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HALO Talks: Elevating Wellness
HALO Talks: Elevating Wellness
Learn from top entrepreneurs and seasoned business owners in the HALO (Health, Active Lifestyle, Outdoor) sector how to optimize your business success. With host Pete Moore, Founder and Managing Partner of Integrity Square.
Jan. 30, 2025

Episode #534: Bringing Athletic Expertise to Connected Fitness with Troy Taylor from Tonal

Episode #534: Bringing Athletic Expertise to Connected Fitness with Troy Taylor from Tonal
Episode #534: Bringing Athletic Expertise to Connected Fitness with Troy Taylor from Tonal
HALO Talks: Elevating Wellness
Episode #534: Bringing Athletic Expertise to Connected Fitness with Troy Taylor from Tonal

On today's episode, host Pete Moore welcomes Troy Taylor, Senior Director of Performance Innovation for Tonal. With a deep background in elite sports, Troy shares his journey from working with Olympic teams to transforming training methodologies at Tonal. We dive into discussions on the importance of both strength and cardio, the intricacies and challenges of training elite athletes, and how technological advancements in fitness are shaping the future. Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or a professional in the industry, this episode is packed with insights on optimizing performance and longevity.

Taylor boasts an impressive 20-year career in the elite sports arena, contributing to the success of three different Olympic teams: Great Britain, Canada, and the USA. Over the course of seven Olympic Games, he has worked across approximately 10-11 different sports in roles including sports scientist, strength and conditioning coach, and physiologist. Taylor's pinnacle role was as the Performance Director for US Ski and Snowboard, where he spent six years guiding athletes like Mikaela Shiffrin, Lindsey Vonn, and Shaun White. Holding graduate degrees in sports fitness and health, Taylor passionately advocates for the importance of both cardio and strength training for longevity and a better quality of life.

Regarding the opportunity in the home market for strength training, he states, "The saturation of the strength market is nowhere near what companies like Peloton are doing in the cardio market right now. So there's still a lot of opportunity in that and in adjacent spaces, whether that's within personal training gyms or in corporate wellness or in boutique fitness and all of these sort of auxiliary places."

Key themes discussed

  • Olympic sports career overview
  • Evaluating new trends
  • Cross-training for athletic skills
  • Sports metrics: Too much data?
  • Elite athletes' consistent edge
  • Future of fitness innovation
  • Untapped potential in the strength market
  • Time-efficient training insights
  • "Efficient " gym workouts explained

A few key takeaways:

1. Integration of Cardio and Strength Training: Troy emphasized the importance of both cardiovascular and strength training for long-term health and performance. He noted the shift in focus over the years from predominantly cardio to recognizing the significant benefits of strength training for everyone, including the general population.

2. Holistic Approach to Training Elite Athletes: Taylor highlighted the necessity of understanding individual athletes needs, their history of successful training, and their sport-specific demands. He talked about the balance between relying on athlete feedback and introducing innovative, evidence-based methods to optimize training and performance.

3. Principled Approach to Performance Innovation: At Tonal, Troy uses a structured approach to filter through new trends and technologies. This includes checking for underlying mechanisms, understanding the dose-response relationship, and ensuring the data is reliable. He emphasized the importance of combining principles with the latest innovations for effective performance enhancement.

4. Unique Needs of Different Sports and Personalized Training: Troy talked about adapting strategies across different sports, borrowing techniques from one sport to benefit another. For example, alpine skiing requires specific endurance like handling longer term isometric loads, which informs how they train and condition athletes for those particular requirements.

5. Consumer Engagement and Enjoyment: Troy shared insights from research showing that engagement and enjoyment are crucial for sustained fitness activity. He mentioned a study where users on Tonal maintained consistent enjoyment and engagement levels over eight weeks, unlike traditional gym equipment users whose enjoyment decreased over time.

