Is your gym a gym or is it a "fitness club"
Bally Total Fitness
What's the heaviest dumbells they have?
The one closest to my job....100s; the one closest to my house....105s (the rubber-coated Ivanko ones).
Do they have a T-Bar row apparatus?
Yes!! The lying one, with the really LONG arm between the handles and the place where you load the plates.
Do they have punching bags?
Yep....in the aerobic room.
Is there a pool? Sauna? Hot tub? Cold tub/ice maker?
The one near my job......Yes; the one near my house.......NO.
Powerlifting platforms? (the kind you can drop a loaded bar on from 6 feet)
Again, The one near my job......Yes; the one near my house.......NO.
Squat racks? (sounds silly to ask, but there are gyms that do not have them because untrained people will hurt themselves and are better off on a hack squat machine)
If you're referring to the powerlifting cages, the one near my job has ONE; the one near my house has TWO.
At my gym the dumbells only go to 110. We have 1 squat rack, and only 1 smith machine, 1 cable crossover. One preacher curl bench.
Thankfully I get to workout at noon so I usually don't have to wait for equipment. And this is a Bally's gym. The old gym had so much more before they closed it down to build the new "state of the art" gym, but they lost so many amenities the old gym had. We used to have steam room, and dry sauna, indoor track, indoor basketball court and raquetball, 4 squat racks, tbar row..... now its a fitness club. You used to get to work out to ac-dc and van halen...now its top 40 crap.
What happened to the old school workout dungeons?
Recently I went to a local high school where my workout partner works. They have a pool so we went over there for a swim. I asked him about the weight room so he brought me to the gym. Their weight room sucked. It had old cybex machines, one benchpress, and a couple pilates machines. There was dumbells up to 60 pounds. What the hell is anyone going to do in there? Then he says this is just the students weight room. Then he brings me to the athletic department weight room. Apparently this is only for the kids in competitive sports.....and it was like something out of pumping iron. They had the powerlifting platforms with the big colored rubbery weights. They had medicine balls going up to like 80 pounds. They had a row of hooks with the athlete's weight belts hanging up....and a board on the wall with the school records for bench, deadlift, squat, cleans, etc....
They had weight sleds with harnesses...dumbells going up to 150 lbs...old school VERTICAL leg press machine, and a modified hack squat that was almost upside down for guys to do lineman drills off of...like a face down hack squat. Weighted jumpropes. Punching bags....and enough benches and freeweights for a whole team to workout at once.
All this stuff my tax dollars pay for for these kids, no wonder the high school bench record was 340. Meanwhile Bally's makes all this money and can't be bothered to even pick up a t- bar row. WTF?
As I said, the Bally clubs where I train have T-Bar rows. No blaring heavy metal music plays over the PA system, not that it matters to me. Plus, the weight room is right next to the aerobic room, where the high-tempo music drowns out the sounds from the PA system, anyway).
