Gyms are scrambling to add squat racks for the strength-training renaissance

Venture into any commercial gym during peak hours, and you'll likely see the same thing.

Row after row of empty treadmills, stair climbers, and elliptical trainers. Meanwhile, crowds of people are swamped around the squat racks, benches, and free weights, waiting to pounce on the first free piece of equipment.

Long cardio sessions are a thing of the past. Now, everyone and their mother (literally) is into squats. And deadlifts. And hip thrusts. And a multitude of other strength-building moves, especially ones that help sculpt a powerful lower body.

Data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, the major trade association for sports equipment manufacturers and fitness brands, illuminates this trend. Since 2019, gym-goers have been ditching the ellipticals and stair climbers, reaching instead for kettlebells and free weights.

There's just one problem: most commercial gyms are not equipped for this shift in consumer preferences. They're becoming a graveyard for bulky, old cardio machines with dated plugs and grainy televisions.

Gym owners are aware. "Trust me, our members will come up to us and tell us exactly how they feel," Mauro Maietta, district fitness manager at Crunch Fitness in Manhattan, told Business Insider. "We have some locations where they're like, okay, what's with the 40 treadmills? We need more benches."

But, it turns out, remodeling a gym is not simple. The process is slow, expensive, and complicated. It's often easier to swap out an old elliptical for some new cardio machine, even if that's not what people want.

Cardio created the gym industry

Prior to the 1960s, fitness trends didn't really exist. Gyms were for children. Kids played sports, ran track and field, and did Presidential Fitness Tests at school, but adults didn't have time for such childish games. That all changed when Kenneth Cooper coined the term "aerobics" — a type of high-energy exercise that he said would reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Or, for short: cardio.

Suddenly, exercise wasn't just a fun activity. A new idea was taking hold, that jumping, running, jazzercizing, and other forms of bouncing around are important for your heart and your waistline. This cultural shift created a demand for places to work out. It created the gym industry, and cardio was the driving force. Sure, there was muscle beach in L.A., which had been around since the 1930s, but that turf was largely reserved for the ultra-shredded Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world who wanted to look a certain way.

The problem with the cardio-centric gym was that it stemmed from a half-baked understanding of fitness. Cardio certainly plays a role in heart health and longevity, but it's not the whole story.

The past couple of decades have seen a boom in science showing that resistance training has a wealth of benefits, beyond looking big and strong. Lifting weights can help you feel younger for longer, delay chronic illness, boost bone health, and reduce pain. It may even improve your self-image. Weight-lifting isn't even necessarily about getting big – it can actually help you stay lean and toned. In fact, studies show strength training beats cardio, when it comes to fat burning.

"What the evidence is showing is that building muscle through strength training, as opposed to using cardio to manage weight, has a much greater effect on promoting longevity," the "Smarter Workouts" author and fitness industry consultant Pete McCall told Business Insider.

But, while scientists and trainers have known this for a long time, it has taken a while to catch on more broadly. Before the pandemic, studio classes, like spin, were booming. From 2018 to 2019, gym-goers were hungry for cycling, stair climbing, and rowing, according to data from the Health & Fitness Association, the trade group representing gyms, studios, and the fitness industry at large in the US.

COVID triggered a sharp pivot.

The boom of strength training in 2020

In the early months of 2020, people working out at home turned to social media influencers and personal trainers, many of whom extolled the benefits of resistance training. By June, Amazon had run out of barbells and dumbbells.

Fitness influencers had been driving an interest in strength training since the dawn of Instagram in the mid-2010s, but it was a niche trend.

In 2020, suddenly, influencers like Kayla Itsines, Kira Stokes, and Kaisa Keranen were amassing millions more followers around the world. Fans, pent up in their living rooms, navigating the unclear perils of a new pandemic, wanted to feel strong and look good.

"Women used to have this misconception that if they did strength training, they'd become too muscular," Pamela Kufahl, senior director of communications at Health & Fitness, told Business Insider. But consumers are getting savvier. Kufahl says from Gen Z to elders, there's been a real and growing recognition of the importance of strength training for longevity and even mental health.

Since gyms reopened, members are spending more time muscle-building and less time on cardio machines, the Health & Fitness data shows. People — in particular, women — are investing more of their gym dollars into personal training sessions.

Demand for unique, personalized fitness has upended the point of the gym.

These days, people aren't going to the gym for solo elliptical sessions, they're joining run clubs to work up a sweat (and maybe even find love). Boutique group fitness classes, like Pure Barre and Orange Theory, are proliferating, and membership is growing at boot camps like CrossFit. Pilates — low-impact resistance training that touts strength and longevity — is soaring in popularity, per Fitt Insider analysis.

If you've been in any large gym, you don't need to pore over industry reports or financial filings to tell you all this is true. These days, cardio is just one part of fitness. Treadmills, while still the most popular, least intimidating piece of equipment in the gym overall, might be used for a warmup or cooldown, not the entire workout.

