“This is something that’s not being framed correctly by my industry,” says Pilar Gerasimo about fitness clubs’ emphasis on six-pack abs and sexy, lean thighs. So Life Time Fitness is using its Experience Life magazine to declare fitness more than the ability to wear skinny jeans. Gerasimo edits Experience Life, which goes to more than 600,000 paid subscribers (most of them Life Time members) and appears on about 3,000 newsstands throughout the country. The January issue features a revolutionary “manifesto” for health and well-being.
“The context for health being a revolutionary act is that . . . what’s normal is to sit in front of a TV or sit at a desk for hours a day, it’s to eat whatever’s convenient or available,” Gerasimo says. “It’s also normal then to seek medical attention for health conditions and chronic diseases that are largely caused by lifestyle.”
Life Time repositioned itself last year as a holistically “healthy way of life company.” Now Experience Life seems to be tapping the cultural and political zeitgeist to reinforce that.
Words like “revolutionary” are appealing because “particularly Americans love the idea of independent choice and freedom,” Gerasimo says. “One of the things that I write in the manifesto is that health, in many ways, is the first human liberty. It’s the thing that gives you the choice to go out and do whatever you want to do with your life.”
