Ex-Planet Fitness CEO Backs Absolute Recomp, a Premium Strength Gym With a ‘Holy F—’ Factor

Chris Rondeau sees parallels between Absolute Recomp, a brash, Dallas-based strength training chain and Planet Fitness. Not in terms of style, but in both brands’ ability to fill a gap in the industry

Nabil Saeed has a quality test for every gym he designs, and it’s not member surveys or net promoter scores.

It involves imagining what a priest would think, should one stumble into the premium, strength-only concept built for the committed lifter Saeed says the big boxes stopped designing for.

“A priest should walk into our clubs and be like, ‘Holy fuck, that is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,’” said Saeed, the 28-year-old founder of Absolute Recomp (AR), a chain of five lively clubs in Texas’ Dallas-Fort Worth area.

He calls it the holy factor, and for those taking note, a mere “oh my god” flunks the test. That overused phrase? That’s what you say when you walk into a cool coffee shop nowadays, he said.

It’s a test that has at least one notable convert: Chris Rondeau, the former longtime Planet Fitness CEO who joined the low-price gym giant a year after its founding and helped build into the largest gym chain in America. 

He’s now invested in Absolute Recomp as a partner, board member and chief growth officer, marking his first move since backing Brazilian fitness brand Panobianco late last year.

The move comes as Gen Z-ers like Saeed, the very generation the fitness industry is chasing, is now taking the reins, old enough to build what they want themselves. What they’re creating is anything but stuffy; it’s something no one in a suit could conjure on their behalf.

It certainly isn’t an idea that can be developed in a boardroom with a couple of executives in an afternoon, Rondeau said.

“This is something that takes years and years of trial and error, refinement, building that culture,” he said of Absolute Recomp.

Knocking Down Walls

Saeed began training his first client as a high school sophomore, after the sudden death of his father in 2015. Training pulled him out of a black hole, he said. His first client happened to be an up-and-coming model who got picked up by Calvin Klein and Nautica. Saeed posted about it on Twitter, and the roster snowballed: one client became 15, then 50. By senior year, he signed his first lease on a 1,500-square-foot space subdivided by 11 walls.

He spent the next four years knocking them down, expanding to 4,000 square feet, then 6,000, then 8,000. When COVID hit, Saeed took the roughly $200,000 he had saved and jumped into equipment liquidation, then recycled the proceeds into the open-gym concept that opened around the turn of 2021 and became AR.

Saeed designs the clubs himself, a sort of callback to when he was 11 or 12 in Dubai, watching the city go vertical.

“At a young age, I knew that the craziest things that the brain could conceive are possible,” he said.

What that means, in terms of design at least, are results that aren’t easily replicated. It’s more than just a vibe-lit, marble-clad gym.

“There’s tons of those popping out everywhere,” he said. “That’s not what we are.”

A Chance Meeting

On the opening day of the new club, Saeed was working the floor when he walked up to a visitor touring with his son, shook his hand and asked what he did for a living.

The visitor was Tim Kurtz, an accomplished franchise operator from the Planet Fitness orbit, then in the process of exiting the brand post-COVID. Kurtz, a former competitive bodybuilder and powerlifter, had been hitting hardcore gyms with his son.

“This is the energy. This is what a club was like when I was a kid,” Kurtz recalled telling his son. “This is what is missing in the market.”

A friendship became a mentorship, then a partnership, as Saeed grew the business and eventually told Kurtz he believed the gym could become a national brand. Rondeau entered the picture separately, tipped off at a dinner by an equipment leasing contact who had seen the club’s economics and encouraged him to check out AR.

When Rondeau finally walked through the doors, the fitness industry veteran said it brought to mind what Planet Fitness franchisees described upon first discovering the HVLP giant’s big box clubs: “a place that they’d never seen exist.”

“It was exactly how I felt,” Rondeau said.

Strength, Wall to Wall

AR clubs run a minimum of 35,000 square feet, with leases in negotiation as large as 65,000, and equipment from Watson, Arsenal, Panatta, Rogers and New Tech. No pools or basketball courts, but there are specially designed posing rooms, showers and saunas. Memberships land between $65 and $80 a month.

“We have priced it to make sure that 18-to-21-year-old people can get into our brand and have a longer lifetime value, instead of having to wait till 28, 30 years old before they make enough money to spend $200 a month,” Kurtz said.

The content creator-friendly clubs are open 24/7, 365 days a year, with two to three staffers overnight rather than a key-fob system. The membership has also shifted dramatically: what launched at roughly 70% male now runs 43% to 45% female, with women drawn to a floor stocked with 120 leg pieces and 30 glute and hip machines.

“We are maniacal about brand integrity and member experience,” Kurtz said.

Day passes are available for $25, as well as the option for 5-day and 7-day passes, allowing people to travel all over to visit AR.

Discipline at Scale

Four AR clubs are on target to open this year, with hopes of roughly doubling that pace and adding 10 to 15 more the following year. Two joint ventures with franchisees are underway in Colorado and Illinois, but the brand is not hiring franchise salespeople and expects to remain primarily corporate-owned.

Nine times out of 10, future franchisees will be operators the trio has known for years, the team said.

Rondeau, who watched Planet Fitness wait two decades and roughly 1,500 U.S. stores before crossing into Canada, endorses the discipline. International ambitions can wait, as the white space at home is too large, he said.

The fitness business, he pointed out, started backwards, opening with hardcore temples like Gold’s and World Gym when the market needed beginner-friendly clubs first.

“The level and propensity of Gen Z to work out far exceeds any other generation before … they’re craving to work out is far exceeding anything, even Millennials,” Rondeau said.

“Gen Z was the smallest membership group of Planet Fitness until Covid hit, and now it’s the largest in just a few short years,” he added.

He sees AR as a correction the industry has been waiting on, back to a serious strength club – the kind a priest might swear about.