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When Greg wanted to get back into shape last summer, he joined his local LA Fitness near his home north of Dallas. As he signed up, the 54-year-old says, he was persuaded by the sales representative to pay an additional $420 a month for eight personal training sessions, but only because he was informed, incorrectly, that these sessions were part of a three-month program that wouldn’t automatically renew. Months later, when Greg did eventually try to pull out after facing unexpected autorenewal charges, he was reassured by his trainer that she would make note of his cancellation in the gym’s system—yet he continued to be charged. When he then complained to front desk staff, he was advised to send a cancellation letter to corporate headquarters in California. But after doing that and still being charged, he was told that the company had never received it. Over six months, Greg sent three letters requesting that his sessions—and eventually his entire membership—be canceled, but was told that none of them were ever received.
Greg’s experience is not unique. Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission has collected evidence of LA Fitness’ informing customers that their cancellation requests have not been received, even when sent by certified mail. This has left people stuck in contracts, like Greg, who has now been charged more than $3,700 in fees for a gym he has been trying to quit since the start of the year.
Greg’s ordeal has left him feeling stressed, deceived, and—quite rightly—pissed off. “It enrages me,” said Greg, who asked that only his first name be used in this story. “It’s so calculated and intentionally Kafkaesque. It really does feel like some sort of B plot to a Catch-22 novel or something.”
Few other industries have more predatory reputations than the commercial fitness world. While most gyms operate ethically and responsibly, there are ample stories about shady behavior, hidden fees, and labyrinthine contracts that are difficult to break. This summer, federal regulators were blocked by the courts from implementing sweeping national changes that would have made it easier for customers to escape unfair or deceptive memberships. This has left people who are fighting to break free from gyms suffering enormous stress and, in some cases, financial calamity.
“I was really bummed out,” said Christa Prater, a 34-year-old in Los Angeles, who had only just begun rebuilding her credit when she was suddenly confronted with hundreds of dollars in charges earlier this year from a local boxing center that she had tried to quit, based on terms and rates she said were not in her contract. “My budget was tight,” she said. “There was no wiggle room, and so to get hit with these extra costs was just like, Oh, my God. It set me all the way back. It really broke my heart.”
Complaints about gyms are on the rise, according to the Better Business Bureau. About 4,500 have been made by aggrieved gymgoers so far this year—a 4 percent increase from last year, Melanie McGovern, the consumer watchdog’s director of public relations, told Slate. Complaints most commonly come from individuals in Florida and California, she added.
It was in California that Jon Aguirre, a 40-year-old electrician in L.A., became embroiled in a dispute with another local boxing gym. Aguirre and his wife had agreed to an eight-week course, but the gym owner eventually took him to small-claims court, seeking more than $1,200 for a six-month program that, Aguirre said, he had only ever agreed to discuss the possibility of signing up for. “I just feel stressed out,” said Aguirre, who is so disillusioned after losing in court that he works out only at home. “This is too much BS to try to get into shape somewhere and someone’s trying to rip you off and be shady. I ain’t got time for this shit.”
“I left believing that I could cancel at any time,” one aggrieved gym customer said. “I was not advised at all about how difficult and almost impossible canceling during the first year would be.”
This rising number of grievances can be partly explained by the increase in Americans joining fitness centers. The Health & Fitness Association trade group estimates that almost 1 in 4 Americans is now a member of such a facility, an all-time high. More than 430,000 people also currently work in the fitness sector, which is responsible for $22.4 billion in economic activity across more than 55,000 health clubs. But the boom in competition can also mean additional financial pressure to generate profit by any means possible. “Depending on who you’re working for, that pressure is coming down,” said Jim Thomas, a management consultant with more than three decades of experience in the fitness industry. “It’ll cause you to do some things you probably shouldn’t do, like unethical salespeople not wanting to let people cancel or having to get a sale no matter what.”
