TALKBACK
Kath Hudson • Journalist • Health Club Management EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT . . .
Behaviour change A
ccording to Dr Mike Loosemore – head of exercise medicine at UCL’s Institute of Sport Exercise
and Health, and founder of Active Movement – most people are so far away from the government’s activity guidelines that they give up before they even start. However, with physical inactivity now
the fourth biggest killer, we can’t afford to let people give up on themselves. So what can the fi tness sector do to help change the behaviour of the public at large? Loosemore thinks the bar should be
set very low: simply encouraging people to stand up, instead of sitting down, as a good starting point. He says one of the main problems we’re facing is that
physical activity has been engineered out of our lives: the Housewife Survey in the US found that women with children under the age of fi ve are doing 14 hours less exercise a week than 50 years ago, with the same calorie consumption. So should part of operators’ offering
involve tutoring people about how to bring activity back into their everyday lives? For example, clubs could encourage – and indeed help plan – a public transport commute: research from Transport for London has shown that people are more likely to hit 150 minutes’ activity a week if they use the underground. For those who have to drive a car, maybe they could be encouraged to park slightly further from their destination and run or walk the last
HAVE YOU HAD SUCCESS IN CHANGING BEHAVIOUR? EMAIL US:
HEALTHCLUB@LEISUREMEDIA.COM
DR MIKE LOOSEMORE Founder • Active Movement
“T
he people who find the government’s physical activity
guidelines intimidating view gyms in the same way: it’s just too far away from their reality to seem possible. The health club industry has to understand that not
everyone wants or is able to go to the gym to be physically active; operators need to find new ways to reach out to them. Fitness instructors should be trained in motivational interviewing and be able to advise people on how they could get more active. That may well not be at the gym at first. Only 7 per cent of men and 3 per cent of women are fulfilling
the public health guidelines. Thirty per cent are doing less than half, and half of those don’t do anything at all. Health club operators could help by spreading the word that it’s not just heavy or moderate activity that can improve health, but doing any type of activity. I ask people to start by just walking up one step when they’re on an escalator. Taking this achievable approach has led to some outstanding results. People need to have a reason to change their behaviour.
About 20 per cent will manage to change if they want to, and this goes up to 60 per cent if they have support. A monetary stake can work and is becoming a popular tool in the US.
”
DR JUSTIN VARNEY Consultant public health medicine, health and wellbeing • PHE
“P
ublic Health England is publishing a new national framework to move
things forward on an industrial scale. The aim is to get everyone active, but we’re especially focusing on the 29 per cent who do less than 30 minutes’ activity a week. There’s a massive role here for the sport and leisure industry to drill down to those audiences they don’t reach, find out the barriers and design programmes that will appeal. For example, we’ve seen great results from women- only swimming sessions in areas with large Muslim communities. To achieve our aim, we need the health and fitness
industry to collaborate and share good practice regarding what works. There is so much replication at the moment, with lots of people reinventing the wheel. I want everyone to rebrand the same wheel. There’s only so much you can do for market generation
from a fixed standpoint, so operators are going to need to take activity to people through outreach work. A great example of this is Birmingham Leisure’s Gym Without Walls programme, which offers activities in parks. To change behaviour, we need to make it easier for people to become active: if they don’t come to clubs, we need to take activities closer to them.
” 34 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital September 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
Minimum activity guidelines are offputting to many; some even use them as an excuse: ‘I can’t achieve that, I might as well do nothing’. So how can we change the national psyche and get people moving?
bit? Apparently Cameron Diaz always runs from place to place on-set to boost her activity levels, so what exercises could we give people to do at their desks, or while waiting for the kettle to boil? Do we need to create a new form of
membership for people who are not yet ready for the health club experience, coaching them to change their eating habits and start to get active in a less intimidating environment? This might not create new members instantly, but it can still drive revenue and may provide future members. Going forward, changing behaviour is
defi nitely going to become increasingly important, so how should operators go about it? We ask the experts....
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