Friday Failboat 5

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

Terrible writes:

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

I just moved to Plano from Kansas City a couple weeks ago. I live just south of Frisco on Preston (just into Plano), am now lifting at the Plano Gold’s on Park and Preston.

I know a few of youse guys on here live in the DFW area – if there is some interest in meeting up, I’ll post up my email address.

The Gold’s has a deadlift bar jack, which is fucking phenomenal.

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.

Leave a comment ?

23 Comments.

  1. Man. I couldn’t even laugh at you, Brent. This one hit home hard. BRB while I go kill myself…

  2. I wonder if he blogged about what he saw of you, I’ll try and find it.

  3. I miss this.

  4. good ass post. i know those feels bront. EVERYONE looks at me at the gym with the “why dont you just fucking kill yourself yet? oh i bet he tried, but failed at that too” look.

  5. The Gold’s is pretty nice except the benches are like 2x as wide as they need to be. Luckily for me, I am so bad at benching it doesn’t really seem to matter.

    My email is bjbunn@gmail.com, would love to meet up and goof around. I don’t really squat, but I do have Do Wins so I can pretend that I do (DL/PR/BE would be preferable but honestly I don’t care).

    Also, as I just moved down here and haven’t started working yet, my schedule is purty flexible.

  6. Outstanding narrative. Captivating. Really good stuff.

  7. A+ Post, would read again.

    I made it a habit to not go to the gym before 9pm. By 9, it’s almost completely cleared out, and all that’s left is a couple high school kids and an old man or two. The high school kids take full advantage of their raging hormones and lift more than I could ever hope to and probably make fun of me while they rest between sets (look at this jackoff in his Adidas weightlifting shoes, doesn’t he know about Nike Free Runs?), and the old men could not care less about my presence. They bang out their bodyweight lunges and call it a night. Feels good, man.

  8. Went and visited my uncle recently. He said I have some good size but he asked why I’m not cut. Good. I tell all of my friends I lift for function, they ask why don’t I try to get jacked, what they don’t know is that I secretly do rear delt raises and db flies and shrugs till I almost drop the weight on my toes. So I AM trying to get jacked but no one can tell. Good

  9. the best part of this post is when you said “pics or GTFO” I lol’ed hard at work when I read this.

    Brent do you think in an alternative universe there is a version of you and you’re extremely huge and jacked? I’d like to think so.

  10. Ok usually these suck as of late. But this one was an easy would read again. Nice job FOB-Manlet

  11. nobodystopsdblob

    The fitness center where I work costs 10 bucks. It is pretty much unremarkable. Basically, it’s a place for people in my building to spend their lunch break in different clothes. But there is an older guy who seems like he used to power lift and another who seems like he was probably a body builder. I feel sort of connected to them. A few months back former bodybuilder strikes up a conversation with me while I am in between deadlift sets to warn me of the dangers of the lift. You see, he used to be dumb too until he got hurt. Now he knows better. He is enlightened.

    He is bigger than me by 30 pounds. He is probably past 40 years old, maybe past 45. He has a lower body fat than me. He probably out lifts me, including on the deadlift. No, he definitely can out deadlift me. I only ever see him on his way to or on his way back from Spin class. I think I might just buy the Insanity DVDs or workout to P90x commercials. Tell me why I shouldn’t?

  12. I train at the Gold’s in Cairo, Egypt. If you’re in the neighborhood, let me know. All the weights are made for dropping, so when we coordinate everything that we do, and I mean, everything, we can drop them, but only if we yell on the last two. Careful, don’t walk in front of the 5 dudes praying to Mecca who happen to be right in front of the showers. After all this, we can eat at the Ruby Tuesday. Chicken and rice only, brah.

  13. lol @ the r/fitness people pretending to do starting strength

  14. I train here; http://www.muscleworksgym.co.uk/

    I feel quite out of place.

  15. Hey Brent, I figured I’d give you your daily dose of humorous rage, so here you go from your FAVORITE website of all time:

    http://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/showthread.php?t=31668

    A one armed guy competes in an SPF multi-ply meet and predictably squats a little high, who gives a fuck what the fuck do you expect from a one armed guy in an SPF multi-ply meet it was still 700 pounds on his back pretty close to parallel and he still benched 170 pounds and pulled 315 with one goddamn arm for fuck’s sake, and some SS forum member who admits that he only put 30 pounds on his press in five months of novice linear progression informs us that despite this dude’s shitty circumstances it “is not an excuse to half squat”. Your thoughts?

  16. Come on down to Crossfit Dallas Central off 75 and Fondren. We just moved into a brand new facility (I believe Brent lifted at the old location at one point). Great atmosphere and equipment.

  17. Was doing pendlay rows in the gym I just joined for the summer, one of the staff in his white polo and vibrams came over and asked how my workout was going then asked that I be more gentle with the plates because they will become chipped down to nothing. I wasn’t exactly smashing the bar onto the ground but it probably wouldn’t have made as much noise if the bolts in either end of the bar were secured properly instead of being a half turn away from falling out. 🙁

  18. i hate you brfent tikm

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