Future of Fitness

Every check-in at your gym is a research data point, and most operators are sitting on it. Spencer Tatum of TCU’s Roach Institute of Athlete Engineering explains how gyms, health clubs and performance centers can turn the data they already collect into grant funding and better member outcomes.

Get Eric’s free Q2 State of Fitness Report: → https://q2-report.future-of-fitness.info/

Eric Malzone welcomes back Spencer Tatum, Chief Athlete Liaison at TCU’s Roach Institute of Athlete Engineering, for his third appearance on the show. Spencer explains how a shipyard...

Is HYROX just a fad? Centr CEO Andrew Sugerman says the data says no: across 100+ HYROX race cities, not one has shrunk. Here's why gym owners can't afford to wait.

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Eric Malzone sits down with Andrew Sugerman, CEO of Centr, the official equipment partner of HYROX, to make the business case for HYROX. HYROX has 1.5 million athletes and more than 100 races...

 The Mindbody, ClassPass and EGYM merger created a $7.5B fitness giant. Its two co-founders explain why GLP-1s will hit gyms before AI does, and who really wins.

FREE REPORT: Get the Future of Fitness quarterly industry report → https://quarterly-report.future-of-fitness.info

Recorded live at Playlist Summit in Boulder, Eric Malzone sits down with Fritz Lanman (Playlist, parent of Mindbody, ClassPass and Booker) and Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer (EGYM), the co-founders of the combined company, a few months after the deal cleared regulators. Inside: why they're refusing to "integrate for integration's sake," why scale is what finally mak...

Eight Sleep's Dr. Nicole Moyen has data from millions of nights of sleep, and it shows menopausal and pregnant women want the coldest beds of anyone. So why has almost no research looked at temperature and sleep in women?

Get Eric's free Q2 State of Fitness Report: → https://q2-report.future-of-fitness.info/

Dr. Nicole Moyen, Senior Director of Science and Clinical Research at Eight Sleep, joins Eric to break down what close to 200,000 members and millions of nights of data say about temperature and sleep. In a study of nearly 100 peri- and postmenopausal women, the Po...

Two thirds of Zing Coach's most active app users were already gym members. CEO Anton Marchanka explains why that one finding pushed the company out of consumer fitness and into the gym operator's own app.

Get Eric's free Q2 State of Fitness Report: → https://q2-report.future-of-fitness.info/

Eric Malzone sits down with Anton Marchanka, CEO of Zing Coach, to talk about why the AI personal training company moved from a standalone consumer app to a white label coaching product that runs inside a gym's existing app. Anton says nine out of ten users proactively sh...

Adam Shane spent 13 years helping scale Barry's. Now he's putting his own money behind Yoga Joint, a Florida infrared fitness brand that fills suburban classes with 55-plus people, and he's taking it straight into Manhattan.

Adam Shane, Franchise Owner and Managing Director of Yoga Joint New York, joins Eric Malzone to explain why he's flipping the usual boutique playbook and proving a suburban model in the city. He breaks down Yoga Joint's split between 60-minute Flow and 45-minute FIIT classes in 95-degree infrared rooms. He also explains why he's hunting for 3,500 to 5,000 square foot spaces when most...

Dr. Heather McKee, PhD behavioral scientist and motivation science advisor at MyZone, joins Eric Malzone to explain why motivation is the wrong thing to chase first and what actually gets members to stick around past January.

Dr. McKee argues that action creates motivation, not the other way around, and that operators should design for a member's ordinary Tuesday rather than their idealized best day. She breaks down why six week challenges quietly fail most members, citing Eric's own experience retaining just 4 percent of a 50 person challenge cohort six months later, and introduces the concept of competence matching...

 What if the next major shift in fitness and health isn't another wearable or blood panel, but knowing which of your organs is aging fastest, and whether the things you're doing to improve your health are actually working?

Paul Coletta is Co-Founder and CEO of Vero Bioscience, a predictive health company commercializing Stanford research in proteomic organ aging.

Before Vero, Paul spent decades building consumer businesses and brands across Disney, MTV, Hewlett-Packard, Jamba Juice and Urban Remedy. He isn't an MD or a PhD. Three years ago, he says he didn't even know what proteomics w...

