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- Confinement - Your home can be a gym
The training at home, the virtual breath of the monitor, the broomstick and the carafes as a bar are over. In phase 2 you can go to the gym , although the 30% capacity reduction and strict sanitary measures make the routine so different that many centers have chosen to continue with the blind lowered until mid-June. You sweat in two square meters, with a mask and hand sanitizer . But there are those who can no longer wait, and that socialization in these spaces remains in quarantine. Companies either.
According to the National Federation of Entrepreneurs of Sports Facilities and Gyms (FNEID), more than 5.5 million people exercise in the more than 4,700 sports centers and gyms, and the billing difference compared to all of 2019 is estimated at 1,000 million.
With the membership fee paid, the first concern is to contact the center, especially in those belonging to chains that usually have high enrollments. Collapsed phones, applications for the appointment that were not responding ... quite a challenge for which they had been preparing since the start of the de-escalation. In some, there were more cleaning staff than monitors , because group classes are still prohibited and the use of changing rooms is only allowed if they are disinfected after each use.
The big question was whether the client would be afraid of contagion. "I feel safer here than in a bar . " Alexandra tells it while she takes off the sweaty mask and passes a cloth with disinfectant through the weights with which she has just trained. Today he goes back to work and before he went to the training box to do his crossfit session.
"The protocol is clear"
To the ropes, the dumbbells and the hoops of this semi-industrial-looking environment have been added the two-square-meter grids where Alexandra and her colleagues have to train. "I think the protocol here is much clearer than in stores or restaurants. It is comfortable, you even forget that you are wearing a mask, although at first it is strange."
She has been training at FullCrossfit since October and, although she remained active following the classes proposed through social networks, she wanted to return. "It was getting a little heavy not having contact with the coach," he says.
"In crossfit it is common to clash hands when we achieve something, move freely throughout the space, community is created. But now we know that there are things that have come to stay," admits Abel Herrero , who a while before Alexandra arrived. He had directed a class with a maximum of eight people that this "box" located in the heart of the Valencian neighborhood of Benimaclet allows.
Just out of an ERTE, like the rest of his seven colleagues who also teach in another center in Valencia, and with a branch in Madrid, he has had to prepare the space and "educate" the members . "You have to disinfect your feet when you enter, move in the marked direction, and disinfect all the material they use."
It is up to him to disinfect the floor after each class and two other generals a day that are run by a specialized company. "We don't want to take the slightest risk," he says. Therefore, the only thing that cannot be used are bicycles with air resistance, to avoid the flow that is generated.
Nobody goes to their classes with fear, which have been reduced to 45 minutes, with prior reservation and without the possibility of using the changing rooms . "We all adapt them. For people who came to train before going to work, we have brought the class from seven in the morning to six so that they can go home to shower," he explains.
His normalcy will return as the de-escalation progresses, "but people were already eager to get their routines back a bit." What costs the most, "the mask". "It has to be surgical, which is more adapted. With an FFP2 it would be impossible to bear it," confesses Rubén, who also attended training this morning.
In the gym run by Sergio Rubio, Anytime Fitness Abastos, in Valencia, there is also activity again. "We have installed partitions between the ellipticals and the straps , and we allow the showers because they are cleaned after each client," he explains as he replaces freshly disinfected dumbbells. The important thing was to resume the activity, which will be extended in mid-June, when in phase 3 the group classes of 20 people are allowed without an appointment and the capacity can be 50%.
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