You’re not a pirate, so don’t bring your crew of buddies with you. Too often you see a group of usually young guys going to the gym in a pack of three or more. This breaks gym etiquette for so many reasons.
The most obvious reasons start out with crew members blocking off an area. Sure the crew might be using just one or two benches, but the crews stands around the benches or equipment with plenty of space between each other (so they can say no homo). This ends up blocking walkways and even access to other equipment and machines. Then when someone needs to say excuse me, ironically, to get by or access something, the “inconvenienced” crew member has the audacity to look annoyed.
Then there’s the how much longer it takes to use the equipment. Having so many people involved means that it will physically take them longer to get done on the equipment, to the detriment of the crew and other people that might want to use the weights.
Think about it, for endurance/hypertrophic lifting, the crew will fail in one of two ways. Either they all share one weight bench, for example, and lose any hypertrophic potential due to the time it takes to cycle everyone through, or they take up numerous weight benches and then turn into hogs. I’ve also seen one case where a crew took every twenty pound dumbbell in the gym. After waiting for ever, I went up to one of them and indicating a currently unused set of 20’s, asked are you using that. He says yeah bro, so then I point to another unused set of 20’s and ask what about that one. Thankfully he was smart enough to see then what his crew had been doing and let me use it. This story also then relates to another way a crew can be a hog. This same crew was on benches with all of the 20’s but then, oh then, they took set’s of 25, 30, 35, and 40. Luckily they aren’t dedicated lifters so they couldn’t go higher in dumbbell weight but think about how many weights that took from others to use!
And then for powerlifting, take the above and it gets worse. Any weights used need to get stripped since all of the crew isn’t at the same weight. This ends up in a ton of time wasted putting weights on and off. This is a very loud process too, which leads into my next point, crews are obnoxious and loud.
Let’s face it, a lot of times people in crews are what is known as howler monkeys. This is different from the animal known as a grunter. A grunter is usually a solitary creature (can sometimes have a mate) that can actually put up a fair bit of weight, but will make sure that everyone in the nearby vicinity knows they can do it via their attention grabbing grunts. (I’ll discuss this gym etiquette point later). A howler monkey is a skinny or small creature that has a groups of similar creatures around it, chatters a lot in noisy fashion, and has way too much energy that isn’t being applied to weight lifting. People don’t like hearing them babble on about whatever is going on at your frat or high school. (Or worse yet from my time in the Marine Corps, how awesome and cool they are. Yes, crews happen with appalling frequency in the Marine Corps, especially when deployed on ship where their crimes are magnified in those tiny, tiny shiphold or deck gyms. But those are stories for another time).
Then there’s what this level of noise, and going in a crew in general, says about them. They’re here for a social experience, not to do work. They’re also are probably inexperienced. In general, the pirate crew is there to show off, or worse yet, go hunting for booty. Yarr. (Which gibts at yet another gym etiquette violation).
Crews lead to nothing but gym etiquette violation.
Biggest thing, by going in a crew, you’re not helping yourself. You have to deal with differing uneducated opinions, the distractions from talking, and the near inability to get a good lift in. If you need a spotter, it’s okay to go with one partner who’s on the same page with you and who is there purely to lift. You don’t need the other four spotters.
A Plaid Viking 