Guide to Offering Recovery as a Service
Recovery: return to a normal or healthy condition involving areas; musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, restoration of energy, and mental/psychological.
According to NASM, Recovery from training is becoming recognized as one of the most important aspects of physical activity and overall wellness.
Further, the American Council on Exercise says “post-exercise recovery is a vital component of the overall exercise training paradigm, and essential for high-level performance and continued improvement.
Scientists, doctors, trainers, and fitness professionals have long understood that recovery is a critical phase of the exercise-adaptation cycle. Your muscles don't actually grow while you are working out; they grow while resting in between sessions. Working out, creates micro-tears in your muscles and when those micro-tears heal, your muscles grow. If you don't give them adequate time to heal, you’re literally sabotaging your fitness/wellness regimen.
Beyond the exercise cycle benefits, recovery reduces toxins, increases flexibility, enhances mood, reduces inflammation, decreases soreness, increases blood flow, improves sleep, reduces stress… the list of health benefits is quite impressive. According to IDEA Health and Fitness Association, a well-designed fitness and wellness program also boosts immunity.
With the world’s renewed intensive focus on health, wellness, and stress-reduction in the midst of COVID, the demand and need for recovery has heightened – and rightfully so. Recovery is an essential part of the wellness environment forward.
What Should Your Recovery Offering Look Like?
As with everything, balance is key. Offering a balance of modalities, services and technology that can synergized so that members and clients can “mix things up,” and reap the combined benefits is optimal.
Certainly, restorative yoga and tai chi are strong options. Incorporating devices that enhance and accelerate the recovery process in innovative ways should be another consideration.
How to Program a Recovery Session
When looking to build recovery sessions to be used as a service to monetize, you should begin with considering what clients or members are looking to recover from. Typically, that’s pain and soreness from strength training, a run, etc. It could also be fatigue … maybe the client is looking for a restorative session. These are the two most typical scenarios.
Next, establish a movement pattern sequence to address the issue. Recovery and restoration require an increase in circulation around the area or areas affected. Enhancing circulation brings fresh oxygen and nutrients to the muscles and soft tissue, effectively speeding up recovery – or in other words – easing the soreness and restoring energy. So, the intent here is to establish movement patterns to increase circulation.
Remember, time is of the essence … a recovery session should not be too long. A 15-minute session works great for a client to get in and out and feel refreshed.
Power Plate is a great solution. Vibration therapy enhances circulation quickly and a 15-minute recovery session is extremely effective. One of our popular recovery sessions is programmed like this: Click here for a sample Power Plate recovery session.
Monetizing Recovery as a Service
Start by determining the cost per minute of a Personal Training Session. So, for simplicity let’s say that a 30-minute PT session is $30, therefore the cost per minute is $1.00. Multiply that by 15 minutes (for a 15-minute Recover Session), which gets you to $15. Consider this your minimum price point. You can increase it a bit from there, being careful to make sure you keep it under the cost of your Personal Training cost. In this example, a 15-minute Recovery Session be priced around $20 very successfully.
Using these principles, you can now offer sessions as a stand-alone service, or combine it with membership packages as a benefit to increase the cost/value of that membership package.
For more information on how Power Plate can help with recovery and service options, click here
