How we are handling the Flu and Coronavirus
How we are handling the Flu and Coronavirus
Since we are all beginning to get a bit more information about the spread of viruses that are making their way around our country, we thought we would address how we handle your safety in our dojo.
What we are doing to protect you:
We have our facility cleaned every night after classes. This includes disinfection of all contact surfaces including, but not limited to, all bathroom surfaces, our floors, mats, water fountain, door handles counter tops and shared use equipment.
Our instructors are also diligent about using hand sanitizer often and washing their hands between classes. We are trying to teach our students without actually touching their hands or faces. This is not much different from our normal method of instruction but just serves as a reminder that we need to be more vigilant, right now. As you all know, the martial arts are contact sports. We work with partners and we can’t avoid contact all together.
Our front office staff is doing additional wipe downs of the surfaces in the lobby.
What you can do to help:
We would like to remind our adult students to try not to touch your face and then work with another student. We recommend you wash your hands before and after class. Parents, it would be helpful if you teach these guidelines to your children as well.
As you know, during Apple Day, we always instruct students to go wash their hands after class before coming over to the food table. This is likely more important than ever, now. So, please help us out by doing this voluntarily and by asking your children to do it as well.
We highly recommend that you wipe down your sparring gear after every time you use it. You are welcome to use our Clorox wipes, but a simple disinfectant solution at home is probably best.
Adults who use our weight equipment, please help us out by grabbing a clorox wipe and wiping down equipment you have used afterwards. We do also clean it daily, but your help will be greatly appreciated.
If any student has a runny nose, sore throat or cough, we respectfully ask that you stay out of classes. We hope you already know that a fever means you need rest, not workouts. Asking you to stay out of classes is counter intuitive for us. We do our best to get you into class as often as possible. But right now, the best thing for all of us is to respect our community.
If we help keep each other well, we will get past this Cold and Flu season with success and will return to less vigilant germ watching!
Kathy Olevsky is an 8th Degree Black Belt who has been teaching martial arts classes in Raleigh, NC since 1980. She is an international speaker on Women’s Empowerment and the Business of running Martial Arts schools. Kathy writes a bi-monthly column for MA Success Magazine and has authored a book on self-defense, Take Control.