Jeez Louise, everyone has been slagging on that imported communist who would be mayor of New York:
One little probably spur-of-the-moment and probably impromptu TikTok video later, and suddenly everyone is Hans or Franz.
I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. Because I tend to plateau around 45. Coincidentally, that’s why I dodge the question when someone hears that I go to the gym and asks me how much I can bench. I can sleep on a bench for hours, I say.
As you might know, gentle reader, I am an intermittent weight lifter and have been a member of one gym or another for most of my adulthood.
I tend to be diligent in spurts, and then slack off, and then be diligent again for a while. Generally, I tend to get to a certain point and then rather plateau before I slack off. And I tend to plateau right around that 45. And then when I come back to the gym after a couple of months of slacking off, I have to start my way back to it.
In a bit of my defense, my workout is not geared to driving toward a big number max for one or two reps. I tend to want to do a lot of reps at whatever weight. So I can do eight or ten at 45. I have gotten back into the habit of starting reverse pyramids there and then backing off the weight by five pounds and doing eight or ten reps all the way down to the bar. Which ends up being, I dunno, a hundred or so reps total. Not 1 at a couple of plates.
I don’t tend to work with a spotter anyway, so I have to make sure I don’t work completely to the point of failure, or I’ll have to hold a bar at the failure point until some stranger rescues me (it’s only happened once, and that was enough).
Bloody hell, I don’t even calculate the max. I just pay attention to how much weight is on one side. Because that’s all I need to remember, not the calculations of what a man I really am.
This is spoken as a guy who went into the weight room in high school and could not lift the bar alone if it had the heavy screw-on collars you never see any more.
So, yeah, not doing some sort of Internet clout dance on this particular instance. And it’s a waste of time to do so.
Well, unless you have blog-inches to fill.
But the guy was not afraid to lie on the bench, knowing his limitations. How many of the ha-ha! crowd would not?
