Aaron De Jong & Steven Webster - Movr & Asensei: The Future of Digital Movement Health

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over three years and running. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Please stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This episode of the Future of Fitness is presented to you by the Fit Tech Club, a business network run by the creators of the FitTech Summit, Europe's leading conference devoted to fitness and health technology. Look, friends, the fitness industry is changing faster than ever. The intersection of technology with fitness and health is growing bigger and more dynamic by the minute. Gyms are exploding figuratively, and their constituent parts are ending up at home, outdoors, on your wrist, or in entirely new places with brilliantly new concepts. Investors are pumping astronomical amounts of money into the market like we've never seen before. The FitTech Club believes that collaboration is the advantage to these times of change. That's why the club aims to bring thought leaders together to inspire them by making the right contacts at the right time and giving insights to the industry's most relevant and current trends. Here's what Melanie Lauer, CEO of Kettler and Tritsport, says about the FitTech Club.

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If you're interested in the fitness technology game and looking to accelerate your growth, I highly suggest you check out fittechsummit.com forward slash club to learn more. You can join the highly valuable newsletter, apply for the FitTech Club itself, or simply learn more or connect with people like me. That's fittechsummit.com forward slash club. To live your healthiest, longest life possible, you need to understand what's going on inside your body. People age at different speeds, and generic annual blood work doesn't properly evaluate your biological age, but Insight Tracker does. InsightTracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system designed to extend your health span and slow down the aging process. Created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics, Insight Tracker analyzes your blood, DNA, and fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized and where you're not. You'll get a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition, and supplementation for your body. Add inner age 2.0 to any plan to calculate your true biological age and see how you're aging from the inside out. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire Insight Tracker store. Just go to insight tracker.com forward slash future. That's insightracker.com forward slash future. All right, we have Aaron DeJong and Steven Webster. Welcome back to the Future of Fitness Fellows. Great to be here. Really excited. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. There's gonna be a lot of great insights from you guys. And uh as we just discovered pre-recording conversations that none of us are qualified to give crypto investing advice. So this would not be about that. And uh just let people know we're recording in June of 2022. So in case something significantly changes in between now and then, it's been a dark time for crypto. So anyway, moving on to more positive things. Um it's great to have you guys. Uh I'm really excited to discuss the uh collaboration announcement that you guys have. Uh you both are uh pioneers in in the health space and as far as movement health, especially, and uh really interesting technologies you guys have. So if if we can, I think just to give people a background. I mean, I've had you both on the podcast, and people can go back and listen to those individually to get you know insights on what Mover and Ace Sensei do. But just to get people updated really quickly, maybe Aaron, tell us what it is that uh that Mover does.

Yeah, but thank you um for the quick insight and especially the focus on movement health. I think at its core, very simply, um, Mover originated and today is powered by this recommendation algorithm that we created um first to power an end-consumer app. Um, and now it's the core sort of processor behind everything else we're building, which is Mover Assess or ability to capture assessments and make recommendations based off those individualized learnings. And we're building out some really exciting stuff around you know analytics and uh in the future predictive um uh uh you know mechanisms around that just personalization engine, and we'll kind of dive into that. Um but that's that's the core pro product of Mover and the whole focus, the goal is to improve movement health uh measurably on an individual standpoint um with everybody who uses any of our technology.

Right on, right on. And uh Steven, give us some insights. What is uh what is Asensei up to nowadays?

Yeah, so I mean, you know, fundamentally we set out to do one thing, which was to make human movement legible, teachable, and understandable to a machine. Uh and once you've done that, um, it just unlocks the kind of experiences uh that you can deliver digitally. Um, you know, my last real job was at Microsoft, uh, and we had a great phrase that uh we were transitioning from GUI to newy, from graphical user interfaces to natural user interfaces. Um and natural user interfaces were basically you know speech and gesture, I think Microsoft Connect, right? And so I think speech under you know, speech recognition and speech understanding, you know, that's been kind of the state of the art of what how AI can allow us to interact with the machine. Um and it you know has unlocked whole um you know, whole categories of solutions. We're doing the same for human movement. Uh, and you know, the the area of focus for us because you know we we we came at this problem because we've all been sports coaches and we're all passionate about coaching sport and the opportunity to coach sport at scale and coach fitness at scale uh by doing it digitally. Um but to coach you have to be hands-on, you have to be able to watch somebody and you have to be able to make adjustments and make corrections to them. Um so that's where we're pointing the essentially capability first, is it kind of connected fitness and connected health.

