Illustration by Jake Goldwasser

Prime Clubbing Hours

Analyzing hourly traffic at every New York Sports Club reveals trends both universal and local.

It’s the aspiring fitness model’s worst nightmare. You’re trying to dive into a massive squat session so that your buns really pop on the boardwalk this summer, but some jabroni is using the power rack for eight sets of bicep curls. This scenario, along with heated squabbles over the last towel and unpopular but increasingly implemented two-to-a-shower policies, are symptoms of the dreaded overcrowded gym.

Helpful in this matter are Google’s bar graphs of any business’s popularity during its open hours, a feature they introduced in July 2015. The numbers are based on anonymized locational data tracked from the hundreds of millions of smartphones that use Google Maps. The results are so useful that we’re willing to ignore the unsettling reality of Google’s omniscience:

Google’s “Popular times” feature lets you know how busy a business is.

Let’s try to wrangle this data now that we’re aware it exists. With 48 locations spread out across the five boroughs, no gym chain is as ubiquitous in the Big Apple as New York Sports Club. So if we gather the hourly histogram for every NYSC location, we’ll get a good view into the “average” flow of people in and out of a gym.

This is a little bit easier said than done. Since you don’t want to manually gather this data — which would require inspecting the source code of each histogram and recording the height (in pixels) of each bar — you’ll need a scalable strategy for scraping data from the Google results page.

Enter Apifier, the company that builds custom cloud-based web crawlers. Give them a look if you have a scraping project that’s beyond your expertise or availability. Using a crawler they explicitly designed for this purpose, we were able to gather the “crowdedness” data from all NYSC locations on ten separate dates last fall. Here’s a look at the most basic hour-by-hour graph, which averages all the gyms together:

Before we jump into the analysis, you should be suspicious of that y-axis — what does it mean to be 100% crowded? In short, each hourly bar is on a 0-to-75 pixel scale, with the top reserved for a business’s peak. So a gym’s scale starts with an established capacity that describes its busiest hour and then works down from there.

This normalization is a blessing or a curse depending how you look at it. On one hand, the figures aren’t true headcounts that you can compare to each other. Then again, a gym’s fullness relative to its normal levels might be what you’d like to measure anyway.

The surges every night between 6 and 8 PM are predictable, as are the smaller Saturday and Sunday peaks around noon. People go to the gym after work and are a little lazier on the weekend. Notice, however, that while there’s both a morning and a lunchtime peak on Tuesday through Friday, only the latter occurs on Mondays. Perhaps people are still shaking off their weekends?

Looking at the average of 48 gyms sands away the idiosyncrasies of each, though. With that in mind, let’s do a few deep dives of certain gyms on certain days. Here’s the NYSC on 41st Street and 3rd Avenue versus the one on Varick Street on Fridays:

The location on 41st is right in the middle of Manhattan’s buzzing midtown business district and only an avenue away from Grand Central Terminal, the ultimate portal for working professionals, so its popularity on Friday mornings is not surprising. By the evening, though, most have fled this commercial neighborhood in pursuit of their weekend.

Three miles south sits the Varick Street location, which is relatively quiet in the morning but then sees a peak around 7 or 8 pm. This gym’s location in the West Village likely explains why it features the opposite trajectory on a Friday than the one on 41st. Not as many people flood the neighborhood in the morning, but visit (or stay, if they are residents) for its nightlife, making it a practical option for a pre-pub pump.

Our second deep dive shows one gym that is pretty popular on Sundays and one that is definitely not. Again, the locations can explain at least some of the discrepancy. The 41st street location is within shouting distance of Times Square, a place that no NYC resident wants to approach on the weekend. It’s telling that club sees no reason to keep its doors open past 3 PM.

The Atlas Park location, on the other hand, is part of a sprawling mall in Queens, so visits to the gym can be folded into larger shopping excursions. Plus, it’s possible that Queens residents aren’t so easily dissuaded by weekend travel since they’re more dependent on cars and not the fickle and crowded Manhattan subway lines.

Since we’ve left 44 locations un-investigated, let’s list a few notable superlatives and attempt to explain them: