Troy Taylor – VP of Performance Innovation at Tonal on Merging Science, AI, and Fitness

All right, welcome back to the Casey Adams show. Today I am joined by Troy Taylor, the VP of performance innovation at Tonal. Troy, thank you so much for coming the show today.

Thank you so much for having me on the show today.

Of course. No, I huge fan of your work and before we dive in, I just wanted to commend you for the career that you've had. For people that may not know, prior to working at Tonal, you were quite influential in the world of just high performance, training for success. Ski snowboards. You've worked with hundreds of athletes and have been a part of seven or so Olympic games as a high performance coach. And when I was doing my research, I just really, quite frankly was like, wow, the transition to where you are today at Tonal, which we'll dive into, it makes so much sense and I'm so excited to dive into this conversation to talk about all things high performance. So thank you so much again for taking the time today.

I appreciate that. It's been a fun 25 date myself years or so. Yeah, it might not look obvious on the path, but once you plot it out, kind of makes some sense.

Yeah, absolutely, man. So I know I briefly gave some quick context, but for those that may not be familiar with Tonal overall, I know I'll be the first one to say it. When I first heard about Tonal, I was so intrigued. I've had the privilege of using the product. A lot of my friends have them at their homes and I love it. But for those that may not know, I'd love you to give a quick high level before we really dive in.

Yeah, absolutely. So at the highest level, it's an entire gym that fits in your space with personal training. And so what, I mean, it's an entire gym. It is if you're listening, if you're watching on camera, it's the device behind me on the wall. But it can do 250 or so plus movement patterns from deadlifting and squatting and pull downs and flies and curls and pretty much anything that you can think of you doing in a gym in terms of there it goes from £5 up to £250 and actually feels, feels like from free weights, a little, a little heavier. We could talk about there. But it uses electromagnetic motors rather than resistance. So it's very small. It's about 5 inches thick. Looks not too dissimilar to maybe a vertically mounted big screen tv. When it's mounted so it fits in your space, it's designed to look very friendly. Something you want to show off, not store in a cupboard or away. Take pride of place in your house or your home gym, so you want to use it more frequently. That's very intentional with personal training. So people like myself that have trained a few athletes, but people have trained, you know, general population, run training studios, personal trainers, you know, PhDs in exercise science. We do a lot of the programming so we program in there. There's a full live coaches that you get, you get coaching cues and form feedback. There's a front facing camera so you can see yourself and watch your videos after the fact. So you have all these elements of personal training and program creation. So yeah, that' tonal in a 60ish second.

I love it. No, I appreciate that context and as I mentioned before, I've used tonal personally and I've always loved the experience with the product. And I want to ask you what initially led you to tonal and what was your experience with the product yourself?

Yeah, so two simultaneous paths. So pandemic, unsurprisingly, it was late, late December of 2019. So just before the pandemic, I had a board member at the Olympic team who was involved in tonal as an investor and he said, you've got to try this device. And I'm like, sure, home fitness, I'm an Olympic team. It's not generally what we do, but sure. I begrudgingly sent a staff member to L. A to go and try it and like go. Just like, you know, someone's ticking the box. He's a board member of mine. I'm going to do this. He went out, he tried it, he came out. It's actually legit. Really good, good. And I'm like, huh, Was not expecting that. Fast forward a couple of months, we're getting one delivered to the Olympic team training center here in Park City in Utah. And it's like mid December, mid, mid, mid March now. And the pandemic's hit and the training center closes down and I'm like, well, what should I do with this tonal? I'll send it to Mikaela Shifrin. She's arguably the world's best ever skier. Just won her hundredth World cup race, most in history. So sent it to install in the, in in her house so she could train during. I got to try it. I absolutely fell in love with it. This is an incredible piece of equipment. It works for someone like Michaela Shifra, one of the best athletes in the world. Takes a lot of this high end tech that we're trying to do. In Olympic sport actually makes it really accessible for general population. And fast forward about six or nine months later and they asked me to join the company.

Wow, that's so cool to hear. You know, even the, you know, having someone from the team go check it out and you're like, all right, we'll see, we'll see. To then like falling in love with the product and now being, you know, not only the head of innovation, but it's so cool to hear that, how those paths cross and even just to, to take a step back and to really set the conversation today. I know I mentioned it at the beginning and you, you did some, some, some brief, over the brief overview there, but you worked with, you know, so many hundreds of high performance athletes. You know, you helped, what was it, seven different Olympic games. Talk to me about your journey into this industry of high performance and working with athletes because, you know, as someone that's obviously not working in that industry, like what is the path to doing so? And was this always a dream of yours when you were growing up or where did that come into your life?

