How To Bring Extra Motivation Into Your Solo Home Workouts

Have you ever gone to the gym and seen someone around you go hard like this:

Well, not exactly like this, but they’re going really, really hard. When you see that, how do you react? Chances are, this spurs you on some level to push hard yourself. It serves as a sort of second-hand motivation.

In a world where Indian work hours are getting increasingly erratic, more and more professionals are looking to their homes as a place to maintain regular fitness. Yet, despite all the benefits of working out at home by yourself, there are potential behaviours that could stop you right in your tracks:

Lack of motivation ends up being the biggest impediment to us staying regular with our home workouts – something that we don’t seem to face at the gym. Three factors are at play here:

• Social Connection: Gyms facilitate community and shared motivation. In these spaces, ‘me’ turns into ‘we’ – you get the sense that, while the process might be different for each individual, everyone’s working towards a common goal of better fitness & health together.

• Accountability: Gyms usually have trained professionals that tell you when you’re doing something wrong and push you when you’re not giving it your all.
• Structure: These facilities usually have the perfect blend of equipment and expertise for you to progress in your goals over years, not just weeks or months.

For a long time, it was thought to be difficult to bring all these qualities to your home without sacrificing at least one of them:

That was then. Now, you can bring each and every one of these motivational aspects to your home – with space-optimized smart home gyms from Portl. Both our offerings – The Portl Studio and The UltraGym – are designed with the goal of giving you everything you need long-term in order to push harder and achieve all your specific fitness goals.

Let’s look at how Portl’s digital-first approach brings each of these aspects to your home:

Social Connection Delivered Digitally

To highlight the impact of people around us when we’re working out, the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association did a study comparing group exercise to solo workouts in a 12-week period. Group exercise participants reported:

The rise of all kinds of group workout classes in the country – ranging from zumba to pilates to spinning – shows that Indians are increasingly preferring these kinds of formats. The question becomes – how can we replicate this at home?

Behaviours during the pandemic lay the blueprint for this. While we were bound to our homes, we learned how to do things with others remotely – whether it was watching movies, playing games, even working out. Both of Portl’s offerings come with a free home workout app that lets you exercise together with your remote friends in real-time. What sets our ecosystem apart from normal online classes is the in-built gamification geared to maximize your motivation.

You can utilize this gamification in a variety of ways:

• You can compete with your friends in real-time using Portl’s Buddy Mode.
• If you can’t do it in real-time, you can pick a shared workout with the same competitive parameters and face off with either your remote friends or your loved ones using the same machine at different times.
• And, if you don’t have the energy to make all these plans, you can undertake any of the community challenges on the app and compete with members of the Portl family.

We’ve left literally no room for excuses, because the community and competitive spirit you seek is just a click away when you work out with Portl at home.

Accountability Through Numbers

Many people choose to go with personal training when they purchase gym memberships, simply because they need a sense of accountability as they grow into their fitness journeys. They need to hear things like ‘you can push more’ and ‘you’re doing this wrong’ in the pursuit of getting better.

Portl doesn’t go for such an in-your-face approach. Instead, we give you accountability by accounting for every single thing you’re doing in your workouts. Portl’s cutting-edge real-time performance tracking gives you full visibility to hold yourself accountable in each and every workout:

Structure That’s Curated For Long-Term Progress

Let’s say you go to the gym and don’t take up either group workouts or personal training. If you’re just getting into it, chances are you often end up feeling like this:

There are certain things you can do. You can see what others are doing and do the same, you can approach a person who looks like a seasoned gym rat and ask them for tips, or you can even go on Instagram and follow any of the workouts prescribed by the many fitness influencers out there. All are viable, but they lack the structure needed for you to make long-term progress.

Portl prides itself on having an ecosystem with the structure to help you get to where you want to go. While none of our products come with a dedicated home gym trainer, some of the best fitness professionals in the world have come together to curate personalized programs that you can follow for years. Even in the space of strength training, where you can often outgrow equipment on your journey, the Portl UltraGym comes with digital resistance upto 35kg each side that is sufficient for even seasoned bodybuilders, especially when you adjust and accumulate the resistance given through our 5 different workout modes.

Which Portl Will You Get Into?

With motivation in-built at every stage of your day-to-day fitness journey, Portl has redefined how to workout at home through 2 distinct yet equally gamechanging offerings: