We Talk To Troy Taylor

Last Updated: May 31, 2024By Tags: , , , , ,

The Superset | Troy Taylor | Strength Training

 

  • Troy Taylor will be on the next Tonal Talk.
  • Your last chance to enter the Four-Week Fast Track contest.
  • The Tonal Community hit 200 Billion Pounds!
  • Tonal and Tim Landicho are looking for book recommendations.
  • Tonal asked the community, “Why do you love Tonal?”
  • New Content – Upper Body HIIT, Full Body Strength, & More!

All this plus our interview with Troy Taylor!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

We Talk To Troy Taylor

Welcome to Episode 65.

I’m doing Ultimate Arms a second time.

What made you decide to do it again?

I feel like I saw forward momentum.

You did. I can attest to that.

I did another thing in between. I was like, “I’ll do this again.” At the moment, I’m trying to get lean instead of doing super intense because I’m not eating as much food.

You’re doing the accumulation one or something like that.

It seemed like a bad time to do that thing.

You’re low on carbs. You need those carbs for recovery. Side note, there are a lot of people who do bodybuilding that don’t think that you need to eat carbs. They think all you need to do is eat protein. While protein is an important part of that, it drives me crazy as a MetPro coach. The people who don’t get that carbs are beneficial for your recovery but you can tell a difference.

I’ve always been very disconnected between cause and effect when it comes to things regarding my physical nature.

You’re like, “This is how it is, whatever this is.”

We’d been together for a while when you were like, “I feel like I’m starting to get sick. Maybe I’ll take an Advil Cold and Sinus.” I would wait until I was miserable to take the Advil Cold and Sinus and then be like, “These don’t work.”

That is what you did.

It did take me honestly years at this point of working out and eating differently before I started to realize, “How come this one’s kicking my ass?” I’m then like, “It’s because of the way I am in my MetPro rhythm that I’m not eating a lot of carbs.” I was like, “I’ve done this other times and it’s been challenging.”

It’s not like, “I need to sit down a second. Give me a minute.”

A refractory period, if you will. If I’m eating fewer carbs at the minute, at the moment, I should probably do something that’s not quite as intense. That’s intense but it’s focused on one specific area. It’s not huge amounts of volume like Extreme Accumulation or House of Volume.

I’m curious, how much volume did you lift after I left the room?

It was 13,000, maybe 15,000.

I lifted for 45 minutes. It was chest, back, and biceps. I felt like I was going to die after 45 minutes.

That was a lot. I came down at the tail end.

It was 6,000 pounds, half of what you did. We’re all in our place in our journey. I’m not like, “Poor me.” I’m fascinated by that because when you first started, you couldn’t keep up with what I was doing. You could do the same length of time but because I had already been doing it for 8 or 9 months at that point, I was a little bit above where you started. Not only have you caught up or surpassed but you doubled it. That’s pretty amazing.

It feels weird. It’s awkward, especially comparing it to you.

I don’t see it that way. I have taken significant periods off of the Tonal. You’ve been consistent. Since you started, you’ve never not done Tonal.

You could kick my ass with anything cardio-based.

That I could, especially if it’s endurance. I’ll keep on tracking and be like, “Bye.”

I’m dead. I hit 8 million pounds. My strength score is so close to 1,000. It’s 996. Honestly, it would probably be over 1,000 if I didn’t do the arms thing twice. If I switched back to something that was more volume-focused, I’d probably be there. That’s not what I wanted to do.

You have to worry about the goals, not the numbers.

At the end of the day with the strength score, it’ll be fun when I hit 1,000 but whatever.

I love that you think it’ll be fun. I still get excited over your PRs and you still don’t. You’re going to go up but it’s not of course.

If you lift it one way long enough, eventually it can be 1 pound heavier and then you hit a PR.

The thing is you kept lifting. I don’t think you give yourself enough credit for that.

What pre-tell do you have for this episode?

We’re going to talk to Troy Taylor. He was scheduled to be on the next Tonal Talk in the official Facebook group for Tonal. There was also the Four-Week Fast Track contest. There was a big community milestone that Tonal hit and some book recommendations happening over on the OTC as well. There’s some fun stuff happening within the Tonal community.

Before we get to all that, shameless plugs. Don’t forget that we’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and TuneIn. Wherever you find a podcast is where you can find us. While you’re there, be sure to follow us so you never miss an episode. Maybe leave us a review. It is super helpful. It’s greatly appreciated. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/SupersetPodcast and watch all of these over on YouTube. There’s all that. Let’s dig in, shall we?

We shall.

Troy Taylor will be on the next Tonal Talk.

He was going to talk about all the behind-the-scenes things that Tonal does as far as putting the creation into what classes they make more of and things like that. There’s so much data that is there that Tonal has. Especially if they’re new to the community, they’re doing a workout, and have no concept of all that goes into, “Why did people pick this certain workout? Why are they making this or that?” There’s a lot of data that goes into that.

One of the things that’s probably the most fascinating and helpful is that it’s real data. If you ask people, “How much do you bench press,” you could knock off at least 20%.

You’re going to get a lot of results that aren’t accurate.

It’s like asking somebody how long their junk is. It’s like if you ask a guy what his body count is, you can knock off 20%. If you ask a girl, you can add 20%.

It depends on the girl and the guy.

