Gym Rage: Spinning Out of Control

Sept. 20, 2007 — -- For the millions of Americans looking for another reason to skip hitting the gym, they can add to their list of excuses one more — gym rage.

A New York City hedge-fund manager says he was assaulted by a fellow health-club member at a Manhattan gym this week because he was grunting too loudly during a spinning class.

Stuart Sugarman, 48, says that he spent two weeks in the hospital with a damaged spinal cord after Christopher Carter, 44, became so enraged by Sugarman's "whooping" that he threw him from his exercise bike.

"[Carter] didn't like the volume at which my client was cheering and getting amped up," Sugarman's lawyer Samuel Davis told ABCNEWS.com. "After making some rude expletive-laced comments that my client desist from cheering … he got off his bike and into a linebacker's position. Then he charged across the room, lifting my client off his bike and smashing his head and neck against a Sheetrock wall."

Carter was charged with misdemeanor assault, which his lawyer Mike Farkas characterized as "imaginative at best … [and] a manipulation of the criminal justice system."

Davis says his client suffered a concussion, a spinal cord contusion and a "massive herniated disk."

Gyms have been the focus of a number of donnybrooks in recent months, leading some to dub the phenomenon behind health-club assaults gym rage.

Two English women ended up wrestling on the floor of their Birmingham aerobic studio in May after a fight broke out over the direction a fan would be pointed.

"We looked round and saw two women standing next to the fan, arguing over it," a witness told the Birmingham Evening Mail.

"They were screaming and shouting, then the next thing we knew they were pushing and shoving each other. … They ended up rolling on the floor, pulling each other's hair and scratching each other's faces," she said.

In January, a Salt Lake City man said an off-duty cop "blocked his car with a police cruiser in a gym parking lot and tried to pull him out of his vehicle through the window" after a heated basketball game, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.