Tips To Avoid A Crowded Gym

Crowded Gyms Suck!

This post is a few weeks late as the 1st of January always brings a herd of new gym goers, but the content fits none-the-less. I hate crowded gyms. Its among the worst experiences in fitness. If you goto the gym to socialize and prefer this crowded time, you can ignore this post. If you are a normal person that is fine with some organic gym chit-chat, but are primarily there to get shit done, keep on reading.

Afternoon

If you want to avoid peak crowds, your first strategy is to avoid peak times at all costs. If your job allows flexibility, go in the afternoon. The gym is a ghost-town around 2pm. It is just awesome! But this isn’t feasible for nearly everyone.

Night Time

Go at night. Before I built out my Garage gym, I would typically go as late as I could factoring in how late the gym was open. How much time I would have to get a 50 minute workout in while having enough time to eat another meal after the workout. AND be able to wind down enough to get decent sleep. This is the biggest problem with the late night approach, winding down and getting solid sleep. I would go the second the gym would begin to wind down from the after work crowd. For most gyms this starts around 6:30 pm. But in bigger cities, the slow down time might never come, or not until closer to 8pm.

Morning

This is the inverse of night time gym attendance. You need to time it out so you have enough time to get decent sleep, get to and from the gym, and still get ready for work. Even if your gym is fairly busy in the morning, don’t worry about it. Most AM gym goers are there for Cardio or a Class. The weights section will be pretty much all yours outside of a handful of people.

Time it with Popular Classes

This can be an underrated approach and you can only learn this over time for your specific gym. Some gyms have extremely popular classes where it will look like the gym is CRAZY busy from its parking lot, or from the flow of people in and out, but it could be all due to extremely popular classes going on. For some gyms this can even be during or on the fringes of peak hours.

Times To Avoid As Much As Possible

4:30-6:00pm. I have never seen a decent gym slow at these times. For obvious reasons. People get off work, and goto the gym before heading home.

7:30-9am. The morning rush is very dependent on your area. And some busy morning gyms are a bit later or earlier depending on the crowd. Attempting to guage the morning crowd will take some trial and error.

Peak Hour Fringes

This relates to both the night time and morning time approach but with a small twist. If your life simply won’t allow for you completely avoid peak times, attempt to be smart about when you go during peak. For instance, in the mornings if you get there before the morning peak, you should be able to use the most popular equipment early in your workout, and when the gym gets busy you can use equipment that is almost alwasy available, like the Cable machines. Same things goes for at night but in reverse. Time out your trip to get there towards the end of the peak. Then start your workout with the less popular equipment while every bench or squat rack is used up, and while the people begin to file out you can use the in demand equipment.

  1. Try Mid Afternoon

  2. Night Time

  3. Morning

  4. Time it with Classes

  5. Hit Peak Hour Fringes

Not Getting Preferred Equipment Sucks!

As I stated above, you need to time it as much as possible so you can get on your preferred equipment. If you absolutely cannot avoid peak hours, start with my Fringe Hours approach. Try to have your time at the gym overlap at the beginning or end of peak hours, and adjust your workouts accordingly.

Another approach is how you plan to setup your week’s worth of exercises in an intelligent manner. The most obvious change here is to NEVER bench on Mondays. Monday is called national bench day for a reason. Nearly everybody who benches, benches on Monday. It’s extremely difficult to get a bench on Mondays. Another strategy related to benching is to use the Incline Bench. It’s often empty, which is a shame because Incline Benching is better for you anyways.

You would be surprised how easy it is for you to get a bench on Thursday instead of Monday. And if it is possible to fit into your lifestyle, avoid the gym on Mondays altogether. Sneak in a day on the weekend instead. This breaks one of the commandments of Never Miss A Monday, but that is a stupid rule. You get 7 days in a week. If you plan on going to the gym 4 days a week, there is nothing that is going to happen to you, or affect your gains if you go Tuesday, WEdnesday, Friday and Saturday. Also the gym is almost always empty on the weekends, it’s awesome. For years I use to goto the gym on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Years…

In general, be smart about it. For wheelers, there is a lot of equipment that is essentially useless for us at the gym. This puts more popular equipment higher up our priority list. Understand your gym dynamics. Mix up the order of your workout. Mix up the order of your workouts for the week. Go early. Go late. Time your gym time with the fringes of peak hours. Or during an ultra popular class.

Be smart about when you go, what you can do when you get there and in what order you can do things for the week that works best for your gym and lifestyle.