Weekly Roundup · Sep 20–26, 2026

Barrecore and Boom Cycle Shut With No Warning. The Same Studios Failed Three Years Ago.

Five well known London studio brands closed on the same day. Barrecore, Boom Cycle, Kobox, Reformcore and Triyoga. Members found out by email. So did the instructors, who had been chasing late pay for weeks.

Here is the part nobody else is reporting. When a company goes under properly, an administrator gets appointed and there is someone to send your claim to. That has not happened here. Companies House still lists the company as active, with no insolvency process at all. So a member who paid £2,400 up front has nowhere to go.

These same studios have failed once before. The previous owner is still in liquidation, and the company that bought them has been through five directors in fifteen months.

If you sell packages or memberships up front, expect a member to ask you this week what happens to their money if you ever close. Have a real answer ready before they ask.

Members Quit in the First Month. Selling a Course Instead of a Class Pack Might Fix It.

Researchers followed 389,481 people using a training app to see who kept going. Only about one in ten beginners was still training a year later. Half had stopped by week 19.

What predicted who stayed was how consistently they trained in their first 28 days.

So here is the question for your studio. A class pack leaves it to the member to book, and week three is where they quietly drift. A course has set dates, so someone is expected in the room on Tuesday. We go through how to sell the second thing instead of the first, and why those first four weeks deserve most of your attention.

Oura’s $2.2 Billion IPO Is Mostly a Payout to Early Investors.

Oura, the smart ring company, set its terms for going public. When a company floats, you would expect it to sell new shares and keep the money to grow the business. Most of the shares on sale here already belong to existing investors, and that money goes to them.

By Oura’s own filing, once the tax bill on employee stock is covered, about $6.2 million of the raise is actually left for the company.

Why this matters to you. Wearables are the thing your members quote at you. The companies making them are under real pressure to turn a profit, so expect prices, subscriptions and partnership terms to move this year. If you are weighing up a wearable tie-in, read the terms closely and keep it easy to exit.

Gym Members Over 65 Grew Fastest Last Year. Here’s How to Reach Them.

US gym membership hit an all time high in 2025. The group growing fastest was people over 65, up 8.6% in a year.

Hardly anyone markets to them. Most studio websites are full of photos of people in their twenties, and that tells an older reader the place is probably not for them.

Three easy changes. Put a couple of older members in your photos. Say plainly what a beginner class involves. Run something in a daytime slot. We go through what this group wants and where they are already looking for it.

Mindbody Will Now Compare Your Studio to Others. Here’s What to Ask First.

Playlist, the company behind Mindbody, launched a tool that compares your studio’s numbers with other venues. It is built on anonymized data from more than 110,000 of them, so if you use Mindbody your numbers are already in that pool.

Benchmarks are useful. The catch is that the announcement never says what “similar” means. A 400 member gym and a six reformer Pilates studio are different businesses. If you are being compared with the wrong type of studio, the insight will not be much use to you.

Before you act on any benchmark, ask what it is comparing you with: how many studios, what size, what format, and which city. We go through the questions worth asking first.

How to Grow Revenue Without Adding More Members

Life Time added 1.2% more members last quarter and grew revenue 13.7%. Almost all of that extra money came from the members it already had.

We lay out what revenue per member actually is, what good looks like for a studio your size, and the two moves that raise yours.

If you want the version with the operator moves behind it, that started as The Take on double-digit revenue growth.

Apple Cut Fitness+ Staff. The Problem Is One Every Gym Knows: Churn.

Apple cut part of the team behind Fitness+, its workout video subscription. Reports point at two things. The content costs a lot to make, and subscribers do not stay.

That is worth sitting with, because Apple has the budget, the distribution and the production values, and video alone still could not hold people.

Here is the encouraging part. The thing Apple cannot do is the thing you already do. Someone notices when a member misses a week. Someone knows their name and their bad knee. If you have been worried that an app will replace you, this is good evidence that the video library was never the thing keeping people. Put your effort into the coaching and the check in, and treat your on demand content as a bonus rather than the product.

A Crunch Franchisee Tested Hot Yoga Inside Its Gyms. Now It’s Signing for 25 Studios.

CR Fitness runs more Crunch gyms than any other franchisee. Before committing to hot yoga, it put heated classes inside its own clubs to see whether members would actually turn up. They did, so it has now signed to open 25 Yoga Joint studios.

If you run a boutique studio, this is how your next competitor tends to arrive. It is a big gym that tested your format on its own members first. By the time it opens near you, it already knows the demand is there.

Your advantage is the room and the teacher. Ask a few regulars what keeps them coming to you specifically, then make more of that answer while you have the time.

Run Clubs Grew 3.5x Last Year. Now They Have Their Own App.

Run clubs on Strava grew three and a half times in 2025, and last week an app built just for them launched.

Most run clubs are free, so there is no competing with them on price. The good news is that you do not have to. Host one instead. A free run club that starts and finishes at your studio is the cheapest way we know to get local people through your door and let them see the place.

If you want to try it, pick one evening, keep it genuinely free, and put someone warm in charge of it. We go through how these clubs are being run and what the new app changes.

Read This Week

Two posts we read this week, both worth your time.

What’s About To Win In Fitness? It’s Not What You’re Thinking… — Rach Hirsch, Rach Hirsch • The Wellness Investor

Rach Hirsch • The Wellness Investor

What's About To Win In Fitness? It's Not What You're Thinking...

A few months ago, a major fitness conference in Europe reached out and asked me to speak about “what’s next in fitness…

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7 days ago · 43 likes · 1 comment

A European conference asked her to speak on what is next in fitness. They were expecting Pilates, or Hyrox, or a reformer nobody has heard of yet. She talked about run clubs and hiking groups instead. Her numbers are the same ones we used. Hiking clubs on Strava grew 5.8x in 2025, running clubs 3.5x. Her line is “the fastest-growing thing in fitness right now doesn’t have four walls. Instead just a group chat.” Read it straight after our run club piece. The opening is free and the rest is for her paid subscribers.

The Business Stuff Every Pilates Instructor Should Know, Part 3: Building a Private Client Base — Holly Swanson, Pilates Field Guide

She ranks where private clients actually come from, warmest lead to coldest. Social media sits at the bottom. Her reasoning is that a private client hands you their time and money to do what you say. That kind of trust almost never gets built on a feed. The warmest lead is the person already in your group class, in the two minutes after it ends, when they ask why one wrist hurts. At $130 an hour, a few of those change what a member is worth to you. Read it straight after our revenue per member piece.

That is the week. If you want the longer pieces, where we take one story and work through what to actually do about it, that is The Take. It runs twice a month and costs $8 a month.

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Weekly Roundup · Sep 12–18, 2026

True Fitness Closed Overnight. What It Means for Your Prepaid Packages.

True Fitness and True Yoga closed every one of their Singapore clubs on September 10. No warning. Within a day, 241 members had complained, and between them they’d lost more than $609,000 in classes they had already paid for. Those members are now creditors of a company in liquidation, and that usually means they get little back. Here’s the part for you. Every class pack you sell is money you owe until the member books the class.

Solidcore Built a Strength Class So Its Members Stop Lifting Somewhere Else.

Solidcore announced Ascend on September 14. It’s a heated strength class, opening in December at Manhattan West in New York. Members can book it with the credits they already have, at no extra cost. That tells you what it’s for. Most Solidcore members were getting their strength work at another gym, and a second membership is where people start to leave. The upsell comes later, with a new top tier for members who want both.

Planet Fitness’s Free Teen Pass Stalled at 3.7 Million. It Hasn’t Said How Many Paid.

About 3.7 million teens used Planet Fitness’s free summer pass this year. That’s the same as last year, the first summer the program didn’t grow. The number that would show whether it works is how many of those teens went on to pay. Planet Fitness has never published it. You probably run a smaller version of this, like a free week or a trial class, so judge it on who pays 30 days later, not on sign-ups. The follow-up that turns a trial into a regular is in our 10-visit onboarding playbook.

Fitstop Is Opening Four Studios in Houston. Its Model Was Built to Travel.

Fitstop, a strength brand from Brisbane, is opening four studios in Houston. The owner looked at six other franchise brands first, and his general manager helped grow Orangetheory in Houston to 27 studios. Australian formats travel well because they were built to be copied from the first studio: the same programming, the same design, everywhere. F45 is the warning. It spread fast too, then left the New York Stock Exchange in 2023. If you’re planning a second location, the same test applies. Write the programming down.

Read This Week

Three posts worth your time. One is about class spots you’ve already paid for. Two are from owners working out what their studios actually need from them.

Your No-Show Policy Is Costing You Five Figures a Year — Courtney Clapper, The Business of Pilates

The Business of Pilates

Your No-Show Policy Is Costing You Five Figures a Year

The Spot That Cost You Nothing (Except It Didn’t…

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18 days ago · 4 likes · Courtney Clapper

Read this after our Solidcore piece. Solidcore is letting members move credits between formats, and every credit that moves also moves a spot in a class. Clapper does the maths on the spots nobody uses. Take a studio running 20 reformer classes a week with ten spots each. At a 15% no-show rate, that’s about $54,600 a year in spots that were booked and never filled. Her sharpest point is about late-cancel fees. If a class is worth $35 and the fee is $15, “you’ve priced skipping at a discount.” Waitlist auto-fill won’t save you either. It only fires when someone cancels, and a true no-show never does.

What Happens When the Founder Takes a Backseat — Kenzie Wesp, The Founder’s Files

The Founder's Files by Kenzie Wesp

What Happens When the Founder Takes a Backseat

If you are a founder heading into any kind of extended time away, whether that is maternity leave, a medical leave, a sabbatical, or just a trip you actually want to unplug on, I think this applies to you too…

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19 days ago · 1 like · Kenzie Wesp

Pair this with our Fitstop piece. Fitstop travels because it runs without its founder in the room. Wesp is testing that with her own business. She owns four studios and is taking four full weeks of maternity leave, not “available if needed.” Her studios haven’t run perfectly, and she says that’s the proof it’s working. If everything ran exactly as if you’d never left, either you weren’t as needed as you thought or your team never got room to lead. The practical part is one handover document and one skill she taught her managers first: telling “this needs me right now” from “this needs me eventually.” As she puts it, “Not every fire is actually a fire.”

The Weight of Getting Everything You Asked For — Andrea, Elevéte with Andrea

Read it straight after Wesp’s. Andrea runs a dance studio and a Pilates studio that’s about to turn one, and she’s in her final year of law school. Her studio manager is moving to a virtual role, and she still hasn’t found all the right hires. So she’s building what she calls an attention filter for owners. It’s four questions to ask when something lands on your desk. What needs me? What only needs my eyes? What needs someone else? What can wait? Her line: “Maybe capacity is knowing what you’re supposed to carry in the first place.”

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Three years later, the recovery room is one of the fastest-growing formats in fitness. We compared the two side by side.

What the review ranked as well supported: foam rolling, compression garments, cryotherapy chambers, photobiomodulation (red light therapy), hydrotherapy in the form of cold water immersion, and active recovery. Cryotherapy chambers reduced muscle pain in 80% of the post-exercise studies reviewed. Red light showed generally positive findings for muscle fatigue and for strength and endurance performance.

What it graded as thin or mixed:

• sauna, which lacks systematic reviews entirely and may impose additional physiological stress.

• Recovery boots and sleeves, where most studies report a change in perceived soreness but performance findings are mixed.

• Occlusion cuffs, mixed and carrying injury risk.

• Massage guns, where the recovery research is limited, two case studies reported serious injury, and one study found a potential increase in soreness.

• Stretching came out no better than passive recovery.

