Death comes to us all eventually, but ask any high-end gym and they’ll tell you that for the right fee, you can delay the inevitable.
Over the past year, fitness spaces like Continuum Club, Life Time, and Equinox have launched longevity-focused programs that use biometric data to create personalized routines to improve fitness, sleep, nutrition, and mental clarity. Implicit in this vision is the idea that the gym will be a place to improve not just your physical health, but your entire life. To that end, many premium establishments are featuring shared lounges for socializing, co-working spaces, and even childcare services, creating all-in-one environments designed to optimize every aspect of a member’s day.
The idea is “a white glove service where we figure out exactly what you need and then we take care of it for you. You just show up and do what we say,” says Tom Wingert, Continuum Club’s chief risk officer and executive vice president.
In practice, this entails an intensive three-week course of biometric data collection, including in-house blood testing, bone density scans, sleep analysis, functional movement screens, and more. The survey results are then fed into Continuum’s proprietary AI system to create a specific program for each member. All of this costs a staggering $10,000 per month, and yet it’s still keeping people away: Continuum already had a waiting list of more than 700 people before it even opened in May.
These efforts are a by-product of the focus on longevity that has swept through the wellness industry in recent years. In the 2010s, the industry boomed as practices and products once considered luxuries, such as massages, expensive skincare, and special diets, began to be viewed as necessities. The 2020s longevity movement is a product of this phenomenon but takes a decidedly different approach, viewing the body as a machine that needs to be “hacked” and “optimized” for maximum efficiency. If Gwyneth Paltrow was the driving force behind the last wellness wave, the most prominent icons of this new movement are Silicon Valley tech billionaires like Brian Johnson and medical heavyweights like Andrew Huberman, who promote improving lives through “science-backed” research and technological interventions.
These new luxury gyms are a by-product of this longevity philosophy. They eschew intuitive self-care approaches in favor of data-driven analysis of tangible biometric information. They even use technology-influenced language to portray the human body as a machine that can be reprogrammed to function efficiently. At Continuum Clubs, for example, members regularly visit a “lab” to be tested; personal trainers are “human performance experts.”
Whether these spaces become as popular as detox diets were in the 2010s remains to be seen, but a culture increasingly focused on extending life will likely continue to reshape the fitness and wellness industry, and these gyms are just a taste of what’s to come.
More than a gym
Personalization is at the core of this experience: Upon arriving at Continuum’s Manhattan space, members are greeted by a concierge team who guide them through the specific tasks of the day, such as a session in a hyperbaric chamber, a personalized IV infusion, or a session with a personal trainer who follows a prescribed program based on the member’s data.
According to CEO Jeff Halevi, the key to the club’s success is “helping members become their ideal selves without strict exercise and diet regimes that may work for a period of time but then quickly drop off. It’s a true lifestyle experience, not just in what we offer but how it fits into people’s lives.”
Life Time Fitness, which has 1.2 million members and 200 locations across the U.S., is opening a longevity clinic called Miora at its flagship location in Minnesota in December 2023 and is currently planning to expand to other major markets. Members who sign up for the program will have their blood tested and, based on the results, will be given a personalized program of hormones, peptides, infusion therapy, exercise and nutrition programs, and beauty treatments. According to Natalie Buschot, vice president of corporate communications at Life Time, the program was created in response to the longevity trend that emerged after COVID-19.
“We realized that there were people who were interested in performance, anti-aging (or better aging) and longevity, and they wanted more information about how their bodies were performing from the inside out,” Buschow says. “We saw where things were going and jumped in, so we introduced Miora, and our first pilot was a huge success.”
Meanwhile, in May, Equinox launched its EQX Optimize program, in which members will pay $40,000 a year for access to Equinox gym facilities, blood testing through Function Health (a startup co-founded by Dr. Mark Hyman), the Oura Ring, one-on-one coaching with a personal trainer, sleep coach and nutritionist, and monthly massage appointments.
Long-term membership is just one aspect of these gyms’ selling point: Continuum calls itself a “social members club,” and all members are interviewed upon joining.
According to Wingert, acceptance will depend on their ability to increase “representation across industries, age groups, lived experiences and demographics,” because “we don’t want this to be just a finance space.”
Members can mingle (or network) in the common room, which features a juice and snack bar and workshops on topics ranging from terrarium making to breathing exercises, or work quietly in soundproofed breakout rooms.