“How many sets do you have left?” For me, a normal question to know if I need to adjust my schedule. For another, a source of irritation.
“How many sets do you have left?”
This week, I received a reaction to the article titled “My experience with Basic Fit? I’m leaving now!”. The article was a complaint about (what I consider) a lack of consideration for others at the gym. It was about occupying the only squat rack in the gym (to do everything except squats). I wrote that after waiting for half an hour, I finally asked the guys how many sets they still had to do, and I got rather annoyed when the answer was “another ten sets”.
In response to this article, a reader wrote that he could really get annoyed by people asking “how many sets do you have left?” Judging by the number of funny images you can find about this on the internet, apparently there are more people who do not appreciate this question.
The tone makes the music
It’s not the first time I’ve noticed that some people find it a very odd question.
In the same Basic Fit I complained about, I had such an incident a few weeks earlier. An older lady had been using the leg extensions for a while.
In the time I waited for her, I had already done two other exercises (about 6 to 8 sets in total). The extensions were the only exercise I still had to do for the quadriceps. So, I decided to ask her how long she thought she would still need. Simply so that I could assess whether it was worthwhile to do another exercise in the meantime. Because she was a somewhat older woman who seemed visibly awkward, I asked in my friendliest and least intrusive manner how long she thought she would need the machine.
The reaction was one of pure indignation. “Why? I’m just busy”, to which I explained that I just wanted to know if it was worth waiting. “I’ll be busy for a while yet”, was the answer.
Then I walk away to start with an exercise for the calves. While I’m still doing the first set, I see that the woman has already walked away to another machine, and the extensions are already occupied by someone else. The first thing that came to my mind was the English version of a female dog in capital letters with exclamation marks. Now I had to wait for the next person again while she could have just said she only had one set left (if she even did those).
Why such an annoying question?
What’s wrong with that question? I can understand that this woman has no idea about things like a training split and why you want to do certain exercises at a certain time. Someone who walks into the gym, looks around, and thinks:
“That one seems nice”.
Only to find out during the exercise itself which muscles are trained with that exercise. By the way, I never saw her again, probably because of all those pumped-up machos who keep rushing her while she’s having her relaxing moment.
You don’t want to do nothing for ten minutes or unnecessarily change your schedule when you don’t have good alternatives for the exercise you want to do. The simple information of how long someone is busy allows you to decide whether to go for an alternative or wait. It’s not meant at all to rush someone or give the idea that I think I have more right to a machine. After all, it’s not like on the water where the biggest boat has priority.
If you train seriously and have a certain schedule for yourself, then you know that you often have to be flexible. You will regularly have to do an alternative exercise because the machine or weights you want to use are occupied.
You take that into account.
In most cases, I first look for an alternative when a machine is occupied, but they are not always available. The reason I specifically wanted to use the squat rack mentioned in the article was because it was the only place in the gym where you could do shrugs with 200 kilos. Or I first do a completely different exercise for the muscle group I’m training, but in the example, it was about the last exercise of the training.
Because I pride myself on having a reasonable level of empathy, I find it very annoying if I completely don’t understand someone else. So, I tried to figure out if I’ve ever been annoyed when someone asked me that question. To be honest:
No. At least, not really.
I can remember one time when a group of guys first asked me how many sets I had left, only to immediately ask the same thing to two others who were doing completely different exercises (for different muscle groups). Instead of looking for alternatives, they seemed to just choose what they liked and kept ending up on machines that were already occupied.
That seemed to me like it could be done more efficiently.
I took into account that they might be trying to follow some sort of full-body schedule and didn’t know enough themselves to know what good alternatives would be, but I didn’t exactly get the impression that they consulted a schedule every so often.
So no, I really don’t understand why the question:
“How many sets do you have left?” is a source of irritation for some.
I understand that sometimes you want to do a certain exercise for a longer time. For example, if you want to train heavier in a low rep range and need a large number of sets for warming up. However, I don’t do this on a busy Tuesday evening in the only squat rack when I know it takes an hour. However, I might be such a “links-can’t we all just get along-kumbaya-heal the world-type” in a every-man-for-himself world.
There’s also plenty more I don’t understand, so if a reader can explain this, I’d love to hear it!
