Have an extra starting salary to spare? Equinox has announced a new “full health optimization” membership that costs $3,000 per month, or a whopping $40,000 per year.
Called Optimize by Equinox, the program is a collaboration between the luxury gym and a lab testing and insights company called Function Health. It combines Equinox’s gym membership, personal training, and fitness assessments with Function Health’s panel of lab tests and analysis, along with lifestyle coaching and some other goodies.
It’s the latest entry in the buzzy precision medicine, longevity healthcare, and optimization space. Serena Williams recently backed one such company called Lifeforce, while John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are behind another, called Tally Health, though these are just two in a burgeoning industry.
The idea is that these hybrid tech-medical-wellness platforms do blood testing to measure all sorts of “biomarkers,” such as hormone levels, that ostensibly deliver insights about the current state of your health as well as longer term predispositions. Function Health’s overall goal is to help people “live 100 healthy years.”
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Generally these platforms offer suggestions on sleep, nutrition, supplements, healthcare, and fitness toward those aims. Equinox takes the idea further than most (but not all) by offering personal training as a part of the service. As the name suggests, it’s all in pursuit of “optimizing” health and performance, meaning tweaking your lifestyle to extend your “healthspan” (or the number of years you live as a healthy person).
“Our members live high-performance lives, and this program gives them yet another level of movement, regeneration, and nutrition, leveled up,” Equinox and Function Health representatives told Well+Good via email when asked about who they thought the Optimize program was for.
The somewhat nebulous nature of the optimizing for healthspan goal aside, what does Equinox’s longevity membership actually look like? The program has raised eyebrows online, thanks to the price and the wealthy coterie’s obsession with longevity (it’s giving James Bond villain).
Here’s what an Optimize by Equinox membership will actually get you
- An Equinox membership
- Function Health blood testing “for 100 biomarkers—everything from heart, liver, and kidney health to metabolic and immune systems to cancer markers and nutrients,” done once per year
- Equinox fitness tests for VO2 max, strength, and movement range, done once every six months
- Assessments/analysis of both the Function Health and Equinox tests
- Three weekly personal training sessions
- Two 30-minute meetings per month with a sleep coach and a nutritionist
- The Rest & Recovery Kit that includes the Equinox and Oura co-branded Oura ring
- A monthly massage
Is Optimize by Equinox worth the price tag?
The $40,000 annual cost of Optimize by Equinox certainly contains a lot of pricey items all rolled into one membership. An Equinox membership itself costs $3,600 to $6,000 per year, while personal training sessions average $160 per session, and a massage at the Equinox spa is $245. So annually, training sessions would be $5,760, and massages would cost $2,940.
Function Health tests cost $499 per year, and then there’s the $545 Oura Ring and yearly Oura membership.
As for lifestyle coaching, according to telehealth company Nourish, a nutritionist session costs $90 to $134 in New York. Life Coach Magazine says sleep coach services average $200 to $1,500, though it’s not totally clear what that gets you. So, ballpark, a nutritionist and a sleep coach session would come to $300. Twice a month for a year is $7,200.
All those services together cost $23,544. That’s pricey on its own, considering the cost of an average gym membership and personal training at somewhere other than Equinox cost far less.
But hey, if you’re bought into the Equinox luxury-verse and are really trying to do three personal training sessions per week plus lifestyle coaching, $23,000 is what it will cost you—which is still $16.5K shy of $40,000. Perhaps that markup accounts for the integration of all of these services into one streamlined—dare we say, optimized—package, with personal trainers who are read in on your annual cortisol and thyroid hormone levels.
Or, thought of another way, what is the cost of the less quantifiable product of increased healthspan and generally “optimized” health? Average medical costs per person annually in the U.S. are a whopping $13,493 per person. If the idea is that treating your whole body as a unified system through sleep, exercise, and nutrition could keep you healthier longer, perhaps the high cost of a health optimization program could actually be worth it.
Then again, Function Health has an all caps disclaimer on its homepage that it does *not* offer medical advice or treatment, and is very much not a substitute for going to the doctor.
The question is: Can you put a price tag on preventing future health problems, and is that something a program like this can actually deliver? As of now, there’s no way to know. The people stressing about longevity—tech titans, finance bros, wellness gurus—haven’t lived 100 healthy years just yet.
In the meantime, follow these tried-and-true longevity tips: Move your body in all the ways you love, eat nutrient-dense foods, manage your stress, practice compassion, and live in the moment.
