BabelSocials @ Babel Fit

For a long time, fitness was fundamentally individual. You joined a gym to train, did your workout and went home.

That behavior is changing. People are increasingly building more of their social lives around health, whether that means training together, hiking, running, playing padel or comparing notes on nutrition and recovery.

Babel was already an established premium fitness brand with a pool, a resort-like atmosphere and a strong member base already sharing the same spaces and routines. While the outgoing members naturally found their people, many of us, me included, still trained alone and went home.

Babel's founder had brought me in to shake things up and help elevate the brand. One opportunity I saw was turning all that repeated contact into an actual community.

That became Babel Socials.

Putting hundreds of members under one roof doesn't automatically create a community. You still have to give people reasons to interact.

I developed the idea for Babel Socials with Babel's founder and CFO, then worked closely with Danny, who helped shape the programming and lead the day-to-day execution, and later Janat, who took over that role as the program grew. Rather than force everything into one format, we experimented with dozens of activities built around different ways people might want to participate.

We brought specialists into Babel to talk about health, performance and longevity, and used member interests and emerging trends to shape everything from golf and hikes to games and other activities beyond the gym.

Eventually there were four to ten things happening every month, both inside Babel and across the city. Babel was starting to feel like more than somewhere you went to work out.

People connect much more naturally around something they already care about.

Golf people found other golf people. Runners met runners. People curious about longevity met others thinking about the same things. They came for the activity and the relationships formed around it.

We poured wine and ran cocktail-making workshops with Soulsister Spirits. We did escape rooms, game nights and plenty of other things that gave people a reason to interact outside the gym.

Every couple of months, we also ran Secret Socials, invite-only dinners with a slightly different mix of members each time, alongside Babel's founder, trainers and team.

We used prompt cards, icebreakers and conversation games to mix people up and get them talking outside their usual circles. You might arrive knowing two people and leave knowing ten. It also gave members a chance to know the people behind Babel outside the normal trainer-member dynamic.

Many events were open to non-members, members brought friends, and those friends discovered Babel through people they already trusted. Every event also generated its own stream of photos, videos, tags and shares, putting Babel in front of far more people than actually attended.

Community had become an acquisition and brand-building channel without feeling like one.

After roughly 90 events, we wanted to see how far the idea could scale.

We built Coldchella, a large-format wellness and lifestyle event around the audience Babel had been developing, bringing fitness, music, food, drinks, experiences and brand activations into one place.

The first edition sold out at around 1,200 people and brought in 20 brand partners.

It proved that a community built around a gym could support something much bigger: a standalone wellness event people genuinely wanted to clear their weekend for.

Coldchella wasn't a bolt-on marketing activation. It was the community at scale.

As that audience became increasingly interested in health, performance and longevity, another opportunity started emerging.

We partnered with Perfect Healthcare Group to bring clinical screening and health data into Babel.

Members could undergo screening and blood testing, then sit down with doctors to understand what their biomarkers might mean for their health, hormones, performance and longevity.

That changed the conversation. Fitness had traditionally started with what you could see: weight, strength, body composition and how you looked in the mirror. Now we could also start with what was happening inside the body.

The more interesting question was what happened afterward: could those results shape how someone trained, ate and recovered, then show whether those changes were actually working?

You could begin to see the outline of a feedback loop between clinical information and everyday behavior.

AI was already around when we were building this, but what it could realistically do in this space was much more limited.

Today, bloodwork, body composition, sleep, training and recovery can increasingly feed into the same system. AI can now analyze meal preferences alongside nutritional needs, track changes through progress photos, and review training or mobility videos to identify issues and give feedback on what to work on next.

Doctors and trainers would still oversee implementation. What changes is everything that happens between those touchpoints. Instead of operating largely in the dark, the individual can bring together their own data, research, questions and experimentation to build a much richer picture of what is actually working.

AI turns that constant stream of information into a feedback loop that simply wasn't practical before.

If I were building the model now, that layer would be fundamental.

Babel gave me an early glimpse of a model moving in two directions at once. Wellness is becoming more communal, while the health experience underneath it is becoming increasingly personal.

Better data and AI allow more of the experience to respond to the individual, while community, programming and shared experiences give people a reason to participate in the first place.

More communal above the surface. More personalized underneath.