Content strategy: Think outside of the box.
9 hidden ways in-app exercise programs boost your user's experience.
The shift to in-app exercise programs, especially among app-minded fitness goers, comes with numerous benefits. The last decade has seen significant interest among fitness brands and trainers in in-app workouts to enhance the exerciser's training experience and to address workout guidance and tracking.
Several innovations in digital fitness delivery infrastructure and the emergence of best practices from early adopters indicate that digital training may indeed be a practical alternative to its at the gym counterpart. In addition to their ability to store large amounts of material, portability, ease of use, and easy tracking, in-app workouts provide for a fun training experience with a range of attractive features and customizable options for personalizing workouts.
In this article, we will look at some of the ways in-app workouts can aid the training experiences of fitness goers and boost their levels of engagement.
What are in-app workouts?
In-app workouts are the digital versions of the traditionally printed exercise routines that can be easily accessed, followed, and modified from various mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. In-app workouts have several interactive and collaborative features that help increase the exerciser’s engagement.
Let us look at how in-app workouts increase a fitness goer’s engagement.
1. Engaging multimedia format
Various in-app workouts incorporate various forms of multimedia—audio, video, photos, animations—to provide guidance throughout the exercise routine, or to provide exercise instruction that instantly explains how to perform exercises the user may not understand or be familiar with at the click of a button.
Further, with in-app workouts, fitness goers need not wait to purchase a book or DVD from a physical store. Instead, users access these digital programs online. Based on the content provider, some of them can also be accessed from the provider’s website or social channels.
2. Accommodates more training styles
Every fitness goer has a unique training style. For instance, some prefer watching videos or reading text whereas others are more comfortable following along with an instructor.
In-app workouts address these needs and allow for a more engaging and enriching experience as compared to plain text and sometimes video to help expand training opportunities to fitness goers who may not have done as well using traditional training materials.
3. Unique training experiences
With traditionally printed textbooks and videos, users are responsible for developing how they’ll follow and track workouts. However, most of the guidance and tracking is often limited to pencil and paper, the user’s memory, or creating the exercises and routines in tracking apps.
In-app workouts, on the contrary, allow users to add a wide range of interactive tracking elements that are not found in printed training materials, such as systematic tracking of exercise and workout times, repetitions, distance, or load and resistance band colors to better engage the exerciser.
Fitness goers can also access various in-app activities and assessments that are much more inspirational compared to traditional mediums.
4. In-app workouts enable customization
Implementation of in-app workouts allows users to customize the training session to fit their workout style, needs, and available equipment. Additionally, if a user completes a certain series of workouts, takes a fitness test, and does not achieve their desired results, the user can adjust future activities in a way to help them reach a certain level of mastery.
5. Workout Guidance
This is an excellent feature that makes in-app workouts the preferred format for many fitness goers. Instead of scanning pages or text for workout routines and what to do next, in-app workouts walk users through their routines with voice, video, photos, and animations to make them convenient for users when it comes to performing and tracking workouts. In addition, workout guidance adjusts for changes the users make to their routines.
6. Ease of tracking
Unlike eBooks or PDFs, where users need an additional method(s) to record and track their performance or memorize sets, reps, times, loads or resistance bands, in-app workouts put recording and tracking all these stats in one place and allow for automatic or manual recording of them. Logs are also maintained automatically removing the burden from the user.
7. Accessible anywhere and anytime
In=app workouts can be accessed and performed almost anywhere. Further, with the platform’s workout library, users can access all their programs and workouts from their iOS and Android devices through one convenient app.
8. Sharing
One of the key elements of successful training is community engagement. In-app workouts allow users to easily annotate and then share their results or notes with friends, other fitness goers, or training groups.
9. Note & analysis features
In-app workouts offer fitness-goers ways to take notes and review their performances. Most in-app workouts today allow notes to be tagged to specific workouts in a program to help users assess and evaluate their progress to help them make necessary modifications to their routines.
Summary
In today’s competitive fitness landscape, an online training environment is becoming a popular alternative for fitness-goers with no time or desire to go to the gym for hours. With an ever-increasing tech-savvy generation of app-minded fitness enthusiasts accustomed to processing information from smart devices, embracing digitized versions of exercise workouts can make imparting and absorbing information effortless, while maximizing user engagement at the same time.
Digital or in-app workouts promote a new-age approach to training and working out that allows fitness goers to connect with like-minded people in a more collaborative environment, leading to better user engagement. It also helps in fostering more interactive, cost-effect, and up-to-date training programs for better user outcomes.
However, the ubiquitous nature of digital fitness apps requires content providers to be aware of potential pros and cons to be able to best support the conversion, delivery, and effectiveness of their exercise content.