The Future of Fitness with Tonal:  Insights from Olympic-Level Training to Innovative Home Gym Solutions. EP 019

Stephen McCain: Troy, welcome to the Stephen McCain podcast.

Troy Taylor: Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

Stephen McCain: Yeah, when you showed up as someone who wanted to be on, on, on the show, I got really excited because I knew about your product that you're working for, but you have an incredibly well versed background and exercise. Physiology and you're part of a lot of Olympic teams, a very incredible resume.

I would love for you just to kind of give us a brief overview of your background and how that led to tonal.

Troy Taylor: Yeah. Ah, thank you. Yeah. I like many people. I was in 25 or so years ago. I date myself, but you know, was in school. Didn't really know what I wanted to do in the future. Love sport. Didn't think there'd be much of a career in something called sport science or strength conditioning or anything like that, but kind of love sport.

Wasn't sure what I would want to do. Went to university, thought I'd become a PE teacher, physical education teacher or something like that, started studying sports science, went back, did a master's degree, turned out I was quite good at it. And when I was doing my master's degree, I started volunteering for the British Olympic swim team.

This was in 2002, so leading into the Commonwealth Games in England, that's the accent, I'm British and then later the Athens Olympics in 2004. And in that sort of internship while I was doing a master's degree essentially I started working with athletes and loved it. And this is what I wanted to do.

A human performance, understanding how humans get better at sport performance and physical fitness and all things related to that. So, fast forward over about. 20 ish years ended up working with three different Olympic teams. So Team GB, Team Canada and Team USA as a sports scientist, as a strength conditioning coach, later as a director of sports science and medicine and a high performance director most recently at the U S Olympic ski and snowboarding team.

So I was high performance director there from 2015 to 2021. And got to work with all these incredible athletes incredible. Humans that can do incredible things on the sport performance field and also a bunch of incredible support staff, physiologists, psychologists, dietitians, nutritionists, physical therapists, strength coaches and sort of these diverse skill sets.

And so I really enjoyed doing that for close to 20 years in the last few years at the ski team. I started working a lot with startups, really with the idea of how can we get. Competitive advantage to get on the top step of the podium. So in the lead up to the 2018 Winter Olympics, we ran projects in transcranial direct current brain stimulation.

That was company called Halo that did some brain stem back in the day and some research projects around that. We were the first ever Olympic or professional team to use virtual reality. We filmed the entire course in 360 video working with Stryver, a small startup out of Stanford at the time, but basically got involved in the startup world.

And I kind of re found my passion for, huh, human performance. And tech and that's really cool. And so literally coming into sort of the early stages of the pandemic. I knew of tonal. I didn't think home fitness equipment was really where I would spend my career necessarily, but was aware of the product.

As lockdown happened and gyms closed and training centers closed, I ended up getting a tonal for Michaela Schifrin, one of the world's best ever skier, most winningest athlete of all time in skiing. So got a tonal for her, tried it, loved it and thought, wow, this is really cool. This is like technology that like I, as a consumer.

Not as an Olympic level athlete can buy and fit on my wall. I point behind me because it is there but is also something that I would want to use with Olympic level athletes. I hadn't come across anything like that before. So fast forward about another 12 or so months and. The company offered me a job to come over and lead their performance team, which is really the intersection between sort of what I've done from my background in those 20 years of human performance.

How do we take the best of what science and the best of what we know from training the best athletes in the world and apply that into the product through software, through content and through product development to help. general population people.

Stephen McCain: Phenomenal. That is a nice trajectory. You've found yourself on. I mean, look, I think, you know, I was an Olympian and I imagine you get awesome compliance when you're working with Olympic level athletes. So you can give a training program and you're pretty. You know, pretty damn well that this gonna get they're going to comply to it.

Right? So I imagine for you, it was a great way to really learn what worked, what didn't work, sharpen your skillset, and then to now be able to bring that to Something like tonal, where you probably have, I would imagine your database of data points for people working out must be massive. And to see all of that come together, it must be quite a phenomenal thing for someone with your background to now have almost like big data working for you on a massive scale.

Sitting on top of a history of working with some of the best athletes in the world.

Troy Taylor: Yeah. Don't tell my bosses. I'm a kid in a candy shop. That's kind of the ideal. So yes, working with the best athletes in the world, you don't get to work with that many of them, right. In 20 years, seven Olympic games, you know, I was fortunate to maybe work with 50 Olympic medalists, which is a huge amount.

And I'm extremely grateful for that 500 or so Olympians in my entire career which is awesome. You know, that's an entire career for 50 people that got to step on the podium. And one of the attractions of Tonal is coming and now you're impacting on, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis.

And purely from a selfish ego perspective, if you think you can improve the lives or help improve the lives of that many people, that's really kind of fulfilling. And so, yeah, you talk about that database. So every time someone lives on Tonal we measure at 50 Hertz, so 50 times a second, what force they're producing, how fast they are moving.

