Lyon Recreation Center

ABSOLUTELY NO BAGS OF ANY KIND ALLOWED IN THE FACILITY! So keep your eye bags, douchebags, and gym bags at home or your precious bags will be confiscated and you will be charged $ 10 to reclaim them. If you plan on bringing lifting gear like belts, wraps, etc. you will probably just have to wear them with your outfit before coming in. Some of the staff is really chill about allowing bags, though (I love you guys).
You can probably guess that a «gym» that enforces a «no bag» policy is going to be complete and utter shit — and you would be absolutely correct! Lyon Rec. Center is the worst university gym I have ever trained in. As soon as you step foot into the facility, you can already feel your gains being sucked from your body.
Half of the barbells are bent and the weights are so old they on the verge of disintegration. There is most of the typical gym equipment on the lower floor: incline and regular benches, lat pulldowns, etc. and 3 power racks. There are two platforms that are beat to hell with ripped matting and cracked wood. Platforms are meant for the sport of weightlifting. Weightlifting has specialized bars. Why have platforms if there are no weightlifting bars??? Well, after sending email to the Lyon Center administration about the shitty equipment and lack of weightlifting bars, they responded saying that the goal of Lyon Center is to serve the student body, not a niche sport. They also stated that they would consider looking into the equipment I suggested in the future. Fair. Months later, I come to the gym and see two new Rogue 2.0 bars and a slew of useless bars that anyone hardly uses. While the Rogue bars were slightly better than the rest of the bars, they still aren’t really meant for weightlifting. Why did they cheap out on the weightlifting bars and buy a bunch of shitty, useless bars??? Because Lyon Center. I really don’t understand the point of having platforms and not having weightlifting bars. Weightlifting bars aren’t the cheapest, but they last a hell of a long time and they can be used for any exercise that requires a barbell. But the average stiff, non-​spinning bar can’t really be used in weightlifting training. Get it??? It just makes more sense to have barbells that cater mainly to weightlifters, yes, but these bars are versatile!
Anyways, my tolerance for the shitty equipment quickly dwindled so I asked the staff if I could bring my own bar. I just needed authorization to store the bar overnight at the facility, but guess what! They wanted to charge me for locker to store the bar, when the lockers can’t even fit barbells! I am practically offering to donate a decent barbell to the gym, but apparently Lyon Center wants to remain a shitty gym.
There’s nothing else at Lyon Center worth reviewing. It’s a gym that is in desperate need of renovation that probably won’t receive it for a long time. The equipment sucks, the policies suck, everything just sucks ass.

Of the numerous advantageous things SC has to offer, the gym is NOT one of them. Constantly crowded, gym equipment in poor condition, bad smell. Honestly, the student body is ashamed of the gym and it makes a cheap 24 hour fitness look like gold in comparison. The gym just needs a remodel and a thorough cleaning.

LOL. I’ve avoided reviewing the Lyon Center for so long because it’s the free gym on campus and the closest one to my apartment, but after four years of frustration, enough is enough.
First of all, if you’re going to the gym to break a sweat, PLEASE WEAR DEODORANT. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to switch machines because students have reeked of body odor. This is an easily avoidable problem, people! Use some Dove!
Secondly, half the machines here don’t work. If you want to run on the treadmill here, you’re SOL. Half of the machines are old and terrible, and the other half are new but broken. I’ve seen lines for the treadmill almost every time I’ve gone to the Lyon Center, which leaves me with two options: the elliptical and the bike.
I’m only giving the Lyon Center 2 stars instead of 1 because it’s free, but for the money that USC costs, we deserve a better gym. Also, more than one set of 5-​pound weights would be awesome!
I’ve never personally been, but my roommate pays an additional $ 70 per semester to go to the group classes at the Lyon and he seems to enjoy those. They do Nike Club, spinning, etc. May be worth the investment.

