The OCU Emergency Operations Center team decided to reopen the Aduddell Fitness Center for student use starting Sept. 1.
The decision was made after careful consideration by the EOC regarding new safety policies and cleaning measures, along with input from Josh Hall, assistant director for student life and intramural and recreational sports.
Hall said the Aduddell Fitness Center will be implementing some new protocols with the reopening.
“One of the many safety protocols that we will be taking in the fitness center is that all students will have to wear a facemask at all times while in the building,” Hall said. “There will be a sign in, sign out and temperature check for everyone who comes into the fitness center. There will also be a limit of one hour maximum at a time, and there will also be a maximum of 24 students allowed in at once.”
Hall said the fitness center will update its hours of operation for the semester, and amend who can currently utilize the facilities.
“Our hours will be 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, and then 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday,” Hall said. “This semester, the fitness center will only be available to currently enrolled students.”
Hall said the standard towel service, showers, locker rooms, free weights, yoga mats and jump ropes will be unavailable until further notice due to sanitation guidelines.
“We just have our cardio, elliptical machines, recumbent bikes and the weight machines,” Hall said. “Everything else we won’t be able to utilize this semester just because of the difficulty in keeping them clean.”
Hall said he is glad the EOC chose to reopen the fitness center and believes it will be very beneficial to students.
“I wasn’t surprised at all that we were told we could open up the fitness center, just because we have been using a very safe cleaning procedure, as well as some of the strongest cleaning materials out there,” Hall said. “We use a virucidal disinfectant that actually kills viruses.”
The fitness center has also invested in new sanitizing equipment for the building to aid with disinfection.
“In addition to what we were already doing, we have also gotten a fogger and will be fogging the fitness center a few times a week to make sure that there are no germs or viruses in the gym.”
Isabel Harwell, cell and molecular biology junior, said she thinks the gym’s reopening will be a helpful resource for students to be able to utilize.
“In college, I feel like it’s already hard enough to get yourself to go workout, let alone if you have to go out and get a gym membership that you have to pay for every month,” Harwell said. “Even then I feel like it’s hard to get college students to workout sometimes. But access to the fitness center is still a good thing for college students to have so they can go workout whenever they might need or want.”
For questions, students can contact Hall at jhall@okcu.edu.
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