Gym patronage and resistance training has exploded over the last decade.
Since 2009, gym membership and visits has grown by 22%, with 59 million Americans today owning memberships and visiting the gym twice a week. In addition, 25 million Americans utilize fitness equipment at home, including a mix of weights, suspension (TRX), resistance and cardio machines. Source
However, there’s no dominant consumer gym app.
No consumer mobile product today has captured these gym-goers, unlike the few dominant players in outdoor cardio (Strava, Runtastic) or indoor cardio (Peloton). Most top ranked fitness apps today target the unmotivated “living room” exercisers with ineffective calisthenic and bodyweight-only movements. Our target and underserved market works out in the weight room, with customers already familiar with paying monthly subscriptions to exercise.
Constructing progressive resistance training plans is hard.
One reason why there’s no defacto gym app is the difficulty in constructing progressive resistance training plans. Effective exercise prescription is highly individualized and requires expert application of exercise science. That’s why professional personal trainers cost $100/hour to continuously adapt workout plans to their client’s capabilities, goals and daily lives.
Consumer fitness tech today is like Google Maps without directions. We have data-rich maps of people’s physical activity, but fail to help them navigate towards real results. Fitbod bridges the gap with new personalization techniques like machine learning and predictive analytics.
Resistance-training is the perfect application of machine learning technology.
And resistance-training is the perfect exercise for this application. The activity naturally produces highly structured data (sets, reps, weight, etc.) and people vary widely in physical capability, making the quality of the recommendations critical to providing value. Today, anyone with a smartphone should have access to individualized fitness and nutrition guidance – created without human intervention.
Strength-training is where we start applying this technology, with cardio, calisthenics and nutrition to follow.
