When gyms eventually open for business, what will they be like?
When you are able to go back to gym, what will it be like?
The Covid-19 outbreak feels like a tipping point for the fitness industry — joggers abound, people are sharing hot tips on where to find dumbbells online and thousands of Joe Wicks converts are doing star jumps every morning — but for brick-and-mortar locations, it might be tough to capitalise.
In regions of the US where gyms have reopened, safety protocols include keeping changing rooms and shower facilities closed, reducing capacity to 25% and even members wearing masks or full-fingered gloves, none of which are likely to be popular.
In Canada and Hong Kong, gyms are installing Plexiglas shields around treadmills, offering phone-sanitising stations or implementing temperature checks.
Experts are concerned gyms could act as super-spreading environments — one dance class in South Korea was linked to 112 cases of Covid-19.
This led researchers to conclude in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that: “The moist, warm atmosphere in a sports facility, coupled with turbulent air flow generated by intense physical exercise, can cause more dense transmission of isolated droplets.”
UKactive, the leading notfor-profit health body for physical activity in the UK, has released a framework for reopening, with recommendations on cleaning, spacing equipment to encourage social distancing and reducing attendance based on a 3m2 maximum capacity.
“We reduced class sizes and implemented more cleaning in February, but we also totally redesigned our workouts, Richard Tidmarsh, the owner and chief strength coach of London’s Reach Fitness, said.
“Our normal workout is four to five people in a group moving between different exercise ‘stations’, but we changed that so that every user has designated kit and equipment.
“You’d be directed to your own station as you walked in and in each zone there would be dumbbells and kettlebells laid out, sanitised after the previous class finished.”
Reach is also shifting its class schedule to allow clients to attend only when necessary — heavy barbell work has to be done at the gym, but guided yoga classes can be done at home.
“We’re capping our class capacity, spacing treadmills to conform with social distancing, ensuring that clients never share any equipment at any point in the class, cutting our classes to 50 minutes so we have more time to deep-clean the studio and surfaces before and after every class,” the UK founder of Barry’s Bootcamp, Sandy Macaskill, said.
“We’ll also be implementing temperature checks and Plexiglas screens to ensure social distancing and scheduling our staff across single studios rather than multiple sites.”
Where things get tougher is for gyms with unsupervised, drop-in training or 24-hour access via key card.
“The industry is highly professionalised, service-orientated, and well set up to handle this,” CEO of UK-based Total Fitness, Sophie Lawler, said.
“Gyms have a variety of levers to regulate things, but our experience so far is that the customers themselves are as invested as anyone in keeping a safe environment to train in.”