Jon Ward left the influencer playbook behind at Plunge to build something with no media, no selling, and an NDA at the door — and he's already turned away over a hundred applicants to protect it.

Jon Ward, Founder and CEO of The Assembly, joins Eric to unpack why he's betting on trust over reach in an industry drowning in pitches. Jon breaks down how GLP-1s are splitting the gym-going population in half, why brands like Evolve went from zero to over $100 million in under a year, and why he thinks "health" needs to stop being treated as...

James Hurlock went from professional rugby to founding Fitura Brands, the multi-concept franchise platform behind Padel SWT, Core Precinct, and ContrasTheory. He explains why he's betting on three categories at once — and why he's deliberately taking the slow, expensive route to franchising.

James Hurlock is the Founder and CEO of Fitura Brands, a Utah-based wellness holding company that launched in 2026 at a $20 million pre-money valuation. Before founding Fitura, Hurlock served as founding CEO of FS8, Chief Partnerships Officer at F45 Training, and Chief Brand Officer at The Picklr, where he helped grow the indoor pickleball franchise to ro...

Jon Canarick has spent 25 years investing in gyms, and he's still trying to explain why doctors won't write a prescription for exercise. As Managing Partner at North Castle Partners, he helped build Equinox, turned around Curves, and backed Barry's long before boutique fitness was a category.

Canarick walks through what actually changed in fitness private equity since he joined North Castle in 2001, from the corporate franchise wave that built 24 Hour Fitness and LA Fitness to Planet Fitness's pricing model, which he credits with pulling more Americans into gym memberships than anything else in the last quarter century...

Garmin Health's Andy Beckman joins hosts Eric Malzone, Juliet Starrett, and Alex Alimanestianu for the quarterly roundtable, talking wearables and the Training Peaks acquisition before the group digs into a full quarter of fitness industry earnings.

Andy Beckman explains what Garmin Health actually does, from employee wellness and insurance underwriting to military fatigue tracking and the pilot study that flagged COVID cases 48 hours before symptoms appeared. Juliet Starrett and Alex Alimanestianu then break down the numbers: Garmin posted a record quarter with revenue up 11% to $2 billion and its fitness segment growing 25% to $757 million, Lifetime grew revenue 13.7% to $866...

Your gut lining rebuilds itself every five days — faster than any other tissue in your body — and that turnover rate is either your best defense or your biggest vulnerability, depending on what you're doing to it. In the final episode of this series with stem cell scientist and STEMREGEN founder Christian Drapeau, Eric Malzone digs into why the intestinal lining is "the most fragile and vulnerable part of your body," how estrogen withdrawal at menopause quietly wrecks gut repair, and why Christian believes the real story of aging isn't inflammation or free radicals — it's a failure of the body's own re...

Paul Lunter didn't start out trying to build a wellness empire — he was in construction, watched someone in pain step in and out of the shower for relief, and built a machine instead. Thirty-seven years later, that machine (HydroMassage) has grown into WellnessSpace Brands: five product lines, 400 million sessions delivered, and installations in 50+ countries at Planet Fitness, Life Time, Gold's Gym, and beyond. Lunter walks Eric Malzone through the company's medical-market origins, the R&D behind machines like the PolarWave Dry Plunge and the company's newest RedZone sauna which uses no wood, and why he thinks recovery is a pe...

Jeff Byers, CEO of Momentous, returns to Future of Fitness for his third appearance to unpack how the brand grew revenue over 1,000% in three years while landing partnerships with all 32 NFL teams and 10+ Department of Defense contracts. Byers breaks down why Momentous walked away from a $500,000-profit product line over a science and brand-integrity call — literally scrapping $400,000 in inventory rather than sell it through — how the company is approaching its first-ever retail launch with Vitamin Shop, and why a $500,000 commitment to women's health research with Dr. Stacey Sims fits into a bigger 20-year brand strategy. From Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement to w...

Why do women lose bone density so fast after menopause — and what actually reverses it? Neurophysiologist and stem cell researcher Christian Drapeau (founder of STEMREGEN®) breaks down the biology behind bone and muscle aging, why strength training is the single most powerful lever for reversing the damage, and what most people get wrong about protein and collagen intake.

