Ryan Gosling (Photo credit: gdcgraphics)
A Google search for "fitness tips" yields about 257,000,000 results. For anyone trying to get healthy, sitting at a computer sifting through all of those is probably the least productive thing to do—besides maybe eating a Big Mac while lying down watching Man Vs. Food.
A good chunk of those results are probably unreliable and finding the fact-checked ones, the useful ones, takes time—something young people trying to be active don't have.
That's why Derek Flanzraich, a 24-year-old Harvard grad, started Greatist.com. It's a health and wellness site providing reliable articles to make fitness easy, stress-free and accessible for 18 to 35 year olds fed up with all the noise on the Internet.
"For the past eight years I've been really passionate about health and wellness, but it kind of blew my mind that I didn't know where to turn to get answers," Flanzraich told me in an interview.
The articles range from "What's Really In My Hotdog?" to "The Ultimate Guide To Vitamins And Minerals," to "10 Healthier Beers (And How To Choose The Right One)." Each article is fact checked by multiple experts and also provides information in a pretty laid back tone.
Launched in April 2011, Greatist has grown 30 percent on average every month for the last eight months and is about to pass 1 million unique visitors this month.
It's success that Flanzraich attributes to providing information to an age group that isn't historically thought of as being interested in health and wellness.
Most of the businesses in the health space are centered on reactive health, he said—reactive being when someone is sick here's how to help them, or the doctor said to lose weight and here is how.
"It's as much a trend that people are becoming more aware of health and wellness in their lives, and I think at an earlier age," Flanzraich said. "People younger and younger are saying I want to do all these things and no one to my knowledge has targeted them and said, 'here's the site for you.'"
He said in terms of general health and wellness it's really hard to find something that people in this age range are comfortable with. And what young, healthy person would be comfortable getting fitness tips from somewhere like, for example, WebMD.com, the Internet's equivalent of an emergency room (it's also the 5th option in a "fitness tips" Google search)?
Millennials are drawn to the light-hearted content on Greatist—it's hard to not click on an article called "60 Healthier Drinks For Boozing." Greatist is also using social media to connect to this younger audience. The "Boozing" article has been shared on Facebook 7,265 times. Flanzraich said social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter have been some of the site’s biggest drivers of traffic.
It seems Greatist has tapped into something here. Young people are interested in fitness, not as a way to fix health problems they already have, but to live a healthy life and prevent any problems in the future. When a fitness site connects to the topics college age people are interested in (yes drinking) they will read it and share it, and hopefully start living a healthier life.
"Once you start hitting 18, 19, 20, 21 you're starting to put together those habits and attitudes that are going to last throughout your life," Flanzraich said. "Now is the time you can order at a restaurant and say 'hold the potatoes and give me extra veggies.'"
He says there is a way to build a healthy lifestyle into a normal life and when people are young that's the best time to start.
"The truth is people 18 to 35 don't see the obvious effects of the poor choices immediately, and I think that's often times where things go wrong," Flanzraich said. "I'm a big believer in people knowing what's good and what's not-interesting sometimes they don't feel empowered to make those choices."
So why is Flanzraich this passionate about making people healthy? He was a "hefty" kid in high school before he got interested in his own health, and just this week he finished the "Six Pack Abs In Six Weeks" a fitness routine that had him working out every day of the week, which he blogged about on Greatist.
This term, "Greatist" was coined because Flanzraich said when it comes to fitness you don't have to be the greatest; you can just be a greatist.
"It's someone who works on being healthy just as an artist is someone who works on art," he said.
Here are some of Flanzraich's favorite fitness tips:
- High impact interval training is better than slow and steady and more fun.
- Finding a drink you like when you go out to the bars that isn't full of calories can make a huge difference.
- Cooking at home can be really helpful.
- In terms of fitness find activities that you like to do. Maybe instead of being on an elliptical play basketball.
