Social distancing and isolation have brought serious concern about the future of fitness. There’s a high chance that spending so much time in quarantine could lead people to feel less motivated to work out and as a result fall out of their regular fitness routines. But the fitness industry worldwide answered promptly by moving their business online to help clients keep up with their new virtual workout programme.
By making their group classes available online or offering virtual personal training sessions, fitness businesses have been able to reinvent and explore new opportunities to engage with their communities, although through a computer or smartphone screen. We know you all love to bring the same energy online by Zoom, Google Hangouts or YouTube streaming to your members’ at-home gyms (or living rooms).
So, we’ve listened to your needs and wishes: the functionality to add your live-streaming classes to the Virtuagym schedule is available now.
Is your fitness business going fully digital?
The Coronavirus crisis has caused the fitness industry to go digital. Exploring and enriching your digital offering is not only going to help you just during the pandemic, but it will also be a must-have even after the Coronavirus outbreak is over .
While we are still not sure what will the new measures be, the online world will still be an option to reach out to all those people who are not able to attend the gym or PT sessions.
[caption id=“attachment_11299” align=“alignnone” width=“800”]
Alliance Images || Shutterstock[/caption]
Thanks to technology, there are many options you can explore in order to bring your business online and create a virtual platform to interact with your clients. Don’t miss out and keep up with motivating your clients to stay fit and work out from home.
What tools should I use for virtual classes?
One of the easiest ways to keep your schedule busy with personal training sessions and online group classes comes from ordinary streaming tools like Google Hangouts, YouTube and Zoom.
Pick the tool that suits you the most, but be aware that Zoom might be the favourite streaming tool among the fitness industry. Why? Zoom is the streaming platform that allows setting online personal training 1-1s as well as big group classes in just a few clicks. Fitness businesses enjoy using Zoom because with a small upgrade you go from training up to three people to hosting up to 100 attendees in your classes. Pretty great, isn’t it?
You can create events and reach out to a huge number of people that would never fit your gym classes, by just sharing a link and going live with your workout routine. Download Zoom , live stream and record your virtual classes for everyone who wasn’t able to join your fitness sessions.
[caption id=“attachment_11422” align=“alignnone” width=“800”]
Jacob Lund || Shutterstock[/caption]
Who would have guessed that live streaming would end up helping fitness professionals and their members feeling more connected than ever? Go all-in on digital fitness content to be “alone-together”. These are the reasons why you should step up your game with live streaming classes:
- Easily engage with your clients and build strong online relationships
- Offer your sincere support and create a safe space to channel emotional stress through fitness
- Recreate the atmosphere of intimacy that you have in your group classes
- Peer pressure increases motivation
Integrate your digital offer on Virtuagym
With this new feature, you can decide to share your content with your members only and keep your business structure up and running. You can also decide to make it mandatory for them to buy a credit to join these classes . We hope this new feature will help your business during these challenging times.
If you haven’t done it yet, you can easily integrate your digital offering into your schedule in 4 simple steps:
1. Launch your new offering to your members and maybe even share this with your potential new customers via social media, your website, maybe even via the phone (old school yet effective) or launch email campaigns.
2. We’ve created a new field to fill in once you create a class. In this field, you need to paste the link from Hangout, Zoom, YouTube or any other link to your video chat to access the class virtually. Your members will be able to join the classes by clicking on the link from the schedule on the web platform - it’s only available for members who have access to the schedule or bought a credit for this class (if you decide so). This feature will be available in the mobile app version very soon.
3. Send an email or push notification before the class to remind the attendees to join the class. Zoom, Hangout or YouTube are great platforms to stream your online classes (and integrate smoothly with Virtuagym). Open the link 15 minutes before, so the attendees can chit-chat like they normally do when they attend your classes. The social aspect of working out is very important and should not be forgotten.
4. Ready? Set? Sweat!