Key Takeaways:

JJ Creegan has helped build three of the biggest names in fitness — Planet Fitness, UFIT, and Orange Theory — and now works as a fractional COO/CEO helping emerging brands scale. In this episode, he and Eric dig into the K-shaped fitness economy, why the industry is "data rich but knowledge poor," and the exact visit-frequency formula that predicts member retention. They also cover the state of boutique fitness, the Pilates consolidation wave coming, and why the walls between fitness, medicine, and wellness are finally coming down.

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Online coaching is a $28.9B industry racing toward $120B by 2031 — but 71% of people who start an online fitness program quit within 90 days. In this episode, Eric sits down with Cody McBroom, founder of Tailored Coaching Method, who's built a 7-figure, ad-free coaching business over the past nine years without ever accepting a pay-in-full client. Cody breaks down the "identity-based coaching" model that took his team's client retention from 3-4 months to 14 months, why AI is reshaping how people find (and vet) a coach, and his genuinely nuanced take on GLP-1 drugs and the fitness industry's future.

Key Ta...

Global expansion, jiu-jitsu black belts, and Dana White's secret philanthropy — Adam Sedlack, CEO of UFC GYM, is back on The Future of Fitness after a five-year hiatus, and the growth story is staggering. From surviving pandemic-era bankruptcies to opening a new location every single week across 46+ countries, Sedlack breaks down the pricing overhaul that fueled 25% member growth and record profit margins, why "the consumer always has the answer," and how UFC GYM built a scalable system for teaching high-skill disciplines like BJJ and Muay Thai across 180+ locations without sacrificing quality. He also opens up about the Mark Mastrov coaching tr...

Christian Drapeau, neurophysiologist and stem cell researcher, joins Future of Fitness to explore the body's natural repair processes and how they change as we age.

Christian breaks down the balance between breakdown and renewal, how that balance shifts over time, and why a single underlying process connects so many different systems in the body. He also explains why bone health has more to do with collagen and flexibility than most people realize, and how estrogen and menopause relate to the body's repair mechanisms.

This conversation is for general educational and informational purposes only and is...

Brian Keane has built a fitness empire that most coaches only dream about — four bestselling books, over 580 podcast episodes, a top 0.5% global podcast, and more than a thousand coaches trained through his mentorship programs. But before any of that, he was a primary school teacher who realized twenty minutes into his first day that he'd climbed the wrong ladder entirely. In this conversation, Brian breaks down exactly how fitness entrepreneurs, gym owners, and online coaches can stay relevant — and even thrive — as tools like ChatGPT and Claude start answering the same questions clients used to pay for. He walks throug...

Healthcare in America is stuck in a "sick care" model—we wait until people are already ill, then scramble to treat them. Dr. Gloria Winters, VP of Health Innovation at the YMCA of the USA, has spent the last year building something different: a community health operating system that pulls together your wearables, your medical records, and AI-driven insights into one place, so you actually know what to do with your health data instead of just staring at numbers. In this episode, she breaks down her "house" framework for the $5.6 trillion healthcare industry, why falls cost the country more th...

Something changed after 40. Recovery takes longer, energy dips, and the effort that used to work stopped working. You were told it's just aging. Neurophysiologist Christian Drapeau makes the case that it's something else entirely: the decline of your body's own repair system.

In this first episode of The Science of Vitality After 40, a four-part series with Christian Drapeau, host Eric Malzone explores the system almost no one talks about. Christian wrote the first paper proposing that our stem cells function as the body's repair system back in 2001, and here he explains what that system is, why it...

Alberto Perlman has been trying to get on this podcast for years — turns out all it took was bumping shoulders at an industry event. As co-founder of Zumba, he's built the world's largest branded fitness program: over 15 million weekly participants, 200,000+ locations, and a presence in 185+ countries, all while surviving 25 years of hype cycles, fads, a pandemic, and everything in between. In this episode, Eric Malzone sits down with Alberto to trace the entire Zumba story from the beginning — a packed gym class in Aventura, Florida with a literal padlocked door, a co-founder who couldn't speak a word of English pitc...

