Hey, Gang.“24 Hour Fitness” has just broken ground for a new facility in town. Now I know how the T-Mag gang feels about these gyms that look like raves and discos and all the “N-Sync” , “Madonna” and “Cher” music you have to tolerate, but due to my work schedule, a 24 hour workout facility sounds intriguing. I didn’t want to call their 800 number in order to get a sales pitch from “Buffy or Brian, the Personal Trainers”, so, as always, I turn to you guys for the real scoop. My questions: 1) This may sound dumb, but are they ACTUALLY open 24 hours? (American marketing will do stuff like that, 'ya know!) 2)They advertise as having “tons of free weights”. Bottom line: how are the weights and cardio equipment? 3)Anything else important, let me know. Thanks guys!
I’m not sure what qualifies as a “real” gym as I have only recently started resistance training, but my employer provides me a free membership to 24 Hour Fitness. I can tell you that it is very similar to a Bally’s. It sounds like you will be training during off-peak hours (as I do) and they really are open 24 hours. The only potential problem I see is the maintenance and janitorial type stuff is done in the early morning (2 to 5am), so a few pieces of equipment are out of commission then. And, yes, there is an obnoxiously loud sound system playing the latest boy-band and Brittney hits.
Don’t buy a membership until you see the facility! They can promise you anything, but it won’t necessarily be that way. These facilities can vary GREATLY from location to location.
Of course it has it good and bad. Bad, the people there are usually a bunch of lamers. You must see really poor technique day in and day out. You would get the sales pitch from some idiot.
Good, lots of equipment and most people aren’t really using them. The majority of people at my gym are either on cardio machines or weight machines. The only time you ever see anyone on a squat rack is when some dumb meathead is doing curls. I would get a membership as soon as they are available simple because they give out cheap memberships to the first several hundred and then it just goes up. I got my membership before my gym opened and I’m locked in at 24.00 per month for life. You will get hit with the whole initiation/processing fee. It is the cost of the first and last month and the paperwork fees, I think mine was 250 or so. After the first year you are month to month and what’s nice is that you can go to any 24 in the country. Within a 5 mile radius of my place there are 4 24hr’s. Yes most of them are opened 24hrs but some are open from 5-12. The times are different by place but once they get a larger membership base they go 24hrs. Hope this helps.
Mufasa, DEMAND a 1 week free trial period…I have
belonged to a number of gyms in my day, and I’ve
always received a free trial week. And make sure you
visit them during your usual workout times…Not to
sound too mystical, but by the second or third visit, you’ll
get a gut feeling as to whether the gym fits you or not!
A few years ago I was trying out a new gym and was in
the middle of my sumo routine when I looked behind me and
saw the owner standing there shaking his head.
He waited until I had finished the set then asked me to stop,
saying that I was making the other members nervous. Needless to
say, this was not a “hard-core” establishment. The bottom line:
I never joined! As with any relationship, it’s always good to go
out on a few dates BEFORE you make any long term commitments,
if you catch my drift!..Always HARDCORE, Joey Z. ::::----::::
If you can’t get the manager to let you see the floorplan and tell you what equipment they’ve ordered, I’d hold off on buying a membership until the place is finished. I bought a membership in 24 Hour at a location they’d bought from a defunct chain called Family Fitness. The weight room when I got there was a racquetball court with some ratty carpet thrown down…and I got some of the best workouts I’ve ever had in there. Go in at 5AM, get the college dude working the desk to throw in the latest Tesla CD (yeah, I’m dating myself - the chain was actually still called “24 Hour Nautilus” then) and go to it! Anyway, the point is: they kept promising a full remodel, and that the new weight room would be great…well, they finally (a year later) actually did the remodel, and the machine room upstairs was fine (all shiny new Cybex stuff.) BUT…the free weight area downstairs was stuffed into a claustrophobic room with a 9’ ceiling (saw a HS basketball player put 45lb plates through the ceiling tiles once!) which two months after it was finished still stunk from the sealant they used to glue the rubber mats to the floor. On the other hand, a friend in the East Bay went to a 24 Hour that rocked! They vary a lot from location to location. Most are open 24 hours Monday to Friday, but some may be open shorter hours on weekends…again, it varies.
I’d go in, talk to the manager, and see if they can show you the floorplan. They may try to pull some high-pressure sales stuff on you (“buy today and get that low rate forever”), and there may be a delay between the time you buy and the time you can actually use the place…when they remodeled the one I went to, I went in one day and was told I couldn’t work out. “But you’re open”, I said. “Yes, but not for workouts.” “So you’re a gym…but you can’t work out. Kinda like a restaurant that’s ‘open’, but not serving food, eh?” (That earned me the look of death from the sales swine!)
