This new gym costs $2,000 a month

At Avant, Yorkville’s new 31,000-square-foot fitness club, a membership can run you up to $2,000 a month—and you can’t just swipe a credit card to get in. Applicants must first submit essay-style responses to questions like “Why are you the ideal Avant member?” The acceptance letter itself reads like U of T admissions copy: “After careful review, our leadership team recognized in your application the mindset, ambition, and drive that align with the high-performance community we’re building.” Suddenly, securing a squat rack feels harder than getting into grad school.

The club, which comes from the team behind Liberty Village’s Altea, opened recently in the former Nordstrom Rack at Yonge and Bloor. It’s pitched less as a gym and more as an exclusive club. (The home page boasts, “We Don’t Accept Everyone—And That’s The Point.”) There are six boutique studios, including Reformer Pilates, spinning, boxing, a cold plunge pool, sauna and steam rooms, and a suite of recovery gadgets like compression sleeves and massage chairs, plus red-light therapy and PEMF pods. And, of course, there are complimentary espresso shots and validated parking—because Yorkville.

Related: The Cult of Wellness—Inside the expensive, obsessive, addictive quest for a perfect life

Membership tiers—Garde, Privé, Noir—are straight out of the Starbucks marketing manual, where foreign words are shorthand for luxury. You can secure a basic Garde membership for $185 biweekly, level up to Privé for $250 or go big with Noir, the $1,000 biweekly top tier. That gets you unlimited classes, a weekly personal trainer, a monthly “accountability session” (Catholic confession, but make it fitness), endless “handcrafted” smoothies and access to the Axis Suite, which promises spinal alignment, near-infrared heat, acupressure and vibration—though whether that involves a gadget, a masseuse or a sci-fi contraption only the moneyed initiates get to find out.