How Data Helps You Muscle Up
Connected fitness devices routinely collect workout info. High-tech US gym brand Tonal is finally using that data to help you move better
Imagine a personal trainer who’s worked with hundreds of thousands of clients, charting every single rep of every single movement with each of them. Now imagine that you could access that trainer’s knowledge for every workout, simply with a few taps on a touchscreen. This is the power of Tonal’s artificial intelligence, which has collected every shred of data on every single rep of every single exercise done by its users. For the past four years, during each exercise, Tonal has tracked the speed and direction of its cables, allowing it to calculate how explosively its users are moving, when they’re fatiguing and where their form is breaking. At the end of last year, the company also started gathering video insights, thanks to a new Smart View function that lets you record your workouts.
It’s all part of the company’s goal to help you maximise how you train, whether or not you’re working out on one of its machines. When using Tonal, its data quietly informs the resistance it gives you and the rep counts it pushes you through, says Troy Taylor, Tonal’s senior performance director. But even those who don’t own one can benefit. (For now, it’s only available in the US.) The company is partnering with a host of researchers, including MH advisor Brad Schoenfeld, for peer-reviewed studies on projects that rely on its data to explore resistance and arm-muscle recruitment, variable resistance and strength improvements.
Consider the reverse lunge, which is a lift that many gym newbies struggle with. More than a million lunge reps are done on Tonal each week, and the information those reps provide helps the machine guide Tonal users to quality reps that can make their legs stronger and more stable.
No, it can’t deliver inspiring motivational cues or notice ultra-subtle flaws in your form like an IRL trainer can. But Tonal’s advanced data can get you started on the basics of the reverse lunge, an exercise every guy should learn to do. And Tonal’s data indicates exactly where most users struggle with the move.
‘Imagine if you could access
a trainer’s knowledge for every workout’