Blink Fitness Is Planning a Huge Boston Expansion

Blink Fitness/Photo provided

Boston is bursting with fancy big-box gyms and swanky boutique studios. In the summer, we’re up to our elbows in free fitness series. But when it comes to the middle ground between those two extremes—affordable gyms—the list suddenly gets a lot shorter.

Todd Magazine, president of Blink Fitness, hopes to make that list significantly longer. He says Blink, a low-cost gym with almost 50 locations in the New York area, is aiming to open its first Boston locations by the end of 2017, provided the company finds qualified people to open franchises. Ideally, he says, there will eventually be at least 15 to 20 Blinks in the Metro Boston area.

So how cheap is Blink? Dirt cheap. Memberships start at $15 a month, and personal training starts at $27 per session. Of course, there are some drawbacks to joining a gym that costs only a little more than your post-workout green juice—there are no group fitness classes, and certainly no luxurious locker room toiletries—but Magazine says that doesn’t mean it’s a low-quality gym.

“The old adage of, ‘You get what you pay for,’ we’ve kind of broken that paradigm,” he says. “You don’t have to compromise the member experience.”

Magazine says Blink focuses on hospitality and accessible, inclusive fitness, stressing the emotional benefits of exercise rather than the chance to get ripped. Even its advertising campaigns feature people of all shapes and sizes.

“We talk about the concept of putting mood above muscle,” he says. “We’re showing a diversity of people and showing that you don’t have to have a perfect body in order to get the benefits of exercise.”

Magazine says the search for Massachusetts franchise owners has only just begun, but stay tuned. Boston, land of $180 ClassPass memberships and $30 drop-in classes, could use a few more budget-friendly ways to get fit.