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Transcript

0:00 I am super excited to announce that we now have a formal partnership with the prospect wizard. And when I say wizard, I mean wizard. Obviously, you have a website. This allows you to convert your website traffic visitors directly into leads. It's not just another chatbot, and it's not AI, but it allows a visitor to call, text, or leave a voice mail. Immediately goes to you, your sales team, or anyone else in the club instantly. MIT shows a study that if you contact the lead within 10 minutes, chance of them converting goes up 9 times that of the average. We got the Atlanta Clubs on it, VIDA Fitness, Gold's Gym, Mountainside, City Fitness Philly, College Park. Become one of the next halo companies to deploy the wizard. It's easy to use. Go to the prospectwizard.com. Get a free 30 day trial. Talk to my boy, Dave Gallon. He will get you all set up and let the leads flow based on the wizard. Go get them.

1:03 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks. I have the pleasure of bringing one of the elite trainers related to strength, ski, snowboard, and tonal to the show. We're talking today with Troy Taylor, senior director of performance, innovation, and potentially my future coach in the future here as soon as possible. So welcome to your first Halo Talks. I really appreciate you having me on. Awesome. So, look, we've kinda toggled between cardio is good for you. You know, you should go and and walk. You should do some strength training. I used to work with the group that owned Gold's Gym. I said, let's just stick true to, you know, to to to strength training and and look you good in the mirror. So talk about your background and, how things have kinda come full circle.

1:51 Yeah. So my background, not to date myself, but for about 20 years was in the elite sports space. Was fortunate to work for 3 different Olympic teams, so team GB, team Canada, team USA, across about 10 or 11 different Olympic sports, 7 Olympic games, ended up as a I was a sports scientist, a strength and conditioning coach, a physiologist, ended up as a high performance director at US Ski and Snowboard for about 6 years, around the Olympic team for the Pohang Chung Olympic games. So people like Mikaela Shiffrin, Lindsey Vonn, Sean White, that those types of people. So I've been involved in the sport fitness health space for my entire career. That's what my graduate degrees are in, and just sort of super enjoyed that. As it relates to sort of cardio and strength, like, all exercise, I think, for good. For those that are interested in living long and living living better for longer, both cardio and strength training are super important. I think for the longest time early in my career, particularly in the general population space, you know, it was very much a cardio first. You know, that's where you're gonna get most of your health benefits from. And the strength side of it was really for either for aesthetics and bodybuilding or bros that wanted to put on muscle mass and, you know, look look good in on the beach. And I think what you've seen over the last 5 to 10 years is a plethora of evidence of both sort of in the research side and now in social media of the value of strength training for long living healthy lives. Yep. So let let's start off with elite athletes. Talk about what it's

3:24 like to train someone who, 1, is at that level, 2, probably has their own, you know, ideas and prescription of of how they wanna train, and how is it to manage somebody like that to to actually get them to the next level. And and and then we'll we'll talk about, you know, how to how that is like the top of the mountain, and then how do you train the the the mass market? Sure. Like, I think whether you're an elite athlete or general population, everyone's an individual. Right? So everyone's got their own specific quirks, either, you know, things that they like or don't like, things that their body responds to or don't responded to. And so I think you have to treat them as an individual. I would say painting a broad brush. Once an athlete gets to being on Olympic team, on a professional sports teams, they've had a lot of successful training and know a lot about what works for them. And so you would be a fool not to try and learn everything you can from them about their training and what has historically worked. But just because it's historically worked doesn't mean it's also optimal. And so you're keeping this balance between, like, understanding what they've worked, and and then sort of thinking about, okay. Well, is there ways that we could make this better? I refer a lot to the there's a an underlying psychological model, self determination theory. That really is about autonomy. Right? You having ownership in your program. So I like to give athletes and general population as much autonomy as they can. But you also need competency, so you need to be good at something, and you also

4:55 need, to have relatedness or connectedness, a sense of purpose around that. But those are the underlying sort of, constructs of motivation of how you get someone. And I think the further up the elite athlete, the more autonomy you give them in their training on a broad basis. Some people not, but most people, yes. So let let's talk about you as a a director of performance innovation, which are kinda two words that are, you know, performance is kind of like, okay, that's like traditional. Innovation is like, you know, Troy needs to know like what the next best thing is or like every piece of technology, physiology. So how do you, if somebody's gonna wants to aspire to be in your position, how do you kinda manage and challenge yourself with also saying, hey. I'm not like, you know, a a magician, or I'm not trying every new thing.

