Anbu’Den’ and Thala Dhoni Inspired fitket, says Murali Vijay
During the holiday season in 2018, Murali Vijay was enjoying a break along with his friends Sam, Suresh, Kount & Sudhir in New York. Through the course of their stay in the Big Apple, VJ casually observed there was hardly any obese/overweight person in New York City. That made him realize that the case is pretty much the same in most of the fast-paced large cities such as Mumbai, London, Sydney, Paris etc where people rely heavily rely on public transportation to commute to work, and automatically tend to put in their daily steps required to stay fit. This perception made him worry about the fitness of people in their home town Chennai, as the city consists of a high percentage of white-collared workers who drive or ride their bikes to work.
This concern of lack of fitness stirred a lot of discussions and brainstorming between him and his friends. In a moment of inspired thought, the idea of 100 steps to a run was born as a simple concept of layering cricket into fitness for cricket fans in Chennai to improve their fitness & overall wellness levels. And lead to the inception of fitket.
When the team bounced this concept with Mithali Raj, captain of the Indian women's national cricket team and the highest run-scorer in women's international cricket, she instantly got the idea & agreed to sign up as the brand ambassador. With her immense support, fitket released their launch campaign #fitnesswithMithali on Sachin Tendulkar’s birthday on 24th April. This campaign went viral on Instagram with over 200+ women cricketers taking up the challenge and submitting their fitness videos to Instagram & inspired to create an awareness movement to fight the virus with fitness during the lockdown.
The simple idea of 100 steps to a run later transformed quickly into a gamified fitness app with a patent-pending AI-powered personalized nudge engine for corporates to engage their workforce in a fun and meaningful way. fitket also has come up with Chennai Fitness Premier League (CPCL), an inter-corporate fitness and a fun(d) raiser initiative where corporates compete to raise awareness to expedite rainwater harvesting projects in Chennai before the monsoons.
The objective is here to create an active lifestyle for the corporate employee whose lifestyle has suddenly become too physically inactive due to the WFH COVID-19 situation. This sedentary lifestyle which is the root cause for weight gain, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, mental illness like depression
Corporate fitness premier league
This challenge requires employees to complete daily workout challenge to hit score runs, a boundary or six, and sometimes unlock a super-over to do a 7-minute workout to get 20 runs. When an employee regularly scores a century consecutively for 3-days, they get a hat trick & for a 5-day century streak, they level up and become a Test cricketer. When the employee reaches milestones like scoring career runs of 6996, they collect exclusive digital goodies and rewards like the Don Brandman stat card, which can get them the baggy-green cap as a reward. The corporate that collectively scores the highest runs will be declared as the winner of the CFPL.
#CheerForCheSuK similar to #danceforchange: https://www.donorplatform.org/news-rural-youth/danceforchange-ifads-virtual-petition-for-rural-youth.html
- an inter-corporate fun(d) raiser initiated by DJ Bravo for corporates in Chennai to give ”Thala” a Che Su K farewell to raise funds for Akash Ganga to increase rainwater harvesting in Greater Chennai Area. Murali Vijay & Mithali Raj will also be promoting the cause on fitket through their social media handles.
Talking about the Cheer for #CheSuK project, International Cricketer Murali Vijay, who is also the co-founder of fitket added, "Chennai is my hometown and a city that I deeply care. It was difficult for my family and me to see the city go through both the water crisis and floods in the previous years. I am glad to be part of this project and contribute to the city I love in a meaningful way."
Joining Vijay, Mithali Raj, the brand ambassador of fitket and Captain of the Indian Woman’s Cricket Team commented, “I am proud to be associated with fitket. Happy to support them in their vision to be a charity generator for key social causes such as the rainwater harvesting."
Kountinya Sai, CEO - fitket quoted, "At fitket, we are committed to supporting the local communities and social causes transforming these communities positively. We request and invite individuals and corporates in Chennai to join hands with us in contributing to this project."
Adding to Kountinya, Sam Albert, co-founder and the Chief Data Scientist of fitket said, "Ours is not just a simple gamified fitness app. It's a platform engineered based on behavioural economic principles and Octalysis Gamification Framework, which works in tandem with our patent-pending AI-Powered Nudge Engine developed using deep learning ML algorithms. This combined mechanism personalizes the nudges and rewards the users in performing the next best action and develop healthy habits, thus helping him to lead a healthy, wealthy, and happier life."
Talking about the Wellness Platform, Sudhir Moni, the President and Managing director of fitket commented, "We have built fitket working along with some of the top Physical Fitness, Mental Wellness, Behavioral Economics, Gamification, and Technology experts. I hope corporates leverage this in holistically improving their employee wellness efficiently. Also, I grew up in Chennai, and it feels great to contribute meaningfully to the incredible city via the cheer for #CheSuK Project."
fitket is the also the official fitness partner for the Jamaica Tallawahs team in the CPL T20 cricket tournament to support the Black Lives Matter movement in the Caribbean countries.