Yeah, I was super lucky and super fortunate. So growing up, I love sports. Not particularly talented, not particularly dedicated, but love sports played, you know, whether it's, I was, I'm British, that's the bad accent. But you know, soccer or football, cricket, rugby, it, squash, it did not matter. But if it was sports, I was involved in it and I love doing it. And so like, you know, when you're getting into like, you know, high school and you're wondering what should I go to university and do? And I was like, I don't really know, but I quite like biology and I really love sports. And this was late 90s and it was just like, there was just starting of like the first sports science courses and I'm like, well, I want to go to university. I don't know what to study. I'll do sports science. So I started, went, went and started my undergrad and I, it just kind of clicked. I really liked it. I was quite good at it. I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I thought I'd become a physical education teacher in a school or maybe go into personal training or something like that. And I tried that. I finished university, graduated, you know, got a, got a job in personal training. Realized I didn't want to do that full time, was not my career. Went back, got a master's degree in exercise physiology. Thought I'd just buy myself some time. And when I was doing my master's degree. I got to volunteer for the British Olympic swim team in the lead up to the talking.042004 Olympic Games in Athens and started working with athletes. I would do all the jobs that no one wants to do. So, you know, you take blood samples to measure lactate levels. You take sweat samples to measure like, how much sodium are they losing. You'd measure hydration, which is done via urine. Like do all these other things. But it was. I got to work with athletes, I got to learn how they trained and went there. And I kind of basically was fortunate. I'd done that volunteer experience at university. Then I got a job immediately afterwards. I'd always loved to travel. I'd coached soccer in Long Island, New York before that and a job I lived in the Sac harbor for 12 weeks every summer. It was awesome. Thought America was great. So took a job with the US Olympic team after then and just kind of progressed and ended up being. Yeah. Director of science in medicine, a high performance director. Went to seven Olympic games with three different countries and. And kind of just, yeah, rode that way for 20, 20 ish years.

Wow, that is. That is such a beautiful career arc, man. And you know, as someone that grew up in the world, like I grew up playing sports my whole life, mainly hockey, lacrosse and American football. And I've always been, you know, everyone watches the Olympics. You see it as like just this time every four years where at least for me is like glued to the TV watching specific races or events. As someone that's worked in it, what were some of your biggest lessons from working with these athletes over the years that you've been able to then transform and bring into tonal?

You'd say, yeah, there's so many. I really. The power of a collective team working towards a goal is something that I think Olympic teams particularly, but I'd say any sport organization does better than actually any business I've ever seen. I think there's a ton that the business world can learn between having this almost singular vision of winning a championship of Olympic gold, of fulfilling your dreams and the motivation and the alignment that that kind of brings. Like the vision for us against snowboarder is to be simply the best in the world. That's it. Which. Which is the most number of podiums, most number of medals in the Olympic games. And that drives pretty much every decision through the organization. Obviously you want to do that ethically and morally correct and so you put some guardrails on it. But there's incredible alignment which is really hard to get in business there's lots of, lots more kind of fractions and opportunities and it's, it's not clear what winning always looks like in business. And so I find that that would be number one. Number two would be the resilience and grit of athletes, particularly coming back from injury or disappointing results, but particularly from injury. Someone like Lindsey Vonn who just came back, she just came out of retirement this year, but like I have seen her personally been airlifted off a race more than, more times than I can remember and she, you know, countless number of surgeries and comes back and puts it all on the line again. Like we love in fate, like in startup world, like you know, fail fast, learn quick.

Yeah.

When failure results in crashes and you still come back and you still learn and you still progress, that that's the level of tenacity and of not giving up and of doing this not actually for the medals or the money, but for the love of the sport. And to push yourself and to prove things I think is truly special. And there are countless athletes that have shown that.

Yeah, I've always loved drawing that parallel and hearing people like yourself speak about that parallel between sports and business because I think not only is it so true, but when you say it's very clear in sports, as you said, what winning is and that collective vision towards that is it's like this unbreakable bond that unless you've seen it or you've experienced it as an athlete or whatever it may be, it's so unique and different where as you mentioned, the fragmentation in business, it can be more gray area of what does winning mean individually, as a unit. And I love that. And I'm curious to know when it comes to your time when you became a part of Tonal, I believe it was 2018, is that correct?

I came to Tonal 2021.

Okay. Oh, 2021, when you came to Tonal, like talk to me about what, where the company was and what you were most excited about when coming into this, you know, fast growing company in 2021.

