For years now, members of LA Fitness at Culver Center have been deprived of heavy bags, an almost basic component of any modern gym that requires membership fees for use.

Those of us who remember the years this location used to be Bally Total Fitness recall how well the heavy bags fit into the ecosystem of the gym and  added to the quality of our workouts. Once LA Fitness took over, all was well for a while. Then it went south for no reason, and members caught the flack for it.

Shortly after the LA Fitness takeover, heavy bags were replaced by cheap, easy to break standing punching bags... a terrible alternative for anyone committed to thorough bag training. These were the type of bags that break when you look at them with a determined stare. Bags that belong in a grade school gym. When the weak standing bags predictably deteriorated after a few weeks of use, the members were blamed for breaking and vandalizing these cheap bags, and were punished at large by the gym opting to do away with ANY kind of bags whatsoever. This alienated a hefty population of members who can't get that kind of workout any other way. Some of us had to go to supplement our LA Fitness membership with boxing gym memberships, which is nonsense.

We have been told there is not enough space, and there are at least three areas in the gym on the upper three levels that the writer of this petition could point out as suitable, without disrupting placement of current machinery or the "feng shui" of the establishment. There is literally half a football field's worth of mats laying around that gym in prime real estate, and that's not even touching on the impractical use of space in the personal training area on the ground floor.