10 Reasons 2026 Will Be Your Best Year as a Gym Owner

Industry data reveals that 2026 could be the best year gym owners have ever seen.

Revenue is up across every gym model, average revenue per member is rising, and even the lowest-performing gyms are earning more than they were a year ago.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper presents data from Two-Brain’s latest “State of the Industry” report and highlights 10 reasons gym owners should be optimistic for the year ahead.

He explains why personal training and small-group training continue to outperform during uncertain economic times, how predictable competition formats such as Hyrox are driving retention and revenue, and why gym owners are finally starting to charge what their services are actually worth.

He also looks ahead to some of the biggest opportunities for gym owners in 2026: closing the business knowledge gap and using AI as a tool to make human coaching even more valuable.

Tune in for the full breakdown, and to see the data for yourself, download the “State of the Industry” report via the link below.

Links

State of the Industry

Gym Owners United

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0:25 - Revenue and recession proofing

2:24 - Opportunities with Hyrox and MetFix

7:13 - Success with small-group training

13:59 - Charging more and keeping clients longer

18:05 - Business knowledge and AI tools

Transcript

Chris 0:02

2025 was not the easiest year ever for gym owners, but there was a lot of progress, and there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic for 2026. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to give you some reasons for hope in 2026 using data from our state of the industry 2025 guide and some of the current trends that I've been exposed to around the industry. So the first reason to be optimistic about 2026 is that revenue is up across all gym types, according to the data in our state of the industry guide. Median monthly revenue increased from about$17,000 last year in uh small group gyms to$18,750 this year. Median monthly revenue increased from$11,000 to$16,000 in one-on-one personal training gyms. That's a huge jump. And median monthly revenue increased from$13,000 to$16,000 in big group training gyms. So that's really amazing. We're starting to see like revenue growth kind of across all segments of the industry. That means that the market is growing despite economic concerns in a lot of places. People still want fitness, but they're more selective about where they invest their money, which means this isn't a shrinking industry. It's a growing one. You know, I can remember years ago, 2008, actually, one of my clients was a financial advisor, and she said, Chris, when this market goes down, you're toast buddy. Nobody's going to be buying gym memberships. And she was right about the gym memberships, but she was wrong about coaching. In times of financial challenges, premium services actually go up in sales. That's why people buy more supplements even when the grocery prices go up. And it's why people don't stop buying personal training when gym memberships are going down too. That leads me to point two. Personal training is recession proof. During financial downturns, as I just said, gym memberships tend to get canceled, but personal training holds or even grows. When money gets tight, people tend to cut the things that feel optional in their lives, but they keep the things that feel essential. And personal training, when done right, feels essential. So your strategy going into 2026 is stop trying to compete as the cheapest gym. Focus on being the most personal experience, human to human. Use any economic downturn or any challenge, be it for your town, your state, your country, the world, as an excuse to build up your personal training and small group personal training. Point three, another reason to be optimistic about 2026 is that HyROX is showing us how to make competition accessible and a valid retention tool. So when CrossFit took over, they kind of had this 80-20 rule. And I'm talking about, you know, back in its the start of its rise to peak popularity, 2003 through 2008, that meant that it would take 20% of movements from different disciplines, but they were the 20% that were used the most 80% of the time. So it's an 80-20 rule. For example, uh CrossFit took like the basic kettlebell swing and the two kettlebell snatches and the kettlebell press. Like that's 20% max of all the exercises available with kettlebells, but those are the ones that were used 80% of the time and produced 80% of the programs and produced 80% of the results. That's the 80-20 rule. And the 80-20 rule is genius. But when you apply that to competition, CrossFit's like constantly varied nature make competition inaccessible for most gym people because you just had to be great at everything. You couldn't have any weak lengths at all. Gymnastics, weightlifting, rowing, everything, right? Swimming. And so that meant that gym members couldn't train confidently for unknown events. And, you know, while most of my members would never want to do a CrossFit event, back in 2009, we could confidently send 10 people to, you know, a throwdown or a competition and expect them that they might actually do well. But now none of my members could ever even dream of competing in a CrossFit competition. The high rock solution, and this is a good lesson, even if you're not a CrossFit gym, is to take the CrossFit intensity and proven movements and add predictability. It's like a marathon. The challenge doesn't change. So people can train for it. They know what to expect and they can work backward from that goal to