my alter ego is jim, he likes to go to the gym, but not with my friend tim, who lives somewhat close to aa gym

After four months (FOUR MONTHS!!) I was gym free, today I finally visited a gym in Jakarta. The gym was scary. Not pet-peevy scary, but there were just a lot of things went wrong and gone awry.

So what would you do if things that make you consider that a gym is a bad one flashed one by one right in front of your face?

What would you do if you find that the equipments are old? By old, I mean the-year-I-was-not-born-yet old. Perhaps even older. So by that, it was unstable, squeaky, and dirty. Believe it or not, my hands were sort of covered with grease after my training session.

What would you say if there are not enough equipments? Variety speaking, that is. I had to improvise when I need to do dips and barbell shrugs. I mean this is dips, come on. You need to go to gyms to do dips, just because it is almost impossible to do it at home. And nope, there is no dip station. In this case, there is no pull-up station as well. And I have a feeling that that dip station was never used as a dip station prior my coming there.

Push-down station was used as a pull-down stations. Weird, eh. And amazingly, there are actually two other pull-down stations, but people were hogging the push-down station. There are no bench with a inclinable back support. That means, yeah .. I'm having sort of trouble doing stuff like military dumbell press.

Speaking about dumbells, how would you feel when you have no idea how their dumbells were organized? They were NOT regularly increasing. The adjustable dumbells increase every 2.5 kgs. I mean this is dumbells we're talking about. Not barbells. DUMBELLS. And then, I have no idea whether they have all weights, just because people who had used it, wouldn't put it back on the rack. They what?

That makes me question the quality of the gym bunnddies. Behaviour-wise. They have an ... a very ... indiscipline behaviour. And I haven't talked about the routines. But they sit on unused machines (which is so troublesome because there are only few of them). Nobody (except me, of course) uses towels on the benches. They, well, we sweat because we're in the tropics. But, since they don't use towels, you know what happens with the bench afterwards. Ick. They don't put the weights back, so in order to find a good pair of two-and-a-halves, you will always need to scour the room. Not only with your eyes. Gosh!

Now, how they do their routines is ... kinda ridiculous I may say. I'm not saying that I am perfect, but I know for sure, that there are a lot of mistakes in how they're doing it. The most apparent is that almost all the guys copy each other. So the skinny guys do the same routine as the ample (or fat) guys, but with a hell less weight. It is safe to assume that they have never heard of ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph.

There are no variations in their training. Like at all. Everybody was doing the same regime. The same pull-downs, the same concentration curls, the same decline sit-ups, the same same same. Weird. And boring, if I had to fall in that trap.

But I found one conclusion that I've been asking myself for a long time, though. You see, I considered myself as one of the weakest bloke in my old gym. Because an indian guy who stands almost the same cut as mine, can press much more than I can. A slimmer european (the platonic friend that I was talking about) can lift heavier than I can. I was thinking, am I being weak? Or am I just weaker?

Turned out yesterday, that some people who are more built than I am were using weights that are the same or less than my usual lifts and presses. So .. Hmm .. Maybe Indonesians are weaker physically. But then again, how come do we excel in weightlifting?

So to sum up, I think I hesitantly have to succumb to apply a membership in those franchised gym spread along Jakarta, a.k.a. marketplace where you could find yoga classes for sale, as my friend put it.

Or I should stay in this gym, to discipline them. Use a towel! Don't sit there! Put those back! Gosh, what a biatch.

PS: The last two words on the title is not typo. You can check more on the lad right here, for example.