Loading and ZigZagging in Commercial Gym

[Scott Stevenson]

I guess there's always more than one way to skin a cat!! I've just been rotating between squat, hacksquat and smith squat on compound exercises depending on what's free - people generally are quite nice and don't mind me working in (e.g jumping and doing 1 leg extension set between my compound) but sometimes the rest period might be a bit longer...
...would that be a problem??

If you're creeping forward on reps and load, which adds up over time, that variability in rest interval will make a difference.

For Quads, a great ham iso. exercise that you can almost always get away with is a lying DB ham curl (on the floor). Just grab the DB's and commandeer near under the machine / rack you're using.

Lap squats can also be used with a barbell as a quad iso movement, i.e., as your last exercise after your (compound) BB squat loading sets are over. The same can be down with a smith machine, but there you've got smith sissy hacks and somersault squats to choose from.

I'm sure because your a unit most people would jump off a machine straight away if you asked - I think I need to get a bit more size before my stature gets that reaction

LOL!!! I'm not like that at all in the gym, actually...

Just today, I had to grab a quick one (out of town traveling) and wanted to do a cable crossover pec fly. Another guy was doing pull-ups with the cross-bar of cross-cable machine and I went over to ask him if I could work in with the cross-cable. (He was bouncing around from machine to machine.) He was actually annoyed that I bothered him, which I suspected might happen.

IMO, No one has any more right to a machine really than another person, unless there's some common sense reason why someone should have priority. (E.g., if a monster is leg pressing 1000+lb and a 85yr woman wants to work in, it doesn't make sense for him to unload 20 plates each time she want to do a set when she could wait for him to finish.)

-S