Similar Posts
A day in the strife
I was lying on my back on the gym floor, deciding between crawling to the locker room or asking the staff to call an ambulance. I’d had acute low back attacks in the past – from doing bent over barbell rows, T-bar rows, and also from deadlifting, like in this case. But I’d never before…
The Jerk Store Called
Taking a break from the gym is great not just for the physical rest, but also for stepping away from the mental grind. I’m not even talking about what’s required to motivate yourself day after day. The gym environment itself creates anxiety and stress. One major hassle is the way you must compete with other…
The Four-Legged Leg Press
Although I am frequently dismayed by people’s laziness and all around carelessness in the gym (obviously: I’ve started a blog about it), I am equally impressed by how creatively they accomplish nothing. When it comes to training legs, people generally steer clear altogether. Squat racks, leg press machines and Smith machines collect the most dust…
Up Scale
In a prior post about gyms and membership fees, I wondered: Is the cost worth it for “the super high end place that … lets you grunt away in a spa-like environment?” Well, I don’t want to talk about the circumstances, but I found myself in just such a location today. You know the kind…
Seductively Simple
I’m not kidding when I say that folks struggling with good form should focus first on doing just one clean, quality rep. I can think of a number of bodyweight exercises where this rule applies: crunches, dips and certainly unassisted pull-ups. Today at the gym, however, I saw another kind of one rep exercise that…
The Broken Windows Theory Of Health Clubs
All this talk of barbells sailing through actual gym windows got me thinking about sociologists’ theory of Broken Windows. Some researchers believe that municipalities can prevent serious crime by addressing problems when they are small: Repair broken windows quickly and vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. New York…