Check around your club. Do you know where your AED is? Is there appropriate signage for emergency exits and fire extinguishers? Do you have an appropriate emergency response policy in place?

Now check your staff's professional background, especially personal trainers and fitness instructors. Do they have three or more years' experience? Do they have proper certification? How about your members? Have they filled out a health history questionnaire? If not, have they signed a waiver?

Chances are, most club operators already can answer “yes” to these questions. However, club operators who cannot answer “yes” to all these questions may need to make some changes to their operating procedures if the club certification standards being developed are passed and become common in the industry.

Currently, the club industry is in the process of creating a standard for a voluntary certification that some people see as crucial to establishing the legitimacy of the industry. The goal of the standard, some in the industry say, is to help make fitness clubs a more respected resource in the eyes of the public. Doctors would be more comfortable sending their patients to a certified health club for post rehabilitation or simply to lose weight, for example. The same comfort level would apply to insurance providers.

NSF International, Ann Arbor, MI, a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization, is coordinating the development of the standard that ensures balanced input from public health officials, consumer representatives and industry leaders. Others represented in the development of the standard include manufacturers, trade associations, regulators, program administrators, retailers and other stakeholders from the health and fitness community.

NSF Draft Standard 341: Health/Fitness Facilities is the official title of the certification standard. Health/fitness facilities are defined in the draft as commercial (for-profit), community (not for profit), corporate and clinical (medical fitness) facilities. The American College of Sports Medicine's (ACSM) Health/Fitness Facility Standards and Guidelines, Third Edition, was used as the basis for NSF Draft Standard 341. (For requirement categories, see the sidebar on page 36.)

The people on the joint committee who voted on the standard, which currently is in its 13th revision, represent a who's who of organizations in the industry. The International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA), the American Council on Exercise (ACE) and ACSM are just a few of the industry bodies who are helping to develop this standard.

SETTING THE STANDARD

IHRSA says its participation in the process is guided by five principles. Facility certification standards must be practical and should reflect current responsible industry practices, grow the health club industry by increasing consumer confidence in the safety of accredited facilities, attract positive attention from the medical community with an increase in the number of patient referrals to health clubs, and attract positive attention from employers, insurance companies and other potential third-party payers, according to IHRSA.

Thomas Richards, IHRSA's senior manager of public policy and a member of the joint committee, voted against the draft of the standard last fall.

“Generally, the draft did not align with our guiding principles,” Richards says. “We are still hopeful that a reasonable standard will be created that can be embraced by the industry.”

Others who voted against the standard, such as Geoff Dyer, founder of Lifestyle Family Fitness, St. Petersburg, FL, also are not necessarily against standards. They simply have issues with some of the language in the draft of the standard. Dyer says the ultimate objective of the standard is for clubs to operate in a safe manner.

“I think it's the right move for the industry to establish standards for clubs to abide by,” Dyer says. “Setting rules is easy. Getting clubs to abide by those rules is more of a challenge. We have a cottage industry, and you've got to take into account that a lot of the independent club owners need to be able to comply with the overall standards so it's fair for everyone.”

David Herbert, an Ohio attorney who has written extensively on negligence and risk management in the club industry, is a non-voting member of the committee. Herbert is against the current draft of the standard.

One of Herbert's main problems with the standard is the definition of acceptable accrediting organizations for personal trainer certifying companies. The NSF definition lists the National Commission of Certifying Agencies (NCCA) as the agency to provide third-party approval for certifying agencies. Herbert says the definition also should include the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, both of which IHRSA included in addition to the NCCA in its recommendation about certification companies for personal trainers. IHRSA made recommendations similar to Herbert's in its comments to NSF regarding acceptable accrediting organizations for both personal trainers and fitness instructors.

“The industry has done an awful lot since 2005 to comply with IHRSA's recommendation,” Herbert says. “At this point, to take those five years and throw them out the window, when all of these organizations have gone through accreditation in one fashion or another, would be contrary to what IHRSA recommended a long time ago.”

Graham Melstrand, vice president of operations for ACE, voted for the standard. Melstrand says the standard could be beneficial not just for members but for the referring community — physical therapists, physicians and dieticians, to name a few.

This type of standard has been a goal of physical educators and exercise science professionals for at least 30 years, he says.

“There's a reason, I believe, that our participation and our influences in the industry are so low, and that's because no standard currently exists,” Melstrand says. “What we hear about and what makes the news are the worst practices, and those are the ones that people tend to focus in on.”

The purpose of the certification from a pragmatic standpoint, Melstrand says, is to enhance business and make the industry more attractive to a larger percentage of the population. The certification cannot be used solely as a marketing piece, Melstrand adds.

“We have to have substantive change to earn the confidence of the medical professionals,” he says. “One of the goals of this is to have a standard to say, ‘We've met this standard. We've met this certification. And that should give you some confidence in our people, in our staff, in our facility.’ If the bar isn't set at a reasonable level, there's really no point to it.”

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