The national Life Time Fitness corporation will open its first Life Time Athletic in Michigan this summer, a high-end health club with an extra emphasis on service, luxury and exclusivity.
The state's first Life Time Athletic will open at 4106 Telegraph Road in Bloomfield, likely by the third week of June and earlier than the planned Fourth of July opening, says General Manager Beth Bock, a long-time Life Time Fitness employee who has hoped for a decade that a Life Time Athletic would come to metro Detroit. Life Time Fitness has seven clubs in Michigan and 109 around the country.
"This is our luxury brand, kind of our executive brand…This will be a diamond-level club, which is our highest level of membership," she says.
The building comes in at three floors, taking up nearly 75,000 square feet. The club includes higher-end fitness equipment, Bock says. "We have high-end equipment as it is, but this takes it to a whole new level."
At Life Time Athletic the staff-to-member ratio is lower: "We want to anticipate our members' needs," she says. The men's and women's dressing rooms are about luxury treatment with their own whirlpool spas, dry saunas and eucalyptus steam rooms and "every item you can think of. Don't bring a thing from home," Bock says.
There are adult fitness studios for yoga, barre and group workouts and studios for children, who are a crucial part of the Life Time Athletic membership. It includes three hours of daily programming, from yoga and zumba to arts and crafts and language arts for children. Child care can be arranged for different caregivers to do pick-ups or drop-offs.
Life Time Athletic also offers a testing lab, where registered dietitians measure overall health from vital signs to food sensitivity and hormone levels that dictate diets, best times to work out, and more.
Membership also comes with access to special programming and fitness destination trips. "We're not a gym with equipment and four walls," Bock says. "We really are a health club. Education and even entertainment is a part of that."
Life Time Athletic will be hiring 225-250 employees, about 70% of whom will be full-time. Usually just 30-40% of the staff is full-time, Bock says.
"We want full-time, dedicated, career-minded people here to serve the members," she says.
A preview center for the future Life Time Athletic is open at 4036 Telegraph, next door to the construction site for potential members who want to see renderings, plans and learn about membership.
Source: Beth Bock, general manager, Life Time Athletic, Bloomfield
Writer: Kim North Shine
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