You are lazy and mediocre — A deep dive into the fitness market
By: Enrico Mellis
Tags: Venture Capital, Tech, Fitness, New Years Resolutions, Startup

Pythagoras didn’t have a six-pack

Source: Proof that Pythagoras didn’t have a six pack.

Apparently, there are those types who get up at 4 am, meditate, read a book, and finish running 15k by 8 am. If this applies to you: congratulations. For the rest of us, life is more difficult.

Some problems are hard to figure out for the first time. Once a solution is found, it’s easy. Pythagoras’ theorem probably took him quite a while to figure out, but now every 7th grader will eventually be able to apply it.

And then there are “Schwarzenegger problems”: you and I both know what it takes to become a bodybuilder. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Yet, it’s incredibly hard to become a bodybuilder — or fit, for that matter.

What established fitness products still mostly do today is give you access to workouts you already knew. HIIT can be traced back to a German athletics coach called Woldemar Gerschler in the 1950s. Yoga stems from India, some 3,000 years before Christ. And you can’t tell me that the fundamentals of sit-ups and pull-ups have drastically changed — although many charlatans want you to believe that.

Just Kinda Do It

Motivation seems to be an ethereal concept & notoriously tricky to exploit. First were the theories of negative & positive reinforcement (i.e. Skinner & Pavlov) or self-efficacy theories (i.e. Bandura in the 70s). In the 80s, Self-Determination Theory (intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation) became known in research circles. The theory was recently popularised in the mainstream by Daniel Pink in his bestseller Drive. Researchers then found that the simultaneous presence of high extrinsic and high intrinsic motivation is likely to yield the most positive benefits for adult athletes. Building on that, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi coined the “state of flow” which was exuberantly picked up by coaches, managers, and artists worldwide.

Problem: most of this research was conducted on professional athletes. If you’re not a professional athlete, there are limits to how far this can get you.

Your genes don’t want you to work out

The mind is a product of the brain, and the brain is a product of evolution. Our struggle to work out and eat healthily is a struggle with comfort. About 2 million years ago, humanity transitioned into a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Hunting was a group effort, involving lots of running, jumping, hiding, climbing, and coordination with a group of co-hunters. 2,25 hours per day was the average physical activity of a hunter-gatherer. The activity was physically and mentally demanding and our survival depended on it.

That is why exercise is a mood booster. It is shown to have a direct, acute impact on both your prefrontal cortex & hypothalamus activity. Exercise will leave you with a better mood, higher energy, better memory, and higher attention levels. The long-term positive effects include reduced depression symptoms or anxiety levels. The parts of our brain activity during a complex activity such as hunting are the same areas that also play a key role in memory and executive functions such as problem-solving and planning. These exact same areas also seem to profit from exercise.

The problem: these effects appear during & post-workout. In modern society with readily-available, calorie-rich food, and no need for physical activity to survive, our evolutionary wiring makes it hard for us to be active & healthy. Avoiding physical activity that is unnecessary and rewarding in the long-run is a fundamental, universal instinct among adults. In times when calories were scarce, going for a run around the meadows for fun was frowned upon. For 90% of human history, there was no “need” to be motivated to exercise. Evolution provided us with hunger, a sufficiently strong urge to stay active. Exercise as we know it is an invention from the era of industrialisation. Nowadays, you need to trick your brain into wanting it.

For 90% of human history, there was no “need” to be motivated to exercise.

Neuroscientist Evian Gordon describes how the safety and comfort of the couch and “comfort-food” creates pleasant short-term gratification. The pain of getting up at 6 am to leave the house in Berlin’s Siberian winter conditions — not gratifying at all.

DNA of a team player

Source: Chauvet Caves in the South of France

Hunting was a team effort and there is a reciprocal relationship between social bonds and exercise. Not only does exercising with your friends motivate you more, it also strengthens the friendship, which in turn — you guessed it — makes you exercise more. 42% of gym members miss exercising with other people and 22% miss their class instructor or personal trainer.

The social reward of working out together extends further. It is proven to become a signifier of belonging & social recognition — which sounds familiar to those of us sharing Strava runs on Instagram? Especially in recent years, upscale & experience-focused gyms have had tremendous success with younger generations. From Pilates, Yoga & HIIT boutiques to premium gyms such as Equinox, Soulcycle, or Barry’s Bootcamp, these strong brands cracked the code. Social media boasting accelerated the trend to become a social must for many, creating almost tribal-like energy for the brands.

It‘s all fun & games

Since successful hunting was key to survival, it was key in mate selection. Studies found that competition is an even stronger motivator for exercise than friendly support. Giving “friendly” support actually made some subject groups less likely to go to the gym. Competition instead triggers a social escalation process. In a competitive setting, people make each other more competitive, driven by sexual selection and other social recognition drivers.

Hunting included collaboration, strategy, and stalking game. It was an activity closer to a video game — or team sports. Running on the treadmill or lifting weights in a windowless room is just lacking those dimensions. People who wear a virtual reality headset while running or biking enjoy their experience more than people who do the same exercise while staring at a wall in a gym (no surprises here…). Even watching TV provides a measurable boost in enjoyment. A “cognitively impoverished” environment will bore you and make you less likely to come back.

Source: Can stock photos get any better than this?

Lastly, building habits has been shown to reduce “cognitive resources’’ for working out and support regular exercise habits. You basically don’t have to think about getting out of bed in the morning and put on your running shoes. Cultivating this “instigation habit” can be a strong predictor of long-term workout consistency.

Building a champion

Our evolutionary roots suggest that we are mentally engaged endurance athletes. If we don’t remain active, our capacities are going to fade — not just physically, but mentally as well. There seems to be a mismatch between our lazy lifestyles of today and how we evolved. So we need a motivator to get us moving.

We believe that the winning product in this market will be able to trigger the fundamental drivers of workout motivation and actually make people fitter and healthier. We have developed our investment hypotheses around what we believe will create a winner in this segment.