Thanks to sites like YouTube and online fitness publications, it seems like tutorials on virtually any form of exercise—from yoga to barefoot running—are at your fingertips. But personally, I’ve found that it’s difficult to manage the slew of content on the often-exotic exercise styles, and make sense of it with my everyday fitness routines.
Boston-based FitVirtual is trying to fix this with an online platform that allows you to manage and design customized fitness plans, and stay motivated by your social network. It’s first taking this approach to small- and medium-sized businesses, to power customized employer wellness programs, a service it is rolling out this September.
That’s the “bread and butter” of the business as far as revenue goes, says founder and CEO Nabil Aidoud. But don’t fret if your company doesn’t adopt the Fit Virtual technology. You can log into a free version of the site, at FiVi.com. There’s also an iPhone and Facebook app for the site, with an Android version on its way.
The online portal enables you to manually enter your workouts on a personalized calendar, as well as attach videos showing proper exercise form to a personalized workout calendar. It also offers built-in calculators that can track how much you burned in a particular workout, based on your weight and gender. Users can change their workout logs each week through drag and drop functions, as well as view the activity of other users in their network via news feeds.
“We’re tapping into the power of social media to allow wellness program administrators to develop highly customized wellness plans for their targeted population,” he says.
Aidoud, who previously worked as an IBM consultant, says he got the inspiration for his startup, which launched in 2009 and has been bootstrap funded to date, after staring at a company fitness poster while pulling overtime hours on a Saturday. He says while traveling heavily as a consultant, his health lagged due to lack of sleep and poor eating on the road.
“I thought so many people must be just as miserable as me,” he says. So he decided to develop a platform where consumers could engage with fitness plans regardless of their location or expertise level.
At the corporate wellness level, FitVirtual is interested in