The data they get is real. They know exactly how much you lift and when you started a program and stopped or maybe when you took a little bit longer to finish something. All that stuff is hyper-specific and accurate in a way that it probably never could be if it was all self-reported.

How many times have you talked about the phone line always wrong? Don’t believe that.

In radio, we would say don’t believe the request lines. You take it into consideration.

It’s not the only thing you take into consideration.

It’s not the only metric because most people are never going to call the radio station to make a request. It’s only the people who are the most passionate about a specific band or song.

The same thing happens with all kinds of programming, not just in the world of Tonal but anywhere. I see it over on the OTC where people will say, “I only like this kind of programming. Why aren’t you doing more of this?” The data would say that there’s a subset of people taking those kinds of classes but then lots of other people are taking other kinds of classes. That’s why they make the decisions they make.

Your last chance to enter the Four-Week Fast Track contest is upon us.

This is cool because if you get chosen, you get to go into the Tonal studio and hang out with the instructors and stuff. That’s pretty neat.

They let you pick any one item from the vending machine in the break room.

It’s all filled with healthy things.

It’s all broccoli sprouts.

Gross. Can you imagine if that was in a vending machine?

Can you imagine what that vending machine and break room would smell like? Everybody eats broccoli all day. Everybody’s like, “No stretching. You keep that downward dog to yourself. You had four pieces of broccoli for dinner. No, thank you.” The Tonal community hit 200 billion pounds.

It’s astounding. That’s a big number. You have 8 million of that all by yourself. It’s pretty cool.

Let’s do the math. What percentage is that?

It’s a much bigger percentage than my 2 million. There’s that. I don’t know about math because I don’t like to do math.

Nor do I. I was a Mass Communications major who didn’t graduate until the age of 45 only because of a math class.

I was a Business major so I should like to do math but let me point out that business math is different. You can do it in Excel, although I could do this math in Excel.

200 billion is a lot.

That’s ginormous. It wasn’t that long ago that they hit 100 billion pounds.

It stands to reason that the community collectively is like the community individually. It takes forever to hit that first million.

You start to zoom.

I hit 8 million not too long ago but I’m almost a quarter of the way to 9 already. It feels like it’s only been a few weeks and I’ve been doing something that is admittedly less volume.

It is like a compound interest.

Increasing exponentially. I’m not quite exponential in my weightlifting.

Compared to me, you are.

Compared to where I was pre-Tonal.

I’m amazed. I was looking at the leaderboard, which a lot of people are like, “The leaderboard means nothing,” but it does because it’s how many times you show up. There are people who are telling the truth about how often they show up. If you have that much time to lie about it, who are these people?

You can log into the app and let something play to increase your time but you’re only lying to yourself.

I saw that I was 23,000 out of 75,000. I remember when you first started doing the Tonal, there wasn’t even a leaderboard. Not long after that, it was only 20,000 people on the leaderboard. It’s pretty cool to see it growing exponentially and not everybody puts their information on the leaderboard. You don’t have to. I have no idea how many are out there but it’s cool. It’s neat.

If you are a reader, Tonal and Tim Landicho are looking for book recommendations.

This was the time you weren’t able to be there but I got into a conversation with Tim about books. He was out on the OTC looking for book recommendations. He had several and then he was asking people for theirs. There’s a whole book thread that has all kinds of amazing book recommendations out on the OTC. I thought it was fascinating.

I also liked that it wasn’t just asking for fitness or nutrition-themed books.

It was all kinds of stuff.

You can work out your head, too. You’re more well-rounded when you do.

Total had a little promo. “Why do you love Tonal?”

I loved this. I saw it over on Instagram but I’m sure they have it in more places than that. They asked people why they loved Tonal and they had all kinds of different answers. They all spoke to me in different ways. Some people were like, “It’s because I can do it at home.” Some people were very much like you, Tom, “It’s because I don’t have to think.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing otherwise and you do.”

It takes all the guesswork out of it.

“Here’s my $50 a month. You tell me what to do.”

“Tell me the things and I will do it.”

“I will walk away and not think about it again.”

“Until you show back up.” I loved hearing people’s reactions and their sincerity about it. It’s an amazing machine. I truly love it. I get that it’s not for everybody, especially people who are very dismissive of how much weight that you need to lift. “You need to lift so much more.” For the average person, it’s way more weight than you’re ever going to need. It’s cool.

I would agree. There are certainly people out there that are super jacked and that maybe won’t get them where they want to be or keep them where they’re at. For 95% of people, you’re okay. You’re not going to outlift the machine. You’ll be fine. If you do, it’ll be by a smidge. Do a couple extra reps. You’re good.

Even slow it down. It does change how intense the reps are when you slow down the momentum. When you lift or pull, let it go down at a much slower pace. I promise you, we’ll add a whole nother level.

As always, there are tons of new content for people to partake in. We’ll start with the new Upper Body HIIT.

This one is 28 minutes long and it is with Kristina Centenari. It’s upper body but you’re going to elevate your heart rate and get your upper body pump on. You’re going to do both. It’s going to be duration-based intervals, lifting heavy to build lean muscle and burn fat.

We have the new Full Body HIIT.

This is part of that reps 45 and this one’s with Coach Woody. It’s intermediate and it’s 51 minutes. It’s a high-energy HIIT workout that’s going to combine four things, resistance, endurance, power, and stamina. It’s an amazing full body workout.

You have the new Full Body Strength.

