My gym only has two power racks, one with deadlifting pads and one without. The rack without pads was being used by someone squatting, so I was using the one with the pads for (RDLs), along with two other guys doing the same exercise.

Halfway through our sets, a fourth guy came over and asked if he could work in with us. The issue was, he wanted to do deadlifts, while we were all doing RDLs. We were already rotating between three people and changing weights after almost every set, so adding a fourth person doing a different lift would take even longer.

More importantly, the deadlift pads were set up outside the rack, so we had to move our RDL setup out of the rack space. I politely asked him if he could wait until we finished our last two sets, and then he could take over the rack. But he got pretty annoyed and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just work in with us, even after I explained the situation (and the other two guys also weren’t keen on a fourth person because of the waiting time).

Eventually, he gave up, muttered some curses, and walked off to use another machine.

Looking back, maybe we could’ve made it work if we moved things around, but with only two sets left, it felt more practical to just finish up quickly. So... AITA?