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The Stephen McCain Podcast
Insightful interviews, strategies, and advice from people making world-class decisions in human optimization, performance, & longevity with Olympian Stephen McCain.
The Stephen McCain Podcast
The Future of Fitness with Tonal: Insights from Olympic-Level Training to Innovative Home Gym Solutions. EP 019
Troy Taylor brings Olympic-level expertise to your living room through Tonal, the revolutionary wall-mounted smart gym that's transforming how we approach strength training. As someone who's coached multiple Olympic teams including Team GB, Team Canada, and Team USA, Troy now applies that elite-level knowledge to create training programs anyone can access at home.
What makes Tonal different from traditional weight training? The electromagnetic resistance system—which Troy describes as "what Tesla is to combustion cars, Tonal is to free weights"—allows for dynamic resistance that adapts to your strength curve in real-time. This means adding more weight where you're strongest and less where you're weakest, optimizing every repetition in ways impossible with conventional equipment.
The most fascinating aspect of our conversation centers around the unprecedented dataset Tonal has accumulated—over 250 billion pounds lifted across approximately 8 billion repetitions from users spanning ages 18 to 90+. This treasure trove of information has revealed surprising insights about strength development, especially for those over 55. The average user experiences a remarkable 73% strength increase in their first year, with even more impressive gains in power development (strength + speed), which directly translates to functional activities like rising from chairs and climbing stairs.
Perhaps most surprising is what predicts long-term adherence. It's not how much you do in your first week, but whether you show a gradual upward trajectory in engagement over your first month. This finding has transformed how Tonal designs its beginner programs, prioritizing consistency over intensity.
Whether you're looking to optimize your home workout space or simply curious about how technology is revolutionizing fitness, this conversation offers a glimpse into the future of strength training—where Olympic-level expertise meets cutting-edge technology to make evidence-based training accessible to everyone. Follow Troy on Instagram @StrengthScienceTroy to learn more about this fascinating intersection of strength science and technology.
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Welcome to another episode of the Stephen McCain podcast where I bring you people making world-class decisions in the field of human optimization and performance. This week I'm interviewing Troy Taylor from Tonal. Tonal is the world's smartest home gym. It's very innovative and we discuss how this device is really shaping the future of fitness and strength training. I'm sure you're well aware of if you are in the longevity space at all and listen to longevity podcasts that strength is correlated with longevity, and so I'm always interested when these products come onto the market. So this is kind of like the Peloton for strength training and it's got some amazing features and they're able to get a ton of data on strength training populations that are using their device to improve their programming. And Troy has an incredible resume where he has worked with a lot of teams, a lot of Olympic teams, and so it's a really great opportunity to learn how this company is taking these really advanced protocols and combining it with an advanced piece of technology that can just fit on your wall and take up a pretty small footprint to have an amazing home gym. So if you are interested in this kind of stuff, you're going to like this podcast. Let's do it, Troy.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Stephen McCain podcast. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, when you showed up as someone who wanted to be on the show, I got really excited because I knew about your product that you work for. But you have an incredibly well-versed background in 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 yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 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. I love sport. Didn't think there'd be much of a career in something called sports science or strength conditioning or anything like that, but kind of loved 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 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, I 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 US Olympic skiing 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, dieticians, nutritionists, physical therapists, strength coaches and sort of these diverse skill sets and so I really enjoyed doing that for close to 20 years.
Speaker 2: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. There was a company called Halo that did some brain stim 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 how Human performance and tech and that's really cool.
Speaker 2: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 I got a tonal for her, tried it, loved it. I thought, well, this is really cool.
Speaker 2: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 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.
Speaker 1:Phenomenal. That is a nice trajectory you've found yourself on. I mean, I think 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 is going to get. They're going work, sharpen your skill set 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't tell my bosses I'm kidding the 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 120 years, seven Olympic games, 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, but 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 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 a lot of people who 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, the baseline level is a 12 week training study, an eight week training study. We get to track people.
