Author: ezfacility

Your face is red, your muscles are burning out, but you will be darned if you drop that weight before you hit 20 reps. What are you (and your trainer) telling yourself to do at this point to keep going?

“Remember to breathe.”

Proper breathing is critical to your fitness success (and, well, living in general). It’s especially important in classes such as Yoga and Pilates where the focus is predominantly on breathing. However, those deep “cleansing” breaths may not be as clean as you think. In many gyms, aside from oxygen, you are also breathing in carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ozone, dust, cleaning chemicals and even formaldehyde.

A recent study measured the doses of these dangerous gases over the course of a month at peak hours of a select group of gyms. Researchers found that the high levels of pollutants collected exceed the indoor safety standards of air quality.

Yikes.

High levels of dust (kicked up from members going through the whole range of motions) and formaldehyde (yes, formaldehyde, as in the substance used to preserve dead animals) were the main culprits. However, the biggest concern was the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) measured, that are just a natural effect of all that healthy exercise. The problem is that all this healthy exercise is happening in a (usually) small, confined space, like an aerobics studio. When we breathe during exercise, we are mostly breathing through the mouth and this means the air is not being filtered through our nostrils, causing this polluted air to get sucked deeper into our lungs.

Now, as horrific as this sounds, there is a simple solution for gym facilities: ensure there is proper ventilation. People are not going to stop coming to the gym to work out—especially when it’s colder than the arctic outside—but this should be a wake-up call for gym and sports facilities. Ensuring proper ventilation and paying closer attention to the cleaning products you use can go a long way in improving air quality. Mopping instead of sweeping the floors will also help to reduce the amount of dust.

There are many solutions facilities can use to improve their air quality. Do your research and make sure you are providing a healthy place for clients to work on their fitness!

When you think about it, there are a lot of shuffles out there. There is the IPod shuffle, the playing card shuffler, and even a dance called the Cupid Shuffle! However, as a gym and health club owner the worst shuffle you may be all too familiar with is the shuffle clients and prospective clients can get lost in. So, let’s chat about how technology can act as the light at the end of the tunnel.

Prospective Clients

To be honest, new clients sometimes get lost in the shuffle. As much as you would like to think it doesn’t happen, it does. In fact it is pretty easy to lose someone you do not know much about. Think about it ; they are able to come and go from your gym with ninja stealth because the only thing that even resembles a record that they were there was that paper flyer you handed out at a local café offering a free pass. However, if your front desk is not paying attention or the pile of flyers is lost, then so are your records. With gym management software that has a strong CRM component, being able to not only report on who walked through the door, but what they did and where they spent their money is a vital tool. So it should be obvious that having a strong CRM is key, but let’s also talk about hanging paper flyers. With so much business being done online it is essential that your gym management software also contain the tools to get your business online. Having an online portal where clients can go to register eliminates the need to manually enter prospects into the system and allows for a place clients can peruse current facility offerings, and even see a full list of available classes. With potential clients being far more educated now than at any other given point in history, providing them the tools to educate themselves can go a long way in getting them to visit your facility. Having the client do a bulk of the “heavy lifting” at home ensures they are not just another paper in the stack.

Current Members

After learning about prospective clients you may be thinking how could I lose current clients—I have all of their information already! Gaining client information is important; however, gaining the right information is even more so. An overwhelming fact we should all be able to agree upon is that current clients have extremely valuable information—you just need to know how to organize and access it. Sure, you can tell how much your members are paying from your bank statements, but this can be both time-consuming and rarely gives you any insight into the success or failure of the products and services you offer. With competent software, not only can you track how much each member is paying, you will also have immediate access to an array of crucial information including clients with expiring memberships, clients with class packages that are about to run out and, most importantly, who’s memberships or packages have already expired. Think about it, every package that goes un-renewed or sits expired is, for the most part, money left on the table. Strong software will provide notifications and ample reporting to keep the business owner always in the know. For example, “ALERT: Bryant has 1 session remaining on his Personal Training 10-Pack” may be an inconvenience in terms of the email, yet the possible return is well worth it. Furthermore, with a POS system, you can associate purchases with clients. Although it may be something as simple as a Gatorade with every Zumba class, that info creates a buying profile for the client. Once you know what products a client prefers you can expand upon those offerings and sell more! Without management software, you may struggle to track these critical variables that help you smoothly manage your business. How do you know that John Doe, whom you see every Monday come in for this 5:30 workout is paid up on his membership? With management software, your staff is able to access a client’s history with the touch of a button.

