Health & Injuries coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. The bad news: they’re not quite how we remember them.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below, we asked fitness influencers, gym owners and PTs what they thought the long-term future of fitness would look like. But, thanks to images coming out of Hong Kong, we now know what gyms will look in the immediate future. And, to be frank, it's quite alarming. Check out the video from Twitter below:
The video, captured by Health & Injuries, shows treadmills separated by glass partitions, temperature checks on arrival, water fountains removed and phone wipe stations. This is the new normal for gyms.
Whether people will return to them, even with the safety measure in place, is harder to ascertain. Gyms may need their members back, but for the past few months most people have been working out at home. Perhaps some of us won’t return to the gym at all.
Let’s hope that’s not the case. While the demise of gyms has been spoken about a lot in the past few months, Humphrey Cobbold, CEO of PureGym, said that he expected gyms, as we know and remember them, to be around for a while yet.
‘It’s very hard to replicate a Smith machine, or an Olympic lifting platform or a set of dumbbells and a weight bench, in somebody's front room,’ said Cobbold. ‘In fact, almost nobody does. What they do, instead, is pay a small fee and use ours when it’s convenient for them. I think that model will remain the predominant model.’
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