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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

Popularity is an anti feature at the gym. Working adults have limited windows to workout and so once a gym gets affordable like 24hr fitness where seasonal sales at Costco make it VERY cheap it becomes a gym you might not actually want to work out in.

Then you have the whole gym owner archetype which I won’t dive into but IMO exasperates the issue.

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Mega-gyms are pretty terrible. I've never been to a 24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, or Gold's Gym that wasn't a sea of equipment hoggers, broken machines, random dirty towels, occupied lockers, and screens with CNN or daytime TV on. What's even more strange is how willing people are to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for an Equinox membership. The rationale is that paying that much upfront keeps you motivated to make your payment worthwhile, but both people I know who've made this mistake ended up going only a few times before giving up.

Smaller neighorhood gyms are so much better, let you cancel any time, and don't make you talk to a sales-bro when signing up.

> I've never been to a 24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, or Gold's Gym that wasn't a sea of equipment hoggers, broken machines, random dirty towels, occupied lockers, and screens with CNN or daytime TV on.

I was a member of Gold’s Gym in Japan for more than a decade and worked out at many different branches, and other than occasional equipment hoggers none of that applied. The gyms were all clean and well maintained. I also used a Gold’s Gym for a while in Southern California, and it was fine, too. When it came time for me to cancel my memberships, there was no hassle whatsoever.

Another mega gym I used a few times in Southern California was pretty awful, though. I still remember the dirt under all of the machines and the caked dried sweat covering the handles of the ellipticals.

> Another mega gym I used a few times in Southern California was pretty awful, though. I still remember the dirt under all of the machines and the caked dried sweat covering the handles of the ellipticals.

That must be the 24 Hour Fitness on Ocean Park Blvd in Santa Monica.

TBH - Anything Japanese doesn't count.

They have a sense of Quality that almost no other demographic does.

I assume part of the attraction of an equinox is that everyone else there is paying hundreds of dollars per month for a gym membership

Yeah, that's probably the unsaid motivation. I just haven't seen it actually turn out that way with the small sample size I've people I've known who signed up for Equinox.

The other thing about Equinox, and expensive gyms in general, is that a gym's price and amount of equipment doesn't closely correlate with fitness success. You can't outrun a poor diet, genetics explains the vast majority of a person's physique even if they get their body fat down to <13%, and only maybe 6 different exercises will work out all the major muscle groups. Setting aside the dirtiness or crowdedness of certain gyms, every extra dollar you spend at the gym is a diminishing return. As a regular guy, I simply can't justify paying that much for Equinox no matter how hot and motivated those gym goers will be because I already have the motivation to work out twice a weak at a cheap ass (yet clean and uncrowded) gym that's closer to me anyway.

I used the equinox next door to the office for a while because it was next door to the office (and membership was subsidized). It seemed that the customer base was fit people between 30 and 45. Being outside that demographic meant I didn’t have to interact with the other customers, which to me was a feature.

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