The Peloton Alternative to Traditional Gyms: How Peloton Paved the Way for "Chic Home Fitness" Innovation
The Peloton alternative provides you a different option than the classic gym membership that many dread. Peloton has raced ahead to become a household name, synonymous with working out at home for many.
Now, more people than ever are thinking about skipping the gym to stay home and workout without so much as putting a foot out the door. Local startup, Golden Home Fitness, founded in Winchester in 2015 with a new Personal Training Studio in North Andover, has taken this trend a step further, bringing in-home fitness instruction out of the screen and into real life, with in-home and on-site Personal Training.
Here, we’ll cover how Peloton has set the pace for the field and paved the way for local companies like Golden Home Fitness to clip-in, get in the saddle, and help clients on the road to fitness success, right at home.
The Clothes Hanger Treadmill
It’s an archetypal vice: the “Clothes Hanger Treadmill,” the January 15th cupboard of untouched Kale Smoothies, the Gym Membership that’s never used but kept for “next week/month/tomorrow when I’ll get into gear…” Hopefully, these familiar tropes are foreign to you, but frankly, as we all know, it is far to easy to slide down this slippery slope of “almost did.” Now, why is this such a common problem?
It’s because we’re asking ourselves to climb Mount Everest without any extra oxygen; we’ve hamstrung our chances of success before even starting. By making health and fitness a rugged endeavor, where we have to summon all the willpower and carry on through the pain, we make it far to easy to quit. After all, no one’s forcing us to do it (usually), and if we decided to drink Kale Smoothies, we could just as well decide to quit.
The Maillot Jaune of “Chic Home Fitness” Equipment
Now, with that mindset of “no pain, no gain,” home fitness has been relegated to the fringe, even with the ease of the Peloton alternative. Why would you want to think of agonizing workouts when you’re trying to watch Netflix?
The key is to make going towards your fitness goals fun, attractive, results-driven, and incremental. You should look forward to not just the result, but to enjoy the process, choose the activities and equipment that you can integrate into your day-to-day lifestyle.
Where Peloton has changed the game is by making challenging seem chic, sweaty feel swanky, and intense feel inspired. A now-viral twitter chain makes fun of the company’s seemingly over-the-top advertising of where Peloton bikes look to be best-suited.
Still, the effect of this persistent branding, combined with showrooms in luxurious malls (something itself blasphemous of for home workout gear), has opened the door for an entirely new “Chic Home Fitness” industry. The success of this approach is evident in their 0.65% churn rate (monthly membership turnover), which is roughly a quarter of what most gyms experience.
Racing Ahead of the Peloton Alternative Together
Despite the negative attention on being over-priced or unnecessary, people seem to be agreeing with their wallets. Having grown from $348.6 million to $719.2 million in revenues during the Fiscal Year 2019 and recently held their Initial Public Offering raising over $1 Billion, there seems no sign of slowing down the cadence soon. New competitors such as Mirror, Fight Camp, and Tonal, as well as established brands like Technogym, have capitalized on this new mindset towards exercising at-home in style.
What all these companies lack is an in-person human connection. Local startup Golden Home Fitness has addressed this need while providing the convenient, time-saving, and results-driven training that we’ve now come to associate with these “Chic Home Fitness” companies. This approach has struck a chord, having seen steady growth since founding in 2015, now including a live personal training and wellness studio in North Andover. More and more people are associating fitness success with fitness in-home: they do not see it as a painful process, but as an elegant addition to home life, and as an inspired, fun, and chic addition to daily living.
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By Coach Will H. Hansen, a professional Personal Trainer of six years and a Home Fitness enthusiast of over fifteen years. Photos include Coach Dovile Zemaityte on a Gronk Fitness RXM Bike in the cover photo, as well as the GHF Team with Gordie Gronkowski Jr. of Gronk Fitness Products at the Studio Grand Opening.