How to Make a Gym Commitment Stick

As sunny and smiley as gyms’ front-desk employees can be, they’re covering up a secret that keeps the industry going: Once you’ve signed up for a membership, they don’t want you to come in very often.

In fact, gyms are set up to entice the type of customer who will prepay for months or years and then rarely show up. In order to make money, private clubs need to bring in about 10 times as many members as their weight and cardio rooms can accommodate at any given time. This fact ends up shaping the way gyms are designed as physical spaces. In order to attract the type of people who will buy a membership but probably never work out with any regularity, designers give gyms sleek, hotel-like lobbies where membership paperwork is handled. Meanwhile, the intimidating equipment is kept in the back, out of sight—along with the sometimes intimidating brutes who grunt while using them.

All this trickery works: On average, people estimate that they’ll go to the gym they belong to more than twice as often in a month than they actually do.

How can you counteract the forces repelling you from the gym? Economists have a solution. They know that people are really bad at prioritizing long-term benefits: It’s much harder to go to the gym right now than it is to say you’ll go two weeks from now. Keeping this in mind, one solution economists recommend is to sign another contract—one with yourself.

The basic idea is that you set a goal—say, to go to the gym three times a week—and give money to a friend with some instructions: If you meet your goal, your friend will give it back. But if you don’t, your friend will donate it to charity, or spend it. Going back on your commitment, then, comes with a financial penalty.

A study by led by Heather Royer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, demonstrates the persuasive power of these contracts, a power that lasts long after they expire. Royer and her co-authors tracked the fitness habits of about a thousand employees at a large, Midwestern company who had access to a company gym. For some randomly-selected employees, the researchers stepped in, offering them $10 for every time they visited the company gym, covering up to three visits per week. After a month, attendance doubled, but, after the deal ended, people returned to their old workout-dodging habits.