In a typical January, people with fresh New Year fitness resolutions would be heading to gyms to try out new exercises and routines.
With at least one survey finding that 39% of respondents gained weight during the COVID-19 pandemic, gyms should be even busier this year. However, as we deal with yet another phase of the pandemic fueled by the omicron variant, people seem less willing to head to the gym and could see their fitness goals crumble as a result.
While avoiding the gym could put a damper on fitness resolutions, there are concerns that people should take seriously when considering heading to their health club. Even with mask and vaccination mandates, it’s nearly impossible to remove all risk of infection.
“There’s more concern again about being in a room where people are sweating,” says Ken Leon, director of equity research at research firm CFRA, according to Fox Sports Charlotte.
“I’m just a little bit more uncertain about it with omicron because there’s so much more virus particles and it can linger there for probably a little bit longer,” UC San Francisco infectious-disease expert Dr.
Peter Chin-Hong told The Los Angeles Times about going to the gym.
Indeed, gym owners in Ohio, Chicago, Ill., and St. Louis, Mo., and elsewhere struggle to keep up with mandates as they wonder if their members will even show up.
“We generally would have seen probably 10 to 15 leads a day from Dec. 26 through to Jan. 2 between phone calls, drop-ins, website inquiries, etcetera,” Chris Thacker, owner of the L.A.B Gym in St. Louis, told NPR. "I don't know that we saw 15 over that 10-day period.”
“It’s such a critical month, when people tend to rejoin gyms,” she says. “And the industry was already struggling before Omicron,” said Liz Clark, president and CEO of The Global Health & Fitness Association.
A ClubIntel survey from the first summer of the pandemic found that, at that time, 65% of respondents planned on returning to their gym after the pandemic. However, this percentage dropped among Millennial and Gen Z participants.
By the time ClubIntel published a study in December of last year, 32 percent of gyms were still closed, 20% of members had not returned to their gyms and had stopped exercising, and 57% said that COVID-19 being out of control is why they had not come back.
While gyms are a go-to for meeting fitness goals, people can also work out at home. According to a poll conducted by OnePoll on behalf of AI fitness app Freeletics, 72 percent of American participants believe gyms will actually become a thing of the past due to the pandemic. Overall, two thirds of respondents said the pandemic made them realize they did not need to go to the gym to stay fit.
As of January 5, the 7-day moving average of daily new cases of COVID-19 increased 85.7 percent compared with the previous 7-day moving average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 95 percent of cases are omicron variant cases.
Those who have tested positive for COVID-19 should actually put their New year exercise goals on hold, said the Wall Street Journal. The American College of Sports Medicine suggests that low-risk patients rest for at least 10 days and that asymptomatic patients should rest for seven days.
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