Technogym founder Nerio Alessandri on his brand’s evolution and the future of wellness

For the first half-hour of our Zoom call, I can’t help noticing that Nerio Alessandri is in perpetual motion. He moves from side to side, bounces slightly, shifts his weight as though the chair beneath him is alive. I chalk it up to restless energy – this is, after all, a man who built a global fitness empire from his garage – until, as we wrap up, he suddenly stands, grips the seat beneath him and hoists it into view.

It’s not a chair at all, but a giant medicine ball. “Active sitting,” he grins, as if revealing a magician’s trick. Even mid-interview, the 64-year-old Italian founder of Technogym is finding ways to train. The moment feels like perfect shorthand for his four-decade career: maximise every movement, interaction and opportunity.

This drive has made him one of the most influential figures in the fitness industry. Those heart-rate monitors on your gym equipment? He invented them. The screens on treadmills? Also Alessandri. And now, the US$2.6 billion company he started in 1983, at age 22, is leaning harder than ever into data-driven personalisation.

“Worldwide, 90 per cent of people’s training programmes are wrong,” he says. “It’s really unbelievable.” Why? “Because they don’t have the information. They don’t have the proper feedback.”

In a world flooded with fitness content and cookie-cutter apps, Alessandri believes most people are working hard, but not working smart. When you have 40 minutes or an hour to train, he explains, the wrong posture, speed, range of motion or load can leave you operating at just 60 per cent efficiency. Without genuine customisation, you can train forever and still not reach your goals, and in an age where patience is scarce and attention spans shorter than ever, progress needs to be tangible, and fast.

Technogym has long been a fixture in professional sport, used by everyone from Olympic athletes to Hollywood actors, including Rafael Nadal and Jason Momoa. These days, it is combining artificial intelligence with data from 70 million users to refine training plans and equipment design. The technology promises to democratise elite-level coaching. Though, like most innovations in the wellness industry, its reach is still shaped by who can pay for access.