Charles Atlas where are you?
I was at the gym yesterday admiring my carefully sculpted form when this dude and his girlfriend come in. They were having a heated discussion in some funny language, maybe Spanish, except that it didn't sound like any Spanish I'd heard so maybed it was Portugese.
This guy is wearing a short-sleeved, collared shirt the color of those gold-brown couches everyone had in the 1970s. That's not really pertinent to the story except that it established him in my mind as a dork and someone who didn't know what he was doing in a gym.
Sure enough, he heads over to the shoulder pull machine and sets up for that rowing-style exercise in which you sit and pull the bar towards your chest like you're rowing a boat. He puts on like 30 pounds and does 10 quick reps. It's obvious that he wasn't close to actually working his muscles, and it appeared to confirm my suspcicion that he was one of those people who don't really know how to work out and who come to sit on an exercise bike without moving except to change the channels on the TV in front of them.
Then he goes over to the bench press machine. I see him start doing really fast reps, bam bam bam bam bam, and I think, "Right. That's easy when you put freaking 30 pounds on the machine". Then I notice something odd -- there aren't any weights left at the bottom of the stack when he presses up. It dawns on me that holy crap, this guy is benching the whole damn stack, at least 200 pounds. Although I don't lift to add bulk and get big, I have a fairly large frame, and I've never tried to do the whole stack of weights. I think I could maybe do one or two reps at 200 lbs. Maybe.
And the crazy thing is this guy did a good half-dozen sets like this before I left. He would finish, get up, and then yell at his girlfriend for a minute, smile, kiss her, do a bunch more 200-lb reps, and start all over again.
This guy was not ripped at all either, he was just freakishly strong.
This guy is wearing a short-sleeved, collared shirt the color of those gold-brown couches everyone had in the 1970s. That's not really pertinent to the story except that it established him in my mind as a dork and someone who didn't know what he was doing in a gym.
Sure enough, he heads over to the shoulder pull machine and sets up for that rowing-style exercise in which you sit and pull the bar towards your chest like you're rowing a boat. He puts on like 30 pounds and does 10 quick reps. It's obvious that he wasn't close to actually working his muscles, and it appeared to confirm my suspcicion that he was one of those people who don't really know how to work out and who come to sit on an exercise bike without moving except to change the channels on the TV in front of them.
Then he goes over to the bench press machine. I see him start doing really fast reps, bam bam bam bam bam, and I think, "Right. That's easy when you put freaking 30 pounds on the machine". Then I notice something odd -- there aren't any weights left at the bottom of the stack when he presses up. It dawns on me that holy crap, this guy is benching the whole damn stack, at least 200 pounds. Although I don't lift to add bulk and get big, I have a fairly large frame, and I've never tried to do the whole stack of weights. I think I could maybe do one or two reps at 200 lbs. Maybe.
And the crazy thing is this guy did a good half-dozen sets like this before I left. He would finish, get up, and then yell at his girlfriend for a minute, smile, kiss her, do a bunch more 200-lb reps, and start all over again.
This guy was not ripped at all either, he was just freakishly strong.
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