Yeah, I think I signed when we just raised, I don't know, however many hundred million dollars at whatever billion dollar valuation for a fitness startup. So I came in at the very, very top within my first month. I'm on a LeBron James TV commercial shoot. So it kind of gives you that sense, super bowl commercials, like, not that I was a major part of any of those. I'm not a marketer per se, but involved in the space. And really then you're, you're Trying to take advantage of the opportunity that's being presented. Like I, I speak about this like from a business point of view, not from a humanitarian Covid was very bad for a lot of people and kind of thing, but from a business opportunity. It presented this huge opportunity. Right. You've just got this product, it's been in market a couple of years, it's draining traction and then everyone suddenly kept at home and you know, it doesn't matter if you're tonal or a pair of dumbbells, you can't get enough strength equipment or training equipment in people's houses. And so you're just trying to hold on and ride it and scale as quickly as possible. Trying to make sensible long term business decisions. But in this chaotic environment of if we don't sell them now, you know, you're not sure when you're like, you don't know how long it's going to last. And so you're trying to scale everything and that, that requires a lot of a discipline to do really well. And I think we have learnings that we would have done things differently back then but also just like a lot of crystal balling of like wow, our supply chains needs to know what are we going to do in 18 and 24 months. And I don't know, do you? And you're going from 300 staff, 200 staff when I joined to 7, 800 staff in the space of less than 12 months. So everyone, 75% of the people in the company are new. So you're trying to onboard on top. So it's, it's really, it was, it was super. I learned a ton. I made and I'm sure the company made like tons of things that we would do differently then. But it's, it's, it's a, it's a unique experience that I think unless you've been involved in, you know, a startup that's really gained traction and kind of hit that, that you probably like, it's easy. I think back now why didn't we do X, Y or Z? But I remember at the time of like I think everyone's trying to make the most sensible as they are with the data they've got. It's just really, really challenging. And yeah, if you, if you don't grow when it's available then maybe you won't ever grow. So you have to take advantage of that opportunity.

Yeah, no, it's, it's so cool to hear the, you know, the, the hyper growth mode is not only it's rare but to be a part of that, especially during that moment in time where as you mentioned, like you and the team have a product that everyone needed. The gyms are shut down. I can't imagine that 2020, 2021 era of, you know, tonal behind the scenes. And something I want to touch on because I know when doing my research, you know, a huge part of what you do, I believe is the integration of human performance science and peer reviewed research into tonal's strength training programs. I would love to dive deeper into really what that means, you know, the integration of human performance science to then the peer reviewed research aspect of it to of course make the product better over time. So we'd love to just dive into there. And really what does that mean for people that may be unfamiliar?

Yeah, so a lot of what my team on the day to day focuses is, is basically what does a world class coach do in person and how do we bring that to life in a product that's in hundreds of thousands of homes across America. And why world class coach? Well, they tend to be evidence based or we, we and I particularly take a very evidence based approach as in peer reviewed kind of things. Now evidence can be peer review, it can be experiential. There's lots of ways we, our data set I would say is an evidence based approach. We can talk about later. But a lot of what we do. So an example, we just released a new feature. It's, it's called drop sets which you've sure, I'm sure you've heard of. No one's done. But rather than just doing a normal drop set in, in the gym is you go in, you do some bicep curls, you know, you pick up the 35s at one end of the rack. You go to your rough, you know, fairly tired, maybe to failure, maybe to not. Then you put them down, put up the 25s and you do the same. Put them down, put the 20s run the rack. So we wanted to take a peer reviewed science approach to how might we bring that product. So in that. Well, we're like, well we, we know that training close proximity to failure from the research evidence. The Reps that are 1, 2, 3, 4 reps from failure are the ones that stimulate the most muscle growth or muscle hypertrophy. Those are the ones that count. You don't always have to go to failure, but you kind of want to go close to failure if you want to build big muscles. So we took that kind of research, we know that. So how can we optimize this training experience on tonal, so our members get more of those effective or stimulating reps. What we did is we used another peer reviewed research training technique called velocity based training. That's when we know that the velocity loss is when you get close to failure, you slow down in your reps and we can measure that on tonal in real time. So what the drop sets on tonal does is starts you heavy, you do six, eight reps. We notice when you're two reps from failure and we drop you just enough reps so you stay two reps from failure. And then we maintain that if you get more than three or four reps from failure, we'll drop or sorry, closer. The one or two reps from failure will drop the weight again and get you go back to 3 to 4 and then back down to 1 to 2 and 3 to 4 and 1 to 2. And we can maintain that for 18, 20, 24 reps. So taking the peer reviewed science, this is the best way to build muscle or really time efficient way of building muscle and then applying that into, well, how would you bring that to a product to life in a product in people's homes? So that launched on January 8th and I think I just pulled up a dashboard. £250 million have been lifted on drop sets. On tonal, I think it's more than 600,000 sets have been done.

