gym management

The Twilight Zone: Tales of gym management part 2

Published December 8, 2016 | By Annie Dohack

I will spare you the long intro, but in short, this is a series of word sights, sounds, and humans that keep my day at NBS Fitness alive and well.

Installment one of Twilight Zone

  1.  I have started training at 5:30am.  Usually, I am in plenty of company, but last week I showed up and only had a handful of other people in the gym with me.  As I got to training, Elyse noticed a PILE OF CORN on the ground.
  2. In the previous facility, the bodybuilding crew would meet and go over posing each week.  As the facility wasn’t huge, we were always in the company of other lifters who didn’t seem to mind.  However, we did get PLENTY of unsolicited posing advice mixed in the tales of others former greatness.  Particularly, we had two national level bodybuilders going through their posing when the whole thing was interrupted by a guy who vented his frustrations about being “too lean” and “too dry” for the local show he competed in.  For the record, I have yet to hear any judge at any level place a bodybuilder low for being “too lean.”  Overdieted/stringy/small: yes. Too lean? Negative.
  3. Also in the previous facility, we did not have a fenced in strongman area. While we were sure to lock up anything that could be swiped for scrap metal, we didn’t worry much about locking up the 200+ atlas stones. Hell, if you could steal if, you deserve it.  To our knowledge, no one had ever attempted to steal one…until last winter.  During a pretty warm day, I opened the garage door to do some log pressing.  I sat down and was watching a passerby who didn’t see me. Sure enough, he spotted the stone and started looking around to see if anyone could see him.  Somehow he missed me staring right at him and attempted to steal a 275ish atlas stone. I let him struggle with it for about 3 minutes before telling him to knock it off. He offered no explanation as he ran away.
  4. During a gym tour, a guy who went on to be a member presented me with cheesecake in order to bargain his way out of an enrollment fee.  To avoid getting bombarded with cheesecake, I will spare you the outcome.
  5. I explained to a grown, 28 year old man what a debit card was and ran his very first debit transaction.  The whole idea of banks giving you plastic cards and keeping your cash was somehow foreign to this guy.