Yoga Studio Goes Online During Stay-at-Home Order
By: Anna Azallion
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CINCINNATI — With fitness studios closed and Ohioans stuck at home, HI FI YOGA in Cincinnati is offering its classes online.
Tommy Moorman and Lori Allen have been teaching one class per day live on Instagram.
“This gives us an opportunity to provide karma yoga, meaning no cost, just volunteering our content to the world. And this allows us to kind of bring in more people to the community,” Moorman said.
This is just one way Moorman has gotten creative to keep offering HI FI YOGA’s services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Having to close the doors of HI FI YOGA has created challenges, though.
“It’s significant, it’s all around,” he said. “It affects us day to day, hour to hour, meaning no longer can we have our doors open. And you know, we’re a yoga studio but we’re also a community sanctuary. Often times people come to our studio and they’re not looking to do yoga, they just want to get away or they just want to chat or network and not having our doors open for that availability, it’s been tough.”
Moorman said it’s hard to not be able to interact with students face-to-face. From a business perspective, he said, it’s been tough to not have as much revenue coming in. HI FI YOGA is still bringing in some revenue, though.
“Being a yoga studio 99.9% of our business was face-to-face and you know human-to-human. Now it’s digital and so we have transitioned our focus to an online library,” Moorman said.
Clients who already have a membership with HI FI YOGA have unlimited access to the library. Others can purchase a membership for $40/month to gain unlimited access to the library, Moorman said.
Since the start of the video library, Moorman said they’ve been able to increase memberships.
“We’ve been picking up members that have left Cincinnati that loved us that are now living in California or Colorado or Nebraska,” he said.
Moorman said he plans to continue the video library after the pandemic. For some students, the video library is far from a perfect replacement for in-studio classes, though.
Many other yoga studios are using Zoom for remote classes. Corepower Yoga, a chain, is offering classes daily live on YouTube. Other types of fitness studios are using Instagram live, zoom and YouTube too.