Our training facility isn’t open all day. This is a choice I made since Day 1. And I credit my former employers The Quad in shaping this choice. 

We are open for what I call peak demand hours. Much like pubs and restaurants, we are open for business for a few hours in the morning, an hour in the afternoon and a couple of hours in the evening. We choose to not to remain open all-day. 

This choice is based on a few factors:

1. Majority of our clients will to choose to train either in the morning or evening. A few show up in our packed 11 am batch. It makes no sense to me to have our facility open all day to have a few folks amble in at 10.10 am etc or 2 in the afternoon.

2. Coaching is a mentally intensive endeavour. I would rather me and the other coaches concentrate our efforts in three quality hours of coaching rather than diffuse our focus across several hours through the day. 

3. Work gets done. There’s a tempo to the training hour. Having a fixed number of people show and train in a planned manner over the hour gets a lot of work done systematically. 

4. Communities get built when people train together. 

5. Carefully planned work and rest. No time wasted. Lots of rapport built. 

6. No-one works in our gym unsupervised. For many reasons including safety, our love of equipment and ensuring people get work done well, we choose to not have unsupervised sessions in our gym.

7. Having people commit to show up at a specific time and for an hour improves adherence.

Takeaway 

There is a chunk of the day when the gym is unutilised. Some argue that is suboptimal use. I argue that the gym exists for the coaches to deliver the coaching service. 

Framing it this way changes how we view our job: we get paid to coach, not to sell memberships to use equipment.