5:44 Sure. Yeah. It's, it's a tough balance. Number 1, surround yourself with people much, much smarter than yourselves. I get to work with data scientists and hardware engineers and software engineers and, you know, other performance staff members that are far more intelligent than I am and have really good ideas. So so number 1 there. Number 2, I think you have to have principles or mechanisms, that you rely on to filter through the noise. Right? There's a lot of stuff out there. You could spend your entire career chasing your trail around, like, what's, you know, what's the new thing and some influencer is saying we should do this. And so you have to have kind of a checklist or principles. I tend to work off the idea that, like, is there a underlying mechanism, physiology, psychology, or some other that I can understand or someone smarter than me in my network, this makes sense that it should work. That's sort of number 1. Number 2 would be, like, has it been shown to work in the doses that are physiologically normal? And so, like, you know, an example of that might be, like, testosterone. Right? We know that testosterone exogenously taken in large amounts helps with muscle mass. But, actually, like, the the amounts that you can manipulate with endogenous, physiologically is much smaller zones around that. So but is there a mechanism and is it in a dose response that might make sense to the I can kind of work around there? And thirdly, like, is that data ideally in humans or if we're looking at animal research primates that are most similar to humans to underlying mechanism. And if you can tick those, then it becomes a cost benefit

7:15 analysis. Right? What is the cost financially or time wise, and what's the potential benefit I might get out of it? And is it worth a try if it's safe? So, you know, when you'd look at the at the ski and the snowboard, obviously, there's different mechanics related to becoming an elite, athlete, and and you use a different, you know, maybe a lot of balancing, maybe a lot of core. When you go into it to an athlete that's in a sport that maybe is not something you've covered before, how how do you kind of walk through alright. Let me understand. You know, I remember that there were football players who were taking, like, ballet and, like, dance classes, you know, which now, like, you see a wide receiver and they're like, you know, they're like touching their toes against the, the the line or you we got a guy who, trains hockey, players up in up in Ottawa, and, like, he's all about, like, just, like, the shift. And, so so how do you kinda diagnose that and maybe, like, you you have such a unique opportunity to kinda, like, take things from different sports and say, hey. I know what you need to do, and I know how to, like, optimize those parts. Totally. I would say most of my career, my early career, and even now is taking stuff from one sport that I learned and contextualizing it and fitting to it to a new sport. Certainly, I I've stolen my entire career and continue to do that on a on a daily basis. So I think number 1, you have to understand what it takes to win, like a sports demand analysis, a gold medal profile. What are you trying to develop in said

8:46 sport or in your life in general? But having an understanding of what the big picture looks like, the term in British sport is used, what it's what it takes to win model. But that that will break down technically, tactically, physiologically, psychologically. What are the traits, skills, capacities, that I need to be able to develop in an athlete to give them a shot of winning? And so I think you start with their and so every sport you'll go into, you kind of learn. You'll look at, like, you know, history from research. You'll talk to tons of coaches, talk to tons of athletes. What what data does the individual sports team have on that sport? So what have other successful athletes done in the past? And you can kinda build up this. It's a jigsaw puzzle. You don't have all the pieces, but you get enough to see the kind of the shape of the picture that you wanna create or wanna help create. So I start start definitely with, with what it takes to win. And then then there's about like like assessing where you're at, where do you wanna get to, and how you're bridging the gap. It's not, like, overly complex in that kind of way in that you've got depending on the particular sport. You know, some professional sports teams, it might be a win now. I've got, like, one season to develop this.

