The hardware assumption just expired
For a decade, heart rate training in gyms came bundled with a hardware business: the club or the member bought a proprietary chest strap, and the strap was the ticket into the system. That assumption made sense when nobody owned a wearable. It stopped making sense years ago: look around any class and count the watches.
The market has noticed. Myzone, the category's biggest brand, now supports Apple Watch, Wear OS and Garmin, a move we analysed in our piece on that announcement. But third-party wearables still sit inside the Myzone ecosystem: members need an active Myzone Go subscription, currently $6.99 per month in the US, to use their own smartwatch. The hardware choice has widened; what still separates systems is whether member-owned devices connect without a per-member wearable subscription. That difference is exactly what our Myzone alternative for gyms page breaks down.
What bring-your-own-wearable changes for a club
The entry cost collapses. A belt per member is either a capital purchase for the club or a sale you have to make to every joiner. With member-owned devices, day one costs a screen and a licence, and with Uptivo Snap the screen can be a TV you already have.
Adoption stops being a sales job. Asking a new member to buy a strap is friction in the exact week you are trying to build a habit. Asking them to tap the watch they are already wearing is not.
The data follows the member, not the building. A member's watch trains with them on holiday and on the home rower. A club system that accepts it sees the whole picture, which matters for coaching and for spotting who is fading.
Hygiene and inventory disappear. Nobody has ever enjoyed the belt-washing rota.
The honest trade-off: accuracy has a hierarchy
A chest strap reads the heart's electrical signal; a watch reads blood flow at the wrist optically. For steady efforts the wrist is usually fine; for intervals with hard wrist work, a strap tracks changes faster and more reliably. We wrote the practical guide in chest strap vs watch accuracy. The conclusion for operators: the answer is both, not either. Let members bring what they wear, keep a set of straps for those who want precision, and never make the hardware the barrier to entry.
This is exactly how Uptivo is built: any Bluetooth LE or ANT+ device connects, from Garmin watches to any brand of chest strap: clubs can keep a set of Uptivo Belt-D chest straps for members who want maximum precision, with Uptivo Lightband armbands as a comfortable optical alternative. Wearable-agnostic is not a feature we added under pressure; it is the founding design decision.
What to check before you commit to any system
Bring three devices to the demo. An Apple Watch, a Garmin, an old chest strap. Watch the screen, not the slideshow.
Ask what "support" means. Is the watch a first-class citizen in live classes, or does it only sync afterwards? Live is where the retention effect happens.
Ask who owns the data. If a member leaves the club, what happens to their history? If the club leaves the vendor, what happens to yours?
Count the true cost per member. Hardware, replacements, hygiene time, onboarding friction. The licence fee is rarely the biggest line.
Why this matters beyond the budget
The point of live heart rate in a class was never the hardware: it is that visible effort keeps people engaged and coming back, the mechanism behind effort-based retention. Every barrier between a member and the screen, cost, setup, a strap they forgot at home, is retention leaking away. Open wearables remove the biggest barrier there ever was.
If you want to see a live class running on the watches your members already own, speak to an expert.