This guy was on the incline bench station while I was doing my squats. When I was transitioning between exercises, I was looking for tens and I realized that he had five tens on each side of the bar. He pushed it once about halfway and told his spotter that he was still just warming up and threw another four fives on the bar, which he pressed with even less ROM, followed by one more with another four fives, which he barely moved for one rep and let out a loud scream during. He then moved on to bench press, which he set up as follows: tens, collars, twenty-fives, fives. Forget range of motion, he had the safeties set up about three inches above his chest and didnt touch them. Next he moved to the back extension machine, and at this point he turned full Dom Mazzetti and turned it into a chest exercise, pressing it down towards the ground and then letting it come back up while leaning on it. After I finished my deadlifts, I passed him on the way out. As I walked past, he whispered come on! to me under his breath.
Had a veritable zoo the other day. This one guy did behind-the-neck presses and half-ROM upright rows with a curl bar. This other guy did calf raises standing with his toes on a plate... only problem is his heels never got above his toes. He had six pounds of dumbbells distributed across both hands. Another guy was doing set after set of rows, none of which moved at more than a twenty-degree angle. He essentially showed up for an hour to swing barbells and dumbbells back and forth. Also had the usual cast of characters: loud leg press guy, guy who does every single curl station, guys swinging chrome dumbbells back and forth with their arms hanging, girl doing very slow movements with chrome dumbbells under the watchful eye of a personal trainer, etc.
Upper body day, we just got two more benches for a grand total of three. When I came onto the weight room floor, two of the benches were being used for dumbbell stuff. On the remaining bench, a guy was lying face-down, nose-in-bench, breathing heavily with his eyes closed. He was slowly elevating his arms so his hands came just above his hips, then lowering them until they were just below his hips. I waited for him for a while, but eventually I realized he wasnt going anywhere and went over to ask one of the dumbbell guys how many sets they had left. One guy had two sets, so I waited for about five minutes and then carried the bench he had been using over to the rack. The guy was still there, lying face down and breathing heavily. He looked like he was drowning in one inch of water.
Im starting to really like my gym.
It was smith machine day at the corporate gym. Guy 1 was doing bent rows with 25's on each side with about 12" ROM. Half of that ROM was due to his knee kick.
Guy 2 was squatting with a 45 & 25 per side. Feet together, knees straight forward, high bar and completely vertical back. One of my gym bros who knows my disdain for the smith machine pointed it out to me and, following a brief moment of wtf is he doing, we had a good laugh.
I have found something the smith machine is good for. I chalk up my shirt for squats. After squats are done I'll take my shirt off and beat it on the smith machine to get rid of the chalk. The smith machine is tucked away in a corner of the gym isolated from everything else so the temporary chalk cloud isn't an issue.
like this?
Guy 2 was squatting with a 45 & 25 per side. Feet together, knees straight forward, high bar and completely vertical back. One of my gym bros who knows my disdain for the smith machine pointed it out to me and, following a brief moment of wtf is he doing, we had a good laugh.
I have found something the smith machine is good for. I chalk up my shirt for squats. After squats are done I'll take my shirt off and beat it on the smith machine to get rid of the chalk. The smith machine is tucked away in a corner of the gym isolated from everything else so the temporary chalk cloud isn't an issue.[/QUOTE]
Saw a dude load up a smith machine with what looked to be 30 pounds maybe. Stood perpendicular to the bar (facing the mirror of course), grabbed it with one hand and...
Started doing one side shoulder shrugs.
Really? Don't you want to save time and maybe do both at the same time? I dunno, maybe he was doing rehab work, or missing his left hand or something.
YouTube In case Rippetoe needed an example of why choker style straps can be dangerous.
Went to chalk up today and found a guy posing for a selfie with the bar loaded for my (volume) deadlifts. I asked if he wanted to do a set. He sheepishly declined.
So last night I arrive at the gym, pleased to see its sparsely populated, claim one of the empty racks and as I usually do, work out what weight I'm going to be doing that session, and thus work out what plates I will be needing for said weight. I then walk around the gym and from unused stations/storage racks I take the necessary weights back to my rack so I don't have to go hunting in between sets when I'm usually just sitting and trying to recover. Halfway through my warm ups a younger gentleman in roughly his late teens/early 20s comes right over to my rack and proceeds to pull off the pair of 5kg plates I had earlier collected. I told him no, that I would be using them. He then stood there a little dumbfounded and even more so when I gestured that to get to my rack he had literally walked past 3 unused stations that each had pairs of 5kg plates on them and he could use any of them.
After the kid walked away the guy in the rack beside me looked at me a little angrily and remarked 'that was a bit uncalled for wasn't it, you don't own those plates, why didn't you just get some others ?'
To which I proceeded to launch into a long explanation about having already got the plates I needed earlier in my session, having got them from UNUSED stations and even if I had needed to approach a station that was in operation I would have at the very least asked the user if they were using those plates and could I use them if they were not. In my mind, in a relatively empty gym with literally 14 unused stations/racks/benches that at the time all had 5kgs on them, in addition to a couple of wall mounted racks for excess plates, almost all of which were closer to the kid in question than my rack was, for hi to approach my rack and take the two 5kgs plates on my rack without even asking if I was going to be using them was far, far ruder and way more of a dick move than any admonishment I gave to the young kid.
Opinions ?? Was I too harsh ??