9:52 I've got one off season. And so you it's a very short tier period to develop that. Or in Olympic sports, typically, I've got a 4 year quad or maybe even 8 years if it's a development athlete to build this long term plan. So you can start layering in the pieces of development. Okay. Let's build strength. Let's just build strength in general to start with. Let's build a big cardiovascular base if we need to do that. And then as we get further or closer to that goal better profile, we can bring in elements. I'd like to bring in elements of sports specificity. That's not necessarily the idea of, like, training exactly like the sport looks in the gym because that doesn't always transfer, that well, but it is. Hey. Like, you know, an alpine race, Wengen, I think, is the longest race in men's alpine skiing. It's close to 3 miles. It's about 3 minutes. I think we need 3 minute endurance capacity in isometric, you know, 2 to 3 times your body weight squatting. Okay. Let's build capacities like that in the gym first.

10:47 And then you can kind of like so you've got, like, this base of health and foundation. This kind of then a a layer of sports specificity. And then you can kinda think about your performance tactics on the top of the pyramid. What are the things that are gonna work for this individual, a particular warm up routine, particular food strategies, particular sleep strategies, or maybe advanced stuff like when I was at US ski Ski and Snowboard, one of the camps, we did a partnership with Cirque du Soleil. We took a lot of the free skiing snowboarders. We took them out to Cirque du Soleil for 3 days. They did trampot wars. They did all these acrobatic stuff. Right? They twist and spin in some of the free skiing snowboarding sports. And so, like, to learn from these, like, you know, what is an exceptional in a similar space, but different on how they approach that. And so but you look at these performance strategies on top.

11:36 This is Pete Moore. I wanna let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault, and what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and 1 month free or giving away shakes or giving away T shirts. What you wanna do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value, and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called rewards vault. The rewards vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions. You are gonna get those answers. You're gonna be able to target those members, and you're gonna reward them inside your club, inside your spa, and outside of the club, and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues, and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards. You shouldn't be. Promotion Vault's your answer. Trust me. This is real. When I watch games sometimes, I watch, like, a, English Premier League game, and it'll tell you, you know, how many miles the guy ran, right, through throughout the game. The data and the metrics are becoming more and more transparent and accessible. Do you see that as that's great? Or do you see it as like, hey. You kinda like k. You kinda like going like, piercing the veil a little too much. You know, like, I I don't want I don't want the guy I'm training who's like a striker, you know, playing for Man City. Like,

13:09 do I really want people to know, like, you know, all of his, like, stats and his, you know, oxygen levels and, you know, blood pressure that that may be, like, somewhere accessible through, like, a premium, you know, service? And now it's like like, stay away from my athlete. You know, look at the performance. Don't, like, datatize like my guys. Is that is that a fear, or is that like a is that like a media opportunity or education opportunity? I think I I personally am not, not scared of the data, or I don't think there's a negative. I think it's the application of how you utilize it. Collecting data is neither good nor bad. It's neutral. Right? There there isn't thing. It's how you apply it, what you utilize, how do you, you know, work with an individual about that. Like, you know, I'm wearing an Oura ring and, like, you know, sleep data. Some athletes might wanna know their sleep before the day of a competition. Some may not. And, you know, it's up to the support staff, the coaching, and the individual athlete to know how they want to utilize that data. I think on the plus side, it's mostly beneficial if used well. But I think there's a big discrepancy in the elite sport space around just data for collecting data. Let's say, Myles running soccer. I'm I'm not an expert in that space, but height doesn't correlate with a lot of performance. Messi might be the the, you know, the the least distance traveled, but the most important player. And so your metrics have to be to walk around a lot, and and good for him. You know?

