It’s the new year. So you know what that means…

You know what I’m talking about. It’s that time of year when you find the parking lot packed. When you find the front lobby of your gym plastered with new faces. Where the gym is packed like a can of sardines. The dreaded newbies will be invading a gym near you and trust me when I say this… it is going to suck. The one thing that stinks about New Year’s resolutions is the fact that some person whose never worked out a day in their lives has suddenly taken it upon themselves to get in the gym and make a change for the new year, to finally get in shape and stop this lazing around.

We probably sound like garbage to you right now. “How can you hate the fact that people want to get in shape?” Don’t get us wrong, it’s all well and good if someone is serious about making a positive change in their life. But more often than not you’re going to find people that merely head to the gym and treat it like a fad – only to give up after a month and never come back. It would all be okay if they were serious. But the sad truth is, most of them aren’t.

So just how the hell do you manage to get your workout in and avoid the headache of newbs at the gym? Here’s our official survival guide.

Avoiding Peak Hours

If you want to be nice you can just change up your own training schedule to avoid the peak hours of traffic at the gym. Train in the early morning or mid day when newbs aren’t likely to show up. Of course, this is a huge disadvantage to you. Why should you have to turn your gym schedule into something less than convenient just to avoid the plague of newbies? This isn’t about being nice, this is war, a war for your gym. So you’re gonna have to play dirty. Which leads us to…

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Don’t Clean Up After Yourself

You already know the rules of the gym. Wipe down your machine after you use it. It prevents bacterial infections and is just good hygiene. So to freak out the newcomers – do the complete opposite. Ring out your shirt on the machines and make sure every inch of it is lathered in sweat. The serious prospects will just get some paper towels and wipe it down while the quitters will complain and just avoid it at all costs.
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Intimidate the Newbs

The next time a newbie lifter is approaching the bench press just stand in their way, stare them down and let your size do the talking. No scrawny punk is gonna argue with you about using the bench when your bicep is bigger than their head. Grunt louder while you lift, shoot serious glances at the scrawny guys, make them realize that this a serious bodybuilding gym and not some Planet Fitness.

Crop Dust Your Area

Gonna go ahead and say it, no one likes the smell of farts. But there’s farts and then there’s protein farts and trust us when we say the latter is a pretty powerful deterrent. So if you want the newbs to stay away from your rack when you’re taking a breather, just let a bomb off as a protective layer.
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Give Horrible Advice

Some newbies are gullible enough to listen to anything veterans have to say. Mind games are as much apart of warfare as anything else so why not mess with their heads a bit. Give them horrible advice on how they look. If they look in horrible shape tell them that it’ll only take them two weeks to get ripped. Tell them light weight will get them massive muscles. Tell them to avoid the squat at all cost. Chances are if you’re convincing enough they’ll listen. Once they don’t get the results they want then eventually they’ll give up.
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In All Seriousness…

All joking aside, the first few months of the new year are always a mess of crowded gyms and new faces. Some of them may annoy you, well – many of them will annoy you, but at the end of the day this is a passing phase. It’s a part of the gym cycle and just something we all have to get used to. Maybe some of you are lucky and have a truly special gym that keep away non-serious lifters, and to those people we say congratulations. But for the rest of us, let’s just keep lifting heavy and tell ourselves what we know to be true… this will all die down soon enough.

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What do you think are the most annoying things about the newcomers at the gym? Any other advice about driving them off? Give us the details in the comments below and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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