“But there were very few, and you have to be like a superman to do that.” “You have trainers who are making $80,000, $90,000,” said Zdenek Dzur, a trainer who left the Greenwich Avenue location two years ago after nearly a decade at Equinox.
#EQUINOX DUMBO DRIVER#
Omar Kharroub, who trained clients at an Equinox in Northern California until August, said he had worked as a DoorDash delivery driver on the side to support himself. Eric Hannah, who worked at Greenwich Avenue in 20, said he sometimes earned only a little over $200 a week. A trainer who worked at an Equinox in Los Angeles said she could not afford to pay her electricity bills during the ramping period and left after five months. In practice, however, many beginner trainers struggle to recruit enough clients to live comfortably and end up spending unpaid hours at the gym in a bid to improve their numbers. A complex bonus system allows top earners to make six-figure salaries.
#EQUINOX DUMBO FULL#
Trainers who succeed at Equinox pick up enough clients to move from floor shifts to coaching members full time. As they start accumulating clients, trainers can convert floor hours into better-compensated training sessions - $26 an hour for beginner trainers and as much as $62 per session for more experienced employees. During those floor shifts, trainers are expected to pitch their services to Equinox members working out in the gym.
#EQUINOX DUMBO PLUS#
Upon hiring, Equinox trainers begin a process called “ramping”: roughly 15 to 20 hours a week putting away weights on the gym floor, plus some additional hours of educational sessions, all paid at or slightly above minimum wage. “They’re like, ‘We want you to have a really nice work-life balance.’ But at the same time, ‘How do you expect to be successful if you’re not here for 12 hours a day?’” “It’s very ‘Hunger Games’-style,” said Alexander Miotti, a trainer who worked at a Los Angeles Equinox until this summer, when he left after a dispute with his managers. Current and former Equinox trainers in Dallas, Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles said they or their colleagues routinely slept in cars, curled up on yoga mats or dozed off with heads resting on tables during long sessions at the gym. The bed at the Greenwich Avenue location was at least a designated place to sleep. In the gym’s draining environment, new trainers frequently last only a few months, unable to cope with the long hours and low starting pay, interviews show. Some say they can spend 70 or 80 hours a week at the gym - many of them unpaid - hustling to recruit clients, waiting between workouts, planning routines and conducting training sessions.
#EQUINOX DUMBO PROFESSIONAL#
While the gym offers a well-regarded professional development program, as well as health insurance and other employee benefits that few fitness chains provide, many Equinox trainers, especially beginners, work exhausting schedules. In August, Equinox explicitly distanced itself from President Trump when Stephen Ross, the chairman of the company that owns a controlling stake in the gym chain, held a fund-raiser for his re-election campaign.įor some personal trainers, though, working at Equinox is more grueling than glamorous, according to court records and interviews with labor lawyers, fitness experts, Equinox managers and nearly 30 current and former Equinox trainers. Its gyms dot the cities of blue-state America, and the company proclaims its support for environmental sustainability, professional growth and community building. Since its founding in the 1990s, Equinox has become the nation’s premier high-gloss gym chain by selling itself as a kind of luxury product with a progressive culture.
Equinox, the high-end gym chain, calls its five-story facility on Greenwich Avenue in Manhattan a “fitness mecca.” It features a juice bar and a boxing studio, a eucalyptus steam room and a saltwater lap pool.īut until a recent renovation, a less glamorous side of Equinox emerged in the gym’s break room: a spindly, wire-framed bunk bed, blocked from view by a shower curtain, where exhausted personal trainers napped between sessions, using towels to fortify mattress pads so thin that some trainers joked they must have been salvaged from a prison.
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