Ed Trainor emerges from New York Sports Club in Manhattan after a rigorous morning workout. He peers down at his heart rate monitor to check how many calories he’s burned so far: a little over 1,000. He’s nearly halfway to his daily goal and he’s determined to reach it.
His methods? Well, they’re a bit unorthodox.
“I commute through Penn Station each day,” Trainor says. “If I’m behind on my calories I’ll walk around the block to go up another staircase.” After his commute on the train he reaches the parking lot. He zigzags through cars, taking the most indirect route possible to his vehicle. Every step counts!
“Here I am, changing my behavior because I’m wearing this device,” he says.
The root of his obsession is the perfect marriage he’s found between human behavior, fitness and technology. He even helped start a group of like-minded people from the fitness and technology industries to vet his interests. It’s called the Fitness Industry Technology Council (FITC).
The members of the FITC include Trainor, Kevin Steele, Ph.D., principal of Communication Consultants, Inc., Dave Flynt, principal interaction designer of Precor, Don Moore, embedded fitness market segment manager of Intel, Jon Zerden, chief technology officer (CTO) of Athletes Performance and Arlen Nipper, president and CTO of Eurotech, Lloyd Gainsboro, of Dedham Health and Athletic Complex, Joe Cirulli, of Gainesville Athletic Club and Mike Motta, of Plus One Health Club Management.
The goal of the group is to create a platform that allows for innovation, or, as Jon Zerden likes to say, to create the “plumbing” behind fitness equipment.
In order to create the plumbing, the FITC has split into three different groups designed to solve three different problems: the data standards group has set out to define a precise way to measure fitness data, like how many calories are burned during a workout; the cost-optimization team exists to ensure that any new technology is affordable, to facilitate the scale needed to achieve ubiquity; and, the communications specifications group aims to make fitness data accessible for web developers.
In the software world there is a term for what the FITC aims to accomplish; it’s called an “Applications Protocol Interface” (API). An API is simply a guide to creating a piece of software that can work with another piece of software. Apple, for instance, publishes an API for their App Store, which allows developers to create pieces of software for iPhone users. The set of standards the FITC is setting out to create will serve as the API for fitness equipment manufacturers to create a more seamless user experience for gym members.
The group has launched headfirst into the quixotic search for principal technology standards in the fitness industry. If they succeed, they’d have accomplished a feat that could expand the entire industry. “We could really capture more than the 15 percent of consumers we do currently,” explains Trainor.
Of the companies represented in the FITC, Intel is by far the largest. They have an obvious interest in the group: if equipment manufacturers produce smarter machines they’ll need computer chips to do so. Still, the number of pieces of fitness equipment produced each year pales in comparison to the amount of computers, laptops and net books sold to consumers. When asked why Intel had taken an interest in the fitness industry, Edward Hill, director of marketing for Intel’s embedded computing division, replies, “The volume is still interesting enough for us to participate.”
“I think we’re looking at an opportunity for the fitness industry to move into a new frontier,” says Trainor. “The health care industry is about to break and prevention is the way to go.” Exercise is, of course, what Trainor really means by prevention. Hill thinks when fitness data is available, health care insurers will be less interested in visits to the gym than, say, heart rate, which provides evidence not only that a person visited the gym but did more than sit in the whirlpool for 30 minutes.
“Does that mean every time they’re active they have to walk through the front door of our gym?” Trainor asks the question rhetorically. “Of course not.”
When he’s not working out at New York Sports Club, you can find Ed Trainor surfing off of New York’s coast. “I’m usually in the water for an hour and a half… Never have I gotten out of the water without burning at least 1,200 calories.”
The challenge for the FITC is to take two different activities, like lifting weights and surfing, and capture the essence of each workout in a set of data that says something meaningful.
How, exactly, the FITC plans to accomplish that is largely theory at this point. Questions are in greater supply than answers, but Trainor promises that’s about to change. At this week’s IHRSA convention and trade show the FITC will deliver a position statement that, according to Trainor, “will be the tipping point for us moving forward.”