How three fitness industry leaders identified an underserved niche — the hardcore strength enthusiast — and built a premium, proprietary brand designed to make people say “holy f—” the moment they walk in.
Nabil Saeed — and his partners Tim Kurtz and Chris Rondeau — identified a gap in the fitness industry.
“When we went to these gyms and we were all on our come up, we realized we love what we do, but we’re the ones training hard every single time we go in there,” said Saeed. “We had our training regimen set, we saw results and there wasn’t necessarily a place that catered to the enthusiast — the interested, heavy exerciser in the strength world.”
That gap — between the HVLP gyms built for the masses and the small, no-frills “black iron” clubs built for bodybuilders — is exactly what Saeed, Kurtz and Rondeau, a Planet Fitness co-founder, set out to fill. The result is Absolute Recomp (AR), a strength-first concept the trio doesn’t hesitate to call the Disneyland of fitness.
A Brand Built for the Superuser
Kurtz, who has spent decades in the industry as a multi-unit Planet Fitness franchisee, said the HVLP boom did the industry a huge service by making fitness accessible to the masses. But that same growth left a specific member behind.
“Back when I was young and Chris was young, there was nothing for the average person, right? And that brought on every club trying to really go after that that member,” explained Kurtz. “Just about every brand wants that member. And it kind of left that committed strength enthusiast, workout enthusiast to the side. We feel it’s an underserved and undervalued market. As Nabil built the first club, our goal was to build a brand that was actually for that member and build a premium brand for that with our true DNA.”
Rather than positioning AR as competition to the HVLP giants, Kurtz sees the brand as complementary. When a club’s most dedicated members — the 5% to 10% who show up constantly and push the equipment to its limits — migrate to AR, he argued it actually benefits the larger, value-priced clubs by freeing up space for casual members.
“That consumer who comes to us has found their home, which is what they’ve been looking for,” said Kurtz. “We really fill that gap, but it has to be done in a super-premium way. We’re a much wider demographic than the traditional hardcore strength gym.”
That workout enthusiast — the one who shows up 25 days a month, trains for an hour and a half, and treats the gym as a second home — is who AR was built around. Rather than treating strength as an afterthought tucked into a corner alongside group fitness studios, pickleball courts and basketball gyms, AR flips the model, so strength training is the entire facility.
Despite being a very different concept and culture from Planet Fitness that Rondeau founded, he can draw the operational parallel of catering to an underserved niche for the first time.
“I walked out of AR like shaking my head, saying this reminds me of the franchisees who used to come and visit me and my Planet Fitness partners when they were looking to hop on board and they would walk around saying, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’” said Rondeau. “It was exactly the same feeling I had when I first walked in AR for the first time in person. I always say it’s not even a gym; it’s an experience. It’s something that is just jaw dropping when you see it in person.”
Saeed has created a luxury environment with marble finishes and an unmatched variety of specialized equipment — many pieces even seasoned industry veterans have never seen before. Rather than feeling like a typical gym, the club delivers a unique, immersive experience that leaves a lasting impression, especially for dedicated lifters who appreciate the extensive equipment selection and attention to detail. Each new AR club is stocked with 350 to 600 pieces of equipment in total.
“It’s not cement floors and rusted dumbbells,” explained Rondeau. “Everything’s marble. It’s like a kid in a candy store for a weightlifter.”
Proprietary by Design
If there’s one word the founders keep returning to, it’s proprietary. Saeed said he was determined from Day One to build something that couldn’t simply be knocked off with a paint job and a few new machines — a situation he’s watched play out across the industry for years.
“I kept seeing these brands and they’re just like a different color change and a plus-or-minus-15-pieces-of-equipment,” said Saeed. “We said that people go to Vegas, to Dubai and they’ve got these experiences you just can’t find here. We said, okay, we’re going to do it in fitness.”
That philosophy shows up in the smallest details. The lighting fixtures are custom-developed and take six to eight months to produce — nothing is ordered off the shelf. The marble, wall materials and equipment mix are all sourced or fabricated specifically for the brand. Every club starts as a hand sketch before it’s engineered into a physical space.
“We’ve built a corporate infrastructure to substantiate the scaling of hand-sketching to production, manufacturing and then landing and installing in the club,” said Saeed. “It’s just not that simple to go order from one manufacturer, go to the other, and rinse and repeat.”
