Planet Fitness/other US-only phenomena thread

European here. Can I get a quick rundown on Planet Fitness? Things I've learned so far:

>aimed at normies/fatties
>literally gives fucking pizza to customers
>grunting is not allowed for some reason

My questions:
>are there any exercises which are forbidden there i.e. if you do them they kick you out?
>is the pizza thing done every day?
>what if you keep grunting on purpose? do they call the police?
>what is the mainstream fitness/health community opinion about PF? I mean what do professionals in the media say about it?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=PdccUsn8N4Y
bodybuilding.com/fun/ridgely17.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

I heard big lifts are outlawed in planet fitness, stuff that makes alot of noise. Ex: deadlift

>can't do oly lifts
>can't lift heavy
>most of them barely even have free weights at all
>pizza happens once or twice a month I think but I've seen bagels and shit too
>you get removed by PTs
>nobody talks about it because it's a joke

Never been to one but I've heard and seen a lot about it. Better off spending all the money you save on a real gym buying a small home gym.

They're all franchises, so despite having the same name they're owned and ran by different people.

The one I went to for a bit didn't have any barbells, dumbells only went up to 55, but they did have like 5 smith machines :^)
That also had a notice on them forbidding deadlifting.

Pizza was done at like 5pm on Friday only.
They didn't actually enforce the no grunting shit.

People see it as a treadmill farm and nothing more.

It's literally a 10$ gym membership you get what you pay for

I go here cuz I'm broke. user is right, it's mostly a treadmill farm. There are some big guys I see regularly that bench two plates on the smith machine. It's a good starter/normie gym. At my location pizza is once a month, but I've never actually been there when they have it.

>dumbells only went up to 55

That's not that bad to be honest

Yes... Yes it is.. At least go up to 80.

>he believes the PF memes

PF is cheap, adequate. That's really it.

If you're some meme-lifting clown, you should save up for a better gym instead of whining that the cheap gym doesn't want to be legally liable for your fuck-ups.

What pizza do they give out to customers? Do they order from local places or do they have like a contract with some specific pizza chain?

If you're an old person or a woman that just needs dumbbells and an elliptical machine in order to stave off sarcopenia, planet fitness is ten bucks a month, go fucking nuts.

If you actually want to get big, PF is not for you. Most of them have no free barbells at all, only machines. They say this is to fit with their casual target demographic, but actually because it makes the insurance much cheaper.

I went to one for a while when I started lifting, and I lucked out with it. I'm convinced some are way worse than others. Mine never served food, and the free weights went up to around 85. None of the employees gave a shit about what lifts you were doing. Granted, you would see the occasional moron using a machine in some hilariously wrong way, but it wasn't so bad for the most part

I am going to start lifting soon and I'm considering planet fitness to start off because it's so cheap and I don't want to be locked into a 12 month contract yet. The one near me only has dumbbells and smith machines, would I be able to do the exercises in pic related?

It varies from gym to gym. Typically it's like once a week. Memes will tell you it's to keep the gym members fat, but that's not true, PF relies on people not ever coming to the gym, even on pizza day. "Free pizza" is just to get fat people to sign up, who then mostly rarely, if ever, come to the gym.

If you do compound lifts on a machine, your form will be wrong. More importantly, you won't work your stabilizer muscles, and so when you go to free weights, you'll find yourself only able to do a fraction of what you thought you could

Yeah I'm aware of that but would it be a good start? My dilemma is that the office where I work is building a new fitness center, but I have no idea what it will consist of or when it will be completed. If it does turn out to be nice with a lot of free weights I'll probably use it, which is why I don't want to commit to a year membership at another gym that's more out of my way.

If you don't mind losing progress, yeah, go ahead. Wouldn't hold my breathe about a fitness center having a barbell though.

Although, now that I think about it, at least for bench and OHP, you could start with just dumbbells I guess. Even if they only go up to 50 or 60, that would take at least 6 months for bench and over a year for OHP.

That was my plan if I do sign up there. But the more I think it over I don't like the idea of PF. There is a better gym near me (World Gym) for about 35/mo. There's also about 30 fucking crossfit gyms and a powerlifting gym really close by.

office/apartment building/hotel gyms are usually even worse. cardio machines, dumbbells, kettleballs, and a smith machine is usually what you're looking at. better to just go to a real gym imo. see if they have a month-to-month thing rather than having to join for a year, usually a lot more expensive but if you want to hedge, hey

It's also a franchise over here in Greece now, has been for the past few years.

All of their gyms are newly opened with new equipment and rather great layout/facilities etc. but there's no squat rack and the pricing is so competitive (they'll do crazy offers every now and then giving out yearly memberships for 70 euro) that rush hour is unbearable.

I'd seen some commercials by them recently about berating fatties and tried to find them to post but instead I found this
youtube.com/watch?v=PdccUsn8N4Y
Watch the last commercial in this video and it sums up the memes pretty nicely

Just imagine a really shitty cheap gym run by SJW but staffed by mixed race teenagers who literally do not exercise and do not really care about the policies.

In the beginning they were all anal about making sure nobody deadlifted or whatever, but now they hire minimum wage retards who don't really care, functionally it's no different from any other cheap machine gym.

Also fags say you can't get strong on a smith machine, yes you absolutely can if you break your ass at it. I bet nobody saying "smith machines don't work" has ever squatted 5 plates on one.

Crossfit gyms are absurdly expensive, don't bother.

Of course you can massively increase the strength and size of your primary muscles with a smith. But because the weight is fixed, you do not work your stabilizers at all. If you squat with a smith up to five plate, and then try regular squatting, you'll topple at two or three. Plus straight bar path is just incorrect for most lifts

It`s a business with a solid demographic and that does well for itself. If you don't like what they offer, you're more than free to train literally anywhere else, including your house or in public.

>a solid demographic
More like gelatinous. Also 90% of them go once a week or less. It's a company that basically exists to allow fatties to say they have a gym membership

Can I ask what, if any, exercises should (not could, but should) be done on a Smith machine?

Well obviously you don't want to just jump right to the same weight.

For discussion's sake, if you are not a powerlifter, let's say you are an athlete or something and have no intention to actually compete at squatting but instead need to apply that strength elsewhere, why would it matter at all which one you went for? You would have little experience at actually squatting, but if your goal isn't to squat, then what's the problem?

There are squat variants used by bodybuilders (feet forward, hindu, sissy, etc) that are just a lot easier to do in the smith without falling over.

If you want functional strength, freeweights are the way to go. If you want to be strong to be better at moving heavy things, your best bet is to practice moving heavy things, not sliding them up and down a rail.

I got sucked in once when I needed a quick gym on a two month vacation. The whole "$10/month forever" shit quickly jumps to $150 for the first month due to fees. No free weights, no plates larger that 25pbs, and the people looked like you transplanted then from a SIR NYR comic strip.

Rows are fine. You can also lock the bar up high and do pullups. Shrugs are probably fine, and calf extensions. And since the weight is below you and the bar path is straight, theoretically deadlifts would be ok? Probably not though.

If you insist on doing free weights it likely isn't the place for you.

If you're happy doing isolation machines then it is cheap and the machines are rarely ever busy, because most people just use it to treadmill and watch tv.

The place is so loud with the sound of 40 old people and cardio bunnies running on treadmills that no one is going to hear you grunt and I really doubt people are going to care. The only time I've ever heard the "lunk alarm" go off is some lady legit dropped her weights with a huge crash. It was pretty funny, because couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds.

The gym membership model is literally predicated on the idea that most people won't use their machines. If everyone went to a gym daily then PF would have to charge way more than 10 dollars a month for membership.

They do that stuff to intentionally chase off the super serious gym-bros who will use their equipment and go everyday. It's a profit margin thing and it is fucking brilliant.

Just opened here in Dominican Republic. Has a sauna, bunch of free weights, huge area. Allows heavy lifts.

Better than Gold's Gym desu and cheaper too.

