Across America, fitness chains are hoping they can help ailing malls get healthy again.
“The story has been written over and over that malls are dead,” said Jason Thunstrom, a vice president at Life Time Fitness, which has 127 centers nationwide, including seven in metro Detroit. “We completely disagree with that. They simply are evolving.”
After nearly 30 years of operating mostly stand-alone gyms, the privately held company based in Chanhassen, Minn., near Minneapolis, is aggressively targeting shopping centers as places to offer health-related lifestyle services, including cafes, spas — and even bars.
Other fitness groups — including LA Fitness, Planet Fitness and Gold’s Gym — also are building in shopping centers, in some cases in spaces that have been vacated by struggling stores.
So far this year, fitness studios accounted for 17% of the retail space leased by the 170 most active retail tenants, according to Costar, a Washington, D.C.-based commercial real estate information and marketing firm.
Nationally, fitness and health clubs are a $25.8-billion-a-year business, estimates Statista, a New York-based data research organization.
There were about 36,000 health and fitness clubs with about 55 million members in 2015.
Irvine, Calif.-based LA Fitness — which boasts more than 690 locations in North America, including 17 in metro Detroit — has had a gym in the Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn for years.
In May, the fitness chain opened a new gym in a Sarasota, Fla., mall in a space that was vacated by a department store. It also is building a second gym in Livonia, where defunct grocery chain Farmer Jack had a store.
Planet Fitness, which is based in Hampton, N.H., has more than 1,200 gyms — including about three dozen of them in southeast Michigan — in North America.
Earlier this year, Northgate Mall in Durham, N.C., announced it is adding a Planet Fitness gym. The mall said it also leased space to the county library, as the library undergoes renovations.
Chris Klebba, who owns 14 Planet Fitness franchises in Michigan, Indiana and Canada with his son, has two Planet Fitness gyms in enclosed malls in Burton and Michigan City. Other gyms are in buildings that used to be Staples, Kmart and ABC Warehouse.
More than anything else, he said, the availability of retail space is driving fitness clubs to move to malls.
Fitness clubs, he added, are helping to breathe new life into dying malls.
“We’re bringing in anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 members a day using a club,” he said. “Just the very nature of having people in there has a positive effect. In areas we’ve come to, we give landlords a boost on their leases.”
Dallas-based Gold’s Gym, which has more than 700 gyms globally, but currently no gyms in Michigan, opened a two-level fitness center inside the Plaza West Covina mall in West Covina, Calif., outside Los Angeles six years ago.
On the upside, gym managers there said, there’s always foot traffic. But, on the downside, sometimes, parking, and for new members, finding the entrance — since it is in a mall — can be a problem.
Life Time sees opportunity in remaking retail centers as they try to refocus as destinations that offer more than shopping.
“We’ve been growing as a company over the years,” Thunstrom said, adding that Life Time is betting that malls will be around for a long time. “Now we find ourselves in what is undoubtedly the fastest growth period we’ve ever seen.”
Up to a third of Life Time’s 30 new projects in the next three years are likely to be in malls.
So far, none are slated for Michigan, but the company did not rule out the possibility.
Life Time’s first mall project was in 2014 at International Plaza, a posh mall in Tampa. It opened a gym after a Lord & Taylor department store vacated, and since then, the fitness company has identified other mall locations.
This year, the company opened a gym and health center in a vacant mall in Chestnut Hill, a Boston suburb. The 268,000-square-foot shopping center, which is owned by Bulfinch Cos., was redeveloped and renamed Life Time Center.
It includes a fitness club, offices offering physical therapy and chiropractic services, areas for personal training, a spa, a café and bar.
In addition, Life Time has a deal with GGP — a Chicago-based real estate investment trust with several shopping centers — to fill spaces left behind by shuttered department stores with gyms. Fitness club developments are planned in malls in Houston; Bellevue, Wash.; Littleton, Colo., and Oklahoma City.
In two years, the fitness company expects to open a three-level athletic resort close to home, at Southdale Center in Edina, Minn., which bills itself as the nation’s first indoor regional shopping mall.
There, Life Time is demolishing a J.C. Penney and building a new center in its place.
“If we were to roll back the clock years ago, I don’t know we would have ever seen this as an opportunity today,” Thunstrom said. “We believe that malls just need to evolve to meet the current consumer demand.”
