One of the gearheads at my LA Fitness asked if I could spot him while he squats. I admitted that while I had never done so before, I would do my best to help him out. Let me preface this ultimately failed lift with the following:
This guy was huge. Large, lean, and had relatively good form in his warmup sets for squats (he did not cheat any range of motion) as well as having the long legs that facilitate a squat. He walked around the gym with an alpha pose I could only assume had been earned by years under the iron. Anotherwords, I assumed he knew what the fuck he was doing. Ehhhhh. Wrong.
Roidrage loads up the bar with 275. I assumed this meant he was going to use his massive strength to rep to failure, and needed me to help when he did not have the sense to just sit down. Nope. Roidrage goes down for rep 1, and doesn't even move at the bottom of the squat rack.
"Help me brah, cmon!"
Ok...I pull up on the bar until he can stand up.
"Ok, one more," he says.
No, I thought. You didn't get the first one Smalls. There is no one more for you. This time you're on your own. He goes down and immediately falls forward towards the back end of the squat rack (instead of sitting down onto the safety bars like a normal person would), makes a lot of noise, and turns around to face me.
"Where were you brah?"
I believe I was where I needed to be. For future reference, the picture below is what he expected me to do.
 |
| Ya no thanks |
In my mind, spotting still only applies to a few situations.
Spotting is:
- protecting someone's life if they fail a heavy lift- assisting someone for a forced rep at the end of a set
Spotting is not:
- pretend time where I lift something for youIf a weight is too heavy, it's too heavy. That's what getting stronger is all about. Your worst challenge today is a cakewalk a year from now. Roidrage should have known better.
No comments:
Post a Comment