This is Strong As a Mother with Coach Ash. This is a full body also 51 minutes. This was originally to celebrate that Mother’s Day timeframe. It was things like holding babies, lifting them out of the crib, and chasing kids around. All of those things are important to being a mom and all the mom people who act as moms, whatever you are. This is awesome because this workout helps you prep for those demands and be able to do all those different kinds of movements.

We also have the new Recovery.

Sweet Back Relief with Coach Tanysha. This is an intermediate twelve minutes long. You’re going to be able to get all the kinks out of your back in fifteen minutes. You are going to use your foam roller and work your way down from your neck to the mid back and then to the glutes, releasing tension.

It says you finished standing a few inches taller. I can use that. We also have the new Quick Fit.

This is Attack the Abs and this is with Coach Ash. It’s fifteen minutes. It’s for the core. You’re going to get your core from every angle. This is a duration based on Tonal and bodyweight exercise. You’re going to go through all these rotational and anti-rotational movement patterns with short rest periods.

Finally, the new Quick Fit.

This is for the back. It’s a superset seven minutes long. You’re going to do a compound move with an isolation move to build your back by maximizing time under tension. You’re going to lift heavy first and that’s going to stimulate the hypertrophy and endurance. You’re then going to lighten up and engage in burnout mode.

These all sound like good additions to other things. If you’re, “I haven’t done this in a while but I don’t want to do another 30 minutes,” you can do it.

It’s especially great for people who, let’s say, are doing lots of full body or maybe you’ve got a great well-rounded program that’s doing upper and lower but it’s getting to be swimsuit time and you might want to focus in on the core or back. This is a good way to do that. These types of workouts are great to add on.

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Joining us from Tonal is Troy Taylor. How’s it going, Troy?

It’s gone well. Thanks for having me back on.

We appreciate you being back. You’re a great source of information from the Tonal’s Strength Institute. There’s always so much going on in that world and all over Tonal. Why don’t you bring us up to speed on how things appear to you from your vantage point when you think about the state of strength?

State Of Strength

We released a big report. It was at the very end of 2023 so maybe in December, called the State of Strength. We want to take a deep dive into our member base and share some of that data that informs a lot of the product decisions and also the programming decisions we make but a little more than even that to give a sense of what training across hundreds of thousands of people look like. That’s not an opportunity that many companies get to do or share.

We wanted to share that it’s about Tonal members and Tonal users. It’s very applicable to us but more, it’s a deep dive into people that resistance chain in general and some of the things that are going on there. We did that at the end of 2023 and we wanted to do a couple of things. We wanted to pick some trends. Our hot topics are generally around the fitness and fitness-related industry, more like women in strength training and what that looks like, the active aging population, how strength training is becoming more popular and common for them, and some of the things that we have a unique insight into.

One of the things I’m passionate about is I love optimization problems. I’m all about like, “What is the science? Tell us about the best possible way to do something or get better games,” which is nice and it’s geeky for me but it doesn’t matter unless people do it. It’s the training portion, showing up, consistency, and engagement. We have probably a better vantage point than anyone else in the world of understanding engagement and what drives engagement or is associated with engagement and consistency. I tried to share some of that data and what we have from a unique vantage point.

A lot of times, historically, this data has to be self-reported. You’re trusting people to either remember what they did accurately or tell you the truth because people love to think they’re tougher and stronger than they are. Tonal provides such a unique opportunity that there’s no way to fudge the numbers. It is what it is.

It’s both the quality of the data in terms of it is what you did. It’s also the fidelity of the data. It’s every single time you lift it and every rep like 50 times a hertz or 50 times a second, every rep of every person. You’ve got this fidelity component, which allows us to understand that. It’s also a bit around an ecosystem. We have a trainer but we also have an app. We can understand what’s the associations between, say, how you check your stats or how many friends you follow. Not directly related to training but may influence or be associated with training-related stuff. We can take this slightly broader holistic things, which was interesting.

When you think about the report that you folks did, what were the things that stood out to you personally the most? What were the things you were most excited to see there?

Probably the biggest thing and this prows my age but I was super keen to show some of the active aging and understanding what strength training looks like as we age and what we can do. The biggest things that were in the report around that was I may have said it on this show but in the beginning, we’ve known for a while that strength training, you can make changes. You can get stronger in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 60s or 70s. You can put on muscle mass.

I don’t think anyone has shown and certainly not with the kinds of ends that we have like 20,000 plus or more than 55 plus were included. It showed 70% or 75% increases in strength in their first year. It was a huge increase. I knew we could increase it. The research says in 20 or 30, 60-year-olds over 12 weeks, they can increase it by a little bit. What we show is over a year’s worth of training can increase 70% or 75%.

It didn’t make it into the report. There’s only so much data you can pass here. If you went out another year and you went to two years because we have this longitudinal data set, they were making over 100% increases in strength on average. This is one of the things I like. This is me. This is not me cherry-picking, “I took our very best super users who work out six times a week and have perfect consistency. They made these great games.”

They did make great games, by the way. This is the me on the whole sample size with 175,000 and to be included in this sample. The only things you had to do were train at least three times in total and have a consistency of more than 5%, which means that you worked out at least once every 20 weeks. That’s a low bar. We could have had a lot of things to cherry-pick this data to make it like it could seem even bigger and better.

