PROFILE
Our equipment doesn’t consume power but does generate it, recycling human energy
diabetes, focusing on lean muscle mass in a way that directly addresses those who are new to exercise. How do you measure your impact? Our energy-generating kit has been very valuable in this respect. Users could already charge their phones while they worked out, and we used human power for lighting our gyms, but we started looking at other ways to harness the energy in a useful way and realised we could use it as information. What I mean by that: the energy showed us what people were doing on the equipment, so we defined what counted as a ‘hit’ – a single use, which is basically continued movement with no pause longer than 30 seconds – and are able to provide this, along with user data from our app and on-site surveys, to our customers. We’re looking at other strategies at the moment to further evidence people’s engagement with our gyms. There is much evidence to support ecotherapy – being outdoors
PHOTO: THE GREAT OUTDOOR GYM COMPANY
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Issue 9 2021 ©Cybertrek 2021
You’ve just launched TGO-Activate.com. Tell us more Our vision today is to help communities become healthy and sustainable, but to really get people to change their habits, they need an understanding of what to do in our gyms. This is why – alongside our on-site smart screens – we’ve also launched TGO-Activate.com, a website where people can purchase specially created classes and courses. These aren’t just about health and fitness. They’re about wellness and connection to our planet – we’ve worked with organisations such as Diabetes UK to quality assure our content. For example, I’ve created a course called Heal, Care, Move, which is rooted in a belief that overconsumption is the cause of both lifestyle disease and damage to the planet. Building on that, I believe it’s the wounds we gather as we go through life that lead us to over-consume, so we start by addressing this – helping people find joy in movement and the great outdoors, so they become the best version of themselves – before helping them do good in their own spheres of influence by caring for others. TGO-Activate.com prices currently start at £2.99 for a class, up to £12.99 for a course, and we plant at least one tree for every purchase; for Heal, Care, Move we plant 20 trees. You can keep track of ‘your’ trees on your dashboard, which helps people feel part of what we’re doing. We’re launching TGO-Activate.com with a variety of partners throughout the rest of this year, starting with a partnership with Marks & Spencer (M&S) which ran to the end of September. This offered free taster sessions, then a 50 per cent discount on the rest of the content, and gave us exposure to three million people. Importantly, it was also free to everyone: you could download the M&S Sparks app for free and didn’t need to make a purchase at M&S to access our content.
