Top Gym Management Software
Wristbands that count your steps, clothing that monitors your heartbeat, watches that know when you’re asleep — in a market continually and increasingly flooded with fitness gadgets, it’s useful to keep track of the latest ones and to consider what, if anything, is the role of gyms and fitness centres in relation to them. When your clients have them, how can — and should — you make use of them?
Continue reading “Gadgets in the Gym”
I’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.
Continue reading “The Early Bird Catches the Great Deal”
Back 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.)
Continue reading “Want to Retain Your Clients? Motivate Them”
Recently, 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 (…)
Continue reading “Matching Clients with Trainers”
Yesterday 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 (…)
Continue reading “Workers Need You”
My 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 (…)
Continue reading “Targeting the Golden Ager”