Ceres has a new place to keep fit with the opening of the spacious Crunch Fitness at 1611 E. Hatch Road.

The new business was welcomed to the community by the Ceres Chamber of Commerce which hosted a Friday ribbon cutting and tours of the facility.

The 40,000-square-foot gym occupies the space that previously was Big Lots and before that Rancho San Miguel and Raley’s originally.

As the building was being retrofitted, Crunch Fitness was signing up customers in a pre-sale effort.

“The community was really excited and responsive,” said Davis Jenkins, the field marketing and communications manager for the local franchise. ”We were open selling memberships for about four months leading up into our grand opening, so everybody was pretty excited. There were a lot of people who had joined and were waiting till the 26th to finally get in here and work out.”

With nearly 600 locations and three million members worldwide, Crunch Fitness is the number two fitness club in the nation.

The franchise that owns the Ceres location also owns one in Merced and Tracy.

According to Jenkins, Crunch Fitness began in a New York garage in 1989 as primarily a group fitness studio with classes and “then from there, we kind of grew into a normal big box gym while still keeping our roots in group fitness.”

Crunch offers three different studio style class formats such as the hot Pilates studio and regular group fitness classes and high intensity interval training classes.

Within the box gym there are three different studios as well.

“So Hot Stuff is gonna be in our hot room. Infrared heating gets up to 100 plus degrees in there. And then our group fitness studio is where were we’re gonna hold our Zumba, our yoga, some of our strengthening classes. In the very back we have a whole bunch of punching bags, sleds, battle ropes, turf that are led by our trainers in like a circuit style class.” 

Crunch Fitness is open 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekdays and 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. on the weekends. The business employs approximately 23 workers.