build up to it. You know, still, most of my members could never compete in a CrossFit competition today, but most could do HIROX right now if they wanted to. This is a great benefit for gyms because number one, it's a client acquisition tool. It's actually drawing people into gyms. We have the data to show that. It's also a retention tool. You know, there's this critical one-year mark when your clients are hitting their goals and they're trying to think of like what's next, you know, and they're they're trying to see kind of a next level. HIROX is actually great for that. And it's also a revenue multiplier. You can charge separately for HIROX. It's a different program. You can have specific classes. You can also sell personal training and nutrition coaching around it. So it's a clear ROI,$130 a month investment with really measurable returns if you know how to do it right. And that's a great reason to be optimistic. Another reason to be optimistic, especially if you're in kind of the CrossFit space, but even if you're not, um, Metfix could, I think, save CrossFit. You know, CrossFit's got a mission problem right now. It lost direction after about 2018. The whole campaign of like fighting big sugar united affiliates around a common enemy, but now that's gone. And without a unifying mission, CrossFit became another workout methodology. Maybe it's our favorite, but in the eyes of the consumer, it's not that different from, you know, Orange Theory or whatever. MFIX is different, though, because it brings back a unifying mission, which is fighting metabolic disease. It has this time, though, a community-driven genius. So unlike CrossFit, where all the genius lived in Greg Glassman's head and was kind of bestowed downward to the rest of us, Mix's genius kind of emerges from the community. Right now, the community of MFIX affiliates is building tools and graphics, and they are the ones simplifying the message themselves. And it kind of feels like the genesis of something big and it's community-driven rather than uh Greg-driven, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it coming from a guru, but this feels like it's gonna have great staying power. Movements succeed when people feel ownership, and MFIX gives gym owners and coaches the ability to contribute, not just consume the basic points. And so while the path to ROI with Metfix affiliation right now is not super duper clear, we're working on that, and we're working with MFIX and within MFIX uh to help clarify that for gym owners too. So I'm excited about it, and I think there's uh a lot of reason to be optimistic about the future. One, you know, earlier I said like Metfix might save CrossFit. The reason is that Metfix and CrossFit are not competitors. You know, Greg, in person with me in Cleveland last weekend, said, I'm not gonna touch the exercise piece. I can never do better than what I did with CrossFit. It's great. Like it does not need change. Now we're working on the metabolic piece uh that's more focused on nutrition. And he his hope is that every gym goes out and gets CrossFit certifications to teach the fitness piece and works, you know, as a MetFix affiliate also to bring in the whole package. So that was reason four to be optimistic in 2026. Reason five is that small group personal training economics work better than expected. Look, when we publish our state of the industry data, it's not because I'm trying to prove a point and I'm not grinding my own axe here. The data reveals the trends and the knowledge and the best practices instead of just reinforcing or trying to prove what I'm saying. And so what's really interesting here about small group personal training data in this year's state of the industry is that lead gen data, and we're talking about like median leads per month, is almost identical for small group as for big group. So small group was generating like almost 20 leads a month, big group was generating only about 13, you know, and one of them was generating about 10. But what's really crazy and what's really close is the set and close rate. So the small group set rate, the number of people that go on your website and book an appointment to come and talk to you was 30%, and their close rate was 60%. But the big group rate, so CrossFit Fitbody Boot Camp, you know, HIT training, kettlebell, whatever, was almost identical. So small group set rate, I said 30% of people are going on your website booking an appointment. Big group, CrossFit HIT, Boot Camp, whatever, 33%. Almost the same. And close rate was almost identical too. So small group set rate, 60, uh, set rate 30%, close rate 60%, big group set rate 33%, close rate 62.5%. People are not buying or they're not more likely to buy when they come in a big group gym. And what's really interesting here, I think this is the key insight, is that while small group training gyms are tending to get more leads, the ads are almost exactly the same. So here's what this means: small group gyms get, you know, about the same number of leads as big group gyms, maybe slightly more, but they're mostly running the exact same ads. So it's the same people coming in. And that means that the same marketing is attracting the same people to small group training as it is to big group training, right? And then what's wild is that their appointment booking rate is almost identical and their purchase rate is almost identical. That means that price is not the objection, except in the gym owner's head. The clients don't know when they're coming in, if they're signing up for small group personal training or big group or whatever. So they don't have this preconceived notion, they're not pre-filtered for price. They're