Gyms

I found this on a lifting website I'm on. American capitalism can just be downright fuckin evil.


I work out on a pretty shitty piece of equipment (bench, dumbbells, and barbell) in my garage at home. My wife suggested that we join this gym that's new in town and asked that I "check it out". I'm speaking about Planet Fitness.

So I go to their website. First, they have a policy that is totally descriminatory against weightlifters. Period. You grunt, you are out. No deadlifts allowed. You will be banned. Dumbbells are limited to 80lbs. Seriously!? I was shocked. This supposed to be a gym, right?! RIGHT?! Then....I found THIS gem on the "About Us pages:

Fun Facts!
We give away 35000 free t-shirts every month!

Have you seen PF's famous candy jars filled with purple and traditional Tootsie Rolls?? We go through over 750,000 each month!

On Pizza Nights (the first Monday of every month) we go through 3000 pizzas. That's 24000 slices per year!

The second Tuesday of every month we serve up free bagels to our club members! Come on by and get your own! Only at PF! More like Planet Fatass....



You might never see so much of a disparity between places of business than in the gym industry. I'm a guy that has only worked out at two places: my basement, and in school gyms of some sort, be it high school or college. Both of these places are not for pussies. My basement has only a bench, a whole lot of weight, a jump rope, and a piece of metal tied to the cieling for pullups. There is nothing more that I need there. The school gyms I have lifted at are the kind that many football players and other athletes trained at, so the incline benches were always used, guys actually did squats once in a while, and the biggest guy in the gym was always in the corner doing snatches and clean and jerks. There was a fair share of runty frat boys doing curls in the squat rack, but it wasn't that bad.

Maybe I've been spoiled, because when I read the above, I was shocked. How do you have a gym where you can't grunt? I've been around guys that howled like banshees on their last set of Hammer tricep extensions, so I understand keeping it in line, but seriously...no grunting? No deadlifts? Like, ever? So for my legs, I have to do one legged, one arm overhead squats on your swiss balls with those little pink dumbbells? I know, I know, it "hits the core hard".... I hope the next person that says that to me has a very large oak tree fall on them.

The dumbells only go to 80? I'm not a strong guy, but this is nearly the only reason I may join a gym in the near future: things like my DB bench are going past the point where I can use 65's in my basement, so if I want to use lower reps, I need the 80's. And that's me...I can't imagine the guys who are actually strong. I'd burn the building down.

So basically, this place doesn't want you lifting heavy, doesn't want you being loud, and doesn't want you to do the lifts that benefit you the most.... but goddamn, they got jars of candy everywhere! And they give away pizza. Loads of it. And bagels. If you fat fucks don't want to work out, or it gets a little to tough for you, there's always pizza night!

This is the gym industry, and I know that. They want a thousand people to sign up, knowing that five hundred will never show up at all, three hundred will go for two weeks and then quit, and one hundred will come but barely break a sweat, and the gym will stay nice and clean and their machines will last for twenty years. Of course, it's the less than one hundred like me that will go in there and bang shit around and nearly give ourselves aneurysms going for one rep maxes on squats or make ourselves puke from doing too many dips at the end of our workouts that they seriously don't want even applying to their beloved gym. Or they hope we apply, but then our car blows up so we can never make it, or our job transfers us to Seattle and we forget to cancel the membership (in which case we'd commit suicide, because that's what people in Seattle do, and then the gym could continue charging our credit card for long after we're dead.)

Dissapointing to say the least. It makes me want to go in there and miss a jerk on purpose because I'm grunting, flinging the Olympic bar right into the squat rack (killing the guy who's curling there), making chalk fly everywhere (because I hid it in my ass to get it into the place), puking on the floor (because it was my last set), fall into the dumbell rack (that only goes up to fifty pounds), and cleaning myself up in the bathroom all the while being a gentlemen while there (which means pissing on the toilet paper holder).

Fuckers.