Author: ezfacility

I have a confession to make: Exercise bores me. Don’t get me wrong — I love staying fit, and I love the way I feel after a great workout, but no matter what exercise routine I try, after a while I get bored and want something new. For a while I was into spin classes. Then it was Zumba. Then aquatic aerobics, HIIT-style repetitions, and just plain jogging. Now I’m all about indoor climbing. I was starting to think there’s something wrong with me, but then I stumbled across a post on the “Be Active Your Way” blog, a publication of the Department of Health and Human Services. Written by Alexandra Black, a dietician and IHRSA’s Health Promotion Manager, the article is not about keeping exercise interesting — but it nevertheless put my mind at ease and inspired me to continue trying new routines.

What the article is about is this: using trial and error to determine the best workouts for individuals. “Each person,” Black writes, “has a unique genetic makeup, different life experiences, and varied medical histories that make it nearly impossible to prescribe one great diet or one great fitness plan for all.” Because of this, she says, the best way for individuals to figure out what works for them is through trial and error. The health and medical industries are beginning to recognize this, and the result of moving away from a one-size-fits-all mindset is better care and better long-term health for people. Black puts it this way: “As the trend towards individualized healthcare continues, we’re recognizing that every person is different, and that treating them as such — both in healthcare and in wellness — is often where the real magic happens.”

Which brings me back to my boredom issue. Reading Black’s thoughts on trial and error made me realize that the only way for me to find a routine that doesn’t eventually bore me is to keep trying new ones — and that it’s okay to do so. Maybe I just haven’t found the right one yet, and I need to keep searching until I do. Or maybe it’s the case that my genetic makeup, life experiences, and medical history make me a person who needs constant changes in her workout routine in order to most benefit from working out. Whatever the case, thinking about fitness as something that requires an individualized approach completely changes the way I think about working out. It gives me a feeling that I have permission to keep trying whatever I want to try.

Why am I sharing all this? Because chances are that an individualized fitness approach is something that would appeal to your members too. Of course, if you have personal trainers or some kind of personalized workout program, you already promote individualized fitness — but doing so explicitly could put your members at ease (enough so that they renew their memberships and talk your facility up to all their friends and social network connections). Defining individualized fitness and explaining its benefits — through posters, emails, social media, and one-on-one sales and promotion pitches — can help your members feel freer to engage in their own trial and error, giving new workouts and exercises a try, experimenting until they know what works best for them. And helping them in that way greatly increases the chances that they’re going to keep coming back to you.

I was surfing around on the Internet the other day when a jarring Club Industry headline caught my attention: “American Physical Inactivity Reaches Six-Year High, Club Memberships Increase.” It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but according to a recent report from the Physical Activity Council (PAC), a group made up of IHRSA and five other sports and manufacturer associations, it is the case that 82.7 million Americans (28.3 percent) were physically inactive in 2014, an increase of 0.7 percent from 2013. It is also the case that health club memberships have grown by 18.6 percent since 2008, with the total number of health club visits in 2014 surpassing five billion for the second year in a row. Health club members checked in an average of 103 times in 2014, an all-time high.

What does it all mean? The data, based on nearly 11,000 online interviews carried out with a nationwide sample of individuals and households, suggest that the country’s fitness-related crises — obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and the like — are here to stay, and perhaps only getting worse. But at the same time, more and more people are joining health clubs and they’re visiting their clubs more often.

It can be hard, with statistics, to make meaningful interpretations and arrive at some kind of truth. But it seems safe to say, at the very least, that the news from the Physical Activity Council is both good and bad. As Tom Cove, PAC chairman and president and CEO of the Sports and Fitness Industry Association put it, “While we can look at [the physical inactivity] number in a negative light, I would like to use it as a wakeup call to not only our industry but the rest of society. It’s time we put our time and resources into industry initiatives and national campaigns to increase physical activity.”

