The Bannatyne Group, which has its headquarters in Darlington, has upgraded the equipment and carried out renovations to refresh its offering at its Ingleby Barwick, Darlington, Durham, Chester le Street, and Coulby Newham health clubs.
The refurbishments are part of the Bannatyne Group’s continued investment in its health clubs throughout the UK to provide members with state-of-the-art exercise machines, with a focus on the installation of smartphone-enabled interactive equipment which allows members to monitor their results.
To help members easily keep track of all their biometrics, exercise regimens and fitness achievements, Bannatyne has developed an app which, along with facilitating class bookings, stores metrics from Technogym SKILLMILLs and Wattbike consoles in one place. This allows users to constantly observe their workout parameters during and after exercising so that they can adjust their regimens accordingly to maximise results. Members can even link in with other applications, such as, mapmyfitness and runkeeper.
The Bannatyne Group has capitalised on the increasing numbers of people signing up to health clubs with friends and family by introducing Technogym’s Omnia and Queenax rigs, which transform gym-going into an inclusive group activity.
Techogym rigs are a new functional training system that are designed to maximise members’ interaction by allowing multiple gym-goers to use the equipment at the same time. It covers all aspects of training including strength, endurance, stability, flexibility, coordination and speed.
In addition, all of the North East clubs have had upgraded cardiovascular and resistance equipment installed, as well as expanded free weight sections, which now contain ergonomically-designed weight bars and dumbbells.
The improvement programme went a step further at the Durham health club, where a new Bannatyne Spa was created last year, with five treatment rooms; three of which are individual treatment rooms and two dual treatment rooms, which enables users to share their relaxation with friends or family.
Four of the Durham club’s squash courts have also been refurbished to bring them up to County standard to allow members and the club’s squash teams, one of which recently became champions of the Durham & Cleveland Squash Rackets Association Division One, to practice in an official match-standard setting.
A brand new spin studio, fully equipped with the latest Les Mills Virtual RPM Technology was also added. RPM is a high-intensity, but fun, cycling workout with virtual instructors putting members through their paces.
Colin MacGillivray, Regional Manager for the Bannatyne Group in the North East, said: “We’re extremely pleased with the results of the refurbishments at our North East health clubs. All of the equipment is top of the range and will help our members achieve their fitness, health and wellbeing goals more effectively.
“We’ve also increased the variety of classes available to members, including virtual classes and Chico’s Block Fit class, which combines elements of dance, high intensity training, combat and yoga into a single fitness class.
“It will be interesting to see how our members will use the results monitoring equipment in conjunction with the new functional training area. Functional training, which focusses on training movement patterns rather than isolating individual muscle groups, is the way that the industry is heading and we’re right at the cutting edge, enabling members to incorporate technology into their exercise programme to achieve the best possible results.”