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Gold’s Gym is ready to pump Southern California up all over again.
The legendary iron paradise — where Arnold Schwarzenegger famously blasted his biceps at the original Venice Beach location — is mounting a massive comeback across after nearly getting wiped out of the local market.
The iconic fitness chain has inked a major development deal with Roknipour Investment Group, run by
Matt and Tyler Roknipour, to open 15 new locations across Southern California over the next seven years, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.
The aggressive expansion follows a near-fatal squeeze in the region after a longtime franchisee abruptly cashed out after 36 years and sold 23 locations, leaving the brand standing with just one single spot: its corporate-owned Venice flagship.
Eight of the new locations are planned for Los Angeles County and seven for Orange County, with the first expect to open its doors within the next year. Specific sites have yet to be announced.
The latest development for the fitness franchise amounts to a homecoming of sorts for the bodybuilding institution, which traces its roots to a small Venice gym opened by Joe Gold in 1965.
“Unfortunately, we lost all those legacy locations, and we viewed that as a must-have opportunity to get back into the LA market,” Gold’s Gym Chief Executive Brad Reynolds told the journal. “This is the home of Gold’s Gym.”
Now, Gold’s is rebuilding.
“We saw Gold’s exiting in SoCal, we were like, ‘Hold on, this looks like an opportunity for us,’” Roknipour said.
But the brothers aren’t planning to simply recreate the old Gold’s locations.
The new gyms are reportedly expected to clock in at around 25,000 to 30,000 square feet — smaller than the roughly 40,000-square-foot Venice flagship — and will have what Roknipour described as a more “premium feel.”
And forget crowded group classes, because the next generation of gyms is more about pure iron.
“What we’re focusing on is indexing the physical gym more towards strength and performance, so less sort of group classes, group training, and more performance area,” Reynolds told the Journal.
The resurgence is part of a larger dramatic turnaround for Gold’s.
Hit hard by pandemic lockdowns, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020, before being scooped up by German fitness group RSG Group for $100 million.
The franchise now has more than 500 locations worldwide.
