An Assessment of UBC’s Recreation Women’s Only Fitness Hours Program

Currently, UBC Recreation is only offering Women’s Only Fitness Hours (WOFH) 9 hours per week out of the 96.5 hours per week that the ARC gym space operates for, despite self-identifying women making up 55.8% of the UBC community’s population (University of British Columbia, 2021). WOFH is a program that offers self-identifying women designated times in which they are able to participate in physical activity (PA) in a safe and private environment (University of British Columbia, 2022b). WOFH was designed to provide women the confidence and empowerment they need to implement PA into their everyday routine (University of British Columbia, 2022b) without the fear that many mixed-gender gyms provide. Therefore, the purpose of our project was to examine the effectiveness of the communication of WOFH to the targeted community as well as to improve awareness by utilising feedback from survey participants and the existing literature. All of the survey participants (n = 119) recruited are self-identifying women currently enrolled as either an undergraduate or a graduate student at UBC Vancouver. Participants were directed to a short Qualtrics survey in which they consented to participating, then answered a variety of multiple choice, Likert-type and open-ended questions. Surveys were distributed through social media, including Facebook groups and Instagram stories over a span of two weeks. One Facebook group, in particular, targeted a specific UBC student population which may have played a large role in contributing to this study’s successful participant count – UBC Sororities. Following data collection, data analysis took place. This research highlighted several key findings including: the population of students aware of WOFH; of those aware, the number of students who have attended WOFH; reasons for continued participation, satisfaction ratings for WOFH experiences; gauged interest in attending WOFH; and gauged perspectives on UBC Recreation’s WOFH in relation to other women-only gyms. In response to these findings, there are four recommendations for UBC Recreation to consider implementing to increase both awareness, participation and satisfaction of the WOFH program. First, UBC Recreation should expand into the gym space during WOFH, rather than keeping the program confined to the studio. Many participants expressed they wished they had access to equipment outside of the studio, but were not confident enough to attend the regular gym hours in order to access the equipment. Second, WOFH can be offered at both the ARC gym and the BirdCoop. By doing so, there can be increased time designated for WOFH, and thus different time frames to accommodate a wide range of student schedules. Third, many survey participants were unaware of WOFH until completing the survey. Therefore, the third recommendation is to utilize social media to further promote WOFH to increase attendance. The last recommendation is to provide weight training education, as many students expressed in the survey that they feel uncomfortable in gym settings due to lack of knowledge. There are also several areas in which future research can examine. The first is to examine the best methods in which to provide education in order to ensure students feel comfortable using all of the equipment and machines. The second area is to assess if ‘Bring a Friend’ is beneficial to retention rates, and whether or not this promotion would encourage more people to engage in PA. The last area that can be further examined is overall satisfaction and benefits of the program. Although this was included in our survey, only 12% of participants had attended WOFHs. This would be a beneficial area to further examine once there is more awareness and participation in the program in order to increase satisfaction and meet the needs of the participants. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”Education, Faculty ofKinesiology, School ofUnreviewedUndergraduat