One in 75 Latin Americans passes through Smart Fit's platform. Founder Edgard Corona on why he built his own aggregator.

Every large gym chain watched corporate benefit platforms take a share of their members and negotiated over the terms. Edgard Corona built his own instead, lost money on it for years, and now holds more than a third of that market in Brazil. He founded Smart Fit in 1996 and built it into the largest fitness operator in Latin America, more than 2,000 clubs across 16 countries, and moved to chairman in March when his son took over as chief executive.

The season was brought to you by Zing Coach.

In this conversation:

• Why the cost of money in Latin America, not strategy, decides how many clubs he owns

• What a low-cost operator has to change before it can open in Morocco

• Why a gym group is buying its own NVIDIA hardware instead of renting compute

• What he thinks every large chain got wrong about aggregators, and what it cost them

• Where the model behind all of this actually came from, and it is not fitness

• What has to be true before a gym chain can call itself a health company

Chapters:

00:00 One in 75 Latin Americans is on the platform

00:27 Who he is and what he is building

01:23 What Smart Fit actually is, and where it goes next

02:38 Why he owns eight in ten clubs instead of franchising

03:24 What travels into a new market and what does not

04:15 Where new concepts get tested before they reach a budget club

04:59 The part of the experience nobody is building yet

05:21 Why a gym chain built its own aggregator

07:09 What it takes to put a rival gym on your platform

08:19 Build or buy, and the cost of capital behind it

09:35 The mistake he thinks the industry made

10:11 The members who had never trained anywhere

11:13 What stops a gym chain becoming a health company

11:52 What he took from Life Time, and the wearable plan

13:55 From fingerprints to face recognition at the door

14:37 Ten years out

15:03 One decision

Links:

• Edgard Corona on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn

• Tomorrow Health website

• Apply to join FitTech Club

• Zing Coach

Season 2 opener, brought to you by Zing Coach. Only 22 percent of people ever try a personal trainer, says Zing Coach CEO Anton Marchanka.

Personal training is the most effective retention tool a club has, and almost nobody buys it. Anton Marchanka puts the lifetime trial rate at around 22 percent, and says the reason is structural: there are not enough trainers to meet the demand, and the ones who exist cost more than the membership. He runs Zing Coach, which built a consumer AI coaching app and now licenses the model into clubs including New York Sports Clubs, and he ran Daily Burn before that, so he has operated both sides of that line.

In this conversation:

• Why he charges operators per active member rather than per location, and why the price per member falls as usage rises
• What Zing Coach had to unlearn from the consumer business before the first club deployment worked
• Why high-value-low-price clubs and boutiques buy the same product for opposite reasons
• Who the product does not work for, in his own words
• What integration actually costs an operator, in a number he gives on the record

Chapters:

00:00 The 22 percent who ever try a personal trainer

00:52 Why Daily Burn pushed him off the mobile-only path

02:43 What 850,000 paying users showed about retention

03:50 Not enough trainers, and too expensive

05:18 What selling into gyms forced him to unlearn

06:59 Who this does not work for

07:18 Charging per active member, not per location

09:03 Why budget clubs and boutiques buy this for opposite reasons

12:04 The consumer app as a testing ground

13:02 Strength training, AI adoption and community

15:27 What integration actually costs

15:58 What operators get wrong on day one

18:08 The gym floor as a guided experience

Links:

• Anton Marchanka on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health website
• Apply to join FitTech Club

A prescribed health app in Germany sells for 200 euros. Adham Kassab, COO of haelsi, on where 120 of it goes.

Germany lets public health insurers pay for a prescribed app. That sounds like the easiest distribution deal in consumer health until you price the entry: an information security certification, an audit, a randomised controlled trial, ongoing reporting, and a further charge every time you change the product. And once you are listed, the person using the app is not the person paying for it.

Adham Kassab ran Selfapy, one of Germany's best known prescribed digital therapy companies for mental health, through its sale to MEDICE. He is now Chief Operations Officer at haelsi in Vienna, a network of health centres that sells corporate memberships, rents capacity to doctors and builds its own digital services on top. He has run the software side and the physical side of the same market.

In this conversation:

- Why prescribed health apps in Germany cluster around the same price, and what is actually left per order

- Why "customer" is the wrong word in healthcare, and which of the three stakeholders blocks the deal

- Why most digital health products have not reached profitable unit economics

- Why doctors stopped being persuaded by downloads, retention and engagement

- What the fitness industry has to prove before an insurer will pay for strength training, and the one step a gym operator can take this week

Recorded in early 2026.

