Many people have no choice. If your neighborhood has only one club, that’s the club you probably need to join, even if the facilities aren’t top-notch. You’re more likely to use the mediocre fitness center around the corner than the firstrate gym that’s 45 minutes away. If you have a routine of basic exercises, you can get a good workout in just about any facility that calls itself a gym. Don’t be scared off by the name of a health club or the size of the people who work out there. Among the general public, Gold’s Gym franchises seem to have a reputation of catering only to serious bodybuilders. In reality, Gold’s clubs — like any other chain clubs — cater to people of all ages and ability levels. We know a 94-year-old woman who is an avid attendee at Gold’s Gym in Sacramento. Some gyms attract more serious lifters than others, but believe us, at virtually every gym in America, people like you attend. Besides, you can gather a lot of information from hanging around veteran lifters. If you’re lucky enough to have your choice of clubs, weigh your options carefully. You may want to tour each club to discover the variety of machines and mechanisms offered. You also want to notice if the staff is friendly and helpful. When you tour a club, bring the following checklist for consideration for your membership:
- Hours of operation: Some gyms are open 24 hours a day; others close at noon on weekends. Make sure that the hours of operation fit your schedule.
- The cancellation, freeze, and refund policies: Many gyms let you put your membership on hold for medical or maternity leave (freeze). Some clubs refund your remaining membership if you move more than 25 miles away. Most states have laws that allow you to cancel within three days of joining with a full refund.
- Qualifications of the staff: When you visit, ask what the club’s requirements are for staff certification. Nationally recognized certification organizations include the American College of Sports Medicine, the American Council on Exercise, and the National Strength and Conditioning Association, among others.
- Cleanliness: Make sure that there are no strange growths in the showers. Check the weight benches and equipment for sweat residue. Most gyms have squirt bottles with bleach cleaner and towels handy for cleaning equipment before and after you use it. Remember that you’re joining a gym to improve your health, not destroy it.
- Equipment quality: The quality of free weights doesn’t vary much, but it’s not a good sign if the plates on the dumbbells rattle around or you see lots of “Out of Order” signs scattered around. High-quality weight machine brands include Cybex, Nautilus, Galileo, Body Masters, Hammer Strength, and Icarian. Try out a few machines. Do they move smoothly? Is the weight stack rusted? These subtle signs relate to how well the management takes care of the gym.
- Friendliness of management: Does the staff at the front desk greet you with a smile, or are they standing in a clique gossiping about the members? If the staff isn’t accommodating before they’ve made a sale, think about how they’ll act after you sign on the dotted line.
- _ Cost: Cheaper isn’t always better. If the club’s machinery is always broken or the bathrooms are cleaned monthly instead of daily, you may pay more in doctor’s bills for injuries and infections than you do for your monthly membership.
- Extra conveniences: Some gyms have hair blow dryers in the locker rooms, Internet access on the cardiovascular equipment, membership competitions, and special guest instructors — little extras that keep you motivated over the long haul.
- Affiliation with other clubs: If you travel a lot, consider joining a club that is affiliated with gyms around the country. Large chains may not have the most qualified staff or offer the most personalized attention, but you can save money on guest passes.
You may feel overwhelmed when you walk in a health club, but don’t let feelings of anxiety stop you from signing up. Within a few sessions, your terror of the machines will seem unwarranted, and the club starts to seem as familiar as your own neighborhood. Here are a few reasons to become a health club member:
- Equipment choices: At a health club, you may have dozens of machines for each muscle group including newfangled contraptions that haven’t yet reached the consumer market or are too expensive or too large for home use.
- Advice: A gym that is invested in you has staff members walking around who can remind you how to do the perfect back extension or how to adjust the calf machine.
- Safety: Weight training isn’t inherently dangerous, but if you do happen to get stuck underneath a 100-pound barbell, at least you have people around to rescue you. You also have plenty of spotters to choose from.
- Motivation: After you’re inside a health club, you eliminate all your excuses not to exercise. Besides, the atmosphere of a club may make you want to work out. You see people of all shapes and sizes pumping and pushing and pulling, and you can’t help but be inspired to do the same.
