Sean Hyson

When I first started lifting weights, I trained in my dad’s home gym. Actually, it was his home office, but he had a bench, bar, and some plates and dumbbells. Now these were plate-loading dumbbells, not the fixed weight kind you see in gyms, and they had spring collars that held the plates on. Real old, rusty ones, too. I was doing dumbbell flyes when the collar on one quickly slid off one of the handles. Guess where my face was at the time?

The plates (I think I had a 10 and a 5 on each side—thank God I was weak) cascaded down onto my face. I had a nice fat lip for a week… but I finished the workout.

LESSON LEARNED: Don’t use dumbbells that have spring collars. When you’re working out alone. And lying on your back. You probably shouldn’t bother with flyes, either.


I had been training for a few years, I was in college, and I met this girl I liked at the gym. She had seen me in street clothes, but this was the first time she saw me in a workout T, and it was sleeveless. (And, truth be told, I made sure I got there a few minutes early to get a little pump going before she walked in.)

She saw me and her eyebrows jumped. “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t know you had all that under your shirt.” I replied, “Wait til you see what’s under my pants!”

While that should have sent her running, she foolishly laughed it off and asked me to train her.

The girl I’m referring to... looked nothing like this girl.

“How do I lose this arm butt?”

“This what?” 

“The fat in my arm pit. It makes my arm and shoulder look like butt cheeks.”

“Oh, right, well…” I was getting in the zone. “You gotta do front delt raises. Let me show you.” So I led her through a workout that I would be locked up for even suggesting today. Ok, I wouldn’t be locked up, but if there was justice in the fitness world, I should be.

Three months on my program and her “arm butt” had reached J.Lo proportions. No, it wasn’t that bad, but I didn’t exactly make things better.

LESSON LEARNED: Don’t train girls when you’re not a trainer. Actually, no, you can train them because it makes you feel like you have power over them, which is really rare. So maybe the lesson is that if you’re going to lie and act like you know what you’re doing, steal good advice from someone who really does know and take credit for it.

One day my friend Mike met me at the gym. The plan was to train arms.

“Why don’t we try this workout today?” he said, handing me some pages he’d torn out of a magazine. “It’s from Men’s Health…”

“Fuck that,” I said, cutting him off. “Do you want to look like those losers, or do you want to look like Arnold?”

“I like the guys in Men’s Hea..,”

“Arnold! Ok, let’s start with the barbell curl. Go stand in the squat rack.”

“But why do we always have to start with the barbell curl?” Mike asked. “This article says that the chinup works the biceps harder, and you hit the back too.”

“We’ll hit back on Back Day. Don’t you know the schedule by now? Go hold that squat rack, bro! Or somebody’s gonna show up and… squat.” (In case you’re wondering, no, we’re not still friends today. And it wasn’t my decision.)

“But we do the barbell curl every time…”

“The barbell curl is the fundamental exercise for building mass in the biceps”, I told him, quoting page 400 of Arnold’s The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, 2^nd edition.

“Hahaha. The ‘fundamental’ exercise, huh? You sound like those posters in the library—‘Reading is fundamental.’”

LESSON LEARNED: Well, Mike learned that the barbell curl is fundamental. But, as I learned later, the chinup is more efficient and useful over the long haul. I also learned that I don’t like workout partners. And they don’t like me.

When I first moved to New York, I hired a personal trainer. Not because I thought I needed anybody to show me how to work out (see above), but because this guy at my gym came up to me and told me he was a boxing trainer and, if I wanted it, the first two lessons were free. (I wonder how many other people found their trainers that way.)

I had always been interested in learning to box, and I figured this white collar gym on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with palm trees in the lobby, was as good a place as any to start. On our first session together, the trainer didn’t show up. For our second session… he didn’t show up. I figured the third time was the charm, and indeed it was, but just as we were warming up, he told me to stop.

“Let’s move to another part of the gym. It’s, uh, too crowded here.” There was one old lady on a machine, about 20 feet away.

“Uh oh, let’s move back,” he said, as he spied another trainer in the distance. This went on a few more times until I had to ask what was up. “Ok, Shane. Let me be honest. I don’t really work here.”

A week later, and apparently eager for more punishment, I met him at a different gym. After the boxing lesson I was pretty wiped and was ready to leave. That’s when he announced, “strength and conditioning!”, pointing his finger up in the air like it was a eureka moment.

He led me to the weight room and told me to get into pushup position. Next thing I knew, my chest was stapled to the floor, as he deposited a 45-pound weight plate on my back. Two more plates followed, and then the command, “Do pushups. I want six in the top third range of motion, six in the bottom third, and six full range. Go!”

This guy had dreadlocks and a goatee he’d grown to a Satanic point. You can imagine the atmosphere when he started chanting, “Six, six six! Mark of the beast!”, and laughing maniacally as I struggled.

LESSON LEARNED: Don’t hire a personal trainer. Or at least not one who looks like the devil. And don’t take advantage of “special deals” from gyms. In all things fitness, you get what you pay for. And if it comes cheap, there’s a good reason why.

What have you learned from your mistakes? Post it in the comments below. The best answer wins a prize TBD by me. (I promise it will be something cool.) And I’ll pay for shipping and handling.