YMCA

To me, gym is always the best place to hang out after work and during weekends especially for a guy like me with the status of alone but not available.

I was a gym member in Fitness First Menara Maxis KL for nearly 3 years before I quit due to relocation to London. Throughout a year living in the city life has changed much - lots of pressure from work, having to cook daily for a lazy person like me, lots of crisp and junk food. I had lost 7kg and looks so unhealthy. A year ago I was 70kg and I was fit!

I had been looking a gym desperately and visited few gyms including Fitness First, LA Fitness and some small timer but none made me feel right to join. Nearly join the 'platinum' Fitness First club at St Paul as I can sign up with corporate rate of GBP41 per month. I was pissed because being misled that I can visit all FF clubs in the UK but later found out I can't go to 2 'black label' clubs which are bigger and better and cost GBP55 per month. In fact most of the 'gold' or 'platinum' clubs are much smaller and extremely packed during peak hours. LA Fitness is about the same at GBP40+ per month.

After much consideration I finally decided to join the Central YMCA Club located at Tottenham Court Road. It's the very first YMCA in the world established in 1844. Although it looks a bit old but it has everything that I need. At GBP47 I joined the London Fitness Network package which allow me to go to some other local gyms in case I'm lazy to visit the main club.

It's a 4 storey basement building:

• Ground floor - reception area
• Basement 1 - swimming pool, studio, stretch area, lounge with live sports! Cafe, there's even a photography club room but I'm not sure whether it's active or not!
• Basement 2 - weight machines, stretch area
• Basement 3 - a huge multi purpose sports hall, a rock climbing wall, a RPM (cycling studio), a squash court, sunbeds area (need to pay extra though), cardio machines, weight machines, free weight area, changing room and sauna (no steam room which I prefer more though)

At last the gym glove that I brought to UK a year ago is useful again!

There are a lot of interesting classes included in the membership like body pump, abs class, RPM, yoga, capoeira, canoeing in the pool! badminton, volleyball, basketball! ping pong, trampoline etc.

I love playing basketball, it's the best sports to sweat a bit and not as boring as doing the cardio machines. Hope to make a few friends and can play a bit more. I would like to try rock climbing as well but so far I haven't seen people doing it there. There's a volleyball class on Wednesday evening and the training looks very professional. Anyway I think volleyball is a very gay / ah kua friendly sports if you watched the Thai movie Iron Ladies before. I saw a black ah kua who played exactly like those in the movie!


There's a very interesting Trampoline class on Tuesday evening. However I don't think I'm able to join the class at the moment as when I first joined, I picked up a skipping rope (the last time I did that I think was like 15 years ago!) and I was a bit shocked when I felt dizzy just after few minutes jumping. I don't wanna collapsed half way doing it and I'm glad that I didn't continuing to hesitate longer before joining the gym.



Trampoline YMCA from Eugene Goh and Vimeo.

The only part which I don't quite like about the gym is the shower as there are only 2 dividing partition between the showers and no doors! Being an Asian I'm extremely uncomfortable with it initially seeing everyone walking around exposing their private parts and to my horror, lots of gays! It reminds me of the gay fella who approached me in FF KL before sending me 'I miss you' texts. Anyway slowly I'm getting used to it as I start realising that my size is actually quite ok comparing to the kwai lou's.

I saw an old gay who looks 80% like Paul McCartney of Beatles and I almost laughed out when I saw him took off his shirt in front of me in the changing room. He got nipple piercing on both of his sagging tits. Not only that, he has got the funniest body tattoo I had ever seen in my life - 2 flowers surrounding his 2 nipples.

After few weeks joining the gym I start to appreciate and like the gym more. Although now I can only lift half of the weights which I managed to do last time but I feel I'm picking up the pace and is getting fit again. I had gained a kg to 63kg after 3 weeks and I'm closely monitoring the progress and let's see the result after 3 months.