Fitness Lab AI wants to help you keep your fitness resolutions

The first step for many people looking to make a change in their health is signing up for a gym membership. Unfortunately, while many people take that first step towards better health, they often find a reason to give up. According to recent data, over 50% of Canadians who join a gym quit within the first six months.  

It’s a pattern that Sai Kishore Chalumuri has seen over and over again working with clients as a fitness manager. Sai also happens to be an embedded systems developer who knows how to get at the root of a problem. 

“I came to see the big pain point in the fitness industry is there is no system or tool that can understand people’s needs and give them a tailored program,” Sai said.  

The gap is not workout plans, but in designing a program that adjusts to the changes in a client’s daily life. Sai said having a great coach or gym facility is often not enough to keep clients coming back. 

“Everyone in their life will go to the gym at one point. But eventually something happens in their day to day and they drop out,” he said. “I wanted to see if there was a system that we can use to predict the if or when a client will quit so trainers or gyms can adjust to meet the client’s needs.” 

Sai’s research led him to develop Fitness Lab AI, a behaviour-first fitness platform that combines emotional intelligence and biometric feedback to deliver personalized coaching. Users create a profile with their health metrics and fitness goals and then the system creates motivational “cue cards” that provide emotionally intelligent guidance tailored to their current mood.  

For personal trainers and fitness managers, Fitness Lab AI provides insights into how clients are progressing and can identify issues before they become a roadblock for a client.  

“We want trainers to understand the client's behaviour outside the gym so that they can take action,” Sai said. 

Keeping clients engaged is especially important for personal trainers. Sai said the industry client retention rate is between 15 and 30 percent. 

“In North America, personal training is expensive with clients paying an average of $300 for four hours of training. But if the client is not feeling the value at any moment, they cancel,” he said. 

Sai is currently running a pilot of Fitness Lab AI to understand how trainers and members interact using the app. The pilot also gives Sai additional data to help fine tune the experience.  

Learning how to work with pilot users is just one of the lessons that Sai learned from the Venture Lab For Tech (VL4T) program. He said the program’s structure helped him take Fitness Lab from idea to market while still working a full time job. 

“They keep you accountable through two check-ins per week with a coach,” he said, “What I really appreciate is the progression. By the end of Phase 1, you have solid early validation, market research, and customer discovery done. By the end of Phase 2, you have your MVP. And by the end of Phase 3, you've launched. You're not just running with an idea from a dream — you're validating it at every stage before moving forward. That's a structure I haven't found anywhere else in my entrepreneurship journey.”