Canberra's fitspo identity still intact, but class numbers lag through Omicron

Dan Baker, the owner of Pilates with Dan in Belconnen, said that while his books were full of clients, his classes were still poorly attended.

"We've had no cancellations of any of our memberships," Mr Baker said. "We've got more clients on our books now than we did at the end of last year."

"So things are going OK in terms of overall numbers but people actually turning out to classes is actually a little bit low."

Mr Baker said coming out of the territory's lockdown in October last year hadn't quite garnered a "joyous return", with a slow start blending into Omicron interfering with people's plans to get back into fitness classes.

"As soon as Omicron came, everything kind of disappeared really quick," Mr Baker said.

Gyms and fitness studios have faced harsh restrictions over the last year, shut down throughout the lockdown, they were allowed to open from October 19 with density and capacity limits in place.

Limits on the number of people who could attend classes were not removed until November 26.

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"So January was very rough, we were probably about 40 per cent down [on revenue compared to last year] and for February we're about 20 per cent down."

He said he thought many of his clients, who were parents to young kids, were taking the cautious approach because of apprehension around the return to school.

"Everyone we talked to about this situation is being very cautious about how many activities they do a week and who they're hanging out with," he said.

"There's a lot of people kind of holding their breath a little bit in the first couple of weeks of school to see where where this virus goes."

There is hope moving forwards though, with bookings climbing in March, indicating demand is still there but a "wait and see" attitude is the main obstacle.

The business is still profitable, he said, but falling short of monthly profit margins.

"We had plans of expanding this year but we're going to probably have to put that on the backburner and [start] to build up our war chest again."

For Mr Baker, there's not much more to it than riding out the latest wave of the virus.

"Apart from reinforcing messages around vaccinations and making sure that in our classes everyone wears masks - and keeping the studio as well ventilated as possible - there's not a lot else we can do to change people's perspective."

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