For the month of March, I’m spending more of my time in Robinson’s Galleria instead of SM Megamall, thanks to the 1-month gift certificate my sister got from Gold’s Gym where she’s enrolled. I’ve been going to the gym for over a year now and during the past year, most of it has been spent at Excel Fitness Center at the fifth floor in Megamall.

So how was my time in Gold’s so far? It’s been great! I’ve gone there twice already during the past week and I must say that the experience was quite refreshing. I love the locker room, in particular. It’s spacious, quite clean, has a sauna and steam bath, and the shower stalls are very excellent.

The first visit, I spent my time feeling my way around. I was used to the equipment (Cybex) over at Excel and so I spent a considerable amount of time surveying the machines over at Gold’s (Nautilus) and looking for the ones to include in my 2-day split routine.

The leg curl machine was the one I had a hard time looking for. The ones over in Excel and in a local gym I’ve tried here in Las Piñas are the lying type. So I was expecting something similar in Gold’s and it took me several minutes before I spotted a person using the seated leg curl machine.

Another thing that confounded me were the slightly more complicated machine adjustment machanisms. I really must’ve looked like a newbie since I had trouble adjusting the seats and various other adjustables.

Apart from the troublesome machine acclimatization, I found them to be quite a joy to use. I liked the incremental weight machines since the weights were all clearly labelled, with both pound and kilogram measurements. In addition, for the machines where the weights are in 15-lbs increments, you can add either an additional 5 or 10 pounds with a simple insertion of a pin. In Excel there is only one machine (the lying leg curl) that has this amount of control and the implementation is not as slick as those of the Nautilus machines.

One thing I had trouble was that I had no way of comparing the weights I was pulling and pushing between the similar machines in Excel and Gold’s. For one thing, only a few machines in Excel were clearly labelled. For most of them, you can only see “2,” “4,” “6” and so on on every other weight. And whether the “2” means 20 pounds or something else is left as an exercise to the exerciser.

So I didn’t know until I went to Gold’s that I was already capable of bench pressing (chest press, to be more precise) 85–100 lbs (3 sets of 10 repetitions).

Anyway, I finally got to try the sauna and the steam bath for the first time in my life. Aside from the obvious fact that it’s hot in there, I found it to be very relaxing. I could grow used to the occasional hot treatment.

So far, it’s been a very positive experience for me. I’ll definitely try to go there as often as possible in order to make full use of the gift certificate. Sayang rin kung di mo susulitin diba? I don’t know what happens after the month is over. I will probably go back to Excel, or I may enroll in Gold’s or Fitness First. We’ll see.