Lifestyle Gyms

The Consumed column in last week’s New York Times magazine looked at Life Time gyms – a gym that doesn’t want to be a gym but a place of education and entertainment:

Life Time locations, which look like a cross between a shopping center and a resort, are open 24 hours a day, and the chain charges $50 a month, plus an initiation fee, but has no yearly contracts. The point is not simply to steal away current gym-goers but also to appeal to the percentage of the population — particularly families and women — that has considered joining a gym and never does, perhaps because they find gyms a little too… gymish. “People refer to us as the de facto community center,” the enthusiastic Brown maintains. “It’s the first place people come to recreate and indulge, to relax, exercise, to participate in a basketball league, to swim in the pool with their extended family, get a massage, have a healthy-way-of life meal.”

Fitting In – New York Times