With a day packed with meetings and a dinner reservation in another neighborhood, I wasn’t going to have time to go across town to quit gym number two, Planet Fitness ($10/month), which I joined after starting a copywriting job nearby. Once I decided to end the contract, my morning plan of heading to the actual location in person was immediately shot to shit after I took too long to leave the house. This was three years ago, when I felt I had the world at my fingertips. I originally joined before my wedding to buff up and lose the beer gut I’ve cultivated roughly since birth. The first was Crunch ($9.95/month), about a 10-minute walk from my old apartment, a half hour from my new one, and far too long a ride from my current job to justify my membership. How I Went About Quitting 3 Gyms in 1 Day In the spirit of taking control of my bank account and limit the pull of my gym guilt all in one fell swoop, I decided to embark on an odyssey to quit (that is, cancel my membership to) all three in one day. I’d walked past all of them during off-hours, but could never muster the energy to go actually go in and do it. I wondered why it took me so long to quit even one of the gyms.
So, it’s important to read the entire contract before signing.” “If you sign your name to a contract, you are likely going to be bound by all terms contained in the contract. “Far and away, the most important thing to remember as a gym-goer is that courts strongly prefer the concept of ‘freedom of contract,’” Katz, the lawyer, told me. If you want to push the matter further to break your contract without a fee, you'll probably not find much help. Most gyms force people to send a certified/notarized letter or to appear in person, often while paying a cancelation fee. Many make it notoriously difficult to end memberships, overcomplicating the supposedly simple service and making the contracts air-tight to ensure they live up to the phrase 'health is wealth'. “Attorneys typically have seen every loophole or angle that a customer can use to wiggle out of a contract, so the drafting attorney has tried to seal up every potential loophole.” “Simply put, the contracts are so complicated because they are drafted by attorneys,” says attorney Steven M. "It’s important to read the entire contract before signing."Īnd the gyms have one thing that you (probably) don't: legal know-how.
At a certain point, that needed to change. Fueled by changing jobs, moving apartments, and general laziness, I allowed myself to stay indebted to Crunch, Planet Fitness, and Blink locations in far-apart neighborhoods. What made me really wasteful was that I kept thinking that a change of scenery would be the spark that lit my fitness fire. Put the two together, and I had a comfortable little cycle going, always optimistic that I'd take the plunge and really commit-but that type of thinking, at least for me, wound up getting me into trouble.
For five consecutive years, I was also among the people who used their gym memberships less than once a month. For the past decade, I've been one of the nearly half of Americans making fitness-related resolutions. My problem began in a fairly typical way: I resolutioned myself. At least, none of the three gyms that I once held memberships for (at the same time!) during one ridiculous period. During this time of isolation, I've taken a moment to reflect upon these places and think, 'Do I really miss this place?' For me, the gym was one luxury that I ended up not needing after all. Bars, theaters, barbershops, and-most painfully for our physical well-being-gyms.
As we continue our quarantine, let us remember the luxuries of the past that we can no longer indulge.
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