Millennials in Britain are moving their socialising from the pubs to boutique fitness studios.

Here you were thinking the obsession with smashed avo on toast was bad.

I guess in the long run there’s something to be said for ’boutique gyms’, and according to The Guardian it’s only the third B, but I can just imagine some tattooed Brit with a beer in hand having a good whinge about it all.

About those B’s, then:

Traditionally, British socialising revolved around the two Bs: boozing and bitching about the weather. But now a third B is muscling in: boutique gyms. While a jog around the park or a monthly Zumba class is far cheaper, fitness fanatics with disposable cash can now spend it on interval training in LED-lit rooms with more sparkle than Studio 54.

For some, fitness is replacing boozing as more and more people teetotal and gym. As a result, bars in the UK are closing, while the fitness industry is on the up:

Adjunct industries, such as sports nutrition and athleisure clothing, are also bulking up (the sports food and drink industry grew by 11.5% to £77m in 2017-18). Fifteen per cent of the UK population has a gym membership, and that doesn’t include the premium, pay-as-you-go studios such as Frame, F45 and Psycle that are springing up.

Millennials can now meet up in an environment that looks like a bar, but is significantly less likely to cause drunk texting or table dancing.

Victoria Scott, founder of ‘The Sweat Crawl’ (as opposed to the pub crawl), describes the experience like this:

I spent a recent Thursday evening in Trib3, a boutique gym in Sheffield, pounding a treadmill. Around me, a packed, mostly female group tackles a 35-minute HIIT (high-intensity interval training) class. This isn’t a regular class. A DJ in a baseball cap plays dancehall classics while disco lights rotate around the room.

My heart-rate monitor compares my progress to the rest of the class. As I blink sweat out of my eyes and my vision blurs, I glance up to see that my heart rate is at 92%. Usually when I feel dizzy in a darkened room with pounding music, I’m in a nightclub. But why bother when you can have the same experience in a half-hour workout, and it is good for you?

Seems like a good idea, but the memberships are pricey and only really accessible to a select few.

The trend seems to be confined mostly to the UK and the US, although Cape Town’s Switch offers something similar.

Here’s a video if you’re interested:

Not interested, but I am craving a drink.

[source: theguardian]