Surely the several high-profile cases of gym mishaps involving notable athletes, including the Sacramento Kings' Francisco Garcia and USC football player Stafon Johnson, are flukes.

And that guy in Chicago suing his health club over a deflated Swiss ball, that man in Taiwan who won a court judgment after slipping on a wet gym floor, that woman in Los Angeles nearly chewed up by a treadmill? Again, flukes, right?

In a word, yes. Accidents involving equipment in health clubs, gyms and team weight rooms hardly are common, experts say, and nothing to raise your blood pressure over. For every Garcia — who broke his wrist hoisting dumbbells after the ball he was sitting on burst — scores of exercisers daily bob upon such balls without incident.

As Kings owner Joe Maloof lamented to The Bee after Garcia's bad break, "You wouldn't expect it in a million years."

A 2000 article in the journal The Physician and Sports Medicine looked at emergency-room visits nationwide for weightlifting injuries from 1978 to 1998 — the most recent data studied. It showed that while minor injuries (soft-tissue related) jumped 35 percent during the period, 64 percent of all injuries were little more than bruises.

Dr. Ches Jones, a health science professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and the study's author, said, "More serious injuries that required hospitalization were rare. In most cases, the injury was due to the individual not taking proper safety measures, such as wearing flip-flops instead of shoes, (and the) result was a broken toe.

"There were a few cases that the equipment was at fault. But the majority were due to not practicing safety by the person lifting the weights."

In fact, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported that most weightlifting injuries occur at home, not in health clubs or school weight rooms.

Still, experts say health club members need to exercise vigilance when it comes to using weights, treadmills, exercise balls and other fitness tools. A database search returned no reports in recent years of widespread recalls of exercise equipment.

"Pretty much throughout the health club, you have to be careful," says Dr. Henry Williford, an exercise physiologist at Auburn University, Montgomery, who has long studied exercise safety. "In the weight room, there's been problems with faulty equipment and kids in the weight room that shouldn't have been in there.

"Spotters (people who guide the bar back into place following a set of repetitions) are very important. Now, the weights people lift are so heavy it may take three spotters instead of one. And balls require a certain amount of balance and skill, and you have to make sure (they're) inflated correctly."

In seven years as a personal trainer, the last four with Capital Athletic Club in downtown Sacramento, Mike Mendoza says he has witnessed only "a handful" of accidents in the free-weight area. But that doesn't mean lifters aren't at risk, he says. He puts the blame on poor form and inattention rather than faulty equipment.

"I'd say about 40 percent of the guys in there have poor form," Mendoza says. "Or it's a result of guys doing too much (weight) too soon."

When it comes to using heavy weights, such as the bench press or squats, spotters become vital. Mendoza says he's seen spotters "watching TV or watching the woman walking by" rather than attending to the task at hand.

Zach Trowbridge, a fitness instructor at Gold's Gym in Natomas, Calif., says lifters need responsible spotters familiar with the experience level and skill of the lifter.

"You really need to have a level of confidence with the spotter and be very clear with what you want," Trowbridge says. "Tell him beforehand, 'I want to lift off on three' or on your count."

Many health clubs have instructors who roam the weight room to monitor activity and make sure people lift safely and with proper form. The problem is getting people to listen.

"When I try to correct someone's form, they don't want to hear it," Mendoza says. "It's almost always men."

Trowbridge says egos can "get out of hand. The guys are like, 'Oh, put another plate on the bar.' But that other plate makes their form go to complete garbage and they're in trouble."

The injury to USC's Johnson, who required surgery after dropping a bench-press bar on his throat in late September, was not a case of too much weight or poor form. But some have speculated that a popular "false grip" on the bar — with the thumb next to the fingers instead of hooked around the bar — could have been a reason it slipped.

"A lot of guys are using it," Trowbridge says. "They call it the suicide grip, the monkey grip or the thumbless grip. It's for comfort on the wrist, but at the same time, the risk factors go through the roof."

As shown by the Garcia case, the weight room is not the only part of the gym where fluke injuries can occur. Tens of thousands of fitness balls are used in health clubs and weight rooms nationwide, and in the past two years, there have been scattered reports of the balls popping under a heavy strain.

"Clubs need to make sure they buy commercial-grade, 2,000-pound burst-resistant balls instead of the $15 ones from Sports Authority," Trowbridge says.

Another apparatus that is a potential danger is the treadmill. In 2007, a California appeals court ruled in favor of a Los Angeles woman who sued her health club after her foot stuck to a viscous substance on the treadmill, resulting in a fall.

But exercise experts say the vast majority of treadmill injuries result from inattention by users getting distracted by watching TV or talking on their cell phones while running.

"At our university," Auburn's Williford says, "people are always not paying attention, and then all of a sudden, they're flying off the back of the treadmill. Fortunately, we've never had anything serious."

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