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Why start another company in fitness and health?

There are thousands of health and fitness apps already on the market, so why start another one? Pillar Founder and CEO, Dan Wakerley shares why his is different.

By Dan Wakerley
Founder and CEO, Pillar

TLDR:

We’re building a fitness service that is control system for your fitness and health journey: the single place you to to know where you’re at, what that means for you, and what next to move towards your goals.
This should have pretty startlingly positive results for your physiology and mental health, and so what you can do, your happiness, career, wealth, and how long you stick around on planet earth for.
We’re building this out over time. Stay tuned for how how we are building toward this. At the moment Pillar works for those of us who love cycling - either because we have “cycling goals” or like it as a way to keep fit/ healthy.

Get in touch with me (dan@pillar-app.com) if you’re interested in using our service or being part of the journey in some other way.

Tell me a bit more....

Where are we at, as a society, with our fitness and health?

Who: At Pillar, we’re looking currently at people in mature industrialised countries - like US, UK, Australia. The majority of us in those countries, really want to improve our fitness and health. We want to do so on our own terms - according to our physiology, our preferences, and around the (perceived) immovable commitments we have in our lives

Our awareness: We are more or less conscious of where we are at - how fit and healthy we really are, and what that really means for the rest of our lives - what kind of “active” activities does that enable us to do, how long are we likely to live, what kind of quality of life are we likely to have.

Broader issues: In our lives more generally, we are seemingly/actually overloaded, with little time , and constantly distracted- some down to technology, changes in working practices, pursuit of progress and value creation (not “bad” things per se). These impact our ability to:
(i) understand where we are really at
(ii) whether we should take action, according to our current position vs our own goals
(iii) what to do if so.

Problem: The problem is, our collective health and fitness is in poor nick, and a few indicators of our collective fitness and health are getting worse. Us fitness and health converts have our own problems - injury and illness through overtraining and chronically under-eating being some of them. Some headline stats about this:

% of US population who are obese or overweight went UP 2010-2019, from 63% to >66% (CDC)
50% of regular runners get injured every year
A third of exercising women may be amenorrheic (loss of menstruation)
Nearly 30% of us rate our health at 5/10 or below in the UK, and only 20% rate it as 9 or 10/10

So what have we done (as the health and fitness industry at large)?

We’ve introduced tons of solutions - some terrible (think miracle diets and exercise regimes), some really good at what they do - all of them partial and disconnected from each other.

These are things like:

Calorie counters - to tell you how much you’ve eaten, like My Fitness Pal
Great training environments - like Peleton, Barry’s, Fitness First
Healthier food - groceries and supplements
Wellness trackers - like Whoop and Oura ring, to tell you how fatigued you are and your capacity to exert yourself on a given day, and how well you’re resting.
Other measurement services / tech : counting steps, resting heart rate, estimated calorie burn, speed, power created (eg how much power you can put through the pedals on a bike).

These sit on top of a fragmented set of services (public and private) for healthcare and life insurance.

To be clear, the good solutions in the above categories are important. They play, and will continue to play, a really valuable role (like Oura, HRV4Training, Garmin, Peleton for example).

However there are problems with this fragmentation:

No solution really knows you - they only know a part of you
They take a fragmented approach to your fitness and health - which often leads to an incoherent approach. For example, a disconnect between nutrition and activity/exercise (because you don’t know how to connect what each one is telling you and which to ignore based on how you’re actually doing). This leads to things like:
a) Obesity
b) Overtraining and then injury, illness (things like bone density, susceptibility to illness through reduced immune system effectiveness)
c) Not hitting your fitness goals (your body can’t adapt if it doesn’t get the right rest and fuel)
You have to stay on top of several products and services (effort intensive, time consuming).

So why are we (Pillar) building another fitness and health company?

To connect the dots, and give guidance on what next. To help you take integrated action across the different pillars of your fitness and health, in a way that’s right for you and your life. To simplify your life.

If you already use some of the services I’ve mentioned, you’ll get more value out of them.

It’s complex, and it is new, and we’re building it out over time (to progressively address more problems and cater for more and more parts of our society). And it will genuinely get you great results.

That’s why we’ve got some world leaders in exercise, nutrition and health on board to build this right.

Reach out here (dan@pillar-app.com) if you want to hear more, be part of the journey, or use our product.

Download Pillar here: