Zombies

After last night, I’m officially annoyed at my gym. They decided the way to improve the gym was to mount TV’s all over the place. Yay. Now it’s gone from a “gym” to a “place where I have to walk around clusters of zombies and ask people if they’re done using the machine they’ve decided to convert into a couch while watching ‘Best of UFC’ clips”.

I think the number of people in the gym has gone up lately, too. This is probably partially due to the TV’s as well. I happen to know that I’m a daydreamer, and the gym is a bad place for that. So, I went out and bought a $9 Casio with a stopwatch: when I finish a set, I start it. That way, when my brain inevitably drifts off onto random topics and suddenly snaps back to the Real World(tm), I can look at my wrist and know if I was flaking for seconds or minutes, and when I ought to start the next set. It doesn’t look like many other people in my gym have such discipline. Add in the TV’s, and you have people in the gym for twice as long, periodically remembering to pick up something heavy, and mostly staring up at TV’s.

And getting in my way.

TV’s don’t belong among freeweights. By the cardio stuff: fine. Cardio is long and often boring. Strength trainging is about focus and paying attention to sets, time, and the response of your body.