Chapters:

00:00 Three people in a restaurant: who is the customer

00:12 Unit economics and how fitness gets paid, in brief

01:26 What Selfapy is, in plain terms

03:12 Three tiers of health app, and only one gets reimbursed

04:40 One orders, one eats, one pays, and what listing costs

06:10 200 euros per prescription, 80 euros of margin

07:18 haelsi: centres, corporate memberships and doctor rentals

09:39 GLP-1, muscle loss and why there are no fitness partners

11:05 Why doctors do not prescribe strength training

11:31 What fitness has to prove, and one step to take this week

14:29 What a clinic chain and a therapy app share

15:40 Outcome-based reimbursement changes the top metric

16:53 Big tech in health: more potential, not more effectiveness

17:26 Consumerization is not reversible

18:15 Pulse check: seven questions, seven answers

Links:

• Adham Kassab on LinkedIn
• Haelsi
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

Life Time has 17.2 million square feet under roof and 1.5 million members. Jeff Zwiefel on converting both into a longevity business.

Recorded in 2025.

Most operators talk about adding a medical offer. Life Time built one inside the clubs it already owns, and Jeff Zwiefel puts numbers on it: what a single location produces, what margin it carries, and how much of an existing membership base he expects to convert.

Zwiefel was president and chief operating officer of Life Time, which he joined when it had seven clubs in Minnesota and left at 180. In his final years there he was building MIORA Longevity and Performance, the company's longevity business, and separately a new vertical, Life Time Health.

In this conversation:

- Why Life Time treats longevity as a conversion problem rather than an acquisition problem

- What one longevity location produces per month, and the margin band he underwrites

- The share of an existing membership base he expects to buy, and why he thinks it is not higher

- Why the hardest of his three build problems was hiring practitioners, not clinical design

- The research that changed his mind on GLP-1s, and what he thinks the category is worth to health clubs

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open

00:29 Introduction

01:39 Seven clubs to a lifestyle company

03:15 The two projects he is scaling

05:31 The longevity gold rush

06:32 Inside the metabolic code

08:28 Hub and spoke, not club by club

09:37 What one location can produce

11:15 How much of the base converts

11:56 Three things that nearly broke it

13:23 Whether this travels outside the US

14:48 Clinic KPIs against club KPIs

16:18 GLP-1s and the health club industry

18:42 Where the next growth comes from

20:15 What he is watching next

Links:

• Jeff Zwiefel on LinkedIn
• Life Time
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

150 events in the 150 biggest cities, and HYROX is at 85. Co-founder Christian Toetzke on why a race fills gyms instead of emptying them.

Recorded in 2025.

The fitness industry built itself on burning calories and aesthetics. Christian Toetzke's argument is that no other sport in the world runs on that motivation, and that this is the reason the average gym membership does not survive the spring. His alternative is a dated external goal that a member trains toward, which changes both how long they stay and what they will pay for.

Toetzke co-founded HYROX in Hamburg in 2017 with Moritz Fürste. It runs a standardised indoor fitness race, the same format in every city it enters, and licenses the training programme behind it to affiliated gyms through HYROX 365 for a monthly fee. Before HYROX he built and sold a mass-participation cycling event business, so he has taken the same thesis into two categories.

In this conversation:

- Why HYROX is the only mass-participation format that sends people into gyms rather than out of them

- What a gym has to package and sell before the affiliate licence pays for itself

- Why Toetzke will never open a HYROX gym, and what that decision protects

- What the gym industry gets wrong about the motivation it has been selling for forty years

- Why he thinks the profitable gym of the next decade owns less equipment, not more

Chapters:

00:00 Why an athlete spends differently

00:28 Christian Toetzke and the HYROX model

01:23 The three markets still missing

02:39 Why the product is deliberately offline

04:08 How a gym becomes an affiliate

04:40 The only race that sends people into the gym

08:35 The motivation the gym industry never sold

10:44 From elite to everyone

11:50 Which gyms the format actually fits

12:29 Why HYROX will never open its own gyms

14:00 Electronic targets and machine judging

16:09 The gym as the place your week is built around

18:12 Why the profitable gym owns less equipment

Links:

• Christian Toetzke on LinkedIn
• Hyrox
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

Sweatcoin pays people to walk. Co-founder Oleg Fomenko on where the money comes from when your product pays the customer.

Recorded in January 2026.

Every fitness business charges for activity. Membership, trainer, kit. Oleg Fomenko built the reverse, and he tells Natalia Karbasova that early investors called it a charity and asked where the business was.

Fomenko is co-founder of Sweatcoin and now leads Sweat Foundation, the business behind the Sweat token and Sweat Wallet. He spent most of a decade on Sweatcoin before moving across, and the two companies exist separately for reasons he explains in the episode.

