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The steps we’re taking to ensure your safety when you return to the gym and to sport

3 min read

As we approach the day we can reopen our gates at Langstone on 29 March and our doors at St. Paul’s Gym on 12 April, we thought we’d explain our plans a bit more. We still need to play our part to keep COVID at bay and ensure we can continue to enjoy physical activity and sport in a safe environment. Contrary to belief, nationally gym environments have been extremely low in the transmission of COVID and ours has been no different. Much of this is down to the increased levels of cleaning, social distancing, one-way systems as well as wearing a face covering while moving around facilities.

We wanted to be clear about what we’re doing in each facility to ensure your safety is paramount when in facilities. As such we are following a number of guidelines and advice to ensure we haven’t missed anything. First up, we follow government guidelines to ensure we’re allowed to legally open, secondly, we follow the University advice to ensure the safety of the whole campus, thirdly we follow ukactive guidelines to ensure industry-wide we’re playing our part and finally, we follow each sports National Governing Body guidelines to get people playing sport safely.

With Langstone Sports Site re-opening in the coming weeks, we can’t wait to get you back playing sport. If you’re using Langstone, please make sure you’re following our site guidelines, NGB guidelines and cleaning your own equipment regularly. We’re there to ensure everyone’s safety on-site. To help us out please ensure you’re wearing a mask when not playing and using the one-way system.

Daniela Fichera, Health and Safety Coordinator

Cleaning our facilities:

Our facilities and equipment are cleaned regularly to ensure your safety. We’ll deep clean our facilities before we re-open our doors. Our cleaning spray that is available to you on the gym floor is the same that we use as staff to clean. The all-purpose sanitiser concentrate is safer for your use as well as safer for the environment than most traditional disinfectants. It’s approved to be effective against coronavirus (e.g. COVID-19, SARS, MERS) and highly effective in killing EN14476, EN1276, EN13697, EN13623, and EN1650.

Additionally, we use disinfectant wipes approved to EN1276. Both products are 99.9% effective in killing viruses and bacteria and recommended and used university-wide.

How often do we clean?

Our cleaning company clean the whole facility daily with the exception of gym equipment and mirrors. They focus on touchpoints including doors handles, touch plates and handrails. Throughout the day they revisit to ensure these are regularly cleaned.

Each morning our staff deep clean equipment - ready for your use when we open the doors and then spot clean hourly until we close. We do encourage you to clean the equipment you’ve been on as an extra precaution.

The products we’ve highlighted are used daily for the deep cleans and hourly for the spot cleans. We’ve also placed plenty of cleaning materials around the facility to enable you to clean equipment before and after you use any piece of kit. Our cleaning protocols are ukactive and government approved and we strive to go above the recommended times.

Extra precautions

To ensure we’re really thorough, we also use Ultra Low Volume fogging to clean every 28 days, this lasts for 30 days. This technique uses large volumes of air at low pressure to transform fluid into droplets which get dispersed into the atmosphere. By producing micro droplets that float in the air for roughly 10 minutes after application, these droplets clean even those inaccessible areas regular cleaning can’t reach helping to stop the spread of infection. The great thing about fogging is that you can clean over the top of this without reducing its effectiveness.

What do we ask of you?

  • To help keep everyone safe while using our facilities, we ask you to do the following:
  • Use the NHS track and trace app - signing in to Langstone Sports Site or St. Paul’s Gym upon arrival.
  • Wear a face covering at all times at Langstone when not playing or training.
  • Wear a face covering at St. Paul’s on entry, in reception, in changing areas, corridors, break out areas and when leaving. Basically, when you’re not exercising.
  • Sanitise your hands when entering our facilities and throughout your stay - including Langstone.
  • Follow the one-way system at all facilities.
  • Clean down gym equipment after use ready for the next person (and before if you want to be extra cautious).
  • Check room capacity on gym floors and if at capacity wait until one person leaves before entering.
  • If you have any concerns, please come and find us at reception.