The Gym List

Another year of training is over, and, in just over a week we will back traveling in our caravan watching our hard earned muscle mass wasting off. Closing out my last few gym sessions, I thought about all the weird and, mostly useless, things you see at the average gym and decided to make a list that should be posted in every gym. 

Ormiston Pound

• Understand the difference between training and exercise. Sadly for all you BodyAttack devotees, anything from Les Mills is definitely exercise. 
• Training is not done sitting or lying down because you must "be able to fall down when you do a barbell exercise so that you have to make sure you don't."¹ Exceptions can be made if you are 92 and almost blind (see #6), otherwise, stand up.
• Full range of motion, all the time, always.
• Never, ever use the ab roller machine. 'Nuff said. 
• Use a training log. It's impossible to know if you are getting stronger if you don't keep track of your sessions.
• No one is too old to lift. No one.  
• The likelihood of you actually needing a "recovery shake" after your work-out approaches the likelihood that Donald Trump will start telling the truth. 
• You can't out train SAD (standard Australian diet), so put your big girl panties on and stop eating all the crap.
• What you take out of your diet (sugar, grains, industrial seed oils) is far more important than what you add in.
• It does not matter how much weight you have on the bar if your form sucks. 
• Training is hard and requires grit. Toughen up, you're an adult now. 

1Mark Rippetoe