How the right Gym Insurance can spare you anguish

With the memory of New Year 2019 still fresh, it would be fair to speculate that many people will have now got underway with pursuing their fitness goals. Those people could even include more than a few members of your gym. The UK’s gym scene is evidently booming… According to a report by LeisureDB, the number of gyms nationwide recently surpassed 7,000 for the first time. Furthermore, total membership has neared 10 million for a national penetration rate of 14.9%, meaning that one in every seven UK people holds a gym membership. Even outside your gym, you probably know plenty of people who have started paying more attention to their fitness, perhaps by picking up a Fitbit or Apple Watch or mulling over joining a boot camp. However, it’s crucial that you suitably look after staff and members at your own gym. Failing to do so could hamper your gym’s success – in terms of both its reputation and finances. Here’s an in-depth look at how various facets of gym insurance could help you to meet crucial bases.

The gym scene is financially flourishing – but watch out

There are various routes to taking up employment at a gym. You could, for example, become a personal trainer, receptionist or gym equipment engineer. You could even climb the ladder to become a gym manager – the average salary for that position is £29,000, reports The Sun. However, running a gym comes with many tough responsibilities. In running that gym, you would be running a business – and this can entail keeping on top of piles of paperwork, managing staff and organising stock orders. That’s before we even mention the potentially draining and lengthy hours. Therefore, you can easily imagine how quickly frustration could set in if someone made a successful claim for compensation against your business. That could be an all-too-real possibility, given that your gym could attract many people with high expectations of your ability to ease their fitness efforts.

What core insurances does your gym need?

It could be said that ‘gym insurance’ is not a single product; at Fitness Gold, we offer a vast range of covers under that single banner. Some of these covers are applied automatically, and are important to gyms for similar reasons they are to businesses more generally. Our selection of automatic covers includes, for example, employer’s liability insurance, which is legally required for gyms employing any staff or trainees. If an employee is injured when working for you, and you are found to be at fault, you would be liable to compensate that worker financially. Startups.co.uk highlights the example of a personal trainer who, while training at your gym by which they are employed, is injured and then blames your business. Should you need to pay compensation, employer’s liability could help you to meet much, or perhaps even all, of that expense. Then, there’s public liability insurance. We offer this too, as an automatic cover for gyms – and it is often vital to businesses that make regular contact with members of the public, as gyms clearly do. Unfortunately, a gym is a place where members can be especially vulnerable to picking up injuries. However, the key question is when your gym’s staff would be to blame for those injuries. You shouldn’t expect a gym-goer to readily let one of your personal trainers off the hook if, say, that trainer explains a move too poorly and the gym user consequently falls or drops some equipment. In either situation, the client could be injured and hold the trainer – or more to the point, your gym – responsible. Given that compensation claims can total millions of pounds, you could take much comfort from holding public liability cover, for which we can issue a standard limit up to £5 million.

How can you insure your gym’s equipment?

The answer to this question very much depends on what equipment you want to insure and where exactly it will be. For your gym, you have probably invested in a broad array of expensive equipment, from dumbbells and barbells to sound systems, so you should try to account for all of it. Where is that equipment? If you keep certain items in the gym itself, you could easily assume that they would be safe from fire or theft. However, as you still can’t wholly rule out such risks, it could prove worthwhile to take advantage of the contents cover of our gym insurance product. As we provide this cover on a ‘new for old’ basis, you need to carefully consider how much it would cost to replace your items with entirely new ones. It doesn’t matter if your current supplies were bought second-hand; the ‘as new’ value influences the level of contents cover necessary. You might regularly transport certain pieces of equipment from one location to another. In that instance, you could still insure these items with our ‘goods in transit’ cover. This, too, is applied as standard; it covers damage to any applicable items while they are in transit in a vehicle in the UK. What about business items that are away from the gym but not in transit in the above manner? You can insure those items as well, albeit strictly in the UK and with separate, optional cover for ‘items away from the gym’. Take careful account of the terms and conditions when applying for this cover.

Should you insure the gym building itself, too?

Our optional covers for gyms also include buildings cover – but if you rent your gym’s building, you should ask the landlord whether they have already purchased insurance for it. If so, you could omit buildings cover from your gym insurance policy and save yourself some money as a result. Indeed, the key to the appeal of gym insurance from Fitness Gold is that you can tailor your policy to suit your specific needs and preferences. To get started with requesting a quote, hit the big red ‘Get a Quote’ button on the gym insurance page of our website. We will then guide you through the subsequent steps.