How do you go to the gym?
Do you mosey over to a bare-walled local establishment that vaguely smells of old sweat and hasn't been renovated for 20 years?
Or do you walk over to a gym/coworking space/cocktail lounge/fitness restaurant/art gallery/event space/high-end member's club?
If you do the latter, you may be part of an emerging elite where it's obviously assumed that you're working out. What matters now is how and where you are working out.
Think about it. In the old times, it used to be that the meatheads ruled the gyms. The more muscle you had packed on, the higher status you were. Think Gold's Gym in the 70's when Arnold and his protein posse would rule the roost.
In the brave new world of lifestyle gyms, however, the heros are a bit more complicated. It's not enough that you look like a guy who may or may not have given serious thought to injecting protein intravenously while sleeping. But nor is it some new "geek" cult either. In fact, many people at luxury gyms are just as hardcore as their less trendy brethren consigned to the local basement establishment. Again, what matters now is not if you have muscle but how you have muscle.
What does that look like? Well, in essence, the fashionable gym-goer of today want their experience to be something between a luxury boutique hotel and Ivan Drago's training montage in Rocky 4.
These aesthetics are important, but they're not the main thing. The real key to be one of the people who "get it" at the new lifestyle gyms is to be tapped into wellness. Wellness is a very important and purposefully vague term that basically means it's about to get expensive. It's not that simple of course, but it does quickly start to overlap with wider luxury categories of consumption. It is really a mindset of consumption, a kind of meta-brand of affording self-care. Most importantly, at the luxury lifestyle gym it is the indispensable pathway to mastering the "how" part of your muscles.
And this is really the argument here. Lifestyle gyms ultimately do not just offer multi-function spaces out of some simpleton idea of having a nice club-house for grownups. It's much more serious than that, or else people wouldn't pay as much as they do.
The reality is that by providing markers of a well-rounded life centered on wellness the gym experience becomes lifestyle affirmation and social signal rolled into a single glorious package. That affirmation and signaling tells a simple story: By being well, I'm doing well.
And that, ultimately, is where it becomes about social status on two levels. The crass membership cost part is easy enough to understand, but any old pleb can win the lottery any old day. Does simply paying the price of admission mean a full integration into the lifestyle heaven of the luxury gym? Heck no! Such hoi-polloi tactics won't get the mindset of wellness that must course through all exercise activities, lest you be no more than a sweaty animal trying to people walk in these places.
So don't be fooled that all gyms are equal anymore. Luxury lifestyle gyms focused on wellness are fast becoming the new breed marker of a social status that both affords it and "gets it".
