[JerryLBell]

My wife and I had been members of Lifetime Fitness in North Carolina before moving here. This is a chain of gigantic gyms that are open 24x7 with hundreds of pieces of equipment, multiple fitness rooms, climbing walls, racquetball courts, pools, etc., etc. Coming here was a bit of a shock. The workout facilities at some of the regional rec centers are basic at best. A dozen or so pieces of equipment (treadmills, stationary bikes, elliptical trainers, etc.) with no classes and with fairly limited hours. We glanced at the Anytime Fitness on State Road 44 and kept on going. Unless it pulls some kind of Doctor Who magic and is bigger on the inside than the outside, it is a small gym. We ended up joining MVP (they only have two locations, one in Brownwood, one in Spanish Springs) and thought of them as a fraction of what we had been used to despite charging nearly as much. However, once we joined and started taking some of the classes, we found we really liked the gym. The only downside to them is that they can get really crowded. When the snowbirds are in town and January comes around with everybody making a New Years resolution to get fit, it gets hard to even find parking near them. A couple of years ago, United Healthcare (an extremely popular health insurance provider here due to their tight relationship with the Villages health system) started including memberships with many of their plans. Whoopee! Free gym membership! The crowd situation got even worse. We gave up going for January and February last year as we just couldn't get in. Then COVID hit and they closed for a while. When they opened, they did so at reduced capacity, particularly with classes. I think they're doing as good a job as anybody could possibly do, but you now have to get reservations 24 hours before classes open or you cannot attend them. That can be tricky as some classes fill to capacity very, very quickly. As more of us get our vaccinations and we approach herd immunity, they will probably open back up to full capacity and we'll get back to normal, which means busy-to-extremely-busy in the winter and pretty available during the summer. I do wish they would open up a few more locations to handle the explosive growth in The Villages to the south of State Road 44 though I haven't heard of any plans to do so.

Keep in mind that the clientele of any gym in The VIllages will be mostly or all Villagers. If you're expecting a Gold's Gym-type experience with VERY muscular and steroid-enhanced young men grunting while lifting massive weights to impress themselves and others, you will be disappointed. What you get are a bunch of retirees working hard not to get massively fit but instead to just slow down our inevitable declines. And you won't get a lot of negative judgement if you are in less-than-optimal condition yourself.