The grading has held up, and 2026 sharpened one line of it. Writing in Physiologically Speaking on September 4, exercise physiologist Brady Holmer summarized where the cold plunge research has moved.

Physiologically Speaking

Physiology Friday #333: Can a Cold Plunge Prime Your Workout?

Greetings…

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23 days ago · 16 likes · 3 comments · Brady Holmer

Used regularly after resistance training, cold water immersion “reduces muscle protein synthesis in the short term and strength/hypertrophy gains in the long term.” After endurance work the picture is different, and the effects “don’t appear to be detrimental and may sometimes even be helpful.”

That split is commercially significant, and almost nobody selling a plunge makes it.

What about the price list?

SWTHZ sells private suites built around an infrared sauna, a cold plunge and a vitamin C shower. Perspire Sauna Studio sells infrared sauna suites, with red light as a feature inside them. Restore Hyper Wellness runs 225 or more studios on IV drips, cryotherapy, red light and mild hyperbaric oxygen. World Gym’s new Belconnen club, which opened on August 27, bundles a fifteen-person traditional sauna, two ice baths and two ice showers into a Gym and Wellness membership from AU$37.95 a week.

Sauna is the common thread for most of those rooms. It’s the modality the review puts in the thin column. Red light, which grades well, is usually the add-on rather than the anchor.

Recovery is what the research studies. Wellness is what the category sells.

There is a naming question sitting underneath all of this, and it is not cosmetic. The literature studies recovery. The businesses sell wellness. It is Restore Hyper Wellness. It is World Gym’s Gym and Wellness tier. It is SWTHZ describing itself as a luxury wellness studio.

Recovery is a performance claim, and performance claims can be checked against evidence. Wellness is not a claim of that kind. The relabel moves the product outside the reach of the literature that grades it, which is worth noticing before you buy a room full of equipment on the strength of the category’s own language.

The economics under the menu

SWTHZ’s Item 19 disclosure covers the 13 franchised locations open for all of fiscal 2024: average gross sales of $573,762, a median of $556,226, and a range from $438,824 to $718,752. The build cost in the 2026 filing runs $631,798 to $1,314,102, up from $569,757 to $1,193,974 in the 2025 filing.

The average unit does not gross in a year what the cheapest build costs, and the build got more expensive while the category got more crowded. The International Franchise Association expects roughly 15,000 new franchise establishments across the sector in 2026. The underlying equipment markets are smaller than the noise suggests: cold plunge tubs at $381.7 million and sauna and spa at $4.42 billion, both real categories at modest scale, being franchised at a pace that assumes something larger.

The part nobody can sell

The review is clear about where the strongest evidence actually sits. Sleep, nutrition and periodisation are the cake. Devices are the icing. Sleep has the deepest research base of anything in the paper, with documented effects on sprint time, reaction time, aerobic capacity and body composition.

Sleep is also the one recovery intervention nobody can put a turnstile in front of.

As of September, the measurement is free as well. Apple’s Series 12 samples heart rate variability twenty-four times more often than the previous generation and returns a daily readiness score at no charge, alongside a Health Age built on VO2 max, resting heart rate, sleep and HRV. watchOS 27 shipped on September 14 and the watch reached stores on September 18. Oura charges $5.99 a month for the same category of output and WHOOP charges up to $359 a year, which is a point we made about the wearable business and which lands differently here.

Both ends of recovery now cost nothing. The intervention with the deepest evidence was always free. The measurement joined it this month. The part being financed at six and seven figures sits in the middle, and it is the part that grades worst.

That is the same shape as the wider sleep economy, where the products with the most confident marketing cluster around a deficit the customer already feels, and the highest-evidence intervention stays free. A recovery room and a sleep supplement are running the same play. The felt need is genuine. The thing that would most reliably meet it is not for sale.

Three positions, three different problems

What follows from this depends on what you operate, and the three seats are genuinely different.

A gym can bundle recovery as an amenity and never make it carry its own P&L. A standalone contrast studio is underwriting a six or seven figure fit-out against an average unit volume that does not clear it inside a year, while gyms bundle a version of the same menu into a membership. A premium social club is selling the room, the ritual and the people in it, which is why the evidence grade bites least there.

One thing worth doing this week regardless of model: audit which modality your members actually use, by session, before you buy another one. Most operators have never separated the equipment members book from the equipment members walk past. It costs nothing and it takes an afternoon.

The research and the price list rank these products differently, but that gap is the whole business of recovery.

The buy and skip list

Read this as a grading of the evidence, not of the products. A modality in the thin column is not proven useless. It is unproven, which is a different problem, and a more expensive one when you are the person financing the room.

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Weekly Roundup · Sep 5–11, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

bsport Asked 550 Boutique Members Why They Never Booked. 63% Said the Schedule.

bsport surveyed 550 active boutique members across the US, UK, France, Germany and Spain and asked what stopped them booking the first time. 63% named inflexible class schedules, ahead of inconvenient location at 38% and wanting a trial class at 25%. Price did not lead. A prospect who cannot find a class that fits their week never reaches the pricing page, and in your analytics they look exactly like someone who balked at the price. Of the three barriers, the timetable is the only one you can fix without a new lease or a discount.

Six Days After Oura Filed, Apple Made Readiness Free.

Oura filed for its IPO on September 3 on the strength of a membership that brought in $240.5M over nine months at an 89% gross margin. Six days later Apple put a free daily Readiness score on Apple Watch Series 12, alongside a Health Age score and a $119 panel of 50-plus biomarkers at Quest. The interpretation layer was supposed to be the moat, and Apple made it a default setting. For studios the readiness number stops being something to sell and becomes an input. What you can still charge for is what happens when the score drops.

HYROX Founders Took Back 51%. Everyone Reported a PE Takeover.

Infront completed the sale of HYROX on September 8 and the headlines said private equity had bought it. The ownership table says founders Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fuerste now hold 51%, with L Catterton and WndrCo underneath them as minority partners and Infront fully out, at a reported valuation around €600M. That changes who has to say yes before anyone squeezes the affiliate licence, which EoS pays $130 a month per club for. Founder control buys gyms continuity. A €600M valuation still needs a growth case, though, and one of the four levers runs through your P&L.

Gold’s Gym Built an App for People Who Never Walk In.

Gold’s Gym has more than 550 locations, and this week it launched Hone, a movement, nutrition and body composition app built with Demotu. It is piloting in 46 company-owned clubs, rolls out to all members next, and in 2027 goes on the App Store for anyone, member or not. That last tier is the tell, because a building has a catchment area and an app does not. With fitness apps keeping about 3% of users at day 30, a standalone subscription is a hard bet. As a lead source with a movement assessment already on file, it looks a lot smarter.

Your Booking Software Just Signed a Lease on Bond Street.

Arketa runs booking, payments and websites for thousands of boutique studios, and it has now opened a studio of its own, Powered, at 31 Bond Street in Manhattan. Its stated reason is to understand the demand and pain points operators face, which is a vendor with $22.6M raised saying out loud that it did not fully understand its customers. The gap is everything a dashboard cannot show you: the 5am instructor cancellation, the member whose only workable slot is full every week. The risk for everyone else is a product roadmap that drifts toward studios shaped like Powered.

The Gym Group Raised Prices 5% and Still Added Members.

The Gym Group’s first half: revenue up 10% to £133.1M, revenue per member up 5% to £22.14 a month, and members up 4% to 991,000 across 245 UK sites. A budget operator raised its price and grew volume in the same six months, so roughly half the growth came from price. If the most price-sensitive segment in UK fitness can take 5%, a coached studio charging four times as much has a weaker excuse than it thinks. The moves for pulling that lever are in our Take on growing revenue in double digits while members grow in single digits.

74% of Gym Operators Grew. Only 37% Plan to Open Again.

Xplor surveyed more than 180 gym and leisure operators in 19 countries. 74% grew over the last three years, just 2% declined, and 68% opened a new location. Only 37% plan to open another in the next two years. What is holding them back is supply: 59% struggle to find sites, 60% cite rising member acquisition costs and 56% cannot recruit staff, with the UK seven to ten points worse on every line. Only 36% would consider debt, which explains why so many build from cash flow instead of buying a distressed club.

Life Time Launched LT Social. HYROX Took Its Dating App Global. Neither Charges for It.

Life Time’s LT Social is an application-only community with monthly events at flagship clubs, set to start in New York on September 12 and 13, at no extra cost to members. HYROX took its Surf dating partnership into the UK, Ireland and Latin America, pairing strangers as doubles partners at races. Neither is charging for community, because both are using it to hold a price that classes alone stopped justifying. Life Time’s version needs flagship real estate in eight metros. The HYROX version needs a partner with a marketing budget, which a single-site studio can actually find.

Pickleball Venues Charge $75 a Month for 70,000 Square Feet. The Money Is in Dwell Time.

Pickleball participation grew 479% between 2020 and 2025 to 24.3 million players, and the committed core playing eight or more times a year went from 1.4 million to 7.5 million. Venues like Chicken N Pickle run 30,000 to 70,000 square feet at $75 to $149 a month and hold people for 90 to 120 minutes, because the court fee is the business and the food exists to stretch the stay. A boutique studio charges more for 50 minutes, sells one thing and clears the room. Dwell time is the metric almost no studio tracks.

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Read This Week

Three posts worth your time, and two of them are about the number most owners read too quickly: retention.

Your Studio Retention Number Isn’t What It Looks Like — Holly Swanson, Pilates Field Guide

Read this straight after our bsport piece. bsport tells you why people never booked, and Swanson tells you whether the ones who did actually came back. She splits retention into two numbers, the studio’s and each teacher’s, and measures a return inside 60 days, because 30 is too short and 120 means they are not really a regular. 85% or higher is an A+. Filter out unlimited memberships, which show close to 100% and flatter the average, and watch for 5-packs stretched across two months, which count as retention but never become recurring revenue. The schedule shows up here too: a teacher stuck with the 11am to 1pm slots will sit lower than one with the 6am classes, and she says plainly, “A steady 70% in the right context is good.”

Is Every Brand a Fitness Brand Now? — Beyond, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow

Tomorrow's Tomorrow, by Beyond

Is every brand a fitness brand now?

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a month ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Beyond

Pair this with our Gold’s Gym and Arketa pieces, which are the same move from the other side: a gym selling an app to people who never walk in, and a software company opening a studio. Their argument is that “fitness is no longer a siloed part of a person’s life,” and that the experience now starts hours before the session. Useful context for any studio owner wondering why a member’s attention is harder to hold than it was.

Your Gym Isn’t Underpriced, It’s Under-Retained — Jim Thomas, Jim’s Substack

Jim’s Substack

Your Gym Isn’t Underpriced—It’s Under-Retained: The Profit Problem Most Gym Owners Are Trying to Fix the Wrong Way

If your gym is struggling to grow revenue, your first instinct may be to raise prices, sell more memberships, increase your advertising budget, or launch another promotion…

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16 days ago · Jim Thomas

The counterweight to our Gym Group piece. The Gym Group shows a price rise can work, and Thomas’s point is that it cannot cover for members walking out the back. Sell 50 memberships and lose 45 and you netted five. Cut cancellations to 25 and you added 25 without a single extra lead. Two gyms charging the same rate, one keeping members eight months and the other 24, are running different businesses. His practical asks: flag inactivity at 7 to 14 days instead of 30, run onboarding touchpoints from day one through day 90, and stop using discounts to save a member who has already stopped showing up. The line to take into your next pricing conversation: “Your gym may not be underpriced. It may simply be under-retained.”

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Weekly Roundup · Aug 29–Sep 4, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

Oura Filed for Its IPO. Their Monthly Subscription Is the Story.