McCall, who is a consultant for the cardio icon StairMaster, says this trend is only just getting started. "You're going to see a lot more interest in the next few years in strength training from all age groups," McCall told BI. "The 20-somethings, the 40-somethings, the 60-somethings will all be gravitating towards strength training, just because of the benefits it provides."

A conundrum for gyms

This sharp shift requires some adjustment for gym owners. In most gyms, the weight section is one small corner of their floor plan, and it is becoming increasingly crowded.

"Suddenly, now they need more plate-loaded equipment, they need to find space for that," Kufahl said. "Strength equipment takes up a lot of space, they need to be bolted in. To move strength equipment around is a big task for a lot of gym operators and it requires some planning, it requires determining what to do with the flooring."

To fully outfit a 1,300-2,800-square-foot gym for strength-training, you need dumbbells, kettlebells, barbells, medicine balls, three to four racks, and flooring that can withstand heavy weights. That takes around $60-75,000, Chris Travis, owner and coach at Seattle Strength and Performance, said.

Often, it's a higher initial cost for gyms to buy that strength equipment, because it's designed to last a lot longer than treadmills, ellipticals, or stair climbers, which might be on a multi-year lease, and have lots of electronics on board.

Businesses can't bend to every new trend, but consultants say it's time to do this remodeling job.

Since COVID, gyms have struggled to keep their members. Last month, Blink Fitness, one of the cheaper, most basically-equipped gyms in the New York City area filed for bankruptcy, signaling a realization that many before- and after-work gym crowds just aren't coming back. But Blink's parent company Equinox, a luxury brand with plenty of space for personal trainers and kettlebell racks, plus one elite $40,000 membership tier for longevity-seekers, is still in expansion mode.

Crunch gyms have spent the last few years investing in more lifting platforms and clearing space for strength training, Maietta, the Crunch district manager, said. Recent renovations around the country have included more than $200,000 worth of new equipment, which buys new dumbbell racks, plate-loaded strength equipment, and Olympic lifting platforms, according to press releases. Other priorities include more open-plan turf areas for functional strength training with weights like kettlebells, Crunch CEO Jim Rowley told Athletech News in January.

It doesn't have to be a shot in the dark, either. Gyms have access to all of the data stored on their treadmills showing exactly how often people are using them.

"I can go and use a code on an elliptical or I can use a code on a stair climber and get an idea of how many hours it's been used over the last month, three months, six months, whatever it is," McCall said.

Gym managers can use that data to determine how they might want to remodel their space — and some do. "Some health clubs are building new locations without cycling studios, I mean, that's how much that group fitness is being affected," McCall said.

A new demand for specialized muscle gyms

Gym-goers are increasingly seeking out more specialized spaces, and not just for spin class.

When JDI Barbell, a strength-focused gym in Manhattan, opened in 2016, it was a small operation, popular with seasoned gym-goers looking to step up their game. It started out as one of a few exercise spaces dedicated to powerlifting, strongman exercises, and Olympic-style weightlifting.

Lately, business is booming even more.

"It's one of the biggest reasons we get people coming in: 50% or more of members come to us after leaving a commercial gym because they're looking for something more," Priscilla Del Moral, JDI's co-owner and manager, told Business Insider.

Miriam Fried, a New York City-based personal trainer and founder of MF Strong, said she's seen the same trend at her gym: clients wanting more strength-focused workouts after tiring of the cardio-heavy fitness classes at bigger gyms.

The issue has helped fuel a resurgence of small gyms, which can focus on catering to a more individualized experience than their big-box counterparts.

"You can have a million different types of machines, but if you're missing the 'it' factor that makes people feel welcome and supported, they may not want to keep coming," Del Moral, who founded a nonprofit called The Strong Gurls Club, told BI

Is this the death of the elliptical?

This doesn't mean cardio is out. But it's being forced into a bit of a makeover.

"We now know that strength training is really good for you and that's here to stay, but we know you still need to go for walks and get your heart rate up," Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, professor of history at the New School and author of "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession," told Business Insider. "The treadmill is not disappearing."

Brands that manufacture cardio equipment are looking at tweaks they can make. StairMaster's parent company, Core Health & Fitness, has been building out its fleet of machines, acquiring Jacob's Ladder, offering a new self-powered treadmill, and developing more assault-style bikes. They're branding themselves as more of a high-intensity training equipment provider than just a stair-climbing apparatus provider these days.

Increasing enthusiasm for strength-training and longevity is also a boon for the fitness industry – potentially keeping people in the gym for way more years than they might have been capable of before. Strength training is ideal for extending your "play span," your ability to keep doing what you love as you age.

Maietta, the Crunch manager in New York, said he (41) is still showing up athletes who are years younger than him. He credits that to his lifting.

"What strength training really affords people is to make age just feel like a number," he said.