Twenty four stations, four turnovers, and nobody at the desk keeping score.
An ordinary day in a circuit gym, and the work that did itself while the room was busy.
100% free to use, no hidden fees. Members pay about 5% at checkout.
Twenty four stations, and every one of them is a paid seat.
Your 6am has twenty four spots because you have twenty four stations. That is the whole economics of a circuit gym. A class that runs at twenty is not a slightly quieter class, it is four spots you did not sell and four people who wanted them.
So the cap is a real number, and the roster in front of the coach at 5:58 is the room. Who is booked, who has scanned in, and what each of them is paying with. An unlimited membership, a ten class pack with one left, a drop in, a ClassPass booking and a corporate pass all sit in the same list and all take one station.
Check in happens at a kiosk, on a barcode, or on the phone they already have out, and it can be set to count only once they are actually at the gym. Two people did not scan. In a capacity limited class a no show is not a neutral event, so it is recorded against the member at the class rather than reconciled at the end of the month.
What happens next is yours to set. Your own late cancel window, and then the class comes off their pack, a fee applies, or nothing does, because plenty of owners would rather not police it. Whatever you pick, it applies the same way to everyone at 5:59 in the morning, with nobody at the desk deciding whether this one counts.
Her ten class pack ran out on the way in.
Packs are how most people start at a circuit gym, and they are also where gyms quietly leak members. Somebody buys ten, uses ten, and there is no moment at which anyone tells her what happens next, so nothing happens next.
Recess sells packages, bundles, subscriptions, contracts and payment plans alongside each other, tracks what is left on every one of them, and tells the member before the last class goes. The thing she is offered on her way out is a membership, not another pack, because that is what suits somebody who just trained ten times in five weeks.
It lands on the day it is relevant rather than three weeks later, by which point she has found somewhere else to be at six in the morning.
The six week challenge board moved without anyone typing.
Circuit and HIIT members are motivated by counting. Classes attended, weeks in a row, the wall with names on it. Most gyms run a challenge every couple of months and then maintain it in a spreadsheet, badly, until somebody stops updating it and the whole thing dies in week four.
Recess runs challenges, points, milestones, clubs and leaderboards off the system that already knows who attended what. The board moves when people check in. Members see where they stand in your own app, badges land the moment they are earned, and a hundredth class is something the software notices rather than something you find out about by accident.
Progression is the newest part of Recess and is rolling out now.
She has never done a circuit class, and the 6pm would not let her book it.
She found you at lunchtime, liked the look of the 6pm and tapped it. The booking did not go through. She was told in one line that the 6pm asks for the onboarding session first, with the two assessment slots open this week underneath it, one of them tomorrow at seven in the morning.
A cold start into twenty four stations of loaded movement is how people get hurt, and it is also how a coach loses a class. He spends the hour beside one person who has never picked up a kettlebell while twenty three others work at half attention.
Without the gate that conversation still happens. It just happens later, in person, at the door, where he has to tell a woman who turned up ready that she cannot do the class she came for.
You set the requirement once on the class: a prerequisite session, a skill a coach has signed off, a tag you keep on her record once onboarding is done, a level, an age range, or the membership or program she holds. Put it on the classes that need it and leave the beginner hours open to anybody.
The room turned over four times and the second room ran against it.
Five thirty, six fifteen, seven and seven forty five, back to back, forty five minutes of work and fifteen to reset the stations. A small group strength class runs in the second room across the same three hours. Different caps, different coaches, different pay rates.
Rooms sit inside a location, and you can run more than one location, so the two rooms never fight over a single capacity number. If you assign stations, a member is placed in one and can see it before she arrives, which is most of what makes a forty five minute turnover work.
Coaches clock in and out, and are paid by class or by head count depending on how you do it. Payroll comes off the attendance those four classes already recorded, so nothing is retyped, and the seven o'clock that somebody covered at short notice lands on the right person's line.
One member hit a hundred classes. Another had not been in for three weeks.
