Stop chasing traffic. Start embedding your business in your client’s daily life.
Why “High Traffic” Is a Trap
Want to know the number one way to put your studio on the fast track to success?
Location. Location. Location.
I’m sure you’ve heard this before. But there’s a good chance that what you’ve heard is wrong.
Most fitness professionals interpret “location” through a flawed, outdated lens. They chase the conventional real estate mantra: find a high-traffic location, maximize visibility, secure good parking. Commercial agents love to sell you on traffic counts. Fifty thousand cars a day. Two hundred thousand transit riders. An 800-unit residential tower going up next door.
That advice is dangerously incomplete.
Traffic alone is not a strategy. A river of the wrong people is worth less than a trickle of the right ones.
Putting a big-box gym on a major arterial road makes sense — a business built for everyone needs volume. But your personal training or boutique fitness studio is built for a specific person with a specific need. The question isn’t how many people pass your door. It’s whether the right people pass your door — and more importantly, whether they’re already in the habit of being in your neighborhood.
Take a look at your city’s top fitness studios. They likely all have one thing in common: a great location. Our research confirmed it — location was the number one factor people considered when choosing a gym. It matters more than equipment, class times, and sometimes even price. So yes, location matters enormously. The question is what “great location” actually means.
The 10XPT Location Framework: Leverage Existing Habits
After decades of building and advising fitness businesses across multiple cities and countries, one location principle has proven reliable across every studio I’ve worked with:
Find a space within walking distance of your city’s most popular shopping, dining, or lifestyle street.
Not directly on it necessarily — but as close as possible, and ideally next to the businesses your ideal client already frequents regularly.
The logic is simple but powerful. You are not trying to introduce your target client to a new neighborhood. You are trying to put your business in a neighborhood she already visits, already trusts, and has built a routine around.
When your studio is two doors down from the coffee shop she stops at on Saturday morning, or half a block from her favorite restaurant, you’re not asking her to go somewhere new. You’re asking her to notice something that’s already on her route. That is a fundamentally easier sell than asking her to drive to an industrial park or a strip mall she has no other reason to visit.
What to Look For: Your Ideal Client Is Already There
Forget the traffic counts — or at least, stop letting them lead. Put on your walking shoes and evaluate any potential location against this checklist.
1. The Right Neighbors. Who is coming and going from the surrounding businesses? A high-end café, a yoga boutique, a wine shop, a quality restaurant, a dentist’s office — these anchor businesses tell you who the neighborhood serves. If the businesses around you attract your target client as their target client, you’ve found a location that does your marketing for you before you open your doors.
2. Proximity to a Flagship Street. Every city has one — the street that functions as the cultural and commercial center for your target demographic. Being within two blocks gives you the credibility of the address, the foot traffic spillover, and visibility to people already in discovery mode — walking, browsing, looking for what’s new.
3. Passive Visibility. Car traffic alone doesn’t fill studios. But visibility from a well-traveled road is a passive marketing asset that works around the clock. Being seen — your signage, your branded windows — by the right people on their daily commute is awareness that compounds over months and years without costing you a dollar.
4. Existing Activity Hubs. Universities, hospitals, professional office districts, parks, and trail systems. Anywhere your target client has a recurring reason to be is a traffic source you didn’t have to create. The client who passes your studio three times a week on her lunch run is being introduced to your brand at zero cost to you — repeatedly, until the day she decides she’s ready to call.
Why Downtown Isn’t Always the Answer
It’s a common instinct to look for space in the heart of the city. “Our clients are professionals, so they must be downtown” is a reasonable-sounding assumption — and in many mid-sized cities, it’s dead wrong.
Take Edmonton. Downtown has roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people during the workday. After 5:00 PM, that number is cut in half as people leave for the neighborhoods, restaurants, and third spaces they actually want to be in. If your target client is a professional with disposable income, she isn’t spending her leisure time in the downtown core. She’s spending it in vibrant, walkable neighborhoods built around the things she enjoys.
Building a business in a ghost town is a fool’s errand. Follow your client, not the daytime population count.
Case Study 1: PT Studio — Edmonton, AB
When we scouted for Defining Eve, a women’s personal training studio, we didn’t walk into a commercial real estate office and ask for high-traffic retail space. We asked a different question: where does our client already spend her time?