And tonal is just it's right over 250 billion pounds, lifted something around 8 billion. Reps probably close to a. billion sets 50 ish million training sessions. The data is huge, growing daily and also longitudinal, right? Because a lot in my field, I got to work with an athlete. You work for a quad or two quads, sometimes even three Olympic cycles.

But for the vast majority of the research that we base a lot of our recommendations off at the sort of the baseline level is, a 12 week training study, an eight week training study. We get to track people like Tonal launched in like late 2018, early 2019. So we've got users that been using our product on a weekly basis since 2019.

So it's five years worth of data. And it's not in a research sense, it tends to be just 18 to 24 year old, mostly male college students. That's who does research in exercise science, little more on the female side, and we're getting better at that, but not great. With Tonal, it's. 18 to 80 plus year olds.

There's 90 year olds on our platform. And so you've got this huge range, so this big data set over a long period of time with a huge sort of subsection of the population that's both sort of, you know, been on the, they're on the age ranges from young to very old. And also, like, not far off a 50 50 mix of male to female.

It's about 55 percent male, 40 percent female. 5 percent female, but close to equal gender balance. And so it gives you this really great cross sectional look into how humans train.

Stephen McCain: This is so interesting to me. I look, let's talk about the tonal product first for somebody who's listening to this podcast. They might be going, well, what is tonal? What's the commercial? Who's the basketball player now? That's that.

Troy Taylor: LeBron

Stephen McCain: LeBron James. Yeah. So if anyone has seen that commercial, that's what you've seen tonal on TV, but it's got this small footprint.

It's looks like a vertical screen with these arms sticking out. That can be used as cable weights and those can be adjusted, but maybe tell us a little bit about the actual piece of equipment.

Troy Taylor: Yeah. So at his highest level and my VP of product farm and gave me this kind of piece, but it's an entire gym with personal training. That fits in your space. And so how does it do that? How is it an entire gym? Well, the reason that is, is electromagnetic resistance, the easiest way to explain it is like similar to like Tesla is to the combustion car.

You know, tonal is to free weights. Not that one's better or one's worse. They're just different. But we create. Resistance via electromagnetic resistance. That means we can do it by our motors and this motors don't have to be large. They can be quite small, which means you can fit it on your wall. And so that's how it creates resistance.

It also allows us to manipulate the resistance in various different ways that don't apply to gravity or where gravity wouldn't make that possible. And we can talk about how it might do that. But essentially, that resistance, it goes in there. Yeah. For those that are watching on thing, there's a touch screen and it can switch on and the arms come out 250 plus something movements up to 200 of resistance 300 programs, 5000 workouts.

So that's the sort of personal training element is like integrated form feedback, computer vision, and a whole bunch of other stuff that basically a really high end tech gym that literally fits on your wall.

Stephen McCain: That is awesome. All right. I want to dig in a little bit here. So in terms of the various exercises you can do, you can move, you can do all movement patterns, push, pull, horizontal, vertical plane, squat, hip hinge.

Troy Taylor: Yeah, you can hinge, you can deadlift, you can squat, you can barbell squat, you can, you know, squat with handles or more like a goblet kind of squat, you can do lap pull downs or chin up variation type kind of movement patterns. You can pull horizontally, you can push horizontally. Yeah, you can do all types of movement patterns.

Yeah, it's over 200 moves that are in the movement library. And then you can add additional moves as you want to do with this. I use like sled dragging on it and use the cables as

Stephen McCain: Oh, wow.

Troy Taylor: resistance, put on a harness and do some other crazy stuff like that. But yeah, almost unlimited.

movement variations.

Stephen McCain: Okay, this is great. And then in terms of the resistance, is it isokinetic? Meaning it's matching you wherever you are?

Troy Taylor: So yes and no, we do have an isokinetic mode that we use as a strength assessment. So isokinetic, same speed which means the speed you'd set the speed. I want to move out one meter per second or half a meter per second or 20 inches per second. And the resistance varies depending on how much you're pushing.

We use that as a strength assessment at the start. So it's an isokinetic assessment. That's quite used a lot in physical therapy and for maximal testing. In that situation, it's a very safe way of testing strength because if you can't push, it doesn't ask you to push any harder, but it's actually not that an enjoyable way to train.

Not that many people love doing it because everything's maximal all the time. It's highly effective, just not highly engaging. And you talked earlier about my experience with athletes are very. adherent. Your average population might not have the same level of adherence by things. So we try to make it enjoyable exercise for them as well as effective and marry those.

So we do use isokinetic, but mostly essentially what we are able to do is probably what would be feel more similar to free weights. So more traditional in the field in that, okay, it's 50 pounds on the way up 50 way or pounds on the way down and you can standardize. What we can do is we could manipulate something like that.

