If you're hoping to hit the treadmill, lift weights or work out on the circuit at gym, you will have to book an appointment. But be warned, there will be no access to showers, sonar or water towers as fitness centres and gyms open to the new normal under strict coronavirus prevention guidelines.
Gym enthusiasts will also have to get used to exercising on their own little isolation demarcated boxes where they cannot share equipment.
CrossFit Cyprium in Randburg and CrossFit Northcliff, opened their gym doors to strict guidelines on Tuesday after nearly five months of closure due to Covid-19.
CrossFit Cyprium manager Eduan Viljoen said to reduce the risk of infections, they had to reduce the number of people who take their classes from 40 to only eight.
“The classes, some of them started 5.30am in the morning and they would be 45 minutes long, and then there's a 45-minute gap until my next class just to make sure that these guys can clean the equipment and then they can leave, then there's a gap and the next people come in to an empty gym,” Viljoen said.
“They come to their station and can clean their stuff again. There's only eight people allowed per class now, before I'd do about 40 people.”
Like Viljoen, CrossFit in Northcliff has also had to create spaces where only one member can exercise and are not allowed to leave until they are done.
“We’ve always known that Covid is not going to go away, [that] our normal is not going to be normal and we’ve adjusted quite well,” CrossFit Northcliff manager Marishka Cameron said.
“We’ve sectioned off the floor, we’ve minimised our classes. Where we used to have 20 people in a class, we’ve minimised to 11 and we’re checking how that goes and we’re seeing if that will work.”
Cameron said that they also make use of the outdoor gym area where there was better ventilation. “Obviously, we’re not using the showers because we’d have to sanitise after every single shower and that’s not safe. We encourage people to not have gym bags, their water bottles, they can’t even come with sweat towels because that also carries germs, it’s crazy but that’s how it is,” she said.
Gym membership tanked during lockdown, according to the two CrossFit managers SowetanLIVE spoke to. They had to freeze membership and asked those who could continue paying to pay even as little as R100 from the R1,000 premium they usually pay.
Viljoen revealed that they went from 150 paying members to less than 10 in the third month of the lockdown. “It was rough, we had a conversation not so long ago saying what’s the way forward, what can I do differently. Thing is, the first two months it was okay but then people started dropping off because it’s not enough to be online, it’s not enough to be on Zoom, we need interaction,” he said.
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