Visualise a cavalcade of cars driving through the gates of a small brightly-lit community hall one bitter winter’s night.
Mine was one. I’d signed up for the six-week come-all-ye cardio class to kick-start my 50th year, but it soon emerged that many of the attendees appeared to be GAA players in their 20s.
Problem: although I was speed-walking-fit, I was neither extremely fit nor 20 anymore…
The class turned out to be a one-size- fits-all session, which seemed to suit the 20-something footballers and camogie players.
But it didn’t suit me, neither my fitness level nor my age. So I ended up vomiting into the frosty bushes outside the back door and deciding never to go back.
That’s where Cork entrepreneur, gym-owner and former rugby player Chris Kenefick comes in.
Chris has created an app for the gym cardio class which ensures that every participant – be they beginners, average gym-goers or athletes, teenagers or seniors – gets a workout specifically tailored to his or her ability and age.
Revelate Fitness brings the latest technology to the gym cardio class offering a 45-minute workout across rowers, bikes and ski machines, which enables participants to train at their personal ability level, and also compete against themselves to improve their fitness.
The technology, the first of its kind, runs the class and sets appropriate exercise targets for each member, offering low-impact training and a variety of work-outs catering for all fitness levels and all ages- quite literally from teenagers to octogenarians.
Points out the Sunday’s Well resident and qualified civil engineer who co-owns and runs the popular Obodo Gym on Cork’s South Douglas Road with his sister Lucy:
“When you go into a cardio or spinning class, the coach is generally at the top of the class doing the exercises and telling you what to do.” In contrast, he explains, Revelate frees up the coach to observe, teach and generally engage far more with individual class members.
Revelate also makes things less stressful for gym newcomers, who can feel intimidated by their lack of fitness compared to other participants, the unfamiliar routines and the sight of a trainer sitting on a bike at the top of a class, spinning and shouting, he says.
“We’ve heard stories about people going to a class and not knowing what they were doing; people can end up feeling very self-conscious,” Chris recalls.
“Gyms can be intimidating places if you’re not fit,” he says adding that it’s an environment which can be difficult for people who are starting out a bit overweight and not terribly fit and trying to understand the gym mindset.
“You can end up feeling stupid because you don’t know what’s going on.” “When we were developing the Revelate IT platform, we based it on two principles. The first is that every user has a target for their own fitness level.
“The second is that they can track their progress. We’ve seen that when a person can see their results and the improvement in their fitness, they’re more likely to keep going.”
As a result, Revelate offers classes that are more organised, easier to understand and, in terms of the exercises, personalised and varied, allowing participants to choose their own challenge level and select from a variety of exercises.
Users log in before the class starts and can view their workout results and compete against themselves using the app to track progress.
A leaderboard system fosters a sense of friendly competition and community among users across all the gyms.
Meanwhile, the trainer is freed up to, yes, teach participants.
Revelate’s roots stretch back to several years spent in Australia, to where Chris emigrated in 2008 after graduating from UCC’s civil engineering programme.
Down Under, he and his sister Lucy became interested in Crossfit Training, a popular functional fitness concept – so interested, in fact, that when they returned to Cork in 2012, the duo set up a highly successful Crossfit gym in Douglas.
When the Covid Pandemic hit, Chris used the downtime to investigate new ways of running cardio classes – and hey presto! Revelate Fitness was launched in 2022.
Reaction to the concept has been extremely positive – 18 gyms and some 2,500 gym users across Ireland now use the app, which has also been adopted by gyms in the UK and Spain.
“I wanted an app for the smaller gym that may not be able to offer the high technology being used in large gym classes in big cities like London, where the average gym membership can cost about €250 a month or so.
“We looked at the classes, and they were all more or less the same. People were either becoming bored very quickly or felt intimidated by the fitter people in the class.
“We wanted to offer a better system that suits everyone and keeps them for longer.”
Later this year he expects to offer the Revelate programme for individual workouts as well as for classes.
Obodo, now one of the biggest gyms of its kind in the country, is very popular – not just with the average gym-user and sports teams using it for pre-season training, but with people who are not traditional gym users, as well as with adults in their forties, 50s and upwards, says Chris:
“Quite a high percentage of our users are over the age of 50, which is very rare in the fitness industry generally,” declares Chris, who strongly believes that the gym industry as a whole does not do enough to cater for older adults. Revelate, he feels, changes all of that.
The Revelate app has also received positive feedback from people with special needs, he reports – a group of Cork city badminton players has trained with Obodo every Saturday for the past two years, while several other groups with special needs now use Revelate as part of their training routine in gyms around the city.
Revelate has also proved highly effective in the hugely popular Hyrox fitness racing space and is now working with nearly a dozen groups in the sector in Ireland, the UK and the USA.
“We find the technology makes the races easier to manage – we have a motion-capture app that counts individual reps in terms of squats, lunges and burpees.
Our technology makes it easier to run these events. It standardises the judging by helping to ensure more consistency in terms of judging.”
