Your Fitness App Thinks You’re Doing Great

I have trained nearly every day of my adult life. Tracked macros before tracking macros had an app. Watched what I ate when the people around me were eating whatever they wanted and calling it living. My wife and I do yoga together every day. I train weights on top of that; not as a lifestyle brand, not for the Instagram grid, but because we decided a long time ago that the body you have at sixty is built in your thirties and forties whether you’re paying attention or not. I have run marathons, obstacle races, and one ultramarathon; events that don’t forgive months of comfortable inactivity dressed up as a fitness journey. You either did the work or the course tells you immediately and without diplomacy.

And yet the once-a-month gym goer always has the most to say. They talk periodization. They have opinions on recovery protocols, sleep optimization, and the relative merits of cold plunge versus sauna. They have the vocabulary of someone who trains seriously and the consistency of someone who doesn’t. The industry built that person deliberately; gave them the language, the gear, the identity, and just enough infrastructure to sustain the performance indefinitely without ever demanding the actual output.

Now they are arriving in their forties and fifties with a personal trainer, a Whoop band, and the urgent energy of someone who just received a bad blood panel. They are not late converts. They are late customers; and the industry has been waiting for them with open arms, dim lighting, and a $30 Pilates class.

The global fitness industry crossed 125 billion dollars in gym and health club revenue in 2025, according to industry research aggregators tracking the sector. That figure should come with an asterisk the size of a barbell plate; because two out of every three gym memberships, globally, go completely unused (IHRSA, 2024). Americans alone waste an estimated 1.3 billion dollars annually on memberships they never use. Canadians pay between 60 and 80 dollars a month while membership prices rose 15.9% between 2021 and 2024 (Statistics Canada, Consumer Price Index, 2024). Ireland, with nearly 60% of its adult population carrying excess weight (HSE, 2024), has gym penetration under 11% of the population.

This is not a fitness industry. It is a guilt-management industry with excellent branding; and it has never been more precisely engineered for the generation that spent thirty years avoiding the problem and is now paying a premium to feel like they are solving it.

The Business Model Requires Your Absence

Planet Fitness operates between 6,000 and 10,000 members per location. Its facilities hold perhaps 300 people comfortably at one time. The arithmetic only works if most members never appear; and most don’t. Internal membership utilization data consistently places consistent attendance at between 20 and 25% of the total member base. The lunk alarm; the siren that sounds when someone drops weights or grunts; is not a quirky cultural detail. It is brand architecture. Serious lifters create friction, occupy equipment, and make aspirational casual members feel inadequate. Remove them and the space becomes what it functionally is; a brightly lit room where the equipment exists primarily to justify the monthly charge.

The industry understood something before most consumers did: the product is not the workout. The product is the identity. Pay 10 dollars a month and you are, technically, a gym member. The psychological permission that purchases; to eat, drink, and live without guilt because you belong to a gym; is worth considerably more than 10 dollars. The business depends entirely on the gap between who you believe you are and what you actually do. Globally, 50% of new gym members cancel within six months (IHRSA). The revolving door is not a retention failure. It is a revenue feature. The guilt of non-attendance keeps the card on file. The occasional visit reinforces the identity. Results never quite materialize; but neither does the cancellation.

Canada’s Spa-Gyms: Where Wellness Goes to Look Expensive

The feel-good gym did not invent this. It inherited it; and then Canadian operators refined it into something altogether more sophisticated. Walk into an Altea Active or a MOVATI Athletic and you are not walking into a gym in any meaningful functional sense. You are walking into a hospitality experience that happens to have barbells in one of the rooms.

MOVATI markets itself explicitly around resort-style fitness; pools, saunas, steam rooms, eucalyptus-infused towel service, and group fitness studios where the lighting appears to have been more carefully considered than the programming. Altea goes further; spa treatments, cafe service, aesthetically curated change rooms, and a membership price point calibrated to signal arrival somewhere significant. Both are beautiful facilities. Both are demonstrably popular. Neither appears primarily designed around producing measurable physiological outcomes in its members; and the marketing copy, read carefully, does not claim otherwise.

This is the Canadian iteration of a global structural pivot. Pilates now anchors 43% of boutique fitness studios worldwide (Wellness Creative Co., 2025). Yoga, barre, and indoor cycling follow. High-intensity training accounts for 18%. The fastest-growing, highest-margin segment of the fitness economy is built around formats that produce limited mechanical load; slow, deliberate, aesthetically pleasing movement delivered in an environment engineered to feel transformative whether or not transformation is occurring.

Nothing wrong with pilates. My wife and I do yoga every morning and I understand precisely what it delivers and what it doesn’t. The problem is not the modality; it is the marketing. When a resort-style membership is sold as body transformation to someone carrying metabolic dysfunction or cardiovascular risk, it is not a fitness product. It is an expensive spa with a more credible cover story. When Equinox begins offering sleep coaching, mindfulness programs, and automated massage beds alongside the squat racks, it has already answered the question of what it actually is. The gym is becoming the spa. The spa is becoming the gym. The consumer is paying premium prices for both while receiving the clinical benefit of neither.

Canada Is Paying Twice

Canada’s fitness and recreational sports centres generated 5.8 billion dollars in operating revenue in 2024, a 14.9% year-over-year increase (Statistics Canada, December 2025). Ontario alone accounts for approximately 2.4 billion dollars of that figure across 4,195 registered gym businesses (IBISWorld Canada, 2026). Those are the receipts from an industry selling wellness to roughly 15.5% of the adult population (Fitness Avenue, 2026); a penetration rate declining under financial pressure even as membership prices climb.