Oura filed its S-1 on September 3. Hardware brought in $974M at a 55% blended gross margin. The membership line brought in $240M at 89% (!), and it grew 121% year over year. The $16B target is priced off the second number rather than the first, which makes the ring an acquisition cost and the subscription the actual business. That is the same shape as a recovery room, a nutrition add-on or a PT package, and most operators are still filing all three under upsell.

Enhance, the PT Software Behind Crunch and UFC Gym, Just Raised $18.2M.

Enhance sells personal training software into high-value low-price gyms, and Crunch, UFC Gym, PureGym and In-Shape already run it. The platform handles 500,000 booked sessions a month across 15,000 trainers and has compounded revenue at 65% a year since 2019. In that model the $10 membership was never the product. It buys the foot traffic that personal training converts, and the raise is a bet that the conversion layer is worth more than the door. If you want the arithmetic on what that does to a P&L, our Take on double-digit revenue growth off single-digit member growth is a good companion read.

How Gen Z Picks Where to Live: The Gym Comes Before the Pub

The Gym Group’s third annual Gen Z survey, 2,000 people, puts the gym ahead of the pub as the amenity that decides where they move, and 44% now rank fitness as their first or second discretionary spend. The demand is real and operators are hunting sites on the back of it. The map many of them are reading is Strava’s heatmap, whose users one 2026 study put at 93.5% male and 93.6% cyclists, and which in Baltimore traced the city’s segregation lines rather than its demand. Activity data and demand data are not the same file, and only one of them is telling you where the members are.

Why Yoga Studios Are Cutting Classes and Adding Pilates

Walla’s veteran yoga studios cut yoga class supply by 25% this year. More than 40% of ClassPass yoga studios now take Pilates bookings too, and Mindbody counts a 20% rise in yoga studios adding Pilates since 2023. Nobody surveyed members and found they wanted less yoga. They just looked at the schedule and the rent bill and reallocated the space, which could mean the yoga industry decline is an effect of more limited supply.

GLP-1 Users Spend 4x More on Fitness. Why This Matters

The Consumer Collective found GLP-1 users report $449 a month on fitness against $120 for everyone else, and that number is being reprinted everywhere with the methodology stripped off. It rests on 123 people inside a 500-person survey with no control for household income, and GLP-1s are expensive, so some of the gap is measuring wealth rather than motivation. There is still a super useful finding underneath it, and it points at acquisition vs price.

Strava’s Strength Push: What It Means for Gyms and Studios

Strava has 195 million users and logged more than 500 million strength sessions last year, and in May it rebuilt strength training around 14 partner integrations. Buried in that launch list is also 24 Hour Fitness, scheduled to follow. When a big-box chain pipes member workouts into someone else’s feed, the streak and the social proof accrue to Strava while the floor space stays yours. There is a good case for doing it anyway - read more.

Why Health Trackers Don’t Change Behaviour, and What Studios Can Sell Instead

Owaves surveyed 1,000 college students, who spend $1,070 a year on wellness products and tracking tools. Eight in ten use a tracker, most check it daily, and one in five report making no behavioural change from any of it. That last group is not a lost cause. They have already paid to be told what to do and are still waiting for someone to tell them, because a tracker reports state and never schedules anything or notices when you stop.

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Read This Week

Three posts worth your time, all of them doing the arithmetic the rest of the industry quotes without checking.

Your Favorite Acquisition Channel Is Probably Your Most Expensive One — Courtney Clapper, The Business of Pilates

The Business of Pilates

Your Favorite Acquisition Channel Is Probably Your Most Expensive One

I’ve been staring at acquisition numbers for weeks…

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25 days ago · Courtney Clapper

Read this straight after our Gen Z site-selection piece, because it is the same mistake one layer down: a number that looks like demand and is actually something else. Clapper prices every channel against a lifetime value of roughly $4,000, built from $225 a month, an 80% contribution margin and 24-month retention. ClassPass pays $6 to $15 a class and 94% of its users are new to the venue. Paid social runs $30 to $100 per converted member if you have optimised it and $200 to $400 if you have not. Referrals come in under $25, sometimes as low as $14, and retain 10 to 20 points better at ninety days. Her line on the cheap channel everyone defends: “You’re not paying $6 a class. You’re paying $6 a class, indefinitely, for members you don’t actually own.”

Who Is the $149 Meridian by Whoop Actually For? — Janey Park, The Digital Runway

The Digital Runway®

Who is the $149 Meridian by Whoop actually for?

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a month ago · 1 like · Janey Park

The other half of the Oura story, from the consumer side. Whoop’s new $149 Meridian band carries the same sensors as its $39 CoreKnit, so the premium is entirely aesthetic, and it costs $50 more than a whole Fitbit Air. Janey reads the hires rather than the product: a Chief Creative Officer, a Samuel Ross partnership, a new Chief Commercial Officer, and 600-plus roles opened this year. Her conclusion is that these companies are repositioning wearables as permanent arm accessories rather than gym equipment. Useful this week if you are wondering why the hardware margin keeps getting spent on design while the subscription quietly does the earning.

Do My Two Studios Actually Compete With Each Other? — Kenzie Wesp, The Founder’s Files

The Founder's Files by Kenzie Wesp

Do My Two Studios Actually Compete With Each Other?

If you’re new here, hi friend, welcome to The Founder’s Files…

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a month ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Kenzie Wesp

The operator answer to our yoga and Pilates piece, from someone who chose the cannibalization on purpose. Wesp runs TRUEFORM, a Lagree studio, and The Format, heated Pilates, as separate concepts with separate brands, teams and member bases, and she built the second rather than scaling the first for ownership and franchise reasons. Asked the obvious question, she does not hedge: “Yes, we compete! And that’s the cost of doing IT.” Worth reading before you add a second format into the same room and tell yourself the audiences are different.

That’s the week. If someone forwarded you this, subscribe free at newsletter.therunrate.co. And if you want The Take (our twice-monthly opinion issue) plus the full Growth Playbooks library, the paid tier is $8/mo.

Weekly Roundup · Aug 22–28, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

Gym Member Retention: The Benchmark Guide

The industry average is 66.4% annual retention, published in the Health & Fitness Association’s 2025 Benchmarking Report on 2024 data, across 175 companies and more than 17,000 facilities in 27 countries. The figure most operators actually quote is 71.4%, which comes from IHRSA’s Profiles of Success and reports 2015 data. We traced every benchmark we could find back to its publisher, its sample and its data year, and several of the most repeated numbers in this industry do not survive that check. Retention fell about five points between those two samples while membership grew, which is the squeeze sitting underneath every revenue-per-member conversation this year.

Oura Is Being Sued Over Sleep Accuracy.

On August 20 a California resident filed a proposed class action in the Northern District of California, alleging Oura cannot substantiate advertised sleep-staging accuracy of 79% and 95%, and citing peer-reviewed testing that puts overall stage classification at 53.18%. Oura says it stands behind its science, and nothing has been decided. The useful part for operators is the line the complaint draws in public: a ring measures heart rate, HRV, movement and temperature, then infers sleep stages, readiness and recovery from them, and both columns appear in the app in the same typeface at the same size. Members arrive having already decided what kind of day their body is having, and a week of mainstream coverage is the opening for a coach to explain which half of that screen was ever a measurement.

Five Studios, One Membership: What Crunch Select Is Built to Do.

Crunch’s premium banner relaunches as a multi-boutique club, with Reform Pilates, a strength studio, boxing, an abs and glutes studio and an expanded recovery suite all inside the base membership. Very few members switch on a bundle alone, because a bundled class and a specialist studio are different products separated by instructor hours, class size and the people in the room. The cost is the reference point. Boutique studios take roughly 42% of US industry revenue on about 25% of memberships, and that pricing power holds only while a prospect still carries two mental categories instead of one.

EoS Just Licensed HYROX. So Can You, for $130 a Month.

EoS became the first gym chain to put official HYROX Training+ programming inside its member app, across 25 locations, gated behind its premium tier. The licence it used is open to any gym at roughly $130 a month per site, with no square-footage minimum, no equipment quota and no coach certification requirement, and more than 2,500 gyms already hold it. EoS bought attention and moved first, which is a different thing from buying exclusivity. If the question is whether renting a competition format actually builds anything, our Take on how “Pilates’ answer to HYROX” ended is the companion piece.

Crunch Clubs Are Giving Away 2 Million PT Sessions in One Day.

CR Fitness Holdings is one franchise group with 98 Crunch clubs and more than a million members, and on August 29 it offered every one of them two free 30-minute personal training sessions. TRR estimate: ten trainers per club running back-to-back half-hour slots across a 16-hour day tops out near 31,000 sessions, roughly 1.5% of the advertised figure, which is our arithmetic rather than a delivery forecast. The two million is entitlement and the thirty thousand is the business, and the mechanic underneath works the same at forty members as at a million: one day rather than an open-ended offer, sign-up at a bar inside the club, and every staff member running the same play at the same time.

Mark Mastrov Bought 24 Hour Fitness Back. Eight Months Later He Took the CEO Seat.

Mastrov reacquired the company he founded in January with LongRange Capital, returning as owner and executive chair alongside a stated $100 million investment plan. In August, CEO Karl Sanft left and Mastrov took the seat himself on an interim basis. Eight months is a reaction rather than a strategy cycle, and an owner who gives up his one degree of separation from the floor is betting that knowing the member beats knowing the plan. That knowledge is the single asset an independent usually holds more of than the chain down the road, and almost nobody writes any of it down.

Read This Week

Three posts worth your time, from operators publishing the arithmetic most of this industry keeps off the page.

How to Raise Your Prices (and How to Know If You Need To) by Holly Swanson, Pilates Field Guide

Read this next to our Crunch Select piece, because it is the operator-side answer to a price anchor that just moved. Swanson starts with the diagnosis rather than the increase: full classes with a real waitlist, costs that have risen across several lines, or teacher pay that has to go up are reasons to raise, while a slow season, a competitor’s increase, or a cash-flow problem that is actually a cost problem are not. Then the mechanics, which are where most owners lose the room. Tell teachers first and raise their pay in the same breath, give two to four weeks’ notice, quote the increase as the dollars a weekly member will actually feel, and grandfather nobody. Her line on the announcement: “Don’t apologize. It’s always our first instinct to say I’m sorry, I don’t have a choice. You do have a choice.”

When Did Feeling Good Become So Much Work? — Rach Hirsch, The 2% Club

Rach Hirsch • The Wellness Investor

When Did Feeling Good Become So Much Work?

I went back to camp a few weeks ago…

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a month ago · 257 likes · 20 comments

Hirsch looks at the $368 million that has gone into acquiring 22 summer camps, including a reported $80 million bid from Warner Bros’ CEO for a single one, and reads it as capital voting against optimization culture. Her argument is that a $2 trillion wellness industry taught people to treat feeling good as a leaderboard, with HRV, VO2 max and biological age all keeping score, and that the next wave of money goes to the opposite instinct. Worth reading against the Oura story, because both are about members who are quietly tired of being measured.

Your Clients Are Your Influencers — Anna Noelle Rinke, Homebody Studios

Le Index; Anna Noelle Rinke

Your Clients Are Your Influencers

We’ve all seen the Instagram stories of the Pilates studio plastered with the latest supplement company or skincare brand, only to find out that those classes weren’t for their loyal clients… they were for a select group of influencers…

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a month ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Le Index; Anna Noelle Rinke

US influencer marketing passed $10 billion in 2025 and is forecast to hit $13 billion by 2027, and Rinke walks the practice back through Wedgwood’s royal warrant, Tupperware’s 20,000 dealers and Nike’s first $126 million year with Jordan to separate what each brand was actually borrowing. Wedgwood borrowed status. Nike borrowed reach. Tupperware borrowed belonging, which is the one a studio already owns and the one that stops working the moment community becomes a logo and a broadcast channel. Useful this week if the Crunch bundle has you listing what a big-box membership cannot copy.

