Lighten Up Mr Grumpy! Life's More Fun When You Move Around

What is the core function of the gym ?

From the customer’s perspective, no doubt, to be and to feel healthier. From the gym’s perspective, alongside noble causes such as the provision of the best service in town, and so on, there has to exist, as a pre-condition, the stipulation that money must be made . At least enough money to allow the business to exist and to continue. Make sense ?

Like any retail business, making money is synonymous with customer footfall, or in more common parlance, getting as many members as possible and keeping them as members for as long as possible. (This target may contain demographic parameters to ensure the right “type” of customer). Besides getting and keeping members, gyms want to sell this same group as many additional items as possible - from sugary drinks and sunbed minutes to massage therapy sessions and the dedicated hours of a personal trainer.

These three goals are known as customer acquisition, customer retention and up-selling.

So what ?

Well, the disparity of function as laid out above gives rise to a problem. But let’s look at this from a different angle in order that I might illustrate:

What is the unstated consensus assumption behind every piece of marketing any gym ever does ?

The assumption is that the gym, per se, is good for you. And by good for you, from the depths of twenty ten and the biggest obesity epidemic known to man, many people will take that to mean that the gym will help them lose weight.

Agree ?

Well, that’s just it. Because no I don’t.

I joined the gym in March 2002, weighing in at thirteen stone at a height of just five foot eight. A penchant for playing regular team football at that time, and with a healthy dose of Viking genes, I was in shape at that weight, if a little un-toned. Peculiarly large thigh muscles and a hefty upper body bone structure saved the day for me. But I was close to being overweight if I didn’t watch out. I have used gyms continuously ever since, wherever I’ve been living and working.

This included local chains, such as The Arches in Greenwich, South London, and Beckenham Spa. It also included national chains such as The Fitness Exchange in Beckenham, Kent, LA Fitness and later Esporta in Brighton, Sussex, Cannons in Covent Garden, London, JJB Health Clubs in Leeds, West Yorkshire and in the last couple of years LA Fitness in Manchester and Esporta in Salford Quays.

I would average three days per week in early years, moving up to five days per week by 2007 and nigh on daily for the past twelve months. But across 2008 and 2009 my average weekly attendance was between 6 and 6.5 days. Which is some going.

Yet my weight crept slowly upwards, off my personal radar, as is the way with any momentum of increment, such that come Hallowe’en 2009 I was weighing in at 228 pounds or a smidgen over sixteen stone.

I was working hard at the gym. I wasn’t sat around socialising. My programmes featured a mix of cardio and resistance work, usually rounded off with a swim and sauna.

So what was going on ? How could I gain weight if I was doing this ? After all, the gym is good for you, yes ?

That’s just my point. No. In it’s own right, the gym isn’t good for you in that sense.

I’m not saying it’s bad for you - and it certainly boosted my upper body muscle mass, sense of achievement and my feel good factor. But I am saying that the way gyms market themselves is misleading and unhelpful and ultimately quite dangerous. And I am saying that they do this because, as I mentioned at the top of this blog, they have money to make. And in fulfilling such an obligation the gyms allow the myths and cons to creep in.

They don’t tell outright lies. Rather, they build marketing campaigns, slogans and fact sheets to entice new customers based on an assumption which, by remaining unstated, cannot be challenged. Now that’s clever.

In the last twelve months I have lost 61 pounds or 24 kilos. Or roughly a third of my own body weight. Now I am 11 st 10lbs and this gives me a Body Mass Index of 24.9 - in other words, a safe and healthy body mass.

The gym helped me with precisely none of this. It makes perfect sense if you consider it. The gym wasn’t responsible for me putting the weight on - so how can it be responsible for losing me the same ? I conquered the kitchen. Excess food grew me big. Lack of excess food grew me small again. The gym is a mere bonus activity to help me get definition and ideal muscle toning - you might say it’s a vanity-driven after thought in the scheme of the weight loss question. Nothing more.

So why do gyms display signs and billboards with perfectly formed beach bums accompanied by slogans along the lines of “You could be wearing this bikini instead of admiring it on someone else” and “escape the beer belly” and so on. Indeed, the heading of this blog is advertising copy from a Virgin Health clubs campaign in 2009.

I strike up conversations daily with countless confounded souls. Steam rooms and saunas are great debating chambers, I’ll have you know. And it’s always the same. Some bloke, mid thirties up to mid fifties, with built up pecs, lats and biceps and a swell mid riff tyre of fat, expresses his dismay to me.

“How can this be” he’ll typically exclaim. “I run for half an hour each visit. The machine even tells me I’ve burnt off hundreds of calories. So how come the fat is still here?”

I have to explain, vindicated with the authority of recent success, the way things really are. Kitchen for basics. Gym for the fancy bonus stuff. Yet the more I spread the word, the more I wonder why the gym itself isn’t teaching it’s paid up members the very basic essence of the gym function. Why am I doing what they should be ?

Are you seeing where this keeps coming back to?

Because if the gym told every keen newbie to save their fifty three quid a month as it won’t make a blind bit of difference to their general health until they cut out the curries, bread, pasta, lager, cake, biscuits and mid night snacks, well....your average guy with half a brain would run for the hills and probably decide to cut his (or her) losses, concluding that it ain’t worth the effort - and if it is worth the effort - the gym ain't where it’s at.

The trouble is that we only tend to voluntarily pay people we like. And if the gym tells me the truth I won’t like them any more.

Health clubs worked out a long time ago that even better than making people fitter is to leave people with the perception that they are fitter. Rather than give them health, give them what they want.

Remember, business goals include customer acquisition, retention and the up-sell. Actual improvements to health don't get a look in.

When you're flagging with eats fatigue come January, guilt-addled by the other half and waltzing through resolution Utopia with half an eye on the doormat flier from GymBox et al, don’t say I didn’t warn you!