Can you imagine having a 4 year old kid and telling him that if he wants to go to his room upstairs, he has to climb the rope his dad hung from the ceiling down to the bottom floor? According to Zach Even-Esh, that is exactly what athlete and physical culturist Steve Maxwell did with his boy.

In his article, like one of mine, “Pack Light, Train Hard“, which was featured on straighttothebar.com, Zack says some very telling things about grip strength, machines and where the serious strength athletes are going.

From his post, “With serious lifters leaving the fancy gyms and opting for their garage, basement or backyard – grip strength is becoming a serious focus.”

Zach started off the post with, “The typical gym is often packed with machines.”

As I recently have written, Scott Brengel and his strongman freaks were forced out of our machine-infested training warehouse of a gym because they now want to attract a new clientele. I knew we were in trouble when the first “improvements” were to install patio furniture outside near the main entrance. Starbucks next, perhaps?

Next came a crop of trainers from a nearby trainers gym along with their overweight and outtashape clients. Mike C observes that the new business model is having trainers working with multiple clients at a time. Is Club Z turning into a trainers gym?

With 24 Hour Fitness just down the street, our “new and improved” box may look more and more like that. No sour grapes from me though. You have to make money to stay in business and prosper. Scott and the Freaks are very small subset of people who train in gyms and a few more of us are only a slightly larger subset and we aren’t going to make any gym any money.

So where do we go next? The garage? The backyard? The park? In an upcoming post, I’ll have more to report on where the local heavy-lifting, tight gripping, bumper bouncing hard-core lifter can go lift the way it is supposed to be done.

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