Making group sessions more fun

We wanted to make group fitness session more engaging and fun so we decided to add gamification mechanics to the experience. You can enable this option in the Settings of the application.

Gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) applied in this case to fitness workouts. Gamification encourages engagement with the service and makes the experience more fun.

Selfloops Awards, Badges and Achievements

Zone Mates: recognition given to the two athletes that have completed the workout with the most similar heart rate zone distribution in the entire class. (More than two participants are required in the class).

Zone King: recognition of the athlete that have spent the most time in the heart rate zone the group trained the most in (More than one participant is required).

Range champ: recognition of the athlete that has reached the largest range between the lowest and the highest heart rate during the workout. (The calculation does not take into account the first 5 minutes. More than one participant is required) .

How It works

Enable the Gamification option in the Settings of the application. After the workout you can visualize the results and achievements by selecting the workout in the “Activity Logs” section and choosing the Summary view.

Structured Workouts

In the Selfloops website we have added the ability for a coach to create structured workouts. Structured workouts allow a coach to create training sessions where the target or intensity level of each time interval is specified.

The coach can create a workout specifying as target the %FTP (Functional Threshold Power) or (Bike,Rowing,skiErg) Power.

The image below shows how structured workouts are created in the website.

For each interval a coach specifies the duration and a target. In the picture above the %FTP is used. A structured workout can be assigned to a team or to a set of athletes. The athletes can download the structured workout as ERG file. ERG is a standard file format and these files that can be imported in most of the commercial indoor training software programs.

Our Group Fitness Premium app can also download the structured workouts. This means that those workouts can be executed in a group session, for indoor cycling, rowing and any group session that involves a target power. In the Group Fitness app we have also added the countdown timer of the interval.

We believe this is a great tool to train. You can only improve what you measure!

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed is a view that shows the workouts of your team and athletes performed over a certain period of time. This view is part of the tools we offer to coaches to better track and support their athletes.

The date range of the feed can be selected and the information available are the summary of their workouts and their notes. The coach can add his notes directly from the feed. An in-depth view of the activity is available by selecting the specific item in the feed.

Class reservations made easy

In the Selfloops website we have built an integrated class scheduling and management system. The system can be used as a stand alone service. We are also integrated with major class management systems such as MindBody.

With our system, clients can sign up for classes and select their bike/rower/loaner. They do not necessarily need to make a bike reservation, at signup we automatically reserve a bike for them and they can change it if they want.

We have now added the ability to reserve the place/bike/rower/loaner directly in our smartphone apps, available for iOS and Android.

With our Spark smartphone app, users can sign up for classes, reserve their sensors, check their workouts. A Selfloops integrated experience!

Improving the Athlete-Coach interaction

Our website is a platform to analyze sports performance. In the Selfloops website athletes have an in-depth analysis of their specific workouts and a view of trends across different metrics. Coaches can use the website to manage and track multiple athletes.

Both athletes and coaches can add their feedback next to a workout. The platform facilitates the communication and feedback loop between the athletes and coaches, that’s key to keep improving.

We have now added the commenting ability to our smartphone Spark application, available for Android and iOS.

With our Spark smartphone app athletes can check their workouts, add comments, see the coach’s comments and add their rate of perceived exertion (RPE also called Borg scale). All the information is synchronized with the website.