FOREWORD FOUNDER’S FOREWORD
DAVID MINTON DAVID MINTON • FOUNDER, LEISURE DB
Not What We Are Doing. What We Are Becoming.
S ome people say singularity is now, for me the best everyday example of singularity-like progress is the full-self-driving Tesla. Experiencing self driving, self parking
the Financial Times reported around 80 different of cial UK data series have
been either decerti ed or cancelled outright since 2010 leading to AI and dubious surveys to ll the gap. I’m not advocating that we stop doing what we’re doing as this should not be seen as a partisan issue, but we do need to know what we should be reporting on. The challenge is no longer simply whether
and the car coming when you call it shows the future of autonomous vehicles. At the rst Tesla Diner in Los Angeles the latest humanoid robot in the Tesla Optimus range greets you with popcorn. Sadly, there’s no singularity-like progress in the tness space, when we can’t agree how many sites there are, how often people go and what they achieve. The importance of two gures, total site numbers (7,463) and percentage of the population that are members, (17.6%) is understandable but regrettable. Over the past twenty years demand for these two gures helped the industry raise nance and gave comfort to impatient operators and suppliers that things were going in the right direction. The beauty of having Leisure DB historical trend data on every site with tness reminds me that being positive between 2007-2013 was a tough call when growth could easily have been a rounding error. It’s true that I have been the purveyor of gures and it’s true I had to do what I had to do but we are now at a multi directional crossroads which could include; health, wellbeing, longevity, sleep, nutrition, movement and arts. So, it is time we ask, not what we are doing, but what we are becoming. Today total numbers and percentages seem both old- fashioned and questionable, especially when Leisure DB monitors every site on a daily basis. In the future our State of the UK Industry Report could be produced to order, at a touch of a button. I do sympathise with the desire to have a single objective measurement, something the sector did have, but with so many sector reports now, each with different methodology and research methods, what’s the poor AI platform to do? We’re not alone, the Of ce for National Statistics (ONS) have had ‘quality assurance’ problems dating back to 2008. Recently
exercise works, the evidence is unequivocal but how it can be implemented equitably, consistently and at scale within the NHS pathways. There’s comparatively little consistency in specifying how non- pharmacological interventions should be operationalised in routine care. How many of the groundbreaking current sector links into the NHS are part of the NHS England’s Core20PLUS5 framework? How many are classed as ‘clinical trials?’ How many PhD’s are being sponsored by the sector to provide more evidence?
“The fitness sector doesn’t lack activity. It lacks aligned evidence.”
Providing the evidence base of outcomes needs some alignment to avoid eroding trust, being caught in misinformation and fragmentation. The gures currently collected didn’t help during Covid because they couldn’t answer the questions the Government had in a pandemic. Since Covid the ‘Arts’ who received £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund, have developed scienti c evidence of health impacts for those participating in a wide range of arts activities. Sport received much less and much more piecemeal. Commercial tness received essentially nothing because it sits structurally outside public health infrastructure, and will remain so while our quality of evidence remains uneven where it matters most, and while Treasury logic continues to favour treatment over prevention. The devil, as always, is in the detail, not in total numbers.
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STATE OF THE UK FITNESS INDUSTRY REPORT 2026
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