Curious about the future of fitness technology? In this episode, we are joined by Troy Taylor, the Senior Director of Performance Innovation at Tonal. Troy takes us on a journey through Tonal's success story amidst the pandemic, and the goldmine of data they've tapped into from their expansive user base. We take a deep dive into how connected fitness gained momentum during 2020 and 2021 and how Tonal harnessed this to their advantage.
Troy unveils Tonal's foray into the active aging market segment. With a blend of stability exercises, lower body power and custom content, Troy shares how Tonal is bringing its message to this population.
Resources and Links
Tonal
Troy Taylor on Instagram
Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount here
Functional Aging Institute -- Use FAIMM50 discount code
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
Curious about the future of fitness technology? In this episode, we are joined by Troy Taylor, the Senior Director of Performance Innovation at Tonal. Troy takes us on a journey through Tonal's success story amidst the pandemic, and the goldmine of data they've tapped into from their expansive user base. We take a deep dive into how connected fitness gained momentum during 2020 and 2021 and how Tonal harnessed this to their advantage.
Troy unveils Tonal's foray into the active aging market segment. With a blend of stability exercises, lower body power and custom content, Troy shares how Tonal is bringing its message to this population.
Resources and Links
Tonal
Troy Taylor on Instagram
Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount here
Functional Aging Institute -- Use FAIMM50 discount code
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
You know, the pandemic gave a fast, intense spotlight to a lot of fitness ideas, trends and companies, and some of them have gone away already, while others still have us watching to see what might happen next. Were all of these things just trends, or can some of them have staying power? Well, that's the question I'll be applying to one of the leaders in the so-called connected fitness space today. That's Tonal, which got a lot of attention in 2020 and 2021. Welcome to Optimal Aging, the show for gym and studio owners who want to grow their business with people over 50, and for fitness consumers, too, who want to stay up on the latest information and trends.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, jay Croft of Prime Fit Content, which provides marketing materials to fitness professionals to reach this large, lucrative and underserved segment. Today I'm talking with Troy Taylor. He's the Senior Director of Performance Innovation at Tonal. He brings us up to speed on Tonal and shares his self-described geek-level interest in fitness data and where it all might be heading. It's fascinating stuff and I'm glad to see Tonal finally showing interest in the market. Here's my conversation with Troy. Troy hello, nice to see you today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on, Jay. It's my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Bring us up to speed on where Tonal is and where the connected industry is after COVID. I got a lot of attention there when nobody could leave the house and I'm curious where we are now and what the future looks like for that segment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, there's no hiding. It's been a rollercoaster, I think, across the whole connected fitness space Not properly broadly the whole fitness space as a whole, whether it's a Britson water chain, facilities or more of the connected space. Yeah, the pandemic changed a lot of things for a lot of people. Obviously, the connected fitness market and Tonal, the early leader in that space, had insane growth that you would never, you couldn't predict or would ever imagine, fueled by the pandemic and essentially people needing a new way to work out and accelerating that opportunity. That would kind of have taken five to 10 years, otherwise was condensed into a 18-month, two-year span.
Speaker 2:But, really for us. We took advantage of a lot of that growth and grew and have a huge portion share of the connected strength market outcoming out of the pandemic. Obviously coming, say, 2022 was a year of change for us and I think of the economy and generally the world opened up a bit more and that combined with, honestly, companies like ours, the startup that was heavily funded by venture capital. That's how that model works. You do hyper growth, you take venture capital money, you spend a lot on marketing, you grow as quickly as possible and at some point, you acquire enough customers and enough recurring revenue that you have a really solid business. That's the way that model works. In 2022, in addition to the market, obviously, a lot of that VC money change the way that the companies were valued and looked at. It was less about how much growth you can have and what your bottom line looks like Are you making money and so that led to a lot change within the entire market and within tonal. We obviously adjusted our business model. We spent less on marketing. We went to slow down to how do we become a sustainable, solid, really happy business that's growing at a good and steady rate. That isn't necessarily putting superstar go athletes on Super Bowl commercials every week and things like that. There was a lot of change, not easy change. It's never fun to go through some of those things, so it's nice when someone's funding you to keep growing at a sustainable rate, but probably not realistic to continue forever.
