I've worked out in health clubs almost continuously since 1980, when my father staked me to my first gym membership at a tiny little Vic Tanny in suburban St. Louis. And the other day I got into a situation that was unlike anything I've experienced in those 28 years.

I should note that my gym is owned by an orthopedic practice, so it gets lots of seniors and middle-aged beginners. Some are rehabbing injuries, and some are just people who've figured out it's time to get in shape. I should also note that the management at the gym is on the ball, and the trainers are fully cognizant of the fact they have a lot of newbies wandering around on the workout floor.

But there are some points of gym etiquette that people new to the weight room won't pick up on until they're explained. One small problem I see a lot with older novice lifters is that they often block equipment they aren't using. Typically, they'll stand between two benches to do a dumbbell exercise, not realizing they're blocking both benches even though they aren't using either one.

The problem is resolved easily enough: If the gym is crowded and I need one of those benches, I explain the situation politely, suggesting that they stand behind one bench instead of between two of them. I probably have this conversation once or twice a month, and it's never a big deal.

But the other day it became a very big problem, for reasons I'd need an advanced degree in psychology to understand.

I was alternating two exercises, one of which involved a bench. As I was doing the second exercise a few feet away, a middle-aged woman walked up, set her clipboard on one bench, then stood between that bench and the one I'd been using. She started doing a set of dumbbell biceps curls, blocking both benches.

I said, "Ma'am, I need to use that bench," pointing to the one without the clipboard.

She gave me a look like I'd just farted on her grandchildren. "Why's that?"

"I need to do an exercise on that bench, and I was wondering if you could just step over there so I can use it." I pointed to a spot behind the other bench, which was maybe three feet from where she was standing.

"I'm not using the bench!" she said, raising her voice.

"But when you're standing right there, I can't use the bench. If you just stand right there instead ..."

That's as far as the conversation went. She threw her dumbbells at the rack (luckily, they were plastic-coated Barbie weights, so they didn't hurt anything), grabbed her clipboard, stormed over to the trainers' desk, yelled something at them, then stormed out.

She came back a couple minutes later, wearing her coat, yelled at them again, then stormed out again.

Until I told the trainers what had happened, they had no idea what had made this woman so angry. All she told them was that some guy was ordering her around (they were surprised to find out it was me), it was the second time it had happened to her, and she wasn't taking it anymore.

So I said to one of the trainers, "I guess this wouldn't be a good time to try to sell her my new book."

Beyond the weirdness factor, I think the dumbbell-hurling newbie offers an important reminder to all of us meatheads: Gym culture isn't really intuitive. What seems like basic dumbbell etiquette to a grizzled old gym rat like me might be seen by a total novice as an affront to her dignity. You have to train yourself not to be oblivious to what's going on around you, and that takes longer for some than for others.

Sometimes you have to go beyond merely noticing what other people are doing, and teach yourself to be flexible enough to change your routine if the situation requires it. If the workout calls for supersets and the gym is too crowded for that, you switch to straight sets. If you want to use a barbell but they're all taken, you try to match the movement pattern with dumbbells, or even cables, if that's easier.

The more you know about the exercises you do, the more flexible you can be. Over at T-nation, Tim Henriques has an encyclopedic article on that very subject. It's called "Five Things You Should Know About Every Exercise," and all of us probably should bookmark it.

Here's the lead-in:

The last two -- joint movement, and plane of movement -- are kind of technical and geeky, and I'm not sure I agree with Tim that an average musclehead needs to know jargon like "horizontal abduction in the transverse plane." You could just as easily call it a face pull, and people who know what that exercise is will understand what you're talking about.

I had to know all the jargon to get my training certifications, and to me it was like learning a second language. Granted, it's helpful for someone like me to be fluent in Geekish, but if I expected my readers to become multilingual, I'd have a very short career.

My first gig as a fitness journalist was a part-time copyediting job at Muscle & Fitness, where I found myself asking the guys with advanced degrees in exercise science why we needed to use terms like "pronated" or "supinated" when we could just as easily say "overhand" or "underhand." At first they were surprised by the questions; it hadn't occurred to them that readers wouldn't know these words, and (more to the point) would rather not have to learn them to figure out how to do the recommended exercises.

That's the biggest reason I wanted to writed The New Rules of Lifting. Alwyn Cosgrove and I reduced hundreds of exercises to six simple movement patterns -- squat, deadlift, lunge, push, pull, twist -- and went from there into the many varieties of each of those movements. The idea is that it's more useful to start with broad categories based on general patterns rather than with the minutiae of which muscles you're targeting.

For example, two seemingly dissimilar exercises, such as a flat dumbbell bench press and a standing barbell shoulder press, end up together in the "push" category. Even though they involve different joint actions (adduction on the bench press, abduction on the shoulder press); different planes of movement (transverse vs. frontal); and different prime movers (pectorals vs. deltoids), what they have in common is more important to know. Both involve the deltoid muscles, which pull the upper arms up or in, and both depend on the triceps, which straighten the elbows.

If you approach those two exercises the way a bodybuilder would, and do one on "chest day" and the other on "shoulder day," you end up putting a lot of redundant stress on your shoulders and triceps without giving the rest of your upper-body muscles similar challenges.

I agree with Henriques that it's helpful to be aware of the fact that the plane of movement shifts within each category of exercise. So if you shift from pull-ups to chin-ups, for example, you should realize that even though you're using the same muscles, you're using them in a different plane of movement, so the substitution isn't a perfect one-for-one exchange. Which, of course, is something you want to do for the sake of variety and overall muscular fitness.

As for the other three categories Henriques uses, I'm with him all the way. Most of us catch on to the names of exercises pretty quickly, and I don't think there's a lot of mystery about which muscles are the agonists, or prime movers, on any basic movement. I don't think anyone doing a bench press, for example, fails to understand that the goal is to build chest muscles. But the category of "synergists" is one that's probably mysterious to even veteran gym rats -- especially the guys doing 40 sets of biceps curls on Thursday because it's "arm day," without realizing they already worked those muscles to exhaustion on Wednesday, which just happened to be "back day."

But that's what I love about strength training: There's always something new to learn, or a more sophisticated level of understanding for the things you've already learned.

The only downside to building your base of knowledge is that you get farther away from the novices, at least one of whom is still out there somewhere, stewing over the fact some bald-headed jerk had the audacity to ask her to move three feet from where she was standing.