Final Project Proposal
E - TRAINERIntroduction to E-Trainer
My idea is essentially to turn a 3G phone into a personal weight trainer and stems from my personal experiences in gym environments and interest in finding ways to make new technology truly life enhancing. As a natural technophobe, I am often irritated by how new gadgets can easily complicate my life without giving enough in return. I am only really passionate about devices which can really justify themselves in terms of how they can simplify my life or offer me capabilities that would be impossible without them. This is a concept I think could really change the gym experience and help a lot of people achieve their physical goals a lot quicker and more safely.
The way we currently weight train
I have been in gyms regularly for about ten years and watched and spoken to fellow weightlifters a lot over that time. We all follow some form of routine, chest and triceps Thursday, legs on Fridays and so on. Within these routines we perform a range of exercises during each session that we have learnt over the time we have been attending the gym. Some of this we gain from more experienced friends, some from tutorials in books and magazines and some from watching other people do something and trying it ourselves without any proper instruction. If the aim, as it generally is, is for combined fat loss and muscle building then you will also need to research nutrition quite extensively. Personal trainers and nutrition experts are seen as expensive luxuries for rich people. What amazes me is that weight trainers, especially beginners, who have a far from expert level of knowledge, have to make up their own fitness and training regimes. Publications like Men’s Health have prospered from this exact market, but no-one ever takes a magazine into the gym never mind the suitably weighty ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding’. The reality is most people cobble together their routines with bits of advice they have picked up from a wide variety of sources, much of it hearsay and many novice weightlifters risk injury and joint damage with inappropriate weights and a lack of proper tuition. Gym instructors might be able to offer some advice but are hardly likely to make you their number one priority, most of the instructors I have seen over they years seem pretty distant figure, happy to let people get on with it. Imagine how much better it would be if all of us had a really knowledgeable personal trainer with us every session who could also offer expert level nutritional advice for our rest days.
How E-Trainer would work
Someone interested in starting a course of weightlifting would access our website where they would enter all their physical details, days available to train and their desired training outcomes. The system would create a unique training schedule for you before each session which would be accessible by 3G phone when in the gym. Before each exercise you could view an animation demonstrating the correct form and have a weight suggested based on the details you entered on the web. Help files and handy hints would also be made available. Unlike the inflexible routines offered by other sources the E-trainer could easily suggest alternatives when equipment you need is in use and suggest a weight for your next exercise based on how many repetitions you performed in your previous set, information you could easily send via your phone to the site. By logging in at home and updating your information regularly on the website your routine can be constantly changed to match your progress. If you appear to be lagging behind in a certain area your regime would be altered to bring it into line with the rest of your training.
As Arnie himself once said “bodybuilding is one third training and two thirds nutrition”. Nutrition is a complicated field and goes far beyond ‘eating loads’; it’s hard to tread a line between muscle gain and fat gain since both require an excess of calories in your system. Although I think it would be very irritating for the user and potentially might lead them towards an unhealthy obsession with food if their phone kept buzzing with ‘EAT AN EGG NOW’ messages from E-Trainer all day but they could receive emails with suggested recipes or texts with an appropriate calorie intake level for the day.
Benefits
The main benefit to the subscriber is that they will have meet their goals in the gym more quickly and safely and will no longer have to go to the time and effort of researching and organizing their own regimes. It would bring a lot of the benefits of a personal trainer without the prohibitive cost. People like to feel confident that they will see a return on the effort they put in but often over-train certain muscles or neglect others they know less exercises for. These people can be easily introduced to new exercises and will be happier when they no longer have to guess what the optimum number of reps is or how many sets hit the right note between under and over-training. A lot of guys I have met join gyms with a real desire to improve themselves but have no real idea how to go about starting and are so overwhelmed by the number of machines and possible exercises they never really get going and end up frustrated and out of pocket (gym memberships aren’t cheap!). I love the idea that this service could democratize weight-training, bringing it to the people.
Target Audience
I have always felt that there is a massive pool of guys who feel insecure about their bodies and would love to get in shape but are intimidated by gyms and their own lack of knowledge. I have seen so many young guys in university and college gyms lifting more weight than they can safely manage or training in a totally unstructured way that will only see them make little progress. I feel bad for them because they have the most important thing; desire, but are doing everything else wrong, and will probably get fed up of wasting their efforts and give up after a couple of months. E-Trainer is for everyone sick of forgetting how to do an exercise they read about in Muscle and Fitness magazine when they actually get to the gym or concerned whether they are getting as much out of their training as they should. Obsession, healthy and otherwise, with our physical appearance is one of the great social issues of our times and more people join gyms and purchase the related paraphernalia than ever before. There is a lot of money in the health and fitness market and I could see a huge market for this subscription service, for which a huge number of people already own the necessary device, their phone. Hell, I’d use it and I hate gadgets.
posted by nick_gerrard @ 8:58 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home