That is incredible. And just so, as you were just saying and just so I understand correctly, so those last two to three reps before failure, you're able to sort of maintain that and adapt to it. So you're like consistently living in that two to three, quote unquote reps away from failure. That is, that's incredible.

Yeah, yeah. You basically ride that wave, right? You drop the weight just enough so your fatigue mechanism allows you to do one more and then we'll drop it again and you can do one more and, and you literally ride that wave. So you get a huge number in, in say you did 20 reps, 17 of them would have been less than 3 reps from failure, something around that kind of number. So hugely time efficient. And we have a research study that we're, we're, we've commissioned to try and show them the effectiveness of that specific training technique.

That is, that is incredible. And I think it brings up a bigger point in question in my eyes, which is, you know, when it comes to these peer reviewed exercises that you and the team run through, how often does it translate from specific reviews to then like specific features that are you Know like highly punctual as maybe what you've discussed. Just discuss. Because I'm sure there's. You're reading through a lot of material which is. Which I'm curious about in terms of like the day to day of your specific role. But I'm curious how, how often is it like that punctual of a feature based on the reviews and research that you and the team get to, you know, review overall.

Yeah, I think the goal of research in the. What my. My take on this but I think you. I get to work with a bunch of really good researchers and I think they'd mostly agree is. Is not to write training programs. They are trying to prove out specific, you know, mechanisms or scenarios to elicit like on average this is better than that. That's kind of what we're trying to do with a lot of the research. They're not trying to go hey, this is the best six weeks training program in the world. They're trying to say is high volume training better than low volume training? And there's some arbitrary or less than arbitrary, you know numbers. One does four sets a week and one does 12 sets a week. A week. But is maybe 12 sets a week is better than four sets. And the research probably suggests it is muscle hypertrophy. But they don't test four or five, six, seven, eight like anything. And they don't in there there'll be individual responses, right? There'll be 20 people in that study and 10, 12 of them went up. So it was positive. But four of them stayed the same and a couple declined. And that's where I think you have to start contextualizing and understanding the individual in front of you. So I might think, I would say we are inspired by the research. A lot of the features that we develop like the velocity based training, like the drop sets and kind of the muscle. There's no specific research study that says that particular technique yet is the most effective or effective way of training. But there's enough underpinning mechanisms that make us believe and have good substantial evidence of to make a thought reason of why it would be. And so a lot of what we do in training program design is inspired by. We know there's a lot of research that would say for example supersets, particularly antagonistic paired supersets. So that would be when you do a push exercise and then a pull exercise. Right. I do bench press and then I do a bent over rows. The reason that's a really time effective training technique the research suggests because I don't have to rest for two to three minutes between doing the chest press or bench press and the row. I can like rest 10, 20, 30 seconds and my performance doesn't decrease that much on the row and then I can rest afterwards. So I get kind of two for one, right? I get twice the number of sets in in half the amount of time. Be a technique that we'll use a lot, but it's specific how often it comes up, what the set range is. That becomes much more on the coach and knowing the individual in front of you. From the data that we have, are they a beginner, have they done this exercise a lot? Are they, you know, or are they super advanced? Are they strong? You know how, what other exercises have we done in that, that training session? If, if it's the last block of a 60 minute training session, I probably won't use a superset because you'd probably be pretty tired. But if it's the first block I probably would. And so you're using coaching knowledge com combined with evidence based.

Very cool. That's really cool to hear. And it, you know, it, it makes me wonder personally, you know, when, when you got involved with tonal to now, like what have been some of the biggest breakthroughs with not only the product but just the, the, the innovation in your opinion when it comes to these training mechanisms, how, how has it changed over the years that people that, that may be unfamiliar, you know, or maybe if they use the product, maybe they've considered getting one here recently. I'd be super curious to know just from your perspective, like the innovation over the last four plus years, what have been the biggest things in your perspective?

