Modern Technology: A Boon Or An Embargo For Health And Fitness?

Literature Review

Discuss about the Modern Technology a Boon or Embargo.

A healthy body is a universal need. The World with bulge bellies has made exercise and workout as an important part of life. Extra fat is stigmata in society altogether.  WHO defined overweight and obesity as, “abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health Body mass index is a simple index of weight for height that is commonly used to classify overweight and obesity in adults.” The basic cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended.

Unhealthy lifestyle, increase intake of dense food has let the world in a state of health emergency. The impact of obesity has increased over time (2).With the world being overweight, health industry particularly gyms and fitness training centers are on their way to flourish.

Carrying extra weight does not only hamper the physical life of a person but also affect his mental and social life to large extend. Being healthy is somehow defined as looking in a certain way, skinny, toned with no or little fat. The fat has to shed or melted in any case.

Modern technology gym provides all necessities for weight loss. According to the ACE report, every 2^nd American adult is categorised as obese or overweight. So gym industry is at rescue and help people to decrease their waistline. Modern gym industries help people to remain healthy and work with strategies.  A number of gyms are opened on a daily basis.

Some health professional include exercise and fitness in their prescription. Incorporation of physical activity into life provides various physiological and social benefits.

Physical motion plans have become one of the major parts of healthy life, less we know about the specific fitness program. Modern fitness centers are designed to help public every time.

This paperwork focuses on the qualitative research work emphasizing on the health system and fitness training centers. The work is done on the intervention of well-equipped modern technology in the fitness centers and their impact on the health of people.

The keep fit fashion is not new. It is return to the natural path of life. During ancient days people used to do physical activity as their daily routine of activity. The natural way of human body’s adaptation is profound in itself. Our bodies are planned and designed in such a way that physical activity is a must for appropriate functioning of biochemistry and physiology. If we observe from ancient world, we observe that people were serious about their health care regime. The activities were inculcated in culture and daily life of societies around the globe. In ancient China during 3000 to 1000 B.C., people believed that humanity was key to prevention and that key to prevention was key to long life. Slowly this concept got dominated in the society and gave rise to various philosophies. These philosophies with time lead to various art form incorporated with different physical activities. Various examples like Tai chi chuan, a graceful body movement exist till now and is performed and used around the globe.

 In Indiana working out is known as essential principles of daily life. Ancient Vedas has mentioned the importance of physical exercise as critical to life. The ancient script got converted to the cultural routine of families gave birth of famous Indian mind and body exercise yoga. Yoga includes brief series of stretching and flexibility. Today’s world embraced yoga as modern fitness method efficiently.

The modern world has become a technology hub. New and efficient technology has made our life a better as well as easier to live. At the same time, easier life has decreased the physical activities of human being. It has become a problem in the world. To be fit is a gem in today’s era. It is most influential as well as the necessity of life. The changing lifestyle of adults, teenagers and elderly has made health reason to worry. With 68% American population obese or overweight (3) and 112000 deaths across the USA, promoting weight loss is a public emergency. In his light, ample of fitness centers and gyms have emerged over time. Higher health cost has further bloomed the fitness training centers. Further fitness has become a tag for social acceptance. .Media and advertising industry have played a prevalent role in this shift towards being fit. The contemporary definition of fitness of a person also has various angles. Usually skinny and toned body is considered as fit, and extra fat on the body is categorised as unfit. This particular concept helped to flourish gymnasium industry at a high rate.

With new technology daily upgrading the market gym industry has also used ample of methods to incorporate fitness methods. Technology has changed the outlook on fitness. In ancient time people used to run for hours, today we run according to the calories burned with the time. So for one thing that technology has helped is specific ways to maintain fit. We maintain our life style.The term gym is always accompanied with the word health, fitness, and exercise. These fitness centers equipped with modern scientific technology is creating a new impact on public life. A study conducted provides the first evaluation of a newly engineered type of commitment device, a temptation bundling device. In this study, exercise was bundled with tempting audio novels and found that the attendance of gym was increased by 51 percent. (4). .An another study conducted positive attitude of gym membership and intention to join gym has given a result that positive attitude to join gym depends on factors like membership, pressure to join due to media and advertisement(5). Gym operators need to be updated with modern and scientific instruction. Gym operators needs to be updated with modern and scientific areas.  In a feedback for a wearable technology that sense squats below parallel has potential to improve to share information and to coaches to provide feedback to athletes and other coaches.(6) So technology has enable people to get feedbacks and results. This helped to provide motivation for the clients and advertisement for the gym operators.

