HOW TO SOLVE MOVEMENT CHALLENGES
Miikka Kurunlahti
Miikka Kurunlahti is the CEO at Welapro Ltd. He has created and given the face for Weela - Mobile Gym, which is intelligent and small fitness equipment is the part of future. His passion is to provide fitness training near everyone without need to going gym. The Weela is his dream and lifework and the solution how to solve the challenge of movement.
Miikka Kurunlahti introduces Vela, an innovative portable device offering 1
There is no gravity limiting us. The resistance is created with electricity, making movements much easier and safer for both resistance training and rehabilitation.
Summary
- Vela provides a wide range of resistance from 1 kg up to 100 kg, making it a versatile tool for various strength levels. - The device uses electricity rather than gravity to create resistance, allowing for safer adjustments and changes during the middle of a movement. - Designed for both resistance training and rehabilitation, this portable gym can be used in any location where traditional equipment does not fit. - A dedicated smartphone app supports the equipment with a library of 60 exercise videos and features to track training history. - Following ten years of research and development, this brand-new product features a Finnish design and has been delivering to customers for six months.
Article
How To Solve Movement Challenges
A Finnish Portable Gym Tried To Redefine Where Training Could Happen
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Miikka Kurunlahti presented a simple but ambitious idea: serious strength training and rehabilitation should not depend on access to a traditional gym.
Kurunlahti, speaking on Friday, 13 October 2017 in Helsinki, described Vela as “the gym where there is no gym”, a compact, Finnish-designed system built to bring digital resistance training into places where racks, pulleys and weight stacks could never reasonably go. In a wellness culture often crowded with inflated promises, the appeal here was its practicality. Vela sought to answer a stubborn modern problem: how to keep people moving when space, safety, mobility or circumstance got in the way.
Resistance Without Gravity
The core proposition of Vela was unusual and immediately compelling. Rather than relying on gravity, plates or conventional mechanics, the device generated resistance through electricity. That shift, Kurunlahti explained, changed the logic of movement itself.
“With resistance from one kilo to one hundred kilos, you can customize every movement to fit your needs,” he said, outlining a range broad enough to serve beginners, athletes and patients in recovery alike.
More significantly, the resistance could be changed halfway through a movement. That detail may have sounded technical, but it carried real consequences. In conventional lifting, force is often fixed once the motion has begun. Here, the load could adapt in real time, making exercises easier and safer at vulnerable points in the range of motion.
“Changing the resistance midway through a movement makes the exercise much easier and safer,” Kurunlahti said.
In an age increasingly attentive to injury prevention and long-term physical resilience, that claim placed Vela somewhere between fitness equipment and rehabilitation technology.
A Tool For Training And Recovery
Kurunlahti was careful not to frame Vela as a niche gadget. Its promise was breadth. The system was pitched for both resistance training and rehabilitation, offering a portable answer to the needs of users whose bodies, schedules or environments did not suit conventional exercise spaces.
“You can take this technology anywhere a traditional gym doesn’t fit,” he said.
That portability mattered. It suggested use not only in homes and offices, but also in clinics, temporary facilities, remote settings and recovery environments where large-scale equipment would be impractical. If traditional gyms had long been built around fixed places and fixed routines, Vela attempted to imagine movement as something more flexible, personal and adaptive.
The App As Coach, Library And Logbook
The machine itself was only part of the offering. A dedicated smartphone app accompanied the system, extending its utility beyond hardware. Kurunlahti noted that the platform included sixty exercise videos, giving users a guided library of movements rather than a blank piece of equipment to decipher alone.
The app also tracked training history, an increasingly expected feature in digital health products but one with genuine value. For users in rehabilitation, records can help monitor progress and tolerances over time. For general fitness users, they provide structure, accountability and a clearer sense of progression.
In this respect, Vela was presented not merely as portable resistance, but as a connected training ecosystem.
Ten Years Of Research Behind A Compact Device
For all the sleekness of the proposition, Kurunlahti grounded the presentation in endurance rather than novelty. Vela, he said, had emerged after ten years of research and development and had only been in customer delivery for six months at the time of the summit.
“After ten years of research and development, this technology is here to help solve movement challenges,” he said.
That timeline gave the product a measure of seriousness. It also reflected the difficulty of the challenge it aimed to address. To make training genuinely mobile, while preserving meaningful resistance and user safety, required more than miniaturising gym equipment. It required rethinking the mechanics altogether.
A Small Device With A Large Ambition
What Miikka Kurunlahti offered at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki was not simply a product demonstration. It was a compact vision of how exercise might travel with people rather than waiting for people to travel to it.
Vela’s pitch rested on several clear strengths: a resistance range from 1 kg to 100 kg, the ability to adjust tension mid-movement, support for both rehabilitation and strength training, and a digital platform with instructional and tracking tools. Yet the larger significance lay in what it represented. It challenged the assumption that meaningful physical training must remain tethered to large spaces, heavy hardware and fixed routines.
In that sense, Kurunlahti’s message was less about replacing the gym than about removing its monopoly. Movement, he suggested, should be available anywhere. And in a world where inactivity often stems not from ignorance but from friction, inconvenience and limitation, that was a powerful proposition.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki