I've belonged to maybe fifteen gyms in my life. Big commercial boxes with fluorescent lighting and cable news on every screen. Boutique studios where you pay forty dollars to have someone yell at you for forty-five minutes. A CrossFit gym in a strip mall that smelled like rubber and ambition. A hotel gym in Miami with a view of Biscayne Bay and machines that nobody touched.
The one I go to now is on a side street in El Segundo. It's not fancy. The dumbbells go up to 120. There's a pull-up bar that's slightly bent. The guy who owns it is usually there in the morning, and he'll nod at you when you walk in, but he's not going to small-talk you to death. There's no front desk person trying to sell you a smoothie.
I drive past two closer gyms to get there.
This is the thing nobody talks about when they talk about fitness. Everyone wants to discuss programming and progressive overload and whether you should be doing push-pull-legs or upper-lower splits. And sure, that stuff matters if you're competing. But for the rest of us — people who just want to feel good and not hate the process — the single most important variable is whether you actually want to walk through the door.
The wrong gym is a daily negotiation
I spent two years at a gym in West LA that had everything. Olympic platforms, a sauna, a cold plunge before cold plunges were a thing. It was objectively a great facility. I went maybe three times a week, and every session started with a fifteen-minute negotiation in my head about whether I really needed to go today.
The lighting was institutional. The music was bad. The layout was designed so you had to walk through the cardio section to get to the weights, which meant navigating a gauntlet of treadmills and ellipticals and people watching their phones. Every time I walked in, I felt like I was entering a hospital ward for people who felt guilty about what they ate.
The equipment was excellent. The experience was miserable.
What actually makes you show up
When I found the place in El Segundo, I started going six days a week. Not because I suddenly became more disciplined. Because I wanted to be there.
The ceilings are high. The garage doors open onto the street, so you get a cross-breeze and natural light. There's no TV. The music is whatever the owner feels like playing that day — sometimes it's hip-hop, sometimes it's the Stones, once it was Fleetwood Mac for two hours straight. Nobody complained.
The people are serious but not performative. There's a guy in his sixties who deadlifts more than I ever will. There are a couple of firefighters from the station down the street. There's a woman who shows up at 5:30 AM every single day and does her thing in the corner without talking to anyone. Nobody's filming content. Nobody's wearing a weight belt to do bicep curls.
It's a room full of people who are there because they want to be there. And that energy is contagious in a way that no motivational poster or personal training package can replicate.
The space is the program
I think we underestimate how much our physical environment determines our behavior. We accept this in every other area of life. You wouldn't try to write a novel in a nightclub. You wouldn't try to have a serious conversation at a concert. But when it comes to exercise, we act like the space is irrelevant — as if what matters is only the movements you perform and the load you put on the bar.
The space is the program. A gym with natural light makes you feel awake. A gym with fresh air makes you breathe better. A gym where the owner actually trains there makes you feel like you're in someone's house, not a franchise. A gym where people leave their phones in their bags changes the tempo of the entire room.
I've seen people transform their consistency just by switching gyms. Not switching programs. Not hiring a coach. Not buying new supplements. Just finding a place that doesn't feel like a chore to enter.
What to look for
If I were helping someone find a gym, I wouldn't ask about equipment. I'd ask: What does it smell like when you walk in? Is there natural light? Do the people who work out there look like they enjoy it, or do they look like they're serving a sentence? Can you hear yourself think? Is the owner ever around?
The best gyms I've been to all share a few things. They're slightly hard to find. They don't advertise much. They don't have a "transformation challenge" running every January. The people who go there found it through someone they know, and they stay for years.
That's not snobbery. It's just what happens when a place is built for people who actually want to train, rather than for people who want to feel like they're the kind of person who trains. There's a difference, and you can feel it the moment you walk in.
The habit is the easy part
Everyone thinks the hard part of fitness is building the habit. It's not. The hard part is finding a place where the habit builds itself. Where you don't need discipline because you're not fighting the environment. Where showing up feels like the natural thing to do, not the effortful thing.
I spent years thinking I needed more willpower. What I needed was a better room.
If you're struggling to be consistent, before you overhaul your program or buy a new app or hire a coach, try this: go somewhere else. Find the gym that makes you want to be there. Everything else follows.