Both of them got a message tonight and you wrote neither of them tonight. The first got a milestone, a badge in her app and something you can put on the board tomorrow. The second got a win back sequence in your gym's voice, sent from your own domain, and it went out on day twenty one because that is when you told it to.
High churn is the condition of this business, and a large slice of it is not churn at all. It is people who drifted for a fortnight while nobody noticed, and expired cards on phones that never got the email. Attendance is tracked per member, so four classes a week dropping to none becomes a name within days rather than a number in a quarterly report.
Underneath that, failed payments are retried on a schedule and the member is texted a link to update the card, and the membership restores itself the moment she does. Nobody had to notice or chase. Those are the cheapest members you will ever keep, because they never decided to leave.
The app they open is yours, down to the icon.
Your gym gets its own branded app carrying your name, your logo and your colors, publishable to the Apple App Store and Google Play under your own listing. Nobody is asked to download another company's app to book a 6am.
They book there, join the waitlist, pay, sign forms and see their own counting: classes attended, passes left on the pack, the weeks in a row, the challenge they entered and where they are standing in it.
A member who can see she is at sixty one classes and the next badge is at a hundred is a member who books Thursday. In this business that is most of what retention actually is.
At 9:40 on a Sunday night someone asks whether she is fit enough.
It is the question every circuit gym gets, and it is the one that decides whether she ever comes. It needs answering while she is still on her phone, not on Tuesday morning when somebody finally gets to the inbox.
The Recess lead agent replies, answers what she actually asked, and books her into the beginner hour rather than into the 6pm with the regulars. The waiver goes to her email while she is still in the conversation, and it takes her about a minute.
It works at twenty to ten on a Sunday and it works at lunchtime on a Wednesday, with nobody on your staff involved on either occasion.
Everything a gym needs, switched on from day one.
There is no plan to pick and nothing sitting behind a paywall, so a two room gym runs on the same system as a fifteen location group and pays the same for it, which is nothing.
Zero a month, in a business where people come and go.
No monthly platform fee, no per feature add ons, no setup cost. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered by Recess out of that rather than billed to you on top. That matters most in a gym with real turnover: in the month forty people left and thirty joined, you are not paying a fixed bill built for the forty. The cost moves with what you actually collect.
The gyms we are wrong for.
If one of these is you, we would rather say so now than six weeks into an onboarding. And if you run a twenty four hour access facility with no scheduled classes, no capacity and no coaches, almost everything on this page is machinery you will never switch on.
What circuit and HIIT owners ask before they switch.
Automatically. Every class has a cap and a waitlist, and when a booked member drops, the next person is promoted and notified. If they do not confirm within the window you set, it passes to the person after them, so the spot keeps moving instead of sitting empty.
Yes, and you set the rules. Define your late cancel window and decide whether a no show deducts a class from a package, applies a fee, or does nothing at all. The policy is applied consistently by the system rather than being negotiated at the desk.
Yes. Packages, bundles, subscriptions, contracts and payment plans all live together, and a member can hold more than one. Remaining classes are visible to the member in your app, and Recess tells them before a pack runs out rather than after.
Yes. Challenges, points, milestones, clubs, leaderboards and badges are built in and driven by real attendance, so nothing is maintained by hand. Members see their own progress in your app. This is the newest part of Recess and is rolling out now.
It attacks the two halves separately. Attendance is tracked per member, so someone drifting shows up as a name within days and an automated win back sequence goes out in your voice. Failed payments are retried and recovered on their own, which recovers members who never actually decided to leave.
Yes. Rooms sit inside a location, each class has its own capacity, coach and pay rate, and you can run concurrent sessions through your peak hour. If you assign stations, seat maps let members see where they are before they arrive.
Yes. The migration is automated and our team runs it for you, whatever you are on now: Mindbody, Momence, Walla, Arketa, Glofox and others. Members, history and billing information come across, including package balances, so people are not starting from zero on day one.
No, they download one with yours. Every gym on Recess gets a branded client app with its own name, logo and colors, and it can be published on the App Store and Google Play under your listing. Members book, join a waitlist, pay and see their progress there.