The wealthy drop up to $10,000 a month at community health clubs to relax and age their peers.

These are members-only community health clubs, which vary in thousand-dollar prices and offerings but promise the same thing: a curated, convenient experience that combines health and community with the help of luxury staff and amenities.

For a monthly starting price of $355, THE WELL members can take an alignment yoga class before grabbing a bowl of buffalo chicken for lunch, then head downstairs to soak in the longevity chill, sit in the meditation area, and visit the acupuncturist. The peach and white beauty looks as cool as the modern therapeutic feel, with slightly curved walls, plants chosen for healing and cleansing, and a custom scent of bergamot, grapefruit, and amber.

“It was designed to be your one-stop shop for health,” said Kane Sarhan, co-founder and CCO of WELL. Good luck. “New Yorkers have big lives, big jobs. They are type A commuters. But one thing that isn’t healthy is New York City’s sidewalks or subways. It was about making it easy and convenient for someone who wants health and wellness at the center. “

It first opened its 13,000-square-foot space in September 2019. Two months later, Remedy Place opened in West Hollywood, welcoming celebrities like Rita Ora and Kasey Musgraves to a sleek, masculine, gray space “designed to heal,” founder Jonathan. Leary said Good luck. The goal: to offer new methods of communication and clinic-based self-care, such as community acupuncture or an IV drip with film, for $300 to $2,250 a month depending on the package and location.

It wasn’t until the end of the decade that SoulCycle and green juices became a status symbol in the $4.5 trillion global health economy. Private health-focused community clubs, such as Grace Belgarvia and Mortimer House, have sprung up in London, while other general members-only clubs are beginning to include preventative offerings such as brain training programs. Members-only areas of life in the US have been evolutionary. While the pandemic initially challenged this concept, it ended up strengthening it as people prioritized community and well-being.

Community health clubs have become a booming hotbed of private club gold after the pandemic as the world wakes up from a health scare to a loneliness epidemic. SOURCE, with locations in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Connecticut, is expanding to Geneva and Miami (including a wellness-focused residence) with more expansion plans in the works. Remedy Place expanded to NYC in 2022 and plans to launch 16 clubs nationwide. And the Continuum Club, which combines a “white glove experience” with AI technology to help members reach their fitness goals, just opened in May for $10,000 a month.

There are eight types of private health clubs in NYC and five in LA (though not all are designed to encourage social interaction), according to Private Club Marketing, which helps bring private clubs to life. “Health is now less of a health concern than a lifestyle choice,” said CEO Zack Bates. Good luck. Fueling this change are millennials, who “have put their health and well-being first and have the financial means to participate in these areas to make this successful.”

Life reflects wealth

Courtesy of Remedy Place

The first members-only social clubs emerged in 18th-century London for wealthy men to meet and network with like-minded peers; in the 20th century, barriers were broken down to allow women and other minorities. Today’s version looks like an experience designed for the young, wealthy, and connected to flashy cities with high price tags—think Soho House, which emerged in the ’90s, or the new Casa Cipriani or Zero Bond.

Exclusivity has always been part of the appeal, explains Silvia Bellezza, a business professor of marketing at Columbia University. “The smaller the ‘middle’ group and the harder it is to reach, the greater the signaling power of that part,” he said. Good luck.

The rich often showed this with material things like a luxury bag or a car. But as more consumers had access to these goods, counterfeiters became more skilled, and the world fell in love with quiet luxury, shifting to intangible goods—such as health and well-being, which he says goes hand in hand with the reduction of progressive status symptoms.

They also changed the way they used and displayed their time. Laziness symbolized wealth because the rich could not afford to work. Now that being a slave to work means status and leisure has become more active, he says, it makes sense that community health clubs exist. “Going to a fitness club speaks to this idea of ​​active recreation and the most productive type of leisure time,” he says. “You are not working, but you are also doing something productive; you work on your body or your appearance or you try to preserve your age forever.”

But the health industry has faced backlash for being inclusive and expensive — two things social clubs can’t see.

When ACT reopened after the pandemic, the founders felt that the members-only model was inadequate to help people put wellness first. So they maintain dedicated member programs, such as unlimited experiences and discounts, while offering a la carte services—which Sarhan says sometimes converts customers into members.

While members typically range from 25 to 75 years of age, he says they are mostly 30-somethings with annual incomes of $250,000-plus. But “a person who is small or who does not have money to pay for membership can still have access to us,” he said.

A new need for prevention and longevity

During his 20-year career in health and wellness, Jeff Halevy discovered a three-fold problem. First: Wellness is a silly word that may mean yoga and smoothies to one person, but gluten-free diet and meditation to another. “None of this is really wrong, but the right understanding that moves the needle in the right place, from a results-based perspective, separates the wheat from the chaff,” he said.

Second: Health solutions vary in performance and quality. And third: People not only need to understand how to use these solutions, but how to integrate them into a “game plan—a fluid mosaic that adapts and evolves with their changing needs.” Wearables like the Oura ring are already starting to do this, but he says analytics is a different story: “People don’t need data and dashboards—they need guidance.”

That’s where Continuum Club comes in with health accuracy, providing aggregated data sets from sleep to exercise through a custom-built AI health plan for NYC’s one percent. The location: A 25,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival building that feels modern yet warm with earthy tones and brick walls houses “human performance experts,” hyperbaric rooms, a state-of-the-art gym, and a floatation tank.

Courtesy of The Continuum Club

Its approach based on science and technology is an example of the main wellness trends of the year, according to McKinsey’s Wellness 2024 report: biomonitoring, AI-based personalized wellness recs, products based on scientific performance and clinical performance, and doctor’s recommendations. How community health clubs can bring offerings to members that “instill confidence in efficacy and scientific support” is important, said Anna Pione, one of the report’s authors.

Remedy Place has designed its offerings with “real clinical evidence,” such as blood work tests to create what Leary calls “your body’s instruction manual” and a powerful oxygen chamber to accelerate the body’s biochemical healing process to reverse the effects of aging.

After all, we’re in our healthy aging phase, we’re more concerned with improving our health practices and embarking on Bryan Johnson-like quests to age backwards. More than 60% of consumers say it is very important or very important to buy longevity products, McKinsey found. It’s no coincidence that this rise in interest rates has coincided with the epidemic, Pione—and everyone else. Good luck talked to him—he says he made us more aware of our death and managing our life.

“These are all barriers, and there’s a lot of data and technology available today to help fix this,” Bates said.

Community is something living well

One key to living longer and happier, according to a Harvard study: Social acceptance, which has also been promoted by the pandemic. Building the like-minded has fueled the most successful independent clubs, Bates says, while the ones that fail have created a soulless atmosphere. Well-being often drives people to themselves, he adds.

“This desire for society is connected to health, so it makes sense that a contribution that brings good health and society would be felt,” said Pione. This is exactly why Halevy says he created Continuum as a social group. But he keeps it small as part of the group’s commitment to maintaining a personal and intimate experience; accepting 100 members and expanding to 250 next year with no plans to exceed that limit.

Leary deliberately tries to change the narrative about how we relate to what he calls ”social exchange” instead of traditional social settings and self-care experiences. “This could be anything from a new way of having a day, an alternative to happy hour, when you have a meeting, etc. alcohol and food.

There is also something simple. Halevy says the Continuum Club removes the “burden of time and energy” from those who have busy work, family, and social obligations. This is especially true in big cities like New York, which Sarhan says “chews you up and spits you out.” People tend to run from place to place, taking a yoga class here and seeing an acupuncturist there, she explains.

They need to do more in less time, he adds. “Time is our most precious commodity.”