Just a quickie today.....

I was at the gym yesterday, a nice small little one local to where I live. I'm quite friendly with the GI (Gym Instructor) there and he's obviously got a good grasp of strength training. The gym used to be a real muscle head's gym but it now a bit more "woman friendly". Some of the kit there is still quite industrial but I like it and there's  enough room to move around.

Andy, the GI was doing some cleaning when he saw me doing Preacher curls on with an EZ-bar. I'd asked him the bar weight as it was a small bar but with olympic ends. Turns out it was 8.5Kg (a bit weird) but I said I'd use some collars to take it up to 10Kg. His advice was to not use collars on a preacher bar for bicep curls which I thought was odd from a safety point of view. He was right, it doesn't pose much of a safety risk in that environment, but what are the advantages?

The advantage is simple. If you take off the collars (or do as I did and place them right at the ends) you can see when you are not curling the bar straight. Sure enough, my first two sets the right hand weight started to slip down and off the bar. I'd learnt, straight away, that I wasn't lifting with equal power and I have the chance to correct it now. I'd never of known that if I hadn't have tried his advice.

 The two lessons to be learnt here? Well for me they are: Try lifting with collars at the end (on SMALL WEIGHTS! Don't try it on your dead lifts!) and always listen to other GIs. I'm certainly glad I did. Thanks Andy!

Train hard

Matt