The Fitness Industry in China

China was supposed to become the biggest fitness market on the planet. That part is happening. What nobody in 2018 predicted is how it would happen. The annual-membership gym that dominated Chinese cities for two decades is collapsing, and a very different market is growing in its place. If you sell equipment, sportswear, sports nutrition or a fitness app, the map you were handed a few years ago is now wrong.

Demand is not the problem. The exercising population keeps growing, and gym members keep showing up more often than they used to. The problem is that the business model underneath the industry, selling a year of gym access before delivering a single session of it, is being dismantled by consumers, by courts and by regulators at the same time. This article is the overview: how the market is structured, who operates it, who buys, and what a foreign brand can realistically sell into it. Each sub-segment has its own article on this site, linked where it comes up.

Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA, based in Shanghai since 2012. I have spent a decade selling foreign equipment, nutrition and apparel brands into Chinese gym chains, studios and e-commerce, which means I have also watched several of those chains stop paying their suppliers.

China could become the biggest fitness market in the world within the next 20 years. If only 4 percent of Chinese people join gyms, the country will need to build 30,000 new clubs over the next two decades.

Theo Hendriks, Sports & Leisure Group

That was the consensus view for years, and it was wrong in an interesting way. China did not need 30,000 more classic clubs. It needed a different kind of room, sold a different way.

How the Chinese fitness market is structured in 2026

Four formats share the market, and they are not converging. They are pulling apart.

• Traditional clubs. Large-footprint venues, 1,500 square metres and up, pool and sauna, a sales floor, an annual card. This is the format in retreat. It still employs most of the industry, roughly 991,000 of the 1.172 million people working in Chinese fitness at the end of 2025, which is exactly why its decline is slow and messy rather than sudden.
• 24-hour small-format gyms with no sales staff. Two hundred to six hundred square metres, app-controlled door, monthly subscription, coaches who teach rather than sell. This is where the chains are growing. Entry is scanned through a mini program, occupancy is tracked in real time, and there is nobody at a desk to pressure you into a five-year card.
• Boutique studios. Single-discipline rooms for pilates, strength, boxing, cycling, dance. Small, high price per session, community-driven. We cover the economics of that format in detail in our piece on boutique fitness studios in China.
• Corporate and community facilities. The quietest of the four and the one foreign equipment brands underrate. Employer-funded gyms in office towers, plus government-backed community fitness rooms, are now a real procurement channel. The Chinese sporting goods association reports that demand from work units upgrading staff health programmes is pushing commercial equipment buying away from single-machine orders and toward complete fitted-room solutions.

The membership base tells you how serious the shake-out is. China counted 84.518 million paying fitness members at the end of 2025, down 3.44% year on year, for a membership penetration rate of 6.00%. Fewer members. But active members visited their venue 7.56 times a month, up 42.1%. The casual card-holder who signed up in January and never returned has left the market. The people who remain actually train.

That gap between the broad exercising population and the paying member base is the single most misread number in this industry. Roughly 400 million Chinese people exercise regularly. Fewer than 85 million pay a gym for it. If you want the full set of figures, market size and forecasts, we broke them down separately in how big is the fitness industry in China.

The prepaid card model and why it is collapsing

Here is the mechanism, because it explains almost everything else on this page.

A Chinese club sells you a cheap annual card. It books the cash immediately, before delivering any service. That cash pays this year’s rent, this year’s payroll and, often, the deposit on the next location. Then the sales floor pushes you into a personal-training package of ten, twenty, fifty sessions, prepaid again, because the card alone does not cover costs. The whole structure runs on tomorrow’s sign-ups funding today’s expenses. It works while the queue at the door keeps growing. The moment new sign-ups slow, the arithmetic breaks and the operator either sells harder or disappears overnight with the float. Chinese media has a blunt name for the second option: 跑路, the run-away.

Wellfit, the Shanghai chain founded in 1996 and known for most of its life as Will’s, is the case study nobody in the industry can ignore. L Catterton, the LVMH-affiliated fund, took control in October 2018. The chain had 161 stores at the end of 2023. By the time CBNData examined its books, the official count was 109 sites across seven provinces with 89 in Shanghai alone, and at least 21 of those showed as temporarily closed on review platforms, putting the genuinely trading number under 88. The parent company was carrying more than 2,000 active lawsuits, over 90% of them naming Wellfit as defendant. The Paper reported in March 2025 that every Wellfit site in Beijing and Chongqing had shut, that a local operator had taken over the Chengdu locations for free, and that individual members were out of pocket by 24,000 to 54,000 RMB each. A luxury-backed premium chain with a strong brand and prime locations still could not make prepaid annual cards work.

