In this episode of the SLN Podcast, John Peters is joined by Asaf Avidan Antonir, the Co-Founder of Onyx, the World’s Smartest Digital Trainer and Workout App. Asaf touched on a variety of topics, including how Onyx is connecting consumers through fitness during Covid, how their proprietary algorithms are giving them an edge in personalizing the fitness experience, and why the gym of the future looks more like Amazon Go than it does Peloton. Asaf also spoke about the upcoming Fitness and Active Brand Summit on November 17 where he is speaking alongside the CEOs of Tonal and Liteboxer.
Register here for Fitness & Active Brand Summit.
Podcast Highlights
3:39 – Massive growth in fitness: “We’ve seen a pretty massive growth in our user base and just seeing a lot more kinds of new types of users come into the space and look for new solutions.”
6:30 – The habit of working out at home: “I think the longer you do something the more it becomes a habit. People are still just investing in being able to work out at home. So either starting subscriptions for things like Onyx or buying connected equipment or basic equipment.”
7:40 – Real-time personalization, experience: “I think personalization is really at the core of what we’re doing and our technology enables a level of personalization that simply has not been possible before. So there’s sort of two components to that personalization. There’s the real time during the workout and there’s the long-term personalization.”
9:11 – Performance data available in your device: “With our technology, there are so many other things that we can actually extract by your performance. Things like flexibility, mobility, balance, muscle engagement, a lot of these things that historically required an expensive mo-cap suit are suddenly available in a consumer mobile device.”
11:07 – Apple provides validation for the fitness world: “When you have a company like Apple come into your space, it shows that they believe that this is a massive and growing market opportunity.”
14:02 – Onyx’s real-world data: “Real-world data really helps us perfect our tracking models across different scenarios, across different backgrounds, and different body types. So really that’s the advantage that we have being longer in this space. Also by being this direct to consumer product where we have hundreds of thousands of people using the product every time somebody does a workout, we’re collecting data that helps us improve.”
16:48 – The gym of the future looks like Amazon Go: “I think it [the future of fitness] actually looks a lot more like Amazon Go. You’re gonna walk in and through cameras and various sensors it’ll know who you are automatically and you will be checked in. And then every workout that you do, every move that you make will be tracked and recorded. You’ll get all of this analytics automatically, and you’ll actually have a digital trainer in your ear telling you what you should work on next and kind of giving you feedback on your form, the way that we’re doing inside the Onyx app.”
23:01 – Where Onyx is headed in fitness: “We’re definitely interested in other modalities and other exercise forms. You know, we’re interested in yoga and pilates and boxing and all of these kinds of things. So we think there’s a lot of potential there and then also supporting lightweight equipment. We’rea software only solution. It’s great that we don’t require additional hardware, but the beautiful thing about computer vision is that we can actually support a lot of those things. If you have dumbbells or barbells or bands or anything like that, those things can integrate perfectly well into our experience.”
