On-Demand Webinar: Fit for the Future

Are you ready to discover the secret formula for industry-leading acquisition, engagement and retention rates?

In this webinar Andy Peat, the CEO of Fitness On Demand, and Dr. Steve Boring, the fitness director at the Rochester Athletic Club discuss the future of the fitness industry, the importance of personalization and technology integration, and the role of AI in the industry. They also provide advice for operators on how to implement digital solutions and stay fit for the future.

Some of the topics they cover include how to:

• Create enjoyable member experiences
• Prevent cancelled classes
• Invest in your club and members

You can watch the first 5 minutes here or access the full recording by clicking the button below!

You can read the full transcript below:

Katie Phillip (00:00:00):

Hello and welcome this morning or this afternoon, wherever you're joining from. My name is Katie Philip, I'm the education manager here at the Health and Fitness Association, and we're excited to host this webinar today. So I would like to remind everyone, if you do want to introduce yourself inside of our webinar chat today, we'd love to hear where you're coming from, your studio or club name so everyone can feel free to engage within the chat functionality. Also, as we go through today, if you'd like to put any questions into the q and a panel, our hosts for the webinar today, we'll take time to answer those at the end of the session. So without further ado, I am excited to welcome with us today Andy, Pete, the CEO of Fitness On Demand, as well as Dr. Steve Boring, who's the fitness director at the Rochester Athletic Club. So welcome gentlemen. We're really excited to have you today and I'll let you take it away.

Andy Peat (00:00:55):

Thank you. I appreciate that. Absolute pleasure to be here today and chat to one of the most entertaining and insightful humans in the fitness industry, Dr. Steve. So maybe Dr. Steve, let's just start with some introductions. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:01:11):

Yeah, thank you, Andy. Yeah, so my name is Steve. I am the fitness director at the Rochester Athletic Club in Rochester, Minnesota. We're a multipurpose facility about 260,000 square feet with about 15,000 members. We service all ages from little kids all the way up to, I believe our oldest members, 101 years old. So we kind of do a little bit of everything here. I myself have been in the industry now for coming up on 20 years or so, started as a personal trainer and then I've been a fitness director. This is my second facility I've been a fitness director in, and I feel like it's the greatest job in the world.

Andy Peat (00:01:52):

Love it now. Very cool. 101, what are they doing?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:01:58):

And there's still a lot of things to do around here. It doesn't matter.

Andy Peat (00:02:02):

Yeah, no, that's great. Well, lovely to chat with you today. So yeah, just for everyone's purposes, my name is Andy Peter, I'm the CEO of Fitness On Demand, similar to Dr. Steve, be in the industry for around 20 years. Started off as a personal trainer, as you might be able to tell. I'm not from Iowa, I'm from New Zealand, but based in Minneapolis, Minnesota currently, and head up fitness onto demand, but previously grew the Snap fitness business in Australia and New Zealand was the CEO of Snap Fitness over there, and then came into the United States as the chief product officer for Snap Fitness and then took over Fitness On Demand last year, which has been an exciting, exciting role. So without further ado, I think we'll just, it's enough about us. We'll just get into giving these fine people some worthwhile content. So the future of fitness is where we'll start. And the stat here is quite mind boggling really to see that the US alone has a fitness market that's predicted to be worth 150 billion. As you can see, the difference between 2018 and 2024, there is radical growth. So Steve, what do you think is the main reason that the fitness industry is somewhat booming and what do you think the future of it is? And we'll talk a little bit more about the digital side of it later on. So what do you think that real reason for growth is?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:03:24):

Yeah, that's a great question and it's kind of the 150 billion question at this point. As you see, there's more and more populations now that have access to not only fitness in terms of having access to a gym or equipment or home gyms or something like that, but more access to education. More people are aware now of how good it is for you to exercise. You've seen shifts sort of worldwide from maybe more people having agricultural type jobs or something like that, where that fitness was built into kind of the work that you're doing. You see more growth in obviously our cities and stuff like that. And I think we went through a phase where working out was kind of like, if you weren't trying to look like Arnold, right? I was born in 1987, so I grew up seeing Arnold on TV and stuff like that.

(00:04:18):

And still, I remember my dad got me lifting when I was seven years old, and I remember it was still something that it didn't feel like it was out there for everybody. Certainly we run into a lot of people here that are from the generation where they might've not even had access to PE depending on what their gender was. So I think a lot of the booming that we're seeing here is based around more access to more people and more access to the education of why you should do it. All of the many, many, many health benefits and some of the exercise is medicine and some of those sorts of things that have been getting out in the fitness industry doing a better job of sharing that information with a greater variety of people.

Andy Peat (00:05:03):

Yeah, no, it is a fair point. You use the word medicine, which is interesting just particularly on this topic or the future of fitness really. When people ask me what I believe the future of the industry is, there's two aspects that I look at and medicine and that medicine, fitness combination is becoming more apparent, particularly on the coasts and the more dense cities because you've got to pay for it. And I'm now starting to see gyms and gym chains open up clinics where they have access to doctors who are medical doctors taking blood work, prescribing exercise, prescribing certain foods and certain supplements that are really a hyper-personalization. Now again, you've got to pay for that. I know some memberships are around a thousand dollars a month for that sort of access, but we are starting to see that combination of medicine and fitness, which I think is really interesting.

(00:05:56):

And in terms of the future of fitness, you talked a little bit about how people, we used to be laborers essentially more so we are building things, we were farming, we were doing the physical, we were essentially burning calories all day every day is what you mean. And now what I think we find is we have these generations that all of a sudden are into fitness, whether it be the baby boomers who are trying to be more mobile, live longer, they've got the money to spend on fitness, and they have the time all the way through to the Gen Zs who it's now cool to hang out in the gym and you see them in their pajamas, literally working out in the gym, hanging out instead of the mall. And I think social media has a big reason for that as well because it's cool to be in fitness clothes these days.

(00:06:43):

So the future of fitness to me, really you have to look at the generations and you have to adapt your offering to those because no generation is the same when it comes to fitness, but all of those things combined are the reason why it's booming and ultimately it's good because people, as a society we tend to get fatter. So as long as we're getting fitter, that's going to help us all. But I think a good segue there is more into the digital fitness and wellbeing being a key word. I think that word's been used a lot since Covid and maybe for fitness facilities and the people on the webinar here. What is your view around, are gyms supposed to just do the physical stuff now or are they supposed to do the wellbeing holistic side, and what is your general view of digital fitness? And then we'll talk a little bit about some of the specifics that you have done at the rack.

Dr. Steve Boring (00:07:35):

Yeah, so it's interesting, we actually changed here. We used to, every new member that joins the club here, like many clubs, they get free gifts or complimentary gifts. So we'll do like two complimentary personal training sessions and we had just a little change of tone that we used to ask, what are your fitness goals or what are your health and fitness goals? And eventually we changed it. It's just a tiny little thing, but we changed it to what are your health and wellness goals because we definitely believe in that full approach. Since you mentioned covid, I'm going to use that for a second and say all of us in the industry, whether we were trainers, gym owners, gym goers, all of us figured out ways to get our workouts in probably in our garage or something, but there was something that really, really was missing.

(00:08:22):

It wasn't there. It was that social aspect for a lot of us, even if you come and put your headphones in and you're working out and not talking to people, it's awesome to be able to see other human beings. Part of the digital side of what helped there so much is if you even had the videos and stuff to watch, you saw a lot of that technology really took off. But when you look at wellbeing, my personal belief is any health and wellness facility should be looking at everything. You have your facility to make your members healthier, and health does not just include running a certain time at your mile or squatting a certain weight or anything. There's all those different pieces that make us as an individual. The whole being and exercise was one that I feel in the past was actually overlooked a lot.

(00:09:16):

Now we've done a really good job of bringing that to the forefront with the future of it. I mean, I definitely see this continuing to pick up and gain steam. Things like yoga for example, which yoga is a very old tried and true exercise format, a spiritual format depending on what type you are doing. The interesting thing with yoga is we are seeing people attending yoga classes that even 10 years ago would've been stereotyped as that's not a yoga person. And so you're seeing this more welcoming and inclusive environment and the awesome thing about the digital side is it just really pulls everybody into that same space. It removes any sort of barriers that might exist and it gives those people access to it.

Andy Peat (00:10:18):

Agreed. So for the people listening here, then yoga's a good one, but what would be just a couple of tangible takeaways that if they were to, because everyone is really on the, and I agree with you, you can't just be the physical anymore. People are expecting the mental and the holistic and the wellbeing side. What are a couple of takeaways that people could go and look at today to implement? Is it recovery products? Is it, I think sometimes people think they now need to have counselors in the gyms to say that they're doing wellness. What would be some tangibles that you think people can look at in order to become more holistic?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:10:57):

So just a few of the things that we have here. I mean we do have different recovery products, physical recovery products such as Thera guns and we have massage therapists, things like that. We have health and wellness coaches here. So we have on my staff, my team, we have personal trainers, we have our group fitness instructors, we have health and wellness coaches, we have registered dieticians. One of the things that we found that was just really, really interesting, and you'll see it a lot in maybe more of the hardcore subset, you'll see the shirts, the gym is my therapy or iron therapy or something like that. And there is certainly a lot of really, really positive mental health effects from working out, but you also want to be careful that you, you're not having people only use, I'm doing curls to fix everything. And so for us, we did add some other positions.

(00:11:49):

We added a position here called a member connection specialist, and that position actually exists to help our members. I mentioned we have a very, very large club with a very big member base and a very diverse member base. So this member connection specialist basically connects with you and would say, Andy, you're new to the club, what are you interested in? Let me take you to a class. Let me do this. Now we're in a really blessed position to be able to have that, and I know that's not necessarily something that might be available to all clubs everywhere, but I think even something like maybe a health and wellness coach where you're just able to break some of those other barriers. We've had people really greatly increase their physical results here by unlocking some of the things that maybe we're tripping them up and holding them back that a personal trainer is not going to be able to get access to that information to help. So I think some of those takeaways would basically be invest in your member base by investing in your staff and making sure that you have people there to help with what your members need and your members will drive what they need at the end of the day. Not every club would need a registered dietician perhaps or a health and wellness coach, but your members will let you know if they need that, and I think that's always a worthwhile thing to move on.

Andy Peat (00:13:12):

Yeah, great answer. So you're essentially saying a higher quality, not just your personal trainer who's just going to absolutely just work people out as hard as possible and then leave at the end of the day, you're talking about a higher quality person, maybe more qualified, more education is one way. The recovery tools, those are all great and obviously you're a gigantic club and an institution essentially in your town and for smaller facilities out there that maybe don't have access to those types of professionals in your small towns or areas or unable to pay them what they need this present time. Some things I'd suggest just to start to getting more into that wellbeing piece is honestly, this will sound real cliche and back in the seventies, but people are getting back into stretching. That's what I'm seeing, and before stretching, before their workout and after, and they're now dedicating half an hour of their workout to stretching, it sounds really basic, but having areas set up with actual, we're seeing more and more stretching machines come out, so it's not just a mat anymore, which does force people to actually do it more so than having to just put a mat on and think about what to do.

(00:14:27):

I'm seeing a lot of stretching classes come up in different facilities out there and also real quickfire one, so 15, 20 minute stretching every hour and a half or so so people can time it to their workout, the holistic side of it and the wellbeing isn't just about looking good anymore, it's really about feeling good and your body's just general will determine a lot of how that feeling is in my opinion. And that's why I'm seeing stretching comeback. And I think that that, and again, go a little old school here, but fitness challenges, they have their moments and they have their place and whether it be the type or the competition or not for everyone, but if done right, I've seen some great fitness challenges that are linked to mental health services or charities where people are all raising money for it through a steps challenge or a gym visit challenge or something.

(00:15:23):

I've seen the power of those in the mental health side where members just communicating with each other for a set period of time because when you have this open-ended fitness goal of I'm going to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible, the 80% of the world that don't go to the gym, they're more likely to get involved. If it's for four weeks, there's an end date I can commit to four weeks, that's not scary or six weeks. So I think challenges in stretching are a good way if you are a smaller facility that doesn't necessarily have the staff to start to get into that holistic and there's plenty of content that's at, I know at Fitness On Demand we have a huge range of more of the breath work and the mental health side that people can start to digest as well.

(00:16:05):

So I will then go into talking a little bit more specific about your club in terms of the digital transformation. Now you guys, what I'd consider you guys to be a high tech club. You've got, whether it be through your lockers or your e gyms or your Fitness On Demand and whatnot, maybe you can give the audience an overview of the transition as to how you've added things in, what sort of tangible benefits you look for and what have you found valuable and maybe also what have you done that hasn't worked on the digital front?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:16:39):

Yeah, absolutely. So we're in a really awesome position that our owner is a tech guy and he loves it. He eats that stuff up, so he's obviously been behind really bringing the rack into the modern day from the minute you enter the club. We use gantner software, so all of our members, we all have eids and that's basically your ticket throughout the club. You scan in, it gets you through the front gate. We've got a digital locker system then that you can lock with these. Our cardio equipment links up to it. We have e GM here, which links up to it. And this would also be how you would charge something to your account if you go grab food at the market or something like that. The racks mission statement is member experience first. So whenever we make a decision, no matter how big or how small that is basically what's driving it and we like to try to keep everything within the club as easy for the member to use as possible.

(00:17:38):

So a single sign on sort of thing. There's something very, very powerful and especially those of you who may have smaller clubs, the power and you can do it really, really well of hello greeting somebody by name. That can be difficult when you've got a club that's so big, but even that digital side of you scan into your treadmill and it says, Hey Steve, welcome back. That's pretty powerful. And a lot of the transformations that have happened at the RAC have been driven sort of from the top down in a really positive manner. Adding Fitness On Demand specifically was something that I know we were really excited about. Now I've been at the RAC for eight years as the fitness director and prior to 2022 that did not include Group Fitness, that was actually a separate department, sorry, 2022. So then I sort of absorbed that group fitness department a little bit after Fitness On Demand had come in here, but I'm really great friends with our previous director and we talked about it at length and the way that we've done it here, and this is the beauty of any sort of a digital product, is there really isn't a right or wrong way to do it.

(00:19:06):

It is all dependent on your location. And so we've used Fitness On Demand a couple of different ways here. We've used it with scheduled classes in between our live classes. The photo in the slide here is our lower studio, so that's the largest of our studios I should mention. We have four total studios, five if you include our Pilates reformer, we have a Mind body studio, we have a cycle studio, and then an upper and lower studio with our upper having bars on the wall for Ballet fit and things like that. Our lower being more of our weight training based area. So we have Fitness On Demand in three of those studios cycle upper and lower. We have tried it a bunch of different ways and what we ended up settling on was we've given our members choice, it's what they showed us that they really wanted.

(00:19:57):

So whenever there's not a live class and we have between all formats about 116 live classes per week, so anytime there's not a live class running, you can see the reflection in the mirror there, the Fitness On Demand logo and the big screen. That means you can hop on the kiosk outside and set up your own workout and do whatever you'd like. We'd done it quite a few ways and that's what we ended up settling on because for our member base, we've got Mayo Clinic here in Rochester, we have IBM are the two largest employers here. So you have people basically with very, very busy schedules that may or may not have a lot of time to come in and do over a lunch break, a traditional workout out on the fitness floor, hop on machines. The cool thing about Fitness On Demand, they can come in even as a group and they can pick their favorite workout and they can make that happen at any point.

(00:20:55):

Another thing that was really popular and powerful for us is we have an app where we do currently we request reservations for our live group fitness classes. We don't require 'em, but we request them if we have instructors who are traveling or gone or somebody gets sick and I can't get a sub in time, we pop in whatever the related fitness on demand class is and we haven't missed a beat, right? So yeah, it is been, I would say this is by far the most technological club I have ever been in and it only seems to be gaining Steam. Members love the fact that they can track their progress. So anything we've got our rack app, which includes different body metrics, we have an InBody body analyzer, some of those sorts of things. That feeling of I'm going to go into the gym and work out because the more you can kind of get away from that, the more engaged your members will be and even down to, I feel better doing this virtual class now than I did two weeks ago. Those things are massive for your success as a business and for your members' success in why they are using your business in the first place.

Andy Peat (00:22:16):

Yeah, wow. So you guys really are that sort of end to end technology across all aspects. I guess the word I would use to describe it is you're really going for a frictionless experience. So people, whether it be programming, logging classes whenever they want them to be or buying a smoothie without having to take their wallet, for example. So frictionless, one of the things that I find being in technology in the fitness industry that people will ask is with any product, they have this expectation around, well, if I'm going to spend a dollar on this, I need to make $2 on it. And that's just often not the case with fitness technology. Now a body scanner for example, I've seen gyms charge $20 a scan and I've seen other gyms go, it's part of your membership. This is a perk of it. What's your feelings on that type of ethos where I guess operators who believe there has to be an ROI on anything, otherwise they're not going to put it in. But I find, and I'll just add to that is they never say that about a treadmill.

