This. Seriously - sometimes a machine will break down at my gym and therefore nobody has access to it until it is fixed. Can I file a complaint about them for that? I doubt it.
I understand that things need to be accessible to the disabled and I don’t think most people have any issue with that. But I don’t see how that translates to ‘the gym should provide a way for me to do every single exercise I can possibly imagine, and if they don’t they’re breaking the law’. The makeshift lat pulldowns that the OP has described are basically a made-up exercise that the gym has determined to be too dangerous and neither he* nor anybody else *is allowed to do them. How is that discriminatory? It sounds like the standard lat pulldown machine cannot be reasonably adapted to allow him to use it. Presumably that is also true of other machines in the gym. Surely it isn’t the expectation that every single machine be usable by every single client no matter what their physical limitations?
So what’s the problem exactly? The gym isn’t allowing someone to dangle dangerously from their equipment while they wait for the inevitable lawsuit when he injures himself or someone nearby? Or the gym refuses to buy special equipment only wanted by a small number of people (possibly only one person)? Neither of those seem like punishable offences to me.