When you picture the Italian countryside, you might imagine vast, rolling hills doused in sunshine and sporadically scattered with cypress trees, vineyards and medieval homes. But would you also think of a pioneering health and fitness brand, which boasts training equipment in more than 85,000 wellness centres and 400,000 homes in over 100 countries around the world, as well as the Olympic Games? Probably not.
But it’s time to start thinking about it – because nestled on the edge of the small city of Cesena, located in the historic Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy, are the modern headquarters of Technogym, a world-leading manufacturer of forward-thinking gym equipment.
The origins of Technogym
Opened in 2012, Technogym’s vast Italian headquarters – known as Technogym Village – form a cutting-edge exercise hub in the heart of rustic Italy, where some of the best training equipment is ideated, tested, built, shipped and used on a day-to-day basis. With this complex covering an area of 150,000 square metres, Technogym’s current operation is huge – and yet the brand’s history is humble.
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Rewind to 1983. We’re still in Cesena, only this time we’re in a garage with Nerio Alessandri, a 22-year-old who has just finished his studies as an industrial engineer, and whose first job was packing fruit and veg. An avid sportsperson, designer and maker who feels disappointed with the gym equipment currently available, he sets about designing and building his own – and founding Technogym in the process.
Working only from this home garage, by 1984 Alessandri has already created the Isotonic Line, Technogym’s first-ever training line for gyms. In 1986, he then creates the state-of-the-art Unica home trainer, before 1988 sees him patent the game-changing Constant Pulse Rate (CPR) system. The first software to monitor an individual’s heart rate during exercise, the CPR quickly becomes a staple part of Technogym’s products – and a key tool for developing personalised training programmes.
Wellness is born
Roll on to 1993 and Alessandri defines a philosophy to underpin his design work and engineering: ‘wellness’. According to Alessandri, wellness is not just a term for fitness fanatics who exercise at the gym – instead, it is an entire way of life centred upon regular physical activity, a balanced diet and a positive mindset. Wellness means holistic health and it is, already, a fundamental part of Technogym’s identity.
Unwavering in his commitment to wellness, 63-year-old Alessandri is still the President of Technogym in 2024 – and, to this day, the brand’s official tagline is ‘The Wellness Company’.
A tour of Technogym Village
As a work of architecture and interior design, Technogym Village boasts clean, curvaceous shapes, with calming wood panels and accents of green foliage sympathising with the rural, old-world landscape in which it is situated. Meanwhile, the Technogym products housed within it draw attention to themselves with their bold black and yellow hues – a trademark of the brand.
But why does the look of the place even matter? Because design plays a huge role in Technogym’s ethos and innovations. According to the brand, good design makes a product more approachable and usable – and Alessandri’s concept of wellness is something that you feel. As such, the wellness philosophy can apply to any space in which Technogym products reside, whether that’s the Technogym Village in Italy, a gym in Australia, a hotel in Iceland – or your own home in the UK.
As per the brand’s brief, the architects of Technogym Village delivered a venue that is hard-working and aspirational, but also tranquil and stylish. And thanks to this workplace, the hundreds of staff members are inspired to exercise often, eat well and feel happy about themselves and their contribution to the world.
And you can tell. Wander around Technogym Village and it won’t take long before you’re inside the capacious, two-story Wellness Centre for employees to use as they please, stocked up – as you’d expect – with multiple counts of Technogym equipment. This encompasses rowing machines and racks to the AI-powered Checkup, a mental and physical health assessment station that measures your body composition, strength, balance, mobility and cognition, and which uses thousands of data points to calculate your current ‘Wellness Age’. If yours is too high, Checkup even prescribes training programmes that can help you to lower it.
Go a few steps further, quite literally, and you’re in the Technogym Lab – an impressive suite managed by scientists and supported by university researchers and medical professionals. Here, athletes of all disciplines – from tennis players to F1 drivers – are acutely assessed and pushed to their limits using Technogym technologies. The result? Refinements and performance improvements for both the sportspeople and the Technogym products.
To safeguard nutrition, there is also an onsite restaurant serving freshly-made, pasta-leaning food made from locally-sourced Italian ingredients – the ‘best cuisine in the world’ as I was, of course, told (and can believe). As for conventional office time and meetings, employees either stand at raised desks or sit actively on Technogym wellness balls. As you talk and type each working day, why flop on a chair when you can work your core and improve your posture instead?
What’s more, things aren’t made in garages anymore. All gym equipment is forged at a huge factory inside Technogym Village, with each piece being made to order and individually tested by factory workers before it is packaged and shipped to its final destination.
