Our Community Centre Gym

A couple of years ago a referendum was held in our community to determine adding recreation complexes in our community. For Gibsons, this meant the addition of a community centre with meeting rooms, a "wellness" gym, a couple of racquet courts and an ice arena. I will admit to voting against this referendum for many reasons, but, it passed, and we pay for it through our taxes and fees if we should decide to use it. The fees bothered me since they were much higher than any of my friends payed over on the mainland, but they said it was necessary to charge that much because of the total cost and the lower population to draw from. Recently, I have found a need to use it, so I got over my negative opinions and went today for the first time, purchasing a 10 pack so I would be motivated to continue with much needed exercise.

Well, I was impressed. For what I need I can see this is going to work well. The gym is broken into areas to meet different needs. The Wellness component is comprised of machines which do not have weight settings. Now that may sound a bit strange, it did to me at first, but the machines use compression instead of weights and simply let you go through the range of motion for each exercise, be it chest presses, or leg lifts, or lifting. This working with the motions was advised for me to get some nerve endings working again and it does seem to do that very well.

Another area is the aerobic area with a couple of specialized bikes, regular bikes, treadmills, walking machines, etc. There probably aren't enough there to accommodate a lot of people at one time, but I had no difficulty in the time I was there.

There is a free weights area with more traditional weight machines for lifting using real weights. There were barbells as well so for someone wanting that kind of control with the weights, it was available. I used the bars with no weights and the barbells for some of the circuit I did.

As well there were machines where you determined the weight you wanted to lift by placing a small "bolt" in the correct place. Those worked well for me too. And finally, there was an area for stretching and it had bosu balls, large and small exercise balls, an assortment of other things.

Negatives - the scale weighed me at more than at home.

It will be good for me to continue on.