Innovative workout rooms make people active everywhere

For many people, exercising in a gym is something that is difficult to stick to, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, gyms aren’t open long enough for those who work late, or they push clients to pay for extra lessons that are not in the terms of service.

(Photo courtesy of Lefit)

In response to this situation, some domestic fitness brands have made efforts to ensure their products and services properly meet their clients’ needs.

Lefit is one of them. As a shared fitness platform based in Hangzhou, east China’s Zhejiang province, it provides self-service workout routines for people longing for a flexible fitness schedule.

For less than 300 yuan for a monthly membership, fitness enthusiasts can exercise in Lefit gyms in multiple cities across the country, which are open 24 hours a day.

“I had a good time exercising here, because the gym is open 24 hours a day and I could concentrate on my own fitness routines without being disturbed,” said one woman who works for a company near a Lefit fitness room in Beijing.

As she often has to work overtime, the woman said Lefit provided a perfect space for her to exercise after work, and when she has to go to another city on business, she can still workout as long as there is a Lefit fitness room in that city.

A Lefit fitness room is about 300 square meters in size, much smaller than a traditional gym. While offering some core services like other gyms do, Lefit also boasts several smart fitness facilities and a precise match between its stores and trainers, which means the trainers do not work in one fixed place, but move between different stores according to where they are needed.

Lefit currently has 600 stores in 29 cities across the country, with 10,000 trainers and 6 million members. During the “Double 11” shopping spree in November 2020, sales volume of Lefit stood at 171 million yuan.

According to a national fitness industry data report, the number of people who took part in fitness activities in China was 70.29 million in 2020, an increase of 3.19 percent from a year earlier. However, another report published in 2020 on Chinese people’s nutrition and chronic diseases indicated that more than half of Chinese adults were overweight or obese.

The two reports seemed to contradict each other, as the number of people doing physical exercise kept increasing while the number of people putting on weight was also rising. But this is understandable when people’s increased workloads and unscientific eating habits are taken into consideration.

(Photo courtesy of Keep)

To improve the situation, the fitness industry, and gyms in particular, has been striving to involve more beginners, and helping them cross the threshold into the next step of fitness and form the habit of doing exercise regularly.

Keep, a well-known fitness app that provides at-home workout videos, has seen 300 million users sign up within six years since it was launched in 2015. It has fostered an ecosystem of fitness influencers who give live classes to students via videos.

One merit of Keep is that it lowers the fitness threshold, enabling people to start first by simply moving their bodies, and then practicing more difficult movements once they are on board.

Lefit has also taken actions to get more people to move. It has worked together with the sports authorities and fitness centers in Shanghai and Chongqing cities, setting up fitness facilities for people of all ages and all levels of physical ability.