Tomorrow Health

Kids slipped in at 5:59 pm to beat peak pricing. Felipe Apablaza, CEO of Grupo Wellness, turned that into a gym with no membership.

Felipe Apablaza runs DMOOV, a membership club chain in Chile, and Neo, a gym with no membership at all: you pay per visit and the price moves with demand. His co-founder came from airline revenue management. He says 40% of Neo's users were not going to any gym before, which raises the question of who the monthly contract leaves out.

In this conversation:

• Why kids walking in at 5:59 pushed DMOOV towards peak-hour pric
• How a 90-person cap and a twelve-visit ceiling shape what members pay
• Who comes to a gym that has no membership, and what it costs to bring them in
• Why a free app, not the gym, is Neo's acquisition channel
• How he plans to take pay-per-visit into other operators' clubs

Season 2 of Tomorrow Health is sponsored by Zing Coach - every gym member, personally coached.

Chapters:

00:00 Why the monthly contract is wearing out

00:10 Grupo Wellness, Neo and three things to listen for

01:12 Six companies and a sports city

02:25 DMOOV: one price, every training space

03:43 Ten million in revenue, seven from DMOOV

03:57 Why build a second gym brand

04:42 Kids at 5:59 and an airline revenue manager

05:58 What Gen Z does on a gym floor

06:19 Three things Gen Z wants

06:38 Strength, mirrors and DJ nights

07:36 Pay per visit, 90 people at a time

08:41 From 12 to 55 dollars a month

09:03 A 3.50 average check-in, benchmarked on Smart Fit

09:28 13,000 visitors and 40% new to gyms

10:36 Who the 40% are, and what they cost to acquire

11:25 The free app as acquisition channel

12:28 Nine gyms in Chile, then Peru, Colombia and Argentina

12:59 Why the gym itself is a commodity

13:40 How dynamic pricing flattened the peaks

14:53 What changes in Europe and the US

16:05 Building a technology company out of a gym

17:28 Plugging into the CRMs gyms already use

18:17 Why Latin America is a year behind

19:06 Price points decide Latin America

19:57 What the industry gets wrong about technology

20:26 One decision: four visits a month, not twelve

Links:

* Felipe Apablaza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipeapablaza/

* Neo Plex: https://www.neoplex.cl

* Zing Coach, season sponsor: https://zing.coach/

* Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karbasova/

* Tomorrow Health: https://tomorrow-health.com

* Get episode alerts: https://tomorrow-health.com/#subscribe

* Apply to join FitTech Club: https://fittechclub.com/

192 clubs, 500,000 members, 19.90 euros a month. FitActive founder Eduardo Montefusco on why the next margin comes from software, not square metres.

A FitActive club costs around a million euros to build today, roughly double what it cost ten years ago, and the membership price has not moved. Montefusco runs 192 clubs across seven countries and owns all or most of every one of them, having stopped signing franchise partners altogether on 1 January 2025.

In this conversation:

• Why the word franchise was never the right one for what he built
• What 51 per cent lets him do in eight days that a franchise agreement does not
• Why his banks wanted him to stop taking partners
• Why 19.90 stays fixed while everything around it gets more expensive
• What he expects AI to do to a retention rate that has already moved from 32 to 38

Season 2 of Tomorrow Health is sponsored by Zing Coach - every gym member, personally coached.

Chapters:

00:00 Why he does not need franchisees

01:09 192 clubs, seven countries, 500,000 members

01:53 Why this is not a franchise, and the eight-day clause

03:59 Why partners open a second club

05:27 What a single club costs to build

06:31 Stopping franchising, and what the banks wanted

07:24 Breakeven at 2.1 members per square metre

08:44 Retention at 38 per cent and the AI bet

10:53 Costs doubled, revenue did not

11:53 Selling more to the same member

12:33 What travels to Spain and Brazil

13:50 Where the company goes in five years

14:26 Two tax regimes and a distorted market

15:56 The one decision he would make this quarter

Links:

• Eduardo Montefusco on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-montefusco-53155521/
• FitActive: https://www.fitactive.it/
• Zing Coach, season sponsor: https://zing.coach/
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karbasova/
• Tomorrow Health: https://tomorrow-health.com
• Get episode alerts: https://tomorrow-health.com/#subscribe
• Apply to join FitTech Club: https://fittechclub.com/

A gym is a database. Elaine Jobson, CEO of BeWell Brands and Jetts Fitness, on why Gen Z is rewriting the budget-gym model.

