GO BIG’s BLOG

If you are a serious bodybuilder, strength athlete or just a dedicated trainer striving to achieve your fitness goals, I’m sure that at some time or another, you’ve been plagued by the scourges of gyms everywhere, the social trainer.

These are the guys, and girls, who arrive at the gym, usually kitted out in the latest fashionable gear, and head straight for the change room to ensure that their hair is in place, their make-up is perfect and that they, in their own warped little minds, look good enough to pick up a member of the opposite sex during their “workout.
They then head out into the weight room and, if they don’t strike up a 20 minute chat with another waste of good space right on top of some dedicated trainer straining under a 200kg squat or the like, proceed to get married to a piece of equipment of some sort.
Come on, you know what I mean, the idiot plonks himself down on a flat bench with a 5kg dumbbell in each hand and proceeds to do seated curls for a dozen sets with five minute rests in between, and, he remains: firmly planted for the duration lest someone else should make use of “his bench, while you stand and wait to do dumbbell presses. All this while there’s a perfectly good upright bench two meters away.

Another example of these morons who waste oxygen that the rest of us desperately need while we’re going through the mother of all workouts, is the social trainer who hears about supersets somewhere and decides that that’s the way to gain the most from his weekly visit to the “singles club, and proceeds to do smith machine bench and hack squat supersets, believe me, I’m not thumb sucking this … I’ve seen it. That, keeps two stations busy while the rest of us wait to utilize them. Alright, I know that there are many exercises one can do for a particular body part and under normal circumstances you would do just that but, with health clubs chasing the bucks and overselling memeberships, there’s usually more than double the clubs capacity in there at peak times and even if the *******s were not wasting space you’d still be waiting for an open station.

The solution? Who knows, man. I’d say let the club force them to get a personal trainer for at least a month or two to teach them proper training techniques and etiquette, but the majority of those I’ve seen at work haven’t got a clue themselves and are just down right dangerous, but let’s leave that for another column. Maybe that old tried and tested exercise the clean and jerk will come in handy here. Next time a “socialite gets in your space, CLEAN his clock and TOSS the jerk out of there.

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