Members who don’t love exercising can put it off with a myriad of excuses. Motivation is a problem for most members, but one company is setting out to hit members where it hurts if they don’t exercise — their wallets.
Gym-Pact is a site similar to Groupon in that it provides fitness deals and discounts to a variety of facilities, currently only in the Boston area. The catch is if the Gym-Pact member misses a workout he or she pays a fine, a “motivational fee,” that they committed to paying upon signing up with Gym-Pact.
When people sign up they make an initial commitment to attend one of Gym-Pact’s fitness centers for a minimum of at least one day a week. They then choose how much they want their fee to be for missing out on the commitment, starting at $10. Members can currently sign up for a one or six month commitment. Attendance is tracked by a text messaged based system where facilities have a password that needs to be texted to Gym-Pact each time members workout.
J. P. Krueger, the owner of Fitness Together, a personal training studio in the north end of Boston, has a deal available through Gym-Pact.
“I think it’s a genius idea,” Krueger said. “If I could invest in it I would.”
Krueger believes getting people to use Gym-Pact is a slow process at first but that it will pick up. A deal for Fitness Together has been on Gym-Pact’s site for about two months. A few people have purchased the discounted personal training packages but have not been to Fitness Together yet to use them.
“Being trainers, we already hold you accountable, but this is added insurance,” he said.
According to a Jan. 24, 2011, article from “The Boston Globe,” Gym-Pact launched a pilot program in October with Bally Total Fitness and partnered with Planet Fitness at the beginning of 2011.
Gym-Pact was created by two recent Harvard Grads, Geoff Oberhofer and Yifan Zhang who say on their website that they combined Oberhofer’s love of fitness and concepts from Zhang’s behavioral economics class to create Gym-Pact.
To check out Gym-Pact go to www.gym-pact.com
