When Less is More at the Gym

My gym’s going upscale.

In a bad way.

They’ve spent the last few days adding flat screen TV monitors to the treadmills. By the end of the Thanksgiving holiday they’ve promised us that these sets will be functional and we’ll be able to stare blankly at whatever channel we want (Really? Any channel? I see a lawsuit coming.) from a screen 12 inches from our faces instead of staring blankly at the ones on the wall.

Here’s the problem: When I worked on the other side of town, the gym on that side of town did exactly the same thing.

I hated it.

Since running on a treadmill is infinitely more boring then running outside, I can see the need for a distraction. When Marathon Girl was forced to use the treadmill in our basement, you can bet she has a move playing to distract her. When I run at the gym, I usually find a treadmill near to the TV with ESPN so I can glance at the football highlights (or whatever they’re showing) while I run.

But I don’t plug in the earphones to listen to the sound because I’m usually 1) thinking about what I need to write that night in my book 2) silently mocking the people on the treadmill who are trying to talk on their cell phone and “run” or 3) checking out how fast other people nearby are running and, if they’re running faster, seeing if I can keep up with their pace for five minutes. All of these are in infinitely more interesting than staring at a TV screen.

Now instead of having a TV monitor that I can glance at occasionally, I’m going to have a screen right in front of my face.

It wouldn’t be too bad if I could move the monitor and push it out of my way, far from my line of sight, so I could glance at it occasionally like I do now. Instead they’re attached to some kind of titanium bracket which I doubt even the Incredible Hulk could bend.

Then to rub salt on the wound there’s no way to turn the TV sets off.

So you have to stare at something, even if you’d rather stare at nothing.

At the very least, it would have been nice if they left a handful of treadmills without the TVs for the few souls like myself who would rather do something than watch television. But no, they converted every damn one of them.

The elliptical machines are next.

It makes me glad I cut the number of runs I do each week at the gym from five to three and replaced the two runs with two 30-minute swims. As far as I know, they haven’t found a way to put TV screens in the pool.

Gym Update

I'm sure most of you have been up at late into the night wondering if my and fellow weightlifter complaints about the new gym were heeded. The good news is that you can all start sleeping again. The gym responded by putting in new benches and more disinfect stations so that lifting three times a week is fun again.

And then to show it was nothing personal, they got someone to create a giant balloon replica of me to help attract people to the gym.

I think they did a great job.

At Least They Eliminated the Stank

 

Last month the gym I’d been working out at since February closed temporarily for remodeling. This wasn’t a big inconvenience since there was another gym about an equal distance away that I could visit. Besides the gym I had been going to had a lot of old equipment and I was looking forward to using some newer stuff.

This week the gym reopened. And while there were a lot of needed improvements, there were a few things I thought the gym overlooked.

First the good.

Most of the new equipment is a huge improvement over the old stuff. For example, they have this news machine the works my triceps better than anything I’ve used before. I love it.

The gym seems more open feel to it. It doesn’t feel like there’s tons of equipment smashed against each other and the equipment is laid out in a more orderly fashion.

They put television screens throughout the gym instead of just the cardio section. This serves as a nice distraction between weight reps.

They improved that heating/air conditioning system so now there aren't hot and cold spots in the gym.

Finally, they somehow managed to eliminate that ever-present stank that seems to be part of locker rooms. I have no idea how they did or if the smell went away simply because the locker room went unused for six weeks

Now the bad.

Since the gym I frequent tends to be near a high school and a major university, there's a lot of want-to-be or ex-football players that visit the gym on a regular basis. By far the most popular piece of equipment in that gym is a standard weightlifting bench. Before they remolded everything there were five benches that could be used at anytime. Now there are only two. Yep, that's right, two weight benches. This has created some problems as instead of people using their own bench, they now have to share it with others. I prefer not to share, if possible.

Then the old benches that were used for more dumbbell-type exercises were adjustable so you could sit, if you wanted, at different angles to work your muscles differently. The new benches just lay flat. No option to raise parts of them at all.

Finally the old gym had plenty of those places where you could get a paper towel and wipe down the equipment after you're finished. Now, there's one location that located on the far end of the gym. This means that most people won't bother walking that distance just to wipe down the equipment. That new equipment is going to look nice very long at this rate. Yuck!

Overall, I'm glad the for the improvements but would have thought they'd put a little more effort into making it a little more friendly for those who spend a lot of time using free weights. The other lifters on see on a regular basis feel the same way. Complaints from me and other weightlifters have been taken at the front desk.

And, yes, I did thank them for getting rid of the stank!