Weight Room Revelations

My father wrote this article in German last week, and I thought it was quite good, so I translated it into English:

Weight Room Revelations
by Andreas Reinhardt

I spent a few weeks at a health spa earlier this year to help me recover from a stroke. My physical therapist told me to lift weights as part of the recovery program. When I stepped into the gym crammed with elaborate contraptions – treadmills, ergometers, and weight lifting machines for all imaginable muscle groups – I remembered how I felt the first time I entered such a gym more than twenty years ago.

At the time, the Berlin police force used a weight lifting gym attached to the Berlin Olympic stadium. Two of my colleagues were regulars there. They excitedly went on and on about their training and repeatedly invited me to come along. Since they ignored my excuses (‘Surely, a beginner like me wouldn’t get anything out of it…”), and since for a while now I had mulled over ways to become physically stronger (unlike the spa, which was more of a restoration project…), I finally gave in and went along. I admit I was a little nervous as I imagined myself among all the Schwarzenegger-types.

When we arrived, only a few guys hung around the locker room. Some nodded briefly in our direction, others greeted my colleagues with jockish slaps. Most everybody seemed preoccupied with their gear, and the chatter was of stats, powders, power drinks and mags I had never heard of. I quickly noticed that my t-shirt, shorts and sneakers made me stand out: Everybody else wore muscle shirts and very tight, very short shorts. Some also sported leather belts or sweat bands.
The gym itself was packed; sweating men occupied almost all the machines. With the well-intentioned comment that “the machines are pretty much all self-explanatory” my colleagues left me to myself and then headed for the remaining free training stations.

So there I stood, surrounded by sweating, huffing and puffing men who made a point of focusing on their machines and who broke their concentration only now and then to apply a chalky powder to their hands, to add or remove metal weights, or to adjust their benches. Everyone kept to himself. Only the bench-press stations were manned by two guys at a time, one hefting the metal bar and the other, it seemed, making sure that the bar wouldn’t accidentally crash back down on the lifting man’s head.

Since I’m not entirely stupid, I decided to watch what was going on for a while and maybe get an idea of what I should be doing. I had figured out that each machine trained different body parts – but which ones? I mean, obviously the ones where you used your arms would train your arms, and the ones where you used your legs would strengthen those. But which ones were the ones that fit me, my fitness level, my experience? What was the right order to follow? How much weight should I start out with?

Unfortunately, there was nobody to ask and nobody who offered to clue me in. I felt highly embarrassed – all I had to do was look at the other guys’ biceps and bulging chests –, and to avoid feeling even worse, I hesitatingly approached one of the machines. Several men walked up with determined steps and confident looks, and I stepped back to let them go first. When they were done and I finally climbed onto the machine, their withering looks told me just how welcome they wanted to make me feel to “their” spot. Their faces retained their scowls until they saw just how little weight I intended to lift. Glancing sideways, they barely hid their grins.

I felt greatly relieved when my colleagues had finally finished their program. As we drove back to the police station, they asked me how I had liked it.

“I liked it ok, I guess,” was my evasive answer. “Not entirely uninteresting.”

I unhappily tagged along two or three more times, and then never went back.

And others never go back to church.