Speaker 2:So for us as a company, I think the market as a whole 2020 year, 2022 was really about right sizing businesses, making the solid fundamentals of the economics of the business make it sense and really then for 2023, tonal has been really ball but doubling down on our core market, doubling down on people who are most likely already resistance training and probably on their own home, where we're more managed by. So some of the key demographics around there are really speaking to them. While we right size the business, we got the housing order in with this new business model. So that's top tonal and now we're relatively steady as a business and growing and a stamina on two feet with a healthy balance sheet and that's that. So the market overall is still probably my interpretation of it of connected Genesis still a little in flux.
Speaker 2:You had a lot of players come on in 2021 2022. Not all of them probably got the scale to sustain long term businesses. We'll see. That's my interpretation, and so there's a sort of a fair amount of flux, I think, still within the industry, and now we're also seeing the bricks and mortar space that had this great revival after COVID and sort of consuming creative growth, and some of that's plattering off and some companies are still growing, some are f45 or others that are delisted and changed. So I think there's still some flux within the market overall and I guess we'll wait and see how some of that plays out.
Speaker 1:How much can you tell us about your numbers as far as your members, clients, subscribers? How do we refer to them?
Speaker 2:Members is probably the sort of the way to describe members. We don't disclose like specifics around that and just the way that we're not a public company right now, so things. But yeah, we have a large membership base in the hundreds of thousands of people using our platform on a weekly and monthly basis. So then we have big membership based. It can always be bigger. How we'd love it to grow income some more, but we definitely have that. And specifically related to your podcast, and this week got a number of members like tens of thousands of members in the 50 55 plus range, so arguably the largest database of strength training in the world. About total members have listed 50 billion pounds with a B across more than three billion reps, 25 million training sessions so huge data set. That sort of customer bases generated 30 components, the world's largest strength training database and excited to what the insights we can draw from that to help people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to get to that in a minute, so let me back up here. You classic customer is what? 35 to 55, I believe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say, historically, the most of our members are 35 to 55 year olds. We have people ranging from 16-ish. There's some probably teenage kids, that's the kind of thing. But our membership range ranges from 18 to 80 plus is the broadest kind of things, With 35 to 55 probably being where the largest cohort of our membership. You go a little outside of that 25 to 35 year olds, and there's a decent chunk. And you go up in above that from 55 to 65 year olds there's a decent chunk and then it starts to platter off a little bit after those two. But that's the key demographic.
Speaker 1:Now, why do you think that is? Is that deliberate? Are you specifically targeting people in that age group, or is it more about income level and circumstance and that just happened to be in that age? Well, tell me about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's probably a little bit of chicken, a little bit of that. I think that's the target demographic that probably most started to buy us and until had the most traction that they tell their friends we're a very kinesthetic experience. Lots of people lifted weights. But lifting total weights, digital weight, has a unique feel, almost magical about it. I'm not.
Speaker 2:I think that's what people tell us and so there's that, I think, a referral piece that led to that. There is an economic base of that as well. So 35 year olds generally are hitting higher levels of their income. We are a relatively expensive product $4,000. Suddenly there's some financial pieces there, I think the older clients, how the 55 plus, I think is probably a combination. It's a decent chunk of our membership but it's not the major part and that's probably a couple of fold. I think resistance training for that age group, as your audience knows, is a growing topic but maybe one that hasn't in as well, let's say communicated by health populations. I said maybe say like going for a walk and a road bit kind of training.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:That's the evidence and I think the messaging and podcast, like yours and many others, are changing that narrative. So there's one sort of importance of strength training and then there's probably just we didn't communicate to them, or we haven't historically communicated to that target group as much as we could, and I want to ask you about that marketing to that audience.
