Despite evidence to the contrary (hello Christmas belly!), I have a gym membership. I joined the gym over a year ago now, with a view to lose weight and also improve my physical fitness. While I do like to get out for regular walks (at a pace the wife describes as just slower than sprinting), I otherwise live a fairly sedentary life, especially when I am at work.
When I first started my membership, I was able to attend a couple of times a week. At £25 a month for membership (I know, bargain!) I decided attending at least twice a week would be good value for money, working out at only a couple of quid per session. With babby coming along this year, my attendance rate has dropped significantly, but I still try and get there once a week to pump some iron (and if you believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you…).
Over the Christmas period I had a week and a half off work with bank holidays and annual leave. Obviously, a lot of that time was taken up with festive family fun, but I tried to timetable in some exercise time in between the gorging. This was made more challenging with the reduced festive opening hours, with the gym closed from the 22nd to 26th and 30th to 1st, and reduced opening hours on the days in between. Even outside of the festive period, my gym is open 7am to 9pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm on Saturday and the much reduced 10am to 4pm on Sunday.
While chatting with my mum at one of the aforementioned festive family fun events, she happened to mention a new 24-hour gym is opening up a few minutes' walk from her house. While this particular gym is not open yet, it would be far from the first 24-hour gym to open in the UK. On my drive to the office I pass one such gym, and looking at their website I cannot see any evidence they have changed their opening hours to mark the season (of course they do not have to actually have it on their website, my gym had signs up on the door and posts on social media, but short of actually joining the gym near work to get a definitive answer, I have to assume they remained open 24 hours a day).
When I hear about 24-hour gyms, part of me wonders about who is needing to exercise at 3 in the morning. I appreciate people work shifts (I have done a few myself) but usually those people are working in the early hours and not looking for a gym session, leaving me to assume those with insomnia are the most common attendees.
As I was chatting with my mum and thinking about my own gym, I was also thinking about the staff working there and the impact of extended hours on them and their wellbeing. I assume my gym has relatively modest opening hours and early closing times over the Christmas period for the staff. With only 3 days open between the 21st December and 2nd January, it gives them plenty of time to rest and recuperate themselves. I've written before about my thoughts on public holidays (and the need to have more of them). My gym at least seems to be getting in the spirit of that post and offering plenty of time off for their employees.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there seemed to be a trend for longer and longer opening hours. Not just gyms, but shops, bars and restaurants were all extending hours. I remember taking drives to the local supermarket during my break on night shifts around 2013 to buy snacks at 2am and not having a problem finding a big supermarket open (except of course on Sundays). The inexorable rise to a 24-hour culture seemed unstoppable.
That is, it seems, until the pandemic came along and did a very good job of halting it. Data from the Office of National Statistics suggests fewer people were working nights in 2022 than in 2016 with large supermarkets in particular leading the way out of the 24 hour race (though annoyingly they are using the time not to give employees well needed rest, but to load up online shopping orders instead…). While we might have been told people appreciate the convenience of extended hour shopping (like we are told we want to have extended GP hours etc.), in reality it seems few people were like me completing the 2am snack run. Maybe, just maybe, most people want to be tucked up in bed in the early hours rather than shopping, and while emergency workers and carers will continue to been needed around the clock, I suspect the guys running the gym can probably be allowed to sleep overnight as well. And all of this is without discussing the harmful effects to someone's health of working nights.
It might have been more of a challenge to find time to get to the gym over the Christmas period for me, and when I did get there it was busier than usual, but it seems to me they might just be on the right track with reduced opening hours, and a missed gym session here or there is not going to convince me otherwise.
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