The amazing part of that story is that they had the correct concern, but decided to bother people with something stupid anyway. That's like getting a notification asking how the weather is. Things like that are exactly why I said elsewhere a gym app would be a hard no from me.

Your story makes it sound like somehow the meeting was "let's add notifications, but for what?" and landed on that, which is exactly the type of thing that will lead to massively annoying people. If they don't have an obvious customer need for notifications (clearly they don't), why have them?

The original idea was to add notifications about classes... like if you scheduled a class, to be notified if it was canceled or modified. They felt like they would rather have people be in the gym for a canceled class than to not show up at all.