Singapore's Golden Age of Fitness and the Dead Zone of Mid-Market Gyms

This month, True Fitness and True Yoga closed all their studios in Singapore. Parent company Kontafarma called it an "unprecedented" challenge, citing three causes: the rise of boutique studios, residential gyms reducing the need for external memberships, and the boom in online training.

But the numbers tell the opposite story. Sport SG recorded that 76 per cent of Singapore residents exercised at least once a week last year, up almost every year from 66 per cent in 2026. The market is not shrinking. It is simply changing shape.

I have tracked sports media rights deals and operating models for more than thirty years, and this is the kind of shift I see repeat across many markets: when demand grows, the ones who fall are not the smallest players, but the ones with no clear reason left to exist.

Context: the power structure of a market in expansion

Sean Tan, co-founder of the non-profit Singapore Fitness Alliance, says the industry is in what he calls the "golden age of fitness and wellness". He is not wrong. But a golden age for the whole industry does not mean a golden age for every business model.

True Fitness once ran its TFX club at Millennia Walk — more than 41,000 sq ft, the largest gym in Singapore before it closed. Big box gyms typically start at 15,000 sq ft and gather everything under one roof: treadmills, pin-loaded machines, group class studios, saunas, cold plunge baths, showers, changing rooms and sometimes swimming pools. The fixed costs are enormous: rent, equipment, staffing, utilities, maintenance. When utilisation falls, profit evaporates before revenue does — exactly the trap Sean Tan describes: "operating costs remain high, while consumers have more alternatives these days and can switch providers with ease, making membership revenue less predictable".

Analysis: three market tiers and a squeezed middle

The Singapore market now splits into three clear tiers. Tier one is boutique studios, 1,000 to 2,500 sq ft, usually running a single modality — pilates, indoor cycling — sometimes with no showers or toilets at all, and low setup costs. Tier two is budget 24-hour chains such as Anytime Fitness, Snap Fitness and 24/7 Fitness, sized 4,000 to 6,000 sq ft, located close to where members live. Tier three is the mid-market big box operator such as True Fitness.

The decisive number sits in the cost structure. Sean Tan points out that showers and toilets are the most expensive part of a gym's built facilities. The 24-hour chains strip them out, strip out the large rent, and then compete on price and convenience. Boutiques compete on expertise, personalisation and premium experience. In the middle, big box gyms carry the costs of both ends without owning the advantage of either.

Samuel Gallo, co-founder of Surge Strength & Results, puts it bluntly: "The market itself has never been bigger. Demand is not the problem. Being nothing in particular is the problem. Not the cheapest, not the best, so people drift out of the middle."

Here is the core insight: the mid-market gym crisis is not a demand crisis, it is a positioning crisis. I routinely analyse football clubs through this same logic — a team does not get relegated because it lacks spectators, but because it has no tactical identity clear enough to hold its place. Damien Lee, senior lecturer in sport and wellness management at Nanyang Polytechnic, frames it as "operators in the middle could face greater challenges in setting themselves apart from their competitors".

UFIT, with four locations and around 700 active clients, sells a "circle of care": personal training, group fitness classes, plus physiotherapy, podiatry and nutrition services when needed. Founder and COO Dean Ahmad says 2026 has been its best year in the past five years. Surge invested more than S$50,000 in team education last year alone, and plans to repeat that figure this year. "The coaches are the product."

Contrarian angle: what kills big box is not boutique

There is a contrarian reading I consider more accurate. The rise of condominium gyms and ActiveSG facilities did not kill boutique studios — it killed big box gyms. Ahmad calls it "healthy market segmentation". Price-sensitive, convenience-driven users will never pay for coaching; they were never the boutique audience. The problem is that they used to belong to big box gyms, and now they have a cheaper option right downstairs.

But talking only about segmentation misses the biggest variable: rent. Margins in the traditional fitness industry are thin at 15 to 25 per cent, with rent eating 15 to 20 per cent of revenues. Sean Tan asks: if rent climbs to 30 to 40 per cent of revenues, with manpower and utilities rising alongside, what is left for the business to take home? He traces this back to commercial properties increasingly owned by real estate investment trusts, where landlords must show year-on-year increases in rental yields. Many leases also carry a gross turnover component: the better you perform, the steeper your rent at the next renewal.

Luke Yeo, owner of Unstoppable Fitness — a roughly 4,000 sq ft bodybuilding gym in Shenton Way — says operating expenses run about S$40,000 a month, and roughly S$1.2 million has been invested in building and running the gym since 2026. A single premium commercial gym machine easily costs S$15,000 to S$20,000, before taxes, transport and installation. The pressure is not in equipment cost but in changed customer expectations: people immediately see scale, appearance, showers and overall atmosphere, yet cannot tell two machines apart on specification.

Amore Fitness, a chain more than 40 years old with nine women-only locations, closed outlets at Jurong Point in 2026 and Seletar Mall in 2026, then opened at CPF Jurong in 2026 and Punggol Coast Mall in 2026. Director Lim Kian Leong says the goal is not more locations but the right ones — a line that sounds much like how big football clubs restructure their squads rather than simply buying more players.

Takeaway

The principle here applies to football as much as to fitness: when demand grows and choices multiply, the middle becomes a dead zone. Mid-market operators survive not by doing everything, but by choosing one thing and doing it better than anyone else. The open question for Singapore: as commercial real estate increasingly belongs to investment funds, is there room left in the urban gym model for anyone but the best-funded chains?