Fitness is B.S.

16/05/2026

Three residents are suing the gym below them. They want to push opening hours from 5am to 9am. Now a judge has to legally define how early is too early to grunt.

16/05/2026

90% of gym-goers can't predict their own habit forming, even as it's forming in front of them. Researchers proved this in a Berkeley field experiment, and your members are still proving it on your gym floor today.

Link in the comments to the research and how it can help your members

09/05/2026

Using power words like FREE, NOW, and FLASH in your emails may be affecting your open rates.
A new linguistics study on 31,812 marketing emails found those words reduce opens by 3.5%. ALL CAPS reduces them another 3.3%
I have written a blog on how you can apply the study to your newsletter, link in the comments.

02/05/2026

If your gym's marketing to over-55s runs on fear of decline or defiance of ageing (the "turn back the clock" kind of copy), think again. A 2026 paper that followed more than 11,000 older adults for twelve years gives you a reason to rethink it.

Link to my blog post on this in the comments

27/04/2026

26/04/2026

Spent some time this week reading research on something called partitioned pricing, which sounds dry but actually changed my mind on joining fees.
The basic finding is that when researchers showed people the same total cost laid out two different ways, one with a joining fee and a monthly rate listed separately, the other bundled into a single all-inclusive monthly price, the version with two separate numbers consistently won on purchase intent. Same money out of the consumer's pocket either way, just a different result depending on how it was presented.
Which is awkward, because the industry's spent years waiving joining fees on the assumption that fewer numbers means less friction at the point of sale.
Anyone here actually tested it both ways?
https://fitnessisbs.com/partitioned-pricing-gym-membership/

21/04/2026

Link to the answer in comments

18/04/2026

A 2025 paper in the Southern Economic Journal found something counterintuitive on confidence and member retention.
Less confident members who came in without expecting much stayed longer than the ones who signed up with the before-and-after photo already in their head.
Inflated belief, the paper argues, doesn't push a new member through a slow week six. It helps them walk away from it earlier.
Full piece in the first comment for anyone who wants the mechanism

18/04/2026

Would you trade 25% of your sales for a "prettier" ad? 📉

New research from Elmashhara et al. (2026) reveals a massive gap in how our brains process Facebook ads.

In a head-to-head test:
📸 Photograph ads saw a 71.1% click-through rate.
🎨 Illustrated ads saw only 46.1%.

Why? Because illustrations provide "enjoyment," but photographs provide trust. Your brain looks at a real face to decide if a business is credible. A cartoon? It’s just easy on the eye.

If you’re choosing Canva templates because they look "cleaner," you might be accidentally killing your conversion rate.

Read the full breakdown of the science in the comments

11/04/2026

My money is on the Joker as the culprit.