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Weekly Roundup · Aug 15–21, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

Double Your Weekend Night Bookings

ClassPass reservations for Friday and Saturday classes between 7pm and 11pm more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, and 53% of its 18 to 34 year olds booked a workout instead of a night out in the past year. Most timetables still treat those hours as dead, which is a choice, because a class slot is perishable inventory and an empty 8pm Friday costs exactly what a full one costs. The spread is already visible inside a single week: fitDEGREE reports reformer slots running at 98% utilization at 6pm against 45% at 10am. Filling that Friday hour is the cleanest version of the argument in The Take on growing revenue in double digits on single-digit member growth, which is about what you can charge the members you already have.

Solidcore Is Dropping the Word “Pilates.” What It Means

Every boutique operator is racing to get Pilates onto their signage. Solidcore, 250-plus US locations, $35 to $45 a class, 30 to 35 new studios planned this year, is taking it off. The category name sets the comparison set, and a label that now runs from a $29 reformer class to a $45 one is a price ceiling you install for free the moment you pick it.

Equinox Became a Points Redemption in Bilt. Would That Sell More Memberships?

Bilt and Equinox launched Bilt for the Committed on August 19: join, upgrade and book from inside the Bilt app, and spend rent points on personal training, studio Pilates and spa. Volume should rise, because a $10.75 billion platform with $20 billion in annualized spend knows where someone lives and what they pay to live there. The quieter cost is the reference point, because a $205 to $395 membership on a rewards menu stops being judged on what it delivers and starts being judged on an exchange rate somebody else controls.

Paying for a Fitness App Boosts Engagement for Four Weeks. Then It Fades.

Yale School of Management tracked nearly 12,000 users of a fitness app, about 7% of whom upgraded to a $39.99 a year premium tier. Those users were 11.4 percentage points more likely to log a workout in week one, 7.9 points by week seven, and indistinguishable from free users after that. The sunk cost every annual contract and founding-member tier is quietly sold on does roughly one month of work.

VASA Is Sponsoring 150 Trainer Certifications a Year. Will It Solve Staff Retention?

VASA will fund up to 150 ISSA personal trainer certifications a year for existing staff, who then coach in its clubs. A benefit that vests through service is a real retention hook and any operator would take the trade. Follow the money though: ISSA named the 1,300-coach deficit at Anytime Fitness, ISSA sells the certification, and VASA now pays ISSA, while the employee receives a credential rather than a higher hourly rate.

Anytime Fitness Asia Is on the Block for Around $400M.

Bloomberg reported on August 18 that Inspire Brands Asia is weighing a sale of the Anytime Fitness Asia master franchise at around $400 million, after DealStreetAsia put the target as high as $450 million in July. The business is roughly 600 clubs across eight markets, more than 100 of them corporate-managed. TRR estimate: that is somewhere near $670,000 to $750,000 per club, which is our arithmetic rather than a valuation, and it flatters the royalty half of the business while understating the owned half. A franchisee owns a club. A master franchisee owns a market, and only one of those sells at a multiple.

Arnold’s Fitness App Took No Private Equity. Does Bootstrapping Get You a Better Exit?

Schwarzenegger spent last week explaining his own cap table, telling Inc. that The Pump Club is backed entirely by him and no fund. Founders do not usually market their funding structure to consumers, and the fact that this now reads as a pitch is the signal. He is making the claim in a month where Xponential’s board reviewed a sale, Permira approached Third Space at a reported £700 million, and Anytime Fitness Asia went on the block, and members have learned to read an ownership change as a warning about price and staffing.

WHOOP Will Now Sell Bloodwork Without the Band. Why This Matters for Your Gym.

WHOOP has opened Advanced Labs to people who do not own a WHOOP, with reported pricing from around $199 for a single annual panel, and GRAIL’s $799 Galleri multi-cancer screen sits alongside it with no prior test required. The same week, Mvmnt cut its form tracking free of the Sky Live camera that used to gate it and put it on any phone for £12.99 a month. Your longevity upsell now has a national competitor that does not need your facility in the transaction, and proximity and trust are the only parts of the offer it cannot copy.

Read This Week

Three posts worth your time, from people publishing the parts of this business most operators keep quiet.

The Business of Pilates

Private Equity Never Left Pilates. It Left Xponential.

On February 23, 2026, Barry’s Bootcamp cut the ribbon on its 100th studio, a 6,888-square-foot corner space on Wall Street in lower Manhattan. Milestone number, symbolic address — a boutique fitness brand throwing a party in the literal shadow of the stock exchange it has no interest in joining…

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a month ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Courtney Clapper

Read this next to our Arnold piece, because is making the same argument from the investor’s side. Club Pilates does $1.14 billion in systemwide sales across 1,414 studios and carries 65% of its parent’s revenue, and the market still treats the flagship as something being dragged down by the structure above it. Her lens is the 4 questions she says every operator should ask before signing with any fund, starting with where that fund sits in its 7 to 10 year hold period and who absorbs the slow quarters. A good read!

Consumer VC

Ferrero's Next Bet in Breakfast, AG1 Lauches Gummies, and Alex Cooper's Beverage Shutdown

Hey friends…

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a month ago · 14 likes · Mike Gelb

Buried in this week’s consumer roundup by is the cautionary tale of the month. Unwell Beverages launched nationwide into Target in January 2025, added protein drinks, rebranded, launched an energy line, and shut the beverage business on August 13, one day after Unwell Media raised at a $500 million valuation. The media brand worked and the product it pointed at did not, which is worth reading closely if you have ever been told your audience is the hard part and the rest will follow.

Well Made by Sophie Axelson

Branding Looks Good, Worldbuilding Feels Like Something

Someone commented on one of my videos that worldbuilding is just the fancy word for branding and I get why people think that. They sound like they’re circling the same idea but they’re not doing the same job, and once you see the difference you can’t help but distinguish it in every brand you interact with…

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a month ago · 8 likes · Well Made by Sophie Axelson

We loved this piece from . Sophie separates two things most studios treat as one job. Branding is the font, the palette and the photography, decided once and then maintained. Worldbuilding is what makes someone want to be in your room for thirty seconds while they scroll, which is closer to what a boutique studio is actually selling at $40 a class. Read it next to our Solidcore piece, because the studios escaping a category label are the ones that built somewhere to belong instead of a nicer sign.

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Leave a comment

Between July 16 and August 7, 4 fitness operators told the market they were growing. Three of them counted locations. The fourth, on July 30, actually published what each member was worth.

Start with the three:

• Xponential reported second-quarter results on August 6, and in the same week Club Pilates passed 1,500 studios worldwide.

• Crunch announced on August 7 that it had acquired eight Bay Area clubs, doubling its corporate footprint there from eight to sixteen.

• EōS Fitness opened nine gyms in the second quarter and now has more than 225 open or on the way.

Three growth stories. Every one of them is true.

But if you read the second paragraph of each story, Xponential’s revenue fell 13% to $66.0 million. It posted a net loss of $4.8 million. North American same-store sales fell 6.8%, against a positive 2.4% a year earlier. Average unit volume, the revenue an average studio actually produces, dropped from $686,000 to $659,000. The company cut full-year guidance, and its board is reviewing a sale.

So Club Pilates crossed 1,500 studios in the same week the av

erage studio lost $27,000 of annual revenue.

Why Crunch bought eight clubs back from its own franchisee

Crunch’s announcement is the most interesting of the three, because it runs backwards.

Franchising is how a gym brand grows without spending its own money. Someone else signs the lease, someone else takes the risk, and the brand collects a fee. Crunch went the other direction and bought eight clubs back from a franchisee it already had in the system.

It did that because those clubs need renovating into the Crunch 3.0 format, and a franchise agreement cannot make eight separate balance sheets fund one renovation schedule. A franchise agreement buys standards. It does not buy capital.

Which means the money went into raising what its existing clubs earn.

EōS is the quietest version of the same thing. The release leads with nine openings and 225 locations. Ten completed retrofits sit in paragraph nine. There is not a single per-member or per-club number anywhere in it.

What Life Time published on July 3

Life Time’s second quarter led with a metric almost nobody else in the industry shares.

Life Time calls it average center revenue per center membership. In Q2 2026 it was $993 for the quarter, up 11.8% from $888 a year earlier. That is roughly $331 per member per month.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Over the same twelve months, Life Time’s membership count went from 849,643 to 860,041.

That is growth of 1.2%.

Total revenue grew 13.7%.

A company added almost no members and grew revenue by double digits, because it grew what each member was worth by 11.8%. And it tells you that, in public, every ninety days.

The Number: 1.2%
Life Time’s membership growth over the year to June 30, 2026.
Revenue over the same period grew 13.7%.

So the pattern is not that the industry has no name for this lever. It’s that the operator pulling it hardest reports it every quarter, and the ones still counting doors do not report it at all.

The benchmark table you should consider for your gym or studio

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This Week on The Run Rate

Weekly Roundup · Aug 8–14, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

Are AI Agents Booking or Cancelling Your Classes Now? What to Expect from Booking System Agents.

A member pointed an AI assistant at a gym’s booking system and it found two holes nobody knew were there. It cancelled another member’s reservation, because the cancel endpoint ran zero authorization checks, and it booked classes months past the gym’s own booking window. Nobody instructed it to do either of those things, and nobody was watching the logs. Your booking software was built for humans clicking buttons at human speed, and that assumption is now the vulnerability.

Alpha Fit Club Is Going From 20 Studios to 50. Standardization Is the Growth Strategy.

Alpha sold 20 franchises before it opened a single franchised location, and it is now locking equipment and programming across every new site before the expansion runs. That sounds like bureaucracy until you read the other headline from the same week: a franchisee running 31 F45 studios filed Chapter 11 on August 9. The premium end of the market is where operational drift gets expensive fastest, and the boring answer is the one that survives.

Your Members Are Feeding Their Wearable Data to ChatGPT. That Makes Them Easier to Coach.

They are called datamaxxers, and they export sleep and recovery numbers into a chatbot because the device gives them a score without an explanation. Sixty percent of Oura Advisor testers said the AI explained metrics they had never actually understood, and 46% of US adults now own a wearable. Read that as good news. The member who walks in already knowing what is wrong is a member you can sell a specific solution to.

Fitness Apps Keep 3% of Users at Day 30. Your App Is Not a Retention Plan.

The category benchmark for health and fitness apps is 3% still active at day 30, and activation falls from 26% on day one to 10% by day 28. Annual subscription retention sits at 33%. If your retention plan is “we launched an app,” the numbers say the first week decided the outcome and the app was only the delivery surface.

Xponential Q2 2026: More Studios, Less Revenue Per Studio

Xponential posted $66.0 million in Q2 revenue, down 13% year over year, with North America same-store sales at negative 6.8% against positive 2.4% a year ago. Run-rate average unit volume fell to $659,000 from $686,000. Club Pilates passed 1,500 locations the same week, which is the whole problem in two lines: the door count went up and the money per door went down.

Gym Memberships Are Back to 2019 Levels. But Is It New Growth?

Massachusetts has 1.9 million gym members and roughly 1,700 clubs, both matching 2019 almost exactly. At the same time Healthworks, GymIt and Republic Fitness are each posting membership up more than 20% since 2019. Both facts hold, and together they describe redistribution rather than expansion. Somebody is losing the members those operators are winning.

