The response from either side seems to be "this is ridiculous!"

Ran across this obscure new item: a man was ejected from a gym for grunting during his workout. Much of the internet reaction to this story has been cries of 'ridiculous!' from hard core bodybuilders, but I find the ridiculous part of this story to be this patron's reaction to having his membership revoked - he's suing for defamation of all things because people are making fun of him for getting kicked out.

Now, I had a membership at Planet Fitness. I've had memberships at several different gyms, and been a guest at several others. I've worked out in university gyms, women's gyms, hard core gyms, and Planet Fitness. And I've got to say that Planet Fitness was one of the best gyms I've ever worked out at.

Why were they one of the best? Because they lived up to their tag as a "Judgment Free Zone". I'm not one to be intimidated by the big muscle-y guys in the "guys" weight room. I plow on ahead and enter, moving the pin waaaay back up on the machine and pulling the seat all the way up, but it took me some time to muster up that kind of courage, to enter the "muscle" zone. (Mostly, I think of how much money I'm paying and how much I want to use the equipment I'm paying for and that gets me over any reluctance I might have to tread on sacred masculine territory)

But when I first started going to the gym, those big muscle-bound guys were intimidating. Many of them seemed to hang out just to try to intimidate anyone who didn't have as much muscle mass as they did.

Now I can respect that someone might choose to spend hours in the gym every day to get their body into peak performance. I also can respect the person who simply wants to go in once or twice a week, do some light toning and exercising and spend the rest of their time doing other things. But that respect isn't always evident in gyms, and I've been given the annoyed look for coming in and messing up the place where "real" men are working out. I've just learned to live with it.

What Planet Fitness is doing is trying to create a gym that makes casual exercisers comfortable. They're very upfront about it. Their policies are all over all their material and their website. You walk into a Planet Fitness and you immediately notice that there are more ellipticals than free weights. That tells you something. There are plenty of gyms out there where the emphasis is on weights and you know it the minute you walk in.

What I think is a bit ridiculous, is for someone to walk into a Planet Fitness thinking it's a Golds Gym. They're not the same. And if you want Gold's Gym, you should go there, not the Judgment Free Zone. Crying foul because you thought you could tranform one into the other strikes me as just plain ridiculous.