Across the country, consumer complaints about gyms have evidently become so common that many state attorneys general issue guidance to residents on how to avoid bad ones. Still, there are many tales of fitness centers behaving badly over the past decade. In D.C., one gym continued for months in 2020 to charge at least 50 customers who had received emails confirming their cancellation requests. In Georgia, officials said some gyms were committing “elder abuse” by not disclosing to older adults that they were signing up for memberships that were costlier than basic ones. In Massachusetts, a fitness company purchased more than 3,100 memberships from a gym that had gone bankrupt without seeking those customers’ written consent. And in Michigan, a gym signed members up for a women-only club despite ongoing eviction proceedings, instead sending customers to a smaller hotel gym, where they had to share limited equipment and a pool with male and female hotel patrons.
Just this year, New York State Attorney General Letitia James reached settlements with two separate fitness companies, including the owner of Equinox and SoulCycle, which had each made canceling difficult in violation of a new state law designed to protect gymgoers. James’ investigation into Equinox, which resulted in penalties of $600,000, found that the Equinox sales-training materials didn’t instruct staff to affirmatively inform new customers that they were committing themselves to a 12-month contract. As such, many signed up for what they wrongly assumed were monthly memberships. “When I left Equinox the day I took the tour, I left believing that I could cancel at any time,” one aggrieved customer said. “I was not advised at all about how difficult and almost impossible canceling during the first year would be.”
Former and current gym employees have occasionally shared some of the techniques they’ve been urged to use to sign up or retain clients. Sports podcaster Katie Nolan confessed to listeners in 2023 that when she worked at a gym, she was trained to try at least seven times to persuade customers not to cancel memberships. “It got to the point where, for people like me, you would look for anything that sounded even kind of like a no,” Nolan said. “I had people get to the point where they’d say, ‘Is there anything I can say to get out of this office?’ And I’d be like, ‘That helps! That’s six.’ ”
Daniel Cabral, a 28-year-old comedian in Los Angeles, told Slate that when he worked at a small gym before COVID-19, he would often struggle with feelings of guilt about misleading customers. A person who had come in because they were enticed by a sign outside advertising a $0 enrollment fee might leave only after Cabral found a stealthy way to let them know they were actually about to pay their first month’s dues, their last month’s dues, an annual fee, “plus some other random thing that we just tack on right at the end of our little meeting,” he said. “It always felt very odd—like I was lying to them. And I had to save it right to the end.”
Cabral said he felt particularly skeezy signing up new members for various promotions. For someone just starting to work out, he said, shelling out $50 for 30-minute personal training sessions was largely useless because it was such a short program. “A lot of these people, it’s their first time in the gym, and it just didn’t feel right to me,” Cabral said. He didn’t last long working there because of his discomfort in the role. “I definitely had the lowest sales.”
For Deana, a 53-year-old in Phoenix who also asked to be referred to by just her first name, her experiences with personal training sessions also became a personal nightmare after she was deceived by a national chain into signing two separate contracts after agreeing to sign only one, she said. When her bank account started getting hit with two different charges each week, she notified gym management. But it took five weeks for the issue to be resolved, and that happened only after she filed a grievance with the office of the Arizona attorney general—although, she said, she’s still waiting for the extra charges to be refunded. “I feel silly because I didn’t ask a lot of questions, and I trusted that what they were doing was on the up-and-up,” Deana said. “I was definitely scammed.”
Last year, after 18 months and 16,000 submissions of public feedback, the FTC formally announced its final click-to-cancel rule, which is designed to make ending a subscription or membership as simple as it was to sign up for it. The rule was necessary, the agency said, because of a steady increase in the amount of consumer complaints related to recurring subscription practices; that number jumped from 42 a day in 2021 to 70 a day in 2024. These guidelines, in addition to mandating that sellers provide a simple mechanism for customers to immediately cancel memberships, would force retailers to honestly, clearly, and conspicuously provide all essential information to customers, and obtain their express consent, before billing them. Just days before it was due to go into effect in July, however, the rule was blocked by a federal appeals court on procedural grounds. Under the Trump administration, its fate is now uncertain.
