Overhead presses are one of the six most popular weightlifting exercises that your gym members will likely want to perform during workouts. As such, it's important that you, as a gym owner, understand what proper form looks like and what equipment your patrons will need to stay safe. Benefits The overhead press movement works the arms, shoulders, upper back, and core muscles. Though you may feel like you're doing a solely upper body exercise, you are using the muscles in your back and abdomen to stabilize the heavy weight overhead, which makes the overhead press an excellent choice of exercise [...]
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In the first exercise series post covering the squat, we discussed a number of reasons you, as a gym owner, should know the major exercises your gym members will be doing. Enforcing higher safety standards, knowing red flags to look out for when you're on the gym floor, and understanding what equipment your gym members will need are all essential things you can handle when you know the basics of each exercise. Today's post will cover another major movement: the deadlift. Benefits of the deadlift A compound movement that uses several major joints and large muscle groups, the deadlift is [...]
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As a gym owner, you work hard to devise engaging fitness programs, keep a qualified rotation of trainers on staff, and offer a variety of equipment for your customers to enjoy. But there is one often-overlooked aspect of maximizing your client retention and member satisfaction: optimizing the building itself. Your physical building space is the face of your business. Before your clients walk up to the front desk and greet the first employee they see, they will make a snap judgement about your gym based on what they see around them. Consider the environment and ambiance of your gym, and [...]
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Building A Business In Fitness A recent post on the Club Solutions Magazine's website reminded me of how proactive you have to be as a business owner; in the gym management business you live and die by your ability to lead. As an independent gym business owner, you've probably found the key to your success is working with people to achieve a common objective. The goal of your business is to inspire and assist in the growth and improvement in the physical health of all of the people around you. It's the ultimate secret to success in fitness; you have [...]
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When You Have To Do What You Would Rather Not One of the biggest challenges that a gym owner can face is moving the physical location of the business. Perhaps this is even more of a pressing issue if you already have a location that your clients love. Everything else being equal the best advice is to stay put; don't, at least unless you have to. Of course, there are many reasons that you might actually have to move, so I'm not going to go into the whys and what-fors. Assuming that it's a necessity that you move your small [...]
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Stages Of Building Your Empire The readers of Gym Insight are a pretty diverse group of people; some have aspirations to gym ownership and others are already there. So let's look at one of the sexiest ways to get business funding. This is how the tech startups go about bootstrapping up from nothing and how the process can be applied to your situation. The levels of investment and startup success that have come from the tech industry works in stages as follows: Seed Money from your own pocket Friends and Family investment from those who truly believe in you Early [...]
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Gym Insight just released the first version of our class calendar feature! This will be a standard feature to all of our premium clients. The class calendar feature is also included in our free version for all those who register to try out our software! We now also have a website widget tutorial on the "Classes" page to help assist you in getting the calendar displayed on your own website in real time! Don't be shy, try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.
Seeking Beta Testers: We are excited to announce that Gym Insight is now ready to start beta testing our new class scheduling feature. This feature will be free to all our premium clients and has the capability to be displayed directly on YOUR business website! Before we formally launch the product, we do need your help and feedback to perfect it. If you are you are a premium client of ours, just drop us a line, and we will get you started scheduling. How do I get started? All you have to do is let us know that you are [...]
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Gym equipment is the biggest class of capital assets (and possibly of hassles too) you'll have to deal with when you're starting your own gym. Whether you run a small gym or a national franchise location, there are some things that must be addressed with enough quality to make your investment worthwhile. Once you have the equipment in place you need to ensure that it stays in working order for as long as you need it. Gym equipment is the bread and butter of your enterprise. It may be more or less important, depending on the type of gym you [...]
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Dirty Work Continued... As a business owner there's a plethora of rules regulations and certifications that you have to navigate through. Of course, on top of that, gym ownership comes with its own specific headaches. When you own a business of any description you quickly find out that there are all kinds of tasks that seem to have been designed to distract you from your purpose and the mission of your enterprise. As always, I try to avoid the controversies and politics of ownership but we all have to deal with them. So, my discussion point here is how to [...]
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Because my gym has been doing well recently, I've been forced to analyze all my financials. I say this because I had been solely relying on the competence of my bookkeepers for the past couple of years, blindly thinking that they would do a good job. I was so wrong! The past few weeks, I have been scrambling to brush up on basic accounting principals in order to answer basic questions that are not clearly defined by the books. That means I am completely redoing everything that the bookkeeper did (or in my opinion, did not do). The Jerry Seinfeld [...]
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Turbocharge Your Income With Gym Guest Passes There are many different ways to increase your gym's revenue. Let's focus on how you can use gym guest passes to increase your income, in the way a turbocharger boosts the horsepower of a small car engine. Of course, your own particular approach to this strategy will be strongly influenced by the unique layout of your local racetrack. So, here are two different approaches to gym guest passes, for very different local markets. Gym Guest Passes To Bring In New Members The best and most consistent form of income to keep a gym [...]
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The concept of experience marketing is generating a lot of buzz among business consultants and academic thinkers right now. It encapsulates the emotional and subjective associations that come with using a product or taking part in a service. It is how your members feel about how they get along at your gym. It is all of the subjective associations and emotions they have relating to everything from the hygiene levels to the staff's attitude and the results members get from their workouts. A State Of (The Customer's) Mind As long as members are happy enough to keep coming back, whether [...]
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Digital Media Puts a Human Face On Business Here's an ironic fact: Digital media can actually add a human touch to your gym! In this day and age it's absolutely imperative that, as a business owner, you take full advantage of the low-cost high-impact resources that you can find online, in social media, blogging and video blogging. If you're a bit more ambitious, even podcasting can be a great way to promote your gym. The subject of social media is vast and rapidly changing. I'm just going to put this out there as an idea. It's just a quick overview, [...]
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These days it's almost impossible to avoid the online community and customer feedback. Think of that as a good thing! Make the effort to be aware of reviews of your gym or studio and be prepared to respond. The secret is first knowing where to seek them out and then responding to them, before you find yourself digitally tarred and feathered. Of course some of what you get is going to be positive. However in business it's almost impossible to do anything that provides a customer experience that's universally loved. Misunderstandings and miscommunications can occur even in ideal conditions. Just [...]
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