Some of the kinds of people at the gym.
We all know that using the Gym is a good way to aid weight loss. Not only do you burn calories, you also build up muscle and increase your metabolism.
Using a gym instead of lifting weights at home is a much better way to work out. At the gym you have a much larger range of equipment to use and much less distractions than you have at home.
I have heard some people, particularly women say they need to loose weight before they can join a gym. This is because they are worried about how they are going to look being an over weight person in a gym. May be they are thinking people will laugh at them or make fun of them. May be they think they will look bad in their gym clothes. They might even be imagining themselves breaking a piece of equipment while using it because it cannot take their weight.
So as a member of a Gym myself I thought I would write this article detailing my experiences of people at the gym. In reading this I'm hoping may be a person who was previously nervous of joining a gym would do so.
So here goes ...
The Gym I belong to is actually a corporate gym paid for by my work. I have in the past also belonged to a regular gym at the local sports centre. If you have this option at your place of work for a corporate gym membership I would recommend it. Corporate gyms contain mostly professional people as members and therefore there are less teenagers.
Some of the types of people I have encountered...
The Injured Athlete
The first man I'm going to talk about is a man who comes regularly and works out like absolute mad on a stepper machine. Now what is funny about this man is that he has his arm in a sling and in plaster and his neck in a brace. It's like he wants to exercise to extreme the working parts of his body. He gets on the stepper machine and steps very fast at on almost exaggeratingly fast speed. With people like this in the gym why worry about what you look like.
The Six Dollar Man
Next you get the little old man in his 80s who comes in, puts on his headphones and off he goes. He also likes the stepper machine. Unlike the first guy his movements are very slow almost slow motion a bit like a geriatric version of the Six Million Dollar Man. We'll call him the Six Dollar Man. The man is just skin and bones so he doesn't need to lose weight. He's probably just trying to keep active to so good luck to him.
Master of the show offs.
The next guy we will call "Master of the Universe" or more realistically "Master of the show offs". This guy has big muscles and desperately wants to show them off and how much weight he can lift. Of course no one is the slightest bit interested in how much weight he can lift. People are only interested in how much weight they themselves can lift.
I had been sitting on a machine pushing weights. I was doing my usual four sets of ten with a minutes break between each set. He asked me if he could use the machine in between each of my sets. In other words I would use it, then he would uses it and then I would uses it again and so on. So basically he wants to do is to sit on the machine with me watching him while he adjusted the weight up in order to show off. Then I would have to adjust it back down to my usual level while I did my next set. Well I was certainly not going to let him do that, so I told him "you use it, I'm finished". I then moved onto the cycle machine. While using this, I saw the guy approach someone else and ask him the same question. To my amusement, this person replied "you use it, I'm finished".
Undeterred by this and still adamant in showing how much weight he can lift, he sat on a machine facing me. He progressed to setting the weight up high and began to lift. As he lifts the weight he lets out a loud "RAW" to get attention. I fixed my eyes on the TV in the corner of the gym, and pretended I hadn't seen him. He continued to "RAW" all the way through and eventually realised that he hadn't succeeded in gaining any attention from anyone. No one has commented on how much weight he can lift.