Marckenson Desgrottes
Health & Fitness plays a significant role in my daily life. While many businesses continues to face impacts from COVID, Fitness clubs target to improve corporate social responsibility and pursuing sustainable business practices by doing their upmost part to create a clean environment for their customers, in addition to the gym equipment products they provide. Understating the importance of taking the additional steps to attract customer’s attention, product quality and listening to customer’s interest through surveys, helps businesses understand where growth can be made to gain customer satisfaction and promote their business. Health & Fitness is important to all individual’s life. I strongly feel, healthy people are more energetic than someone that doesn’t pay attention to their health.
Health and Fitness has been a passion of minds since high school. At first, being physically fit, to me, were to remain in shape in order to play sports in high school. Over the years, I understood the importance of being in shape and the positive impact it can have in your life. At the start of point with COVID-19 pandemic. Gyms closed in order to help stop the spread of COVID. I can honestly say, a lot of people were impacted because of this mandate, including myself. Unable to access gym equipment’s effected my friends, family and myself who rely on the gym as a daily part of our activities. This caused a lot of people and myself to miss daily training that significantly helps us remain in shape. The Closure did not only impact the customers. “Twenty-two percent of U.S. health clubs and studios closed permanently since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the U.S. fitness industry has lost $29.2 billion in revenue, according to findings by the National Health & Fitness Alliance (NHFA)”. The fitness industry had experienced 10 years of revenue growth prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the mandated closures of health clubs in many states to try to stop the spread of the virus. “The industry’s revenue dropped 52 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, equating to a loss of $29.2 billion in revenue from March 2020 through June 2021, according to the NHFA. With the temporary closures and the subsequent permanent closures of health clubs and studios, about 1.5 million people lost their jobs in the industry, according to NHFA. That equates to 47 percent of jobs in the industry”.
The pandemic impacted customers, workers and health & fitness businesses across the U.S. When the reopening phase took placed. Myself and fitness customers were happy to have a sense of normalcy again after most day-to-day activities were impacted by COVID-19. Although, Fitness clubs reopened, they faced unusual impact within their operations due to capacity restrictions and disinfectant requirements for all fitness clubs that include additional spending to their business. Customers were frustrated with the issue of having to wait on an extended line to access fitness clubs. However, customers decided to deal with the issue and were happy to just be able to access the fitness clubs for their trainings. Home fitness workout did not work for all. Working out in the comfort of your home can be difficult for most people. Some people are lackadaisical in home fitness workouts. The gym provided a sense of motivation with everyone in the same environment working on common goal towards health & fitness. Fitness clubs payed close attention to current trends and offered discounts on memberships upon reopening, cheaper rates for license trainers to train customers and created the ability for customers to schedule their training hours to help with delays with accessing gyms. I personally like the effort fitness clubs made to ensure customers are able to feel safe in their workout environments by constantly disinfecting workout areas and making disinfectant easily accessible to customers at the gym.
In conclusion, the pandemic has been a daily part of our life for the past two years. With the unknown direction on resolution of COVID-19 pandemic. Health & fitness are very important to customers that rely on fitness clubs. In addition, workers and the fitness business allows customers to have a place/and or environment where it help motivates customers to achieve their desired fitness goals.