14:37 Like, you're just waiting for the opportunity and not Exactly. So your your metric your metric doesn't matter. Right? You need to measure what matters. Maybe there are certain, like, types of midfielders where it's really important to measure distant capacity run and things like that. But for the most part, I think you have to individualize it. What's important to the person, measure what's matter, and then refer it back to them and their coach and others in a way that's gonna make sense to them make the optimal change, which might be not at all. It might be high level, or it might be the full detail, and I think that was individualized. So so gambling would be bad, and education and optimization would be good in in your you know, like, I saw Elon Musk said, like, there's a 10% chance that, you know, AI is is very destructive, you know, or maybe 20%, he said. It's not 0. Yeah. It's it's it's not it's not 0 for sure. And I think whether it's whether it's artificial intelligence or or human interpretation of that data, it's still the the emphasis on, like, the level of intelligence that is being used, it's not a blanket. There is intelligence. It's like you have to actually apply intelligently to be intelligent. So so there are some athletes that I see, like, Djokovic, where, he might tell you a couple things that he's doing, but he's not giving you, like, his full, you know, workout or, you know, physical or mental, you know, preparation. Do is is part of that, for intimidation purposes?

15:57 Is part of that for, you know, I found something and nobody's found yet? What what do you think is, like like, the the yin yang on that? I think it's individual on on different athletes. I think there's there's an element of mesquite mystique about it that creates intimidation. There's a a component. In my experience, having worked across all the different athletes, and I've been fortunate to work with a lot of Olympic gold medalists, like people like Mikaela Shiffrin winning a skier in the world. There's very little secrets that they're doing that are completely different. What they do is apply most of the things slightly better than everyone else, and they are more consistent in their application. There are some things where you're gaining competitive advantage. In elite sports, generally, for, like, 6 to 12 months, you find something that's a new way, something, you know, sometimes it might be something like supplementation.

16:47 An example would be like beetroot juice, which has got nitric oxide in the early, you know, early 2000, in outer two competitions. Some teams were on that earlier than others. Ketones were another ones in the Tour de France. You find this, but it's, like, very short lived. You're finding these sort of incremental changes at US Ski and Snowboard. We did virtual reality for the 2018 Olympics, which was a new innovation in that sport. But they're relatively small, and they aren't they're the cherries on top. They are not the cake. Gotcha. The the cake and the 95% and actually mostly what matters, is is is the basics and and executing well. I think where elite athletes, like, don't want you to share is they partly want that mystique, and they partly wanna feel there's something special that they're doing that no one else would. It gives them a psychological competitive advantage as much as Understood.

17:35 Yeah. So are there a lot of athletes that work out and allow people to to log in and work out with them either through Tonal or through, you know, Zoom or or, like, if you wanna train like LeBron, like, does he say, okay, for the next 30 days, you know, I'm gonna be up at 5 in the morning. Join me. I'm gonna put my FaceTime on. It's gonna cost you, you know, x 1,000 of dollars to train. I haven't seen that yet. I just wonder why. Or is it not something they wanna commit to or have, like, exposed? Yeah. I I think it's more I I would say it's less about the exposing what they're doing and more about the commitment and time. When you're at that very top level, you're you're trying to optimize your life around your performance on on the basketball court, on the ski hill, on the football field, whatever it might be, and therefore committing to something like that. Like, you know, I know Mike Mancias, strainer for LeBron quite well. Like, they they have a a scare. They're up at 6 in the morning. They're doing the but but they have to modify stuff because of press influencers, because of others. And so that maintaining that adaptability. I think it's less about exposing and more it's just not logistically easy. Gotcha. Gotcha. So let's talk about Tonal and, you know, what what you've done there and how you feel connected fitness is gonna continue to to be part of, you know, the the entire ecosystem, or how you see maybe that morphing into, hey. I'm gonna give you a prescription. I want you to do total 3 days a week here. I want you to do this in a park.

