How СOVID-19 Impacts Fitness Industry Transformation

Moreover, these trends emerged everywhere and for everyone — from the USA to Italy, to Japan; from big chains like 24 Hour Fitness to small family yoga studios.

Jane Bahneman, the AFS Community Expert, accurately describes the situation as:

We are all in the same storm, we all just are in very different boats.

Digital technologies — we’re mostly talking about websites and mobile apps — can help to build a new, digitally-driven strategy for your business and help you to adjust to the post-COVID reality.

We’ve also asked Josh Leve, the Founder & CEO of the Association of Fitness Studios (AFS), for his opinion on what fitness studio owners can do from a technological standpoint:

During March-April 2020, the most strict months of lockdown, the worldwide searches for the “Fitness App” topic reached the highest point ever.

What’s happened? It’s quite clear: people started to look for alternative ways to workout at home. Businesses that already offered their customers virtual content got an obvious advantage. This also includes companies that specialize in corporate fitness app development.

Moreover, they were able to put it in many different forms:

• Online pre-recorded workouts 🎥

You may think of this as Netflix for the fitness industry. It’ll require creating a library of pre-recorded workouts, that can be easily filtered by type, duration, needed equipment, intensity, etc.

• Live streaming classes 📹

During the lockdown, live classes became a popular practice for many fitness and yoga studios. Firstly, it didn’t take much to setup: you could start by simply using Zoom or Skype group calls. Secondly, you could still provide a “human touch” to your customers which makes it quite different from pre-recorded online workouts.

• Audio Coaching 🎧

This approach is especially popular in running apps like Nike Run Club. You can implement audio coaching to motivate your listeners, guide them from exercise to exercise and give some technique tips, or both.

• List of exercises 📋

Finally, businesses could just provide their members with written lists of home exercises to guide them during workouts. Some applications (like 24GO app) could automatically make up a list of exercises based on the user’s goals and physical assessment.

Josh Leve from the AFS agrees with the idea of the rising popularity of online content and challenges about it:

The same trend can be proven by data gathered at Mindbody.

Before the pandemic, virtual workouts and online classes were more of a fancy feature for digitally savvy users. The situation has predictably changed during and after the lockdown — a great example of how the fitness industry is changing for digital.

According to Mindbody, the number of customers who access virtual content and online courses has significantly grown:

• 73% of their customers were using pre-recorded video workouts in spring 2020 compared to only 17% in 2019;
• the growth even bigger for live weekly online classes: 7% in 2019 evolved into 85% in spring 2020.

Moreover, the possibility to work out or do yoga at home increased the amount of time people are ready to dedicate to fitness. More particularly, 56% of people questioned by Mindbody claimed to exercise at least 5 times a week. Amaya Weddle, the Vice President of Research and Product Marketing at Mindbody, has quite a convincing explanation for that:

“Consumers are able to just show up and have that experience in the comfort of their home. Many are reporting how great it is because it doesn’t involve a commute, so they're finding that they’re able to squeeze in those workouts between, maybe when work ends and when they have family responsibilities, in ways that they couldn’t before.”

Yet, online content won’t fully replace good old offline workouts at gyms and yoga studios. Let’s take a look at how Coronavirus is changing the fitness industry in terms of members’ offline experience and what digital technologies have got to do with it!

🏪 Coronavirus & New Offline Experience: Reopen and Adjust to the New Reality Right

It’s been said a lot about the rising popularity of online and virtual content. Yet, it’s not going to kill the traditional visits to gyms and fitness studios. According to L.E.K., customers are not ready to replace the physical experience with online workouts:

As you can see, 90% of digital fitness subscribers say they’re as likely as before or even more likely to use a traditional gym after their experience with online workouts. Thus, it means that a big deal of your online-first users can be converted to offline members, and not only vice versa.

However, the new in-studio reality is influenced by both government guidelines and the risen expectations of your customers. This not only directly affects the speed of re-opening but also introduces a broad variety of new safety measures.

