Missing in Action…Spawning Season
2 January 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been missing in action the past month for a lot of reasons: I had a hell of a December – not in a bad way but in a hectic, frantic way. To kick the month off I had to do my yearend double duty with magazine clients. Trade fitness publications avoid end-of-year madness by having all feature articles delivered early. Since no one is really available over the Christmas holidays, articles and columns need be delivered three weeks before the normal due date. This creates one month a year that I have to deliver six published articles in a 30-day period and that is stressful to say the least. Then I traveled to Vegas to assist my old friend Pavel Tsatsouline at the AAU National championships. He took 3rd place in the 181-pound class with a 501 deadlift and his friend Brett Jones won the class with a 529 pull. I cannot express how much I enjoyed working with these two. I have a Vegas travelogue article which I will be posting in the next week. I don’t travel well and Vegas is totally foreign to me and my normal mode of existence: Pavel called it a “moonscape covered with shopping malls, casinos and restaurants.” Stacy and I adopted a 13-year old boy named Kenny; after months of preliminaries he moved in with us in December and while we were (and are) really excited with this 125-pound addition to our tight family unit, things have been a bit crazy – as you might imagine. After I returned from Vegas I came down with a mystery sickness no doubt related to the lack of moisture in Nevada and the mind-warping time change. Now its 2007 and after a bit of forced idleness I feel ready, willing and able to jump back into the mix.
In the fitness biz there is an odd and reoccurring phenomenon relating to the annual radical influx of Resolution Makers. The natural tendency of the overweight and out of shape is to resolve to change the shape of their physique in the New Year and this leads to a migratory flood of fresh faces at the fitness facilities. The resolution influx subsides in around the 1st of February and things get back to normal. January is a tense month as regular gym patrons feel rightfully disenfranchised; I have seen fistfights break out as hordes of Resolution Makers hog equipment, ignore gym etiquette and do plain stupid things that enrage regulars. For example: using the squat rack to set a barbell on (with no plates on the bar or perhaps a pair of 2½’s) in order to do cheat curls. By placing the barbell on the squat rack the “newbie mullet” (gym lingo used by regulars to label a particularly aggressive strain of resolution maker) avoids having to bend down to pick up the curl bar. The newbie mullet becomes loud, aggressive and defensive when asked by a regular to go elsewhere with the lightly loaded curl bar. “I have a right to finish my curls right here – I’m not moving anywhere!” Since a mature mullet can take up to ten minutes to recover from a single sub-maximal set of curls, the squat rack can be out of commission for a full hour - particularly if there is a squad of mullets working out together. Pleas to the gym management on the part of regulars to intercede on their behalf fall on deaf ears. The order from the owners is to allow the mullets and the Mullet Invasion top priority: The mullets are to be given preferential treatment at every turn.
Akin to a commercial fishing vessel stumbling on a school of cod in the North Atlantic, the gym owner knows that the mullets will disappear in about February and they want to extract as much cash out of the mullet feeding frenzy as possible. The owners sell year-long memberships to the resolution-makers in early January, put up with mullet atrocities for 30-45 days knowing full well that soon the mullet school will be gone. So as far as bottom-line conscious owners are concerned, to hell with the bitching regulars and horary for mullets who want to use squat racks in order to avoid bending down 20-inches to pick a 15-pound curl bar up off the floor. In Mullet-Think bending over with a heavy barbell could potentially wrench their marshmallow back muscles and derail the whole transformational effort. Mullets are extremely concerned about injury. Ditto those mullet schools that tie up the entire row of cardio machines pedaling 2-miles an hour for 60-minutes while talking loudly to one another about the most recent Oprah episode or Dr. Phil (mullets overwhelmingly subscribe to the “sensible” fitness philosophies of Dr. Phil) or Brittney and Paris’ latest misadventure. Aerobic machines provide mullets an opportunity to catch up with one another. Mullets like to use the heavy duty benches to sit and perform concentration curls with a 2.5-pound dumbbell. They like to lie back and rest between strenuous curl sets. If a mullet chooses to use the deadlift area to take a nap or sit and stretch (mullets love to stretch) then so be it – they’ll have the full weight of management behind them to ensure that regulars (who management knows will bitch and moan but will never ever quit the facility in protest) don’t violate Mullet Civil Rights. Mullets are big on equality.
Gym owners have told me that that January mullet spawn results in triple the membership sales of any other month. One gym owner summed it up. “The Resolution Makers overwhelm the facility for 30 to 45 days. Each buys an annual membership and once they burn out I never see them again. It’s a perfect situation for me! I get a year’s pay for a month of aggravation! So if my regulars want to moan and bellyache – too damn bad! My January sales cancel out the disastrous months of July and August and allow me to drive a Porsche Boxter instead of a GM Saturn. God Bless Mullets!” So if you are at your commercial gym and frustrated that there is a group of muscle-less strangers lined up at the tricep cable pushdown machine doing strange exercises that completely throw off the pace and rhythm of your workout, take a chill pill and remember that February is only 28-short days away and mullet spawning season will be over by then.
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