{"id":8339,"date":"2018-04-29T20:18:39","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T00:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/personal-trainers-and-technology-a-match-made-in-heaven\/"},"modified":"2018-04-29T20:18:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T00:18:39","slug":"personal-trainers-and-technology-a-match-made-in-heaven","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/personal-trainers-and-technology-a-match-made-in-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Trainers and Technology: A Match Made in Heaven?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The instructions for this blog post were to think about how a company we’re familiar with should respond to the ongoing digital transformation we’re currently seeing. My initial thought was to write about a company I’d worked at, but the two companies I’ve spent the most time at are Google and Amazon. Given that we cover these two companies so much throughout our two years at HBS, I wanted to write about something more unique and non-traditional.<\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to think about what organizations I’m deeply familiar with that could benefit from a digital transformation of their own. Almost immediately, one organization came to mind: the HBS Shad Gym Personal Training program (whom I\u2019ve been going to quite regularly this past semester as I try to get in decent shape before heading back into the real world).<\/span><\/p>\n

It may seem like an odd choice, but I think there’s a lot of value that Shad stands to create by embracing technology in their personal training regimens. Indeed, technology has already deeply penetrated the fitness space, e.g. everything from Nike’s personalized workout app to MyFitnessPal’s food and nutrition journal, even to FitBit’s monitoring devices. And this competition is one of the main challenges that a traditional personal training company like Shad faces. <\/span><\/p>\n

So, at this point, a completely valid question would be to ask whether personal trainers like the ones at HBS Shad will still be a relevant force in five to ten years. In other words, will technology be able to replace personal trainers, and if so why even bother enhancing their offerings with new tech?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, I actually don’t think that personal trainers can be replaced by technology (at least not the technology we\u2019re likely to have in the next ten years). For me personally, there are three major value drivers that the personal trainers at Shad provide – and which technology cannot:<\/span><\/p>\n

– First, they keep me coming to the gym. There have been plenty of mornings when my alarm went off, and I wanted nothing more than to hit snooze and get back an extra hour of sleep. Yet, knowing that I had an appointment with a human being who was giving up their time to work with me always got me up. If I were using an app, it would be so much easier to abandon my routine.<\/span><\/p>\n

– Second, they get me motivated. \u00a0So many times, I’ll be in a workout with my trainer and I’ll be in the middle of my last set and my energy is clearly fading. Yet, right then, my trainer says something like “Come on man. Just two more. You got this.” And those words of encouragement (along with the feeling that I’ll be letting my trainer down if I give up) are enough to inspire me to finish the set. There’s no app in the world that could make me give that last push in the same way.<\/span><\/p>\n

– Finally, and most important, my Shad personal trainer teaches me the proper form for different exercises, and corrects me when I deviate. I’ve tried watching videos and using tools like the Nike app with its personalized workout descriptions. But it’s one thing to watch a workout and another thing entirely to replicate it yourself. So often, I think I’m doing the exact right movements, and my trainer shows me how I’m way off. If I were using technology instead of a trainer, I’d be training myself to make the wrong movements, diminishing the value of my workouts or even worse, injuring myself seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, now that we’ve established that personal trainers can provide a value that today’s technology is hard-pressed to replicate, let’s think about a few ways that Shad trainers might dramatically enhance their offering by leveraging tech:<\/span><\/p>\n

1) <\/span>Using a shared food diary like MyFitnessPal to keep track of clients’ nutrition and eating habits. <\/b>My trainer constantly mentioned how our workouts were only half the battle. What I was eating (and hopefully not eating) were critical to developing a leaner and more physically fit body. Yet, I only saw my trainer every few days. So, when he asked me if I’d been eating right (specifically, getting a ton of protein and good carbs), I’d have trouble remembering exactly what I’d eaten. That’s where we could really use a technology like MyFitnessPal, which allows you to input the food you’re eating in real-time and see exactly what nutritional value you’re getting (e.g. 30g of protein in this chicken dish or 20g of sugar in this soda). If my trainer had me use MyFitnessPal, or even better if we opened a shared account both could access, he could give me much better and more personalized recommendations about my diet and even about what workouts would be appropriate given the amount of calories I\u2019d gotten in a given day. Taking it one step further, a problem I constantly ran into was not knowing if a particular food was good for me or not (for instance a specific protein bar). Using a simple technology like text messages, it would be awesome if I could check with my trainer digitally in real time to see if a particular meal or food item is good to eat, or might derail our efforts.<\/span><\/p>\n