Speaker 1:But first you said digital weight and I know that's what tonal offers, but it's still such a strange phrase to hear. Tell us just a little bit about what digital weight is and why people say it feels like magic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. So, rather than a space system so you've got a barbell and you load up with 10, 20, 30 pounds, whatever it might be of mass basis we essentially have an entrant magnetic weights or with motor that applies that same level of resistance essentially to a cable machine it's behind me that kind of thing so it essentially applies that same level of resistance. What that difference is? It means, rather than I don't know, you were trying to get into an overhead press or something like that. If you were doing that on freeway, you'd have to lift that bar up, lift it maybe to a rack, get into a rack and then push it overhead With tonal, with it being electronic Bluetooth, on off, on off and you can switch it off so it's much easier to get position.
Speaker 2:And then, once you're actually applying that, there's something about having weight to then having up to 200 pounds, but let's say just 30 or 40 pounds the touch of a blue jude button and then the actual sort of once you're lifting. When you lift with free weights, there's inertia. There's inertia you have to overcome to move the weight. But once the weight is moving, you don't have to push all the way through. You get a little bit of help. If you're moving fast with electric, it's as much less inertia than there is with free weights. So it means that your muscles have to make all the way through the range of motion and so this really starts peak activation kind of period. So that's the main differences.
Speaker 1:It's a much more efficient way to spend your time working out, isn't it? You've got greater time under tension, is that correct?
Speaker 2:You can. Yes, then you don't have to change, like changing weights on time. So there's many components but yes, it's a very efficient way. If you think about tonal, if I wanted to go from lifting, say, 25 pounds to lifting 50 pounds, I'd have to. On a bar bar, I take weights off, I put weights on, that's time with tonal, you tap a button and so there's a lot of those processes around the mechanics of lifting that we expedite so you can get a lot of work in a very efficient period of time.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Okay, so I focus on the 50 and over market, but it's really interesting now because Gen Xers are coming into that cohort and changing it quite a bit and a lot of people in the fitness industry are saying, gee, it's not so much 50 where life really changes. It might be more 40. And your target audience is 35 to 55. So tell me about this initial beta programming that you're going to be offering, I believe in October, for the 55 plus market. What's it's your, it's tonal's first foray into directly reaching this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So, as I mentioned, we have a decent size of our membership that are in that 50-55 plus range, but it's not a target group that we really marketed to or definitely communicated as I think strongly as we could have done. We've obviously attracted a large number of them but we have, I would say, prioritized it as a company. And October is really about highlighting the benefits, working and showing some of our member stories. This great member, arli she's a 66, two-time Tanzer survivor. She just lifted £3 million on Tonal in the last two years. There's a bunch of good Tonalcom stories. She's highlighted kind of things, but we've got these awesome member stories of people that are making these great life-changing strength changes that are really impacting their lives. So it's about communicating and showing those. It's about working with some of the sort of maybe influencers that have relatively large audiences in those that know and love and use Tonal and making sure we get that story out. And then it's also making sure that we have programming of content that is specifically designed to speak to an active, aging market.
Speaker 2:And in that I don't. It's not wildly different. The basics of training are not fundamentally wildly different for someone that's 44, 55, then it is in December 20. But there are some things that we might want to emphasize more or less that might be more important. We know that stability in about single leg exercises and working on that becomes more important. The data clearly shows on research that we do start to lose some of our balance as we start to get older. So ways that we can work on single leg and kind of things in appropriate fashion under resistance.
Speaker 2:The role of lower body power is one that I'm personally really passionate about. There's a really strong and emerging or emerged evidence around that strength is important, Muscle mass is important. Power the ability to get out of a chair is really important. Your gait speed is related to your power. If you're a little younger and you know I can get out of a chair, just fight real golf swing and how fighting drivers relates to power. So it's I'm really interested in that.
