A guy was doing cheat reps with lateral raises. Dumbells came down to fast…SPLIT HIS SCROTUM OPEN!!!
A guy is loading plates onto the bar for his next set of inclines. He slams the plates together quite violently. He is topless. The bar is at nipple height. The man now has one nipple.
Any other dodgy stories any of you would care to share???
I may have mentioned this before, but it’s been awhile, so for the new readers, I’ll post it again. It’s also kind of involved, but here we go.
To preface the story, I need to explain the equipment involved. The gym where I was working out at had received a new smith machine a few weeks prior to the events that I’m about to relay. I had used it for some shoulder presses a few times, but didn’t like it for two reasons.
The first reason this machine sucked is that the way you rack the weight was opposite of what I was used to and how all other smith machines I have experienced worked. If you were facing in the “normal” direction for the smith machine (facing the same way it is), you would rack the weight by rotating the hooks back towards you, as opposed to rolling the bar forward, if you can picture that.
Anyway, for most exercises, you couldn’t just reverse the direction you were sitting, because there wasn’t a mirror in that direction, and how can you check out girls that way? No, actually you couldn’t reverse the dircection because the supporting bars on the back side of the machine got in the way.
The other reason this machine was crap was that once you thought you had locked the bar, you really hadn’t. I noticed this several times as I would lock the bar back, but it wouldn’t feel quite right. It needed an extra nudge to lock into place.
Apparently not everyone knew that it needed that extra nudge.
A friend and I were in the gym one Saturday working shoulders, when we heard a weak “Help!” coming from the smith machine. We saw a guy lying under the bar in the benchpress position. Well, my friend runs to one side of the bar, and someone from the other side of the machine grabs the other end, and they lift the bar off of him. He mutters a “thanks” and proceeds to sit up.
That’s when the blood started gushing everywhere. We identified the source of the crimson tide as his nose. Apparently, he had finished a set of benchpresses (one 45lb plate on each side) and thought he had locked the bar into place. He had started to sit up when the bar started to fall. It came down across the bridge of his nose, or close to that area, then bounced up, and finally landed across his neck. It really wasn’t a pretty picture. Thankfully, the extent of the damage was just a broken nose.
I saw and heard something very distrubing about 10 years ago while I was warming up for my workout. A juiced up freak was doing incline bench presses with dumbbells (at least 100lb. in each hand). He was lifting very quickly and banging the dumbbells together hard at the top of the movement. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t paying too much attention to what he was doing, and on one of his reps, when he tried to bang the bumbbells together, he missed. Everyone in the gym instantly knew that he had missed when we heard a sound that sounded like two rifle shots going off followed by a hideous scream. Because the gym was in a bad neighborhood, several members, myself included, dropped to the floor thinking that someone was shooting nearby. When we finally looked up, we saw that the freak had dislocated both shoulders.
In high school one leg day Coach had us power cleaning in groups of 3. One cleaning, two standing on each side to spot (yes, to spot the power clean). This being a very small, crappy high school gym, there were not enough collars to go around. Well, Alex Zambrono cleans 225 but he doesn’t get it racked at the top. The left side dips, the weights start to slide off of the bar. All the while, the guy who is supposed to be spotting him stands there dumbfounded. At the last second, the guy springs into action, right as the 45’s slide off the bar. They don’t hit him, but now the unevenly loaded bar whips up and catches the kid in the mouth as he is bending down to catch the weights. A complete teeth and blood explosion. Gruesome.
One of my high school buddies was trying to power clean 230lbs once, and as he racked it he lost balance, fell over backwards and landed flat on his back while trying to support the bar the whole time, snapping his wrist the end result.