Sweat Fitness — Local services in Philadelphia

I had to update my original review:

DO NOT BUY THEIR TRAINING PACKAGES!! They don't have the staff to support the amount of training packages they con people into buying, and they do not vet the trainers they hire.

I spent $1200 on a training package and they gave me a trainer without a phone, no way of contacting him - no cell phone, no land line. I could not get a hold of him to change or make appt's, he could only contact me.

I called the gym to ask to leave a message for him and they had no idea who my trainer was and had never heard of him. I can only imagine why this 40 year old man did not have either a cell phone or a land line. I said this won't work because I travel for work and will need to be able to reschedule appts and text my trainer. The new trainer contacted me and asked if I could train out of the queens village location, instead of my gym, since that was where he worked. I said no and called my gym to finally ask for a refund.

They gave me the run-around about a refund. I waited two months for it and the "VP of Training" was ignoring my calls and texts about refunding me, and when he did speak to me, he raised his voice and constantly talked over me and argued. The front desk manager will do whatever the trainers tell her to do, and all they do is make bad, unprofessional decisions.

Meanwhile, the original trainer they gave me with no phone, was emailing and calling me from different numbers for three months after, and pretended like he hadn't been let go, asking me when we could train again. I had to keep telling him that he should contact his boss at sweat so he can be updated on the situation. It was really scary.

Contacting anyone that would do anything to help me was impossible. The owner Tracy is impossible to reach. I had to file a complaint and case with American Express who gave me the refund. A week after I did that, I magically got an email from some other guy named Mike who said he 'would be happy to issue a refund and was there anything else he could help me with?' Too little, too late. We ended up canceling our memberships to the gym out of disgust.

This was the second time I bought a training package from this gym where I was unable to use all my sessions due to staffing issues. The first time I bought one, the manager who started with me quit after two weeks, then a young girl came on to manage and train and she constantly canceled and rescheduled appts until she finally quit, too. I finally gave up. It's hard enough to motivate yourself to do training as it is, without all this turnover and grief.

Do not go here, and whatever you do, do not let the guy con you into buying a training package. He spends more time talking, schmoozing and selling, than training his actual clients. Its clear they don't pay their trainers enough here, otherwise they would have more professional, mature, seasoned trainers to train you. This place is an absolute disgrace.

Decent gym but the ellipticals and treadmills and heart monitoring equipment is always broken, despite repeatedly asking them to fix it since June of 2016. I'm going to have to rethink my membership if they don't care to maintain their equipment and ignore...

Don’t sign up for this gym if you plan on ever canceling your membership. They use this “service” called abcfinancial to manage their automatic payments and you have to go through that to cancel. I had called in January to cancel my wife and I’s membership for April. I was told it would cancel and to just send an email to confirm so I did. Then lo and behold I still was getting automatically deducted 45 bucks a month (which is an insane price for a gym with a single bench press) here it is in July and they are still trying to charge me. I called abcfinancial and spent an hour on the phone just to be told that they can’t backdate my cancellation to when it was originally supposed to occur because I had sent them the cancellation email too EARLY. You apparently need to request cancellation within 60 days of your contract end date or it just doesn’t count and they keep billing. Or so they claim. they still were able to cancel my membership but not my wife’s when we canceled at the exact same time and on the same phone call and email even. And they’re trying to say I owe 109 bucks still. So yeah, reporting this as fraud to my bank since I clearly should have been stopped getting billed in April for both accounts instead of just one. I’ve dealt with difficult cancellations with gyms before but this is a whole new level and really ought to be...

felt like I should write a review since so many were negative! I dragged my feet on ending my membership (due to moving north) because honestly, I loved my routine here! And everyone on staff was a gem!

It's definitely a smaller gym, but I'm not an intense work-outter so it was fine.

Anytime a piece of equipment I used needed fixing, it would be fixed within a few days.

Personally I think they could use the upstairs a biiiit more efficiently and take away a few treadmills/ellipticals/stairmasters to get more machines in, b/c there were a few I missed from the old Sweat (Queen Village).

But overall I was quite happy with it, and it never felt crowded.

I didn't love the random $60 fee (I think that was the amount?) that was to help pay for random upkeep/updating the old-ness of the building etc ( I think they said that) - to me that's just overhead for your business I'm not responsible for it - just include it in the monthly bill. But whatever. I will say it got better (air conditioning!) after they got NEW management last fall, so at least the $$ was put to good use!!

The new management also extended hours, which was nice! It made it so much easier to go later at night.

Ending my membership was easy and took a single phone call and an email to start the 60-day clock.

Goodbye...