(The E club in Manhattan was designed to be one of a very perfect kind. It certainly isn't cheap: Monthly membership fees start at around $150 and climb higher as the locations-84 in three countries so far, plus an Equinox-themed hotel chain in the works-get fancier. And you get to feel like a superhero before you've even walked in the door.Įquinox is known as a rich person's gym, which is an accurate but incomplete description.

But what's 30 grand? You work hard, and you've earned it. Between the $500 monthly membership and the $150-per-hour training sessions-the average E club member trains four times a week-you'll be dropping around 30 grand per year. Yes, the kind of gadgetry you find in James Bond films-for a gym. We shall reveal no more.) But even if some non-E clubber-one of the proles who work for you, maybe-were to find this door, he still couldn't get inside, because the door is equipped with a retina scanner, which will process your biometric data to ensure that you are, indeed, a member of this sacred club. (It's inside the Time Warner Center in Midtown Manhattan. In fact, in order to even get inside, you first have to find the slick, unmarked glass-paned door. An unlisted address, because the kind of people who join-successful, powerful, driven-value discretion above all. You probably haven't heard of it, because it's not explicitly advertised anywhere (or because you don't live in New York, the only place special enough for this very special Equinox). And the more personal it became, the more special it had to be: In 2016, folks will pay almost any amount of money to achieve the level of privacy and luxury and individual attention they feel suits their life, or their “lifestyle.” Nobody has understood this better than Equinox, which has brought the innocent gymnasium-the ancient Greeks are either rolling or fist-pumping in their graves-to its evolutionary peak: the E club. Soon, your choice of gym began to say something about you- your taste, your goals, your bodily ideal. And then, in the waning years of the second millennium, there was Equinox, a gym that brought the men and women of New York's top tax brackets under one roof and stripped the gym experience of the greasiness, the odor, the human stain of the iron-pumping set.

In came Curves and Planet Fitness and New York Sports Club and Crunch, where even the logo reassured you that the experience wasn't for wimps. People couldn't get enough of these gyms, and they soon began to proliferate under the watchful eye of corporate America, with a distinct flavor for each crowd. Only weight lifters lifted weights then women did aerobics. Fast-forward a dozen-plus centuries: These dumbbells found homes in new types of gymnasiums-now they're called gyms, because this isn't ancient Greece anymore-like Gold's Gym, where puffy and steroidal men would train (not quite nude) to compete in the public game of self-worship. In these gymnasiums were halteres, a form of weights that would evolve into dumbbells. Open spaces in ancient Greece where men trained, often nude, to compete in public games.

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