Eight years ago, Tommy Duquette sat down to tell me about a startup he was co-founding with four other people. The tech industry—and the world—was very different compared to now, but for the team behind fitness tech Hykso, their mission today remains the same: To make boxing accessible to all. Their company has since rebranded and undergone three innovation eras, so I wanted to learn what’s kept the company—now known as FightCamp—going and how they survived the pandemic.
A Broadening Target Market
“Our ultimate vision is to leverage our expertise in embedded system gesture recognition, motion tracking, and data analysis to move into other sports that are starving for better sports-specific metrics,” Duquette told me back in 2016. Initially, the company formerly known as Hykso was focused on professional fighters. After all, they’re the most interested in using data to improve their punches. But the FightCamp team acknowledged they set their sights too low.
“We have now expanded a much wider target market to make boxing fitness available to every household,” FightCamp Chief Executive Khalil Zahar says. “Our platform offers guided workouts for beginners, enabling them to learn from the ground up. FightCamp has introduced more gamified features to increase engagement with workout regimens, provided deeper insights into workout metrics, and evaluated the capabilities of our hardware and platform.”
Its journey has been anything but entirely rainbows and sunshine. Among the challenges FightCamp endured were the swings in demand, effectively communicating the benefits of boxing training, and the stigma associated with the sport.
The expansion play worked in the company’s favor, with demand increasing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like its peers, FightCamp benefited as people stayed home and bought fitness tech.
However, the ease of restrictions and the return to gyms led some consumers to abandon the pricey equipment they bought. Zahar claims despite this, “demand for fun and effective at-home workouts remains strong, and our user base has stayed loyal.”
To compensate for the new fitness reality, the startup reduced friction points, allowing its members to better incorporate their fitness workout into their lives “quickly and efficiently.”
Debuting the FightCamp Console and Tracker
FightCamp’s latest initiative involves making at-home boxing a multiplayer activity. To achieve this, the company has released its FightCamp Console and Trackers, a hardware system enabling two people to work out and be tracked simultaneously on the same screen. Users can compete against and exercise with one another in real-time, no matter whether they’re in the same household or not.
“It’s been a surprise to us how much usage spreads to others within a household,” Zahar explains. “We have many households with more than one family member using FightCamp. Our members desire to share the benefits of FightCamp with their friends, but previously, like with all other home workout options, only one person was able to use FightCamp at a time.”
The FightCamp package, priced at $399, includes a pair of trackers, a console and quick wraps. To use the hardware, a $39 monthly subscription is required.
The console looks like a rectangular-shaped set-top box that holds up to four trackers. It connects to smart TVs, enabling multiple users to participate in the same workout on the same display. No additional equipment is needed.
This product release also heralds one of the new so-called marquee features for the platform: partner workouts. Zahar is proud of this feature, saying it separates FightCamp from the pack since it’s “the only at-home connected fitness product that enables users to train together with a partner,” though technically, that’s not correct since you can do joint Peloton classes with a friend. However, I suppose the workouts differ between cycling and boxing/kickboxing.
I’m told that the trackers will support more features in the future, including the ability to track additional physical motions such as kicks.
“FightCamp’s goal is to provide a seamless and enriched training experience, making it easier for users to engage with the platform and track their progress effectively,” Zahar says.
When reviewing the litany of user feature requests it receives, partner workouts were one of the most popular, followed by “trackers that can track kicks during our Kickboxing workouts.” The company says it was surprised to learn that its users had little to say about live workouts, which “are often a product anchor for competitors in the industry.”
A Changing Competitive Landscape
The fitness tech landscape has changed in the eight years since I spoke with Duquette. Not only must startups compete against physical gyms and their at-home rivals, but now new technologies are trying to make fitness accessible without necessarily breaking the bank—I’m talking about virtual reality.
Meta and Apple have both released or supported apps for their VR headsets designed to get users moving. How does FightCamp view these competitors?
“While VR is primarily a gaming platform, FightCamp offers a comprehensive boxing and kickboxing experience that has proven to help our users achieve their fitness goals. It teaches correct striking form and allows users to safely experience physical impact with the best punching bag on the market,” Zahar comments. “Additionally, we consistently generate new on-demand workouts with world-class trainers. The positive response from the FightCamp community and our product reviews consistently confirm that we deliver on the promise of effective boxing fitness that gets results.
What about how AI will factor into the fitness landscape? Does FightCamp have a strategy to incorporate the technology into its hardware? “We started using AI before it was cool,” Zahar clarifies, sharing that the company used it in its first-generation technology with the Canadian Olympic team in 2015 and the U.S. Olympic team in 2017. “When users wear the Trackers on their body, the Trackers record and send thousands of motion data points to the Console where they get processed by our proprietary AI algorithm to know when a punch is thrown, what is the speed of it, and what type of punch it was. Soon, you will see the same type of information available for Kicks, which will be supported by our new 4-tracker system, and more traditional bodyweight exercises down the road.”
After a rocky few years, Zahar is confident that the overall fitness tech industry is returning to stability. He expects consumer demand for connected fitness to “get back to the generous and sustainable growth levels” of pre-COVID-19 as more people look to bring fitness to the home, which is better suited to their schedules and commitments.
FightCamp’s Console and Tracker are now available for purchase.
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