Not a lot of people in Glasgow seem to know this, but Wednesday 7th September is/was National Fitness Day.
It was supposed to be a day to celebrate the benefits of being physically active, but also, more importantly, a day when we could encourage more people to move more, more of the time. It was a day to Move The Nation.
What we got instead was more self back patting, a trending hashtag, more confirmation bias and lots of preaching to the converted.
It trended on Twitter, but did that reach make a difference?
On National Fitness Day, it seemed that the already active were hashtagging their day’s activities with #NationalFitnessDay while the inactive presumably went on with their day none the wiser and certainly no more active than they were they day before.
And can we blame them? One National Fitness Day Challenge was to record 50,000 burpees. This is not an exercise that you motivate the inactive with. This is the type of challenge that frightens people and most likely makes them doubt their capabilities.
Is this how we get the inactive moving!?
If you are in London you might be reading this and wondering what I am on about? For you, National Fitness Day included events outside the Olympic Park, events with celebrities and Sports Ministers and events that went on all day. It looked exciting, it looked fun and it really looked like people were getting involved.
No expense spared in London
However, it is supposed to be National Fitness Day, not London Fitness Day and in Glasgow, you would never have known that it was even happening.
In Glasgow, I struggled to find anyone who knew what it was and I struggled to find ANY fitness operator giving it any serious attention.
Just look at the efforts that Pure Gym and the Gym Group went to, in order to entice people in and to share their free gym pass offer! Inside Pure Gym, there were no posters, no flyers and no events that I could see.
It was simply business as usual. With gym membership and attendance increasing, do the likes of Pure Gym and the Gym Group even see a need to invest time and money into National Fitness Day? The pictures below suggest not.
No expense spared
I also visited National Fitness day Sponsor, Argos, to see what activities and promotions they had. As the main sponsor and having read what they had planned, I was confident that they would be celebrating it with some style.
Oh, how wrong was I?
I saw a young cashier with a National Fitness Day t-shirt on and I asked him what was happening. He responded that he had turned up for work and had been given the top to wear. To his credit, he went searching for information and told me that there had been people in, but that they had left. They hadn’t left any flyers or posters and Argos were not advertising any offers, but at least someone had been there. It is however National Fitness Day, not National Fitness Hour.
Wide Open Spaces
Was Glasgow alone and were we just proving that despite our protestations, that we are the Sick Man of Europe?
According to Sean Blyth of World Gym Challenge, the answer is no. He organised and delivered a National Fitness Day event in his Argos Store in Kent and he struggled to engage any members of the public . He reported that while the staff in Argos were helpful, they were too busy to offer any real support.
People were shopping or on lunch from work. They had no desire to work out in Argos and had no real interest in National Fitness Day. This is the apathy and attitudes that we need to somehow break down.
We need to consider ways to engage with people and National Fitness Day, on paper at least, is a great idea. However, maybe the word fitness doesn’t quite fit. Is it possible that this is a word that the inactive recoil from and maybe we need to, dare I say it, consider A Different Approach ?
UKactive are to be applauded for attempting to make a difference. I believe in National Fitness Day and I genuinely hope that we can reflect on what worked well and what went wrong this year. In 2017, we can all work together, to make National Fitness Day better and bigger and help more people, move more, more often.
10 comments
I didn’t hear anything at all about this down in Brighton. I’m also a Pure Gym member and I don’t recall any info in my gym, though I guess in a gym you are already preaching to the converted. Was the point of this to get people to try out new exercise? Or celebrate what they’re already doing to keep fit? I’m not clear on that. As a blogger who writes about fitness and healthy lifestyle I would happily have written a post about it, had I known it was happening. Clearly in the future this needs to be more inclusive and not just centred on people in London.
Brighton is usually one of three main hubs for National Fitness Day, so this, Joanne, is the most worrying replies I have had. Hopefully, UKactive will read this post (and these comments) and realise that we don’t mean to ridicule their efforts, but that we are simply highlighting our concerns, in the medium that we use. Blogs.
I applaud you for writing this post, as a fitness blogger and someone who does marketing for a fitness company I had NFD highlighted in my calendar and was ready for a media explosion, but it seems like once again we are only preaching to the choir. I agree with you that there needs to be more efforts to encourage inactive people to take part long-term, not a day to make already-active people feel smug for doing some burpees in work.
http://www.hannahgetshench.com
Hannah x
Thank you Hannah. I have possibly damaged my relationship with UKactive but my goal has always been to encourage and inspire more people to be active. I was deeply disappointed to see UKactive promote this as a huge success when I had been raising my concerns with them prior to the day and on the day. NFD began trending in the USA and it ended up with pecs and abs pics. How any gym thinks that a 50,000 Burpee Challenge is how you inspire the inactive is beyond me.
I totally agree with a number of the points here. I don’t think the title of the day needs to be changed – ultimately it is a day celebrating/encouraging fitness and we shouldn’t need to sugar that. National ‘activity’ day doesn’t quite ring as well.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the internet, I’ve been a personal trainer for 12 years, a fitness blogger for 4 and this is the first time I’ve not known about NFD.
I asked a gym manager if he’d had any promo material or engagement and he said none at all. It became a bit of a running joke throughout the day that it was national fitness day yet one of the quietest they’d had in the gym for weeks thanks to people being back at school/work!
Lots of the fitness media effort is London based, but even where I am (Manchester/Cheshire), there is a significant enough population to create buzz/awareness about it. The other population centres (Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Newcastle etc) seemed to be missed off the media efforts.
There was no (that I’m aware of) engagement with the fitness blogging community, very little engagement with gyms and as for engagement with Argos – what?! Did they expect shoppers to stop what they were doing and take part in a class? Whoever came up with that idea needs a rethink – it’s lazy PR.
So, onto next year. Where could improvement be made?
Change the day – make sure it’s a weekend in the summer holidays. Get families involved. Engage the blogging community. Engage schools. Engage sports clubs. Engage gyms. Engage workplaces. Do more. Do SOMETHING!
Great points, Steve. I too think that National Fitness Day is a suitable title, but I am trying to think about what is putting some people off. Other than holding events in an Argos Store
I had absolutely no idea this was going on until I saw it trending, honestly, I’d never heard of it before. I went to my gym as usual in the morning, nobody there had heard of it either. It could have been so much more! With better promotion, this could have been a great day to get the public involved & promote a healthy, fitter lifestyle.
Unfortunately, Breanne, this has been a much repeated response to this blog on Facebook. There is always next year…..
I literally only just found out about national fitness day today, a little bit late! I had heard absolutely nothing about it, not even on social media! After the success of #iamteamgb and the hype over the Olympics and Paralympics you’d think there would be a lot more advertisement, even if it was just on social media!
UKactive could argue that they promoted this heavily, but with the amount of people unaware of it, the marketing of it was either insufficinet or flawed.