Imagine a world where you’re at the gym walking by a piece of equipment. As you walk by, an alert pops up on your phone telling you to use that equipment and exactly what to do on it, all based on your personal fitness goals. Now stop imagining and realize that this is all a possibility right now.
Life Fitness, a fitness equipment company, has morphed the Internet of Things into the Internet of Gyms (IoG). The most notable of its innovations, LFconnect Protect, allows gym owners to get ahead of the game by monitoring all of their equipment in order to know when each individual piece needs maintenance. Through connect protect, Life Fitness is currently monitoring equipment in more than 10,000 facilities globally.
The biggest pain for any gym-goer is walking into the gym only to realize that your favorite machine is out of service, who knows how long it will be before it is fixed? Life Fitness’s desire to understand the source of these problems has led to the creation of LFconnect Protect and a reduction in the amount of downtime that gyms see with their equipment.
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But what about the fancy technology that I mentioned earlier and the benefits that LFconnect Protect can have on you as an exerciser? There is also a LFconnect app that is beginning to hoping to change the way people workout. Stepping onto a treadmill and running in a straight-line for 20 minutes is a thing of the past. Now people have the ability to create their own custom workouts and replicate an outdoor workout right on the machine.
From running through the Swiss Alps to watching Netflix and Hulu while completing a workout, I’ll now let the Senior Digital Product Manager at Life Fitness, Amad Amin, take you through some of the newest innovations at Life Fitness and the overall IoG movement:
Q: Start by just giving a quick background and describe what the Internet of Gyms is.
Amad: For us it really started back in late 2012 when we started connecting our elevation cardio product line to the internet. The original intention was to make a lot of things easier. Before we put anything connective online, we had the club owners manually update product settings or create custom workouts. It was a pretty manual process where you’d have to go to the setup screen on each of these consoles and extract that data. It was very time consuming.
We saw this as an opportunity to create a platform where you could go on LFconnect.com and get a free account for any club owner to use. As long as it’s a connected product they can then connect it online and have the ability to adjust and apply our settings to a variety of products on the floor. They can create their own custom workouts. The biggest pain point for any exerciser is going into a gym and seeing your favorite machine is out of service. You wonder if anything is ever being done to take care of it. We took it upon ourselves to start understanding that when things are going wrong, what’s the source of it? Is it not getting enough power supply? Has the latest software been updated? Are there other things that are causing some type of friction to take place on the equipment? We started to put together a whole program on how to monitor it and that spawned LFconnect Protect.
Q: What are some of the benefits that gym/club owners would see?
Amad: For a club owner it’s a business. Part of doing business is making sure everything is up and running for the duration of their business hours. The last thing they want is for exercisers to complain that a machine’s been down. The main benefit is instead of having them wait until the machine is not working, we’re doing a lot of the legwork for them. We’re behind the scenes looking at the logs trying to figure out if something is spiking in activity or if there are certain error codes that are popping up on a routine basis. It’s really us understanding that all our customers have their own businesses and we want to make sure that everything is up and running so that they can take care of their primary customer, which is the exerciser.
Q: How does the LFconnect app benefit the exerciser?
Amad: The app is more focused toward the exerciser. When you start connecting a lot of this equipment online we started seeing the shift in what we called the “quantified movement.” A lot of the exercisers wear Fitbit’s and different types of wearable devices. There’s a million apps to track the kind of activities you want to do. They wanted to take the activity they have within the actual clubs they belong to and relay that to either Apple Health or Google Fit to try and understand what they’re doing in and out of the gym. So we created LFconnect originally just to allow exerciser tracking to take place.
On any of our cardio machines you can log in to our connective products and you can start to understand how long you ran, the calories you burned, the amount of time you spent on the machine. As we started to see more of an evolution in this space, we started giving people the ability to create their own custom workouts on the machines. They can actually go and replicate an outdoor workout and bring it onto our treadmill with the outdoor GPS on our machines.
Q: What are other apps that connect with LFconnect and how do they compliment each other?
Amad: We first started off with Fitbit, MyFitnessPal and Runtastic and eventually realized there are way too many apps for us to keep integrating with. What we did is we started pushing a lot of our API’s (Application Programming Interface) to be more of an open platform. That’s how we differentiate, we allow people to utilize a lot of the API’s that our developers have built and they can connect their third party apps or wearable devices with our API’s to extract the information from our machine’s directly. We saw a major shift in people wanting to use Apple Health and Google Fit so we started sending our data to them as well.
Q: Is this technology going to change how Personal Trainers do their job?
Amad: You can never replace the human element. With something like working out, it’s still a part of the experience that people like. We are definitely a support system for an exerciser that knows what they’re doing and wants to create their own custom workouts but we also allow personal trainers to use our platform to create custom workouts for their clients and push those workouts onto other people that they train who use LFconnect. It’s the best of both worlds, we don’t want to exclude anybody, we’re pretty inclusive.
Q: Tell me a little bit about the new discover console.
Amad: We just debuted in March and April of this year our brand new Discover SE3 console and it’s going to be the latest in the elevation product line. It is a completely redesigned console interface to make it very discoverable and user-friendly. Up until now, even when we looked across the landscape, there wasn’t enough thought being put into the kind of features that are on the machines. Most people just click their specific workout and they’re ready to go.
We offer what’s called Lifescape Courses. These are different scenic routes which you can workout with and that’s what you experience. You don’t see the old LED screens or track screens, you’re actually immersed in this course where you can be running through the Swiss Alps. We also started to partner with a company called RunSocial which is more of a social running experience. They have a bunch of courses that will be downloaded onto our machine and anyone that’s on that course worldwide that’s using a RunSocial course can compete with you at the same time. If you’re in one place and your buddy is running in New York and is on a Life Fitness machine or RunSocial course, you guys would be running against each other in real-time. We are trying to increase that gamification and immersive experience that brings something different outside of just getting on a treadmill and figuring out how you get through the next 20 minutes.
Q: Do you think this will make a workout more interesting or easier to do just with the competing aspect of comparing yourself to other people?
Amad: I think there’s something in it for everyone. For those people that don’t have time and are saying, “Hey, I want to get a quick workout in but I really miss my shows,” it’s really a toss-up. It no longer needs to be a toss-up; you can get on these machines and pick up right where you left off on Netflix at home. It’s something different than the run-of-the-mill cardio experience that most people are used to.
Q: Where is all of this headed/what is next?
Amad: Everyone is trying to connect their product online, I even saw something where refrigerators are starting to connect themselves to the internet so everyone is getting in on this. We’re really thinking this is just the start. We know that clubs are a business and are looking for ways to extract a lot of meaning from the kind of people that come into their facility and provide value. What we want to do is work hard toward empowering our customers to understand how data could be used to help run their business better. We just started helping them customize the products and understand that whole side. Then we started thinking about helping them prolong the life of that equipment through the launch of LFconnect Protect and when we look at the future we want to help them understand the kind of demographic information that they need to better provide the service that their exercisers are looking for, whether there is different types of supplements that they want to sell or types of services they want to offer.
Q: Is this going to help gym-goers realize exactly what they need from their workouts?
Amad: Yeah, that’s part of the puzzle. We see advances in bluetooth technology. People use iBeacons, so imagine walking by an area, say strength equipment, and you get a text message on your phone saying based on your goals we recommend you do this and the machine is open. We’re just getting to that space where a lot of this technology is evolving to allow us to do this. It’s a pretty powerful concept.