how many classes a week should a gym that has 150 members offer?
Hi 🙂
A couple of things to add to above …
– 150 club membership seems barely viable even if you’re charging a high membership fee.
– Classes don’t usually attract members. They are a service to keep your existing members active.
– Two types of group fitness instructors – those that have other jobs & Personal Trainers. Personal Trainers teach for passion but also to promote themselves & gain clients for their personal training business.
– For startups or small facilities, instructors that pay their bills by other means are a good thing. Not so focused on numbers attending so will usually stick around long enough to get attendance up.
– If classes are not included in membership I’d run a survey on what members want then run 1 – 2 as prepaid small group fitness over 6 weeks. You should be able to fill a group of 6 – 8 members off 150.
– small group fitness is a great way to bring contractors into your business. This adds extra skills & means you’re not paying a wage.
What you don’t want to do is start off with too many classes and have to take them off the schedule. It looks unprofessional and feel like your business isn’t doing well. You want your membership base to always feel like your growing.
Also, have 20 people at the 5:30pm doesn’t mean you need to start adding a bunch of class if you only get 3 at the 6:30pm class. That’s a false impression needing to add more class. There is inefficiency that can be corrected a few ways.
1. Add two coaches to the 5:30pm class. This will fix the problem for a bit but if your in a small studio or have limited equipment logistics is always an issue.
2. Reservation System. Which we follow. It caps our classes. creates more efficiency. Allows us to run reports and see which classes or too big or too small. From there we make decisions on which classes to add next.
Hope that helps!
-Mario
www.warehousegymexpert.com
Do you know what classes your members want? Are these free with membership or is there an additional charge? How many instructors do you have on staff and how many classes do they want to teach a week? Can you pay for the insturctors to teach that many classes? Will teaching more classes be worthwhile for your members and you?
Those are some of the questions that I would ask myself if I were considering your question.
I agree with the above answers that it depends on the type of clients who are at your club already, plus the type of clients you want to attract. Since you have a small club, you could always poll them to see how they currently use the gym, whether they’d actually attend classes and what types of classes they’d like.
Some places are cardio driven, i.e. Brick House Cardio club that is all classes and virtually no machines. Other places like Planet Fitness have no classes at all.//