Dr. Steve Boring (00:23:23):

Yeah. So basically from a business standpoint, member retention is one of the most important metrics you can track. If you are able to retain more members for longer by adding a product that is $10,000, you should be able to tell when you have made that money back. What's really interesting is the ROI, in my opinion, should be unique to the device or the product that you're looking at. So we have hydro massage here. We do have a small fee for a hydro massage package monthly. We also have e GM here and the e GM space. A lot of different clubs do charge extra for that or they'll have a separate room. The EGM space here is complimentary and included in your membership, so two products that you could or could not charge for, but why you would or wouldn't charge is more of a personalized internal decision.

(00:24:28):

What do you want your reach to be? Are you okay with 5% of your members using this because you've attached a fee that maybe is or isn't too much in the majority of your members' eyes or is it something that you're going to use straight as a retention tool? Interesting, even that you mentioned the InBody for example, there's a lot of, you'll see the little popup supplement stores and they'll have one in there and it's completely free to use with the caveat that they're going to have 10 different supplements to sell you based on the results you get. We have an InBody five 70, I've seen charges as high as $150 for an InBody test. Wow. One of the ways, and I think this is a good example to share here, we've leveraged the InBody in different ways depending on what else was available in the club.

(00:25:19):

We started, we charged $70 for an InBody test because we spent a lot of time with the trainer going over the results with you. So we sold that quote as the trainer's experience, that's why you're getting this test and there's a fee. We ended up dropping the price to $20 because a lot of members didn't really want the feedback, they just wanted the numbers. And then our final sort of transformation with how we use that InBody is if you use EIM, so we've onboarded you to eem M, you now get unlimited free in bodies anytime you would like, and if you're not in EEM m, there's still a $20 fee. Part of the reason behind that is we've noticed that members that are using E Gym don't quit the club. They stay here because it's a good workout format for them. It's sort of then we can tie that back in with let's say the group fitness studio usage.

(00:26:13):

I'm going to take a wild guess that probably the vast majority of people on this call group fitness is probably complimentary. Maybe you have a different membership type or something, membership level that includes it. Either way you made the decision based on what your member base wants and needs are. So here, the entire group fitness, our entire schedule, well over a hundred classes per week, there isn't a physical dollar ROI on that separate from retention and adding fitness on demand and help us increase that ROI based on retention in and of itself. So you have to know those numbers and that can really guide those decisions for you.

Andy Peat (00:26:57):

Yeah, no, perfect. And not to mention the lead generation that comes with being able to market these products and hydro massage, body scanning, group fitness, you're really saying to all your competition around you, Hey, we've got everything. You're going to have to do a hell of a job to try and beat us because we do offer everything. So there's the marketing aspect to it as well. The body scan one's interesting, and if I had to put a bet on a piece of fitness technology that will be disrupted in the future, and I'll give fitness on demand a bit of a plug here. We have a body scanner coming out in our app in a partnership with a company that ultimately through AI, will then prescribe you and help you track your nutrition and it's all done at your house through your phone. And I'm interested to see, I see it in two ways that there's body scanners coming out and phones using iPhones and stuff, which have the technology now to be able to give those biometrics and you're going to have that which is maybe scalable across 80% of your membership base.

(00:28:06):

And then there's the 20% who want to sit down with the trainer and have that sort of one-on-one coaching, understand all the metrics that come with it and how to fix it. Because in the industry often we've become very good at data and very good through wearables of here's where you're at, but not great at going, well, here's what to do with that. So it is going to be interesting to see that transformation, but I think that's a really good segue into our next three items we're going to talk about are three current trends essentially in the fitness industry. Now, they used to just be previous with Ursa old name, but they used to release their trends every year and that was kind of what you went to. And now there every publication in the fitness industry has their top trends and they're pretty similar.

(00:29:02):

There is consistencies, a little bit of variance, but we're going to talk about three that came up consistently on this year's list. So the first one being healthy aging. I talked a little bit earlier about demographics and the differences in expectations and the product offering that you have per the demographics and which demographic is spending money in the gyms. Buying memberships also is determined by the geography, so you're quite often in a smaller town that might be aging, but the younger people are moving out. You might have a more aging population in your gym membership versus somewhere urban where it might be a little bit younger. This comes to my first point of knowing your demographics. So being able to now know fitness on demand, everyone who uses our mobile app, for example, on the back end you can see exactly your demographics split up and I think that's important for making decisions in the future, but we'll talk healthy aging now.

(00:30:00):

We're all healthy aging every day. We're a little bit older than we were yesterday and hopefully doing it in a healthy way. So the people in the picture maybe indicate 60, 50, maybe a 55 plus type demographics. So this was ranked in the top five biggest moving trends in most publications in 2024 is this demographic getting into the gyms. What do you see at the rack with this demographic, the older population and what are they doing in the gym? Are they getting together for a yap? Are they doing classes, are they doing dead lifts? What are they actually doing and how are you catering for them?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:30:41):

Yeah, that's a great question. So again, with our size, we've got a really nice spread of demographics, but we have our sort of healthy aging member base is pretty big. I think when you're creating content, typically let's say for probably the 55-year-old and plus I think again that social element can be very, very important. We have our, we call 'em our morning coffee crew and some of that they will come in. We see a lot of our healthy aging population utilizing our aqua based classes. We have pools here as well. I forgot to mention using our aqua classes because easy on the joints and it's still a good effective strength type workout. We actually created our own kind of special class type here that we named it Strong Bones and it was essentially to encourage members to come in and get more strength training to help sort of with the positive strength training effects on things like osteoporosis or delaying onset of anything like that.

(00:31:53):

I feel like this population group is really, really interested in the health benefits of, but they're not quite heading out to PubMed every day and reading studies or anything like that. So getting some smaller digestible pieces of information and sharing that through your health professional with them I think has been really, really popular here. Our strong bones class is absolutely booming. When we started that class with basically we marketed it just a little bit because we didn't know what it was going to be and you start with two or three people and that healthy aging population, word of mouth is also massive, so those classes are full. We added a second one and then we created another class that was sort of almost like an offshoot of that and those classes are already full after about six weeks of getting them on there. So definitely seeing an increase in strength training and sort of what comes with that increase in education, and I don't just want to say for the member base, but also for your staff and even you yourself.

(00:33:02):

So I was very young, I was 16 years old when I started as a personal trainer. Some of it I think came with my age and the fact that I was not as mature as I needed to be, but you get a client that was over 50 when you're 16 years old and I'm like, I really don't want to break you. I can't have you do anything hard. You know what I mean? And that feeling still does exist some in this industry and the benefits of progressive resistance training and things like that, they don't go away just because the calendar hits a certain number. So that's sort of what I see here. That strength training trend is across all age groups, but definitely the healthy aging populations are moving more into strength training and it's awesome when you think about somebody that's in their fifties or sixties now was born in the sixties, that's not a long time ago. So they went through this really extensive period of a lot of things happening, technology and social and a lot of changes happening and they're ready to be their strongest self ever and you have an awesome opportunity wherever you are to help with that.

Andy Peat (00:34:12):

And the funny thing is a dumbbell in the sixties and a dumbbell in 2024, it's still the same. There might be a more comfortable grip, but it's still the same even though all the technology and everything else has come in. And it's interesting too, things that I want to touch on that you said the strength training piece that everyone's interested in. I personally believe that in particular, women's strength training is the biggest shift in the fitness industry that no one's really talked about. They should, and what I mean by that is girls are in the squat racks now for an hour and hour and a half and doing not just deadlifts and squats and lunges, they're doing everything in the one place. So fitness facilities need to essentially incorporate more racks. That's what I'm seeing and I have a bit of a rule, there needs to be four racks per 800 members, particularly in my previous life in the Snap fitness business where the gyms weren't that big, but that strength training changes in my opinion, not going away.

(00:35:13):

And operators on this call need to go back and look at their gym and go, do I only have one squat rack, for example? Obviously strength training goes beyond the squat rack, but that is a catalyst for it and they're not that expensive, so it's a good way of being able to modernize to an extent. But back to healthy aging, so what would you call it? Healthy bones, strong bones. I like that. Strong bones. Yep, strong bones. I like that. Yeah, so you're saying you've got a dedicated class that's marketed to a demographic of essentially older people and they're coming because it's unique to them. It suits them in their lifestyle and they have the time for it, but they also like the community side of it as well. I've found with some of the clubs that we work with Fitness On Demand that are definitely a little bit smaller than you guys, they will go as far to say, we know that from eight 30 in the morning to 11:00 AM the gym and the group fitness studio is dead because they're a little bit smaller community, so they go on and put active aging classes on digitally.

(00:36:20):

Actually they don't have the staff, I can't remember what they called it. It might be active aging, but they marketed it and what they found was because these people had the time, they would come and off peak hours and they would just sort of get together in a community. They would talk, they would do the workout, they would talk some more, and you've got to remember in your group fitness studio, you are paying rent a hundred percent of the month for something that's probably used if you're in a smaller region offering 10 classes a week 7% of the time. So how do you get smart and using technology to monetize it essentially, but that was a really interesting point, which goes into our next trend. Integrating tech wearables seem to be the number one trend in the fitness industry and have been for God knows how long now, but how do you integrate it?

(00:37:10):

We're starting to see people and members and consumers, particularly the ones that are now, they've had the internet their entire life. This sort of stuff isn't as wow factor as what it was when maybe you and I were in our twenties when Fitbit came out and certainly like my zone's early days when it wasn't just the norm. It's becoming the norm as smartwatches scale across all devices, not just Apple. People are starting to expect it all to live in one place. How have you gone about integrating tech and what challenges have you found or what successes have you found with that?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:37:48):

Yeah, so I think we do a pretty good job of integrating all of the different technology pieces that we have here. Our rack app is basically a collection of the other apps that we have, whether it be Preva for our pre-core equipment or the EGM app, and then people are using Apple Health and those different things as well. I would say I think that with technology and integrating it, you still do need that certain human touch to help with some of the explanations. A lot of these wearables are tracking so many things now. I mean I can't even hardly keep up with it. I've got a Fitbit and no heart rate just tracking my steps. I forgot to charge it last night and it died on me and I had a mini panic attack because how am I going to get my 10,000 steps today?

(00:38:43):

But ultimately you can track your heart rate. It's telling you all of these different things within your workout, and I feel like the best clubs are the ones that are going to be able to help you understand, even if it's a printout. I understand not everybody has a ton of staff to answer all these member questions, but there's a lot of benefit to making sure that your members know that what they want is what's actually best for them. With a lot of the wearable devices, I mean I remember when the chest straps were the only way that you could get a semi accurate heart rate and the watches are better at that. Now you have people in here sometimes wearing more gear than professional strongman competitor and it's just telling him absolutely everything and how awesome that is.

(00:39:38):

Yeah, I think that there's still a feeling in a lot of clubs that the technology stuff is kind of scary and you're maybe worried you'll get sometimes if I'm speaking at some of these smaller clubs, let's say with maybe three or four trainers on staff, they get sometimes concerned with what if my person looks and their heart rate on their watch isn't where they think it's supposed to be during this workout and now they think, I don't know what I'm doing or something. We've given a lot of information access to everyone and they don't necessarily still always know how to interpret it. Even us as professionals can't necessarily, I mean we don't have the answers to everything. So that integrating technology within your space I think does have to come with a little bit extra of output from you to explain what may or may not be important. Easy example would be maybe a high intensity interval class. Are you doing a strength-based HIT intervention? You may have members then say Hal like Andy, you're not a good instructor because my heart rate isn't as high as when Steve teaches it. Well, I'm doing all body weight and cardio type hit. So little things like explaining that just so that members can understand why this might be important, but in this context maybe it's less important.

Andy Peat (00:40:57):

Yeah, yeah, good call and as the technology company, people say they come to me with all these designs and ideas. I want to build this for my one gym and they want to build an app or something. My advice is always do not develop, just customize and don't build an app that is you're going away from your core competency. Let providers who already do that, the fitness on demand, the e gyms, all those people in the world who have that, and the advice I give people is the integrations that are used. So pulling in steps or pulling in calories from your Apple Health, can you just do something that offers something tangible to your club? So an example I'll give is, so we do the app for Snap Fitness and if people close their apple rings and by coming to the gym every time they do one of those two things, they'll get a credit off their membership, they'll get a little, Hey, thanks for coming to the gym.

(00:41:59):

You just earned 55 cents. Your total is now $65. That's just that little tangible nice to have. Obviously we see with Myzone, it displays the heart rate and the zones, but it's the points that you earn per zone that make the heart rate meaningful really because we do live in a society where everyone's kind of what I call like an everyday athlete. To your point, normal people like they're with all the devices on, but they're everyday athletes. They get in an ice bath, they're doing things and they're taking notice of their fitness like professional athletes used to do and I think that's great, but what a facility can do is just have a real think about what of those integrations can you then put and make unique to yourself. And it might be that you were going to run a challenge based on calories burnt from multiple wearables and coming to the gym and completing a workout equals points and there's a prize or whatever. That's the type of thing. How do you make all those integrations meaningful and bearing in mind that it's still not a hundred percent of your members will have wearables as well and integrations. It is scaling, so you can't leave those people out. So I think that, I mean,

Dr. Steve Boring (00:43:15):

We're in a very gamified culture and very competitive, even if it's not so much competitive with you, and I would say most people who use a gym are at least in some small way competitive with themselves. So the more you can use your tech in a gamified way, whether it be winning a competition or every Thanksgiving, we'll do what's called a Turkey challenge and you build the biggest Turkey by the number of calories you burn. That sort of stuff is very, very, I feel attractive to members and it's easy for any club of any size to put those things out.

Andy Peat (00:43:48):

Agreed. Which is a good segue. We are doing really good segues into next slides here where you're talking personalization of your club to the wearable, personalized, accessible fitness, so hyper personalization, ai, all these buzzwords that you hear across all sectors really, but personalization is a trend that will probably tick up and up in my opinion over the years to come. How are you guys dealing with personalization and even AI if you want to go down that path, what is a member joining the rack getting that you could deem to be personalized to them In a world of Netflix, Amazon, all these content platforms that we use often, everything is personalized. What are you guys doing on that front?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:44:39):

Yeah, so we really do our best to personalize every initial experience that you have here. When a member joins the club, we use a piece called Keep me to Send some automated right off the bat, not so personalized, keep to send some automated yes, correct emails to our new members to basically say, welcome to the club. You get two complimentary personal training sessions. I'll just hyperfocus on the fitness side of this. Then what we do is myself, my personal training lead. Then we get in and we personalize that experience for them. We'll just Andy, what are you looking for? What are your health and wellness goals? Back to that wellness word I used earlier, what are your past injuries? Did you ever play sports questions like that at the rack? One of the ways that we had to keep up with this personalization is I've got a ton of trainers, I've got 44 personal trainers on staff here.

(00:45:39):

We did that purposefully because we want to make our connections and we call our training here within the club. I'm sure I didn't make it up, but I call it relationship based training. So at the end of the day, if you're coming in, I'm extremely proud of my staff. I've got a very, very well educated staff, very experienced staff. If you come in and say, my goal is that I want to lose a little bit of weight, I had rotator cuff surgery, I have a bad knee to be honest, I've got 44 trainers that can work with you. I need something more. What's that next connection so that I make sure that you are going to enjoy your two complimentary sessions, not necessarily that we're even going to sell you more training on the backend, but I need you to enjoy your first experience here so that you stay in the club.

(00:46:28):

We'll ask questions, what are some of your hobbies? Stuff like that. We're in Minnesota right now. Somebody will inevitably say ice fishing. I'm like, great. I know who I'm sending you to. So we try to personalize down to each experience to be as memorable as it can be for you. I'll also give another quick shout to that member connection specialist. That's probably one of the main positions here that I'm just thanking God for every day because I truly know that position is not something that everyone is able to have, but if you can even hybrid something out to an email where somebody can ask you a question, where is the yoga studio? I know I was shown it on tour, but I took a quick vacation after I joined the club and I can't get there. Any way that you can personalize that communication and content going out the better.

(00:47:21):

I'll give Fitness On Demand. Another little shout out that one of the concerns that sometimes people or members will have is they're like, well, if this is a video, this is going to be like a one size fits all, and I have a bad ankle that I rolled when I was 12 or this, that and the other. The thing that's really cool about your guys' library is it's massive. So there really truly is something for everyone. It's also fun and engaging. It doesn't look like it was filmed in somebody's basement using an iPhone one or something like that. So you end up with this really bright, vibrant space and you see two or three people initially in there that came in as a group and you're like, you know what? I'm going to go in and join. You've now added that social aspect and that social aspect is one of the biggest pieces of how to personalize a club experience.

(00:48:09):

I always say if I have one friend in the gym, I'm less likely to quit that gym even if I don't ever see 'em, if I know that they're there, that helps me. I've got a person there, I've got somebody in my space. So the more personalize content and stuff like that coming from your trainers, coming from your group fitness instructors, that should actually be one of the easy parts for you. It's that next level of do you have a popup on your membership screen when they sign in saying it's their birthday? Any little piece like that.