In other words, the number may be alarming, but we can use it to start instigating change. And there’s no group better positioned to do so than the fitness industry — especially given that other statistic, the steadily growing popularity of fitness centres and health clubs. Joe Moore, IHRSA President and CEO, explained it this way: “These numbers demonstrate the important role health clubs play in helping more and more Americans improve their overall health and wellbeing.”

Thus, while the two statistical figures seem contradictory, they’re really sending the same message: Venues that enable and promote fitness and opportunities for exercise are a vital part of the equation when it comes to keeping the country healthy, and we, as an industry, need to step up our efforts to reverse the trend toward greater physical inactivity.

In practical terms, maybe this means it’s time for your club to become more involved in your community and to actively seek out members of the community who lack physical activity. Programs that create incentive for such people to try out your facility and that then support their efforts to sustain a more active lifestyle could work wonders—and could lead to benefits for both them and your club. We spend so much time focusing on physical activity, but maybe what we need to do now is shift our attention to physical inactivity.

As winter is a time for hunkering down, it seems appropriate that I haven’t been able to get myself to the gym for several weeks now; all I want to do is curl up under a blanket. I have, however, managed to find a few exercise podcasts and videos and start working up a sweat in my home office. I know I’m not getting quite the level of exercise I need: no equipment, no trainer, no instructor, no fellow sufferers. But it’s hard to kick my own rear in a gym-ward direction when I know I can get at least some sort of workout at home.

I’m not the only one. I have a couple of friends who swear by the stationary bikes in their living rooms; one guy I know has an entire weight room in his basement. And recently the Wall Street Journal reported that, while sales of traditional home fitness equipment have declined in the past few years, and while the percentage of Americans with gym memberships has pretty much held steady, sales of lower-priced fitness items, like yoga mats and workout DVDs, have increased. The fact is that sometimes fitness centres are competing for customers not only with other fitness centres, but also with those customers’ personal spaces. What can be done to pull people — yes, people like me — away from the yoga blocks in their closet or the medicine balls in their bedroom and into the gym?

The key is to offer benefits that outweigh the benefits of working out at home. The way I see it, working out at home has three major benefits: It saves money, it saves time, and it’s oh-so-convenient. But I know that going to the gym instead of exercising at home would get me to my fitness goals faster. There, I can use equipment that much more efficiently burns fat and increases muscle than anything I can do at home. More importantly, I can call upon the expertise of trainers and instructors who can show me how to position my body just right or explain why I’m at risk of injuring myself if I’m performing reps incorrectly.

But the best thing, the thing I most lack at home? External sources of motivation. No matter how great the podcast I’m streaming might be, it’s nothing compared to the rush I get when I’m trying to run faster than the guy on the treadmill next to me, or the comfort I feel when I mess up a Zumba move and a sympathetic classmate tells me not to worry about it, or the simple satisfaction that comes from not being the only one, all alone, trying to keep myself healthy and live right.

So your task as a health club owner or manager is to remind me why I’m better off at the gym. Have your fitness concierge (you have one, right?) send out emails to folks like me to tell us what the gym can offer us that we can’t get at home. Post videos on social media that show me other people who managed to get themselves to the gym that day. Even ask one of your trainers to call and check in on me — you can bet that being held accountable by someone I’m eager to please is going to finally get my butt out the door. I know I’m saying the onus is on you, but that’s really how it is. You got the gym up and running; it’s your job to get me coming to it.

Keep in mind, too, that you actually can compete directly with some of the home-based workout benefits. Given that convenience is a big factor, you can offer special deals to people who live close to your facility — within a few blocks, say, or within a mile or two. You’re convenient for at least some people. Make it your business to make sure those people know it. And given that saving time and money is a big factor, you can consider offering winter discounts and designing (and widely advertising) super fast classes, ones that get members in and out of the gym in under thirty minutes.

It might be hard to lure people like me out of our houses before the crocuses start blooming and the birds start singing, but it’s not impossible. Make it worth our while.