How High-Tech, Big-Data Innovation Is Improving Functional Fitness and More.

We tend to go to the gym and lift weights in one plane -- up-down, up-down...

But in real life, our bodies move in 3D, up, down and all around, at all angles, across multiple planes of motion.

So if we want to be strong and truly fit, we need to be strong in 3D. And to get there, we need first to measure ourselves fully an accurately.

That's the exciting premise behind Proteus Motion, which is bringing its high-tech, data-driven tool to gyms and other businesses across the country and in Canada. Thousands of people of all ages are assessing their fitness and improving it with Proteus technology.

Founder and CEO Sam Miller joins the show to explain this all. It's fascinating stuff, and I know gym and studio owners will enjoy learning how they can use Proteus to improve their service to people over 50 -- and even use it as a revenue-generating tool. Enjoy.

Resources and Information

Proteus Motion
Sam Miller on LinkedIn

My new course to motivate men over 50 to get off the couch and into fitness

Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount  here
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market

Transcript

Hey, here's a simple question for you, or is it, how strong are you? You know, until now we haven't really been able to test our full body, full motion, strength, and power easily and consistently. We've been limited to measuring. Strength by traditional weightlifting exercises like the bench press and squats, which are all done in a straight line up, down, up, down.

But outside the gym, our bodies move in 3D, not just in one plane of motion at a time. And the recent focus on functional movements and functional fitness means more people want to train their full body motions across multiple planes. To do that effectively, we need to be able to measure how strong we are in that regard.

So now, the growth of a new company called Proteus Motion is giving more people that chance, including a lot of people over 50 who want the general functional fitness, but also those who want to improve their sports performance or those who are engaged in physical therapy and lots more applications.

Hi everybody. Welcome to Optimal Aging, the show for fitness professionals who are focused on the over 50. Market, I'm your host Jay Croft of Prime Fit Content. 

Today's guest is Sam Miller, the founder and CEO of Proteus motion, a high tech data driven company that has created an amazing device to measure. and train in 3D. Sam says it's like training in water. You get adaptive resistance throughout all kinds of motions, not just up and down.

Imagine watching a dancer or a gymnast or a golfer or tennis player, anybody engaged in a fluid physical motion and imagine that person having adaptive resistance training throughout these complex multi plane movements. It's kind of mind boggling and yet it makes perfect sense. It's the kind of revelation we couldn't have imagined before we had the powerful technology to make it possible.

Now, thankfully, Sam explains it much better than I do, and I know you will enjoy learning about this technology and how Proteus can help your business.  Here’s our conversation.

Sam Miller, Proteus: Linear movements,  they make up a very small fraction of the movements that we do in real life.

Less than 5 percent of the movements that we perform in real life. And so Proteus is redefining how you quantify and improve physical strength. Moving beyond one dimensional methods, we care about training and measuring  functional movements and multi planar movements.

Okay. I want to go back to the beginning. You said 5%. So all these years I've been going to the gym, lying on my back and pushing that damn bar up and down. That's 5 percent of the motion of my body.

Probably less. we live in a three dimensional world. And so when we are trying to quantify our physical strength, It's important to be able to quantify, three dimensional and multi planar movements that translate to real life. And if you're just training or measuring movements like a bench press or a squat, it is an extraordinarily narrow,  scope that,  we believe is  missing the larger picture.

That ultimately, can hurt people, without knowing that information or being able to train those ways. So a squat and a bench press are examples of single plane movements, up, down, in, out, right? Give me a couple examples of 3D movements that we all do all the time. Sure. rotational movements are multi planar movements.

Think about a trunk rotation or a,  chopping. Type movement or a shot put type movement or twisting, turning, moving through multiple planes of motion. Right.  divide the body into,  three plans, right? There's a horizontal plane transverse. There's a sagittal plane that goes down the middle, and then there's one that goes kind of slices you  front to back.

 And so if you were just training and or measuring movements in isolated planes, those are important, but you got to be able to pull all those things together to be able to produce movement in real life. Whether it's picking up a cup or I'm picking up groceries or I'm stopping myself from falling,  you are moving through multiple  planes in space. 

which involve a variety of different muscles and movements coordinated together.  and so in trying to improve your ability to perform those movements in real life, it's important to be able to quantify your capabilities performing those movements and to be able to optimally train. or exercise those types of movements that involve or engage those different muscle groups working together to produce function. 