The office building gym is supposed to be something like 11k sq ft, so I'm holding out hope that it will be nice. But yeah I expect it to be shit. Fuck it, I'm going to join the good gym, google reviews say it has 3 squat racks

If you do the same movement pattern, how will the results be substantially different?

I've maintained a 405 squat for years on a smith because usually that's what I have access to.

I think the anti-smith stigma in internet fitness is silly and irrational. You people would literally advise bodyweight exercise over smith machine use, like there's an evil ghost in the smith machine that will make you weak.

Hold on that's way fucking bigger then I expected. I would ask someone first

Freedom units brah

Because of stabilizers. Smith machine lifting just misses critical muscles to moving non-fixed weights.

Im an European and from what I understand Planet Fitness is like a scam. Their goal is to keep you from ever making actual progress so that you don't move on to a better gym but instead stay on your comfort zone at planet fitness eatih free pizza and shit. Am I correct on this, amerifats? Why do you allow this cancer to go on in your country?

I would love to see you squat 405 in a regular squat rack.

1. What muscles are those? Specifically, what muscles stabilize the squat?

2. Why could they not be worked effectively with other exercises in your program?

No offense but this is Veeky Forums and I am not optimistic about your answer, so here:

bodybuilding.com/fun/ridgely17.htm

> Dynamic Stabilizers: Hamstrings, Gastrocnemius
> Stabilizers: Erector Spinae
>Antagonist Stabilizers: Rectus Abdominis, Obliques

Okay, so you would need to hit your hamstrings, calves and core with other movements. Is that a critical problem that could not be solved?

Why could you not just do SLDL, planks and weighted side bends and be entirely fine? (This is a rhetorical question, because I do it and I am fine)

The free food is usually just a day a week. PF members don't progress, true, but simply because they hardly ever show up, which the gym banks on. Exploitative, maybe, but not a scam

Im an European too, and it sounds to me like a gym with 10$/month, free food at the price of not being retarded about lifting. Lift wearing earplugs with DGAF attitude about SJWs

I dunno, maybe you could. Or you could just do regular fucking squats and hit everything in 5 sets instead of 20.

>decide to go to my local planet fitness
>Debbie is stuck in the door again
>Have to wait outside until they can butter her up to
>Fatties swarning over the gym buffet like flies
>Not even worth it
>Decide to get coffee at the gym starbucks
>Abdul, the transexual syrian refugee asks me in broken english how much cream and sugar I want in my double mocha latte
>Sudden surge of resolve, now is the day I make a change for the better
>resolve fades, get nervous and stammer out that I want it black
>lunk alarm goes off
>get tackled by 4 500 pound judgepol
>Handcuffed and loaded into gym trebuchet to be launched into the parking lot.

Fucking Fitness Stop

So if you're doing PPL, just make sure your push day works core, make sure your pull day works lower back, and make sure your leg day works SLDL and calves.

None of that is unusual, everyone automatically just does this stuff unless they are on minimalist meme routines.

It doesn't even add sets to do stuff you should already be doing anyway.

>lunk alarm
they have a literal alarm?

cap this

Its a marketing gimmick. They don't actually use it because it'll disturb the gym bunnies.

Maybe if you were moaning like you were giving birth and chucking weights around they might, but I grunt all the time while using the machines and no one has said shit.

...

I wouldn't be bothered by it if they had a single barbell to use

.I've seen mine used once or twice, but it seems so counter to their entire ideology. They're all about no judgement and then judge people for actually working hard.

Tbf one of the guys who works at mine is probably actually Veeky Forums so has discouraged use of it.

Calf raises are okay

Like I said, it isn't about non-judgment. It is about encouraging people who will turn up regularly and put wear+tear on the machines to go to different gyms.

It has nothing to do with making fat people feel more comfortable so they'll show up more. A fat person who is actually motivated enough to engage in regular dieting+exercise isn't going to be discouraged by some huge dude at the gym. The lunk excuse is a way for fat people to feel better about not going to a the gym period.

But yeah, if you are okay with limited free weight options, then you'll be fine, because the people who work there really don't give a shit.