Many earnest novice gym-goers have a commitment that won’t outlast a green banana. One problem is that newbies exert themselves too much and drop their membership before their overly worked muscles have time to recover. On the other end of the six-pack spectrum, Brad Pitt-looking characters may skate by without breaking a sweat, and drop dead prematurely because they never knew they could work out harder. Fitwall, a new quantified gym in sunny San Diego, wants to ensure everyone is working out exactly hard as they should be.
All members are strapped with heart monitors that display their target heart rate in brightly-lit iPads that hang over them as they perform gravity-based exercises. In the video above, I test it out on their mobile fitwall outside of TechCrunch’s San Francisco headquarters.
“We ensure that you’re monitored, in real time,” says Josh Weinstein, CEO of Fit, who first caught up with me at the Summit Series Outside conference in Eden, Utah. FitWall’s head coach Clifton Harski says that newbies go “too hard, too often,” which leads to quitting. “We want to train hard, but we don’t want to train hard until we’re ready for it.” Check out my sweaty workout above.