The personal fitness sat nav

Florian Sauter holds the chip on his black wristband up against the side of a fitness device. His profile lights up on the display and the machine moves its parts to the height suitable for his arms, legs and back. In front of an installation by a local artist, the co-founder and head of technology at eGym sits astride one of 18 fitness machines on the wooden floorboards of a magnificent building, replete with sand-coloured stone walls and stuccoed ceilings. It stands in the middle of Munich’s Old Town and was formerly the main office of HypoVereinsbank, one of Germany’s largest banks. The start-up eGym has moved into this building for two years before the latter is to be slated for demolition. Fitness machines are now on display in what used to be the bank’s grand hall.

“Instead of having to add kilograms of weight, an electric motor creates resistance,” says Florian Sauter, sitting on the rowing machine and moving the handlebars back and forwards with both arms. Every gym member initially needs to configure all the basic settings on each machine type, which they do together with their trainer. These numbers are saved to a cloud system via a chip. Then the next time the gym-goer trains, all their equipment adjusts to them automatically. The mind can take a break while the muscles are at work. The machine specifies how quickly the person exercising should move and when it is time to stop. Florian Sauter tracks the training curve on the display, noting that “if I manage to collect the points on the curve, I am executing the movement perfectly.” Elements of play like these are integrated into the software as part of a process called gamification. “Training needs to be fun and motivate the gym members to keep going,” the 34-year-old says.

Back in Munich, he shared this with Florian Sauter, his old schoolmate from the town of Sindelfingen near Stuttgart. The two of them had been considering setting up a company together for quite some time. But until then, Sauter had found something to criticise in each one of the ideas. This time, however, Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer recalls: “There’s nothing to fault with this – that was Flo’s response. For him, that was an expression of complete elation!” The division of labour remains the same to this day, with Roesch-Schlanderer acting as the creative mind and visionary who attracts investors and clients to eGym. Sauter is the critical thinker who reviews and technically implements the ideas.

In 2010, the friends founded eGym and shortly afterwards drove across Germany with a prototype they had built themselves, in search of investors. “Philipp then succeeded in selling eight different devices to a gym, although we had only developed one,” Florian Sauter recounts of his partner. The company grew at a similar pace over the following years. Around 350 employees now work here, with most based in Munich and a few developers at a second location in Berlin. There are 70 sales representatives operating throughout Germany, in other European countries and now in the USA, too. In addition to gyms, physiotherapists and companies with in-house sports activities are part of their target group. Today, there are eGym devices installed in 1,100 gyms, while another 1,500 use the software on partner devices.