Fitness First Germany has super-charged its members’ gym floor training experience with the roll out of Funxtion’s Multiscreen Virtual Player solution across its portfolio.

Funxtion’s Virtual Player is a digital platform housing thousands of beautifully shot and perfectly executed video exercises, workouts and virtual classes. Multiple screens (provided by Funxtion) connect to the Virtual Player and are strategically positioned in functional training spaces to optimise the member experience. The exercises featured can be programmed to run concurrently, creating a circuit of digital instructors that provides every member with constant visual prompting. The Virtual Player and digital fitness content are fully custom-branded and display Fitness First’s own backgrounds, fonts, and logo.

“Digital instruction is the next phase of evolution in gym floor training.” Says Martin Seibold, CEO, LifeFit Group – owner of Fitness First Germany. “Providing our members with access to high quality, digitally streamed exercise demonstrations empowers our gym floor trainers to focus more on mentoring and coaching. This creates opportunities to deliver a much more personalised experience for members, creating an environment where every member is progressing towards individual goals.

“We are constantly assessing the market to ensure our offer remains relevant to the lives, expectations and needs of our members, whilst also maintaining our position as one of the sector’s innovation frontrunners. Group training on the gym floor has been a core component of our offer for many years and is still highly valued by our members. This latest integration with Funxtion enhances the already successful format and elevates the member experience to a whole new level.”

The roll out, which began during lockdown at the end of 2020, gives all the brands’ members across 50+ clubs access to the new experience.

Ernst De Neef, CEO Funxtion, says: “Fitness First has been sharing our content via their member app for a while, so all the exercise demonstrations displayed by the multi screens in their sites will already be familiar. This demonstrates a strategic digitalisation journey and provides a valued continuity, highlighting to members the brand’s commitment to ongoing enhancement of the member experience.”

Martin Seibold concludes: “Digitalisation is enabling gym’s to create inspiring, customer-centric experiences that, even a decade ago, could not have been imagined. In-person coaching by our rockstar trainers will remain a core component on our gym floors, supported by a growing arsenal of digital tools. Funxtion is leading the charge in the creation and implementation of quality fitness content, all which can be custom-branded, so the partnership made perfect sense.“

As part of its strategy to create an unrivalled digital member experience, Pure Gym teamed up with Funxtion, experts in interactive digital fitness, to deliver a huge library of exercise content direct to members via the Pure Gym app.

The Pure Gym app enables its 1.5 million members to tailor their fitness experience to reflect their personal preferences, goals and diary. In addition to online booking of classes and personal training, the app now also provides instant access to thousands of exercise tutorials and personalised training plans providing virtual support anytime, anywhere and enabling members to self-manage their training plans.

“This new integration elevates our digital offering to a whole new level,” explains Francine Davis, Chief Strategy Officer at Pure Gym. “The beautifully presented and technically perfect exercise tutorials, created by Funxtion, provide our members with specialist support 24 hours a day, helping ensure they train effectively and safely, even when they are not under the supervision of our gym floor trainers.

“We chose to work with Funxtion because of the quality of the provision, the ease of integration and the potential to work together to deliver further enhancements to our digital offering moving forwards. Funxtion is constantly innovating and adapting their product in response to market needs. This makes Funxtion our perfect digital partner and will help us deliver a member experience which creates a new service standard for the industry.”

All Pure Gym members are encouraged to download the mobile app on joining. Davis, adds: “Our digital offer remains central to our customer experience strategy and, as a result, we are constantly reviewing and enhancing this aspect of our provision. The Funxtion content provided us with a quality off-the-shelf product we could ‘plug in’ to our existing application. No point us recreating what is already available.”