Technogym at the Olympic Games
Beyond its roots in Cesena, Technogym has been the Official Supplier of fitness equipment and digital technologies for the Olympic Games for almost a quarter of a century, making its products the default, familiar choice for the greatest athletes on the planet.
Having already supported Olympic and Paralympic preparations at Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Turin 2006, Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016, Pyeongchang 2018 and Tokyo 2020, Technogym will enjoy its ninth experience as Official Supplier at Paris 2024. Here, throughout the Olympic and Paralympic periods, around 1,200 pieces of Technogym equipment will be available in 29 training centres, including the main training centre in Paris Saint-Denis and other competition venues in Paris, Lille, Marseilles and Tahiti. Approximately 14,900 athletes from around 200 different countries – spanning 32 Olympic sports and 22 Paralympic sports – will use Technogym equipment as part of their final, vital tune ups for one of the most important sporting contests of their lives.
But the Olympics also serve as an important experimentation ground. By employing Technogym’s machines to complete their workouts, the best athletes in the game can offer first-hand feedback that the brand can then use to make adjustments wherever necessary. Then, these machines are ready to distribute to everyday consumers – from amateur exercisers to elites – across the world.
Nomadic training with the Technogym App
Already well known for producing solid, physical pieces of gym equipment, Technogym is now becoming increasingly more active in the virtual world, too.
Enter the Technogym App: a digital wellness space with a welcoming interface that understands you, your wellness goals and your specific training needs. It encompasses an ever-updated bank of target-based or trainer-led sessions, from personalised workouts on a Technogym treadmill to guided yoga or strength and conditioning routines – whatever suits your current levels of fitness, energy and ambition.
What’s more, the Technogym App gives you access to the brand’s so-called ‘ecosystem’, which enables you to train seamlessly between different spaces and equipment – in line with your training targets – wherever you are in the world, and no matter what your time constraints.
At your usual leisure centre during a half marathon training block? The Technogym App might suggest a 10K run. So, simply use the app on your phone to scan the QR code on your nearest Technogym treadmill, see your personal wellness profile and training programme appear on the console, then get going. On holiday but still want to smash a quick workout in the lesser-stocked hotel gym? The app might suggest a low-equipment HIIT session. At home with hours to kill but no equipment at all to hand? The app might create a bodyweight workout for you to try.
And, after each session – no matter how long, short, relaxed or intense – the Technogym App will generate that all-important workout data so you can track your improvement and stay motivated over time.
Technogym Run – the Olympic training tool for all
You’ll be hard pressed to find a gym without a treadmill – and not many treadmills take the guise of the Technogym Run.
Regarded by the brand as the ‘jewel in the crown of the Technogym range’, the Technogym Run is suited to both commercial and home environments and offers an exhaustive list of features to help make running indoors a regular pursuit to get excited about.
Part of the Technogym ecosystem and therefore compliant with the Technogym App, the Technogym Run offers runners of all goals and athletic abilities a wealth of on-demand workouts, which can easily be followed on the sizeable 27” console. These include trainer-led sessions and ‘outdoor’ runs in epic natural locations, where the gradient of the slat-belt matches the elevation of your chosen outdoor setting.
If you use Strava, you can even load up and replicate previous outdoor runs you’ve recorded on the app, or use the Technogym Run to have a go at Strava segments. This is a big box ticker if it’s a favourite route that you can’t currently do due to adverse weather conditions, or if you want to recce a segment in a forthcoming race. Once you’ve logged in and connected to WiFi, the Strava route or segment pops up as a GPS map on the treadmill console and off you go. As you run, the belt then automatically mirrors the gradient of the real-world run, and you can manually increase the pace if you want to run a go-to route a bit faster than before.
Offering the same reactivity and elastic responsiveness of a running track, the slat belt in itself is clever enough to pick up insights on your running cadence, stride length and more via sensors beneath the tread. And there’s no excuse to skip your strength training, either, because built into the Technogym Run are two handles that you can hold onto – pre-, mid- or post-run – to mimic a sled push of up to 55kg.
If you’d rather keep things simple and do your sessions stats-free, though, you can tick off the miles while watching the latest Netflix drama or videos on YouTube, or while playing an on-screen game.
Whether you’re intending to run your first steps or win gold at the Olympic Games, or get faster over 100m or go the distance with an ultramarathon, you can feel safe in your training with Technogym. After all, the brand has spent the past 40 years leading the way in the business – and it has no intention of relinquishing that reputation anytime soon.
