The Body Coach & ustwo : a digital transformation.

Joe Wicks MBE (aka The Body Coach) made his name in the UK as a fitness expert with heart. In 2020, he inspired people around the world to log in for daily exercise during lockdown, getting 80 million KZbin views and raising over £500,000 for NHS charities.
But before that - before we even knew the pandemic was coming - Joe asked us to turn his successful 90-day health and fitness plan into a digital experience, and we jumped at the chance. Lots of us were already big believers in The Body Coach programme, so evolving the business to digital-first was the perfect brief.
The Body Coach has become a phenomenal enterprise built on its tailored, 90-day meal and workout plan, delivered via email as PDFs and KZbin videos. This has worked beautifully for almost a million loyal clients, so our job was to build a digital product that would take the much beloved, effective elements, enhance the experience, and reach beyond 90 days to build habits that last a lifetime.
While many fitness apps focus either on exercise or nutrition, The Body Coach app takes a holistic approach that marries these two elements with an additional focus on mental wellbeing, and with accessibility at its heart. It helps people keep tabs on their progress, it offers recipes and workouts (live and on demand), every meal is tailored to each person’s goals and body, and there’s a planner to help them stay on track.
Digital as a business driver
To set The Body Coach on a path to expansion and growth we brought together our strategy, design, product and technology teams to really understand how the existing business operated.
We looked at The Body Coach’s business and analysed how we could sharpen and augment its offering, delivery method and systems with digital. We designed a new business model, a subscription strategy, a back-end system to support clients with their progress and a website to communicate Joe’s vision.
As a result of our work, it’s faster and easier to continuously evolve the product based on what people need, meaning the business now has the foundation to scale quickly and engage with more people.
Inclusive, accessible, healthy habits
Often, the fitness industry cultivates an unrealistic vision of what health is, while The Body Coach is redefining fitness with an inclusive approach. By making sure people can do the workouts everywhere and by sharing recipes that are easy to prepare, Joe Wicks is helping remove barriers that stop people creating lifelong healthy habits.
We held this ethos at the heart of our work, and brought The Body Coach’s community into the design process to make sure that our solutions would meet their needs and exceed their expectations.
Making, learning, changing - together
The best way to understand this community was to immerse ourselves in it. Before the pandemic sent us all home, we went along to The Body Coach events so that we could talk to people there about their experiences, habits and hopes, and we did weekly workouts in the ustwo studio.
When lockdown made working at home a long-term reality for us (and many millions of others), we logged on with our families for PE with Joe, which gave us all a daily boost. We created the app as an on-demand source of energy - a feel-good battery that’s always with you and recreates the feeling you’d get from being with Joe, powered by a digital-first business.
Award winner!
The Body Coach app won a 2021 Design Week Award, prompting the judges to comment,
“A great brand and position for the app, delivered with energy and style. The numbers show it was a great success as well.”
We’re incredibly proud of our team who went above and beyond to build an app that truly makes a difference.

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