The College Voice

Issue date: 3/9/09 Section: Features

Upon walking into the gym at Mercer County Community College, one is greeted with a surprising yet familiar scene. Upon entering the facility, one is greeted with the regular gym scene: a rubber matted room packed with free weights, an assortment of equipment with which to use them, over 20 aerobic machines and over twenty weight training machines.

However, rather than witnessing a plethora of sweating students in movement, it is more common to see the concrete walls encasing a range of people. The mercer gym is open to anyone in the Mercer area, and thus an extreme array of students, family men, mothers, even grandmothers can and do flock to Mercer for their basic work-out needs.

The Mercer County Community College gym provides all the necessities for a basic workout- it is small and simple, yet it is clean and efficient. However, only a percentage of students who exercise regularly use the Mercer gym. A recent survey of 30 random Mercer County Community College students concluded that very few students use the facilities.

While the membership is free for full-time students and only $35 a semester for students with less than 25 credits, many students take their business off-campus.
In addition to the basic equipment, the gym offers pool memberships as well as free yoga classes. However, Austin Atkins, a gym employee and a Burlington Community College student, said that in a three hour shift, he sees only about 30 people shuffle through the door.

Through the survey 10 students admitted to rarely exercising at all. This in itself is a factor in the amount of students who use the gym- those who don't make working-out a habit won't be venturing into the gym too often.

Also, out of the 20 students that reported they do exercise regularly, five said they do so either at home or at another private venue, while the other 15 said they have memberships elsewhere.

It is easy to wonder why with such an affordable and convenient gym on campus, so many students would be willing to pay extravagant bills for gym memberships. Perhaps it's because although the Mercer gym is convenient and well-stocked it does lack some of the services of other, more expensive gyms.

Lindsay Townsend, a second-semester art major put it simply, "when I go to the gym, I usually like to take classes, and my gym has a lot of different classes that are included in the membership fee."

While the Mercer gym gets the job done, it doesn't offer several classes, nor does it have a café, a spa, a luxurious locker room, or a sauna, all traits that other gyms often boast. Still, how many people actually use the salons, spas, and cafes that their gyms have to offer?

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