What I want to do is this is what happens. This is strength training in the wild for the average person. There are some people that were probably above that bar, hopefully not too many and there were some super users. The average increase in those 55-plus roads was 73%. Over the first year, it gets up to close to over 100% after two years. It’s a huge strength change. That’s probably the number one thing that made me excited about. Related also to the strength training and the active age in the group was the number of people that reported being new to strength training.

There was a very strong relationship between being new to strength training and increasing in age. The older you are, the more likely you are to be new to strength training. That’s like, “That’s a great message.” It seems like public awareness and that strength training is good for active aging. People in their 60s and 70s never strength trained or at least self-identifying as being a beginner are using our products and hopefully, getting stronger out of doing that. That’s cool, too. The benefits are pretty clear research-wise. It’s good to see that people are applying those.

I don’t think I would have taken that in if that was in the report that many people self-identified and it’s like an increase as they age. I know people “should be” doing more strength training. I read a crazy stat once that something like 60% of all women over the age of 60 can’t lift 10 pounds above their head. That’s insane. That’s scary. When you talk about longevity, being mobile, or self-sufficient, that is an important goal for a lot of people. I’m glad that that’s getting into the psyche of the public.

To put numbers on it, I’m looking at the report because I can’t remember the details. I just quote this stuff. I’ve got everything stored in the perfect memory. About 30% of them identify as being beginner. Of 70 roads, it’s nearly 50% identified as being beginner. As you’re 50, there are more beginners, and 60 roads, more beginners. Even go to our 80-plus roads. There’s 60% of those class themselves as beginners to strength training. That is self-identified data. That’s what they select but that’s a cool thing to see. New people are being and people are getting stronger.

Do you have any insight as to why someone is starting strength training so late in life? What got them over the hump?

We did some follow-up questions. I have some senses and data to support it. Of that population, in the 55-plus year-olds, more than half of them identified that living a long and healthy life and then improving fitness is why they bought the home. Those are the goals that they’re chasing. Muscle mass gains may be important to a longer quality of life and things but generally, people are being identified that this is a key component for me to stay independent.

That’s one in some of our UX research interviews and generally custom comments. It’s about independence and maintaining this quality of life. “I’ve worked hard. I’m retired. I want to enjoy this. I want to be able to stay doing this as long as possible.” A lot of that message is getting through to at least the people that are buying Tonal in that age demographic, that strength training is important for them to do that, which is cool.

I famously detest exercise. I have no interest in it from an enjoyment aspect but I’m in my 50s and that is what got me to finally cave and start. I’m seeing other people my age that I went to high school and college with. Some of them are like, “Oof.” I don’t mean it from an aesthetic standpoint. I mean it from like it looks like they’re having difficulties and that’s not going to get better if they don’t do anything. I was like, “I’m going to be that guy and I wanted to get out in front of it.”

The research is pretty clear that if we do what the typical American or Westerner does, we’re going to lose about 10% strength every year. We might lose even more power. Power is arguably more important than strength. Power equals force times velocity. It’s the strength component but how quickly you can do that. If you think about getting out of a chair, it’s a power move. It doesn’t feel like a power move. You have to do it relatively quickly. What happens to older people? They get up slowly. They don’t have the speed. They have the strength to do it.

Strength training is good for the active aging demographic. Share on X

It doesn’t feel like a power move until you can’t do it.

We know that power decreases probably faster. There are a lot of epidemiological reasons that say that and do that if we don’t do strength training and do these things. There’s also a decent base-to-day evidence. We get a 73% increase in our strength. We make our female 55-plus rods and don’t legally quote me on the exact percentage here because I don’t have the report in front of me but made 140% increases in deadlift peak power in that first year.

They get stronger but they get a lot faster. That’s what’s going to get you out of the chair. That’s what’s going to keep you independent. A research test called a timed up-and-go test is how quickly you can get out of a chair. I walk 10 meters, then come back and sit down. It’s like a one-to-one correlation between how slow you are with that and how unfortunately likely you are to die in the next twelve months. It’s a pretty strong correlator if you’re slow at doing that. It’s a power move.

Speed walking is essentially a power. It’s applying force to the ground relatively quickly. We see these huge increases in strength and power, which is super cool to see. Showing it in tens of thousands of people across a long time span with typical levels of training. Not like super exaggerated and crazy you’ve got to be on this crazy training program but this is what our members are doing in our homes. It’s cool to see we’re having that impact.

If you’re older and you’re thinking, “Tonal is expensive,” price out one of those recliners that lifts you when it’s time to get up.

The healthcare-related costs to falls. Once you’re over 65, one of the leading causes of healthcare bills is essentially falls, which tends to be a strength and power issue along with a balance and stability issue. Those medical bills rack up quickly. We hope no one has those. We hope Tonal can do its part in helping show those. It was cool from the day to decided to see that it seems to be making a difference in those members.

I don’t know if you know the answer to this but I see a lot of Tonal ads in my email on Facebook or Instagram. I’m curious if those are the same methods you’re using to get in front of people who are older. I think about my family. They are not the most savvy with social media. I’m curious if there’s a different marketing ploy.

My dad is a Facebook monster. He knows way more than I am. It’s interesting. For most of Tonal’s history, we have this membership base. Not because we’ve targeted them just because they’ve sought us out. It probably wasn’t a conscious effort to go out and have the exact right marketing messages to get these tens of thousands of 55-plus-year-old active aging community. We did launch our first active aging community campaign back at the end of 2023.

