Fitness
Top Gym Stocks for 2026 and How to Invest | The Motley Fool
Staying healthy and looking good will never go out of style. Whether you’re trying to improve your cardiovascular health or want to get stronger, it pays to work out at home or hit the gym. While gym memberships and home exercise equipment cost money, you might be able to recoup that expense by investing in the most profitable gym stocks.
Best fitness stocks in 2026
Here are five of the best gym companies to watch this year:
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Most Planet Fitness gyms are located in the U.S. Management has a long-term goal of reaching 5,000 locations in the U.S. alone, and the company has plenty of opportunity to expand internationally.
Most Planet Fitness locations are franchises, but the company also directly operates more than 280 facilities. The franchise business model results in a very high operating margin with low capital intensity.
Planet Fitness is well positioned to capture market share after many of its competitors closed their doors permanently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Strong results over the last two years have led to reacceleration in club openings and expanded operating margin.
2. Peloton
Peloton (PTON +5.35%) is known for its connected stationary bikes and other home workout equipment. Although users must purchase Peloton equipment, the company earns most of its revenue from the subscriptions required to fully utilize its bikes and treadmills.
Today’s Change
(5.35%) $0.23
Current Price
$4.63
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$1.8B
Day’s Range
$4.30 – $4.68
52wk Range
$4.09 – $10.25
Volume
1.1M
Avg Vol
11M
Gross Margin
50.50%
Peloton has 2.7 million subscribers who pay $50 per month for a connected fitness subscription. Another 500,000 people pay $16 or $29 per month for a digital-only subscription. Digital subscriptions are immensely profitable for Peloton, which has a gross margin of almost 50%.
The home gym company thrived during the pandemic since most people were confined to their homes. But as the pandemic subsided and gyms reopened, the company has struggled to hold on to subscribers, especially for its digital-only product.
The stock has sold off significantly since the height of the pandemic, as the tailwind turned into a massive headwind. Peloton grew its operating expenses as if the shift to home workouts were a permanent phenomenon. It paid for that in subsequent years. Management is now focused on improving profitability and increasing value for existing subscribers.
3. Lululemon Athletica
Lululemon Athletica (LULU +1.62%) is a leading apparel retailer, specializing in yoga pants and other athletic wear. Its premium brand and the comfort of its clothes led to strong sales growth over the last few years as athleisure has become a mainstream style choice.
Today’s Change
(1.62%) $2.76
Current Price $172.85
Market Cap
$20B
Day’s Range
$170.00 – $175.43 52wk Range
$159.25 – $414.14
Volume
2M
Avg Vol 3.9M
Gross Margin
58.35%
Key Data Points
Management once expected to double its 2021 sales by 2026, with a goal of $13 billion in revenue, which may be tough to reach since it expects sales of $11 billion this year. Sales growth has been slower in the United States, but its international growth is strong, and several key markets, such as China, remain under-penetrated by the Canadian company.
The company also moved into the connected fitness space with its 2020 acquisition of Mirror, which it rebranded to Lululemon Studio. The move didn’t work out. It discontinued the Mirror device and partnered with Peloton to service its subscription home workout programs.
4. Garmin
Garmin (NASDAQ:GRMN) started by manufacturing global positioning system (GPS) navigation devices. Today, the company generates the bulk of its revenue from personal fitness devices such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, cycling power meters, and heart rate monitors. Consumer demand for fitness trackers continues to grow as more people look for ways to enhance their health.
Today’s Change
(1.81%) $3.59
Current Price $202.28
Market Cap
$38B
Day’s Range
$198.70 – $202.43 52wk Range
$169.26 – $261.69
Volume
30K
Avg Vol 1M
Gross Margin
58.73%
Dividend Yield
1.74%
Key Data Points
Garmin has experienced strong sales growth for its fitness trackers and watches. With specialized devices for cycling, running, rowing, and more, it’s able to attract sports enthusiasts as well as amateur and professional athletes to its products.
Lower costs combined with its improved scale have helped it drive operating margins back toward relative highs over time. With its success in incorporating its advanced GPS and motion-tracking technology into its devices, it can continue to gain share over time.
