Nearly two thirds (64 per cent) of the world’s health and fitness clubs are currently closed either by decree or by voluntary arrangement.

The closures, part of measures to tackle the Covid-19 (coronavirus) outbreak, have resulted in around 230 million people with health club memberships being unable to attend their regular place of exercise.

The figures have been released by new global fitness data platform fitNdata, launched in March 2020 by David Minton, the founding director of The Leisure Database Company.

As health club closures began to sweep across the world last month, ‘fitNdata’ began monitoring the effects of the pandemic on the fitness industry.

fitNdata combines real-time supply data with consumer fitness data and has pledged to issue regular updates throughout the coronavirus crisis by monitoring the global fitness industry during the lockdown in real-time.

To do this, fitNdata has developed "crawlers", trained to identify all fitness sites around the world, as well as aggregating sources of fitness-related data from the public domain – including site details, facilities, classes and social media links.

fitNdata has received funding from Vedere Ventures, a mergers and acquisitions, advisory and boutique private equity firm focused on fitness and technology. Vedere is led by CEO Bryan O'Rourke and has 14 partner companies, operating businesses focused on fitness and tech.