‘Very distressing’: 24-hour gym policy in spotlight after bodybuilder collapses in shower

The family of a Perth bodybuilder who spent 15 hours unconscious in a gym shower without anyone noticing is calling for greater safety measures at gyms.

Police were forced to break down a door of the gym’s bathroom to rescue Giuliano Pirone, 33, who was found lying in the shower cubicle with the water still running about 10:30pm last Tuesday.

He had been in the shower since 7am without any of the gym’s staff or customers realising he was there.

“My beautiful son was alone on that floor, collapsed, smashed his head for about 15 hours and no-one noticed anything,” his mother Daniela Pirone told Nadia Mitsopoulos on ABC Radio Perth earlier this week.

“The showers are 20 metres away from reception and no-one noticed anything. Don’t the showers get cleaned? I’m just dumbfounded.”

24-hour gyms ‘convenient and affordable’

Barrie Elvish, chief executive of AusActive, the peak body for the exercise and active health sector, said what happened to Mr Pirone was “very distressing”.

“I sincerely hope that this gentleman does make a full recovery,” he said.

He said AusActive did encourage its member gyms to sign up to a voluntary code of practice, which includes measures to try to keep gym-goers safe.

“That includes a proper induction process for new members to any gym, which takes them around how to use equipment safely obviously, but also where duress alarms may be, where a defibrillator may be and so on,” he said.

Mr Elvish said 24-hour, mostly unstaffed gyms were a popular option with gym users because they allowed members to go anytime that suited them, without the cost that applied if a gym was staffed full-time.

“Eight million Australians have gym memberships, and 24-7 gyms are a very convenient facility for the majority of those people that go to a gym,” he said.

“It means they can go at their time of choosing and when it suits them to do that. But they aren’t staffed by definition and it’s not possible to staff a gym fully 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

He said checking bathrooms was also a fraught question, as CCTV would not be appropriate and a staff member going in to check a shower area wouldn’t necessarily know how long a customer had been in there.

“If I was to go into a bathroom to restock supplies and there was someone in the shower, unless I was in that bathroom for 15 minutes or so doing the restocking, I may not think it’s unusual for a person to be in the shower for 15 minutes,” he said.

Giuliano Pirone’s family have also questioned why nobody noticed that he checked into the gym but never left, but Mr Elvish said it was not usual practice for gyms to check patrons out.

“That’s something we could possibly look at, but at the moment, I’m not aware of any gym that actually has a check-out as well as a check-in,” he said.

In a statement, the gym’s management staff offered their “deepest sympathies to Giuliano’s family during this difficult time”. 

“As a 24-hour gym facility, we remain committed to maintaining a safe, secure and accessible environment for all our members.”

Waivers and responsibilities

Beth Rolton, a specialist personal injury lawyer, said while gyms were unregulated, they were still subject to state workplace health and safety legislation.

“The Workplace Health and Safety Act of WA 2020 is the act that imposes a primary duty of care on businesses and that primary duty of care is to ensure it’s reasonably practicable that the health and safety of persons are not put at risk when they are attending that business, so there’s a general broad duty that applies, Ms Rolton said.

She said while businesses like gyms often asked customers to sign waivers around responsibility for death and injury, they could only go so far.

“If you’ve got an activity that does involve a significant degree of physical exertion, businesses can apply a waiver when you sign up,” she said.

“I think it’d be very uncommon if you did join a gym if you didn’t sign some kind of waiver to say that you know if you have some kind of injury or death that the gym is not going to be responsible for that.

Ms Rolton said it was up to gym operators to look at what risks their customers may be exposed to, and what could be done to prevent them.

“What gyms have to do is look at what’s foreseeable and what’s a reasonable response to that?” she said.

“There are all sorts of foreseeable things that could happen in a gym and I guess one of those is having a medical episode.

“So then what the gym has to do is go, ‘What are some reasonable responses to those foreseeable risks that we can implement?’”

“There’s no obligation to eliminate all risk from a gym because that’s just not practicable, but there has to be some reasonable response to what is foreseeable, and so that’s going to be a case-by-case situation.”