Equinox has transformed the world of the gym membership into a more private medical and performance practice. Its Optimize program, also weighing in at around forty thousand dollars per year, now stands at the peak of the “luxury” health and wellness sphere and has amassed a waiting list of more than a thousand people. It offers a combination of comprehensive blood testing, dedicated sleep coaching, nutritional counselors, regular personal training sessions and a health concierge who summates the results into a living document.
Members get extensive lab panels twice a year via an affiliation with Function Health. Blood analysis tests more than one hundred markers in several categories including hormones metabolism organ function, inflammation, and nutrient status. The results are integrated into coaching decisions directly rather than collecting dust in a file.
Schlafring Oura measures sleep and recovery while trainers check VO2 max, strength, and pattern of movement every couple of months. All of the data is considered by the team that causes changes to training loads, meal timing and recovery. People come more frequently than that of course, that’s an intensive week. For Optimize members there are three, one-hour personal training sessions, regular but brief check-ins with a sleep expert and nutrition coach, and a massage at least monthly. A concierge filters the intensity while maintaining overall cohesion. As Equinox chairman Harvey Spevak put it, this type of demand shows that “health is the new luxury”, creditingsocioeconomic elite with deeming longevity and “perfs”, their term for exertion optimized by ‘bulletproofing, ‘ equally desirable as travel.
That price is well beyond a standard Equinox membership, which can cost hundreds a month based on location and access. Optimize demands a hit to the pocketbook in the form of a separate base club membership on top of the forty-thousand-dollar program fee. Yet the waitlist has remained long since the program’s expansion outside of its California and Texas roots into New York and other metropolises. Spevak has credited the number of people on the list as indicative of an “insatiable” demand for services that deliver tangible results, rather than just another workout. What members seem to be interested in is the sense of ongoing supervision. Rather than trying to guess if a new training block or diet is working, they’re receiving clear feedback from bloodwork and wearables.
Sleep coaching takes care of the recovery component that often goes ignored until energy and mood are compromised. Nutritional coaching is connected to the same metrics, so the recommendations are not guesses about calorie balance, but more specific surrogates. The concierge role ensures there’s no situation where you have two experts giving contradictory recommendations.
Proponents of the program acknowledge that such biomarker testing and personal coaching could be convened separately at a quite a bit lower price, and that it is likely that the corresponding evidence relating each measure to increased healthspan we currently lack. Equinox does not advertise any program outcome of added years of life. Instead, it presents the service as an avenue for living every day to an elevated standard with wellness, recovery, and metabolic health framed as interrelated dynamic systems that are quantifiable with regular measurement and modification.
