La Maya joined L.A. Fitness the other day, determined to get some exercise and lose some weight. Moi, besides the fact that sitting in front of the computer is turning me into a bowl of Jell-O, I need to lose about 20 pounds.
So I went over to one of their gyms and talked to a cute young sales dude. They do have a lot of stuff to do, including most notably yoga classes and Zumba. There’s a pool where you can do water exercise, and more exercise machines than you can shake a stick at.
All that gear and all those trainers don’t come cheap. Sales Dude offered two plans: one is $250 at the outset plus $20 a month for as long as you live, and the other is $100 and $30 a month. You lock in the monthly price, so if you stay with the club for, say, 20 years, you’ll allegedly still be paying $20 or $30 a month. I’ll believe that when I see it, but it’s a nice thought. For your dollars, you can go in any time you please, no appointment; you can use any facility you like; you can go to yoga class every day of the week if you so choose, and on and on.
If you use it faithfully, it really is a good deal. Yoga classes alone are $15 or $20 apiece around here; one outfit offers an auto-pay program that apparently will allow you to go as many times a week as you please, for $108 a month. So over time $20 or $30 a month would be incredibly cheap.
However, it’s not the cheapest game in town. I do get a tuition waiver, and so I could take PE classes at the community colleges for free. Advantage of the membership club, of course, is that one can pick one’s own hours, whereas signing up for a PE course means you have to show up at their convenience.
Assuming you would pay about $20/session elsewhere to purchase any of these activities on your own from an independent studio, here’s how costs compare:
If you use it faithfully: therein lies the rub.
First, we have my underlying laziness. Getting me off my duff is quite the little challenge. The current painful spate of plantar fascitis—I can barely limp to the fridge—works to complement the bone-laziness.
Second, I just purely hate gyms. At my grade school, we started “supervised play” (i.e., we couldn’t play as we wanted to, which was freaking fun, but instead had to do what our rather doctrinaire teacher made us do, which was boring and frustrating) just about the time the little monsters started to pick on me. So not only did the fun come to an end, four years of nightmare misery started…and I tend to associate the two, however unfair that may be.
Grade school was such a terrible time for me that to this day I have to force myself to go into a grade school classroom. The characteristic odor of little kids’ bodies makes my skin crawl. Subsequent years led me to feel a lot the same about gyms.
P.E. classes started in junior high and ran daily through high school. Oh, God! How I hated P.E. What a pointless waste of time, what boredom, and what misery. I already walked about three miles each way, back and forth to school every day. I did not need to be forced to run around a playground by some flicking moron who religiously believed that rigorous exercise would cure menstrual cramps so severe they would make me throw up, made to stand around a basketball court with other girls who were no more interested in the game than I was, or ordered to jump off a diving board that terrified me.
None of these memories incline me to hurry over to the gym several times a week.
On the other hand, four yoga classes a month would more than justify the monthly cost (though not the initial fee, at least not unless one stuck with it for a couple of years). The belly dancing and the Zumba sound like fun, and the aerobic classes could be good.
On the third hand… All those things are available for free at the Big Gym Class on the Internet, YouTube. (LOL! Aren’t these girls the prettiest things in action?) There’s no reason you can’t Zumba to a video, in the privacy of your home and at no extra cost.
The question is whether I really would go to these things, regularly and often enough to make it worth the money. Starting Monday I have to show up on campus at 7:30 a.m. My plan is to throw my hiking boots in the car and stop at a trailhead to North Mountain on the way home. That would provide about an hour to 90 minutes of hiking twice a week, free of charge. If I could add to that three more trips to the mountain, it would cause me to lose weight.
Not enough, of course: the last time I hiked five days a week, I lost about ten pounds over three months. But I was a lot younger then, and nowhere near as overweight. But it would be good to be back in shape. Hiking above the rim is a cheap way to entertain oneself—Arizona is full of spectacular places to sightsee on foot, once you get away from the ugly cities, for no more than the cost of gas to get there.
All of which brings one back to the same question: realistically, am I going to get off my duff and go hiking every day?
Well. No. Probably not.
It could be that if I’m paying for this stuff, I’ll feel motivated to go do it.
However, the cost is a little high for me—it will stretch an already too-thin budget. And I’m not earning any money while I’m jiggling around a gym. It’s a rare day when I have any free time, even when I’m not teaching. Really, yesterday afternoon was the first time in as long as I can remember when I didn’t have much to do…tho’ in fact, I did—I was playing hookey when I should have been editing another chapter from the current client’s book.
But I really need to get some exercise, and really need to lose the overweight, which some people think causes or aggravates GERD and which surely can’t be helping the sore foot.
Seems like an awful lot of money to pay for something I could do for free, though.
{sigh} I don’t know. Can’t decide.
Image: Brittany Carlson (USAG Stuttgart), U.S. Army. Public Domain.
