Connected fitness hits a post-pandemic slump

The forecast: Connected fitness users are falling off the wagon, per our updated forecast. We estimate there were 41.2 million connected fitness users in 2022 and that number will drop 2.3% to 40.3 million this year. The numbers will keep falling through 2027, when there will be just 38.9 million users.

• Connected fitness users are adults 18+ who use an interactive fitness platform such as Peloton, Beachbody, and iFit for exercise at least once a month. It includes connected exercise equipment and live or on-demand online classes but excludes fitness band users.

What’s behind the numbers? The pandemic created a boom in many industries, and some are seeing reversals of fortune now that the public health emergency ended in May 2023.

• Consumers who were shut out of gyms and fitness centers in 2020 turned to connected fitness programs and devices in droves. Growth in the number of users shot up 41.5%, to 33.98 million in 2020.
• The boom continued into 2021, with another 18.9% growth in users, to 40.4 million.
• But the trend lost steam in 2022, with just 2.1% growth in users.

Connected fitness services are feeling the pinch: They’ve been unable to keep consumers within their folds, as people return to the fitness activities they pursued in the years before COVID-19 hit.

• Lululemon is looking for a buyer for Mirror, the connected fitness maker it acquired in 2020 for $500 million.
• Peloton, the largest such service in the US, is hemorrhaging users, with 800,000 leaving its rolls this year. Membership has dropped from the apex of 6.1 million in 2022 to 5.0 million in 2026, we estimate.
• Smaller players are also losing members. Beachbody will see user count fall 38% this year to just over 2 million, back to its pre-pandemic level.
• iFit will see an 8% drop in users, to fewer than 5 million.
• And Nautilus, which has a much smaller connected fitness user base, will see a slight 2% increase in US users.

Our take: The bottom isn’t falling out of the connected user market completely. US adults are increasingly adopting devices like the Apple Watch and connecting them to fitness equipment at gyms or in their homes. These consumers are relying on more fluid connections for their fitness routines, further enmeshing them with ecosystems by Apple, Google, Samsung, and other large tech companies that dominate the wearable and phone-based fitness market.