The Man on the Bench Press Has Not Lifted Anything in Forty-One Minutes

A flat utility bench on the north wall of Blue Ridge Fitness & Racquet, on Berryville Avenue in Winchester, was occupied continuously for forty-one minutes and eleven seconds on the evening of Tuesday, 2 September. This newspaper timed it. Over that interval the bench bore the weight of one adult male and nothing else. No barbell was pressed. No dumbbell was raised. No repetition of any kind was performed.

Three other members waited for it. The longest of them waited nineteen minutes, put his towel back over his shoulder, and left the building.

We should say at the outset that we did not go to that gym to time a bench. The Data Desk was three days into a routine study of peak-hour equipment turnover, of a sort we run twice a year and which almost never produces anything. What it produced on 2 September was one line in a spreadsheet so far outside the distribution that this desk assumed the timer had failed.

The timer had not failed. We have since spent three weeks on those forty-one minutes, and the finding we are obliged to report is not the one we went looking for. The man on the bench was not idling. By his own account he was working the entire time, to a written plan, which he keeps, and which he produced within four minutes of being asked whether such a thing existed.

His log for that evening records nine working sets.

I. The Bench, and Why There Is Only One

Blue Ridge Fitness & Racquet occupies a converted retail unit of roughly nine thousand square feet. Its strength floor holds four adjustable benches, three of which are fixed at an incline and cannot be flattened, a fact confirmed by this newspaper on site and by the manufacturer's specification for that model.

There is therefore exactly one flat bench positioned under a barbell. Every member on that floor who intends to press a barbell while lying down must use it. Between 5:45 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. on a weekday, according to our own count across eleven evenings, between nine and fourteen members intend to.

This is not a scandal. It is an ordinary consequence of a floor plan drawn by somebody optimising for square footage. We record it because it is the reason a single bench can be a scarce resource at all, and because the general manager, when we put the layout to him, agreed with the observation immediately and without defensiveness, then declined to do anything about it for reasons we set out in Section VI.

II. What the Timer Recorded

The subject took possession of the bench at 6:02:44 p.m. and released it at 6:43:55 p.m. We have his consent to describe what happened in between and we have checked our account against his.

He loaded the bar to ninety-five pounds at 6:03. He sat on the end of the bench. He removed his telephone from the pocket of his shorts. At 6:11 he stood, adjusted the collar on the left side of the bar, and sat back down. At 6:26 he lay back on the bench, gripped the bar without unracking it, held that position for approximately four seconds, and sat up again. At 6:38 he stood, walked to the water fountain, drank, returned, and sat down.

Those are the four events. Everything between them is a man sitting on a bench looking at a telephone. The bar remained in the rack at ninety-five pounds for the full forty-one minutes and eleven seconds and was returned to the rack empty at 6:44, having never left it.

Repetitions performed: zero. Sets performed, under the definition this desk uses and under the definition used by every strength-training authority we consulted: zero.

III. The Queue Nobody Joined

Three members waited. None of them asked.

The first arrived at 6:09, stood eleven feet from the bench for four minutes, performed a set of dumbbell curls he told us he had not planned to perform, and waited a further six minutes before moving to an incline bench he described to us as “the wrong angle for what I was doing.”

The second arrived at 6:17 and waited nineteen minutes. He is a forty-eight-year-old man who trains three evenings a week and who told us, at some length and with what we would characterise as real feeling, that asking to work in with somebody is a thing he has done twice in eleven years and that both times it went fine.

“I know,” he said, when this was put to him. “I know what you're going to say. I know.”

The third waited seven minutes, then left the floor for the cardio deck and did not return.

The Data Desk notes without comment that the total member-time spent waiting for the bench on 2 September exceeded the total member-time spent using it, and that the bench was in use for none of it.

IV. The Subject Says Yes Immediately

This newspaper approached him on 9 September expecting a difficult conversation. We have had that conversation many times. It usually opens with a private person asking, reasonably, why a newspaper is interested in him.

He asked no such thing. He said yes before the request was finished, gave us ninety-four minutes across three interviews, volunteered his training log, offered to be photographed mid-set, and asked twice whether the piece would mention his programme by name. He has read this article. He has made three corrections to it, two of which we accepted and one of which appears in Section V.

He is thirty-six, works in commercial insurance, and has trained at that facility for six years. He was, throughout, entirely pleasant, and this desk wishes to be plain that nothing in what follows is offered as an embarrassment to him. He does not experience any of it as embarrassing. That turns out to be the whole story.

V. The Log

The document is a spiral notebook, sixty-eight pages, entries running back to March of last year. The entry for 2 September reads, in full: Bench 95 x 9 working. Felt heavy. Good session.

We asked him what nine working sets meant, given that the bar had not left the rack.

His answer, condensed from eleven minutes of tape and checked with him afterwards, is that a set begins when you commit to it. He commits to a set, he said, by setting the intention, addressing the bar mentally, and permitting the nervous system to prepare for the load. He described this as priming. He said the priming is the part most people skip and the part that separates a session that carries over from one that does not. He said that on a good evening he will prime nine or ten sets. He said that on 2 September the bar felt heavy and he elected, correctly in his view, not to force it.

We asked whether any of the nine sets involved lifting the bar.

“That's not really how I'd frame it,” he said.

We put the log to a strength coach of nineteen years' standing, who read the entry twice and asked us to confirm we had transcribed it correctly. Her response is printed in full in our sources. Its publishable portion is: “He has invented rest. He has invented rest and he has given it a name and he is keeping records on it.”

The correction he asked us to make, and which we have made, is that the notebook says working and not work sets, and that we had originally rendered it the second way. He considers the distinction material. So, on reflection, does this desk, though not for the reason he does.

VI. What the Bench Costs

Membership at that facility is $41.99 a month. The strength floor is open one hundred and five hours a week. The Data Desk's estimate of the marginal value of one minute of flat-bench access at peak, derived from the queue observed across eleven evenings and set out in the accompanying chart, is small in dollars and unhelpful as a way of thinking about the problem, which is why we are reporting the minutes instead.

Forty-one minutes. Three members waiting. Zero repetitions.

We put all of it to the general manager on 18 September. He was courteous, he did not dispute a single figure, and he declined to act. His position, which he asked us to print as he gave it, is that the facility posts a thirty-minute limit on cardio equipment during peak hours and does not post one on strength equipment, because a member resting between sets is training and the staff are not competent to judge where resting ends. He added that in nine years no member has ever complained to the front desk about bench occupancy, a claim we asked him to check against the log, and which the log supports.

Nobody asks. Nobody complains. The mechanism the gym relies on to allocate its only flat bench is a social convention that the men on that floor are, on the evidence of eleven evenings, constitutionally incapable of invoking.

VII. A Return Visit

This newspaper went back on Tuesday, 30 September, and he was there, on the same bench, at 6:04 p.m.

At 6:22 he loaded the bar to one hundred and thirty-five pounds, lay back, unracked it, and performed eight repetitions with what our observer, who does not train, described as no evident difficulty, and what the coach we consulted, watching the same footage, described as “completely fine, honestly, that's a set.”

He racked the bar. He sat up. He took out his telephone.

He remained on the bench for a further nineteen minutes, during which two members waited and neither asked. He wrote in the notebook before he left. We have not seen that entry and did not request it.

The Data Desk records the set. It was a real set, performed under load, and this newspaper is not in the business of reporting the zero and omitting the eight. We record also that the bench was occupied for sixty-three minutes on 30 September to accommodate it, and that the man who did it walked out of the building at 7:11 p.m. having had, by every account including his own, a good session.