What you Never Knew about your Fitness Club

There's a hilarious bit in the hit sitcom Friends where Chandler, one of the characters, decides that he is going to quit his job because he's fed up of having $50 going out of this account every month when he just doesn't use his membership. Of course, quitting fitness club isn't easy, as he finds out.

It's the dirty little secret of the fitness club industry. If they didn't have lots of members that they actually didn't expect to never show up, they wouldn't be profitable. Only one out of two new members who join for a New Year's resolution in January actually stay on till April, for instance. The gyms depend on them. When a gym member gets fed up of paying his dues for no reason and actually tries to quit, they make it as difficult as possible (or, as happened with Chandler in the sitcom, they send a fitness goddess into to the gym quitter processing).

Not only  do gyms make a lot of money on members who don't come, they make a lot on extra-spending as well - personal training, the health food and juice bars and so on.

While they may call a fitness club a health club, you have to realize that these are not the healthiest places around. The main reason for this is that it's a place where people come in with very few clothes on, and they let their sweat contaminate just about any surface. What's worse, the towels they give you at the gym are usually not washed properly.

In other words, gyms happen to be hotbeds of infectious diseases. If you're planning to use one, you'd better go there really with full sleeved clothes to wear at all times, your own towels to use their, a disinfectant spray bottle to spray surfaces clean before you get into contact with them, and so on.

Your fitness club isn't really healthy if how they place stress inducing machines in the hands of out-of-shape people, and still refuse to do something about the possibility that people have heart attacks. It doesn't require that much of a stretch of the imagination.

You put out-of-shape people in charge of heavy-duty exercise equipment, and they could overexert themselves. If fitness clubs and personnel who knew CPR road had defibrillators on and, it would be a lot of sense. Every minute that treatment is delayed after a heart attack , your chances of survival top 10%.

A big reason why people are willing to join a fitness club is that they feel that they can really benefit from having  experienced trainers going to them. Well, it may be quite a surprise to you to hear this, but even if they have great physiques, they aren't usually able to tell you how you need to exercise yourself. The thing is, trainers don't need to come in with qualifications or credentials

So if you're looking for a trainer who’s actually trained himself and earned a few qualifications, look for someone who's been approved of by the American Council On Exercise, The National Strength And Conditioning Association And The American College Of Sports Medicine as well.