A driving bass rhythm, "and right, and left, and ohhhhhhh!" If you aren't quite sure where you're going (not unlikely, since it's tucked away down a long alleyway off the main thoroughfare) these disconcerting sound effects will guide you into Fitness First, Tottenham Court Road, London.
Fitness First, the largest privately owned health club chain in the world, has 172 clubs in Britain. This one is a "black label" club - meaning it has complimentary towels, a pool (tiny, claustrophobic, subterranean, but still a pool), and allows access to Fitness Firsts around the globe. In addition, it has all the things we now expect of a gym - mirror-walled workout rooms, ranks of treadmills, weights free and cantilevered - and a couple of things we maybe don't: a personal trainer who used to be Mr Austria, for instance, whose business card shows him in muscle-popping, arms-akimbo pose, and informs would-be clients that he has danced with Madonna. On the opposite wall from Mr Austria's office are posters and leaflets advertising energy drinks and protein shakes. "The perfect training recipe for muscle shaping and building" turns out to be a recommendation that taking "a Multipower protein pack beforehand + a Multipower Red Kick during + 50g of Multipower muscle volume = STRENGTH". And healthy profits, presumably, for Multipower.
Since, according to the Fitness Industry Association, more than 90% of us are no more than 20 minutes from the nearest gym, it will probably not have escaped your notice that gyms are big business. There are more than 5,700 public and private ones in the UK, and according to the most recent figures from Mintel, the market research company, their market value is £2.3bn a year.
In many ways this wholesale infection of the landscape is a recent phenomenon. Yes, the Greeks flocked to open-air palaestras (to watch naked young men go through their paces), the Romans watched gladiators and the Victorians were keen on boxing gyms for underprivileged boys, but gyms as we know them find their precursors in American YMCAs, established for "the improvement of the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men".
By the 1980s, the latter preoccupation was in the ascendant, as was the original hulk, Arnold Schwarzenegger. People who wanted to emulate him flocked to gyms - which by today's standards were both basic and, being full of big men and free weights, intimidating. Then Jane Fonda arrived with her wildly successful aerobics videos - and gyms began to realise that combining the two fads would double their popularity. They added aerobics, Aquafit and step classes, made the environment more appealing to women, and in the 90s gyms took off. "Every time we opened a club it was full six months later," says Fred Turok, chief executive of LA Fitness and chairman of the FIA.
That demand continued through to about 2005, when "the marketplace started to mature, and the rollout of new clubs started to slow down". By early 2006, according to Mintel, things were getting difficult. Clubs and chains were suddenly in fierce competition with each other, slashing prices, waiving joining fees, wooing wised-up customers any way they knew how - and focusing, in many cases for the first time, on how to keep them once they had got them. Attrition - or "churn", as Turok calls it, or lack of willpower, as the rest of us might have it - is a central challenge of the business. Across the industry, between 50% and 60% of gym-goers leave per year. At Tottenham Court Road, they expect to lose 4.5% of their customers a month - which means, says Brett Kinninmont, the general manager, that they have to aim to replace that number every month, particularly in January, the month of well-intentioned new beginnings, which is "huge".
Yet, as anyone who has wandered into a gym on January 2, fallen for a hard sell, paid up for a year and promptly been ignored by the staff and frustrated for the next 12 months will suspect, attrition is built into the system, too. At Tottenham Court Road, as with any gym in a primarily working, rather than residential, area, there are marked daily peaks and troughs. Of their 3,000 members, about 150 will arrive between 6.45am and 8am, 200 to 300 at lunchtime, and perhaps another 200 to 300 between 5.45pm and 8pm - about 600 people in total each day. And these are more or less the numbers they want - a full club, but no queues for the machines or shortages of towels. What if all 3,000 members exercised the recommended three times a week? The club couldn't cope, could it? "Not if everyone comes three times a week," says Kinninmont. "No."
The temptation, then, must be to sign up as many people as possible, then gamble on them not turning up - a kind of fitness pyramid scheme. "That's absolutely true of some gyms," says Leicester University's Dr Jennifer Smith Maguire, author of Fit for Consumption: Sociology and the Business of Fitness. "You can't say that it's true of all gyms. A business model that's almost entirely reliant on revenue from membership dues means that it's in their interest to sign up a lot of people. But if everyone who was a member turned up, then they'd be overcrowded and the facilities themselves wouldn't hold up. There's a calculated risk obviously. Good clubs will take that into account in terms of how many memberships they sell. They know that people will go at different times of day, in terms of their occupations and their personal lives etc." And the new aim of the game is to hang on to them.
So in the past three to five years, gyms have evolved again. It is no longer enough to offer some machines and a couple of rooms to prance ill-coordinatedly around in. You have to provide as many classes as possible - at Tottenham Court Road, there are 70 a week. You have to give people concrete aims (at Fitness Firsts across the land, joining comes with a Bupa health check that tells you exactly where you're at and where you should aspire to be) and reward them for sticking it out. LA Fitness's new KickStart programme provides a health check and a free month's membership if you go to the gym twice a week for eight weeks. Turok claims a "30% increase in what we call 'good behaviour' - a minimum of two visits a week".
You also have to provide extra services - even local authority leisure centres, these days, are tacking on saunas, Jacuzzis, steam rooms, beauty therapists, physiotherapists, massage therapists and sunbeds. Even this branch of Fitness First - "We're more of a fitness club. We don't go for luxury," says Kinninmont - has what looks like a beauty room and a sunbed. At the really high end of the market, at gyms such as the Third Space in Soho or KX in Chelsea, you might get a GP, a next-day laundry service and shoe-shining.
'The operators who have longevity will be the ones that make the experience of going into the gym as attractive as it is when you join," says Peter Brennan, managing director of Virgin Active, which took over the Holmes Place chain at the beginning of last year. "It's not rocket science, but a lot of people joining is only the first step. It's getting them in and exceeding their expectations every time they come in that's important."
