rant · moment 1 of 22

Touring Gyms With His Roommate Alan

from Prove It, You Dumb Fuck! · #91

Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.

8 min

Tim describes touring gyms with roommate Alan looking for a place with a pool, riffing on gym business models built around members who never show up, Planet Fitness culture, pizza nights, grunt alarms, juice-head gyms like Synergy, and the elite New York Athletic Club versus commercial chains.

In this bit15 moments
  • 0:35Tim toured gyms today with his roommate Alan, noting that fat guys being demanding about gym tours is hilarious.
  • 1:22Tim and Alan want a gym with a pool so they can get a discount by joining together and meet people.
  • 1:43One gym's pool has only three lanes with two elderly people dying in them, and they restrict pool time to exactly one hour.
  • 2:08The gym posted a rule on the wall: go over an hour in the pool and they revoke your membership.
  • 2:29Gyms are designed to sign up as many people as possible but actually want no-shows because the place would be unusable if everyone showed up.
  • 3:01Pools are a finite resource that people might actually use, so gyms enforce strict time limits to prevent that.
  • 4:05Tim tried to cancel his gym membership but discovered they only allow cancellations within 14 days before the next billing cycle.
  • 4:47The image of a fat guy walking around Queens gyms demanding an Olympic-sized pool when they're just converted cell phone stores is absurd.
  • 6:10Tim was paying 50 dollars a month at LA Fitness but it closes at peak hours—7 p.m. on weekends—because actual gym-goers don't use it then.
  • 6:57These gyms aren't made for people like Tim and Alan who will never actually go; they're demanding hours as an excuse for not working out.
  • 7:24Planet Fitness charges ten dollars a month and hosts pizza night, creating an environment where no one actually works out.
  • 7:45Planet Fitness has a lunk alarm that shames people for grunting too loud instead of pushing themselves.
  • 8:19Tim says Planet Fitness's logo should be 'Workout Stay Fat' because it's designed to make fat people comfortable around other fat people.
  • 8:35The real problem is that fat people won't go to gyms where healthy people work out because they feel threatened by non-fat people.
  • 8:45Having an identity where you can't be around healthy people because you feel insecure is a bad fucking way to exist as a human.
Mentioned here

Planet FitnessAsphalt GreenLA FitnessAlan

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