Elaine Jobson led the management buyout of Jetts Fitness in 2022, then built BeWell Brands on top of it: a franchise house that runs the same franchise engine across gym, recovery and group-exercise brands.

On her count, Jetts runs 130 gyms in Australia and about 200 overall, with clubs in the UK, the Netherlands and now India. She puts the group at well over 100 million dollars in revenue, and says it is not even halfway.

Her argument is that Gen Z, now the majority of new members on her numbers, wants a gym worth filming from every angle and will pay a bit more for it. The big budget chains, she says, can only change at the pace of their refurbishment cycles.

She also explains why Jetts runs no contracts at all, why she will not put water into a gym nobody staffs overnight, and which market she is looking at for the first time.

🧠 What you will hear:

• Why the membership system holds almost all the IP of a gym
• How Jetts changes around 30% of its concept from Delhi to London
• What never changes, and how she takes the word love to a boardroom
• Why she says contracts only help the business, and what she does instead
• What makes the US interesting for the first time
• Why the budget chains will struggle to keep up with Gen Z
• What the industry gets wrong about unit numbers

⏱️ Timestamps: 

00:00 A gym is effectively a database

00:11 Jetts, BeWell and three things to listen for

01:09 More products on the same shelf

02:16 Jetts, O-Studio and Fitesque by the numbers

03:22 Why franchise

03:33 Over 100 million and not halfway

03:49 Where the franchisee's dollar goes

04:26 The tech stack behind a 24-hour gym

05:09 Why every CEO loses sleep over security

06:01 HYROX: a trend more than an innovation

06:32 Why Jetts is not bleeding edge

07:11 No water in a gym nobody staffs

08:26 What changes between Delhi, London and Australia

10:04 The 70% that never changes

10:22 How to measure love in a boardroom

11:15 A Net Promoter Score that never dips

11:59 Contracts only help the business

13:19 Members who leave and come back

14:21 The Middle East, and the US for the first time

14:48 Gen Z is the majority of new members

15:48 Accessible premium versus the budget chains

16:50 Filmability in a design brief

17:45 Why HVLP is not going anywhere

18:25 Social strength

19:23 Why budget chains can't move fast enough

20:00 The obsession with unit numbers

20:51 One decision: how much to invest in AI

🌐 Links:

• Elaine Jobson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elaine-jobson-72a8a33
• BeWell Brands: https://www.bewellbrands.com.au/
• Jetts Fitness: https://www.jetts.com.au/
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karbasova/
• Tomorrow Health: https://tomorrow-health.com
• Get episode alerts: https://tomorrow-health.com/#subscribe
• Apply to join FitTech Club: https://fittechclub.com/

This episode is sponsored by Zing.Coach: Every member, personally coached. Learn more: https://zing.coach/

Juan del Río ran VivaGym for nine years. He joined in 2016, when it had fifteen gyms in Spain. By the time he handed over, on his own count, it was around three hundred clubs across Spain and Portugal.

In this episode he sets out a framework he calls moments of truth: the specific points in a member's life where intervention decides whether they stay. The first visit. The month usage drops. The anniversary nobody notices. The member still paying who stopped coming two weeks ago.

I put it to him that this sounds like a people problem rather than a technology one. He disagrees, and his answer is the clearest case I have heard for why a gym floor needs software.

He also puts a number on what makes a club work, warns that his own segment has taken quantum leaps in pricing, and names the growth he wishes he had not slowed down.

