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

Stuck at Home

My poor car.  Don't worry Max
We'll make you better.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to chime in here and say my car was totaled and, while this doesn’t affect me for work, this is really hindering my ability to go to the gym.  So for now I’ve been working out at my apartment
fitness center, and hopefully will have something figured out by the end of this week.  …Not having a car sucks, btw, especially in Dallas.

LA Fitness - Victoria (London)

Still recovering from a procedure (though next week I should be back into the exercise/lifting game), but I thought to share my experience gym surfing abroad during this interim period.

A year ago my best friend was working in London, so I decided to go pay him a visit.  He couldn't take off from work, but I figured that was fine, I could go sightseeing on my own.  It also meant that I didn't have to take off from lifting (every day counts!!!).  So of course I look up the gyms near his apartment and found LA Fitness Victoria.  I was staying there for five days (no hotels to pay!!!) and needed to workout for three days, so their three day trial period was perfect for me.

Layout/facilities

When I took this picture I had
no idea that I would use it a year
later in a blog.

The building/space a little strange in that is mostly underground.  I guess this makes sense in a city as crowded as London where anything goes.  You take a spiral staircase downstairs, it feels a bit like going into the tube, except that it is light and airy.

Back in undergrad (2002, to be exact), I got the chance to study abroad at Oxford.  While there, I was fortunate enough to get a gym membership (they didn't have a college gym for us).  It was a very interesting experience because that gym had almost no mirrors, and was almost entirely treadmills/stairclimbers.  There were almost no weights.  I figured this was a reflection of the soccer-culture in UK/Europe.  As opposed to beefy American football players, here it's more "skinny" soccer players.  Also, there seemed to be less concern about physique (thus the lack of mirrors).

I also had a bit of a learning curve.  I was trying warm up with some bicep curls (remember I'm 22 at the time, don't judge) so I grabbed some 20's.  I did like 5 reps and then I couldn't do a sixth rep.  I was really confused.  I was usually using 35s for my last, really tough set. Why were 20 pounders giving me so much trouble??

It was then that I realized that the weights were in Kilograms, not bloody pounds.  I was curling 44 pounds, not 20.

Anyways, back to the London gym.  This gym definitely feels more like an American gym.  Lots of mirrors and weights.  Also, this time I knew that everything was in Kilos, and adjusted accordingly.  Older and wiser.

Classes

I got to see some boxing and aerobic classes in action, they seemed pretty... ordinary.  I guess fitness is the same around the world.

Locker room

I didn't really want to check out the showers here, they were a bit... unclean.  I think they were kind of relying on the location, not the cleanliness of the place, to get customers.

Surfability

This one is actually kind of hard to surf.  You can't just sign up online.  First, you fill out an online form, BUT you need to provide a London phone line for them to call you on.  In my situation I was able to use my friend's apartment's phone line.  But if you're just visiting I doubt your hotel room number will work.

Talked to the nice lady on the phone for a bit, scheduled my tour, and then walked over and took the tour.  She took me around and showed me everything, asked me what I was doing in London, stuff like that.  I distinctly remember the sales associate trying to figure out my skill level, to see if I needed an extensive tour explaining how everything works.  She asked me how much I can bench, and I had to think a bit to convert pounds to Kilos, and then responded with something like "I can do five reps of 100 kilos, does that work?"  She quickly nodded her head and said that was just fine and then left me alone to the weights.

Looking forward to getting back into the iron game and trying out new gyms.

Xsport Express (South Barrington, IL)

So while I’m waiting to be able to get back into the gym, I’ve realized that my gym surfing/critiquing goes father back then mid-2014 when I started this blog.  Two years ago when I was in Chicago for Christmas break, I thought to try to use just gym passes so I could lift while in the Barrington area.  What happened was me visiting the closest gym, an Xsport Express. And that gym wouldn’t let me get a trial pass since I had tried out their gym in Alexandria, VA a few years earlier (BTW the Xsport in Alexandria is supposed to be their nicest gym in the country)

So what happened was I tried to get out of the gym without buying anything but instead the sales guy convinced me to sign up.  He told me that after two weeks I could get a full refund if I attended X number of days and had a free session with one of their trainers. I was only going to be in town for about two weeks, so I decided to sign up.  This was not really my proudest moment, but I really did feel a whole lot of pressure to sign up, and I didn't go into the building prepared for it. So I caved.

I had an ok time there, but I really, really had issue with the trainer who I met up with for the required free session.  It is actually because of this meeting that I do not take up gym’s offers of a free training session with a trial membership.  I don’t want to just completely break down a person’s ability to do their job, even though the fitness industry, as a whole, is a sham and simply won’t get you to be stronger, faster, quicker, leaner, etc., etc.

The experience with the trainer left such a bad taste in my mouth that about a year later I posted a review on yelp.  I mean, not only was he wrong about many different things, he also never admitted to being wrong when I challenged him on his shit.  Here is that review:

This place has a great location, and quite a bit of equipment.  However, they have only one squat rack so things can get congested.

My issue is with the trainers, at least the one that I worked with.


I decided to take this gym up on its offer of a free training session, just to see what it is like, and walked away sorely disappointed.  The fellow I met with really had poor listening skills and appeared to be ignorant of pretty much anything that has to do with weightlifting.  For example, when he asked me what my goals were, I responded with "to get bigger and stronger" (imagine being like Brian Shaw). He then proceeded to tell me how we were going to get my fat% down. ...Nowhere did I mention wanting to get cut.  

