Falstaff and Me
Your Gym Doesn’t Have Enough Meatheads
by Roscid Cup
In which Roscid Cup compares the two gyms he attends in San Francisco, and explains his decision-making process in choosing them.
My intention was to switch to a gym that was open any hour. Too often I ran into a situation where I haven’t gone to the gym yet but it was about to close. That is when I switched. But where to?
Not being one of the Joneses, there’s a little devil on my right shoulder telling me to go to Equinox, the Bond Villain’s gym of choice (or at least that’s how they advertise themselves).
“Don’t do it!” says the rather sententious and opinionated angel on my other shoulder. “You can’t afford it! You will punish your future self if you go to this gym.”
“You don’t want to get bossed around by him,” said the devil. “Sure the monthly fee is steep, but it’s still not as much as what your monthly student loan repayments were.”
“It’s a trick! You know full well that student debt was the bane of your existence for years.”
At this point the devil didn’t reply. He just smh’d at the angel and gave me a we-know-better look.
The angel didn’t give up. “Equinox closes at the same time as your current gym. If you go there you would defeat the purpose of changing gyms.”
“Damn you angel!” I said. “Why do you have to be right. How I hate you!”
Because of my one requirement — open more hours than my current gym — I had to say no to any fancy gym like Equinox, no to World Gym, and no to Planet Fitness (which of course I would have said no to anyway). There was only one choice.
I had to choose 24 Hour Fitness, the Gold’s Gym of the plebeian class. The one on Van Ness has a decently large weight room. But how different it is from the previous gym! Is it worth the price drop? Ignoring the costs/benefits specific to me (My previous gym — Live Fit Gym, by the way — is literally less than two hundred feet from my home), here are some comparisons to make:
The Environment
24 Hour Fitness:
- It smells bad.
- Obnoxious Katy Perry (and such) music blasting from speakers, with occasional propaganda about picking up your weights after yourself.
Live Fit Gym:
- It smells sterile, so long as no one passes gas.
- Sleep-inducing chillwave music.
The winner: 24 Hour Fitness, obviously.
You can’t pump iron in a place that smells like a dentist’s office. At Live Fit Gym the music is bad, but not painful bad, so it just puts you into a lethargy and deflates your pump. At 24 Hour Fitness, the music is so bad that you are compelled to push yourself past exhaustion just to induce enough pain to drown out the music. Not pleasant, but effective.
The Equipment
24 Hour Fitness:
- Lots of Hammer Strength (like) machines.
- Most machines are rusty and borderline broken. If you use one, it might be the last thing you ever do.
- Two squat racks, not counting the Smith machine.
- Lots of benches for bench press, incline press, and even one dedicated for sitting overhead press. If it’s 2AM, you might be able to nab one.
- Said benches are constantly missing necessary plates, but they are never out of the 45-pound plates, so if you’re alpha enough you won’t notice.
- Padded station with bumper plates for doing heavy deadlifts.
Live Fit Gym:
- The machines were designed by an idiot who knows nothing of ergonomics. I’m no physical therapist, but I’m guessing that if you use one, you’ll probably damage your shoulders and your whole left side will go numb for a day.
- Most of the floor is inefficiently covered with these machines, leaving little space for anything useful.
- For all the space taken up by these, there’s still only one of each.
- The only thing here that comes close to being a bench that has a barbell rack is actually just a glorified Smith machine. It can go forward and backward, up and down, or any combination of these, but it’s still on rails. And if there’s just one other person in the gym, you can bet it’s occupied.
- I don’t know if you will get kicked out for doing deadlifts here, but I’m pretty sure the floor is can’t bear it. But if you’ve been doing deadlifts for more than three months, you can already deadlift more weight than you can find in the whole gym.
The winner: 24 Hour Fitness, another no-brainer.
Your Fellow Gym Members
24 Hour Fitness:
- Lots of meatheads.
- People act like they were raised in a barn. Seriously, how hard is it to put your weights back?
- People like to wear belts even when doing preacher curls.
Live Fit Gym:
- Lots of sensitive yuppies.
- People act like they were raised in a barn. Seriously, how hard is it to put your weights back?
- People like to occupy a station for a half-hour at a time just sitting there scrolling through their cell phone rather than use the station or allow others to use it.
The winner: It depends:
- 24 Hour Fitness if you want to get jacked and you don’t care how uninteresting of a person that makes you.
- Live Fit Gym if you’re a sensitive yuppie and you want to stay that way. Just look at you, with your man-bun, and your chia seeds, and your pretentiously unorthodox workout methods… Go join a CrossFit you weirdo!
…so really, the winner is 24 Hour Fitness
Facilities
24 Hour Fitness:
- Are you kidding me? To review the showers there I’d actually have to use them! No way, pal.
- Toilet stalls outnumber urinals three to one. The gym knows its clientelle. Meathead’s gotta juice up on more than just pre-workout IYKWIM.
- I feel like I need a tetanus shot walking into the bathroom.
Live Fit Gym:
- No showers.
- Bathroom is about as clean as a typical Mom-and-Pop restaurant bathroom.
The winner: Live Fit Gym. Even the most alpha of gym bros are subject to pathogens.
Classes, Massages, and Other Amenities
What, you actually need these things? Go back to Martha’s Vineyard you mollycoddled milquetoast, and tell your butler it’s time to be weaned.
The winner: Doesn’t matter.
The Faculty
I admit I do not know this one, because I always use Live Fit Gym during unstaffed hours (not because I’m afraid of getting kicked out, honest), and the only staff I ever see at 24 Hour Fitness is the dude behind the counter when I check in. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say…
The winner: 24 Hour Fitness, because they at least are staffed 24 Hours. Not that I would know if they’ll actually be useful if needed.
So the results are clear: For half the price you don’t even have to motivate yourself, because the unpleasantness of it all does all your motivating for you.
Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.