FitnessHow Gym Attendance Will Help You Stay Healthy and Combat All Covid Variants
Fitness Tech

How Gym Attendance Will Help You Stay Healthy and Combat All Covid Variants

Just when we thought life might get back to some normalcy with the help of vaccines, the COVID-19 variants arrived and made everyone cautious once again. As a gym owner, you’re probably rightfully concerned that members will stay away from the gym again, just as they did during those initial COVID waves throughout 2020. 

Maybe you’re already starting to notice a drop in gym-goers. Is there anything you can do? One tactic is to keep people healthy and better protected against COVID through exercise, and you can also spread the word on how exercise can help. 

How Can Physical Activity Help With COVID-19?

It’s well known and backed by evidence that physical activity makes our bodies healthier, reducing the risk of various diseases and health conditions. Similarly, new research is showing that exercise even has protective effects related to COVID-19. Now, that’s big news.  

An important study found that inactive people who got COVID-19 were significantly more likely to be hospitalized, be admitted to the ICU and die compared to people who participated in physical activity for 150 minutes or more each week. You could break that number down into just half-hour sessions five days per week, which isn’t out of reach for most people. 

Nonetheless, even those who put in more than 10 minutes of physical activity per week had some protection compared to inactive people in the study, even though the protection was less than the group carrying out 150 minutes. This is important to note as well, because even some exercise each week could help. 

Even research from early in 2020 has supported the idea that exercise is beneficial against COVID-19. A review carried out then found that consistent exercise may prevent or cut the severity of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This is a potential complication of COVID-19 that has been a main cause of death associated with the virus. 

Translating This Research to Gym Attendance

This research is good news that has the potential to help your gym members as well as your gym business. Just as exercise can protect against various diseases and health conditions, it has protective qualities against COVID-19 and all of its variants. Let your members know through an email newsletter or other means of communication. Encourage them to keep exercising and motivate them to hit that 150 minute mark whenever possible.

Of course, it’s important to respect if some of your members want to avoid the gym. This is one of the reasons to have a virtual fitness option available, so now is a good time to start one if you haven’t already. Many gyms have made streamed classes part of their memberships, allowing members to work out with the gym from home or come to the gym in person as they please. Is yours one of these? Through virtual fitness offerings, you can keep your members healthy and connected to your gym—and keep the dues coming in—even if they take a break from your brick-and-mortar establishment.

Has your gym noticed changes in membership numbers due to different variants of COVID? Tracking membership with gym management software makes it easy to see these numbers and how they fluctuate over time, allowing you to better understand how societal impacts and trends might be affecting your membership rates. Let us know how your gym has been affected by the variants and how you’re responding. Do you think this research might help your members?