19:05 I want you to do TRX. I want you to kinda use me as, like, a weapon and not necessarily, like, I want you to be only tonal or I want you to be only, you know, lifetime fitness or, you know, pick pick a brand. I feel like there's a lot of choices that that people can make that might actually round them out in different ways that it's not like us versus them. Yeah. Yeah. So my role at Tonal, I'm I'm super fortunate. I get to work across kind of 3 spaces. So my team works across, like, curriculum development, exercises, sets, reps, things that you'll see on the train over the coaches are doing and and get to program and work on that side. Get to work on product development, so new features. So, like, we just, recently launched this something called training effect metrics where essentially every single workout that you do is categorized how much, like, hypertrophy stimulus was that, how much movement quality stimulus, how much, like, functional strength stimulus. So sort of the around there. It's almost like think about, like, step tracking almost for, for weight lifting, not just in sets and reps, but how much stimulus for a particular outcome did you get. And so get to work across product development. And I also get to work in this, like, forward thinking innovation research, like, you know, where is where is fitness going in the next 3 to 5 years? Not in the next 3 to 5 months, but next 3 to 5 years. And how do we make sure that, you know, the tone is aligned to be to be there? So it's a really interesting space to get to play around. My like, the I'd like, you know, big pieces. People need to on average, we need to exercise more. I don't think anyone's gonna disagree that they're like particularly in the US population, but western populations in general.

20:38 Like, we don't really do enough cardio. Like, I think the CDC or yeah. I think CDC would say something like, you know, maybe about 50% of the population self report they meet their cardio guidelines and less than 30% meet the strength guidelines. That's strengthening exercises twice a week. And self report, we know is inflated. Yeah. And so that's only a third of people. So we need people to do more. I think the evidence that it is beneficial for health span, for lifespan, just for general function is overwhelming. So I am all about where do we need to meet people and how do we make it more engaging and more consistent. And so for some people, like me, yeah, that's a 100% total in my house. For some people that might be going to see a personal trainer in their gym once or twice a week and then doing something in their home once or twice a week because that's easier. I've got, you know, young kids, a busy job.

21:26 I I go on kind of things. Some people, it might be, you know, working out one way when they're at home and another way when they're traveling. Some people, it might be seasonal. Hey. I really like to get outside and run-in summer when it's nice, but if you live in Park City, like me in November and it's snowing, like, hey. I can't think. So I think we as fitness and health professionals have to have to be aware of, like, how do we fit to make it more engaging and more consistent for the average population? What the fitness industry is great at is people who are already doing fitness, we make it even better and easier for them. And I think as we we need to grow the pie as an industry and how do we make it more inclusive for more people. Yeah. So if we kinda rewind back to COVID, I'm assuming you were one of the people that said, hey. This digital and the technology, that's gonna be a piece of the puzzle, but the bricks and mortar isn't going away, and and and the in person is not going away.

22:20 So how were you able to maybe have conversations with people, you know, if I liken it to, like, Peloton, you know, so they we're gonna have, like, a 1000000000 members or whatever the guy the CEO said at the time, which is Big bigger than Apple. Yeah. Yeah. Bigger than Apple. I'm like, well, this is pretty easy to do, and it's got a cash register on it. So I I I I'm assuming that's not a great analogy, and I told them that actually when I when I met with them a long time ago. But were you kind of like a, like like a stability force or, like, saying, hey. Look. This is gonna pop for a while, but, like, it's gonna come back to normal. And when it does come back to normal, let's just make sure that we're, like, best in class. And that total is here, and it's not a fad, and it's not something that people just did during COVID, which unfortunately a lot of us are connected fitness companies, you know, are are no longer around. So how how were you able to kinda calibrate that just given your experience? Yeah. Like, I would say it's it like, in some ways, it's quite tough. Right? You're in this once in a lifetime, thankfully. We never wanna go back to a pandemic, but once in a lifetime kind of things where you've got, like, a very captive audience. We were, like, a year old company at the time. Like, been in product market for a year, and you're selling these things like no one's business. You you know, you can't keep up with demand. Supply chains are tricky. You've got venture capitals that are literally giving you, you know, crazy valuations and and throwing money at you to scale as quickly as you can. It's almost like you have to take advantage of that while it's happening. If you don't, you will die, and and someone else will. So I think you have to take capital of it.

