The top 3 birthday facts: ACTIV FITNESS is 40 years old 🎈🎉

40 years of ACTIV FITNESS – wow, that’s old! Or not? After all, 40 is the new 30 – or do we not want to be younger because we are no longer ageing in the traditional sense anyway, but are becoming cooler, crunchier and catchier? One thing we know for sure: we’ve been here for you for 40 years – and we’re here to stay! Today, to kick off our birthday year, we present three facts that you probably didn’t know about ACTIV FITNESS:

3) Opening in the furniture warehouse

It all started small… literally! To be more precise, in a storage room measuring just 140m2 that belonged to a furniture store. It was there, in Erlenbach, in a municipality on the right bank of Lake Zurich, that the first ACTIV FITNESS studio saw the light of day. 40 years ago, founder Armin Fach invited people to get to know him. In the studio that he built himself. And by “build it himself” he means hands-on: he painted the posters for the opening days himself and put them up around the region on his bike. Over time, he had to push the walls of the studio back further and further – because when the first ACTIV FITNESS was about to burst, 742 members were training there – boah! Armin Fach also had the very first subscription he sold framed – and still marvels at it today.

2) The myth of the name

Where does the name ACTIV FITNESS come from? Why exactly “AF”? And why is it spelled with a “C”? There are many myths and legends surrounding these questions: The founder is called Armin Fach, the brand Activ Fitness. Coincidence or calculation, in order to elegantly immortalize oneself with a cleverly chosen combination of letters? We’ll clarify – the fact is (oops, another “F”): it used to be fashionable to put your own name on the brand. The founder says: “Specialist training sounded kind of silly. I knew ‘fitness’ had to be in, and active had to be in….” Aha, that brings us to the subject of the “C”. Armin Fach explains his answer to the question of why he did not spell Aktiv Fitne…..äxgüsi, Activ Fitness with a “k” as follows: “…then I actively wrote with k, but that just didn’t look good visually. That’s when I changed it.” Simple as f*** and understandable, this reasoning 😉.

1) 121 studios, over 3000 employees, 1 target

40 years later, over 200,000 members across Switzerland are training in the ACTIV FITNESS format. A lot has happened since the beginning. But one thing has remained the same: our aspiration to be close to you. With our 121 studios from Geneva to Lake Constance, from Schaffhausen to Ticino and across all language regions, we try to be wherever you live, work or commute. We work every day to ensure that you can enjoy a carefree and well-supervised workout. In this case, “we” are over 3000 part-time and full-time employees who want to take your fitness experience into the future in the areas of fitness training, group fitness, childcare, technology, cleaning, products & project management, customer service, HR, system administration, marketing, etc. Our vision: Switzerland trains with ACTIV FITNESS!…Is that why the logo has always been square like the Swiss flag? Coincidence, myth or prediction? 😉

With this in mind: Happy Birthday to you, to me – to us! 🥳 We feel honored to have been on the market for so long, keeping you moving and making you smile with our FitFact. We continue – with Fitness, FitFact and Fun – and hope you will continue to accompany us on our journey. Who knows, maybe even another 40 years? Challenge accepted! 💪