Bro O'Clock

Here’s the best piece of fitness advice you’ll ever get: Never go to the gym at five o’clock.

This is the hour of the Gym Bro. What’s a Gym Bro? They’re the guys more concerned about being seen in the gym than what they’re actually doing in the gym. They don’t just walk into the gym; they make an entrance. They aren’t in workout clothes; they’re in an outfit. They spend more time on coiffing their hair to look good for the workout than they spend in the workout itself.

I avoid the Gym Bros by going in extremely early or in the middle of the day. A performance needs an audience, so gyms are relatively Bro-free at those times.

But on this day, my only opening was at five o’clock, and I needed to get my rehab done. I’d ruptured my Achilles tendon a few months prior, and you don’t want to skip the physiotherapist’s assignments for that one.

These exercises sucked. The months of muscle atrophy had left my calf absurdly weak and flabby. So I had to do things like put a ridiculously light weight on my knee and do three sets of slow calf raises.

I only had about 30 minutes, so I didn’t even change. I was in jeans. I don’t like being that guy who wore jeans to the gym, but I knew I wasn’t even going to break a sweat, and I could just do the physio and get out of there.

All I wanted was a single bench where I could sit and do my calf raises, but it was wall to wall in there. The Ladies of Lulu Lemon were on parade, the Gym Bros were in full strut, and you could cut the pheromones with a knife.

I watched in horror as my gym, my Glorious House of Gains, was abused and befouled by these posers. Every machine, bench, and rack was occupied, but the photo ops outnumbered the sets and reps. What a travesty.

I almost walked out. I know my gym gets violated like this every day, but I don’t like to watch. That’s when one bench freed up. Unfortunately, it was right beside the most obnoxious and performative Gym Bros in the entire facility, perhaps the entire hemisphere.

These three guys were posturing so hard, they looked like they were filming a satire making fun of douchebags at the gym. They were the prototype for all aspiring Gym Bros: Mid-20s, all fairly well-built, fitted out in their best branded tank tops, flashy runners, and high-end earbuds and cordless headphones.

One guy lays down on the bench, the other two pick up dumbbells and place them in his hands, the lifter does some serious huffing and puffing like he’s walking up to a house made of straw, and then the real fun begins.

The lifting Bro grunts and yells as another Bro cheerleads and spots: “Come on. You got this! You got this!” The final Bro captures the whole affair on his phone, applies the appropriate filters, adds music and commentary, and posts it for the world to see. At the end of the set, lifting Bro drops the weights (even though the helping Bros could clearly take them off his hands). The weights land with a thunderous ba-boom that turns everyone’s heads, (you wouldn’t want the Lulu Ladies to miss your set, now would you?) and then there’s a round of congratulations and posing for another upload to Instagram.

They did this for every… damn… set.

Just imagine the racket when this Bro drops those 70s from that height. It's deafening and infuriating to regular humans. But it's all a part of the complex mating ritual between the Gym Bros and the Ladies of Lulu.

And there’s me sitting right beside them with my little dumbbell on my knee doing my calf raises. I put in some earbuds of my own, and I set the volume much higher than I usually do. With some vintage Metallica blaring in my ears, the silly lads next to me became a dull roar. Though I did need to keep an eye on them with my peripheral vision. Their idiotic dropping of weights was close enough that a bad bounce could roll into my ankles.

My Achilles rehab didn’t take very long, and even though that’s all I was in there for, I started thinking: “Well, since I’m here… maybe I do a few sets of something.”

See, I’m not a Gym Bro, but I would say I’m a Gym Rat, and we're opportunists of a different sort. The key difference here is performance versus persistence. The Bros make grand appearances at the gym when the opportunity to be seen is optimized. But Gym Rats aren’t there to be seen. We’re in there because we have personal goals we want to hit and strength we want to maintain. Weights are what we need to do that, and we'll get a lift in every chance we get.

Gym Rats sniff out dumbbells and weight racks the way regular rats seek food and shelter. If we lose access to a gym because it closed or we changed jobs, we’ll pop up in a neighborhood gym, and failing that, we’ll be scurrying around at garage sales looking for old steel. We workout because of some innate compulsion to get strong and stay strong, not for social media.

That’s why we’re always at the gym putting in time. Like the vermin we’re named for, you may not always see us, but we’re lurking around somewhere. If we can get our workouts in without anyone noticing, so much the better. We might exchange a few words with other Gym Rats from time to time, but like the rodent, we are furtive and elusive creatures.

I saw that I had a bench and 10 minutes to spare, so I thought I could sneak in a few quick sets. I settled on dumbbell presses because everything was right there at hand.

The only catch was my Achilles injury. Strange as it may sound, your legs provide stability when you do bench press with dumbbells, and a weak calf is a liability. For the last few months, I had been doing what you’d think of as a traditional bench press: one bar with weights on each side, grasped with both hands, lowered to the chest and pressed up. This requires far less stability than the same exercise with a separate dumbbell in each hand.

Now, at this point in the story, I have to tell you something that is very Gym Bro-ish. I have to talk about the size of the weights I used because it becomes relevant later on. Talking actual numbers is always a lose-lose situation.

For people who don’t lift weights, the dumbbells I use will sound remarkably heavy.

But to regular Gym Rats, they’ll sound comically light.

So when you talk numbers, you look like a bragging-Bro or bony-armed weakling no matter what the number is. Life-long lifters know the journey matters far more than the numbers.

