It was 4 p.m. on a spring afternoon in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and Doug Young had writer’s block. The 42-year-old runs his own communications consulting agency, crafting copy for professional athletes and sports brands. Today, he was drawing a blank—the dreaded plight of many writers, but not an altogether new experience. What was, however, was his coping strategy: sweating himself into productivity.
Instead of staring at a blank screen attempting to string together sentences that wouldn’t come, he hit the weight room of the luxury gym which houses the sleek coworking space where Young spends his weekdays. “I lifted a little bit, I came back,” Young says. “Nobody cared I was wearing a short sleeve t-shirt and I went right back to work.”
For the past year, Young has called the coworking space at Life Time Fitness his “office.” He begins his workday by scanning into the fitness center’s front desk, then taking the elevator to the fourth floor to use the exclusive coworkers-only productivity zone, dubbed Life Time Work, which opened in 2018.
Reminiscent of an Ace Hotel lobby, metropolitan yet Instagrammable, with ample seating in nooks by bookshelves, cushioned taupe and green leather couches, and sprawling cubicle-less wooden tables, Life Time Work is one of the bougier variations on the coworking space trend that has rocketed upwards in the past few years. Born from the rise of remote and contract work, plus the startup boom, traditional offices have started to give way to more coworking spaces. In 2017, the number of coworking spaces globally jumped to over 14,000 from 436 in 2010, according to a survey by coworking conference organizer Global Coworking Unconference Conference, with an estimated 1.7 million people earning a living in coworking spaces worldwide, according to the 2018 Coworking Forecast.
Life Time, which now has four coworking spaces among its 100 gyms, isn’t the only fitness brand starting to fuse coworking and fitness. In 2013, Brooklyn Boulders rock-climbing gym first introduced the coworking-out concept in their Somerville, Massachusetts location, and has since added three more multi-functional locations. Soma Vida, which opened in Austin, Texas in 2008, combines yoga, life coaching, herbal wellness, massage, and offices. And luxury gym Equinox debuted its first coworking space in 2016, and now has six at their Sports Club locations nationwide. Prices range from $95 to $400 for monthly membership rates.
At Life Time Work, green walls and cubby lockers accent the T-shaped room adding an element of zen to a place. Light, inoffensive music—like Maroon 5 and Bruno Mars—fills the common areas, and sunshine streams in from floor-to-ceiling windows. Financial planners and venture capitalists rent out office space, while others, toting laptops and taking calls, meander about common areas. But unlike the thousands of contemporary coworking spaces, this one comes with a few quirks. Every once in awhile, Young hears the thud of weights crashing to the ground or medicine balls tapping the ceiling or gurglings of bass echoing from a Zumba class from the fitness floors below. It’s an unexpected, though not surprising, aspect working at a gym, Young says.
While the proximity to his home brought Young to Life Time, it’s the convenience keeping him there. He has a sleek place for working and working out—complete with a cafe serving protein smoothies and energy grain bowls (and the kind of employees who don’t roll their eyes when you ask for the vegan option) and locker rooms with hot tubs in them. “Is there anything I need that’s not in here?” Young rhetoricizes. “It is a one-stop shop.”
The convenience of these gym-office hybrids, however, cuts both ways, particularly at a time when concepts like “burnout” and “work-life balance” are gaining steam. These days, there are few aspects of American life that are kept sacrosanct from the encroachment of the office: projects over weekends, work calls at dinner, emails at your kid’s soccer games, and, now, an office quite literally in your gym. Courtesy of the mini computers in our pockets, we’re never technically off the clock. Workers report feeling on-edge too: A 2018 Gallup poll found 23 percent of employees reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while 44 percent reported burnout at least sometimes, due to an unmanageable workload.
But devotees of the new coworking-gym hybrids see these facilities as a solution, not emblematic of the problem. “If I was driving five minutes down the road to Planet Fitness, I’d still be thinking about work,” Young says. “What’s different is I don’t have to get in the car.” Besides, research does support the belief that working out staves off burnout. Some companies have sought to counteract workplace weariness with fitness and wellness programs, with 69 percent of employers offering a wellness program according to a 2014 survey. That’s not entirely new: The Senate has had a fitness facility for years, the same with NBC and more established Silicon companies, like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Facilities like Life Time Work are just flipping the setup from gyms-in-offices to offices-in-gyms to accommodate a burgeoning new economy.