In this conversation:

- Where the revenue sits when the product pays the customer instead of charging them

- What a brand is actually buying when it pays to be a partner

- Why these users are the mirror image of Strava's, and who they are

- Why a failed Bitcoin fork produced two separate companies

- What it takes to put a cash number on an active day

Links:

• Oleg Fomenko on LinkedIn

• Sweatcoin
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

Chapters:

00:00 Why movement should be a trillion-dollar market

00:29 Sweatcoin, and why it pays you to walk

01:40 From 100 million to 200 million

02:54 How it actually works

05:06 Cashing out, and what a token is worth

06:20 Why these are not Strava users

09:45 Where the money comes from

10:56 What a partner is paying for

13:01 Why there are two companies

14:45 The premium subscription

15:50 Putting a price on an active day

19:11 What operators can do with this

20:53 What the industry gets wrong

21:39 Where to find Tomorrow Health

All figures in this episode are Oleg Fomenko's own disclosures at the time of recording.

Recorded one day before EGYM announced its merger. Co-founder and CTO Florian Sauter on why the AI is not a language model.

Recorded in January 2026.

Every fitness technology conversation in 2026 starts with large language models. Florian Sauter runs the technology at EGYM and says that is not what the company builds with. On his account the core product sits on classical machine learning over structured data, and the hard input is not workout data at all. It is hard assessment data from equipment.

Sauter is co-founder and chief technology officer at EGYM, the Munich connected-equipment and gym software business. He has held the role for around fifteen years, from a single room to a company that on 31 March 2026 completed a merger with Playlist, the parent of Mindbody, ClassPass and Booker, in a deal the companies put at 7.5 billion dollars enterprise value with 785 million dollars of new equity. This conversation was recorded on 14 January 2026, the day before that merger was announced.

In this conversation:

- Why EGYM Genius runs on classical machine learning rather than large language models

- Why assessment data, not workout data, is the input that closes the loop

- What member care looks like in a gym segment that carries no staff

- Why a training plan has no single outcome to optimise for

- What combining hardware and software actually buys a product team

Links:

• Florian Sauter on LinkedIn
• EGYM
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

Chapters:

00:00 The gyms with nobody on the floor

00:25 Three things to listen for, and what happened the next day

01:37 Fifteen years, from a single room

02:49 EGYM Genius and the average member

03:55 Why assessment data is the hard part

05:04 Less generative AI, more machine learning

06:54 The Fitness Hub and computer vision

07:33 A training plan has no single right answer

08:53 Everything in house

09:11 Member care with no staff on the floor

10:24 Copilots, and mixed results

11:15 What hardware plus software actually buys you

12:09 Fitness converging with health

13:41 The problem AI will never solve

14:06 Build value, technology follows

Almost 300 clubs and 700,000 members. SATS Chief Digital Officer Gaute Sandal on what actually keeps a member coming back.

Recorded in 2025.

Every fitness operator is told it needs an ecosystem. At the time of this conversation SATS, the largest operator in the Nordics, connected to no wearables and no external apps at all. Gaute Sandal had looked at it repeatedly and put it below the line every time. His argument is not that integration is worthless. It is that it does not move the only number that matters, which is whether a member who is struggling builds a habit.

Sandal is Chief Digital Officer at SATS, running a team of more than 50 people across the app, machine learning and in-club systems. SATS operates close to 300 clubs across the Nordic countries, has more than 700,000 members and employs close to 10,000 people. He is the person who decides what gets built and what gets cut.

In this conversation:

- Why the first eight weeks decide whether a membership survives

- Why more members open the SATS app than walk into a club, and what that makes the app

- Why wearable integration kept losing the priority argument inside SATS

- What happened to the Mentra home-training bet when the clubs reopened

- What SATS tracks in the club, and what it refuses to connect to a member

Links:

• Gaute Sandal on LinkedIn
• SATS
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club
  

Chapters:

00:00 What happens when you stop showing up

00:30 Three things to listen for, and what changed since

02:00 What success looks like for a chief digital officer

03:46 Retention as a commitment on both sides

05:11 Mid-market, full service, and the group training bet

05:28 Inside the first eight weeks

07:17 Clubs and app as one ecosystem

07:48 More members open the app than enter a club

08:36 What happened to the Mentra home-training bet

10:16 Why integration keeps losing the priority argument

12:07 What the ideal integration would actually do

13:34 What SATS tracks in the club, and what it refuses to connect

16:21 What a wearable or equipment partner has to bring

17:45 The ecosystems he rates

18:56 The intervention problem worth solving