Oh, Lyon Center.
First of all, the smell. This gym constantly reeks of sweat, pee, and whatever mixture of… I don’t even want to know.
Second, rude workers. I get that they don’t want to be there, but you can try to have a smile on your face as you swipe people in – not rudely snatch my ID, roll your eyes as you wait for the swipe to authenticate, and slam my ID back.
Third, the treadmills. As a former runner trying to bulk, I would like to run every once in a while. There are 6 treadmill machines – only 2 or 3 work. WHAT?! Why is no one doing anything about this? Absolutely ridiculous… I always see confused fellow gym go-​ers punching at the QuickStart button while crinkling their foreheads. Poor us.
Fourth, I’m pretty sure the ventilation is terrible in there. It’s always so musky. Damp. Which doesn’t help the pungent smell either.
You know… I can keep on going. But the point is, this place is terrible. The only reason why I’m going to keep using their facility is because it’s on campus (convenience), and because it’s free (USC pays my tuition, student fees, etc.).

If you come to USC, you would expect to have a beautiful and gym since it’s USC, land of the most talented athletes in town. Unfortunately, all our money goes to the gym for athletes, which by the way everything inside looks so shiny and clean.
If you are USC admin in charge of the athletics reading this, change the weights, clean the place more often, and paint the walls with colors that don’t remind me to a hospital.

WOW… I can say with confidence that this is by far the SH! TTIEST gym I’ve ever set foot in. USC is seriously pathetic, I miss the days when I was an undergraduate student at UCLA and went to the Wooden Center. For a school that prides itself on its athletic tradition it’s quite tragic just how bad they maintain this facility. Severely understocked with equipment, dirty, crawling with douchebag frat boys, the list goes on and on. I’ve never been to a gym where I had to walk from one end of weight room to the other just to find more plates because there were none in my area. I’m sure their beloved football program does not encounter issues like this, they probably get state-​of-​the-​art equipment every damn season.
Whoever is in charge of the Lyon Center, GET YOUR SH! T TOGETHER AND GET US SOME NEW EQUIPMENT! This facility may have been great in the 80’s but NOT ANYMORE. Wooden Center truly blows this dump out of the water…

Awful, awful, awful!
Very dated and way too small for the size of the student body. As someone else mentioned, this gym was built when the student body was a third of the size. There IS another gym on campus, but unless you are an athlete you are restricted to the Lyon Center and its cesspool of dudebros.
Oh my, the dudebros. So awful. These guys will try to kick you off of a machine if you’ve spent a whole minute on it. They don’t use towels. They don’t wipe down the equipment. Terrible.
Summer here isn’t too bad because most of the trust fund dudebros have gone home. Any time while school is in session is a nightmare. Same with the locker rooms — wonderful when it’s summer, crowded and filthy during semester.
I think if the Lyon Center had «frat only» or «frat free» hours this would be a better place.
But they won’t do that, so until then I’ll regretfully use this gym for free until I graduate in May and then can justify paying for something not so awful.

By far one of the worst gyms I have ever been. I expected much more from a top university such as USC. The gym is dirty and it smells really bad. There are sweat droplets all over the floor and treadmills. It’s way too crowded and poorly designed. This gym really needs to be renovated. My local $ 5 a month gym is way better than this gym. So much disappointment.

Here’s all you need to know about the Lyon Center:
Overcrowded… with frat guys
Understocked… of weights and machines
Inadequately air-​conditioned… climate set to Sub-​Saharan Africa
Poorly maintained… dated and broken equipment
That’s all.

At an expensive top 50 university, this gym was stale and lame. Go to a big public university and you will get a world-​class gym. Even though USC has so many Olympic athletes, the public gym for students sucked when I was there. It had cardio and all I remember was using cardio equipment like the elliptical. I wonder if in ten years this gym has gotten a renovation, but according to Zada’s 3÷18÷14 review, it hasn’t. What does USC do with all its financial resources? spend it on prostitutes? Hello, build a better gym!

Fell way below my expectations for what a gym at USC should look like.
This gym badly needs a makeover! It’s pretty dingy inside and the worst thing is
there is no air conditioning in the main workout room upstairs so it always feels hot and muggy, which causes the air to be stale and stinky.
It has the basics so it gets the job done. But it is way too small for the population it services as you can expect to wait for the treadmills for up to 15−20min pretty often. There is often a wait for the free weights as well…
So why do I keep coming back? As disappointing as it is, it’s a perk that is included in my student fees and I plan on getting my money’s worth out of my tuition. A gross gym is better than no gym.
On the bright side, I do like the women’s locker room and appreciate that their showers have actual doors.