The HYROX Ecosystem and How Your Gym Can Compete

Nike built shoes for it, Shokz sells headphones into it, Atmosphere TV broadcasts it, and more than 5,000 gyms pay roughly $1,500 a year to affiliate. HYROX expects over 2 million athletes in the 2026/27 season, and four of the five layers in that ecosystem are already closed to an independent operator. The training layer is the one nobody is competing for locally, which is where the money actually sits for a single site. If you want the deeper argument on how these training-cycle businesses are really built, check out our previous take on the Pilates Games attempt.

Why Crunch Is Buying Out Franchisees Before Rolling Out Crunch 3.0

Crunch bought eight Bay Area clubs back from its own franchise group, closing August 1 and announcing August 7, and took corporate ownership in the region from eight clubs to sixteen. Refranchising usually runs the other direction. This is what a format upgrade looks like when you cannot negotiate it club by club, and it is a reminder that a franchise agreement buys you standards, never a renovation schedule.

Master Franchising: How Pilates Brands Can Scale Without Their Own Capital

STRONG Pilates runs 120-plus studios across 15 countries and just handed Poland and the Czech Republic to an operator who already runs 181 clubs, targeting 750 locations across Central and Eastern Europe by 2030. You get store count fast and you get it without your own capital. What you give up is control of the member experience in every one of those rooms, and the cost of that trade shows up in AUV long after the opening press release.

AI Workout Programming Is Coming to the Gym Floor. What Trainers Do Next.

Echelon unveiled Workout Builder AI at the HFA Show in March, EGYM is selling Genius into commercial operators, and EoS Fitness became the first large US chain to run it. Both are pitching adaptive programming at gyms rather than at home users. Writing the plan is the part that automates. Deciding what a member is training for, and getting them to keep showing up for it, is not.

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Read This Week

Four posts we actually read this week, from studio owners who publish the juicy details of running a business.

Studio Love Letters By Bekah Burns

Opening My 6th Lagree Studio

25+ studios have opened around us within the span of a year and I was no longer in growth mode like I had been for the past 7 years. I was in survival mode, trying to protect the 5 I already had. I wasn’t planning on opening more locations anytime soon…

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2 months ago · 12 likes · Bekah Burns

had 5 locations, the newest one less than 1 year old, and 25-plus competing studios had opened around her in 12 months. She decided she was done expanding. Then a space came up two minutes from her house, and she signed. Eleven years in, seven of them in growth mode, and she writes about the decision with the personal cost left in rather than edited out. Her line: “doors don’t always open on your timeline.” Read it next to our Massachusetts piece, because this is what saturation feels like from inside one business.

The Business of Pilates

You're Sitting on Your Highest-Margin Hour and Not Selling It

I’ve been running the numbers on studio schedules a lot lately…

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a month ago · 4 likes · Courtney Clapper

The best studio pricing article we read this week. prices out every format: privates at $100 to $130 an hour, duets at $100 to $180 where the second client is close to pure margin, small groups of three or four at $160 to $220, and the full group class that looks like $350 to $450 on paper but only if you hit a 70 to 75% fill rate. Instructor pay barely moves as you add bodies, which is the whole point. She calls the duet “the easiest 100%-capacity hour in your entire schedule,” and most studio owners are still spending their marketing budget filling the room instead.

The Founder's Files by Kenzie Wesp

Two Tiers of Leadership: The Structure That Let My Studios Grow Beyond Me

For paid subscribers, and for every studio owner who’s tired of being the bottleneck. Welcome to a multi part series on “Operations” x…

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a month ago · 5 likes · Kenzie Wesp

runs 2 studios and spent years being the person everything ran through. She rebuilt leadership into two tiers, operations and training, with two levels inside each, and every leader at either studio sits under one of them. Now the studios run without her, which matters because she is about to become a mom. On wearing the hands-on-founder badge: “It took me a long time to realize that badge was actually a ceiling.” Anyone opening a second site should read this before they sign the lease, not after.

The 2% Club by Rach Hirsch

Why The Future of Wellness Might Look More Like a Nightclub

This week I published a piece called The Story Everyone Gets Wrong About Me. If you haven’t read it yet, start there; it’s the piece that makes everything else here make a little more sense…

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2 months ago · 145 likes · 1 comment

went to Bathhouse and came out comparing it to an Ibiza nightclub, because people were staying for hours and moving between saunas and cold plunges instead of getting a workout done and leaving. Her framing: “The wellness industry isn’t competing with gyms. It’s competing for Friday night.” If your members treat your studio as a 45-minute errand, that is the gap somebody else is about to fill.

This Week on The Run Rate

Weekly Roundup · Aug 1–7, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

When the Only Lever Left Is Revenue Per Member

Planet Fitness cut its 2026 outlook in the same week Permira lined up a roughly £700 million bid for Third Space, a 13-club London operator whose members pay around £250 a month. Read together, they describe a market splitting at both ends: growth has stalled at the bottom while spending power concentrates at the top. When you can’t grow by adding bodies, ARPM becomes the whole game, and the sequence matters more than the number. Add value before you touch the price. If you want the pricing side of this in full, our deep dive The Take on why your pricing is older than your software lays out the five key rules.

Anytime Fitness Is Giving Away Apple Fitness+. Apple Might Need It More Than the Members Do.

From August 4, every Anytime Fitness member in the UK and Ireland gets Apple Fitness+ free for the life of their membership, a £9.99-a-month product handed over at no charge. Apple has fought stagnant growth and high churn on Fitness+ since its 2020 launch, so the partnership solves Apple’s distribution problem at least as neatly as it solves Anytime’s retention problem. The operator lesson is about dependence: a perk you build retention on can be repriced, changed or sunset by somebody else.

Your Members’ Readiness Scores Aren’t Telling Them to Skip. They’re Telling Them They’re Overtraining.

Most operators assume the recovery score is about to become the new “I forgot my shoes.” The research points the other way: in recreational runners, a decline in readiness-to-train combined with elevated nocturnal heart rate flagged genuinely overreached athletes with 85% or better predictive accuracy. The members most fixated on their scores are frequently the ones overtraining, and the device tells them they’re tired without telling them what to do instead. Whoever turns that number into a specific session owns the floor.

Discounts Don’t Keep Gym Members. Habits Do. South Korea Just Proved It.

South Korea halved the payout on Teunteun Money, its national program paying citizens to exercise, expecting demand to cool. Participation went from roughly 317,000 to nearly 700,000 people year over year, and average exercise time per participant rose 19%, about two extra hours each. The reward got smaller and the behaviour got bigger, which is the cleanest available argument against burning margin on retention discounts. An incentive is very good at getting someone to start and very bad at keeping them.

A $599 Genome Test Is About to Change What Members Expect From Your Gym.

On August 3, Human Longevity launched clinical-grade whole-genome sequencing at $599, all 6.4 billion base pairs at 30x depth, AI-interpreted, no clinic visit required. That puts the full genome in the same price band as a decent wearable. In June we argued the longevity clinic was coming for your most valuable members, and at the time it read as a premium-tier problem. At this price it becomes a mainstream expectation, and the window to enter the category on your own terms is closing.

AI Is Making Personal Training Cheap. Now Gyms Have to Redefine Its Value.

A human trainer runs $120 to $350 a month. An AI coaching app charges $10 to $30, and investors are funding the gap hard. The replacement framing misses what’s actually happening: cheap coaching creates a new bottom rung of self-guided exercisers who eventually plateau and want the two things software can’t hand them, real options and a room full of other people. What it does expose is how much personal training was never differentiated to begin with. A trainer who counts reps and emails a spreadsheet is now competing with a $15 app that does both instantly.

Women Are Driving the Rucking Boom. It’s the Strength On-Ramp Operators Can Capitalize On.

GORUCK reports sales up around 40% and says women are now its fastest-growing customers. Weighted-vest sales are up roughly 50% year over year to about $27 million. Rucking works because it removes the two things that keep women out of the weight room, intimidation and the fear of doing it wrong, and it’s close to impossible to mess up. Run clubs already showed operators how to turn a free outdoor habit into an acquisition engine. This is the same opening pointed at strength, and most gyms are watching it happen on the sidewalk.

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Read This Week

Five posts we read this week all from studio owners and one wellness investor.

Your Instructor Pay Structure Is Capping Your Margin at 6% — Courtney Clapper, The Business of Pilates

The Business of Pilates

Your Instructor Pay Structure Is Capping Your Margin at 6%

I built a spreadsheet last month that ruined my week…

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2 months ago · Courtney Clapper

The best studio math we read all week, and it sits right on top of our revenue-per-member story. Courtney shows how wages eat 40 to 45% of what a studio takes in, how rent pushes that to about 70% before anything else, and how each of the four common pay models quietly picks your margin for you. If you own a studio and you’ve never run these numbers, run them. Her line on flat-rate pay: it “protects the instructor completely and protects your margin not at all.”

My Most Unpopular Wellness Prediction — Rach Hirsch, The 2% Club

The 2% Club by Rach Hirsch

My Most Unpopular Wellness Prediction Is About to Hit the Grocery Store

I have a prediction about food that I keep getting pushback on…

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2 months ago · 129 likes · 1 comment

This one is about Big Food, and every gym owner should read it anyway. Small brands under $100 million drove 35% of category growth in 2025, up from 15% two years before, while the big guys managed under 1%. Shoppers went to private label when they wanted cheap and to small brands when they wanted good, and everything in the middle got stranded. That’s the Planet Fitness problem with different products on the shelf.

Why I Started a Perimenopause Protocol — Rach Hirsch, The 2% Club

The 2% Club by Rach Hirsch

The Billion-Dollar Perimenopause Problem No One Has Solved

I’ve accidentally been running a little series for months without ever telling you about it…

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2 months ago · 269 likes · 4 comments

Over a billion women are heading into a life stage that lasts a decade, with almost no brands they trust and doctors who were barely taught it. Read it right after our rucking piece. Same customer, walking into strength through the side door, and nobody is ready for her. Any gym or studio owner asking where the next wave of members comes from should start here. Hirsch on women “told they’re fine, or anxious, or just stressed, while their hormones quietly redecorate the entire house.”

If You Want to Open a Dance Studio — Andrea, Elevéte with Andrea

The opposite of every “open your own studio” post out there, written by someone who actually runs one. It takes years to make money, you never really switch off, and running the business matters more than being good at the craft. Send it to anyone about to sign a lease. Her line: “Owning a dance studio has very little to do with dancing.”

Growth Doesn’t Always Announce Itself — Andrea,

The quiet one here, and still worth two minutes. Andrea won a Growth Award during a stretch where she felt underwater, and makes the case that most real progress shows up with no number attached to it. One for any studio owner who only counts the month they just had. Her version: sometimes growth is bigger numbers, and sometimes it’s becoming the person who can handle what would have buried you a year ago.

Who to Follow

— The Business of Pilates

Clapper writes the P&L side of Pilates, which almost nobody does. The category has spent three years generating headlines about booking growth and reformer waitlists while the studios underneath run on a 6 to 7% margin, and she is one of the only people publishing the mechanics of why. This week’s post takes apart four instructor pay models and shows exactly which line item is eating the business, with real dollar ranges rather than the usual “raise your prices” advice. Follow her if you want the arithmetic that decides whether a full class schedule is actually worth running.

That’s the week. If someone forwarded you this, subscribe free at newsletter.therunrate.co. And if you want The Take (our twice-monthly opinion issue) plus the full Growth Playbooks library, the paid tier is $8/mo.