Speaker 2:Like tunnel 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. A 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 of this big data set over a long period of time with a huge sort of subsection of the population that's both sort of been on the age ranges from young to very old and also, not far off, a 50-50 mix of male to female. It's about 55% male, 45% female, but close to equal gender balance, and so it gives you this really great cross-sectional look into how humans train.
Speaker 1:This is so interesting to me. Look, let's talk about the Tonal product first. For somebody who's listening to this podcast, they might be going what is Tonal? What's the commercial? Who's the basketball player? Now? That's LeBron James. Lebron James, yeah. So if anyone has seen that commercial, that's what you've seen total on TV. But it's got this small footprint. It 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at its highest level, and my VP of product, farman, 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 it's electromagnetic resistance. The easiest way to explain it is similar to Tesla is to the combustion car, tonal is to free weights. Not that one's better or one's worse, they're just different.
Speaker 2:But we create resistance via electromagnetic resistance. That means we can do it via motors, and these 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 for those that are watching on things, there's a touchscreen and it can switch on and the arms come out. 250 plus something movements up to 200 pounds of resistance, a hundred programs, 5,000 workouts. So that's the sort of personal training element. It was 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can hinge, you can deadlift, you can squat. You can barbell squat. 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 lat, 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. Okay, like sled dragging on it and use the cables as resistance, put on a harness and do some other crazy stuff like that. But yeah, almost unlimited movement variations.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is great. And then, in terms of the resistance, is it isokinetic, meaning it's matching you wherever you are.
Speaker 2:So yes and no.
Speaker 2: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 a nice kinetic 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. They're 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 apply what would be feel more similar to free weights, so more traditional in the feel, in that, okay, it's 50 pounds on the way up, 50 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% 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, nice, 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.
Speaker 2: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, more of those chains come off. Gravity pulls down on them and 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 Well, what about time, velocity and then?
Speaker 2:So we have that at touch of button, so you don't have to load on chains, 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, 69, 68, 65, 60, 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.
Speaker 1:That's right, and is it doing that all in real time? Yeah, real time I got this thing.
Speaker 2:I think it's something like 4 000 times a second, so it's maybe slightly delayed, but not not noticeable yeah, so you can do so.
Speaker 1:You can 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 uh 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like number one, you can do your own thing, you can custom program your own. You've got some special secret sauce that you love to do or something you just really enjoy doing, Right, they even might be more effective. You can do that on your own right. Not even 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 minimal, as like twice a week for four weeks, or as much as five times a week, uh, 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 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 out of the box, canned program, I was not really interested.
Speaker 2:I'm an Olympic level trainer, I know this, so 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 write some. We have Jenna and a programming team that writes 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 has done 15 years in performance innovation at Exos who are 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 their 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 to programming and, honestly, a lot from my science credibility around that we would to their programming. So that's what we tried to bring.
Speaker 1: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 as something as simple as writing down your weights and so you know how to properly progressively load, instead of coming in the gym next time 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, 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? Yeah, so it has.
Speaker 2:I would say the science and the background we have is like the foundational level. These are things that we think and these are the foundational blocks that we have. I wouldn't say proven out, but we have strong confidence. There's a large evidence they're supporting. So an example 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.
Speaker 2: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 the way you look at it is correlation. 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 adhere more than others? So the program example like we mined that database, we looked at it. I can tell you that people that sign up to programs are 12% 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 sort of aspects of that. We look at things around social engagement People that follow one to four friends or one to 10 friends on the app are something like 20% 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 train legs today or not, people that go back and check their stats again about 20% more consistent than people that aren't, and so it's really around. A lot of adherence is where I think we get a lot of the data.
Speaker 2:There was one really interesting stat one of our data scientists, christy, pulled out was because long-term engagement is what everyone cares about, 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. They grouped them into a high, a medium, a low or quartiles I can't remember. He said exactly what it was, but they looked and, yeah, people that engage more in the first month generally engage a little more 52 weeks later.
