gr81

Atomic Dog
Etiquette School
by TC

The gym where I work out is sponsoring an Easter Egg hunt on Sunday. The person who finds the golden egg gets a free month of daycare.

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction to figure out that my gym ain’t exactly hard core. Of course, one walk through the place would tell you that. For one thing, the benches are a lovely shade of lavender. They have music playing overhead — mostly easy listening stuff — but you couldn’t hear it unless you’ve got one of those highly sensitive electronic ears that you see for sale on the back cover of comic books.

The average member is, oh, about 50 years old, and judging by all the cars with fancy hood ornaments in the parking lot, their average income is easily in the six-figure range.

And oh yeah, like I said, the gym has daycare. Luckily for me, it’s tucked away in a remote corner and I rarely come face to face with a little slobber monkey dressed as a Jack-O-Lantern, an elf, or in the case of the upcoming holiday, a tiny Easter bunny, because as God as my witness, it would suck out what little Testosterone remains in my besieged balls.

This type of gym has its advantages, though. Most notably, I’ve yet to have anyone come up to me, as they have in a hard-core gym, pull their shorts down, and ask, "Hey, TC, does this look infected to you?" Or, "Hey, I just scored some GH. It’s in a can, and the red and white label says, ‘Campbell’s Split Pea Soup.’ Do you think it’s counterfeit?"

Furthermore, I can monopolize a power rack for an entire hour and no one will ask me when I expect to be finished with it. Hell, I could put a shingle roof on the thing and furnish it with a crock pot and a hot plate and set up a small business selling beanie weenies to the gym members and it wouldn’t be an imposition on anyone.

Likewise, I never have trouble finding any dumbbells that weigh over 75 pounds because they’re right there where I left them last Tuesday! All I have to do is dust them off with the little feather duster I carry in the back of my gym shorts and I’m all set!

As you can see, my decidedly soft-core gym has both its advantages and disadvantages. But probably the biggest problem posed by the soft-core gym in general is the lack of hard-core etiquette. All cultures or subcultures have their rules and customs. For instance, when you see a pretty girl walking down the halls at Testosterone, it’s quite acceptable — even polite — to grab your crotch and make honking noises like a goose. But, as I understand it, this quaint custom is considered rude and boorish at other places of business. How strange!

The gym is no different. The trouble is, few people at my gym know these rules of etiquette. So, in an attempt, probably futile, to indoctrinate the members of my gym to the rules and customs of hard-core weightlifting, I’m going to surreptitiously post the following rules in a place where everyone will see them:

1. Please refrain from wearing perfume or cologne in the gym. Maybe they breathe Old Spice fumes on your home planet — the planet Gigolo — but here on Terra Firma, we breathe oxygen. So when the rest of us are sucking wind from doing a heavy set of squats or dead lifts, we’d like to be able to refrain from having a cologne-induced attack of asthma or emphysema. Even body odor is preferable to your perfume because, unlike Shalomar, the scent doesn’t linger for hours, unless of course, you’re talking about Wally, the guy who works in the boiler room and looks like the sweaty Axel Jordache from the TV version of Rich Man, Poor Man.

2. Please don’t use the squat rack or the power rack to do curls. Sure, it’s conveeenient to use the squat rack to do curls. After all, you hardly have to bend over at all… you lazy Sasquatch. Listen, you can do curls anywhere, but I can’t do squats anywhere. I need the rack. Besides, when you put five-pound plates on the Olympic bar with the intent of doing curls, it’s overkill. It’s like Testosterone assistant editor Chris Shugart putting on one of those adjustable Wonder Bras and cranking it up all the way. His breasts are perfectly lovely as is. It’s not only overkill, it’s sad.

Until you can cleanly curl at least 135 pounds — that’s the Olympic Bar and two 45-pound plates — be a good boy and stay away from the racks.

3. Put the weights on the right way. I’m nit-picking here, but there’s a right way to put plates on a bar, and that’s with the embossed side facing in. There’s no real reason for this that we know of — it’s just weight lifting propriety. When chess genius Bobby Fisher comes to your house for a game, you don’t pull out your authentic Star Trek chess set, with Federation characters as white and the Klingons as black. Why, he’d take your little Captain Kirk king and Lieutenant Sulu rook and castle them against your head repeatedly.

You start sneering at time-honored customs like this and pretty soon you’ve got worldwide anarchy. People will eat their salads after dinner, bears won’t shit in the woods, and Bill Phillips will write a book named Body of Lasagna.

4. The gym is not the Christian Science Reading Room. Sure, read the paper in-between sets in the gym. Why, I often do concentration curls while sitting on the toilet, so we’re kindred spirits in a sort of weird, twisted way. In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic here. Hey, if you devoted at least a nanogram of effort into lifting and didn’t read the Sunday Times in-between what you call sets, maybe you wouldn’t look like the pre-diet Rush Limbaugh. Besides, that’s a workout bench you’re sitting on — one that I could be using if you’d stop using it as a Barca lounger.

5. The rest of us would like a drink of water, too. Let me get this straight, you’re just monopolizing the drinking fountain for ten minutes at a time, filling up a 7-11 cup that’s the size of a beer keg because you’re too lazy to make trips to the drinking fountain when you get thirsty? Never mind that I’m drier than Strom Thurmond’s prostate and starting to feel woozy. If we were in Egypt and the rest of us were waiting to water our camels, we’d draw straws to see who would have the honor of beheading you.

6. Leave the cell phone at home. I don’t care if Amalgamated Panty Shields, Inc. just went up a half point and your stockbroker’s dying to let you know. It disturbs those of us who are trying to concentrate. The only reason you should take a call at the gym is if another muttonhead with a cellphone on the other side of the gym is calling to warn you that I’m coming up behind you waving a two-by-four.

7. Respect the personal space of others. If I’m about to try setting a PR (personal record) in the squat or dead lift, don’t stand behind me and start talking to your friend about how you think Ally McBeal isn’t as good this year and that Robert Downey Jr, while he added some spice to the show, probably will be convicted for parole violation which will leave poor Ally alone to ponder the mysteries of dating again.

What I’m doing requires concentration, and I’d like to be able to mentally keep my liver from exploding out of my body, flying across the gym, slapping wetly into the wall and sliding into the dirty towel bin, regardless of whether I made the shot from behind the 3-point line or not.

Similarly, when I’m doing a set of heavy benches, have the courtesy to walk way clear of my line of vision. The last thing I want to see when I’m struggling to control a heavy bench press is the cavernous interior of your left nostril.

8. Stop staring at my butt. This is for all the women out there. Don’t you know it’s rude to stare at my butt when I’m doing leg curls? I know you’re imagining yourself naked, lying underneath me as I strain and groan, but hey, please have some respect for my humanity. I’m a living, feeling person. After all, men don’t do that to you.


Most of you probably work out at gyms where the majority of the members share the same intensity and knowledge of weights, but if you’re like me and work out at places like Bally’s, Family Fitness, or for that matter, any place with the word "fitness" in the title — places that are about as far removed from Louis Simmon’s Westside Barbell Club as a topless bar is from a ballet studio — then I urge you, for the sake of your own sanity, to slap my little list up on the wall.

It might not do any good, but at least you’ll feel a little better.

Testosterone Site/Elite Fitness-Dave Tate/West Side Barbell/Berardi Nutrition & Sports Performance/Steroid Laws- Rick Collins/John Defendis Intensity or Insanity articles/Save the Supersonics

supertech

Haha that should be posted on the entrance of every gym