We know that on average humans are about 25, 30 percent stronger in the eccentric or the downward motion than they are in the upward. So I could make it 50 pounds on the way up, 70 pounds on the way down. And so you can manipulate eccentric, accentuated, eccentric loading, which has been proven to have a lot of strength benefits.

So you can eccentrically overload for those that have been in serious gym situations. You might have seen people load up with chains on the bar. Chains are a really good power exercise when there's lots of chain links on the floor. The bar is quite light, and when you stand up doing a squat pattern the more of those chains come off, gravity pulls down on them, and that it's somewhat heavier.

The reason it's good is because at that end range of motion, we're quite strong and moving fast and adding the extra resistance allows us to produce more power force times. Velocity. But velocity. And then, so we have that out touch button. So you don't have to load on change. You can just hit change mode and it would be 50 pounds at the bottom of that squat and 70 pounds at the top on a linear kind of basis.

And then we have a third mode that we call smart flex, which is. Not the same as isokinetic, but essentially what it does is where you're strongest in a move, it adds more resistance and where you're weakest, it takes away resistance. So if you think something like a pull down, you're strongest in this little part of the motion, right?

This first little bit is the easiest part of a chin up or of a pull down. Down here is really tough and you kind of have to jerk it or really strain to get it down. So we can make that like 70 pounds. 55, okay, 50 pounds down here, and then reverse on the way back. So you can match the force profile, so essentially it's optimized to the individual, or to the movement pattern.

Stephen McCain: that's right. And is it doing that all in real time?

Troy Taylor: Yeah, real time. Well, I

Stephen McCain: this thing is

Troy Taylor: think it samples at something like 4, 000 times a second. So it's maybe slightly delayed, but not noticeable to the human eye.

Stephen McCain: Yeah. , so you can do So you could effectively do something like with bands where you can change the force production resistance curve, you can change the eccentric and the concentric, and then you can have this mode where it's actually in real time, adding more weight where you're stronger and taking away where you're weaker to.

Prevent that. That's probably one of the best ways to prevent injury with using something like this. I imagine, this is pretty cool and you can do all movement patterns. And so what about the actual programs that you have? Because normally when I look at machines like this in the past or any sort of any machine at all that has some built in programs, I immediately say I'm not going to do their garbage.

I know way more than these guys, you know, like whatever. But when I found out how knowledgeable you were, I thought, Jesus, I bet you the programs on this device are probably phenomenal.

Troy Taylor: Yeah, like, number one, you can do your own thing. You can custom program on your own. You've got some special secret source that you love to do, or something you just really enjoy doing, right? Not that it might be more effective. You can do that on your own. But if you want to do one of those 300 programs, and the programs are four week programs, they might be As a minimum, it's like twice a week for four weeks, or as much as five times a week for four weeks.

But typically, they're four week programs and we stack them and block them into making into sort of meso cycles and macro cycles. So longer blocks and durations, but something that like really was critical to the team before I came on board, but became as critical. One of the reasons why is I'd had similar experiences to you in that anything that's like out of the box kind of canned kind of program.

I was not really interested. I'm an Olympic level trainer. I, you know, I know this stuff. I wanted to bring that to that. And so the team that we have. I write some of the programs that are on there, but the coaches themselves, the on camera coaches, right? Some we have Jenna and a programming team that write some others, but really high quality people with, you know, undergraduates, master's degrees, PhDs you know.

20 years working in Olympic athletes, John, who works for me, has done 15 years as in performance innovation at Exos, who are fairly well known kind of things. Jacob got his PhD at P3, Peak Performance Project, which trains virtually all the best basketball players in the world. And so we brought this like really expert team together to provide programming at the same kind of level that we would bring to our individual clients, whether that's people in, you know, later life you know, in that 50 plus and looking to maintain function and form and have great retirement years and great health spans, or they're more athletic and focused.

But we wanted to bring the same level of thought and depth of programming and honestly, a lot from my science credibility around that we would to, to their programming. So that's what we tried to bring. 

Stephen McCain: It's it really caught my attention in terms of thinking, there is some real benefit to sticking to a program. I think that I always tell people, look, you don't want to wing it when you go into the gym, you need to have some sort of plan and a goal. I mean, that's how you get real results, right?

Even if something as simple as writing down your weights and so you know how to properly progressively load instead of coming in the gym the next day. Next I'm going what did I lift last time? But to have these full blown multi week, multi month programs already in there that, and plus it's automatically keeping track of all your data.

It's keeping track of everything. So I think this is incredibly attractive in terms of a complete solution. Let me ask you this. With all this data that you're acquiring from all your users, Is that because you know what, you know, because you've studied and you worked with top athletes, what has all this data that you've acquired now, how has that changed and changed the programming?

