GLP-1 programs for gyms and fitness brands: three models and their economics

A gym GLP-1 program is one of three different businesses wearing the same name. A referral sends members to someone else's clinic. A branded program keeps the member relationship and puts licensed telehealth providers behind the gym's name. An in-club clinic puts a prescriber and a fridge inside the building. The large chains have tried all three, and the choice each made says as much about their balance sheet as about medicine. This post sets out what the chains did, what each model requires, what a member is worth under each in a labelled hypothetical, and what an owner with no medical license has to get right to run any of them. The argument is that for most independent gyms and fitness brands, the program under the gym's brand is the one worth building, because it keeps the member and needs no clinical staff on payroll.

What the big chains did

Athletech News, reporting in March 2026 on a GLP-1 industry report from Inspire360, described the chains taking different routes. Life Time built its own in-club clinics, with prescriptions issued to members on site. UFC Gym paired an in-club longevity service, run with a medical partner, with a telehealth program delivered under the gym's own brand. F45 Training offered a co-branded bundle through a telehealth platform that combined medication access with its fitness and nutrition programming. Planet Fitness and Crunch Fitness both went the referral route, partnering with an outside provider so that members get a referral or a discount and the medical relationship sits with the partner. Orangetheory and Anytime Fitness chose not to offer medication at all, positioning their workouts and staff training as the complement for members who are already on it.

The lesson for a smaller operator is in the spread. The largest and best-capitalized chain built clinics. The franchised, low-price chains referred. The boutique studio brands went for a branded telehealth program. Each picked the model its economics could carry.

Model one: referral

A referral is the fastest thing a gym can do and the one with the least in it. The gym puts a partner's link on its website and posters on the wall, and members sign up with the partner directly. There is no clinical exposure because the gym does nothing clinical. There is also very little revenue: a payment from the clinic to the gym for each member who enrolls is a referral fee, and in many states a payment for referring a patient is a fee-splitting or anti-kickback violation even when no insurance is involved. Partners structure this as a member discount rather than a payment to the gym for that reason.

The larger cost is strategic. The member who enrolls is now the partner's patient. The partner has the member's medical history, the messaging relationship, the subscription and the retention data, and can market other services to them without the gym in the loop. A referral turns the gym's most valuable asset, a member it already pays to retain, into a lead for someone else's business. For a franchisee with no capacity to run anything and a brand rule against it, that may still be the right answer. For an independent with a strong brand, it usually is not.

Model two: a program under the gym's brand

The second model keeps the member. The gym launches a weight loss program under its own name: a branded signup page, a branded patient portal, branded messages. Behind the brand, licensed telehealth providers handle the intake, the prescribing and the follow-up, a pharmacy ships medication to the member's home in cold-chain packaging, and a subscription bills monthly. The gym's staff never touch a prescription and no medication enters the building. The gym does what it already knows: it enrolls members, runs the strength and nutrition programming that makes the medication work, and keeps the relationship.

This is the white-label telehealth model that two of the chains above used, and it fits a gym for a specific reason. The published claims data on GLP-1 discontinuation shows that most patients stop within a year, with a large share gone in the first month, and the things that keep them are contact, follow-up and something to do with the weight that comes off. A gym has all of that already. Members come in on a schedule. A trainer who sees a member weekly is a follow-up cadence no telehealth brand can afford to buy. Program adherence and gym attendance reinforce each other, and the gym is the only party that benefits from both.

What the gym needs to build is short: the legal structure that lets a non-physician own the business around a medical practice, a branded front end connected to the providers and pharmacy, and a marketing and enrollment process that stays within the rules for prescription-drug advertising. Tessic Health runs this arrangement for fitness brands: licensed providers in all 50 states, a pharmacy network at 0% medication markup with cold-chain delivery to the member, the branded storefront and portal, subscription billing, and the management company plus professional corporation structure drafted for the gym owner's ownership. The gyms and fitness brands page describes the fit and the weight loss launch page describes the setup. A gym can assemble the same pieces from separate vendors; the components are the ones listed.

Model three: an in-club clinic

The third model is what Life Time built. A prescriber sees members in a room inside the club, medication is stored and often administered on site, labs are drawn there or nearby, and the clinic may extend into hormone therapy, peptides and recovery services. It is the highest-margin model on paper and the highest-cost one in practice.

The costs are the ones a med spa faces, with a gym's footprint added. A prescriber on payroll or a medical director on retainer; staffing vendors quote a wide range of monthly fees for both, and those quotes should be treated as sales figures rather than benchmarks. A professional corporation to hold the clinical side in states with a corporate practice of medicine rule. A dispensing permit where the state requires one for medication handed to a patient on site, cold storage with monitoring, lot tracking and a pharmacy relationship. Malpractice cover for the clinic. Exam space that meets state requirements, in a building designed for treadmills. And a clinical operation to manage, with the licensure, credentialing and documentation that entails, run by managers whose experience is running gyms.

An in-club clinic makes sense at the scale where the fixed cost is spread across enough members per location to carry a full-time prescriber, and where the operator intends to sell a broad menu of medical services rather than one program. Below that scale, the branded telehealth program delivers the same member experience with the fixed cost replaced by a per-consult fee.

