Health Club Management (HCM): The Magazine of the Global Health and Fitness Industry
Health Club Management, rebranded in recent years under the shorter name HCM, is a business magazine for the health, fitness and wellness industry, published from Hitchin in Hertfordshire by The Leisure Media Company. It was one of the first specialist titles to serve the commercial health club sector, having been spun out of the generalist Leisure Management magazine in the mid-1980s when health and fitness became the first leisure vertical large enough to sustain a magazine of its own. Its readers are the operators, suppliers, investors and policymakers who run gyms, health clubs, leisure centres and wellness businesses in the United Kingdom and around the world.
The magazine reached its 300th edition in 2022, a milestone marked by inviting industry experts to reflect on the sector's development and its future. Today HCM operates as a magazine, a high-traffic news website, a family of handbooks and ezines, and — since 2024 — the host brand of the HCM Summit, an annual conference for decision-makers across health, fitness and wellness held in London.
Overview
HCM is a trade title written for professionals, not gym members. Its subject is the business of fitness: club openings and investment, operator strategy, franchising, equipment and technology, programming trends from Pilates to padel, research on participation and consumer behaviour, and the sector's growing relationship with public health and the NHS. The tone is that of an industry insider's briefing — interviews with chief executives, analysis of market data and practical features on the operational questions club managers face.
The magazine is published by Leisure Media alongside sister titles including Spa Business, Sports Management, Leisure Management and Attractions Management, and it shares with them a publishing model built on print and digital magazines, daily web news, email newsletters, supplier directories and live events. Within that stable, HCM is the flagship for health and fitness, a sector its publisher describes the company as serving as the main global media.
History and Founding
HCM's origin story is told by Liz Terry, Leisure Media's chief executive, in the company's anniversary history of its spa and fitness publishing. When Terry joined Leisure Media as a junior business reporter in 1983, the whole leisure industry was covered by one magazine, Leisure Management, and gyms were still, in her recollection, largely the preserve of weightlifters while school sport was simply 'PE'. The company's strategy was to cover everything in that single title until individual markets could support dedicated magazines.
Health and fitness was the first market to boom, in the mid-1980s, and the company responded by spinning off Health Club Management. The title grew with the industry it served — through the rise of the big commercial club chains, the budget-gym revolution, the boutique studio wave and the sector's reinvention around wellness. Publication frequency was substantial for a trade title: a 2015 imprint recorded the magazine as published eleven times a year. In 2022 the magazine published its 300th edition, using the occasion to gather industry voices on why they joined the sector, its most exciting developments and what the next 300 issues might report.
Publisher and Ownership
Health Club Management is published by The Leisure Media Co Ltd of Portmill House, Portmill Lane, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, the imprint address carried by the magazine, with copyright held through Cybertrek Ltd in its 2015 edition information. Leisure Media, established around 1980-81, is an independent specialist publisher whose magazines and websites serve professionals across the leisure industries from its Hertfordshire base, reachable for subscriptions and advertising through its Hitchin telephone exchange.
The company's leadership is closely involved in the magazine itself. Liz Terry is both chief executive of Leisure Media and editor of HCM — she introduced the HCM Summit in that dual capacity — while Jan Williams has served as HCM's publisher, representing the title commercially at the launch of the summit. That overlap of ownership, publishing and editorship gives HCM an entrepreneurial character: the people who own the platform also write its editorials and convene its events.
Editorial Content and Sections
A typical issue of HCM mixes several recognisable strands. There are interviews with operator leaders — recent subjects include the chief executive of ukactive on the sector's growth potential, the co-founder of boutique brand 1Rebel on expansion after the COVID years, and private-equity investors in fitness businesses. There are insight and research features, from Leisure DB data on the state of the industry to analysis of Gen Z consumers and the growth of Pilates. Practical strands cover topics such as indoor cycling innovation, strength-training environments, rent and property questions, data-protection liabilities, and exercise referral.
The magazine also tracks the sector's frontiers: padel and pickleball finding a place in health clubs, programmes engaging young people, operators responding to weight-loss medication, and physical activity's place in healthcare, including reports arguing for exercise at the heart of preventive medicine. Regular HCM magazine features sit alongside promotional features from suppliers, a company-profiles section and a daily flow of shorter news stories on the website covering openings, appointments and investment across the global industry.