5. Life Time Group Holdings
Life Time Group Holdings (LTH +3.69%) operates more than 180 luxury fitness centers in the U.S. and Canada. Over the last five years, Life Time has seen significant improvements in member engagement and revenue per member, driven by constant improvements and renovations. It recently capitalized on the growing interest in pickleball by dedicating space in its facilities to the sport.
Today’s Change
(3.69%) $1.06
Current Price
$29.82
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$6.3B
Day’s Range
$28.95 – $29.99
52wk Range
$24.14 – $34.99
Volume
2.1M
Avg Vol
2.1M
Gross Margin
35.38%
As a result, it’s been able to produce strong revenue growth through increased membership pricing and additional service sales such as personal training. As a luxury brand, Life Time has the opportunity to increase the value of its memberships more than low-cost gyms, such as Planet Fitness, that cater to budget-conscious consumers.
Its recent moves have resulted in very strong member retention while still attracting new members. Not only does that produce nice revenue growth, but it also provides strong operating margin expansion. The company saw net income increase 55% in 2024, and management’s preliminary earnings results showed a 61% increase in income for 2025.
How to invest in gym stocks
- Open your brokerage app: Log in to your brokerage account where you handle your investments.
- Search for the stock: Enter the ticker or company name into the search bar to bring up the stock’s trading page.
- Decide how many shares to buy: Consider your investment goals and how much of your portfolio you want to allocate to this stock.
- Select order type: Choose between a market order to buy at the current price or a limit order to specify the maximum price you’re willing to pay.
- Submit your order: Confirm the details and submit your buy order.
- Review your purchase: Check your portfolio to ensure your order was filled as expected and adjust your investment strategy accordingly.
Key factors to consider when investing in gym stocks
The gym and fitness industry consists of two types of companies: those that provide expensive, high-end products and services, and those that offer low-end products and services. Companies trying to offer something in the middle of the road struggle to find a customer base. Both strategies can work, but you need to know which strategy the company you’re investing in is taking.
Key factors for gym stocks in particular include how many locations they have, how quickly they’re opening new locations, member growth, and member retention rates. You’ll want to see healthy numbers across the board, and be sure to follow management’s commentary on how they plan to maintain or improve them.
Benefits and risks of investing in gym stocks
Benefits:
- Gym and fitness stocks capitalize on growing health consciousness among consumers. People are highly willing to pay for positive health outcomes.
- Most gyms and many fitness products receive recurring revenue, making their top-line growth highly predictable.
Risks:
- Churn rates: Some gyms and health products can experience very high churn rates, requiring them to continually fill the bucket. A sudden drop in gross additions can cause a shortfall in key metrics, leading to a drop in the stock price.
- Capital intensity: If a gym owner builds its own gyms (as opposed to franchising), it has to invest a lot of capital up front to open a new location, with some uncertainty about how well it can attract new members.
Are gym stocks right for your portfolio?
Gyms, connected fitness, and digital subscriptions all generate recurring revenue, which can lead to more predictable revenue growth. Subscriptions can also provide a strong revenue base for companies to sell equipment or apparel. Focusing on investing in companies with business models that generate plenty of cash is likely the most profitable approach.
The performance of gym stocks can vary seasonally since many people focus more on their health around the new year. But despite that potential price volatility, adding a top gym stock to your portfolio may be just the right fit for you. At the very least, buying stock in a fitness company may make you feel better about paying for an unused gym membership or a Peloton that you hang clothes on.
Related investing topics
Gym stocks FAQ
Fitness
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While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.
The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.
20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples
The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.
The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.
“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.
“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.
Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.
What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning
Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.
Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.
“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.
The Research Has Limitations
Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”
The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.
“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.
Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”
Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.
Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving
It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.
People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”
Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.
“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.
The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.
Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.
The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.
BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.
By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).
Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.
Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.
Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”
Notes to editors:
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]
The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,
About UCL (University College London)
UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.
Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.
We are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.
We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.
For 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.
We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.
www.ucl.ac.uk | Read news at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ | Follow UCL News on Bluesky and LinkedIn
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Media Contact
Tom Cramp
University College London
[email protected]
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise
bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
Subject of Research:
Article Title:
News Publication Date:
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Keywords
Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation
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