Then the law arrived. On 14 March 2025 the Supreme People’s Court issued its judicial interpretation on prepaid consumption disputes, effective 1 May. It voids the standard clauses gyms relied on, no refunds, no card replacement, no transfers, gives consumers a seven-day no-questions right to their principal back, and allows punitive damages against an operator that takes prepayment, stops trading and dodges refunds. Shanghai went further with rules specific to sport and fitness, in force since 1 March 2025: a membership cannot exceed 5,000 RMB or 24 months, a course package cannot exceed 20,000 RMB or 60 classes, no consumer can be sold more than 20,000 RMB in total, and a bank must hold 30% to 60% of the money in custody until the service is delivered.

Read that as a business rule, not as legal trivia. The float is gone. An operator can no longer finance expansion with customer money. Whatever is built next has to be profitable on monthly cash flow.

The unit economics already show it. In 2025 the average Chinese fitness club took 289,000 RMB per site per month, down 22.52% in a year. The average studio took 97,000 RMB, down 1.21%. Small format is not just fashionable, it is the only format that held its revenue. Short-term products now account for 97.1% of studio sales and 85.34% of sales even inside traditional clubs. The prepaid year is finished as a default.

Consolidation: the operators that actually matter

Something confusing is happening at the same time as the closures. Venue count is falling, chain count is rising. Independents are dying and chains are absorbing their members. That is consolidation, and it is good news for any brand that sells business-to-business, because a shrinking number of buyers each control a growing number of doors.

Leke is the one to understand. It announced a 100-city, 10,000-store target in 2023, passed 2,000 sites in 2025, and now runs sub-brands aimed at different price tiers, including a yoga concept and the Lightning Panda value format built for smaller cities. Its franchise terms tell you how it thinks: a city partner signs for at least five sites and has two and a half to three years to open them. That is a supply-chain buyer with a rollout plan, not a single gym owner haggling over one treadmill.

Supermonkey sits at the opposite end. No card, no sales floor, no upsell. You book one class through WeChat and pay for that class. Younger consumers trust it precisely because there is nothing to run away with.

What this means for a foreign supplier is straightforward. Six or seven decision-makers now control a meaningful share of new equipment demand in urban China. Selling to them is a national account conversation, with national account expectations on service, spare parts and training. The 2010s approach of appointing one distributor and hoping is finished.

City tiers: two different markets under one name

Average annual card prices split hard by tier. Tier-1 cities reached 5,215 RMB in 2025. New tier-1 cities reached 3,385.8 RMB, up 62.4% in a single year, the fastest move of any tier. The gap between what a Shanghai consumer and a Hefei consumer will pay for fitness is widening, not closing.

Below that, the 24-hour monthly-card format is going down-market fast. Chains that started in Hangzhou and Shanghai are opening in tier-3 and tier-4 cities where nothing existed except a hotel gym and a school track. Metal Dog’s 777 RMB annual card exists because in those cities price is still the entire proposition.

Practical reading for a brand:

• Tier 1 and new tier 1. Premium positioning works, studios and specialist formats concentrate here, and this is where imported equipment, technical apparel and sports nutrition sell at full price. It is also where your Xiaohongshu content gets made.
• Tier 3 and below. Volume, franchise chains, hard price ceilings. Foreign brands rarely win here on their own label. If you want this volume, sell components, licence, or supply the chain rather than the consumer.

Who trains, and what they buy around the workout

The Chinese fitness consumer of 2026 is younger than the Western equivalent, more urban, more female than the old stereotype allowed, and far more likely to research a purchase inside a social app than on a search engine. Women now make up around half of paying members and out-spend men on an annual basis. Strength training among women is no longer a niche, it is the fastest-growing course category in the country. We go into that shift properly in bodybuilding and strength training in China, and into the combat-sports side of it in women’s boxing and combat sports in China.

Around the gym membership sits a basket of purchases that is worth more than the membership itself.

• Equipment. China’s fitness equipment market reached 819.5 billion RMB in 2024, up 11.63%, and the China Sporting Goods Federation expects it to pass 1,011.4 billion RMB by 2027. At the 2026 China Sport Show, more than 60% of newly launched products carried AI, data connectivity or smart interaction. Treadmills and racks without a data layer now read as last-generation to a Chinese buyer.
• Apparel. The activewear category is where domestic and foreign brands fight hardest, and where positioning beats specification. Our analysis of that battle sits in how to market a yoga and activewear brand in China.
• Nutrition. Protein, recovery and functional supplements. Still young, still a category where foreign origin genuinely helps. Full breakdown in China’s sports nutrition market.
• Apps and connected kit. Keep, the listed online-fitness leader, posted its first full-year profit in 2025 on revenue of 1.637 billion RMB, with 21.8 million monthly active users. Chinese consumers are comfortable paying for training through a screen. If your product has no digital layer, that now registers as a missing feature. The mechanics of connected gyms and app-led training are covered in digital fitness and connected gyms in China.
• Outdoor spillover. Running, trail, camping and padel absorb budget that used to go to gym cards. A runner buys shoes, a watch, apparel, nutrition and race entries every year, and posts all of it. Worth watching even if you sell indoor products.

Where a foreign brand actually fits

Understand who you are up against. China is not just a market for fitness products, it is the factory and increasingly the brand owner. Domestic manufacturers have moved from making other people’s goods to building their own labels, with the price advantage intact. A foreign company competing on price or basic specification will lose that fight every time.

The openings I see working:

• Sports nutrition. Foreign origin still carries real trust in anything ingested, and the category is immature.
• Premium and technical equipment. Not the treadmill price war. Specialist gear where engineering, durability and warranty justify the gap.
• Business-to-business supply to the growing chains. Consolidation created buyers with hundreds of doors and a rollout schedule. That is the single most underused route for foreign equipment brands right now.
• Performance apparel and footwear for the newer sports. Running, trail, padel, outdoor. See how even a mass-market player is repositioning in Decathlon’s premium pivot in China.
• Apps and connected fitness with a genuine feature the domestic players do not have.

Case study: Katrin, an Austrian equipment brand

She runs a company making light-commercial strength equipment, racks, benches, adjustable dumbbells, built for rooms of 200 to 600 square metres. She came to us after a bad eighteen months. Her Chinese importer had sold almost exclusively to large annual-card clubs, and two of those chains had gone under owing her the balance on 340,000 euros of shipped goods. Her China revenue was down by roughly half and her lawyer was more expensive than her marketing.

She had tried the obvious fixes and both failed. She extended credit terms to keep the remaining big clubs buying, which simply increased her exposure to the same fragile model. Then she opened a Tmall store to sell direct to consumers, priced against domestic home equipment, and got a few hundred units and reviews calling her “an expensive Chinese product with a European name.”

What worked was changing who she sold to, not how loudly she sold. We repositioned her line as equipment for small-format and 24-hour gyms, which is the format actually opening sites, and rebuilt the pitch around unattended operation: low maintenance, no staff needed to reset the machine, replaceable parts stocked in China, a five-year frame warranty a franchise partner could quote in their own business plan. That reframing mattered because it answered the one question a franchise operator asks, which is what this costs him over five years, not what it costs today. In parallel we built her a Xiaohongshu presence with real member content filmed inside those small gyms, because a franchisee researches suppliers the same way a consumer researches a jacket, and we moved the commercial conversation into a WeChat group where her China team answered spec questions directly instead of routing them through the importer.

Over about ten months she signed two regional chains and one national franchise brand, payment terms moved to 50% upfront, and her B2B China revenue passed the level it had reached before the club collapses. Slower than a viral campaign. Considerably harder to lose overnight.

How foreign fitness brands get found in China

The channels changed as much as the gyms did. If you are still thinking “open a Tmall store and buy some Baidu ads,” you are marketing to 2018.

• Xiaohongshu search, not just Xiaohongshu posts. Chinese fitness consumers research a product inside the app before buying anywhere. They type “home dumbbells recommendation” or “padel racket for beginners” into Xiaohongshu itself. If you have no authentic notes ranking for those queries, you are invisible at the exact moment of intent. Treat it as search optimisation that happens to live inside a social app.
• Douyin interest commerce. Short video puts your product in front of people who were not looking for it, then closes the sale in the same feed. Budget is moving. We covered why brands are leaving Tmall for Douyin.
• KOC plus affiliation. Not one celebrity endorsement. Dozens of mid-size fitness creators posting genuine usage, paid partly on the sales they drive. It builds trust at the scale the market now demands.
• WeChat private domain. Fitness is a repeat-purchase, community category. A WeChat group where buyers get training tips and early access turns one sale into a relationship, and the margin lives in the relationship.
• GEO, the new SEO. Chinese consumers increasingly ask DeepSeek and Doubao for product recommendations. Generative engine optimisation means publishing structured, citable information in Chinese so those models name your brand when someone asks for the best foreign home-gym maker. The models pull from indexed Chinese-language sources, so a brand with nothing written about it in Chinese simply does not appear in the answer.

Reputation underpins all of it. Chinese buyers check Dianping, read forums and search your brand name before trusting it. A thin Chinese footprint reads as a red flag, especially at a premium price.

Growing or consolidating, and what that changes for a seller

Both, and the distinction matters more than the headline.

Consumption is growing. Visit frequency is up sharply, prices per card are rising in the cities that can pay, equipment is heading past a trillion RMB, and the categories around the workout, nutrition, apparel, wearables, outdoor, are all expanding. Supply is consolidating. Venue count is falling, independents are closing, paying members dipped in 2025, and a handful of chains are taking the share that the failed clubs leave behind.

