How I Met My First Trainee

A Bilingual Brotherhood was Born

As regular readers of mine might know, I live in China, and thus, naturally, work out at a Chinese gym.

It’s a pretty small one, and I’m unfortunately the biggest guy there. I say unfortunately because I’d rather not be the medium fish in a tiny pond, but it is what it is. At least I have the internet to keep my ego in check and keep learning!

A side effect of this situation is that most of the locals are very interested in me, especially the young guys who don’t know much about lifting.

For those of you who don’t know, a common myth that Chinese people often believe is that “foreigners cannot speak Chinese”. This probably got started for the simple reason that most foreigners in China cannot speak Chinese. We do exist, but are painfully rare, because it’s a difficult language.

These guys are curious about my training, but they don’t think that they can communicate with me because they don’t think I can speak Chinese.

So what happens?

Almost every workout, I get people following me around the gym, copying me.

This occasionally reaches almost absurd levels.

I once tested this a few years ago, and a high schooler did the same nine exercises as me in a row.

• I did face pulls. He did face pulls.
• I did dumbbell bench press. He did dumbbell bench press.