Why I Don't Like Commercial Gyms, And The Lonely Squat Rack

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So I had to sign up at a new gym the other day and sad to say, it was one of those hair gelled guys-hoe bag girls-spend half the time on your cell phone-upper body only workout kind of gyms. I know I'm speaking for pretty much 99% of the gyms out there but from the moment I walk in I want to keep my head down, earphones in and get my workout done and leave. I'll be talking about Mr. Hair Gel in this post quite a bit in reference to your typical gym rat.

Why don't I like commercial gyms? I don't like the fancy colours, personal trainers 'training' their clients while just actually wasting their time and money, smoothie bars, the majority of people's time spent socializing between reps, TVs all over the place, fitness assessment crap that doesn't actually measure anything, to name a few. As they come to me I'll be sure to name some more.

I haven't been to these 'normal' gyms in a long time, at least 6 months, since the last half a year has been spent in my school's high performance room focusing on strength training. I've made a shift from the aesthetic look of fitness to general strength training. I'm happy to say they have a couple of olympic bars at this gym, but I'm appalled to say that there's only one squat rack.

I like that people feel that when they belong to a gym they belong to a community of people who share their interest in fitness, but when it becomes another meeting place to socialize and talk on your phone while resting, then they're just getting in the way of people who actually are there to work out. I wasn't surprised to see the majority of guys in the gym working only on their upper body while neglecting the things they use to walk everyday, which brings me back to the lonely squat rack. Why people neglect this piece of machinery is beyond me. All you really need is a bar and two hooks, no need for the entire rack. Yet it's been known to be the king of exercises for ages. Squats work your entire body from head to toe, if you squat you're working your quads, core, hips, back, and that's where real strength comes from. Those guys pushing 12 plates on the leg press aren't doing their quads justice. The squat is built around the hip drive which forces your hips to drive your body up after lowering the weight. Mark Rippetoe wrote a book called Starting Strength where he gave a diagrammatic illustration of where strength comes from. Imagine a person standing up and a bull's eye drawn from their 'core' going out in all directions. The centre, around the hips, is the origin of strength, and as the circle moves out to the extremities you see a drop in strength. Guys with big arms from doing 12,000 curls a day can curl a lot, but ask them to do 10 pull ups and they probably wouldn't be able to do 5. The guy who trains pull ups can do more curls than Mr.Hair Gel (I'm not mad at hair gel users cos I'm going bald).

It's funny to see guys with huge upper bodies walking around on tooth picks thinking they own the gym, and everything else. In a match of brute strength, these guys would fall down like a stack of bricks. Muscle size/quantity doesn't equal strength; there were guys training Olympic weightlifting in my old gym that are half my size and could pull two to three hundred pounds off the floor into the air over their head under control, something I can only dream to do. Ask Mr. Hair Gel to do that. They wouldn't look like they go to the gym if you saw them walking around. It seems like most personal 'trainers', if not all of them are only taught to train their clients with machines that make things easy and don't actually require you to do any work. All muscles are trained to work alone, not in synchrony, so when you push, your triceps haven't learnt to work with your chest.

I don't care so much that these guys walk around thinking they're the sh*t, but what bothers me is the stereotype that people hold that muscle size is directly related to strength. I can guarantee you it's not.