Exercise Adherence 2021
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Your exercise programs need to be a product, they need to be productised. You need to be able to describe your onboarding program as a product, not as a service as it feels much more tangible.
It's much easier to explain and I know when I've worked with operators who've productised their onboarding processes and given it a name, every member of staff is able to explain what goes on.
There's a company that I've worked with across Europe called Aspria, super high-end country club style operator.
They have an onboarding process that has a medical approach,
'the Aspria way'
and it does 3d scanning, it does body impedance. But as a product, it sounds much more tangible than a list of services or measurements they're going to do with the customer.
So think about ways in which you can productise your services.
People talk about exercise adherence and it can be a little bit confusing.
Exercise adherence is the extent to which a customer acts in accordance with the advised interval exercise dose and exercise dosing regime.
Basically, are they sticking to the exercise program as designed?
So if have an onboarding program and you give them an exercise program card, how much of that are they following?
and if you've said do it twice a week,
are they doing it twice a week?
When you look at a lot of exercise adherence studies, one of the challenges is they have almost a level of expectation, but the level of expectation is,
have you achieved the world health guidelines for physical activity?
So have you done 150 minutes of cardiovascular activity?
Have you done the sufficient amount of resistance training?
There's a really famous study that talked about this that I read as part of my PhD literature review and one of the things that popped out for me was, they put people into groups and they said,
we want to see if you can do this,
150 minutes of exercise and there was about 700 people in this study and they'd all entered the study as non-exercisers.
Towards the end of the study or when they reported the study, they said, about a third of people had achieved the 150 minutes of exercise per week for the 6 to 12 week period they were recommending.
The rest of them had failed.
When you read the actual data, the people who didn't achieve it, had on average added 80 to 100 minutes of exercise to their week from a zero start point.
But they were considered failures because they hadn't achieved the world health organisation goal.
For me, when I talk about trying to build up exercise adherence, I would think about designing programs that people can actually achieve fairly quickly and also complete and they might build up to those world health organization goals.
But they may not need to start there.
So you could set things a little bit easier.
Things you want to do with excise adherence,
1.First manage expectations.
Manage the expectations of what the likelihood of completing three or four workouts a week is likely to be.
I've shown you data early on that it's only 10% of regular customers that do three times a week.
2.Build a routine.
3.Work with someone, we do know people who exercise together tend to exercise more frequently.
So have a training partner if that's feasible.
4.Stick to what you like, not what's fashionable.
5. Help customers build confidence and competence in their skills and build in variety over time.
We don't need to keep adding variety for new exercisers that frequently. You could add a bit of variety every four weeks, not every week something new.
6.Set goals on achievement but don't set them too high. Personally, I'd rather set a goal that someone achieved too easily, than something that was too hard and they failed.
But there's a fine line there between so easy that it's inconsequential and too hard that they would never achieve it. It needs to be a bit of a stretch, but if they've never done anything, just coming to the club twice a week is going to be a bit of a stretch.
7.Set some smart goals, but obviously sets what I call superordinate goals. These are the motivators and drivers of behaviour, but make sure your staff understand this.
You increase visit frequency before you increase the time of the workout. Once you've increased the time of the workout, you increase the complexity of the workout
and once you've increased the complexity of the workout, you increase the intensity of the workout.
You don't push intensity first,
you push frequency,
time,
complexity,
then intensity,
if you want people to stick to programs, otherwise they get uncomfortable physically too uncomfortable, too quickly and don't stick with the program.
