I think GMan's right. He doesn't want to get sued.

asked a guy to spot me on the bench today. i said "i don't think i'll need help, but just in case." then he proceeded to put his hands on the bar and possibly do a small amount of assisting each rep. guy was obviously a n00b but there was no one else in the gym. i had to tell him in middle of set he didn't need to touch the bar. i think i hurt his feelings and felt kind of bad about it : (


this guy was sitting on a bench with 10-20lb dumbbells doing some variation of a bench press or curl for probably 45 minutes.

PT had his client mount the 45 degree hyperextension machine backwards to do reverse hypers. I chimed in with "This place needs a GHD" and he surprisingly said "GHR is one of the most underrated exercises, blah, blah, blah." The PT then took his client to the cable row machine which had a dumbbell oriented vertically on the bench. PT then told the client to sit on the dumbbell and do the cable rows. Then he makes the client to pushups on an upside-down bosu ball. All supersetted.

Wait, what?

Sorry, it's a seated cable row of some sorts. Like this, except the client was sitting on top of the dumbbell which was on the bench.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZbfZ033f74

when no one else is in the gym, I bench in the squat rack and use the safety bars there as my spotter.

Yeah I understand the reasoning behind recommending leg press. But sets of 50 are ****ing ridiculous.

I understood the rowing part, it was the sitting on the small end of a dumbbell part that got me.

Hm. Nice. Why didn't I think of that?

Well, I've heard the crazy naked guy in the lockerroom stories but never had an experience with an epic one until now.

Sure there have been those way too casually naked for way too long guys, but nothing TOO strange until now.

On one side of the locker room is a row of about 5-6 sinks with a long mirror, guy is on the far side of the room (thankfully)

Middle aged guy, shaved head, maybe 50's, is standing in front of a sink a few steps back, naked, feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart. He's holding a blow dryer with both hands behind his back below waist level with it pointed downwards at his butt crack, staring straight ahead at himself in the mirror.

I got the f out of there.

Solid.

Were his toes pointed outward approximately 30 degrees? Weight back on his heels? Remind him not to let his knees cave...

As long as he uses good form I don't see a problem.

I thought that was one of the more standard "advanced" gross naked old guy moves at the gym. I know when I went to the YMCA downtown there were a few guys who liked to do variations on that. Always in front of a mirror, always involving blow drying their junkial area, and always with feet wide apart. Often there was motion involved if I remember correctly.

Why tf would you want to remember that, and correctly?!!?

Someday we'll all be old and it will be nice to have a repertoire of gross naked guy moves available for use.

I didn't say I wanted to, . I'm sure all of that will be partially burned into my memory for years to come. Luckily, I can't picture it as a memory, I just can remember what I saw and then (if I choose to, which I don't) reconstruct the memory with some rando old guy in it I guess.

my default speech "can i get a lift? cool, appreciate it. give me a nice smooth liftoff, i'm going for (x amount) reps, and I wont need you to touch the bar after the liftoff, but I might need very little assistance racking it"

generally gets really good results, they dont give a 100lb jerking type of liftoff, and i've assured them they aren't going to have to pull 350+ off my chest, and in almost all instances i know when i'm going to be at or very near failure on the next rep and i just rack it and am glad to have gotten a liftoff.


anyone else think its kind of nuts that franchise gyms almost all of them have a 'no chalk' rule? at my gym in TX when the chalk bowl is full there still isn't a ton of chalk everywhere, and the only thing i can think of is that it looks unappealing to a non-lifter? i dont workout with gloves and i'll bring my own chalk to the gym if i have to b/c sweaty palms on the wrong bar can lead to bad things.



edit; there's definitely a generational gap thing w/ old guys (our parents age and older generally speaking) at the gym. they have no inhibition about walking around a locker room with 20 strangers in it naked while they go from the shower, to the toilet, to the sink to brush their teeth, to floss their ass with their towel, it's like they're just as comfortable as they would be in the privacy of their own home. imo nakedness in locker rooms is from the shower to your towel, no one wants to walk into a locker room of twenty swinging dicks, or a half dozen naked assed old men like the one from "The Hangover" scene in the hospital. But yeah, old dude's strut around naked, guys 20-30 keep it acceptable, with perhaps a few exceptions, one specific one that i could name in this forum but won't

Does anyone with access to old dudes know if it's a generation gap or a persistent feature of being old?

Anecdotally, I've heard that this also applies to old women as they also love to get unnecessarily naked in the locker room.

My experience at a 24hr fitness was that the old women who would do the aquatic aerobics typically just did not give a ****. They would sit on the benches naked, too. That in particular really grossed me out. It was also the general rule that the older and fatter they were, the less they cared about anyone else seeing them naked.

I also saw quite a few different women (some young, actually) weighing themselves naked on the scale in the sink area.

It disgusts me that I am 10x more grossed out hearing about old fat naked ladies than old naked guys.

I feel it is a right of passage.

I am old, I worked 40+ years and if I feel like walking around with my junk out in front of you whippersnappers, well that's what I am gonna do.

Mega tilt today. As im walking up to swipe my key to open the door, through the window I see a guy hop off his elliptical and power walk to the back where the only power rack is (100% sure he knew I was going there and he needed to race me). Fine, whatever, ill wait. For literally the next twenty minutes he's doing hamstring stretches and all this other nonsense to prepare for his bench press. Now, he decides one barbell isn't enough and when he's finally ready to start his sets he loads up the only other bb on the gym so he can superset curls. When he's finally done with his stuff, as im finishing my first warmup set he walks by and says "shouldn't squat every time you're here, gonna hurt your knees" in this super condescending/glad-i-wasted-your-evening kind of tone. Hatehatehate.

I did get a chuckle out of the kid who was doing something that resembled a deadlift on the smith machine and took a pic of the weights after his last set, surely uploaded to facebook by now.

Omg why doesn't that happen to me. Worst I've had is the mirror checking bar curlers wasting my time. Never the in your face asshats. Very nice