We’re trying to tell member stories for the large part of that. That was a first dabble into some of that space. Honestly, it’s showing banal on you. There are people like you that are using our platform. This is the outcome that you can make. We’ve got this incredible video of Arlene, who’s one of our super-user members. She’s 66 years old and a two-time cancer survivor. She reached 3 pounds. I’ve seen the video so many times that I know now.

It shows that there’s reality in this thing. Over 2025, what you will see, I don’t want to speak for our marketing campaign but is us working out how we best communicate to that membership base and showing the advantages of the product that we can provide and the outcomes that we can provide for that type of member.

Increasing Power

When you talk about longevity and strength training, you mention some important points about power and how we work out. Are there other types of things that a person might not make the connection about getting out of the chair that could easily show this ability to increase their power or see how they’re making strides over time besides their strength score?

Sit-to-stand testing is a good one. It’s used in the research quite a lot. If you take a standard high chair, 18 to 24 inches, you want to be able to sit and stand at least 15 times in 30 seconds. If you can’t do that, that’s not a great path of where your strength and power are heading for, essentially healthspan and lifespan.

Healthspan is like living actively full lives and engaging with minimal related disease. Lifespan is how long you’re on this earth for. Both are strongly correlated with that score going down. Once you get over 50, you’re in a good spot. You want to be closer to 30. Once it goes down, that would be one of the places to do that. On Tonal itself, we have that power score, the power meter.

I would utilize it to try and keep that. You want to be trying to hit power PRs, or at least moving with intent, what the research tells us about power training is. Moving fast is good but it’s the intent to move fast that is more important because essentially, it’s mostly a neurological adaptation. It’s about firing sequences. You’re trying to move quickly. Whether you move quickly or not, is important to some extent but it’s de-attempting to move quickly at least in a concentric direction of where you’re thinking.

If you say deadlifting or something like that, you don’t even need to get deadlift. You want to try and explode the upward concentric portion of the movement as quickly as you can then slowly control the eccentric or the downward portion of that. Try and get that power meter that’s all based on concentric power. That’s the property that we want to work on.

Benefits Of Strength Training

There are so many other benefits of, “I’m going to go off and make these active aging things.” The American Heart Association updated its position stance. They meant to show the benefits of strength training for heart health. Research has been there for 5 to 10 years but it takes a long time for these very high-profile public organizations to change their position statements. They came out to say that strength training is beneficial for heart disease prevention and the treatment of it, which was a huge step.

There was a mini-review was used on the impact of strength training on vascular systems, your blood vessels, and how it benefits around there. You get essentially better blood flow and lower blood pressure. There’s a plethora of research coming around the role of strength training as it relates to mitigating or reducing the likelihood of things like Alzheimer’s. It plays a role. It’s not that it’s a preventive cause but there are associations with decreased outcomes as it relates to neurological diseases and in the treatment of neurological diseases and preventing further decay.

There’s a lot of research around there on social and emotional health, stress, and anxiety. All of these like non-traditional, “Strength training makes my muscles big and strong.” It does. That’s a good thing but there are all of these auxiliary benefits that have been underappreciated or under-aware that are coming out in the research literature and making their way into public health, which is pretty cool to see someone obsessed about strength training.

That’s fascinating because, for years, that’s been cardio-based. All the things you said have always been about cardio. I love hearing that strength is getting some attention. It deserves it. When you ask people like doctors or personal trainers, they always say, “That’s the one thing that you can do, lifting weights. That’s going to make you young longer. Not cardio.” Not that cardio is bad. I’m not trying to give cardio a bad rep.

I’m not either. There is some research to suggest. There are additive benefits that are both independent and codependent. You want to do both. Both are a good thing to do. You could probably get more of the basis covered from strength training than probably previously thought, which is cool to know.

I feel like with strength training, you’re going to stumble into some cardio, whether you want to or not. With cardio, you’re never going to stumble into strength training.

That’s probably fair. You can do strength training with high rep, long sets, or long rep durations. You can make it fairly cardio-metabolically active. You can make it fair, get a high heart rate, or get out of breath. breath. Do one of Woody’s hit classes. I’m under load but I’m feeling my lungs as much as I am muscles. It’s very difficult to get the same muscle-strengthening benefits out of cardio prevention of osteoporosis and bone mineral density. Those are tougher to mitigate from a cardio perspective. Although, I will say, I’m not anti-cardio.

Speed walking is essentially a power. It's applying force to the ground relatively quickly. Share on X

I love cardio but Tom is anti-cardio all the way.

I’m pro-exercise with a strong bias towards strength training and reps of eight or fewer. I also walk on a treadmill fat man or outside when it’s not snubby.

It’s very healthy of you and well-balanced. What other items are on the state of strength report that we haven’t talked about that you feel people need to make sure to know about?

Female Strength

We had a section on all-around female strength. We’ve broken through this barrier that 2-pound weights and female strength training is a thing of the past. We showed that in this sample site over a given year October 22 to 23, close to 12 billion pounds was lifted by our female members with an average of three and a half thousand pounds per workout.

If you imagine how many reps you’d have to do if that was 2 or 4-pound dumbbells. This is mean. This means that in one session where you switched on Tonal, you did one set then Tom bugged you. You had to go off and you stopped it. That counts as the hundred pounds that you lifted before you were interrupted. That’s all included. When you start thinking about that, that’s probably on the low side and it’s three and a half thousand pounds.