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This Week on The Run Rate

Weekly Roundup · Jul 26–Aug 2, 2026 · Growth Intelligence for Fitness, Wellness & Health Tech

How to Price a Boutique Fitness Studio (Without Racing to the Bottom)

Most studios set price by glancing sideways at the competition, which is how an entire market races itself to the ClassPass floor. The price should come from one question operators rarely ask: what are you actually selling, a workout or an identity people pay a premium to belong to? Inside is a pricing framework, the 2026 benchmark ranges by format, and the anchoring mistake that quietly caps revenue for years.

WHOOP Hired Nike’s CMO and Glossier’s CEO. When Brand Starts to Matter More Than Hardware.

In three weeks WHOOP hired Nike’s former CMO and Glossier’s former CEO, days after crossing three million members. A company brings in that kind of brand firepower when it has decided the sensor is now a commodity any $199 rival can match. Once hardware stops being the moat, brand and distribution are what’s left to defend, and the same logic hits any studio whose “method” a competitor could copy tomorrow.

Trust in Doctors Fell to 40%. How Gyms and Longevity Clinics Can Capitalize.

A 443,000-adult JAMA survey found trust in doctors fell from 72% to 40% in four years, and members are filling that gap with studios, longevity clinics, and AI chatbots. Read it as a positioning opening rather than a license to give medical advice: the durable win is becoming the trusted guide members think out loud with. Studios that own that relationship capture something conventional medicine is quietly vacating.

Spotify’s New Running Mode Is Here. Streaming Wants Your Workout Too.

Spotify’s new Premium running mode uses AI to match music to your cadence, planting a flag on the workout moment itself. Every platform now wants the minutes your member is actually training, because that is where engagement and stickiness get decided. When an $11-a-month app owns the soundtrack to the run, studios need a sharper answer for what they own in that same moment beyond the four walls.

David Lloyd Fixed Its App Overload. At the Cost of Member Experience. What Gives?

David Lloyd fixed its class-booking bot problem by opening each class exactly nine days before it starts, which forced its most loyal 5am regulars to rebuild their whole routine. The change worked on paper and dropped the friction onto the members least likely to complain and most expensive to lose. It is a clean cautionary tale for a question every operator should ask before shipping any tech change: who actually eats the cost of this rollout?

Article of the Week

“Only 9% of Studios Make Money” — Anna Noelle Rinke (co-founder, Homebody Pilates)

Le Index; Anna Noelle Rinke

Only 9% of Studios Make Money

“I want to open a Pilates studio, any advice…

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3 months ago · 16 likes · Le Index; Anna Noelle Rinke

builds on ’s finding that just 9.2% of boutique studios turned a profit in 2023 and asks why the other 91% don’t. Her answer is four operator disciplines: negotiate the lease like it is the business, run a company instead of funding a lifestyle, market community over aesthetics, and build a team that works when you are not in the room. Honest verdict: light on fresh numbers beyond Hirsch’s, but it is the sharpest gut-check a studio owner will read this week. Her line “you have a job, not a company” is the whole argument in six words.

Who to Follow

— The 2% Club

Hirsch is the researcher behind the number half this issue keeps circling: 9.2% of boutique studios turned a profit in 2023. A wellness investor and founder of Wellness Growth Ventures, she writes The 2% Club with the kind of unit-economics rigor the category mostly avoids, breaking down why the other 91% lose money and what the profitable sliver does differently. In a week where pricing, positioning and profitability were the whole throughline, she is the person actually publishing the stats. Follow her for the numbers underneath the stories everyone else is putting out there.

That’s the week. If someone forwarded you this, subscribe free at newsletter.therunrate.co. And if you want The Take (our twice-monthly opinion issue) plus the full Growth Playbooks library, the paid tier is $8/mo.

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This Week on The Run Rate

Garmin Bought TrainingPeaks. Now It Owns Everything From the Sensor to the Coach.

On July 22 Garmin bought TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic, the actual software independent endurance and strength coaches use to run their businesses. Stack that on top of the subscription-free CIRQA band it launched days earlier, and Garmin now owns every layer from the sensor on the wrist to the coach billing through the app. If you coach or sell programming, your tooling and your biggest competitor just became the same company.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Samsung All Became Health Coaches This Week. Here’s Your Move.

In a single week, ChatGPT Health opened to every US adult, Gemini started writing workouts, and Samsung said the quiet part out loud about keeping people out of doctors’ offices. The information layer studios used to sell is free now. What’s left to own is the conversation about what all that data means, and the first-party member data that makes your version smarter than a chatbot’s.

Gym Traffic Is Still Ahead of 2025. The Number That Fell Should Worry You More.

Mid-year numbers from the Health & Fitness Association look healthy on the surface: visits per facility are still running ahead of a record 2025. Look closer and average visits per member fell 1.3%, and Q2 posted the first quarterly decline since 2021. The growth is coming from new sign-ups, not from members showing up more, and frequency is the metric that predicts next year’s churn.

The FDA Just Legalized the Peptide Menu. Trust Is the Only Thing You Still Have to Earn.

An FDA advisory panel voted 8 to 6 to let compounding pharmacies make four popular peptides, clearing a path for almost any wellness operator to bolt a peptide menu onto the business. The ones who win this won’t be the fastest to sell. They’ll be the ones members trust enough to hear a “no” from, which is exactly why most studios are better off referring out than stocking up.

Garmin Didn’t Kill WHOOP. It Killed the Hardware Margin.

Garmin’s new CIRQA band is $199, screen-free, and ships with no subscription at all. That’s less a shot at WHOOP’s revenue than at the whole premise that a sensor is worth a recurring fee. When measurement gets cheap and commoditized, the durable value moves up to interpretation and coaching, the layer studios already own if they choose to defend it.

ClassPass Added Movies. And Smoothies. And Coworking. Was Fitness Just the Onramp?

AMC tickets, smoothies, coworking desks, concert seats. On ClassPass a fitness class is now one credit option among many lifestyle ones. This isn’t a betrayal so much as the standard marketplace playbook once the platform has enough leverage over its supply. The tell is what smart operators do about it, which is quietly build the owned funnel that doesn’t answer to someone else’s app.

42.3% Now Say Strength Is Their Top Fitness Goal. Your Intake Form Should Notice.

For a year the shift from weight loss to strength was operator instinct and trainer anecdote. A new survey finally put a figure on it: 42.3% of Americans now name getting stronger as their number one goal. The cheapest move you can make this week is to update the one asset that still assumes otherwise, your intake form, so you’re selling people the goal they actually walked in with.

65,000 Members, One Saturday: BFT Just Turned the Gym Floor Into a Ticketed Venue.

HYROX proved people will pay real money to compete, with 1.5 million athletes racing last season. Body Fit Training just asked the obvious follow-up: why rent that demand from an outside brand when you can build the event inside your own four walls and keep the entire gate? Its Podium Series turns the regular gym floor into a ticketed competition, and it’s a revenue line most operators already have the room to run.

Tool of the Week

NotebookLM (Google) — free

The AI coaches that made headlines this week all won on the same thing: interpreting data you don’t control. NotebookLM flips that. You feed it your own material, member surveys, retention reports, SOPs, past campaigns, and it answers questions grounded only in those sources, with citations back to the document. For an operator that means a research assistant that actually knows your business instead of the internet’s average gym. Honest verdict: it’s a thinking and synthesis tool, not a member-facing product or a coaching engine, and the audio-overview feature is more novelty than utility. Use it to make sense of what you already have.

Who to Follow

— The Founder’s Files

Wesp runs multiple studios and four businesses, and writes The Founder’s Files about the unfiltered side of studio ownership: the presale math, the legal paperwork nobody warns you about, the founder-nutrition and burnout posts most operators keep to themselves. In a week where every headline was a platform or a wearable making its move, she’s the reminder that the business still gets built one owner decision at a time. Follow her for the operator’s-chair version of the trends we cover up here!

That’s the week. If someone forwarded you this, subscribe free at newsletter.therunrate.co — and if you want The Take (our twice-monthly opinion issue) plus the full Growth Playbooks library, the paid tier is $8/mo.

The Pilates Games already happened. If you missed the result, there’s a reason, it’s because there barely was one.

The launch was loud. In the spring, Studio Pilates International announced a scored, 100-minute reformer competition across its 200 studios — points on a six-point scale for technique, range of motion, and control under fatigue. There was a global press release, coverage in every trade outlet, and a ready-made framing: Pilates’ answer to HYROX and the CrossFit Games. The purists called it a betrayal of a practice built on internal control. The trade press called it the next competitive fitness format.

Then the inaugural Games ran in late June. The entire public record of the outcome is one Instagram reel highlight from the flagship studio, congratulations for taking part, and a sign-off of “until next time” — with no date. 137 likes. Nineteen comments, most of them from instructors. No scores published, no winners named, no participant numbers, no season two. Ugh…

Both sides spent the spring arguing about the workout. The one-reel ending shows why that was the wrong argument.

HYROX’s sled pushes and burpee broad jumps aren’t novel — every functional gym has run some version of that circuit for a decade.

What HYROX actually built is a five-month sales cycle disguised as a race series. A member signs up for a race in a different city, twenty weeks out. That single decision restructures their entire relationship with fitness: they buy a training block instead of a drop-in class, they show up 3–4x a week because there’s a date on the calendar, and they recruit a partner for the doubles category who now also needs a membership. Athletes routinely spend $400–1,200 per race once travel, gear, and entry tiers are counted — money that doesn’t exist in a cancel-anytime membership model.

Studio Pilates copied the scoreboard. It skipped the invoice.

Their version had no ticket, no travel, no pilgrimage — a six-week internal challenge, included in the membership members already pay for. That’s not a lesser version of HYROX. It’s a faster one to copy and a worse one to learn from, because it borrows the least valuable part of the model. And the result behaved exactly like what it was: a fun member-appreciation day. Members had a great time. The business model stayed home.

Here’s what actually transfers to a boutique studio with no franchise network:

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You are the owner, the head coach, the marketer, the front desk, and the person who fixes the front door lock. You cannot afford a part-time hire for every one of those hats. What you can afford for about the price of one boutique membership a month is a stack of AI tools that can do the repetitive half of the job so you can spend your hours on the half that actually keeps members.

This is not a “10 AI tools that will change your life” listicle. Most of those tools you’ll never open twice. This is the lean stack — six jobs, one tool each, real costs, honest verdicts — plus the two things you should never hand to a robot, no matter how good it gets.

One rule before the tools: automate the repetitive, protect the human. AI is exceptional at the message you’ve typed a thousand times and the graphic you’ve resized a hundred. However it is terrible at the moment a member is deciding whether to stay. Keep that line and everything below works. Blur it and you’ll automate your way to a colder studio.

The tools handle volume. You handle the moments that decide whether someone stays.

Buy the writing tool first, then invest in front desk support. If you only have $50 and one afternoon, buy Claude Pro and wire three ManyChat replies. Those two cover the highest-volume repetitive work in a studio, drafting and answering - and everything else on this list is an optimization on top.

Also, don’t build the whole stack at once; give yourself time to set things up one by one.

The stack

1. The brain — Claude Pro (~$20/mo)
This is the one non-negotiable. Every other tool is optional; this one replaces the “I don’t have time to write this” tax you pay every day. Membership freeze policies, the awkward reply to a refund request, 30 days of social captions, your intro-offer email, the price-increase announcement you’ve been dreading — all of it drafts in seconds. And in Cowork mode it stops being a chatbot you prompt one line at a time and becomes something closer to a hire: it works through the whole task — the full four-email win-back sequence, your onboarding flow rebuilt end to end, the pricing spreadsheet actually built out. You edit, you send. If you buy nothing else, buy this. Verdict: the highest-ROI $20 in your business.

