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Body scanning: Measuring progress
Body scanning has become a major fitness trend, offering both operators and members alike insight into their body composition, muscle mass and fat percentage. Operators offering body scanning share their experiences
Who? Kofi Boateng, coach
Where? Manchester
Supplier: Tanita
How long have you been working with Tanita?
We’ve been working with Tanita for about a year and offer Tanita technology at our Manchester training club.
Why did you decide to offer body scanning?
Health is completely personal to the individual and we’re seeing that for a lot of people, the traditional BMI measurements just aren’t accurate or detailed enough for them to make informed decisions about their health and lifestyle choices.
How does it enhance the service you provide?
We take a holistic approach to health, supporting individuals and communities with their mental, physical and social wellbeing. We use Tanita’s body composition technology alongside our other services – osteopathy, cryotherapy, sports massage, counselling sessions and IV therapy – to ensure that our understanding of our member’s health is a top priority. At the same time, we can help our members with tracking and goal setting, making it easier for us to help them unlock their full potential.
What are the benefits you’ve noticed as an operator?
We pride ourselves on supporting our members with reliable health and wellbeing data and Tanita enables us to do that. Using it helps us as an operator to build relationships with clients, which is an excellent way of increasing retention.
It allows us to provide clients, both corporate and club members, with a really accurate picture of their body fat percentage, muscle mass, visceral fat and – importantly, their metabolic age.
From these measurements our coaches can then help set achievable goals – whether it’s weight loss, muscle gain, improved heart health or simply maintaining a healthy body and mind – and measure progress. It takes the guesswork out of goal-setting and helps us to offer clear routes to our clients to help them get to where they want to be.
Health Club: James McLaren Fitness
Who? James McLaren, director
Where? Bury St Edmunds
Supplier: Styku
How long have you been working with Styku?
We’ve been working with Styku since June 2016.
Why did you choose to use the Styku system?
We were searching for a way to track our members’ progress in an effective, reliable and engaging way.
What stood out to us about Styku was its level of precision, as well as its consistency and comprehensiveness.
Styku’s technology is aligned with DEXA – a type of X-ray scan that’s considered a gold standard in body composition analysis – and offers medical-grade accuracy.
It also offers incredibly realistic 3D scans, the 3D visual actually looks like the user, it’s not just a generic-looking avatar that vaguely captures their body shape in outline. This definitely adds something to the user experience in terms of engagement, I think.
How does it enhance your service?
We take motivating and supporting our members very seriously, we want all of our members to achieve their goals.
Providing our members with an understanding of where they’re starting from, as well as the steps they need to take to improve their health, provides more of an incentive for them. It’s also the best way to gauge a member’s progress from a physical standpoint by having tangible proof that they have achieved a result over a period of time.
Simply asking our members to weigh themselves isn’t enough. It’s not a true reflection of their progress; it’s a small piece of a much bigger pie.
The reason Styku is so effective and has been so great for our service is that it goes way beyond the numbers you see on the scale, analysing hundreds of measures to provide a true, visual representation of members’ bodies. Because of this, Styku has given us much more confidence when it comes to giving members their results.
Styku has definitely enabled us to elevate our service in a number of ways and has become a central focus of our gym and member experience. It’s the ultimate way to visualise the story of our members’ fitness success.
What are the benefits you’ve noticed as an operator?
Styku has had a very positive effect on our business. Members, both in the gym and on social media, have emphasised the important role that Styku has played in their journeys and experiences. It’s helped to keep them motivated and on track with their programmes, ultimately helping them achieve the results they want.
Of our 110 members, maybe five of them have not had a scan, but they know it’s available to them if they’d like to, I think this speaks volumes about how people are viewing body scanning and how valuable it’s become within our gym.
Styku benefits our members by enabling our coaches to track and monitor their physical progress over time to ensure they stay motivated and accountable; creating an enjoyable experience that delivers results.
Who? Mike Hind, personal trainer
Where? Middlesbrough
Supplier: Fit3D
How long have you been working with Fit3D?
I’ve been using the ProScanner for a little under a year.
Why did you decide to work with them?
I wanted to provide something really special for my clients, as well as test my skills. With the ProScanner there’s nowhere to hide for either myself or the client because it paints a true picture of a client’s transformation.
Having been named the Best Personal Trainer in the UK for three years in a row I can’t afford to fall behind. The scanner was a must for me.
What’s the impact?
My clients travel from around the UK to use the scanner. It’s so helpful because it means I can customise diet and training plans based on the outcome of the scan. They can also physically see, from all angles, how their bodies are changing and how they’re getting closer to their goals.
Would you recommend it?
100 per cent. The days of before and after photos are over, people want more information, not just visual improvement, but detailed and accurate body composition data that they can keep track of. Clients want accountability and clubs and trainers should want this too. It keeps clients on target and also improves retention.
It’s also a good source of additional revenue for the gym; within the first year the initial investment of £10k had paid itself back twice over. In my eyes, the ProScanner is a one-stop health assessment and progress checker that every facility should use. It’s an investment in your business as well as your members.
Who? David Conway, contract manager
Where? Sunbury-on-Thames
Supplier: InBody
How long have you been working with InBody?
We have been utilising InBody scanner technology across multiple 1Life sites over the past 12 months.
Why did you choose to work with InBody?
In this digital age where our members are as well informed as ever regarding health and fitness, we were looking to add extra value to our member experience and a USP for our prospective members.
InBody scanning technology has the perfect blend of accessible health screening with detailed scan results in which we can add significant value to our members by analysing their health metrics and goal setting with them. It’s also critical to demonstrate the benefits of the customer’s efforts and allow them to both track improvements and identify areas to focus on.
What are the benefits? Proactive tools for member retention is a key business focus within 1Life and the InBody technology allows us to keep our active members motivated, as well as re-engaging sporadic attendance members.
Within our business model InBody scanning is available to all members to maximise our opportunities to have meaningful conversations about how we assess and improve their health.
How have members responded?
Body composition improvements, whether that’s weight loss, body fat percentage reduction, and or muscle mass improvements are typically desired by the majority of our customers.
InBody’s ability to assess this quickly, in a non-intrusive manner, has proven to be attractive to members who are able to use and understand the unit and understand the results, leading to increased motivation and retention.
Scanning is integrated into our induction process, with a follow-up scan six weeks later. We also encourage existing members to have a scan and offer trial testing events where members can have a scan to understand the benefits.
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