Training in China: Pulse Health Club

Since last week, I started to train here in China, of course using my Ambit. But let me start right at the beginning, which is how we found a proper gym / health club.

In Beijing there seem to be a lot of so called health clubs, but after following up on google, we got the impression that there might be a habit of some just collecting the membership fee and then closing down the facility, with the manager never been seen again. Furthermore, even some seemed quite interesting, the distance to get there was quite far. Last, the prices for health club / gym memberships here are at western level or higher, meaning that a 100 to 200 EUR per month is no exception.

We also found the Pulse Health Club located at the Kempinski hotel in Chaoyang District, which casually is just located a 3 minute walk from the workplace of my girlfriend, and a 10 minute walk from our apartment. After checking out the location, we signed up for a couple quarterly membership which was priced well at the lower end of the membership fee ranges we found, while the club itself is offering high quality standards (2 separate facilities, each with cardio and weight training area, a 15m Pool, Jacuzzi, Sauna, towels and slippers for each guest, free water and apples, of course showers with hair and shower gel, and nice good-english speaking staff).

18th floor Pool

Additionally, there are offered free courses like Yoga, Pilates, Tae Bo, Latin Dance as well as paid courses like Kung Fu and Childrens Ballet (I think i will probably check out Kung Fu, though ;-))

In my first training session, immediately after we had done the inscription formalities, we went to the 18th floor facility to have a 20min swim in the pool, and afterwards checked out the cardio area, with me getting on the bike and my girlfriend checking out the cross trainer. The bike worked surprisingly well, with Watt-controlled manual programs as I am used to do at home. Each piece of cardio equipment has it´s separate TV screen, which I really got used to during the last sessions.

Additionally, Kempinski offers a free WLAN with really good connectivity also in the training area, so I used to add some Email and file checking after my morning training sessions regularly. With opening hours from 6am to 10:30pm, you can quite easily spend some time there all over the day.

NW view while checking Emails in the Lobby

Greetings, Steve