Are you a budget gym bunny? If so, you’re very on trend indeed…
With everyone from your best mate to your mother enrolling on punishing/ torturous fitness challenges or endurance runs, you may well assume that ‘safe’ and ‘traditional’ gym training has taken a backseat to make way for more hardy pursuits, but the stats say otherwise; according to spending monitoring company Cardlytics , we’ve spent 44% more on gym memberships in the past year. Take that Tough Mudder.
Cardlytics has delved deep into our bank accounts (5.5m of them to be exact), and spending on debit cards, credit cards and by direct debit reveals that the budget gym sector has reaped the most profit from our gym habits, with monthly expenditure up by 66% between May and June this year, contrasted with figures from 2014.
The likes of Virgin Active and Fitness First haven’t lost out either, with a rise in spending of 22% in middle tier gym membership, while the luxury lot has seen healthy gains of 14%. It’s not just the gym floor that’s seduced us either, as observing future gym goers two weeks before they signed up revealed that they spend a whopping 96% more on sports clothing and equipment and ramp up their health food store bill by 55%.
Gym goers aren’t all saintly, however, as apparently our intentions to exercise more increase our propensity to eat out in the eight weeks prior to joining a gym by 27%, while in the first eight weeks of membership we spend 15% more on food. Gulp. Good job that that gym tab is increasingly on the budget end…
What are your gym habits? Have they changed in the last year? Comment below or tweet us @GetTheGloss
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