Never been in a gym in my life at 44. Did the free week, Jan did my induction, spent two months in the quiet corner and now I squat on a Monday with Lowri shouting numbers at me. £24 a month off-peak. The no-mirrors thing sounds small and is the whole reason I stayed.
Reviews
What members say.
Six reviews, one for each thing we do, including the four-star one. Collected by an independent platform three months after joining; we do not choose which appear, and the trainers are named so you can see who they are talking about.
Collected by a third-party review platform. Names shortened at the reviewers' request.
GP said lose weight or start tablets. Gav sat me down with a food diary, got me walking, two sessions a week, no nonsense. Four stone in a year and the GP has stopped mentioning tablets. Six sessions for £180, same price as anyone else, and he never once tried to sell me a block I did not need.
Unlimited for £44 and we do Boxing Fitness Tuesday and Thursday, Spin Friday, Hill Run Sunday. Capped at sixteen so Kai actually coaches rather than shouts into a mic. Timetable on the website is the real timetable, which is rarer than it should be.
Seventy-one, two new hips, and Jan's Thursday over-sixties class is the best hour of my week. She worked with my physio on what I could do and never once treated me as fragile. The daytime floor is full of people my age. Nobody told me gyms could be like this.
Great gym, honest prices, Lowri is an outstanding coach. Four stars because the 5:30 Forge Strength is full most weeks and the waiting list only clears if someone cancels; they added a Saturday session, which helps, but a second weekday evening would sort it. The racks themselves never have a queue.
Seventeen, rugby, came for conditioning with Kai before the season and ended up doing boxing one-to-one as well. Dad signed the form, £35 an hour, same as the adults. Kai counts every rep out loud and you cannot cheat him. Fittest I have ever been.
About the four stars
The Monday 5:30 Forge Strength is full. A second evening starts in November.
Tom is right: the Monday and Wednesday 5:30 barbell classes have had waiting lists since the spring, and the Saturday session we added in June helped but did not clear them, because the people who want 5:30 on a Monday are not free on a Saturday morning. From November Lowri runs a second Monday class at 6:45pm and Kai takes a Wednesday at 6:45, which is the whole evening timetable on those days and the limit of what the studio and the platforms can hold. If that fills too, the honest answer is that we are at capacity on weekday evenings and will say so rather than cram twenty into a class built for twelve.
A member? Tell the next person.
Reviews are collected by an independent platform three months after joining, and we never pick which appear. Good or not, they stay up, and we answer every one.