Welcome to The Burn

Twenty years ago, fitness meant running around the school field in driving rain. It meant workout videos on VHS tapes, lifting weights in barebones gyms, and Weight Watchers.

Today, fitness is a Fitbit counting your steps. It’s your phone nestled under a pillow, measuring your sleep quality. It’s diligently scanning barcodes from ready meals into MyFitnessPal, watching yoga videos on your iPad, and running away from zombies.

The goal is the same, but the methods change.

The Burn is about what’s coming next in fitness.

In 2011, I was having lunch with a friend, Naomi Alderman, when we came up with the idea for Zombies, Run!, a running game and audio adventure. While my company, Six to Start, had made location-based experiences before, we’d never made a fitness app or game.

tl;dr — it raised $73k on Kickstarter, launched in 2012 on iOS and Android, and has since sold a million copies.

What I like about Zombies, Run! and the other fitness games we’ve made is that they don’t just track your fitness; they provide new kinds of motivation, enabled by new devices and technology. Sometimes our games end up motivating unusual groups:

What’s next in fitness? It’s sure as hell not another hundred ways to count how many steps out of 10,000 you’ve walked today.

But it might be games that encourage your family to walk more together, or gyms that know exactly how hard they should be pushing you, or turning your fitness routine from a chore into a new form of entertainment.

We’re going to look at the state of the art in fitness tech and games — both today, and in the future.

Welcome to The Burn.