Gone are the days when people needed to wake up before the rise of the sun and rush over to gym centers miles away before they could improve their body fitness. With the advent of technology, physical fitness has taken an interesting turn for the better. People now take gym instructions right from the comfort of their homes and gym centers now have basic digital fitness materials to better satisfy their customers.
It is quite interesting that as a gym instructor, you can get more customers from anywhere across the world without geographical barriers. Digital fitness did not just start getting popular during the 2020 pandemic. It has been a thing for a while now especially as many tech companies keep releasing smartphones, pads and computers.
Many health fitness companies have taken the initiative to create a virtual experience for more users. This development has not only benefited the fitness brands but also people who now have more access to a better health fitness experience via digital means.
This article will outline how you can successfully boost the engagement of your enrolled gym members through applying the right digital experience.
What is Digital Fitness?
Digital Fitness as a term can simply be defined as the use of digital materials, and software to improve the gym experience of people during physical exercise. It involves the use of web applications, mobile apps, digital gadgets, streaming, online fitness classes, and wearables to better serve the users.
Digital fitness also provides your members with a virtual replica of their real-life experience during workouts and exercise.
Why is It Important?
As a gym owner or instructor, digital fitness will be very much important to you because of the following outlined reasons:
- It is a trend that has come to stay. The pandemic has earlier made many gym centers and fitness stores close up for long periods of time. This pause in activity made many people more innovative with tech and come up with different advanced methods to promote fitness and wellbeing virtually. People have adapted and more tools and apps are being created so you need to stay up to date to please your members.
- It helps you to keep your members accountable. You can easily access them online anytime any day especially if you use automatic messaging features in your fitness app.
- It makes their training session more personalized. You can easily attend to many signees at the same time if you use the perfect digital tools.
- A community is very essential for any business growth. One way to improve your members’ gym experience is to create a strong and engaging community and at some point, this might be tasking when distance comes into play.
Creating a good digital experience will combat such barriers and provide your members with the best possible gym experience across distances.
6 Ways to Create A Great Digital Fitness Experience
Many popular digital fitness experiences have come into play with many software and even the use of social platforms like Tiktok, Instagram and the likes.
You can take advantage of this revolution in fitness and create a great digital fitness experience by applying the following:
Personalized Training
According to IHRSA, hyper-personalization will soon become the biggest trend in the world. This involves the use of wearable tech tools that have been personalized for the user based on their biomechanics data. It creates an immersive environment where user data is analyzed and stored by digital applications to provide a more personalized experience for fitness members like health tips, advice, digital tracking and so on.
Live Stream
Live streaming might look similar to training a crowd of people physically in a place but it can be much more technical. This is because it requires more than your fitness expertise. You need to understand how to set up on a virtual platform, get the right streaming devices and be conscious of your lighting. These will either improve or reduce your members’ digital experience.
You can decide to work around your client’s schedule or set an automatic date based on your own calendar.
On-Demand Coaching
On-demand virtual coaching is prerecorded and the video is played by the user in stages. Unlike that of the live stream, where the instructor gives fitness lessons on the spot, in real time.
On-demand coaching is very advantageous when you have too many signed members and may not be able to meet up with different scheduled classes. You can even decide to combine both digital methods as part of your gym services.
Create an Online Community
Authenticity is key to replicating the in-person experience of your online fitness center and you can only do that by building a community. Get your members to interact with you and one another, have Q & A sessions, send them messages and ask for their opinions.
A supportive online network helps to boost engagement in your fitness club and create stronger bonds with existing members. It also helps to sell your business, because people would love to share their experiences with outsiders thereby promoting referral marketing.
Organize Challenges
Organizing fitness challenges amongst members of your club or community will help to improve their proactiveness and also reward outstanding students. There are many apps that help in tracking fitness challenges virtually. You could plan it routinely or after each paid session to encourage more participation.
Combine with Offline Fitness
One of the best ways to create the perfect digital fitness experience is to combine digital fitness with an offline gym center. That way, you can give your members the best digital experience even within the confines of your gym. When people know they have options, it makes the service more attractive.
Conclusion
In summary, it is certain to say that digital fitness is definitely going to stick around for the future. Hence, you need to do all you can to meet your customers’ expectations and adapt to the growing digital fitness world.
