Everybody wants to work out. Not everybody has the money to afford a personal trainer who can be beneficial in figuring out what to do when working out. This is the gap where Proday fits.
Proday, a startup that was selected for the first LA Dodgers accelerator program, is an app that lets you workout alongside professional athletes like Pro Bowl tight end Delanie Walker or soccer player Crystal Dunn of the U.S. Women’s National Team.
“If everybody had the time and money to go see a personal trainer, that’d be awesome,” Proday founder & CEO Sarah Kunst said. “But obviously they don’t, so we want to give people something.”
Proday serves as a more streamlined and reliable workout option than searching the Instagram page of a personal trainer while trying to copy their moves. The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, offers annual and lifetime subscription packages. Paid subscribers get access to workout routines instructed by various professional athletes. The workouts focus around the idea of progressive overload, which is essentially building up difficulty over time. The app allows you to track your progress along with the weights and sets you do.
“We can add a rep, set or a little bit of weight every time depending on what the workout is so that you’re constantly getting a better workout,” Kunst said.
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The app can be extra beneficial to a couple groups of people, among many others: moms with a kid at home who don’t want to pay for a gym membership/babysitter and also retired athletes who are used to training as part of their life.
“One thing that we see a lot with people when they come out of high school or college sports is that it’s really hard for them because they’re used to training,” Kunst said. “All of a sudden to have to make your own time, it’s different.”
Alongside the app, Proday is beginning to provide users with something else: athlete-related content. What Kunst found is that people care about athletes’ opinions on fitness almost as much as they care about their own fitness. In this regard, the new focus on content in many ways creates a perfect marriage with the app.
“Athletes love what they do — they love playing ball, but at the same time they have a lot of other interests,” Kunst said. “They have months and months of offseason, and they very rarely like to share something that might be equal or even more of a passion for them because it’s not something they do while wearing a helmet or a jersey.”
In many ways, Colin Kaepernick revised the way that people think about athletes expressing their opinions on things other than sports. Proday hopes to piggyback off of that, hence their tagline, “We Don’t Stick To Sports.”
Some of the athletes that Proday has a relationship with want to write, and Kunst hopes to make that happen soon. She says that she really likes the type of stuff players do on sites like Uninterrupted. “It makes sense to cover athletes in a much more holistic way than just, ‘hey, they shot a ball, they did good,’” Kunst said.
Proday is equally about motivation and getting people to think about being active as it is getting people to use the app, as Kunst described.
“That’s why we got more into content — because we want to be with people all day encouraging them to do the things athletes do, which is generally good stuff,” she said.