23:49 I think what we we were fortunate as a company, and Ali, our our founder and CTO, now is is kind of like, think. He built this because we want to help people improve their lives. We're not an entertainment device. It like, right? Nothing wrong with Peloton. I love their business. Like, they're actually doing relatively well off their risk earnings call. Like, nothing wrong. No slight on them. They're in entertainment. Right? Their their idea is taking fitness, making it more entertaining, and people will do it. Not not bad model, but not Tonal's model. Tonal model wants entertainment or engagement, but we're about outcomes. Right? We wanna improve people's strengths, improve people's lives. Like, and we can get to track a lot of that. And so that's always come from Ali because of what how he founded the product. It was about his life and reversing type 2 diabetes for himself and, like, you know, losing £45 or whatever he he did. And so that's always been core in the company. It's certainly, like, I'm not gonna lie, the last 18 you know, previous maybe 18 months or the last 6 months or so, but, yeah, you had to recalibrate after the business, after the the the crazy time of COVID, the escalation in scale, and then a sink back down to what's, like, a sustainable business. We're super fortunate that we've been able to grow every single month we've been in existence. Never had a month where we have declined. And we'll be able to do that, like, partly because our churn is so low. Our churn is, like, you know, sub 1% monthly, like, industry level. Like Nice. I don't know, half of Peloton's maybe. And Peloton's like the industry leader, and we're probably about half of that. And so we and it's not just people keep us paying us. It's people keep using us. I think average engagement

25:21 after 3 years is still more than twice a week. 2.5 times mean after 3 years or something in that kinda range. And so you got this sticky product, that you're able to ride that out. But, like, yeah, you have to recalibrate that, you know, how what what does the future look like and where do we play? And we think the home fitness strength market is still actually relatively undersaturated. If you think about Peloton, if I said 50% meet the meet the demand of of of aerobic and and only, you know, 30% meet meet the demand of strength. Like, the the the saturation of the strength market is nowhere near what Peloton is in in the cardio market right now. So there's still a lot of opportunity in that and in adjacent spaces, whether that's, you know, within personal training gyms or in corporate wellness or in boutique fitness and all of these sort of auxiliary places where we have a great device that might might add a lot of value.

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27:28 So so as we close out here, you do a lot of research and and you publish articles, and reports. You talk about rewards based, you know, strategies, and also you you you you're you're also talking about, like, the science versus the fitness. So can you can you give us a little bit of sound bites on recent research you've done, maybe a couple of moments that that you've had as part of that? Yeah. Absolutely. So I got I got a really interesting research study, but the results are coming out next week, and so I can't talk about until then. But if this comes do an update. Yeah. It publishes after then. So some really, really interesting about time efficient training and ways that we can get hopefully better if the results it's 3rd party independent research, so I don't get to control it, but better results in less time. So I'm really excited about that. But I think the the the biggest sort of the one of the we did a study a couple of years ago out of Rhode Island University, doctor Christy Ward, Christy Ward. And she looked at, 45 year old average so 45 middle aged females, new to strength training, and put, like, 8 weeks training, half on tonal, half not on tonal, you know, on traditional selectercise.

28:40 And, like, the reality is is outcomes were fairly similar in that strength. Like, both made strength changes. 8 weeks is not a lot of time to make body composition changes, but both there. But what what they saw is over the 8 weeks, the on using traditional, gym equipment, the engagement or the enjoyment scale dropped every single week down to significantly different at the end of 8 weeks. And so what, like, kind of hints to me is, like, those people probably wouldn't have carried on if they weren't on a research study and certainly would have stopped. Tonal stayed consistent enjoyment from 1st week to last week. No. People are more likely to enjoy it. And so that's really interesting to from us to look at an enjoyment because, ultimately, it's about engagement, enjoying the exercise that you're doing so you stay consistent. So so if you if you if you go down a layer on that, are you able to figure out is that because, you know, they felt like it was 1 on 1 and there was nobody else around? Was it the user interface? Is it the, you know, some some rewards or, you know, someone talking to you? What what what do you think the the key traits are? We've done quite a lot of UX research around it, and it's it's the fact that we're full stack or closed loop in that the hardware, software, and content are all integrated and all caught to each other. So you lift, you get immediate feedback on that, and you get coached about it. You'll get form feedback. You can watch videos. And it's so it's this very self contained, almost like a, you know, slightly walled garden like Apple in some way Sure. That you have this kind of full loop system, and that's super engaging. Yes.

30:08 We have reward streaks, badges, particularly useful earlier in people's journeys, fitness journeys. And then we have, like, deeper deeper dives when they're deeper data dives when they're later in their journey. Okay. Track my volume over time. How many strength sets have I done this week? Am I progressing in my overall strength score? And so you see this idea of, like, okay. Get early reward type systems, and then later building that sort of, like, competency and engagement with the data. Well, what would you say as as a as a tangent to that? If I'm doing 20 minutes of strength training in the gym versus doing 20 minutes on tonal, obviously, my form is gonna be perfect on tonal. I'm gonna get reinforcement on that. How much of a difference does that make in in in, you know, muscle gain, in, you know, in in in cosmetic? You know, like, if I if I'm doing it by myself, I'm not I'm not optimizing the the the the set. Is that is that part of it maybe? I I think there's elements. Like, you know, all depends on the individuals. I don't wanna say you can't get, like, great gains with traditional free weights. That would be, you know, foolish to say and not truthful. You can, but it depends on where you are on your strength training journey, how well you execute the exercises.

31:21 You know? Obviously, you know, if you're a a Olympia bodybuilder, you can lift really well. If you're a first time novice and you go in and you don't have a coach, like, you're probably not getting the benefits out of it, and therefore, we can help with coaching, with form feedback, with videos, with coaching queues, with data around how we do that. The other element is, like, when you go into a gym, and, again, nothing wrong with that. But, like, you go in the gym for 20 minutes, like, how much of that time is actually working? Like, you know, you don't own the gym. Right? You don't have every single piece of equipment. Every single dumbbell is not in theirs. If you go in on Monday night at 6 o'clock on January 2nd, it's probably you're probably waiting around for most of that 20 minutes. Where we have a lot of our efficiency built in is, hey. I can do, you know, a bench press and then a row, which is an antagonistic superset. It's a very, you know, time efficient training technique, and no one's gonna jump on the bench press while I'm doing my row. Right?

32:14 Like, I change one arm position or or don't even change an arm position, just move the bench slightly, and then I can switch between those. And so you have this, like, flexibility within the time schedule, which makes it huge. And then we have, like, dynamic weight mode. We can do eccentric overload or change these more advanced training techniques, which might optimize training even more effectively. Awesome. So so in closing here, you got any, quotes that you live by or, you know, sayings that are like Troyisms? I'm trying to think. I like, I love the I think it's it's been contributed to a bunch of different people, so I don't know who said it first. But I love the the only competitive advantage is losing learning faster than everyone else. And I think that's that's something that I live within my elite sport career. Like, we're constantly what won in 2014 didn't win in 2018 in the Olympic games. And, you know, performance is always improving. And I think as we're in this age of fitness, I think actually learning faster about what works for your body, how you utilize data, and and kind of things, it it rings pretty true there from an individual and also from a business perspective. Awesome.

33:16 Well, Troy, thanks for coming on and giving us a a bit of a tutorial here. It's been a pleasure. And, performance innovation, we're gonna hear about some new things coming out, on your research, and, check out Tonal. And, we will also see you in the background of, of elite athletes getting medals. So thanks for, for everything you've done for the industry. Thanks so much.