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NEW YORK (AP) -- One day in January, a once-regular customer at Fuel Training Studio in Newburyport, Massachusetts, stopped in to take a "shred" class. She hadn't stepped foot in the gym since before the pandemic.
The customer told owners Julie Bokat and Jeanne Carter that she had been working out at home alone in her basement but had slowly become less motivated and sometimes exercised in pajamas without breaking a sweat.
"I was getting bored of what I was doing, so here I am ," Bokat quoted her as saying. She's heard similar comments from customers who've returned after more than two years of working out in a basement or a converted home office.
During the "dark days" of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Bokat and Carter moved equipment outdoors to hold classes in parking lots and a greenhouse they built for the winter. They also held classes online, but attendance still plummeted by 70%. They weren't certain the business would survive.
They weren't alone. Gyms and fitness studios were among the hardest hit businesses during the pandemic, hammered by lockdowns and then limits on the number of people they could allow in for classes and workouts. Unlike bars, restaurants and live venues, there was no industry-specific federal aid given to health clubs. Twenty-five percent of U.S. health clubs and studios have closed permanently since the pandemic began, according to the National Health & Fitness Alliance, an industry group.
For gyms that made it through the worst, signs of stability are afoot. Foot traffic in fitness studios rose about 32% for the first two weeks of January 2023, compared with 2022, according to the most recent data from Placer.ai, which tracks retail foot traffic.
At Fuel Training, the greenhouse is gone, as are the parking lot spin classes. Attendance is still down about 35% from 2019, but Bokat and Carter say more people are coming in every day. The gym-goers say they miss the sense of community a gym can provide.
"I feel pretty positive that man, if we sustained our community during like the darkest of days, it can only go up from there, and it has," Bokat said.
Many gyms and fitness studios had to quickly diversify their offerings in order to attract customers during the pandemic - and some say those changes worked so well, they're permanent.
Guy Codio, who owns the NYC Personal Training Gym in New York, went from nine to four trainers during the pandemic and had to pivot to online training sessions. In 2021, he moved to a different space with lower rent and started renting out space to others in the health and wellness industry including physical therapists and massage therapists.
"Everybody was worried during COVID, so we just need to downgrade a little bit," he said. "We had to change the model in order for us to succeed — almost take a step back, to take another step forward."
Now, he's back to six trainers, but plans to keep the new business model renting out space to hedge his bets in case of another downturn.
In his new space, Codio limits people on the floor to 10 or 12 so customers feel more comfortable COVID-wise. But most customers he sees are "over COVID," and not as worried about getting sick as they used to be, he says.
"If a person is feeling worried there are measures we take, we do have masks or we have them in during different hours when there's less amount of people," he said.