The Forum Athletic Club — Local services in Atlanta

Very poor COVID-19 precautions.

Before COVID The Forum was a pretty solid gym overall and a great one for the price. Plenty of equipment for the volume of users, not the cleanest gym I've used but clean enough. Staff was limited, sometimes a little spacey (i.e. just watching videos behind the counter), but friendly and responsive when I needed them.

When COVID hit they of course closed. I awaited to see what precautions they would take. I finally received the emails with details, waited to see some photos on social about how they were handling things, and decided to go back today at an off hour to see how it was. Now let me break this into two reviews, for those who do and don't support mask usage at a gym.

FOR THOSE WHO SUPPORT MASKS. Masks are not required at the Forum. It's a bit deceptive too, because the first door you walk through (in the Ponce City parking lot) states masks are required. However the door to The Forum itself only says "Masks recommended". Staff had masks, patrons were maybe at 30% mask usage. This is a bummer, partially because of the reasons I will outline below for those who don't support requiring masks but still want to feel safe.

FOR THOSE WHO DON'T SUPPORT MASKS BUT WANT TO FEEL SAFE. I found the Forum's policies to be a whole lot of lip service. Here's a breakdown of what I saw them do right and wrong.

RIGHT: Temperature check on check-in. Provide hand sanitizer at the check-in counter. Close down every other cardio machine to encourage some distance

WRONG: Did not actually rearrange any of the other equipment. Many machines are within 6' of each other. They did not add any new sanitization stations like they said they would (unless you count adding a bottle of hand sanitizer at the front counter). All they did was drop down a couple plastic spray bottles of cleaners at the existing wipe downs stations, which were relatively few to begin with. One of the sanitization stations is so close to one of the cable stations. If someone is doing rows their head is basically 2' away from the sanitizer bottle and towels. They did not rearrange weight plates for power racks. Most of the plates are in a tight corner of the main gym floor, which requires power rack users to walk past each other well within 6' to grab plates. In my 30minutes at a rack maybe half a dozen heavy breathing unmasked people walked within 6' of me. I would expect them to move the plate stands somewhere more central and/or add a second plate stand so users don't need to move through such tight areas to get plates (honestly this would be nice even outside of COVID times). They claim to be cleaning equipment regularly, but during the 90 minutes I was there, I did not see anyone come by to clean any of the equipment once. Meanwhile I saw 4 people cycle through the same power rack, and only two of them bothered to clean it either before or after they used it. Also on claiming to be cleaning equipment regularly, I am someone who usually wipes down equipment before use, even before COVID and even at upscale gyms that would clean their equipment every 15min or less. At those upscale gyms, wipe downs would generally produce a wipe with little to no residue. When I was doing this at the forum, there was always some brown residue, which pre-COVID, was whatever. That said, from this informal test today, my wipes were coming out just as dirty brown as they ever did at the Forum, which is not confidence inspiring for how frequently or well they are cleaning their equipment. In the men's bathroom, they did not block off the middle sink or urinal, meaning no distancing is enforced in the restroom.

CONCLUSION: (A) Do the simple and lowest cost option of just requiring masks for all members.

OR

(B) Don't require masks but put in the effort to actually ensure safe guidelines like 6' distancing and sanitization is happening to the rigor to guarantee safety...

I went to this gym for a few months and was happy at first, but had to switch gyms because they were doing construction and it made the gym completely useless and inaccessible at peak times with how many areas were limited and shut off as well as multiple machines sitting broken for extended times. Additionally, a lot of members are very selfish and inconsiderate, and will sit on machines for a long times on their phone, talking to people, or super setting between multiple machines and get angry if you ask to use whatever they are blocking everyone else from using. Lots of weird egos and entitlement at this gym when we’re all there trying to accomplish similar goals. The clientele is just not very easy to work around and with.

I really enjoyed fast twitch with both Dan who is one of the owners, Sakai, and Patrick, who made the wise decision to leave. However, Bradon, who also teaches fast twitch is someone I absolutely do not recommend for any women. He is constantly touching women in the class from the time they enter until the time they leave, and I repeatedly asked him to not touch me, which he either chose to ignore or did not hear me over how ridiculously loud he was playing the music. This has been noted in other reviews, and other employees are aware of this creepy behavior.

To make things even worse, freezing or canceling your membership is absolutely impossible here. They don’t allow you to do it on site at the gym, they instruct you to email people who absolutely refuse to answer any emails. I have emailed no less than five times over the past month and have still not gotten any response on canceling my membership. I Would not recommend this gym to anyone, there are much better options for a much better rate. Not to mention, if you don’t live nearby and can walk… Parking at PCM is always an absolute nightmare of course.

Hoping someone will see this and finally help me cancel my membership, this is a very repetitive complaint in reviews of this gym. Horrible way to do business. Simone, who is supposed to answer client emails has a reputation for refusing to do so based on what other employees...

Car keyed in the parking area!

Just a warning about parking here. It’s not a very good idea unless you come very early in the morning for Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I thought my car was safe with cameras everywhere but a random stranger keyed my car in the designated parking area. It was caught on camera but the security in charge said that they needed to protect the privacy rights of the person that did it, blatantly on camera driving up and getting out to key cars, and lied about it both to me and police about it not being on camera. Later when I could view the footage with police, they had removed the license plate and image of the person in the footage that they supplied so police said that they could do nothing and I was stuck paying for what ended up being a repair of several thousands of dollars. They solely put effort in protecting the vandal and preventing me from reimbursement for the damage.

Unfortunately the parking isn’t safe. It’s brutal due to very limited parking and tensions run when it’s busy. The trashy and sketchy people that come here think will go out of their way to damage your vehicle if it’s new or nice. Repair took two weeks and cost was over $3000. No one cared because I guess it happens so often.

Regarding WiFi: Bring downloaded music and noise-cancelling headphones because half of the gym is underground with zero WiFi service and zero cell signal. You need something to drown out the rap that is usually blasted at high volumes. The staff also has a tendency to set the temperature for their preference which is low 70s, not really caring that this is uncomfortably hot while working out and created humidity...