I wound up joining a (very cool) Gold’s a few miles away and having to pay 24 Hour for over a year for a membership I didn’t use…check the contract carefully - mine ran 3 years and the only way out was if you moved more than 50 miles from any of their locations…I got out when I moved to the other side of the U.S.
Mufasa, here’s a story about what happened to me at a Family Fitness about a decade ago. (I know it’s not 24 Hour Fitness, but if it helps…) I used to wear Brooks running shoes. What relevance does this have? Well, like most running shoes at that time, they had black soles. When I joined the place the sales guy walked me through (I was wearing my Brooks), talked with me, etc., and I signed up. After they’d gotten my money, the first time I walked in the place they told me that I couldn’t wear black-soled shoes in the weight area! The “reason” was the nice white cushiony tiles that they’d laid down; they didn’t want them “marred” by black streaks or anything. Since I was locked into paying for a year, I had to go out and buy myself an entirely new pair of white-soled shoes, which basically added another $50 bucks onto the membership fee. Man, I was pissed! (As you can tell - I’m writing about this ten years after the fact!) Anyway, I had a measure of revenge because every time I saw any sales person walking a potential client through, and that client had black soled shoes on, I made a point of saying, “Hey, you can’t walk in here with those shoes, man! It’ll fuck up the floor!” Then the sales guy was put in the embarrassing position of having to try to justify their lame-ass floor policy. I’m sure they lost some potential clients like that, which was fine with me. The REALLY irritating thing about the whole situation was that their precious, high-tech floor starting coming apart about six months after the place opened. All the corners of the tiles started curling up, making it easy to trip. (If this was typical of other Family Fitnesses, it’s no wonder the morons went out of business.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that it's probably impossible to anticipate all of the stupid/underhanded things that a gym chain can do to you. In addition to the above about really reading your contract thoroughly, my advice is: see if you can find people who've got memberships at other 24 Fitness clubs in your area, and see what they think. Also, if you can, find out who the manager of the new club is going to be. Often they'll transfer guys around from one club to another, and if that's the case ask someone from the manger's old club. Is he cool, or a dick? Is he a knowledgeable weight trainer, or a salesman? Hope this helps... Good luck!
You can always sneak a kettlebell and some bands into the gym to spice it up a little. One good thing about 24/Bally’s is that they’re guaranteed to be full of eye candy to make the cardio workouts go by quickly.
I was very dissapointed with the 24 Fitness I worked at. When I went there to check the place out, they arranged me with a dealer and pressured me into buying a membership as if the guy was selling me a used car. That Bastard! Their selection of free weights sucked also. They only had 2 sets of dumbbells for each weight, which totally sucked because the gym was crowded all the time. I would sometimes wait ten minutes before I could do my next set of curls. Plus, with their crappy boy band music blasting all the time, it really didn’t help me with with my progress in the gym. If that wasn’t bad enough, they blasted their AC so high it gave me shrinkage all the time. Miss World could be next to me doing a set of hamstring curls and squeezing her ass cheeks really tight as she goes to the concentric portion of the excercise, and it wouldn’t do a thing for me. I really hate those bastards at 24 Hour Fitness.
Ok, here’s my take on the 24-hour fitness question… After you pay the outlandish processing fee and application fee, which in my case was about $450 all together, you then have to pay 1st and last month and then, to top it all off, they will want your bank account number to automatically withdraw the funds from your account at a specified date which usually never coincides with your payday! But the $$ isn’t the worst thing, because even some good things in life must come at a price. Here’s the real kicker… because it’s a franchise business and it tries to cater to ever single fricken need of every single fricken person that has ever made a New Year’s resolution, you’re gonna see every make, model, and attitude of a person in there. What that usually means is some lame-ass punk kid that thinks he’s Mr. Universe cuz he happens to have bigger arms than the two stick-kids he brought along with him to help scope out the chicks, will want to lean on one bench while talking about the party this coming weekend to his two buddies while they each sit on another bench. So their you’ll stand, veins popping out cuz you’ve been holding the 95lb dumbbells waiting for a bench and not wanting to just tell the little bastards to shut up and lift or get out of the gym all because you’re the ‘new’ guy at the gym. So, in a nutshell, because of the variety of people that go to a ‘24 hour fitness’ type of establishment, you’ll probably end up wishing you’d just spent the processing and application fees on a home gym and a couple videos of “Baywatch” to view while in between sets.