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There's a topic posted in the last couple of days about choosing a gym. I disagreed with one mods reply 'a gym is just a gym'. I'll explain why.
Now bare in mind I'm NOT the winner of the World's Strongest Man but I have trained with buddies who compete in that competition. My niche is in hand strength where I am world class. Being strong all over helps me with my hand or grip training.
The mind set, then, is to max out on strength. My form on some lifts doesn't need to be picture perfect - I wanna move the weight from A-B not get the best contraction as I would if I was a bodybuilder.
So, even in the gym I use now, I can use all the stack on many of the machines. The low cable row, with a 20 plate stack (140-kilos/308lbs) maybe? I can rep easily. I'll add plates to the stack. The same of the lat machine, the leg extension, the seated leg curl, the leg press and so on.
For strength I can't go with the usual advice of 'do more reps' because that turns it into either bodybuilding or endurance. Even on kit which I've had made I think about how much weight it will hold. Heck, I'm the world record holder on some items so I'm the ONLY person doing that much weight as it is never mind wanting to max it out.
So my choice of gyms becomes an exercise in looking at how much weight machines will hold. In one place, ideal at the time, I ended up paying for a longer pin to go on their leg press out of my own pocket. It went from being able to hold 500-kilos or so to being able to hold 765-kilos. Even then, before I had my warehouse gym, I ended up being able to max it out. Now, if I won the lotto, I'd buy a leg pres with 2 sets of pins. There are machines which can hold 1000-kilos or more. Sounds good to me.
Another aspect of the mind set, tied into the kit, is if I arrive at and start using a gym where the kit holds more than I can use I (and my fellow strength nuts) work to try and max it out - even if we can't we will still get stronger.
Now bare in mind I'm NOT the winner of the World's Strongest Man but I have trained with buddies who compete in that competition. My niche is in hand strength where I am world class. Being strong all over helps me with my hand or grip training.
The mind set, then, is to max out on strength. My form on some lifts doesn't need to be picture perfect - I wanna move the weight from A-B not get the best contraction as I would if I was a bodybuilder.
So, even in the gym I use now, I can use all the stack on many of the machines. The low cable row, with a 20 plate stack (140-kilos/308lbs) maybe? I can rep easily. I'll add plates to the stack. The same of the lat machine, the leg extension, the seated leg curl, the leg press and so on.
For strength I can't go with the usual advice of 'do more reps' because that turns it into either bodybuilding or endurance. Even on kit which I've had made I think about how much weight it will hold. Heck, I'm the world record holder on some items so I'm the ONLY person doing that much weight as it is never mind wanting to max it out.
So my choice of gyms becomes an exercise in looking at how much weight machines will hold. In one place, ideal at the time, I ended up paying for a longer pin to go on their leg press out of my own pocket. It went from being able to hold 500-kilos or so to being able to hold 765-kilos. Even then, before I had my warehouse gym, I ended up being able to max it out. Now, if I won the lotto, I'd buy a leg pres with 2 sets of pins. There are machines which can hold 1000-kilos or more. Sounds good to me.
Another aspect of the mind set, tied into the kit, is if I arrive at and start using a gym where the kit holds more than I can use I (and my fellow strength nuts) work to try and max it out - even if we can't we will still get stronger.
