What If Fitness Clubs Competed Less and Grew the Market More?"
I am an advocate for capitalism. It is far from a perfect system, but modern capitalism has created extraordinary opportunities for people from almost every section of society to build businesses, create wealth, employ others and forge their own path.
I enjoy owning my own business alongside my business partner, Russell Valler, and through Black Raccoon Consulting we work with entrepreneurs every day who have similar ambitions. We understand what it means to invest your money, time and reputation into something you believe in, and we understand the natural desire to compete and succeed.
Competition itself is not a bad thing. In fact, it is one of the mechanisms that makes capitalism work. Competition encourages innovation, challenges complacency, improves standards and, when it works properly, creates better products and services for consumers.
There is, however, something that has always puzzled me about the way we compete in the fitness industry.
What happens when our determination to beat each other actually prevents the industry itself from growing?
We are competing for the same minority
According to the 2025 State of the UK Fitness Industry Report, the UK fitness industry now has approximately 11.3 million members, generates around £6.5 billion in revenue and has reached a penetration rate of 16.6%. Those are impressive numbers and demonstrate how far the sector has come.
But there is another way of looking at that statistic.
If approximately 17% of the population belongs to a gym, then more than 80% does not. There is an enormous population of people who either have little interest in what we currently offer, do not believe conventional fitness facilities are relevant to them, have tried them previously and left, or simply haven't yet been persuaded that joining one would improve their lives.
Despite that, an enormous amount of our industry's marketing energy is directed towards competing for people who are already engaged with fitness.
We open a gym and immediately look at the membership of the gym down the road. We target people following competitors on Facebook and Instagram. We advertise directly outside other fitness facilities. We discount memberships to encourage people to switch, and occasionally I've even seen operators publicly criticise or name their competition.
I have seen budget clubs park advertising vans outside independent gyms. I have seen businesses deliberately target the followers of specific competitors and campaigns that amount to little more than, "Leave them and join us."
From the perspective of an individual business, I understand the logic. If somebody already spends £40 a month on fitness, convincing them to spend that £40 with you is considerably easier than persuading someone who has never considered joining a gym.
But collectively, surely we have to question where that strategy eventually takes us.
We are fighting over slices of the same relatively small pie instead of asking how we make the pie significantly bigger.
Competition and collaboration are not opposites
I am not suggesting gyms should stop competing. That would be unrealistic and, in my view, undesirable. If another club provides a better service, creates a stronger member experience or develops a more compelling proposition, that should challenge everyone around them to improve.
The mistake is assuming that competition and collaboration are mutually exclusive.
There is an established business concept called coopetition, where organisations compete in some areas while deliberately collaborating in others because doing so creates greater value for everyone involved. Researchers have studied the concept for decades, particularly in industries where businesses can benefit from sharing knowledge, resources or infrastructure while continuing to compete commercially.
There are numerous examples outside fitness. Sony and Samsung collaborated on LCD technology despite competing aggressively in consumer electronics, while major automotive manufacturers have historically collaborated on technology development while continuing to fight for the same customers in showrooms.
They did not collaborate because they suddenly stopped caring about market share. They collaborated because they recognised that certain challenges were better solved collectively.
There is an important distinction there for our industry.
Collaborating to grow a market does not mean you stop competing for your share of it.
Farmers understood this generations ago
Perhaps an even more interesting comparison can be found in agriculture.
Farmers are competitors. They produce similar products and ultimately need somebody to buy what they produce, yet agricultural cooperatives have existed in Britain for generations because farmers recognised that there were areas where acting collectively created advantages that none of them could achieve independently.
They pooled purchasing power, marketed produce collectively, shared services and infrastructure and created organisations capable of negotiating from a much stronger position.
Fram Farmers is one modern example. Its origins date back to 1960, when a small group of farmers recognised the benefits of pooling their purchasing requirements. Today the organisation supports more than 1,400 farming businesses with purchasing, crop marketing and administrative services.
What makes the comparison particularly interesting is that agriculture genuinely involves finite resources. There is only so much land, only so much produce and only so much of each year's harvest available to sell.
Fitness does not have that problem.
We have tens of millions of potential customers who are not currently members of our facilities, yet sometimes we behave as though the only available growth opportunity is taking a member from the club three miles down the road.
What if we changed the message?
Imagine five gyms operating in the same town. One is an independent strength facility, another is a budget gym, another is a full-service health club, another specialises in functional fitness and the fifth is a boutique studio.
Today, each might spend thousands of pounds communicating slightly different versions of the same messages: no joining fee, first month free, six weeks for £49, free trial, better equipment, cheaper membership or more classes.
Now imagine those same five businesses agreeing that, for one month each year, they would put their individual propositions to one side and collectively promote one message:
Let's Get Our Town Moving.
They could organise a community fitness weekend during which every participating facility opens its doors. The strength gym could introduce beginners to resistance training, the boutique studio could offer Pilates, the leisure centre could promote swimming, the functional facility could run beginner sessions and the health club could offer health assessments and education.
