Mario Tarabbia visits the gym about six times a week. But he doesn’t have to go far.
When he moved to his 900-square-foot, one-bedroom rental apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he embarked on an ambitious renovation project.
On walls beside his dining room table, Mr. Tarabbia mounted a roughly nine-foot-tall squat rack and a weight tree to hold Olympic weight plates. He added mirrors, a stationary bicycle and a TV, as well as two shelves to hold several pairs of dumbbells.
In a closet near his makeshift gym, he turned an oversize meat freezer, which had no lock, into a cold plunge tub. “I didn’t even think to tell my landlord about all this,” said Mr. Tarabbia, 36, the founder of a software company. “I was like, well, I’ll just ask for forgiveness.” (He moved in 2022 and has been adding gym amenities ever since.)
For many New Yorkers, commercial gyms are like apartments: cramped and exorbitantly expensive. Basic amenities, like operable equipment and clean locker rooms, seem increasingly hard to come by, and crowds at peak times — often just before or after 9-to-5 working hours — can deter even the most motivated of fitness fanatics.
After the Covid-19 pandemic forced gyms in the city to close temporarily, some New Yorkers never went back, opting to create their own gyms at home. These New Yorkers are willing to sacrifice valuable square footage to gym equipment, all in the name of gains.
“I have a rule when it comes to fitness,” Mr. Tarabbia said. “If I want it, I buy it, because it’s my health, and health is the greatest wealth. So why not spend your money on that?”
Corey Farrow, 29, was an avid weight lifter in high school and college, but “fell off” his routine in his early 20s, he said. When he moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, last summer with his partner and two friends, a space for a home gym was a top priority.
“It’s something that I’ve always kind of dreamed of,” he said. So he turned an empty shared basement in their building into a gym, installing rubber mats on the floor and a squat rack in a corner.
The ceilings in the space are only about 6½ feet high, so Mr. Farrow is somewhat limited in what he can achieve; he is unable to overhead press, for example, a move that involves lifting a barbell above one’s head.
But having his own gym, however tiny, has been a major life upgrade, said Mr. Farrow, a product specialist for an electronic health record company. “I want my own space to do things on my time and not have to wait for anybody.”
At prime workout times, people can find themselves standing by for a treadmill or a bench press, even as commercial gym chains jostle for the patronage of endorphin-chasing New Yorkers. There are affordable, no-frills gyms; luxury gyms, with dedicated recovery rooms and fancy skin care products; and countless boutique spaces with more niche fitness offerings. (Does your dog need a workout? There’s a boutique gym for that.)
While some luxury gym chains took advantage of empty commercial spaces during the pandemic, it didn’t solve the problem of crowds at gyms. It is New York, after all.
“I hate gyms that are crowded, with too much equipment,” said Vedika Anand, a strength and conditioning coach who works in professional tennis. In 2023, Ms. Anand moved to Manhattan from New Jersey and looked at several gym chains in search of one that fit her needs, including the once-trendy Equinox gym. (Ms. Anand visited about 26 Equinox clubs in New York City and reviewed each for TikTok.)
Like other gyms, Equinox has experienced some growing pains. “When the Kiehl’s products got replaced,” Ms. Anand, 26, said, “I feel like I was attacked.” (She’s still a member.)
But for many New Yorkers, a gym, with or without Kiehl’s, won’t do.
Helen Phelan, a Pilates instructor, has been training clients out of her 850-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, since 2021. She uses one of the bedrooms as her studio space, which contains a roughly eight-foot-long Pilates reformer machine and an assortment of blocks and bands.
She sees as many as 16 clients a week. “Most people are, I think, taken back that I live on the third floor and in a townhouse,” said Ms. Phelan, 33. “I don’t have, like, storefront outside. It’s just literally where I live.”
Satisfied with her setup, she doesn’t see herself buying a studio one day. But having her office so close to the place she eats and sleeps comes with its own set of challenges, she acknowledged.
“The same thing for anyone who works from home,” she said, “is that it’s hard to turn it off.”
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