The sun had yet to come up in Edmonton, Alberta, and it was more than 20 degrees below zero. Tanis Smith layered up anyway, ready to run up and down hundreds of stairs among the trees in the Saskatchewan River Valley.

When she arrived at 6 a.m., 10 other people joined her. It wouldn’t be the last time they risked freezing their toes off to get in a workout before the rest of the world wakes up.

“You’re pretty much just putting everything you own on,” said Smith, an accountant. “If you look at the pictures, you don’t know who you are unless you remember what you were wearing.”

Since that winter of 2013, Smith has rarely missed a workout with the group, called November Project, a network of free outdoor group exercise classes that started in Boston. No matter the month or weather, participants roll out of bed before dawn at least once a week and shield their faces from the blistering cold.

One part intense training and one part abject silliness, the project is a model for how to stay motivated to exercise outside throughout the winter.

It started when a pair of friends challenged each other to exercise every morning for the month of November. By the end of the month, they were recruiting others.

“A party is better when there’s more people around,” said Bojan Mandaric, who created the project with Brogan Graham in 2011. “We would talk to anybody who would listen.”

Soon, their meetings were attracting a few dozen people, who then brought the idea to other cities when they moved. Now there are 52 chapters in eight countries, including 44 in the United States and Canada.

What do the workouts look like?

Workouts, which attract all ages and fitness levels, begin with a “bounce,” a hopping, call-and-response chant to loosen people up physically and mentally. How the classes continue varies on the location and day of the week, but most include running and body weight exercises like squats or burpees.

To promote the idea that exercise can be fun, they also might weave in activities that would be at home during childhood recess in the schoolyard.

In Edmonton, they’ve played an intense version of duck duck goose, gone sledding in winter and done Slip ’n’ Slide in summer. One workout in Boston involved a kind of Easter egg hunt, where you search for plastic eggs at a sprint. Crack them open to find commands that could be, walk like a gorilla, do a cartwheel, or grab grass and dump it on Mandaric’s head.

The point is to lower inhibitions, which helps people make connections, said Jason Shaw, co-leader of the Indianapolis chapter.

“Nobody’s cool at November Project,” he said. “At different gyms, especially, you always have the people who just are so cool, or think they’re so cool. We try to nip that in the bud.”

Shaw said chapters mark different milestones, much like Scout merit badges, by spray painting a tag on your shirt for, say, showing up on your first single-digit day.

But they don’t spray when it’s too cold. The paint freezes.

If you don’t have a chapter nearby, many cities offer some kind of running or outdoor exercise group, though many are not free. Otherwise, November Project organizers offered a few suggestions on how to stay motived to keep working through the colder months.

Find a workout buddy

Accountability is a core tenet of the project. Members make a verbal promise to show up, and there is almost a sense of letting down your teammates if you don’t, said Mandaric, who moved to Boston from Serbia to row crew for Northeastern University.

Invest in some gear

There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing, Shaw said. At a minimum, buy a moisture-wicking base layer that will help keep you warm and dry. Avoid cotton, which keeps sweat in contact with your body and will make you colder. And add a top jacket with wind-breaking fabric.

Make it a habit

Commit to exercising on the same days and times for a month. Creating a predictable routine will help you get into a groove that is easier to maintain, Mandaric said.

Most of all, have fun

One of the things Smith appreciates most about the project is its social aspect. She called it “a chosen family” that was formed partly because they were having fun while exercising.

“Fitness doesn’t have to be this hard-nosed, drill-sergeant type thing,” she said. “You can have fun and get fit.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Albert Stumm writes about wellness, food and travel. Find his work at https://www.albertstumm.com

I sold my Peloton in the spring of 2022. It felt like I was getting away with something. I helped my buyer load it into an Uber XL, watched the car disappear down the block and then double-checked my Venmo: $800 richer.

Technically $1,200 poorer, since I’d purchased the bike at full price in the middle of the pandemic — and in the midst of a breakup, for whatever that’s worth — 18 months earlier. But I couldn’t afford to pay that $44.99/month subscription in perpetuity, and I definitely couldn’t afford to look at the bike day after day in the middle of my cramped apartment, living up to its cliche billing as an expensive drying rack. (This online insult was true, but let the record show: a Peloton bike is an excellent drying rack. Hooks out the wazoo.)

