The Gym of Social Mechanics

Right on Greenville, this place is in a happening location.  Sporting the converted space look that I love so much (Garage doors and exposed brick), this is a hip place as well.   Surrounded by tattoo parlors and trendy restaurants like HG supply company, it makes sense that the people that work out here are also young, hip, and tatted up.  I should point out that by no means does this group feel exclusive, everyone I talked to was friendly and open. I do feel the need to point out though that if tattoos and lulu lemon are your thing, then this is the place to be.

So what is the gym of social mechanics? SM purports itself to be a safer take on CrossFit.  They claim that their workouts consist of all the safe exercises of crossfit, without any of the dangerous ones.  So you get all the camaraderie and workout-induced high of a crossfit WOD, without those pesky trips to the doctor.  Sounds like a great idea right? Well, it is a great idea, but whoever programs the workouts here does not have a complete grasp of what exercises are dangerous, as was demonstrated by my first workout here.

MET-CON DAY

My first day I came in on a Tuesday, which is when they usually do their metabolic conditioning exercises. For those that don't know what metabolic conditioning is, it's a workout where you move light-medium weights around for higher reps and for longer periods of time (10-20 minutes).

During this metabolic conditioning exercise we did sumo deadlift kettle bell high-pulls (SDHP), box jumps (tons of box jumps), toes to bar or knees to chest, and wall balls. I was really surprised that they tout themselves as safer than CrossFit because those first three exercises are some of the most dangerous exercises in Crossfit. 

First, the SDHP.  It's been well known for YEARS in the crossfit community that SDHP’s can potentially hurt your shoulder, specifically the supraspinatus.  Don’t believe me? I’m not offended, but if you are interested here are four posts about why the SDHP can easily cause a shoulder impingement that puts your supraspinatus at risk, making it a stupid exercise. And yet, SM’s “safer programming” for that day was chock-full of SDHP’s.  But enough of that, let’s go to another dangerous, and misused exercise: the box jump.

The box jump was originally used as a nice finisher after hard workouts; it was also originally a depth jump. For example, you do your workout, and at the end you do like 6 (AT MOST) reps where you jump from one box, onto the ground, and using the body’s plyometric abilities, bounce back up to another box.  Here is a vid of Dwayne Wade using this technique.  The box jump (jumping from the ground up onto the box without first jumping down off of a box) as it has now become popular, is just bad news in high reps.  A single box jump can be a great test/demonstration of power and agility. If you can jump onto a box as high as yourself then you are quite the athlete.

GHDs, something else that can
be really dangerous if you
don't know what you're doing

But to try to jump somewhat high over and over and over again is just asking for a badly scraped shin at best or a blown Achilles tendon at worst.  The dangers of high rep box jumps has been pretty well documented  (and made fun of); I don’t understand where Social Mechanic can think that doing like a hundred box jumps in a workout is safe for anyone. Hell, I missed a jump myself and almost got hit in the head by fellow box-jumper.

So that leads us to the last exercise in the workout: kipping toes to chest.

It’s not the knees to chest that is so bad, it’s the kipping action that is the element of danger.  The kipping action is dangerous because it is easy to do incorrectly.  Kipping pull-ups is If you don’t have a lot of shoulder strength and you perform the kipping mechanic, it exposes the joint to all types of damage. Kipping knees to chest does the same thing.

Steven Low, writer of an awesome exercise blog, has chimed in on this subject matter as well.  Concerning SLAP tears, he says: 

The reason why you don't seen the top CF athletes getting slap lesions is because their shoulder mobility sucks. If your shoulder mobility sucks when you relax your shoulder muscles at the bottom of the pullup you have your muscles contracting against opening the shoulder all the way thus mitigating any forces on the biceps long head tendon. In addition, the muscles do help bar forces from the shoulder.

However, when you get people who are weak (e.g. women in general, or those with good shoulder mobility) they're the ones getting the primary forces distributed through the muscles into the other soft tissues such as the long head of the biceps. This is especially the case with learning the kipping pullups where there's going to be a lot of jerking down into the motion while learning it.

I would never ever ever ever recommending learning kipping before you at least have 3+ deadhang pullups. It's not just not a good idea putting trauma on the shoulder especially when it's easy to not do it right and jerking down into the movement which is much more dangerous than a smooth movement.

Jerking down from toes to bar can do the same thing for reference.

Someone else has eloquently described what is going on with the kipping motion:

Just imagine the "peel-back" force in the shoulders when they are forcefully wrenched back at the apex/reversal point of the kip. If you really think about it, the head of the humerus is trying to push out the front of the glenohumeral (shoulder) joint, the kipper is trying to RELAX their muscles at the bottom to get the most out of their kip, leaving all the strain on the LABRUM (think of it as a suction cup on the scapula that holds the humerus on the body, with the greatest forces on the top/superior and the front/anterior parts), and the resultant forces--over time (repetition)--TEAR the TOP part of the labrum from the FRONT to the BACK...this is therefore a SUPERIOR LABRUM ANTERIOR-POSTERIOR injury mechanism, almost perfectly designed (as evidenced by the orthopedic doctors making a ton of money off of people who do them).

