Russel Seal Fitness Centre: Affordable or Overpriced? (Part II)

Exeter has a new gym, a very good one. It’s the reason you had to navigate through a maze of construction work to get to the crumb last year; it’s the reason you have had to pay £240 for a gold membership this year; it’s the reason more and more gym newcomers are flocking to our Sports Park.

Circuit training equipment: a great addition.

Its new look, a masterpiece of modernist architectural flair, is a welcome change from the previous gym, which had something of the torture chamber about it.

No longer must you deadlift in dingy lighting or run on the treadmill while staring at a damp-stained wall. Instead, it’s welcoming, well-lit and boasts a fantastic selection of workout stations.

As a function of the expansion of the gym, there will be no more resentment towards the dick who took the last rowing machine, no more awkward questions of “How many more sets you got left, mate?”

Check out those lats, ladies.

Indeed, the bane of all those who used the weights section of the old gym, the whereabouts of the exact dumbbells that you wanted to use, has now been neatly solved.

The new gym incorporates a Hammer Strength dumbbell collection, organised by weight and colour.

As opposed to nosing around other people’s benches and on occasion surreptitiously making off with some poor fellow’s weights, you need only identify the weight by its colour, and away you go.

Spotted: social gym-goers, the worst sort of people.

The gym itself shows the kind of facilities that we should be expecting from a leading university such as Exeter.

Whatever your aim, the new facility offers a range of innovative and technical equipment that reflects the positive atmosphere you might hope for in a present-day university gym.