January consistently delivers a surge in fitness app installs, but sustaining that momentum is where many apps fall short. Initial intent is high, yet engagement often drops long before habits have time to form.
This two-part series explores why long-term retention remains one of the biggest growth challenges for fitness apps. In part one, we examine the structural and behavioural reasons users disengage once early motivation fades. In part two, we look at how thoughtful gamification can be used to reinforce progress, build habit loops, and support retention without undermining the user experience.
With the new year comes New Year’s resolutions, and the most common of all is simple: I want to be fitter. For fitness apps, that intent translates into a surge of new users, all motivated to improve their health and routines.
But what happens next? By the time spring arrives, that initial momentum has often faded. Usage drops, engagement slows, and the app no longer reflects the strong start to the year.
This isn’t because users lack good intentions. Motivation naturally fluctuates, especially when results take time to appear or when routines become harder to maintain. The real challenge is sustaining engagement once that early burst of enthusiasm wears off.
The apps that sustain growth do not rely solely on New Year’s intent; instead, they operationalise it. They design onboarding, CRM, and product mechanics around how habits form and how motivation fluctuates across the year.
This is how January momentum becomes year-round growth.
The January spike and why retention collapses
Gym memberships rise sharply at the start of the year as motivation soars, with attendance surging after the festive period. Research shows 71% of fitness app users drop off within the first 90 days.
The issue is not intent. January users arrive motivated and goal-driven, but both motivation and available time quickly decline as normal routines resume. Retention collapses because most products are not designed to support users once motivation fades and competing demands take over.
Unrealistic expectations are the first problem users encounter. Despite good intentions, users can set ambitious goals without a clear understanding of what is achievable and realistic. Without clear plans, guidance, or feedback loops, motivation can wane over time. As the new year begins and routines return, there is a risk of fitness dropping down the priority list unless the app actively reinforces progress and commitment.
Recent research shows that fitness apps frequently set generic or unrealistic targets, leading users to feel pressured or frustrated rather than supported towards achievable goals and contributing to rapid drop-off with apps losing about 77% of daily users within three days and retaining only 8–12% by 30 days when personalised goal-setting and progress feedback are absent.
Fitness apps that emphasise rigid, quantitative goals without meaningful user-centred design can undermine motivation, causing frustration and eventual disengagement.
Retention fails when apps rely on January motivation instead of building systems that sustain behaviour once it inevitably declines.
Use CRM the right way
High-performing CRM aligns with user intent from the moment of onboarding, rather than trying to compensate once engagement has already started to decline. If users are not explicitly asked what they want to achieve, every message that follows becomes guesswork. This is why the most successful fitness apps capture goals upfront, whether that is committing to three workouts a week, improving strength, building cardio fitness, or simply maintaining consistency.
Once those goals are set, they should directly inform CRM logic across the entire lifecycle. A user who commits to training three times a week should see messaging frequency, timing and tone shaped around that commitment, with reminders triggering only when sessions have not been logged. Messaging should feel contextual and relevant to the user’s stated intent, rather than relying on generic prompts. Cadence should also flex based on commitment level, ensuring users with lighter goals are not treated the same as those pursuing more intensive routines.
Handled correctly, this reframes the psychological contract between the app and the user. Notifications stop feeling like pestering and start acting as a form of accountability because the app reinforces a commitment the user actively chose, rather than imposing its own agenda.
Pausing notifications
Beyond relevance and personalisation, effective CRM also requires restraint and user control. Giving users the ability to pause or reduce notifications during busy periods, holidays, or natural dips in motivation helps prevent fatigue, protect long-term engagement, and keep the channel effective without undermining trust or breaking the relationship. This is supported by the 2025 Consumer Marketing Fatigue Report, 90% of consumers want to customise the frequency and types of messages they receive from brands, and 57% have switched to a competitor after being overwhelmed by messaging. This highlights the importance of giving users control over their communication to reduce fatigue and help support long-term engagement.
Use onboarding to set up habits
Onboarding is where long-term retention is either engineered or lost, yet January onboarding is still too often built around inspiration rather than behaviour.
Motivation may drive the install, but behaviour determines whether a user is still active by Spring, which is why winning fitness apps use onboarding to lock in commitment, not just excitement.
Effective onboarding explicitly captures motivation and goals, prompts users to commit to when their first workout will take place, and introduces a framework that encourages sustained effort rather than short-term intensity. Asking users to schedule their first session is particularly important, as most sign-ups happen during planning rather than execution. By anchoring the first action to a specific date, apps create an immediate CRM trigger, reduce early drop-off, and move users from intent into action more quickly.
Short challenges actively work against this goal. Thirty-day challenges create a psychological finish line, and once that line is crossed, users feel a sense of completion rather than momentum.
Longer challenges that span sixty or ninety days are far more effective because they push users beyond January and into the period where motivation typically drops. Gymshark’s 66 Day Challenge is a strong example of this in practice. The challenge is deliberately designed to outlast New Year motivation, anchoring behaviour across multiple months and reinforcing consistency over intensity. By the time users reach the end, training has shifted from a resolution into a routine, which is exactly the outcome onboarding should be designed to achieve.
Community turns individual effort into shared momentum
Retention improves significantly when users feel part of something bigger than their own workout plan. Community introduces shared effort, light competition, and visibility, all of which increase accountability without relying on constant reminders or pressure. When users can see others showing up, logging activity, and making progress, consistency becomes the norm rather than the exception.
Strava is a clear example of this done well. Its success is not driven by aggressive prompting, but by making activity visible and comparable in a way that feels motivating. Features such as group challenges, leaderboards, and shared progress turn individual workouts into collective participation, creating a reason to return that goes beyond personal discipline. By tapping into social motivation, these community-driven mechanics help sustain engagement throughout the year, long after New Year’s enthusiasm fades.
The real opportunity after January
January will always matter because it is the point at which user intent peaks, but long-term growth is determined by what happens once that initial motivation begins to fade. Fitness apps that win do not treat January as a standalone campaign window; they see it as the starting point of a habit-building journey that extends well beyond the New Year.
They use onboarding to lock in intent while motivation is high, CRM to reinforce commitment as routines are tested, and product design to keep progress visible even when enthusiasm naturally dips. The outcome is not a short-lived January spike, but sustainable engagement and growth across the year.
From progress mechanics to rewards and behavioural nudges, we will break down how smart gamification design helps maintain momentum when motivation and time constraints begin to work against your users. If retaining users beyond the New Year spike is a priority, contact our team so we can help you design and implement strategies that turn short-term intent into long-term habit and growth.
