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a space where I will rant about: baseball, fitness training, MMA, comic books, video games, philosophy, politics, society, and general assclownery.
NOTE: I annotate all my lifting as weight x reps x sets, so 200x3x5 would be 200lbs done for three repetitions for five sets.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Funny Gym Story

Monday's WOD was 5x3 Back Squat. Since I was having dinner with my parents that night I decided to do the workout at a NYSC on Long Island near where I work. It was a good reminder of why I don't live on Long Island anymore. The gym had 1 squat rack, 0 power cages, tons of smith machines. So I set up in the lone squat rack and work my way through the Squats. In between sets I'm looking at all the jokers in there with the faux-hawks and the spiked hair with frosted tips and I'm laughing silently at the ridiculousness of it all. One guy on the Lat Pull down machine jerking his entire body back on every rep and then his buddy cheering when he lets the weight stack crash down. Another two guys doing bicep curls, one guy curling the other spotting (I guess they heard about all those catastrophic curling accidents).
Anyway I finish the squats and since I'm feeling good I decided to do 5x3 Press and after that moved on to some deadlifts. I put the bar on the floor and worked my way through my warm up progression. At 405 (my last warm up set) I notice their is a small crowd around me, one of the guys walks up to me and asks "Are you going to lift that?" I'm sure I had a confused look on my face as I thought that question over. I mean I certainly wouldn't load a bar up for aesthetic purposes so what the hell else would I be doing with it? After a second I told him yes, and then he asked if I wanted a spot. Now I can't even fathom how someone would spot a deadlift let alone why one would be necessary, so after yet another confused pause I told him no, chalked up and banged out a few reps. A few minutes later after finishing my work set, same guy walks up to me and asks "Wow, how much do you curl?" Now if this story was a joke that would have been the punchline, but since it was real life I had to try to explain something about how I hadn't curled in years and training functional movements and such, but it rapidly became clear I would have had better luck explaining calculus to a chimpanzee. He then set up on the smith machine and proceeded to do some "bench press" sets (and in case you're wondering, no the bar never came within 8" of his chest).
So that's my funny gym story (for this week anyway).

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