Hey all. I'm maybe half a year into gym culture and not sure what the appropriate response to my situation was. I genuinely want everyone at the gym to have a fair and welcome time, and to follow whatever the social norms there are.

However, today I am across a situation I'm unsure about. For context, I workout in an apartment building gym that has a decent selection of lifting equipment (rack, barbell, short barbell, curl bar, etc), but just one of each thing. Everyone using the facility generally shuffles around as needed, waiting for equipment or working in. It's particularly hard to handle benching and squatting simultaneously, as we have just the one rack we can use.

Today I came across someone who had each barbell and the rack loaded, along with a handful of other things. Only this person and myself were in the room. I was immediately annoyed and asked this guy if he was using "all of these", and he said "yeah." I asked how many sets he had left on the rack, and he said "idk, about 30 minutes." He was clearly using each piece of equipment in a cycle, such that he'd do one set with one bar, take a rest, then do another set on another, take a rest, and ultimately use the rack maybe once every 10 minutes. Since the rack was set up at a bench height and I was planning on squatting, I asked the guy if he could focus on his benching sets so that I could use it sooner to squat (to avoid having to fully unload, rerack, repeat if we worked in). He immediately went on the defensive, saying "you just got here and now you're telling me how to work out?! Wait your turn or work in" I said "you can't just use all the equipment like that, nobody does this". Eventually after some arguing, he tells me to use the rack anyway, but put everything back "exactly as it was" whenever he came by. This sucks, but I had limited time so I went along with it.

Between sets he could talk to me about how people are reasonable and will let you work in if you don't show up with an aggressive stance like I did. I try to explain that my issue was that he's using every piece of lifting gear, and making everyone work in with him instead of focusing on his sets. He reiterates that I have no right to tell him how to work out. I eventually finish my sets and leave, though at this point we've both calmed down and exchanged names, for gentlemen's sake.

My feeling going into this was that forcing everyone to work in with you in a small gym instead of doing exercises one at a time was selfish, and I've never seen this before. Otoh, the dude has a point that I barged in and interrupted his workout and asked him to do it differently so that I could do sets without having to adjust the rack constantly or wait half an hour for him to finish. I'm not sure what the right gym culture is here.

tl;dr: Guy at gym uses every piece of equipment on a cycle, I ask him to focus on his rack sets, he tells me to stop telling him how to workout. AITA?