Andy Peat (00:48:44):

Yeah, good points. And yeah, people focus on the personalization of the technology front, but the personalization of the social interactions is, I would actually say not even equally, probably more important because I've seen, I myself have been a member of plenty of very average gyms that I've stuck around in just because the people there are good and it was convenient. You know what I mean? Convenience and community will always win, but from a personalization standpoint, and I'll have to do the technology thing here, and I appreciate the shout out, we are on a bit of a journey because all fitness companies now will need to be in that hyper-personalization space and the vision with the way Fitness On Demand uses its content and its programming both inside the group Fitness Studio and outside, is to ultimately using some of our partners to be able to read things like HRV and recovery and whatnot, being able to adjust people's programs and content suggestions.

(00:49:49):

For example, I woke up this morning, I use an app that gives me my recovery score based on my HRV and today it was like, whoa, pump the brakes. You're not and work does this as well. You're not feeling great. And it was true. I wasn't feeling great, so I'm glad it told me that because I didn't want to work out, even though I'll force myself to now because any workout's better than no workout, but personalization is going to be really, really important. Now, for those who don't have an army of personal trainers out there, that's where you do have to rely on your technology provider, whether it be a Keep ai, a Fitness On Demand, whether it be on the CRM communication front or the programming content front. It's a really important question to ask your technology partners, and so we're getting near to the end.

(00:50:39):

I want to leave some time for questions, so I'll just wrap up with really five key points on how digital solutions can set operators up for success and really on the Fitness On Demand front, we want to be available to you to boost your timetable to gain more leads. We know through data that if someone has a group fitness timetable that is robust and accessible to people, they're more likely to inquire. Now, when you struggle with staff, it is okay to put schedule digital content into your schedule. People will still inquire and then you can trust your scale skills from there. I talked a little bit about running digital classes and off peak hours with the active aging example there in the mid-morning, I've also seen Family Fitness being used quite well in the afternoon before that after Work Rush come in. So using family-based digital classes that we offer it Personal Fitness on demand, but really advertising the USP classes.

(00:51:40):

Steve, when he talked about strong bones, that is a unique selling point to the rack to get a community in that he might not have got without that, to be fair. And if his classes are booming and they're about to add another one over time, that will compound. He might find that he's got 150 to 200 members over a couple of years who joined because he's offering a unique class to the demographic. But of course with any sort of classes, instructors sometimes don't show up. So personally, I used to be a franchisee of Snap Fitness and I had fitness on Demands product, and it is an affordable product that I had just because I knew at least once a week a 5:00 AM cycle instructor would not show up. And whilst the digital class does not necessarily replace a human, I don't say that, but what it does do is at least allow the people who showed up to do a workout together and get their sweat on.

(00:52:38):

So really, really important as well. Take advantage of all the content, promote it particularly more on that holistic front. But we'll finish up and answer some questions with Steve. Love to know, what advice would you give the audience here, whether it be small gyms, large gyms, or anything in between? What do they need to ask themselves to go back to their facilities and say, am I fit? Am I facility fit for the future? Am I gearing myself up for the future? And it can be across anything. What are maybe three key things that they need to go and look at?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:53:13):

Yeah, I think probably one of the first things you should do is look truthfully at yourself and see what you do well. And once you know what you do well, you'll know what you're not doing well figure out what the need is and what you can do better. It's not necessarily that we don't have this at all here, so we need to add it. You might not need that. But you mentioned earlier with let's say squat racks. Obviously this right here, we're talking a lot about technology today, but lifting up those big heavy things and putting 'em down again like we've been doing for thousands of years is still, that's going to be, that's why people are at your facility, knowing what your member base is and knowing what your member base could be. You mentioned women lifting weight, the fastest growing sector. This is actually what I did my dissertation on.

(00:54:04):

The fastest growing sector of any sports in the world is women's strength sports growing at an absolutely astronomical pace. So you may say, we don't really have a lot of female lifters in my gym. You will. So to be prepared for that. So looking to see if you're fit for the future. You want to know what you do well, you want to look and see what are the trends in your area, what are your members currently looking for, and what are they going to be looking for when they either click over to the next age bracket or when their kids start coming or when that next generation of gym users starts coming. If you're an 18 or older gym right now, you should probably be looking at what are 15 and 16 year olds doing for their health and other facilities that do allow 'em to use it because they're going to be in your facility in two or three years.

(00:54:50):

And then I think just making sure, again, that, I love the term accessibility, making sure that you're accessible to everyone, the largest population group that you can get. Obviously there are some context. Again, let's say you're an 18 and older facility, you're not going to be accessible for those youngsters, but looking, your four walls are very, very important. But maybe there's an opportunity for you to do a stretch class as you'd mentioned earlier. Maybe you go to a community center, do a stretch class. There's something like that to get your name and your branding out to build interest for your facility and to show people that you are not just maybe what you've been stereotyped as. I think embracing, and this is a fourth, sorry, I like to ramble. Embracing the fact that all of this stuff is going to change and stay the same at the same time.

(00:55:44):

You're going to need racks, you're going to need dumbbells, you're going to need barbells. You're now going to have to have some digital way to show members that they have gained muscle mass or lost weight or what their heart rate currently is, or why this class is maybe a better choice for them than that other class. And they're going to need to see that stuff. And a lot of times they're looking for a screen to see it on, not just a print out of paper anymore. So really making sure that you're kind of up to date on that sort of technology while still allowing us cavemen to come in and deadlift with steel plates or whatever the case may be.

Andy Peat (00:56:19):

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And nothing to add there. And we will wrap up with some q and a. There's a couple of questions there. So the first one, what role do you see AI playing in the fitness industry over the next one, five and 10 years? And this is all right with you, Steve. I'll take this one and then we'll finish off with your thoughts there. I talk quite openly about my thoughts on AI around, there's two aspects to it. For me, there is the member front and the programming and being offering content that hyper-personalization, like I mentioned before, if I need to recover the workout it prescribes for that day is different to what it is if I don't need to recover. And then there's the utility business side where AI is going to help your members a lot better in terms of reading the data.

