Day one

So today was my first day doing my lunch workout at the Wellness Center.  As I expected there are some challenges that comes along with switching gyms.

Today the traffic on the way there was on the annoying side.  Since the gym is very close to downtown Naples there is no avoiding the swarms of old people behind the wheels of their luxury vehicles going 10 mph under the speed limit in all three lanes. It took me close to 10 minutes to get there today as a result.  I will be leaving my office a couple minutes earlier to compensate for the travel time.

As I also expected, there will be an entirely different harvest of gym goers to analyze and observe.  Already today I spotted a young kid showing his girlfriend how to curl with horrible form in the squat rack and another guy who really loved admiring himself in the mirror, a lot.

Today I wanted to do squats and deadlifts.  I was surprised that with the size of the gym they only have one squat rack.  I am not nuts about it’s construction either.  It is non-adjustable so the top set of pegs requires me to almost get on my toes to get the bar off and the next set down requires a bent leg starting position I’m not crazy about.  I struggled doing squats like I hadn’t done it in months, although I think I only missed last week if memory serves me correctly.  I topped out with three reps at 205 and it felt HEAVY.

There is not an obvious area to do dead lifting in the place.  I wound up doing it behind the benches in the free weight area.  I got a feeling that the crowd in there is not used to seeing someone deadlift, especially someone doing it in their socks.  I only did two sets of deadlifting and once again the bar felt heavy.

I was then looking to do quick sets of leg extensions and leg curls.  They have two different types of machines , TechnoGym and Hammer Strength.  I first tried doing leg curls on the TechnoGym machine and it seemed physically impossible to get it at an adjustment level that worked for my stork legs.  I eventually gave up and got on the Hammer Strength stuff which I am pretty sure will be the only machines I use in the place.  They also have some bizarre stuff that works with air pressure cylinders.  I didn’t even bother wasting my time on it.

As far as pull up and dip options go, thus far I have not been super impressed with my options.  They have one power tower type of rig and one assisted pull up/dip machine.  Unfortunately unlike the one at my old gym, there is no option to flip the assist plate out of the way so you can do reps freely.  I still need to do some more exploring to get a full inventory of what my options are, it will take some time. There was one piece of equipment I was interested in trying out, one of those continuous rope machines.  Basically you set a resistance level and then just start pulling a fat rope hand over hand for as fast and as long as you can.  It should be a good supplement to conventional pull up training.

The gym environment seemed a bit on the sterile side, filled mostly with people minding their own business.  It’s no big deal though and if more of my old gym buddies show up it will make things better.

I was very happy to see a gym employee meticulously cleaning the entire time I was there, what a concept.