To preface this article, I am not a cranky old man, far out of touch with the "kids of today," or just a generally bitter person. Having said that, I feel it is high time I called out the Lerner Health and Wellness Center as the travesty of a workout facility that it is.

I go to the gym about twice a week (three times, ideally), so I don't spend a tremendous amount of my week in the HelWell. The fact of the matter is, however, I can't. Not because I run out of energy or because I don't have enough time, but because I simply can't stand being there. There are a number of factors that contribute to this antipathy, and I will discuss them in no particular order.

The facility itself. HelWell itself is actually a really nice gym. The equipment is newer and in good shape, and it has a good variety of different facilities. The problem is there just isn't enough of it. There are probably about two hours between 9-5 that the weights/treadmills area isn't crowded. For those other six hours, it just never seems worth it to work up the effort to go and spend an hour waiting for equipment to open up. I went to Pitt for undergrad, and though it was about 60% larger than GW, its workout facilities were at least three times as expansive. We had a main gym which was bigger than HelWell, plus a field house, and two smaller gyms (this all despite the fact that tuition was about half as much as GW's for an out-of-state student).

The people. Let's be serious, it would be unrealistic for me or anyone to go into a gym not expecting to find a lot of rude meatheads, but HelWell has to have a higher proportion of wanks than most other fitness centers out there. You have your ubiquitous muscle-bound chunksters who have to make everyone else feel awkward by shouting, screaming, and grunting their way to that tenth rep. Even more ridiculous is when the aforementioned grunter is squatting 60lbs. (I don't judge people on their workouts, but c'mon, really?). Then you have the guy who is working on every piece of equipment in the weight room simultaneously:

"Hey, are you using this?"
"Yeah"
"But I just saw you over there doing leg presses."
"Well, yeah, but I'm using this too."
"After you use the benchpress, right?"
"Ya."
"Sorry, I didn't realize this was your private gym."
"It's ok, everybody seems to make that mistake."

This of course exacerbates the problem of not having enough have enough equipment and makes the whole workout even less efficient. Then there are the people who stick one of every single weight on the same rack, always with the heaviest on the outside, of course. Nothing is more frustrating, however, in my opinion, than people who use equipment for the wrong purpose. "Well, I'd like to use that benchpress since there are only four of them in here, but you go ahead and sit on it while you curl, even though there are three flat benches over there that you could use for the same purpose." Combined with the mindless drone of frat-banter, the rudeness displayed by the patrons of HelWell makes spending time there an incredibly uncomfortable experience.

The music. I started the article by stating that these factors were in no particular order, but in this case I have saved the worst for last. I've been to many different gyms of many different sorts, and I've never heard the kind of garbage music that the speakers at HelWell vomit out. Normally, commercial gyms play classic rock: it is acceptable to a broad demographic and is generally pretty inoffensive. Gyms with younger members tend to play more hard-core rap. It gets you pumped up, energized, and ready to work. HelWell, instead foregoes conventional wisdom and ranges between weak R & B and American-Idol-teen-poppy-commercialized nonsense. Let me tell you, nothing gets me jacked up and ready to roll like Taylor Swift's latest yarn, or some other flavor-of-the-week that sounds like it was sung by a synthesizer. Granted, I'm a big music snob and can't take generic songs by run-of-the-mill artists produced by some giant corporation, but no one in the gym seems to like the music they play. What's more, it plays so loudly that your iPod is powerless to overcome the aural onslaught of overplayed, unoriginal tripe.

Working out at HelWell is pretty much the only alternative to an expensive gym membership for all of us law students. Given how awful spending time there is, however, I won't be foregoing my $20 membership to the gym at work any time soon.