The battle to stay fit moves online, but who wins?

The Covid-19 pandemic has virtually transitioned almost every physical interaction to a digital format – something we have now gradually got accustomed to as the ‘new normal’. Learning & education, sales & marketing, healthcare & medicine, commerce & entertainment are now operating mostly on a virtual plane. However, there is one sector that hasn’t been discussed with the same intensity and fervour as the rest – fitness.

Much like other sectors, fitness industry too was quick to shift gears to a digital delivery model. With home-stuck health-conscious users displaying bigger than ever FOMO, accentuated by the shift to remote working, health clubs and fitness chains came out with new interactive & virtual workouts. By blending the fun aspect with fitness, they possibly succeeded in hooking a segment that wanted a real, but virtual gym at home.

As per data from Visual Capitalist, between Q1 and Q2 2020, downloads of health and fitness apps in India shot up 157% as against 46% growth worldwide. This translated to 58 Mn new daily active users (DAUs) which rose 84% vs 24% worldwide. This isn’t too surprising, given India had the largest nationwide lockdown lasting for nearly 8 weeks. But, was it solely lockdown-induced? Or was there a X-factor that drove a spike in engagement levels?

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Fitness apps have been around for the past few years notably the ones such as Nike Training Club, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Fooducate and Aaptiv among others. Their primary focus has been mainly around diet, calorie-tracking or at best offering a library of audio lectures and guides. The new-age fitness apps go a step further. While they still include all the plain-vanilla features, they place greater focus on infusing interactivity and fun to workout routines. For avid gym/studio-goers like me, this was a good-enough motivator to help stay in good shape, all within the confines of home. And the transition, honestly hasn’t been too big an affair. As a regular user of online fitness for the past 8+ months, I have seen many benefits from the currently popular format:

1. Variety: Most of the popular fitness apps such as Cure.Fit, HealthifyMe, FITTR, GoQii and Fitternity offer a wide variety of workouts ranging from Yoga, Pilates, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and Dance. This makes it easy and simple to include a diverse mix of workouts in a weekly routine, helping structure a all-in-one program for endurance, balance, mobility, strength and agility goals. Secondly, the trainings are led by a tribe of 2-3 coaches and demonstrate scale-up and scale-down versions of workouts, to cater to beginners, intermediates and advanced users.

2. Flexibility: The workout sessions (be it individual or group) are scheduled at different times of the day, lending flexibility to plan based on what time works best on a given day.

3. Competitive intensity: The live-streamed group workouts offer an extra bit for the competitive souls. They track and score your performance vis-à-vis others in the group, accord you a rank and allow you to accumulate points that you can flaunt on social.

4. Holistic fitness & wellness kit: Beyond the regular fitness training, most of the apps now offer personalized nutrition plans, dietician/doctor consultations, personal therapies and fitness gears/accessories. While this may be criticized as the ‘consumerist’ agenda (and I’m not vouching for their utility), in times like pandemic these would have brought solace to millions cooped up in homes.

5. Gamified tools/rewards: Some of the apps launched features such as hand wash tracker and rewards for home-bound walking. A few others stuck to the conventional 21-days weight-loss challenges and immunity-boosting campaigns.

That said, virtual workouts are certainly not a 100% replacement for studio-based sessions and come with their own limitations. For one, the energy transfer from the trainer to the trainees does not happen. Two, one needs to put in extra motivation to see through the session in the absence of real-coach guidance and surveillance (at times this is a blessing in disguise). Three, for those used to equipment-based workouts, the practice of body-weight based training in front of screens (as against mirrors) can prove challenging, and may be ineffective too. But in the times we are living in, virtual workouts do offer a good middle-path for the fitness enthusiasts. Eventually, when the world returns to pre-Covid normalcy, we will most likely see a hybrid model – mix of physical facilities and virtual workouts, prevail. Some new-formed habits are simply hard to give up, and why do so when they serve as instant boosters! The battle to stay fit might have moved online, but for the real fitness junkies the real-digital world dilemma barely matters.