For the first time in your club’s history, your members are searching for something more than weights and typical gym equipment. With today’s media outlets, your members know more about nutrition and ways of enhancing their bodies through diets. Now, more than ever, it is important for you to embrace nutrition in your club to retain members and turn a profit.
New Trends
Nutrition has become a major focus for your members – it affects about 60 to 80 percent of their fitness goals. “Clubs are beginning to understand how important it is to provide nutrition programs to members,” said John Peters, the market director for Vitabot, a company that offers online meal planning for clubs. Peters’ company has found a new trend in club nutrition. In the past, personal trainers had no way to monitor what their clients were eating. “They would have to come in with printouts detailing their nutrition,” said Chris Geagon, personal trainer and owner of Main Street Fitness in Warren, R.I. “It would take a lot of time and have way too much information.”
“Consumers are getting really smart about what’s in the products they are consuming,” said Dan Young, the president of Performance Food Centers, a company that implements juice bars within clubs. “The only way to compete is to offer the most natural products with no added sugar, additives, artificial ingredients or preservatives. In order to meet the need, clubs should offer a natural line of healthy products and provide continual education. An educated consumer is your best consumer.”
Geagon implemented Vitabot within his new club and has already seen a difference. He used the product prior to its opening to excite people in the community. “They helped me out with everything,” he said. “They helped me put together flyers and posters that would have taken hours on my own.” The member’s personal trainer can log onto the Web site and monitor their clients diet.
“It frees up so much more time,” Geagon said. “I can log on and see what my member was eating, get an analysis and send them a quick e-mail detailing what I saw. It takes all of 30 seconds.” Peters added, “Clubs should implement nutrition by educating their members on its importance and giving them the proper tools to make better choices. Put a nutrition program in place to help with every member’s health and fitness goals.”
How Nutrition Can Improve Your Club
Many club owners are still trying to understand how their club could benefit by incorporating nutrition. In the industry, growth is always a plus. Developing a nutrition plan will help your club grow and catch the eye of the majority of your members.
“We tie our nutrition into our personal training programs and really stress to the members that 80 percent of their results could come from following the program correctly,” said John Voskamp, the Minnesota regional vice president of Titan Fitness/Gold’s Gym franchisee. “Typically, the ones that choose to follow the program end up with a great testimonial. Nutrition is always a conversation piece within the clubs. Members are constantly asking about diets they read about, new supplements on the market and general questions about calories, fat, protein, etc. It’s a great way for the staff to interact with members and a great chance for staff to direct more difficult questions to a trainer.”
“Anything that drives interaction between staff and members is positive,” explained Jeff Quammen, the director of corporate programs for Urban Active in Lexington, Ky. “By offering different products and different opportunities, you’re always going to have questions. Most of our questions are about the ingredients.”
According to Andrew Lippman, the vice president of marketing for EverNutrition, the most important thing for a club is to keep members happy. “They keep coming back if they feel they are getting proper advice and counseling about nutrition that will enhance their workouts,” he said. “If they can find what they need in the club to practice proper nutrition, they will keep coming back.”
If you decided not to implement nutrition within your club, your members could be missing a critical portion of the fitness experience. “As people become more fit, they become more concerned with health,” said Shawn Stewart, the operations manager for Gainesville Health and Fitness. “When they become more concerned with their health, they eventually want to know if they are eating correctly. Most people will seek nutritional advice anyways.” If a club doesn’t have nutritional guidance it could lose potentially life-long members that have been searching for nutritional advice.
Nutrition Turns to Profit
The profit you turn with your juice bar or café is going to be related to your member workouts. The nutrition in your club will stay an untapped resource if your members don’t know about the benefits, or if they don’t incorporate them into their workout.
Try helping members realize the necessity of nutrition in their workouts. Get personal trainers to push protein shakes or snacks following member workouts. “Nutrition is 80 percent of the battle and is often the missing ingredient in most health clubs,” Young said. “Members join a health club to get healthy and are looking for answers as to what they should eat. Revenues are going to be directly related to your workouts per day and your penetration level. Other offerings should include energy bars, snacks and shakes. However, the largest untapped resource is probably the retail vitamin and supplement market. Many clubs are just beginning to realize that the same people that are counting on them for guidance through their workouts are going down the street to pick up their vitamins and protein. That’s money walking out the door!”
