Category: Blog

Functional-Fitness

Adapting to Functional-Fitness Trends

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Functional-FitnessLast week, the New York Times ran an article about the functional-fitness trend. “Vintage exercise machines have recently become the padded shoulders of the workout world,” the article states, “swept aside for a fresher look.” In other words, out with the leg presses, biceps curlers, and seated torso rotations, and in with the kettle bells, medicine balls, and weighted sleds. Anything that gets you working out in ways devised to help you perform daily activities, like lifting, bending, and climbing stairs, constitutes the latest trend, the article says.
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Happy Employees Means Healthy Business

Happy Employees Means A Healthy Business

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Happy Employees Means Healthy BusinessThe fitness industry is winning accolades in the press these days. In this space a couple of weeks ago, we highlighted an article in Forbes that lauded the industry for its useful website content and its ability to make that content go viral. Now another magazine, Minnesota Business, offers praise of a different sort: Anytime Fitness has won recognition as the best Minnesota company to work for in the large business category.
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The Early Bird Catches the Great Deal

The Early Bird Catches the Great Deal

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The Early Bird Catches the Great DealI’ve always wondered how it feels to get in a good workout at 3 a.m. I don’t belong to a 24-hour gym, though, so there isn’t much of an opportunity for me to try. But this winter I came close. My gym launched a “sunrise special”: For $29 extra a month, members could access the facility starting at 5 a.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. on weekends.
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Want to Retain Your Clients? Motivate Them

Want to Retain Your Clients? Motivate Them

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Want to Retain Your Clients? Motivate ThemBack in the fall, when I joined my current gym, I signed up for a free training session. The trainer I was assigned, Cliff, was friendly, knowledgeable, kind, and encouraging. I met with him twice. I felt I could learn a lot from him — if nothing else, I found him motivating, and I knew I needed motivation — so I intended to meet with him again, but, somehow, I didn’t manage to. (As I’ve confessed before in this space, my gym-going became — I don’t want to say a complete fantasy, but it certainly didn’t happen too often.)
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Keep Your Content Viral

Keep Your Content Viral

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Keep Your Content ViralA couple weeks ago, Forbes ran an interesting article about getting online content noticed. “Want to make your content go viral?” the article asked. “Take a lesson,” it advised, “from”—and here’s the interesting part—“the fitness industry.”
The article noted that, while there is a lot of miracle-diet and exercise-fad gimmickry out there, the fitness industry offers up some genuinely rich and helpful Internet content, including workout videos, guidelines for better ways to work out, and tips for metabolism-boosting diets. In order to get the good information noticed, the article says, new types of fitness experts have emerged: “individuals who exist across the online and physical worlds and operate as equal parts trainer, writer, and social media guru.”
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fitness incentives

Matching Clients with Trainers

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fitness incentivesRecently, the fitness concierge at my gym sent me an email to remind me that I still had one free orientation session to use. When I joined last year, I was given two. I used the first one right away but forgot about the second, and I appreciated the reminder, not only because I didn’t want to let such a gift go to waste, but also, embarrassingly, because it had been a while since I’d made it to the gym. I needed that refresher course (…)
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fitness incentives

Workers Need You

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fitness incentivesYesterday was International Workers’ Day, a holiday created to commemorate Chicago’s Haymarket Affair of 1886 and the events leading up to it. The long and short of it is this: in 1867, the federal government passed a law guaranteeing federal employees an eight-hour work day; all Illinois workers were covered by a similar law. But the government failed to enforce its own law, and workers in Illinois were forced to sign waivers of the law as a condition of employment. So, on May 1, 1886, labor leaders organized a protest to demand adherence to the eight-hour rule. It ended badly, a few days later, with riots, police killing protestors, and someone throwing a bomb into the crowd (…)
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fitness incentives

Finding Inspiration to Achieve Your Goals

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fitness incentivesI recently set a goal for myself: an hour of yoga everyday. It sounds achievable enough, but with work, child-rearing, and millions of other demands on my time (okay, maybe only thousands. Hundreds? Dozens? I don’t know, but it all seems like too much), I’ve failed miserably. I always seem to find some convincing excuse not to do it.
Then I heard about Augie Nieto. Of course, Nieto is a big name in this industry, well known as the chairman of the board of Octane Fitness and the founder of the fitness equipment company Life Fitness — and as a man who, eight years ago, at the age of 47, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (…)
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fitness incentives

Targeting the Golden Ager

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fitness incentivesMy son recently learned how to ride a bicycle, and the last time I took him to visit my parents, he insisted on bringing his new, bright green set of wheels along. My nearly seventy-year-old father, mostly sedentary and not in the best of health, surprised me by pulling his old bike out of the shed, dusting it off, and declaring that he was going to join in on a ride. He was slow and creaky at first, and he fell off once — with nothing more than hurt pride, thankfully — but he went a full four miles with my son (who streaked along with abandon, delighting in his ability to outpace Grandpa)
We don’t see my parents as often as I’d like, and I don’t want my father waiting around for our quarterly visits to get his exercise. When I told him he should join a gym, he laughed, saying he’d be embarrassed to show his old self among all those young, fit bodies (…)
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fitness incentives

Facebook Might Not Get You Members, But It's Still a Great Tool

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fitness incentives There’s been a lot of talk recently about the fitness industry and social media. At last month’s International Health, Racquet, and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA), for example, Nicholas Cristakas, the keynote speaker, discussed the potential impact of social networks on the industry. Six separate sessions at the conference were devoted to one aspect of social media or another. A Club Industry conference this fall will feature a session entitled “Social Media and the Fitness Industry.” And if you Google those two phrases together —”fitness industry” plus “social media” — you get a quarter of a million pages spouting a whole range of opinions on the topic, everything from “Top Five Ways the Fitness Industry is Screwing Up Social Media” to “Social Media and Fitness Business — A Perfect Fit?”
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