For some years now, we’ve been tracking and reporting on the explosion of tech innovation right across the health and fitness industry, from management systems to apps and from AI to tech-enabled equipment. Each day brings us news of fresh thinking and new start-ups.
The market is growing fast, with regular mergers and acquisitions, seed funding rounds and incubators enabling the development of a wide range of new products and services.
The sheer volume of content we’ve been producing in this area has now reached such velocity it’s bursting out of the pages of HCM and the HCMmag.com website and so I’m delighted to announce we’re launching a whole new platform for this exciting and emerging part of the fitness market.
Called Fit Tech, it will connect the community of people who are interested and invested in the fitness technology market via a daily news website at fittechglobal.com (live in Beta), a regular magazine, instant news alerts, video feeds and an ezine.
We’ll also be active on social media, engaging in conversation on twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram as fittechglobal.
We hope you’ll join the community as the new service gears up and that you’ll sign up for the ezine at fittechglobal.com/signup.
HCM will continue to bring you key fitness technology news and insights each month, while Fit Tech will enable us to range more widely in our coverage and to go into more detail, for those who think digitally and want a deeper dive.
Essentially, Fit Tech will be a huge funnel for content relating to innovation and we’ll then curate stories from this feed for HCM’s website and for the print and digital magazine editions.
We see the HCM and Fit Tech brands as being entirely complementary and will run them side by side.
In this issue (page 38), industry thought leader, Rasmus Ingerslev, highlights the opportunity clearly, saying: “Health club memberships are seeing low double digit growth, while the growth in the digital space is 40 to 50 per cent.”
This significant growth in fitness technology is bringing big investment into the fitness sector and we see the challenge for the market as being finding ways fitness tech and fitness-based brick and mortar businesses can thrive together.
As Ingerslev says: “Both areas will see significant growth, but health and fitness operators will be missing a macro trend if they don’t also find ways to digitise their services.”
If you’re an operator innovating around fitness technology in your business and with successes to share and you’d like us to report on your work for Fit Tech, please get in touch.
If you’re a supplier of a tech-based product or service, please let us know if you’d like to be featured and we’ll look forward to teamworking with you on this.
Just as our industry is broadening and extending its influence into health, wellness, sports-based activity and corporate wellbeing, so Fit Tech will also range across these sectors, bringing you all the technology news you need to engage and thrive in whichever part of this growing market you call home.
