What can you get for a $40K Equinox membership? / Instagram
Equinox wants you to live longer. But for a steep price. Equinox has always been the Rolls Royce of gym chains, but now it’s as if it launched a line of gold-plated Rolls. For a cool $40,000 or so, you can join the “Optimize by Equinox” personalized health program focused on longevity. We investigated the optimized Equinox memberships and what this program portends for the future of fitness.
OPTIMIZE BY EQUINOX
Equinox teamed up with the lab-test startup Function Health to launch “Optimize by Equinox,” a personalized program that includes everything from personal training and nutrition plans to sleep coaching and massage therapy all in a quest to promote overall wellness and slow the effects of aging.
“It’s really a paradigm shift in how we’re able to live with vitality and avoid suffering,” said Jonathan Swerdlin, co-founder of Function Health. “It deals with what’s above the surface, your abs and glutes, which you can see in the mirror that are great. But it also deals with what’s below the surface and what you can’t see in the mirror. And that’s revolutionary.”
WHAT YOU GET
If you buy the Optimize program, you’ll first undergo a battery of tests. Function Health tests Optimize members for 100 biomarkers, including liver, kidney, and heart health, cancer markers, metabolic and immune systems, and nutrients in the bloodstream. Then, Equinox tests Optimizers for fitness, including strength, mobility, and VO2 max. The tests are repeated twice annually.
Next, your personal Equinox “concierge” pulls all the tests and data together and helps design a personalized plan to improve your health and fitness. Each member has a core team that includes a fitness trainer, nutrition coach, sleep coach, and massage therapist. The Optimize membership includes: three, 60-minute training sessions per week with the trainer, two half-hour sessions a month with the nutrition coach, two half-hour sessions a month with the sleep coach, and one massage session per month.
“It’s the same as Formula One or an athlete, where you are given a team of top experts in all these different verticals, to design a program based on all the data that we collected,” said Julia Klim, vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Equinox. “It’s a human-first, highly luxury service meets data meets coaching program….I sometimes joke that we’ve always been in the longevity business and the science is catching up.”
WHAT IT COSTS
Cost for Optimize by Equinox is $3,000 per month for a minimum of six months, but that doesn’t include the Equinox gym membership fee with access to their “E Clubs,” which are more like private gyms. The two together will cost you $40,000 or more annually.
LONGEVITY FITNESS
Is the combination of health testing and personalized coaching the future of fitness or just a one-off for especially wealthy workout warriors? That remains to be seen. Certainly, as such testing becomes more affordable, it will be more common. But, for now, we’re a bit dubious about Equinox’s hands-on program. For starters, $40K per year and you only get one massage per month?
That said, we’re much optimistic about the use of biomarkers for fitness. Swerdlin says Function Health’s mission is to help people live “100 healthy years.” The company’s own program costs a much more reasonable $499 for the tests of 100 biomarkers. Reportedly, demand is currently so strong that it has a waitlist of more than 200,000 future clients. Function Health and others like it may indeed be the future of fitness for gym goers. The practical use of such data and how it impacts your training, eating, and resting is only going to increase as this decade continues.
We may not be far away from the day when biomarker tests are standard (and very affordable) parts of training programs and gym memberships. But, for now, for those who can afford it, there’s Equinox Optimize. “Living 100 healthy years doesn’t happen inside of a doctor’s office,” Swerdlin said. “It happens in your daily decisions. And it also happens with the way in which you exercise, and Equinox really helps close the loop on that.”
