HEALTH & FITNESS BUSINESS

An Interview with Harvey Lauer

JULY 01, 2004 — Want to know what the American fitness consumer is thinking? Ask Harvey Lauer, president of American Sports Data, Inc. For the past 19 years, ASD has been the specialist in consumer research for the sporting goods, fitness and health club industries. ASD is the principal provider of consumer research for both the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA) and the International Health & Racquet Sportsclub Association (IHRSA).

Lauer is known for his precise research and plainly spoken opinions. Here are the highlights of a recent conversation with SGB's Health & Fitness Business.

H&FB: As an industry expert, how do you regard today's consumers? What are they doing, and how are they spending their money?

LAUER: Thank you for the elevation to expert, but that's true only in the narrow sense of national consumer research. Since I usually don't fly that low, I can't say what's going on inside the retail trenches. But here's the view from 10,000 feet. Physical fitness today is simplicity itself. The vast majority of the population (over 80 percent) believes in fitness, but only 20 percent gets enough exercise. People have difficulty with self-motivation. That's why, over the last decade, home exercise has been flat while health clubs—and until recently the personal trainer business—has been booming. People simply can't do it on their own. They need help.

But if they must do it on their own, fitness consumers need "easy" exercise equipment. This is why light hand weights, recumbent bikes and yoga have become so popular. Second, they need external motivation, somehow piped into the home—special videos, e-mail encouragement, Internet personal training, or other applications and incentives we haven't even dreamed of.

So all this commotion is starting to move the needle. My latest numbers reflect a little bump in fitness participation—over and above soaring health club memberships.

H&FB: What are the differences between the health club consumer and the home fitness consumer?

LAUER: Home exercisers lack the external incentives provided by a health club environment: social interaction, peer pressure, expertise and discipline, to name a few. But these are motivational techniques and devices that can be imported into the home. Some of these ideas are futuristic, some are already on the horizon, and a few have been around for a while. I'm talking about motivational videos, remote personal training, exercise buddies in chat rooms, regular inspirational e-mails to bolster morale, new tracking and monitoring technology, economic incentives, the weight watcher's concept somehow imported into the home, and still other unforeseen motivational strategies.

If you want to analyze the differences between these two groups, right now, frequent health club users are more masculine, younger and more affluent than frequent home exercisers. Fifty-two percent of frequent health club attendees are male, versus 45 percent of frequent home exercisers. Fifty-six percent of these frequent club users are over age 35, compared with 64 percent for the home fitness crowd.

H&FB: What are your impressions of young fitness consumers and the 50-plus crowd?

LAUER: In my opinion, today's kids are the most spoiled generation in American history, regardless of socio-economic status. Few have experienced need or deprivation, while parents, grandparents, advertisers and other guilty parties have nurtured excessive expectations. They're also less connected to fitness than kids of previous generations, and their renunciation of physical activity is already a cliché. It's blamed on lots of things, but most notably a seismic shift from outdoor to indoor recreation. The usual, guilty suspects are e-mail, chat rooms, Internet surfing, video games, music and other new indoor distractions. Vanishing P.E. programs, withering school sports and the disappearance of pick-up games are other culprits. The so-called extreme sports—despite all the hype and hoopla—have not taken up the slack, certainly not in terms of total participation and caloric expenditure. Naturally, the most glaring symptom of youthful inactivity is the much-publicized childhood obesity epidemic.

If kids were interested in fitness, they would spend money on it. It seems that social class or a low household income are not obstacles to a slew of "new necessities" which, in any other era, would have been luxuries. Most kids have cell phones, video games, loads of CDs, designer clothing, travel sports teams, and spring break in Myrtle Beach or Cancun.

We can attack the problem on several fronts. We need more evangelism like Jim Baugh's P.E.4Life, more kids' programs at health clubs, health initiatives to persuade both parents and educators that inactivity literally kills children. And most of all, we need fitness-minded parental role models—the only people that will make a difference.

I can relate to the over-50 crowd, and that's a much better story. Seniors are actually propping up the fitness movement, and this is a trend no one saw coming. Since 1987, for example, health club membership is up 127 percent, but for people 55+, the number jumps to more than 343 percent. From 1998 to 2003, Pilates is the number one growth activity (up 445 percent), followed by Yoga/Tai Chi ( up 134 percent). Both are predominantly female, and skewed older than the general fitness population. Recumbent cycling, the second-oldest activity measured, has increased by 58 percent during the same period.

There are several reasons for the graying of the fitness boom—if we can call it that. One is that there are many fitness participants like me—people who started running in the late 1970s, and maintained the fitness lifestyle.

Another reason for the popularity of senior fitness is that it's now socially acceptable. When we were kids growing up in the Bronx, if my mother looked out the window and saw an old man running around in his underwear, she would have called the police.

A third reason is therapeutic referral. Huge numbers of medical professionals are prescribing physical activity as an antidote to osteoporosis, heart disease, diabetes and a host of other maladies. Still another explanation for the aging fitness boom is that equipment manufacturers have accommodated older folks with user-friendly equipment for kinder/gentler fitness.

H&FB: Why are you bullish on the future of fitness?

LAUER: I believe in what I'm fond of calling the unstoppable march of humanistic evolution. Although sociological arguments can be made to the contrary, I think that people are becoming smarter and more sensitive about their planet, their environment, their relationships with other people, and also their bodies.

Right now, we're on the threshold of a great leap forward in physical fitness, but not necessarily because of philosophical enlightenment. It's because enough people and enough institutions now realize that physical inactivity is becoming dangerous to our collective health.