Club Enhancement Planning

August 03, 2023

Dear Members,

Hope you are enjoying our awesome Seattle summer weather. There really are not that many other areas in the world that have such a pleasant climate this time of year.

For several months prior to COVID shutting down health clubs in March of 2020, we were in the process of evaluating new equipment and a new design/layout for the Club. That process and planning was brought to an abrupt end on March 16th of that year.

Quite a bit of our cardio equipment, including our treadmills, exercise bikes and ellipticals, are made by the Precor manufacturing company. Precor’s headquarters is in Woodinville and as of the beginning of 2020, they were the 4th largest commercial exercise manufacturing company in the world. Precor is a very common brand at health clubs in the US and especially in the northwest with Precor’s headquarters and one of their main manufacturing plants so close.

When COVID happened, health clubs immediately stopped purchasing any equipment and companies like Peloton (the famous cycle bike) that focused on in-home equipment and exercise started to grow quickly. This resulted in Peloton purchasing the Precor company during COVID. What many of us (health club owners) believed was that Peloton would change the Precor factories into making Peloton bikes and home equipment and replace the commercial equipment manufacturing with that effort.

This shake up in the commercial exercise equipment manufacturing is one example of a total revamping of this business sector because the length of time COVID had on the delay in getting back to the business of creating and selling commercial exercise equipment.

With the effects of COVID now more in our rear-view mirror, Precor is back in full production of commercial exercise equipment and Peloton in-home business has reduced substantially from COVID times. We feel we can finally get back to making decisions on purchasing equipment from companies that have now stabilized enough to stay around for the foreseeable future.

We now want to make plans for purchasing equipment and seeing how arranging parts of the gym will be most beneficial to our members. We will be rearranging our cardio equipment to be what it was prior to COVID and that’s with all the treadmills side by side and the same for the other similar cardio equipment.

We feel the middle of the gym is underused and are looking to make that area more useful. We are thinking the 4 exercise bikes in the middle of the gym typically don’t get used all at once so we could reduce and/or relocate them. We want to make things feel less crowded but at the same time, enable more people to use the Club.

With all that said, I am wide open to your input as members on what you would like to see as an improvement to your Club. Feel free to email me at pat@ballardhealthclub.com with any ideas you would like to share.

Sincerely,

Pat Gilbrough
Owner, General Manager
Ballard Health Club
pat@ballardhealthclub.com