By Erin Phelan
Fitness Industry Council of Canada
This week, thousands of fitness and health professionals will come together at canfitpro 2026.
We will learn together. Sweat together. Share ideas. Reconnect with old friends and make new ones. We will celebrate an industry built around helping people move, feel better and live healthier lives.
This year’s theme is The Power of Us.
And there may be more science behind those three words than we once realized.
For decades, canfitpro has celebrated what happens when people come together through fitness. Now, research is helping us understand how those connections may influence one of the biggest challenges facing our industry:
What makes people keep coming back?
More Than Motivation
A 2026 systematic review published in Behavioral Sciences examined 21 studies investigating the psychosocial factors associated with adherence to instructor-led group exercise.
Importantly, researchers looked beyond people’s intentions to exercise and focused on actual behaviour: attendance, persistence, retention and dropout.
The most consistently supported factor was self-efficacy, essentially whether someone believes they are capable of continuing to exercise and overcoming the barriers that inevitably get in the way.
But the social environment mattered too.
Social attraction to the group, social integration and group identification showed favourable associations with adherence in parts of the research. Instructor-related factors also emerged as potentially important influences.
The researchers ultimately suggest that adherence isn’t explained by one variable. It develops through an interaction between cognitive, motivational, emotional and social factors.
For operators, there is an important distinction here.
Putting people together doesn’t automatically create community.
A busy group fitness class isn’t necessarily a connected group fitness class.
Being surrounded by people isn’t the same thing as feeling like you belong with them.
Would Anyone Notice If You Stopped Coming?
Walk into almost any successful fitness community and you’ll see connection in action.
The cycling instructor who knows which bike you ride.
The people training on the floor at 5 a.m. who are “your people.”
The front-desk employee who knows your name.
The member who saves you a spot at the front of the room and maybe even gets out your weights.
None of those things appear in marketing strategies or facility floor plans.
But they may be among the most valuable things happening inside the building.
Retention expert Dr. Paul Bedford has spent years challenging our industry to look beyond the membership sale and understand the behaviours behind retention.
Yes, we need the metrics.
Did this member come today? How frequently are they visiting? Has that frequency changed? Have they missed days, weeks or even months?
But perhaps we need to ask some more human questions alongside them.
Does this member believe they can succeed here? Do they feel like they belong here? Do they know someone? Does someone know them? Do they feel part of something?
And perhaps most importantly:
Would anyone notice if they stopped coming?
Connection Is a Business Strategy
This conversation becomes even more important when we look at what’s happening across the fitness industry.
ABC Fitness’s 2026 Mid-Year Wellness Watch Report, drawing on its global ecosystem of approximately 40 million members and nearly 30,000 clubs and studios, reported that new gym joins declined 9% year over year while cancellations increased 8%.
At the same time, its consumer research found that 67% of respondents identified community as their biggest driver of motivation and accountability, while 57% said being part of a fitness community significantly affected their long-term commitment to an active lifestyle.
That should get an operator’s attention.
When acquiring members becomes harder, giving existing members reasons to stay becomes even more valuable.
And retention may be influenced by experiences that are remarkably low-tech.
Someone knows my name.
Someone expects me.
Someone notices my progress.
Someone notices when I’m gone.
The People Leading the Room Matter
The research also gives operators another reason to think carefully about instructors and coaches.
Great instructors do far more than deliver great workouts.
They help people feel capable rather than intimidated. Included rather than invisible. They learn names. Introduce people. Celebrate progress. Modify movements. Create rituals and shared experiences.
In other words, they can help create two things that emerge from the adherence research:
Competence and connection.
They help someone think:
I can do this. And I belong here.
A great instructor doesn’t just make someone want to finish today’s workout. They help create an environment that makes it easier to return for the next one.
Our instructors and coaches aren’t simply delivering a service.
They are building the social infrastructure of our facilities.
And that should influence how we recruit, train and value them.
Technical knowledge matters. Programming matters. Coaching ability matters.
But perhaps we should also be asking: Can this person make people feel seen?
From Research to the Fitness Floor
For operators, the opportunity isn’t to simply add “build community” to the strategic plan.
It is to deliberately create the conditions where connection can happen.
Look at the first weeks of the member journey. How quickly does someone experience success? Does anyone learn their name? Are they introduced to other members?
Look at programming. Are there opportunities for people to see the same faces regularly and develop a group identity?
Look at instructors. Are they only evaluated on the workout they deliver, or also on the environment they create?
Look at milestones. Do we recognize the 100th workout, the first push-up, the return after an injury or simply the consistency of someone who keeps showing up?
And look at absence.
Technology can tell us when attendance starts declining.
But what happens next?
Sometimes one of the most powerful retention tools available to us may still be another human being saying:
“Hey. We missed you.”
The Power of Us
Which brings us back to canfitpro.
This week, we aren’t simply going to talk about the power of connection.
We will experience it.
We’ll walk into sessions where someone saves us a seat. We’ll reconnect with people we haven’t seen since last year. We’ll learn from instructors who make us believe we’re capable of something new. We’ll meet someone in a hallway who gives us an idea that changes our business.
For a few days, we’ll experience exactly what we’re trying to create for the people who walk through the doors of our facilities:
A place where people can succeed.
A place where people are seen.
A place where people connect.
A place where people feel part of something.
Then we’ll go home to our clubs, studios and fitness facilities.
And perhaps the most important question we can take home with us is:
Do the people we serve feel the same way when they walk through our doors?
People may join because they want to get stronger, healthier or fitter.
But one of the reasons they keep coming back may be much simpler.
They found their people.
And that really is the Power of Us.
Fitness Industry Council of Canada (FIC) is the not-for profit trade association that represents the voice of fitness facility operators across Canada. Representing more than 6,000 facilities with more than six-million members nationwide, FIC pursues a legislative agenda in the hope of bettering the fitness industry for both consumers and operators. FIC aims to work with both industry and government to improve the health and physical activity levels of Canadians.
