Maintaining club engagement during COVID-19

What happens when lockdown forces us to say goodbye to the social side of exercise? Kelly from Atlas Fitness shares how they’ve gone above and beyond to maintain community spirit in their club.

Physical activity and sport play a huge part in people’s social lives. For many of us, regular classes or fitness sessions are a weekly highlight. They’re a time to catch up with friends and do something that makes us feel physically and mentally strong.

So what happens when lockdown forces us to say goodbye to the social side of exercise?

Atlas Fitness provides Group Fitness sessions, Running sessions and High Intensity Interval Training. We combine the outdoors with fitness in a fun and motivational environment that welcomes all abilities. We emphasise community. Our priority is our members and we are here to support them.

When lockdown began, we suspended group training and immediately took to Facebook live to conduct our sessions. All our instructors have now hosted a virtual session. We are running sessions on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 6pm and then Saturday mornings 9am. We kept sessions running on the same days as we normally would, but revised the time, allowing our members to help decide the new times.

Community Spirit

We have a WhatsApp group for social use. All members can use this channel to ask questions and talk amongst themselves. But it also allows us to check in and gauge how the members might be feeling.

We have a strong group of people that are like family, and they look out for one another. This has really helped us adapt to virtual workouts. If someone is struggling and they don’t feel comfortable putting that in the group chat, other individuals will let us know the conversations they have been having and we can then put things in place to help.

One of our members isn’t familiar with Facebook and was struggling to access the sessions. They told this to another member who then let us know, and we ensured that we allowed at least 5 minutes at the start of the online session to give people extra time to sign in. We then got feedback that this made the individual who had been struggling feel great as we were able to do a shout out and hello when they joined live.

We love what we do and we love our members; without them we wouldn’t exist. So we decided to do more than just virtual sessions.

Quiz Nights

We host a quiz night once a week for our members. It is optional, but we have had about 40 people sign in each week. We use Zoom and send out a link prior to the start of the quiz.

Virtual challenge

We set our Atlas team a challenge to see how many miles we could log in a week. We set a low target ensuring that our members would achieve this. We put out a video on social media asking members and their families (those in the same household) to cycle, walk, scoot, jog etc as many miles as they could. We recorded 1500 miles in one week! It was amazing and the feedback we had was great. One member who had only been leaving the house once a week then told us that she had left the house three times that week, running on two occasions. She felt incredibly proud of herself and she felt better for getting some sunshine as well!

Check-ins

We have sent messages and emails to all our members to ask how they are. We have been on the phone to several of our members talking all things life. Sometimes it is fitness related but other times it’s just a catch up. Everyone knows we are available and here for them.

One of our members was struggling mentally with the lockdown and with fitness expectations. So, we were able to surprise them with the support they needed. We found out when they were going out for their daily exercise and where they would be, and we dotted ourselves around the route to cheer them on. We clapped from afar and told them that they could do it. Although some people would say this wasn’t essential, it was. We were able to support them and motivate them to carry on, we put a smile on their face, and they knew we were there.

We think that our sessions and extra-curriculars are filling something. The classes provide some normality and the extra socials do provide something that we don’t get from the sessions. However, there is still something missing. People miss physically being with people and unfortunately, we don’t think there is a way to virtually create this. I think more could be done, from us and others, but what that is and whether we are capable of it, we aren’t sure.

Top Tips for keeping your audience engaged

• Communicate – We talk to our members every day, in the WhatsApp group, on the phone, social media, email and we update them on any changes as it happens.
• Honesty – We are completely transparent with our members we can’t do something they’ve suggested, we explain why and hope this is enough. They know we are trying and the decisions we make are in the best interest for as many people as possible. They also know that we aren’t perfect, and we might make the wrong decision, but it wasn’t on purpose.
• Knowing you are there for them – Our members are incredibly strong people. Many are keyworkers. We know that everyone will adapt to the situation differently, and we want people to know that it’s ok. Our members know that if they need help, they can come to us. It sounds corny, but Atlas isn’t just about fitness. It’s about people, understanding them and being there for them.
• Effort – People just want to know that you care and are doing something about it. It’s more difficult now to show that, but this is when it matters.

We have tried to reassure our members that right now motivation will change and fluctuate as this is a weird time for everyone. Assuring them that there are no expectations of them to come back fitter but to listen to their bodies. We remove fitness during the extra circular activities, keeping it for during the virtual session only. Everything else is about support!

For more support on adapting to COVID-19 check out our supporting the sector page.