Melinda Silverman and Barbara Ludman
Change is pain or it is if you’re a Virgin Active member trying to navigate around your newly renovated gym.
Members felt the burn last year when the new owner cancelled contracts and increased the fees; but despite threats of lawsuits and the flight of two-thirds of the members, the group broke even in six months.
Now new people are joining and some defectors are returning but if they’re walking into one of the clubs being Virgin Activated, they’ll never recognise them. Gone is the neighbourhood feel the familiar, ageing machines, the drooping potplants, the little nooks and crannies where you could slap down a mat and work the knots out of your hamstrings. They’ve been replaced by glitz and glamour, shiny metallic stair treads, neon signs and colourful “accent walls”.
According to Carlette Scholtz of VHS Architects in Pretoria, the brief was to give the place a “totally new look”, to signal the change from the old Health & Racquet to the new Virgin Active. “We used neutral, natural materials white for the structure, granite coloured tiles and very strong colours for the accent walls. The ‘visual lifestyles’ are very big prints on vinyl and they add to the visual impact of the club.”
These “visual lifestyles” one actually advertises Tag Heuer watches consist of gorgeous people shouting with joy as they go about spinning or running or swimming, in sharp contrast to the average club member hot, sweaty, slightly overweight and feeling the pain.
Old Eds, the Houghton flagship of the group, has always had a communal atmosphere but things have changed. For communal, see the “cardio area” just past the entrance a huge block of new imported treadmills, stationary and recumbent bicycles, cross-trainers and step machines where the weights used to be. The machines are set out in rows 10 to 12 machines across, 10 rows deep, in a two-sided room of their own, battery-hen style. The sight of dozens of people engaged simultaneously in this fruitless, repetitive activity is enough to put one off gyms forever.
Old Eds general manager Marco de Vries doesn’t see it that way. “By placing the cardio area at the entrance to the club,” he explains, “first-time visitors to the club and the majority of our members would feel less intimidated when entering the facility” which apparently was often the case when the weightlifters were out there in front. Anyway, that’s where Old Eds could easily cluster dedicated plugs, since cardio equipment is electrically powered unlike, for example, machines on the circuit and weights. So weights swopped places with stationary bikes.
Club managers decided on the placement of the machines and at Old Eds, which hasn’t an enormous amount of space, many more new machines were crammed in, to the delight of people tired of waiting in line for a treadmill.
However, cardio machines are mind-numbingly boring. So under the old system, treadmills overlooked the pool, and one row of bicycles looked out at the circuits so the terminally bored could watch other members torturing themselves in different ways.
Under the new system, stationary bikers can look at the bums of other stationery bikers which may or may not be a rewarding sight, depending on your tastes or the quality of the bums. Machines in the cardio section, like most machines throughout the gym, have been placed with their backs to the windows. But there’s a row of television sets up top and you can plug your own earphones into the console attached to each machine just like those plug earphones you get on airplanes. It could of course bring back happy memories of flying lower class on Virgin Airlines.
There’s a new studio for spinning called V-cycling (in pursuit of branding) and a variety of machines on the circuit some exactly like the old ones, but new and locally made, and some imported free-motion machines, new to South Africa. There aren’t enough mirrors in the weight room on one wall instead there’s a huge “lifestyle” poster of a guy in a bicycle race but De Vries assures us more mirrors will go up in phase two.
The Randburg club with the same number of machines, but fewer members and more floor space has gone about it rather differently. Although general manager Iona Swanepoel assures “all cardio is more or less in the same area”, some of it overlooks the pool, some faces the screen in the juice bar. “The big thing for me is the placing of the equipment, which now gives the members choice. Some people feel a bit claustrophobic where there’s a lot of equipment,” she says. “And it’s nice to have the opportunity to run and look over the pool.
“You’ve got to look at the logistics. You can’t have a treadmill behind a stepping machine because the person on the treadmill wouldn’t be able to view the television.”
“For me,” she says, “it’s about making the member most comfortable when they’re in for training. It’s the experience that they have within the facility that’s critical.”
Not all change is pain it can also be positively invigorating. Take for example the two new “sensation showers” installed in the changerooms at Old Eds. Scholtz says each shower has three different shower heads and three different mixers with endless experimental opportunies. Some, as they say, like it hot; the question is how and where.
In both clubs, there are plenty of people around in black lycra shorts and T-shirts with the Virgin Active logo a requirement now for all employees. In case one forgets, dazzled by all the neon and inspirational posters, whom to thank (or blame) for it all.