Fitness club adds new location inside mall
EL CENTRO — When the Imperial-based 4:13 Fitness announced it would be opening a new location at the Imperial Valley Mall, the news was met with some skepticism. After all, gyms are not traditionally the first thing one associates with a shopping mall.
That has been changing elsewhere, and it figures to change locally now that 4:13 unveiled its new location to the public on Friday.
“Never once did we second-guess ourselves,” the new gym’s manager Sommer Luna said. “There were people that questioned us like, ‘Are you sure you thought this through?’ But our mentality was San Diego. If you go to San Diego, you see gyms at every mall. We just looked at this like a huge opportunity, as this was a prime location.”
4:13’s new approximately 5,000-square-foot facility, located between Charlotte Russe and the Disney Store, came to life after a smooth, eightweek move-in process, Luna said.
The new facility includes Hammer Strength workout machines, drum bells, kettle bells, a CrossFit area known as The Cage and 10 televisions for customer viewing.
The gym will be open daily from 5 a.m. until midnight. An outside entrance accessible via a key fob is available when mall is closed.
Members will have access to both 4:13 locations.
“I think it’s amazing,” Luna said on Friday. “I think we really brought our A game on this; it’s a game changer. I’ve already had someone tell me today, ‘I don’t feel like I’m in El Centro. I feel like I’m in San Diego.’”
4:13 planned the opening of the new facility for Black Friday as a way to “get in with the holiday rush.”
“It’s right before the holidays,” Luna said. “It’s the busiest time of the year, and everyone is going to be walking by and they could sign up. And then it’s also right before New Year resolutions.”
While the new gym didn’t offer any major Black Friday deals like its neighboring retail businesses may have, it did offer $1 signups throughout the month and waived the initiation fee for anyone who signed up on Friday.
Already members at 4:13’s Imperial location, Isaac Jimenez and Carlos Montano eagerly stopped by the facility’s soft opening Friday to see what it had to offer.
“In the Imperial location, all the CrossFit stuff that they have and all the free weights they have, it’s one of the best in the Valley, so that’s why I was excited to come check this one out — and I see that they do have a lot of stuff, too,” Jimenez, a 20-year-old Heber resident, said.
Montano, 20, of El Centro, also enjoyed all the new equipment the facility had to offer.
“They have a lot of good equipment,” Montano said. “It’s new stuff that they don’t have at the other gym.”
The two both said they were pleased with the new gym’s location, as they’d no longer have to make the drive to Imperial to work out.
To Montano’s delight, the gym has a majority of its front entrance windows blocked off, so no on-looking shoppers passing by would interfere with his focus during a workout.
“I thought people would be walking by and be able to see you work out, but no, it’s just like a normal gym,” the El Centro resident said. “It’s cool that it’s at the mall, too, because when you’re done you can go get a post-workout meal or a smoothie. You can’t really do that at the other gym.”
“I feel like I’m going to be coming to this one more than the Imperial one,” Jimenez said.