You Guys Like... Stuff?

Like most people on the planet, I know I should be working out a lot more than I do. For a while there I had been really good about hopping on the exercise bike every single day. What had started out as a Lent Challenge had been going on for the better part of a year. The problem is that riding an exercise bike can get really boring because even if you drag the bike over in front of the television, the scenery still doesn't change all that much. I tried adding addition exercises to my routine to try and keep things fresh but the simple fact of it was I had done the one thing you should never do when it comes to working out - I had fallen into a set pattern. Not only does it get boring but your body eventually adjusts and the workouts stop doing anything. The much smarter move is to keep changing things up and keeping your body guessing as to what it coming next but there is only so much you can do when all you have to work with is an exercise bike and an ab ball. Without seeing any results I started losing my interest and skipped a day. Unfortunately one day became two, two became three and so on. So I knew I had to get back into it but just needed something to properly motivate me, which showed up in the form of a new gym opening up in my neighborhood. I didn't enjoy my last gym membership experience but thought perhaps access to many forms of exercise equipment would do the trick, so this afternoon I decided to at least go down and take a tour of the place before its Grand Opening on Monday.

I haven't been a member at a gym for a couple of years but it doesn't appear there have been many advances in gym equipment technology in the last few years. Sure, there are some new fancy step-machines which move your body in ways nature probably never intended but the fact remains that if you've seen one gym you've seen them all. The biggest difference between gyms is really the staff and since this particular place isn't open yet the staff isn't around. This made the idea of a gym 'tour', which is already unnecessary, increasingly strange. As we were walking around this afternoon the guy took us into the weight room, then the room with all the elliptical equipment before eventually showing us the locker rooms and racquetball courts. They all appeared to be full of shiny and nice new equipment but at the same time they didn't contain anything which I wouldn't see in any other gym in America. Hell, if you own a TV you've probably seen a commercial for half this stuff at some point or another so you know what it does and how it works. At one point the guy was explaining how the sauna works and it took every ounce of willpower I had to not inform him that his sauna worked the same as every other sauna in the history of man. Even though I had never been in this building before in my life I am fairly certain that I could have given the tour and not missed any of the high points.

The larger issue here was that there is ample room for questions to be answered but in this situation I couldn't come up with any questions which were really worth asking, which created a lot of awkward silences that are not ideal in any sales situation. I'm not saying I wanted the guy giving us the tour to be talking non-stop but at least make some small talk as we walked from room to room. Instead it was all on us to keep the conversation going and even though my mind was racing I came up empty. In any other tour situations you can come up with at least a few stock questions to fall back on but those escaped me here. For example if you were looking at a car, "How's the gas mileage?" or "Can I get it without the third row?" are perfectly rational things you would want the answer to. If you were interesting in buying a house "Sewer or septic?" and "Is this gas or electric heat" are essential questions you need to get an answer for. But in this scenario I had no idea what was I supposed to ask because I have been in a gym before and already know the answers. "Are your weights heavy?" would have made me sound like a moron. Seriously, just tell me how much it costs a month and if the optional classes are included in that price (the only two things which will separate one gym from another) and then leave me to wander the place on my own. I'm sure there are dozens of cameras in the place so the front desk can keep an eye on me and it is not like I'm going to try and shoplift a bench press under my shirt so I really didn't need the tour guide to be glued to my hip.

There was only one benefit of the awkward silences and that is the guy showing us around didn't decide to fill them by continually trying to get me to purchase an upgraded membership which I would never use. I just need a place to lift weights and get on a treadmill a couple times a week and they seemed to get that. On top of that the fact that the gym is close about a 5 minute ride from my house also cuts down on the number of excuses I can use as to why I didn't go on that particular day. (Seriously, that is the same amount of time I would spend dragging the exercise bike out and refilling the leaky ab ball.) Ultimately the biggest thing that this gym had going for it was that it was not my old gym, which is why I ended up leaving with a new membership and we will see what happens. If it stinks I can cancel without breaking any kind of contract, but I'm hoping that the chance to play with different equipment is enough to motivate me to go to the gym frequently until the visits feel like something I should just be doing. They say it takes about six weeks for something to become a habit which seems like a reasonable amount of time to maintain a gym membership. Of course, that isn't going to happen if I show up, head to the bench press and find out that even though the weights are labeled as 45 lbs they actually only weigh 20 lbs. If that happens won't I feel stupid for not asking about how heavy the weight are?