The future of fitness with Pure CEO Colin Grant

Hong Kong's Pure Group yesterday unveiled its vision of a connected, game-led future of fitness, with technology and experience at the core of its new six-floor studio in the heart of a revamped Lan Kwai Fong.The new studio is the first in the world to offer an immersive fitness experience, which has been driven by a partnership with experiential fitness group Les Mills.The move, says Pure Group CEO Colin Grant, taps into this growing idea of a "gamification of fitness", that aims to make exercise more fun attract a new wave of millennials and fitness enthusiasts."We don't build gyms we build nightclubs. It's a social experience," he said."We've brought together entertainment, technology and fitness and they have merged and basically it's the gamification of exercise. If it's fun and if it's engaging, you will workout more often and harder."https://vimeo.com/125159607The Les Mills Immersive Fitness experience features cinema-quality video on a full 270 degree floor-to-ceiling screen, combining technology with exercise.Vaughan Schwass, CEO of Les Mills Enterprises, said merging technology and an interactive experience was driving the future of fitness."The fitness industry was in need of a shake-up," he told Marketing. "Attracting young people to clubs is hard, this is not fitness as an outcome, it's an experience."Schwass said a major study into the future of fitness launched in partnership with Nielsen, was one of the instigators into the new technology."We were looking at what the next 10 years of fitness will look like and what we realised is that the younger generation were not interested in gyms as they were, they saw them as big boring boxes."That led us down a path of how do we create more experiential fitness and overwhelmingly right now,  young people like it."For Pure, the studio also combines its growing reach into health lifestyles, combining food with its apparel business and fitness facilities."We've evolved into a complimentary lifestyle brand and anyone who is looking to get healthy, or stay healthy, hopefully we can provide all the components," Grant added.