The Industry Built Bikes. Consumers Went and Bought Dumbbells.

A slow-moving problem sits beneath connected fitness's subscriber numbers and gets far less attention than it deserves: the exercise people increasingly want to do isn't the exercise most installed hardware was built to deliver.

The Modality Shift, In Numbers

Tracking data behind the current connected fitness equipment market makes this shift unusually easy to see, because it shows up consistently across every cardio machine category at once.

 
Figure 1: Training Modality Shift, Strength Gains as Machine Cardio Declines.

Between 2021 and 2024, free weight and dumbbell usage among gym members rose from 28.4% to 32.1%. Over the same stretch, resistance machine usage fell from 31.4% to 26.6%, ellipticals dropped from 23.2% to 18.8%, and stationary bikes slipped from 21.6% to 19.4%. Treadmills remain the most-used piece of equipment at 43.4%, but even they ticked down. One category up, every machine category down. The Health & Fitness Association's 2026 report reinforces this, naming free weights as the leading area of equipment-usage growth while traditional high-intensity and standalone cardio formats keep softening. When a pattern holds across five separate equipment categories over four years, it isn't noise.

What makes this different from a passing format trend is the evidence underneath it. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine linked any amount of resistance training to a 15% lower risk of all-cause mortality, along with 19% lower cardiovascular mortality and 14% lower cancer mortality, with the largest benefit- a 27% reduction in mortality risk- showing up at around 60 minutes of resistance training per week. That's roughly two short sessions. Public awareness of that research has spread fast, and behavior followed it. Trends built on accumulating clinical evidence don't usually reverse.

Why This Is a Hardware Problem, Not a Content Problem

Here's why that's awkward for connected fitness specifically: the installed base is overwhelmingly cardio. Bikes, treadmills, rowers. The equipment millions of households bought during the pandemic is, in aggregate, optimized for exactly the modality consumers are drifting away from.

You can't fully fix that with software. A company can add all the strength classes it wants to its content library, and many have, but a connected bike is still a bike. Converting a cardio-equipment household into a strength-equipment household requires a second hardware purchase, not a subscription renewal, and at the price points in this category that's a genuinely hard sell to someone who already spent thousands on a machine that still works fine. That's a structural ceiling on how quickly the category can realign itself to where demand is heading.

It also explains a lot of otherwise puzzling industry behavior. Smart strength systems get attention wildly out of proportion to their actual unit volumes precisely because everyone can see where the demand curve is pointing. It also explains why the same gym data showing strength rising shows growth in pickleball, yoga, and Pilates, formats built around movement variety and functional capability rather than sustained machine cardio. Consumers aren't just switching equipment; they're redefining what being fit means, blending strength, recovery, flexibility, and recreation in ways that don't map neatly onto a single screen-equipped machine in a spare bedroom.

The Risks That Follow From All of This

Stack the modality mismatch on top of the category's other pressures and the risk picture gets fairly clear.

 
Figure 2: Connected Fitness Equipment Market Risk Matrix.

Subscriber churn against a saturated installed base sits at the top on both probability and impact. Right behind it is the hardware replacement cycle, which is genuinely long: someone who bought a bike in 2021 may not replace it until 2028 or later, so the category can't count on natural upgrade demand to refresh its subscriber base anywhere near fast enough to offset attrition. Competition from reopened gyms for discretionary fitness spending, high price points exposed to consumer pullback, and churn sensitivity to subscription price increases all rank high-impact. Product safety is a quieter one worth flagging: iFIT's recall of older NordicTrack RW900 rowers over console overheating affected tens of thousands of units, a reminder that a large base of aging screen-equipped hardware carries long-tail liability.

There's also a capital dimension. Tonal and Hydrow, which each raised hundreds of millions during the boom, haven't secured new venture funding in over three years. Meanwhile, 2026 capital has rotated toward AI-driven health data companies like Whoop, Eight Sleep and Ultrahuman. Investors have moved from funding the machine to funding the data the machine produces, which makes it structurally harder for sub-scale hardware players to finance the software investment now required to compete. The consolidation that follows is already visible: Interactive Strength picked up Ergatta in March 2026 at a valuation reported between USD 8.8 million and USD 19.5 million, a small fraction of what the connected rowing category absorbed at its peak.

The read-through for anyone in this space: strength capability isn't an optional product-line extension anymore; it's where demand is heading, and the evidence says it's staying there. The companies treating it as a checkbox on a content menu are the ones most exposed to everything else on that risk matrix.