gym as community center
Jun. 1st, 2006 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidfcooperThe profit sector emulates YMCAs & JCCs.
From NY Times Magazine
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 4-30-2006: CONSUMED; Fitting In
By ROB WALKER (NYT) 751 words
Published: April 30, 2006
Life Time Fitness
While a number of things about Life Time Fitness distinguish it from other gyms and health clubs, one characteristic leaps out to the casual observer: hugeness. There are about 50 Life Time Fitness locations, and each one is immense -- 110,000 square feet (around 2.5 acres) on average. That is larger than a typical Home Depot, let alone a typical gym. Inside a Life Time Fitness location, or on the acre and a half or so of surrounding land, you are likely to find a rock-climbing wall, dozens of plasma-screen televisions, waterslides, a cafe with free Wi-Fi access, a child-care center and a spa. Oh, and exercise equipment.
There is nothing new about an American business appealing to potential customers with the consumption equivalent of overwhelming force. But as the context for a workout, resortlike luxury seems slightly dissonant. Yet that, in a way, is the entire point of Life Time Fitness (which had revenue of about $390 million last year), explains Mike Brown, senior vice president for operations. Plenty of other gyms and health-club chains offer yoga classes and juice bars. But Brown argues that Life Time offers these things on a scale that makes customers consider it ''a healthy-way-of-life country club.''
Brown and Bahram Akradi, Life Time's founder and chief executive officer, have been in the fitness industry for decades. Akradi's explicit goal in starting Life Time was to expand the idea of gymness -- or, perhaps, to avoid that idea altogether. Brown describes the process that led to the first Life Time location in Minnesota, in 1992, as a bunch of ''gym rats'' imagining a fantasy version of a fitness facility that would attract people who were sick of austere, bleak weight rooms and cold, metal lockers. More important, though, they wanted to attract people who never could quite bring themselves to sign a yearly contract at such places.
And so when Brown talks about the locations that have followed (in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere -- generally near suburbs, where there's enough space to accommodate Life Time's monumental scale), he mentions the cardio machines and the free weights and so on, but sounds more pumped about the art on the walls, the cherry lockers, the marble flooring in the dressing rooms, even the air ''recycling'' system that he says keeps the place fresh so that it ''doesn't smell like a gym.''
Life Time locations, which look like a cross between a shopping center and a resort, are open 24 hours a day, and the chain charges $50 a month, plus an initiation fee, but has no yearly contracts. The point is not simply to steal away current gym-goers but also to appeal to the percentage of the population -- particularly families and women -- that has considered joining a gym and never does, perhaps because they find gyms a little too. . .gymish. ''People refer to us as the de facto community center,'' the enthusiastic Brown maintains. ''It's the first place people come to recreate and indulge, to relax, exercise, to participate in a basketball league, to swim in the pool with their extended family, get a massage, have a healthy-way-of life meal.''
As Brown goes on about the various ''education'' and ''entertainment'' opportunities at Life Time, it's easy to wonder if actual exercise isn't sort of a minor side show, something to be ''exposed to'' on the trip from the waterslide to the cafe. Of course, Brown says this isn't so; the company is serious about fitness. But in offering a comfortable, friendly setting, Life Time relies on a strategy that is getting quite a workout these days: bookstores, coffee shops, even Home Depot (with its various do-it-yourself workshops) are all trying to offer consumers a setting that's meant to give people a ''third place,'' aside from work and home, where they want to go. (Churches have used this term as well -- there's even a Third Place Cafe at the Crossroads Church in Southern California.) Suburban sprawl may be alienating and disconnecting, but there are any number of retail environments where you can buy a little community, or at least some sense of it; maybe Life Time is not so much a gym with amenities as an oversize Starbucks with weights. Of course, Life Time customers who actually work out remain engaged in a lonely and basically self-centered enterprise, but at least they're doing it in a nice place in the company of other like-minded people -- lots and lots and lots of them.
From NY Times Magazine
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 4-30-2006: CONSUMED; Fitting In
By ROB WALKER (NYT) 751 words
Published: April 30, 2006
Life Time Fitness
While a number of things about Life Time Fitness distinguish it from other gyms and health clubs, one characteristic leaps out to the casual observer: hugeness. There are about 50 Life Time Fitness locations, and each one is immense -- 110,000 square feet (around 2.5 acres) on average. That is larger than a typical Home Depot, let alone a typical gym. Inside a Life Time Fitness location, or on the acre and a half or so of surrounding land, you are likely to find a rock-climbing wall, dozens of plasma-screen televisions, waterslides, a cafe with free Wi-Fi access, a child-care center and a spa. Oh, and exercise equipment.
There is nothing new about an American business appealing to potential customers with the consumption equivalent of overwhelming force. But as the context for a workout, resortlike luxury seems slightly dissonant. Yet that, in a way, is the entire point of Life Time Fitness (which had revenue of about $390 million last year), explains Mike Brown, senior vice president for operations. Plenty of other gyms and health-club chains offer yoga classes and juice bars. But Brown argues that Life Time offers these things on a scale that makes customers consider it ''a healthy-way-of-life country club.''
Brown and Bahram Akradi, Life Time's founder and chief executive officer, have been in the fitness industry for decades. Akradi's explicit goal in starting Life Time was to expand the idea of gymness -- or, perhaps, to avoid that idea altogether. Brown describes the process that led to the first Life Time location in Minnesota, in 1992, as a bunch of ''gym rats'' imagining a fantasy version of a fitness facility that would attract people who were sick of austere, bleak weight rooms and cold, metal lockers. More important, though, they wanted to attract people who never could quite bring themselves to sign a yearly contract at such places.
And so when Brown talks about the locations that have followed (in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere -- generally near suburbs, where there's enough space to accommodate Life Time's monumental scale), he mentions the cardio machines and the free weights and so on, but sounds more pumped about the art on the walls, the cherry lockers, the marble flooring in the dressing rooms, even the air ''recycling'' system that he says keeps the place fresh so that it ''doesn't smell like a gym.''
Life Time locations, which look like a cross between a shopping center and a resort, are open 24 hours a day, and the chain charges $50 a month, plus an initiation fee, but has no yearly contracts. The point is not simply to steal away current gym-goers but also to appeal to the percentage of the population -- particularly families and women -- that has considered joining a gym and never does, perhaps because they find gyms a little too. . .gymish. ''People refer to us as the de facto community center,'' the enthusiastic Brown maintains. ''It's the first place people come to recreate and indulge, to relax, exercise, to participate in a basketball league, to swim in the pool with their extended family, get a massage, have a healthy-way-of life meal.''
As Brown goes on about the various ''education'' and ''entertainment'' opportunities at Life Time, it's easy to wonder if actual exercise isn't sort of a minor side show, something to be ''exposed to'' on the trip from the waterslide to the cafe. Of course, Brown says this isn't so; the company is serious about fitness. But in offering a comfortable, friendly setting, Life Time relies on a strategy that is getting quite a workout these days: bookstores, coffee shops, even Home Depot (with its various do-it-yourself workshops) are all trying to offer consumers a setting that's meant to give people a ''third place,'' aside from work and home, where they want to go. (Churches have used this term as well -- there's even a Third Place Cafe at the Crossroads Church in Southern California.) Suburban sprawl may be alienating and disconnecting, but there are any number of retail environments where you can buy a little community, or at least some sense of it; maybe Life Time is not so much a gym with amenities as an oversize Starbucks with weights. Of course, Life Time customers who actually work out remain engaged in a lonely and basically self-centered enterprise, but at least they're doing it in a nice place in the company of other like-minded people -- lots and lots and lots of them.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 02:50 pm (UTC)