I am a gym rat, and I chose the second option. Breathing is important, so on heavier sets I will exaggerate it a bit to make sure I’m still breathing properly. I will occassionally grunt for the last rep or two of a heavy set or a burn out set, but I think people SHOULD be making some noise if they’re doing that sort of stuff.
I used to make tons of noise way back in high school, but when I graduated and started going to a regular gym, it stopped being cool and just started being rude. The people who grunt or scream on every single rep, even when it’s clearly not very difficult are just obnoxious and get obvious roll-eyes from me. Seriously, I’ve seen guys grunt when curling 10 lbs for sets of at least 15 or 20 on every single rep. And then there’s the other extreme of the guys who do way more weight than they can do properly and scream loud enough that I can hear them across the gym over the music in my headphones. The former guy is just a little bit obnoxious, but the latter one definitely breaks my concentration and I’m often forced to time my sets to avoid lifting at the same time, which just makes it even more frustrating.
And yeah, spotters who yell… stop that. It breaks my concentration too. This is half the reason why I only ask people to spot me that I kind of know, because they’ll shut up and let me lift. The other half being that they actually know how to spot and don’t just immediately lift the weight up at the first sign of trouble, but that’s another rant altogether.
I exhale strongly but no yelling. But then, I don’t lift that hard. At my gym, the owner rented some space in another building for the super lifters. So all their purple-pantsed, gamma-ray induced screaming was kept away from us mortals.
I’m out of the gym now to save money, but I selected “other” for my normal gym behavior.
Most of the time, I’m quiet and controlled and trying to focus on breathing properly.
Once in a while, though, when I’m lifting big (for me) weight (like the first time I squatted 280), I’ll let out an inadvertant yell. It’s never on purpose; it just happens when I’m trying to max out and am giving everything.
Do I detect a note of “you can’t HANDLE the truth!!” in that post?
So you are saying that there are gyms…and there are gyms? Gym rats shouldn’t work out where wannabees work out, and wannabees, if they work out where real gym rats work out, should expect to put up with a lot of noise?
Exactly. As a paying member of the gym, you have the freedom to do anything that doesn’t interfere with my workout. The minute you start bothering me, you’re out of line.