Let me h elp you decide. You said, and I quote “I purely hate gyms.” If that’s true, then how would a gym membership work out in the future do you think? Probably not well. WHo will stick with something they hate? You don’t need a gym membership to clean out your wallet and get you in shape. All you need is you! My wife bought the Zumba DVDs, and while not cheap (we had to discuss if we should really buy them and if she’d really use them — we ended up getting them off ebay), they cover the cost of a gym after a month or two. We have netflix streaming where she gets other videos. She looks up at-home workouts on youtube (she’s always telling me about these vidoes on youtube called extremehomefatloss — she doesn’t go to their site where you have to pay, she just gets their videos off youtube [another long discussion we’ve had]). And you know what she does? Runs, walks, jumps rope… So if you’re unsure and especially if you HATE gyms, then don’t do a gym! There’s other ways. 🙂
For me, I do physical labor most days, so that keeps me in shape. So there’s yoru other option, become a blue collar worker! 🙂
@ TB: Now there’s a thought! Maybe I could earn a decent living, too.
If I weren’t old as the hills but I still had a ton of money, I’d love to go to one of those workshops at Thos. Moser, where you learn how to build an actual piece of fine furniture. Wouldn’t it be incredibly cool to be able to make a beautiful piece of wooden furniture? And wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to make your living with it?
I personally find that the ‘going because I paid for it’ only works for a short time. You’ll go for the first couple of months, but once that expense becomes ‘normalized’ you will have less motivation to go for that reason. If you hate gyms, I would probably not figure this is going to be a good investment for you. As you said, there are ways to do this stuff at home, plus you do have the pool where you could use what you already have to increase your exercise.
1. How far a drive is it? (If you said, sorry). More than 10 minutes, and I’d spend the 20 minutes inside my house walking really fast (that’s what I do when it’s hot).
2. These places are not doing well, so I would negotiate. the place downtown here was originally a hefty joining fee PLUS 80 bucks a month AND you had to pay in advance. At our most recent inquiry: The fee went down to zero and it’s 30 a month for each–AND we can pay by the month.
@ frugalscholar–
1. There’s a brand-new one right around the corner. I could walk there, if the main drags were safe.
2. Hmmm… That’s interesting to know. And it explains something: La Maya said she was charged $250 and fifty, not twenty, bucks a month. I just assumed she mis-spoke…but maybe my having asked it they had a senior citizen discount elicited the lower price.
3. It’s worth nothing that the Baptists have one of those vast megachurches just down the street from the Cult Headquarters, and inside that thing is a gigantic gym, complete with an aerial walking track. They offer the same services, cheaper. The problem there is, they fund lobbying for social legislation intended to strip women of their reproductive and personal rights, they oppose full civil rights for gays and lesbians, and they support some extremist political candidates…and so I’m not comfortable giving them money that will be used to work against me as a woman and against my friends who are gay or lesbian. Still…it’s there, if I just must get my exercise in a gym.
Try you fit. I don’t think there’s classes but they have weights and cardio machines. Should be 10/mo no contract. They replaced a gold’s gym near me and I just received a flyer. They have TV on each treadmill….which I need if I am going to run more than 10min on one! (I haven’t joined yet. I got this mailing like Tues).
Says Glendale, PHX, Chandler, W Beth., with Mesa, Tempe coming soon.
If I’m not being too nosy, how is your abdominal pain?
It’s not getting much better. Monday I need to call and make another doctor’s appointment, I guess.
LA fitness is always giving out cards for a free week around here. Might at least be worth picking one up to try it out.
Also, don’t take their prices at face value – they are totally negotiable and willing to give “discounts” that apply to your rate forever. They also run “family and friend” add-on specials with no initiation and $20/month to add another person to an account. At least that’s true for the LA fitness out here.
But if you’re not going to use it, it’s a complete waste no matter how much it costs. We actually pay for 2 gym memberships for me and it’s totally worth it. I use one at least 3x/week and the other at least 1x/week for yoga since it’s not on the beaten path between home and work (but does have an amazing yoga instructor). Over the past few years, the gym has turned into much more than just a place to work out in the AC – it’s a part of my social life, too. I’ve met friends through there, and when you get to know most of the regulars in a “group fitness” class and have an instructor who makes the time pass more like a happy hour than a tough weight lifting session, it’s fun.
Good luck figuring it out!
I would be FORCEFUL on the no initiation costs. Check out other places, make them work against each other. This way if you don’t find yourself going you just quit.
I am too cheap to want to spend money on exercising. I did start going to water arobics at the local college but then the teacher quit. However it gave me enough time to learn the moves and now I just take my noodle to the lapswim time and jog etc. up and down the pool on my noodle. I have an alumni card that allows me to use the pool for $15 a year…for the ID card. I commit to going to the pool once a week and have been able to do that for about 10 years now. I also walk around the block and bike around town to keep me moving. The thing that might make going to the gym worthwhile is to do some weight training. The more I read about the importance of it in old age the more I am tempted to spend money on it although I do have a couple of 3lb weights I wave around while I watch the news on TV if I remember.
@ stellamarina: How true. I’m fortunate to live in a region where the weather promotes outdoor exercise (FREEE!) almost year-round. We have so-called “mountain” parks in the middle of the city — they’re really more like craggy hills, but uphill is uphill, and so far the city hasn’t started charging people to use them. Even when it’s staggeringly hot in the summertime, most nights you can at least go for a walk in your neighborhood after dark or right before dawn.
The real problem, then, is overcoming one’s innate love of loafing…