It's hard to say of this is more funny or annoying. It's both, though.

[xiphias]

So, Brian, the trainer I work with at the gym, has been wanting to get 65 pound dumbbells for a while now. And I'm the excuse he got to finally do so. (And, well, he paid for them himself out of his bonus check. . . )

They finally arrived, on the day when I was going to be doing dumbbell presses anyway, so I got to be the first person to use them, even before Brian got to try them out. So we started doing my set.

The first set was with the 55-pound dumbbells, and it went fine. My second set was with the 60-pounders, and it was, of course, more difficult, but still went fine. And for my third set, I got to try out the new 65-pounders. (That's 25 kilos, 27.2 kilos, and 29.5 kilos.)

And I just FLEW through that set. Brian said, "Wow. It looked like you were barely working at all harder than with the 60-pound dumbbells."

And I thought about it. And I picked up a 60-pound dumbbell in one hand, and a 65-pound one in the other. And I hefted them. And I handed them to Brian. Who also hefted them. And said, "No way. No fucking way."

So we went into the other room with the scale. And we weighed them. "No fucking way." So we went into the OTHER other room with the digital scale, just in case the first scale was being weird.

Nope.

Turned out that the 65-pound dumbbells weighed 62.5 pounds.

And the 60-pound dumbbells weighed . . . 62.5 pounds.

Brian's comment was, "How do you even screw that up? This thing has absolutely no function OTHER than to weigh sixty-five pounds."

Comments

[redbird]

I wonder what the tolerances are on the dumbbells at my gym. I've been assuming that the reason the 12.5-pound ones feel that much harder than the 10-pound ones is that 10 is my comfortable range, what I use most of the time for that exercise, and 12.5 is pushing it. (And some days I step down to 7.5, if it's that or not do biceps curls at all.)

And I wonder how weirdly they'd look at me if I told this story and asked if they've ever checked the weights of the freeweights.

(I know that "levels" on the exercise bikes are arbitrary and not consistent across models; I also suspect that the heart rate measurements aren't reliable.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

We spot-checked a couple other ones: the 20-pound dumbbells were 20 pounds. The 22.5 pound ones were 22.0 pounds. Brian said that he's going to go through them all and weigh them all, mainly out of annoyance.