LA Fitness — Attraction in Portland

*UPDATE:

I felt like my 3/5 star review with feedback was fair. After posting my review, Tyler the sales rep who was extremely aggressive and interrogative about signing up for the training session, called me personally yesterday to accuse me of lying on him to the district manager and was extremely interrogative and argumentative. Who does this? Seriously. Who calls a cancelled member's cell phone off of their personal phone number to argue about their feelings on an honest review? That is not normal.

And let me make this clear. LA fitness has one more time to reach out to me unsolicited again before I take legal action. Bank on that. I don’t care if I have to lawyer it up or go to headquarters. Calling my phone number, which should have no longer been active, unsolicited after cancelling my membership to argue and attempt to what? berate, intimidate me? It’s illegal and harassment. You can NOT do that.

No means no. Be respectful of critical feedback from prospective clients and learn better conflict resolution skills. Tyler really needs to be fired. Full of ego, pompous, unprofessional and gives a negative view overall on LA Fitness. I will not be stepping into any LA fitness again ever. **

OLD REVIEW BELOW:

So the facility itself was beautiful, there's a pool, racquetball, tons of equipment and its extremely clean and spacious. Overall, the atmosphere is nice. The girls at the front desk were very informative and friendly.

The reason why I'm giving it 3 out of 5 starts is due to the trainers I have (or have not) encountered. I called multiple times to set up a tour and no one got back with me, so I just came in the gym myself. When I signed up I set up an initial appointment with Steven at 10:00 am and he never showed up. As a result I waited for about 15-20 minutes before another trainer, Tyler, stepped in. Tyler was very knowledgeable and friendly, but also extremely pushy with setting up a trainer membership ($180 for basic, $360 I believe for standard and $440 for premium). I flat out told Tyler no, he still kept going and tried a variety of standard car salesman tactics to get me to sign up.

For me, when a rep does not respect the fact that no means no without barraging a slew of mildly interrogative questions, it's a deal breaker, not a negotiation period for me.

As a result, I won't be continuing my membership here. Aside from that, LA Fitness is great as an...

First they will invite you on a "Free Training Assessment"

From there, they will hard-sell you a training plan. But the worst part of the plan is that they don't care about your results, they care about getting you to give them money to buy some time slots.

They first pitched me a HIIT style workout to build muscle, which I didn't really want to do. They said that's the best way to put on muscle, which was incorrect from what I learned online. They told me that it was the best way because they wanted to sell me several 'different' workouts to justify their program, saying that the body needs a different workout everytime I come to the gym. And for that I need a trainer to tell me what to do.

I said I don't want to continue, I wanted to do more weight training. Sensing that I will not continue with their HIIT-style workouts, they immediately changed the strategy to weight training to retain me. That was the second red-flag.

Now, there are several trainers and you can only work with them at specific times. They get booked out, so it's not like you're working with one trainer consistently. You gotta choose from whichever's available.

The sessions are only 25 minutes each. And because I chose to pay in monthly installments, I can only get four 25 min sessions per month. Then I'd have to wait for the next month to come by to have more sessions. Initially, I needed more sessions to learn my form, the exercises, and the nutrition plan that I should be following. And once I had that, I thought I'd use fewer sessions later in the year, assuming that I bought out all my sessions and I could use them however I wanted.

But no, they only come 4 per month. Even when I had signed the contract for an entire year.

If I say I don't want to continue, I'd have to pay half the price of the remainder of the year and the program will stop immediately. So I get no sessions for walking out.

They cite the contract if you say you want to cancel. So I must pay the entire years worth of training fees. But I only get those sessions when as pay for those installments, not when I need them.

The staff or the process has no flexibility either. Pathetic experience. Please don't fall into this trap. There are far many fitness coaches out there that will get you superior-quality results because they are actually focused on selling you the end result, not selling...

Like another commenter here, I was also scammed by the personal training manager, David G. The first training session I had there was with the said David G, he is a very good trainer indeed. He just “forgot” to mention that instead of being paired with a professional trainer like him, I was going to be paired with a rookie trainer. Not only that, after 2 months, when the rookie trainer just disappeared, I couldn’t schedule training sessions because they were no more rookie trainers. Turns out, David G sold me a package that included only access to rookie trainers, again, without mentioning this tiny detail. Had I been made aware of this detail, I would have not bought the package. Also, since there were only master trainers available, I was told I’ll just have to wait till new rookie trainers are available. I had to fight my way through in order to be patched up with one of the master trainers till a new rookie came by. Needless to say, at this point, I felt very unmotivated to workout in this environment. Finally, I canceled, in person, both my membership and personal training package, only to discover in December that I have been billed for PT sessions for the months of October, November and December. I was met with great animosity when I tried to get a refund for these months. I had to call several times, come in person to the location to confront David G. I’m still trying to get my money back from these scammers, they claim I booked PT sessions in October and November, despite me not being a member anymore since October. Be very careful! These people are shady! If and when you choose to cancel your membership, make sure to get a printed confirmation that they have...