After usurping your grocery shopping experience and your entertainment streaming habits, e-commerce behemoth Amazon (you know, the one that's responsible for keeping your Nespresso pods stocked) is making a case for you to ditch your Apple Watch. In an attempt to woo early adopters and amp up its offerings, the new Amazon Halo Band—which retails for $99.99, but is currently available for $64.99 during its Early Access period—has tapped Santa Monica-based Openfit to curate an exclusive series of fitness-focused "labs," designed to help you kick your unhealthy habits to the curb. Game on.
Openfit, which was founded notably ahead of its time in 2018, is a digital platform for fitness, nutrition, and wellness with a heavy focus on weight loss. The site houses hundreds of live and on-demand workout classes led by certified personal trainers and instructors, personalized meal plans and recipes, and even guided meditation sessions.
Now, in a collaboration sure to boost its national recognition, the quarantine-friendly fitness hub has designed five signature "labs" accessible to subscribers of Amazon Halo, a new health and wellness membership that "helps subscribers understand the connection between what they do and how they feel," according to Amazon.
Each Openfit lab was created to serve as a personal, fitness experiment, providing trackable progress and data along the way so that users can take note of which programs or actions led to the best overall sense of wellbeing — all of which will be housed in the Amazon Halo Band. After selecting the preferred lab, Halo subscribers will complete a set series of methodically planned workouts over the course of one to two weeks.
Openfit's initial lab offerings include: Sculpt Your Body with Xtend Barre, Total Body Toning with XB Pilates, A Two Week Yoga Journey, All You Need Is 600 Seconds, and A Beginners Introduction to Yoga 52.
If you're the kind of casual athlete who just wants a feel-good workout without thinking too hard, Amazon Halo (which does not include a watch face or screen to limit distractions) probably isn't the wearable fitness tracker for you. But, if you're numbers-obsessed and enjoy testing out the measurable impact of new habits and routines, we'd recommend giving it a shot.
The membership, which is free for the first six months and auto-renews at $3.99 per month after that, includes access to over 100 "science-backed" labs (in addition to Openfit labs), body composition measurements, sleep tracking, and tone of voice analysis…just in case you need to perform a quick pulse check on your Zoom meeting etiquette.
As a quick note, only users with an Amazon Halo Band and membership can access the Openfit labs; however, if you have an active Openfit subscription, you have access to all of the same workouts (plus hundreds more) that are available on Amazon Halo. An annual subscription to Openfit will run you $96 annually, but you can test out the service free for 14 days.
