Power Plate celebrates its 20th anniversary with a fresh perspective on product relevance, positioning and experience. New UK head of sales, Iain Murray, shares his thoughts on future direction from the unique perspective of a former operator and personal advocate

With 15 years of senior health club management experience with Fitness First, David Lloyd and Virgin Active, plus firsthand experience of healing a serious injury using Power Plate, Iain brings a new outlook to one of the longest-standing, consistently performing products on the market.

What do you see as Power Plate’s biggest challenge?
Power Plate isn't utilised to its full capacity in the industry – if it was, the results would be there to see.

That's because the product's biggest strength is also its biggest challenge.

As a total body solution that amplifies results, Power Plate can enhance any movement by working muscles harder than if the same movement were to be performed on the ground without it.

This means it can support any training style, application or goal and allow users to prepare faster, perform better and recover quicker.

This makes the product incredibly versatile, yet also creates barriers to use.

From my years in club management, I’m aware that teams understand the concept of vibration training, but not always the application. Compounded with a persistent churn rate, training and education of staff can get left behind.

How are you overcoming this?
We're working with customers to map out where Power Plate fits with each brand and customer journey. Giving the product its place within these helps frame what each club utilises the product for and then – importantly – where it fits into their story and experience.

This leads into the education and engagement aspect – our team offers both staff and member training designed to ensure operators have the skills, knowledge and confidence required to utilise Power Plate.

The strategy is all about activation – getting as many staff and members on the product (both old and new) to experience it for themselves and learn how to get the most out of it.

Once understanding increases, we see a rise in confidence. When staff and members are comfortable on a Power Plate, we start to see adherence and then the emergence of product advocates.

That was my own experience of Power Plate. As a David Lloyd team member, I was introduced to the product many years ago and shown how I could use it for rehabilitation and ongoing maintenance of the knees after injury.

Having been told I would never play football again, Power Plate helped me overcome my injury to such an extent that I'm still playing today.

I moved my routine workout onto the plate, as well as my preparation and recovery, and the rest is history.

How can operators activate Power Plates they already have?
PTs crave to deliver added value to their sessions and members are looking for unique or different training options. This can be achieved by simply creating more of an experience around after-session recovery in a dedicated space on Power Plate.

Preparation can also be done in this way, as indeed can an entire workout.

Delivering dynamic training, variety and progression leads to results and gets more clients interested in doing something different too. This, in turn, improves retention and overall profitability.

With millennials and Gen Z making up a huge proportion of health club members, but not being familiar with Power Plate and demanding different, experience-led sessions, we've developed a specific new suite of small group training programmes.

These have been designed with a variety of demographic groups and industry trends in mind and have been developed based on research into the social, motivational and accountability drivers that determine exercise choice.

These include Burn, Strong, X and Zen programmes, with regular new content for a ready-to-roll solution.

We're seeing these small group training concepts being implemented as part of a total club or boutique solution, as well as in studios where Power Plate is the standalone product.

Where are the growth opportunities for Power Plate?
We're having success in driving member experience, as the product is such a great tool for engagement. This is key to experience and Power Plate is the perfect platform for that – either for inductions, pre- or post-workout or for entire sessions.

We're also seeing clubs move their Plates to fit into a particular journey or experience they're delivering, either as part of the main gym, or studio or within boutiques dedicated to Power Plate.

They're starting to think about how to integrate what's admittedly a specialist product into their offering to help differentiate, deliver on experience and drive retention and profitability.

Clubs are always focused on sales, and the feel of a product can really help when trying to sell to a new client. There's no better product than Power Plate to illustrate this, as it can demonstrate immediate results – a 30 second stretch is a simple but effective showcase.

We're also coming back to our scientific roots with more health and wellness applications. As these areas continue to grow, the lines between medical, rehabilitation and fitness are merging. Meeting the needs of these populations requires a new strategy not only from Power Plate but our whole industry.