- Cost: A typical yearly health club membership costs between $250 and $2,000, depending on where you live and what type of facilities the club offers. Home weight equipment may cost you less over a period of years, but unless you’re a Silicon Valley multimillionaire, you probably can’t afford to update your equipment as often as health clubs replace their contraptions. In order to stay competitive, many gyms turn over at least some of their equipment every year, if not more often.
- Relaxation: Ironically, a health club may be just the remedy for busy people who say that they don’t have time to go to one. At the gym, you’re free from stress and distractions. The phone doesn’t ring. Your kids don’t beg you to watch A Shark’s Tale for the 127th time. Your boss can’t assign you a last-minute report.
- Other facilities: Weight training is only one component of fitness. At a gym, you have treadmills, stationary bikes, stairclimbers, and other elliptical trainers. You may also find a sauna, steam room, swimming pool, vending machine, and even a snack bar (eat the healthy food, of course).
Even if you’re not interested in joining a health club, you may want to incorporate aspects of the gym experience into your home workouts. Adding the following health club features to your home gym boosts your motivation and sense of purpose.
- Sign-in sheet: When you go to the health club, you have to sign in at the front desk to prove you were there. If you’re the type of person who’s motivated by measuring your accomplishments, record your attendance at your home gym in a workout log or even create your own attendance sheet and tape it to the door or keep it on top of yourfile cabinet. Signing in at the beginning of your session reinforces your commitment to weight training.
- Mirror: The purpose of a mirror isn’t to develop anxiety over the shape of your body. You need a mirror to check your form, especially when you’re doing free weight and band exercises. Just make sure that you watch where you put your dumbbells and barbells. If you leave them on the floor, they may roll around and crack the mirror. The best way to avoid this problem is to invest in a dumbbell rack. Any mirror suffices as long as it’s big enough for you to see your entire body when you’re standing with your arms spread wide.
- Comfortable mat: A mat is useful for doing strength training exercises on the floor, such as abdominal crunches and side-lying leg lifts. And, of course, it’s useful for stretching and doing yoga or Pilates exercises. You can substitute a towel or blanket, but these substitutions tend to bunch up. Most exercise mats fold or roll up and can be placed in a corner or underneath your weight rack. A good mat costs $20 to $100. The differences between a cheap mat and a more expensive one are many:
- The thickness and quality of the padding
- The quality of the surface covering
- The antibacterial and antifungal materials
- The way the mat stores
- The mat should be long enough so it fits your body from the top of your head to your tailbone. The padding should be cushy enough so your knees don’t dig into the floor when you do the modified push-up and other exercises that require kneeling. Shirley recommends combining a towel over a mat for strength training exercises as the towel absorbs perspiration and extends the life of your mat.
- Rubber mat: A rubber mat, placed under the equipment, looks like the rubber mats on the floor of your car. They help cut down on noise and vibration to the floors below, and they help protect your floors and rugs from sweat and wear and tear. Mats are particularly good to put under equipment that leaks oil, such as multigyms and treadmills. Some mats are custom designed to fit under specific pieces of equipment.
- Proper attire: Health clubs require you to wear freshly laundered exercise clothing so the grime from your jeans, leather belts, and work shirts doesn’t soil the pads on the weight equipment. Follow the same rule at your home gym, too. You’ll prolong the life of your equipment. Plus, it’s a lot more motivating to work out when you’re wearing clean, comfortable clothes that allow your skin to breathe.