What each member is worth

The example is a labelled hypothetical with round numbers, not a benchmark; a gym should substitute its own membership price, wholesale medication cost and staff time. Take a gym with a $60 monthly membership and a weight loss program priced at $229 a month on top of it, with medication and cold-chain shipping costing the program $120 a month at wholesale with no markup, a flat $25 provider fee per completed consult, and four consults in the first six months. Acquisition from the existing member base costs, say, $30 per enrollment in staff time and messaging.

Under the referral model, the gym earns nothing from the program directly. Its upside is whatever retention lift comes from members who lose weight and keep coming, which is real but hard to see at the front desk.

Under the branded program, a member who stays six months pays $1,374 for the program. Medication costs $720, consults $100, acquisition $30, leaving about $524 of contribution per member before staff time, on top of the $360 of membership dues over the same period. A member who stays four months contributes about $316. Fifty enrolled members at six-month average retention contribute about $26,000 over the period on the program alone, from a member base the gym already had.

Under the in-club clinic, the same member pays the same program price, the medication costs the same at wholesale, and the $100 of per-consult fees is replaced by a share of a prescriber's salary or retainer plus the clinic's fixed costs. Whether that comes out ahead depends entirely on volume per location, which is why the chain that built clinics is the one with the most members per building.

The cost structure deserves a closer look. A platform or partner that takes a percentage of program revenue is taking a share of contribution that the gym's own member base produced. A flat per-consult fee and wholesale medication with no markup leave that contribution with the gym, which is the published basis on which Tessic Health prices: no revenue share on any plan, month to month after a one-time setup fee, plans from $1,000 a month.

A referral turns the gym's most valuable asset, a member it already pays to retain, into a lead for someone else's business.

Compliance for an owner with no medical license

A gym owner does not need a medical license to own the business around a medical program, but the structure has to be right, and the do I need a medical license guide covers the general question. The points below are the ones that come up for gyms specifically.

• Corporate practice of medicine. In states that enforce it, a company owned by non-physicians cannot employ prescribers or direct their clinical decisions. The standard structure is a professional corporation owned by a licensed physician for the clinical side and a management services organization, an MSO, owned by the gym for the brand, marketing, technology and non-clinical staff. There is no official count of which states enforce the rule, so assume it applies until counsel in the gym's state says otherwise.
• Referral payments. A per-enrollment payment from a clinic to the gym is a fee-splitting or anti-kickback problem in many states regardless of who pays for the medication. Structure value to members as discounts, and value to the gym as management fees under an MSO agreement at fair market value, never as bounties.
• Clinical decisions. Trainers, front-desk staff and the owner do not advise members on whether to start, stop or change medication, do not handle side-effect questions, and do not answer clinical questions in the gym's messaging channels. Every one of those routes to the licensed provider. A trainer's programming for a member on medication is fitness advice and stays that way.
• Member data and health data. Gym membership records and the medical program's records are different kinds of data with different rules. The patient records belong to the clinical entity and are protected health information; the gym's marketing system should not be able to read them, and gym staff should not have a login to the patient portal. A business associate agreement covers any vendor that touches the clinical side.
• Advertising. Prescription-drug advertising on Google requires LegitScript or NABP certification, per Google's policy page, and Meta requires weight loss ads to target adults 18 and over and limits before-and-after images, per Meta's health and wellness policy. Posters and social posts that name a medication are prescription-drug advertising. Claims about results are governed by the same rules that apply to any weight loss marketing.
• Texting. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, marketing texts require prior express written consent, and the statute provides for damages of $500 to $1,500 per message. A member list built for class reminders is not consent to receive weight loss program marketing.
• Franchise and landlord terms. Franchise agreements often restrict what a franchisee can sell and under which brand, and leases for medical use differ from leases for fitness use. Both should be read before the program is announced.

Under the branded telehealth model, most of this list is handled once at setup: the structure is drafted, the providers are licensed, the certification is filed, and the platform separates member data from patient data. Under an in-club clinic, the gym carries all of it on an ongoing basis.

Questions operators ask

Does the gym need a medical director? Under the branded telehealth model, the clinical entity has a medical director and the gym does not need one of its own. Under an in-club clinic, yes, and the director has to actually direct.

Can trainers talk about the program? They can describe that it exists, explain how to enroll, and run the fitness and nutrition side for members who are on it. They cannot discuss whether a member is a candidate, what the medication does for that member, or anything about dose. A one-page script for staff, written with the clinical entity, prevents most problems.

Is a boutique studio too small? The branded model has no clinical fixed cost, so the floor is set by the platform's monthly plan and the studio's ability to enroll members. A studio with a few hundred members and a strong relationship with them is closer to the boutique-brand case above than to the franchised-chain case.

Should a gym start with a referral and upgrade later? The problem with starting on a referral is that the members who enroll become the partner's patients, and moving them later means asking them to leave one clinic and join another. A gym that expects to run a branded program within a year is usually better off building it first, since the members it would have referred are the same ones it would have to win back.