First of all – WHO TRAINS AT GOLD’S GYM?

Terrible writes:

Been waiting forever for a post, then got too busy to check –

PS, I have absurdly long legs and no calves, so that will be totes cool.

BRB choosing the least popular, least prevalent globo gym in the DFW area. The Gold’s there is pretty OK, I can’t bench there thanks to being a fucking manlet. A meet up sounds lovely. I’ll pay a drop-in fee or vice versa. We should all get together and have a great fucking time. Post your email or add me on fb and we can exchange digits. Pics or GTFO.

I’ve been training at 24 Hour Fitness for some of my pressing/squatting and bodybuilding. It works out pretty well. When my time management is bad (all the time) I end up doing the stuff that matters in the afternoon, go to work, then bodybuild and circle jerk in the gym after. Or, if I don’t feel like driving half an hour to the gym and I’m not training the oly lifts, you can find me among the crowd at 24 Hour Fitness, which is composed primarily of middled-aged guys on TRT, really jacked younger guys with great stacks, guys who don’t even lift, and redditors from /r/fitness pretending to do Starting Strength. If you actually do find me in this crowd, please talk to me. I’m probably about to kill myself.

When I go after work, the gym’s much less crowded. Which is great because it means I’m guaranteed to not have to wait for the squat rack. But it also means that everyone else in the gym is acutely aware of what the other 4 people are doing.

Tuesday night, I end up at 24 Hour Fitness to do front squats, weighted pull ups, curls, rear delt flyes, and seated calf raises. Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy workout. Get dat quad pump, build dem baby calves into muscular bulls, make dem rear delts POP. I’m just herpderping around, working on my physique.

In comes three pretty jacked people, a guy and lady – who is more muscular than me – following the lead of someone I can only guess to be an aspiring IFBB pro. They proceed to go through a giant set of the machine lat row, chest-supported rows, and various lat pull downs. They time their rest periods to roughly 30-60 seconds. The IFBB-to-be guy urges them on with quiet determination.

“How much should I do on this next set?”

“More weight.”

“What do you think, maybe another 25lbs?”

“More weight. Go.”

And they hammer out some really great-looking sets for their upper back. It’s like watching Delta Force clear a shooting house in seven seconds. Beautifully efficient. Boner-inspiring. Makes me wish I was one of them. But I’ll never be one of them. Because I was in JROTC in high school. Because I’m a 5’5″ manlet and don’t have the aesthetics.

I front squat my topset for the night at 315lbs (having back squat 380lbs for a cumulative total of 16 reps the day before), and the IFBB-to-be watches with complete disinterest. Do you want to know why? Because he front squats 315lbs for 10 just to get some blood flow into his VMO. Does it after he pre-exhausts with some sets of 20 on the leg extension machine. Then finishes up with 1k lbs+ leg presses. Then he injects equipose into his vastus lateralis.

They finish their workout in about forty minutes. You guys realize that beyond this point, the testosterone production from lifting weights peaks and your body starts to flood with cortisol, right? Don’t kill your gains. Afterwards they all head up to the cardio floor to get in some time in the fat-burning target heart zone.

Relieved that I now have the weights to myself, and that the IFBB-to-be won’t be there to be completely unimpressed with everything I do, I begin in earnest my final circuit for the night – rear delt flyes, seated calf raises, and barbell curls. I am pretty spent from the earlier workout I had, working, and now coming to the end of this workout, so my curls get pretty sloppy. I over-extend my lumbar, I use hip extension to aid in the concentric portion of the lift. Look man – I’m tired. I just wanted to be done. So I finish up my last ugly set of curls. Then I examine myself in the mirror – not because I’m happy with my pump. My internal monologue is basically –

Look at you. You’re disgusting. PATHETIC. FILTHY.

And then I unrack my weights. As I do so, I look up to the second floor and realize the IFBB-to-be was watching everything. My doyouevenlift.jpg curling technique, my blatant self-examination in the mirror, he saw everything. He shakes his head, sitting on the throne that is the ergonomic stretching contraption, and leaves to meet his trainees on their treadmills to tell them about the fucking amateur Asian kid with baby calves.

This is the Friday failboat.

AngryRunner writes:

I miss you. Re-found your blog after an internet hiatus.

Hey man. I’m glad you’re still around and back to training. Hope you’ve been well, we should catch up.