But, like I said, it’s relevant in this story, so I was looking at the 100-pound dumbbells. And I looked at them for a good long time. I had a whole conversation in my head about it. On the regular bench press where you have just the one bar, I was doing sets with two plates: 225 pounds. So you might be thinking: Well, what’s the issue? If anything, you should be able to do 110 pounds per hand no problem. But trust me, that is not how the math works.

There’s some kind of special math involved because of the extra balance and guidance that each hand has to perform. This means less weight.

Also, with a bench press, you can just load up the bar with the weight, slide under it, and start your exercise. But when you’re by yourself and you’re using separate dumbbells, you place them by the bench you’ll use, sit down, hoist one up and rest it on your knee, hoist the other up onto the other knee, then you heave them up close to your chest and roll back onto the bench into position. So you need to be able to boss them around single-handed, and that means less weight too.

I had been using the 100s before my Achilles injury, but that was my upper limit when I was firing on all cylinders. I wanted to show myself I was back in action, so I stared at those 100s.

I don’t know if it was the recent injury, but the wiser Adam prevailed. So I started looking at the 95s, but that’s on the edge too. I feel like dumbbells north of 90 turn mean. If I lift with anything less than perfect control, they’ll punish me. They’re headed for the center of the earth, and if they need to tear something in my shoulder to get there… so be it. So I grabbed the 90s.

I sat down on the bench and heaved them up onto my knees, one at a time, and thought to myself: I really should have taken the time to change into shorts. It felt ridiculous seeing the 90s sitting there poised on my jeans.

I do what many guys do to get from seated with dumbbells into the lying down position. I pop my knee up to boost the weight up to my chest with one leg, then do the same with the other leg, and roll down onto the bench. It was a little dicey on the left side where my calf was still weak, but I made it. And the set went fine.

When you’re lying down with 90 pounds in each hand, sitting back up can be tricky too. It’s easier to let them drop. But I’ve always been of the mind that if you have the strength to do a proper, controlled lift with the weights in the first place, you ought to be able to lower them down near your hips on the last rep, sit back up, and place them down beside you where you picked them up, which is what I do. Again, the weak leg made it feel awkward, but it was doable.

As I rolled through the second set, I was happy that I went with the 90s instead of tempting fate. I knew I could handle more, but it was a nice, comfortable place to start back into using dumbbells, which I prefer over the single bar bench press. But just as I was getting ready for my third and final set, I heard something off to my left.

It was one of the Gym Bros! Did you forget about them? I certainly did. I one hundred percent forgot these divas were even there. There was only one left. He was sitting on his bench with dumbbells on his knees, and he said something to me that I didn’t hear because James and the gang were playing Through The Never in my ears.

I popped out one of my earbuds and said, “Sorry, what?”

“Bruh, you throwin’ those 90s.”

Note: If you ever use the word Bruh unironically, you might be a Gym Bro. This particular Bro had just startled me out of my own little world, and I still didn’t clock what he said.

“Come again?” I said.

“I said you just throwin’ them 90s.”

I heard this comment as criticism / mockery, and not without reason. I’ll often put on an ill-fitted T-shirt from a team building exercise 10 years ago to go workout, and my shorts and shoes are strictly functional. Zero style, zero glamor. And I’ve seen the Gym Bros snickering amongst themselves at my aesthetic before, but the pissants don’t usually have the sand to actually say something to me. I probably sounded a little defensive or even irritated as I said:

“Well… I would lift more, but I’m coming back from a pretty serious injury.”

“What?” he said.

“Achilles rupture a few months ago,” I said. “I’m still rehabbing it.”

He just stared at me for a minute, and I started to realize he was not making fun of me.

“Bruh, what I’m sayin’ is, we had guys hitting their PRs with the 70s. Then you sat there and warmed up with 'em.”

That’s when I saw that it was a set of 70s sitting on his lap. The gym has two sets of them, and once I’d decided that I’d do a set of bench press, I walked over to the rack, plucked up the other set of 70s (which was apparently their one-repetition, maximum lift) and rattled off 15 or 20 reps with them to get the blood flowing before I started my set.

Then I noticed that his sidekicks weren’t doing their big performance lifts anymore. They’d retreated to one of the cable machines, and they watched as this spokes-Bro talked to the clueless, jeans-wearing, old fart who just ambled in, set up right beside their big show, and started out lifting them with no fanfare or effort to speak of. I was probably ruining their vids. Packed in as tight as we were, every pic and vid they posted would feature a guy their dad’s age lifting heavy in the background.

He continued, “Like I said, those 90s… you throwin’ em.”

“Oh, yeah… I guess so.”

“I’m just sayin’… nice work, dog.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, thinking to myself: Dog and bruh? This kid’s checking all the boxes.

He shook his head and said, “Don’t know how you’re doin’ it.”

I thought about telling him how things really are, how the numbers are meaningless, how it’s just a daily battle with yourself, maybe help this lad metamorphose from a Bro to a Rat.

But I don’t get a ton of chances to feel like a legend, so I confess, I leaned into it that day.

Instead, I said:

“Just keep hammerin’, son,” as I popped my earbud back in. “Just keep hammerin’.”

I laid back down, pumped out another smooth and controlled set of 10 with the 90s, sat up, and set them gently back on the rack. Not a clink or clack to be heard.

I gave the Bros a barely perceptible nod as I passed them on my way out of the gym. And, yeah, I might have felt like I was an action hero walkin’ away from an explosion without so much as a backward glance.

Perhaps enjoying that more than I should was a Gym Bro moment in an otherwise Gym Rat lifestyle, but what can I say, I’m only human.