1) went to a big chain gym in a city, Gold's Gym. (the other big chain is Anytime Fitness, i think...not sure if there're others). it was $25 just to have 1 session. i was too tired to bother for that sort of price so left. think the monthly price was about $110 (or more).
2) went to the local gym (a medium-small complex with big swimming pool) to look around. they have about 5 machines (leg press, lat pulldown bar, some weird side push thing, you know the sort). no pullup bar, but the chief trainer showed me that you can rig one out of the lat pulldown if you know the trick. thank god. the heaviest dumbell is 10kg but there's a screw-end dumbell so i can build my own one with the handful of weights there. no bench, no rack.
3) attached to the above complex is a separately-advertised 'personal trainer' program. the guy owns a room next door with his own squat rack/bench/weights. it's about $124 for 16 seventy-minute sessions. you need him to accompany you. standard is 2x a week, i said i might be interested in 3x. that'd be ~4 weeks for ~$100 i guess. but 70 minute sessions is a little short, and having a guy stand there with me all the time? he sorta hinted that maybe i'm better off at the above complex gym instead, and I agree, i don't want to have to be phoning this guy to re-arrange one of my 16 meet-up sessions all the time.
4) went to the other 'local' gym. it's a big complex in an industrial park about 20 mins bike ride away. went on monday at first, but of course gyms aren't open in japan on mondays, duh. also gyms in japan don't tend to open before 10am. like, if you try to visit a gym before 10am, expect it to be closed, afaik. it's like expecting to be able to buy size 12 shoes or an XL sized jacket (japan XL, not american XL) within an entire town. expect to simply not find any, unless you're paying mid-high range prices.
anyway, i went back there today because it's not a monday. forgot my gym shoes but they had rental ones, thank god. i don't think 'training in your socks' is a thing in japan, afaik they will just say 'no.' gym just isn't really a thing there, so anything out of the ordinary is definitely not going to be permitted.
the girls got the chief guy to come out to me. he showed me that you pay for membership via a vending machine at the door. you put in money and get a ticket, take the ticket back to the girls, pay for rental shoes, take your shoes to the shoes locker, give the key back to the girls, who give you another locker key, go to the changing rooms where you put your other stuff in a locker, then he led me through to the gym part of the complex. there were, i think, 3 machines, and 5 treadmills, and a mat. that was it. i really expected a bench and rack there, it's a huge complex in an industrial park, called a fitness park, and the other local gym woman seemed pretty sure it had more facilities than them. there were zero free weights.
the man with me then spend about 5 minutes trying to explain something to me, i couldn't understand at first. turns out that he was trying to explain that the rule of the gym is that you need to be able to read japanese so you can read the safety instructions on the side of the 3 little machines. i'm literally talking a push machine, a lat pulldown, and something else i didn't even bother to look what it was. finally i understood that he was trying to ask if i had a japanese friend who could come and read the instructions on the side of the machines for me. it was so laughable. he then led me back to the locker to get my stuff, trade the key, get my shoes, get a refund for my ticket and for the shoe rental, and off i went back home.
that is my experience with japanese gyms so far. it's kinda sad. the kids are all very sporty (they're forced to all do 1 sporting club after school every single day, at my school), but working people do not gym it seems, or maybe some of them run. the working hours in japan are said to be really retarded (like finish at 7pm), and afterwards - i have been told - cannot confirm - the culture is to go to a bar/restaurant after work every single day with friends or coworkers, then just go home late. i don't know to what extent that is the case, but i'll find out eventually. maybe going to my new gym (when i can get some money out to sub to it) will show me what sort of people go there after work
I wanted to go for a single workout when I was in Tokyo, in most gyms single entry was too expensive/not available, but I ended up finding something decent. The 4ish places I got to see all seemed very reasonably equipped. So you might just have bad luck.
Just find out where this guy trains and fulfill your dreams of training in a proper gym with competent athletes.
