Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Your Gym - a seething hotbed of fear and resentment?

Sports Science is apparently the 10th most popular choice of University course for British Students, with just over 2% of all students enrolling in theses courses. Essentially this means 1 in 50 people educated to degree level in the UK are qualified to manage a gym or sports centre.

As 20% of all people in the UK have a degree, this then means that one person in every 250 in the UK population is qualified to manage a sports centre.

However, only 7% of the UK population are members of a gym . Or 17 out of every 250.

Gym staff-member ratios are around 200-1, so there are clearly not enough jobs to go round - by a long way.

Assuming that anyone who was dedicated enough to do Sports Science to degree level will certainly be a member of a gym after they graduate, 1 in 17 people using your gym are also going to be qualified to manage it.

Take away the near-50% of people who join, go for the first 2-3 months and then slack off, and suddenly around 1 in 8 people pedalling away on an exercise bike near you are also qualified gym managers - unable to get one of the handfuls of jobs actually working in the gym itself.

All across the country legions of unemployed Sports Science graduates are sat right now pedalling away, giving the evil eye to the handful of staff fortunate enough to actually get jobs in the gym, and plotting ways to kill, kidnap or generally sabotage the genuine instructors and managers, all the while bitterly muttering under their breath "I could do your job far better..."

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