Which digital group exercise classes are your members choosing to do when they’re working out away from the club, and what do these behaviours mean for the way you market your on-demand content – and, indeed, for the content you self-produce?
We’ve crunched all the Web Player usage data from the first half of 2022, across all our customers around the world, and there are some interesting themes emerging…
Strength is strong
Looking across all the different genres of workout available on our platform, strength has emerged as a clear favourite for the first half of this year, accounting for a quarter (25.5%) of all content streamed.
While cardio comes in as the second most popular genre, it accounts for only 13.8% of streams, suggesting that many people still look to the larger equipment of the gym – or perhaps going for a run or bike ride – for their cardio workouts.
Strength workouts, however – often done using smaller pieces of kit or even bodyweight only – are seen as achievable, non gym-based workouts. On a similar vein, bootcamps accounted for 12.1% of streams.
We thought it would be interesting to break the strength data down further, and we found that full-body strength workouts dominated: 42.5% of all strength workouts done through our Web Player platform were full-body. This was closely followed by core workouts, which accounted for 32.5% of the strength workouts selected by our global users.
Complementing in-club
Continuing on the theme of complementing rather than duplicating in-club workouts, we’re still seeing recovery and low impact styles of workout coming through as popular choices on the Web Player.
Yoga alone accounted for 12.3% of all Web Player workouts in H1 2022; if you add together the usage of our yoga, pilates, meditation and stretch & recover content, you get to a nice round 30%.
That’s almost one in three at-home workouts incorporating a good degree of stretching, flexibility and mind-body connection.
We’re hearing a lot of clubs anecdotally reporting that members are doing different workouts at home from what they do in-club, whereby home is seen as a great space for recovery and club for the more high-impact, high-energy workouts. Our data supports this.
Stack it up
There’s a really interesting trend in terms of length of workout selected, too, whereby the most popular class length is 20–30 minutes (38.6%), followed by 10–20 minutes (29.4%).
Class durations of under 10 minutes account for 15.3% of streams, and 30–40 minutes for 12.5%. Anything longer than 40 minutes drops almost off the radar.
However – and here’s the big learning – in almost half of all sessions (47.9%), the actual stream time was less than 10 minutes. Meanwhile, 25.5% of streams lasted 10–20 minutes, and 19.2% 20–30 minutes.
Put another way, while a large proportion of users are selecting workouts that have been recorded as 20- to 30-minute sessions, not everyone is completing those workouts.
What the data suggests they are doing instead is taking the ‘meat’ of those workouts, then switching to a separate, dedicated stretch class for example – for a more comprehensive, extended stretch – rather than using the cool-down of the main workout.
The learning? Digital users want stackable content delivered in bite-sized chunks so they can mix and match at home, building a jam-packed session that fits their mood and needs that day, as well as the time they have available.
Keep it fresh
A final observation, which is a point we’ve made before but which is still absolutely key: members want a steady stream of fresh content, so they always have something new to try and don’t get bored doing the same-old virtual workout from home.
The evidence? We’re seeing significantly more usage on our platform for the content providers who are really active, launching new content on their channels on a regular basis, than for those who upload a class collection and then leave it untouched for months.
For more guidance on the content trends that can help you shape your digital business, get in touch now: info@wexer.com