Dufisthenics

I really find going to most any public place annoying in some regard but since I am at the gym more than most other shared spaces I really get a large dose of stupid behavior there.

So as I got on my cardio machine for the customary 5 minute warm up my sound environment is shattered by a rhythmic, high pitched squeal coming from the corner of the cardio area.  This machine had been making increasingly larger amounts of noise over the last week or so but it was not utterly ridiculous until today.

So now of course the gym management should not allow a machine to get to this condition, at the very least they could have thrown an Out of Order sign on it which would have fit right in with the other dozen or so pieces of equipment that are broken or not working 100%. But I found my attention turned to the gym patron using this machine instead, or more specifically, how clueless he is.

This older guy is a regular and is a bit odd.  His outfit always includes a sweatband. He also lugs in his own personal 18 inch fan whenever he comes to the gym which is plugged in and angled to keep him from sweating.  So anyway this man was on this machine that was squealing like mad.  He acted like he was deaf and stayed on it until finally after enough people complained, a gym desk clerk asked him to get on another machine.

As in most things I analyze this based on what I would do in the same situation.  If I got on a machine that sounded like it was ready to throw a bearing I would find another machine to get onto within the first 10 seconds.  This guy was so inflexible that he HAD to use that piece of equipment, no matter what the impact was on the rest of the gym.

As I was stretching there were two more examples of clueless behavior.  Somebody was in the aerobics room that is adjacent to the free weight area.  All of a sudden I hear repeated pounding against the wall that faces where I was.  I know in that room there is a projector screen on that wall so I wondered why somebody would be using it to bounce something off of.  The fact that that same wall had full length mirrors attached to it on the free weight side made it even dumber.  I moved to the opposite side as I was anticipating one of the mirrors becoming dislodged and come crashing down.

Finally we had some younger guy that spent a lot of time admiring himself in the mirror.  He was doing close grip bench press for triceps.  Not only did he insist on dropping the barbell back onto the hooks after each set, when he was finished he left the area without putting anything away.  Not only was the loaded barbell still on the rack, there were two 25 pound plates dropped and left literally in the middle of gym floor in the middle of where people walk.  I eventually picked up one plate after another guy picked up the other.

I just never will be able to develop tolerance for people that treat shared spaces as their own personal bubble.  Being so oblivious to the consideration of others just isn’t in my DNA and it’s a struggle I never expect to come to terms with.  I can place a pretty safe bet who these individuals supported in the 2016 election.

As far as my workout goes, I did a modified dragon flag set this week after conventional dragon flags left me feeling like I tore my spleen last week.  Instead of going all the way up and down I just dropped into a position where my feet were maybe 18 inches off the ground and held it for 15-20 seconds.  I could still feel some strain in that same area doing the static holds but not enough to make me quit.

Today’s Workout

5 minutes cardio/stretching

Pull ups x 20

Push ups x 50

Hanging knee raises x 20

Static dragon flag hold x 15 seconds

Weighted standing oblique crunches – 45lbs x 10

Static dragon flag hold x 15 seconds

Weighted standing oblique crunches – 45lbs x 10

Static dragon flag hold x 20 seconds

Weighted standing oblique crunches – 45lbs x 10

Ab wheel knee roll outs x 10

Standing straight arm oblique rotations x 20