Jay Croft: Great. Now this podcast focuses primarily on fitness for people over 50 or so. And so functional fitness and these full body movements and rotation and balance and all these things are super important to the fitness professionals who listen to this show. But there are other. purposes for your proteus equipment besides helping older people with functional fitness.

Tell me a little bit about some of the other intended uses or applications of what you guys have come up with.

Sam Miller: Sure.  There's  an extraordinarily broad set of. Applications and versatility of produce. We like to say that produce is 1 of the most uniquely versatile pieces of training and testing or measurement equipment that has ever existed in the fitness space period.

Um, and it has been a challenge for us, actually, since the beginning, since I founded the company and. 2016 officially of, of, uh, choosing kind of a market or a vertical because there are so many different applications.  but I can start answering that question with just a zooming out with like,  what are we actually doing?

What are we trying to do? What's the big vision? Proteus is redefining how we quantify and improve physical strength and power. Moving beyond one-dimensional methods.  we have developed a way to produce a full body assessments and reports on your physical capabilities related to strength and power in a way that's never been possible before that include insights with personalized training recommendations related to functional movement.  So you can perform or test any conceivable movement on Proteus with a physical machine. That allows you to move freely in any direction, any movement, whatever it is that you're looking to evaluate or train.

Trunk rotations, you could do basic movements, single leg squat, lateral lunges, jumping even, pressing, rowing, bicep curls, chopping, shot put, plyo movements, anything you can imagine. And you can string together any combination of these exercises into tests or evaluations, um, in through our software, uh, each machine has a 27 inch touch screen,  and it has a library of,  movements are a standardized test you can choose from, or you can create your own, and then you can go through a battery of these movements,  and tests in as little as 3 to 6 minutes, Per individual.

So for example, 15 movements in five minutes is, unprecedented. We like to say it would require 20 pieces of equipment in a lab with a PhD student and three hours of time to produce 10 percent of what we produce in five minutes. These reports deliver,  insights that let you know, how do you compare to someone like you against our cloud database, which has a billion data points.

Of hundreds of millions of reps from tens of thousands of users filter the demographic comparisons by age, sex, height, weight, sport, position, whatever it is that you're looking to compare to  contextualize the results and understand how you stack up what deficiencies you have, what imbalances you have and what areas of the body and movements you need to train and how. 

And get shareable reports that you can actually share to mobile, um, with these hyper personalized recommendations  it for the businesses that we work with, which we are. We're B2B. So we sell to, we like to say businesses that provide services to athletes. And we consider anyone an athlete we're in 400 locations in the US and Canada from.

Pro and college teams to mainstream commercial facilities to,  sports performance, sports medicine and physical therapy, biohacking and even chiropractic.  we have about at those 400 locations. they're all businesses.  we have about 75, 000 users and those users. Range and age from age 8 to age 98.

They include some of the best athletes in the world across all major sports.  we were just in 3 episodes in Netflix's Quarterback, Patrick Mahomes. who uses Proteus 3 times a week for the last 2 years.  Damien Lillard,  Justin Verlander.

 the list goes on. But those elite athletes represent only the 1% of less than 1% of our user base. We've got tens of thousands of users that are,  youth athletes, college athletes of all sports. And the fastest growing demographic that we have is the 35 to 65-year-old group. And they were using Proteus for a lot of different reasons and a lot of, there are a lot of different applications.

So, ultimately, what our vision is that produce becomes the universal standard for physical strength,  and power measurement, which we believe will be ubiquitous,  in any location, business,  organization where human performance is valued, which we think is ultimately belongs in more locations than a treadmill.

 and the way that it's used is it's because the software basically provides the it's like the data hub that informs how you should be training in an automated way.  that is super empowering for trainers at any level, including novice trainers. It allows businesses to standardize their own testing and evaluation procedures and then.

 use that to develop personalized programs for clients of any capability or age range. and those programs don't have to be, they can be done anywhere. but we often see that many exercises are performed on Proteus, because Proteus is also a training tool with its own unique benefits. And  I can explain that a little bit deeper as well.

Jay: Yeah, I'd like to get to that, but first I want to pause here for a minute and just explain to people what we're talking about. And first, before we get to that, I want to encourage people to go to the website which is ProteusMotion. com And Proteus is spelled P R O T E U S ProteusMotion. com, you've got a lot of videos there and explanations of what we're talking about.

So basically you guys have a piece of equipment that you developed, you sell this piece of equipment to gyms and,  training centers.  cause you've got great versatility  with this thing, as you just described. And then if the consumer, I want to go into my gym, they've got one of these, I can get an assessment on my strength and power and range of motion and a bunch of other data points.