Yeah, I think overarching. The biggest thing is we started with a, when I joined in 2021, a big data set by pretty much anyone's standards. It was, I don't know, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of users there, but tens of thousands of users over like three years until you had a lot of data and kind of things. But we, we didn't necessarily have the systems infrastructure and data science team to start bringing the insights out. Now you're talking about hundreds of thousands of users over 6 plus years and 18 to 80 plus year olds like all walks of life for multiple things. And we have the data science team and the systems in the process to start gleaning better understandings, better recommend better insights, better everything from that data set. That's the underpinning. Like you know, if you're going to do a pyramid that that foundation is really what kind of Allows us to develop pretty much any feature now is we have this long history of data, of understanding our users and their individual journeys on training. And so that the utilization and that, that literally comes on so many, pretty much every product, every recommendation, every time I write a training program, I'm going to go back and I'm look at the target user, right? Is it advanced build muscle Male. Okay, well if they're that kind of thing. What, what have we done in the past? What has worked, what's not, what were typical increases, what exercises respond better or do people choose what length of workouts you know is going to get the maximum engagement through to like what type of titling is sticky? Like you know, my job and the entire job tournament is to get people to work out. That's like yes, we, we make money if we do that, but if we get people working out and making gains, we're in like plus one. And so like we can utilize all that data in every single feature that we do. So that's one I would say. Beyond that, the, the biggest innovation more recently on that combination of hardware, software and performance is in the new Tonal 2 product that launched in January. And so now we have a front facing camera built into the system. We always had a camera. It just honestly its field of view and quality was not good enough to be able to do movement off of it. Now we have a front facing camera that we can run AI pose models off every single rep. So we can understand you in human space. And if I fast forward some period of time, I don't know, we also know the force that you're pulling. So once you know human movement and joint angles and you know, force, you can do a lots of really interesting biomechanics. So that opens up a huge amount of understanding human movement on a scale that no one's done. We also developed this new aero mode which is turning Tonal, which is a strength training device actually into a cardiovascular training device. So you know, you can now pull on Tonal and work your heart, your lungs, red blood cells, all of that cardiovascular benefit, much like you might with a treadmill or a bike. But you can now do it on Tonal, which is a real change in terms of our ability to service and help people make even more health and fitness goals. Benefits.

Wow. And so that you said that's called arrow, is that right?

Yeah.

What makes, yeah, I guess what that makes me curious like as someone that trains for marathons and obviously very cardiovascular focused for certain times throughout the year. Talk to me more about that, what makes that new feature able to train those specific elements of cardiovascular health prior to what was available beforehand?

Yeah, so what we did is took inspiration from a rower and a flywheel. We don't have a flywheel, but what we did was mathematically model on a motor what that feels like and then apply that to a motor based system. And so that kind of like, you know where it's heavy. When you at the catch on a rower, the first movement's kind of a little bit and then it's kind of light at the end and then the recovery is really easy. So you get this kind of much more. Like every rep takes like two to three seconds and you have this kind of hard and then lighter. And so we have that. But rather one of the things that I've always struggled with my own cardio is I get really bored and I want multiple movement patterns. So one of the things we wanted to do with aero was yes, we have this feel, but we want to apply this not to just rowing or ski hugging, but like let's create like a med ball slam arrow move. Let's create a lunge arrow move, a shot arrow move, a Russian twist for working on my core. So we developed all these like we have five at launch, different kind of movement patterns that use this resistance profile. And the reason that it's on tonal two is we are, we basically have to respond the motor like 14,000 times a second. You're pulling hard and fast, as hard as you can on this thing and we need to dynamically respond it really quickly. But all these different movement patterns. So you can kind of do this, you can do. I watched a 90 minute soccer game doing, doing aero. I would say most, most, most of it's doing like, you know, high intensity interval efforts, 30 to 60 to maybe, maybe like IFEO 2 zone 53 minute intervals. But you can just go steady state zone too, if you so choose to.

Very cool. Yeah, that's, that's incredible. And you, you said something prior to this around the, you know, the new camera and the AI aspect and you know, as someone that is constantly like reading these, like in depth analysis of data, really taking in data. When you think about AI, like what excites you the most around AI and the way that we can now and into the future look through data more efficiently. As someone that's really at the core of innovation and performance. What do you think? AI? And again, maybe this is a prediction, maybe this is a thought that you have around it, or maybe you don't Know what excites you about AI when it comes to these data sets that we can learn from and make the product better in the future?