2) <\/span>Video conferencing to check client’s form, even when they’re not in a session.<\/b> Shad personal trainers aren’t available on weekends (at least mine wasn’t). Yet weekends are the best time to work out, given all the extra free time. It would be great if my trainer leveraged video chat technology (e.g. Google Hangouts or Skype) to check in on my form even if he couldn’t be there in person. That way, without having to come in to work on the weekend, he could still quickly make sure I’m staying in line with his teaching and furthering our progress, rather than damaging my body.<\/span><\/p>\n

3)<\/span> Keeping track of and analyzing all the available data on our workouts.<\/b> My trainer, like all great trainers, keeps track of how I’m progressing in our workouts. Yet rather than remembering all this in his head or even with pen and paper, it would be so helpful to input all the data into a spreadsheet program. For example, if I was able to do 3 sets of 15 bicep curls at weight x on Monday, and then weight x + 10 on Wednesday, but then back down to weight x on Friday, it would be amazing to have all that data available to both of us to look at and analyze. For one thing, as a person who’s working out, it’s so easy to forget exactly what workouts you did, even the day after you did them. (This is especially true with a good workout that’s pushing you to exhaustion and making your brain less likely to remember the details.) So, even something as simple as an excel file showing the specifics would be great. <\/span><\/p>\n

But going one step further, looking at trends in the spreadsheet could be very powerful. E.g. we can see if certain exercises are progressing less quickly, or if certain workouts are negatively correlated with each other, etc. \u00a0Being able to look at this data and sit with a trained workout professional to analyze it could optimize my workouts greatly.<\/span><\/p>\n

4) <\/span>Create a community of all the trainer’s clients to support each other.<\/b> My trainer has a bunch of clients. But other than the times when one of us starts a workout and another ends theirs, we don’t have much interaction with each other. Yet, we could be a super valuable tool for one another. Having social encouragement and folks to bounce off frustrations and concerns with could help keep clients motivated and effective in their workout regimens. Even something as simple as a private Facebook group for all of my trainer’s clients could be a great forum for us to encourage and support one another.<\/span><\/p>\n

5) <\/span>Join workout data with HBS healthcare and health records. <\/b>Now this is one that’s pretty unique to Shad since it’s a part of HBS. For most students here, 性视界 is both our gym and our healthcare provider. And so often, the two aspects of our lives are intertwined. For instance, I recently had a minor health issue that kept me from being able to work out at the same cadence and intensity. What I ended up having to do was go see my doctor and then relay what he told me to my personal trainer. It would have been so much better to turn that into a three-way digital conversation (e.g. email, messenger, or whatever) between me, my doctor, and my trainer, so my doctor could better understand the situation and my trainer could better tailor his workouts to what I need from a health perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, it would be great if my trainer could send all the data he’s collected on my workouts to my primary care physician, so he could see what kind of fitness condition I’m in and take that into consideration during our checkups. \u00a0Yet, obviously, anything involving healthcare data is very privacy sensitive, so this would require full patient consent.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, despite all these ideas for ways to integrate technology, such initiatives are likely to be met with resistance by the Shad trainers themselves. Personal training is an old school profession, and trainers are likely to say something like \u201cI\u2019ve been doing things a certain way for years, why should I change?\u201d A good counter-argument would be to say that if Shad trainers don\u2019t embrace these new technologies, they\u2019re more likely to be replaced by them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, another type of resistance we\u2019re likely to see is trainers saying they don\u2019t feel comfortable developing or creating new technology. Yet the nice thing about all the ideas above is that they don’t require new technology, or even particularly sophisticated technology. Everything I’ve described would greatly enhance the personal training regimen at Shad, but would only require leveraging the new technological tools that are already at our disposal. (That said, Shad would need a slight organizational change to make sure trainers are up to speed on modern tech at their disposal, and they may need an IT manager to keep track of it all).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How should Shad Hall Gym's personal trainers respond to the threats and opportunities posed by digital transformation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2471,"featured_media":8340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"class_list":["post-8339","hck-submission","type-hck-submission","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"connected_submission_link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/assignment\/driving-digital-transformation\/","yoast_head":"\nPersonal Trainers and Technology: A Match Made in Heaven? - Digital Innovation and Transformation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/personal-trainers-and-technology-a-match-made-in-heaven\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Personal Trainers and Technology: A Match Made in Heaven? 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