Fitandhappy, a women’s fitness business, was happily providing boot camps and personal training in and around Edinburgh until lockdown was enforced.
Head coach and founder, Julia McCabe, moved the business online and developed new courses to help people develop healthy habits.
Working into the night, she replicated the boot camps on Zoom. Julia said ‘it was important for me to keep the community feel. We were operating in 5 different parks before the lockdown and so it seemed the right thing to do to replicate the parks virtually.’
With the boot camps set up, Julia had to adapt her personal training to working with people over Zoom. ‘This was surprisingly straight forward and it works really well for our clients. We miss seeing them face to face but it’s been fantastic to continue to provide our women with the support they need.
When things were running smoothly, Julia began to think differently about her business. ‘We’ve started an online group coaching programme called Healthy Habits Made Easy. It teaches women the skills of behaviour change and creating habits that stick’ she said. ‘The lockdown has made people more familiar with technology and more comfortable in using it. This has greatly aided our ability to sell courses over the web.’ The groups are kept small, less than 10 per course, so Julia can still give the personal touch and get everyone together twice a week for coaching.
Despite all the work online she is dying to get back outside. ‘I started this business so that I work with people in the fresh air. Yes, we have used the lockdown time to develop our online offering, and we anticipate that this will be a big part of our business going forward, however, I really can’t wait until I can get back out on my bike and meet people again outside.’
