The Idea of FytFeed
When COVID hit, life changed a lot. Luckily for the founders of FytFeed, they had a couple of great friends who immediately pulled together to start building a decent garage gym. Work and social routines changed, but the small group of four friends felt fortunate to maintain some normalcy in their fitness routines thanks to their new home gym. Their gratitude for living in Johnson City, TN, an area with a phenomenal outdoor infrastructure, skyrocketed as well. They had the opportunity to be active in the outdoors and amplify their outdoor hobbies while maintaining social isolation. While their high activity level helped them maintain a positive outlook, it didn’t solve all the negative effects of social isolation. Although co-founders, Dennis and Katie, use some activity-based apps, they felt there was much lacking in the social components that could add fun, excitement, and motivation to their active lifestyles.
FytFeed co-founders and their FytFam: the four friends partnered up to create a home gym and get active in the outdoors during COVID. This photo was taken during a mountain biking trip to Buffalo Mountain in Johnson City, TN.
As the idea grew out of their immediate needs, the co-founders also reflected on their personal fitness journeys, which was a driving force shifting the spark of an idea into a vision and mission (we’ll soon be rolling out a blog series called “What’s Your Y?” where we will dive into the ‘why’ that drives FytFeed’s co-founders and others).
FytFeed's Vision
FytFeed wants to build a community that enables people to encourage, inspire, and motivate one another to live sustainable active lifestyles. We want to provide a platform where you can generate challenges that encourage you and your friends to be your best and reach your next goal. More importantly, we want you to build a community and community-based challenges that feel fun and attainable for where you are in your fitness journey—no matter what activities you enjoy, what devices you use, or how you look doing it. We want the platform to be a place where people feel a sense of community that uniquely caters to making their fitness journeys fun and achievable.
The Big Picture
Physically active lifestyles provide us with so many health benefits. The physical benefits are obvious, such as reduction of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.1 Furthermore, physical activity has been shown to help delay brain aging and improve cognitive processes and memory.2 In fact, regular physical activity provides pain-relieving and antidepressant effects. The chemicals our bodies produce from living actively actually help provide feelings of happiness and wellbeing: “giving strength to the ancient principle of “mens sana in corpore sano” (i.e., a sound mind in a sound body).”2 By living an active lifestyle, we inherently enable ourselves to enjoy life more fully due to increased mobility and higher overall health, which frees us up to have more fun! Nevertheless, a study by the Pew Research Foundation showed that 79% of Americans say they should get more physical exercise than they do.3
"Physical activity improves cognitive processes and memory, has analgesic and antidepressant effects, and even induces a sense of wellbeing."
The goal of FytFeed is to make activity both sustained and fun by utilizing the power of community. Research backs up the effectiveness of social encouragement and friendly competition as a means to become (up to 90%) more active!4-7 As we develop the platform, we are taking full advantage of these statistics.
Our aim is to provide a fun interpersonal platform for everyone to find support and encouragement through a fully interactive feed where activity tracking meets social engagement and community. FytFeed aspires to provide everyone an avenue to set attainable goals and challenges that truly push one another in unique and fun ways. It’s not about being the leanest, strongest, or fastest athlete—it’s about building a community that has fun and enjoys the journey of becoming and being our best-feeling selves.
We’re still in the early phases of prototype development, but we want to introduce our idea to the world to receive feedback and questions! We’re excited to continue building our community along our tech startup journey. More to come soon – so, please sign up for our newsletters, connect with us by email (hello@fytfeed.com), or follow us on social media @FytFeed. We are so excited to continue this journey!
References
- https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/factsheets/physical-activity.htm
- Di Liegro, C. M, et al. Physical Activity and Brain Health, Genes 2019, 10, 720; doi:10.3390/genes10090720.
- https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2017/02/02/americans-health-care-behaviors-and-use-of-conventional-and-alternative-medicine/
- Zhang, J, et al. Support or competition? How online social networks increase physical activity: A randomized controlled trial, Preventive Medicine Reports 4 (2016) 453–458.
- Laranjo, L, et al. The influence of social networking sites on health behavior change: a systematic review and meta-analysis, J Am Med Inform Assoc 22 (2015) 243–256; doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2014-002841.
- Zhang, J, et al. Efficacy and causal mechanism of an online social media intervention to increase physical activity: Results of a randomized controlled trial, eventive Medicine Reports 2 (2015) 651–657.
- Social networks push runners to run further and faster than their friends, Nature 544 (2017) 270.