"Exercise has changed to more being 'a part of my life'," adds Brennan. "It's about wellness, about feeling good spiritually as well as physically, as well as mentally. The same amount of people join a gym for relaxation and to release stress as they do to tone up, lose weight. So in marketing a club, if your message isn't one that gives this whole picture of mind, body and spirit, you're appealing to just a small percentage of people who are looking for a very intensive workout, losing weight and increasing muscle strength. Which is why this whole growth of mind/body and yoga, and Pilates and Power Plate, has been so important to this industry, because it's pulling in groups of people who probably would never have joined a gym if you didn't offer it."
Increasingly, gyms are also trying to persuade families, for example, that one of the things they should do at the weekend is go to the gym together. Child membership of gyms has risen by 40% in the past three years. Virgin Active gyms provide not just one pool, but two - one for children. Capitalising on fears that children aren't getting enough exercise, on rising fears about letting children play outside at all, many Virgin Active gyms provide children's spinning-style sessions, a martial arts aerobic workout and sports drill training; the really young can skip, play hopscotch and tag.
"People are working longer hours and they're more stressed," says Brennan, "and they're looking for one place where they can go in, exercise and relax in, say, a Hydra-Spa or a pool. They're also looking for an area to look after their day-spa and beauty type of treatments, and they're looking for a place for their kids to get fit." The industry term for that is "the third space", and part of the gamble is that when wallets get tight we will be unwilling to give up this me-time, though no one really knows if the strategy will work.
"I think anybody who said they didn't worry about an economic slowdown has their head in the sand," says Turok. "The fact is that any commercial industry will suffer if there is a slowdown in consumer spending. There will be vagaries between operators, but what has happened at LA Fitness is that people are using exercise not as a luxury purchase but as part of a lifestyle purchase. If you commit to your health and well-being and take a holistic approach, you will continue to eat wholesome bread and not drop down to buying a 27p, no-goodness white sliced loaf. You will still buy the better quality, unless you really are hard up. We need to make sure exercise forms a core part of people's lifestyles, as opposed to being seen as a quick fix - I can jump into the gym 10 minutes before I go on holiday and I'll look good in my bikini. This isn't about body beautiful; it's about body healthy."
It's a seductive argument, but many are realising that the industry is going to have to change again. Despite the billions of pounds spent, only 9.4% of the adult population pays to go to a private gym; add in public leisure centres, and it's still only 12%. Commercial gyms are desperate to get their hands on as many of the remaining 88% as possible, and it is in the government's hand-wringing about rising levels of obesity (50% of us, apparently, by 2050) that they see their main chance.
Turok recently made a speech to an FIA summit audience that included the public health minister and minister for work and pensions. He listed the numbers - the 6,000-odd facilities, the 40,000 trained fitness professionals, the 200,000 employees - and then his main grievance. "We have the time, the expertise, the capability and the burning desire to be part of the public health solution, yet we are kept at arm's length . . . We could be working more closely with you in your war on obesity, asthma, diabetes, coronary heart disease, cancer, mental health [sic] and almost 20 other lifestyle diseases." He went on to suggest, in effect, a public-private partnership for fitness.
There are, on the face of it, attractive aspects to the proposal. The obesity epidemic is, if we are to believe the figures, a fiscal and social emergency. As Turok and others like him argue, the government has so far concentrated largely on the eating aspect of prevention - school dinners, junk food ads, food labelling - and exercise must be made part of the solution. But there are other significant issues.
"The kind of collective problems we face with obesity and inactivity require hugely complex solutions," says Leicester University's Maguire. "And that means involving a whole host of stakeholders and bodies, so it's not that the fitness industry can't play a part. But I have some serious reservations about the government getting into bed with the leisure industry, which is going to serve those people who are already least likely to be inactive and obese. I don't mean to victimise those who aren't health club members, but the bottom line is that you are looking at a majority of the adult population that's inactive. And to say that they [gyms and health clubs] are able to address population-level health issues is to re-entrench the class divide in terms of who is healthy and who has access to health opportunities. I have no problem with them delivering their health and fitness and leisure products - I'm a consumer of them - but they're ill-equipped to tackle those problems."
I mention that for all the upbeat marketing, there's something depressing about the gym industry expanding to accommodate 12-year-olds, and younger. "It's depressing on a number of levels," says Maguire, "and one of them is the way in which the market steps in where the state fails. It just reinforces that we fail our children on a daily basis in terms of physical education. And the parents who are most able, economically and culturally, to respond, respond through the market, not through the education system, not through the state. And so you see, again, there is this re-entrenchment of a class divide."
Even for those who can afford to go to gyms regularly, the whole enterprise is riven with contradictions. Personal trainers may make you more motivated and fit, but they can't make you too motivated or too fit or you'd stop needing them. It isn't in a gym's interest to encourage you to build exercise into your daily life, because that would cut into gym hours. It is true that they are often the only option in cities, if there are few parks, no bike lanes, bad weather, but it is also true that gyms have a vested interest in keeping you indoors.
"Gyms can be the site of healthy activity, there's no question," says Maguire. They provide, especially the good ones, expertise, motivation, role models. All of that can be tremendously beneficial. But if that's the only time there's physical activity in your daily life, chances are that it's the first thing that goes when life gets busy, the first thing that gets cut when your disposable income gets crunched, the first thing that goes when you've got something more fun to do. It's the classic example of someone who takes an elevator up to a club and can't be bothered to climb the stairs. Stairs are cheaper, but they don't come with all the bells and whistles. I understand as much as anybody the appeal of the bells and whistles, but it's an awfully expensive way to not necessarily get healthy".
