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The fitness industry has proven consumers will pay premiums for experience — Life Time grew Q2 2026 revenue 13.7% while membership rose just 1.2%. Now, according to an Athletech News report, operators and health-tech firms like InsideTracker are pursuing a harder prize: selling provable health outcomes, both to members and to healthcare payers shifting toward results-based contracts.
The fitness industry has mastered monetizing experience — recovery lounges, cold plunges and premium tiers that members reliably pay for — but its next revenue opportunity lies in selling measurable health outcomes, according to a new Athletech News analysis. The report, citing Q2 2026 earnings and comments from InsideTracker CEO Rony Sellam, argues that amenities are a “thin moat” that competitors can replicate, while demonstrated, clinically credible results — from individual blood biomarker guidance to results-based contracts with healthcare payers — represent a harder-to-copy frontier.
The experience model is working, for now. Life Time grew revenue 13.7% to $866 million in the second quarter of 2026 while membership grew just 1.2%, according to the report — a revenue gain of 11.8% per membership. At Planet Fitness, Black Card penetration has climbed from 62.6% in 2021 to 68%, and even value-market YMCA operators have signed up hundreds of members for monthly recovery add-ons.
The industry’s underlying base is strong. A record 81 million Americans belonged to a gym, studio or fitness facility in 2025 — 26.1% of the population aged six and older — logging nearly 7 billion visits, with no-shows at an all-time low of 4.6%, the report states.
But Sellam argues the amenity race is commoditizing. “Amenities can deliver great returns, but they’re a thin moat,” he said. “As experiences become table stakes, the next tier has to be something a competitor can’t order from a catalog.” The report points to consumer appetite for health insight as evidence: wearable ownership has climbed from 13% in 2015 to 46%, and Quest Diagnostics expects its consumer testing business to grow 20%-30% in 2027, reaching $250 million. When members want to know what is happening inside their bodies, that spending often leaves the gym ecosystem — what Sellam calls “wallet-share leaking out of operators’ own relationships,” not churn.
InsideTracker’s answer is its Terra platform, a modular health intelligence system that combines blood biomarkers with activity, sleep, nutrition and DNA data to generate individualized, evidence-based guidance — infrastructure the company says fitness businesses can integrate rather than build themselves.
From Membership Fees to Healthcare Contracts
The stakes extend beyond selling more add-ons to existing members. According to the report, 44.9% of U.S. healthcare payments already flow through arrangements tied to results rather than services, and performance-based contracts with digital health vendors can put vendor fees at risk against measured outcomes. Buyers in those arrangements expect validated clinical measures — such as HbA1c and blood pressure — rather than the attendance, engagement and satisfaction metrics fitness operators traditionally track.
New federal initiatives are widening that door. The report cites CMS’s ACCESS model, which ties payments for technology-supported chronic care to measurable health outcomes, and MAHA ELEVATE, which is testing evidence-based preventive care approaches that include physical activity. Together, they point toward chronic disease management and prevention as potential entry points for fitness operators seeking payer relationships — a market far larger than premium memberships.
The fitness industry’s premiumization wave has run roughly a decade. Operators layered recovery lounges, cold plunges, red light therapy and tiered memberships onto traditional offerings, and members paid: the Planet Fitness Black Card shift and Life Time’s per-member revenue growth illustrate how operators expanded average spend without proportional membership growth. That model coincided with record engagement — the 2025 figures of 81 million members, nearly 7 billion visits and record-low no-shows marked a high point for the industry, according to the report.
At the same time, consumer health testing moved mainstream. Wearable ownership more than tripled since 2015, major wearable and virtual-care companies integrated blood testing, and diagnostics firms forecast sustained growth in direct-to-consumer testing — creating a competitive threat to gyms’ share of member health spending.
“The industry has already answered the question of whether consumers will pay more for a better experience. The next question is how they show the next generation of services is moving the needle beyond better fitness and performance, and delivering measurable results in other areas of health and wellbeing.”
— Rony Sellam, CEO of InsideTracker
Whether Members and Payers Will Pay
The report is an analysis, not a demonstration: no fitness operator has yet shown at scale that outcome-based health services can generate revenue comparable to the amenity boom. Whether members will pay premiums for biomarker-linked guidance — beyond the 46% who already own wearables — remains untested across market segments, from value gyms to luxury clubs.
On the healthcare side, the pathway is early. ACCESS and MAHA ELEVATE are new federal initiatives still in testing phases, and it is not yet clear what evidence thresholds payers will require before contracting with fitness operators, or how quickly any such contracts could scale. Building the “intelligence layer” connecting fitness services to clinical biomarkers also involves regulatory, privacy and data-quality questions the report does not fully address. InsideTracker cites peer-reviewed science and longitudinal data behind its approach, but independent adoption results for the Terra platform were not detailed in the available material.
Watch Biomarker Pilots and Payer Deals
Indicators to watch include whether gym chains and studio operators begin integrating blood-biomarker testing and health intelligence platforms into memberships, and whether Quest Diagnostics’ forecast 20%-30% consumer testing growth in 2027 materializes — a signal of demand operators could capture. On the payer side, results from CMS’s ACCESS model and MAHA ELEVATE will shape whether chronic care and prevention contracts open to fitness operators. Fitness companies’ future earnings calls may reveal how much of their per-member revenue growth comes from experience add-ons versus any measurable-outcome services — the clearest test of whether the industry can monetize results, not just experiences.
Key Questions
What does it mean for fitness to ‘monetize outcomes’ instead of experience?
Selling experience means charging for amenities like cold plunges, recovery lounges or premium tiers. Monetizing outcomes means charging for provable health results — such as improved biomarkers like HbA1c or blood pressure — either directly to members or through contracts with employers and healthcare payers that pay based on measured results.
How strong is the fitness industry right now?
Per the report, a record 81 million Americans belonged to a fitness facility in 2025, logging nearly 7 billion visits, with no-shows at a record-low 4.6%. Life Time’s Q2 2026 revenue rose 13.7% to $866 million on just 1.2% membership growth.
Why are amenities considered a weak competitive advantage?
Because equipment like cold plunges and red light therapy systems can be purchased by any competitor with sufficient capital. Sellam calls amenities a “thin moat” — once common, they become table stakes rather than differentiators.
What is InsideTracker’s Terra platform?
Terra is InsideTracker’s modular health intelligence platform that combines blood biomarkers with activity, sleep, nutrition and DNA data to produce individualized, evidence-based health guidance — designed so fitness businesses can add health intelligence without building the scientific infrastructure themselves.
Are healthcare payers already paying for outcomes?
Partially. According to the report, 44.9% of U.S. healthcare payments flow through results-tied arrangements, and federal initiatives like CMS’s ACCESS model and MAHA ELEVATE are creating new pathways — but fitness operators’ entry into these contracts remains early and unproven at scale.
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