Dupage Policy Journal

Naperville resident Simon Poole has been served with a ban from Life Time Fitness in Warrenville after raising concerns about a man being allowed to shower in the women’s locker room.

Poole said his 10-year-old daughter and his wife were in the women’s locker room at Life Time Fitness in Warrenville when a man came in and started using the facilities.

"My wife and daughter went into a women's changing room assuming they have privacy and naturally assumed that a biological male would not walk in there to shower, go in the steam room and get changed while other women were around,” Poole told DuPage Policy Journal. "My wife felt nervous and unsafe and is also concerned that this male may have been showering in the shower stall next to my 10-year-old daughter.”

Poole reported that after calling the gym’s management to complain about the situation, he was banned from the club.

The Life Time Fitness Poole’s family formerly belonged to is located at 28141 Diehl Rd. in Warrenville.

The location is part of a larger chain of fitness centers owned by Leonard Green & Partners, TPG and operated by founder and CEO Bahram Akradi.

The Chanhassen, Minnesota-based company employs an estimated 36,000 people across 156 athletic clubs and a variety of other related business.

The move by the Warrenville location of Life Time Fitness to allow men to use the women’s changing rooms and showers comes amid a push for women seeking their own spaces in health clubs.

One gym was noted to have “covered windows so there's no creepy 'window shopping' by passersby,” much less a man allowed in the showers unbeknownst to female gym-goers, according to shape.com.

A survey conducted by Fitrated noted that of 890 respondents, over 70% noted they had experienced uncomfortable attention from males at their gym including being stared at and flirted with.

“Getting offenders to stop these unwanted actions can be difficult, so over 82% of women who’d been followed around while exercising altered their workout routine as a result. In response, more than half of women who’d been harassed while working out started avoiding certain areas of the gym, and over 41% outright spent less time there. For more than 1 in 5 women, these negative experiences caused a moderate to extreme impact on their fitness goals,” according to Fitrated.

Life Time Fitness has a history of not knowing what is occurring in women’s changing room facilities.

At the Burr Ridge location, an elderly woman died in a bathroom stall but was not found until two full days later, the Chicago Tribune reported.