coming in, they're presented with a solution, and the same rate of people are signing up. Now, some of this, too, is that people who are doing small group personal training are probably better at selling their package because there's still a lot of big group training gyms who confuse doing a free trial with actually coaching somebody to change their life. That's you need a prescriptive model for either case. It's just the small group personal training gyms have been using a prescriptive model for a long time. And a lot of big group gyms have not. But if you're running a big group gym and you just want to run big groups all day, adding that prescriptive model means that you're probably gonna be able to sell or close people at a much higher rate, and they're gonna be probably paying what you're actually worth instead of what you're probably charging right now. The key here, though, is that people do not make a choice based on price between small group and big group at all. It's the same people seeing the same ads coming in, being told the price, and signing up at a rate that's about double what most big group gyms charge. So that's a reason for hope. And the reason to be optimistic here is that your pricing problems are mostly in your head. They're not in the client's head. Okay. So there's also model advantages to small group personal training that are being revealed by the data. Smaller gyms have fewer expenses, which means the owner gets to keep more. They also need fewer staff, which means that the staff who are working at small group personal training gyms generally earn a lot more, as well as the owner keeping more too, which means their business is less fragile from month to month. They all they have the same ability to attract and retain clients, but the small group personal training model has a much higher revenue per client, which is about 240 a month versus um 158 a month, right? So$80 more per client per month, and it's the same client signing up for both. It's a reason to be optimistic because it kind of shows us a clearer, simpler path forward than what a lot of us are doing with grinding with big gyms. The sixth reason to be optimistic is that the floor is rising. What this means is that even the struggling gyms are doing better than they were a year ago. The bottom tier of gyms is climbing. So if you look at the big group model, the bottom tier last year was doing about$11,500 a month. And now they're doing$13,000 and$13,500 a month, which is a 17% increase. The worst gyms are still growing by about 17%. That's great. You know, that's actually outperforming the S P 500 index, right? That's good. It means that the entrepreneurs in the fitness industry are getting better because that's what causes that increase. Small group is increasing even more. The bottom tier of small group gyms was doing about$7,600 a month last year. Now they're at$12,000 a month. That's a 58% increase. And that's because the small group personal training gyms are really starting to get their act together. And because they have fewer expenses and fewer staff, they can change the trajectory and grow so much faster. The one-on-one gyms uh saw their bottom tier improve significantly as well, because a lot of those gyms that work with us now are switching to small group. And so instead of just selling their time an hour at a time, they're putting people together and doubling their income. This is a great reason to be optimistic because it's stuff that you can do. If you want a one-on-one gym, you can start working on semi-private or small group. If you want a big group gym, you can start working on like semi-private and building that up. Like they meet in the middle, and um there's a path forward for you. Just talk to a two-brain mentor. The lowest point in my gym owner journey was not the day that the check bounced that should have paid me. It was the day when I lost hope. I had, you know, the kind of this trifecta of challenges. My rent was due. I had nothing in my account. I couldn't pay myself, I couldn't pay the coaches. But I more than that, I couldn't see a way forward. I didn't know how things were ever going to change. And so the reason that I'm sharing, hey, small group seems to be working really well, is to show you like there is a path forward for you. Whether you're owning a big group training gym, a small group or one-on-one personal training studio, there is a proven path, and everybody's doing better when they follow that path. Even the gyms at the bottom third of performance for any gym type are making more money than they did last year. And so the baseline, which was like barely hanging on and not gonna renew their lease, has moved up. So now instead of just clinging to life, the gyms are actually doing okay, which means the market is supporting better businesses at their actual value. That's a huge reason to be optimistic because that hasn't happened in the last 20 years. The seventh reason to be optimistic in 2026 are that gym owners are starting to charge what they're worth. So ARM, the average revenue per member, is up across the board. Last year, big groups averaged about 150 bucks a month. This year, they're averaging$158.54. Small group last year averaged$200 a month, now they're averaging$240 a month. One-on-one averaged$254.32 a month last year, this year$282.71. Not giant leaps, but this matters because after 10 years of encouraging gym owners to raise their rates, it's finally happening. It's not about greed, it's about sustainability. A higher ARM enables better pay for your coaches, more stable business that can weather economic changes, better service delivery because you're not broke and overtired