Who doesn’t have a piece of gym equipment at home … that gets used to hang clothes on?
In a survey conducted by NPR in 2018, some 13% of adults included exercising more as one of their New Year’s resolutions. Not surprisingly, 12% of gym memberships are initiated in January.
The ugly truth, however, is that 80% of new gym members will quit within five months.
A typical gym can have thousands of members but only enough space for a few hundred to show up. Half of the members will never come, and, believe it or not, gyms actually count on that.
If every person who joined a gym actually came regularly, the cost of maintaining the facilities and equipment would become unbearable — not to mention the need for more space as well.
Every day after school growing up, Britt Taylor would hit the studio. When she wasn’t dancing competitively, she was on the cheer squad or running track. Now 20 and in college, Taylor belongs to two gyms in her hometown of Boca Raton, Florida, and goes five or six times a week. Though she has a busy schedule as a student studying communications, fitness has become one of her top priorities.
In a 2023 survey from McKinsey, more than half of Gen Z respondents said fitness was a very high priority for them. Forty percent of all respondents said the same.
Like Taylor, these young people aren’t just working out at home — they are helping drive up gym attendance. Surveys by the fitness organization Les Mills found that the share of adults who reported going to the gym increased to 32% in 2019 from 27% in 2013. Other surveys and data from companies like Placer.ai and ABC Fitness similarly suggest more people are going to the gym more regularly than they did several years ago. And the memberships of chains like Planet Fitness have exploded — that brand gained more than 4 million new members from 2019 to the end of 2023.