Gen Z: Why Generation Z prefers to sweat in the gym

Arthur pumps. He “squatted”. These are squats with a bar and weights on it, good for your stomach, legs and butt. Slices weighing 80 kilos are now on display. He slips his head under the bar and places it firmly on his shoulder blade. He squats down, comes back up, nice and slow, six times. His breath is tight and his face briefly turns red. Pump briefly, step forward. He carefully hangs the weight back on the “squat rack”. Arthur turns around, grins. “It’s your turn, Dad.”

I looked at him, grinned back – and first took down the weight plates. I've always played sports, all kinds that are played with a ball. No strength training. In the end, I'm weighing 50 kilos, my son corrects the position of my feet, I bend my knees and slowly rise again, repeat, my breathing becomes heavier with each set, I pump. Then I carefully put the pole down again. My son looks caring and a little proud. I feel like I brought home 14 points on a math paper.

According to an Allensbach study, almost 20 million Germans visited a fitness studio at least once last year, a quarter of the customers are 19 to 29 years old – and 1.58 million are even between 14 and 18 years old. So one of them is now our eldest son. When he was a child, I always tried to get him interested in sports. Classic club sports. In vain: He was never interested in playing football; he also tried hockey, tennis and judo without any enthusiasm and gave up after a few months.

The lack of any ambition when it came to sports also had advantages: like so many parents, we never had to spend the weekend as a “hockey dad” or “soccer mom” in more or less desolate sports facilities. To see that he doesn't lack sporting ambition when it comes to shaping his body, just look at his tense biceps in the gym. It started a year ago, when I was 16 – first he accompanied a friend to the gym as a guest, and shortly afterwards dumbbells that I had once bought slowly made their way into his room. Then registering in a “low cost” studio with the German market leader: cheap, can be canceled at any time, later switching to a fancier and more expensive studio with a two-year contract. His biggest wish for Christmas and birthday.

There is a specialized chain for every target group and every need, especially in large cities. He has been training according to plan for six months now, persistently and with enthusiasm, and he has also optimized his diet. And he's not alone in this very obvious change. “Hardly anyone in my class does team sports anymore, but everyone goes to the gym,” he says. “Everyone my age thinks it’s cool – even the girls.”

Call someone who needs to know what young people are interested in. Marcus Adam started as an intern at the start of the German music television channel Viva and ended the music television chapter in 2011 as “Vice President Talent and Music” of MTV. Until the beginning of this year, he was head of marketing at John Reed Fitness, the stylish brand that focuses on music with live DJ sets in the empire of McFit founder Rainer Schaller, who had an accident in his plane in 2022. For a year now, Adam has been, among other things, co-owner of the medium-sized studio “Deen” in Berlin-Friedenau, which has been there for 40 years. “Fitness is growing in all areas,” he says, “but especially in the young target group of 14 to 29 years old.”

Body optimization is the thing, especially among teenagers. “In recent years, the proportion of members has certainly doubled.” Health is an issue for all generations; for older people it is primarily about prevention and staying fit, for young people it is about looking good and reducing stress. “Body shaping meets fun – with the strong driver of social media.” You have a great desire to be part of a community.

You just have to go to the Fibo fitness trade fair, which just took place in Cologne at the beginning of April: “There are thousands of people who want to see their fitness role models live.” For example the Austrian Sascha Huber, who has 1.72 million followers on YouTube and just posted a video of his first Fibo visit. Or bodybuilders like Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia, who has 9.8 million followers on Instagram alone. Or the German Markus Rühl, about as tall as he is wide, who still has more than a million.

When asked how his interest actually aroused, Arthur immediately says: “Friends and social media.” He has watched more and more videos on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and he also follows “legends” like Coleman and Arnold Schwarzenegger new “artists” like Leonidas Arkonas. He would train with dumbbells weighing 150 kilos. Even if – fortunately – he finds the bodies of many strength athletes too extreme, they are role models for many boys in his circle of friends. “You just want to be strong!” Getting the best out of your body and getting a “good body” is also his personal goal.

To show me what his training looks like, Arthur took me as a guest to his Hamburg studio for a week. I followed his regular programs with him (and less weights): “upper body & legs”, plus a little “cardio”, i.e. endurance training. He patiently explained the exercises to me, showed me which muscles should be trained, how to stand and where to load. As a clueless person, I quickly realized that you can do a lot of things wrong, even with something as banal as training with dumbbells or barbells. And I discovered that, in addition to the classics, there are sophisticated devices for almost everything – such as a “dip/chin assist”, a tower with various handles and (counter) weights and a supportive surface that can be used if necessary for kneeling to train pull-ups .

My son showed me a world that I had previously only had vague knowledge of: I had been to fitness rooms in hotels a few times, but I was only a member of a studio for one winter in my life, that was in Berlin in the noughties at the foot of the television tower at Alexanderplatz. At the time, I took a few classes that mixed kickboxing and aerobics, and otherwise tried out the equipment pretty haphazardly. There was no proper instruction – and I never asked for one. A mistake that wouldn't happen to me today – and probably wouldn't be allowed by any studio.

Arthur's Gym also has an app – of course today – and he uses it to create his personal training program. He now trains almost every day with a level of persistence that I have never seen before. The only exceptions are the “rest days” that the muscles need for growth. And they are growing rapidly at his age. Since then, no mirror or reflective window has been left out to check the shape, and no opportunity has been missed to show off the biceps to the family. And during the test training he casually demonstrates that he can now press his father's body weight during the “bench press”.

The fitness industry, apart from the Corona dent, is an industry that has only known one thing for decades: growth, explains Marcus Adam. This can also be proven with numbers. According to figures from the fitness studio association DSSV, 4.4 million people in Germany were members of a studio in 2003, and in 2023 there were 11.7 million. The industry benefits just as much from digitalization (with an estimated 375,000 fitness apps in 2023) as it does from society's drive for self-optimization, which is linked to the desire for maximum personal freedom.

Flexibility is an advantage of fitness over classic club sports, says the expert: Today, you can do fitness practically 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter where you are. The big chains are in every city – and there are also many cooperations. “It's a win-win-win situation, especially for teenagers: the social acceptance of boys and girls increases, they get a direct positive response to the results from those around them and the parents also think it's good.” For Arthur himself, that's Gym, as he calls it, “a kind of safe place”. “The training helps me concentrate better. I'm focused, I'm working out and I'm not looking at my cell phone during that time.” And that's of course a point that I welcome as a parent.