Have We Been Doing Gyms Wrong?

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Walk into most gyms today and the experience is familiar enough to feel inevitable. There is loud music and rows of mirrors, a reception desk where someone tries not to make eye contact while steering you toward a personal training package, and a pervasive sense that the building exists primarily to extract a monthly payment rather than to do anything in particular with you. There is also, god help me, tripods.

The assumption behind all of this is simple… the gym exists to make money, and you exist to provide it. What makes this arrangement peculiar, once you examine it, is that the business model works best when you stop showing up. Roughly half of all new gym members quit within the first six months, and the industry has built itself around that fact rather than against it. In Britain alone, there are now over seven thousand gyms serving more than ten million members, and across the Atlantic, around 77 million Americans held a gym membership in 2024, a record figure. That is an enormous market, and yet the average annual retention rate across the industry sits at around 66 per cent, meaning something close to one in three members leaves every year. The gym, as a commercial institution, has normalised its own failure to keep people. And hey, judging by my students’ attendance this year, I’m in a similar boat. No judgement.

This kind of gym model is dominant enough today to feel like the only one that ever existed. It was not. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, a very different idea of the gym flourished across Britain, Ireland, North America and beyond. These were gyms run as co-operatives, owned by their members, governed by elected committees, priced at a penny or two a week, and animated by a conviction that physical culture (an older term for gym cultures) was a communal good rather than a commercial product. They rose quickly, mattered deeply to the people who used them, and then, for reasons worth examining carefully, largely disappeared. Their disappearance was not inevitable, and understanding why they vanished tells us something important about what we lost when they went. Put simply, there used to be community gyms and they were incredible places.

The Co-operative Gym at Its Peak

The Health and Strength League, founded in 1906 as an outgrowth of Britain’s longest-running weightlifting magazine, became the organisational backbone of the co-operative gym movement in Britain and Ireland. By 1939, the League had affiliated over 800 gymnasiums across Britain and Ireland, with further outposts across the Empire, and its membership had surpassed 166,000 people. These were not negligible numbers for any voluntary organisation of the period, let alone one dedicated to weight training.

What made the League gyms distinctive was not their size but their structure. The 1939 Health and Strength Annual set out the ideal co-operative gymnasium in precise terms, describing a committee-run, non-profit institution where any surplus was reinvested in the club, where membership fees were kept deliberately low at typically one to three pence a week, and where no individual could exercise a ‘one-man show’ over the club’s direction. Any committee member who failed to attend five consecutive meetings was removed from the board. Democratic accountability was built into the rules rather than aspired to in the mission statement.

The pricing tells its own story. At one to three pence weekly, gym membership in interwar Britain cost roughly one-sixth the price of a cinema ticket and half the cost of a third-division football match. The League’s motto, Sacred thy Body as thy Soul, positioned physical culture as a moral and civic duty rather than a luxury, and the low fees were an expression of that belief made practical. Members did not just pay into these gyms, they built the equipment, swept the floors and fundraised. In Ireland, Dublin’s Hercules gymnasium, which still operates today as the country’s oldest continuously running gym, saw members create their own training equipment from scrap metal. Health and Strength magazine responded to the widespread problem of material scarcity by publishing detailed instructional diagrams on how to build apparatus at home, treating labour-in-kind as a legitimate substitute for capital.

I trained at Hercules for eight years, and I think about those early members fairly often when I am in there. The equipment has improved considerably since the 1930s, but the culture has not changed in any way that matters. People know each other’s names, their training histories, their long-term goals, and knowledge moves freely between experienced lifters and beginners without anyone needing to be asked. The Iron Culture podcast recently included Hercs in their documentary which is well worth a watch (even if I am in it).

When I travel, I look for gyms with a similar character, and occasionally I find them. Oliphant’s Academy of Physical Culture in Toronto, founded in 1913, is one. Its a member-run, no-frills space that has operated on the same community-continuity model for over a century, and walking into it for the first time feels immediately familiar, not because the building resembles Hercules but because the organisational logic is identical. The clubs that resulted from the interwar co-operative movement were, by any contemporary commercial standard, chaotic. In my research, I came across a White Horse Weightlifting Club in Staffordshire which moved from a room above a founder’s house, to a hall beside a pub, to a hotel, to a working men’s club over the 1930s. These gyms existed within broader networks of working-class associational life, the same terrain as trade unions, friendly societies, and co-operative stores, and they survived on volunteer labour, shared equipment, and the willingness of members to keep showing up regardless of where the club happened to be housed that year.

Why It Mattered

To understand what co-operative gyms actually provided, it helps to borrow two related concepts from the social sciences. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg, writing in the late 1980s, argued that healthy communities depend on what he called ‘third places’, informal gathering spaces that are neither home nor work. The pub, the barbershop, the café, the bowling green: places where people congregate without agenda, build relationships across social lines, and experience something like belonging. Robert Putnam, in his landmark study Bowling Alone, extended this argument into a broader analysis of how American civic life had hollowed out over the second half of the twentieth century, with people less likely to join clubs, attend meetings, volunteer, or participate in organised community activity. His central metaphor was that more Americans were bowling than ever before, but fewer were bowling in leagues. The activity had persisted while the community around it dissolved. This is old hat to any powerlifter or weightlifter who suddenly finds themselves in a commercial gym. The first observation will usually centre on the fact that no one is chatting with, or cheering along, someone else.

The interwar co-operative gym was, in Oldenburg’s terms, a textbook third place. Members of the Health and Strength League wrote regularly about seeking out their nearest affiliated club when they moved to a new town, and the League badge functioned as a recognition signal between strangers. One editorial described it as ‘the key to friendships’. Clubs held social evenings, inter-gym competitions, and shared volunteers across regions, and the gym was not somewhere you went to train and left but somewhere you belonged. This matters because Putnam’s argument offers a clear-eyed diagnosis of what the commercial gym has failed to provide.