Speaker 2:So make sure we got programming, make sure we emphasize that lower body power and then sarcopenia, mitigating it and sarcopenia age related loss of muscle mass, and making sure that we're having programming. That's making sure we're hitting enough resistance training to increase that. And I think if you went back 10 years ago I don't think the research evidence is certainly delayed public Probably didn't think you could put on muscle mass much beyond 30 or 40 and definitely not, and that's just unventally wrong. You've got there's a meta analysis came out by Gojap a couple of years ago and use it or lose it. I think it's the title he showed. People are putting on muscle mass in their 50s, 60s and 70s and they're putting on strength maybe not muscle mass plus a, but strength in that 80s and 90s and so we want to do our part to communicate that.
Speaker 1:Whether it's good for tonal, but it's just right it is, and I think there's a tremendous gap there. People much older than I am I'm going to be 60 soon and people much older than I am, I think, don't understand the role of strength and just functional fitness and then being able to carry on their lives. They still think that muscle means weightlifting young boys that they remember from college and high school or something. They don't see that it's relevant to just health. As we age, they're not aware of sarcopenia or osteoporosis, and now weightlifting makes bones stronger and that kind of thing. So there's a tremendous opportunity here for everyone in strength training.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering what has finally spurred tonal to take this initial step to reach out to this market, and not so much from a not sure a stick point of view, as it's a nice thing to do, but from a financial point of view. There's a lot of money there. There's a lot of people over 55 with money and they might not want to go to a gym. Seems like it's a good crossover with tone, but perhaps not. What am I missing?
Speaker 2:I know, I think it is like I don't know, I can't remember the strategy business part of some, but sometimes you have to say no to the good, to say yes to the gray, and we've had a lot of really good and great opportunities. We're still at relatively young startup. Yes, we had this incredible growth, but honestly, there's just more good projects that we want to do than we've had the time so far to do. So I don't think there's anything about that particular market that we didn't want to address. We just there's only so many messages you can put out there and so many kind of ways that you can build your brand as a young startup, even as a well established company yeah, even the largest companies in the world. While it appeals to a lot of people, then it actually appeal to everyone, although they appear sort of very large, but that's only in the last five to 10 years. You go back before the iPhone and they were probably not there. So I would say fundamentally, there's not a reason why we haven't. We just had too many things and we got around to it. Now I'm more excited to do that. Yes, from a business economics perspective, it's a really.
Speaker 2:There's an increasingly large evidence base around the role of health on active aging, not just improving lifespan but improving health span. And I'm going to go on health span. It's one that I see. My nan is 101 years old. Incredible that she's lived 101. I span is long. She went to my. She was traveling internationally until her early 90s, which is huge feet, wow. You go to Australia she's in Britain, by the way. It's a long flight, but the last five to six years and she's in her mid 90s.
Speaker 2:At this point I'm not holding anything against, but her health span has gone bad and it's primarily because of anything mentally. She's cognitively still there. She's not got anything like cancer or any sort of major disease. She's starting with the strength to get up anymore. She doesn't have the power to get out of the chair to go for a walk. She bow a couple of times, which we know is a precursor for then getting weaker and so increasing that health span.
Speaker 2:And now mid 90s Great job, like making fun. I think we could have even done a little better. She could be 101 and still walking around on it, and so I think there's a real interest personally in that space and improving that. And business wise, yes, there's there more. And I have an afterthought population. We know the income does increase as we get a little older. There's less 55 plus roads in in commercial gyms than in any other population, and so we know that people are training in their 35s and 40s, whether it's on tunnel, in a gym, wherever it might be. But it seems, the way that I look at the data, they're not. Then stop. They stop resistance training if they will. We want to be an alternative for that group, if, should they want.
Speaker 1:About this upcoming campaign. What can you tell me? What will I as a consumer? Will I notice anything while I see print ads and magazines? Will I see digital ads on Facebook?
