Fitness is BS.
I use behavioural science to fix the decisions that cost gyms members.
Most people who join a gym fully intend to use it, and plenty of them stop coming anyway. Behavioural scientists call that the intention-action gap, and most of the problems I’ve dealt with in thirty years of running gyms and pools start there.
The acquisition problem
Ads and search can get someone onto your website, and whether they join from there depends on what they see and feel before they reach the form. I work on the page they land on and the first visit they book, so more of the people who look end up joining.
The retention problem
High satisfaction scores don’t stop members cancelling. Whether someone stays comes down to the habits they’ve built around coming in, and I find out which of those are slipping in your gym and show you what to change.
Where this gets applied
Pricing
Why ‘Free’ Outperforms ‘$0’ in Pricing
Retention
Why Gym Members Quit While They’re Still Improving
Programming
What Peloton’s Century Club Reveals About Group Class Engagement
Acquisition
The Joining Fee Paradox: What Partitioned Pricing Research Says Gyms Are Getting Wrong
Marketing
What 31,812 Marketing Emails Reveal About Why Your Gym Newsletter Gets Ignored
Motivation
Hyperbolic Discounting Isn’t About Willpower: Why Gym Members Quit Long-Term Goals
Start here, free
Gym Hacks
Every fortnight I take one problem gyms keep running into and work out from the research what to change. Each takes about five minutes to read, and there are 77 so far.
The Cognitive Bias Library
Each of the 78 biases is written up in gym terms, with the research behind it and the places it shows up on a gym floor. It’s all free and you don’t need to sign up.