To celebrate National Fitness Day 2025, a new blog series shares the success of ukactive members that have helped power the campaign. The series explores the benefits that getting involved in National Fitness Day can have for organisations and their communities.
In our second blog of the series, we hear from GLL’s Customer and Communities Director, Joe Rham, about how GLL has used the day to help get more people active, and why National Fitness Day is a key date in the organisation’s calendar.
GLL has supported National Fitness Day for several years across our 250-plus venues, delivering leisure services under our Better brand. As a charitable social enterprise leisure trust, we are all about improving the physical, social and mental health of local communities by getting people more active, so there is strong synergy with ukactive’s initiative – and not just for one day of the year.
In previous years, we have promoted National Fitness Day on posters in centres, via our CRM, online and on social media – amplifying ukactive’s message highlighting the role physical activity plays across the UK, helping to raise awareness of its importance in assisting us to lead healthier lifestyles.
We shared last year’s ‘Your Health is for Life’ message (the 2024 theme) with our existing, and potential, customers, to engage them to take small steps towards a lifestyle which can both protect and improve their health.
We also offered a free one-day pass so customers could enjoy free access to gyms, swimming pools, fitness classes and hundreds of other activities at all GLL locations on National Fitness Day.
All our GLL leisure centres and gyms participated, and this offer was displayed on our website where customers could choose their preferred location, claim the one-day pass and book their sessions. The Better UK app also notified all our customers of the offer, and we promoted it across our social media.
To help generate awareness, ukactive also listed its members sites on its location finder, which helped consumers find which of our sites were participating.
While it’s not possible to associate individual new membership sales with this National Fitness Day initiative, we did have more than 100,000 visits over the weekend, extending the opportunity to get active to many more people – some of whom would not otherwise have entered a leisure centre.
As part of the promotion, we identified eight ‘Hero Venues’ across our estate to host media visits at individual sessions that best exemplified our varied offer. As a result, we were successfully featured on multiple radio interviews, a BBC One live broadcast from one of our centres and mentions in local newspapers. This helped us raise awareness of National Fitness Day and our brand’s partnership with a national community initiative.
Last year we also offered swim webinars working with Swimming Teachers Association (STA) to capitalise on the renewed interest in open water swimming – supported by special guests Professor Greg Whyte OBE and Keri-anne Payne, plus GLL experts.
Our support for the event also dovetailed with our clients’ public health messages, signalling our shared intent to ‘move the dial’ on community health and wellbeing.
For us, engaging in National Fitness Day is about getting people to make the association between getting active and having a better quality of life, higher earnings potential and increased productivity.
The cost of neglecting the nation’s health is huge. The Health Foundation has estimated that the public health grant allocation of £3.9bn in 2025/26 is 25% lower on a real-term, per-person basis, than it was in 2015/16.
The impact of this funding reduction can be seen in many areas, from increasing levels of health inequality to rising levels of obesity. Sport England’s Active Lives Survey 2023/24 classes a quarter (25%) of the UK’s population as inactive, completing less than 30 minutes of physical activity per week. But it also comes with a financial cost.
Research cited by The Health Foundation found that each additional year of good health achieved in the population by public health interventions costs £3,800. This is three to four times lower than the cost resulting from NHS interventions of £13,500 per additional year of good health. An increased focus on public health is good for both people and the public purse.
For National Fitness Day 2025, we’re looking to build on last year and try to encourage even more people to get active on the day. We are already trialling this year’s event online and will be updating our offer in August.
National Fitness Day is an important day in our calendar. By allowing the public to visit our centres for free and spread the message through media, we can raise awareness for our facilities and boost membership numbers, all while contributing to the health of our nation.
If you have previously taken part in National Fitness Day and want to share your story, please get in touch by emailing: press@ukactive.org.uk.
For more information, visit www.nationalfitnessday.com and stay up to date by following the campaign on LinkedIn, Instagram and X.
