Crunch Fitness - Winter Garden — Attraction in Winter Garden

Oi, I don't write reviews. Signed up online for a month to month to see if I'd like the gym after sampling it out for a month. Showed up first day at peak hours and left after a quick tour around because of how slam packed it was. The most crowded gym I could imagine. But hey, peak hours, cheap membership, I get the trade offs. Decided to show up the next day at 8PM to see if things thinned out, but once again it was very overcrowded. Mostly high school aged kids and their guests filling every free weight bench and 80-90% of the machines, with lines here and there. I decided at that second visit, the gym just isn't going to be my gym. No big deal, I was willing to wager a month's payment. Or so I thought.

I go to the front desk, which was as crowded as the gym. I wait to speak to the lady up front after she signs in a half dozen guests of other members. I tell her after two days, this place just isn't for me, because it's far too crowded. I didn't even expect my money back. She informs me that I have a 90 day agreement, pointing to a laminated sheet in front of her, relating to online sign ups....let that sink in - A piece of paper at the physical gym location with fine print telling me I have an agreement that I signed up for online? I get pretty frustrated after she keeps giving me the flat company policy line. I signed up yesterday. I ask her personal take on how she'd see this if she were in my position, to see if there was a human being behind those AI responses. She thinks its a fair deal lol. It's clearly not, and the entire process is intended to squeeze short term gym goers that are the bread and butter for this industry. Then they make cancelling such a hassle, people keep paying. Insidious. Two days in, yet they have me on the hook for months, plus an upcoming annual fee. I was willing to commit to one month and let the gym earn my repeat business, but instead I was snared in a trap.

So I leave frustrated, to which the lady (who claims to be a manager) twists the knife with the most sarcastic jovial and enthusiastic "Have a great day, sir!" This company seems to take an adversarial stance with their customers.... And yet people keep signing up. The majority of these 5 star reviews have to be artificial, or bought cheap with T-shirts and sign up perks. I can't imagine a world where any adult sees this as a 5 star gym.

I called back after I got home having looked at the site, and I have the pleasure of speaking to the same person. I say there's no sign of any 90 day business, but she is adamant that there is. More blah, blah, blah and I ask for a real manager's name.....She wont give it to me!!! Lol, she literally will not even give me the name of a manager that has any authority, as that is their "location's policy". So many policies here. No customer service policy, though. Supposedly, I can come in again tomorrow and talk to that person. Now why do you think that might be their policy? Not much of a stretch to say they probably deal with this a lot, as people don't take kindly to being scammed.

"Am I being unreasonable?", I thought to myself. So I started looking deeper. It took me half an hour to find the 90 day agreement details, and that's with me looking specifically for it. So you have to get past the point where you put in your payment info (the terms and conditions prior do not mention it), to which you then have to check the "membership agreement" box that provides an adjacent summary conveniently void of the 90 day agreement details. But hey, everybody clicks the link to open the full document, right? So I did open it. The early red herring reference to cancellation of the extended membership agreement says 30 day written notice, yada, yada. I suppose I'm supposed to know that only applies to anything outside the 90 days??? It's not until I'd gotten a few thousand words in was I illuminated to my actual buried 90 day deal with the devil. Does this all seem like fair practice to anyone? Our lady at the gym's personal take? "Seems...

I've been going to this location regularly since it opened two years ago. Over these two years, I have seen a lot of good and bad changes.

The good: Trainers are less overbearing about the personal training offers compared to before. I'd say I only get advertised to once every few months now, which I appreciate compared to how often they used to try and sell personal training to me. The men's bathroom seems to be cleaner than how bad it was half a year ago. The soap and hand sanitizer dispensers seem to be getting refilled regularly now too. Fans were installed in the boxing/high-intensity area of the gym, which was something that was desperately needed. That area sits underneath the second floor and has no visible ventilation system on the ceiling, so it used to get very hot and muggy in that area due to no air circulation. The fans don't work super well, but it's better than nothing.

