Data from leisure sites from across the country in January show that new members accounted for 9 per cent of the total number of those attending a gym last month. That compares with January 2020, the last January before the arrival of the Coronavirus, when new members accounted for 10 per cent of all those going to a gym. 

The East, North-West and North-East of England saw big surges of new members. The North West saw the biggest proportion of new members with more than 14 per cent of attendees of gyms having brand new memberships. 

Yorkshire and the East Midlands saw the most reluctance to take out a gym membership last month. 

In London and the South-East new memberships only around three-quarters of their pre-pandemic levels 

4global used its Datahub platform to produce the findings, which draws on information supplied by hundreds of leisure sites across the UK, analysing more than 1.3 billion data points about the physical activity of over 20 million people.  

“Physical activity is a vital part of maintaining an individual’s physical and mental wellbeing. We will continue to track the data as we move further into 2022 and hope, as we are now seeing the pandemic restrictions begin to lift, that we will begin to see a continued surge in activity, hopefully to levels greater than they were pre-pandemic,” said Eloy Mazon, chief executive officer of 4global.