Budget gyms: Are they worth it?
I love going to the gym. I’ve been a gym goer for over 10 years now, since my flatmate at university suggested it would be a good way to keep my boyfriend interested. It wasn’t. I lost the boyfriend and kept the gym membership. Ever since, the gym has got me through all sorts of life events: break ups, house moves, new jobs…
I like everything about the gym: the intriguing equipment, the people watching, the bad music, even the exercise itself. It’s my sanctuary. At the start of the workout I get time to think, to process the day, luxuriating in the good things and dwelling on the negative. Then, as the workout gets harder, I get more out of breath, my muscles start to hurt and I manage to forget everything except how to survive the here and now. I switch off totally in a way my brain rarely manages. I’m free.
So this year, when I decided to give up my gym membership, it was a big deal. I thought about it for a number of months. The main reason for my decision was that it was just getting way too expensive. I’d always justified the expense to myself with the fact that I go to the gym a lot, so £50 a month doesn’t actually work out that expensive each time. But, I’m in the middle of buying my first house and things like gym memberships were eating into the amount I could save each month for a deposit.
The gym itself was also not as good as it used to be. I’d been a member of the same gym for about five years, a Virgin Active. I had a lot of good times at that gym. I did my first ever boxing there, my first Body Pump class, I even learnt how to swim. A lot of positive experiences and happy memories. But over time it felt like Virgin was losing interest, until finally the gym got taken over by Nuffield Health. Nuffield painted everything green and all of my favourite class instructors left. It felt like the time had come for me to say goodbye too.
Even then I was expecting the service industry’s customer service instincts to kick in. I thought that they would try to stop me leaving. That they would offer me a cheaper deal to protect their income. I even hinted that I could be persuaded out of my decision. But nothing. It was like when you dump someone and they don’t try to talk you out of it. In fact, they agree with your decision and say they won’t miss you that much anyway. It’s just plain offensive.
So, I bought some weights, found some exercise videos on YouTube and set about keeping fit at home. And it worked to a certain degree. At first I didn’t even miss the gym. I kept to a schedule of regularly working out, but it just wasn’t the same. I’d get distracted by my flatmate or the TV or my phone. I wasn’t motivated by having other people around to push me and ended up lifting lighter weights. Exercise stopped being the time when I could switch off and ended up being engulfed by the rest of my life.
With a mortgage offer in the bag I decided that I could afford to go back to gym membership, but it needed to be a cheap gym membership. It needed to be a budget gym. According to the FT more than a fifth of the UK’s gym members go to a budget gym and the number of us is increasing all the time. In Birmingham city centre I had the choice between Pure Gym, easyGym and the one that I went for, The Gym. At The Gym I get 24-hour access, 7 days a week to two floors of cardio and resistance equipment and free classes, all for £11.99 a month. Not bad.
And what is the experience like? Well, unsurprisingly, it feels cheap. The lockers feel like the cheapest lockers ever invented, the equipment is old and the air conditioning sporadic. The changing rooms are straight out of my secondary school sports hall and you never see the same person twice. But, I don’t really go to the gym to make friends and the equipment was good enough to allow me to run my fastest ever 5k time to date last week. As for the lockers, as long as I don’t have one break on me, I can live with it.
I couldn’t go to a budget gym forever, but in the short term, it’s a godsend. It’s given me back my fitness and my space to think. And let’s face it, few things in life are more important than that.
