This guide covers fitness and recreation facilities from formation through claim defense. It develops the waiver and assumption of risk framework, distinguishing express release from primary implied assumption of risk and identifying the four categories no waiver reaches. It works through the health club statutes nearly every State has enacted — contract length limits, cooling-off periods, protected cancellation grounds, bonding, required disclosures, and the strict-compliance consequences of omitting them — together with auto-renewal requirements and the cancellation-mechanism parity rule now driving enforcement. It covers the non-waivable duties: equipment maintenance and defect response, premises conditions, cardiac emergency preparedness, and accessibility under the public accommodation framework. It develops trainer standard of care and scope limits, staff classification and wage exposure, and youth programming. It closes with incident response, insurance coverage gaps, and claim strategy from both sides.