Troy Taylor: Yeah, so it has. I would say the science and the background we have is like the foundational level. Like these are things that we things and these the foundational blocks that we have proven out. But we have strong confidence. There's a large evidence they supporting. So an example, like of that might be I don't know, proximity to failure and hypertrophy.

So we know we need to work relatively hard. We need to work close to failure, not necessarily to failure, in order to stimulate muscles to grow. We need a sufficient level of relative intensity. That science has shown that with, I think, a relatively high level of degree of confidence. And so that's like a foundational level.

What the data set has allowed us to do is, one of the things that we talked about and we talk a lot about internally is Science doesn't tell us a lot about what makes someone consistent. How do we get engagement? And that's actually way more important than whether you worked hard or not. It's whether you turned up or not.

And that has a much bigger effect. And so what the data sets allows us to do is mostly in, in the way you look at that is correlation. And correlation doesn't always make cause and effect. It's not necessarily causation but correlation to things. What are some of the things that have the highest correlators with people that.

you know, adhere more than others. So the program example, like we, we mind that database. We looked at it. I can tell you that people that sign up to programs are 12 percent more consistent than people that don't. Quite simple. And that might be partly because our programming is awesome. But it might also be behavioral science commitment device.

You made a commitment to do something. You signed up to do this. Therefore I want to do it. And so there might be silver aspects of that. Yeah. We look at things around social engagement, people that follow 1 to 4 friends or 1 to 10 friends on the app have something like 20 percent more consistent than people that don't people that check their stats, they have cognitive.

Engagement in their own process, their self ownership of their journey. And hey, how much did I lift? Did I, you know, did I train legs today or not? People that go back and check their stats again, about 20 percent more consistent than people that aren't. And so it was really around a lot of adherence is where I think we get a lot of the data.

There was one really interesting stat. One of our data scientists, Christy pulled out was because long term engagement is what? Everyone cares about it. That is the only thing, not the only thing that matters, but the most important thing. Do you turn up can turn up consistently over a long period of time?

We don't get any fitness gains in a day, a week or even really a month. To be honest, they do take long. And so she looked at analysis and looked at people. Who'd been training at least a year on total, I think it was, and she looked at what they did in the first month on total and it was like, okay, well, did they work out a little or did they work out a lot?

And then she broke them in like it was, they grouped them into like a high, medium, a low or quartiles. I can't remember. He said exactly what it was, but they looked and yeah, like people that engage more in the first month generally engage a little more 52 weeks later, but of its own, it's not a great correlator.

It does not a great predictor of performance. What was a much stronger predictor of how much do you engage one year later is not how much you did in the first week, but whether you did a little more in week two than in week one and a little more in week three than in week two and a little more in week four than in week three.

So if you were on this upward trajectory, so I came in first week, I trained twice for 15 minutes. 30 minutes of workout. But I came back the next week and did 35. And I came back the next week and did 40 and came back the week after and did 45. And that upward trajectory only needed to last a month. That was a really strong predictor of 52 week RU engagement still working out consistently a year later.

And so this upward trajectory, and this is based on Again, this is not causation data. It's observational data, but that makes a ton of sense of people that were engaged in their journey and kind of things. So those are the types of nuggets that you can pull out from that programming. So now when I program, how does that affect?

You can damn right, sure, I'm going to make your first week. If you tell me you're a beginner and you've never worked out, I'm going to make your first week. I want to make it that you turned up, you're not too sore, you had a good time, and we didn't take too much of your time. That, like, that's my main objective, that you, that first week, if you're a complete beginner, It wasn't bad.

I could do this again. And the next week later, maybe I'll give you a set more. Two sets more. A week later, three sets more. Like just a little more. Not lots tons, but a little more. I progressively overload you. But what I'm trying to do is get you to engage a little bit more each week. When we move by week four, we move from two times a week to three times a week.

Still for 15 minutes a time, maybe. And those small pieces, really long term engagement.

Stephen McCain: Well, it's fascinating because it's not just about how do we make you stronger and fitter, but how do we keep you consistently using the product? Ultimately, you know, the things just sitting on the wall gathering dust. Yeah, you're not going to get fitter and stronger, so I think that's incredibly interesting how you're mining your data to, to find those nuggets.

Let me ask you this. What about. Are you guys hooking into any other things like aura ring, people's HRV, or is the machine inherently already able to track your nervous system and how fatigued you are just on your, your force production or your velocity and things like that.

Troy Taylor: Yeah, I would say somewhat following the next 12 or 18 months. So we plug into Apple Health. And so we will track your exercises into Apple Health. And so if you told me in your Apple Health kit or Android, I think, but in your health kit data that you just ran a marathon yesterday. I'm not going to recommend that you should do a leg workout today.

