The Deadman Night Rider

A forum for evening students of the SMU Dedman School of Law and other outlaws..

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Like clockwork -

Well, they were back tonight. The Resolution crowd turned out at the gym in full force, just as they do the first week of every January. By Valentine's day they'll be gone, their prepaid dues beautifully subsidizing the cost of the rest of the year's workouts for the rest of us, but we'll have to trip over them for a couple of weeks at least. For the next month, there'll be a sustained run on 30-pound dumbbells and a spot in front of the mirror.

If there's anybody out there who wants to last longer than that, here are a couple of tips:

Always go to the gym at the same time--6 PM, 8 PM, whatever. You'll start seeing the same familiar faces of that time slot's "crew" and little by little you'll become a part of it. Start with head-nods of acknowledgment and move up from there to "hey, man's" and pretend-guns with the thumb and forefinger. The people in this crew are a great source of motivation and advice.

Speaking of advice--only listen to advice from someone who's hesitant to give it. If someone prefaces their comments with "I don't usually tell people how to work out...", listen up: you're about to hear something valuable. Corollary: don't give advice. Ever.

Never sit on a machine or bench in between sets. The damn trainers actually encourage this little breach of etiquette because they allow their clients to do it while they're training them. The rest of us hate this, and you will grow to hate it too.

Cable crossovers are only good for bodybuilding magazine photo-shoots--they are not a real exercise in the strictest sense. Worse, they block access to the cable machine for better exercises. Even worse, crossover fanatics are also multi-set fanatics. I've never seen a crossover man who could stop at less than 10 sets.

Shadow-boxing in the mirror, much like dancing, should be done in the privacy of the home. I used to see this only in Russian gyms, but now this disturbing behavior is popping up on this side of the ocean.

Even if you don't feel like going, go in and do one exercise. The default fallback is the bench press. It's better to come in for 20 minutes, do a lackluster workout, and keep your consistency up than to create gaps in your workout regimen. If you can make it to the end of March, you've got it made--you'll be hooked by then, and next January you can bitch about the Resolution crowd like a grizzled veteran.

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