One of the things that again didn’t make it into the report that I get to see on the back end is that’s 10% more than 2023, which was 10% more than the year before. We’re seeing this progressive overload. Slightly different member sets are included perfect one-to-one but you’re seeing increases in the amount of people lifted. We see people lift more in programs than they do in free lifting. Having a little like, “I got to complete this,” that is more likely to lift more. Both our female and our male members, that’s true.

We did notice some differences between the most popular exercises that maybe some of our female members do versus our male members overall but especially our male members who are not doing a ton of legs, especially if they’re given their choice. If they’re not in a program and it’s their free lifting or custom, they’re doing a leg set. I can’t remember what it was but certainly not every workout. It was one every 2 to 3. Twenty-five percent of free lifting workouts have a leg exercise in them.

1 in 4 has one leg exercise. Goblet Squatting was the most popular move and the most commonly done. Neutral deadlift was number two. We’re noticing that our female members are more balanced within their overall strength profile and exercise selections. I contribute, unfortunately, probably to the male stereotype that I’m doing more than one of every four but it’s probably not one every two.

I feel like I’m good. I’ve talked about this before because I only do programs. I almost never do one-offs and I never skip leg day. If it wasn’t in a program and I was left to my devices, I would be doing what you’re doing and I know that about myself. I only do programs. I might hate it but I’m like, “This is the next item up for bid. I’m going to do it.”

Engagement And Consistency

66% of program workouts have leg workouts in them versus 25% of free lifting. We try to make sure that they’re in there. There’s a lot more around that. That was interesting. The other piece that I was super interested in was this engagement and consistency piece. How can we understand? We can’t identify causality. We can’t say, “This caused this. This is not a randomized control trial. This is just observational data from thousands upon thousands of people.”

What we can do is associations. I generally use the heuristic that successfully uses trails. You go, “These are things that successful people do. If I do enough of them, maybe I’ll be successful too” approach. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t map one-on-one. One of the things that we noticed is people that who follow programs are 12% more consistent. Work out more frequently and regularly than people who don’t follow programs.

That makes some sense in that maybe people who would opt into that are more likely to be signing up for something consistent. There are also some behavioral science concepts around commitment devices, “I’ve made a commitment to do something. Therefore, I am going to do it,” but we get to see that quite strongly. We find that our older members are more consistent than our younger members, too, which is interesting.

We have the specter of death hanging over us. That’s a commitment device all.

It is a motivator. I’m keeping going. They’re more consistent. Maybe they have more time available. It might be another reason. It’s slightly less morbid. One of the things that I found super interesting was that app to train or work out. 30-plus people are around 20% more consistent than people who don’t. If you were following people on the app, check what they work out.

It might be reverse causality that you’re engaged in the platform, therefore you follow people. I’m not saying it’s a perfect method but even once you see it into 1 to 10 people. You were 10% more consistent on average, following 1 to 10 people, or if you checked your stats. You’re around 20% more consistent in your workout than someone who didn’t check their stats.

It’s these little things that maybe you can do that might be, “If you’re struggling with commitment and of doing the things that you identify.” We call it in the resources, the exercise intention behavior gap. “I have the intention to exercise but there’s this gap where I do not exercise intention behavior gap.” If you want to bridge that gap, what are some of the things that you can do? Probably sign up for a program that is probably going to help you versus trying to do individual workouts. Take some choice architecture decision, making out of it, and get a commitment advice.

Maybe follow-up signs. Follow some friends on the app or join the Facebook community but get some engagement point of view because you can see more people similar to you to motivate you and accountability buddies. Check your progress. We always like to make progress towards our goals. What we’re showing in this data is people are making great progress. You’re likely, if you train, to make great progress, too. If you do those three things alone, you’re probably likely to smaller that intention behavior gap.

That’s all very exciting. I’m curious if the data shows any difference between a 4-week program, a 2-week program, or a 1-week program. If there’s a certain number of weeks people might suddenly get a little less compliant.

The completion rates are inversely related to the length of the program. It goes a little more than this. I don’t know this data super well. Caveats and terms and conditions apply. Particularly when you are more beginner-focused, you’re not as into routines and not as consistent. Something like Atomic Habits would tell you it’s about doing the smallest worthwhile step. Not to sign up to a pro. Do something. We certainly see within that user cohort. A 1-week program or 2-week program is much more likely to consistently stick to it and quick fits.

Short workouts are better than longer ones are doing that. If you sign up for four weeks of House of Volume and it’s your first time ever working out, you might not be completing it in the designated timescale. There’s this relationship between particularly early in your strength training journey in making these small steps. Maybe it is worthwhile having a commitment to do something like a 1-week program or a 2-week program.

Make sure they’re short workouts and they’re enjoyable. We do see a relationship between star ratings or people’s enjoyment of workouts and how likely they are to do them and come back. That’s repeated in the research literature, too. I might have said this last time. We did a study with Rhode Island that showed people’s enjoyment using Tonal versus selective-sized traditional gym equipment. It showed that over an eight-week training study in middle-aged females enjoyment was maintained on Tonal where it decreased on selective sized equipment.

