Purpose
This document is intended to set out the customer proposition of the first generation of 'afterburner' apps (7MW and Afterburner). It focuses purely on what this proposition is and how it is communicated to potential customers in order to demonstrate value.
Core Proposition
The key value of our offering can be summed up as follows:
To lose weight and get healthy, focusing on burning calories is simplistic and inefficient. Instead, focus on changing the way your body works, one workout at a time. This approach magnifies the effect of every subsequent workout, multiplying the effects of your efforts each time you go round the loop.
How does it work?
- Step 1 - Overload: during a workout we push specific systems in your body past what they are used to. Specific types of exercise stimulate specific systems.
- Step 2 - Adaption: after a workout we give your body time to recover. It uses this time to adapt to become better at the work we gave it. This is where the magic happens.
- Repeat: each time we go round this loop, we create a bigger effect, burn more energy and more fat.
How does your body adapt?
When prompted to do so by the correct exercises, intensity level and recovery period, your body adapts and improves in many ways. We can group a lot of these into the following benefits:
1. Burn more energy all the time, 24x7.
By increasing the amount of muscle tissue in your body, we can increase the number of calories you burn all the time, even when resting.
This doesn't mean 'bulking up', it means increasing the density and strength of your muscles and the number of muscle fibres. Also, sedentary and people of average fitness (including women) can gain a lot of muscle mass without seeing muscles grow noticeably. If people are really concerned, they can concentrate on areas that won't bulk up like core and buttocks.
Resistance exercises are used to cause these adaptions.
2. Burn more calories during exercise.
By increasing the amount of muscle tissue in your body, we can increase the amount of energy you can burn per second.
This is the same physiological adaption as above, but a separate benefit. If you are stronger you can do more work (move more mass more quickly) and physics therefore dictates you need more calories of energy to do so.
3. Burn body fat, rather than sugar.
By improving your cardiovascular system, we can get your body to burn more body fat (rather than sugar) during a workout.
4. Control your appetite to reduce snacking.
5. Be less prone to store excess food calories as fat.
Physiological adaptions
There are more details about the actual adaptions and how they are presented in Afterburner here.
Secondary benefits
Although we need to be careful with these:
- Healthier heart, lungs and general wellbeing
- Higher resistance to illness
- Lower likelihood of heart disease, diabetes and a longer, healthier life.
- More freedom to eat normally.
Supporting concepts
- Overload
- Recovery
- Adaption
- Progression
- Reversibility
- High intensity training
- The 7 minute workout
- Afterburner-specific:
- Workout pie charts
- Afterburn display
Background
- Principles of training (taught in GCSE PE): http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/pe/exercise/1_exercise_principles_rev1.shtml
- Research paper "7 minute workout" by Brett Kilka and Chris Jordan: https://www.evernote.com/l/AAR3rEHSiVlFLLsFgWR0ZPaGQ_c2fkxGSvw