Yeah, there's, there's a lot the, the ability to synthesize when you have like I actually see, I saw again I, I see there's two different, two use cases of AI. At least two use cases, probably many more, but two use cases within, within the fitness environment there's one, there's this like human movement pose modeling that's only going to get by better. I can understand you in space and how you move and make recommendations around that and I think that's really interesting for people Tracking right. Lower back instances affects, you know, I don't know what the stat is but a lot of Americans have, have lower, lower back pain kind of things. Movement quality, it matters and how we do that and how do we load properly. Right. We know we need to progressively overload to make changes but we don't want to load so much and bed. We don't want to overload poor movement patterns. So really refining that kind of process I think is really super interesting. And while there are solutions, including ours that are on market that, that do that now, I think you're only going to see increasing granularity and quality within that kind of perspective is one number two on the sort of the big data in the LLM kind of kind of piece. There is really the, I think the unique opportunity for us and for others in this space is taking your base at LLM, OpenAI or whoever you may like, but then having your proprietary data set on top of that and so using the LLM to make use of that data to everyday people. So an example, this is not a product that a feature that's in tonal but something one of my staff members, Jake sent me the other day but he uploaded all of his tonal data for the last 12 months into you know, an LLM and it's just like write me. Gave it a few prompts, a little structure to it. It's like, you know, what are the key variables, what's changing, what's going on? And you got this like detailed breakdown of hey, you're doing like you know, 25 more pushing than you're pulling. Your left side seems to be like 30 stronger than your right on these kind of movement patterns. You know, you tend to be when you miss your first workout, if when your first workout is not before 10am you don't work out that on that day 80% of the time like all with not like the prompts were not very crazy.

Yeah.

And so now I'm like, that would take me as a like, like high performance coach running through a training log.

Yep.

Weeks to months to. I'm not sure I would have gleaned these insights. Now that's an LLM, just like popping that out as a weekly report just, just for fun. I think that level of granular, like you've, you turned, you've turned data into insights, which I think is the raw opportunity for AI in my space.

Absolutely. No, it's, it's so cool that you, you mentioned that because I think it's something too. Like, as a, as a whoop user myself, you know, I got the whoop here and you know, they have that like, whoop AI chat where you can say like, hey, like, tell me about the days that I get less than seven hours of sleep. Like, what are, how do I typically feel? And like, the ability to have access to that personalized data set I think is not only remarkable when it comes to like, what does this look like in 10 years? If you've been tracking your daily sleep, sleep, daily heart rate, daily workouts, the specific movements you're making with the camera, like, all of that compounded over time is something that as a user I'm really excited about. And it's cool to hear you talk about that in terms of like the use case there and with the proprietary data set, how that could be, you know, utilized for the user overall.

Yeah, I think, you know, I think whoop is another case of a very large proprietary data set to do that. And I think, I think the opportunity is a lot of the solutions now are very like, user active of. I need to prompt to say I did something, like tell me about something. And I think when we'll get to is we have gleaned an insight and we can inform you of that insight without you necessarily having to ask the system. I think that becomes quite powerful as a change, an opportunity around how you interact with technology. When technology can start giving you these insights, not unsolicited, but at the right prompt, appropriate time, is, I think, a real opportunity for this.

Absolutely. No, it's really, really cool to hear. And something I want to talk about is when it comes to the tonal itself, I'm curious and I'm curious to get your viewpoint, which is, you know, when it comes to the space needed, just to pivot the conversation a little bit, if people aren't familiar, as mentioned, you know, I've used the product many times in my friend's garages that they turn into a gym. As someone that like doesn't currently have the product, what is the typically the best environment for this in your home? Like what's been like the, your personal perspective or recommendations for the people that are listening today?

Yeah, like, honestly, anywhere in your home that you're going to see it a lot of times is the best place for any piece of fitness equipment. Like I love tonal. I think you should work out on tonal. But like James Clear, like make it obvious, right? You need like walking past if, if it's, if it's in the garage and you live in a cold climate like I do, do not put your fitness equipment in there unless you absolutely have to. Because I do not want to go in my garage more than I need to in winter. Or if you live in Florida, you know, in summer. Like, I mean you want to somewhere you go a lot and somewhere where you want to work out. Like, you know, I think that that's gone number one or that's probably number two. Number one is, is anywhere somewhere is better than nowhere. But number two is probably, probably somewhere you want to want to work out on. For us, you need a 7 by 7 by 7 space. So 7 foot ceiling, 7 foot wide, 7 foot in front of it. It doesn't take up that much space when it's compacted, like it's compacted on my wall. It's five inches from the wall. It, you know, it's basically a big screen t. A big screen tv. But when you're working out, you kind of need a 7 by 7 by 7 space in order to be able to do the different movement patterns and function around and do that. We have like, you know, I have mine behind my office here or behind my desk here because I love to do exercise snacks. Again, from the research literature, I do tons of two to five minute workouts. I'll finish this soon.

Two to five minutes?

Yeah. Real quick. I'll go in, I'll do a warm up set. Not if I'm doing heavy squats or something, but if I'm doing bicep curls, overhead press.

Yeah.

