How Technology Can Enhance Your Gym Experience
By Kosha Shah 25-Oct 2020 Reading Time: 11 Mins
COVID-19 has negatively impacted many industries and several businesses, but the fitness domain has been explicitly hit hard. Most of the membership-based gyms have faced a difficult time due to lockdowns. Some gyms dependent on a membership model are trying to move into the virtual exercise space. However, generating sufficient income is a crucial challenge.
Besides, some fitness companies and virtual health coaches that have started providing virtual gym programs have seen significant growth. Some of the smart gyms have been initiated and transformed as a high tech gym utilizing smart technology to offer body smart fitness workouts. These fitness centers use gym management software and the best fitness technology to enable online workouts.
Many fitness centers provide online workout videos, advice on workout routines using digital mediums, healthy food recipes, and much more. The fitness companies are using the blend of technology and fitness as a challenge to alter their conventional business models and attain success. In this specific blog post, we will explore how modernized technology can enhance Gym experiences.
Use of Gym Wearables
Fitness wearables are now increasingly used as an intelligent fitness technology showing enhancements in the accuracy of the data they monitor and track. With new fitness tech features and functionalities, they now deliver more concrete data and attainable health goals on a day to day basis.
Wearable devices are used as a power tech gym functionality that can be leveraged to increase member engagements and fitness experience in a gym. The live boards show members’ heart rate and calories burned to add an interacting new dimension to virtual gym classes.
Further, using wearable technology assists in building a fitness community within the gym and helps boost in creating innovative workout experiences. Gym stakeholders just need to convince their members that membership to your gym will only boost the effectiveness of their wearable device and fitness program accuracy.
Use of Artificial Intelligence
Modern-day Artificial Intelligence (AI) is vital to empower computers and different devices to make quick decisions with fewer inputs. The fitness industry has moved forward with early applications for AI in trouble-free customer-facing functions such as class or member registration, answering service queries, statistical calculations, and web chatbots to enable more smart marketing and sales practices.
Thinking of artificial intelligence as your full-time gym employee, it never takes any of the breaks; it never gets exhausted; it merely works for you. The AI technology empowers the fitness centers to continuously be in service and even assists in identifying and predicting the latest trends.
By implementing Artificial Intelligence into either composite or specific work roles, you can quickly fill in the gaps of your work force and even assist them in completing work swifter as well as with more accuracy. This scenario gives back precious time to your gym team while satisfying their existing members and meeting prospect touch-points.
Use of Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is one of those modernized and advanced technologies that have helped humans visualize about decades of science fiction. Today, Virtual reality (VR) seems within grasp for many categories of businesses. In a rush to develop future technology, the gym or fitness industry is seeing an extensive range of products looking to tap this budding new market.
Gamification is the most critical driver of innovative fitness VR products, enabling regular workouts with the video game-inspired objectives, set goals, and diverse scenarios. Further, early research is demonstrating VR could have attention-grabbing psychological effects on different types of exercises. As per reports, using Virtual Reality (VR) headsets during exercising can trim down pain and boost how long someone can uphold an activity.
Virtual reality is quite exciting and generates a lot of interest with everyone from young, seniors, or millennials with curiosity to try out the new technology. By enabling a VR system or solution into your fitness center could re-energize your current members. There is also that prospective that VR can provide on the promise of Gamification, extending the appeal of exercise based on demographics for people who are not able to attend or avoid gyms.
Smart and Intelligent Fitness Equipment
Intelligent fitness equipment leverages advanced technology to offer informed data to a user’s overall or even specific workout while offering gym staff valuable insights into the machine’s efficiency. Sensor technology enables real-time workout analysis and even grading a user’s technique to provide crucial feedback to help gym trainers train their members in a better way. The cloud-connected machines and equipment further facilitate gym employees to remain updated entirely to their devices’ maintenance requirements.
Smart equipment brings a stirring new aspect to your gym or fitness center. It can boost members at diverse engagement levels, offering them a new reason to visit the gym. In addition, cloud-connected equipment can determine one of the most prevalent friction points for gym members, and that is broken equipment. The smart technology notifies and alerts gym operators to stop using broken machines with automated diagnostics, which can be critical to adding to the retention efforts.
Enabling Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management is an important task, which is designed to enable the gym management of a customer’s data and involved workflows. Customer relationship management (CRM) software modules have swiftly built themselves as each business owners’ go-to tool to manage the operations.
Fitness CRMs are valuable software tool for gyms to well-organize their prospects, handle current members, and monitor performance levels. The right CRM software module can optimistically affect each and every aspect of your gym business. It should be able to make your workflow more proficient, offering your current team to get back their valuable time for converting prospects and also meet member engagements at different stages.
Further, it should easily integrate with your existing software solutions to bring together data collection and its accessibility to analysis in one place. It makes interactions smoother through emails, text messages, alerts, and notification capabilities to improve your sales and marketing efforts.
Key Takeaways
So, these were some significant impacts of technology on the fitness industry. While the future will be full of challenges and anxiety, the best strategy and tactic for any business is to keep an eye on the transforming landscape. With precise evaluations of new business opportunities through modernized technology can lead to big payoffs and continued success for your gym or a fitness center.
The challenge for fitness businesses is to sort through this mix of technologies and related trends. There can be possible downsides to every technology trend that should factor into your decision-making procedure as you consider executing them into your current fitness business. Hence, as a gym owner, company, or a fitness stakeholder, you need to precisely determine which technology trends will play a long-term role in your gym business’s accomplishments.