What you will hear:
- What a low-cost club needs before it works, and why 400 members is a dead room
- How he clusters moments of truth so a club of 250 addresses only the fifteen who need it
- Why he refuses to choose between quality and quantity
- Opening versus acquiring, and why he would not trade one for the other
- What broke first between fifteen clubs and three hundred
- Why he replaced the membership system, the CRM and the apps during the pandemic
- The most costly mistake of his tenure

00:00 Speed is the only real competitor
00:24 Nine years, fifteen gyms to three hundred
01:32 What caught his attention in fitness
02:10 What changed in how he runs the business
02:57 Moments of truth, defined
04:12 What you actually do with them
04:44 People problem or technology problem
06:45 Why speed beat every competitor
07:32 The ladder: 100, 300, a million members, a thousand gyms
09:41 Franchise or own the clubs
10:34 What one club needs before it works
11:47 Cost structure and inflation
12:42 Build or buy
13:16 What breaks first at scale
14:16 Quantum leaps in pricing
15:07 Why Spaniards use their gyms more
15:37 Who walks in now
16:22 Health beyond the gym floor
16:59 The mistake he would undo
17:19 What everyone gets wrong
17:34 One piece of advice to an operator
18:18 The back-to-school quarter

Links:

- VivaGym: https://vivagym.es
- Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karbasova/
- Tomorrow Health: https://tomorrow-health.com
- Get episode alerts: https://tomorrow-health.com/#subscribe
- Apply to join FitTech Club: https://fittechclub.com/

120,000 members and a 70% use rate. NYSC CEO Bill McMenamy on what it costs when members actually turn up.

Most club economics quietly depend on members who never come. Bill McMenamy built the opposite: a majority of his members check in more than 16 times a month, his use rate is above 70%, and he is candid that it costs him more in repairs, maintenance and capital than a half-empty gym would. He took over New York Sports Club in 2022, straight out of Chapter 11, with a fifty-year-old name and, in his words, no website, no app, no CRM and no equipment worth having. He came from Gap and from pharma, not from fitness. Today he runs 32 clubs across four cities, ten public partnerships, the boutique brand Fhitting Room, and 120,000 members.

In this conversation:

• Why a full gym is more expensive to run than an empty one, and why he wants it anyway
• What the club everyone told him not to invest in now returns
• Why he refuses to measure ten partnerships on ROI, and what he looks at instead
• What a human coach is for once software writes the training plan
• Why he is about to stop charging members for something they pay for today

This season of Tomorrow Health is brought to you by Zing Coach.

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open

00:16 Intro

01:16 Fitness is immature in its use of data

02:51 Three kinds of member, one building

04:26 The club nobody wanted

05:27 Rebuilding a brand that had nothing left

06:55 From three visits a month to sixteen

07:40 Why he refuses to measure partnerships on ROI

08:29 Selling units is not selling solutions

09:27 What a coach is for once software writes the plan

12:48 Why he is about to stop charging for the app

13:56 Which health markers are worth optimising

14:40 Insurance will write the exercise prescription

15:41 Subscription rules are about to change the model

16:48 Why a boutique does not work inside a big box

18:41 Invest in your people this quarter

Links:

• Bill McMenamy on LinkedIn
• New York Sports Club
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Get episode alerts
• Apply to join FitTech Club

One in 75 Latin Americans passes through Smart Fit's platform. Founder Edgard Corona on why he built his own aggregator.

Every large gym chain watched corporate benefit platforms take a share of their members and negotiated over the terms. Edgard Corona built his own instead, lost money on it for years, and now holds more than a third of that market in Brazil. He founded Smart Fit in 1996 and built it into the largest fitness operator in Latin America, more than 2,000 clubs across 16 countries, and moved to chairman in March when his son took over as chief executive.

The season was brought to you by Zing Coach.

