When App is your fitness coach

Fitness enthusiasts are no longer willing to follow week-old diet charts given by their nutritionists. They want real-time help, assistance and motivation. Catering to the needs of these customers are portals and apps which are monitoring the health of the users closely, offering quick and effective advice, thereby garnering effective results.

“A person who is on a diet has around 40-70 questions a day like—Can I have a cup of tea? If so, can I add sugar and if I can, how much? Quick responses to these questions help them make a lifestyle decision. They need someone making these decisions on the go,” says Ritu Shrivastava, founder of Obino, a weight-loss coaching app. On their platform, coaches respond to queries within a few minutes and seek pictures of lunch and dinner consumed to keep them on the fitness track.

Shrivastava, who won her own battle of overcoming post-natal weight gain, realised that dieting should be convenient, with first-rate coaching and help overcome the huge unregulated market of nutritionists and dieticians. “There is a dietician at every nook and corner. However, very few of them organised and move it into a virtual platform,” she said.

Even Bhavishya Wadhawan, founder of 98Fit, realised that few people get access to the best-in-class dieticians. “In the market, very few of them are well qualified. Most others do a two-month course. On the other hand, we bring in the best of talent and hire those who have strong degrees like MSc and even PhD,” he says.

Consumers, Wadhawan says, require convenience. They do not want to make appointments and visits, spend time enquiring for gyms and trainers et cetera. They want ‘active’ apps where experts are available easily and quickly. 98Fit has evolved a white-label solution which calculates and formulates a diet plan and workout routine within half-a-minute, also thereby providing B2C services to many brick-and-mortar companies, gyms and fitness-related businesses as well. “As there is a new plan to follow every day, it brings down the monotony and helps them motivated,” he says.

Apps are making it easier of users to meet their weight loss goals. They cut through the clutter of many advice-givers, informal articles, alternative medicines and unqualified professionals who either slow down or jeopardise the process. It comes as no surprise that most of these apps are hence seeing the success as Obino with its personalised diet plans and stringent follow-ups from coaches has around half-a-million customers, three years since its launch. 98Fit has claimed to generate over 100,000 diet plans since its launch last year. Many other apps have already taken over the space be it Bangalore-based GetActive, which offers fitness options to working professionals, or HealthifyMr that has forged joint ventures with top medical institutions. These are some of the many such apps that are growing in the space.

However, fitness training and dieting have a high incidence of failure due to their dependence on individual's determination. Apps with human coaches and systems that provide constant reminders are solving the motivation problem. “Like a real coach, we monitor the users, check when they get off the path and repeat the process,” Shrivastava said.

...& ANALYSIS

• Apps cut through the clutter of many advice-givers, informal articles, alternative medicines and unqualified professionals
   
• However, fitness training and dieting have high incidence of failure due to their dependence on individual's determination