Like the executives of larger start-ups, those at ones that are just building up also see the appeal in offering in-office fitness facilities, and now they can. When Alex Falcone, the 25-year-old COO of custom apparel company You Ink It, was looking for a Philadelphia coworking space, he sought out one with a wellness component and was keen on being “a locker room away from changing and getting that aggression out” during a challenging workday.
After touring the WeWorks and MakeOffices of the city, Falcone and his small team decided on City Fitness, a place where they could kill two birds with one stone, and a short drive from his company’s production facility in nearby Camden, New Jersey. “If I have an hour free, I can change real quick and I can spend it stretching, hitting the sauna,” Falcone says. “I can keep my body active so I can perform better.” Of course, that's not particular to Falcone: A 2015 study found that after four weeks of exercising, workers were less stressed and emotionally exhausted, and a 2017 study concluded that employees who participated in workplace wellness programs increased their productivity.
Traditional coworking spaces have a bro-y reputation, thanks to a constant flow of beer on tap and startup workers galore. But coworking spaces in gyms have a decidedly more centered energy, and attract a clientele who have a shared interest in wellness, making for easier social cross-pollination. Several studies have linked the presence of a workout buddy with increased exercise, effort, and motivation. And when you have an accountability partner in your bootcamp, it makes sense to have one in the workplace, too.
A member of Life Time Work, Kerri Konik, who runs her own boutique brand consulting agency, pays for a higher tier membership which ensures her a dedicated desk. The 53-year-old starts her day by checking in with her cube-mate, a local lawyer; the two will discuss upcoming work projects and plan that evening’s workout, usually a yoga class. “Now I have to go because I told her I would go with her,” Konik says. Plus, having a workplace friend ensures Konik won’t spend half the day in a social-media wormhole. “We’re [encouraging] each other on for the betterment of our businesses.”
Before joining Life Time, Konik worked from her home office, but found the experience isolating, especially when her son left for college two years ago. “I worked at home for a year, everyone’s on slack, but I’m still by myself. [When] my son went off to college, I became really by myself,” Konik says. “Yes, there's a beautiful conference space but the community aspect of not working alone—I love it.” She’s not the only one who seeks out who is looking to a coworking-office gym to solve for another challenge of contemporary living: loneliness.
As fitness becomes increasingly community-focused—take the popularity of culty group classes SoulCycle and Orangetheory—it makes sense that this strength-in-numbers dictum can be preached under one roof. At B Inspired, an all-women coworking space above a gym in Philadelphia, a need for camaraderie—professionally, athletically, and personally—brings members to the space, say founders Liz Harris and Amy Carolla.
Prior to starting her own financial education and advocacy firm geared toward professional and collegiate athletes in 2017, B Inspired member Courtney Altemus commuted between Philadelphia and Wall Street. Altemus was a 10-year member of Balance, the gym counterpart of B Inspired, so taking her work upstairs was a no-brainer. Although her male business partner works from a separate coworking space next door, it’s the community of women at B Inspired keeping Altemus engaged with both work and fitness, she says.
“It seemed like working from my house was going to be amazing,” Altemus, 50, says, until she realized that it could be isolating. “While I enjoyed the first couple days, I just needed the community aspect.” Even better, now, Altemus gets to choose the coworkers she wants, instead of negotiating a social environment that she couldn’t control. “I had so few women around me when I was in Wall Street that were my peers,” Altemus continues. “Every day [I faced] the challenge of trying to be as good as the guys and then actually doing my job. Having that removed and just being able to focus on doing my job and also knowing that I have these strong women with me I really appreciate.”
Of course, it all comes at a cost. In traditional offices—along with health insurance, 401Ks, and transit reimbursements—fitness centers or wellness reimbursements were another employer-sponsored perk. But at the new offices-in-gyms, workers are shouldering one more benefit. After all, in the new gig economy, nothing is really free.