In this conversation:

• Why the cost of money in Latin America, not strategy, decides how many clubs he owns

• What a low-cost operator has to change before it can open in Morocco

• Why a gym group is buying its own NVIDIA hardware instead of renting compute

• What he thinks every large chain got wrong about aggregators, and what it cost them

• Where the model behind all of this actually came from, and it is not fitness

• What has to be true before a gym chain can call itself a health company

Chapters:

00:00 One in 75 Latin Americans is on the platform

00:27 Who he is and what he is building

01:23 What Smart Fit actually is, and where it goes next

02:38 Why he owns eight in ten clubs instead of franchising

03:24 What travels into a new market and what does not

04:15 Where new concepts get tested before they reach a budget club

04:59 The part of the experience nobody is building yet

05:21 Why a gym chain built its own aggregator

07:09 What it takes to put a rival gym on your platform

08:19 Build or buy, and the cost of capital behind it

09:35 The mistake he thinks the industry made

10:11 The members who had never trained anywhere

11:13 What stops a gym chain becoming a health company

11:52 What he took from Life Time, and the wearable plan

13:55 From fingerprints to face recognition at the door

14:37 Ten years out

15:03 One decision

Links:

• Edgard Corona on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn

• Tomorrow Health website

• Apply to join FitTech Club

• Zing Coach

Season 2 opener, brought to you by Zing Coach. Only 22 percent of people ever try a personal trainer, says Zing Coach CEO Anton Marchanka.

Personal training is the most effective retention tool a club has, and almost nobody buys it. Anton Marchanka puts the lifetime trial rate at around 22 percent, and says the reason is structural: there are not enough trainers to meet the demand, and the ones who exist cost more than the membership. He runs Zing Coach, which built a consumer AI coaching app and now licenses the model into clubs including New York Sports Clubs, and he ran Daily Burn before that, so he has operated both sides of that line.

In this conversation:

• Why he charges operators per active member rather than per location, and why the price per member falls as usage rises
• What Zing Coach had to unlearn from the consumer business before the first club deployment worked
• Why high-value-low-price clubs and boutiques buy the same product for opposite reasons
• Who the product does not work for, in his own words
• What integration actually costs an operator, in a number he gives on the record

Chapters:

00:00 The 22 percent who ever try a personal trainer

00:52 Why Daily Burn pushed him off the mobile-only path

02:43 What 850,000 paying users showed about retention

03:50 Not enough trainers, and too expensive

05:18 What selling into gyms forced him to unlearn

06:59 Who this does not work for

07:18 Charging per active member, not per location

09:03 Why budget clubs and boutiques buy this for opposite reasons

12:04 The consumer app as a testing ground

13:02 Strength training, AI adoption and community

15:27 What integration actually costs

15:58 What operators get wrong on day one

18:08 The gym floor as a guided experience

Links:

• Anton Marchanka on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health website
• Apply to join FitTech Club

A prescribed health app in Germany sells for 200 euros. Adham Kassab, COO of haelsi, on where 120 of it goes.

Germany lets public health insurers pay for a prescribed app. That sounds like the easiest distribution deal in consumer health until you price the entry: an information security certification, an audit, a randomised controlled trial, ongoing reporting, and a further charge every time you change the product. And once you are listed, the person using the app is not the person paying for it.

Adham Kassab ran Selfapy, one of Germany's best known prescribed digital therapy companies for mental health, through its sale to MEDICE. He is now Chief Operations Officer at haelsi in Vienna, a network of health centres that sells corporate memberships, rents capacity to doctors and builds its own digital services on top. He has run the software side and the physical side of the same market.

In this conversation:

- Why prescribed health apps in Germany cluster around the same price, and what is actually left per order

- Why "customer" is the wrong word in healthcare, and which of the three stakeholders blocks the deal

- Why most digital health products have not reached profitable unit economics

- Why doctors stopped being persuaded by downloads, retention and engagement

- What the fitness industry has to prove before an insurer will pay for strength training, and the one step a gym operator can take this week

Recorded in early 2026.

