I have only ever been in one gym that had really sound choices for what sort of equipment they have in their weight rooms, ever. The one I am a member of now is not that gym. It seems as though they just kind of bought whatever they could find for sale when they acquired a lot of their gear. For starters, half of the plates are in kilograms and half are labeled in lbs, which makes for a very confusing situation. However, today I want to focus on this damn near useless piece of equipment.
It is a beast and is quite possibly the largest piece of equipment in the entire weight room. The problem that I have with it is not that it doesn't have a purpose, it is that it is time-consuming to use an also redundant because there are already several other machines that achieve the same purpose.
It's primary function is for doing flys or butterflys, which is a chest exercise where you have your arms at the side and arc them to the center where your hands eventually meet. This machine does not have plates that you select with a pin but rather you have to use individual plates from the stock that are normally scattered all over the gym. This is dumb because they already have several fly machines that are compact and do the same job... like this one for example.
This pieces of equipment accomplishes the exact same thing but instead of needing to hunt all over the gym for a plate that is not being used it has all the weight that most normal humans would ever need to lift all contained in a rack - a rack that is already labeled in both lbs and kgs.
Another problem from our original machine is that for people like me that can do 80-100 kg sets, is that the weights must be placed on the machine very low to the ground that can only be accessed by putting yourself in an awkward position to access it.
This introduces a wonderful opportunity to tweak and accidentally injure your lower back, which is always fun and these sorts of injuries are actually very common in the gym.
Virtually no one in the fitness center ever uses this machine and it takes up the amount of space that 2 or maybe even 3 other machines could be occupying. It really should be retired.
The only thing that I could even imagine someone would ever NEED this thing for would be if they were capable of doing fly-sets that were above the capacity of the compact rack machine, whose top end is something ludicrous like 200kg. However, the dumb red monster machine can only fit 4 plates on each side and our largest plates are 25kg.... so go ahead and so some math there real quick if you feel like it.
Mostly, I have been happy with CNX gym in Chiang Mai but this is not the only redundant or dumb machine that is in their stock. I think a little bit more attention to detail should be put in place.
I realize that this likely doesn't apply to many people and perhaps is not interesting, but tonight I was just staring at the machine and felt like letting it know how much I hate it and the fact that it takes up entirely too much space for what its intended purpose is. :P
If you have a gym story about something that was just dumb they had in there, i would be interested to hear it.