The Next Frontier in Digital Fitness Is Coming to a Gym Near You

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Take a look around any gym and you'll see people consulting phones about what move comes next. Digital fitness has brought expert trainers straight to our fingertips, and with Life Fitness On Demand—the newest launch from the cardio machine engineers at Life Fitness—your treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes, and more will now come with built-in trainers.

Announced Tuesday, the next move by Life Fitness heralds a digital fitness era marked by even more accessibility. While Peloton long ago made the trainer and the machine a package deal, introducing the same principal to equipment found in gyms across America means an even wider reach for digital fitness. Ranging from 10 to 40 minutes in length, the 80 newly launched classes span across a host of cardio machines you'll spot at the gym, in health clubs, at hotels, and more.

life fitness on demand
Photo: Life Fitness

"We are thrilled to be the first to offer on-demand cardio classes on a full line of cardio equipment," said Dan Wille, global vice president of marketing and product development at Life Fitness in a press release. "Life Fitness products are in over 250,000 facilities around the world and 60 million people use them every year. Our priority is to help our customers—commercial fitness facilities—keep their exercisers satisfied."

“We believe by partnering with Life Fitness, we will be able to provide users with premium workout content with the goal of expanding our reach and making fitness more accessible to a global audience.”—Nathan Forster, founder and CEO of NEOU

To make sure gym-goers are sweating it out with top-of-the-line trainers, Life Fitness partnered with NEOU—an on-demand fitness platform featuring classes shot in NYC. “We are proud to provide people with an easy way to get active and stay motivated by offering a variety of fitness options, on the most globally-recognized leader in fitness equipment,” Nathan Forster, founder and CEO of NEOU, said of the partnership. “We believe by partnering with Life Fitness, we will be able to provide users with premium workout content with the goal of expanding our reach and making fitness more accessible to a global audience.”

Yes, the idea of combining your gym membership with your on-demand workout budget sounds appealing. Beyond that, however, the move by Life Fitness and NEOU suggests what future gyms could look like. “The era of consumers prioritizing the newest treadmills and the nicest showers is over," Brynn Putnam, founder of Mirror Home Gym System, previously told Well+Good. "Now, they’re prioritizing smart content and great instruction, so resources should be allocated appropriately.” In the case of Life Fitness, there's no need to choose between the latest-and-greatest equipment and expert instruction.

What it's like to try an AI running program: 

Until your gym gets one of these ultra-techy treadmills, here's how to use the 5-4-3-2-1 technique for easy running workouts. And why you should start your runs on a hill

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