Yeah, awesome. And I think some of the things that you know just to set the table for this as well is that like you said, Stephen, we all have coaching experience, like we've all done that. And I think ultimately what we want to do is uh or what we want, and you guys are actively doing it, and I'm just talking about it, uh making the coaching experience even better, right? Giving coaches and you know, facilities and and fitness professionals, you know, people that are actually qualified and passionate about the work, making them better at their their jobs and giving the clients better kind of clients and consumers better experiences and and ultimately better results, right? That's what we want. Another thing to kind of wet the appetite for people that are listening is we're really gonna get into kind of like demystifying personalization of what that means. Uh we joked about all the buzzwords out in the industry nowadays. Uh it's it's pretty ridiculous at times. And uh I think that's something that people will really pull away from this as well, and what what the next you know uh chapters of of Connected Fitness may look like. So you guys have a cool announcement, you guys are are now collaborating, and I think that's a great story as well. So maybe give us some insights as like how how'd you guys get together? What does this collaboration look like, and what can you tell us about what you guys will will be doing?

Do you wanna you wanna tell that story?

Yeah, I'll give the quick story, and I think what's so cool is the way we teed up both of our solutions. It's like we could end the conversation now, like, oh yeah, perfect fit. You know, like an innovative way to collect and and direct human movement and from a sensei and from our point of view, like we're just obsessed with creating systems that actually synthesize and personalize uh movement recommendations on like a specific exercise level to as big as workouts. But um yeah, that's the table has definitely been set. How we met, um both I think Steven and I had had each other's companies on our radar. Um, but really it was just uh Steven had downloaded Mover um had sent uh an a submission through our general uh reply from our bi-weekly newsletter, and it was like very simple. It's like, hey, love what you're doing, we're doing something in the space, we should connect. And our customer support um specialist just flipped it to me, and we were on a call the next week, and I and within 15-20 minutes, we were like, Okay, our our companies are gonna do something very powerful together. Um, and it's been it's been happening quick since, and we've had people very interested in uh and companies interested in our technologies before we're even like market ready. So it's it's been a quick roller coaster, but a very um a fluid one that that almost like the shoe fit right away. So that's that's kind of where it started from. It was just a random email in my inbox.

And I gotta say, I rec you know, as a founder, I mean anyone that's listening that's a founder, they know this. Especially um, you know, whenever you do a capital raise and it gets registered with the SEC, there's a whole ecosystem of like really annoying services businesses who just watch for SEC notifications, scrape emails, and be like, hey, do you need accounting services? Can I make you a video? Can I get you a frame for your patent? Um, and so uh, you know, I'm I'm I'm I I literally have I've got like a Stream Deck, you know, sitting underneath my monitor that I program kind of shortcuts on, and one of them is uh basically opens an email, uh, auto-completes unsubscribe and then hits send. And every time I've got one of these emails highlighted, and I just hit the button on my so it's deeply satisfying. I just hit this button on my stream deck, and it's like get me off your mailing list. So so for me to call the email Aaron like goes against everything that I enjoyed. But uh, you know, I think that you know, we we spoke about this, we spoke about this a little bit before. You know, called emails are not uh you should call email, you should step up and introduce yourself, but like say why. Um, you know, if if it's just uh, hey, I notice we have people in common or I notice we're in the same industry, it's like that is not sufficiently enough of a reason that I'm gonna um you know uh open up my inbox to you. Uh so yeah, I I loved what the guys at Mover were doing. It was kind of personal to me, like mobility and mobility practice as I've got older is something that I was introduced to through a trainer, and I kind of had the epiphany of supple leopards and uh all such things. And uh, you know, I spend a lot of time I'm standing at my desk and I am very focused on not to be sitting all the time. And uh, you know, it's part of what I wanted to take to scale. Uh I think more people should be um understanding their movement and how to improve their movement. And uh we're just really excited by what the guys do, and you know, as I'm sure we'll get into the the one plus one equals more than two. Uh I hate saying one plus one equals three, so I'll just put it that way.