2. Front-desk & DM response — ManyChat (~$14–29/mo)
Roughly half your inbound leads come through Instagram and Facebook DMs asking the same three things: how much, what times, do you have an intro offer. ManyChat auto-answers those 24/7 with keyword rules, books the intro, and captures the contact — so a lead who messages you at 9pm gets a reply at 9pm, not at 11am when you finish coaching. That speed is the whole game: research on lead response consistently finds that answering within five minutes makes a lead roughly 21× more likely to convert than waiting an hour. Capturing the contact also quietly fixes something most studios are bad at — knowing where your members actually came from instead of guessing “probably Instagram.” Honest note: ManyChat’s conversational AI is a separate ~$29/mo add-on that pushes your stack toward the ceiling — start with rules-based flows and let tool #1 write the scripts. (New to it? ManyChat’s own setup guide walks you through connecting Instagram and building your first keyword flow in 15–30 minutes.) The purpose-built “AI receptionist for gyms” platforms are good, but they start around $149/mo — more than this entire stack — so graduate to one only when your inbound volume clearly justifies it.

3. Graphics & content — Canva Pro (~$15/mo)
Class schedules, reel covers, carousels, promo graphics, the same square post in five sizes. Canva’s Magic Studio turns a rough idea into on-brand assets in minutes, and its templates mean you’re not designing from a blank page at 11pm. Verdict: the fastest way to look like you have a marketing person when you don’t.

4. Email marketing — Brevo or Mailchimp (~$0–20/mo)
Your list is the only audience you actually own — not rented from an algorithm. Both tools have free or near-free tiers at small list sizes, with AI that drafts subject lines and full sequences. Point tool #1 at the strategy (”write me a 4-email win-back for members who haven’t checked in for 21 days”) and paste the output here. Verdict: unglamorous, and the highest-retention channel you have.

5. Meeting & call notes — Granola (free tier, ~$14/mo paid)
An AI notepad that quietly listens to your team huddles and sales/tour calls and writes the summary plus action items for you — no bot joining the call, it just runs alongside you. The quiet value: you stop re-litigating “who said they’d do what,” and you can review why a hot tour didn’t convert. The free tier covers unlimited meeting summaries with 30 days of history; the $14/mo paid plan unlocks the full archive and integrations. Verdict: the one on this list you’ll doubt you need — until week two.

6. Scheduling & captions — Buffer (~$6–15/mo)
Batch a week of the content from tool #3, let the AI assistant draft platform-specific captions, and schedule it all in one sitting instead of posting live daily. Verdict: buys back the single most reliably-wasted hour in a studio owner’s week. (Worth knowing: Metricool gets recommended a lot in this slot and has a genuine free plan, but its paid tiers start around €43/mo — on its own that’s half your budget. Buffer is the better fit at this size.)

The $ math

The brain · Claude Pro · $20/mo

Front desk & DMs · ManyChat, Essential rules-based · $14–29/mo

Graphics & content · Canva Pro · $15/mo

Email marketing · Brevo or Mailchimp · $0–20/mo

Meeting & call notes · Granola · $0–14/mo

Scheduling & captions · Buffer · $6–15/mo

Total: roughly $55–113/month.

Our best tip: Lean on the free tiers! Granola’s free plan, email under a few hundred contacts — and you’re near the bottom of that range. The one line that scales with you is the front desk: as your contact count climbs, ManyChat steps up in price, and right about when it pushes you past $100 you’ve hit the volume where a dedicated AI receptionist starts to earn its keep. Every line here replaces hours you’re currently doing by hand — or not doing at all.

What to never automate

The tools above handle volume. These four moments are where studios are won and lost, and a robot voice in any of them costs you more than the tool saves:

• The first real hello to a ready-to-buy lead. Let AI qualify and book. Let a human close. People join studios because of people.

• The cancellation conversation. A member leaving deserves a person, not a flow. It’s also your single best source of truth about why others are quietly on their way out — and with more than half of members churning before year two, that’s not a small pile of intel to automate away.

• Anything that needs you to read the room — an injury, a complaint, a member going through something. AI cannot feel the moment. You can.

• Publishing raw AI output. Every tool here drafts; none of them are your voice. The five minutes you spend editing is the difference between “a studio that uses AI” and “a studio that sounds like a chatbot.” This is the same line that separates useful AI programming from the accountability gap that makes AI workout plans fall over — the tech drafts, the human commits.

Your 20-minute start this week

Don’t build the whole stack at once — you’ll stall. Do this:

1. Buy tool #1 today. Ask it to write the three DM replies you type most often (price, schedule, intro offer).

2. Drop those three into a ManyChat keyword flow. That alone gets you 24/7 lead response by Friday.

3. Batch next week’s posts in Canva + Buffer in one sitting on Sunday.

That’s three tools, under $50, and the two most repetitive jobs in your studio handled — this week.

Frequently Asked Questions

What AI tools does a small fitness studio actually need?

Six jobs, one tool each: a writing/thinking tool (Claude Pro), DM and front-desk automation (ManyChat), graphics (Canva Pro), email marketing (Brevo or Mailchimp), meeting and call notes (Granola), and social scheduling (Buffer). Together they run about $55–113/month. If you only buy two, buy Claude Pro and ManyChat.

Can AI replace a front desk at a fitness studio?

Only the repetitive half. AI can answer pricing, schedule, and intro-offer questions 24/7, book the intro, and capture the lead’s contact details — which is most of the volume. It should not handle the first real conversation with a ready-to-buy lead, a cancellation, or anything requiring emotional read. Automate the FAQ, keep the human for the decisions.

How much should a solo studio operator spend on AI tools per month?

Under $100 is realistic and enough. Lean on free tiers (Granola, email at small list sizes) and start with rules-based automation rather than paid conversational AI add-ons. Purpose-built “AI receptionist” platforms for gyms start around $149/month — more than this entire stack — so only graduate to one when your inbound volume clearly justifies the cost.

This is Part 1 of AI for Operators. Part 2 — Predicting Churn Before It Happens, how to wire up a simple at-risk-member score from the data your booking software already collects — is for paid subscribers.

This Week on The Run Rate

Eli Lilly Just Bought a Piece of Oura. The Ring Was Never the Point.

In one week, Lilly took equity in Oura, Google shipped a $9.99 AI health coach, and WHOOP added licensed clinicians. Nobody is fighting over measurement anymore — that’s already free. The fight is over who gets to tell your member what to do about it, and studios are about to find out they never actually owned that layer.

The Fitness Industry Says It Can’t Find Trainers. Its Own Report Never Mentions Pay.

ISSA’s 2026 hiring report counts a 1,300-coach deficit at a single chain and names a “readiness gap.” It contains no wage data, no turnover data, and no pay ranges. That’s not an oversight — that’s the finding. “Skills gap” is what an industry calls a pay problem.

Spartan Will Give You a Trophy for Recruiting Your Own Members Into Its Race.

Deka’s Gym vs Gym runs in your facility, on your staff’s weekend, with members you recruit — and one of the two titles on offer is literally for how many people you signed up. The cost and revenue share aren’t published anywhere, including on Spartan’s own page. Before you enter, do the math on who’s acquiring customers for whom.

Basic-Fit, Europe’s Biggest Gym Chain, Is Barely Building Gyms Anymore. That’s the Strategy.

Basic-Fit built a 2,184-club empire on relentless expansion. In 2026 it plans roughly 50 new clubs — and just posted the first positive free cash flow in its history. The land-grab era of fitness is over; the efficiency era runs on data, AI and franchising. If Europe’s biggest operator stopped chasing growth-at-any-cost, your market is telling you something too.

Fitness Tracking Is Being Democratized — and WHOOP Is Exhibit A.

One developer bypassed WHOOP’s subscription in about 24 hours. Another fused its heart-rate stream with his work calendar and ranked coworkers by stress. When tracking is free and hackable, hardware is just a vehicle — and every wearable company (and every studio leaning on one) needs a new answer to what it’s actually selling.

VO₂ Max Just Made the Pages of Vogue. Cardio Is Officially a Longevity Product.

British Vogue is telling readers to track VO₂ max — the strongest single predictor of lifespan science has found. When a lab metric hits the beauty section, cardio stops selling calorie burn and starts selling years of life. Studios that reposition first take the premium.

Most Fitness Science Was Never Tested on Women. That’s a Positioning Opportunity.

A New York Times op-ed said what operators quietly know: optimization-bro fitness content is leaving men hollow. The deeper problem is the evidence underneath it — women are just 34% of sport-science research participants, and only 6% of studies are women-only. Well-being-first positioning wins both halves of the market.

Book of the Week

The Membership Economy — Robbie Kellman Baxter

The book that named the model every studio now runs on. Baxter’s core argument: stop selling transactions and start building a “forever transaction” as the relationship where the default is staying, not going on and off. The chapters on tiered pricing, onboarding as the retention lever, and why acquisition-first thinking kills recurring-revenue businesses map one-to-one onto boutique fitness. Honest take is that it’s an oldies but goldies as it was first launched in 2015 so some of the case studies show their age eg. Netflix and SurveyMonkey, not Pilates and recovery rooms, but no one has written a better framework for membership businesses since. Read it for the mental model, not the examples.

Who to Follow

Bekah Burns — Studio Love Letters

Eleven years and five boutique studio locations in, Burns writes the newsletter most studio owners are too polite to: Studio Love Letters publishes her actual P&Ls, her mistakes, and posts like “Please Read This Before You Open a Pilates Studio” — the one with the stat that 92% of boutique studios aren’t profitable. In an industry where most advice comes from people selling something, she’s an operator opening her books. That’s exactly the kind of honesty this industry needs more of.

Coming This Week

Monday — Playbook: Your $100 AI Stack. The six-tool stack that does the work of a part-time hire for under $100 a month — what each tool actually does, what it costs, and what you should never automate. Free for all subscribers.

Wednesday — The Take. The inaugural Pilates Games launched with a global PR blitz. It ended with one recap reel and 137 likes. What happened in between is a lesson for every operator being pitched a “community event.” Paid subscribers only — upgrade here.

That’s the week. If someone forwarded you this, subscribe free at newsletter.therunrate.co — and if you want The Take (our twice-monthly opinion issue) plus the full Growth Playbooks library, the paid tier is $8/mo.

Here’s a growth hack that costs nothing and takes about twenty minutes a day: a Pilates sock brand grew a meaningful chunk of its early audience by leaving genuinely useful, specific comments on posts from Pilates studios and instructors. No ads. No influencer contracts. Just showing up, consistently, in the comment section where its exact ideal customer was already scrolling.

That’s the whole mechanic. When a studio’s followers see a brand engaging thoughtfully and specifically — not “love this! 🔥” but an actual observation about the post — some percentage of them get curious and check the brand out. It’s borrowed reach, and it’s free.

Why does this actually work?

The reason this works is algorithmic, not just psychological. Comments are one of the strongest engagement signals platforms reward, and a thoughtful comment from an account outside a creator’s usual circle gets surfaced to more of that creator’s followers than a like ever will. You’re not just getting seen by the studio you commented on — you’re getting seen by everyone in that comment thread.

You don’t need a bigger ad budget. You need to show up where your buyer already is, and say something worth reading.

How should fitness studios actually run this playbook?

Pick four account categories: bigger boutique studios in adjacent, non-competing niches, adjacent-niche influencers like run clubs or nutrition coaches, independent instructors with followings larger than your studio’s, and non-competing local wellness businesses. Spend 15–20 minutes daily leaving specific, useful comments on their newest posts, and track which ones drive profile visits.

The specifics matter more than the volume. Here’s the actual step-by-step:

Step 1 — Build your target list

Fifteen to twenty accounts across the four categories above. Prioritize accounts whose followers are demographically and geographically close to your actual buyer — a run club three towns over beats a huge fitness account with the wrong audience. This is the same targeting logic behind why most new members come from just three sources — proximity and relevance beat reach.