Before he built one of the biggest names in youth sports training, Will Bartholomew was a walk-on at the University of Tennessee trying to survive fall camp with a quarterback named Peyton Manning. In this episode, the D1 Training founder sits down with Eric Malzone to trace the whole arc — training athletes in an open field back in 2002, opening a patio-carpet-and-turf gym with racks he screwed together himself, and slowly turning that into a franchise system now closing in on 220 locations nationwide. Will gets honest about the messy middle: no point-of-sale system at location two, why D1 doesn't open on...

Can you actually train yourself to age like an athlete instead of just "aging well"? In this episode, Eric Malzone sits down with strength coach and Just Fly Sports founder Joel Smith — eight years coaching at UC Berkeley, five Olympians, nine medals, a world record, and four national track titles under his belt — to unpack what real athletic longevity looks like beyond the buzzwords flooding the fitness industry. They dig into why "meaningful movement" beats generic training programs, how play, seasonality, and community pickup games might matter more than your macros, and why coaches and gym owners need to help...

Eric Malzone sits down with Eric Bormel, Managing Director at Solomon Partners, for a deep dive into mergers and acquisitions in the fitness and wellness industry — breaking down exactly what it takes for a fitness brand, gym, or health tech company to get acquired, what drives valuation beyond revenue, and how founders can pick the right buyer instead of just the highest bidder. Using the recent Rouvy-to-Zwift acquisition as a real-world case study, Bormel pulls back the curtain on the M&A process from first meeting to closing the deal, explains why connected fitness companies like Peloton are finally st...

In this episode of Future of Fitness, host Eric Malzone sits down with Dr. Tania Elliott—board-certified physician, three-time Chief Medical Officer, and a leading voice in healthcare innovation—to break down the collision course between the fitness industry and the future of preventative health. Dr. Elliott doesn't hold back: she calls out the fitness world for being too intense or too dainty, challenges the gatekeeping role of primary care, and paints a vivid picture of what the health club of the future should really look like. From the over-reliance on protocols and biohacking to the untapped power of comm...

In this quarterly industry roundtable, Eric Malzone, Juliet Starrett, and Alex Alimanestianu dive deep into the fitness sector's biggest earnings reports and emerging trends. Lifetime Fitness continues its premium brand strategy with impressive revenue growth while strategically shedding lower-tier memberships, but Planet Fitness faces headwinds with declining membership growth and a paused price increase. The team dissects Xponential's mounting troubles as the company burns through cash amid a New York AG settlement, while Garmin's fitness segment absolutely crushes it with 42% revenue growth. CrossFit's future looks brighter with Bruce Edwards returning as CEO—an affiliate owner who actually understands the co...

What does it actually take to build a thriving HYROX program inside your gym — and turn it into a serious revenue engine? In this episode of Future of Fitness, host Eric Malzone sits down with David Magida, Global Head of Training at HYROX, to unpack everything gym owners and operators need to know about getting into the fastest-growing fitness sport in the world. David shares how he went from running a boutique gym in DC — nearly losing it all during COVID — to overseeing a global affiliate network of nearly 16,000 gyms. From the electric energy of a 40,000-athlete HYROX event in Lon...

In this episode of The Future of Fitness, host Eric Malzone sits down with Erik Jivmark, CEO of Sleep Cycle, to discuss how passive tracking technology is transforming the health and wellness industry. For 15 years, Sleep Cycle has been quietly analyzing a millennium of sleep every single night, leveraging audio and advanced machine learning algorithms to map sleep stages with the same precision as leading wearable hardware. Now, the company is democratizing this massive data layer by opening up its seamless Sleep SDK to developers, health apps, and IoT providers worldwide. Erik shares the brand's incredible origin story—from an...

Eric Casaburi — founder of Serotonin Centers and former builder of Retro Fitness — is back to break down one of the most exciting business models emerging at the intersection of fitness and longevity medicine.

In this episode, Eric walks us through the creation of SLIM Gym (Serotonin Light Impact Model), a turnkey longevity clinic concept that plugs directly into existing gym and fitness studio spaces (think 200–500 square feet of unused office or childcare rooms). It delivers hormone replacement therapy, medical weight loss, GLP-1 protocols, peptide therapy, IV therapy, and comprehensive lab work to gym members—without the gym owner ev...

