OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
seen as a safe option. Now the gym has taken off again and casual swimming is back to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, lane swimming is consistent with last year: around 75 per cent of our fitness members use the pool and still see swimming as an important part of their weekly fitness regime. But alongside swimming lessons, the main area that’s being squeezed is family swimming. Families are still coming to our centres, but they aren’t always using the pool. They’re enjoying other aspects of our offering: soft play, family badminton, TAGactive… Overall footfall remains high, but with a drop-off in family swimming. All of this is broadly in line with the findings of Sport England’s Moving Communities survey from October 2024. In its report, Sport England observes that although “swimming still represents the most quoted main activity”, people’s “activity mix has changed gradually over the last four years, with swimming decreasing and fitness and group exercise increasing”. In 2021, swimming was the main activity for 44 per cent of Moving Communities respondents. This had dropped to 34 per cent by 2024, while fitness classes and the gym rose from 23 and 25 per cent respectively to both reach 30 per cent in 2024. [See graph below.]
Are there any growth areas in your pools? Our swim participation is strong overall, but the senior market is a particularly important area of growth. In the 12 months to 31 March 2025, we delivered 804,000 senior swims, mostly for individuals aged 60+. Swimming is a wonderful, low-impact form of exercise that offers great health and wellbeing benefits and this number continues to grow steadily.
JACQUI TILLMAN & IAN COTTON
We’re still teaching 180,000 children to swim each week – higher than pre-pandemic and realistically a return to a more normal pattern
Swimming has currently hit a plateau, so we must explore new opportunities for growth, say Everyone Active’s aquatics experts
Sport England Moving Communities (Oct 2024) – main activity participated in
What are the headlines from Everyone Active? We’ve definitely seen swimming plateau over the last 12 months and from discussions with Swim England, it seems many other operators are experiencing similar. If you look at swimming lessons in particular, there was a huge boom post-pandemic. The children who hadn’t had an opportunity to learn during lockdown all came into the system in 2021 in one huge influx. At Everyone Active, the typical length of stay in our learn-to-swim programme is three-and-a-half to four years per swimmer, so that swell in demand has now worked its way through the pipeline and these children are now coming out the other end, again all pretty much at the same time.
It isn’t that people don’t want swimming lessons any more: we’re still teaching 180,000 children each week, which is higher than pre-pandemic and realistically a return to a more normal pattern. It’s just that it’s down from around 186,000 post-lockdown – a period in which we got used to steady growth every month. Faced with a more significant drop-off than we had been expecting, it’s now back to the drawing board to find new ways to keep growing. We’ll have to work that little bit harder. We’re seeing a plateauing in other areas, too. Swimming was people’s go-to after the pandemic; whether it was the chlorine or the ability to social distance, it was widely
34%
39%
Swimming
42%
44%
30%
28%
Fitness classes
24%
23%
30%
28%
Gym
27%
25%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
2024
2023
2022
2021
70
71
STATE OF THE UK FITNESS INDUSTRY REPORT 2023 STATE OF THE UK SWIMMING INDUSTRY REPORT 2025
STATE OF THE UK FITNESS INDUSTRY REPORT 2023
70
71
STATE OF THE UK SWIMMING INDUSTRY REPORT 2025
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker