Listen up!
There is a hidden danger to gyms that I doubt you’ve ever thought of. But it’s not to your muscles, bones, ligaments or tendons.
First, what is sound?
According to Wikipedia, it is a
“vibration that typically propagates as an audible wave of pressure, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.”
It’s that blare in the air.
It’s that motion in the ocean.
It’s that vibration in the foundation.
This pressure enters your inner ear, goes through a bunch of different bones, then eventually passes to the auditory nerve, which signals it to your brain and finally it’s interpreted-hopefully!
This all happens very fast…at the speed of sound, basically.
Rachel Raphael (awesome name alert!), an audiologist at Mercy medical Center in Baltimore said:
“it is likely that even short durations of loud intense weights dropping can have the same potential damage to hearing as a shotgun blast or an air bag deploying (both estimated at 140db)”
How high is 140db?
Yikes. Keep in mind this scale is logarithmic — a helicopter is roughly ten times as loud as a hairdryer.
Furthermore, that’s just normal weightlifting-plates rattling and clanging together, occasionally dropping on each other when unloading.
The sound is typically very transient, which is why we don’t notice much, but imagine how loud dropping a metal plate on another metal plate would be if it was continuous.
Here’s a more sobering story. Listen up!
“My hearing was ACTUALLY permanently damaged when a sticky iron weight fell on a leg press machine at a 24-hour fitness about 5 years ago. One extra weight slab was “stuck” to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned.”
“The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20–30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter. Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like “static”, for lack of a better explanation. All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky…”
Tinnitus is often caused by going to loud clubs, parties or rock concerts.
But it’s certainly plausible that it could be caused by two flat metal plates hurtling towards each other and then slamming together forcefully right near your ear.
Thanks for tuning in!
