People can sometimes be the most cumbersome critters on this planet. I see them every day, walk among them, and I suppose that I am technically classified as “one of them”. Then, I step into the gym, and this is where the fun begins.
When I lift, it’s more of a hardcore “I’m going to break something” attitude than a “I want to make friends” attitude. Once my foot steps out of the locker room and my music is blaring in my ears, it’s GO time. I don’t want to talk. I want to hurt. I want to pick things up and put them down. Sometimes, I want to pick BIG things up and put them down HARD. Sometimes, those things are the other people around me. Come on, you know the feeling…
Walk into the weight room sometime in a new gym, someplace that isn’t full of pro athletes (or maybe it is, I don’t know) and take a look at who is there. Don’t stare at them! You don’t want to be THAT guy, do you? Yeesh! But take a good look and notice their individual habits. Some may stand out, others may not. For me, they are all walking danger signs that are undoubtedly about to wreck my concentration and make me lose my mojo. For example…
I once went in to do a little light lift and follow it up with a little walking on the ol’ treadmill. There are 3 people in the gym, and a class of old folks is about ready to sweat to the oldies in another room. I plow through some back and bicep work, put my wraps-n-straps away in my locker, and prepare to hop on a treadmill. Then there is this sound, approaching from the left, somewhat like a mix of thunder and the roar of stampeding buffalo. The doors open and old people FLOOD into the cardio area like it’s full of AARP brochures and Perkins coupons! I’m standing there, not 3 feet from the ‘mill I am about to use, and Ms. Fitness Queen 1956 jumps in front of me and begins to shake her booty doing a power walk. Ugh…
Today, I’ve decided to do supersets. I’m going to do some bench exercises and couple them with a tricep exercise using the lat pulldown machine. In my gym, the two pieces of equipment are in different rooms. I start to bench, do a good set, and leave my shaker cup of Ultra Reps there to mark my spot. I walk out to the lat pulldown machine, nobody is there, so I proceed to put the right bar on and burn out the Tri’s with some pushdowns. I leave my towel on the knee pad, looking around to see if anyone is hovering, and go back into the other room. For 2 minutes. Just 2 minutes. Another set on bench and I’m ready to hit the machine again, so I walk out pumped and roaring to go and SEE A GUY SITTING ON THE KNEE PAD WITH MY TOWEL TOSSED ON THE FLOOR??? Ugh…
A few years back, I had a pretty basic Sony mp3 player. This was before the iPod revolution, so you can imagine how old I really am here. It was shaped like a kidney bean, for whatever reason, and I didn’t have extra long earphone cords to reach my ears if I put it in my pockets. So, like the hardcore mofo that I am, I put the thing on a small chain and wore it around my neck. That was fine for a few days, until I was blasting some barbell shoulder presses and literally smashed that old mp3 player between the bar and my sternum. D’oh! For the next few weeks, until I found the right player for my apparently too-hardcore-for-normal lifting style, I had to listen to the ambient music in the gym. This is going to be good.
Now, I know you have your own style of music and have definite song preferences to listen to while you’re getting sweaty all over the iron, but for me, I prefer mine to be loud, fast, and heavy. I’m a metalhead, complete with a mohawk, and yes, I used to have really long hair that I would whip furiously around in a peacock-like display of headbanger sexual prowess. Slipknot, Mudvayne, old Metallica and Megadeth, Korn, Rammstein… yeah, that’s my playlist. Of course, now that I have no music pumping into my ears, what do I have to listen to? What “reasonable” music for the workout populace does the gym choose to play? Well let me tell you, it is damn near impossible to do a hardcore workout if you have to listen to the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Whitesnake, and the Moody Blues. No. Just no. It doesn’t work. It sucks.
Yet among the laundry list of things that piss me off at the gym, there are just a few people who I actually find amusing. It’s not that they are that rude and get in my way. It’s that they themselves are in there just as I am, trying their hardest to do work, but just don’t quite get it. My favorite is someone we commonly refer to as “The Breather”.
He’s in his 40s, salt and pepper hair, works out in sneakers and jeans, and I suppose his training style might be some sort of circuit …thing. He breathes, loudly, every rep, and at the exact opposite time when you are supposed to breath during a rep. It’s so loud that you can hear it anywhere in the gym. The front desk attendants keep checking on him to make sure he’s not actually dying. New people are afraid. If there were children, I’m sure they’d run in terror. If Dorothy were here, she’d run in fear of another trip back to Oz. Otherwise, I suppose he’s ok. I got on a treadmill next him once, and although he was just a tad bit aromatic, I figured that was alright since we were at a gym and not a fine dining establishment. All was going well as I started to do my thing. And then he farted…loudly…and it was bad.
Comment back and tell us about what pisses you off at the gym.
