(Some people involved in exercise programs like to log their progress, note achievements, talk about how good they feel, and log their workouts. I prefer to whine.)
Today’s whine is the Big Box Gym.
You know the kind I’m talking about: Gold’s Gym, Planet Fitness, Freedom Fitness, LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness (are you seeing a pattern in the naming strategy?) They offer ridiculously low “registration fees” (this month, you can join Planet Fitness for only 20 cents!) and a basic membership plan that’s just under $10 per month. Included in this are some perks . . . free training or a session with a dietician, a locker room, maybe a sauna or a massage table. I hear Planet Fitness does free haircuts for members.
The secret to the Big Box Gym business model is this: they are gambling you won’t come in. From a business perspective, they hope you will sign up, pay your registration and membership fee, and never, ever come back. Coupled with this if the fact that most people forget about their gym memberships and pay for years, and years, and years, always “meaning” to either cancel or get back to the gym, and they do neither.
As a business model, it’s genius. People pay you for not doing something (go to the gym) because they feel as if they ought to be doing it. The only way this business model could fail is if people actually go, because, if even a third of the members showed up at any one time, then no one exercise because there would be lines ten deep to use each piece of equipment. The Big Box Gym is basically paying someone (the gym) to gamble with your money. And it works.
But I digress. My whine is not about the business model of the Big Box Gym; it’s about my Big Box gym, which is Freedom Fitness on Saratoga.
Where do I start? First of all, it’s in a place that used to be Gattitown, a local pizza parlor/arcade where my children had all kinds of birthday parties when they were growing up. It’s a space that I associate with happiness and my children’s laughter. I remember epic air hockey games, ski ball, virtual roller coasters, bumper cars, and lots of other fun things. The free weights are where the bumper cars used to be, and the men’s restroom is where the ski ball was.
Somehow, the space seems wrong.
Plus, the gym is where you’re supposed to go live a healthy lifestyle, to work out, to burn off the food you’ve eater.
But if it’s a space in which you’ve literally eaten a few hundred pizza slices, dozens of soft service ice creams, and who knows how may glasses of soda, it just seems wrong—almost sacrilegious—to work out there.
Aside from the stunning lack of pizza and ice cream at my gym, there are other problems with the space. The walls are lined with televisions tuned to seemingly random channels. And I mean lined—the walls of the free weight areas have TVs, the walls of the resistance machines have TVs, and the cardio area, which is on the second floor, has TVs.
I’m trying to figure out WHY. I guess it’s to occupy you or give you something to do when you work out (especially with cardio), but I’m not sure. You can’t HEAR any of the channels. Yes, I know it’s a big box gym and a big area, but I have gone to other gyms where the cardio machines have places where you can plug in, tune to a channel, and get the audio to match the TV. This is not so at my gym.
The last time I was at the gym, I sat on the recumbent bike, peddling. Three TVs were almost immediately in front of me, and they were tuned to a) a telenovela, b) an infomercial for some kind of fancy blender, and c) a rebroadcast of a Kansas City Chiefs game from 2014. The telenovela was full of dramatic shots of very attractive women looking very worried—about what, I’m not sure. Perhaps they were worried about whether the blender was worth a hundred bucks or not. Or perhaps the telenovela ladies were big Chiefs fans, and they were worried because their team was trailing the Raiders by a touchdown.
And then there is the music. Loud, electronic, volume so high you really can’t hear yourself think. My wife, Diana, was sitting next to me. We tried to chat, but neither of us could hear the other. Again, I found myself wondering WHY. Why did the music need to be so loud. Was it supposed to be inspiring? Make me want to work harder?
Then it hit me—it was incredibly obvious. The music in the gym is so loud that the young people can’t hear the old people scream. It’s a practical solution.
I could whine about other things—the beautiful, fit people, the guys who sit at the same weight station for an hour so no one else can use it (this is called “parking”), the “free” personal trainers who don’t show up or can only meet you at 3 am on the third Thursday. . . but I shall stop there. I’ll keep going to the gym, not out of any joy, not even out of a desire to get fit, but because I’m cheap. If I’m going to pay then bucks a month, I’m going to get
