Home Workouts Are Here to Stay?

With COVID on yet another rampage, it's safe to say my anxiety and low tolerance for crowded spaces is back, including my local gym. This graphic came from The New Consumer, a publication by Dan Frommer, who's been a tech and business journalist for a really long time. He takes survey data and other information across industries and aggregates it into a newsletter.

If this graphic is representative and home fitness is really here to stay, we better start talking about self accountability or hiring experienced and knowledgeable coaches remotely.

There's a reason why Peloton's stock has leveled out over the last year. Just because you want a Peloton (or insert other exercise equipment here), doesn't mean you'll like actually doing it all the time. The things you enjoy, like exercising, you might not always want to do. It might be time to push yourself into wanting it, hold yourself accountable, and remind yourself of the last exercise experience you enjoyed. This takes self discipline.

And the push notifications from a fitness app aren't the same thing as a real, live coach calling you about your training, checking in on your nutrition, and calling you out when you need it. It’s one thing to say you prefer to workout at home because of a raging pandemic, but it’s another thing to do it properly under the guidance of an experienced coach.

Another aspect worth noting is that when we work out in front of other people, whether in a commercial gym setting, group fitness class, or with a personal trainer, we push ourselves harder. So if we’re working out from home, when no one’s watching, we might take longer rest periods, stop before we’re really pushing our limits, and overall slow or stall our training progress. These are all things to consider, not to mention, when we go it alone, we might not have a proper and progressive training program or nutrition guidance.

The biggest difference I see is in the want to vs. have to. If you have an appointment with a trainer or a friend at the gym, your brain says you have to go. If we have a bike in our garage, we don't have to go ride it. And wanting to is hard when the couch looks so good. If you need a remote coach to push you for home workouts, I'm here to help. Because it's not always easy to do it on your own.