Unlike a traditional franchise model, no two AR locations look alike. “Kind of like Anthropologie, every unit has its own personality, its own look,” said Kurtz. “You’re not going to go into Dallas and then into Florida and see the exact same unit. Every experience is different. And our member travels from club to club and they want that different experience, that different look.”
Scaling Without Losing the Culture
AR currently operates five clubs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with five more underway in Illinois, Arizona, Houston and Denver — expected to open over the next seven to eight months. From there, the plan is to build five to 15 corporate clubs a year, alongside a highly selective franchise program adding a similar number annually.
Each new location runs in the $8 million-plus range to build, and Saeed said that figure assumes volume discounts already built into the business. Trying to replicate the concept from scratch, he estimated, could run a competitor closer to $12 million or $13 million.
Rondeau, drawing on his Planet Fitness experience, said the key to scaling without diluting the brand comes down to franchisee selection. “Even if they had all the net worth in the world, if they didn’t believe in the culture and believe in the concept and the product, we just didn’t even sign them up,” he said. “That same mindset is extremely important with AR.”
Kurtz agreed, adding that AR is looking for operators who are sophisticated, well-capitalized and genuinely obsessed with the brand. “They have to really understand we’re not just looking for the pros,” he said. “These people have to love the brand and bleed red and black.”
The Membership Model
AR’s membership pricing starts at $65 a month for a single club, scaling up to roughly $80 a month for access across all locations, along with perks like retail discounts and guest passes. It’s a price point Kurtz says is intentional: high enough to filter out the casual gym-goer, low enough that a younger, serious lifter can still get in the door.
“It creates a barrier for the casual lifter,” explained Kurtz. “But it’s cheap enough for the younger person to get in if they’re really serious about it.”
Recovery amenities are intentionally limited — each locker room includes a sauna, but the brand has stayed away from cold plunges, cryotherapy or tanning.
“We want to focus on the experience, right? A professional, positive, clean experience from the moment you walk into the lobby to everywhere in the club,” emphasized Kurtz. “That’s most important to us. And we feel adding all the recovery amenities take space up for equipment and really takes away from the experience we want to always have for our members. So instead of running around trying to fix cold plunges or clean tanning beds and everything else, we’re focused on that member experience at all times.”
Rondeau said the biggest lesson he’s carried over from his Planet Fitness days when it comes to experience is discipline — resisting the urge to chase every trend sweeping through the industry.
“The industry has a lot of fads that come and go,” said Rondeau. “Don’t pay attention to what everybody else is doing. Do your model and do it 100% right, and don’t let the distraction of fads that come and go. Stay disciplined along the way so the brand always has the ultimate integrity.”
Saeed took it a step further, arguing that fitness enthusiasts can’t simply be won over with equipment alone. “You can’t rent a box and then throw equipment in it and expect fitness enthusiasts to come and stay,” he said. “That’s not how it works. I think a lot of operators are going to find out in a very difficult way that that’s not how it works.”
The “Holy F— Factor”
Ask the founders how they measure success on opening day, and they don’t point to a spreadsheet. They point to a reaction.
“A standard test for us when we open a new club is Tim, myself and now Chris will bring in a friend or a past business partner — somebody who hasn’t seen the brand before,” said Saeed. “We like to call it the ‘holy f— factor.’ If we don’t get a ‘holy f—‘ out of them when they walk in, we failed from a design perspective.”
It’s an internal benchmark the trio takes seriously as the brand scales into new markets, and one they say won’t get watered down as AR grows.
“As other brands scale, it’s like, yeah, I’ve seen this before, it’s not as good,” said Kurtz says. “That’s the opposite for us. The bigger we get, the badder we get.”
Success, Saeed said, has come from more than innovation. He credits the partners and leadership team around him for allowing him to stay focused on what he does best: envisioning what’s next for the brand. While he believes resilience, patience and discipline are essential for anyone entering the fitness industry, he insists AR’s greatest differentiator isn’t simply its equipment or luxury finishes — it’s the experience.
“We’re not just a gym,” said Saeed. “We’re quite literally the Disneyland of fitness.”
As the company expands across the country, that’s the standard the team intends to protect — creating clubs so distinctive that fitness enthusiasts travel from around the world just to experience them.