Speaker 2:But of its own, it's not a great correlator. It's 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 workouts, but I came back the next week and of workouts, 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 are engaged in their journey and kind of things.
Speaker 2: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, I'm going to make your first week.
Speaker 2:If you tell me you're a beginner and you've never worked, 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's my main objective 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 meet 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 of time, maybe, and those small pieces really long-term engagement.
Speaker 1:Wow, 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, the thing's just sitting on the wall gathering dust. Yeah, you're not going to get fitter and stronger, so I think it's incredibly interesting how you're mining your data 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 force production or your velocity and things like that?
Speaker 2: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 marathon yesterday. I'm not going to recommend that you should do a leg workout today. I'm going to show up on your tonal there's a little Vitruvian man and green is ready, gray is like kind of semi and red is fatigued. Your legs are going to show up red, fatigued, because you just ran a marathon. And so there's that level of integration of where we can use it for some recommendations, I think the future 12, 18 months, without saying this is in the product roadmap. But 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 tone on them. That actually gives me better sensitivity data and to some extent.
Speaker 2: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, have experienced this Some days where you don't think you have it and you do, and some days where 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'd 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.
Speaker 1: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 going to 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?
Speaker 1: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 Just to respond to that.
Speaker 2:I think, if you think about back your career, you were a sort of 90s 2000 athlete right In gymnastics. I started my career around late 90s early 2000s. 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 something on my finger or on my wrist that was measuring all the different things, and so I do think the consumer has access to a ton of data.
Speaker 2: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, because it either tells 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 becomes the real value. And we're still a little way away from that as an industry not as tonal, but as an industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 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?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So my I'll answer the first part, my personal take on it. Yes, I think strength is well. I think the research, the epidemiological research, is very clear that strength, even grip strength, is a great predictor of longevity, probably 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 gain strength overnight.
Speaker 2: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 are innately strong. But in order to have that strength in later ages and particularly we know how strength declines at later points, it means you've consistently trained. I think it's my personal bias that the consistency aspect of training over a long period of time and 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 exact 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 75% increases or in the low 70s 73%. I don't want to misquote my own research 73% increases in strength in their first year on tonal. That's the average, the mean that's not the best possible. So there's people that worked out only once a week in that, or people that have worked out four or five times a week, once a week in that, or people that have worked out four or five times a week. So the mean increase is 75 in the first year. Wow, yeah, so huge increases in strength.
Speaker 2:We can't measure hypertrophy muscle mass it's not easy to do in a system like us but the products of strength are undoubtedly. We see in 55 plus or us. 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% 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. It 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.
Speaker 2:And what I think we also see, which I'm interested in, is 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 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 a 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.
Speaker 2:If you watch an elderly person, a frail person that maybe 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 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 70s and 80s and 90s. Walking across the streets power exercise in your 80s and 90s. Getting your luggage into a carry-on so you can go on vacation, enjoy your retirement years. 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% increases in deadlift peak power. So it's the strength with the speed and I think that's super cool.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. And what would the programming look like for power, if someone was doing a power?
Speaker 2:program.
Speaker 2:To be clear, 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, let's say they're an intermediate, so not completely brand new. They can do movement patterns, they know how to hip 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.
Speaker 2:A lot of the time I see people being a bit too, not that we don't want to be uncontrolled, but you don't need to intentionally slow down. If the bar has 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 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 can drop if you want, but it's control the downward motion but move the concentric direction, move it fast would be number one.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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've 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'd think about actually what we talked about before, that change Adding, change mode is a great way to work on power, because 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 change, but it's heavier at that top portion. So you're going to generate more power, which is going to train that property.
Speaker 1:Those are sort of three of the ways that I would incorporate it. Yeah, yeah, great stuff. Is anybody topping out on the? Because you said it can produce 200 pounds of force. Is that per each one?
