A Workout and a Blood Draw: Longevity Treatments Come to Gyms

livemint.com:

Would you get blood work done at your gym? Longevity-focused treatments like IV vitamin drips, biological-age testing and peptide injections—questioned by many doctors but embraced by a growing group of health enthusiasts—are coming to mass-market fitness centers. Some fitness brands are adding or investing in clinics that offer access to weight-loss drugs, too. The push has the potential to bring once-fringe treatments purported to fight aging further into the mainstream.

Health and fitness giant Life Time opened a longevity and concierge medicine clinic in its downtown Minneapolis location this month, and plans to add others. The Houstonian Club in Texas, a 185,000-square-foot fitness facility with upward of 13,000 members, opened an on-site location of a longevity and wellness center earlier this year. Xponential Fitness, which owns boutique fitness brands like Pure Barre and Club Pilates, is acquiring a chain of clinics offering wellness treatments and access to weight-loss medications called Lindora.

Membership prices at any of these wellness centers range from roughly $90 to $380 a month, with options for add-on treatments, on top of monthly fitness club memberships that can cost between $180 and $650. Proponents say the new offerings are low-risk and fill a need for those frustrated with traditional medicine. Skeptics say some treatments are a waste of money at best and carry the potential for harm at worst.

Many lack robust substantiation of their health claims, traditional doctors and researchers caution. The gyms’ moves are an attempt to capitalize on Americans’ growing interest in finding novel ways to live healthier for longer, industry professionals and analysts say. In 2022, roughly 29% of exercisers were