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Planet Fitness Streeterville Chicago

Planet Fitness Streeterville

Planet Fitness Streeterville Chicago

240 E Illinois, Chicago, IL 60611

Website

Opening hours: 24/7 for members, or staffed hours are Mon-Fri 24/7, and Sat-Sun 700-1900.

Cost: one free workout at each and any club – no questions asked. Click here and scroll to the bottom:

Location and Entry

First of all, getting inside Planet Fitness Streeterville – don’t enter the building downstairs and go up the escalator like I did. You’ll end up in the Wholefoods carpark, oops. Instead, go up the steps outside in the image I’ve posted and then head towards the building; the entrance is right there.

Facilities

Planet Fitness Chicago is part of is a large chain of PF clubs, with a good standard and range of equipment. Their gyms are attractive and colourful. At a glance it looks like an ideal gym that would cater for everyone. But having visited a couple now, what I find it lacks is a good range of free weights, and does not cater well for heavy lifters.

There are however motivational messages around the gym about “no judgment” and it’s clear the gym focusses on making itself appealing to those new to fitness, so perhaps doesn’t want to cater for heavy lifters. That’s fair, but if that’s the case, why do they have a sign up advertising the first Monday of the month as pizza night? Not what I would hope to see in a gym that clearly targets itself at those potentially new to health and fitness and rethinking their lifestyle.


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Weights

The heaviest dumbbell at Planet Fitness that I could see was 65lbs (most clubs go up to at least 100lbs) and barbells go up to 60lbs, both straight and curled bars. This particular club had two Smith machines that you can load up but other than that, there was little to cater for serious weight trainers. No squat racks or benches with loadable barbells, and not a chin up bar in sight, although there was one assisted pull ups machine.

When I attended on a weekday lunchtime, the small freeweights area was the busiest part of the gym with both of the Smith machines and a couple of benches in use. Meanwhile other areas were relatively little used.

Cardio

Downstairs hosts a large cardio room with a range of treadmills, bikes, crosstrainers, ellipticals and step machines. The free weights room is at one end, along with a fair number of resistance machines. At the other end lies the 30 minute workout area. This area has a mixture of resistance machines and equipment similar to stepboards, where you can spend one minute on each station, working different muscle groups. Neat idea, although I’ve never seen anyone using it for that purpose.

Mixed Facilities Room

There are two separate rooms upstairs at this Planet Fitness gym in Chicago. However there’s no door between them, you need to go back down. One contains mostly arc trainers, a range of glute/leg machines and some decent mats where you can do floor work, along with stretching apparatus. There are also Swiss balls and medicine balls. Apart from weights, these are the only gym toys you’ll find here. The other upstairs room simply contains more resistance equipment, similar to that downstairs.

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Summary of Planet Fitness Streeterville

Planet Fitness Streeterville is a clean and attractive gym although they are a little too fond of their resistance machines for my liking! Also, when I attended I found it was not very well air-conditioned, particularly upstairs, although manageable. I’d choose to use this gym on a leg or cardio day, as opposed to an upper body day, simply due to the lack of pull up bars.

Overall, well worth going to on a free pass, unless you require a heavy range of free weights.

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Planet Fitness Streeterville Chicago

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