Maybe, you know, lap pull downs. I'll go in, I'll do a warm up set set. I'll do a heavy set and then I'm done. And then I'll come back an hour later or 30 minutes whenever I have time and do it again or a different exercise. And so I accumulate these really things. So this works really well for me because I have no reason not to do it right. I push my desk out the way, I, you know, press end on the call and within 30 seconds I'm working out. I literally can't be there. So that works great for me. Lots and lots of our members have a dedicated space where they have, quote unquote, a home gym. Very few people have a dedicated home gym, but lots of people have. This is my spare bedroom, but it's only used four nights a year. And I have my, you know, I got my peloton bike in there and I got my tonal or I've got some dumbbells and my toenail or I've got a rower and my, you know, you know, they've got a couple of different pieces thing and that is their space. And I think that's kind of makes a lot of sense. Right. Being intentional about having a space to work out in also makes a ton of sense. I am fortunate. I have two tonals. I have one in a home gym too. So I get to do my big workouts in that one and my quick ones in here. But honestly, it varies. There are people that have it in their living rooms and do that. I think it's wherever you're going to see it and utilize it is where any fitness equipment belongs.

Yeah, very well said. And that brings me to my next point that I was curious about, which was your daily, you know, performance workout routines and how that's changed over the years. While working at Tonaline. I love the, you know, you said the, the workout snacks and, and I'm curious to know. And dive in a little bit there around like, you know, if you recommend that to people that are like sitting down at their desk all day and like when you started incorporating that yourself.

Yeah, like I wouldn't say that's the only way I work out. I'd probably work out like that. I'm fortunate. I work out a lot. So like three, three times, three times a week I'll probably do exercise snacks. I'll probably accumulate five or more less than five minute workouts during the day. So I only worked out for 25 to 30 minutes. Not for a long time, but I'll do that. Do I recommend it? I think there are, there are a lot of health benefits of doing that. There's actually some research that it like know whether it's walking up the stairs or jumping on tonal. But breaking up your day is probably better than doing like a solid block of exercise at the end of the day if you had the choice, both are better than nothing. But breaking up there. There's cognitive benefits to working out both like mood but also like executive function, memory, operating, that kind of stuff. And I think there's, there's health benefits from glucose regulation, insulin sensitivity, of working out more frequently. So about three times a week I'll probably do that and then another two or so times I'll have more of a dedicated proper kind of focus. I'm working out generally probably not more from 30 or 45 minutes but for 30 or 45 minutes straight. I tend to do quite a lot of upper body, lower body split is tend to be my major split and I personally am doing a lot of drop sets these days on tonal. Love that primarily because of the time efficiency. I'll do a warm up set, a drop set and then I'm done for that muscle group. Wow. It's really, I don't want to say it's easy, it's very fatiguing. I work with like accumulating 15 reps, 2 reps and failure is tiring. I don't do it for every exercise but for like upper body I'll mostly do drop sets. For lower body I stick generally to big compound. I'll squat, I'll deadlift and I'll take more 6 to 10 rep range. I don't go super heavy but I also don't want to do 20 plus rep. Squatting isn't my, my, isn't my thought of a good time. So I, but I tend to do, I tend to do lots of job sets because I can accumulate real, real a high amount of training stimulus in a, in a relatively short period of time.

Love.

Wow.

That, that's, that's so great. Love to hear that. And what do you have any. I've, I've been someone that over the years like I, I've had a cold plunge. Right. More recently I, I got a sauna, a red light infrared sauna installed in my place and, and I've been loving that you know, the four or five days a week that I do it. Do you have any other modalities that are daily rituals in your life or that things that you recommend to others?

I, I actually I think the evidence base for saunas is, is strong and growing. I wouldn't say I'm like, I read it religiously, I know everything about it but like you, you can't not read a research paper these days and find a positive benefit whether it's on lifespan, health span, various different biomarkers. Yeah, exposure to heat seems like a real beneficial. I do not have One I would love one in Park City in winter.

Yeah.

But I, I definitely think that there's probably value in this. I'm not a big, I don't actually focus a ton of time on that. I personally sleep is my single biggest thing. Like absolutely having a cold ass bedroom like as low as, as low as it can go and ideally as dark as I can make it. Like that makes a world of difference for me. I wear an aura ring. I used to wear a whoop and kind of things but I, I see, you know, drops in overnight heart rate increases in, in deep and REM sleep like, like the colder the better and the kind of things is where I'd focus. And actually the biggest thing for me outside of sleep is also diet. I, I focus on really on fundamentals and you know, sufficient protein, decent healthy fats. I have a decent amount of carbohydrates but like titrate them based on my goals. If I'm trying to look to build muscle or if I'm looking to try and shed some fat and I tend to manipulate that up and down a little bit but I don't go crazy low, crazy high but generally just like eating with, with like good food quality. So yeah, I don't do I. I was into ice baths and cold plunging back in the I'd say early 2000s. They were very common in okay sport. Yeah. Yeah. Like lots of code cold water bars, lots of actually contrast bathing cold and hot. I, I never personally found a huge benefit. I would say the research evidence in my opinion which is not, not my subject matter expertise is yeah it's fine. I don't think it's overly great. I, there are, I, there are some negative effects for muscle hypertrophy and reducing the inflammation effect.

