Since it is the new year gym memberships are exploding despite the pandemic. If you live somewhere that is heavily populated you probably aren't allowed to go to gyms but there will come a time (fingers crossed) that things will change and we will all be allowed to go back uninhibited.
That doesn't mean that you should immediately sign up for a massive many month program at your local gym as a method of attempting to improve your health. In many ways this can actually be the wrong approach. I have known plenty of people that have just thrown their money away on a gym. I'll use a personal example of a smaller gym that had both daily and monthly rates.
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There was a smallish gym that had 5 treadmills, 3 exercise bikes, a couple of ellipticals and a perfectly adequate array of weights in the form of both machines and free weights. Only the most hardcore lifter would find this amount of weights inadequate.
Attending this gym cost a mere $5 a day or it was $80 dollars a month. Most of the people that I knew that were members did the monthly deal and this really started, over time, to not make a great deal of sense to me because none of them went on a daily basis. Let's break this down with some 2nd grade math real quick. In order for the monthly deal to be worthwhile you would have to go to the gym at least 17 times in a month.
I go to the gym 17 times in a month but I don't think that this is the case for a majority of people including my fellow Americans. This would be especially true for the usual Johnny come lately type folks that take part in the mostly bogus and bound to fail new year resolution fitness regimens.
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Let's think about the example I had the other day about the guy on January 2nd that had hired a personal trainer that was pushing the guy WAAAAY too hard. It is now the 9th of January and I have not seen that guy in the gym ever since. I would imagine that he signed up for the monthly membership because it comes with a few introductory lessons from trainers. I wonder if that guy is going to come back at all.
There's another rather funny and a bit tragic story of a friend of mine that was joining me in the gym on a near daily basis after he saw the results I was getting. He paid a daily rate for about two weeks an then decided that he was going to keep this up and got a month's membership that day. He ended up tweaking his leg exercising that day and then never returned .
I think that especially if you are just starting out it is vital that you only go for the daily rate and even if you aren't very quick at the math pull out your calculator and look at the finances behind this. Are you realistically going to go from being someone that never goes to the gym, to being someone that goes more days out of the month than not? I know you THINK you are going to become a gym junkie but we need to face some really harsh realities... you probably aren't.
Also, when I go to a gym on a daily rate, and I realize that this is very specific to me personally, I tend to "get my money's worth" and really stay there for a long time and get a full workout. It is far easier for me to be lazy and take off early if I know that doing so has no financial pitfall.
Furthermore, most gyms have some sort of free trial and if this is the case you should definitely give that a go. They tend to have rather pressure-filled sales pitches but just keep your calm and tell them you'll think it over and then leave. You don't need to sign up the first day. Most gyms wont even advertise that they even have a daily rate but I have only ever been to one gym that this was actually the case.
Just be smart, save yourself some money, and get fit in the end anyway.
I am not a personal trainer nor a dietician. I DO know that I lost 50lbs over the course of a year and have kept it off... maybe you can as well