The demise of the FTC rule was celebrated by the Health & Fitness Association industry group because it “imposed a sweeping, one-size-fits-all mandate that ignored the operational realities of fitness businesses.” In addition to lobbying against the federal reforms, the HFA has been battling bills in statehouses across the country. This includes successfully stopping or amending 31 state bills concerning click-to-cancel requirements and autorenewals in 2024, and stopping or amending eight bills that would have forced fitness businesses to disclose the total price of memberships, including any fees and service costs.
A spokesperson for the HFA said the group had been “actively preparing” for the FTC rule before it was vacated but said the industry had already taken “meaningful steps to enhance transparency and accountability.” The vast majority of gyms operate with “clear, consumer-friendly membership options,” the spokesperson added. “While we recognize that isolated incidents can occur, they do not reflect the standards upheld by the vast majority of health club, gym, and studio operators. We support efforts that encourage fairness and empower consumers with clear, accessible information when entering into any membership agreement.”
Efforts to more forcefully regulate the industry continue. Following the court decision blocking the FTC rule, Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana unveiled a federal bill designed to achieve similar ends. In statehouses, work also continues. After the 2024 passage of a New York law protecting gymgoers, representatives in Illinois enacted a law in August against fitness centers promoting so-called lifetime memberships. State Sen. Christopher Belt, the architect of the legislation, told Slate that gyms in Illinois were advertising such promotions, in violation of a state law that capped fitness contracts at one year, but then often automatically renewing them with changes to fees or benefits. “It’s a scam at the very essence of the word scam,” Belt said. “It’s deceptive in their business practice, and it needs to stop.”
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The new law ensures that gymgoers are advised well in advance if their contracts are changing, and it forces gyms to provide copies of a contract to any customer who requests one. Belt said he prioritized passage of the law after speaking to more than 50 constituents who had complained about gym behavior. “There was frustration,” Belt said of the stories he’d heard. “It was a sense of bait and switch. It was a sense of helplessness, because they just didn’t know their rights. They felt they were trapped in the contract.”
The FTC, too, is continuing its regulatory oversight of the fitness space. In August, a month after the click-to-cancel rule was struck down, the agency filed a complaint against the parent company of LA Fitness and other chains, which has more than 600 locations and 3.7 million members across the U.S. The feds accused the company of forcing customers into “unfair and unlawful cancellation processes that are not simple and in fact are difficult, time-consuming, and inadequately disclosed to consumers.” These included authorizing only one employee at each gym location—someone there only during the workday and, even then, frequently unavailable—to handle in-person cancellations, making cancellation forms difficult to access on the website, and requiring customers to provide hard copies of the forms even if they lacked access to a printer.
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But the FTC also found that even if customers attempted to cancel by sending the forms in the mail, like Greg in Texas did, they often said the gym claimed that their letters were never received—even when they were sent, as recommended, by certified post and showed delivery. “The odds are that one was lost, but three?” Greg said of the multiple attempts he has made to cancel via mail. “I don’t see that there’s any way out of it if they’re never going to acknowledge my letter.”
Fitness International, the parent company of LA Fitness, did not respond to requests for comment. (The company has previously said the FTC’s allegations “are without merit.”) However, Greg’s membership was finally canceled on Oct. 3—three days after Slate first contacted Fitness International to inquire about his case. Refunds for his membership and training sessions were finally processed on Oct. 18.
Greg and others interviewed by Slate for this story said their experiences dealing with gyms had been so off-putting they’ve vowed to stay away from such fitness centers going forward. “It was so scummy,” said Prater, the Los Angeles woman who struggled to quit a boxing center. “So, for the time being, I’m content going for a free run outside. No one can charge me $40 a month for that.”