In this episode of The Future of Fitness, host Eric Malzone sits down with Karl Foster, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Sport Alliance, to bridge the massive gap between AI marketing hype and operational reality in the fitness sector. Drawing from his unique trajectory from personal trainer to CTO and global AI leader, Foster reveals how Sport Alliance's native CRM and ERP integrations—Perfect AI and Magic AI—are redefining the member journey. He outlines the critical distinction between passive chatbots and proactive, agentic AI ecosystems that capture time-sensitive data to drive engagement, boost sales conversions, and optimize retention. Fost...

In this episode, Eric Malzone catches up with Eric Cressey, high-performance sports specialist and Director of Player Health and Performance for the New York Yankees. The two take a deep dive into the evolving world of sports performance, touching on the ongoing crisis of youth sports specialization and what it takes to actually build sustainable velocity without blowing out young arms. Cressey shares how his team leverages advanced sports science and biometric data to drive precise interventions, while also keeping a critical eye on the over-saturation of the mental performance market and the over-hyped trends in recovery technology. Finally...

Eddie Hertzman, founder of Athletech News and creator of the Athletech Innovation Summit, pulls no punches in this conversation about what's holding the fitness industry back — and what it's going to take to finally move it forward. From the frustrating silence of successful fitness executives who refuse to show up at industry events, to the critical gap between how this industry sees itself and how consumers and investors see it, Eddie breaks down why fitness still hasn't gotten its "got milk moment." He and Eric dig into the second year of the Athletech Innovation Summit, what makes it genuinely di...

Women over 60 are one of the most biologically dynamic — and most overlooked — populations in the fitness industry. In this closing episode of the Women's Health Series, host Eric Malzone sits down with Dr. Jennifer King, behavioral scientist, gerontology researcher, and nationally competitive physique athlete, to tackle one of the industry's biggest blind spots: the near-total dropout of research, diagnostics, and programming once women move past menopause. Dr. King unpacks why clinical guidance so rarely includes the very women it's meant to serve, how gym environments send the wrong signals through layout, tour routes, and equipment placement, and what intentional desi...

In this episode of Future of Fitness, host Eric Malzone sits down with Dr. Amy Bantham — public health researcher, fitness professional, and founder of Move to Live More — for a refreshingly real conversation on women's health across the full lifespan. Rather than carving women's health into isolated phases like pregnancy or menopause, Dr. Bantham makes the case for a whole-person, health-span approach that starts in childhood and never stops. They dig into why most women aren't lacking motivation — they're lacking time, community, and programming that actually meets them where they are. From the funding gaps in women's health research, to bui...

Women's health has been one of medicine's most overlooked frontiers — and the data gap is decades deep. In this episode, Eric Malzone sits down with Anaelle Oiknine, clinical development lead at Ultrahuman, to unpack why the majority of drugs, exercise prescriptions, and health metrics have historically been built around male physiology — and what that's cost women. From the thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s to the ongoing research mismatch around endometriosis, Anaelle breaks down the systemic failures that left half the population underserved, and why the tide is finally turning. She shares what continuous wearable data is revealing about the fema...

Dave Appel, Chief Health & Wellness Officer at KORB Health and 35-year fitness industry veteran, joins Eric Malzone for a candid conversation on the collision of telehealth, GLP-1s, hormone replacement therapy, and the gym business model. Dave breaks down why the fitness industry can no longer afford to ignore the 80% of the population that doesn't identify as "fit," how GLP-1 medications like semaglutide are opening gym doors for people who never felt welcome in them, and what gym operators need to know right now before peptide deregulation reshapes the entire landscape. From KORB's partnerships with InShape Fitness and Fitness 19...

Jane Wang brings a rare cross-disciplinary lens to one of fitness's oldest problems: member retention. With a background in clinical research, mortality risk, and 12+ years in corporate wellness, Jane shares why the industry's approach to churn is fundamentally flawed — and what a data-driven, human-centered model looks like.

What We Cover: