Special Podcast Episode: How To Know If You're Really Getting Stronger.

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Hey, everybody, it's Brock here filling in for Ben Greenfield while he's off gallivanting around Thailand doing his triathlon camp and doing a 70.3 in an Olympic distance race a week apart. Crazy guy. I don't know what he's thinking, but today I've got Matt Kuzdub in the. In the room with me. I was gonna say in the studio, but we're actually in my dining room. We can call it the studio for. And he is the lead sports scientist at a company called Push. And we're going to talk about the product that he and his team are developing right now, how and why, and all the good stuff about the, about the whole product that's coming out and hopefully get into some of the journey of how you got to where you are and where the product is today as well. So welcome to the show. Thanks for coming by.

Thanks a lot for having me here, Brock. Really excited to be here today. And thanks for the coffee. Yes, it's strong. So I'll be talking quite a bit, I think.

Yeah, I think by the end of the show, both our eyes will be.

Bugging out and we'll be like, I.

Guess first of all, before I have a sip of coffee, I'm gonna get you to talk about yourself a little bit. Tell us about your background, your education, what got you here.

Absolutely. I was always a big sports fan and that sort of led me into an undergraduate degree in kinesiology. I also competed as a tennis player. After school. I tried to go on tour a little bit. Didn't quite work out. Well, it is tough out there. It's a bit of a grind, but.

Yeah, there's not a lot of money, is there?

There's not a lot of money in it unless you're at the very top. But the experience was fantastic and it kind of got the wheel spinning for me a little bit and I wanted to learn a little bit more what kind of separated top performers from the rest of the pack. So I enrolled in a master's degree in strength and conditioning and got a chance to, after school, got a chance to work with some traveling tennis pros and. And then this Opportunity with push came up and thought it was really interesting, so I give it a shot.

So you just gave up everything and went whole hog into push?

I wouldn't say everything. I still work with some athletes part time.

Cool. So they're mostly tennis players then?

Mostly tennis players, yeah, A few volleyball players. And I'd love to down the road get into more sports, but currently tennis players.

Interesting. Cool. I actually didn't. We've had a few conversations now and that's never come up. That's interesting.

Yeah.

Ben is a huge tennis player. We could someday set up a match between the two of you.

Yeah, I'd probably have to play left handed though, for him to have a chance. Kidding. Ben.

Yes.

Zing.

Okay, so most of the time when people come up with new ideas, when they come up with an idea for an app or for a newsletter, for a company or for any kind of invention, the idea comes from some sort of problem that they're trying to solve. So they'll sit down and realize, okay, my life would be easier or people's lives would be easier or more interesting or more fun if X existed. So what was the problem that you guys were trying to solve? What was your X?

So this all started with Rami, our CEO. He's an engineer, but he's also a very avid kind of Olympic weightlifter. So he was in the gym about a year ago, or just over a year ago, and he hurt himself and he thought there must be some sort of way where I can objectively get some feedback on what I'm doing in the weight room. Okay. So we started researching what's out there. What kind of devices are out there? Everything out there. Force plates and linear encoders. These kind of really technical devices are all research based, lab based, and expensive. So he started looking into what these devices had inside them, and he said, you know, I could probably build one of these myself. Cool.

So these are all like, all the devices you just listed. These are our ways of measuring force or velocity or output or something while you're lifting weights and not while you're running or while you're swimming or anything like that. Specific to weightlifting?

Yeah, specific to.

Or resistance training?

Yeah, they can measure jumping as well, and how much force you're producing in those type of movements, but also things like squats and Olympic lifts.

Okay, gotcha. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt the story there.

No, no, no, not at all.

So he injured himself in the. Doing some Olympic lifting.

Yeah.

Had to take some time off anyway. Had this this thought of I could make a better product. So yeah, so that's push.

Yeah. And then he, he went with sort of a, an early prototype which was probably, you know, as big as a softball. And I went to his Olympic weightlifting coach and showed it to him and he thought, wow, this is great. You should continue doing this and see where it goes.

Awesome. So I saw the device, or at least the. Is it the alpha copy that I saw?

You saw the early prototype, and it.

Was about the size of like a pack of cards, maybe a little bit fatter. And you strap it on to just below the elbow, like right on your forearm.

Right.

Now I understand you showed me the, the newer prototype. It's a little bit smaller, a little bit skinnier. Is that the, the size that you're going to launch with?

Yeah. So in the spring, that's the size that we're looking to do. We have a beta that's currently getting, getting made and that'll be sort of in between the two sizes.

All right. And people can get copies of it. Like they can pre order the prototype or I guess not the completely final version, but the version that's coming out in the spring is that with the Indiegogo.

The Indiegogo campaign, we had two main objectives with it. So the first was to get betas on board beta testers. And that consisted of mainly coaches, researchers, athletes. And so we had about 100 betas, which we'll be sending those out in December, January. They're gonna test it out with their athletes and give us some feedback and then we'll have the final product ready in the spring. And that's sort of why we launched the Indiegogo campaign, to kind of spread the word and start getting pre orders for that final version.

Cool. Okay, so I'm gonna just sort of get back to, back to the whole idea that I can't remember his name. Remy. Rem.

Rami.

Rami. It was in the, in the gym. He's doing Olympic lifts. He injured himself and so he wanted to, to invent something that would help him to not get injured or help other people to not get injured. So how exactly will Push do that? How will it give him the knowledge or coaches? The knowledge, athletes the knowledge to not hurt themselves or not overexert themselves?

It's a great question. Basically, the device has an accelerometer inside of it.

So like the same thing that's in like an iPhone or an Android phone or something.

Okay. Yeah. But it samples that are at a really high frequency, which gives us a Lot of feedback on movement that people are doing in the weight room. We have to write custom algorithms, though, for, for each and every exercise to be able to tell you how many reps you've done and give you real feedback on each of those reps. Oh.

Yeah, I guess it needs to know the difference between an overhead press and a bicep curl. It needs to know what that movement looks like or feels like. Or there's a gyroscope and an accelerometer. Is that right?

Exactly.

So I guess the gyroscope would pick up the rotation. The accelerometer would be the what, the velocity or the amount of movement.

The movement basically detects movement. And from those two, we can get a lot of information.

So it'll actually like, if you're going through, let's say, a complex at the, at the gym or a set of like a superset or something, it would know the difference between doing a squat, doing a deadlift, doing an overhead press, all that kind of stuff based on the algorithms that you guys have fed into it.

Exactly. You do have to tell. It is app enabled and you do have to tell the app which exercise you're doing and the load that you're doing it at, because based on the load, then we can get the force that you're applying in that exercise.

Okay, so I'm in the gym and I've got the push on my forearm and I have my smartphone with me. Is it iPhone and Android?

Exactly. Yeah.

So you can have either one in. I say, okay, I'm going to do my, my deadlifts now and I'm going to be doing it with £135. So I put in £135, put the phone down and, and get to work. And then it does. What does it do from there?

From there, just press go. You do your exercise and right away it detects. Right after you're set, you can review exactly what you just, just did.

Oh, so it's real time.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Exactly.

So, yeah, you actually just look at your phone and be like, okay, I did 10 reps.

I had.

What else does.

It'll tell you how much force you had you applied for every rep of that set, the speed of movement. So how fast, if you're doing a squat, how fast you were coming up, and then overall the power that you were outputting.

Okay, so I guess you can actually, you could use that as watching your own fatigue set in during that workout. But would you be able to analyze that sort of over a Longer time period. So you're not just looking at today's workout, but looking over the last week or the last month.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you could do either or monitor yourself during that session, or look at trends over time and see if improvements occurring based on your. On your training program. And then you can modify and update your program to make sure that you are, in fact, improving.

I know you actually, you showed me a bunch of this stuff, so I'm acting a little bit dumb here because I have seen it, but for the benefit of the audience. So there's more than just the interface on the phone itself. You can actually log into a website and see all the information in a much more granular level or even a sort of bird's eye view of it.

Right, exactly. So you can create a workout on our portal, and then that workout can get pushed directly to the app. So every exercise and every load that you're working with can get sort of automatically populated. And all you have to do is press go on either the device or the app before every set, and it records everything for you.

Cool. So I actually, I see, like, you didn't list this as one of the problems that you were setting up to solve, but I, as a coach, see this solving another problem, which is the. That I create these workouts for my athletes. I can track their running and their swimming and all that kind of stuff using Garmin devices or Suunto or the Fitbit or any of those kind of things. But I've always had to sort of take their word for it that they were getting the actual strength workouts done. So what you're saying is I could, as a coach, set up a workout, say, I want you to do this many deadlifts, this many cleans, this many overhead press, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, send it to them. And then my athlete would actually just show up at the gym and say, okay, I'm gonna do this workout. I'd actually have physical evidence of them, a, I guess, completing the workout and seeing how they're actually doing at the workout.

Yeah.

Are they improving? Are they. Are they getting. Well, hopefully not getting worse. Yeah, all that kind of stuff.

Exactly. And with coaches having lots of athletes or trainers having lots of clients to work with, they can't monitor every second of their workout. So I think that's a useful way to keep track of what they're up to.

That is. Yeah, I see that as a huge thing. And I know that Ben's whole interest in what you guys were doing came a lot because he really worries a lot about overtraining. A lot of the stuff that we focus on, a lot of questions we get on the podcast are about over training, being overworked. And this would really give you a way to see if the force. Would it be the force and the velocity and stuff that's dropping off that would give an indication of some sort of fatigue, I guess.

Yeah. I think a lot of the research out there today is looking at velocity stuff. Seeing the drop in velocity during an exercise, either during a set or over time over multiple training sessions, that can be a big indicator of sort of central nervous system fatigue.

Yeah. And I guess also being able to see that information, you'd actually be able to strive to hit a certain amount instead of just sort of like, okay, well, I lifted it and it felt pretty good. You could look at the. Well with the real time feedback and be trying to hit an actual goal of force and really akin to the way people use power meters on bicycle.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we actually had a lot of inspiration from some of the cycling apps out there. One of them was Strava, and they do a great job of tracking and even having a social aspect to their app. So that's sort of one of the areas that we were looking at, web apps out there doing a great job.

I guess that actually brings up another idea or a point. If at some point, maybe not right now, but at some point, are you looking at being able to integrate the information to, say, training peaks or be able to bring it into, like, Strava? If they opened up their API or allowing you to force or push information into it, do you see that as something you guys would move towards?

Absolutely, absolutely. We have. Currently we have an open API and we're looking to integrate with various different apps that are currently out there.

For the audience out there who doesn't know what an API is, it's basically apps or systems like Facebook, Twitter, any of those kind of things. They'll have what's called an API that you can tie into, so you can have your application or your website or your sales service or whatever actually communicate with another system. So it's just a fancy way of like apps talking to each other, basically. Cool. Cool. Yeah, I see that as like the. The social aspect is huge. Like, I know a lot of my runners, I coach a lot of runners, and if they don't put their workouts up on Facebook, they get so much guff from everybody else, like all their friends, all the other runners around them and stuff. Stuff. And it's like, they find that to be a huge motivation. And yeah, you don't really see that at this point. There's no way to, to say, like, you can say, I did a workout for 30 minutes at the gym and it's like, well, good for you. Did you, did you walk on the treadmill or did you lift something heavy?

Exactly. There are guys out there that talk about, oh, I lifted this much or I benched this much today, but it's still not giving you a real metric as to what you're, what you're doing in the weight room. So, yeah, the social aspect, competitive aspect is huge. We want to be able to have even some certain high profile athletes, you know, that are using the device post their power outputs for, you know, their Olympic lifts or, you know, their squats and things like that, and then people can follow them and, and share their own workouts, routines.

Cool. Do you ever see this moving beyond, beyond the gym, beyond the weight room? And maybe because you mentioned tennis, would you be able to use it for something like analyzing somebody's tennis stroke?

Absolutely, absolutely. We've had a lot of interest in using it in sort of sport specific applications. So a tennis swing or a golf swing or a strike in volleyball, things like that, Even swimming and running, those are, those are kind of, they're all on our own.

We missed a really important one. We're in Canada right now. You didn't say hockey.

Hockey. I know.

It's got to be tied into hockey somehow.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe a slap shot or something like that.

Yeah. Cross check.

Yeah.

How much force did he get into that guy's head?

Exactly. So those are, those are really interesting areas for us to look into down the road. I think we can do it. It's just a matter of testing really being able to test all these different things and come up with the algorithms. That's sort of where the brain power is in all this. It's the custom algorithms.

Yeah. You said that you had a bunch of the beta versions out to different universities and different sport clubs and stuff. And you're collecting, I guess, just gigabytes of data from all these different people. And then I guess the real challenge is once you have all that data, what do you do with it?

Yep. Yeah. So we're asking those coaches to let us know what exercises they're doing. And then when we receive all, all the data, we can kind of start looking into ways of analyzing those specific exercises so they can have that information as well. So we're rolling out with probably about 20 exercises for our beta program. And for our final version though, we'd like to get close to the hundred exercise mark. So that'll be in the spring and then it'll just be software updates and exercise updates from there.

Cool. Now I know like you mentioned, that it's a matter of collecting the data and getting the algorithms and stuff, but it's also got to be a bit of a monetary thing too. Like the Indiegogo seems to have been very successful for you for raising money, but to do these constant updates and keeping things going, are you, are you seeking more funding or is it really just the hope that it'll pay for itself at a certain point?

No, we are seeking some funding. We are, we're in an investment round right now that we're trying to, trying to close in the next month or so. Mainly Canadian investors so far, so. But we are looking to move down into the valley hopefully soon and get some funding from there as well.

Alright, so if any VCs are listening out there.

Exactly. Get in touch with us.

We'll put your contact information in the show notes for sure. And we'll actually put in a couple of videos too. I know you've got a couple of really cool videos that do a good job of showing what the device is doing and how you could use it in certain ways, circumstances and certain atmospheres and stuff. What else? Is there anything else you'd want the folks to know about what you guys are doing?

We also just launched a blog actually yesterday. So what's the URL for that? That'll be on Tumblr.

Okay.

Actually, yeah, we're using Tumblr right now and I can send that information to you, but basically it's going to be really kind of heavy on the sports science stuff.

Okay. So it's gonna be a blog, not necessarily just about the product itself, but about all the science around.

Science around what we're doing and just sort of kind of what's, what's out there right now, what are, what are sports scientists researching and what do coaches want to look for and, and that sort of thing. So we really want to focus in on kind of what's in the cutting, cutting edge right now.

Awesome. So if somebody wants to go and actually like pre order a device today as they're listening to this app, what would they do? What should they do?

So you can still pre order our device on our website@pushstrength.com. oh great. Okay. And then hopefully in the new year we'll have some other ways you can get your hands on a device.

Awesome. Well, I think that summed it up really well. I feel like that'll give the folks a good idea what you guys have been doing. And hopefully if you have any questions, post them in the comments section on the website. And maybe we can even get Matt or somebody from the team to answer some questions. If you've got some stuff that goes beyond my knowledge of the product, I'll make sure to involve you guys in, in that process. And yeah, thanks for coming by. This has been very cool.

Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. Really appreciate it. And we're always looking for feedback. So if anyone's, you know, out there wants to know more, please get in touch with any of us.

Awesome. This is Brock Signing off for BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

Sam.