Question
What's a good online resource with a description of all the weight machines at the gym?
Answer
I have exactly this problem. As a result, I do far less strength training than i should, on far fewer machines. But the problem goes beyond the lack of good instructional videos. Gyms are in general set up to only be effectively usable by obsessive paleo types, or people who can afford to pay outrageous amounts in personal trainer fees. They are like IBM mainframes for muscle Morlocks. They need to become more like Apple.
My gym (an excellent high-end state-of-the-art gym) has machines with some basic cartoons. I've looked and found nothing of the sort you describe, other than disorganized and unreliable quality YouTube content. The best sources for technique appear to be books by pros but they don't cover the bewildering array of equipment that evolves every season, and are inconvenient anyway. They tend to be minimalist-fundamentalists who want you to reorganize your life around working out.
This is a startup waiting to happen for the first hustler who signs up a major chain. Left to themselves the equipment makers will just keep adding fancier personal TVs and brand-specific crap.
Users use complete gyms, not brands of equipment. There is a strong need for a neutral 3rd party tech integrator to create Gym 2.0 models that include:
1. Instruction videos for correct technique at every station, accessible on smartphones via a QR code scan or on-station touch screen.
2. Digital maps of the floor
3. Workout design tool as a gym level iPhone app
4. Integration with non-equipment or dumb-equipment parts (weights, yoga, calisthenics) of the gym
5. An API against which startups can write premium value-added services (like auto-computing a workout for a specific gym from a template, so I can reproduce workouts from old gyms in new ones, or a bridge to food diary/diet services) etc.
Basically we need equipment to get dumber and gyms to get smarter.
The tech is not very hard to conceptualize and design. The problem is that equipment makers have an incentive to integrate vertically around closed platform models and the personal trainer industry has an incentive to fight anything that gives users more control.
Gym owners, especially owned chains as opposed to franchises, have a strong incentive to solve the problem right, but lack the tech savvy of the equipment makers.
So if you can convince the CEO of a major chain to supply market muscle (and maybe money), this is easily a billion dollar market.
I think this is a genuine scary-schlep problem in Paul Graham's sense. It may seem like a self-indulgent first-world problem, but once solved, Gym 2.0 can probably help combat the obesity epidemic, make gyms vastly more affordable and usable, and eventually raise health standards in the developing world as well, once the tech commoditizes.
My gym (an excellent high-end state-of-the-art gym) has machines with some basic cartoons. I've looked and found nothing of the sort you describe, other than disorganized and unreliable quality YouTube content. The best sources for technique appear to be books by pros but they don't cover the bewildering array of equipment that evolves every season, and are inconvenient anyway. They tend to be minimalist-fundamentalists who want you to reorganize your life around working out.
This is a startup waiting to happen for the first hustler who signs up a major chain. Left to themselves the equipment makers will just keep adding fancier personal TVs and brand-specific crap.
Users use complete gyms, not brands of equipment. There is a strong need for a neutral 3rd party tech integrator to create Gym 2.0 models that include:
1. Instruction videos for correct technique at every station, accessible on smartphones via a QR code scan or on-station touch screen.
2. Digital maps of the floor
3. Workout design tool as a gym level iPhone app
4. Integration with non-equipment or dumb-equipment parts (weights, yoga, calisthenics) of the gym
5. An API against which startups can write premium value-added services (like auto-computing a workout for a specific gym from a template, so I can reproduce workouts from old gyms in new ones, or a bridge to food diary/diet services) etc.
Basically we need equipment to get dumber and gyms to get smarter.
The tech is not very hard to conceptualize and design. The problem is that equipment makers have an incentive to integrate vertically around closed platform models and the personal trainer industry has an incentive to fight anything that gives users more control.
Gym owners, especially owned chains as opposed to franchises, have a strong incentive to solve the problem right, but lack the tech savvy of the equipment makers.
So if you can convince the CEO of a major chain to supply market muscle (and maybe money), this is easily a billion dollar market.
I think this is a genuine scary-schlep problem in Paul Graham's sense. It may seem like a self-indulgent first-world problem, but once solved, Gym 2.0 can probably help combat the obesity epidemic, make gyms vastly more affordable and usable, and eventually raise health standards in the developing world as well, once the tech commoditizes.