I have heard that.

Yeah. And I think it's probably actually age related. So my, my hypothesis on that is there's a lot of research around non steroid anti inflammatories like ibuprofen in, in younger adults if you pop too much ibuprofen it hurts your gains. You basically if you take all the inflammation away, there's no stimulus to change. In older people you can pop as much ibuprofen as you not more than you should not change things but as doctor prescribed and you actually continue to make gains because systemic inflammation in people my age is a bit higher. So I suspect as I get older I probably get more benefits out of my cold baths. But when I was younger I used that to say that I didn't need to hop in for three minutes in.

40 degree water, for sure. No, I love that. I went through the change recently having a cold plunge sauna and I've loved sauna.

A lot more enjoyable, right? Yeah, definitely.

A lot more enjoyable for sure. Man. A couple more questions before I wrap up here, Troy. One being, you know, when it comes to tonal and the future, what excites you the most about what you're building, where you spend your time within the company and just overall the, you know, the industry that you're in overall?

Yeah, I'm. There are, there are so many things I, I number one, feel extremely fortunate to have my job, my role. I get to, I get to do the like, design things like drop sets or aero and work with a team that does products. I get to, you know, jump into some of our content and programming that we do on there and I get to jump in. I'm wearing a tonal training lab hat. So I ran a boutique pop up fitness training center based on only on tonal in New York City for the last two months.

So cool.

So I get to kind of play across all of those and I get excited about all of those. I think think the thing overarching that makes me most excited is I think there is now enough of a change and enough of an awareness of the value of strength training in public life. It's not just for athletes, it's not just for bodybuilders. Strength training is a core part and for most of my career that's not been true. That the lay person that's 45 years old that just wants to be healthy and live well for their kids and play golf when they're 65, didn't realize that strength training was important or the postmenopausal woman that like this was a valuable. And I think we're getting to a point where most, at least those in the know are aware of the value. And so I think that's a huge positive benefit that benefits tonal as a company for sure. But I think it's just really good for the population to know that because the data's been there for a while within, within tonal itself. I think the thing that excites me is, is we have not had a month where we haven't grown. Every single month of the things our membership has grown, our churn is well, well under 1% which is like the lowest the industry has ever seen by so incredible significant magnitude. And so we had this really sticky product. And it's not that people just continue to pay us right Churns how long people pay us. But like engagement after you've been using the Device more than three years is still on average two and a half times a week. 10ish. Wow, three years.

I have a friend, I gotta say my buddy Jordan, he is the probably top of the list like power user, everyday posting obsessed about the product. And I feel that you speaking and saying that data. I look at my friend who posts on his Instagram every day. I'm like makes sense. He is such a power user and love, love loves the product.

Yeah, there are those fanatics out there. But even the mean customer is still continuing. So those things make you side because if you've got a product like people who are increasing in awareness in strength training Churn is low. But like engagement is super high and people are making outcomes. I think the average change in strength in the first year on tonal increase in strength is in 57% or something. We did a state of strength. So people are making gains. So you use the product, you make gains, you continue doing so. The fundamentals of like you know, so we just need to expand that. Right. How do we continue to grow that opportunity?

That is, that's so cool to hear and I love that. And I, I gotta say Troy, I could talk to you for, for hours here about just exactly even what you just said around strength training and like the rise of that and the adoption of it to like the general population. It's been really cool to see and someone that obviously loves interviewing people like yourself that are knowledgeable in this space. Just also hearing that that thesis spoken about on other shows that I listen to. It's a great opportunity for you and the team and I can't wait to just continue to follow along the tonal journey. And before we wrap up, I want to give you the opportunity to share the best place for everyone watching or listening to follow you to stay connected with tonal and really just to stay in the ecosystem that you guys have created.

Yeah, Tonal. Tonal.com is the website you can find out all about tonal on tonal.com our Instagram. We also post a ton of member related stuff stuff on there. So Instagram for tonal on LinkedIn. My name Troy Taylor. You can search and find my face. I'm on Instagram a little bit under strength Science. Troy. I post a fair amount of tonal related workouts on there and some science behind training.

Love it. Well, I'll be sure to link that all down below. And once again Troy, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today. I really appreciate your time.

I appreciate the conversation. Thanks so much. Kasey.