Your Gym Equipment Is Dirtier Than A Toilet Seat

If you think all you're going to come home from the gym with is a six packed and sculpted buns, then think again.

It turns out the equipment at the gym is dirty, really dirty, and with every dumbbell that you pick up you could be risking illness and infection.

Equipment reviews site FitRated conducted a study of 27 different pieces of equipment at three different national gym chains in the US and what they found was alarming.

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They gathered bacteria samples from each machine and they bacteria that can cause skin infections, as well as some that are even antibiotic-resistant.

"The average treadmill, exercise bike, and free weight are all teeming with germs – more than 1 million per square inch apiece," they reported.

The found an exercise bike had 39 times more bacteria than a plastic cafeteria tray and a treadmill had 74 times more bacteria than a water tap.

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However the worst piece of equipment by far was the free weights, with 362 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Yuck.

So while our first reaction might be to cancel that gym membership (dramatic much...) FitRated recommends that you "disinfect machines both before and after you use them, never walk around barefoot, don’t touch your face, and always wash your hands and change out of your gym clothes immediately after a workout."