“The average club member pays between $30 and $35 for a membership,” Lippman said. “In addition to that, if a club can make $3 extra per guest, per week, on nutrition, that can add up pretty quick. That can be an extra $1,000 a week for a club.”
Voskamp said he shoots for a dollar per workout in his clubs. “We try to maintain at least a 20 percent margin on all ancillary products,” he explained. “The juice bars definitely help with this. They have a high margin and low shrink.” Peters added, “Depending on their marketing scheme, clubs should be able to drive 10 to 15 percent more revenue. Offering nutrition solutions is a great opportunity for clubs to capitalize and make money off members.” Marketing could be the key to success behind your profit margins. “Include a 14 day nutrition program trial that you can send to human resource directors at local businesses,” Peters said. “Offer a two week guest pass to all their employees.” Geagon, who just opened his club, said he used a nutritional marketing scheme prior to his club opening. “I sent out an e-mail with a flyer attached to the HR director at a company down the street,” Geagon said. “I heard back from her within 30 minutes asking when I could come down and bring more information. Within three days, before I even made it down to the company, three of their employees had already called and signed up for my nutrition program.”
How It’s Done
There are a few ways clubs have developed nutrition programs over the years. Clubs like Gainesville Health and Fitness Centers have a nutritionist on site for additional dietary counseling, along with their online nutritional programming. “GHFC has weight loss coaches, various free seminars, along with personal training/weight loss programs combined with small group personal training and weight loss programs,” Stewart said. “I feel that both the group and individual weight loss programs are important in health clubs. Everyone is motivated in different ways.”
Not every fitness club has been designed to incorporate such a wide variety of nutrition options. Geagon said online meal planning has completely changed his abilities as a personal trainer and has helped him better understand his members. Quammen and Urban Active have a mildly different approach. They incorporate their juice bars within the front desk so they can cross train employees. With their system, they have more people in the club that know about nutrition who can assist members.
“Training on the front end is key for us,” Quammen said. “Ongoing training so that they know what is in the product helps them answer questions to satisfy the members. Providing the employee with information gives them a good basis to fall back on. You always have staff coming and going, so training is ongoing. The longer they deal with the members, the better they are going to get.”
Having employees constantly push nutrition keeps members thinking in the right direction. However, sometimes the regular employees don’t have as great of an affect on the member. Stewart said a lot of their personal training clients eventually move into a nutrition program. “When a member seeking to lose weight speaks with a sales counselor, the sales counselor will usually sell them a package of both personal training and weight loss,” he said. Stewart and GHFC have done a great job of combining nutrition and workout throughout their club to keep members focused and headed for the overall goal.
Fortunately, health and fitness goals are ongoing. People will hit their goals and maintain results if they stick with their workout and follow a healthy nutrition program. If nutrition is marketed properly to the members as a necessity to them reaching their goals, they will continue to purchase your nutrition products and services. It should be every club’s goal to educate all members on the importance of healthy nutrition. Once they implement your system and see the results, retaining and gaining members should be a piece of cake. -CS
Why Nutrition is Necessary:
- REMEMBER, members are going to want information about nutrition when they hear about fitness results. If your club doesn’t provide them with nutritional solutions, they will get it somewhere else.
- PROFIT can be made if members are having successful workouts and implementing good nutrition. Use PT sessions to get people on the right nutrition track.
- RETENTION will always be the idea of the game. Keep members motivated and on track through a combination of exercise and proper nutrition. They will stay plugged in because you showed them the way.
- GROWTH should be inevitable. Without nutritional guidance in your club, you probably aren’t going to grow. Clearly, it has moved to the forefront and you don’t want to get left behind.
- RESEARCH different possibilities for implementing nutrition. Each club has a different demographic which means it must use a different nutritional plan. Find the one that works best for your club and start pushing it to members.
Interview by Tyler Montgomery
This is in response to the article on Profitable Nutrition. Having a “nutritionist on site” was only mentioned once in the whole article. To think that clubs can offer viable nutritional services without a registered dietitian is surprising to me. Purchasing prepacked meal planning software does nothing for individualized nutrition counseling that people really need to be successful. Offering high calorie smoothies also does nothing for nutrition education that is so obviously lacking in most health clubs. You hire trained professionals for personal training, why not promote hiring trained professional such as registered dietitians for nutritional counseling? Nutrition affects all fitness goals. Why not treat it professionally and ethically by offering nutriiton at health clubs by nutrition experts?
Thank you.