Gallup refreshed its GLP-1 numbers on September 8, and I don't think the industry has absorbed them yet. Eleven percent of American adults are taking one of these drugs for weight loss right now. Two years ago it was 3 percent, and 15 percent have tried one.
Two of them come as a pill now, Wegovy since January and Lilly's Foundayo since April, so the needle is gone as an excuse.
The big operators have noticed. Inspire360's quarterly report, covered by Athletech News in August, counts 23 operators running GLP-1 programs, up from 17 in January, and cites Planet Fitness data suggesting about half of the people on these drugs are thinking about a gym.
Half of one in nine is a lot of tours, and most clubs will run them the way they ran them in 2019: the walk-through, the trial class, the welcome emails. Those people are gone by spring, and nobody at the front desk can tell you why.
They show up moving less than they did before the first shot
The study worth forwarding to your coaches came out of ENDO 2026 in June. Researchers pulled 753 adults with obesity out of the NIH All of Us database, all on a GLP-1 and wearing a Fitbit, and compared the months before and after.
Steps went down, from 5,047 a day to 4,487, and moderate-to-vigorous activity from 28 minutes a day to 22. Sajana Maharjan, who led the work, said the findings "reinforce that exercise cannot be optional for people taking these medications."
It runs against the assumption baked into most sales scripts, that a member dropping weight is also moving more. On these drugs the appetite goes first and a good part of the energy goes with it, so the person walking in is eating less, moving less and watching the scale fall without lifting a finger.
The weight-loss member every gym was built around walked in heavy and motivated, with a normal appetite, and the club's job was the calorie deficit. This member already has the deficit; it came with the prescription. So the calorie counter on the wall, which is still what most clubs lead with, is selling this person something they already own.
A quarter of what they lose is not fat
A review in Metabolites this May gathered the body composition data in one place. In SURMOUNT-1, the big tirzepatide trial, about three quarters of the weight lost was fat and a quarter was lean tissue, and real-world bioimpedance data lands in the same range, a quarter to a third, at six to twelve months.
The authors' minimum: two or three strength sessions a week on the big muscle groups, and 1.2 to 1.5 grams of protein per kilo of body weight while the weight is coming off.
That is the opening for a club. The appetite suppression comes from a pharmacy; the strength work has to come from somewhere with squat racks in it.
If they don't need to move to lose weight, give them a different reason
Take a member who hasn't trained in ten years and has dropped fifteen pounds in eight weeks, and put them on a leaderboard sorted by watts or pace. You won't see them a third time. Every screen in the room is telling them they're last.
Keep the screens up and put a number on them that this member can actually win. Heart rate zones scale effort to the person, so a brisk incline walk is a real zone three session for someone eight weeks in, and a screen scored on effort instead of output gives that member a score on day one.
If the weight is coming off without the workout, the workout has to be worth doing for some other reason, and a points system is the cheapest one to build. Give points for minutes in your own zones. Let a streak build, let status climb with effort, and put people on a team that notices when they skip. None of that depends on what the scale said that morning.
A study of an eight-week gym challenge published this year found attendance rose during the challenge and slid right back afterward, and the only people who kept the gain were the ones who liked the sessions for their own sake. So build status and streaks that run all year instead of selling another eight-week challenge with a finish line.
Members who stay in that program get two things the drug won't give them. The strength sessions protect muscle, and a hard session lifts mood in the weeks when appetite and energy are both down.
That is what our heart rate screen does with the wearables members already own. Effort is scored against your own capacity, so someone eight weeks into a GLP-1 and the fittest guy in the room can take the same class, collect Uptivo Performance Points on the same scale and both walk out with a score worth having. It runs on whatever screens the club already has, through SNAP.
The prescription ends before the membership should
JAMA Network Open looked at 125,474 adults with overweight or obesity and found that 64.8 percent of those without diabetes stopped their GLP-1 within a year. Roughly a third of them started again, mostly because the weight came back.
What happens in the three or four months after the last dose decides whether you keep the membership. A member who got stronger and knows a coach by name has a reason to keep showing up. If all she got was a smaller number on the scale, the last dose is also the last visit.
It also changes how you read attendance. Her motivation runs on the prescription cycle, not the calendar, so when visits thin out in month two, because the side effects are at their worst or a refill is late, that is the moment to call. The members who cancel are almost always the ones nobody was following, and with this group you can see the drift coming weeks out.
We built DASH so that call happens: every member gets a churn risk score from attendance and training activity, one coach can keep an eye on a hundred people instead of a dozen, and the GLP-1 cohort gets flagged with weeks still left to act.
Everyone wants to sell the drug, almost nobody is working on the part after
Orangetheory wrote muscle-building habits into its 2026 Transformation Challenge for GLP-1 users, 24 Hour Fitness runs muscle-preservation programming, and New York Sports Club and O2 Fitness partnered with Thrive to sell access to the drug itself.
Any chain can sign a telehealth deal, and it gets you the first month. The money is in being the club where these people keep what they lost, because that is years of dues from someone who already spends on their health.
You don't need a clinic for any of this. You need an onboarding that assumes a body changing fast, a program that leads with strength, feedback scored on effort, and somebody actually picking up the phone through the first ninety days. Do that and you still have these members in month thirteen.
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