and stressed. But most importantly, people are realizing now that it's easier to add$10 per client than it is to get and keep 10 new clients. The reason this makes me so optimistic is it's a mindset shift. Gym owners are moving from competing on price to charging for value, and the market is accepting it. It's proving us right. Your clients don't want the cheapest option, they want the best value for them. And people are starting to get that. As gym owners embrace that more and more, this trend is only going to continue. There is no downside to gym owners charging what they're worth, getting more comfortable with it, and building that expectation with their clients. None. The eighth reason to be optimistic in 2026 is that we're finally keeping clients long enough to change their lives. Hallelujah. So here's the big milestone I'm so excited about. Two-brain gyms just crossed the 24-month leg length of engagement threshold for the first time ever. Now, behavioral scientists agree that you need about two years to wire in a habit to the point where it's life-changing, where they're going to keep doing it forever. So this really, really matters because for clients, it means they're staying long enough at your gym for the transformation to actually stick. They're not just getting fit for a few months or trying something out. They're changing their lives. For your business, it matters because increasing leg by just two months can equal an extra$30,000 in income for the average gym owner. And for the industry, it matters because we're no longer just churning people through memberships. Buying a gym membership used to be this bait and switch where you try to sign people up to this long-term contract knowing they'd be out by March 17th, which is like quitting day for gyms. And instead, the retention rate data shows a 93.8% monthly retention overall now. So the big picture is we're not just selling fitness classes and choreography on the bike anymore. We're actually delivering long-term health outcomes. And that's what we all got in this business to do. Now I'm gonna just pause on the narrative here. 24-month leg might seem low to you. And if you're not measuring your length of engagement accurately, you might think that's super low. Well, my average leg is five years, right? I hear this all the time. The reality here is that if you say that your average leg is five years or even four years, it means you're probably not getting enough new clients. And everybody's been with you for a very long time, which means you've probably never increased your rates and you're probably still delivering everything yourself, you don't have a real business yet. The industry average two years ago for leg was like eight months. Last year it was about 13 months. That's more realistic. If you look around your gym at the people who joined in the last two years and ask yourself, like, how long are they staying? They're not the five year clients. They're really about two years. And if you look at all the clients you've had over time, instead of just the outliers who are around after five years, you're gonna find the average is probably under a year. Getting to two years is game changing because what that means is that when people quit your gym after two years, they're not quitting fitness. They're going out and doing 5Ks, they're learning to swim. Like me, they're cycling again. You know, maybe they're joining another gym, but they're not quitting fitness. You've actually built a life-changing habit. It's more of a graduation than a breakup, and you should feel proud of that. Mission accomplished. The ninth reason I'm so optimistic about this path in 2026 is that the business knowledge gap is the new opportunity, and that is a solvable gap. You know, Tubrain exists to solve that gap for you. So here's why I say that. First, owner profit data tells an incredible story. Okay, so the big group median, if we take like all the big group gyms and we break down how much the owner is actually making and we group together the most common number, that median is$52,200 a year. Okay, that's what I would call the average. But the big group mean, if you just add up all the money made by big group gyms and divide by the number of gyms, is$97,656 a year. That means that the top gym owners are doing about$20,000 a month in profit or an extra$240,000 a year. Now, there is a gap, right? There's a gap between these top performing gyms and like the average gym. And that gap between mean and median shows that skilled owners who treat this as a business and not just a passion project or a hobby are pulling way ahead. So they're not just developing their coaching skills, they're developing their business skills. These aren't outliers or anomalies, they're talented business owners who've been coached to create world-class businesses. They are not just lucky, they're not starting out with more money than you. They're investing in business coaching and learning the skills to actually run a business. That means it's possible for virtually anybody to learn the skills and put in the work and get to where they're going. You know, we publish a leaderboard every month here on TwoBrain Radio, and we show like what the top 10 are doing. And every single time, we've been doing this for, I don't know, eight years. Every single time they say, I just do what my two-brain mentor told me. Or they might say, like, I'm I'm running this and I've got all four funnels working, right? There's no secrets. There's there's nothing that these people are doing that's magically better than what you're doing. There's no secret knowledge they possess that you don't, that's been hidden from you. What