From a business perspective, new restrictions change the economics of clubs and absolutely not in favor of their owners:

• They cut revenue. Both because of the overall reduction in the number of people who are ready to return to studios after the lockdown, and the compulsory governmental limits of the number of guests in the studio at a time.
• They increase spendings. At the same time, studio owners have to spend more on cleaning staff, services, and products to maintain a safe environment in the gym or fitness/yoga studio.

These emerging trends in the fitness industry push owners of fitness businesses to re-evaluate and optimize studio footprint. It actually means taking a fresh look at the unit economics of each studio.

Studios located at popular locations (like shopping centers) may face a significant foot traffic decline. At the same time, studios in residential areas may notice an increase in foot traffic as more people work from home or prefer to avoid crowded places.

Among other current trends in the fitness industry that make up our new reality is the reorganization of current studios to stay viable while reducing in-studio capacity.

You know it better than us: re-opened studios had to follow new rules of accepting 1 person per every 100 square feet versus a “1 per 60” ratio of the pre-COVID times and allowing to use only every other or even every third machine at a time.

Thus, owners have to try to fill their studios as full as possible throughout the whole day to deal with the inability to accept all the members during the traditionally busiest hours.

Such tools weren't invented yesterday. Yet, they've changed their status. Earlier, it was mainly considered as a product that provides extra value to businesses. In the post-COVID times, Club Management systems can mean much more and help to rebuild trust with members and manage customer flows under new rules.

The key features of such systems are:

One additional feature that can attract people to studios is the integration of workout equipment with a mobile app. You could develop a React Native gym app where your customers can track their workout performance. Still we’d like to pay special attention to the booking feature since it helps to adjust to trends affecting the fitness industry. Here’s how!

Online Booking 📲

An online booking system is the most obvious solution you can apply to control the number of people inside the studio while keeping the whole process user-friendly. It works especially good for scheduled classes:

• You set up a class for a specific time and date, limiting the number of participants according to the current restrictions. For example, you’ll hold a strength training on Monday with 7 participants instead of pre-COVID 15.
• Members can book a class using your branded website or mobile application.
• Thus, users will see in advance if there are any free places and won’t arrive at your gym just to find out that it’s already at the maximum capacity. At the same time, they’ll be able to check all the available classes, dates, and times to pick the ones that fit them the most.

You may also design a similar system to manage ordinary workouts. Yet, every person spends a different amount of time doing his or her exercise program. That's why you may come up with an alternative system to keep the number of visitors at the allowed level.

New technologies that are changing the fitness industry let you stay creative while looking for the best ways to incorporate them in your business model. For example, you may create such a system to manage the number of customers in your studio at a time:

• Calculate the maximum allowed number of visitors.
• Display the current number of visitors out of the maximum on your website or in a mobile app. For example, “Capacity: 10 out of 16”.
• As your admin check-ins a person who just arrived, he will also add 1 new visitor to these stats. Accordingly, when a person lefts, the admin will remove 1 visitor from the stats.
• The system may also calculate how much time every customer has already spent in your studio to provide a hint for others on how soon he may leave. It’ll be helpful in situations when your studio is full or almost full but encourage people to arrive since someone mat leave soon. For example, “Capacity: 14 out of 16. 3 more than 1 hour, 2 more than 1:30 hours”.

You may automate the system even more by adding a Digital Check-In feature.

Digital Check-In ✅

Digital Check-In isn’t a separate product but rather a feature that became highly relevant due to the latest changes in the fitness industry. We recommend checking this page to see how 24 Hour Fitness is adjusting to the new reality with their Workout Reservations and Digital Check-In features. It may actually be an experience you’d like to copy.

As you can see from the video, Digital Check-In is designed to limit to reduce human-to-human contact by automatically checking in upon arrival. It makes the whole process much faster and helps to avoid touching any high-contact surfaces.

You may also integrate it with your booking system. Upon checking in, the system will update the number of available places in the studio and run the clock to count how much time this particular user has spent in your studio.