No Staff, No Sales Pitch: Why 1,300 Unmanned Gyms Are Spreading Across China
A 27-year-old's frustrating gym experience — constant sales pressure — became a 1,300-store chain of 24-hour unmanned gyms, and the business model says something about what young Chinese customers now want.
The story begins with a diagnosis. In Weifang, Shandong, a man born in the 1990s was 27 when a checkup came back with the "three highs" — high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high cholesterol. He did what the doctor recommended and joined a gym. What he got instead was the sales pitch: staff pressing him to buy memberships, upgrade packages, personal training. He was trying to solve a health problem and was being sold a product, and the experience stayed with him.
So he opened his own gym. It had no staff, no reception desk and no one to walk you through a membership card — a 24-hour unmanned operation where people booked and entered online. The detail that made it famous was the most mundane: a short video of the gym staying open through Chinese New Year, when most gyms in China close for the holiday. It went viral, and the gym's sudden popularity was not about the equipment.
The next problem was safety, and the solution was the founder's own. Unmanned gyms have one vulnerability: a stranger tailgating a paying customer through the door. He built an anti-tailgating access system — a door control that stops a second person from following someone in without their own credential — and turned it into a selling point. Five years on, his chain has 1,300 stores, and the hashtag attached to the story reads like a market research report: "young people who hate being bothered are flooding into unmanned gyms" (讨厌被打扰的年轻人涌入无人健身房).
This is not a one-off. The gym industry in China has long carried a reputation for prepaid membership cards that disappear when the gym closes, and for the hard-sell tactics that come with them. A 24-hour unmanned gym is a direct answer to both: the membership is a subscription, the door is the salesperson, and nobody is waiting at the exit to renew your contract. The model also fits a shift in how young Chinese consumers spend — alone, on their own schedule, with minimal human interaction. An unmanned gym is cheaper to run than a staffed one, and it passes the savings on in a lower price point.
Whether 1,300 stores of this model can hold is a different question. Unmanned gyms compete on price and convenience, not on coaching or community, and the industry's history is one of low-cost chains expanding fast and then thinning out. But the founder's own framing is the most telling part of the story. "The original intention was to give people freedom" (做这个的初心就是自在), he said in the interview that started the wave, adding that he will keep trying more "freedom" models. The word he chose — 自在, meaning ease, unhassled comfort — is not what a fitness entrepreneur's pitch usually sounds like. It is what a customer of a 27-year-old who once got tired of being sold to would say.