When I returned to my apartment I cursed loudly and kicked my couch. Idiot: I’d forgotten to give him the plug. It was still lying there, like a garden snake, surrounded by dust bunnies. I threw it in a backpack, confirmed the buyer’s address and schlepped the three miles to his home on a Citi Bike. It wasn’t my safest ride. I was stressed — it felt like I wouldn’t be rid of the damned machine until I handed him the plug, like he could still retcon the whole deal. Sure enough, once there, he had a flurry of extra questions: While I’ve got you, I noticed the bike tilts a bit to the right, should I be concerned—

I gave him a good five minutes, then Larry David’d my way out of there. There wasn’t anything wrong with the Peloton. I think he knew that. My issue with it was the same thing everyone else was experiencing, the reason there was now a robust secondary marketplace on Facebook, Craigslist and eBay, the reason that Peloton had fired nearly 3,000 employees that previous winter (while, laughably, including one free year of all-access Peloton in its severance package). I wanted no access to Peloton. I wanted it out of my life. My buyer almost certainly sensed this desperation, and the second chance to see me had given him second thoughts. But in the end, I guess, the deal was too good for him to pass up.

Like anyone else, the pandemic had done a number on me. When WFH’s other shoe dropped, it turned out to be a giant boot…and landed on my face. I once thought remote work was my savior, but it made me feel cooped up and burnt out. Aside from going back to the office (I’m lucky to have that option), I came to prize frequent offline field trips. Maybe it sounds strange, but even regular trips to the grocery store helped me pull myself out of social hibernation.

In the years following my Peloton sale, my exercising life mirrored trends across country. I joined a gym, a workout club and a soccer team. I signed up for road races. I visited bathhouses and Pilates studios and wellness retreats for doses of repose. Sometimes, these initiatives were for the express purpose of being around others — to make friends. But often, I just found myself happy to get out of the house.

Introducing: Amp

It was with some healthy cynicism, then, that I boarded the M train to SoHo last week for an in-person demonstration of Amp, the home fitness machine designed by Palo Alto software engineers and funded by Shalom McKenzie (a billionaire, and the largest individual shareholder of DraftKings). I guess I wasn’t just skeptical, but surprised: why on earth, knowing what we know about the role of IRL community in today’s wellness sphere, is a company trying to reclaim the golden era year of “connected” fitness machines?

To be fair, for a while there it seemed certain that home fitness was the future of exercise. As health studios stumbled, these connected machines proliferated: Peloton and Hydrow (and many, many more) were leagues more elegant than their predecessors. These units featured affable instructors, gamified classes and digestible workouts. It was thrilling to know you could take a 15-minute trip to your basement or garage and emerge sweaty, bettered.

But we all know what happened next — tens of thousands of people had a similar experience to what I described above — and the realm of home fitness has felt murky ever since. Maybe, some of us concluded, all you need is YouTube and a yoga mat. Not a clunky machine, nor the albatross of a monthly payment (during an era of peak subscription fatigue).

Nevertheless: here’s Amp, industry zag. I met with five Amp employees in New York (the company is based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv), including Amir Levanon, chief product officer, for an intimate test of the new machine, which plans to start shipping in January 2025. I wouldn’t say that I walked away convinced that Amp can win over American households next year, but I was deeply impressed with the software behind the hardware. The machine runs on new-fashioned AI, rendering a workout that I found equal parts challenging, unpredictable and fun.

So. What’s Different This Time?

If you had to sort Amp into the family tree of connected fitness machines, it would be on the same branch as Tonal, Tempo and Mirror: strength training that’s mounted on your wall. Here’s a quick recap of each:

• Tonal, as you may remember, debuted with endorsements and investments from LeBron James, Maria Sharapova and Tony Gonzalez. The machine is basically a massive monitor outfitted with a pair of arms, which you use to push and pull “digital weight” (also known as electromagnetic resistance, which is similar to the sort of resistance used in high-end exercise bikes and rowing machines).
• Tempo is a similar concept to Tonal: huge screen, geared towards lifters. Except its core equipment includes actual weights, which are stored in a shelf underneath the monitor. It looks like an armoire you’d find on a spaceship.
• And finally, we have Mirror. Or we used to. The company was acquired by Lululemon in the summer of 2020 for $500 million. By the fall of 2023, the athleisure brand had had enough. It stopped selling the device (which was like Tonal, but without the arms, and with classes that focused more on bodyweight training), and hatched a content distribution deal with another beleaguered connected fitness company: Peloton.