Speaker 2:Most of our marketing needs. There's this more digital related so things that we'll be telling those member stories and pushing that out through our official total Instagram account. I'll be working with some of our members and influencers and making sure that we have both adverts but how people use tunnel in this age demographic. Trying to actually I don't know if I get marketing approval for this trying to share some of our data, because that's one of the things that I think is unique about ours is we have this incredible data set. So whether this makes it into the campaign or not, but I've definitely talked today we see our 55 plus roads.
Speaker 2:I think this is analysis of 20,000 approximately. As long as they trained at least once a week so once a week on terrain or the child's had things the women made about 75% increases in their strength overall, 75% in the first year. Men was about 50. But altogether it's about six, 60 years. She said, if you aggregate it, that's huge.
Speaker 2:And then we followed them for another year because we've got all the data. We followed and that people doing it followed and these are people just trained. I don't know what they're doing necessarily. They might be following my programming, might be doing their own. The only criteria is they use tunnel at least once a week and you go out to two years and the women have made 90% increases in strength and the men have made 75% increases, and so we're seeing really impactful things that are changing people's lives. Like you go from a 75% increase in your strength over it, that's a big increase, and we actually have some data that says 55 plus year olds make larger increases in lower body power than under 55s. I think it's almost completely novel.
Speaker 1:Now let me back up and understand that over 55s are making greater gains in their lower body strength than your power. Yeah, I haven't.
Speaker 2:They do make it as well actually, but it's in strength and power.
Speaker 1:And why is that? Do you think there's a?
Speaker 2:couple of factors that play into it. Again, I've got to clarify this is observational data. People train on total. We mine that data. I'm not giving them a training program. There's no randomized controlled trial. We've done a bunch of those with researchers. We could talk around some in older populations. This is just looking at how people train and then measuring essentially their estimations of strength and peak power. I'd say the main reasons we see increases in that there's a couple, I think generally they've came in at a lower ceiling so these people were not training as much and they had a bigger opportunity to get.
Speaker 2:And I think there's something about tonals training. I talked about that inertia component before. I don't make it too sciencey. Essentially, with tonal not having that makes you have to contract all the way through and actually peak power happens at the top of the range of motion and so you happen to pull during that. So if anyone's ever trained or seen anyone train with chains, total work like that all the time. We have a chains, motors bow. You can add to it if you really want to. But it's that system all the time where the further you get away it doesn't get heavier, but essentially freeway gets lighter at that point because inertia helps you totally. It doesn't, I think so. Yeah, those power increases. So I said I think it was 75% for females, 50% for males. After one year in power it's 140% increases in power, 100. That's the difference between getting out of a chair and not. It's about making it across a stop sign before the green mag goes away and the red light comes. Hopefully everyone stops for you, but it's that significant increases in power.
Speaker 1:You've got all this great data gathered and we're all excited or scared or both about artificial intelligence. What's the future look like for connected fitness? Regarding previously, you mentioned the way that you anticipated will be a blending of trainers and big data and AI, and it's all going to come together somehow. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's going to be a split. There already is a split, but I don't think necessarily the consumer necessarily understands there's connected fitness, which is fine. I think this takes time to emerge and come in there, but the way that I view it and the way that Tonal views it is connected fitness is about streaming, connecting and internet, putting on a workout on your screen, on a phone, on a tonal or something else and things, and that's good. You just kind of bring group fitness to the home. There's a lot of benefits to that. It's usually pop it up. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. The difference for us is that's one end, that intelligent fitness is really this improved. What's, yes, doing all of that, that connected fitness styles, but this blending between people like me. So I have a master's degree in exercise physiology and being there, lots of different events.
Speaker 2:My team has PhDs in training. We accumulated hundreds of years of training, so the best of human performance. And we also have a big data science team again PhDs in data science and the merging of those to really bring insights and recommendations that you can't get on a road or would be extremely difficult to do, because we've got all of this data about how you're training. We've got people like me. How about we create an algorithm that gives you a 10% increase or it looks like you're a bit tired today. Let's give you a 5% decrease.