I'm going to show up on your toenail. There's a little Vitruvian man and green is ready. You know, gray is like kind of semi and red is fatigued. Your legs are going to show up red fatigue because you just ran a marathon. And so there's this, that level of integration of where we can use it for some recommendations.

I think the future. You know, 12, 18 months without saying this is in the product roadmap. How do you integrate a higher level of granular data? Is it sleep data? Is it heart rate variability data? Or as you kind of alluded to, do I just need to do a warmup set and measure your force and velocity on tonal?

And that actually gives me better sensitivity data. And to some extent, You told me you only slept for six hours and you normally sleep for eight, but your central nervous system looks great. You're primed, you're ready. You're firing you as an athlete. If experienced, there's some days where you don't think you have it and you do.

And some days where, you know, you thought you had it and you don't, we probably have higher resolution and sensitivity data of that than anything else we can measure that force. We can measure that velocity. And so if we start normalizing that, we can look at your. We call that a Z score, like your normal change.

What's your normal variation? And if you're outside of that variation, should that be a predictor? That's not in the product today. There's conversations. I don't know when that will make it into the product, but certainly those are some of the opportunities of where you get to really specify the details.

Stephen McCain: yeah. I mean, I always tell people, look, if you optimize for fitness, you end up optimizing everything else because , look what an athlete does in order to be completely optimal at his sport. He will go to bed on time. He will eat good food. And watch his diet. He will make sure his stress levels and things aren't stressing him out.

And I, I think a lot of times you can take so much data, you know, cause sit there and be like, Oh, there's no way I'm gonna have a good workout. Cause my aura ring said this and that. And really at the end of the day, it's exactly what you said. I've had some of my best workouts. When I did not think it was going to happen because I felt like garbage.

But at the end of the day, if you just show up and you let the thing, okay, it feeds back to you that you weren't as strong and you weren't this, that kind of implies to you, what am I doing in my life that I could be, have showed up better to this workout. If I optimized for my workouts. Yeah. I didn't go to bed on time last night, or you know what? 

I'm letting this thing happen or letting this happen. And so, sometimes you can get a little bit overwhelmed with some of these things, but I just wanted to see, since you guys are so data centric, maybe what you were driving towards. Let me ask you this in terms of,

Troy Taylor: to respond to that, I like, I think if you think about back, your career is you were sort of 90s, 2000 athlete, right? In gymnastics, you know, I started my career around late 90s, early 2000s, sort of working there. If you think about the data you had as an elite athlete back then, or the first data that I collected.

The average consumer probably has 10 times more data that wants to has 10 times more data than I had on the best athletes in the 90s and early 2000s. I'd have maybe some heart rate data. Some performance data, like how did they swim or run or whatever? It might be self tracking of sleep. There was probably no decent nutrition apps.

I certainly didn't have like something on my ring on my finger or on my wrist that was measuring, you know, all the different things. And so I do think the consumer has access to a ton of data. I think what we're focused on, and I think every company will say this is it's not about the data.

It's about the insights. And so what is at the forefront of our thinking is. We will add data sets if I can give you an insight from it. If I can make your behavior, change your behavior, Rico's either tell you to do something or tell you not to do something. And until I get to that level of confidence that we can do that really well, then it's not necessarily always worth just aggregating more of it.

But once we can give that insight, tell you, hey, here's an informed piece of. Based on this data set or these combinations of data sets, here's something that I think is going to work for you, Stephen, today, then that's becomes the real value. And we're still a little way away from that as an industry, not as tonal, but as an industry, but we'll get there.

Stephen McCain: yeah, it's a good point in terms of your data and building strength because we know strength is correlated with longevity. I'd love to hear your sort of personal feelings about that, but. I do want to know what data are you seeing for people to actually gain strength in older populations, like 55 plus, is it possible?

Are people really doing it? Yes, I

Troy Taylor: Yeah, so my, I'll answer the first part of my personal take on it. Yes, I think strength is what I think the research, the epidemiological research is very clear that strength, even grip strength is a great predictor of longevity, probably only pet only maxed by VO2. It's probably the second best marker of living.

a long time, I would say it's arguably a better predictor of a health span and living quality years, your ability to do that. So I'm a big fan of strength as a whole. Why? Because you don't shrink, gain strength overnight. Strength is an investment of time in the same way that VO2 max is an investment of time.

It's not necessarily the product of strength, although you do need strength to do these activities. Like you need strength to lift up the groceries, to lift up your grandkids, to do all these other activities of daily living. But It means you've invested training time. If you are strong, more than likely, some people innately strong, but in order to have that strength in later ages, and particularly know how strength declines at later points, it means you consistently trained.

I think it's my personal bias that the consistency aspect of training over a long period of time and the adaptations to that are probably some of the physiological drivers of. longevity. The function of that strength is improving your health span. Personal bias. I'm not sure I have a ton of research to back that up, but that's how I think.