Got all that? Among those names, Amp is most similar to Tonal, except it has one arm and no monitor. Some of the company’s employees told me the minimalist design was a massive priority in the conception of the product — and you can tell. (It looked fantastic in a SoHo showroom with the best lighting around, but the machine would stunt just about anywhere.) That said, I have to imagine the design sensibility also represents a conscious paring back of connected fitness machines, in an age where they’ve weathered so much buyer’s remorse and online vitriol. The design is beautiful and simple. But it’s also: “don’t mind me.”

AI to the Rescue

The other defining pillar in the Amp pitch — and its most important one — is AI-driven personalization. The digital app functions as an omniscient trainer. It catalogs every single rep you take while using the machine, and counts that weight on aggregate. (I found this very satisfying; for example, after a mini “pull” workout, it informed me that I’d lifted nearly 800 pounds in five minutes.) But the AI also makes sense of how you lifted the weight: the force you generated, the extent to which a rep was easy or not.

Armed with that knowledge, the AI is able to auto-regulate a workout in real time. That dial on the front of the machine is manual (you can turn it to a maximum of 100 pounds), but it’s also smart, and can shift seamlessly to a more manageable weight from one set to the next. The more you use Amp, the smarter it gets. On days where you’re not sure what to do, but you have a general idea of timeframe and targeted muscle groups, all you have to do is input that information, and the Amp app will generate a workout. You have user override, too — if you don’t want to do a specific exercise (say your shoulder’s bothering you and you’d rather not do press-ups with the T-bar, just ask for a substitution). All told, it’s pretty remarkable how many exercises the machine can offer with just a few attachments: a T-bar, dual handles and rope chief among them.

According to Levanon, the longest a person has trialed Amp to this point is eight months. So, in theory, that AI trainer is the expert to end all experts on that individual’s physical strength: their recent record, long-term weak points, workout preferences, the whole nine yards. And unlike a human trainer, who, inconveniently, has other human trainees to worry about, the amp AI is unilaterally obsessed with you.

It’s a compelling pitch. I mean, it’s compelling tech. I was most taken with two AI-driven details in particular. First, the weight feels different based on which mode you choose: “Fixed” simulates a standard cable machine, “Amplify” makes the rep lightest at the “top” of the motion, only for them to become heavier on the eccentric side (this is great for muscle building), and “Band,” which eerily feels like you’re lifting with resistance bands. (It’s a different sensation, focused on “variable resistance” — the tension increases as you “stretch” the weight, and recruits your stabilizer muscles.)

The second feature that tickled me: an in-app, Guitar Hero-style game, meant to encourage a healthy rep cadence, or time under tension. Take a peek at the image above. Imagine you’re performing bicep curls. As those golden beams flash towards the bottom of your phone’s screen, you’re trying to time the rep (explosive effort up, steady decline down) to catch each beam. If you’re performing the rep correctly, you’re basically creating a net, patrolling the bottom of the screen so no beams slip through. It’s stunning how many curls I performed, so focused on this little game, before I remembered I was lifting, and that my arms were pretty tired. The game got way harder at the end (as I wasn’t lifting the bar high enough anymore) and I had to grit my teeth to 25 reps.

Our Verdict, Plus Parting Thoughts on Connected Fitness

I was somewhat amused to sift through Amp’s Instagram page and discover — beyond testimonials from Terry Crews and a merry-go-round of Miami influencers — endless invective from would-be customers.

For months, apparently, the public had clamored for Amp to reveal the price and launch date of its device. There were lots of eye-roll emojis and ???s as the weeks stretched on and Amp continued to post content, sans specifics. One commenter wrote: “Yeah. We need some type of details already. I’m just going to order Tonal instead since who knows when this is even being released, if ever. I was really excited about this. Now I’m just annoyed af.” Another frequent visitor: “You can’t do anything with it because this product isn’t real.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this: people so excited about the product that they’re protesting its very existence?

My gut tells me customers just want something to believe in again. The conversation around connected fitness has trended angsty and disjointed since the initial machines burst onto the scene a half-decade ago. The market has slipped, but the demand — and rationale — for sleek and reliable at-home fitness machines hasn’t gone anywhere. Plenty of people still work from home or operate on a hybrid model. Gym attendance is roaring again, but adherence requires motivation and transportation. The benefits of strength training, no matter your age or gender, have never been so clear. Then Amp comes along and keeps telling you to imagine a scene like this. It all sounds amazing. But so many of us have been here before. At a certain point, you just need to know what you’re committing to.

