With the manner in which the fitness industry is evolving, it’s become less about what the service providers and products manufacturers who serve this particular industry envision and more about what the consumer wants. For a very long time leading up to the present, it was all about the hot new fitness product to hit the market or the hot new exercising programme which was dictated to by the service providers, but it’s no longer that way.
Millennials have had a huge hand in shaping how anything develops these days with their very strong opinions and how they just have a knack for speaking with their dollars. Additionally, some of the savviest of these Millennials take it upon themselves to tweak and further develop certain technologies to their own liking as they in a sense have access to developmental tools like being able to learn how to code and perhaps even 3-D print or assemble components to arrive at customised solutions.
The fitness industry is undergoing one of these customisation onslaughts from the savviest of Millennials, which is inevitably steering the industry in the direction of fully embracing virtual training.
Escape Fitness explored some of the many elements which are coming together to make up what is a steady migration towards the full adoption of virtual training, with some rather interesting findings.
How Millennials Live Their Lives
Millennials undoubtedly have a lot of time constraints placed upon them, some of which are by choice rather than by requirement. If the typical Millennial can forego having to drive to the gym in favour of using some virtual training infrastructure, for instance, you best bet they’d choose to stay home and use that technology to get their much-needed exercise completed. That is after all the ultimate aim — getting the main task done with perhaps the least amount of “admin” possible.
The Tech
As far as the technology with which to facilitate virtual training goes, the good old video surfaces as a popular medium. It’s as easy as how it was done a few years ago, with instructional training programmes contained on VHS tapes, often featuring a popular figure with a participating group of fitness enthusiasts. Nowadays such videos and even more refined and specialised ones can be accessed via our Smartphones and other such devices, so video lives on as a popular medium through which the fitness industry can remain a part of our lives.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are two emerging tech developments which are perhaps the imminent future of virtual training as they allow for lots more engagement than plain old instructional videos. Things get as close as possible to being real with Virtual and Augmented Reality, allowing otherwise straying customers to stay connected with their gym and fitness instructor of choice so as to quickly access what they pay for as part of their gym memberships.
At the end of the day though, some physical equipment may still have to be incorporated, but it can come in much cheaper forms and can be stored easily at each participant’s home, to be used in a virtually set environment to achieve the ultimate goal of fitness.