I have been working out with Steve’s for the last 3 yrs. Been on and off with them cause the company that I was with earlier had their own world-class gym. I have worked out at about 4 different gyms till date and have experienced the good and the bad. And I came to mouthshut in search of a good gym to replace my horrible gym (read Steve’s).
My review is about the Airport rd gym. I’m not sure how they run their other centers. Their website claims that the Airport road branch is the largest. Hmm, in terms of carpet area, maybe. But in terms of available facility - NOT!
Here are my peeves with Steve:
1) Will you give the religion a little rest? They have always had a propensity to bring in religion into most aspects of their day-to-day conduct at the gym. Even their website claims to have "spiritual nexus". I’ll not go over what that might mean but here’s the problem with that.
The music that plays in the gym (and oh so loudly) is religious music!! And it is mostly some man (who can’t sing for nuts) crying about his woe-begone soul and how he is going to be rescued!! Sheesh! If I had put up with this all along, I lost it one day when I walked into the gym to be shocked by the wailings of two young kids begging for forgiveness from the almighty and that they would stay away from all sin etc. This kept on for about 15 mins after I entered the premises and what really gets me thinking is what kind of ppl make children go through such shit?
2) If this is a gym where are the quipments? They have 4 treadmills, (no 5, no 3, no 4, no... actually two are just for show and one does not work...)See what i’m saying. And that’s pretty much the case with most of the equipments in the "gym". The dumbells and weights are ill maintained and have fallen on me on two occasions and both times when I was precariously positioned to be injury prone. They brought a few equipments from another gym that had got dismantled and set it up here much to the delight of the members as they now could workout on some real equipments than what was on show (the reaction was akin to beggar’s thrown into a feast). Within a month all the equipment was gone. This seems to happen at such a fairly regular frequency that one begins to suspect a scam.
3) If this is a gym why am I breathing cigarette smoke? The "gym" is in the second floor. The first floor of the buidling is used to run a gambling place (i don’t know if "ring" is an appropriate word cause that would be an insult to sports like boxing). The gamblers stand outside and smoke in the stairway. If you think the smoke permeating into the "gym" is a nuisance, ask the ladies who got harrased and teased trying to enter the "gym". I have been told that one of the ladies had to go out and fetch a policeman, who happened to be outside, to have him clear the bunch of hooligans that were blocking her path and not letting her get to the gym. (One of the many reasons I hate smokers - it’s sadistic in its very nature of indulgence).
4) If this is a gym, where are the trainers? I remember there used to be a pro bodybuilder who trained folks in the morning hours but he quit. What we have now is a bunch of riff-raffs who know diddly-squat about fitness (and that pun is the only thing good I can say about the place).
Summary: This is a proselytization camp and the gym’s just a fascade. For the money’s worth, search other gyms close by. You can save your life and limb (from bad equipment), your dignity (from harassing gamblers) and your peace of mind (religion is an ailment of the brain; when it gets cancerous it can become epedemic).