The bad: The parking lot. I have sometimes spent up to 20 minutes circling the parking lot, trying to find a parking space. It is becoming ridiculously hard to go to the gym because of the overcrowding of the parking lot in the mornings and evenings. This is more of a critique of the clientele as the gym is not responsible for customer car usage or the amount of customers who decide to come in each day, but opening a new location or buying out a neighboring store to expand the parking lot could be better than having people park in the grass or the loading bay area behind the Goodwill that is exclusively for semi trucks. There are only more customers as time goes by and more people move in to Winter Garden, so I am legitimately considering switching to the Ocoee location because I am tired of spending 1/14 of a tank of gas and 20 minutes of my time just trying to find a parking spot. Overcrowding in the gym during business promotion days. Sometimes this location lets partnered businesses set up promotional desks with information about them and merchandise. Alongside the parking lot issues this causes, it makes the gym packed to the brim with customers. I know enough about fitness to know alternative exercises I can do if a specific machine is not free, but seeing every single bench and bench press machine taken up by groups of teenagers for up to an hour kind of ruins my whole workout plan on chest day. There are a lot more people at this location than there ever were two years ago, and it's starting to become difficult to walk around without bumping into someone. People using phones on machines (or in their cars when the parking lot is full). I understand minimal phone usage to switch to another Spotify playlist or send an important text, but I see many adults and especially teenagers using machines as seats for them to scroll through social media on. I have seen people sit on a machine for up to 30 minutes and do a grand total of one set in that timeframe as they send texts. As for the car phone usage situation, it is a potential cause for the absence of open parking spaces. I often do my stretches outside of the gym after my workout for 20 minutes, and during this time I usually see 7 (more or less) instances of people getting in their car, turning the ignition, and then using their phone for the next 15-20 minutes. This is something that Crunch likely has no authority to change, but it is a problem nonetheless. The new sanitizing wipes and their associated trashcans. I regularly wipe down the machines I use before I use them (because a decent fraction of customers don't wipe them down when they're done) and after I use them as a courtesy to the next person. These new sanitizing wipes dry out 2 minutes after you take them out of their container, and much sooner if you use them once. The low reusability of these wipes combined with the very small trash compartments on the wipe dispensers (and the infrequency of the trash being emptied) leads to the trashcans overflowing with used wipes, which are then blown around the gym by the...

Day 2 Update: A big plus is the inclusion of Apple GymKit at this location on most all the cardio equipment. That's technology that pairs quickly with your Apple Watch while working out and feeds information to the Workout app. The watch also sends heart rate information back to the equipment. It's fantastic. However, I'm really starting to think they aren't cleaning the locker room at all. There was black powder/soot all over the floor by one bank of lockers. I also found a loose screw on a floor where there are bare feet. The showers had pieces of toilet paper or something all over the floors of them. Making matters worse, at risk for sounding like a curmudgeon, the teenage customers are treating the gym like their high school locker room, loitering in groups for far too long. Same behavior in groups at various pieces of equipment. I've tried visiting during different hours today and it's the same result as my prior visit.

Day 1: I'm hoping my first experience here is just due to some opening-week bumps in the road. I'm locked in for a year, which I signed up for sight unseen, and that's my bad. I am, however, locked in at a lower rate as a "Founding Member" which is why I gave this location 3 stars. Even with a few misgivings, this place is better off than other area options such as LA Fitness or Planet Fitness. My workout today focused on Cardio and there is a massive selection of equipment. Surprisingly, a few were already in need of attention near the front of the upper deck (they had signs on them saying such). The two elliptical machines I used needed balancing as they would rock back and forth during use. Perhaps these are just first-week grand opening issues. They offer WiFI, at least it seems they do as I can see a "Crunch Public" WiFi option, however, the password was nowhere to be found...until I was leaving. The exit side of the front counter had a sign with the password. That should actually be at the entrance or in multiple places throughout the gym. Just a small oversight. The locker room dirtiness is perplexing. There is a sign that clearly states that the locker room is closed for cleaning from 2pm-3pm daily. That is the exact window in which I was working out and the locker room was completely open the entire time, yet in desperate need of attention. There was copious amounts of water all over the sinks and floors, a giant puddle near the showers that wasn't quite making it into the drain, and hair covering nearly every surface of the floor and walls of the too-small shower stalls. Speaking of the shower stalls, there is no place to hang a towel. At all. Just a long bench, which is frankly, not clean and not gonna happen for towel holding. Put up some hooks, please. The current generation of high school students crowding this location loiter about the equipment and locker room tossing water on the sauna heater and joking about how they need to "sweat it out bro"... I mean, to each his own, but there's a sign that explicitly says NOT to douse water on it... it will short out. I don't have high hopes for the maintenance of the sauna. As mentioned at the start, this was my first visit, and perhaps 2pm on a Monday is the highest traffic time for this location? Hard to know since the Crunch-O-Meter in the Crunch Fitness app is not turned on for this location. It's not all bad, they're also offering a nice perk of bringing a friend for free during their opening period. I counted about 15 workers, mostly at the front counter signing people up for memberships, and trainers all huddled around their table working on trainer stuff, presumably. There was no cleaning staff that I noticed outside of the one person who was wiping down the hydromassage beds. Perhaps it will all calm down soon, though. I remain hopeful these are just the side effects of a busy opening week. I'll be sure to update my review...