I think we all have our personal answers to this question.  Most of us know we should exercise to get through this (not everyone has that need I realize.)  I remember several years ago when my husband and I went to buy a piece of exercise equipment and asked the salesman what we should buy, since we could only afford one piece.  He replied, "The one that won't trun into a clothes hanger.

Well, it did, of course.

Pay for what you'll use, DVDs, weights, a gym membership and it WILL be worth it - it is for me....and years ago, I never would have believed that to be true.

Free article from the Wall Street Journal:

Does Paying for a Gym Make You a Dumbbell?

• By NEAL TEMPLIN

When I walk through the streets of New York, I pass strange rooms where people are doing strange things.

Some folks are attached to madly spinning wheels. Others are straining to keep metal bars from crushing them. Still others jump around in unison as someone yells at them.

It all looks like something out of Dante's Inferno. And the most amazing thing is that people are paying to endure these trials.

The strange rooms are gyms, and I've been an on-again, off-again member of the cult over the years. My wife, Clarissa, and I have also purchased some of these machines of torture for home use.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for our spending on gyms and fitness equipment over the past 27 years. It came to $8,500. Pretty big money considering there have been numerous years when we spent nothing.

Clarissa drove me nuts back in 1982 when she purchased a $79 six-month membership at a gym and went exactly three times before it expired. She explained to me that she didn't feel comfortable going to the gym until she got in better shape.

Isn't that the point of working out? "Women will understand," she told me the other day.

Some 41 million Americans are health club members, more than twice as many as in the late 1980s, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association. Historically, 12% of memberships are signed in January, the most of any month, as Americans vow to knock off their holiday flab.

I've come full circle on the gym question during my life. They're worth it if you use them. But you can keep in good shape spending a lot less money.

I lifted weights for a while during high school. But growing up in California, I mostly kept fit by biking, bodysurfing and playing endless pickup games of basketball and touch football with neighborhood kids.

At the age of 23, I got my first job at a daily newspaper in the California desert. The mind-numbing heat made outside exercise an ordeal. I remember standing in line at some farming banquet and passing by a mirror. I took a look at my growing paunch. I joined a gym.

Since then, I've alternated between going to a gym and working out at home. I've usually looked for grungy gyms -- the sort of places where the weight-lifting equipment is in good shape but there isn't a whole lot else.

From 1989 to 1995, I covered the auto industry for the Journal. I lifted weights twice a week at a delightfully unpretentious place called Muscle's Gym, just outside Detroit. I paid as little as $200 per year.

I called the gym recently. It now charges $250 a year. "We're as far from the contracts and fancy gym as you can get," said owner Jerry Cuppetelli as weights clanged in the background.

You can't find these gyms in every city anymore. Too often, it's a fancy gym with lots of bells and whistles. If you ask how much it costs, the person at the front desk often won't know. Instead, he'll want you to meet with a "fitness consultant," who will pressure you to sign a contract. It's a bit like buying a car. You may end up feeling like you need a shower -- before you even work out.

Working out at home has its problems, too. We've all heard horror stories of people buying stuff they didn't use. I have one. In the late 1990s, I attended a spinning class and thought it was one of the best workouts I had ever had.

So I bought a $700 spinning bike for home use. I tried a few workouts and found the position reaggravated a neck problem. End of spinning workouts. The $700 bike leads a lonely existence in our basement.

Now I'm back to the cheapo approach to fitness. I walk a lot. And I do Pilates or calisthenics on my living room floor most mornings. Total cost: $60 for an exercise mat. It's not exactly Dante's Inferno, but I'm working on it.

I'm always amused by articles like these.  The people who write them don't exercise consistently and blame it on something else or are mad that they paid the money and didn't have the commitment to use whatever it was. 

I DO pay for my gym membership (or I did until I began working there) and everything about it is worth it to me.  Most of the ladies I see have been members for a very long time, but my gym is very special - it's been an all women's gym for 25 years.  It's as much a social networking place as it is a gym.  Women of every shape and age feel comfortable there.  They work out because that's what you do at a gym.  They socialize because that's what you do when you see the same people every day.  I'm very fortunate to have found this place!

I don't work out at home.  Don't like it.  I love the social environment of a gym, so that's what works for me.  I'm fit and stay that way because I love going to my gym and have made exercise and fitness a part of my life.

My $0.02 on the subject.

Linn

My YMCA Membership is worth every dollar I pay for it.

It is easy to rationalize the cost with the money I have saved not eating crappy food and soda.

Also, the cost of the Gym is a incentive to go for me. I too have heard to many stories of people paying for memberships and never going. NOT ME!.

IF I am paying the money I will make sure I get my $$$ worth.

In the future as I lose more weight and become even more active I may not need to keep my membership and that would be a good thing in a way, but I do not think I will cancel my membership soon.

If I didn't have a gym membership I wouldn't exercise regularly...there are too many distraction at my home and I just won't do it. I have the equipment and dvd's here, but not the motivation. For me going to the gym is essential. It's worth every penny because I actually do go.

I think I would give up cable and internet before I gave up my gym membership!  I like the actual routine of going to the gym. I know that if I relied solely on working out at home, I'd get distracted and end up not doing as much of a workout. The phone rings or you see something that needs to be done, ya know?

I just wish I had figured out how much good consistent exercise does much earlier in my life. I can be such a bonehead!

Nicci