When co-operative gym culture gave way to the commercial model, physical culture was separated from its associational roots. The activity continued, people lifted weights (more in fact, than ever before) but the community around it largely dissolved. The research supports this reading: members who participate in group activities at a gym are around 56 per cent less likely to cancel than those who exercise alone, and gyms with a strong community dimension retain members at notably higher rates than those without one. People, it turns out, do not stay for the equipment.

Why It Fell Apart?

The decline of co-operative gym culture was gradual rather than sudden, a slow erasure over a number of decades when people realised there was profits to be gained in a certain type of gym ownership.

The pivotal figure is Vic Tanny, an American bodybuilder and entrepreneur who built the first successful gym chain in the United States during the 1950s. What Tanny understood, with a clarity that his predecessors lacked, was that a gym membership and actual gym attendance were two entirely separable things. If you sold memberships aggressively and kept the price accessible, a significant proportion of buyers would sign up, go infrequently or not at all, and continue paying rather than endure the mild embarrassment of cancelling. The fixed costs of running the building remained constant whether twenty members trained that day or two hundred, which meant that the revenue from non-attending members was almost pure profit.

Tanny did not invent the idea that gyms could make money but he popularised the idea that gyms could make more money the less their members used them. His own Centers eventually went bankrupt owing, in part, to his overreach and aggressive sales tactics, but he showed others that big, impersonal franchise gyms could be profitable at scale.

What the franchise model added was scale without accountability. A franchise operator like Planet Fitness, which now runs over 2,400 units across the United States with nearly 20 million members, is not in the business of fitness in any meaningful sense (although to swim against the tide, I have trained in several and loved them). No, Planet Fitness is in the business of replicating a standardised environment efficiently across locations, and the standardisation is precisely the point, like McDonald’s. Every Planet Fitness is the same purple carpeting, the same lunk alarm etc. and that sameness is what the franchise model sells to investors. So too, incidentally, were Gold’s Gym franchises.

But community cannot be franchised, because community is not a feature. It is something that accretes slowly through shared history, repeated contact, and the kind of low-stakes mutual obligation that builds up between people who train in the same place over years. The franchise model produces environments in which that process is structurally impossible, because the environment has been designed for interchangeability rather than belonging. In Britain, the three largest franchise operators together run over 300 clubs, and what they share, beyond the logo, is the elimination of the local and the particular in favour of the scalable and the predictable.

The logical endpoint of this trajectory is the unstaffed 24-hour gym in an industrial unit on the edge of town, which has spread across Britain and Ireland with a speed that suggests we have collectively decided this is fine. These gyms offer access around the clock at low cost, and they require nothing from you in terms of social engagement, which is framed as a feature rather than a deficit. You are given an access code, a carpark, fluorescent lighting, and equipment in rows, and you arrive alone and leave alone, and the company that owns the building prefers this because staff cost money and human contact introduces friction and costs.

You are not a member in any meaningful sense of that word. You are a subscriber to a service, and the service has been precisely calibrated to deliver the minimum viable product while removing every element that Oldenburg identified as making a third place worth having. And yes, these gyms have saved my ass on more than one occassion and are lifelines for shift workers but they shouldn’t be the norm. The interesting question is not why these gyms exist but why we have so readily accepted the idea that this is what a gym is.

The Return

In 2016, a small group in Bristol opened a co-operative gym, something that would have seemed entirely unremarkable in 1935 and that feels almost radical now. Bristol Co-operative Gym is member-run, free-weight focused, and governed by aims that map almost precisely onto the Health and Strength League’s founding principles: affordable access, inclusive culture, democratic governance, and no pressure to perform or conform. It is registered with the FCA as a Co-operative Society, publishes its accounts publicly, and operates on a sliding-scale membership model designed to remove cost as a barrier to participation.

Since opening it has trained over a thousand people, which is not a large number by the standards of the industry but is a meaningful one by any other measure. Its website describes the mainstream commercial gym in terms that the Health and Strength League would have recognised without difficulty

Most gyms are designed to maximise profit, not our fitness. They shame us into buying memberships and then not attending. They can be unwelcoming, alienating and intimidating.

The critique is functionally identical to the one being made ninety years earlier, which suggests that the problem has not changed, only become more profitable.

A Question Worth Asking

There is a habit in fitness culture of treating its own history as though it began sometime in the 1980s, with aerobics classes, chrome dumbbells, and the rise of the modern gym chain, with everything before that dismissed as primitive prehistory. That habit is misleading in ways that have real consequences. The co-operative gym movement shows that commercial gyms are not the natural endpoint of how human beings organise physical culture but one model among several, and specifically the one that proved best suited to capital accumulation rather than to keeping people exercising. A 66 per cent annual retention rate is not a flaw in an otherwise functioning system, it is the system functioning exactly as designed.

The interwar co-operative gym movement was not squeezed out because it failed its members. It was squeezed out because it succeeded at something the commercial model had no interest in replicating, namely the creation of places where people actually wanted to be. What replaced it was progressively stripped of the features that made gyms worth belonging to, the committee meetings, the penny subscriptions, the shared equipment built from scrap metal, the sense that the place was yours because you had helped build it.

Putnam was right that bowling leagues mattered and that their disappearance was a symptom of something larger than bowling. Bristol Co-operative Gym, Hercules, Oliphant’s on whatever unremarkable street you pass every day on the way to somewhere else, these are not curiosities or survivals. The commercial gym has had seventy years to solve its retention problem, and it has not solved it, because solving it would require becoming something other than what it is. We already know what that something looks like. And oddly, it begins with a people first vision of fitness.