Opportunity: It’s hard to imagine a greater gift that a fitness center could give to beginning exercisers than to help them overcome the odds and make fitness an ongoing part of their life. Exercise is widely considered one of the single best sources of lifetime health and wellness, but it is difficult for many beginners to get the hang of it and stick with it. Whether it’s a senior’s goal of healthy aging, a teen’s heartbreaking challenge with weight control and self-esteem, a patient’s recovery from heart disease or injury, or anyone’s desire to get in better shape--your facility’s ability to systematically help members, overcome the physical and psychological challenges they face in the first year on a program, can make a lifelong difference.

Challenge: The science of helping a new or returning exerciser to succeed is well documented. Both the physiology (method) and the psychology (motivation) have been researched and taught for decades. The problem is that putting the science into practice means continual coaching, handholding, and personal encouragement. Few fitness centers can afford to provide the level of staffing required to give beginners the amount of consistent, daily support they need to succeed. As a result, the majority of new members, except for a small percentage who can afford regular personal training, don’t make it through the first year. And of those who do make it, many use poor form and fail to get the results they seek

Solution: FitLinxx adds Intelligence to your existing fitness equipment to enable even a small staff to provide exercisers the support they need to succeed. FitLinxx "learns" each member’s program, "coaches" them through their workout, and "tracks" their progress to provide motivational feedback and to ensure that your staff knows which members need help. This allows your facility to provide the necessary handholding and motivational edge to help members succeed.

Outcomes: Consistent feedback and encouragement makes exercisers more confident, enthusiastic, and motivated right from their first workout. And the interactive "coaching" ensures members use proper form at every session, which in turn leads to better physical results. Together, improved mental motivation and proper exercise form give new exercisers a much higher prospect of locking in the new lifestyle they seek, and staying with their fitness programs long-term.

Using FitLinxx, members are more confident, feel safer, and stick with a program at a much higher rate. Staff is more effective and efficient in helping the new members succeed. And the facility as a whole achieves a higher retention rate among new members.

Opportunity: Having complete and accurate information about participants’ program compliance, would allow management (teachers, staff, commanders, insurers, etc.) to hold users (students, troops, patients, etc.) accountable for their programs – rewarding strong performance and taking action as needed for non-compliance.

Challenge: Paper systems do not allow effective compliance reporting.. Workout cards are often not properly filled out. Even when they are, compiling meaningful information from a file full of individual workout cards would be a massive clerical effort.

Solution: By collecting exercise results automatically from the equipment, FitLinxx can provide a full accounting of every users’ workouts. The results are always complete and up to date. And there’s no risk of error – either intentional or unintentional. FitLinxx can display the results in different formats – for reviews, grading purposes, or hierarchical analysis to the chain of command.

Outcomes: In the military, commanders can look top-down at compliance by unit, and drill through the results right down to the individual level. In schools, teachers can quickly assess compliance for grading and review purposes. For facilities with members that have insurance-subsidized memberships, reporting is simple and accurate – a differentiation that can be used to attract potential member referrers.

Opportunity: With the health crisis stemming from inactive lifestyles and poor diets growing, an increased community commitment to fitness is critical. Many community organizations - hospitals, schools, non-profits, and community health clubs - are jumping in to help fill the void and offer people a place to develop a healthy lifestyle.

Challenge: The first several months of starting a fitness program and trying to transform it into a lifestyle are extremely challenging for most people. Without a significant amount of supervision and personalized support, the vast majority of new exercisers drop out soon after starting. Once they have tried and failed, it often becomes more difficult to get them back to try again. It is therefore critically important to ensure they succeed on the first try. Unfortunately, the limited number of staff at most fitness centers is insufficient to provide the level of personal assistance that most beginners need.

Solution: FitLinxx gives staff the Intelligent Edge to provide personal assistance to members and help them succeed. Rather than simply supervising a few members’ workouts each day, an instructor using FitLinxx can oversee the progress of literally hundreds of participants. FitLinxx coaches the members on proper form, and reports progress back to the staff so they can lend support at critical moments in the members’ program.

