The Gym Group: see capacity without the app!

If you're like me, you hate busy gyms. I was very happy to learn that I can view my gym's capacity at any time with The Gym Group:

But there's a catch! It can only be viewed using their app.

This annoying decision is made even more annoying after you discover that in order to get the number, the app is just making a simple web request. You really have to wonder why I need to provide location data (a necessary app permission), and have Google Play Services enabled, just to see the response of a web request.

Let's get it without the app. The process is 2 steps:

1. Logging in and obtaining:
   • a cookie
   • your ID
   • your gym's ID
2. Sending a web request to /gym-busyness

I'll be using hurl to send requests, but you can use any tool that can send web requests and read responses.

Start by making a POST request to /login with your username and password. The Content-Type is x-www-form-urlencoded (a simple web form). Here is it in hurl:

POST https://thegymgroup.netpulse.com/np/exerciser/login
[FormParams]
password: ********
guestUuid: 
username: ****@******.net

and then run:

npx hurl login.hurl --very-verbose

From the output, find and copy:

• your cookie - set by the set-cookie response header
• uuid
• homeClubUuid

Now all we need to do is make a GET request to /gym-busyness. Here it is in hurl with placeholders for the values above:

GET https://thegymgroup.netpulse.com/np/thegymgroup/v1.0/exerciser/{put uuid here}/gym-busyness?gymLocationId={put homeClubUuid here}
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: {put set-cookie here}
Host: thegymgroup.netpulse.com
User-Agent: okhttp/4.10.0
X-NP-API-Version: 1.5
X-NP-APP-Version: 6.1
X-NP-User-Agent: clientType=MOBILE_DEVICE; devicePlatform=ANDROID; deviceUid=; applicationName=The Gym Group; applicationVersion=6.1; applicationVersionCode=60

That's it! No app required. Here's an example of the result:

{
  "gymLocationId": "",
  "gymLocationName": "London Wandsworth",
  "currentCapacity": 20,
  "currentPercentage": 12,
  "historical": [
    {
      "hour": "12AM",
      "percentage": 4
    },
    {
      "hour": "2AM",
      "percentage": 2
    },
    {
      "hour": "4AM",
      "percentage": 6
    },
    {
      "hour": "6AM",
      "percentage": 21
    },
    {
      "hour": "8AM",
      "percentage": 29
    },
    {
      "hour": "10AM",
      "percentage": 34
    },
    {
      "hour": "12PM",
      "percentage": 32
    },
    {
      "hour": "2PM",
      "percentage": 36
    },
    {
      "hour": "4PM",
      "percentage": 40
    },
    {
      "hour": "6PM",
      "percentage": 33
    },
    {
      "hour": "8PM",
      "percentage": 5
    },
    {
      "hour": "10PM",
      "percentage": 0
    }
  ],
  "status": "open"
}