My wife and I checked out the few rec centers with workout facilities and found them pretty... modest. Our view is spoiled by the fact that we had been members of Lifetime Fitness in the town we were retiring from and the gyms in that chain are amazing. They're open 24/7, have large indoor pools, several hundred workout stations, rock climbing walls, basketball courts, etc. Everything here looked pretty boring and small in comparison. We ended up at MVP and have been more pleased with it than we thought we would be. They have a pretty good selection of equipment and all but their main thing is their exercise classes. They have a LOT of them and we've found a few that have really helped us. The one down side is that there are only two locations and they can get fairly crowded in the low season and insanely crowded in the high season. They really need to build additional locations, especially as the southern end of The Villages continues to grow like crazy. By the way, if you move here and are on Medicare and decide to go with one of the United Healthcare insurance packages to supplement it, the membership to MVP is included. While that will soon be great for me (I turn 65 and get on Medicare in a few months), it really added to the congestion at the gym when this first got started about 18 months ago.
There are other gyms available outside of The Villages. There is a small gym on 44 that is part of the Silver Sneakers program and should be free or inexpensive for most of us living here. There are several towards Leesburg as well.
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