Enjoying working out is important to working out or building a love or enjoyment of working out and doing the smaller steps are important for them. We see some of our most engaged members. They want more and harder. They’re almost the reverse. It’s like, “Give me more.” I’m like, “Seriously?” I think you cannot write a harder training program. This is hard. Lindsay Bond didn’t do this training program when I was running the ski teams. I’m not sure that we should be but okay.

Moving fast is good, but it's actually the intent to move faster that is more important consistently. Share on X

I feel like that’s how you felt about House of Volume.

“That’s all, Joe.” He’s like, “Can I ride this?” I’m like, “They seem to want it. Go for it.”

We’re going to have to start signing waivers before we start programs.

There’s a subception of our membership that’s like the challenge, shall we say, of doing. They finish it and they bust through PRs. They make huge gains. Certainly, when we’re on the beginner side of it, small work while steps. How can we stack the odds in our favor? Hopefully, there are some of the tactics we can do.

Those are incredible. I feel like this is a good time, Tom, for you to ask your question about Strength Score because it goes right in line with what you said.

I’ve done House of Volume a couple of times. They all blur it out.

Showing off now, Tom.

I’m just saying I’ve done it. I’m still doing these episodes with my shirt on. I haven’t made that many games but I had an interesting thing happen with my string score that has never happened. This is not a complaint. I know those questions about a string score are going in complaints.

Why didn’t it go up? Why didn’t it go down? I hit a PR and it didn’t change.

Mine did go up. It went up 60 points after I finished a workout. Not even completed a program. It was the middle form. It was like I hit the jackpots on the slots watching it go. I was like, “What did I do?” I was mystified. Any insight as to why I would suddenly bounce up to that level?

Can I give my guess? I want to give a guess first. This is my guess that I tried to explain to him.

Someone there took pity on me?

It’s because he started to do his more volume-based programs. All of a sudden, this level of volume, this level of strength, and the amount of how often he was working out started to go up. That is my thought but I’m curious.

That’s probably a pretty good basis for what’s going on. First off, the strength score is only related to your estimations of your strength 1RMs and PRs. It’s not related to volume and power. It’s only related to estimations of 1RM across. Not all but the vast majority of the movements. How we can increase our estimation of one RM and therefore, jump up our strength score is we either lift a heavier weight for the same number of reps that we have, or we lift the same weight or a lighter weight for more reps.

We can lift heavier or we can lift more. Those are essentially the two underlying components. There’s a bunch of other AI machine learning and stuff. I don’t understand. That’s essentially what’s feeding into the system. With something like House of Volume, if you saw that increase, I would speculate your data is a nominize so I don’t know and I couldn’t find out. Number one, it was probably a movement that you hadn’t done for either a while or ever before.

If it’s a movement that you haven’t done or ever before, we take it fairly consistently low baseline or we take a baseline based on your strength score, whenever that movement came into the library or a long time ago. It might have been somewhat artificially low given that you’ve been given months of training of more volume. You could express a lot more strength in that move than we’d previously been understanding.

Say, it was rack squats for example. We’ve never done rack squats. We’d asked your 1RM for 10 reps was 40 pounds. You went to House of Volume and know how many reps are in there. It’s probably 18 or 20 or some higher amount of that. Maybe you either increased the weight or based on your other moves, we estimated your weight, it was more. You lifted 50 pounds 20 times rather than 10 for 40.

That would calculate essentially a new increase in estimated 1RM for that move, which would then increase your task or pattern, which would increase your lower body strength score, which would then increase your total strength score. That would be my estimation. It was a movement that you hadn’t done for either a long time or maybe ever. Maybe it was a movement that was added to a movement expansion pack that maybe wasn’t in one of our earlier ones before. You had done that then you lifted it a lot of times. Our weight that we thought was, “That’s impressive, Tom. Let’s give you a gold star. It’s the strength score points for that.”

I’m trying to think about it. There’s something I did that was unusual like a move but I’ll have to go back through and look to see if there’s anything that jumps out of it.

Your answer was more thorough than my answer. I still feel like that was pretty much my answer, Tom.

It’s pretty much the same. I gave it a little background.

I’m just stupid.

People are more likely making great progress if they train to make great progress too. Share on X

I speak for more words to say the same thing is my forte. Not the other way. You cheated. It said bicep curls and you did deadlifts. That’s the one that’s hacking the system.

Hopefully, people aren’t doing that.

I feel like we should bleep that out because people will start playing that game.

Everyone’s already worked that out.

Have they? Got it. Honestly, it’s interesting to see it move but I have no real self-esteem link to it. It is what it is. I’m going to do what I do. When I saw that big of a jump, I was like, “That’s different.”

It’s a good, I’d say, broad metric of things. You want to be increasing over time. The strength relationship is a linear log relationship, which means that essentially, I get strong quickly, relatively quickly. It takes me a long time to get stronger and a long time to get even stronger. It goes up steeply, then it plateaus off. That’s only a linear log. It’s like a 1 to 10 relationship. If I could increase my strength by 10 pounds in the first month, it might take me 10 months to increase it in the next 10 pounds or something like that. This is very slow descending.

Particularly, early in your journey, you’ll see these rapid increases. You get stronger and then it will plateau. We want to see a general upward trend of it generally. It’s not something to live or die by if it increases by a few points or decreases by a few points. They’re all within the natural normal variation. I’ll get myself in trouble for this but eventually, we’ll come out with some other things that will be useful for you to also track in that space, eventually. Nothing coming this week or next. Certainly, stuff that we’re working on in the background is how can we give you some more holistic metrics.

