After a survey of the fitness industry carried out pre-during-post the pandemic, and after chats, emails, phone calls, in-person and digital coffees, we rewind the tape of the fitness service offering to today. The sustainable redevelopment of mixed indoor+outdoor areas converges, like it or not, on the traditional gym. The crux of the matter is the transition of fitness spaces from static to dynamic according to the rules of a “hybrid” fitness demand that has exploded, but has fragmented.
Physical, digital, hybrid fitness
Physical fitness, digital fitness and phygital fitness, i.e. liquefaction of the offer no longer attributable to the well-known fitness facility: a few crucified machines and zero instructors. This translates not only into a new and necessary multiformity of fitness practice locations but above all into the mobility, as well as uncontrollability and unmanageability, of operators and users. Large flows now move from one gym to another, spamming the barrage of calls from the reception at deadlines. Also stop impulse purchases instead of reasoned ones, including fitness and above all trust, the old one, considered analogical, towards your gym and towards those behind it.
Intelligent fitness spaces (AI) with less than one impact will have to hybridize through reusability, modifiability, and even ease of transport of some of their parts and/or accessories. These concepts will re-orientate a question that will be halfway between the indoor and outdoor sports that have been forced to spread during the pandemic. That event has inevitably left a great trail, in terms of distancing and not user distancing, and the sports points will have to do exactly the opposite of standardizing themselves: structurally customizing themselves wherever it will be necessary to place them (gravitational basin and proximity strategies) and wherever it has decided to move this fitness market which has hyper-mutant rules.
Fitness Industry A-Z: Offerta
Necessary digression. The entry into the Italian market of low-cost gyms first and then the pandemic explosion had eliminated the revenues of hundreds of fitness centers and sports points spread across the national territory. Following meetings with sector managers, some enlightened and attentive to feedback, others presumptuous and certain of their choices, the focus was (some) on the absolute and indestructible strength of low-cost business. Management approaches that failed the sports facility strategy exam (packed gyms and changing rooms with hordes of customers in quantities double if not triple compared to the square meters of gym), led to failures in the Offer, where the pandemic had not yet arrived: the price battle had reduced margins well before those events and covid had nothing to do with it.
From there another problem began to arise: the fitness centers had eliminated the best technical resources, no longer being able to afford to pay for them or not considering them capable of providing new (perhaps useful) strategies in a context of low-costism and elimination of content of the Fitness Offer. Which is health: defining a health service (do you go to the gym to feel better or not?) low-cost is oxymoronic so as not to use less noble terms. Without a strategy anymore, the offer of sports fitness services disappeared, and a large slice of the market was occupied by the low-cost networks which initially launched thanks to the critical mass of a fitness user that brought an enormity of “micro -turnovers” and to obvious economies of scale. Then, however, it became clear that it was just a first battle won, followed by many others lost.
The current situation of fitness supply and demand
Subsequent events, i.e. the economic-energy crises with a surge in the production costs of the Fitness Offer, put an end to many local managements that were unable to cope with the management costs in the face of a drop in turnover per customer. Unless you enroll four-users-per-square-meter, which leads to a peak and then the Mariana Trench. The obstacles were therefore insurmountable: unworkable locations for wall structures not even meeting safety criteria, abnormal energy costs given the absence of intelligent technological equipment, out-of-control environmental impacts, supply of by-products both inside and outside the fitness facilities.
The economic picture has therefore become cloudy after the first battles won (the Pyrrhic ones, useless) and now the situation, in terms of the health that should be offered to all the components of a Fitness Demand in the face of a serious Fitness Offer, is this:
1) sport&fitness follows two directions, the low-cost one for audiences who do not have economic resources and that of excellent services accessible only to those with high incomes. We could/should move on an excellent middle ground, useful for margining on entrepreneurs’ budgets, for recovering technical resources indispensable for conveying the Health Offer and useful above all for users, abandoned to themselves or to fratricidal struggles between personal trainers uncontrolled by the fitness facilities, attentive only to the rent contribution from the “uncontrolled” people who control the service (!). Incomprehensibility one;
2) sport&fitness are no longer fulfilling educational-aggregative functions, which will cease if the local plant complex stops providing services with “content”. The health-play-educational activities for young people, a large customer segment for which the trainers-teachers have responsibility, are relegated to autonomy in the use of the machines with a wellness protocol drawn up by the influencer who graduated as a trainer in forty-eight hours. Incomprehensibility two. In the Fitness Offer to 2024, something needs to be reviewed.
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Photo by Photo Genius / LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR / dylan nolte / Danielle Cerullo
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2024-05-13 13:23:30
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