They gym you describe isn't a gym in my opinion. It is a "fitness club". The business model of those places is to sell as many memberships to as many uncommitted people as possible. Most people go to those gyms just to keep their bodies somewhat healthy after sitting at a desk for 8 hours (or 16 hours if Japanese stereotypes are true.)
^.^ the problem is if you don't live in tokyo then you probably just won't have a gym near you, they just don't do it here. welp i'm going to go see if my money transferred and if so go try out my 'fitness club' :D the fact that it's only 5 minutes away from my house is such a big bonus that I don't really care lol, altho deadlift is one of my fav exercises and i was doing so well with it lately : ( : ( : (
The girl I am dating right now is from japan and she says that gyms aren't popular compared to the US. Japanese people tend to stay slim due to their diets and most people work so many hours that the don't really have much time for fitness.
yea that's exactly it. (altho the school lunches at my school are fuckin beyond enormous lol)
japanese portions for everything are...well....japanese-sized
hotdog buns? small, and 4 in a pack
bottles of soda? it's hard (even impossible) to find a bottle of coca cola larger than 1.5 litres (let alone of any other drink)
frozen food? frozen veg comes in packs of like 250g max. forget about buying 1kg of frozen anything at all. (250g frozen veg is same price as 1kg frozen veg in the rest of the world, so it's expensive as hell too - but fresh veg can be cheap if you're in a lucky area)
you can forget about 1kg packs of frozen fries, or burgers, or chicken nuggets, or whatever. stuff like that does not exist. (you can get like 250g packs of some japanese varients of fried food, but they definitely don't seem to be popular)
1 litre tubs of ice cream? not on your nelly. (ice creams and deserts are most often sold in singles here - they're pretty good tho)
crisps (potato chips) are really the only thing i've found that matches the western world in quantity. (and rice).
biscuits, chocolate snacks, etc, are almost always individually wrapped, or like 3 biscuits wrapped in 1 plastic packet. people don't just munch on a whole pack of biscuits here, almost everything is sold in mini-sized portions.
there ARE lots of INSANELY unhealthy crisp-like snacks, but they're all disgusting - actually almost all japanese sweets & snacks are absolutely horrendous-tasting (apart from the ice creams). for example, jams (in cakes etc) is often replaced by some bean paste stuff (yeah it's not great). all the exotic-flavored snacks they have here (like green-tea flavored, avacado-flavored, and so on) honestly taste completely revolting, i was actually shocked that they're being sold (and they completely populate the shelves...).
basically everything is mini-sized or scant in some way, or in the case of the majority of snacks it tastes horrific. aside from that, the fact that i think they use chopsticks for everything means that food really does take 4x longer to get down, and i'm sure that has an affect on how much you eat too. i've witnessed a class of 30 children slowly picking up their donut with their chopsticks, rather than munching it down with their fingers. yes, it's as weird as it sounds
stuff like coleslaw and other mini-salad products seem to be extremely japanese-sized (like 100g or whatever for it at a full price - not even worth buying lol).
as for bentos (medium-sized pre-cooked meals of sushi or fried food with rice wraps), they are sold in quantitiy in every cornershop and supermarket, but they are a little bit pricey, and again they are japanese-sized, so a big westerner would just prefer to cook his own stuff probably than spend $4.50 on a medium portioned bento
(bentos: )
* i do kinda disagree about the 'they dont have time for fitness thing' rly tho. i think if fitness is a thing in your culture/community then you'll find an hour for it every day. at one job i'd finish at 6pm, gym, get home at around 8pm. because fitness was an important thing to me. i know a lot of americans go running at 7am before work or whatever, and i saw a number of japanese running at 9pm by the lake. i think a fair number of american businesses (like office-oriented businesses) have in-house gym facilities, so the employees can work out during lunch break. if strength and/or fitness is important to you then you always have time for it nomatter what, it comes before TV and so on. it just doesn't seem to be important to japanese, which is a bit strange considering how much they make their children do it !!!
EPT
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