Senior Director of Fitness at YouFit Gyms

Raphael Konforti

Healthcare visits are centered around data and the positives or negatives associated with those results. As healthcare and wellness evolve, people continue to have more access to data. The fitness wearables market penetrates 21% of the population while there are well over 100 million active Apple watch users as Apple pours more into more fitness and health features. Even those without a wearable who own an iPhone have health data recorded, such as a daily step count. There’s no shortage of fitness data, whether you want it or not. As fitness apps collate and filter the data through AI filters and algorithms, the original human-to-human contact with health information is dwindling. The relevance of how the apps work comes down to what’s required to be healthy and fit.

There are four fundamentals to eliciting healthy behaviors and outcomes. Nutrition, movement, recovery, and mental health. The quantity and quality of foods are paramount to supply the body with the appropriate amounts of nutrient-dense foods. While many will solely focus on the quantity, as many popular macronutrient apps do, the body needs more than calories to be healthy. We are what we eat, nothing more and nothing less. Movement (not only exercise) performs a host of benefits to hormonal regulation, blood sugar regulation, cardiovascular health and more. Along with strength training, recovery is the largest trend within the fitness industry. As the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is perpetually activated ironically through technology, the body can rarely shift into a parasympathetic state to rest and recover. The lack of recovery leads to burnout and poor mental health. Exercise (empirical evidence equally suggests nutrition and recovery as well) is considered the most powerful drug to enhance mental state, and the better you feel, the more likely you are to exercise.

Much like spokes on a wheel, these fundamentals all rely on each other. Degradation across one fundamental negatively impacts the rest. Alternatively, the more robust one is, the easier the others become. The better you recover with sleep, the better your workouts are, the better your nutrition, the better your sleep, and so on. The vast majority of fitness apps focus on only one fundamental, rarely considering how they interact. There are apps to measure recovery levels, to track food, meditation apps and influencer-laden exercise apps. It’s much like the irony of American healthcare plans - medical, dental, and vision are separate orders even though your eyes and teeth are all part of your body. From this, the next evolution of fitness apps must provide integrated solutions and thoughtful guidelines around realistic habits and behavior change. If 90% of people who start an exercise program quit three months later, it’s unlikely that trying to fix all four fundamentals through fragmented fitness apps will be successful.

What you must also consider is that while technology improves the ability to collect and analyze data, it’s the same technology that promotes unhealthy behaviors, and barrages of advertisements full of false promises. Discussing health and fitness from an objective standpoint always has value so long as we don’t rely on apps to make every decision for our health. To create habits and lifestyles, you need to use instincts and focus on the one behavior that has the greatest impact on all fundamentals. For the next evolution of fitness apps to last, they’ll have to leverage more inclusive data to provide users with attainable identity-based changes where and when they matter most. The capacity for fitness apps is no longer limited by data or technology; it’s limited by a person’s ability to digest and take action. Habits, at best, take three weeks to form; the more simultaneous habits, the longer it takes. The more habits are taken on, the less likely you are to succeed.

It’s up to health and fitness professionals to add the human element into fitness apps to guide people through individual paths towards health and fitness. There’s nothing as powerful as a real person following up, especially when empowered with accurate data.