Supernatural Health Makes Fitness ‘Taste Like Ice Cream And Work Like Broccoli’ (Leanne Pedante)

Supernatural’s original head of fitness Leanne Pedante is one of VR’s first stars.

Her face greets athletes who find themselves in virtual reality and her voice accompanies them on a fitness journey through the sweaty ups and downs of rigorous movement. Many members of the Supernatural service credit her and fellow coaches with helping them make behavioral and even identity shifts leading to dramatically different lives. Their hearts broke in January this year when Meta laid her off along with most of the staff at Supernatural, a studio it acquired just a few years earlier, causing a reset of the VR industry from pioneers in video like Felix & Paul to game studios like Schell Games.

Supernatural Health launches this fall on the Quest store as an independent entity again and Pedante, her fellow coaches, and the original founders of the company are set to restart anew their path into VR fitness. While technically they compete with the likes of Sam Cole at FitXR, the two services along with other fitness-focused experiences offered in VR see more ground to gain together reaching people worldwide who aren’t going to the physical gym anytime soon.

“When I initially beta tested it, I was like, my god, this is amazing. But I really didn’t predict that it was gonna reach the demographics of the people that it reached,” Pedante said on the Good VR Podcast. “I didn’t think that it would kind of have this incredible [adoption] by older folks which was a total shock to me.”

As January 1 approaches, another year over, a whole wave of people will be donning new VR headsets with resolutions in mind to start the year building new habits. It’s a bit of a mantra at Supernatural, Pedante explained, that the aim of their service is to make something that “tastes like ice cream and works like broccoli.”

“We wanna be the best at delivering this distinct thing that we have had person after person after person tell us for the past six years, which is I have never enjoyed working out as much as I do doing this thing,” Pedante explained. “When we talk about building a fitness habit, it’s easy to diminish it to be like any other habit. But the reality is like if I get myself to floss my teeth every day, which I’m still working on, but like if I’ve managed to master the habit of flossing every day, it doesn’t really change my self-perception. I don’t have some like revelatory identity experience of like ‘I’m now a person who flosses their teeth.’ But when you go from feeling like someone who has never been able to exercise, never enjoyed movement, never felt your body as the source of power, and then you shift into being a person who looks forward to the movement, who doesn’t cower from a physical challenge. That is a major identity shift. And Supernatural consistently delivers that to people.”

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