The Question

Is this a universal experience? Just 13 year old me, mom, and 10 other 40 year olds [at Curves]??

The Answer

1997 was a heady time for gyms. This trend piece from the New York Times namechecks Crunch, Equinox, New York Sports Club, Chelsea Piers, and David Barton, which all went on to become New York fitness institutions. Quoth one expert:

''Ten years ago New York was lackluster in its development of first-rate, dynamic, energized and entertaining fitness clubs,'' said John McCarthy of the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association. ''Today it has taken the lead from Los Angeles in terms of trends.'’

I’m dying at this quote from the founder of the “Gym Source,” a brand lost to time:

They shy away from criticizing one another in public, but behind the scenes they are locked in a death struggle for clients, gym-friendly real estate and most important, the sexy new trends that will keep them ahead of the curve. Some of what they come up with may seem a bit over the top, but there are hard business reasons behind it.

''The real reason is nobody wants to exercise,'' Mr. Miller said.

But never mind gyms generally; we are here to trace a path to and from Curves, the ladies’ workout-lite gym that, for a brief time in my formative years, absolutely dominated a certain slice of the fitness and health landscape. Curves seemed poised to change everything, until the moment came that that should have happened, and it changed absolutely nothing at all.

But it’s hard to talk about Curves without talking about its direct precursor, Lucille Roberts. You likely wouldn’t know of Lucille Roberts, who both was a person and still is currently a regional chain of gyms, unless you’ve spent some time in the tristate area. Roberts opened her first free-form gym geared toward women in 1969 in midtown Manhattan; at the chain’s peak, it operated 50 locations.

Lucille Roberts is also quoted in the 1997 piece:

For Lucille Roberts, whose gyms are named after her, the key to the future is rapid expansion and corporate uniformity.

''We are working on a standardized exercise program,'' said Ms. Roberts, who says her under-$200-a-year gyms are pitched at female clients like the secretary, the teacher and the policeman's wife. ''It will be like a McDonald's, where you know what you get in every place.''

But as it turns out, Lucille Roberts could not expand faster than Curves. In fact, few businesses before or since have ever expanded faster than Curves.

Curves was founded in 1992 in Texas by a conservative pro-life Christian couple1, but didn’t open its first franchise until 1995. At its peak around 2006, there were nearly eight thousand locations just in the US (for comparison, there were about 1.5 times as many McDonalds; today there are only about 2,000 Planet Fitness locations).2 In fact, Curves made this very comparison in 2005 in a press release. In 2008, Curves had 4 million members to Gold’s Gym’s 3.5 million. In its day, Curves was a fucking monster. The New York Times was thrilled:

''It's about time for something like this to take off,'' said Lisa Callahan, medical director of the Women's Sports Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. ''For many women, it's too intimidating to go into a room where there are a lot of men lifting heavy weights and grunting and groaning.'’

I personally have only watery and out-of-focus memories of the actual experience of Curves, since I was a young teen at the time and don’t think I ever set foot in one (if you can believe it now, or remember from then, no one was targeting us with workouts at the time, really. This was well over a decade before Instagram came to wellness influence prominence, and you could easily miss the 3 sets/20 reps circuits of chair dips and side lunges printed on pages 137-138 of your 151-page copy of Teen Vogue/CosmoGIRL!/Teen/Seventeen/ElleGirl).

Instead of women generally, Curves appealed squarely to the harried mom. It emphasized the following: