Gee, I guess my CREDIBLE site is totally smashed by your “bob’s fitness cite” How nice that he graduated from Geocites. :rolleyes:
You gonna quote me some Bodybuilding Fitness magazine articles next?
You WANT a beginner to start squatting all the way down from the start. With low weights so that he can build the strength of the ligaments and tendons gradually and safely. Waiting till you can squat 405 and then doing ATTF squats is what causes injury.
A newbie with too much weight on the bar is a problem, but that isn’t what you said. You said he was going to low, two different things.
As for the flexiblity, I don’t know about that. If you can do ATTF squat with no weights you are plenty flexibile enough, just slowly add weights and you will be safe. Maybe if he is so big his big ol belly may get in the way and throw off his form, but again, the OP did not say that.
This isn’t the case at my gym. I’ve been corrected by employees before, and have seen other people have the same experience. However, I go to a women’s gym, so maybe the atmosphere is just different.
I haven’t seen that at all - I mean, they don’t give you anywhere near the same amount of attention, but they do correct you if they notice you’re doing something drastically wrong. It’s probably more for their own protection than anything else (lawsuits) but still.
I could find 100 websites that agree with me, just like you can. If you want to go all the way down, more power to you. If you were a beginner and I was training you, I wouldn’t let you go all the way down.
You also have to take into consideration the body type. I can go down farther than my brother, since I’m shorter and more of a powerlifting type while he’s taller and leaner and more of a bodybuilder type. You can’t say that one specific workout technique (no matter what exercise we’re discussing) will work for everybody, because it won’t.
Well, train your people how you want. I guess as long as you aren’t hurting them it doesn’t matter. The fact is that science does not support your claims, and I could provide studies to back up my claims, not mere opinions of other trainers who have probably never had any official schooling in biomechanics or physiology. In the fitness world, half of the information passed around is out of date and just repeated because other people are repeating it. Science is the only thing that matters, and what the studies show, at least, IMO. I guess YMMV, so I will discontinue this hijack.
You probably think stretching is so important too and that you need to eat 300 grams of protein a day as well. Oh well, keep passing around that outdated information. SDMB isn’t about fighting ignorance or anything.
If you’re reporting his response verbatim, then he certainly was an ass. But I wonder what other things were going on in his life just before you showed up. It could be that you were the last in a long line of people to give him criticism that day, and he took your comments to be just another attack. Or maybe he had a really bad day at work. Or maybe his dog just died.
Or maybe you weren’t as kind in your approach as you conveyed here.
Not that I’m trying to justify his bad behavior, but it seems like such hostility doesn’t come from nowhere.
Sorry to jump on the bandwagon here about squats. Half will say full-squat, the other half will say half-squat. I just find that full squats work better for me. YMMV.
“At parallel (where the thigh is parallel to the floor, higher than the depth of a full squat by about 30 degrees), the compressive forces on the patella (kneecap) are actually at their highest (Huberti & Hayes, Journal of Bone Joint Surgery, 1984: 715-724). Decelerating, stopping, and reversing direction at this angle can inspire significant knee pain in even healthy people, whereas full squats present no problem.”
As far as the stretching thing goes, I’ve heard both but recent studies are saying it’s fine if you do it but it doesn’t help you any more than if you don’t. I personally like being limber, so I choose to stretch. Sometimes when people put on a lot of muscle, they can lose that so it’s important to do so before, during, and after a workout.
Like all weight-lifitng experts, everyone has their opinion. Let’s try to be civil here, with all these people running around screaming they know what’s best, it’s hard to sift the good from the bad.
It’s all I can do sometimes not to walk over and start yelling, “Set your back! My God, set your back!” at them. Funny story, I hopped on an erg for the first time in about 6 months the other day and tried to figure out how far I’d fallen since I was rowing on a crew in college. Turns out not very well - I barely finished twenty minutes with a sub-1:55 split. And I thought I was going to die doing that.
I understand. I mean, I don’t mind tips on technique every once in a while, but it’s usually some guy I’ve been trading spots with or something and we’ve been chatting while working out. I think if some guy just walked over and started talking to me, however, I’d be pretty annoyed, although I wouldn’t be as rude as that guy.
I think the only time you should really interfere is if someone is in immediate danger of seriously hurting themselves. The only thing that I could see would be the hyperextensions with the 45 pound plate. That’s a ton of weight.
I’m a gym rat and have been at it longer than I care to remember. I’ve seen some pretty horrendous stuff being done in the gym. All in the name of fitness. By newbies and old pros alike. Hell, I’ve done some pretty stupid shit too from time to time.
That out of the way, I’ve got to say, I’m with the MYOB crowd. Guys like you’d describe have a lot wrapped up pretty tightly in that self important package of theirs. Pull a string, like you did, and it all unravels pretty quickly. As you’ve discovered.
Unless somebody actually comes over to ask me about what I think the right way to do something is, I simply let them figure it out the hard way. The trainers, BTW, are not responsible for you doing dumb shit unless you hire them to train you. Even then, a perfectly safe exercise can cause an injury and the club may be asked to be accountable, but there is that little matter of a WAIVER which you signed when you joined up.
:dubious: FWIW, I think the guy rubbed you the wrong way to start and you figured you’d give him a “friendly” poke in the eye. Almost got away with it too.
This drives me batshit. I hate it when people use their shoulders for their curls. It also drives me nuts when they do their reps so fast they’re flinging their weights around. Another thing that makes me crazy is when people lay on the stairmaster or hold on to it for dear life because they’re going so fucking fast that if they actually had their legs doing the work, they’d never keep up with the thing.
I can name a thousand things at the gym that make me crazy, and sometimes I’d love to say something to someone about it. But unless that person appears approachable - i.e., they smile at me and strike up a conversation - I usually don’t bother. It doesn’t sound like you were being a jerk, but if he’s already self-conscious, he might view your advice as some sort of insult. That’s shitty that he’s teaching his girlfriend to lift like that. I’d second or third asking a gym employee to talk to them, particularly if you still have connections at your gym. But I wouldn’t approach him again, and I’m not certain I’d approach the girlfriend by herself, either. He’s probably already told her about the guy who told him he was lifting wrong, and might have added his own perceptions as embellishments, so she might not be receptive, even if you talk to her by herself.
I can sorta see FatGuy’s point, though. Not like I’m condoning his attitude or his response, but I’ve worked out at the Y, and if I was in the middle of my routine and some random stranger strolls up to me and says, “You’re doing that all wrong, get a trainer, and I just happen to have the name of a trainer who works cheap,” I’d think it was some jerk who’s being paid to troll the gym and advertise his “friend’s” services.
Sorry, but there it is. He probably saw you as some jerk-off of a “gym trainer telemarketer” - and I’d bet a lot of us wouldn’t have as much of a problem with someone responding that way to a telemarketer.
Maybe it’s just 'cause I’m a girl, then. Or I talk too much, hence my username.
Still, if a random guy walked up to me and told me I was lifting all wrong and I thought he was being an asshole about it, there’s a good chance I’d say something to my workout partner.
