Mastering the January Rush: A Data-Driven approach
After a record-breaking 2025, Ashbourne looks to January 2026 and how their partners are using reliable and easily accessible data to learn from previous years and deal with the January rush.
The influx of January members is one of the most well known trends in the fitness industry, to the extent where many who have never even set foot in a gym know that every January that car parks fill, queues lengthen, and a fresh wave of determined faces arrives at our doors.
As a company that has been helping independent gyms and fitness clubs make the most out of their data for over 25 years, it is no surprise that we find one of the industry’s most prominent and predictable trends to be a great chance to employ a proactive, data-driven approach.
We’ve encouraged some of our partner gyms to go back through their data for the first quarter of previous years and identify the trends, both positive and negative, so that they can better prepare for this New Year.
By going back over the data contained in their dashboards and reports from previous Januarys, they are able to identify countless trends to either prepare for, or avoid entirely.
Trends such as:
Identifying which classes were consistently full in the first few weeks so that additional class capacity can either be added or put on standby.
Allowing them to pinpoint the exact time the post-work rush usually peaks.
Revealing which days are historically busiest across this busy period and when extra staff might be required.
Understanding when in February and March that member attrition started to take its toll and January Joiners started to leave, therefore allowing them to know when they should focus their marketing efforts to boost their memberships.
All of these measures and many more have helped those gym owners bolster that famously fragile retention rate among January Joiners.
And this isn’t just a practical scheduling measure to make life easier for staff. It can be a crucial part of the first impression each and every new January Joiner is going to go through.
It could be avoiding them going through a long and tedious queue at the front desk, a fruitless search to find a free member of staff, or trying to use equipment that is out of commission or permanently occupied. All of these things create immediate friction and frustration that can demoralise a gym member who signed up off the back of a New Year’s Resolution.
By utilising BI Dashboards, our partner gyms are able to easily draw upon their historic data and predict their busy periods with greater accuracy and certainty. While intuition and recollections are incredibly valuable, especially in our industry, access to this data can provide insights that might not have been visible from the gym floor.
We’ve seen our fair share of January rushes over the last twenty five years and we’ve assisted thousands of our partner gyms through this hectic period. While our technology has constantly evolved, our approach and advice to independent gyms has stayed the same. Through careful, data-driven planning and preparation, any fitness business can turn the January rush into a fantastic opportunity to start the year on the front foot.