Coming soon to Hobbs, Anytime Fitness is under construction at 3901 N. Grimes, just north of Home Depot.
Martin Lebrun, managing director for Anytime Fitness in Carlsbad and Hobbs, said the franchise is scheduled to open a 7,000-square-foot facility at that location in the first quarter of 2018.
“We opened our first location in Carlsbad last September and it’s been a lot of lessons learned with that one, with special awareness, knowing how to outfit the gym for success,” he said. “So we’re building on the success of the Carlsbad gym, opening a larger location so we can cater to more people.”
Once open, the Anytime Fitness gym will be available to members 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Lebrun said, “Anytime Fitness was founded on a convenience model. The idea is it’s a 24-hour gym. Every member has a key fob. They just slide their key fob. It opens the door and they have access to the gym any time they want. Our primary focus is going to be convenience.”
According to the franchise company’s website, which already lists Hobbs as “coming soon,” Anytime Fitness currently has nearly 3,300 gyms worldwide. Besides the U.S., where more than 2,000 Anytime Fitness gyms are located, the countries with the most Anytime Fitness gyms are Australia (431), Canada (135) and Japan (134).
Lebrun said the franchise has developed a coaching model to help people to “get to a healthier place” (a company slogan) by giving them accountability, encouragement and a lot of guidance in the way they train and work out.
“A lot of our folks have transitioned to small group training, one-on-one personal training and we will be able to offer that through certified personal trainers that we will be hiring locally in Hobbs and bringing over from Carlsbad,” he added. Equipment to be available for use at the Hobbs Anytime Fitness will be state of the art, Lebrun said.
“We use Lifetime Fitness and Precor. Typically, we’ll use Precor for all of our cardiovascular equipment, the treadmills, ellipticals and what have you,” he explained. “Then, from the Life Fitness range of products, we use mainly Hammer Strength, low cost equipment, lasts forever and it’s applicable for novices to weight lifting experts. It’s really the standard in the industry.”
In preparation for a grand opening, the manager said prospective members will be allowed to sign up early.
“In a couple of months, we’ll start a pre-sale in Hobbs so we’ll be setting up throughout the community, offering a discounted membership so people can sign up ahead of time,” he said. “Then we’ll have a special event for everybody that signed up so they’ll be able to check out the gym before we open it to the public.”
According to the website, for the second year in a row last year, Entrepreneur magazine ranked Anytime Fitness number one on the magazine’s annual Top Global Franchise list. Averaging more than 300 new gyms a year for each of the past nine years, Anytime Fitness recently expanded to China, Belgium, Sweden and Italy. New gyms will also open soon in Colombia, Panama, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. As well as in Hobbs.