(00:57:18):

Who are they, what do they potentially want? And then also who is more likely to cancel? We've seen CRMs like Keep me AI, do high risk member cancellation predictions and then deployments. But ultimately the number one thing I say about AI is it doesn't matter if someone gets the world's greatest personalization and programming and data, they still have to walk through the door or they still have to put on some sneakers and do a workout. They still have to do it. Versus a call center where AI could replace all people there in a job. It's not like that in the fitness industry. You're always going to need that human touch. A live instructor is always going to be the best outcome for a great experience, and AI is just going to help personalize and there will be some motivation behind it. But the beauty of our industry is people still need to get in and do the work to ultimately get the feeling that they're seeking. Would you agree with that, Steve?

Dr. Steve Boring (00:58:18):

Absolutely, absolutely. I think as long as you're not looking at it because AI is a tool, right? And a tool can be what the user makes it. So I think sometimes you'll hear people are really concerned with AI spitting out programs and coming from a point of laziness, but I think that's a negative way to look at it. I think that it is a tool that can help expand and solidify what you already do well and knowing that at the end of the day this may bring you people that it wouldn't have before. I think it's a building tool that you then now can have a face-to-face with someone that you wouldn't have five years ago.

Andy Peat (00:58:55):

For sure. And lastly, really great question here that we'll do because it's a great one. What would you say to someone that is hesitant to implement digital solutions due to cost and complexity concerns? What would you say to someone on, yeah,

Dr. Steve Boring (00:59:10):

I'll hop in on that one. So I think that you sit and you do your initial SWOT analysis 99 times out of a hundred, you are going to find that the strengths of adding this are going to outweigh what the potential threats are. Any form of digital technology just opens doors more to things that you may not be able to handle on a one-to-one basis, unless you just have a mountain of staff. I'll use us again as an example. We're getting pretty close to 500 staff, but we have 15,000 members. So even there, we just cannot handle everything alone. So when you are looking at what the cost may be, you're going to have to assume that you will improve your member attention based on getting good products in because none of you're going to go out and buy the first thing that you see without doing your research on it.

(01:00:11):

You're going to find that it's going to, in a lot of cases, it's going to strengthen your offerings and hopefully bring your team together. Now, I've talked a lot about the benefits that we've had with Fitness On Demand here. Let's look at something like E Im, a lot of clubs are having trainers within clubs are having pause like this is putting them through a workout For anyone not familiar with e gm, it's basically select eyes, but digitized equipment that you go through and it pumps out a workout for you and takes you from start to finish. So now I'm a trainer and I'm like, Ooh, that's doing my job for me jokingly, if that one piece of equipment with that technology can replace you, you need it to up your game a little bit. What we have seen happen, and what I believe clubs will see when they add this stuff in is that my trainers are busier now than they were before because onboarding members to this equipment, the members have already told you, I would like some assistance in this case, this assistance is complimentary because now they can come in and do this workout.

(01:01:14):

We get asked 100% of the time, how many days a week should I do this? There's your hook right there. Awesome. You should do this two or three times a week. What are you going to do on the other days? I have no idea. Great, let's get together and we'll talk about that some more. So when you look at the costs included with this, whether it be a subscription fee, an initial purchase, anything like that, meet with the rock stars on your team and say, how do these costs become either profit centers for us or how does it improve our retention rate of members? Because at the end of the day, if you're retaining a higher number of members, that was worth doing whatever that may be.

Andy Peat (01:01:55):

Yeah, good call. And I'll just add to that by saying SWOT analysis. And the thing with digital solutions is you don't need to go out and get them all and you don't need to spend thousands of dollars a month. And I'll finish off with the Fitness On Demand plug here that for a couple of hundred bucks a month, we can ultimately control your group fitness digital studio, we can your cable tv, we can do your digital signage, we can do your member app and your personal training software. Hopefully those five things separated are probably 1500 bucks a month in Consolidated with us is going to save you money. So it's just about talking to the technology companies that you're looking at that you're interested in knowing what does my members want and just getting a feel for it. Trying the product yourself, you don't have to rush into decisions, but ultimately you don't have to spend a huge amount of money. And I'll finish by saying, if nothing changes then nothing changes. So if you've got a gym that's sat there for 10 years and nothing has changed, then you can't expect one day to get an extra a hundred members. You have to take the risk somewhere. And the risk might be buying a new squat rack. It might be putting in Fitness On Demand, and the answer is, is probably both of those things are the right reason or might be bringing an eem or something like that.

(01:03:22):

Myself, I love talking to operators, so if you have any questions in terms of advice around what technologies you, you'll get no hard sell from me. Find me on LinkedIn. Steve, I'm sure you would love to hear from people as well. Can people find you on LinkedIn?

Dr. Steve Boring (01:03:38):

I'm a little behind on LinkedIn. Find me on the racks website, www.rackn.com. RA cmn.com. In fact, I'll throw it in the chat real quick and do feel free to, you can send me questions or email or anything like that. I'll just actually throw my email address in there.

Andy Peat (01:03:56):

Brilliant. Well we'll wrap up there. Appreciate your time my friend. I know we're just down the road from each other, so we need to get together in person. I know we're going to do a few more of these things later on in a few months, but I appreciate everyone's time and yeah, this was a lot of fun to host and I wish everyone a safe and happy weekend coming up as well.

Dr. Steve Boring (01:04:16):

Thanks for having me on. Everybody. Have a great rest of your week and I hope you had a good time.

Andy Peat (01:04:23):

Thanks guys. Cheers. Bye.