Gym Trials: FlexIt App Lets You Try Fitness Clubs
In several U.S. cities, FlexIt lets users try an array of gyms paying per minute with no tour, paperwork, or membership.
If I downloaded the FlexIt app and I lived in Santa Monica, California, I could go on gym trials, visiting Burn Fitness by the beach and working out there with battling ropes and stationary bikes on the rooftop beneath palm trees for 32 cents a minute, heading to the Iron Fitness on Broadway and using their boxing equipment for 30 cents a minute, or walking into the Gym LA in Brentwood and taking a class with the posh people in the suburb for 24 cents a minute.
Well, to add another if to the scenario: I could do all if fitness clubs in the state weren’t shut down due to covid-19. But you see how the FlexIt app works: with no membership, users can go to several gyms in their town and pay a per-minute rate to exercise there, as if they were a monthly-due-paying member. The gym trials app itself is free to download.
It’s an alternative or an augmentation to traditional gym membership for travelers, people who work on one end of a city and live in another and anyone used to no-hassle freedom of choice, founder and CEO Austin Cohen said in an interview with Athletech News.
“Millennials and Gen-Z-ers have been conditioned to access everything from the tips of their fingers,” said Cohen. “The consumption methods they are conditioned to aren’t suited for traditional gyms.” He added, “With our product, there are no tours or paperwork. You just swipe your phone [at the entrance] and work out.”
Cohen, who had worked in venture capital, launched FlexIt in February of 2019. Your choices on the budding app vary vastly depending on where you are. Though there are participating gyms across the U.S., FlexIt still hasn’t touched many major cities. There are no options in my actual home of Pittsburgh, for example, and vast swaths of the Midwest, Southwest and Pacific Northwest are unserved by the gym trials app, as of now. Some metropolitan areas have just one or two FlexIt gyms.
But the program has built impressive clusters of options in several metropolitan areas —including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, Tampa and Dallas-Fort Worth — with gyms charging as little as six cents a minute for trials. The rates are decided by the club.
There are some exotic options; for $100 an hour, one can play at KonnectGolf, an indoor virtual golf course in Manhattan, with digital simulations of famous golf courses.
Of course, FlexIt’s plans were redirected by the onset of covid-19. Indeed, the launch date of February 2019 meant the startup only had a year to grow before its essential product, gym time, was disallowed and then its desirability was colored by people’s risk assessment and unease over the continuing pandemic.
Like many fitness businesses, FlexIt pivoted to digital instruction. Instead of paying to try a gym, one could pay to take one-on-one personal training with any instructor at that gym via Zoom or one of several specialty apps for fitness instruction, a service that many shuttered gyms were otherwise reserving for their members. Many still offer this. Again, the gyms set their price for trials. Cohen said prices range from $15 to $60 an hour.
“Virtual personal training is a completely new concept to people,” Cohen told Athletech News. “Many people didn’t know they could do it and they love it. … Right now there are so many fitness options. We think that means our network is unparalleled in terms of options.”
