Hewitt Tomlin

Dave Appel is challenging the fitness industry to rethink its role in health by confronting stigma and embracing integration.

He argues that gyms are standing at a historic crossroads. One in eight Americans are now on a GLP-1 therapies, and research shows these patients are twice as likely to join a gym and more likely to stay if they feel supported. Yet too often they are judged, dismissed, or ignored. Dave frames this as the single greatest growth opportunity fitness has ever seen, and one the industry cannot afford to miss.

At KORB Health, he is proving the model. By embedding medical weight loss, hormone optimization, mental health, and longevity programs directly into gyms and health clubs, Dave shows how telehealth can move beyond prescriptions to become coaching, education, and sustainable lifestyle change.

Unlike plug-and-play providers, KORB Health employs its own clinicians, creates monthly touchpoints, and builds bridges back into gyms through co-branded programs and classes. The result is powerful: gyms and health clubs unlock recurring revenue without upfront cost, and members gain trusted access to care that brings them in instead of pushing them away.

For Dave, this is bigger than business. He sees the stigma around GLP-1s and hormone therapies as a repeat of past battles over creatine, TRT, and CrossFit itself, tools once vilified before becoming mainstream. “We have to stop pretending that hard work and clean eating are the only answers,” he says. “Genetics, biology, and environment make the playing field uneven. Medical therapies are not shortcuts, they are catalysts. If someone finally feels good enough to walk into a gym, that is not a threat. It is the chance to change their life forever.”

His stance forces the industry to confront what health, resilience, and access must mean in the 21st century.

Dave Appel grew up in Chicago with sport as his compass and coaching as his craft. He trained as a PE teacher and quickly became known for testing new tools like heart-rate monitors in the classroom, years before wearable tech became mainstream. While most teachers clung to dodgeball, Dave was teaching kids to measure effort and recovery, convinced that physiology mattered more than games.

In Austin, he carried that mindset into entrepreneurship, co-founding one of the city’s first CrossFit gyms. For more than a decade he coached athletes of every shape and ability, logging thousands of hours on the floor. During COVID, when the gym was forced to close, Dave handed out every barbell and dumbbell to members so they could keep training at home. Nearly the entire community kept paying dues through lockdowns, and when the doors reopened, the gym exploded. That lesson, that people rally when they feel trusted and supported, has defined how he leads ever since.

Coaching also revealed the limits of fitness alone. Dave saw members train five days a week, eat clean, and still lose the battle with weight or metabolic health. When he learned about GLP-1s, he recognized the same resistance he had seen with creatine, testosterone replacement, and even CrossFit itself. Every breakthrough in performance is branded as “cheating” until it becomes obvious it works. For Dave, the stigma around medical therapies is not just misplaced, it is harmful. If someone is finally motivated to walk into a gym, that moment should be welcomed, not judged.

That conviction led him to KORB Health, where he now serves as Chief Health and Wellness Officer. His mission is clear: ensure that patients who begin with medical therapies are guided back into movement, nutrition, and community instead of being left on their own. He remains a coach at heart, still training and mentoring at his Austin gym and drawing on the culture he and his wife built there. Those same lessons of accountability and resilience now shape his work in healthcare, where his perspective is simple but uncompromising: fitness without medicine fails too many, and medicine without fitness does not change lives. The future of health depends on both.

Dave’s mission is to close the gap between healthcare and fitness.

Through KORB Health, he is turning medical breakthroughs into fuel for movement, resilience, and longevity. Every program begins with trusted clinical care and ends with people stronger in the gym, sharper at work, and more confident in life. The future is not medicine or fitness, it is both working together to create lasting health.