Chapters:

00:00 Three people in a restaurant: who is the customer

00:12 Unit economics and how fitness gets paid, in brief

01:26 What Selfapy is, in plain terms

03:12 Three tiers of health app, and only one gets reimbursed

04:40 One orders, one eats, one pays, and what listing costs

06:10 200 euros per prescription, 80 euros of margin

07:18 haelsi: centres, corporate memberships and doctor rentals

09:39 GLP-1, muscle loss and why there are no fitness partners

11:05 Why doctors do not prescribe strength training

11:31 What fitness has to prove, and one step to take this week

14:29 What a clinic chain and a therapy app share

15:40 Outcome-based reimbursement changes the top metric

16:53 Big tech in health: more potential, not more effectiveness

17:26 Consumerization is not reversible

18:15 Pulse check: seven questions, seven answers

Links:

• Adham Kassab on LinkedIn
• Haelsi
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

Life Time has 17.2 million square feet under roof and 1.5 million members. Jeff Zwiefel on converting both into a longevity business.

Recorded in 2025.

Most operators talk about adding a medical offer. Life Time built one inside the clubs it already owns, and Jeff Zwiefel puts numbers on it: what a single location produces, what margin it carries, and how much of an existing membership base he expects to convert.

Zwiefel was president and chief operating officer of Life Time, which he joined when it had seven clubs in Minnesota and left at 180. In his final years there he was building MIORA Longevity and Performance, the company's longevity business, and separately a new vertical, Life Time Health.

In this conversation:

- Why Life Time treats longevity as a conversion problem rather than an acquisition problem

- What one longevity location produces per month, and the margin band he underwrites

- The share of an existing membership base he expects to buy, and why he thinks it is not higher

- Why the hardest of his three build problems was hiring practitioners, not clinical design

- The research that changed his mind on GLP-1s, and what he thinks the category is worth to health clubs

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open

00:29 Introduction

01:39 Seven clubs to a lifestyle company

03:15 The two projects he is scaling

05:31 The longevity gold rush

06:32 Inside the metabolic code

08:28 Hub and spoke, not club by club

09:37 What one location can produce

11:15 How much of the base converts

11:56 Three things that nearly broke it

13:23 Whether this travels outside the US

14:48 Clinic KPIs against club KPIs

16:18 GLP-1s and the health club industry

18:42 Where the next growth comes from

20:15 What he is watching next

Links:

• Jeff Zwiefel on LinkedIn
• Life Time
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

150 events in the 150 biggest cities, and HYROX is at 85. Co-founder Christian Toetzke on why a race fills gyms instead of emptying them.

Recorded in 2025.

The fitness industry built itself on burning calories and aesthetics. Christian Toetzke's argument is that no other sport in the world runs on that motivation, and that this is the reason the average gym membership does not survive the spring. His alternative is a dated external goal that a member trains toward, which changes both how long they stay and what they will pay for.

Toetzke co-founded HYROX in Hamburg in 2017 with Moritz Fürste. It runs a standardised indoor fitness race, the same format in every city it enters, and licenses the training programme behind it to affiliated gyms through HYROX 365 for a monthly fee. Before HYROX he built and sold a mass-participation cycling event business, so he has taken the same thesis into two categories.

In this conversation:

- Why HYROX is the only mass-participation format that sends people into gyms rather than out of them

- What a gym has to package and sell before the affiliate licence pays for itself

- Why Toetzke will never open a HYROX gym, and what that decision protects

- What the gym industry gets wrong about the motivation it has been selling for forty years

- Why he thinks the profitable gym of the next decade owns less equipment, not more

Chapters:

00:00 Why an athlete spends differently

00:28 Christian Toetzke and the HYROX model

01:23 The three markets still missing

02:39 Why the product is deliberately offline

04:08 How a gym becomes an affiliate

04:40 The only race that sends people into the gym

08:35 The motivation the gym industry never sold

10:44 From elite to everyone

11:50 Which gyms the format actually fits

12:29 Why HYROX will never open its own gyms

14:00 Electronic targets and machine judging

16:09 The gym as the place your week is built around

18:12 Why the profitable gym owns less equipment

Links:

• Christian Toetzke on LinkedIn
• Hyrox
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club