F45 Dalston is a good gym. Here is why people still walk down to us.

F45 Dalston sits in Stamford Works on Gillett Street, a minute off Kingsland High Street. It has a loyal following, coaches who learn your name, and a full room at quarter past six in the morning. We are not going to pretend otherwise. But we get a steady trickle of people walking the twenty minutes down Dalston Lane to Reading Lane, and it is nearly always for the same two reasons. They wanted more than one workout, and they wanted to pay less than two hundred pounds a month for it. This is the honest version of how the two compare.

What F45 Dalston actually offers

F45 is functional group training run as a franchise, and Dalston is one of the better studios in London. Their own site describes more than eighty workouts drawn from a library of five thousand movements, split across cardio, resistance and hybrid sessions with recovery on top. The timetable is a real one: seven or eight sessions on a weekday starting at 6.15am, and three each on Saturday and Sunday. Around forty in a week, which is roughly what we run.

The coaching gets the credit it deserves in their reviews, and the room has a proper atmosphere. If a forty five minute team session with someone on the microphone is the thing that gets you out of bed, it works, and it will keep working.

One workout a day, the same for everybody

This is the part that surprises people who have not read the schedule closely. F45 runs one named workout per day, and every session that day is that workout. Tuesday is Maximus, Wednesday is Triple Threat, Thursday is Pinnacle, Friday is Down Under, Saturday is Battle Royale, Sunday is Major 6, Monday is Quarterbacks. Whether you turn up at 6.15am or 6.55pm, you are doing what everyone else did.

For plenty of people that is the whole appeal. You never have to decide, the programming is handled for you, and the entire room is in it together. For others it is exactly why they leave. If Thursday is a session you do not get on with, or your legs have not recovered from Wednesday, the choice is to do it anyway or lose the day. There is no gym floor to fall back on, because F45 Dalston is a studio rather than a gym, so there is nowhere to go and train on your own programme instead.

What it costs

F45 publishes its prices, which we think is the right thing to do, and they sit in the membership options panel on the studio page. Unlimited training on the rolling month to month plan is £230, billed every four weeks. A one month unlimited pass is £250. A ten class pack is £265, which is £26.50 a session, and a single drop in is £27.50. There is a fourteen day trial at £49 for local residents, and intro offers come and go, four weeks for £99 when we last looked.

One thing worth knowing before you sign: because the rolling membership bills every four weeks rather than every calendar month, you pay thirteen times a year and not twelve. That is a shade under £3,000 across a year.

What one membership covers here

Fit This is on Reading Lane, tucked behind Hackney Town Hall. One membership covers the whole place. The gym floor, every class on the timetable, and the sauna. Nothing is a bolt on and there is no joining fee.

We run around forty classes a week as well, but across fourteen formats rather than one a day, so a week can be HIIT on Monday, Pump on Tuesday, Vinyasa on Thursday and boxing on Saturday. Or the same class four times, if that is what you want. Eleven coaches take them, and you get three free personal training sessions when you join, so somebody sits down with you at the start and works out what you are actually training for. The floor is open from 5.45am until 11pm on weekdays, which matters if the only slot you can reliably make is a late one.

On price, a membership is £55 a month rolling, £45 on three months, and £40 on twelve. A day pass is £15 if you want to try the place properly before committing to anything.

We are not going to claim we do F45 better than F45. We do not run F45. If what you want is one branded, programmed, coached team session and nothing else to think about, that studio does it well and £230 a month buys it. What we sell is a different thing: the run of a full gym, a broad timetable and coaching included rather than charged for, at between £40 and £55.

Getting between the two

Reading Lane is about twenty minutes on foot from Gillett Street, straight down Dalston Lane and Graham Road. If you would rather not walk it, Dalston Kingsland to Hackney Central is a single stop on the Mildmay line, and we are a couple of minutes from the station exit. Hackney Downs is around twelve minutes away on foot, with a covered walkway through to Hackney Central.

Hackney's independent community gym

The other difference is one that does not fit in a table. We are independent. Not a franchise of anything, not a chain that arrived when the area got popular, just the gym a lot of people around here already trained at. We sit alongside the Town Hall, the Empire and the library, and most of the room lives or works within a mile of the door. If you want the longer version, we wrote one: a guide to the corner of Hackney we are part of.

Come and see for yourself

The best way to settle any of this is to train here once. The trial is free, we do not ask for a card, and nobody will follow you round the floor. Turn up, take a class, use the gym, have a sauna, and see whether it suits you better than one workout a day.