The Member Has Changed. Most Operators Are Still Selling to the Old One.
By Lee Robinson
At the Fitness Technology Summit in Washington, D.C. this month, I joined a panel titled “The Member Has Changed. Have You?” alongside Tom Lapcevic, Executive Chairman of ROR Partners and former CMO of 24 Hour Fitness; Brent Potter, Senior Director at Purpose Brands, who leads 43 Anytime Fitness and Orangetheory locations; and Dina Elshurafa, Co-Founder of Reform Athletica in Dubai and Riyadh. Aaron Mueller, Director of Marketing & Partnerships at First Credit Services, moderated.
AI dominated the event, and every vendor in the hall had a plan for it. So I’ll start with the point I most want operators to hear: if you can’t describe your members in cohorts, and you don’t have a process for what you want that data to produce, AI should not be your first investment. Automating a guess only gets you to the wrong answer faster.
1. Know your member before you buy the tools
The stakes are rising. ABC Fitness’ Mid-Year 2026 Wellness Watch Report, drawn from 30,000 fitness businesses serving 40 million members, found new gym joins down 9% and boutique studio joins down 5% year over year. When the top of the funnel shrinks, your existing members, and the people who look like them, become your growth plan.
Start by cutting your member base four ways:
- Who they are: age, gender, and home zip code
- How they joined: web, in person, or phone
- How they use you: visit frequency, class mix, and personal training
- When they leave: tenure and drop-off points
Operators often push back that their members will move anyway. In most markets, the housing data says otherwise. Homeowners’ reluctance to give up below-market mortgage rates has kept home sales near multi-decade lows for three straight years, and just under 22% of mortgages carry a rate above 6%. Almost one in five homeowners with a low rate say they wouldn’t consider moving for any reason.
That makes your trade area unusually stable. The people within driving distance of your club today will likely still be there next year. You can win back the ones who lapsed, and you can use your best cohorts as a template for finding more like them.
2. Lifetime chose quality over quantity, then brought the boutique inside
Lifetime is the clearest example of an operator that cohorted its members and acted on what it found. Its membership guidance tells the story.
Lifetime has been deliberately shrinking its qualified medical memberships, which are administered through insurance providers and carry significantly lower dues. In the first quarter, those memberships fell by about 15,000, or 14.9%, while all other memberships grew by about 27,000, or 3.7%. Total dues revenue still rose 11.9%. Because of those cuts, management guided total center membership growth to just 1% to 1.5% in the third quarter and 2% to 3% in the fourth. Strip out the medical memberships, and the company expects underlying membership growth of 4% to 5% in both quarters.
The revenue math works because the remaining members are worth more. Lifetime ended Q2 with about 860,000 center memberships, up only 1.2%, yet total revenue grew 13.7% to $866 million. Average monthly dues rose 12.3% to $245, and average revenue per center membership climbed 11.8% to $993. Bahram Akradi has been explicit that the company is prioritizing revenue quality, retention, in-center engagement and member experience over membership volume.
The second half of the strategy is just as instructive: Lifetime is reinvesting in the experiences its best members are willing to pay for, starting with boutique formats.
- Pilates, fast-tracked. Lifetime launched CTR, an athletic reformer class, at select clubs in 2025. Demand was strong enough that many clubs added waitlists, daily class limits and no-show fees. The company then fast-tracked the class from 10 locations to a goal of more than 60 by the end of 2026, and CTR became the most waitlisted class in company history.
- Signature Group Training, scaled. In July, Lifetime opened its second dedicated HYBRID XT studio in Frisco, Texas, as part of its Signature Group Training portfolio, riding demand for hybrid fitness competitions.
- Programs that lift the membership, not just the add-on line. Management said these programs are meant to support membership acquisition, engagement and dues growth rather than act as separate revenue streams.
That last point is the lesson. Lifetime looked at what its highest-value members were buying, often at boutique studios down the street, and brought those experiences inside the club. That gave members a reason to pay a premium membership price rather than stack a separate boutique membership on top. Reformer participation nationally has grown more than 70% since 2022, according to Mindbody, so the demand is real.
The takeaway for operators: find out which formats your best cohorts are buying elsewhere, and bring them in. You don’t need a bigger membership count to grow. You need to know which members you’re built for, and give them a reason to consolidate their spend with you.
3. The stretched consumer is buying value, not price
The macro backdrop explains why value matters so much right now. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2% in September. August CPI came in at 3.4%, the Fed raised rates a quarter point on September 16, and it projects 2026 PCE inflation at 3.7%, well above its 2% target. At the pump, gas averaged $4.33 a gallon in September.
Under that pressure, the consumer splits. Walmart is the best evidence: its CEO said the majority of its share gains came from households earning more than $100,000. Affluent shoppers are trading toward value, and everyone else is cutting back. That is the K-shaped economy, and your membership base lives in it too.
