Has Lockdown Changed Fitness Forever?

They were halcyon days (if you could ignore the pandemic and you were lucky enough to avoid it, and you weren't working double shifts in a hospital or supermarket). When the sun shone forever, and the streets were full of people walking, running and cycling with only the occasional Ocado truck on the road. We were told we could exercise once a day, and many people took it as an instruction. More people were outside exercising in more numbers than ever before. A route I run in my local town, before lockdown I used to see 0 to 5 other runners, but during it I would see 20-40 other people walking and running.

For some people lockdown was a fitness bootcamp, with 3 or 4 sessions a day. For others it was a 1000 yard stare, a drinking competition with sloe gin and slow internet connection. Others were in the middle like me, initially over-reached myself trying to do 30 ab-wheels in a row and ripped my abs, then couldn’t run for weeks due to persistent cough and then found a happy middle ground of runs, walks and home workouts, however, the people who run my local corner shop probably think I live on beer, discos and double deckers.

Home workout kit: Will this be the end of gyms? (These are not all my kettlebells, didn't want to make anyone jealous)

And if you weren’t outside, you were inside following Joe Wicks (or the parents were while the kids were on their ipads) or yoga with Adrienne, (I also like yoga with Kassandra and SarahBeth yoga). Or doing a zoom class with some instructors from your local gym, or like me taking part in a zoom yoga class once a week. At the same time every fitness influencer on instagram was showing you how you could do a home booty blaster workout with equipment you made from a watering can, a towel and 2 bags of weight loss tea.

I saw a lady walking around my local park eating a pot noodle, I guess she figured it was a way of staying in calorie balance. And from the odour wafting through some of my local parks, half the population have been stoned through lockdown, and getting the munchies could account for supermarket shelves being bare for a while. And these people may be desperate to get back to the gym to lose some of the ‘lockdown lard’ (I’m copyrighting this phrase because some gym is bound to use it in a membership campaign). But many people may not be going back to the gym.


And now things are getting back to normal. Already I see less people out walking and running, maybe they’ve gone back to work or popped to Primark instead. And the traffic went back to normal, which means I could either run into the dick on the pavement who refuses to socially distance or run in the road and risk getting hit by a Ford Ranger. There are still a good amount of cyclists on the road, families too, which is good to see, and some place have increased cycle lanes and provision. Unfortunately, where I live that hasn’t happened, which means if I cycled to work it would be like a scene from the Spielberg film Duel.

In the park I’ve seen old guys doing jumping jacks, a couple teaching themselves to skip and an adult lone guy teaching himself how to skateboard (must have been a lockdown goal he set himself). The personal trainers are out in the park too, and you can play ‘eye spy which one of these people watched the body coach’. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it’s like a freakin’ fitness jambaroo around here!


Meanwhile crossfit imploded because one of its head honchos went insane, and not in a cool Colonel Kurtz has gone ‘up river’ Apocalypse Now way but more like that dishevelled guy you see wandering around town carrying a bag for life with indeterminant contents who then stands too close to you in the supermarket queue and talks about lizard people conspiracies and then follows you onto the bus and sits next to you with no mask because viruses are a myth because you can’t see them.

And then all those crossfit affiliates realised that yes, people joined because of the crossfit name, but now they stay for the community and people. So there probably is no need to be an affiliate anymore because 1) You get to make up your own random circuit workouts 2) You can now call those workouts whatever you want, no need to call them Cindy or Fran anymore… you could use a wildlife name instead, Woodpecker WOD and Natterjack AMRAP to celebrate the fact the animals took the land back while we were all watching Netflix and daily briefings.

At this point no one knows when gyms will re-open, but it will probably be the day the kettlebells and bands you ordered 3 months ago finally arrive. But will people go back? The answer is some wont, they are happy with home workouts and training outside, especially in the summer, things are always different in the winter. And if your activity is swimming you will go back unless you're brave enough to do open water swimming, because you can’t do lengths in your kids paddling pool.

But I think most people will go back in some fashion. Because the gym is not just about exercise, it is about community and belonging and this is a big one for many people, mental health. Yes, you could workout at home, the same way I could make a coffee and sit at home and save £2.80, but I like going to coffee shops and watching the world go by.

How ever much corporations and businesses think otherwise, generally people don’t join and stay at gyms because of anything your marketing department put together, every local micro/ single site gym knows this. People join because of location and price, and these days its less about equipment because all gyms are pretty much the same. But they stay because of the atmosphere, their friend's, the instructors.  Your entire management team could leave tomorrow and members wouldn’t know, but if their favourite yoga or pump instructor leaves you will definitely know about it.

The unsung heroes of fitness during this lockdown are all the instructors and coaches who have carried on teaching classes on zoom, doing house party hangouts or instagram live workouts for free or donation only. Not because anyone in the companies they work for asked them to do it or paid them but because that is what they do, they teach people, they make peoples day better. And your customers and members want to support your business because of your staff they see every day. And some of those instructors and PTs may not be coming back, they may have figured online zoom classes and PT in the park is better for them and their clients.

It could change for the better, people realising that workouts don’t have be one hour, and businesses providing more online content for members and better in person coaching. It may diversify how people consume fitness. If it makes more people more active in any way, it will be a positive thing to take from this terrible event.

People will go back because collective amnesia is a powerful thing. Just like in The Plague by Camus (which of course, I read in lockdown), people go back to normal, people forget, people get used to new norms. And maybe it will make fitness facilities raise their game as well as their cleaning rather than their prices.

And when gyms re-open they should probably instigate fancy dress Friday in homage to Joe Wicks. And in 100 years time someone will ask "why do you all dress as spiderman and knights on a Friday?" and someone else will reply saying "I think it’s to celebrate when Sir Joe of Richmond stopped parents going insane during the first corona pandemic" and then they will eat a post workout Soylent Green protein bar and discuss who will win The Hunger Games 2121, will it be Crossfit Oceana airstrip one, or Crossfit Eurasia.

But until those gyms open, I'm off to do some press ups in the sun followed by a post workout beer.