And then, I can train on it.  as a, an extra tool with my workout. It could replace my workout. Maybe I'm not sure about all of that. So explain us exactly like what is this thing we're talking about?

Sam: Proteus is the son of Poseidon. Greek demigod. Proteus is also the root of the word, uh, protean, which means adaptable, fluid, versatile, and that's exactly what, what Proteus is itself. It is itself a piece of equipment that allows you to perform natural, fluid, movements and both train and test them.

So produce is both a resistance training tool and a performance testing tool  as a, as a performance testing tool. It allows for the first ever way to quantify functional strength and power. And for any human movement, which has never been possible before. Um, we like to say that, well, we think of it in the way that like, we've got wearables for sleep and recovery and  body scanners for imaging,  so what's the equivalent for physical strength and power is like, how much can you bench or squat?

 and that's been,  the standard for a long time, simply because there haven't been tools that allow you to easily quantify these movements produce is that tool, but it is also a training tool and, and the key. Part of the invention and the reason that if anyone's going to our website, produce motion dot com produce has this very unique form factor.

It's roughly the size of a treadmill.  it has this,  mechanical system that has a, an arm. If you will,  you grab the handle, there's different attachments. and you pull or push the arm. You can manipulate it or move it in any direction, just as you move, no matter what movement you're moving or performing, and we've invented of the many inventions that we've patented.

 a new modality for resistance training that you can think about. It's like training underwater on land. Okay. And it might be hard to wrap your head around, but it's called, we patented something called 3d resistance. And if you think about like, just as an example, think about a free weight, you pick up a free weight, right?

You're getting resistance. Always towards the center of the earth, right? It's gravity, no matter what movement you're doing, but it's always downwards resistance, right? If you're using a cable machine, which is on rope, basically you're getting resistance always towards or against the direction of where the rope is coming from, with Proteus, we use a magnetic resistance that is adapting and reacting in real time. 

To match or mirror the direction of your movement, no matter what direction you're moving. It feels like moving through a fluid  and you can change the viscosity of the fluid, right? So it's like aquatic training on land, but you can make it feel like mud. And what this does is it provides it's a totally new experience, but it provides a neuromuscular stimulus.

That is significantly greater than a freeway or a cable machine. Yeah. It's safer.  It's more fun. And for certain populations, for certain things, you can use it and you should use it as  one of the only tools you use. Yeah. For credible results. And for the older population, what it effectively does is it helps you move better and feel better.

Yeah. And everyone's all about that.

Jay: Functional fitness is such a big,  selling point in,  Marketing fitness to people who are,  50 or 60 or older, They don't want to spend all day in the gym.

They want to be able to do the things that they enjoy. And when I watch your videos, I'm seeing people, it looks like they're replicating sports movements. They're like golf swings or baseball swings, but also. Real life things like picking up your baby, your grandbaby and tossing up in the air or bringing in the groceries from the garage and putting them up in the cabinet, you know, that twisting motion that you talked about.

tell us about. The kind of response you get  if you have any sort of response, I know you've got so much data, maybe you can share some of that data with us about this subsection of the market that really wants that functional fitness.

Sam: So in Proteus's software, we've got a library of workouts, for example, and everything you do on Proteus is extraordinarily time efficient, whether it's training or testing,  you're never on Proteus for longer than 10, 10 minutes, really. I'll give you an example. We've got a core stability workout, which is awesome.  and it's a trunk rotation. It's,  some lifting movements, some chopping movements, some balance oriented type movements and the screen guides you through what are you doing?

You're just following along to the video. There's real time feedback.  we even have like PR notification, personal record notifications, and,  leaderboards and all that sort of stuff. If you want to get real competitive because a lot of our users do, but, uh, it's a super engaging. Bye.  and of course, every all progress is tracked,  which you can see objectively how you're progressing over time across any of these movements and overall,  it kind of organically forces you to engage your entire body, stabilize your core, no matter what movement you're doing.

produce force from the ground up and use your body effectively and efficiently to perform efficient movement patterns and You can do it almost every day without soreness because it's a concentric muscle contraction. So it's got this really incredibly unique  Muscle stimulation benefits.  For the muscles that you want to activate for five different shoulder exercises, Proteus produces up to 95 percent more,  peak muscle activation than a free weight or a cable machine at the same level of resistance  with very limited strain and load on the joints.

Because it's like, think about aquatic training on land, right? It sounds great. I love the way you described that. It's like training underwater. Yeah. It feels really good. 

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