The location we chose — just off 109 Street and 88 Avenue — wasn’t chosen by accident. It sat at the intersection of everything our target client already did.
Visible. The studio was visible from 109 Street and the High Level Bridge, one of Edmonton’s primary north-south commuter routes. The right people saw it every day on their way to and from work.
Adjacent to the hub. We were half a block from Whyte Avenue — Edmonton’s most popular shopping, dining, and cultural street, and the natural habitat of the professional woman we were building for.
Perfect neighbors. The Sugar Bowl, The High Level Diner, Red Bike, a dentist, a bakery, a café. Anchor businesses our target client was already visiting regularly. We weren’t asking her to discover a new neighborhood. We showed up in the one she already loved.
Proximity to work. The University of Alberta and the University Hospital were adjacent — where a significant portion of our client base worked or studied. The studio was already on their route before they ever heard our name.
Lifestyle alignment. We sat at an apex of Edmonton’s river valley trail system, one of the most extensive urban trail networks in North America. Runners, cyclists, walkers, and hikers passed our front door every morning.
No single factor was decisive. Together, they created a location where our target client was already present, already in motion, and already in the habits that made our business a natural next step. And critically — by being just off Whyte Avenue rather than on it, our lease rate was roughly half what the main strip would have cost. The location worked for the brand and the business model.
Case Study 2: Yoga Studio — Montreal, QC
The same principle applied in a different city with a different target client.
When we located Naada Yoga at 5540 Avenue Casgrain in Montreal, we chose a spot just off Saint Laurent Boulevard in the Mile-End neighborhood. The Plateau and Mile-End are where Montreal’s culturally engaged, seriously minded residents live, shop, and eat — the natural habitat of the dedicated yoga practitioner who had outgrown the drop-in studio down the street and was looking for something with genuine depth.
Being just off Saint Laurent gave us the credibility and foot traffic of the flagship street without the flagship street rent. The location itself communicated the brand before a student walked through the door — a serious program in a serious neighborhood, built for people who took their practice seriously.
There was, however, a problem.
Geographically, the location was right. One block off Saint Laurent, solid foot traffic along Saint Viateur Street, walking distance from a major shopping and entertainment hub. But the immediate neighbors were all in the textile industry. Close — very close — to being the right spot. But not quite.
The space and the lease were too good to resist, and the location was 90% right. So we took it. Then we did something that turned a near-perfect location into a genuinely great one: we redirected the existing traffic directly to our door.
The target client was close — just one turn and a hundred feet away. So we gave her a reason to take that turn. Naada began hosting events in front of the studio — outdoor yoga classes that closed the street, a new farmers market organized and anchored by the studio. These events gave the right people a specific reason to be exactly where we needed them to be. They created foot traffic where there had been textile workers. They generated press. They sold memberships.
The lesson: a near-perfect location, combined with the creativity to close the gap, can outperform a perfect location that’s been taken for granted.
A Simple 10XPT Location Scouting Exercise
Before you sign anything, walk the neighborhood and answer these five questions.
- Does my ideal client already spend time here? Look for lifestyle alignment, not just demographics.
- What businesses surround this location? Are they places your clients already frequent — or businesses that attract a completely different person?
- How strong is the foot traffic, and who is it? Sit nearby for thirty minutes at different times of day and observe. Not how many people — who.
- What times of day is the area busiest? Morning coffee crowds, lunch traffic, evening dining and nightlife — does the rhythm of the neighborhood match the rhythm of your business?
- Does the neighborhood reflect your brand positioning? Premium studios thrive in premium environments. The neighborhood you choose makes a statement about the brand before anyone reads your name.
The Big Idea: Leverage, Don’t Fight
Great locations don’t generate traffic. They leverage it.
The smartest fitness businesses place themselves inside the daily patterns of their ideal clients — not in the path of the most people, but in the path of the right people, doing the things they already do, in the neighborhoods they already love.
The lease terms, the build-out costs, and the square footage all matter. But the best deal on the wrong street is still the wrong street.
Scout for your client first. Negotiate the lease second. When you do that well, your location becomes one of your most powerful, most passive, and most durable marketing assets — one that works every single day without a budget, a campaign, or a single boosted post.
Location strategy is one component of the complete studio launch framework covered in The Successful Trainer masterclass. For the full system — research, branding, marketing, and customer service — visit 10xpt.co.