Planet Fitness Chased Fitness Trends and Risked Forgetting What Made It Different

Planet Fitness built one of America’s biggest gym businesses by appealing to people who did not particularly like gyms. Its recent push toward strength training, recovery products, and a broader fitness audience shows what can happen when a successful brand starts chasing the customers everyone else wants.

Planet Fitness succeeded by being almost aggressively uncool. While traditional gyms competed over serious equipment, bodybuilding culture, personal training, and athletic performance, Planet Fitness built its identity around people who felt uncomfortable in those environments.

The purple-and-yellow gyms promised low prices, treadmills, basic machines, pizza nights, and perhaps most importantly, a “Judgement Free Zone.” The customer did not need to become a fitness obsessive. They just needed to walk through the door.

That positioning helped Planet Fitness grow to nearly 3,000 clubs, but the fitness market around it has changed. Strength training has exploded on TikTok and Instagram, protein has become practically a lifestyle category, and younger consumers increasingly arrive at gyms already familiar with squats, deadlifts, glute exercises, and resistance training.

Planet Fitness has responded by redesigning some locations, adding more free weights and resistance equipment, and explicitly acknowledging that weight training is becoming a much bigger part of American fitness culture. Responding to customers makes sense. The danger begins when adaptation starts muddying the reason customers chose you in the first place.

Planet Fitness Did Not Have a Fitness Problem

Planet Fitness entered 2026 expecting systemwide same-club sales to grow between 4% and 5%, revenue to rise approximately 9%, and adjusted EBITDA to increase around 10%. After a disappointing first quarter, management dramatically reduced those expectations. Same-club sales growth was cut to approximately 1%, projected revenue growth fell to roughly 7%, and expected adjusted EBITDA growth dropped to about 6%.

The company was unusually candid about part of the problem. CEO Colleen Keating said net member growth during the crucial beginning-of-year signup period had been weaker than expected. Management also acknowledged internal marketing problems, including creative that had not resonated sufficiently with the core beginners Planet Fitness historically attracted. The company responded by changing its marketing and pausing a planned nationwide increase in the Black Card membership price.

That is important because the underlying fitness market itself was not collapsing. Keating continued to point to growing consumer awareness around exercise and wellness as a long-term industry tailwind. Planet Fitness therefore faced an awkward possibility familiar to many established brands: the market was growing, but its message was becoming less effective.

Chasing the Weight-Lifting Boom Creates a Brand Problem

More consumers lifting weights is unquestionably an opportunity. Planet Fitness would be foolish to ignore it. The company has been adding strength equipment as cardio loses some of its former dominance, and this can make clubs more useful to existing members.

But Planet Fitness should be careful about trying to become the gym that serious fitness consumers already have plenty of choices for. Its original competitive advantage was not superior equipment. It was reducing the emotional cost of joining a gym.

That sounds soft until you remember how powerful it is commercially. Millions of people know they should exercise but feel intimidated by fitness culture. Planet Fitness designed almost its entire brand around removing that anxiety. The lunk alarm, low monthly price, brightly colored facilities, simplified equipment, and beginner-friendly advertising all communicated the same thing: this gym is for normal people.

If Planet Fitness increasingly looks, sounds, and markets itself like everyone else, it risks competing on everyone else’s terms.

Recovery Is Another Tempting Trend

The same tension appears in the Black Card business. Planet Fitness has been experimenting with red-light saunas, LED red-light booths, and other recovery offerings at approximately 100 clubs. Management says the company is studying whether these amenities improve membership acquisition, upgrades, and retention.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with the strategy. Recovery is a growing part of fitness, and premium amenities provide a reason for members to upgrade. Black Card penetration reached roughly 68% in the second quarter, up more than two percentage points from the previous year.

The question is what business Planet Fitness wants to become. Strength equipment, wellness technology, recovery services, and premium membership upgrades all offer incremental revenue. Together, however, they can gradually pull a company away from the beautifully simple proposition that originally made it enormous. Cheap. Easy. Friendly. No intimidation. Businesses often underestimate the economic value of clarity.

Small Businesses Make the Same Mistake

The Planet Fitness situation contains a useful warning for smaller companies. Trends are seductive because they come with visible demand. If everyone suddenly wants AI, businesses add AI. If wellness is growing, brands become wellness brands. If subscription models are fashionable, companies launch subscriptions.

The problem is that every addition can make positioning slightly fuzzier.

A business should certainly evolve, but it should know which customers created its advantage before trying to capture a completely different group. That principle also applies to prospecting. A company can use Salesfully’s B2B and consumer sales data to define audiences by geography, industry, demographics, and other characteristics instead of simply advertising to whoever happens to be fashionable.

Valkyrie, Salesfully’s AI Sales Copilot can help research those prospects, identify decision-makers, organize contacts, and prepare more targeted outreach.

Good marketing begins with knowing whom you are trying to attract. Planet Fitness’s own 2026 reset provides a very large corporate example of what happens when that answer becomes less clear.

Planet Fitness Probably Does Not Need to Become Cooler

Planet Fitness is hardly a broken company. Second-quarter adjusted EBITDA still rose to $152.8 million, the chain continued opening clubs, and management says its revised strategy is intended to restore sustainable membership growth. By June 30, the system had reached 2,930 locations.

The more interesting question is whether Planet Fitness needs to follow fitness culture or simply accommodate it. Adding more squat racks makes sense if members want them. Adding recovery technology may increase Black Card value. Neither requires abandoning the beginner who feels awkward walking into a gym for the first time.

That customer built Planet Fitness. Sometimes chasing the next big thing does not make a brand more relevant. Sometimes it simply makes the brand look more like everyone it originally beat.