If you DIY the fitness program in your senior living community, you probably think your offerings are market-standard and don't need to be reconsidered. Even with strong staff running your fitness program, that in-house team has limits on what they can build for the community, and it's likely that you're missing out on opportunities for substantial improvement. The problem with those missed opportunities is that even with something as basic as exercise, it's tough to know what you don't know.
- Annual fitness center visits increased 44% despite there being no change in total eligible residents during this time.
- Appointment volume increased 68% which means that residents got a lot more high touch interaction with our fitness experts.
- The average number of fitness center visits per day increased 43% and the number of residents who visited the fitness center at least once per month jumped 20%.
- In a community where the group fitness program was already strong, we made a few tweaks and overall class participation increased 9%.
As I said, the staff leadership at this client location was strong before we came on board; they were doing a nice job tracking and using available data as well as providing good variety in programming. But, there are limits to what a small team can do in an environment like that without additional job-specific support. And that's the value of outsourcing your fitness center program to an organization that specializes in building and sustaining strong resident fitness programs. We were quickly able to help this team:
- Identify new ways to attract residents into appointments and structure documented follow-up practices to keep residents engaged in their exercise programs.
- Adopt a program evaluation framework that allowed them to focus in on a few goals and truly evaluate what was/wasn't working in their community.
- Provide comprehensive balance training/fall prevention programming with a depth that far exceed previous efforts, and served to draw in new participants to the fitness center and group fitness classes.
If you're ready to start moving your community fitness program to the next level, click below to download our eBook: How to Transform Your Fitness Center From Vacant to Vibrant.
