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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 and endocrine systems, we can get your body to burn more body fat (rather than sugar) during a workout.

The more oxygen can be delivered to your muscles during exercise, the more of your energy requirements can be supplied by oxidising fat. 

4. Be less prone to store excess food calories as fat.

By improving your insulin sensitivity, we can make it less likely that food calories you eat will be stored in fat tissue in the first place.

All exercise helps with this but especially intense exercise and strength training in particular has the biggest effect, partly due to the increase in muscle tissue. If you have good insulin sensitivity, more of the carb calories you eat will we be stored as glycogen instead of being converted to fat and stored as adipose tissue.

Physiological adaptions

The underlying adaptions that deliver the above benefits are:

  • Muscular strength adaptions:
    • Increased density and mass of your mechanical musculature (muscular hypertrophy).
  • Cardiovascular adaptions:
    • Increased density and mass of your heart muscles (cardio hypertrophy), pumping more blood per second.
    • Bigger veins and arteries, able to handle more blood per second.
    • Increased lung capacity as the lungs grow more alveoli and are able to pass more oxygen into the blood.
  • Metabolic adaptions:
    • Improved insulin sensitivity.
    • Improved regulation of hunger hormones.
    • Improved ability to burn fat as fuel.

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.
  • Suppressed appetite due to intense exercise.

Supporting concepts

Communication mechanisms

We have the following mechanisms available to us to communicate concepts:

  1. Onboarding process: sequence shown on first launch of each app. This could be a video, animation or a series of screens. Each app needs it's own version.
  2. Timeline articles: delivered to the user via their timeline (and push notification where relevant) after they complete x workouts (or x active days per week for y weeks, or x days since first run). The articles are long-form html and can include images, videos or anything else.
  3. General UI: some concepts are partially explained or reenforced via the UI elements, such as the workout pie charts and afterburn chart.
  4. Marketing materials: app store listing, website and advertising material.

Additional considerations

  • The user experience in the 7 Minute Workout app must obviously target retention and provide value, but must also up-sell Afterburner. The goal is to get the user to a point where they think "I'd love to be able to see these adaptions happening and know which exercises to do, when to do them and when to rest", then (if presented clearly) they will see the value of Afterburner and consider signing up.
  • We should provide less detail in 7MW and hold stuff back for Afterburner. This provides more value for Afterburner subscribers, plus they will be more engaged and interested.
  • Timeline articles need to be carefully structured to allow readers to extract value from them quickly, yet dig down into more detail and substance if interested. Tone should be informal.
  • Our approach isn't for everyone. Someone not able to withstand high intensity exercise due to age or injury would do better to exercise for longer at low intensity. Also, someone with a lot of time to dedicate to exercise would get better results by performing a mix of high and low intensity training. Our approach is for people with limited time, wanting maximum return.

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