Workout at home: With gyms shut, fitness firms go online for sessions

With gyms continuing to remain shut, fitness firms are offering live online training sessions to help people keep up with their exercise routines

When the lockdown began in March, flight attendant Tanya Malhotra started experiencing pain flare-ups and a feeling of weakness. “I have a chronic illness for which I need to work out regularly,” says Malhotra, a resident of Delhi, who could not go to the gym anymore.

Then her mother introduced her to health and fitness start-up HealthifyMe's online live workout sessions. Malhotra took up a plan where she got a personalised yoga trainer and diet coach at a price of Rs 5,000 for three months. She now trains for stretch yoga in the morning and does cardio workouts in the evening.

“The exercises are designed in such a manner that everyone who is attending the class can follow them. I am planning to stick to virtual classes even after things normalise, as I can log in and attend them even when I am out of Delhi,” says Malhotra.

With gyms, parks and swimming pools continuing to remain closed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, many like Malhotra have turned to digital platforms to keep up with their fitness routines from the safety of their homes. And fitness companies have launched live sessions to take their training online.

Fitness videos have been around for decades, of course. But they don’t allow you to interact with trainers. The live online classes offer a two-way interaction, one where trainers can give attention, correct posture, and motivate users.

 

As soon as the pandemic broke out in India in early March, HealthifyMe formed a team of five members to assist co-founder and chief technology officer Sachin Shenoy set up HealthifyStudio — a pilot for conducting live streaming of training sessions. “The team worked for 48 hours at a stretch, building up an ensemble system to deliver these sessions online,” says Manan Chandan, associate director, new initiatives, at HealthifyMe.

The technology team created an ensemble of web tools for the live sessions, including a Zoom back-end with customisation. A communication layer was built to send notifications for bookings, emails and messages, along with a scheduler tool. “We are going to replace some tools like Zoom with products which have a better infrastructure and are more suited to our needs,” says CEO Tushar Vashisht.

With 16 million registered users, HealthifyMe offers a wide variety of workout genres, including strength and conditioning, dance fitness, Ashtanga yoga, and zumba. Its Smart Plans, available for Rs 299 a month, is an AI-enabled programme that provides a diagram of workouts and nutrition suited to a person’s physical needs. Instead of a live coach, the platform uses an AI-powered coach named "Ria" who answers questions related to workouts, posture and nutrition.
 

At HealthifyStudio, each live session is limited to only 30 users, because it is tough to give individual attention to a large number of participants online. 

To address this problem, health tech and fitness firm Cure.Fit, which also ramped up its online classes post the pandemic, has developed an "energy meter". The meter's built-in camera examines the user and determines which joints are moving and in what fashion. Based on the exercise being done, it tries to compute if the user is exerting more or less pressure than required. This allows the trainer to be more attentive to users and enables Cure.Fit to have hundreds of users participate in each live session.

The company, which was founded by Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori and is backed by venture capital firm Accel, has also created a feature called an orange zone, which tells the trainer if the person is exercising correctly. If she is in the light orange zone, it means that she is not straining herself enough. And if she shows up in the red zone, it means that she is over-exerting himself and needs to slow down.

The “energy meter” observes the user’s actions and computes a graph based on machine learning and gives real-time points. These points are reflected on the scoreboard for the users participating in the live class. This real-time leaderboard also ranks them on the perfectness of their action, which in turn becomes a motivational factor, encouraging them to aim for a higher score.

However, the energy meter is an optional feature. “With the energy meter on, all the calculations happen on the user’s phone. It does not identify the person, but sees only a silhouette of the person,” says Ankit Gupta, head of engineering and operations at Cure.Fit. 

As the lockdown led to the closure of Cure.Fit’s centres, it had to let go about 10 per cent of its trainers to cut costs. Then, the company decided to go all out to beef up its digital fitness offerings. Currently, 1.5 million people are using Cure.Fit’s online service, which is five times more than the number of pre-lockdown users. The company also offers personalised virtual classes, where a trainer guides the user one-on-one.

Other fitness firms are doing the same. Fittr, is an online fitness startup, is building an audio-visual capability for offering personalised live classes. According to Jitendra Chouksey, founder of the  Pune-based company, the feature, for which it has hired 70 fitness coaches, will be rolled out next month.

“We were planning to onboard gyms as a part of our next strategy, but we dropped that idea and started working directly with trainers for an online setting,” says Chouksey, a software engineer. 

 

According to reports, the fitness segment is a $2.6 billion market, growing at an annual rate of 27 per cent. It will reach the $32-billion mark by 2022, of which fitness services like online classes, gyms, and formats like zumba, yoga and aerobics will contribute around $6.6 billion. Hence, OTT platforms have also jumped into the fray as people are now spending more time consuming content at home.

Recently, Disney+ Hotstar partnered with Cure.Fit, Sarva Yoga Studio and Brilliant Wellness to source health and wellness content by fitness and yoga experts, spiritual gurus, and nutritionists on the platform.