Speaker 2:And then we've got this data, science and this long history of what you've done. We can personalize on a level is really just never been possible before. The very best trainers in the world can do that on a one-on-one basis, ab with some very expensive equipment. Now, really, the opportunity for companies like ours is this intelligent fitness to bring the best of those. So you really get the best of both worlds. You get the best of human performance combined with the best of big data. So you the training program that's going to give you outcomes that you want in the most effective matters. That's what we're trying on.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to talk a little bit, if you can, about the fun of it. I haven't used a tonal yet, I would like to, just haven't. Yet it seems like fun, but I'm the techno geek. Do most people find it fun and what? Maybe tell me that your favorite aspect of working out with one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love training full stop and nerdy meat head or nerdy groin, that's, that's my jam. I've always been into training that kind of things. But to go to the nerdy side, we did a research study out of the University of Rhode Island took 39, I believe, middle-aged 54 year old average females and we did an eight week trend study with them. We did eight weeks of classic selector size equipment. So you go in, you do your chest press, you do your leg curls and kind of things like to size equipment. And we did eight weeks on tow two groups around rice. I'm not involved, it's an impended things. It'll be published at some point. But that the relatively slow process. So our summer as unpublished results, like we both saw in both groups, nice increases in strength over the eight weeks. Arguably toners were slightly better, if I really wanted to pick it out of. But you train, you get stronger. What we saw is they did a pace scale which is, I think, physical activity enjoyment scale. That doesn't make pace but some neglect. It's an, in a measure, more of enjoyment. And what we see here we see this with gym memberships start really high, high motivation, high enjoyment, and then over towards the end of the eight weeks on selector size equipment statistically significant decrease in enjoyment by the end of the eight weeks. What we saw with total is no decrease in total. Most of this. They carried on enjoying it. So that's the short, the research side of it. There is evidence to say that people more enjoy working out on total than other quick. That was in that subsection where you can rapulate that to others.
Speaker 2:But 55 year old females who work tip work untrained, I would say on a personal level. It's just engaging because you've got a trainer in front of you. You can manipulate weights in ways like for people like me. I like to work out with chains in the gym but I don't because there's a real pain in my like setting them up and lifting that lift. And not to justify doing any of that, I'm not on tonal and not that mode. I like to get a little creative on my Instagram and see some of it, but I like to do these kind of. You've never been able to do some of these exercises with this resistance profile. I do chin ups with resisted exercise Like you couldn't hang a weight which is static. I can have a dynamic weight when I do pull ups where the pull up bar is a lot, and then you can get really creative and how you play around with this and we have a lot of internal that just people have really high satisfaction and enjoyment levels and actually really high engagement levels, which is cool for us.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Cool for everybody. Hey, listen, I tell folks where they can go to learn more either about tonal and this over 55 campaign, or connect with you either way, whatever you prefer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that the official tonal tonal is probably where most of the sort of influencer type stuff will get pushed out and that would kind of things on Instagram. The same on Facebook we have the OTC, the official Facebook community, which is more of a members community, but certainly anyone that's interested or thinking wants to get to know about the product and what members think of it and things like that would be there. Tonalcom is our website and mine personally is Strength Science Troy at Strength Science Troy on Instagram and I, yeah, I post my crazy workouts on tonal where I'm trying to push about it, but I post a lot of research out there. So I've got two or three or four or five posts on summarizing. I talked about that Go to the link, use it or lose it campaign, so I cover that in an Instagram post to have a like. The most effective way is of training from the research evidence and then I share some tonal data on that too, troy thank you so much.
Speaker 1:This has been really fascinating. I look forward to seeing this campaign. I look forward to thanks. All right, thanks, bye. Thanks for listening.
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