There's also another article here by Whole 9 that basically sends the same message of do dead hangs before working on the kip. Crossfit Virtuosity also recently mentions how important it is to have strict pull ups before you start kipping (and provides a great program to get strict pull ups).

So yeah, kipping anything can be dangerous for your shoulder if you don’t have the technique or strength.

To sum it all up: this place can offer up some dangerous exercises if you’re not careful and aware of the dangers.

STRENGTH DAY

Afterwards I was told that they usually do a strength workout on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays, so I decided to come in again and see how it works on strength days. I was curious as to how different their strength day is from their met-con day.  …That and I still didn’t have a car and they were within walking distance.

So the workout was 5-5-5-5 of hang clean.  The instructor said we could take as much time as we wanted between sets, so I was pumped.  I usually take 2-3 minutes of rest between sets when the lifting gets heavy, and my moderate goal was to have the last set be 185#.

However, I never got to that weight because everyone else rushed through their sets, leaving me as the last lifter standing, so I ended on my third set.  I was a little disappointed because it seemed that no one was really interested in trying to lift as heavy as they could.  Maybe they were following some template I was unaware of, but I don’t think so.

Following the strength part was yet another metcon, a variation of Cindy: 10 rounds of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, and 15 squats.  So really the main focus here is the met-con again, with a little strength on the side.

So all in all I don’t see how this gym is really any different than your normal crossfit gym except for the fact that they don’t do snatches and clean and jerks. (although apparently they do hang cleans).  As a big fan of Olympic lifting I’m a little disappointed that they threw the baby (Oly lifting) out with the bath water (high reps Oly lifting), especially when they decided to leave a tub of acid (kipping, SDHP, and Box jumps) lying around.

Days in: 143

Money spent: $10

SMU's Fitness Center

So I decided to buckle and paid for a guest pass at a gym. I was only going to have a car to drive for one day and all the other gyms that I have lined up are going to be one or two week passes. I didn't want to possibly waste passes so I had to go for an option where I could just pay $10 and go out one day.

Exercising that option led me to good ol' SMU, my old stomping grounds. Back when I was a student at SMU, the fitness center was atrocious. It was so small there the daily campus wrote about how the square footage of gym per student ratio was so much lower than other like-sized Universities.

For a while I used to lift weights in the cinco center (which was much nicer than the previous facility). It was called the Cinco center because it was only supposed to be up for five years and then torn down. Originally it was just a stopgap for the football team, it was a place for them to work out while the real strength and conditioning facilities were being built. But after the football team was done with it SMU then decided to save some money and let the students use it and make that the fitness center.

So with all this disappointing history with SMU, I was really excited to see this new (to me) facility. I had heard it had a wall climbing section as well as so many more basketball courts then before, plus a track and an indoor soccer court. They even have, as SMU should, an outdoor reflecting pool for people to sunbathe and hang out. You know, strut their shit.

The gym is actually pretty nice. Two years ago I used to work out at Duke's fitness center and Dukes gym is actually newer and better than SMU's so I was a little disappointed. On a side note I really don't like Duke fans, really annoying with their basketball superiority complex.

But back to SMU's facilities. I think they have seven basketball courts and one indoor soccer court all on the first floor. Above that is indoor track that runs around the whole space. You have to go downstairs to find weightlifting floor.  I was expecting a light and fresh place, similar to Equinox.  Instead, the walls are a light beige, making it seem kind of muddy, and the light is a little yellowish too.

I was also a little surprised that they didn't have more squat racks (four). Although the number that they have for here is more than adequate I guess. They also have two Olympic lifting platforms which, interestingly enough, were being used all the time when I was there.  It's nice to see people doing Olympic lifts, I used to think no one ever knew about them.

Very serviceable, but nothing fancy

Lockers

Non-descript. The type where you bring your own lock, though most of the lockers are not day lockers but people's personal lockers.  The showers seemed decent. Also, it seems one of the sinks was having issues, have no idea how long that had been going on but they way it was talked about seemed like it had been that way for a while.

Surfability

They simply do not offer free trial passes here. I knew I wanted to eventually visit this place, so paying was inevitable, but it was so nice to keep the streak going.  Given that this is a school's gym and not a gym that's a private business, they just let you pay the fee and you can walk right on in. There's no tour or anything.

For the record, an alumni guest pass is $10.  Still kind of upset that I ended up paying for a workout.  Oh well, guess it took a car wreck to make me break the streak.  Here's to another one!



Days in: $142
Total money spent: $10