FitWorks, Rocky River OH

This is some of the most unfriendly staff that I have ever encountered in a gym.
None of the staff is happy to have a job working there!
They should fire the fat guy at the top and start to rebuild with a better attitude and new equipment, or Planet Fitness will run them out of business!

Good selection of workout equipment. They stay on top of most repairs and keep the equipment in fair shape. The place gets overwhelmingly packed between 4-6pm most days. The wifi is terrible and clearly not sufficient to handle the amount of visitors using it. On busy days the wifi will cut out and kick you offline stating that the access point is full. On slow days you might be able to stream a few songs on spotify with long periods of buffering between songs if you're lucky.

Nicest fitworks I’ve been too. The staff is friendly, the place is clean, and everything is always in working order! Love the cardio theater

Fireworks is a large gym with plenty of weights and machines to choose from. It also has multiple rooms for cardio, yoga, hitt workouts and classes. What I don't like about it is the caged in area is usually closed off for classes so any of the weights located in that area are off limits. This gym is usually overcrowded after work so you pretty much have to jump on what you can to get some type a workout. The gym needs better area management.

From the first day i came the staff was great and the couple days i had couple personal trainers that were great and they work every muscle in the killer cage of theirs i call it u will definitely go home sore lol but its worth it they have everything here u need zumba classes yoga its nice and times are very flexible

Just started here last week, but I can tell I'm going to feel at home. Lots of equipment, a cardio room with movies, and trainers available for a reasonable price. Clean too

As a personal trainer myself, this gym flat out sucks. Their equipment is old, far too over-used, and the place altogether lacks the ability to get a decent lift in.

The barbells and poor quality, with the plates being even worse. For anyone trying to serious (and safe) lifting, avoid this place at all costs. I wish I would have had more time to try out my “free trial” week because I wouldn’t have signed up in the first place.

They don’t have bumper plates, so don’t even bother trying to deadlift if you don’t want to re-set your bar after every.single.rep. There are only 3 squat racks, all of which are too small to even squat comfortably in. The staff is so-so as far as being friendly, but I find their personal training staff to only be body-building competitors who strut around the gym intimidating people and pushing their opinions on others.

Overall, gym could have potential if they made some huge changes as far as equipment goes, but they won’t so I suggest not even bother.

Might as well be working out at Planet Fitness, in my opinion.

You think this gym is bad Casey the trainer came from Parma Fitworks which is a horror show with the Transgender manager Chas and the monster trainer that looks like he is on roids Mike.all Fit works should be shut down.

Spectacular staff and management. I've been a member for over 2 years and I'll always recommend!

This is my first gym membership after college. Makes me miss the rec on campus. Cleaning machines after use is not enforced.there are only a few spray bottles in the whole gym. At my old rec there was one about ever three machines. I do love the cardio theater though.

Been going for over 10 years, both new and old locations. Excellent staff and employees work hard to make this a great experience. Very clean.

TL;DR
1. Poor layout and inefficient use of space
2. Low quality barbells and squat racks
3. No dedicated deadlift space
4. Neglected broken benches

Don't be fooled by the size and glimmer of the FitWorks facility, because it is a joke. The first issue is that there are far too many machines and treadmills. The treadmills, even at peek hours, do not get close to half filled. As for the machines, there are so many bogus specialty isolation machines that, again, don't get much use and the space they consume could be a great area for floor space for doing things like stretching and ab workouts, which leads me to my next point. The "ab space" is a small little semi-circular slice jutting out of one of the walls. There is plenty of room as long as you're the only one there.

The next knock on it is the terribly low quality barbells, benches, and squat racks. For starters, they have 4 different kinds of barbells, and I don't mean that they have specialty bars such as a buffalo bar or safety squat bar, I mean they have 4 different brands that all seem to be a different weight as well as varying thickness. If you've used a quality barbell such as a Rogue Power Bar, you know the difference as soon as you pick up one of the barbells at FitWorks. The FitWorks barbells are way too thick, and you end up getting a forearm workout when you bench press. Also, some of the barbells don't have a center knurling on them, so good luck if you have to low-bar squat with one of those sliding down your back. Also, the pins on the squat racks are either way too low, or way to high for your body.

The benches are low quality as well because to unrack the barbell, you have to push the barbell up about an inch or so, and as a result you lose all your tightness. Good benches have little j-hooks for the bar to sit on so you only have to lift the bar less than a quarter of an inch to unrack the barbell.

The incline benches have the rack itself way behind your head when laying on the bench. This leads to the unsafe practice of having to lift the barbell up off the pins in an awkward position where your arms are back behind your head supporting a heavy weight.

They do have a decent number of free standing benches for doing dumbbell work, but as I mentioned earlier about the poor use of space, there is a limited area for these benches. Oh, and as of the last two weeks, there are 3 broken free standing benches, none of which have been fixed, so good luck getting a bench during peek hours.

My final point is around deadlift space in that there isn't any dedicated space. But that's not even the half of it. The plates used at this gym are rubber and have indentations on 3 of the sides, so what happens is when you lower the weight, if the plates rotate, now you have one side down in the indentation and the other side maybe is not, forcing you to adjust your setup after each rep. There is also a sign to not use chalk in this gym, Here's a wild idea, provide a small shop vac to clean up any chalk left behind.

This place does have potential, but for someone that primarily lifts and pays attention to detail, it lacks in many areas that I went into detail about above.

My advice to the gym is to invest in some high quality barbells, remove some of the fluff (excessive treadmills and machines) to allocate room for the things that people in this gym use the most like benches and squat racks, dedicate space to deadlifting with some platforms, and purchase some round plates specifically for deadlifting.

Its definitely one of the better gyms in the areas, but most often is too crowded for my liking.