Speaker 2:It's 200 pounds 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 curl 35s and on tonal I'm only doing 25s. And so I commissioned this research study to compare tonal pounds to free weight pounds and we called it wheel feel or free weight equivalency feel. The long story 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. Eventually gravity slows it down relatively quick but you get a bit free energy out of that.
Speaker 2:Tonal with motors doesn't allow you to get the same level of inertia, so it feels a bit heavier. So it's 200 pounds 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 pounds, I can max out deadlift and that things, and so there is a small percentage of our population that can max it out pretty much only from those sort of 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. Okay.
Speaker 1:Got it. So, look, I'm impressed. I mean, clearly, your training programs in this thing, I'm sure, are top-notch. You're basing it off of a massive aggregate of data. That is very insightful and, I'm sure, making your programs even that much more effective. The thing has 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 a 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 $3,595, $3,595. And it's got to be connected to a wall, right? So how does all that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally so. Yeah, wwwtonalcom 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 off and we really want to make sure that you hit those studs, Not like my home improvement work where I'm like, yeah, I had a mirror slash 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% finance I think is the maximum and kind of there and pay out there.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:But vast majority of homes, particularly in the US, you can come out, get installed and set up then, and then 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. There's funky things like Bluetooth weight on and off so you never have to struggle getting through. 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% of our members that joined last year are still members and I'm like 90% of our members that joined ever are still our members.
Speaker 2:Like our people, thankfully, love the product and continue to subscribe and continue to use it over nearly three times a week, I think is the average three years later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 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 Because he kind of had this clinic with a LivO2 oxygen training thing and some PEMF and he bought it. He's like dude, I love it. I love it and 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 assume you are using this thing.
Speaker 2: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 weight lifted for about 18 months. I have them there. It's just so much easier to work out. Tonal 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 tonal.
Speaker 1:Phenomenal, 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 the full spectrum of demographic, especially aging population, I think this makes a lot of sense because it inherently has a teaching device right there. It has some safety modes. You don't have to get a car 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, because 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 100%. This seems like 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 something interesting that you've found in your experience or with the data that maybe you just want to put out there?
Speaker 2:No, I obviously. I'm wearing the logo and work for the company, so I agree it's a pretty compelling product. I think the biggest surprise for me that I've started working. I was not an Olympian, not even close to being an Olympian, but love training and love exercise, and so I've never been really struggling to motivate it. 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.
Speaker 2: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 bench, like warm up and do one set of bench and then drive back. It's not highly efficient use of your time, right? You? You've right. I'm going to spend at least 30 to 45 minutes here, probably an hour, because I'm waiting for equipment and then I'm going to drop. I'm going to make it hit. 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 of bench. Okay, I'll do like, go and do on Zoom call, jump behind me, do a set of squats, like I think I accumulate so much more training because I'm kind of just jumping into it all the time.
Speaker 2:Now, unfortunately, I work from home and so on, 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 it kind of. But that's literally changed my workout like mentality. You know, I used to have to build up this almost like psychological right. Right, I'm going to hit it hard.
Speaker 2: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've 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 and never intended to train that way.
Speaker 2: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. Like doing an hour of exercise and then 23 hours of nothing, that kind of 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 it's not as good. So these mini bouts are really good for that. It's really good for cognitive too. I didn't realize that doing a set of cards before I go and meet with my boss makes me better at meeting with my boss or presenting or hopefully, doing a podcast.
Speaker 1:Maybe I should have another set of sports.
Speaker 2:The benefits of that I never really realized and that's been a real nice side effect for me.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 and 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 tonalcom you can go to my resource page on this podcast. We'll have all links to everything that's going to be at stephenmccaincom. Backslash tonal T-O-N-A-L. Troy, how can people find you if they're interested in reaching out? They have any questions.
Speaker 2: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 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. Oh sure, on Instagram it's Strength Science Troy, strength Science Troy on Instagram. And then, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn too. So, yeah, definitely reach me out if you're interested in finding out more.
Speaker 1:I'll put links to all that as well Again in the show notes. Stephenmccaincom backslash tonal Troy slash 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.