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Inside Apple’s secret gym

The tech giant is moving into the health and fitness market

Rachel Hosie
Wednesday 06 September 2017 13:12 BST
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We all know working at cool tech companies can often mean free food all day, nap pods and leaving via a slide (maybe).

But one of the best - and most helpful when it comes to money-saving - perks of a workplace is a gym.

And a company that you may not be surprised to learn has a particularly impressive gym is Apple.

A few miles from Apple’s new headquarters in Cupertino, California, you’ll find their invite-only secret exercise lab.

This is where the tech giant’s employees workout, clad with Apple watches and clutching iPads while they burn calories.

And as they run, cycle and row, exercise physiologists, nurses and medics monitor data.

Having revolutionised how we listen to music, work and go about our daily lives, Apple is now interested in how we can improve our health.

Not content with simply counting calories burned and distance travelled, however, exercisers here measure everything possible, including their oxygen consumption (via a $40,000 mask).

30 min workout for your lunchbreak

As one would expect at any decent gym, there’s a studio for group classes and a pool, but Apple’s gym also features three climate-controlled temperature chambers, set to recreate everything from Arctic to Saharan conditions.

“Our lab has collected more data on activity and exercise than any other human performance study in history,” Jay Blahnik, Apple’s director of fitness for health technologies, told Men’s Health.

“Over the past five years, we’ve logged 33,000 sessions with over 66,000 hours of data, involving more than 10,000 unique participants.”

Apple is working on how its watch can sync with gym equipment, providing more detailed analytics of a workout than most people will have ever experienced.

Just when we’d all got on board with tracking our steps, it looks like that may no longer be enough - Apple is, as usual, upping the game.

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