Vietnam's Golden Age of Fitness and the Dead Zone of the Mid-Market Gym

At 5:45am, a duty staff member unlocks a gym inside a shopping mall in eastern Ho Chi Minh City. Twelve people have already been waiting in the corridor for twenty minutes. The first three claim the treadmill row, two head straight for the free weights, the rest queue at the chest press. Peak hour in a 1,800 square metre facility looks exactly as it should: crowded, loud, warm. At the front desk, a hastily taped A4 sheet reports that the membership renewal rate last quarter fell 18 per cent year on year. Same room, same hour, same familiar faces. More people training, fewer contracts renewing. I have stood in that queue. I have heard the owner say the line I have heard at least twenty times in two years: “So many people, but revenue will not move, and I do not know why.” He is not wrong. He is looking in the wrong place. Earlier this month, True Fitness and True Yoga closed all their Singapore studios at once. Parent company Kontafarma called the challenges “unprecedented”. When the doors of a gym close, it is the emotions of those left behind that finally open: members with unused memberships, trainers with untaught sessions, creditors with unpaid invoices, and a thousand kilometres south, Vietnamese operators reading the story with a feeling they struggle to name. Singapore is the market Southeast Asian fitness operators watch to predict their own future, the way smaller clubs watch the Premier League table to guess where they will finish. When True Fitness, the island’s largest chain for more than two decades, collapsed, the story did not stop at one company. Kontafarma’s stated reasons are familiar: the rise of boutique studios, condo gyms reducing the need for external memberships, and online training platforms. On the surface, it holds up. Set against the data, the picture changes colour. In 2026, 76 per cent of Singapore residents exercised at least once a week. In 2026, that figure was 66 per cent. A market lost its biggest gym chain while participation rose steadily for six straight years. That deserves more than a news line. Sean Tan, co-founder and president of the non-profit Singapore Fitness Alliance, puts it plainly: “We are in what the industry calls the golden age of fitness and wellness. There has never been greater awareness of the importance of exercise.” So where is the problem? In the structure. I read transfer boards for a living, where a striker can be unemployed while the striker market is boiling. The principle is identical: the market does not die, a specific position within it does. In Vietnam, that position is becoming clearer every quarter. No collapse big enough to make headlines has happened yet, but data I gathered from more than forty gym owners, personal trainers and chain managers in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City over eighteen months shows a repeating pattern: revenue at facilities of 1,500 to 3,000 square metres is growing slower than inflation, while participation in pilates classes, CrossFit boxes, pickleball courts and running events is multiplying. Picture the market as a league with three groups of clubs. Group one: boutique. One hundred to 250 square metres, usually a single discipline, sometimes no showers or toilets at all. Opening a small pilates studio costs a fraction of opening a large gym. In return, these operators sell expertise, personalisation, community and measurable outcomes. Group two: budget 24-hour chains such as Anytime Fitness, Snap Fitness and 24/7 Fitness. Four hundred to 600 square metres, open around the clock, located near where members live. Sean Tan points to the decisive detail: they save enormously by not building showers and toilets, the most expensive part of a gym’s built facilities. Group three: big box gyms. From 1,500 square metres upward, everything under one roof, treadmills, pin-loaded machines, group class studios, saunas, pools, changing rooms. True Fitness’s TFX club at Millennia Walk spanned more than 41,000 square feet, roughly 3,800 square metres, the largest gym in Singapore before it closed. Three groups, three entirely different cost structures. That is the crux. Large gyms carry enormous fixed costs: rent, equipment, staffing, utilities, maintenance. Sean Tan notes that profitability becomes a challenge when utilisation falls, because operating costs stay fixed while membership revenue becomes less predictable. The numbers matter. Traditional fitness margins are thin, 15 to 25 per cent. Rent takes 15 to 20 per cent of revenue. Tan asks: if rent climbs to 30 to 40 per cent of revenue, with manpower and utilities rising too, what is left for the business to take home? In Vietnam this variable is harsher in one respect: most gym space sits inside shopping malls or urban developments owned by large developers and real estate funds. Negotiations follow Tan’s description closely, with gross turnover clauses tying rent to sales. Do well, and the next renewal almost certainly brings a rent increase. He calls such negotiations “cold and without emotion”. One owner in District 7 told me he signed a ten-year lease with 8 per cent annual escalation; by year four, rent had consumed nearly a third of revenue. He kept the doors open. He simply stopped hiring trainers. This is where the three-group league matters. In football, the hardest group to survive in is not the weakest. It is the middle: not cheap enough to be relegated and live on broadcast money, not rich enough to buy stars, with no European place to attract sponsors. They survive by belonging nowhere. Mid-market gyms are the same. Samuel Gallo, co-founder of Surge Strength & Results, gave me a line I wrote in my notebook: “If a free gym downstairs is enough to make someone switch, it raises the question of what else that gym is offering beyond access to equipment.” He added: “Not the cheapest, not the best, so people drift out of the middle.” The middle. That is the most accurate name for the problem. But the middle is not dying from cost alone. It is dying because behaviour changed. Damien Lee, senior lecturer in sport and wellness management at Nanyang Polytechnic, describes consumers who no longer anchor their routines to a single membership. They mix formats: the condo gym, outdoor running, pilates, pickleball with