LA Fitness — Attraction in Norwood Park Township

Disgusting.

This gym has gone further and further from anything I would consider as a gym much-less a place to call home.

The staff, has done without a doubt their best and corporate has left them to take the complaints of the members with no resolutions. We’ll start from the top.

Dirty. The gym is just dirty. From the entrance to the locker room, you can smell the mildew in the carpet. The men’s locker room sink area looks like one of those rooms you pay to take your anger out with a baseball bat. The sauna door has been broke for months with all the heat escaping through the broken portions, members wet paper towels and stuff it like a paper art project to keep the heat in.

Showers? Make sure you have proper foot attire at all times.

The upstairs is where 95% of the gym is located. I haven’t seen a tour given upstairs since Luke left as GM and it’s apparent as to why. I would lose every sale if I showed people this catastrophe.

Ever. Single. Bench. Is. Broke. Not one is bolted to the ground. The support arms cave in once you lift the bar off the rack that might as well end in a rotator cuff injury.

Not one barbell is straight or has clips to follow.

There hasn’t been a D grip for the cable in probably 5 months. If and when you were able to find one, good luck finding a clip to attach to the cable. To the same cable that the wire is so frayed, it cuts your hand open trying to attach it in the first place.

If you’re able to find a rope, make sure to take a picture because it won’t be seen again for some time. The beige ones that are found are so beyond broken down and worn out, you might as well attach a cucumber to the cable.

Then you have the weight area. 5lbs-45lbs, you better call Carmen San Diego or Dora the Explorer to find the set because they’re scattered across the entire gym, upstairs and down.

Then you go from 55-125. The support brackets that hold them on the actual stand have been broke for well over a year. Just a matter of time before someone smashes their hand or the entire frame breaks hurting someone.

The plates for the weight bars, well if my dog needed a chew toy that’s where I’d find one. Every plate is from 5-45 is cracked, chipped, or in some broke.

The tanning beds, if they’re working, make sure you don’t melt your face because the lightbulbs burned through the acrylic to where there is physical holes. If they’re functioning at all, or clean, then there’s one left to use.

But be assured, pay $45 a month or $499 for two years and be locked into the dump of the north.

The front desk staff and maintenance staff have worked diligently to clean, maintain and fix what can be with what they got. That’s who should get 5 stars. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig with trying to make it beautiful. They’re trying their best.

Corporate is the problem. They have had work orders for months which won’t be filled.

They have had orders for new equipment which haven’t been filled.

Norridge is the one of if not the busiest Chicagoland XSport, also marked as a premier location. The only thing that is premier about this location is watching people fight in the parking lot over a spot, which is ...

I cannot in good faith recommend this gym to anyone unless they are willing to pay more for less. I had been attending this particular location for a few years now and met really hard working men and women. I was always meeting someone new and learning about new techniques from old and young. What made this location appealing was the high ceiling, variety of equipment and the wealth of knowledge that serious gym goers offered.

As good as the positive elements were for this location, a few key negatives that have been unaddressed have taken a toll on this location. First and foremost is maintenance and broken equipment. I cannot begin to tell you how many times equipment has been broken and left for weeks on end with no improvements made. Cables snapped, handles split, benches falling apart, machines not operating and ellipticals grinding. To make matters worse, some creative clients would try to improvise a fix that would only make the equipment more dangerous and leave it open to an unsuspecting person who didn’t know, prone to injury.

The second is clientele. Like any good business, it requires a steady stream of new clients. It also helps to have clients that care and are invested in maintaining the facilities that we all use. It’s become habit for people to leave trash and equipment strewn across the facilities. A common habit was leaning barbell plates against a machine or in a walkway. A few times, the weights gave out and hurt someone who wasn’t paying attention. One could spend minutes traversing the gym looking for a dumbbell before they found it elsewhere. It was also common to find the locker room and bathrooms with trash and all kinds of human biological matter in just about every of the places.

Last and foremost is actually the staff and corporate policies. Before I left, a manager expressed that it was not their job to maintain to maintain the facilities and given that it was public gym, the behavior explained above was expected and tolerated. Added to that, the locker rooms have been broken into a number of times with no report filed and nothing done to address the issue at hand. I simply did not understand why I was paying a monthly fee and yearly fee to tolerate the above premises. I wish I had paid attention when good staff members that gave a damn would leave within a month or two of being at this location.

Since then, I’ve only heard that the conditions have gotten worse and young clients have began trashing equipment and fronting off other clients with expletives. One elderly client was forced to leave after he bravely confronted this behavior. The parents complained and corporate took an action that only rewarded the behavior that this gym is currently promoting. More equipment has gone missing or broken and conditions have not improved.

This location will require: proper funding, a staff that cares enough to do their job and a willingness to uphold gym policies that are fair to everyone. Until these changes are made, this location is going to continue hemorrhaging good clients that will take their time, money and...

When COVID closed out all the gyms back in March, I called around and cancelled all my accounts and memberships that I knew I would be unable to access or use (Xport being one of them). While everyone else had at least their customer service staff available through phone or email, Xport found it convenient for them to make their cancellation procedure a painful process. They had no phone or email access to their customer service line. The only way their automated phoneline advice members to cancel their memberships, where through snail mail (I didn’t find any other way to get a hold of anyone). Reluctantly I sent a letter out as I was given no other options (find it hard to believe that not one employee was able to respond to emails from the safety of their own home). Nearly 5 months passed by and I didn't receive a respond from Xport through mail, phone, or email. Yet I did see that there were no recurring charges throughout that time span, so I assumed that they had simply received my cancellation letter, cancelled my account, and for some reason just decided it was unnecessary to respond that they had received my cancellation request. Fast forward to August 15th, I saw that they started billing my account once again, for $49. I contested the transaction as unauthorized through my credit card company (American Express) and explained to them that I had mailed in a cancellation letter to them. I noticed today my credit card balance was off by $49 dollars and saw that despite the fact that AMEX had reimbursed me for the unauthorized transaction, Xport had responded to my contest and decided to rebill my account. They claimed they never received a letter from me. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of the letter I had mailed out. They also decided that in response to me contesting the first transaction back in August, they had cancelled my account. Yet up to this day I’ve never received a cancellation letter, call, or email from Xport.

I find it vicious of them to try to bill their members when they try to cancel with them during a pandemic, right when people are being laid off and furloughed across the board. They didn’t have any customer service representatives available to cancel through the phone, they had no customer service email to reach out to in their website either. I find it ridiculous that they pride themselves in having the newest state-of-the-art gear at their facilities, but don’t have a phone or email to get a hold of and those things have been around for decades, only snail mail. It’s even more vicious of them to contest $49 and send a notice of the account cancellation to the members’ credit card company, but not to...