Continuum Club doesn’t have personal trainers. “We’re calling them human-performance specialists,” chief revenue officer Tom Wingert tells me as we tour the 25,000-square-foot flagship in Greenwich Village, walking through a room of weight racks and barbells that have just been set up. It’s also not a gym. The founders prefer “wellness social club,” which, like the custom-designed walnut stump banquettes that will serve as tables, nods to a certain kind of exclusivity. As does the price tag of $10,000 a month.
Why $10,000 a month? Science. “This is the lab,” Wingert says, pointing to an empty room that will soon be home to bone-density scanners and treadmills that will run VO2 max tests to track client oxygen-consumption levels. New members, for which there is a wait list, will begin their Continuum Club journey with a full biometric scan — their blood will be drawn, their sleep analyzed, and a wearable device will run instantaneous assessments of their heartbeat, step count, and blood pressure. The results will be input into the company’s proprietary artificial intelligence, which will create a personalized training program for them. You can go to Planet Fitness if you want to get yoked, but Continuum Club, per the company’s press materials, is about “the journey to becoming the ideal version of oneself.”
The branding is slick and intentionally gatekeeping (an upcoming art show is advertised as the “first and only time” the space will be open to the general public), but Continuum’s leadership team has relatively mundane origins. Chief executive Jeff Halevy is a former Today show health correspondent and syndicated fitness host who, more recently, started the AI-powered training platform Altis. (Clips of him cheerfully guiding senior citizens on how to do squats while holding bottles of laundry detergent as Willy Geist looks on seem to be everywhere on YouTube.) Wingert is a Lululemon alum. The idea was to open a tech-forward, white-glove experience that Halevy hopes will “change the wellness market as a whole,” as he told New York Business Journal.
The space is housed in the Archive Building at 666 Greenwich Street, a Romanesque Revival–style building that has, over the years, acted as a little time capsule of New York City fitness trends. It was a Crunch Fitness before David Barton Gym and its nightclub vibe moved in. Then it became a Peloton Tread studio (with its Big-heart-attack vibe). Continuum’s eight-year lease with Rockrose Development signals yet another leap on the ladder of fanciness. “Crunch did not do custom plaster,” Wingert says.
There will be a hyperbaric chamber, an IV-therapy station, an infrared bed, and a float tank. There will be massage therapists and saunas. Because this is still New York, the cold plunges are vertical, which Wingert says are safer but also “eat up a little less square footage.” Members will be told which room to use and when, depending on whatever their personalized AI tells them, which will be updated in real time. You can almost picture the executive putting in 80 hours at Goldman every week moving through the space, gladly being ordered around by Continuum’s human-performance specialist and his all-knowing little watch, before getting a quick IV drip. A lounge area with a curated plant wall, raised by grow lights, will be a social space. Which is itself serious business in the world of Continuum. Wingert cites a Harvard study that found that social connections lead to longer lives. “It’s important when we think about the scientific underpinning of what we’re trying to accomplish here,” he says.
Elite wellness culture’s obsession with optimization increasingly seems like a bid for immortality. Celebrities and the ultrarich get full-body health scans and blood swap while observing 16:8 or 18:6 fasts. Continuum is promising something like one-stop shopping for the never-die crowd. It’s obvious enough that if there was a client base willing to spend more than 30 times a monthly membership at Equinox or Life Time (plus a $10,000 onboarding fee) for an AI-powered wellness country club, they would live in New York (for at least part of the year). The club will cap its opening membership at 250 people and already has another 250 waiting for an invitation. They are, Wingert says, finance types, athletes, celebrities, artists. He wouldn’t tell me any names but references a Wall Street managing director who will be one of the club’s founding members and the kind of client Continuum wants to attract. “He realized that there was a limitation in his performance at work based on how not well he was taking care of his body,” Wingert explains, so “he started really diving into the investment in his personal well-being.”
Wingert sees the company expanding (he has his eye on Miami) but also making its AI programming a product that will be available on its own. You could be your own Continuum Club from the comfort of your home in Duluth. “There’s only so much that we can do to change the world by selling private wellness-club memberships that cost $10,000 a month,” he says. Not that the cost is a problem. “Actually,” Wingert tells me, “we’re looking at a price as a feature.”