What does our research? What does our data set over increasing strength in 55 plus? So I sort of mentioned earlier, most of the research studies in this is like, you know, A six week study in 65 year old males or females, you know, showed that if they train three times a week, doing X, Y, and Z training program, then they make, you know, reasonable changes in both strength and hypertrophy in muscle mass.

Maybe you go from six weeks, maybe to 16 weeks. That's kind of about the longest study I've seen in that space. What we can show over multiple years is that doesn't just happen for a short window of time. And it's not just with a specific program. If you turn up and engage with Tonal or just in resistance training in general,

Stephen McCain: in

Troy Taylor: percent increases or in the low 70s, 73 percent I don't want to misquote my own research, 73 percent increases in strength in their first year on Tonal.

With that's the average, the mean, that's not the best possible. So there's people that were worked out only once a week in that. Or people that have worked out four or five times a week. So the mean increases 75 percent in the first year. Yes, a huge increases in strength. We can't measure hypertrophy muscle mass.

It's not easy to do in a system like that. But the product of strength undoubtedly we see. In 55 plus year olds, we see you training more times a week does lead to greater changes in strength, but it kind of starts to plateau quite a lot around four, two times a week. You're still making nice increases.

Once a week, you can still make 25 percent increases in strength in your first year, but you see almost a linear step change. If you go from twice a week, once a week to twice a week to three times a week. Starts plateauing a little at four, and then it kind of levels off at four. Once you're doing four or so times a week, there's marginal benefits from doing five and six, but not a ton.

And so we see that. And what I think we also see, which I'm interested in is No, not just strength, but the power side of it for longevity and for aging. Strength is the easiest thing to measure and therefore has the most research is what we most quote, but like grip strength, hand grip strength is the most you know, easily accessible measure of strength in a research setting.

What would be much more functional is deadlift strength, right? That's actually a movement of life. Can I pick this heavy object off of the floor and stand up? And we see massive increases in deadlift strength from people that train with the deadlift pattern. So we do see that. But what we also see is massive changes in deadlift power.

And so their ability to stand up, not just with additional weight, but with additional speed and their ability to do that, because that's strongly correlated with standing up out of a chair. If you watch an elderly person, a frail person that maybe doesn't. Doesn't, you know, isn't strong or powerful. They generally can get out of a chair, but it's a very slow movement pattern, right?

It's a very methodical thought out movement pattern, whereas a younger healthy person or even just an older, stronger person is more powerful. They can apply that force over time going up the stairs. Power exercise in your seventies and eighties and nineties, walking across the streets, power exercise in your eighties and nineties, getting your luggage into a carry on so you can go on vacation.

Enjoy your retirement. Yes. Power exercise. They're all about getting things up relatively quickly. And so it's really interesting data that we're seeing that the power increases actually arguably more than the strength. And people that train deadlift once a week. I think we saw 75 ish percent increases in deadlift strength, but we saw over 100 percent increases in deadlift peak power.

So it's the strength with the speed, and I think that's super cool.

Stephen McCain: That's really cool. And what was the, what would the programming look like for power? Someone was doing a power program 

Troy Taylor: Yeah. And so to be clear, like these weren't necessarily just training for power. These are just people that were training and these are their average outcomes. But if I was trying to train someone for power, like let's say they're an intermediate. So not completely brand new. They can do movement patterns.

They know how to hit hinge and do that. They're not necessarily lifting extremely heavy weights or anything like that. But I think number one is intent is focusing on moving relatively quickly in the concentric direction. I, a lot of the time I see people like being a bit too, not that we want to be uncontrolled, but you don't need to intentionally slow down.

If the bar has like a 10 rep weight on it, a 10 rep max weight, like it's not going to be super fast from the first rep anyway, because it's kind of heavy. And so trying to move with intent and move powerful, because there's a lot of research from the sport world that actually moving fast. isn't is important, but not that important.

The intent to move fast. It's the neuro connections that we're trying to drive. So the intent to move quickly with safe form and then control the eccentric control the downward motion. So you or you drop if you want, but to control the downward motion, but move the concentric direction, move it fast would be number one.

Number two is you can't work power for that many reps. I gave a 10 rep example. I would generally go less. Most of my power stuff is like, Hey, do six reps. And move all of them relatively fast with relatively heavy or do clusters, right? So a cluster set is where you kind of break up a bigger set into smaller chunks.

So, rather than a set of six, I might do three sets of two with like 10 seconds between each of those sets or 15 seconds. So do two reps, take a mini rest. Two reps. Take a mini rest. Two reps. And so you still got six reps of work, but you've got this recovery period because we know we need that recovery for that sort of CNS system to be able to drive maximally.

And then thirdly, I think about actually what we talked about before that change. Adding change mode is a great way to work on power. Because you're as you come up, right? For anyone that's deadlifted, it's pretty slow getting off the floor, right? And then you get it up to about your knees and then you can shoot the last bit really fast.