Having been to about ten different college gyms I know what a good gym needs. this place has all of the essentials and some TRX equipment. They ahve just added some powerlifting supplies and the staff seems to be getting better. They really needed to let go of some of those spoiled little brats that worked there.
Now its clean and they have beefed up the equipment.
HOWEVER:
There is a inexcusable lack of 45 pound plates. If there are more than ten people using the racks there isn’t enough plates to go around. Also, if all of the squat racks are being utilized you are lucky to have four plates to work with.

This is a perfectly adequate facility… for a University one quarter the size and quality of USC.
Given USC’s urban setting and LA’s general dearth of parkspace, the onus falls on the university to provide recreation space for its students, but they don’t.
As another reviewer noted, USC’s student population has tripled since this facility was built, and it’s simply nowhere near big enough to accomodate the USC community. It’s jam-​packed most of the day even in the middle of the summer.
It does look a bit dated inside and the equipment is overused, but I can live with all that. The simple fact is that unless you go between 9am and Noon, this place is too packed to get anything done.
Combine that with the fact that it’s full of 19 year old overpriviledged bros with 0 gym etiquette, and it’s just a place you never want to go.
I’m not a gym snob who needs a pristine weight room full of brand new equipment to be happy, and I’m not part of the crowd demanding the place be torn down, but considering the fact that USC A) keeps expanding B) just had a nine-​figure funding drive and C) is an URBAN campus with ZERO accessible park space nearby, it’s completely unacceptable that the Lyon Center remains USC’s only gym space.
USC needs to expand the Lyon Center or build three more gyms of the same size, and they need to do it 10 years ago.

As a preface, I am a CU Boulder student who is very proud of his (WAY LESS EXPENSIVE) schools’ (recently upgraded) athletic center and pays $ 42 a month to go to Mountain’s Edge Fitness instead, where I get a never crowded, politely staffed, well equipped and small gym in an excellent location. My standards are extremely high and I go to gyms for weight rooms to do power-​lift style exercises. Los Angeles appears to completely lack affordable, non-​shitty weight room oriented gyms. Everything is Crossfit, Zumba, MMA, Yoga, etc. in a grueling testament to LA’s reputation for posturing and image. The lack of a straight up «GYM» that doesn’t suck or is overpriced boggles the mind.
Paid $ 140 for three summer months so I could go to it with my boyfriend before I return back to Colorado to continue my schooling. Felt like a deal when I paid for it and I naively assumed it would be an excellent gym, because come on, it’s USC! A school renowned worldwide for their athletic programs in a city known for its’ addiction to the aesthetic.
My judgement? Unquestionably the worst gym I have ever had the misfortune of signing up to. How terrible is it? Alas, let me count the ways.
For staters, there is astoundingly little equipment in the primary weight room downstairs, which is in a perpetual state of anarchy and disorganization. I can count the number of times I’ve seen staff actually cleaning up/​doing bro pickup with one hand over weeks of visits in the 5−8pm bracket; though I must concede the student staff are generally polite, though rather unhelpful. There is a chronic shortage of plates and there are times that I’ve had to patrol the whole weight room area just to find one, in the process I end up losing my bench to some dull-​faced gorilla bro.
Oh, and about those patrons. ABOUT DEM BROS. I have never in my life experienced a deeper low of gym etiquette. You can’t leave a space for five seconds without someone vultureing your weights. Bros routinely set up at the power racks for extensive workouts that don’t even use the rack. I once had a rack swiped under me by an individual who spent 10 minutes getting set up to use it as a cage for floor core work, not using the rack for anything but a buffer between him and other people. I’ve had plates taken from me between sets. It doesn’t help that there’s this air of shallow posturing in the entire room. At least the people that are more visibly experienced or are not wearing as much money as possible have tendency to be very polite about rotating in and out of machines past one another. But for most people there’s a paranoid/​angry discomfort from talking with strangers in the room.
And to add to the fun, the gym NEVER has a quiet period after morning. It’s ALWAYS uncomfortably packed.
Then there’s the fact that the staff flip off the lights 15 – 20 minutes before close, start barking on the intercom for you to finish and pack away up to 45 minutes before they close. Either the staff aren’t paid well, aren’t used to working, are treated like crap by their management or some combination of those. Laziness and neglect are the main problems about the staff, but when you talk to them they’re usually nice. They just don’t do anything
The place also is an outrageous caricature of USC’s treatment of their students. The entire facility is a booby trap of fees, regulations and punishment. There are not enough day use lockers, most are rentals and fees are everywhere. Loads of people take their backpacks in the gym area (which are often put behind the mirror guards and I don’t mind) but there are warnings of confiscation fees everywhere.
The Lyons center is a joke, a spit in the face of fitness advocates everywhere and a pit of gym rat refuse. I love working out, it brings me immeasurable joy. I depend on it at time for my happiness. But I won’t endure this sad excuse for an athletic center hosted by one of the most catastrophically expensive schools in the United States. I am outrageously glad I am not a Trojan. Because if this is what they consider a student service for what they charge, then I thank god I’m not a part of the joke.
Well, I paid for it, so I guess I am now.
Dang.

