The workout-at-home rage has a big risk no one is talking about

When gyms closed due to the coronavirus crisis last year, many of us had to completely rethink where and how we worked out. SoulCyclers and Wanderlust yogis alike had to quickly adapt to working out from home — and made big financial investments to help them do so. As a result, Peloton sales surged, Mirror far surpassed its projected revenues, and Beachbody saw its online subscriber base grow by 300 percent.

Thanks to technology, we’re now able to get the benefits of a good workout from the comfort of our own homes. Want variety? Online workout programs offer hundreds of classes. Coaching? You can subscribe to the fitness trainer who most motivates and inspires you, even if they’re located halfway around the world. Community? Live classes let you compete with workout buddies in real time.

There is, however, one vital element missing from at-home workouts: Personalized feedback on form. With no instructor or trainer watching your workout, you could be squatting in a way that’s causing serious wear and tear on your knees — without even knowing about it until months later, when the damage becomes painfully severe.

As I’ve mentioned before, form matters — a lot. Good form not only prevents injuries and speeds recovery time, but also promotes a longer and better quality of life. As more people adapt to working out from home over the long haul, we’re going to see a growing demand for technology that helps people practice good form, wherever they may be.

Form is the next vital sign

Heart rate. Blood pressure. Blood glucose levels. These are common vital signs that we’re all familiar with today and, especially in the case of athletes, track on a regular basis.

Yet there was a time when few people even knew to pay attention to these numbers, let alone recognized them as vital signs. Our familiarity with them only grew over time. First, doctors started measuring these signs and used them as indicators of our overall health and fitness. Then, thanks to the ‘quantified self’ movement, individuals started paying more attention to them. Today, many of us own personal devices and tools that let us monitor these vital signs on a regular basis. In fact, some of us wear gadgets that keep us informed of these vital signs throughout the day, even during sleep.

We’ve also invested in tools that help us track other indicators of our fitness and health, like Fitbits that count steps, bike power meters that track speed or Oura rings that help us understand how well we sleep. Getting to 10,000 steps a day — or to a certain performance level on a Peloton or Tonal — are but proxies to help us assess our level of fitness.

What today’s popular gadgets don’t measure however, is our form, the common denominator to any physical performance output we seek. Yes, an Apple watch can tell you if you’re below, at, or above your target heart rate during a workout. But it can’t tell you if the way you’re doing your sit-ups is hurting your back, or if your pushups are stressing your elbows. To measure form, you have to have a comprehensive sense of your whole body’s motion and its quality — knowledge a wrist or finger gadget can’t provide.

People want these insights. A recent review of Tonal, a popular at home strength training machine, on The Verge, listed as a con the fact that “no one’s really monitoring your form.”

At fitness classes and gyms, we relied on instructors, trainers, and workout buddies for tips and guidance on our form. Today, people need to be able to get this information even when they’re working out solo. And judging from the history of vital signs — alongside the recent rise in spending on personal fitness and health tracking devices — people are willing to pay for technologies that provide this knowledge.

We must make form simple to understand and track — anywhere

Form is poised to become the next vital sign people want to understand and track, so long as we give people a way to do so seamlessly and with ease. Today, tracking our heart rate or steps has become as easy as checking a watch — so tracking our form needs to be equally simple.

Already, people are spending thousands of dollars on Pelotons and Tonals — and have a sense of literacy about what they’re gaining and losing as a result of the new ways they are working out. Yet the better-known technologies that exist for tracking form today, unfortunately, do not provide the sort of granular, personalized feedback people are looking for. There are, for example, products like Tempo that use machine vision to track a user’s form and Tonal with their recently debuted ‘Form Feedback’. However, these types of tools only work when you’re directly in front of them, actively engaged. They can’t help you when you run in the park, play tennis, or simply work out unfettered in your backyard.

And of course, good form is also important all those hours of the day when you’re not working out. We need a tool that helps us keep in good form when we’re walking up the stairs to our homes, playing catch with our children, or simply vegging out in front of the TV. After all, the form that we’re endowed with goes with us wherever we go.

That’s the big disconnect that exists with fitness trackers and at-home connected fitness products today. Vital signs are signals we need to track wherever we go, and form is a vital sign that we absolutely need to understand, in context with the varied activities we engage in throughout the day. Yet few tools exist to track our form, and those that do track it do so not continuously, but only in very specific situations.

The future of form tracking

Study the current landscape of fitness tracking technologies, and it’s easy to identify what people will want next: an easy way to track their form, anywhere and everywhere.

Already, people seek easy-to-understand information that holds them accountable to their form. But they don’t want to live their lives in front of a mirror, change the way they exercise, or wear extra gadgets. Instead, they want to continue enjoying the workouts they like best and go about their lives the way they normally do, only with technologies that provide them with ready, real-time information to improve their performance, prevent injuries, and improve their quality of life.

Until now, fitness technologies have focused on simply tracking what a person has already done — how many steps they’ve walked, pounds lifted, reps achieved. But to truly provide benefits, these technologies must also show what a person should do next. Technology should automatically inform people not only how their form was off in the previous rep, but also how to fix it in the very next rep.

This is the future of fitness technology. The solution could take several different forms — whether it’s smart apparel embedded with form-sensing technologies or machine vision that’s seamlessly incorporated into our living spaces. Regardless, the next big invention in this space will have to combine form and function — allowing people to measure and analyze the quality of their movement accurately and objectively in an organic, seamless process wherever they may be. This is the new technology that will truly empower people to reach their health and fitness goals, whether that’s higher speeds or a longer, happier life.