The company finally released those details a month ago: $99 to reserve the right to purchase a machine, $1,795 to buy one (including installation, minus the $99 you already put down), a year free of the Amp app (predicated on pre-order), and from there, $79 a month, forever. (Or, until you sell it on Facebook Marketplace.)

Or maybe not. Maybe Amp’s AI will prove a difference-maker this time around. After all, if you spend a year with its AI personal trainer and see consistent gains, that’s almost certainly because that tech proved indispensable to your routine. Wellness already constitutes a jumbo-sized slice of our personal spending pies — you could see someone axing a different monthly service in order to make room for that $79 fee. (If someone truly doesn’t want to use the app anymore, by the way, the machine will work as an apparatus on the wall.) Critical to Amp’s success, though, in my opinion, will be emphasizing its AI software from the start. Tonal also has extensive AI programming: with real-time weight adjustment, tailored workouts and even a corrective “Smart View,” intended to correct poor form. But Tonal didn’t launch with all of these features.

While Amp employees stressed their hopes of cultivating an online community within the app (think game leaderboards), I’m more interested in the machine as an intimate enterprise. If you can’t beat workout clubs, don’t think about them at all. For nascent lifters, eager to learn the tricks of the trade but mortified to test their form and mettle on an intimidating gym floor (where a slipped weight could mean a cracked metatarsal), I love the idea of a smart, smooth, at-home solution, which, again, includes a trainer “who” is unceasingly devoted to your progress. The paradigm seems uniquely suited to strength training.

Years removed from my roller coaster with Peloton, I’m feeling peaceful about connected fitness. I don’t personally have the funds, or space, for a machine like this, but I think it’s a worthy reboot, with real potential to change people’s lives, featuring one of the healthiest AI-human relationships I’ve seen across any sector. (Assuming Amp’s AI doesn’t stage a robo-revolt and force you to cable-fly 100 pounds in the middle of a rep.) I’ll be rooting Amp on from the sidelines — encouraged that it exists, but relieved I won’t have to make an existential decision on it one day.

FRIDAY, Nov. 15, 2024 (HealthDay News) — If you’re over 40 and raise your levels of exercise to that of the top 25% of your peers, you might gain an average of five more years of life, a new study calculates.

For over-40 folks in the lowest level of daily activity, a similar move could bring an average 11 extra years, the same report found.

The study results surprised even its Australian authors.

“Our findings suggest that [physical activity] provides substantially larger health benefits than previously thought,” wrote a team led by Lennert Veerman. He’s a professor public health at Griffith University School of Medicine and Dentistry in Gold Coast, Queensland.

The new study focused on U.S. data: Information on daily physical activity gleaned from “activity trackers” worn by participants aged 40 and above in 2003 to 2006 federal health surveys; and data on U.S. deaths from 2017 and 2019, also recorded in federal databanks.

Veerman’s team calculated that daily levels of physical activity (in whatever form) that placed people in the top 25% in terms of fitness was equal to about 2 hours and 40 minutes of normal-paced (3 miles per hour) walking.

The researchers calculated that if everyone over 40 suddenly matched this activity level, it would raise everyone’s expected life span by five years — from the 78.6 years it’s now estimated to be to nearly 84 years.

Of course that leap in fitness would be tougher for some than others. The Australian team said that moving folks in the lowest 25% up to the highest 25% would mean the equivalent of an extra 111 minutes of normal-paced walking daily.

There’d be a huge health payoff, though: Almost 11 extra years of expected life for this group, the team said.

Among this group as well, the researchers estimated that each extra hour spent walking each day would translate to an extra six hours of lifespan.

Vreeman’s team stressed that the study couldn’t prove cause and effect, only that extra physical activity seemed associated with living longer.

The findings were published Nov. 14 in the British Journal Of Sports Medicine.

So, how to encourage more couch potatoes to leave the couch behind?

According to the researchers, changes in policy and planning at the community level can make a difference.

“Infrastructure measures that encourage active transport, walkable neighborhoods, as well as green spaces, might be promising approaches to increase physical activity and resultant healthy life expectancy at the population level,” they wrote in a journal news release.

More information

There are tips on upping your fitness at the American Heart Association.

SOURCE: BMJ Group, news release, Nov. 14, 2024