How to get a timely workout in a packed gym

Imagine the following scenario. Your name is Harry. It’s the first Monday of January and you’ve just gotten off work. Like millions of other people throughout the western world, part of your new year’s resolution was to finally get in shape, to drop those extra twenty pounds that were fifteen a year ago and ten a couple years before that. This was supposed to be your first day back at the gym. But its not going well. It was a stressful day at the office, you had a meeting at five o’clock that drug on for an extra fourty-five minutes and now as you look at your watch and walk across the parking deck, you see its almost 7 pm. As you approach your fiesta, you flip the unlock button on the keys in your pocket. Moments later you’re sitting in the driver’s seat taking a deep breath and closing your eyes. Now your wife Jane calls you. She wants you to pick up some medication her doctor prescribed her on your way home. The pharmacy closes at nine.

You look at your watch again. You know you will need 30 minutes to get to the gym and get ready. Your workout program last an hour and you’ll need another 15 to 20 minutes to get from the gym to the pharmacy. The pharmacy is close to your house so it wouldn’t make sense to drive there and then drive all the way back to the gym.

It’s the first day of your workout and you’re still filled with hype, motivation and discipline, so you crank up your car and head off. 30 minutes later, you’re wearing your workout clothes, you have your sweat towel, but as you’re walking up the benches - bench press is your first exercise for the day - you notice that the gym is packed full. There are people on every machine. You get to the benches and they are all taken. At two benches there’s even a line starting to build up.

Now you’re frustrated. You have to finish quickly but the gym is full. You don’t want to compromise your workout in you can help it. So what can you do? Well, believe it or not there’s actually quite a bit.

First, don’t be shy. Go up to each person on a machine, squat rack or bench and ask them how many sets they have or how much longer they have. Be sure to use nice gym etiquette, of course, that is, don’t ask while they are in the middle of a set. It also goes without saying, but be friendly and nice and avoid negative comments. This works surprisingly well, many times, someone will just have one set or just a minute or two remaining and then you can jump in. A second option, especially when the gym is totally crammed, is to ask if you can jump in and share the machine - the worst they can do is say no - but on the upside you both get a spotter and the chance to meet someone new. I’ve met several training buddies this way. It can also be a fun way to meet new people - especially if you’re on vacation. If they’re fine with it, then you share a bench or rack, spot each other, chat between sets and sometimes hit it off. One thing I’d recommend though is using a bit of common sense here as well. For instance, if your max bench press is 60kg (132 lbs) and they are warming up with 150kg (330 lbs), it probably doesn’t make sense to train together since you’ll end up spending most of your time loading and unloading plates.

Now let’s say everyone still has a lot of time left and nobody wants to share a machine with you. What then? This is where you can start changing up the order of your exercises. Let’s say your workout consist of a smith machine bench press, a regular barbell back squat, leg extensions and calf raises. Well, we just found out that all the smith machine bench presses are being used. What about the squat racks though? Maybe one of them is open? No? Okay, what about the leg extension machines or the calf raise machines? It’s almost always the case that one of the machines, benches or racks that you need is going to be free, so if you just change up the order of your exercises you’ll typically be fine, and that will take care of it. But let’s say - just for the sake of a complicated argument - that all the machines, racks and benches are taken for all the exercises we want to do. What can we do now? Well, believe it or not there are still options! What we can do, is look for similar exercises, just as words have synonyms, so too do exercises. A bench press for example, comes in many flavors, you can do a barbell bench press, various types of machine bench presses, dumbbell bench presses, push ups, and the list keeps going. Essentially, all these exercises train a horizontal pressing movement pattern and target the pecs, anterior deltoids and triceps muscles. Now, each of these horizontal pressing variants provides a slightly different stimulus and just as a synonym equivalent to the actual word, the exercises are not perfectly equivalent to one another, still the same general movement patterns and muscles are trained and so substitution of one exercise variant for another is a viable option (in some schools of thought on strength training such as Westside Barbell Conjugate Method or Brandon Lilly’s Cube Method it is even considered advantageous)

In my experience, these methods or some combination thereof has always been enough to keep my workouts timely and ready. So try them out, and then if you ever find yourself in Harry’s situation, you can rest assured you can keep your new year’s resolution, finishing a quality and timely workout and getting to the pharmacy with plenty of time to spare.