For an entire decade I was shielded from the pain and frustration of trying to join a gym or health club by virtue of working in one. In 1995, at university, I took an uncharacteristic break from my (then) main hobby of smoking Marlboro Lights, took up exercise, did an accredited "exercise to music" course and taught classes at a variety of London clubs. Not only was this relatively lucrative, but I was given free access to all amenities. I spent 10 years floating about in infinity pools that, from a socioeconomic point of view, I had no business being in. I also enjoyed unfettered access to as many fluffy towels as my priority locker would allow.
Relinquishing the classes was the easy bit - it is surprising how quickly you can acclimatise to being a couch potato - but surrendering the health club access was hell, a wrench on a par with stepping down as president, giving back Air Force One and joining the queue for the Easyjet check-in. In vain I tried to find a third way, one that would allow me access to clean facilities and a variety of classes without tying me in to a prohibitively expensive health-club agreement. Initially I was lucky, finding a good council-run facility in north London that still offered a pay-as-you-go system for individual classes. But then it was bought by a private club and swiftly flew out of my price range.
I even experimented with transferring my workout outdoors and doing something useful, joining the British Trust for Conservation's green gyms programme (http://www2.btcv.org.uk/). After all, I figured, your muscles don't know the difference between being in a state- of-the-art fitness studio and doing useful community-spirited work that also burns calories, such as clearing brambles in a park. Only my muscles do seem to know. My fitness regime needs a fitness studio facility, someone shouting at me through a microphone, loud music and the promise of a hot shower afterwards as an incentive.
Not much to ask, you may think. Only it is. I recently moved to Brighton and, fretting over my body mass index and with obesity statistics ringing in my ears, I jogged round to my new council-run facility only to find that it offered zero classes. Would-be aerobicisers are referred to another facility a 15-minute drive away (I don't have a car). I decided to go private.
More than seven million of us are either gym members or registered users according to the recently published report, The State of the UK Fitness Industry, commissioned by the Fitness Industry Association (motto: more people, more active, more often!). The report shows that public sports centres with fitness facilities (2,596) are now outnumbered by private facilities (2,890), but it is definitely the latter sector that displays all the signs of robust health. The private market is dominated by the big names: Fitness First, 162 clubs; Whitbread (owners of David Lloyd Leisure), 111; Hilton Group plc, 82; and LA Fitness, 66. But this changes daily, as the big guys consume the little operators and then each other. This week, for example, Holmes Place has been bought by Richard Branson's Virgin Group, creating a new super-operator.
In fact, if you can escape the clutches of the big operators and opt for an independent private gym, you are likely to get better value for money: the average monthly membership at a single-site operator is £36.33 compared to £46.98 at multi-site operator clubs.
Back in Brighton my options were limited to the big operators that had moved into the area. Neither LA Fitness nor Fitness First Women was able to give me a tariff of membership fees, insisting that I need to be booked in with a "membership needs assessor". This is now common practice among health chains, which seem to feel no compulsion to give any indication of prices up front.
According to both chains, the meeting with a "needs assessor" was for my benefit, to assess my fitness goals and what I wanted to achieve. However, neither assessor I met had any specific fitness training. If I were of a cynical disposition, I would say this is like walking into a shop with no price tickets, the shopkeeper working out how much of a gormless sucker you are and then setting a price just for you.
On both occasions, it was impressed upon me that time and fitness waits for no man or woman. Both were offering "no joining fee" windows that would coincidentally end the following day. In fact, when I came back a few days later, they were miraculously still enjoying this magnanimous offer.
Despite my fear and misgivings over a lack of transparency in this process, I plumped for LA Fitness, seduced by the many toned and fit people enjoying the facilities and looking as if they were waiting for a call from their agents to secure them an appearance in an MTV video. But while the atmosphere was electrifying, the small print was not and the deal with my membership needs assessor came crashing down around the floor when I spotted the "£55 administration charge", which rather took the shine off the limited offer of no joining fee.
Apparently this included a rucksack and water bottle. "But I have my own," I pleaded. Conspiratorially, my membership needs assessor leaned towards me and said she would knock the admin charge down to £25 if I were to forgo the rucksack package and did not breathe a word to head office. I declined and did discuss the matter with head office. "I don't know where they got the £55 figure from," said Rob from marketing at head office. "It shouldn't be any more than £25."
All irritating, but perfectly legal (and no great surprise considering these people are working on commission). In fact the only time the fitness industry seems to have attracted the attention of regulatory authorities was in 2004 when the Office of Fair Trading launched Are They Fit to Join?, a guide to health-club membership terms prompted by a spate of complaints by consumers tied into dodgy contracts that turned out to be 12-month credit agreements.
Since then, most fitness chains have tightened up such agreements, or at least cover themselves by being more transparent about the terms of the contract. However, it remains all too easy to carry on paying for membership after you have ceased to use the club's facilities. Some 40% of consumers do this, many not realising that the onus is on them to inform the club in writing that they need to stop paying.
I can still raise my heart rate significantly by recalling the £300 I paid to a Cannons Club last year after my email cancelling my membership (I had moved away from the area) apparently failed to reach it. There was nothing the club could do to refund me retrospectively, despite my pleading emails, because the onus was on me to inform it that I was cancelling my membership and on me to make sure that it received my email. Fair enough. Only it does not seem particularly fair at all, perhaps indicating why, although 81% of consumers drop out of private gyms and fitness clubs after six months, they continue to pay an average of four months fees long after they have done their last hamstring curl on the premises.
Then there are the more extreme tales as told by the Citizens Advice Bureaux, such as the woman who joined a Merseyside gym only to find that she must pay £11 a month to use the changing rooms, or the man who found himself owing £576 for a gym he had not yet visited. Not the greatest tales of human suffering, granted, but bound to cause consternation among those of us who, after all, are just trying to shed a few pounds and tighten our triceps.
The fitness message is, in fact, ludicrously simple: the best way to stave off obesity and heart disease is by working out three times a week, strenuously enough to reach my target heart rate. It is advice I am pathetically keen to follow, if only I could find a venue that will tell me how much it costs to join and sell me a clear and transparent membership rather than a very expensive rucksack and water bottle.
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