Are competitive gym classes the best way to lose weight?
The boom in competitive gym classes may horrify many, but could be the best way to a winning workout, says Charlotte Lytton
Ever run that little bit faster on a treadmill to keep pace with the person on the next machine? Reached for a heavier set of weights when another gym-goer did the same? A little competition never hurt anyone, but a number of gyms are now making this part of their ethos – and employing leader boards in classes that pit you against the person next to you as you work out.
It’s a somewhat different ranking system to that we’ve seen this week, with a UN study naming Britain the third-fattest nation in Europe. One in four of us are now obese, the report concluded, with lack of exercise, poor diet and drinking to excess being blamed. Add to that a recent survey from Public Health England, which found that four in 10 women do not get enough exercise, and the notion of adding a little incentive to spur us on makes sense.
Gail Hutchinson, a PR manager from London, thinks so. She attends Poweride spin classes at Third Space, which monitor attendees’ efforts via a leader board at the front of the class. While it may sound horrific for those languishing at the back going through the motions, Hutchinson says watching her bike number move up or down the rankings keeps her “accountable” and stops her “wasting time”.
Also offering a second-by-second analysis of your regime is Formula3, a circuit class launching at the gym’s new City branch this month, in which screens are synced to users’ fitness trackers, displaying their efforts in painstaking detail.
It’s a similar story at Row30 at Gymbox, a “fully connected” class in which members switch between rowing together at a set pace and competing to reach a certain distance in the quickest time. Meanwhile, at Cycle Beats at Equinox, you can log your ride time and output with other members of its 90 UK and US outposts. The scope for measuring yourself against others has never been greater, or, depending on how you look at it, more brutal.
But while those who attend such classes say this gamification of fitness “adds some friendly competition”, isn’t it intimidating, rather than motivating, for the rest of us?
Apparently not. “If we trace human history, we are innately competitive, we had to be to survive,” says Michael Caulfield, a sports psychologist who is backing Wiggle’s Get There campaign to highlight exercise motivation. “If you see two children run, one will try to beat the other – it is how we are wired. If we see someone doing a better time, particularly in a gym, instinctively we will want to match or beat them.” That is why, he believes, competitive gymming “can be very effective”.
It’s not just the classes either: take the soaring popularity of Strava, which measures users’ running and cycling activity in meticulous detail. The app, which sees a million new downloads every 40 days, logged 4.5 billion miles by users in 195 countries last year – and allows them to compare themselves with each other on particular routes.
At Strava HQ in San Francisco, staff participate in group training while wired up to fitness trackers, with the results displayed on a leader board. Indeed, visit any high-end fitness studio and you can’t move for numbers: be they tallies on changing room walls to celebrate those who attend the most classes, or the diminishing fat percentages of loyal members proudly shared on the gym’s email list.
This data “acts as motivation to improve,” Caulfield says. Yet competition-enhancing performance didn’t begin in the social media age. “Before Strava, I would use people running ahead of me in the park as targets to catch before a certain marker,” recalls David Shearer, Professor in Elite Performance Psychology at the University of South Wales. “I Iike a bit of competition, it spurs me on.”
Yet he admits it’s not for everyone: his wife, whose fitness levels are the same as his own, has “no interest” in others’ efforts. There is also a “big danger” that laser focus on competition “takes the fun out of fitness,” according to Caulfield. “If you see yourself regressing, a part of you might say: ‘I’m not getting any better, so I might as well give up.’ It shouldn’t always be about measurement.
Making numbers the be all and end all of a pastime you might otherwise have done just for the hell of it can indeed dent your enthusiasm – after an email informing me that my efforts in a cycle session had rendered me eighth out of 11 in my team and 20th in a class of 28, I wasn’t thrilled (though nor was I surprised). But do I now pedal that little bit harder? Probably. I can only hope my fitness levels will thank me for it.
‘If two children run, one will try to beat the other. It’s how we are wired’