He also lost any respect I had for him when I told him I was squatting three times a week (starting strength program).  He threw down his pen when I told him that and said "oh well that's too much, that's your problem right there."  Really??? He was going to sit there and tell me that programs such as the Texas method, starting strength, or any Olympic lifting program is inherently flawed because they all involve squatting multiple times a week?  What about the well-renown Bulgarian system that has people squatting heavy multiple times a day multiple times a week?!?! Clearly this "trainer" knew nothing about training, and sadly the rest of the session did not prove otherwise.


I will say that he had me wear a heart rate monitor to make sure I didn't pass out. I doubt many trainers out there take such an easy precaution that has a lot of potential benefit, and more should do this.


That said, he had me do lots of accessory exercises in three sets of ten reps.  First off, the fact that we did so no strength work whatsoever (heavy weight at 3-5 reps) and did only hypertrophy (lighter weight at 10-12 reps) seemed off the mark since my goal was to get stronger (although this should theoretically get me bigger, though only up to a point).  Secondly, the emphasis seemed to be on the accessory work, not on the main compound lifts.  Accessory work is fine, but if I want to bench 315 for reps (as I stated in my goals) I'm not going to get there doing three kinds of tricep presses.


It honestly felt like this guy's program was mainly to "feel the burn", not really to train to a particular goal.  I would suspect he is great with coming up with an exercise routine, but not a training routine.  If you don't know the difference between exercise and training, then you should be working as a "trainer".


I should also mention that it seems like these guys are part supplement salesmen.  He kept telling me 
I should get some protein powder and I kept telling him no thanks I prefer to just have a steak. Supplementation is fine, but I felt like it wasn't his place to try to push the stuff on me.

Unquote . I can really see the beginnings of this blog in this review, it's kind of cool.  Simply re-reading this story makes my blood pressure rise though, and it makes me glad that I haven't had to deal with a trainer in a professional situation since then.  I don't mind helping out trainers from time to time (Like explaining to one at Trophy how the over head press works)

Taking a Short Break

So I have had some medical procedures done to my shoulder and back last week, and the Doctor's orders are for me to take a month off of any real exercise.  I'm going to oblige and put this gym surfing on hold for now.  I will stop the clock and resume it when I get back into the gym. So, for example, if my next trial is a week I will just add those seven days to the 141 days I have so far been working out without paying.

I'm kind of glad I'll be missing out on the new year's resolution rush, but I also wonder what it would be like. I imagine getting tours from flat-eyed sales associates who've said the same thing 80 times for that day alone.

I also think I'm going to post an awards list of some sorts. This will be based just on my opinion and just me having some fun.  People keep asking me which one my favorite is, but it's like asking which one is your favorite child. They are all special snowflakes.  I think I'll post it with the end of the 2014 year.

Texins Activity Center

So this place really hits the nostalgia button for me.  My father worked for Texas Instruments, so during the summer in college I would workout here. It was here that I had my first experience with a personal trainer and really started to love lifting (Didn't hurt that I had a big crush on my trainer, Cissy). My first job ever was working the juice bar here. I also worked at TI for a while so I again worked out here and participated in some of the inter-mural programs with coworkers.

Not a whole lot has changed since I last worked out here, back in the early naughts.  Where there were once CRTs (Where I saw episodes of the first season of Survivor) there are now flat screens. This place is nerdy.  TI has a lot of engineers, so that’s who works out here.  Also, because I work out in the 9:30-11:00 time slot I work out with all the retirees.  So I get to run into friends of my dad while working out.  This is not the easiest gym to get to since it's on TI's campus, though it is kind of cool that I have to go through a security check point to get to the gym.

Layout/facility

This place is very large, and they live up to the name of activity center.  They have various group exercise rooms, a basketball court, indoor track, outdoor track, indoor pool, soccer field, sand volleyball courts, ping pong table, etc.  About ten years ago I got my dad hooked on mat Pilates classes, and though he’s retired he still goes to classes. I like to think that’s one reason why though he’s 74 he is still very active and has good mobility.  Anyways, they have something for everyone here. It's kind of like a college gym with the programs, but populated by older people.

Group classes

They have tons to offer here. I think I tried out a karate class here once (was not impressed, but that could be because I was spoiled by going to an awesome Kung Fu/Tai Chi place first). I also did some yoga/pilates classes with my sister and dad back in the day and remember them being good.  I've also seen swimming classes, so there is tons to do here.

Locker rooms

These are the exact same as they were back in 1999. At least for the men, this is not for the modest.  The showers are community, and you will have lots of old naked guys walking around.  They have a hot tub, and although lots of blow dryers they don't really offer any products. So you have to bring everything yourself.  Personally that's fine with me because, with the exception of Telos, I have yet to see a gym that offers everything including aftershave.  If you're going to have to bring something, might as well bring everything.

Surfability

This place is amazing with it’s free trial system.  First, they use a punch card for seven days. That means they trial period isn't for a week, it's for seven WORKOUTS. if you lift three times a week like me, that means you'll get over two weeks free. It's pretty awesome. The punch card does expire after like 30 days, but that is more than enough time to get your workout on.

Days in: 141

Amount spent: $0