I kept going to the messy gym even after I finished the vouchers. Since I was paying for every session, I decided to take a look at a different one. Yesterday, after roughly sleeping from 3 am to 9 am or so and feeling like shit, I made a trip to the Aquatics centre. I’m wondering how I managed to survive last year, whilst on the V-diet, sleeping for 2-3 hours and then training at 7:30 am. How was that possible?
In spite of my sleepy eyes and my inability to find the right entrance door, I managed to see the big signs advertising a £99 membership for gym+swim, 6 months, no “*only for students” fine print, no nothing. It seemed the best offer on the market so I signed up for an induction, just to check out the facilities.
Today I got to see the place. It all smells of chlorine because of the pool and it’s incredibly hot on the hallways and in the stretching area, the bathrooms near the gym don’t look great and the main fitness suite is, well, just like any other gym. I told my instructor, a nice young lady this time, that I’m mainly interested in weight training. At first, she showed me all the machines in the fitness room and made me test them all. For the first time in an induction I was actually asked to sit down, adjust the seat and do a few reps on each machine. I tried to fake interest, but the only thing that got me excited were the assisted pullups.
I showed her my programme for the day and she seemed quite impressed. She asked if I was training for something in particular and I had to say it’s only for the sake of training.
And then we entered the power room and I felt the sun shinning brighter. She showed me the plyometrics boxes. Yes, she used the word ‘plyometrics’ and I wanted to hug her. They’re not exactly boxes, they look like ugly coffee tables and aren’t very stable, but they’re good for now. The room isn’t very large, but it has 4 squat racks, 2 Smith machines (not very interesting, I know), a few benches, dumbbells and a stepper; no trap bar, but a decent number of olympic bars and even a 10 kg one were available. The room looked neat and all the weights and bars had their place. There were about 3 or 4 people already training in the gym, but it didn’t feel crowded at all.
Everything was within reach, I didn’t have to walk all across the building to set up my exercises. The atmosphere is relaxed and the people don’t look like ex- or future convicts. I started the induction at 10 am and finished all my exercises by 11:30. In the other gym it would take me nearly 2h to complete my session and probably half of this time would be spent searching for weights or walking back and forth from the power room to the stretching area, which was on a different floor.
I can’t wait to train again. I’m going to camp there for a while. 😀
TwoBlueberryMuffins 