Today, while at gym, I connected my brand new Apple Watch to the Stair Master and, if I wasn’t dying climbing a stairway to nowhere, I would have been amazed. Stair Master Version Death sends the data of my workout to my watch – flights climbed, speed, and in turn, my watch sent back my heart rate and expected energy burn. When I got home, and within range of my phone, all this data synced in the background meaning I got a notification that I had climbed a virtual 20 floors in 5 minutes. The future sure is amazing!
After our typical 5 minute warm up, slaving over the never-ending stairs, we moved onto weight training. Apart from being half dead, my brain was already whirring. Gym needs more tech in it, not less. The free weights don’t talk to my watch, and how heavy I went last gym session is all in my head. Luckily I have my workout plan printed out with some scribblings of how heavy I was able to lift, and so I know the goal I am aiming for. But why is this process so manual? Why is tech moving so slowly in an area that is calling out for disruption?
While I strained on the leg press under 150 KGs of weight plates, my mind was off on an adventure. The adventure of rethinking gym to make it easier for new-comers, more challenging for gym rats, all the while ensuring people kept up the habit and made progress without stagnating. The answer – tech in everything and weight plates cast into the annuals of history.
Let me entertain you with my vision. And if Elon Musk decides to do this, then all I ask is that my share be only a measly 25%. Thanks Elon! I’ll keep an eye out for the cheque…
Every gym user enters the gym with an NFC tag. We currently have this to get in and out of City Fitness. This is now your gym passport.
Upon tapping your tag, the gym now knows who you are, the time of day, and your workout schedule. Heading to gym on a Wednesday at 18:30, the gym knows that you’re probably heading in for a quick cardio session, for example. You enter gym and after a stretch and warm up (you should always be warming up, but you know that), you start on your workout. And this is where the magic begins…
Going to the leg press for example, you scan your NFC tag and the machine loads up your warm up weight in accordance with your gym plan. The machine does this through pistons (don’t ask me how, I am not a mechanical engineer) – it somehow knows how much resistance is equal to 50 KGs and puts that on the piston. No more weight plates to worry about! And this can work with any machine and even some free weights. You do your workout and when done, tap your tag again to ‘sign off’ from the machine. The machine then uses the WiFi to connect to the gym network and sync your progress with your gym plan / profile.
Oh, but what if you’re working out with a friend, or you forget to sign off? There can be two options here for each instance. If you’re working out with a friend, when they tag on for their first set, the machine does a quick weigh-in. No two friends are 100% the same weight, and it assigns the weight on the seat to a person. Since the gym network knows your weight anyways, discerning you from your weight and weight fluctuations will be a breeze. If you forget to sign off, the machine signs you out after an amount of time, but only after you have tagged onto another machine. This will help with those doing super sets as well, allowing a user to work on two machines at the ‘same’ time effectively.
Once you have done your workout, you tag out of gym. The gym network now knows what exercises you did, the weight, the frequency, sets and reps. It all goes into your gym profile and updates your fitness app. You have a complete breakdown of your workout. Pair that with a heart rate monitor, such as an Apple Watch, and boom – your entire progress, stats, everything, all for you to view and check.
The next day when you tag in, the gym network knows where you are and how heavy the machines need to be in order for you to continue making progress.
And so this is my idea for Gym 2.0. A fully connected, smart place to work out. You can add other integrations like food tracking, or change your plan, and basically you have a system for almost all your physical heath. Add some body scanning once a month and you have a complete physical profile. I am getting excited just thinking of all the data, and how it can work!
So what do you think? Is this not a part of the utopia we’ve all wanted? More automation, less worry. In my mind, this lets the machines work out stuff for me, and allows me to go to gym to be in the moment.
The moment of challenging myself.
