Dumbells, Deadlifting, and Dumbasses: Gyms and Weight Training in China, Part 1

Last year I began weight training as a serious hobby here in China. I started training in high school, but to be honest I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when it came to doing things safely, properly, or eating and using proper nutrition and supplementation.

I decide to take up weight training seriously for several reasons. Mainly I chose to do it as a way of managing stress. Being an introvert, I internalize stress, and after 6 plus hours of teaching I accumulate a lot of it. Pushing heavy-ass weights keeps me from wanting to do things like crushing the little twerps that I teach. The health benefits have been great. I have been getting stronger, building muscle, and burning fat. When I’m on a regular training routine I’m healthier, happier, and managing my life in China feels a lot easier.

That’s not to say that training here has been any walk in the park.  Things like finding a good gym, navigating Chinese people and gym culture, finding a good supplement and nutrition store, and buying proper food are all major hurdles that one is faced with when attempting to get fit here in China.

Rather than launching into a big narrative about training, I’ll just break this post down into specific issues and address them one at a time.

 Finding a good gym

Gyms are a nearly as numerous as bicycles in China.  Many of the fancier apartment complexes in Beijing have one in their basement. In populous areas you can find a gym just by walking around the streets for 15 or 20 minutes, but finding a good gym is not an easy task.

Price:

Unlike the States, where there are basic standards for most workout facilities, gyms in China often ignore health, safety, and equipment standards, so the quality of a place can range from absolute shit, to an executive-style health club where they have people whose sole job is to towel you off after you shower.

Most young expats in China can only afford something in between.

That being said, it is difficult to beat Chinese gyms on the price for a membership.  For a 13-month membership, which limits me to working out in the mornings before 2pm, I paid around 2,700 RMB, or about $415 U.S.  In the States that might pay for 4 months at a decent gym.

However, Chinese gyms require that you pay all the money up front when you buy your membership.  In some ways this is a smart practice. Most Chinese people buy a gym membership and never use it,  much like in the U.S., . If a moron pays 4,000 RMB up front for an entire year and doesn’t use their membership, the gym still pockets their money.

This is also a problem if you have limited knowledge about what constitutes a good workout facility.  You might pay a lot of money up front based on how a gym looks and feels during your one free visit, but later on you find out that it has a lot of issues.

I would recommend a gym that charges around 3000-4000 RMB per month. At this price range you will be guaranteed at least some modicum of good service and a good training experience.

Workout Area and Equipment:

One major problem I faced was finding a gym that has plenty of free space.

My training sessions are based on a modified version of a workout program called Stronglifts 5X5, which is a basic power lifting workout with bench press, squats, deadlifts, and overhead press.  You need lots of room to do all of these exercises safely.

However, weight training is somewhat of an afterthought in a lot of Chinese gyms. Many gyms just buy the minimal amount of weight training equipment they think a proper gym should have, and throw it into a cramped, back corner of their facility. This can be a major problem during peak hours when the gym is full of people. If you are doing an exercise like deadlifting, it is a major inconvenience, and not to mention dangerous, to have people constantly walking through your lifting area.

Fortunately, I was able to find a gym that has an entire floor dedicated to free weights and weight training.  There are many gyms like this in Beijing; you just have to spend a little more time shopping around for them.

Another issue I faced was finding a gym with proper equipment. China is the world’s capital of fake crap, and this includes free weights, dumbbells, machines, and just about anything you might find in a gym.

Like many things in the Middle Kingdom, being able to afford a gym membership is a very recent phenomenon, and the average Chinese gym user doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Most Chinese guys don’t lift heavy, so gym owners figure if they throw in a couple dozen fake plates, barbells, or dumbbells, their customers won’t really notice. However, when you are doing reps of heavy weight, it is quite noticeable when the equipment you are using is fake.  Dumbbells, fixed curl bars, and plates that say they are the same weight will actually be several pounds off.

My friend Justin and I had a run-in with this shortly after starting at our current gym. Justin was benching, but he stopped, and said it felt like one side of the bar was significantly heavier than the other. I did a couple reps and noticed the same thing. We took the plates off and brought them over to a gym scale to weigh them.  It turned out that there was actually a 5 lb. difference between the two 45lb. plates that Justin had on the bar.  This could have caused Justin serious injury when lifting.

Justin was using plates that were stamped with the name of the gym where we work out. Initially we thought nothing of this, as it is possible for gyms to get free weights that are specifically detailed with the gym’s name in the U.S.  However, our gym’s owner had probably decided that he would save a little money by having his own plates made for him, rather than importing them from the States, and the factory deliberately shorted the weight on some of the plates in order to charge him more. The owner probably didn’t care, because the price he bought the weights for was still far less than it would have cost to buy them from outside China.

Later on, we tried out some fixed-weight barbells that had the gym’s name stamped on them, and we found that many of those were off as well.

Our gym also had plates and dumbbells that were foreign brands, so we weighed them too, but we didn’t find any shockingly big differences in weight among them. Now we strictly use the weights that are clearly foreign brands and not copies.

Another problem I’ve faced was a lack of certain equipment that almost all gyms would have in the U.S.

I recently tore the MCL in my left knee, and I also found out that the cartilage is going soft in both my kneecaps, but prior to these issues I was squatting several times a week.  It was an absolute pain in the ass to find a gym with a proper squat rack or power rack. Most Chinese guys don’t train their lower body, so you are lucky if your gym even has a good leg press. The most common leg training method I’ve seen in Chinese gyms is using a smith machine.

Smith machines look like a squat rack, but the bar is permanently fixed to poles, which it slides up and down. Theoretically, this allows the user to lift safely on their own without the help of a spotter.  However, the Smith machine also absorbs some of the weight, so training isn’t as difficult, and it forces the body into improper ranges of motion that are potentially damaging to one’s physiology. The smith machine is the refuge for every ignorant idiot at my gym, and most of the time they use it for chest exercises, and not even for training their legs.  If the parts of the gym where I lift are vacant of good plates, I can always be sure to find them stacked on the smith machine.

Fortunately I was able to find a gym with a good power rack, and leg press, but it took a lot of looking around before hand.

In short, before you get a gym membership here in Beijing, or anywhere else in China, do your homework, and know have a good idea of the proper equipment and space you will need for the style of workouts you do.