A known HVLP shows what happens when price rises without visibly better value. Same-club sales grew 1.7%, driven entirely by rate rather than volume, and the company is testing a national promotion to measure price elasticity. That isn’t a knock on the HVLP. It shows that price alone has a ceiling when the buyer feels squeezed, and it’s the mirror image of Lifetime’s value-first approach.
4. You don’t beat a $15 app on price. You beat it on outcomes.
When a prospect weighs your club against a workout app, don’t try to win the argument that a gym beats an app. Make the case for value. You aren’t selling access to a room. You’re selling a result the member cares about.
Three moves work:
- Bring the app inside the membership. Use it to deliver nutrition plans, guided programs, progress tracking, and coaching between visits. Reach the member outside your four walls.
- Price the added value modestly. An increase of 25 cents to $3, depending on your price point, tied to a visibly better experience is a different conversation from a hike with nothing new behind it. It also usually beats trying to upsell a separate $15 add-on.
- Treat the fee as the door, not the product. Costco is the model. Its renewal rate was 92.3% in the U.S. and Canada at the end of fiscal 2026, because members renew for the value behind the fee. Our industry still loses roughly half its members each year. Closing that gap is the opportunity.
5. The sale is decided before the first visit
Your next member may never use a search engine to find you. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found that 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to find local businesses in the past year, up from just 6% a year earlier. Among the most affluent buyers, the shift has already happened: Yext found that 54.5% of consumers in $150,000-plus households start a local search with AI.
AI is also far more selective than a search results page. A SOCi analysis of more than 350,000 business locations found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local businesses. I’ve seen this firsthand. I had an AI model build my training plan, then asked it where I should train to hit my goals. It recommended a facility based on what that club had published, not on how close it was to me. Meanwhile, 63% of gym members had already made up their minds before booking a tour or trial.
The takeaway: your website is now your front desk. Every class, amenity, coach, schedule, and price should be described in full, kept current, and easy for both people and AI to read. If it isn’t written down, you don’t get credit for it.
6. Your real competitor is Amazon checkout
Members don’t compare your join flow to the gym down the street. They compare it to Amazon and Walmart. Amazon says items delivered same day or overnight rose 40% year over year in the first half of 2026, and customers who add fresh groceries to same-day orders shop about twice as often as those who don’t. Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce sales grew 24% last quarter. Speed builds habit, and habit drives spend.
For operators, three friction points matter most:
- Payment fit. Many members, especially younger and lower-income ones, bank with neobanks: digital-only banks with no physical branches, such as Chime or Varo. Those customers often live closer to their paychecks, so a draft that lands two days before payday is more likely to decline. Aligning billing dates with when members actually get paid, and offering flexible options such as buy-now-pay-later for annual fees or PT packages, reduces failed payments without cutting price.
- Instant value at sign-up. The moment someone joins, give them a first workout, a first goal such as 10,000 steps, or a first nutrition plan. That is the gym version of same-day delivery.
- Exit as easy as entry. New York City’s click-to-cancel rule took effect October 1, making it the first U.S. city to require that canceling be no harder than enrolling. Roughly 30 states now have some version of a click-to-cancel law. Cancellation friction that once protected revenue now creates legal risk and resentful former members.
7. The most underrated moment: who they meet on day one
People join for results, but they stay for people. In ABC Fitness’ data, two-thirds of members say community is their biggest driver of motivation and accountability, up 12% year over year. The flip side matters just as much: nearly a quarter of non-gym members are put off because they don’t know anyone at the gym or have no one to work out with.
The quiet failure is silence. More than half of gym members have stopped attending without ever formally canceling, and nearly half of lapsed members say their gym never reached out to them proactively.
So design the first visit around a connection: a buddy, a small-group class, a coach who checks in, or even a virtual high-five in the app after a first workout. It’s no accident that Lifetime’s fastest-growing formats are small-group classes with waitlists; community is built into the product. Then push hard to get every new member to their sixth visit quickly, because those early visits form the habit that predicts how long they’ll stay.
8. The one investment that pays off most
If you only make one investment in the buying experience this year, make it understanding your member. Cohorted data lets you simplify the join, personalize the offer, decide which boutique formats to bring in-house, choose where AI actually helps, and spend retention dollars on the members you’re built to keep.
Start this week with three questions:
- Which cohorts produce the most lifetime value, and what do they share?
- Where in discovery, joining, and the first 30 days do people drop off?
- What does your membership deliver that a $15 app, or a boutique studio down the street, can’t? Is it written clearly enough for an AI to recommend you?
Answer those, and AI becomes a multiplier. Skip them, and it’s an expensive way to automate the wrong thing.
Lee Robinson is VP of Sales at ABC Fitness Solutions.
Sources
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ABC Fitness helps operators recover more of the revenue they’ve already earned, with smarter collections, intelligent payment retry, and AI-powered front desk support built into the platform.
Lee Robinson leads global commercial strategy at ABC Fitness Solutions and has spent 20 years in the fitness industry. This is part of the Built for Operators series.