How Fitness is Evolving (Part II)

Towards a fitness ecosystem

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LeBron James and Recovery

The NBA star LeBron James spends $1.5m a year on recovery alone, including cryotherapy, hyperbaric chambers and Normatec leg boots. At first glance, this might seem excessive, but when viewed through the lens of optimising for performance and career longevity, the results speak for themselves. At 36 years old, James is playing his 18th season in the NBA, which includes four championship-winning teams and four MVP awards.

At 36, LeBron James is playing his 18th NBA season. Source: Forbes

James's focus on recovery emphasises a fundamental shift in the broader fitness landscape – fitness is no longer synonymous with exercise alone, as it increasingly encompasses elements of the wellness economy.

However, as an elite athlete, James has a team of people around him to help understand his body – and, in turn, optimise his training and recovery. Unfortunately, this luxury is simply unaffordable to most. 

In a technology-driven world, in many ways, it's remarkable how poor our understanding of training and recovery is. As a result, fitness, nutritional, and recovery advice varies wildly, reducing many of our resulting decisions to guesswork. Yet, this may be changing. A burgeoning recovery-focused economy has formed with wearables at the centre, using data to help us make inferences on how we can train, eat and recover 'smarter'. 

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The Rise of the Wearable

Will Ahmed was recruited into Harvard to play squash, soon finding himself captaining the team. Long hours on the squash court and in the library resulted in overtraining – pushing his body beyond what it was capable of. Ahmed's interest in training and recovery piqued, and he set out to understand what he could measure to prevent training dips. His research turned into an obsession that soon laid the foundation for WHOOP, a company now valued at $1.2bn in its latest funding round.

You may have seen the faceless WHOOP straps on top athletes spanning the NFL, MLB, NBA and beyond. Eli Manning, for instance, is both an active wearer and investor of the brand. WHOOP's rise reflects the transition of wearables from first-gen step-trackers to a way not only to understand your body but to optimise it. In short, it's the culmination of a decade's work for Ahmed to train (and recover) smarter.

The WHOOP Wearable, Source: Inside Hook

By measuring variables such as heart rate variability ("HRV"), WHOOP can provide strain, recovery and sleep scores to its users. In turn, users can understand how primed their body is for exertion or how different factors (e.g. alcohol consumption) affect recovery - and, in turn, make behavioural changes to optimise recovery. 

WHOOP is not alone in helping us understand our strain and recovery - it is joined by others, including Oura Ring, FitBit (Google), Apple Watch and more. Others, such as Levels, are exploring next-gen wearables, such as glucose monitoring and metabolic fitness. However, in many ways, wearables collectively share an objective - striving to become a form of 'personal software' for consumers, capitalising on a world where fitness, health and data increasingly intersect. Much of this is driven by a generational mindshift towards fitness, as Millennials and Gen-Zs both prioritise wellness more than older generations and are naturally digitally native. 

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The Pursuit of Recovery

However, whilst wearables have provided us with mounts of quantitative data on how we feel, how we optimise our behaviour is still very much in its infancy. Whilst there are now startup economies dedicated to recovery, sleep and nutrition, what is missing from the fitness landscape is an integrated health & fitness solution. Whilst LeBron James has a team of people who intuitively understand the right mix of training and recovery concepts to optimise his performance, consumers are left mainly guessing as to how to optimise their wearables scores.

This is primarily a factor of how siloed fitness concepts are, making it difficult for consumers to build a holistic perspective of their health & fitness. We are beginning to see the emergence of domain leaders such as EightSleep (sleep), Peloton (connected fitness), and so on. However, they do not fully integrate with each other, or with wearables. In an ideal world, inferences from all of these devices would connect to one another, helping us make decisions that optimise our overall recovery.

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The Future Fitness Ecosystems

Looking forwards, wearables and data are likely to sit at the nucleus of health & fitness ecosystems, akin to how iOS sits at the epicentre of the Apple Universe. Through being the "connector' to the other health & fitness aspects of our lives, data from wearables could become the conduit to feeling our best selves. For example, ecosystems could sense when we are stressed, tired or energised, and optimise our workouts, food and sleep accordingly. In many ways, this could be our own data-driven stack to mimic the support teams surrounding the likes of LeBron James. 

Successful ecosystem players will:

✅ Use wearables as their nucleus.

✅ Build proprietary components of the ecosystem stack such as connected fitness classes, personalised nutrition or sleep devices. 

✅ Focus on community to cement the role of the ecosystem in consumers' lives. 

This North Star is already in play – the question is less about will it happen but more about who will succeed. 

Big tech has already entered the wearables race, including Apple (Apple Watch), Google (acquired FitBit) and Amazon (Halo Band) and have already started adding complimentary health & fitness services to these devices. Apple, for instance, has used the Apple Watch as its "connector" to the fitness domain, launching Apple Fitness+ in 2020. It has also inked partnerships with other providers such as Orangetheory, YMCA and Crunch Fitness. Elsewhere, connected fitness players such as Peloton, Mirror, or Tonal can build around their connected fitness niche. Peloton, for instance, acquired Atlas Wearables in 2020 signalling its intentions to be a significant fitness ecosystem player. 

Interestingly, how the ecosystems will be built out may vary between players. Some may opt for a hybrid model - combining proprietary components with third party integrations (to a much higher degree than the status quo). Others may opt for a full proprietary model, where they "own" every part of the stack. As the sector evolves we are likely to see a string of partnerships and acquisitions which will dictate what these future ecosystems look like.

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Final Thoughts

Elite athletes such as LeBron James can afford to employ teams of people to help them train (personal trainers), eat (nutritionists & chefs) and recover (access to next-gen recovery devices, etc.) optimally. Naturally, most consumers don't have this luxury.

However, as wearables are increasingly adopted by consumers, data will enable health & fitness ecosystems to help optimise our behaviour through connected services. Instead of guesswork, we may all soon be able to train and recover like LeBron James. 

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Sources & Additional Reading

The $1.5 Million Expended By LeBron James Every Offseason Is Money Well Spent | Darren Heitner

Can Big Data Solve Human Fitness? A Conversation With WHOOP Founder Will Ahmed | Tanner Garrity

Issue No. 102: The Big Business of Recovery | Anthony Vennare

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