Joined a new gym last night. Hilarious

[CommanderFun]

I've never found center knurls that useful. I don't have an issue squatting with the ones without them. I DO have an issue trying to find my grip on a bar where the rings are spaced like 24 inches apart, as well as trying to setup grip/stance on just about any exercise with a barbell.

[Matt James]

I would note that the IWF approved bars have a center knurl, though.

[CommanderFun]

Saw a guy go for what I'd call the epic 1 inch barbell shrug. He sets up the safeties on the rack so the bar is about an inch or so below lockout for a deadlift, and then stacks god knows how much weight on the bar. I was doing the math from afar and he had over 800 pounds on there. I had to watch and see what this guy was gonna do. Finally, he just grabs and slightly moved the bar up, possibly not even off the safeties and just pulling the bar to flex a bit under all the weight he had stacked on either side. After this single "rep", he unloaded the bar, and proceeded to rep out squats with less than my 5 foot tall girlfriend does. Might be the strangest thing I've seen in a gym.

[Bill Anders]

That might have required the twisting of the head like a confused dog pose for a minute. Unless that would get in the way of the next set.

[Farmer]

I've heard a few times, and believe I've also read that bars with no center knurling are for people who want to do cleans or Olympic lifts and worried the knurling might take skin off their faces or throats. Don't know if that's true, just passing on.

I think that's more of a problem with crossfit, and doing high rep sets of Olympic lifts/variants.
No doubt going to see some slop in your technique doing that sillyness.

I don't do crossfit, but if I go through a phase where I'm doing a lot of power cleans, I will occasionally get some scuffing on the collar bone area or neck.
With full cleans I have never had this problem.

Its interesting to note the IWF women's competition bar, and most 15kg WL training bars you'll see, but not all ... have no center knurl.

One story on the men's bar is long ago the center knurl was for the single hand lifts where you would grab the center.
The women's bar was created long after the single hand lifts were done away with.
The center knurling was just left on there I suppose, as an artifact of just what was being done in the past.
I figure they came to the realization it was useful for squatting.

The women's bar is ideally only used for snatch and clean and their variants, but not squatting
But I see women often squatting with the yellow bar all the time without problem.
One would think the men's center knurl would be useful for high-bar squats (sitting high up on the traps).

[LuciusSulla]

Just found this thread for sharing all the silly shit people do in the gym. Let me share, we have two flat benches for the bench press and numerous free adjustable benches for dumbbell work. But the other day one bench was taken by someone actually bench pressing and the other by a woman using the bench press station for her fucking ab work! A gym staff member saw my look of disgust and said ‘yeh I know mate, frustrating isn’t it! Can’t tell her to move cos it’s the bosses wife!’ Sigh…

[Gerald Boggs]

Watched a Joe doing his warm-up squats in Adidas sandals, left before he got to heavy weight, so don't know if he did all his squats that way.

[Gerald Boggs]

Proof that optimism is alive and well. At the gym this week, I saw a extremely fat person wearing a Bodybuilding.com t-shirt

[EdTice]

Proof that optimism is alive and well. At the gym this week, I saw a extremely fat person wearing a Bodybuilding.com t-shirt

I'd like to think that this is the result of optimism, but more likely the fallout of deceptive marketing. "The new you is only 84 videos away." You just have to do the epic workout and use the nutrition plan for twelve weeks and you will look like the models in the photo. Uh, yeah, sure. And then when it doesn't work they guy is going to assume he is deficient and go home in despair until the next marketer comes along and takes his money. The cycle will repeat forever.

[Gerald Boggs]

I joined a new gym last year and in spite of some of the really stupid stuff I've seen, I've just kept my head day and my mouth shit, but today I did an intervention. Two male teenagers were about to get themselves hurt trying to deadlift weights far beyond their ability. If it had just been two guys that couldn't bother to learn/ask how to deadlift, I would have let them alone, but one was claiming knowledge and the other was trusting him. I didn't think it was fair to let him trash his back because of misplaced trust. I got a surprise afterwards, one of the staff came back to the deadlift area and thanked me. She said they had been watching on camera and were about to go put a stop to them, when they saw me step in and start coaching.