colleagues, free digital programmes, even travelling regionally for Hyrox with their training communities. Fitness spending has become fragmented, flexible and driven by experience, community and measurable outcomes. The same pattern exists in Vietnam, only faster. A Hanoi member can run in Thong Nhat Park in the morning, lift in a building gym at noon, play pickleball at night and take a yoga class at the weekend. No single membership covers that schedule. No mid-market gym survives by selling one card to one schedule like that. The market has split into two clear responses. First, deep specialisation. Surge Strength & Results does one-to-one personal training only, with no group classes and no memberships. It has three locations, but Gallo says the biggest investment is people, because “the coaches are the product”. Last year alone the company spent over S$50,000 on team education. UFIT takes a wider view. Four locations, about 700 active clients, no pay-per-use or membership model. Clients can add a physiotherapist, podiatrist or nutritionist as needed. Founder and COO Dean Ahmad calls it a “circle of care”. He says: “We work more with clients who are paying for expertise and accountability, not just access to equipment and facilities.” According to Ahmad, 2026 has been UFIT’s best year in five. Second, relocating rather than expanding. Amore Fitness, a women-only chain of more than forty years with nine locations, closed 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, judged by neighbourhood demand, rent, operating costs and changes to the properties themselves. For Vietnamese operators, both paths read as practical advice. Do not try to cover every need. Pick one and do it better than anyone. Or, if you do cover everything, pick a location where nobody else can cover you. The costs do not disappear. Unstoppable Fitness, a roughly 4,000 square foot bodybuilding gym on Shenton Way, runs about S$40,000 a month in operating expenses. Founder Luke Yeo lists rent, utilities, business loans, manpower, cleaning, laundry, equipment maintenance, software and marketing. About S$1.2 million has gone into building and running the gym since it opened in 2026. Yeo also flags a factor few notice: a premium commercial gym machine can cost S$15,000 to S$20,000, excluding tax, transport and installation. Differences between two machines are hard to spot, he says, but clients immediately see a gym’s size, appearance, showers, changing rooms and overall atmosphere. His conclusion is worth copying down: “An independent operator isn’t competing only on membership price anymore. You’re competing on equipment, design, convenience, amenities, technology, community, branding and the overall experience.” When I showed that line to gym owners in Vietnam, the most common reaction was a few seconds of silence, then: “True, but doing that needs capital.” Exactly. That is why the middle does not die at once. It bleeds slowly. The accepted explanation has a blind spot. It assumes the market is rewarding specialisation and punishing vagueness. True, but incomplete. At least four blind spots sit beneath the surface. First, boutique studios are not as safe as they look. When Gallo says “the coaches are the product”, he is describing both the greatest competitive advantage and the greatest risk. The most important asset of a studio is not on the balance sheet. It lives in the heads and relationships of a few specific people. When a good trainer leaves, they do not take the equipment. They take the clients. Second, the phrase “healthy market segmentation”. Ahmad calls condo gyms and public facilities such as ActiveSG healthy segmentation rather than a threat. Technically true. But it is a polite way of saying the cost of training infrastructure has been socialised. A condo gym is not free; it is inside the apartment price. A public court is not free; it is inside tax. Private fitness is competing against an opponent that does not need to break even. In Vietnam, where every new township has an internal gym and every park has a running path, that pressure is heavier than in Singapore. Third, the 24-hour franchise model. It is cost-efficient, but its cash flow comes from two sources: members and franchisees. When opening speed becomes the measure of success, the pressure shifts from retaining members to selling more franchise contracts. Vietnamese retail and food and beverage history already shows where that leads when supply of outlets outruns real demand. Fourth, and most important: people debate competition while the real issue is rent. Tan traces the problem to commercial property increasingly owned by real estate investment trusts, where landlords must show year-on-year increases in rental yields. “Rarely can you now find instances where your unit is owned by an individual with whom you can have reasonable discussions on rents,” he says. Even if a Vietnamese operator does everything right, hiring a nutritionist, investing in trainer education, building community, one line in the cost sheet remains beyond their control. And that line tends to rise exactly when they start succeeding. Finally, Vietnam has a layer nobody wants to mention: sales culture. When trainer income depends on contracts sold, upselling becomes a logical consequence rather than a personal fault. But that experience pushes customers out of the middle faster than any competitor’s advertising campaign. Mid-market gyms lose members for financial reasons, and lose credibility for human ones. The next domino is not the gyms. It is the twelve-month membership card. Every business model here assumes customers pay for a year in advance and do not show up enough. When members mix formats and pay per session, per class, per running season, that assumption collapses. Operators who shift to flexible revenue while holding their margin will survive. Those still living off the percentage of members who never come will die with it. The craft does not reward arriving on time. It rewards being in the right place, and staying longer than everyone else. For a gym, the right place is a position nobody can replace with a free gym on the ground floor. We hunt the news all day, but in the end the news hunts us. This story does not ask how big your gym is. It asks: if tomorrow your customers could train free in the lobby downstairs, what keeps them?