We live in an on-demand society. Uber. Deliveroo. Spotify. We’re used to getting a service whenever we need it, from wherever we happen to be. And we want to be able to organise it from our phones.
Now you can add personal training to that list of at-your-fingertips services (all the better to burn off that Deliveroo).
Traditionally something that you’d buy as a package after seeing an advert for a special offer at your gym, Daria Kantor set up on demand workout app TruBE “to take the traditional concept of personal training and adapt it to today’s lifestyle”.
As a keen exerciser — Kantor was a semi-professional tennis player in her youth and coached the Maccabi tennis team in her home town, Geneva, as a teenager — she saw a need from consumers “to find a trainer that can work around their schedule.”
“One thing we see more and more is that people are struggling to fit exercise and working out into their everyday life,” she says. The theory behind TruBE is that if you are able to order a personal trainer to your house, hotel room or local park at a time that suits you, you’re more likely to get fit.
According to Kantor it’s increasingly hard to find a good trainer. “When bigger gym chains came into the market they reduced the number of trainers they were employing and replaced them with machinery, making access to the gyms extremely cheap” but leaving many highly trained professionals either out of a job or twiddling their thumbs, while potential clients were still queuing up at the customer service desk.
She has built up a network of more than 30,000 independent trainers who she claims to vet ruthlessly — “we use exceptional experts from the health and fitness world” — coming from diverse backgrounds and including ballet dancers, marital artists and world-titled kickboxers.
Services on offer include traditional personal training, yoga, boxing, pre- and post-natal training and running. Sessions cost around £50 for an hour.
Although the idea of on-demand training feels the opposite of traditional personal training — the idea that you give an hour of your week every week to training with the same person — Kantor says that over 80 percent of sales at TruBE are package sales. So you get consistency with the same trainer at the same time every week. The remaining customers are often frequent travellers, who don’t want their exercise routine to be disrupted or someone who wants to try something new.
In four years TruBE has signed up 50,000 users, giving it a leading position in the UK market for fitness apps. The “average lifetime of a customer” — let’s not take that too literally — for a health and wellbeing service is six months. Compare that to an average gym user: they also have a “lifetime” of around six months, but Kantor says that you’re more likely to use your sessions booked through the app than those offered at a gym. Her technology increases the “motivation factor — it creates a difference in the way you interact with exercise.”
Kantor — who is the daughter-in-law of Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress — tries out every service offered on the app, and sometimes gets her daughters, aged nine and 12, to help her test them. TruBE does offer sessions for children, as well as the option of adding up to two additional people to your session.
Kantor moved to London from Geneva nine years ago, although most of her family now live in Israel. TruBE is based solely in London — a conscious decision on Kantor’s part.
“People in Switzerland are so blessed. Everyone does sport, it’s normal to go skiing at the weekend. In the UK people are much more stressed and have less time to work out. That’s why a product like this works so well in the City.
“It’s so important to listen to yourself and be true to where you want to be as a person,” says Kantor.
