Lincoln Park Athletic Club — Local services in Lake View Township

This might be the warmest gym I’ve ever worked out in. The cardio room consistently feels like 80+ degrees year round. As I’m writing this, it’s 85 degrees outside and it still feels cooler than the air in the gym.

During winter, the heat is turned up so high that it’s difficult to comfortably walk on the treadmill for longer than 20 min without being soaked and overheated. During summer, the AC barely breaks a breeze and the only ventilation comes from a couple of ceiling fans.

It’s gotten to the point where I now bring a small personal fan with me to the gym because I can’t count on them to provide adequate air conditioning, especially during heatwaves.

They never open any windows in the gym to get fresh air in, even during the cooler months of the year. As I noted above, it is not uncommon for it to be cooler outside in the summer than it is in the gym. Don’t even bother trying their other Lakeview location (LVAC) - their AC doesn’t even work lol.

I’ve never belonged to a gym where we don’t receive any email communications from management about updates at the gym. They only send an email once every few months to advertise their personal training sessions. Around holidays, they post fliers on the front door with the gyms holiday hours so you have to go in person to even check when they’ll be open. The only “upgrade” I’ve noticed here in the past year is them painting an orange wall in one of the studios for no reason.

Crossing my fingers that a better gym opens someday soon so we can all collectively cancel our memberships and go somewhere with better hours, better AC, and better management who listens to...

It's impossible to find a perfect gym for the right price. Wouldn't we all like to be able to afford Midtown Athletic Club or East Bank Club? But we can't, and may not live convenient to their locations. So we have CAC clubs. Not as fancy as Equinox or FFC, but a step above L.A. Fitness and XSport, and ahead of Planet Fitness-----in terms of facilities.

Not the most convenient location for me personally, sometimes it takes me 20 mins to get there. But if it's not crowded, it's worth it. It does get very, very crowded, think Mon - Thurs around 6PM.....I just give up on lifting weights those days, go to treadmill....Sometimes I walk around just seeing what I can do where I won't have to awkwardly stand around and wait for a machine or pool lane.....but this is part of the experience. The good thing is, when you do this, you don't have to feel guilty about skipping the gym, and it's an abbreviated experience. You may not hit your goals, but you put in the effort, and the "mental benefit" of exercise is still there to a degree lol

When you can use the machines and it is not very crowded, it's totally worth the membership. But I pay $80 through Gympass. Would recommend that if it is an option as it seems to avoid the auto-renew membership issues some have mentioned. $80 is less per month than the month-to-month, but more than the annual rate. Without Gympass.....it's a closer call. The YMCA nearby here for $50 was a good compromise, would consider those if this didn't...

Seriously Overcrowded. Predatory Membership Policies.

If you can go to the gym between 9AM-3PM you're fine, in fact its a great gym if you can go on off hours. Otherwise you might as well not come. Which is why I stopped going. If you're lifting weights I'd expect to wait 10+ minutes for things like bench and curl bars in realist weight ranges and don't even think about "getting in line" for the squat rack, they only have 2 and it feels like there are about 100+ people at the gym at any given time. This isn't even the worst part.

The worst part is how they try to lock you into payments.

I signed up for a displayed fixed-length membership. Little did I know that there is an auto-renewal policy. Which isn't even in the Terms and Agreements, but come to find out it's in a supplementary "Note." So if you do decide that this is the place to waste your time at, then make sure you bring your lawyer.

You can't even download the terms and agreements from the website, they only host it in a "non-downloadable" format that's hard to read. Best of all, they sell your collection amount. For me I stopped going, moved and had discontinued the card that I had linked up so they auto-renewed my membership for a year, falsely charging a discontinued credit card and then sold my "debt" to a company in India with only a PO Box as an address. So now I can't even dispute the claim with the company I have the issue with. A real...