they're doing is learning exactly what to do and doing it. The degree of success depends on your ability to do it and do it and do it again. That's it. It's not to acquire secret or higher level knowledge. Everything that you need is in the Two Brain Mentorship program. The coach is there to make sure that you do the work because that is the separator between the top gyms in the world and the bottom and the median. What's really interesting about these top gyms is what they're not doing. They're not working 80-hour weeks, right? They're not twice as successful because they're working twice as hard. They're not underpaying staff. They're not twice as profitable because they're twice as greedy. They're not using bait and switch tactics. There's no secret marketing recipe that they're trying, then it's going to fade away in six months. They're not burning themselves out. What they are doing is they're taking a scientific approach to business. They're looking at their numbers regularly. They're building skills through mentorship, they're using their staff to grow their businesses instead of trying to do everything themselves. That presents an amazing opportunity for you, which is the professionalization of gym ownership. And this also means that like the opportunity has never been bigger in the fitness space for those who are willing to learn the business side. You don't need to be the best coach in the world. You just need to be good at owning a gym. I mean, if you're a B plus coach who's also a B plus gym owner, you're going to be in the top 10% of gym owners worldwide because most gym owners are an A plus coach and a D plus or C minus gym owner. And they never ever realize the value of their skills. The tenth reason I'm so optimistic about 2026 is that AI is our tool, not our competitor. Okay, so the gap in trust with using AI is growing. A lot of gym owners are kind of worried about AI, like, oh, geez, I just saw a co-pilot now does like this video on training session where it's analyzing. But consumer trust in organizations that are managing personal data has dropped sharply. Over 17% of consumers have full trust in organizations that are handling their identity data. And even as AI usage jumped from 41% to 68% of consumers in one year, less than half of those consumers now believe the benefits of outline of online services outweigh their privacy concerns. And this is the lowest level it's been since 2019. That means that your ideal client wants humans, they want interaction. Your ideal clients, the people who are stable in their career, they're over 30, like they're probably landed with a family, they're busy with their kids, they are the most skeptical of AI trainers. 68% of older adults are concerned that AI might reduce human interactions. And among older adults who used AI for health information, 47% said human interaction would be better. A striking 80% of AI non-adopters prefer interacting with people over machines, and 53% say they need to feel accountable to another human for this to work. So this is a double win for gym owners. First, you can still use AI behind the scenes, let AI tools generate your marketing content, adjust your ads, auto-send messages, and even help write your programming. It makes you more efficient and frees you up for the human stuff that your clients want to buy. And that means that you can be the human in front of your clients because your clients know that the website chatbot is automated. They know your emails might be automatically generated or at least sent. They might even suspect that you use AI for your programming, but they want to believe that you are checking it, altering it, tailoring it, filtering it as a human. And the bottom line here is that we can use AI as tools without fearing AI is our replacement. We can be AI's master, not its competitor. Your clients don't want a robot coach. They want a human who's smart enough to use robots to deliver better coaching, and that's you. I personally think that fitness is uniquely positioned to use AI here instead of competing with it. Because research shows that older adults emphasize the irreplaceable role of human expertise and interaction in healthcare, highlighting that AI should be integrated as a supportive tool alongside providers, not as a replacement. That's us, that's physicians, that's nurses, that's paramedics. We're not just selling workouts, we're selling human accountability, connection, and expertise. And AI should make us better at that by taking the other stuff off our plate instead of making us obsolete. More and more gym owners are acting on these tactics. A lot of gym owners listen to this podcast, they get our free resources, they read our blog every single day. 40,000 people read our blog every day. Thank you. The ones who take action are seeing dramatic results. And that's why you're starting to see them like pull away. The great thing, though, is that the entire industry is being pulled along with them, as some people learn, but more slowly. The industry is growing, revenue is up, gym owners are charging what they're worth, we're keeping clients long enough to change their lives. New ideas like HyROX and Metfix are creating a lot of energy. The business knowledge gap means that there's room to grow if you're willing to learn and act on your knowledge. And AI is a tool that makes us better, not a competitor that replaces us. The opportunity has never been bigger for gym owners who are willing to charge what they're worth, learn how to run a business, use modern tools intelligently, and then focus on being the human being that their clients need. Here's to 2026. I hope it's your best year ever.