Obviously, it’s not practical to put an entire line of weight machines in your home, unless you’re willing to take out a second mortgage to pay for the weights and for the new wing of the house you’ll need to build. A more reasonable alternative is a multigym, which combines several weight lifting stations into one frame. Most multigyms have one or two weight stacks, meaning that one or two people can work out at a time. Good multigyms give your muscles a sufficient workout, although most models don’t feel as smooth or as solid as health club machines. A decent multigym costs between $300 and $1,000. Buy from equipment specialty stores, not from department stores and certainly not from TV infomercials. Visit several stores to compare prices. If you don’t live near a specialty store, call the manufacturers and ask for the dealer closest to you. Most top brands have a dealer in every nook and cranny in the country, as well as in many parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In some cases, buying directly from the manufacturer is cheaper. Good multigym brands include Parabody, Paramount, Universal, Vectra, Pacific, Hoist, and California Gym. Here are some tips for buying multigyms:
- Look for sturdy and thick padded seats filled with dense foam. Seats covered with durable material clean easily. The pad is the part of the equipment that has the most body contact, which includes your sweaty body. With a cleanable cover, you can wash away your workout sweat after each use.
- Look for machines that use plastic-coated cables as opposed to chains or giant rubber bands. Check all cables for imperfections and fraying.
- Try out every exercise station. Some may feel comfortable, while others make you feel like your arm is about to be ripped out of its socket. Look for a weight stack that moves smoothly up and down. Some machines that move smoothly at heavier weights become wobbly and sticky when you’re lifting only one or two plates.
- Make sure that the parts are easy to adjust. You don’t want to waste half your workout fiddling with the arm and seat adjustments to make the machine fit your body.
- Look for free assembly. Forget about those “easy-to-follow” directions. Trying to put some of these contraptions together yourself is like trying to build a space shuttle with a step-by-step manual.
weight machine
If you have a dedicated space for your home gym and want to buy a bench, your best bet is an adjustable incline bench — one that adjusts from a flat position all the way up to vertical. Make sure that the incline mechanism is secure and easy to manipulate. With some cheap brands, the pin that holds the backrest upright tends to slip out or, even worse, break off. The decline feature shouldn’t be a high priority because you won’t use it very often, if at all. Before you buy a bench, sit on it, lie on it, drag it around, adjust it, and inspect it. Look for a high-quality Naugahyde, leatherlike material used to cover all seat and back pads.
Figuring the cost
Good flat benches start at around $100 and run upward of $500 for extra-thick padding and high-quality hardware. Adjustable incline and decline benches range from $200 to $600. Good bench brands include Hoist, York, Icarian, Paramount, and Tuff Stuff — the brands you’re likely to encounter at the gym —along with Galileo, Cybex, and Body Masters.
Storing your equipment
Storing your bench is nearly impossible. Benches that fold up and go under your bed or fit neatly in a closet don’t exist. For this reason, you should have a dedicated space for your home gym that’s roomy enough for a bench (and all of your equipment). If you can only fit in the weights, skip the bench.
Unless you’re related to the Sultan of Brunei, you’ll probably find it too expensive and too space consuming to buy a whole array of fixed-weight barbells, as recommended with dumbbells. It’s more practical to buy an empty bar and clip on the weights yourself. You can buy bars that weigh 15 to 45 pounds, although the most popular bars are the heavier bars used in health clubs.
Figuring the cost
Barbells cost about the same per pound as dumbbells, but if you’re lucky, you may find them as low as a nickel a pound. Most stores sell variety packs, often called Olympic packs, which come with a whole assortment of plates weighing a total of 200 to 300 pounds.
We also recommend buying collars to keep the weight plates from sliding off the bar. MCR makes the sturdiest and most user-friendly collars. You slip the collars on the bar and twist a small lever, locking them in place. They cost $20 a pair.
Storing your equipment
As with dumbbells, we recommend buying a barbell rack. Vertical racks ($100 to $200) take up less space and cost less than horizontal racks ($300 to $700). However, it’s more awkward to place a bar on a vertical rack. Store your plates on a weight tree — a contraption that has several rungs. Weight trees come in an astonishing variety of shapes and sizes and typically cost $75 to $200.
Buy a rack to store your dumbbells. Racks save space, and they keep your house looking tidy so your mother won’t have to step over your weights if she stops by unannounced. Also, a rack can save you from injury because you don’t have to constantly bend over and lift the dumbbells off the floor. Don’t be surprised if a rack costs more than the dumbbells you’re storing. A $200 to $300 rack is adequate, but you can shell out up to $800 for a three-tiered, chrome rack.
