Luxury fitness chain Equinox is poised to launch one of the most expensive annual gym memberships in the world, with a promise to help members live healthier and longer — for a cool $40,000 a year.
Dubbed “Optimize by Equinox,” the program was created in partnership with lab-test startup Function Health to craft personalized health plans for its wealthy participants, including personal training, nutrition and sleep coaching, as well as massage therapy.
Announced Monday and earlier reported on by CNBC, the pricey program taps into a rapidly growing market for longevity, as modeled by gurus like Bryan Johnson — the tech mogul-turned-anti-aging fanatic who spends upwards of $2 million on a controversial regimen to beat Father Time.
Austin, Texas-based Function Health is a membership-based platform that’s already cashing in on the growing market by offering its customers access to 100-plus lab tests for all major biological functions –including thyroid, hormone, cancer detection, heavy metals and Alzheimer’s risk tests, among others — to help its patients live longer.
Optimize will run its members $3,000 a month for a minimum of six months — or $36,000 for the year.
The fee doesn’t include the roughly $4,000 annual Equinox gym membership, bringing the total cost to about $40,000.
If you think the price sounds steep, you’re not alone.
“I cannot imagine my patients being able to afford that for what it is,” Dr. Brintha Vasagar, a family medicine doctor based in Delaware, told The Post.
The Optimize program will initially be available starting at the end of May in New York City, then Highland Park, Texas, and eventually other states, according to CNBC.
The program will begin with a swath of tests executed by Function Health, which will look for 100 biomarkers.
Equinox, which has 107 locations globally, will then run its own battery of fitness tests, including VO2 max — or maximal oxygen consumption test, which measures how much oxygen a person can use during intense exercise — as well as strength and movement range checks.
“It’s really a paradigm shift in how we’re able to live with vitality and avoid suffering,” Jonathan Swerdlin, co-founder of Function Health, told CNBC. “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.”
The tests are repeated twice a year, per CNBC.
An Equinox “concierge” will then pull all the fitness and health data results together to design a personalized plan to improve their overall health and fitness.
To execute the plan, each member will be equipped with a core team that includes a fitness trainer, a nutrition coach and sleep coach as well as a massage therapist.
Equinox’s top-level trainers will work with Optimize members during three, 60-minute training lessons per week.
Aside from working on fitness goals, Optimize members will also get two 30-minute weekly sessions with a nutrition coach, plus half-hour sessions with a sleep coach and one massage therapy session per month.
In all, the program amounts to 16 hours a month of coaching and training, CNBC reported.
Although the initiative could be promising, one issue Vasagar pointed out was the apparent lack of a medical professional.
“What would you do if you find out that you have a cancer or that your thyroid levels are abnormal?” Vasagar wondered. While a personal trainer, dietitian and “concierge” can optimize our health, the doctor noted, they can’t fix it all. “There are some medical diagnoses that no matter what you do with your diet, exercise, sleep, and massage — you will not be able to cure.”
Currently, aspiring Optimize members can join a waitlist via Equinox’s website, which only requires a person’s full name and email to sign up.
It wasn’t immediately clear how Equinox will go about selecting members for the pricey program, or when they’ll be contacted to officially sign up.
“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,” Julia Klim, vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Equinox, told CNBC.
“I sometimes joke that we’ve always been in the longevity business and the science is catching up,” Klim added.
Vasagar mused that if the money isn’t an issue, it could be a worthwhile investment.
“If you have that sort of disposable income where you are able to devote that much money to optimize your health, I mean, what is worth more than your health?” Vasagar said.
The new program comes at a time when Equinox has 27 new clubs in its pipeline, including in Philadelphia and Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades.
Additional reporting by Amy Eisinger
