Incentives Matter
[A] new website called GymPact … promises to pay you to exercise — and charge you when you don’t. It’s both a carrot and stick approach to get you to the gym, which is often the toughest sell of exercise.
How does it work? You sign up on their web site, saying how many days each week you plan to exercise and what you’ll pay if you don’t. The minimum penalty is $5, but one user actually opted to charge himself $100 per miss, says Zhang. The site will ask for your credit card information, which is how you’ll get dinged at week’s end if you’ve missed one of your promised days.
You’ll also need to download GymPact’s free iPhone application, which allows you to check in at the gym, using your phone’s GPS… When you check in, GymPact will verify that the location is a gym, yoga studio, tennis court – or whatever – and you get credit for that day of exercise.
Source: CBS News
I have trouble understanding why a $5 incentive is stronger than the incentive to live healthy, prevent heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc.
At last, a way for fitness centers to make money: give memberships away for free & automatically charge “members” who don’t use the gym. This could actually work.
Very neat premise! Here’s to hoping they soon expand to cover Android devices, Nike+, etc. in the near future.
Hard to believe people sign up for this.
“I have trouble understanding why a $5 incentive is stronger than the incentive to live healthy, prevent heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc.”
People seem to respond more strongly to short-term incentives rather than long-term incentives, which makes sense. Losing $5 is an immediate certainty, whereas obesity, diabetes, etc is a more distant possibility.
Hope nobody mentions this to HHS.
Since all our money belongs to government anyway, ObamaCare will soon be charging each of us a tax of $5 per missed gym appointment if one’s government approved GPS locator doesn’t show that one stopped at an approved gym at least 5 times per week for one hour.
Just a little outgrowth of the “Let’s Move” program…
This is novel. Seems like there would be some logistical difficulties to make it work.
This is a good and smart approach. Although, how could this business be profitable if all their clients were fitness “freaks” that would not miss a minute of their workout? They would never be penalized, therefore there would be no money coming in.
What’s the ratio of the number of people who actually stick to their schedule to the number of people who don’t? Is it worth it?