Roman Fitness & Yoga
Phạm Văn Nghị, Đông Thành, Tp. Ninh Bình, Ninh Bình
Opening Hours: 5:00 – 21:00, 7 days a week
Cost: 50k per day or 900k per month
Location
Roman Fitness and Yoga is situated close to the centre of Ninh Binh, around 1.5km north of the main intersection. It’s run by the same friendly owner who owns Roman Gym and Coffee which I visited yesterday, a bit further out of town. Although you might miss seeing it from the street, it’s correctly positioned on Google Maps. So just turn off east opposite Ngo 12 Dinh Tien Hoang and it’s the huge building right there!
Facilities
Like its sister club, Roman Fitness and Yoga has excellent top of the range equipment and plenty of it! This branch of the gym is in my opinion better. You’ll enjoy an open plan gym set out on one floor only (studios and changing rooms are upstairs), so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for and have everything together. I think this branch is also a bit bigger.
Best of all, its location on the ground floor means it’s naturally significantly cooler, which makes a huge difference in the tropical heat. The club is largely cooled by fans with a couple of plug-in air con units around, though these weren’t in use on the slightly cooler morning I arrived. Whilst there’s no substitute for full aircon, the ground floor location helps considerably.
You’ll be given a towel upon arrival (I was offered 2!) and a key to a locker if you wish.
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Weights
The club has dumbbell freeweights up to 30kg and something I haven’t seen for a while – a range of fixed weight barbells. They go from 10kg – 30kg in 5kg increments and you’ll find a full set of both straight and curled. There are also a few adjustables ones knocking about too.
What struck me here was the number of squat racks – I counted 4 in all. You’ll also find several bench press racks.
They’ve made good use of space by having several dual resistance machines, working antagonistic muscles. These are bicep/triceps, abductor/adductor, chest press/shoulder press and a leg extension/curl. These are all located next to the cardio machines.
There’s a couple of disc loadable resistance machines too, namely a rear kick and inclined leg press.
At the other end of the gym you’ll see an assisted pull-ups machine, a lat pulldown, pull-up bars with a narrow set of cables and a pec deck.
Cardio
The cardio equipment here is very modern and all looked brand new. You’ll see around six treadmills, three upright bikes and two crosstrainers.
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Functional Training and Boxing
At the end of this well-equipped gym, you’ll see a fully functioning boxing ring! Inside it there are gloves, pads and shin-shields and outside it, three punchbags and more gloves and pads. All the equipment looked new and in excellent condition.
Non-boxing related gym toys included a large number of medicine balls and power balls of varying weights.
I also found some foam rollers, plyoboxes, large tyres, battle ropes and a Swiss ball. There are also some small stepboards.
There’s a whole loads of floor space in the gym for doing whatever exercises you fancy – it’s very spaced out. But if you did want to do some exercises in privacy, there’s very small room at the far end of the gym which contains a yoga mat and few blocks. You could knock out some burpees in there or so other floor work, though it’ll only comfortably fit a few people at a time.
Studios
Yep, there’s more than one! I found two huge studios upstairs, one of which contained a large number of Swiss balls and the other simply space. The timetable is as follows:
Summary
All in all a great value club and I’d pick this gym over its sister, Roman Gym and Coffee, mostly due to the temperature in summer, but I also much prefer the layout of this one. Additionally, it has a bit more equipment and caters better for boxers. It’s still hot in summer, but train early and you’ll probably survive. The size of it and modern equipment make it an appealing all round option and great value for 50k.
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