Audience and Circulation
HCM's audience comprises senior decision-makers in the fitness industry: chief executives and managing directors of club operators, independent gym owners, local-authority leisure managers and trust executives, franchise investors, and the equipment, technology and service suppliers who sell into the sector. Industry bodies such as ukactive and the Swimming Teachers' Association have partnered with Leisure Media to reach that readership, and the STA and Royal Life Saving Society UK both signed strategic media partnerships with the publisher to promote workforce campaigns across the leisure sector.
The scale of the digital audience is visible on the HCM website, where news archives run to many thousands of stories — a search index on the site counted over 12,000 news items — and the brand's reach underpins ventures such as the HCM Summit, planned for 400 delegates in London with a global live stream. For advertisers, HCM offers access to the buyers who equip and operate the world's gyms.
Print and Digital Editions
HCM has long been published in parallel print and digital editions, with the digital edition of each issue readable through the healthclubmanagement.co.uk website and subscriptions handled through Leisure Media's subscription services. Print distribution in the magazine's 2015 imprint was handled by Royal Mail and Whistl in the UK and Total Mail globally, reflecting an international subscriber base for a British-edited title.
Digitally, the brand extends well beyond the magazine. The website publishes news daily, organises magazine features by issue, and hosts supplier information and promotional features. Annual HCM Handbooks gather reference material and industry insight — recent editions carrying features on franchising expansion and wellbeing culture — while ezines and social feeds keep the readership in continuous contact with the title between issues. Readers can choose to consume HCM in print, as a digital magazine, as a PDF or online, a choice the publisher has offered across its portfolio for many years.
Notable Editors and Contributors
Liz Terry, HCM's editor and Leisure Media's chief executive, is the magazine's defining figure, writing editorials, interviewing industry leaders and fronting its events. Terry, who holds an MBE, has used the platform to argue for the fitness sector's unity and public-health role, including through the publisher's partnership with FIBO, the world's largest fitness trade show, under which Leisure Media became FIBO's first official global media partner in 2018.
Editorial colleagues named in the magazine's history include Katie Barnes, who edited Health Club Management before becoming editor of Spa Business, and Kath Hudson, a long-serving writer whose reporting covers investment, franchising round-ups and sector features. Contributors range across the industry's leadership: analysts such as David Minton of Leisure DB, ukactive executives, operator founders and investors all appear in its pages, making the magazine a forum in which the sector talks to itself as much as a record of its news.
The HCM Summit and Industry Role
In 2024 HCM extended its role from chronicler to convener with the launch of the HCM Summit, an annual conference for decision-makers across the health, fitness and wellness markets, held at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, London, on 24 October 2024 with pre-summit events the day before. The all-keynote event was designed for 400 delegates in the room, webcast live globally and available on demand, with a trade exhibition run alongside in collaboration with clients from the HCM, Spa Business and FitTechGlobal networks.
The summit, which returned in 2025 with speakers including PureGym's chair Humphrey Cobbold, reflects the position HCM has built over four decades: a trusted intermediary between operators, suppliers, policymakers and experts. Its news judgment and convening power — exercised also through foresight reports and partnerships with bodies such as FIBO, ukactive's orbit and the swimming and lifesaving organisations — make it one of the institutions through which the modern fitness industry organises itself.
Recent Developments
HCM continues to publish its magazine, handbooks and daily news through 2025 and 2026, with recent issues covering the Pilates boom, operators engaging younger audiences, strength training's growth, the implications of weight-loss drugs for activity levels, and the rebranding of long-running industry research as Leisure DB became Evolve alongside its twentieth State of the Industry Report. The magazine also reported the sector's mourning for Les Mills, described in its pages as a founding father of fitness.
The HCM Summit's sell-out 2025 edition, opened by Liz Terry with PureGym's chair, showed the events side of the brand maturing into an annual fixture. From a mid-1980s spin-off produced when gyms were a niche pursuit, HCM has become the global trade magazine of a fitness industry that now presents itself as part of the healthcare system — and the magazine's own agenda, centred increasingly on prevention, longevity and participation, mirrors that transformation.
