Gallup updated its 2026 estimates on GLP-1 use on September 8, and I don't think the industry has absorbed them yet, because in two years what used to be a niche has turned into something closer to a mass market: one in nine American adults is now taking one of these drugs to lose weight, and the curve isn't slowing, partly because two of them now come as a pill in the US, so anyone who had been holding back over the idea of an injection now has another option.
The big operators noticed a while ago, and by now dozens of chains have built a program specifically for these members. The problem is what happens everywhere else, where somebody on the medication gets exactly the welcome they would have gotten in 2019, the walk-through, the trial class, the welcome emails, and then by spring they're gone, and nobody at the front desk can tell you why.
After they start the drug they move less, and nobody on the floor knows it
The study worth handing to your coaches was presented at ENDO 2026 in June, and what makes it useful is that it measured what people actually did rather than what they said they would do: researchers took Fitbit data from 753 adults with obesity who had started a GLP-1 and compared the months before and after. Daily steps dropped by more than five hundred, and vigorous activity fell along with them.
That runs against something every gym takes for granted, which is that a person losing weight must also be moving more. In this study the opposite happened, and it isn't hard to see why: the drug switches off appetite, and in all likelihood takes some of the energy with it, so the person walking into your club is eating less, moving less and watching the scale drop without having lifted a finger.
This changes the job more than it might seem at first, because the weight-loss member every gym was built around came in heavy, motivated and hungry, and the club's work was to build them a calorie deficit. The member on medication already has the deficit; it came with the prescription. So the calorie counter, which is still the first thing most clubs put in front of them, is no longer the argument that wins this member over.
A quarter of what they lose isn't fat
The research on body composition in people taking these drugs tells one consistent story: a sizeable share of the weight lost, roughly a quarter, is lean mass rather than fat. Which puts muscle, not weight, at the center of the problem, and the literature converges on a floor of two or three strength sessions a week, with more protein than someone with no appetite tends to eat.
That is where a club holds a card the pharmacy doesn't have, because the drug takes care of the appetite, but the muscle has to be built by the member, through two or three strength sessions a week that somebody has to program, correct and progress in load. That somebody is a coach, and that place is the weight room: no pill, and no screen, does that work for them.
If they don't need to move to lose weight, give them another reason
There's a problem that comes before muscle, though, which is that doing three sessions a week means showing up three times a week, and this person has just lost the reason to do it, because the weight comes off whether they stay home or not. The club's first job, before programming any strength work, is to give them a reason to walk in.
Take a member who hasn't trained in ten years and has lost fifteen pounds in two months, and put them on a leaderboard ranked by watts or pace: you won't see them a third time, because for a full hour every screen in the room has been confirming that they're last.
That isn't a reason to turn the screens off, it's a reason to put a different number on them, one this member has a chance of winning. Heart rate zones scale effort to the individual, which means that for a beginner a brisk incline walk is a demanding session in every sense that matters, and a screen that scores effort instead of output hands them a score of their own, an honest one, from day one.
The point is that if the weight comes off anyway, the workout has to be worth doing for something else, and a points system is the cheapest way a club has to give it that something: points for minutes in your own zones, a weekly streak that after a while you don't feel like breaking, a status that climbs with accumulated effort and a team that notices when you're missing add up to a reason to come in that has nothing to do with what the scale said that morning.
The game has to outlast the event, though, because time-limited challenges push attendance up while they run and drop it back to where it was as soon as they end, as a study published this year on an eight-week gym challenge showed. The drop was smaller among people who said they trained partly because they enjoyed it, and that is the argument for keeping status and streaks open all year instead of running yet another challenge with a finish line at the end.
If that habit takes hold, the rest follows: the member who comes in three times a week to protect a streak is the one a coach can put a barbell in front of, and strength sessions stop being a recommendation and become part of the routine. On top of that, training lifts their mood in exactly the weeks when the drug has taken away their appetite and, probably, their energy too.
The UPTIVO screen does exactly this part of the job, using the wearables members already have on their wrists: effort is measured against each person's own capacity, so someone two months into treatment and the fittest person in the room can take the same class, collect Uptivo Performance Points on the same scale and both walk out with a score that means something. With SNAP, all of it runs on the monitors you already have on the wall. To be clear, heart rate measures effort in classes and mixed formats, not the weight on the bar: its job is to keep the member coming, and what they do once inside, strength included, is the coach's call.
Two in three stop the drug within a year, and a membership should last longer than that
There is a number the industry rarely quotes: among patients without type 2 diabetes almost two in three stop the medication within a year, according to a study in JAMA Network Open, and most of them don't restart. These drugs are meant to be taken for years, but for a lot of people the months after the last dose arrive anyway, and those are the months in which a club wins or loses that member for years. The outcome is decided by what happened before: the member who got stronger in the meantime and knows their coach by name has a reason to keep coming, while the one who only took home a lower number on the scale disappears the day the drug stops.
It also changes how you read attendance, because this member's motivation follows the treatment cycle rather than the billing cycle: when visits thin out in month two, because side effects are biting or a refill came late, that is the moment to call, not the moment to wait. My conviction, after years of looking at club data, is that the members who cancel are almost always the ones nobody was following, and with this group the advantage is that the signals come early and show up clearly in the numbers.
We built DASH so that call actually happens instead of depending on someone's memory: every member gets a churn risk score from attendance and training activity, with priorities already sorted, which lets one coach follow a hundred people instead of a dozen and see who is on medication while there are still weeks left to bring them back. It's also where you can see whether the strength sessions in their program are actually happening or whether they've stopped at classes.
Everyone wants to sell the drug, almost nobody is working on what comes after
The big American chains are moving in two directions: some have put strength work at the center of their programs for members on medication, others have signed deals with telehealth platforms to resell access to the drug itself.
A telehealth deal, though, is something anyone can sign, and at best it buys you the first month's dues. What matters more is being the club where, when the drug changes or stops, what's left is a person who built strength, a habit and a relationship with their coach, because that is worth years of membership from people who have already shown they'll spend on their health.
None of this requires turning into a clinic. It requires welcoming people who arrive with a body that's changing fast, giving them a reason to come before anything else and then putting strength first, and above all it requires somebody who actually picks up the phone during the first ninety days, because that is how you still have that member in month thirteen, long after the last prescription.
Sources
Gallup, In U.S., GLP-1 Usage Reaches New High
Endocrine Society, Exercise decreases among people taking GLP-1 medication
Athletech News, More Gyms Are Integrating GLP-1s Into Their Offerings, Report Finds