Shuttered gyms & dumbbell price gouging: COVID-19 is threatening the Peninsula’s diverse fitness scene
By: Kate Bradshaw
Tags: Bay Area, Fitness Tips, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Small Business

Up until now, the Peninsula’s fitness scene has offered a diverse ecosystem of gyms, studios and personal trainers who collectively showcase as many ways to exercise as one can imagine — from Olympic weightlifting to dance classes.

But these businesses — especially the small, locally-owned ones, already facing steep rent costs by nature of being located in the Bay Area — are now coming to terms with an uncertain future, threatened by the coronavirus and the tight restrictions that could keep them from opening in person for some time. It’s still not clear when or how these locations will be allowed to reopen, and even once they do, whether they’ll find enough willing customers to make up for months of revenue lost during the shutdown.

Many are adapting rapidly, pivoting to new delivery models, or shifting the uses of their spaces entirely.

For instance, some local YMCA chapters, like the YMCA of Silicon Valley location in Mountain View, across the street from El Camino Hospital, have repurposed their physical locations to become child care centers for children of health care workers.

Kids participate in socially-distanced day camps at the YMCA of Silicon Valley location in Mountain View while their parents work at El Camino Hospital across the street. (Photo by Magali Gauthier.)

Many have switched to offering pre-recorded or live-streamed video classes. Some are free; others require a fee.

Fantasy Dance Studio, based in Mountain View, has switched to offering live-streamed classes via Zoom to its roughly 100 dance students from ages 3 to adult, according to Sarah Monreal, who teaches hip hop, jazz, contemporary dance and ballet there. The studio switched to online classes almost immediately when the shelter-in-place orders took effect and is running classes as close to normal as possible, maintaining the same schedule and expecting students to dress and prepare for each class as they would in-person.

Monreal said they’ve kept about 95% of their students; in part by providing discounts to all students for April and May and offering scholarships to students whose parents have lost their jobs. Looking to the future, they’re devising plans for how to keep students safe when they’re allowed to meet again. For instance, students will likely have to undergo temperature checks.

Another way they’ve kept students busy is by developing challenges for them to participate in, like this Mother’s Day Dance Competition, where mother-daughter teams were invited to submit videos of choreographed routines to Meghan Trainor’s “Mom.”

Switching to Zoom classes enables workouts to still be interactive, but it’s still not the same as having in-person classes, some say.

“There’s nothing that really replaces authentic human connections,” said Erin Paruszewski, owner of Alkalign Studios, located in Menlo Park and Los Altos, who was quick to pivot to online classes. Still, there are a lot of unknowns about how long people will be willing to pay for live-streamed classes when they can’t go in person.

“I think right now people are being supportive and patient,” she said. “We worry about how long that will last.”

The incomes of their clients have been impacted by COVID-19 too, she added.

Josh Courage is one small gym owner who said his timing was good — for getting out of the gym business. Before the pandemic struck, he and his family were planning a cross-country move and he was in the process of selling his Belmont-based gym, where he specializes in Olympic weight lifting training.

When the pandemic hit, he decided to instead shutter the gym completely, and has since taken his training knowledge online, where he offers members five customized workouts per week based on a monthly subscription model. The workouts are provided through an app, and the model has tiers based on how much workout equipment the subscriber has access to at home.

Tier 1 is for people who don’t have any extra gear and limited space; it seems to be working well for his clients living in small New York City apartments right now, he said. Tier 3 is for people who have access to a full suite of gym equipment. Prices range from $35 to $50 per month.

“The future of fitness is at home,” he said in an interview. “People will quickly realize you can get a great workout at our house if you have the space.”

Manufacturers of home workout equipment are backlogged; dumbbells are now the latest hot item undergoing price-gouging, he added.

“It’s interesting to watch how the fitness industry has transitioned into this,” he said. While some gyms have pivoted to online live-streamed classes, he predicted that enthusiasm for those would wane over time.

He also was skeptical that people will rush back to gyms at the rate they would need to for business owners to make up for their losses over the past few months.

If he were still in business, he said, “Yeah, I’d be very scared — and not 100% confident that after all this I’d be able to market aggressively enough to bring in the (money for the) extra rent I’d have to be paying.”