Outcomes: FitLinxx is proven to dramatically increase adherence and retention rates for beginning exercisers, eliminating the need to increase staffing levels. This allows organizations focused on improving community health to truly deliver a total fitness solution for its members.

Opportunity: Most fitness professionals know how to help members succeed.. When members’ results begin to trail off, instructors know how to modify programs to get them back on track. When members lose motivation, instructors know how to discuss their goals and progress to reenergize them. When members succeed, a positive word from a staff member can be just the feedback that’s needed to help lock in the members’ exercise commitment and their commitment to your facility.

Challenge: Unfortunately, knowing how to help and knowing who to help are very different issues. There’s no way to know which members need help in any of these categories at any given point in time. Staff can’t tell who is in need simply by watching members exercise. Those who need help the most are rarely the ones who ask for it -more often than not, they just quietly quit. Finding opportunities to praise progress is challenging; even when workout cards are filled in, they’re hard to analyze to identify milestone points. And finally, while instructors tend to have skills at setting up programs and motivating members, their experience might vary, leading to uneven quality of service to members.

Solution: In most fields, professionals have technology tools to help them do their jobs well. Now fitness professionals do too. FitLinxx collects and analyzes members’ workout data, enabling staff to identify who is having difficulty or trailing off, and who has reached a milestone and is ready for praise. The system can even write custom messages for the staff to send or modify based on templates, so your least experienced staff can give the service of your best employees. FitLinxx not only increases staff effectiveness, but helps staff develop their skills by freeing them to focus on the "value add" parts of their job - helping members.

Outcomes: By giving staff the tools they need, you open a world of new benefits for your members and your employees. Members receive individualized feedback from staff and are more motivated and successful as a result. Armed with data, staff is able to be proactive, helping members at moments of need and praising moments of achievement, rather than simply being reactive to the problems of only a few vocal members. You will be supporting your staff just as professionals are supported in other industries, with the tools and technology befitting their important role in helping your members. As a result, staff feels better about themselves, about your facility, and about the job they are doing for you.

Opportunity: The fitness staff is the front line of any facility’s effort to serve its customers. The impact of having instructors that do their job well is significant in meeting nearly any goal – from mission achievement to economic outcomes such as member retention. But service levels tend to vary from instructor to instructor, often even more dramatically than management might realize. In one study, a site with a retention rate between 60-70%, overall, found its individual instructors were achieving retention rates that ranged from below 50% to nearly 90% with members assigned to them. The site’s management was also very surprised to find that the top instructor was not whom they expected, but rather someone who was quietly dedicated to helping members succeed. If sites can accurately measure staff performance, rewarding top performers and managing poorer performance, service and success can be managed as well.

Challenge: Unfortunately, in spite of the importance of good staff-member interaction, it is very difficult to track and reward. As a result, most sites end up having to review instructors on their personalities and anecdotal feedback from a few vocal members, rather than rating them on the true quality of their day-to-day member service.

Solution: FitLinxx has a number of tools to help staff do their job well. In addition, the system has tools to allow management to see how well instructors are using these tools and positively impacting their members in these ways:

• First, by tracking the frequency and consistency of each staff member’s interaction and follow-up with members, the system gives measurements of the staff’s quantity of follow-up.
  
  
• Second, by keeping an online record of the content of messages sent and notes about verbal interactions, management can easily spot-check the quality of interaction with members.
  
  
• And finally, by tracking and comparing the adherence and retention performance of each instructor’s members, management can quantify and compare the outcomes each instructor is achieving.

Outcomes: FitLinxx’s tools collectively allow management to measure staff directly on the quality of their performance. Many facilities use these metrics as part of their staff development and performance review process. Motivated, professional staff members truly appreciate being recognized for the positive impact they have on members, while poorer performers can be more effectively managed for success going forward. Some facilities use the staff performance information as part of a pay-for-performance program, believing that if the sales team on the front-end of the membership process is paid on commissions, the staff on the backend, who are responsible for service and retention, should benefit in proportion to the quality of their results as well? The bottom line is that information empowers management to better manage staff, and that results in better service to the members.