Well, you can still do that with chains, but it's heavier at that top portion. So you're going to generate more power, which is going to train that property. Those are sort of three of the ways that I would incorporate it in.

Stephen McCain: Yeah. Yeah. Great stuff. Let me, is anybody topping out on the, cause you said it can produce 200 pounds of force. Is that per each one?

Troy Taylor: It's 200 total. I did a study actually out of High Point University two years ago now because a lot of our members were saying, Hey, in the gym, I can like curl 35s and on tonal, I'm only doing 25s. And so I, I commissioned this research study to compare tonal pounds to to free weight pounds and we called it wheel feel or free weight equivalency feel the long story of that short of that study was the research showed that tonal feels about 25%.

heavier on average, and it's because of inertia and the way that inertia works. Once you start moving that bar, the bar actually wants to keep moving Newton's laws. It's eventually gravity slows it down relatively quick, but you get a bit free energy out of that. Tonal with motors doesn't allow you get the same level of inertia, so it feels a bit heavier.

So it's 200 of resistance probably feels closer to 250. I think Something I can't remember exactly what the percentage is, but most of our members never come anywhere near tapping out. I would say on deadlift. Yeah, I can lift 200. I can max out dead deadlift and things. And so there is a small percentage of our population that could max out pretty much only from those sort of those gross movement patterns from the floor.

So deadlift variations, maybe an RDL those types of stuff. But the vast majority of members never come close to it.

Stephen McCain: Okay. Got it. So look I'm impressed. I mean, clearly training programs in this thing, I'm sure are top notch. You're basing it off of a massive aggregate of data, and that is very insightful and I'm sure making your programs even that much more effective. The thing is a small footprint. I imagine the thing can even coach or explain exactly how your form should be before you do any sort of exercise.

You probably have beginner, intermediate, advanced stuff. You have, I mean, this thing is. Turnkey solution. Walk me through, let's say I want to buy one. What is the process? I see on your website, you can finance it or it's 3595, 3, 595, and it's got to be connected to a wall, right? So how does. How does all that work?

Troy Taylor: Yeah, totally. So, yeah www. tonal. com is the website and you can find out all the details there. The hardware itself is about 3, 500. And then there is, we come in and install it. We do an installation process. It's like hanging a big TV, but it's a big TV that you're going to pull up and we really want to make sure that you hit those studs.

Not like my home improvement work where I'm like, it might be yeah. It's 50 50. Yeah, I had a mirror smashed the other week. So we don't want that with our customers. So we come out and we install it for the customers. And so a team comes, so you'll come in, you can purchase outright there, or you can affirm finance it up to 48 months at 0 percent finance, I think is the maximum and kind of there and pay out there.

Typically schedule installs within about two to three weeks right now. And so you can come out and we'll find a wall. You essentially just need studs. They can be wooden or they can be metal. There are some concrete limitations. We can install on some types of concrete and not in others. But there's details around there.

But first, vast majority of homes, particularly in the U. S. You can come out, get installed and set up then and then you're There is a subscription on top of the hardware that is mandatory for 12 months. You can drop it after the 12 months, but that's what gives you access to those modes and to the training programs and the advanced features.

The machine still works. You can, there's funky things like Bluetooth way on and off. So you never have to struggle getting full that stays forever. But the programs and the dynamic weight modes and some of those are a 60 a month subscription on top of that for as long as you want to keep them.

And it turns out a ton of our members see a ton of value. I saw a stat that was like Peloton was something like 90 percent of our members that joined last year are still members. And I'm like, 90 percent of our members that joined ever are still our members. Like our churn is like people thankfully love the product and continue to subscribe and continue to use it.

Over two and nearly three times a week, I think is the average three years later.

Stephen McCain: Yeah. You know, I recommended a while ago, a doctor friend of mine. I said, you should look into this tonal device. I think it'd be great for your clinic. And cause he kind of had this clinic with a live O2 oxygen training thing and some PEMF and he bought it. He's like, dude, I love it. I love it. And you know, I've had my eye on this for a long time.

I just thought it's very slick. It's very sophisticated. I love the footprint. I, are you, I assume you are using this thing.

Troy Taylor: Yeah, I train exclusively. I do have a free weight squat rack behind me that I got at the start of the pandemic before I could get a tonal. That I actually free weight bench press last week, hit 225 for a triple. So not that strong, but like I was reasonably happy with that. I hadn't free, I hadn't free weight lifted for about 18 months.

I have them there. I just, it's just so much easier to work out in total. Don't have to change weights. It remembers all of my weights. It progresses me. I can do all of these like weight modes that I like to do and keep it interesting. So yeah, I train almost exclusively on, on total.

Stephen McCain: Phenomenal, a phenomenal I really am very interested in this. And in the field that I'm in and the different businesses I'm associated with, I just think this is a great product. I personally want to try it, but I think that for, you know, the full spectrum of demographic, I mean, especially aging population.

I think this makes a lot of sense because it inherently has. Teaching device right there. It has some safety modes. You don't have to get a car and drive to the gym, which I love working out by myself. I have no problem unless I get terribly out of shape, which almost never ever happens. Cause then it's kind of like I like to be in the environment, but man, for me, I like to just get it done and be into it a hundred percent.

This seems like a. A really great option for someone at home to be using this. Is there anything we missed? Is there anything in terms of tonal or that you would like to add to this? Or maybe some, something interesting that you've found in your experience or with the data that, that maybe you just want to put out there. 

Troy Taylor: No, like I, I obviously I'm wearing the logo and work for the company, so I create, it's a pretty compelling. I think the biggest surprise for me that I've started, like I was not an Olympian, not even close to being an Olympian, but like love training and love exercise. And so I've never been really struggling to motivated.

What I found is I exercise snack. So much more now I have tonal, like, and so for those that don't know, the exercise snack is a short bout of exercise, relatively intense. I like when you're going to the gym, you're not going to drive in there, drive to the gym, go and get changed, go in and do one set of benchmark, like warm up and do one set of benchmarks and then drive back.

It's not highly efficient to use your time, right? You. You're gonna, I'm gonna spend at least 30 to 45 minutes here, probably an hour because I'm waiting for equipment and then I'm gonna drop. I'm gonna make it. I don't do that. I train. I come in the morning. I go in, do a couple of warm up sets and then I'll hit a set bench.

Okay, I'll do like going doing zoom call, jump behind me, do a set of squats. So I think I accumulate So much more training because I'm kind of just drumping into it all the time. Now, unfortunately, I work from home. And so, and I have no ability to do that. I'm basically on zoom calls most of my day. So I get 10 minutes here and there in between the finishing and kind of, but that's literally changed my workout mentality in that I used to have to build up this almost like psychological, right?

I'm going to hit it hard today. I got 15 sets in my workout program and I kind of think I'm like. It's a mental task just to like, I'm going to have to push it. And now I'm like, Oh, you got one set. It's going to be pretty tough, but it's one set. And then you've got an hour break. I'm like, so I kind of think so, which I never really thought I would train that way.

I never intended to train that way, but it's just been kind of almost life changing because. There's also a lot of research around how those mini bouts of exercise actually really good for your physical health, not just the strength, but just like movement, right? Doing an hour of exercise and then 23 hours of nothing.

That hour doesn't actually counteract all the 23 hours of doing nothing as well as we'd like it to. It's better than not doing it, but it's not as good. So these mini bouts are really good for that. It's really good for cognitive to didn't realize that doing a set of cars before I go meet with my boss makes me better at meeting with my boss or presenting or hopefully doing a podcast.

Maybe I should have another set of scores, but the really, the benefits of that I never really realized. And that's been a real nice side effect for

Stephen McCain: Yeah, I love that. I would be willing to bet that's exactly, I'd be doing it like that all the time. And I've seen some of that research that you're referring to, and I like that. I like the idea of just. Getting peppy, you know, like just boom. And going back and I mean, I would, I think I would put the tonal if I get it in my office and literally, cause I just love having an active workspace.

So man, Troy, awesome product, man. Kudos to you guys. Like, I really think you guys have crafted something special. And the fact that they are bringing people like you. With as much history as you have with working with, you know, elite athletes and all the science that, you know, in the programming that speaks a lot to me about the company.

So I'm I'm excited. You got a chance to come on here and you know, in terms of anyone listening. If this sounds like something that you're interested in, definitely check it out at tonal. com. You can go to my resource page on this podcast. We'll have all links to everything that's going to be at Steven McCain.

com backslash tonal T O N a L Troy. How can people find you? If they're interested in reaching out, they have any questions.

Troy Taylor: Yeah, so you've given the tonal website. Tonal also has an Instagram, lots of member stories and the programs that are dropping that are on there. So just search for tonal. I am on Instagram. I came a decade late, but started maybe last year or so I to, I post mostly my tonal workouts some of the fun stuff that I'm playing around with and tonal or some of the latest research around there.

Or I'm on LinkedIn. I don't know what that backslash is also on Instagram. It's strength science. Troy strength science. Troy on Instagram on then. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn too. So yeah, definitely reach me out if you're interested in finding out more.

Stephen McCain: Fantastic. I'll put links to all of that as well. Again, in the show notes, stevenmccain. com backslash tonal. Troy really appreciate the time. Thank you for sharing this. I think this is a really great product for my audience. And thank you guys for tuning in and we will see you on the next one. Stay healthy, everyone.

Cheers.