Why you're paying so much to exercise

Millennials are turning the fitness industry upside down

On a frigid Sunday this month, Rianka Dorsainvil, a 29-year-old financial planner outside Washington, D.C., found herself running up a steep, snowy hill wearing a 20-pound vest and dragging a 215-pound man behind her.
 
She was paying for the privilege. The man harnessed to her was her personal trainer, who runs a studio out of his home and micromanages not just Dorsainvil’s workouts but her meals, too. She calls him the “mad scientist”.
 
“It’s great to have an expert pushing you in the right direction,” she said.
 
A growing segment of the US population is making a significant sacrifice for physical fitness, and not just in sore muscles and pre-dawn wake-ups. More and more people are paying hundreds of dollars a month, or thousands a year, for personal workouts, special classes, and ever more luxurious gyms.
 
Dorsainvil and her husband, a technology consultant, spend about 10 per cent of their monthly budget getting fit, she figures. That includes training, memberships to a gym where she starts her day at 4:30 am, and the bulked-up grocery bills, including supplements, that fuel all that exercise.
 
By contrast, the average American spends a minuscule amount on getting in shape. Almost one-fifth of Americans are health club members, and the average US club dues are $54 a month, or 1.2 per cent of median household income, according to the latest data from the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, or Ihrsa, the fitness industry trade group.
 
Even if you stick with a regular gym, though, your dues have probably been going up. Traditional health clubs held off on price increases after the recession but are now feeling squeezed by rising costs and new competition robbing them of longtime members.
 
Thousands of boutique gyms have opened, each with a niche. Studios feature one-on-one training and group classes in CrossFit, cycling and spinning, kickboxing, barre, boot camp training, yoga, pilates, martial arts, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), indoor rock climbing, and countless others hoping to be the next fitness fad.
 
They aren’t cheap. SoulCycle, the popular cycling studio brand, costs $34 a class, or a discounted $850 for 30 classes, in New York. Go three times a week for a year and that’s at least $4,420.
 
Luxury gyms are also seeing brisk business. Equinox opened 10 new clubs last year, bringing its total to 86. In New York, where a third of Equinox clubs are located, monthly memberships can start above $200 a month.
 
Many of the most enthusiastic exercisers are millennials, a generation that would appear least able to cover the extra costs. Weighed down by student debt and living in cities with skyrocketing rents, young urban dwellers still shell out $20 to $40 for an hourlong class and $50 to $100 or more for a personal training session.
 
One way they save money is disloyalty. Ihrsa estimates 86 per cent of patrons of studio gyms also visit or are members of other gyms. You could mix your SoulCycle with some equally pricey kickboxing or CrossFit, but there are also many new cheaper options. Even as Dorsainvil pays up for a trainer, her main gym costs her just $10 a month.
 
Hers is one of a wave of budget gyms, costing $20 or less a month, that have swept across the US since the recession. The idea is to offer exercise equipment without extras. Planet Fitness, for example, has 1,200 locations in 47 states and plans to grow to 4,000 clubs in the US.
 
While midmarket clubs barely gained members, the number of budget club members grew 69 per cent in 2015 alone, Ihrsa estimated last year. Much of this growth is driven by franchising, a trend that has brought outside money to the fitness industry.

© 2017 Bloomberg