Golds Gym

Great gym.
Lots of equipment that is in excellent condition.
Clean, no, pristine.
Lots of parking.
Super friendly staff. I was on a Golds Gym travel pass and they made me feel completely at home and very welcome.
What’s not to love?

Seriously now, require the Sunday morning spin class instructor across the hall from yoga to shut the door! Or, restructure your class times.
Julie guides us through a powerful yoga hour but her music and our concentration are drowned by the screaming spin class overlapping by at minimum half the class time.
Facility: clean and welcoming.
Staff: generally friendly
Location: superb.
Three stars which could’ve been five.

It’s one of the nicer looking gyms around, sure, but it’s soooooo expensive.
The staff can vary from extremely helpful to indignant as well. Sometimes they’re the jovial girl who’s always smiling and on top of her business, but more often it’s like the guy who wears a hoodie and whines about it being cold so he refuses to turn the f@#$ing fan on!!! I’m sorry you’re not sweating your fatness off, guy, I’m just technically paying for you to work here so please turn it on like you’re supposed to so I don’t die from heat stroke.
When we tried to buy our membership the kid at the counter told us he didn’t know how to set up the membership. The next day the lady who got to enroll us told us he was more than able to and was just lazy… mind you this is one of the personal trainers she’s talking about. Lazy… personal trainer… lazy. Yea. Other personal trainers here will bombard you with misinformation about nutrition. One of them actually started an unsolicited conversation (argument, actually) with me about eating a piece of toast before working out because she thought carbs were evil. This isn’t inconvenient misinformation, this is dangerous misinformation. Carbohydrates are the way your body metabolizes the precursors to Serotonin into your brain. Carb deprivation is a horrible way to lose weight, and can have serious side effects on your mental health. This is the type of careless advice you’ll get from the extremely unqualified trainers here. One single piece of whole wheat toast before you work out isn’t going to ruin your workout. They’ll tell you that they’re «Certified Nutritionists» here but really, the title «Certified Nutritionist» doesn’t mean anything in CT. I could certify you as a nutritionist right now. Class begins: you need food to live, meat gooood, sugar baaad. Poof! You’re a certified nutritionist.
Periodically they have classes that cause an influx of people. Some of the instructors are polite and some blast their music so loudly that you can hear it from the second floor all the way across the building and down to the first floor. There are few things worse in life for me than being forced to listen to an hour of Zumba against my will. Not many things can make my workout less enjoyable than that. Maybe if someone was tattooing my face while Zumba-​ing themselves…
The locker rooms are really clean. They offer you free tanning if that’s your thing. They also offer you the ability to use the pool over at the Ramada… but that’s not really a perk. You can go in and have a drink at the bar and nobody will stop you from doing a few laps afterwards. Also the Ramada never cleans the outside half of the pool and it’s connected to the indoor half so it’s always lethally chlorinated to keep you from getting a weird skin fungus because you’re technically swimming in all the garbage they left outside.
But like I said, it looks really nice. I’ll give them that the gym is clean, too.