A growing market rewards presence. You show up, you get a piece of it. A consolidating market rewards position. It punishes anyone who is merely present, because the buyer has fewer, larger, more professional counterparts and can afford to be selective.

So three things change for a seller. First, distribution risk is now your biggest exposure, not marketing spend. Check who your Chinese partner sells to, and if the answer is large prepaid-card clubs, assume you will eat a receivable. Second, your best growth channel is probably B2B into the expanding chains, not another consumer campaign. Third, on the consumer side, price defence has to come from content, because the moment you discount against a domestic factory you have entered a fight you cannot win.

The room for a new entrant is still there. It is just in the new formats, in the newer sports, and in the categories where foreign origin still means something. It is not in the old clubs, and it never will be again.

FAQ

Is it too late for a foreign fitness brand to enter China?

No, but the easy entry is gone. The annual-card club channel that welcomed foreign equipment in the 2010s is shrinking, and with it the distributor model that fed off it. The openings now are sports nutrition, premium and technical gear, apparel for running and newer sports, connected fitness, and direct supply to the 24-hour and studio chains that are opening sites. Pick a category where foreign origin still carries trust and where you are not fighting domestic factories on price alone.

Why are so many Chinese gyms closing if fitness consumption is growing?

Because closures and growth are two different things happening to two different groups. The venues failing are traditional clubs built on selling annual cards upfront, a structure that breaks the moment new sign-ups slow. Spending is still rising, it just flows to pay-per-session studios, monthly 24-hour gyms, apps, equipment and outdoor sports. Demand is healthy. The cash-upfront financing model is what died, and courts and regulators have now made sure it stays dead.

What did the new prepaid consumption rules actually change?

The Supreme People’s Court interpretation issued in March 2025 voids the standard no-refund, no-transfer clauses, gives consumers a seven-day right to their money back, and allows punitive damages against operators who take payment and vanish. Shanghai’s sport-specific rules cap memberships at 5,000 RMB and 24 months, cap course packages at 20,000 RMB, and require a bank to hold 30% to 60% of prepayments. Operators can no longer fund expansion with customer money.

Which chains should a foreign supplier be talking to?

Start with the small-format operators that are actually opening sites: Leke and its Lightning Panda value brand, Zhongtian on the studio side, Jiandan and the regional 24-hour chains, plus Supermonkey for group-class equipment. These are national account conversations. They will ask about parts availability in China, maintenance intervals and total cost over five years, because their franchise partners build those numbers into a business plan before signing.

Do foreign brands need to go beyond tier-1 cities?

Only if the economics work. Tier-1 card prices are around 5,215 RMB a year, new tier-1 around 3,386 RMB, and it drops steeply from there. Premium imported products sell at full price in tier-1 and new tier-1, and that is also where your social content gets created. In tier-3 and below, price is the whole proposition, and a foreign label rarely wins on its own. If you want that volume, supply the chain instead of chasing the consumer.

Which channels matter most for selling fitness products in China in 2026?

Xiaohongshu for discovery and in-app search, Douyin for interest-driven video commerce, WeChat private domain for repeat purchase and community, and a KOC-plus-affiliation network for credible reach. Tmall and JD still handle the transaction, but they are the end of the journey, not the start. Add generative engine optimisation in Chinese so DeepSeek and Doubao name your brand when a consumer asks them for a recommendation.

Is home fitness equipment still a good bet in China?

Yes, with a caveat. The category grew as consumers left annual-card gyms, and equipment overall reached 819.5 billion RMB in 2024 heading toward 1,011.4 billion by 2027. But it is crowded and domestic manufacturers set the price floor. Win on a specific use case, apartment-sized strength training, rehabilitation, senior fitness, rather than on a general catalogue, and make sure the product records data. Over 60% of new launches at the 2026 China Sport Show had a smart layer.

Work with GMA on the China fitness market

GMA is a Shanghai agency that has been positioning foreign sports, nutrition and equipment brands in China since 2012, on both the consumer and the chain-supply side. We build Xiaohongshu and Douyin presence, run KOC and private-domain WeChat programmes, and open conversations with the gym operators that are actually expanding. If you sell fitness equipment, apparel, nutrition or an app, contact our team and we will map where you fit in the market as it is now, not as it was in 2018.

Read also:

• How big is the fitness industry in China?
• Digital fitness and connected gyms in China
• Boutique fitness studios in China
• Sports marketing agency in China

Sources: 2025 China Sports and Fitness Industry Data Report, published 14 March 2026 by Shanghai University of Sport, Sunpig and the IWF Shanghai fitness expo under the guidance of the Chinese Bodybuilding Association, reported by sports.cn; CBNData; China Sporting Goods Federation.