There will be a press conference.

Longer Muscle Lengths Training

Are there any other emerging trends in strength training or anything else that we haven’t covered you want to make sure that we cover?

There’s lots. We’ve covered most of them. Some of the things that are strength training research that make me geek out and get excited. There’s lots of research coming out around long muscle length training. Back in the day, it was always about the squeeze. You’ve got to pump the squeezes. That’s where you get the growth.

The research is trending toward in the last year of months. It’s the stretched part of that. Imagine you’re doing the slide, the bottom part of the slide. That stretch portion might be the most hypertrophic to build the most amount of muscle. Full repetition training is still that I would recommend and Tonal recommends. Certainly, it seems that a longer muscle length position is most important. It’s certainly for some muscles, whether it’s for every muscle or inside is not clear.

There’s a lot of research around that. A lot of that research is on things like quadriceps extensions or hamstring curves. If I do the top portion of the move, I’m in the short position. If I do the long, I’m more stretched. My quads are more stretched. That consistently stretched position is more beneficial potentially for hypertrophy than that top position.

This is my message. Don’t cheat on that stuff. If you’re thinking about a pull-down, you want to make sure you feel that that stretch control the way up but feel the stretch at the top. You don’t want to stop here. You’ll probably cheat yourself out again. You want to make sure that you get the full stretch on something like a row or if you’re doing a chest press or a bench press. You make sure that you contract your entire chest or flies. It’s the bottom part of the motion.

We want to focus on the stretch. The research is interesting in that space because there are not too many new and novel things that we learned. They’re like, “I didn’t know that.” That’s a topic that’s become more prominent in the research literature. The other one that has come out has been there’s always the question about how much volume is enough volume, the best volume for hypertrophy mostly for building muscle, and how much should I do.

There have been two published meta-analyses or maybe three. One in 2010 that had no studies involved in it. One in 2016 by Brad Schoenfeld and one in 2022 by Bez Valley said, “Around 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week is the optimal amount of strength training for building muscle.” If you do more than that, not that it’s bad but you won’t get any more gains. This is on average. If you’re brand new, I would not recommend that.

On average, in resistance training people do about 10 to 20 sets. If you see most of the total programs in Tonal, particularly in our intermediate-advanced, you’re going to find us right in that range. That’s something that the coaches and I will use as a barometer for. “Is it hypertrophy? Is there enough stimulus in that?” If I had 10 to 20 sets of bench presses, it could be 10 sets of chest, 4 sets of bench presses, and 4 sets of chest flies. You’re getting multiple movement patterns to get to that 10 to 20 sets.

That’s where the research literature was. There was a study that came out that they started at 20 sets, 22 sets, and they increased 4 or 6 sets every 2 weeks for 12 weeks. They ended up in the 40 sets and 50 sets. They found non-significantly different increases in the real-world meaningful but not statistical increases in hypertrophy going up to an average of 35 sets a week, which was the first time it’s ever been shown. That is the highest volume.

I’m not saying everyone to go and train for 35 sets a week. That would be challenging to do. They did it for one muscle part. It was for quadriceps and that’s all they focused on. Some of that research informed our program that is coming out has already been talked about with Coach Ackeem and Ultimate Arms. We’re directly applying some of that research of high volume. It’s essentially a specialization phase.

It’s cool for my side to be able to use research and apply that to training. We’ll do other ultimate series like body part specializations where we’ll get into the 30-ish sets a week of arms in that program. Everything else will be relatively low or very low but it’s all application of research into training is co-and-cut cool.

That’s fascinating. I love that. You folks are right on the cutting edge.

I try to keep myself in a job. I’ve got to come up with new ways to train. You shouldn’t be doing the same things we did many years ago. “Why do we have you, Troy? There’s this little study. Let’s do a program.”

This has been fascinating and has lots of useful information that may calm some people down, too. You are doing the right thing or there’s a method to the madness. Trust the system.

Enjoying working out is important to working out. Share on X

There are a lot of smart people well beyond myself that go into creating these things. You should have a lot of trust in what we put out.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us. Before we let you go, let everybody know where they can find you in all the places.

My Instagram account is @StrengthScienceTroy. I am somewhat regular again. I went through my highs and lows. I posted every day. I never had an Instagram account. I created one and posted every day for 3 months, then didn’t post for 6. I’m back to once or twice a week so you can follow me there. My LinkedIn is my name and face.

That’s how I am with working out. I do this every day, I’m on it, then I will fall off and I’ll come back with a more reasonable timeframe.

Follow our program and follow some friends. Check your stats and progress. Work out early in the morning. Some data suggests. I mostly jot that down to nothing special about the morning. It’s less stuff that comes up in your day that can get in the way. If you work out in the morning, you tend to be a little more consistent because you get it done before the rest of the day happens.

Thank you so much, Troy.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much.

—

That brings this episode to a close. Where can people find you?

People can find me on Facebook at Facebook.com/CrystalDOKeefe. Also, on the Tonal leaderboard and all the other socials @ClipOutCrystal.

You can find me on Twitter @RogerQBert or Facebook at Facebook.com/TomOKeefe. You can find the show online at Facebook.com/SupersetPodcast. Don’t forget that you can watch all of these over on YouTube. That’s it for this one. Thanks for reading. Until next time. Keep lifting.​

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