Ask Silke Hensel where fitness is heading and she does not start with treadmills or square footage. She starts with people. The way she sees it, the gym as a place you feel obligated to visit is a fading idea. What replaces it is something closer to a habit people actually want, woven into daily life through design, community, and a sense of belonging. “Brand is less about campaigns and more about consistency, experience, and trust,” she says. It is a line that doubles as a summary of how she has spent the past fifteen years working.
That work has touched some of the most recognizable names in the industry. As Chief Marketing Officer of RSG Group North America, Hensel led brand and growth strategy for Gold’s Gym and JOHN REED Fitness, and she cofounded HEIMAT in Los Angeles, a concept that blurred the lines between gym, members’ club, and cultural space. Along the way she has built a reputation as one of the more thoughtful operators in a category that too often confuses marketing with discounting.
A Berlin start
Hensel’s route into fitness began in brand strategy at Grey, the WPP agency where she learned to think about positioning and storytelling. In November 2009, the German trade publication CP Monitor reported that she had joined the Berlin headquarters of McFit, then the country’s largest fitness chain, to lead Corporate Media. The role covered the membership magazine, an in club television channel, the studio terminals, and an early online community.
McFit was the founding brand of what would later become RSG Group, the company that today owns Gold’s Gym, JOHN REED, and HEIMAT. Starting there gave Hensel a view of the business from the inside out, at a moment when European fitness still treated brand as an afterthought rather than a core asset. She spent the following years moving between operations and brand, building the instinct for how the two have to work together that would define her later work.
Building brands that feel like culture
The clearest expression of that instinct came in the United States. JOHN REED Fitness, the European gym brand built around music and design, expanded into Dallas, Downtown Los Angeles, and Santa Monica under her watch. The Santa Monica club, opened in June 2023 inside a former JCPenney building on the Third Street Promenade, leaned into a coastal, light-filled aesthetic with murals from local and international artists. It was a gym that wanted to be photographed, and it was.
HEIMAT pushed the idea further. Hensel cofounded it as a premium space where training sat alongside hospitality, design, and programming, an early version of what the industry now talks about as the lifestyle and longevity category. Her bet was that the next generation of members would not be won by more machines or longer hours. They would be won by environments that felt worth showing up to.
That thinking extended to how she reached younger audiences. At Gold’s Gym, she helped move one of the most storied names in fitness toward a new generation, including an early entry into the Name, Image, and Likeness space with college athletes. The goal, as she described it at the time, was less about selling memberships and more about signaling what the brand stood for.
Where the category is going
Hensel talks about fitness less as a product and more as a system that becomes part of how people live. She is particularly interested in the shift toward longevity and wellness, in how Gen Z relates to health, and in the practical question of how artificial intelligence can make marketing organizations faster and sharper rather than simply more complicated.
Alongside her executive roles, Hensel runs SPRKL, a Los Angeles and Berlin-based advisory practice offering tailored marketing and growth support, with a particular focus on European brands entering the United States. It is a niche she knows from experience, having spent much of her career translating concepts built for one market into something that resonates in another. Cultural nuance, she argues, is not a finishing touch. It is the difference between a brand that lands and one that feels imported.
Most recently, she was appointed Global Chief Marketing Officer of Ultimate Performance, the premium personal training company, a role that extends her brand and growth work onto an international stage.
Building openly
Hensel is increasingly visible as a voice on leadership, having spoken at industry conferences across Europe and the United States on brand building, customer experience, and the role of AI in marketing. She has talked openly about navigating the industry as a female executive, and she is building out her own platforms to share more of how she works.
For all the brands on her resume, the throughline holds. Hensel believes the companies that win in fitness over the next decade will be the ones that treat their members like people they want to keep. “I believe the future of this industry is not about more gyms,” she says, “but about better systems.” On current evidence, she intends to help build them.
