Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.
I read that the gyms in Germany are in crisis. According to “Spiegel”, only 9.3 million people in Germany are said to be members, around 20 percent fewer than before the corona pandemic.
I have to say that probably no one has contributed more to this crisis than I have. I’ve never been to a physical gym for a second in my life, unlike my parents and kids. I think it’s my socialization. In the 1990s, when the studios became more widespread in Germany, they were the place where mainly men who liked to show their upper bodies went to get a good pump.
For my part, even at the pool, I didn’t think showing my body was a good thing. So all those gyms were no-go zones for me. I would have been afraid of simply being crushed by a weight bench.
In the meantime, more than every tenth German is in a fitness studio. They can’t all be muscle fetishists. But I still couldn’t motivate myself to visit such a studio.
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When my parents were recommended by their doctor to join a health club to do something for their back, they did it immediately. Now they have a gym membership, and now I’d have to take the risk of bumping into them doing ab crunches. That would also be very uncomfortable for me.
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But now gyms are dwindling because people have stayed indoors during the pandemic. I heard that home gym suppliers like Peloton were booming back then. With such devices, you pedal at home and are connected via the Internet to a whole community that also does sports at home.
But now Peloton is struggling to grow and needs to cut prices. It is said that this is because people stopped exercising at home and went back to the gym. But they never seem to have gotten there.
It is interesting that the fitness industry complains that the pandemic months at the beginning of the year were particularly problematic. Because most people sign up at a gym when they make New Year’s resolutions that they ultimately don’t stick to.
The Germans used the pandemic not to sign any contracts at all, which they would later have canceled because they would not have gone after all. In that sense, I seem to have been doing everything right all along. Just thinking about it makes me feel fitter.
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