Joining a gym - things to know before signing

Do not sign up long term, you may be committed now, but work pressures and family life often get in the way and you can sometimes find yourself paying out a lot of money for nothing. Circumstances change, people move, have accidents or get a new job and find out they cannot commit that time to a gym any more.

Find out before you sign anything what the get out clauses are, I have heard some horror stories where you have to live 25 miles away from the gym but they are large gyms and have them across the country and the people are tied in for life, unless they pay a huge get out fee.

They make their money by actually tying you into a long term contract that they are pretty sure you won't use, so they can sit back and watch the money roll in for doing nothing.

Do not under any circumstances use your credit card or debit card to pay for it, this gives you no control of stopping the payments. Only they can do that, even telling the bank to stop the payments doesn't work and if you try to stop the card it will get transferred over to the new card. The only way to stop these payments is then to cancel the account and do you really want that hassle. If you don't believe me, check out recurring payments in google and you will see what I mean.

Find out what their notice period is, some tie you up for 3 months so you could be paying 3 months for nothing, also find out when you are able to give notice, some gyms only have two weeks of the year where you can give notice before it is automatically renewed and after that you have to wait a year again before you can give notice.

Remember anything you sign is a contract and alas legally binding. Do not take the sales persons word for anything, they will lie to you to get you to sign. If you are unsure, take the contract home and have a look at it, if you don't understand ask them to get someone to explain it in lay terms and have it written out and signed by them with a witness.

If they won't take direct debit or put you on a month by month rolling contract walk away. If you don't feel comfortable signing up for a year then don't. Leave it and find another customer friendly gym.

Any gym worth their salt will allow you to pay when you are using it and stop when you no longer wish to.

If this all sounds a bit extreme, judging by the amount of people who are tied into these contracts for years I'm thinking its not.

Please tell everyone you know about this who may be thinking of joining a gym. Don't get me wrong there are some great reputable gyms out there who believe if you don't pay you are cancelled end of story, which is how it should be.

Also if more and more people refuse to sign these long term contracts then gyms will be forced to offer more user friendly contracts.

So join the battle against these ridiculous contracts and refuse to sign anything that commits you to longer than a month.