Grant Hughes is co-founder and COO of Los Angeles-based FocusMotion, a wearables-first motion technology and application company dedicated to improving health through movement, gesture, fitness monitoring and quantification. As an MBA student at the University of Michigan, Hughes and co-founder Cavan Canavan won the Pryor-Hale Award for Best Business in the Michigan Business Challenge.
Two years ago I co-founded FocusMotion, a wearables-first motion technology company, and in that time have watched the industry grow to meet the needs of its users, while also changing the way movement technology is tracked. Wearables are slowly revolutionizing the fitness industry. Why, then, are gyms lagging behind in fitness innovation?
Simply put, it will not be gyms or gym equipment manufacturers who will lead the fitness innovation charge because while they have many strengths, they have no core competency in technology. Also, their longstanding business models aren’t frontloaded with the margins required to sponsor robust R&D efforts. The product life spans for fitness equipment are long enough that rapid iteration isn’t possible (this industry isn’t alone here; we see the same thing in the auto industry, which is beholden to long product lifecycles that mean cutting-edge technology goes unimplemented in a timely manner.)
So when and where will the digital gym revolution take place? The answer is now, and on the wrists of gym-goers. As more and more people begin using wearable devices, consumers themselves become their own networked health tracker, able to tap into their favorite fitness apps with their wearable for an immersive training experience. As the digital fitness industry evolves, smart devices and sensor-equipped clothes on the body will augment the wrist devices to provide even more feedback to gym-goers on how to best reach their fitness goals.
These new fitness-enabled devices will provide the data and capability to understand not only which specific exercises are being done, but also how many, and how well exercises are being performed in real time. This type of monitoring is challenging even for trainer to track on a rep-by-rep basis, and even more confounding for a gym-goer trying to log it in a workout journal. Then, there’s the task of trying to understand how all those metrics accelerate the achieving of fitness goals.
All of that changes with wearables. In addition to the instant precision monitoring of exercise performance based on your specific, customized goals, suddenly, you are your own personal trainer – at a fraction of the cost. As wearable technology becomes more sophisticated — and this is happening at a very rapid clip — the data collected will outstrip the expertise of even the best personal trainer. For example, whereas your personal trainer can only guess at when you’ve “had enough,” your device will use hard data to warn you — based on deteriorating form or sluggish rep tempo — to skip one last set of squats to avoid a potential injury, now or later.
More good news for gym rats: Companies like Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft are now dedicating ever-increasing resources to the digital training game. Each of them now has a wearable on the market, and each of them has a data collection aggregation system. In the case of Samsung, the company debuted a prototype solution, which FocusMotion partnered on and developed, earlier this year at CES called Connected Fitness. Using Connected Fitness, a user with the Samsung Gear and their smartphone can move seamlessly from a treadmill or elliptical directly onto strength training, without any loss of data. The result: not only is all cardio information — calories, distance, time, etc. — collected by the Connected Fitness app, but also all of the strength training data — exercise performed, number of repetitions. And the best part is, a gym-goer doesn’t have to manually input any of this; it happens automatically.
So, where does this leave gyms? Not out in the cold. While gyms themselves aren’t going to lead the wearable technology charge, they can still benefit greatly from systems like Connected Fitness. In fact, I would challenge those in the gym industry to develop their own apps for wearables to drive member engagement and satisfaction that will leverage the work already being done by companies like FocusMotion.
In this scenario, members will be able to take their workouts and their general wellness to a higher level using wearable tech, and they will feel as if their gym is there every step of the way. From cardio to strength training to Zumba to yoga, people will be empowered to be their own trainer, with a comprehensive overview of their health and wellness levels and goals literally at their fingertips. It’s time for gyms to think about what wearable technology means for the future of the industry as they shift the paradigm from simply a place to workout to being there for every step of their members’ journey.