Xcel Fitness

Been going to this gym for 5 years. They hired some new girls at the front desk recently that aren’t capable to do the most important task they have… Be there on time to open! Waited 45 minutes and no one showed up to open on a Sunday. Reconsidering renewing my membership

I somehow ended up on the mailing list for this joke of a gym. It’s not an automated mailing list where you can hit an unsubscribe button and it’s taken care of. I have exchanged emails with this «gym» for MONTHS and I was led to believe that they would remove me from their mailing list. (I live in Texas. Their facilities are in Canada.) Yet I am STILL subjected to their «please give us money for our services, even though we have truly crappy attention to details.» If they can’t manage to remove me, someone who lives absolutely nowhere near their facilities, in a completely different country, from their mailing list, then why would you want to pay them your hard earned money for what are obviously subpar services?
If they can’t manage to remove me from their email list after multiple requests, can you imagine the nightmare of trying to quit this gym and remove your credit card from their database?

I’ve been a member here for about a year and a half.
I pay $ 15/​month which is a promotion that they offer a couple times a year. It comes with a one-​time $ 100 registration fee and then $ 15/​month for life. Not too shabby. Better than the $ 60/​month I was paying at my last gym.
I’ve seen a lot of negative reviews of this place, and to be honest, I just don’t get where they’re all coming from. Then again, maybe I use the gym a lot differently than these people do.
I’m in and out in about 45 minutes, 3 times a week. I live nearby, so I avoid the change rooms if I can, mostly just to save time, not because I think something is wrong with them. I’d rather walk in, work out and leave rather than dick around getting changed. Even in the winter, the most I’ll do is grab a locker so I can switch shoes and leave my jacket some where. I’ve never had a problem with the locker rooms here in that respect.
Sure I’ve seen a couple things broken here-​and-​there. A machine goes out of service every once in a while. But typically I see it working again pretty quickly
I don’t use a lot of the cardio machines very often, but I’m almost positive they just put new mini-tv’s on about half of their treadmills.
They also just replaced all of their free-​weight plates. They used to have a mix bag of different types of plates, different styles, some hexagonal, some round, etc. Now they’ve replaced everything with a uniform set of rubber covered perfectly round plates.
Yeah it gets hot in there in the summer. It’s a gym. You’re there to sweat anyway, so what does it matter?
My biggest complaints about this place are:
— Some of the equipment is pretty tightly packed in. It can make navigating between it a little treacherous if people are on it. Luckily, the gym is usually pretty dead during the times I use it, so I rarely have that problem.
— They often don’t pick the best stuff to watch on the TV. I mean come on, would it kill you to make sure you’re playing the Jays games when they’re on? To be fair, I’ve never really cared enough to go ask them to change the channel, I doubt they’d be against it.
— I wish they were open a little later on the weekend.
— Twice in all of the times I’ve been there the water fountain was out of order. It would have been nice if they had been giving away free bottles of water to make up for it, but hell, I don’t mind dropping $ 1 for a small bottle to get me through my work-​out. Worse things have happened to me.
If you’re looking for a top of the line health club with all the frills, this is not the place for you. If you’re looking for a place to get in, do work and leave, I couldn’t imagine a better choice.

This is the worst gym I’ve ever been to. Don’t go here. Don’t sign up here. Avoid this place at all costs. When you first walk in, it looks alright. Nothing special, but hey, for $ 30 per month it’s fine, right? Then once you start going you realize it’s most definitely NOT worth $ 30. Why is this a bad gym? Let me count the ways.
1. It’s dirty. Does it ever get cleaned? It’s possible, but I’ve never seen it. Not the bathrooms necessarily, those seem to be cleaned pretty regularly, but the gym floor itself I don’t think is ever cleaned.
2. The staff. They don’t leave the front desk for any reason ever. Not to organize the weights once in a while, not to clean the floor, wipe down machines, replace paper towels, nothing. There is anywhere from 1 – 4 people at the front desk, none of them ever doing anything that I can see. They aren’t very friendly and sometimes are outright rude.
3. If something breaks, it stays broken, for good. When I started there was two stair climbers, one of which had a out of service sign on it. No big deal… except that three months later it still had the sign on it. I asked the guy at the desk when it would be fixed. His reply was «they had to send it away.» So of course I asked «when are they sending it away,» to which he replied that he had no idea. Three months after that it was finally fixed. Then in the mens locker room… There are three showers, three sinks, three urinals and two stalls. At this time one sink is broken, one stall is broken, one urinal is broken, and one shower is broken, some of them for many months. I think there has been only one functioning stall for at least six months.
4. During the flood in toronto area early July, a lot of businesses had problems with water damage, XCel was one of them. They had to tear out the floors, cancel all classes, cut back the hours significantly, close the womens studio, close the boxing studio, remove all the drywall from about four feet on the wall and down. It was a big deal, and of course given the situation I completely understood they needed time to renovate and fix things up. Well over two months later… the only thing that’s been fixed is the drywall. There are still no classes and the gym is still running on reduced hours. The place is still a mess.
So that’s pretty big stuff. But the devil is in the details! Here are some more:
5. Nobody puts their weights away. EVER. That goes for dumbbells, plates, everything. I’ve seen guys do lateral raises with dumbbells, drop the dumbbells after their last set, and simply walk away, leaving them in the middle of the floor.
6. The dumbbell racks are a nightmare. Not only are they not in any sort of order, but weights aren’t even paired together. You spend half your time trying to find matching weights.
7. About half the dumbbells are the older style with small plates actually bolted onto steel handles. No big deal– lots of gyms have them and they work just fine. Except about half of Xcel’s don’t have labels so you are guessing at what the weight actually is. And about half of them have the bolts loose on the end, so you’re kind of always wondering if the plates are going to drop onto your face while you’re doing dumbbell presses.
8. None of the collars fit the bars. Not sure why they are even there.
9. The dumbbells go up to 100… then jump to 120 and that’s it. If you need something in the middle you’re out of luck.
10. Even before the flood it poured through the ceiling every time it rained. There would be buckets all over the place to catch the drips, and usually it didn’t work.
11. There aren’t enough pins for all the weight stacks. So it happens where you want to use a cable exercise and there is a free cable… but you can’t use it because there aren’t enough pins.
12. The inner ring on a lot of the weight plates is rusted. Makes it hard to put them on or take them off.
13. There are two crossover towers where you can do cable crossovers among other things. Yet they have only 3 handles. Makes no sense.
I could talk about what’s wrong with this gym all day. It’s simple though… JUST DO NOT GO HERE.