The Luxury Gyms Selling a Longer Life
Death will come for everyone eventually. But if you asked a set of luxury gyms, they’d tell you they can help delay the inevitable — for the right price.
Over the past year, fitness spaces like Continuum Club, Life Time, and Equinox have launched longevity-focused programmes that use biometric data to create personalised routines to improve fitness, sleep, nutrition, and mental clarity. Implicit in this vision is that the gym becomes a place not just for improving your physical health, but your entire life. As such, many high-end facilities feature communal lounges for socialising, co-working spaces, and even childcare services, creating an all-in-one environment designed to optimise every facet of a member’s day.
The idea, says Continuum Club’s CRO and vice president Tom Wingert, is to create “a white glove experience where we know exactly what you need and we take care of it for you — you just need to show up and do the things we say.”
In practice, that involves undertaking an intensive, three-week-long course of biometric data collection that includes in-house blood tests, bone density scans, sleep analysis, functional movement screens and more. The findings are then fed into Continuum’s proprietary AI system which creates a specific regime for each member. This all costs an eye-watering $10,000 per month, but that has not kept people away — Continuum already had a 700-plus waiting list before it even opened its doors in May.
These initiatives are a byproduct of the focus on longevity that has overtaken the wellness industry in the past few years. The 2010s saw the wellness industry boom as practices and products once seen as indulgences — massages, expensive skincare, specialised diets and the like — more and more were viewed as necessities. The longevity movement of the 2020s is the offspring of this phenomenon, but it takes a distinctly different approach, viewing the body as a machine to be “hacked” and “optimised” for maximum efficiency. If Gwyneth Paltrow was the leading figure of the last wellness wave, this new movement finds its most prominent icons in Silicon Valley tech billionaires like Bryan Johnson and medical influencers like Andrew Huberman, who promote using “science-backed” research and technological interventions to improve your life.
These new luxury gyms are a byproduct of this longevity philosophy. They eschew an intuitive approach to self-care for a data-driven analysis of concrete, biometric information. They even use tech-influenced language to describe human bodies as machines that can be reprogrammed to function efficiently. For instance, at Continuum Club members regularly visit the “lab” for testing; its personal trainers are “human-performance specialists.”
While it remains to be seen if these spaces will become as prevalent as the detox diets of the 2010s, the culture’s increasing fascination with extending lifespan will likely continue to reshape the fitness and wellness industries — these gyms are just a preview of what is to come.
More Than a Gym
At the heart of these experiences is personalisation. Upon arrival to Continuum’s Manhattan space, members are greeted by a concierge team who direct them through their specific tasks for the day, whether that be a session in a hyperbaric chamber, a personalised IV-drip or a session with a personal trainer who follows a programme dictated by that member’s data.
The key to the club’s success, according to CEO Jeff Halevy, is that it “helps members become the ideal version of themselves” without “rigid exercise or dietary regimens, which may provide some results for a certain period, but then just have crazy attrition. This is a true lifestyle experience, not just in terms of what we provide, but how we integrate with someone’s life.”
Life Time Fitness, which has 1.2 million members and 200 locations across the US, launched its longevity clinic, Miora, at its flagship Minnesota location in December 2023, with plans to expand to the rest of its major markets currently underway. Members who sign up for the programme undergo a blood test that informs a personalised regime of hormone, peptide and IV therapies; exercise and nutrition programmes; and beauty treatments. According to Life Time’s Vice President of Corporate Communications, Natalie Bushaw, the programme was created in response to the longevity trend that the company noticed emerged after Covid-19.
“We saw that there were a set of people whose focus was performance, anti-ageing (or better ageing) and longevity and they want more info on how their body is performing from the inside,” said Bushaw. “Miora came into play because we could see where things were headed and dove in, and our first pilot has been a smashing success.”
Meanwhile, in May, Equinox launched its EQX Optimize programme, which costs members $40,000 a year for access to Equinox gym facilities, blood tests from Function Health (a startup co-founded by Dr Mark Hyman), an Oura ring, and one-on-one coaching with a personal trainer, sleep coach, and nutritionist, along with monthly massage appointments.
Longevity is just one aspect of these gyms’ selling propositions. Continuum calls itself a “social members club” — every member undergoes an interview to be accepted.
According to Wingert, acceptance is predicated on their ability to increase “representation across industries, age ranges, lived experiences and demographics” because “we don’t want this to be another spot where just the finance bros get to be a part of it.”
Members are encouraged to socialise (or network) at the juice and snack bar and in the common room which hosts workshops on topics like terrarium-making to breathwork. Quiet work can also be done in soundproof breakout rooms.
