LatASIA

Wow! - You won't be smiling when you find out just how bad your gym experience will be!I have been going to the gym this week.  Getting up at 6am and hitting the gym at 6:30am so that I can get some exercise before going to work. 

I have regretted joining the gym almost since the beginning of joining.  When I first joined the facilities were still new and in good condition.  However you could tell that the build job was quite poor and that the facility was not going to be able to stand up to much use.

True enough, here we are two years later and the gym is shoddy, badly laid out and quite dirty.  Clearly they are not making enough money from the place.  Either that or they are just trying to milk their asset for as much money as they can, before abandoning it and their customers.  Who know!

The gym space has been cut quite significantly in the last 18 months.  Partly due to them creating spafes for them to start their latest half-daft idea for squeezing more cash out of you. It really is an unpleasant company to do business with and I am surprised that people still join such a shoddy establishment. 

I have seen the True Gym at Central World and it seems like that company is in a league of its own within Bangkok.  But who knows?  Maybe they will let standards slide dramatically too.

The best thing about going to the gym at 6:30am is that you miss the vultures circling the place looking for their next feeding frenzy.  When I say vultures, you might know them better as 'Personal Trainers'.  That is what they masquerade as. 

In actual fact they are nothing more than Salesmen who have been given aggressive sales targets to meet and therefore have to be out them hassling and abusing members to try to get those sales.  They put infinitely more effort into giving you sob stories about having to meet sales targets and how the 'boss' might sack people this month.

These guys could put the bar girls and money boys to shame when it comes to the "My mum's really ill and needs an operation..." routine.  They think that they are clever, using the sick techniques they are taught by the smart-ass American who have brought their aggressive US style sales approach to the Thai market. 

All that happens is that they ruin the experience of going to the gym for their members.  But Wow! - get this - they do not really care about the customer experience.  It is all just sell, sell, sell.  The customers seem to be viewed as nothing more than poor saps to squeeze cash out of.

In Bangkok, there is a good chance that your personal trainer will know more about sales than he does about good exercise workouts and muscle definition.California Global Warming Joke:  The gym used to give you a towel for showering and also a hand towel to wipe down equipment after you had used it (which sweaty people like me have to do if we do not want to offend the next user).

As part of their effort to stop global warming, the gym no longer give you a hand towel to wipe down equipment.  Neither do they give you paper towels and disinfectant to clean their machines.  No, this classy gym that fools itself into thinking that they are one of the best around, expects you to bring one of your own towels to wipe down their equipment.

So the gym's contribution to global warming is to save their own money and make their members spend their own cash on detergent and laundry costs.  I did not realise that if we all just pass the costs on to someone else then that means that we are making a contribution towards saving the planet.

When my friends and I discussed it we found that we were all thinking the same thing.  That only a "luxury" company with a cash flow problem would try to cut costs like this and dress it up as some half-baked global warming initiatives.

My recommendation:  Think very very carefully before you choose your gym.  For me, there ain't no sunshine in California.