There are the supercheap, McDonald's-style homogenised brands like Jetts and Anytime Fitness. At the other end of the spectrum Virgin Active is going luxe. Its newest club in Melbourne is set to launch with a 25 metre swimming pool, spa facilities and Anti-Gravity Yoga. There are, of course, the increasingly popular boutique clubs like Functional 45 which are taking a trendy piece of Australia's $1 billion-plus fitness pie too.

Fitness First is taking a different tack.

In Melbourne, on Monday, they launched a first of its kind club, fusing technology with a move back to natural movement.

There is already a world-wide push to get people out of the sterile gym environment to run, jump, throw and climb outdoors. It's the paleo movement of exercise, if you like; a return to the way we used to be and used to move.

In the case of Fitness First's new High Performance Club this concept has been injected with science and the technology used by elite athletes to help them improve the way they move.

Walking into the refurbished Collins Street's club is not like walking into your stock-standard gym, which, in my eyes is a good thing given I don't particularly like gyms.

It's a brooding space with an industrial feel. Instead of the 60-plus treadmills that used to crowd the main space, there is a 20 metre blood-red sprint track.

The traditional machines have largely been replaced by ones that engage the muscles as we use them in sport; encouraging dynamic, functional movement with resistance for developing strength.

But, the piece de resistance is the signature MoveLab and its accessory 360° Performance Analysis.

I'm keen to try it on for size to find out how it works for your stock standard person like me.

First up, I get a body composition test measuring metabolism, body fat and bone density. I'm thankfully advised that I'm not obese, nor skinny fat and not in totally terrible nick.

Win.

Then, using cameras and sensors used by the AIS and professional athletes, the MoveLab captures your biomechanics and even, based on the speed with which perform certain tasks, predicts your maximum strength and velocity.

I've got "wobbly knees" says national personal training manager for FF, Michael Cunico. With awareness of this, I am conscious of tracking with more stability.

It's also nothing a few hundred single leg lift exercises and a bit of technique coaching can't fix.

The cameras show up injury compensation, stability and the minutiae of technique, Cunico explains, so training programs can be tailored to help you improve your weakness and fine-tune your strengths.

"The benefit from using the movelab and taking the performance score is it gives us a starting point to assess where you are at," Cunico says. "From here we can recommend programming and exercises which will give you the opportunity to improve your performance markers."

Cunico says he believes it will appeal to anyone who takes their sport seriously.

CrossFitters, for instance, can benefit from the sensing technology which shows the line of the bar when you deadlift along with the angles of your legs, torso and arms. Runners, on the other hand, can accurately gage how hamstrung they are by inflexibile hamstrings and whether instability in their legs could be slowing them down or predisposing them to injury.

The technology is expensive so, Cunico explains, whether it is rolled out to other 79 Fitness First branches depends on how much people want to have the kind of fine-tuned analysis used by the pros.

It is also part strategy; FF, in their attempt to outsmart bigger or wealthier rivals, is creating each club with slightly unique features and feel.

We move on to the track to do agility testing, inspired by tests used for AFL recruits, and are soon we are on the clock weaving and crouching, pushing sledges, doing chin ups, jumping and sprinting.

Several technical glitches aside, it is fun and the automatic feedback insightful.

After it all I end up with an overall performance score of 67, which puts me into 'competitor' category. So much a 'competitor' that I'm disappointed I've missed out on the 'Pro' which is a score of 71-90.

If I'm going to get there Cunico says I have to, boringly, do more chin ups and, more interestingly, learn to inject my movements with more efficiency and momentum.

How?

"Working on your power and force production will help, so movements where you are lightly loaded and moving fast," he explains.

Something to work on.

I still don't love gyms, although now it seems there are even gyms for those of us who don't love gyms.

This feels less gym and more a place to train and refine technique inside to get an edge on the outside. Whether it's at Fitness First or any of the other 3000 gyms in the country, how well we can move outside ought to be the point of training inside a gym in the first place, surely?