SIRI, LET'S GET SWOLE!
It’s an all-too-familiar late summer La Nina day outside when I’m connected to an enviably sunny Santa Monica, via Zoom. On the other end of the line is an even sunnier Jay Blahnik, Apple’s senior director of fitness for health technologies. Blahnik’s signature energy is striking on screen, as it is everywhere else, and his self-confessed obsession with fitness and tech renders him full of motion as we chat, swaying from side to side at what I can only assume, and hope, is a standing desk.
Blahnik has worked in fitness for more than 30 years and, if anything, his enthusiasm for it has only grown in that time. He developed fitness devices and apps at Nike in the mid-2000s, wrote the book on flexibility (Full-Body Flexibility) and he’s also a rowing instructor. But his role within Apple has cemented his name as the man who transformed fitness forever. As Apple’s dominance in the health and fitness space continues unabated, so too does Blahnik’s unmatched influence in the industry.
The Apple Watch debuted in 2015. By 2019, Watch outsold all Swiss watch brands combined, by 50 per cent. And with the continued expansion of the brand’s health and lifestyle offering, that gap is expected to increase exponentially. The greatest advancement since the launch