Bottom line at the top: they actually have some really good/​unique weight machines upstairs that i haven’t been able to find anywhere else.
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this isn’t anything close to the mckay center and definitely needs to be bumped up on USC’s renovation list. that being said, i think people are a little too dramatic with their complaints.
any gym in the country: will be crazy between 7 – 9 AM, 12 – 2 PM, and 5 – 7 PM, could use more popular machines such as leg press, lat pull down, ellipticals and treadmills, etc, and could be faster at repairing broken machines. lyon is no exception to that but it is definitely still sufficient to get the job done :)

You would think that going to USC, forking over about 50,000 a year would provide you with a better gym and recreation center wouldn’t it? No, let’s buy extravagant gold statues and drop buildings here and there.
Though I’m a proud Trojan through and through, the Lyon Center could go through some work. Some machines are out of date to say the least. The aesthetics of the facility are sub par compared to the rest of campus. Just because the school has history doesn’t mean we shouldn’t update with the times.
It gets the job done, sure. But when our gym lacks that more modern oomph and we’re losing out to a facility like UCLA’s Wooden center, we have a problem.

You would think with the ridiculous amount of money USC rakes in, they could put together a nice gym for their students but definitely not. All they have done to improve the workout facilities is put a new one by the Health Science Center which is 8 miles away from campus. Not much of a help. Definitely a shitty gym.

This gym sucks. It’s muggy, lacks up-​to-​date equipment, and has a terrible layout. Oh yeah, and the rock-​wall is a p.o.s; it should just be torn down. I guess that’s what you get at an old private university.

It was built in 1989 and named after longtime Trojan trustee General William Lyon (USAF-​Ret.). Since then, USC’s student body has tripled. Unfortunately, Lyon Center is the same size.
It has a special place in my heart. My first gym, it’s where where I went to skinny to fit.
Still, the Lyon Center is one of the most amenity-​deficient university gyms. Certainly, it is too small and outmoded to sufficiently serve USC’s huge, fitness conscious student body. Other major universities have gyms that are contemporary, cutting edge, even dazzling. The Lyon Center is bested by gyms at the University of Florida, Texas-​Austin, Wisconsin, UCSB, UGA, and Michigan — which has two student gyms. Among local schools, fUCLA and LMU both have more impressive facilities.
There’s a nicer gym on campus at Heritage Hall, but it is reserved for athletes. Friends who play sports can sneak you in sometimes, but for the most part non-​NCAA students are stuck with Lyon Center.
It can get the job done but stays crowded. In college, my buddies preferred to work out at local chain fitness centers like Gold’s or LA Fitness because of the school gym’s deficiencies. Pretty embarrassing for one of the nation’s top schools.
The Lyon Center has undergone some helpful renovations; e. g, the old volleyball court now has fitness equipment instead. But it really is time for USC to either expand Lyon Center or just build a second student gym.