Meanwhile, physical inactivity costs Canada 3.9 billion dollars annually in direct healthcare expenses and lost productivity (Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute / Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, 2023). Obesity costs the healthcare system an incremental 5.9 billion dollars annually, with workplace productivity losses reaching an estimated 21.7 billion dollars (Obesity Canada, 2025). The country is simultaneously funding a 5.8 billion dollar industry that serves a shrinking minority; and absorbing approximately 27 billion dollars in annual consequences for the 85% that industry never reaches.

That is not a market failure. That is a policy failure dressed in athleisure.

The fastest-growing segment of Canadian fitness is not the gym floor. It is the app. Canada’s fitness app market reached 635 million dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach 2.46 billion dollars by 2033, growing at an 18.1% compound annual growth rate (Fitness Avenue, 2025). Forty percent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 use a fitness tracking app daily (Canada Fitness Industry Report, 2026). A generation that quantifies everything and moves less than any cohort before it has found the ultimate feel-good product; progress measured without progress achieved. Close your rings. Log your sleep. Watch your resting heart rate trend slightly downward. The data feels like accountability. It is not.

The Logical Endpoint

For Ireland, the domestic picture deserves a direct look; and it is not a comfortable one.

Ireland sits at under 18% gym penetration; among the lowest market penetration rates in Western Europe. Sweden registers 21.6%. The Netherlands 17.1% (European Health and Fitness Market Report, 2022). Ireland built a fitness sector that is 80% privately owned, dominated by independent operators and budget chains like FLYEfit and Ben Dunne Gyms offering no-contract access at between 25 and 29 euros a month (Fora, 2019); and then watched nearly 60% of its adults accumulate overweight or obesity regardless (HSE Research, 2024).

Physical inactivity costs Ireland approximately 1.5 billion euros annually (WHO Ireland Country Physical Activity Factsheet, 2024). The WHO declared obesity an epidemic on the island following COVID-19. The Irish Health Survey 2024, published by the Central Statistics Office, confirmed that 63% of men and 50% of women reported overweight or obese weight measurements; figures statistically unchanged from 2022 despite every wellness trend that moved through Dublin in the intervening years. The OECD Health at a Glance 2025 report placed Ireland’s self-reported obesity prevalence at 21%, above the OECD average of 19%.

The boutique sector’s response to all of this has been to open more pilates studios, install cold plunge pools in Ranelagh, and charge 30 euros a class to the same narrow converted demographic that was already exercising. The 82% without a gym membership remains where it was. The industry is not designed to reach them. It is designed to extract maximum revenue from the minority who have already decided to appear; and to ensure that minority feels, at all times, that they are participating in something aspirational rather than something clinical.

Ireland’s technology sector understands product-market fit. Apply that framework to the Irish fitness industry and the conclusion is uncomfortable: the product fits a market that does not need it, while systematically failing the market that does.

The Psychology They Are Monetizing

None of this is accidental. The perceived effort from 45 minutes on a stationary bike in a dark room with a curated soundtrack is neurologically real. Dopamine fires. Endorphins release. You leave sweating and satisfied. The problem is that perceived effort and actual physiological stimulus are different variables entirely. Building muscle requires increasing resistance applied consistently over time. Building cardiovascular capacity requires sustained effort above a meaningful threshold. Neither reliably occurs in most of these sessions; and the industry understands this, because if meaningful change occurred at scale, members would eventually plateau, get bored, and stop needing the gym the way they currently need it.

The feel-good gym’s retention model is structurally opposed to a good coach’s model. A good coach produces results; results produce confidence; confidence eventually produces independence. The gym needs you aspirational, dependent, and never quite there. Close enough to feel movement. Far enough to keep renewing. The eucalyptus towel at MOVATI and the infrared sauna at Altea are not amenities added to a fitness product. They are the product; and the weights room is the amenity that makes the membership feel legitimate.

Conclusion

The fitness industry is not broken. It is working exactly as designed; and that is the problem. It identified that most people want to feel healthy more than they want to be healthy; and it built a $257 billion global infrastructure to serve that preference at scale. The spa-gym convergence; cryotherapy suites, red light therapy lounges, resort pools, guided breathwork, automated recovery beds; is not an evolution of the fitness product. It is the honest arrival at what the product always was.

Clavicular is where this logic terminates. A 20-year-old American who began injecting testosterone at 14, used crystal meth as an appetite suppressant, advocated hitting facial bones with a hammer to reshape them, and sold a $50-a-month optimization course to young men who confused his body with evidence of a system that works; he is not an aberration. He is the performance training archetype stripped of its eucalyptus towel and its resort lighting. The fitness industry sells the identity without demanding the work. Clavicular sold the fantasy of output while becoming its warning label; reportedly hospitalized after a suspected overdose and visibly damaged by the same optimization culture his audience called looksmaxxing. The distance between a Spa/Gym membership and a bonesmashing tutorial is shorter than the industry would like you to believe. Both are selling appearance over physiology. Both depend on the customer never standing in front of an honest result.

I have been in this game long enough to know the difference between someone who trains and someone who performs training. The marathons clarified that. The ultramarathon confirmed it. You cannot fabricate the work when the distance is real and the clock does not negotiate. Most people never stand in front of an honest clock; and the industry has constructed an entire economy on ensuring they never have to.

The 60 dollar monthly fee quietly leaving millions of bank accounts is not the real cost. The real cost is the 3.9 billion dollars Canada absorbs annually in direct and indirect healthcare expenditures from physical inactivity; the 1.5 billion euros Ireland absorbs for the same reason; and the tens of millions of people who leave a beautiful, eucalyptus-scented room convinced they accomplished something; while the chronic disease accumulating in their arteries, their visceral fat stores, and their metabolic function does not register how the playlist made them feel.

Sell them a gym. Give them a spa. Call it wellness. The public healthcare system will cover the rest.

Marc-Roger Gagné MAPP

@ottlegalrebels