No pain, all gain: How data shapes The Gym Group

‘It's very easy to motivate people to watch Netflix; very hard to motivate people to go to the gym’

Almost half of The Gym Group’s HQ staff work in the tech department. Why does a fitness chain have such a focus on data?

With almost 11 million UK citizens being members of a gym, the clang of weights and whir of treadmills is a familiar sound to many of us.

But the sounds you don’t hear – of technology quietly doing its work in the background – are just as important in supporting fitness’ popularity surge.

The Gym Group is a low-cost, 24/7 chain with 245 locations around the country and more than 890,000 members: a model that only works thanks to its tech.

“[The 24/7 model] wouldn't run without it,” says CTO Milan Juza, when we meet in The Gym Group’s’s Croydon location near its headquarters.

“Any business in this industry, maybe 10 years ago, would be thinking about itself as a fitness business that happens to have some tech. Now, it very much thinks of itself as a business where technology powers everything; it cannot run without technology enabling every single piece of the operation.”

The humans are still “crucial” to the mix, but need “the data, the insights, the telemetry and the ability to make decisions through technology” to do their job well.

Weighing the options

The Gym Group has invested in data-driven decision-making – beginning all the way back with where to site new locations. The data team (made up of three parts) uses a spatial model to understand the demographics of an area, which includes stats like population size and travel time to the proposed location.

“The vast majority of our members tend to live within two kilometres of the gym, which means that we need to get the catchment area right.”

Once a site is chosen, The Gym Group uses tech to analyse and project membership growth. This is based on historical data and models, with course correction possible through pricing and other elements if the actual growth doesn’t match the projection.

There are also the gyms themselves, where technology runs the doors, CCTV cameras and other elements required to make 24/7 operations possible; as well as the mobile app, which Milan proudly talks about as a motivational tool.

Forming healthy habits

If data collection helps The Gym Group make decisions, then does the same also work for members? Milan thinks so.

“We're trying to get these insights to ultimately give members the best possible experience, but also create motivation for them to want to stay and build on the habits they have established already.”

That’s all done through the mobile app, which not only grants access to gym sites but also tracks workouts, attendance and more.

But, Milan admits, “It's very easy to motivate people to watch Netflix; very, very hard to motivate people to go to the gym.”

He adds, “Retention and human motivation is a very complex and multi-faceted topic. There isn't a ‘Do these two or three things, and it will you will achieve what you wanted.’ It's a collection of hundreds of small interventions.”

Those small interventions begin when potential members first download the app. A short questionnaire is used to build a tailored plan for their goals, and if they use the app to track workouts it also logs their progress data. But even without that, the app can provide micro-motivations.

“Visit patterns, [for example]; giving them some deep understanding of, you know, if you visited one more time a week, you might see slightly different results or better results.

“We also know that there are certain thresholds in a...member’s life cycle that disproportionately influence their habit building, or their motivation. So typically, the first forty-five days of someone's membership, building and forming the habit in that period is so important. If you get it right, you're much more likely to stay for longer.”

From dumbbells to data streams

We’ve already mentioned The Gym Group’s diverse data team, which is split into three integral parts: one each for engineering, analytics and data science. Each plays an important role in gathering and using the data The Gym Group’s members produce.

The data engineering team’s job is integrating new data feeds, which includes sources like IoT sensors for lighting and temperature, as well as third-party tools like Salesforce and Workday; while data analytics, unsurprisingly, focuses on deriving useful insights from data – part of that data-driven decision-making model the Group relies on.

Finally, the data science team feeds on analytics to do things like churn propensity modelling: calculating a unique score for every member to show how likely they are to continue their subscription.

“Three years ago, there would probably be about four or five people [employed across the teams]. Each of those is probably about five people at the moment.”

That sounds about right for a company with a corporate HQ employing around 200 people, and 1,800 across the UK; but the numbers are more impressive when looking at the wider tech department.

“If you look at the [whole] tech team...that combo is currently about eighty people; so it's a sizable sort of function, certainly one of the largest in the HQ if you look at the two hundred total [HQ employees], which tells you that the business is going big on tech as an important component of its strategy.”

It’s taken years for the fitness industry to reach this point – but good things come to those who weight.

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