Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Akshay Verma, Co-founder, FITPASS, to learn more about the current trends in tech-enabled digital platforms that are influencing people’s fitness journeys.
Health & Fitness trends
If we go back to our fourth grade textbook and look at what health was defined as back then, it was a state of physical and mental well-being. So, fitness is something that is very crucial to us, and even culturally, it has been very crucial to India and to Indians as a society. Fitness is now on everyone’s mind, and the way we see the trends going forward is that, especially with the younger generation, everyone has realised that you have one body, one mind, and it is on you to take care of it as you continue to work towards your aspirations. So only if you are fit can you achieve your aspirations. This is something that even the airline industry tells you. First, you have to put on your own oxygen mask and then the other person’s. So what that means is that until you can take care of yourself, until you are not a liability to society, your office, or your family, and only then are you an asset for everybody, can you look at progressing on everyone’s behalf and yourself?
What we need to understand, and this is a line that I use frequently, is that sitting is the new smoking’. What we’re trying to make people understand is that inactivity actually kills more people globally than smoking. This is a report by the WHO. Inactivity kills 3.2 million people globally. So being active and being fit the way we think of being fit, which is looking a certain way and having a certain physique, are two different things. So anybody who wants to adopt fitness in their life should start being active, and any activity is better than zero activity. I think the trend going forward is exactly this: people have understood that they have to take care of themselves, which means they have to be physically active and understand what their body says, along with balancing their mind, of course, and mindfulness is equally important to practise. I think that’s the trend towards personalised journeys for the 1.6 billion people in the country.Making fitness affordable: Challenges
The biggest challenge used to be mindset and people deprioritizing fitness and their own well-being because they had other pursuits and other goals in life that were prioritised, and I think that has been solved. Now the biggest challenge that remains is: how do you make fitness affordable and accessible to everybody? Because currently, the way fitness works is that you have gyms and studios in the ecosystem that require you to pay for the whole year upfront. And that has to be broken with an asset-light model, or, if you want to call it that, the uberification of the fitness economy. But ultimately, we have people living across the country. So digital solutions that are tech-enabled get you to personalise the journey and make it affordable, accessible, and convenient.I grew up in India, played sports for the university, and went abroad. I went to Oxford, worked in London, went to New York, and studied at Columbia. The one thing that I had in common across my journey was being physically active. When I came back to India on a sabbatical in 2013, one thing that I was not able to access was activity because of the way the Indian fitness ecosystem was made, where you needed to pay for the whole year upfront. That became a big barrier because I get a haircut every three or four weeks, but my hairdresser never asked me to pay for the whole year.
That is where we realised that 18 to 35 is an age group that makes up 50% of India’s population; however, none of them are able to afford fitness because of the way the fitness ecosystem is priced. This had to be broken, and that is where we came in.
FITPASS
FITPASS is India’s only full-stack fitness and wellness solution. FITPASS is one single membership that allows you to access 7500+ premium gyms and fitness studios across the country. This means that you, as a customer and as a member, can work out anywhere, anytime, and anyhow you want. Even if you want to work out at a gym or a yoga studio, or Zumba, Pilates, KRAB, MAGA, CrossFit, mixed martial arts, or rock climbing, you can do this across our partner network. We also command the world’s largest AI platform for fitness coaching, called Aria.
