Meet Teemo, the iPhone game that turns spare minutes into fitness adventures.
What is Teemo?
It can feel impossible to squeeze time for fitness into life’s ever-expanding to-do list. And when we do exercise, it can feel more like "work" than fun. That’s why we created Teemo.
Teemo is a game for the iPhone designed to help us find the time to work out and increase our overall fitness, all while having fun with a team of friends.
By combining short, simple exercises with an iPhone adventure game you can play with friends, Teemo turns exercise into the kind of playful, encouraging fun it should be.
A simple, effective workout approach
Designed for fun with a team of friends
Brought to life through virtual adventures
The Story of Teemo
Teemo was born out of a collaboration between Bonnier R&D, Ammunition Group and Elinext.
Our goal for Teemo is a tad audacious: We want to help people live healthier, happier lives. Research shows that even small amounts of exercise lead to better overall health, that interval training is one of the most effective ways to gain fitness quickly, and that social motivation is the glue that makes good habits stick. With Teemo, we're bringing these ideas together into one fun and quirky little game you can carry with you everywhere and play anytime. We hope you enjoy it.
FAQs
No, currently all players need to be on Facebook to be part of a team (although anyone can certainly play solo), because Teemo uses Facebook Connect to enable our social features.
Teemo's workouts are built on interval training, an exercise methodology that boosts overall fitness during short bursts of exercise, and can be done by people of almost any skill level. With interval training, the amount of reps aren't as important as working at a level that's fairly intense for you, for a certain amount of time, followed by rest periods. So an accelerometer wasn’t necessary.
The short answer is no. The long answer is that we sequenced the exercises to be part of the story, so your workout goes hand-in-hand with your adventure. You could cheat and tell your teammates that you’ve completed an exercise when you haven’t, but cheaters never really win—especially when it comes to getting fit.
Well, they’re kinda-sorta real. Each Teemo game starts with real geographical and cultural information, researched and written by adventure travel experts who have actually visited the places in the stories. But we never had a yak with a fever, we never chased a jewel thief around Switzerland, and our tour boat didn’t really sink in the Amazon.
The difficulty of the exercises you’ll do roughly corresponds to the rising and falling efforts of a real expedition (ie, as you get closer to the summit of Everest and the climbing gets harder, the equivalent Teemo exercises get harder, too). But even at the "hard" level, a Teemo Everest climb is nowhere near as challenging as a real Everest climb.
Teemo’s exercises were selected by certified trainers with expertise in functional movement, strength, flexibility, balance and cardiovascular fitness. The program is based on a high-intensity interval training protocol, which has been scientifically proven to be one of the most safe and efficient ways to increase fitness and improve overall health across diverse populations of exercisers.
In contrast with programs that focus on running or lifting weights, Teemo mixes things up with a variety of movements that engage your whole body and require no equipment. And rather than make you count "reps," Teemo uses an interval timer with rest periods built in, so you just need to work as hard as you’re comfortable with for 20 seconds, and then rest for 10 seconds. For more information about the Teemo training program (including scientific references), check out our blog.
Not yet. We’re starting out with iOS first. If you’re dying for an Android version, by all means, let us know—a strong demand will probably speed us up.