Nobody has to pretend their businesses are identical. In fact, the differences between them become an advantage because someone who hates the idea of a traditional gym might discover Pilates, swimming, small-group training or another activity they genuinely enjoy.
The message reaching the community would no longer be, "Our gym is better than theirs." It would be, "Being more active could improve your life, and somewhere in this community there is probably an option that works for you."
That is a very different conversation, and crucially it is aimed at people outside our existing market rather than simply those already inside it.
The commercial opportunity is enormous
There is an important commercial argument behind this as well as a social one.
The 2025 industry figures use a UK population of approximately 67.9 million when calculating market penetration. If the sector could collectively increase penetration by just five percentage points, moving from roughly 17% to 22%, that would represent approximately 3.4 million additional members.
At an average membership price of only £25 per month, those additional members would generate around £85 million of additional membership revenue every month, or more than £1 billion every year.
That is before personal training, small-group training, specialist programmes, food and drink, retail and every other form of secondary spend.
The point is not that every gym should suddenly abandon acquisition campaigns and launch a community initiative. The point is that the potential market available to us is vastly greater than the one we spend so much time fighting over.
There is an enormous harvest available. Perhaps we could spend slightly less time trying to take crops from the farm next door and a little more time cultivating land nobody is currently using.
What could collaboration actually look like?
It does not need to involve complicated agreements, national governing bodies or competitors sharing commercially sensitive information. There are relatively simple ways local operators could work together while remaining fiercely competitive businesses.
1. Joint community activity campaigns. Local clubs could collectively promote physical activity rather than individual memberships through initiatives such as a "Get Our Town Moving" month. Each operator could contribute activities suited to its own expertise while sharing the cost and reach of the wider campaign.
2. Coordinated open weekends. Imagine an annual fitness weekend where gyms, studios, leisure centres and other activity providers simultaneously open their doors. Residents could experience several different forms of exercise and find an environment that genuinely suits them rather than being sold whichever option happened to advertise to them first.
3. Inter-club events and competitions. Healthy rivalry can actually strengthen collaboration. Local fitness leagues, charity challenges, team competitions and community events allow members to represent their own clubs while collectively creating excitement and visibility around exercise.
4. Collaborative corporate wellbeing programmes. Rather than five facilities separately approaching the same employers, local operators could create a broader wellbeing proposition. Employees might gain access to different participating facilities, allowing them to choose between swimming, strength training, classes, Pilates, functional training or other activities.
5. Shared education, resources and initiatives. Independent clubs could collaborate on staff development, specialist speakers, recruitment initiatives, community education and even selected purchasing opportunities. None of those things prevents them competing aggressively when it comes to delivering the best member experience.
The principle is relatively straightforward: collaborate where collaboration grows the market, then compete on who delivers the best experience once people enter it.
Perhaps we are targeting the wrong competition
Some people will undoubtedly read this and think I am being naive or idealistic. Perhaps human nature simply makes this difficult. We are naturally protective of resources and suspicious of those competing for the same things we want.
That instinct made considerable sense when survival depended on access to limited food, shelter and territory. But we are not cavemen fighting over the last available watering hole, and the fitness industry is certainly not short of potential customers.
Perhaps the gym down the road isn't actually our biggest competitor.
Our competitors are inactivity, lack of confidence, poor understanding of exercise, previous negative experiences and the perception that gyms are places for people who are already fit.
Our competitor is the person sitting at home thinking, "A gym isn't for someone like me."
Those are problems that affect every operator, regardless of whether their membership costs £20 or £120 per month.
There are already businesses demonstrating what can happen when the industry looks beyond the traditional gym customer. Studio35, for example, has deliberately developed a proposition aimed at people who often do not identify with conventional gyms. Rather than simply building another facility aimed at people already engaged with fitness, its model seeks to make structured exercise accessible to a different demographic.
That is interesting because it represents genuine category growth. It creates another customer rather than simply moving an existing one from one provider to another.
We need to grow the category
Most successful industries understand that there are two battles taking place simultaneously. Individual businesses compete for market share, but the industry as a whole also needs consumers to want the category in the first place.
Fitness has an extraordinary proposition.
We can help people become stronger, healthier and more confident. We can reduce isolation, create communities and help people remain independent for longer as they age. We can improve physical and mental wellbeing and, at our very best, genuinely change people's lives.
Yet collectively we sometimes manage to reduce that proposition to "No joining fee this weekend."
Perhaps that is where the mindset needs to change.
I am not advocating the end of competition. I want ambitious operators to compete, innovate, raise standards and build brilliant businesses. Black Raccoon exists because we believe businesses should grow, become more profitable and perform better.
But I also believe there is a bigger opportunity sitting in front of us.
If 83% of the population is outside our current market, our industry's greatest opportunity cannot simply be persuading somebody to cancel their membership at Gym A and move to Gym B.
We need to understand why millions of people haven't joined either of them.
And perhaps some of those barriers are simply too large for individual operators to tackle alone.
Compete for market share, absolutely. But collaborate to grow the market itself.
Because sometimes the smartest way to get a bigger piece of the pie isn't to steal somebody else's slice.
It's to work together to bake a much bigger pie.