fi tness industry isn’t ready; it’s that people don’t realise what we can do. They don’t even realise we’re here. For example, we recently did a project in Madrid with Sanitas [the BUPA brand in Spain] – a one-year intervention with 700 of its staff – and Sanitas was genuinely surprised by the benefi ts exercise was able to bring. “Potential partners – governments
and other sectors – won’t come to us. We need to go and open the door for ourselves by proactively engaging in the public health agenda.” In 2009, Jiménez was invited by EHFA
to apply for the Standards Council job, to which he was duly appointed in April of that year. “This provides potentially the best platform for the industry to move into the public health arena,” he says. “We can centrally develop a strong agenda and communicate this to the industry, as well as having the ear of the EU and governments across Europe so we can make them aware that we do indeed have an agenda.
january 2012 © cybertrek 2012
“Not only that, but the EU provides
funding opportunities in areas such as learning, health promotion and research. These are co-funding schemes – you have to invest your own money as well – but they’re a chance for us to prove what it is we’re capable of delivering. Other industry sectors are already doing this very well, but the fi tness industry isn’t as yet.” But to effectively deliver a public
health agenda, he explains: “We need to modify our main skills and look for new competencies in our staff: physiological knowledge is important, but we need staff with psychological know-how too. We need people who can engage with individuals and lead behavioural change, and we need proper assessment and evidence-based programmes – not only for people who pay for personal training, but for everyone. “People pay us for structured exercise,
advice and expertise, and the quality of our product is not currently good enough. So we need to raise our
Jiménez’s team has applied for EU funding to investigate the impact of structured exercise on those aged 65 and over
standards, with a fundamental shift in what we are offering.”
setting standards To that end, the EHFA Standards Council has begun work on developing a standards framework for “people, programmes and places” in the fitness industry. “We’ve started with people, because this is key in a service industry such as ours – we need to professionalise the industry,” says Jiménez. The Sector Qualifi cations Framework
maps out 22 occupations in the fi tness industry, spread across fi ve domains: those working with the general population; those working with special populations; management; education; and external professionals – such as physiotherapists – who have qualifi ed
Read Health Club Management online at
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