Basic-Fit Salles de Sport Paris - Porte de Choisy

To be honest, after my bad experience in Basic Fit in Madrid, I was very biased, but still, I decided to sign up at Basic Fit in Paris and give it a try because it was the closest gym to my home. And I do not regret this decision: it has nothing to do with Basic Fit in Spain: it is by far a better gym. What I love about it is that you can train however you want and how hard you want (whereas in Spain I was limited by the equipment (e.g. 40kg max dumbells in Spain vs 50kg in France) and by the staff (e.g. they interrupt you during your sets), it is a small warehouse-style gym, it has all the equipment you need (what I like that you won?t find in most gyms: a trap deadlift bar, and breaker benches (you can swing the bar while still racked to unrack it easier and more safely). Most of the staff is extremely friendly. There is an excellent atmosphere among the regular members.

However this gym is far from being Fitx in Germany (best chain in Europe), and here are some reasons why:
The maintenance of the equipment is very poor, karabiner goes missing for months (the entire gym currently has only 2 of them, so whether your bring your own or your wait for people to finish using it), you need to go downstairs to the reception every time you need to use the rope (because there is only one for the whole gym, and the staff hide it so it does not get stolen).
Also, the large surface is highly underutilized For the 5000 members that are signed in, there is only one dual adjustable pulley, two lat pulldown pulleys, and one rowing pulley.
The water system is absurd: there is only one dispenser, and only downstairs (the weight section is upstairs), so you need to go downstairs every time you want a refill (which would be fine if you could fill your bottle every time, but you can't choose how much water you want: it automatically fills 300ml, and you need to wait 30 min for the next refill). So you pretty much spend your whole training session going downstairs and upstairs again: it gets really annoying. In addition, you need to pay 5? per month to be able to use this machine and scan your Clubcard for every refill (and wait for the software to load). If this wasn't enough, the screen that you need to touch to select the water flavor often does not work or bugs.

More over, what I don't like about this gym, is that the single day pass costs 8 euros (non-refundable; in FitX you get one free day pass in each different location), and they will make no exception to let you in if you forgot your Club Card.

Last but not least, what I don't like about Basic Fit are the opening times: 8:00am-10:30pm (weekdays), 9:00am-4:00pm (weekends).
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