If residents can’t sleep at night, they will have yet another option to pass the time come August – they can get in a workout at the gym.
Russ and Jaime Allen are bringing Anytime Fitness to Hollister. The couple owns the Gilroy and Morgan Hill locations for the rapidly expanding franchise-based business – they opened one and bought the other within the past two years – while the Allens plan to open the Hollister site in August.
They are renovating the former homes of China Garden and an AT&T store in the Nob Hill shopping center into the new Anytime Fitness. They will start what they call “pre-sales” of memberships, with promotions included, in July.
While the owners plan to bring all the features emphasized by the national brand – such as being open 24 hours and pushing its engagement of all types of people – Russ Allen said the Hollister location will focus on cleanliness, customer service and keeping all the equipment to the highest standards. They are opening the new Anytime Fitness in a city with few fitness clubs – a negative point for the county emphasized in the recent Healthy San Benito Initiative report commissioned by local nonprofits and government agencies.
“Everything needs to be perfectly clean,” Allen said this week from the new location where renovation work is underway.
Along with the cleanliness and service – members can expect a peppermint each time they visit, and workers will likely remember their names – Allen said they will have some basic rules: No grunting, dropping weights or cussing. Those types of features may explain why he expects women to make up about 65 percent of club membership.
Allen called it warm and inviting and compared it to a Sunday school environment.
“We live behind the belief that everyone belongs here,” Allen said.
They will try to draw members with such amenities as big-screen TVs, satellite TV at each workout station, the “latest and greatest” machines and what Allen described as “extra care” toward them. There will be spaces for weights, cardiovascular machines, a lot of classes and stretching, Allen said.
“We’re going to take extra special care of them,” he said.
