Hi everyone my name is Jiajing Guo.
I'm a research engineer at Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center North America.
Today I'll talk about our paper
"It's great to exercise together on Zoom!
Understanding the Practices and Challenges of Live Stream Group Fitness Classes"
This work was done with my advisor Professor Susan R. Fussell
during my Ph.D. at Cornell Information Science.
A huge body of research shows that exercise has many benefits for our physical and mental health.
Many people engage in physical exercise in the format of group physical classes like
the picture shows.
Studies show that exercising with a partner or in a group encourage people to work out harder
and longer than exercising alone.
Exercising with others also help us build and strengthen social connections.
Unfortunately during the covid-19 pandemic,
millions of business were forced to close including fitness centers and studios.
As a result, both exercisers and the fitness industry started to switch to online fitness format.
Although online fitness existed before the pandemic,
It became popular after traditional gyms and fictional clubs switched to the online mode.
Many classes are broadcasted via zoom and exercisers are getting used to working out
facing a camera.
However there remain questions and unknown challenges in this kind of new workout format.
Many people including instructors and participants tried live classes
for the first time doing the pandemic.
In this study we try to answer two questions from instructors' and participants' perspectives.
How do they teach or participate? What do they think are the differences between live and in-person classes?
What challenges do they face and how do they address the difficulties?
We conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with 11 instructors and 14 participants in the US.
Half of the instructors have more than three years of teaching experience.
All the participants have taken both in-person and live classes.
The categories of fitness our interviewees were involved in
include yoga, high intensity interval training, Zumba, Pilate, and dance.
For more details about our interviewees, please refer to the full paper.
Here are the findings we summarized.
Regarding the first question about instructors' practices, challenges and solutions,
Instructors reported a huge difference between live stream and in-person class
in how they deliver instruction and interact with participants.
For example, they cannot walk around the room, give tactile feedback,
or customize instructions in live stream classes.
Non-verbal communications such as smiles, eye gaze,
and hand gesture are not easy to detect either.
The challenges for the instructors can be summarized into four categories.
They have limited resources to create a professional workout space,
such as a space to include the full body in the camera,
equipment and internet to stream high resolution videos.
Also they are bearing stress and anxiety,
not only from COVID, but also from teaching itself.
Already overwhelmed by teaching and managing the zoom meeting room,
instructors felt it was much more cognitive demanding
to deal with their surroundings than in an in-person class.
Instructors have limited information and approaches to give feedback
Some participants do not share the video.
Even some participants have the video on,
the position of the device may not capture the full body of the part they are exercising,
such as when they are in the floor section.
Also, in an in-person class,
the instructor can walk around and observe participants from multiple angles.
But in live stream classes the angles often are fixed,
unless participants move the device.
Like this instructor said,
I'm very three-dimensional type of guy.
When I train somebody, I could probably walk a circle around him.
I cannot do that over Zoom. I missed a lot of that.
And lastly, instructors found rapport building is not as easy as before.
If the participants do not turn on the camera, they can only see a list of names.
They are not used to recognizing people in this way.
Also there's little small talk and private conversations in live classes.
Instructors found it hard to build a closer connection
with participants, especially for newcomers.
They came up with various strategies to overcome these challenges
such as purchase equipment to deliver high quality live streams
reach out to family members and friends to get support.
And adjust the class content to fit the general population.
Now let's move to the participant side.
What kind of practices, challenges, and solutions in live group fitness classes for participants?
One common practice that is worth noting is the camera use.
Around half of the participants said they were unwilling to share the video.
out of a bunch of reasons, such as privacy, social pressure, self-consciousness,
and peer pressure.
Like one participant said,
if I don't like flow or I don't like something that they are doing
They don't have to see that if I make a face. I can stop working out.
Others mentioned that they don't need to feel too worried about the dressing
if they have camera off.
And they don't have to push themselves too hard
because there's no peer pressure.
Challenges for participants can be categorized into three themes.
Same to the instructors, not everyone has enough space to exercise at home.
Participants reported the inconvenience of private chats,
either with the instructor or with peer exercisers.
The last one is a unique challenge in fitness live streams
that participants find it hard to give real-time reactions while exercising far away from the device.
Different from live stream discussed in previous studies,
in fitness classes, manipulating the device then going back to the exercise
was time consuming and distracting.
Like this particle said, if I'm sweating, I don't want to go to my computer
and stop what I'm doing, to type something out.
Besides some passive strategies like keeping the camera off
some participants reach out to friends or family as workout buddies.
They are either co-located or remote while following the instructors at the same time.
Based on our findings, we want to propose some design ideas
The ideas come from two directions. One is to solve the problem.
We can enhance the social interaction in live group fitness classes.
Here is one example. Participants can rotate the wrist or tap the palm to indicate
if they're good or not with the current movement.
The summary shows up on the instructors device,
based on which the instructor can adjust the workout.
Another direction is to explore the opportunities that leverage the advantages of CMC.
For example, the two interfaces on the left side are for participants to decide
which data they want to share with the instructor.
Such as demographics, physical injury history
and heart rate during the workout.
The interface on the right side is the instructor's dashboard as a built-in feature of the video meeting app.
They can see the data shared by participants and adjust the exercise.
In summary, this work contributes to the CSCW community by investigating the current practices and challenges
in live group fitness classes from both instructors' and participants' perspectives.
Some challenges are unique in fitness streams such as instructors giving feedback
and participants making real-time reactions while exercising far away from the device.
We also propose sound design ideas from two directions.
One is to solve the problem, another to explore new opportunities.
We haven't covered all the details in this talk.
For more information, please refer to the full paper.
If you are interested in this topic and want to discuss more,
please reach out to the authors. Thank you!