Since gym and modern technology are gel together so constructively that today we cannot think of working without treadmill or running without earplugs in our head. The technology has of course double-edged sword. It saves time and keep track on healthy life style also. E.g. Pedometers help to count and keep check on the number of steps taken throughout the day. Studies reveal that pedometers based walk has increased daily based physical activity and with no loss of time. Pedometer handlers increase their physical activity by 27 % (7). A  Pedometer-based walking plan are usually significant and effective. It help to raise a competitive environment to the person and help to motivate for more physical exercise. Other than pedometer, accelerometers is also one of the positive creation to the world of being fit. In a study accelerometers indicated   data that “less than 5% of adults in the United States engaged in 30 min per day of moderate exercise, 5 to 7 days per week.”(7). The study shows that the updated technology can give a friendly as well as can take the business away from the gym operators. The various work done in due course of time on gym and technology has given positive as well as negative effect of technology on the gym.  Our work done  weather gym and technology go hand in hand or weather new technology is  just taking the gymnasium industry toward backward shift. Data analysis show most of the members come to gym for weight loss (8). But with technology in hand people prefer to control their fitness routine themselves according to their own ease. Technological backup and gym as industry has a different relation .It goes in hand in hand only to some extent. It becomes a competitor afterwards.

Centre for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that “all adults get at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week.” Gym can be good way to do follow a routine workouts but at the same time personal trainers and machine help people to do workout within their home. To gym helps people to take time and socialise. It enhances social life by putting you in regular group of people. One can sleep peacefully and more sleep means more energy and a more even mood. At a same time one lose weight and will feel good. With use of various technology on personal basis we can get fit but additional benefit of social life will be missed.

Other factors which makes going to gym rather than personal work out are better use of technology, getting fit under professional trainer. Effective training and low cost maintenance has also made gym a better option than working out at home. It provide efficient use of machines under professionals

On the other side working out at home has also benefits. One can control their own routine. There are effective less chances of infections and disease. One has less reasons to cancel its working out session. Be it a cold or hot exercise will not be effected. More effective result in short span of time has also been observed with personal trainer. Use of internet as trainer has also a profound reason for working out at home. There is also no membership fees for month. There are less confusion and more freedom to do workout. Since effective working out can or cannot be with gym.

Conclusion

Our study which is basically done on literary analysis. The study shows that gym and modern technology can effect positively as well as negative on the society. People going to gym has increased in some part of the world and at the same time has decreased in other part of the world.  Gym as industry need to maintain its standard by using innovative methods. Providing different facilities may help to maintain its standard. Including diet professional, physiotherapist and dermatologist can help gym operators to move in more clients. We further worked on the questionnaire made by us for future study.

Further study is based on interview of three different people connected to the fitness centre. We can work on paper by interviewing gym instructor, a regular client of gym. Question can be

1 How do you find ways to keep people motivated coming to gym in this technology freak era? (Gym instructor)

2 How do you want modern technology can improve fitness training?  (client)

3 How effective it is to go to gym rather than working out at home?

On the basis of above study we can here make a scope for further research on maintaining balance use of technology by gym operators. Regulation of gym, being   inclusive and work more than just losing weight, operating with reference with hospitals and  going for innovative  methods will help gym industry to  work smoothly .We wind our work with a series of thoughts and a gateway for research in the field of fitness and technology.

References

Department of health World health organisation.

BBC, health article, Weekend exercise alone ‘has significant health benefits’

Culén, A.L., Finken, S. and Bratteteig, T., 2013. Design and interaction in a smart gym: cognitive and bodily mastering. In Human Factors in Computing and Informatics (pp. 609-616).

Milkman, K.L., Minson, J.A. and Volpp, K.G., 2013. Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management science, 60(2), pp.283-299.

Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Leeman, O. and Ong, J.S., 2008. Lost and Found Again: Subjective Norm in Gym Membership. DLSU Business & Economics Review, 18(1).

Oakes, K., Siek, K.A. and MacLeod, H., 2015, May. Musclememory: identifying the scope of wearable technology in high intensity exercise communities. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (pp. 193-200). ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering).

Vividen Heyward, 6^th edition Excerpts from Advanced fitness assessment and exercise prescription, Human kinetics.

DR?GAN, A.A., 2013. segmenting and profiling fitness club customers: a case study. Review of Management & Economic Engineering, 12(1).