Gladstone Health & Leisure has partnered with Bounts – a fitness app that motivates and rewards people for being active.

All leisure operators using the Gladstone Plus2 system will now be able to activate the rewards app, opening it up to more than 3,000,000 Gladstone members across the UK. The app allows users to collect and redeem points – or ‘bounts’ – against national brands and local retail outlets and services.

In selecting the app, Gladstone managing director Arthur Morris said the leisure sector as a whole needed to look beyond its current provision and “find new ways to engage people and encourage activity".

He said: “Incentive schemes such as the nectar card have proved behaviours can be influenced by introducing rewards. Bounts offers a unique opportunity to reward activity.”

App founder John Stuart agreed that while motivating behaviour can be complex, the reality is “that a lot of people like rewards and research shows that rewards work – just look at other industries that reward loyalty and do it well”.

Stuart said the app provided structured insight into exercise patterns, and was designed to motivate and incentivise individuals to increase their physical activity and use of health and leisure facilities. Bounts would also “create a new reason for instructors to speak to members and generates daily insight and social activity to keep people motivated”.

As well as rewarding activity completed within the health club or leisure centre, Bounts is also capable of linking with a number of established fitness tracking apps and devices, such as Map My Run, Runkeeper and MyZone, enabling users to log effort and collect points for physical activity completed in any environment.