The Gym Group asked 2,000 people aged 16 to 29 what a neighbourhood needs before they will move into it. The answer was a gym, ahead of the pub on the corner.
That comes from the third annual wave of its Gen Z Fitness Pulse, run with the polling firm OnePoll. The same research found 44% of Gen Z rank fitness as their first or second discretionary spend, against 36% for streaming services and 36% for dining or drinking out. It is UK data and the pub comparison is very British, but the underlying behaviour has now shown up across three annual waves.
We have written before about Gen Z treating the gym as the venue that replaced the bar. This is the next move in the same story. The gym has stopped being somewhere they go and become a fixture of the neighbourhood they select, sitting alongside transit and groceries in the things that decide a lease.
For operators, that turns a cultural fact into a site selection problem. And the map a lot of people are reaching for is Strava's.
Why the Strava heatmap looks like a demand map
Strava's global heatmap aggregates activity from more than 200 million users, and it does correlate with places people want to be. A 2023 study in Boston found runners favoured streets that read as accessible, open, clean and safe, particularly those with natural features. Those are close to the same attributes that price a neighbourhood, which is why the heatmap keeps getting read as a proxy for desirability. Bright lines look like demand, and the map is free.
Should you use Strava's heatmap for site selection?
Not on its own. The heatmap shows where Strava users are active, and Strava users are not a cross-section of your catchment. A 2026 comparison of a recreation area found the platform's users were 93.5% male and 93.6% cyclists, with 35 to 54 year olds making up 62.9% of Strava users against 43.9% of the actual survey sample. A study in Mobilities found the data statistically useful but carrying a demographic bias toward younger male cyclists. Treat it as one input, never as the demand map.
| Measure | Strava users | Actual survey sample |
|---|---|---|
| Male | 93.5% | Broadly balanced |
| Cyclists | 93.6% | Mixed activity |
| Aged 35 to 54 | 62.9% | 43.9% |
The Baltimore case is the one to sit with. In 2019, Runner's World reported that the city's Strava heatmap appeared to mirror its racial segregation, with activity concentrated in the affluent areas. The map was not showing where running was wanted. It was showing where running was already safe, comfortable and habitual for people who already buy fitness subscriptions.
Site into that and you will systematically pick affluent, male, cyclist-heavy catchments (the geographic area a club draws its members from) and call the output a demand signal. You will also be bidding for those blocks against every other operator reading the same free map.
What to use instead
The Gym Group finding is the usable signal, and it is more specific than it first looks. If proximity is what decides the lease, then the competitive asset is the site itself, and a site is a property decision rather than a marketing one. That reframes the budget conversation: the money that wins a catchment is spent at signing, not on acquisition afterwards.
Three inputs beat a heatmap. Residential development pipelines and new-build permits show where the Gen Z households are going to be, rather than where cyclists already are. Transit and walk times show the real ten-minute radius. And your own member records show where people already travel from and how far they will go, which is the only demand data in the list that is actually about your members.
That last one matters most and is the one operators consistently leave in the CRM. Strava's own value has never been the map. As we argued when the company went public, the asset is knowing the customer, and more recently that has meant pushing into strength logging to see the half of training the map never covered. Strava is busy fixing its own blind spot. Operators should not build a property strategy on the version with the blind spot still in it.
Gen Z has told us, three years running, that the gym decides the postcode. That is a real and unusually clear signal. The risk is not the finding. It is that the cheapest map of it is also the most biased one available.