OK, I didn’t want to say anything when it first happened, because I wasn’t sure if it was me or if it was the failure of the equipment, so I decided to wait & see. And, well, because if it was me, I might not have ever told anyone! But it wasn’t so we’re good to go.

OK so here’s the scenario. You may recall from a previous post that we opted to get our own home gym equipment on the cheap, rather than try to get a membership around here for a club that’s not as good as we’re used to anyways, and then have to actually find this club and drive there. Cool. Well we got a Smith Machine, and like most it uses Olympic-sized weights, meaning that the carrier hole is large (and possibly, in charge). Wanting to keep our weight collection as simple as possible, I searched out for Olympic Dumbells. I use dumbells for a lot of exercises, substituting Dumbell presses for bench presses to counter my chest deformity/imbalance, etc. So I was rather pleased when I found some olympic dumbells at The Sports Authority that looked to fit the bill; they looked as though they’d fit 4-5 10lb plates on each end, plus the locking collar. SWEET, I thought, I’d be in business and able to easily move up weights. The pickup date was July 5th, the infamous “move out of so cal” day. This was because the only place that had the home gym Smith Machine I wanted was halfway between so cal and “here cal.”

Anyway. I liked the idea of the locking olympic dumbells because it meant I didn’t need to have two separate & incompatible sets of weight: Olympic for the Smith Machine, standard for just about everything else. Cool, no duplication!

Now if only it would have worked out. Fast forward to the first workout back for me, my chest. I go a little light because it’s been two weeks, but it doesn’t matter, because my left forearm is about to get a nice surprise, in the form of 70lbs in an awkward decent towards my face. I guess making it quite a surprise to my face as well, huh?

So I was putting the weight up to do some incline dumbell press. The “locking collar” on one of the dumbells didn’t lock so much as it faked it, and next thing you know as I get 70lbs over my head & face area, it’s calling its own bluff and the weights start to shift. Now this is bad for more than one reason. It’s not that the weights have to fall to cause catastrophe, but imagine straining to hold a certain amount of weight up, and suddenly the balance point – which you had in the middle of your grip – suddenly changes and you can’t really compensate fast enough, and next thing you know you have weight crashing towards the ground. This is made doubly worse if your face is between the ground & the weight.

So the weight shifts and I am no longer in a position to keep it up. It starts to cascade towards my face, which while not pretty, certainly wasn’t going to be bettered by 70 more pounds landing straight on it. So I arched my body to put the weight closer to the outside of me, which worked, and it grazed off of my side and landed on the padding below. Well that set was shot, I thought, guess I better set up the second. Only problem was, as I went to tighten the locking collar up fully, I felt a sharp pain in my left forearm. Ouch. I guess as the weights were headed down the side of my body, I tensed to try and soften their landing. Bad idea, because that meant that I was basically doing a negative one-armed curl of 70lbs with momentum! For those that don’t know, that’s a freaking lot of weight. So yeah, it’s way more weight than I could handle even on my best day, and something had to give. My forearm was the lucky winner! Ouch.

That was mid-July. It’s now late September. I’m beginning to lift lightly again, heavier on non-bicep-related exercises as that’s where the damage is most apparent. But I’m working that back in now too, and it’s getting better. I say it’s 70% now. 65-70%.



Which is the long way to say this:
Do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT invest in olympic dumbell sets; they’re sure to be your downfall. The locking mechanisms can’t hold as much weight as they need to, especially considering the fast movements & angle shifts associated with dumbell exercises. Let’s see, what else to say about my weightlifting saga up here?

Oh yeah. Though I bought it thinking it’d be cool as sh*t, I must say that the Gold’s Gym GR7000 could use some serious improvement. It’s hard to know these things in the store because it’s not like you can load it with 500lbs and test it out. But yeah, it kinda has its flaws, some of them serious enough I’m contemplating writing them about it. The seat base on one side is plastic. Plastic, y’all. Do you know how stable that feels when you have your own body weight plus an additional 100+ pounds? Yeah. Could use a little revision there, guys. Then there’s the thoughtful way they cut costs by supplying the Smith Guides as hollow tubing instead of, say, solid tubing? So when I’m doing squats on it, the bars flex and bend, which isn’t too confidence-inspiring. And this is a problem kinda, because the safety catches are attached to the poles and then rotate onto some locks to stay in place. Well, if you try to rack the weight near the safeties (say, to do calves), the latches flare out and can (and have on one occasion) come off what holds them in place at a specified height, meaning no more safeties. That’s bad.

On the “Not going to kill anyone” front, I can still pick a few flaws out. The damn bearings they used don’t actually exist. Which sucks, because it means that teamed with the fact that the bars bend, friction increases non-linearly. What? Why so technical? OK OK, what it means is that if you put on 100lbs and you gauge that you could do twice as much, think again. The friction created by adding that much more weight doesn’t double it, it freaking quadruples it. Yeah, So maybe it achieve this phantom 200lb goal weight you have to trial & error by 10’s or something, maybe ending up at 140 or something to “double” the weight of 100lbs.

The short of it? Take a browse by a gym equipment store, take pictures, come up with ideas to make it better, then have someone build you the thing with your improvements. That’s what I should have done.



More to come. Eventually. I swear
Yeah there’s been a hiatus. I haven’t had time, OK? And my usual two-day off routine for Monday & Tuesday has been done in, so probably not until.. Let’s check the calendar… OK, Thursday good for you? We’ll tentatively schedule a Thursday blog, but be prepared to have it pushed back to Saturday, OK? Much to talk about, but so little time to write it all up and post it. But we’ll get there eventually, huh?

Peace.

Tags: Gym