If you think about it, the ultimate goal—for a gym or health club –is to gain more clients and, in turn, gain more money. A huge key to that principle is not only attracting, but also signing prospective clients. Yet, a lot of businesses can find themselves struggling with this due to poor tracking. From tracking interested prospects coming into a facility to tracking what prospects are doing and buying — Gym Management Software can be a great way to ensure no one gets lost in the shuffle.

Maybe 2015 was the year of the treadmill. The cardio-room classic was in the news a lot last year, made prominent especially because of the tragic death of Dave Goldberg, who was the CEO of SurveyMonkey and the husband of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Goldberg was exercising on a treadmill at a gym when he lost his grip on the railings, fell backward, and fatally hit his head. After that, news outlets and social media channels were buzzing with concerns about treadmill safety, and stats from the government’s Consumer Products Safety Commission were frequently cited: 24,400 people in the United States visited hospital emergency rooms because of treadmill accidents in 2014. Between 2003 and 2012, thirty treadmill-related deaths were reported. Nevertheless, at the end of the year, IHRSA released a Consumer Trend Report which found that treadmills are — still, after many decades and many accidents — the most popular form of equipment-based exercise among health club members.

So maybe every year is the year of the treadmill. It’s interesting to consider why the machine remains so popular, especially in the face of new exercise technologies and new research about more efficient ways to exercise. The first thing to note is that the treadmill has a long history, much longer than most people realize: The first treadmills were invented around 4,000 years ago, one of man’s earliest machines. They were used to transport water; much later they were put to work powering dough-kneading machines, bellows, turbines, and other industrial equipment. In the 19th-century, as technology developed and treadmills were no longer the most efficient machines in the factory, they were used as devices of punishment: Prisoners in European countries were made to walk them as retribution for their crimes.

Of course, sometimes they still feel like a punishment. But exercisers keep coming back to them. They became what they’re known as in their current incarnation in the late 1960s, when a mechanical engineer, William Staub, read the book Aerobics, by Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper. The home treadmill was born, and over the past forty or so years it has evolved into the machine everyone keeps coming back to. So what does keep them so popular? First of all, the time-savings factor. Obviously, home-users can just hop on or off, and even walking on a treadmill at a moderate pace for 20 minutes a day can help them stay in shape. At your facility, same thing: easy in, easy out — there’s very little time lost for a member who just wants to check in, bang out the treadmill routine, and get on with his or her day. Second, there’s versatility. Treadmills stay interesting because you can increase or decrease the intensity at which you use them, change the incline or speed, and experience a whole range of exercise activities with one relatively simple piece of equipment. Moreover, of course, exercisers can use them in any weather. Another thing treadmills allow for that most other pieces of equipment do not is multitasking.

Users can watch television, send emails, read magazines, internet shop—any number of tasks can be performed while a workout still gets accomplished. And, finally, they’re easy to use. Unlike some exercise equipment, treadmills are simple; almost anyone can get on one and start using it without the help of an expert.

So, why is it worthwhile to ponder all this? Given the enduring popularity of treadmills, it’s important to consider regularly their role in your facility. Do you have enough of them? Are they simple enough? Up-to-date enough? Have you ever conducted a survey to suss out how your members most like to use them, or simply spent a few hours observing patterns of use? Do your treadmills stand in a sad row in some corner of your cardio room, or are they given the prominence their popularity suggests that they deserve? Use IHRSA’s latest Consumer Trend Report as a prompt to assess the treadmill situation at your facility, and figure out how to more actively use treadmills to your advantage.