The poetics of Planet Fitness

& why it might be a cult

Hello, porcelain royalty.

My 2023 fitness goal: be the kind of person who doesn’t need help opening a jar of peanut butter.

And that’s precisely why — even though I typically limit exercise to things that involve squishy mats (yoga, pilates, rock climbing) — I joined a Planet Fitness.

So I thought I’d bring you an honest review. It’s not sponsored. About one sentence in, that will be evident.

5 things I dislike about the Great Planet of Fitness:

#1: the name.

A bit of an overpromise.

If there were an extraterrestrial planet on which fitness was so prominent as to be its namesake… I would expect it not to be full of people like me, who read the machine instructions before use.

County Fitness, Local Fitness, even Fitness Nation all feel closer. More “down to planet earth,” if you will.

#2: the color palette.

What in the Barney-meets-Cadbury-Chocolate is this?

It looks like if you ordered Lakers gear from Amazon, but it was an off brand that came in over-saturated and likely to bleed in the wash.

The worst part is that when your gym is roughly $15/month (see: pros), you get videos on the internet of people doing the most unhinged things there. This week alone, I’ve seen a Reel of:

• a man catapulting himself into the air by the lat pulldown thingies (a technical term)

• a man getting fully tackled by five cops on the gym floor

And you know how I know they were both in a Planet Fitness? Because the color scheme is so ungodly recognizable.

#3: the lunk alarm.

It’s an admonishing alarm they sound when anyone slams down weights or does anything overly grunty and gym bro-ish. It’s nice in theory, but you know who slams iron the most? The girl who can’t open her peanut butter jar and lacks the ability to control any weight in the double digits.

The one who’s wondering if ‘slams iron' is even a phrase.

Fortunately, so far, I’ve been unpunished. I’ve decided there must be a formula: they hear a weight slam, look up, and if you look like you’d struggle with the office door against a winter breeze, you’re free to go.

So this I can overlook. But it brings me to…

#4: So. Many. RULES.

I have friends from Europe who often complain about hiking in the US because of how many trail signs there are, telling you what to do. To that I say, you have yet to travel to the Planet of Fitness.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of signs in the gym:

1. don’t use your phone in the locker room
2. don’t take phone calls while working out
3. don’t slam weights
4. don’t leave weights here
5. don’t put weights there
6. don’t stand weights in a precarious position on this one particular corner
7. don’t breathe, you inconsiderate animal
8. you belong

Which brings me to perhaps the most important point…

#5: May be a cult?

Their slogan is The Judgement Free Zone®. And it’s plastered everywhere. Frankly, I’m not sure I agree with the strategy. If you pick the treadmill right next to me when ten are open, you need to be judged. If you wear jeans to the gym on leg day, you need to be judged. It’s for your own good.

And between the signs and the phrases and the telling me what I can and can’t say, my culty senses are tingling. Or maybe that’s just my triceps.

Ok to round us out, I’ll throw in a redeemable quality.

At around fifteen bucks, I consider it a transactional relationship. You give me your ample pounds of iron with which to slam, and I give you the satisfaction of thinking you’ve evangelized another.

Also, I do enjoy regularly sitting down to a machine, ready to bring the weight down to peanut butter poundage, only to find it’s already there. It’s like, yes!! I’m among my people!!! I always wanted to BELONG.

Damn it. They’re good.

🐱
Emma

A fun extra tidbit:

If you’re into analyzing the cultiness of everyday things like so, might I recommend the Sounds Like a Cult pod? I might. I will. I am.