As one of the Many Martial Arts Facilities in Ontario we are petitioning for Premier Ford and the entire Ontario Jobs and Recovery Committee  to consider niche studios (ie. fitness, martial arts, dance, etc) as separate from large multinational box gyms when planning re-opening phases.

As stated in the phase 1 opening of Ontario “High-contact sports are not allowed even if they are non-team. These include sports where physical distancing cannot be practiced such as: racquetball, squash, boxing, wrestling sports, martial arts.”

My location, along with others in this category have the ability to re-open with MOL and Public Health guidelines. These businesses are able to easily adapt to guidelines just as other businesses are required to in the province regarding physical distancing, adequate sanitizing, and PPE use.

It is essential to get our community moving & back to their pre-pandemic levels of sport activity, health & fitness. 

Over the years, we have seen members go from obese to healthy BMI's, reduce hypertension, get off blood pressure medications and move away from the pre-diabetic stage. Our service is part of the solution for helping our community to stay healthy physically, mentally & emotionally. 

Unfortunately, we have seen a lot of our community suffer in each and every of these areas during lockdown.  

Facilities like ours are unique in that we can easily & effective created proper physical distancing with individual exercise stations (generously spaced apart). In addition, small groups are coached allowing for orderliness. Proper sanitization and scheduling of space usage is easy to manage. 

In Canada there are just over 2300 Martial Arts Facilities. The Average Martial Arts facility has 100-150 Students. That means that on a Low, before the shutdown there was anywhere between 230,000 to 345,000 people training in the Martial Arts. That is a Conservative Number. Let’s say we applied that number to a lot of the other service-based industries, Dance, Gymnastics, Small Gyms, we now have perhaps 1.3 Million people on the low end that were in an activity that all of a sudden stopped one day.

We strongly believe it is worth making a distinction between the different types of fitness centres in Ontario. There are a great number of facilities like ours that are positioned to safely and effectively serve our communities in helping with their physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.