Step 2 — Turn on notifications for that list

The value of this tactic decays fast. A sharp comment in the first hour on a post gets seen by far more people than the same comment six hours later, once the algorithm has already decided who sees the post.

Step 3 — Write comments that add something, not comments that perform enthusiasm

“This is exactly why we tell our members to prioritize eccentric loading on leg day too” beats “🔥🔥🔥 love this.” Reference something specific in the post. Add a genuinely useful detail. The goal is that someone scrolling the comments thinks “who is this?” — not that the poster feels flattered.

This is where most brands that try this tactic fail — they treat it as a volume game and blast the same generic compliment across fifty posts a day. That approach gets ignored by the algorithm and the humans reading it. One sharp, specific comment on the right post beats twenty generic ones, because specificity is what makes another follower stop scrolling and actually read your name.

Step 4 — Make your profile worth the click

This entire tactic is wasted if someone clicks through and your bio doesn’t immediately tell them what you are and where you’re located. Location and category should be the first thing visible, before anyone has to dig.

Step 5 — Track it like a channel, not a vibe

Note which accounts’ comment sections consistently drive profile visits or follows and double down on those, drop the ones that don’t. Most studios never do this step, which is exactly why most studios never learn whether the tactic is working.

A simple way to track it without extra tools: check your profile’s weekly follower source data (most platforms surface this) after any week where you ran the playbook consistently, and compare it to a week where you didn’t. The difference tends to show up fast, because unlike paid acquisition, this channel has almost no lag between the action and the discovery.

The bigger principle

The mechanism here isn’t new — it’s borrowed audience, the same principle behind partnerships and cross-promotion — but the execution cost has collapsed to almost zero. You don’t need a partnership agreement or a swap negotiation. You need a list, a notification bell, and the discipline to write something worth reading before you hit reply.

This is also the exact inverse of the trap most studios fall into with content: pouring effort into their own feed while ignoring the much larger audiences already gathered next door. Most operators genuinely don’t know where their members actually come from — comment-jacking is one of the few acquisition channels cheap enough to test properly before deciding whether it’s worth scaling.

Twenty minutes a day. Fifteen accounts. Real comments, not emoji. Run it for three weeks before you judge whether it’s working — algorithmic discovery compounds, it doesn’t spike.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is comment-jacking in fitness marketing?

A no-cost growth tactic where a brand leaves genuinely useful, specific comments on posts from larger adjacent accounts whose followers match its ideal customer, borrowing visibility from that account’s audience.

How much time does this growth playbook take?

About 15–20 minutes a day — building a target list of 15–20 relevant accounts and leaving thoughtful, specific comments on their newest posts, ideally within the first hour of posting.

How do you measure whether comment-jacking is actually working?

Track profile visits and follower-source data (most platforms report this) for weeks you actively run the playbook versus weeks you don’t. Real traction shows up as a spike in profile clicks from the specific accounts you targeted — not just vague overall follower growth.

Want more free, zero-budget growth tactics like this? Subscribe for weekly breakdowns, or upgrade for The Take and the full Growth Playbooks library — every article the moment it goes live at therunrate.co.

Run Rate · therunrate.co

Weekly Roundup · Jul 4–11, 2026

Gen Z Didn’t Just Quit Drinking. They Found Something Better.

US drinking just hit its lowest rate since 1939, and Gen Z fitness spend rose 9% in the same window. That’s not sobriety — it’s a full reallocation of social currency from the bar to the studio. The operators winning that budget are selling the third place, not the workout.

Strava’s IPO Isn’t About Data. It’s About Deeply Knowing Their Customer.

Strava filed for IPO the same week its niche clubs quadrupled. The lesson for studios isn’t scale — it’s that knowing one customer’s specific, obsessive interest beats trying to serve everyone. Your client data already holds the same advantage.

Crunch Just Put Their Money on Pilates. But Can It Buy the Experience?

Crunch is rolling out 20 Pilates locations on connected reformer tech, chasing the 66% surge in ClassPass Pilates bookings. The workout clearly scales. Whether the boutique experience survives a big-box rollout is the open question — and the moat.

The New Country Club Looks a Lot Like a Boutique Wellness Studio.

Virgin Active’s new Mayfair club bundles fitness, recovery and lounge space into one membership. It’s the community-first model boutique studios pioneered — now being run at luxury scale. Premium members are buying belonging, not access.

3 in 4 Instructors Feel Underpaid. Paying Everyone The Same Will Not Fix It.

New instructor data shows a decade of flat pay. But the fix isn’t a blanket raise — it’s admitting some instructors are talent and most are commodity, and building a pay structure honest enough to say so.

A Free Rest Club Went Viral in NYC. What Smart Studios Can Learn.

Club Rest Stop charges nothing and still can’t keep up with demand. The takeaway isn’t to sell rest — it’s to give away community the way they do, and build the paid layer behind it.

The Rise of Rest and Recovery as Fitness’s Next Big Monetization Play.

Wearables made nervous-system data mainstream, and recovery studios are proving people will pay to lie down — at wildly different price points. The trick is knowing which layer to sell and what to give away first.

Tool of the Week

Opus Clip — AI clipping that turns long video into ready-to-post vertical clips

Upload a filmed class, a workshop, or a founder-to-camera ramble and it finds the strongest moments, crops them to 9:16, and captions them automatically. Built for studios sitting on hours of footage and no content pipeline. Honest verdict: genuinely good at volume — the cuts and captions land — but it can’t manufacture a hook that isn’t there. Feed it flat footage, get flat clips. The free tier (60 minutes a month, watermarked) is enough to know whether it’s for you before paying $15/month.

Who to Follow

Lise Kuecker — founder of Studio Grow

She built and sold her own studios in the mid-seven figures, then turned that playbook into a consultancy that’s worked with studio owners in 40+ countries. Her podcast, The Business of Boutique Fitness, is one of the few places studio economics get discussed with real numbers instead of vibes — and she founded the Boutique Fitness Coalition in 2020 to fight for the sector when it needed it most. If you run a boutique studio and follow one operator-side voice this year, make it this one. Follow her on LinkedIn.

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Equinox Doesn’t Compete on Price. It Competes on Identity.

Equinox raised membership prices again this week — while boutique studios keep racing ClassPass to the bottom. The gap isn’t the workout. It’s the identity contract members are actually buying.

ClassPass Trained Consumers to Expect Optionality. Now Studios Are Paying for It.

ClassPass didn’t just build a discovery platform — it rewired how members think about commitment. Studios that understand the optionality mindset are retaining members at real margin. The ones that ignore it are filling classes at 40% margin and calling it growth.

Pilates Isn’t a Workout Anymore. It’s a Business Model.

The Pilates studios naming their method, building an in-group, and pricing above the ClassPass floor are quietly outperforming everyone else. It’s not a secret formula — most operators just haven’t committed to it.

WHOOP Built a $1B Category. Now Every Boardroom Wants a Piece.

WHOOP sells a screenless rubber band for $239 a year and built a $10 billion company doing it. Google, Garmin, and Apple are all now copying the model — here’s what that means for the wearable data flowing through your studio.

Apple Is Building a Women’s Health OS. Your Gym Is Either a Node in It or Invisible.

iOS 27’s perimenopause tracking and Apple Health+ aren’t just features — they’re Apple staking a claim on the 40+ female health journey. That’s the same journey a huge share of your membership base is already on.

Planet Fitness Just Deployed AI Coaches. Here’s What It Means for Independent Studios.

When a 2,500-location chain moves, the whole market shifts. Independent operators have a narrow window to counter-position before AI coaching becomes the baseline expectation, not the differentiator.

57% of Fitness Studio Members Churn in Year One. Most Operators Don’t Know Why.

The data is damning, and it isn’t about price, location, or equipment. Members who leave tell a consistent story — the question is whether you’re listening before they go.

80% of New Members Come From 3 Sources. Most Studios Are Funding the Other 20.

Acquisition budgets get spread thin across every channel “just in case.” The data says most studios are over-investing in low-yield channels while the three that actually drive new members stay underfunded.

Also This Week

• AI Can Write Your Workout Plan But It Can’t Show Up For You

• Nike Had the Budget. It Never Had the Fitness Studio Moat.

• The Longevity Coach Is the New Personal Trainer

• Stop Checking Your Stats. Come Work Out.

• Crunch Has a New CEO

• Daxko Just Bought an API Stack

• Strength Training Just Replaced Weight Loss as the Top Gym Goal

• Apple Is Coming for Oura’s Ring

• Connected Fitness Is Plan B

• Your Gym Software Just Became Your Distribution Channel

• The Longevity Clinic Is Coming for Your Members

• Lululemon Built a $10B Brand Without Ever Running a Single Ad

• Whoop Just Won a Fight Apple and Samsung Couldn’t

• The Vibe Era Is Over

• Exercise Is the Best Dementia Prevention Tool We Have

Tool of the Week

Whippy AI — voice AI receptionist for gyms

Whippy AI answers calls, handles booking, and follows up on missed leads without a human on the phone. It’s built for smaller studios that can’t staff a dedicated front desk during off-hours or peak call volume. Honest verdict: it’s a newer entrant chasing the same problem Replify and Zenoti already have production traction on — the tech is promising but less battle-tested. Worth a pilot before a full commitment, not a blind buy.

Who to Follow

Kristin Abel

Kristin Abel spent 17 years running a yoga studio before becoming a business broker specializing in boutique fitness exits. With Nike shuttering its studio experiment and Crunch installing new leadership this week, her lane — helping operators actually buy, sell, or wind down a business — is the conversation most fitness marketing content ignores. Worth following if you want the unglamorous, financially literate side of this industry instead of another growth-hack thread.

Want the full breakdown behind any of these? Get “The Take” (biweekly, paid) goes deeper on one story with a real opinion attached, and our Growth Playbooks give you the operator-ready templates.

Upgrade at newsletter.therunrate.co, or catch every article the moment it goes live at therunrate.co.

advises Series A–D SaaS founders on pricing and monetization. His recent take: the companies winning in H2 aren’t the ones with the best product — they’re the ones who stopped treating pricing as a one-time decision.

Fitness operators should be taking notes.

Most studios set their membership prices once — usually when they opened — and adjust reluctantly every few years when they feel the squeeze. Meanwhile, boutique class prices have risen 6% year-over-year (the average class now costs $21.32), operational costs are up 5–10%, and the member’s relationship with value has completely shifted. Consumers in 2026 will drop $60 on a single class if the experience matches the price. They’ll also ghost you immediately if it doesn’t.

Here are five pricing rules that SaaS founders are applying right now — and what they actually mean for your studio.

1. If you haven’t revisited your pricing in 18 months, it’s already out of date.

In SaaS, pricing used to be a once-every-18-months exercise. Now it can be stale in six.

Fitness isn’t moving that fast — but it’s moving faster than most operators think. Rents are up. Instructor rates are up. ClassPass is training a segment of your market to expect discounted access. Equinox raised rates. Your neighborhood Pilates studio opened a second location charging $40/class and has a waitlist.

The market is repricing around you whether you participate or not. If you’re not actively reviewing your price point annually — against your costs, your competitive set, and your member mix — you’re drifting.

The move: Put a pricing review on the calendar for Q3. Not a price increase — a review. What does your current price signal to a new member walking in the door? Is it accurate?

2. Your best pricing data is buried in your cancellation conversations.

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THE TAKE

Most fitness studios think they know where their members come from. They don’t.

Walk into most studios and ask: “What’s your top acquisition channel?” You’ll get one of two answers: “Referrals.” Or “Instagram.” Occasionally both, as though they’re separate things.

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