McFit, the original budget gym is undergoing a transformation with a new look and estate-wide overhaul, as Liz Terry reports

When the late, great Rainer Schaller conceived the idea for McFit in the mid-90s, the health and fitness industry in Europe was approaching stagnation in its economic lifecycle and having boomed through the 80s and into the 90s, was starting to plateau, with decline not far off.

This general malaise was exacerbated by the recession that had gripped the world in the early 90s, meaning it was a volatile time for the sector.

The launch of McFit in 1997 was to change all that, resetting the industry and unlocking unbelievable areas of growth with its new budget pricing model that put health club use within reach of the majority of the population by largely removing price resistance, with Schaller having the ambition to make fitness training ‘affordable for all’.

The first location
The first McFit was located in Bavaria and as word about it spread through the industry, the club became a magnet for operators and investors, who were interested to see the new business model in action and understand its potential.

As it turned out, Schaller had a ten-year head start with McFit, but the following decade, entrepreneurs began to launch their own budget concepts, John Treharne at the The Gym Group in 2007; Jan Spaticchia with énergie and JJB with MiFit in 2008; Peter Roberts with PureGym and James Caan with Nuyuu in 2009; Spaticchia again at FitLess (which became Fit4Less) in 2010; and Mike Balfour’s Fitness First budget concept, Klick Fitness, in 2011 – the same year Rene Moos opened the first Basic-Fit. These were a few of the early pioneers. Some survived and thrived. Some didn’t.

But it’s hard to catch a first-mover, especially when that person is Rainer Schaller and they have a decade on the competition and so McFit scaled steadily, reaching 243 clubs by 2017, when HCM spoke to the top team (www.HCMmag.com/McFit2017).

Having pioneered the sector and grown the McFit brand, Schaller widened his remit, renaming the company – previously The McFit Group – to be the eponymous Rainer Schaller Group (RSG) and launching businesses and brands across numerous health and fitness verticals until his untimely death in October 2022, aged just 53.

These multiple concepts – the product of is creative imagination – included everything from the high-end John Reed and Heimat to John & Jane’s and Gold’s Gym. There was also a super-budget concept, HIGH5, which undercut McFit, as well as restaurants, night clubs, fit tech and nutrition businesses and modelling agencies within the diverse group.

Although many health club businesses have exceeded McFit in terms of scale, the brand is still lauded as a groundbreaker, so news that the estate is to have a major overall got HCM interested and here we share with you the new look and feel for the McFit estate – playful bright and social – which is currently being rolled out across all clubs following trials in Vienna, Austria and Heilbronn, Germany.

In addition to refitting the clubs, RSG continues to fine-tune its McFit portfolio, having just sold its 47 Spanish clubs to Basic-Fit, in a deal that concluded on 27 March.