Yeah, two two plus over two. Yeah. Over two. Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, the outreach is a funny thing too, just to touch on that, because uh, you know, as a as a podcast host, I get a lot of pitches for people who may want to be on. It's like obviously people have not no idea what my podcast is actually about sometimes, and that's really annoying. And I think if we don't even have to talk about LinkedIn outreach nowadays, that's just been desecrated uh and completely burned down. But here's good news is if with all these seas of cold crap outreach, right? Just basic stuff and no one's actually looking at your profile and understanding your business. If you do send one out that is authentic and it catches someone's eye, it stands out. So there's some benefits to that as well. If like this is an actual quality outreach with a good reason and you know uh thought put behind it, then it stands out, which is I guess good news for people who like to Google the outreach. So in a sensei working together, you know, maybe help my simplistic mind with a use case. Like, what does this look like for uh a consumer or an athlete or a coach or someone who's gonna be using what you guys are putting together so we can uh kind of understand, you know, outside of the words describing about what it actually looks like in application.

Aaron, can I suggest we kind of go from left to right and just like do a day in the life of a customer? We'll start with them. Uh so uh I love telling stories through the lens of the person that's actually experiencing it rather than talk about the technology. So, Eric, um I want you I want you to imagine that you um you're the customer of a particular fitness app, um, because you know Aaron and I are both B2B companies, so we're offering our capability as something that can be integrated into your app. Um, so you're using your favorite workout app, your favorite fitness app, your favorite training app. Um, and one day you're going to open that up and be like, oh, there's a new button here to do like a movement assessment. Or um you might not even be aware you're doing a movement assessment. You might just be in the midst of an active warm-up, you're getting taken through three. So let's talk about that use case, because that's the the, I think, the more exciting one. So yeah, you can press a button and be taken through a functional movement screen, very clinical. Um, or you're in an active warm-up, but now your uh your camera, uh so essentially captures motion in one of two ways, either through a camera on a smartphone or a connected fitness tablet, or we use connected apparel. Today we're talking about computer vision, uh 3D computer vision from a regular camera. So you're doing your warm-up, you're in the field of view of your camera, uh, and unbeknownst to you as you're warming up, you're doing your mountain climbers, you're doing your squats, um, mover have taught a sensei when they're doing that particular movement uh and you recognize that they're doing a movement, at this position in the movement, tell me what the range of motion is of this joint. So for instance, and we always talk about squats, right? For instance, when you recognize someone is doing a squat and you recognize that they've reached the bottom of the squat, I want you to measure their hip flexion and over the course of five or six reps, give me their average hip flexion. And just write that data point down. Um, and then as you warm up, we'll capture, and Aaron can say how many he needs, but we'll capture a number of these measurements as you're warming up. And what we're what we're delivering, what Essenti's delivering in that moment, is exactly the same thing as coaches. We would all do as we're watching our athletes warm up. Well, they're warming up and it's like, hey, Eric looks a little sticky in his hips today, or like, what's up with your have you got tight ankles today? Oh, my calves are like super tight today. And as we're seeing that, we're already fast forward and we're already already thinking, damn, I was gonna do X today, but like if he's got super tight ankles, do I want to stop now and work on that? Or do I do I want to adjust the program that I'm about to personalize the program that I'm just about to deliver? Um, and as I'm coaching, uh as I'm coaching you, um, maybe because of some of those things I saw in that warm-up, I'm gonna change the language I use when I'm cueing you because I I I want to kind of help you with that. So I'm gonna pass off to mover, I'm gonna pass off to Aaron, but we've just collected a bunch of joint angles at particular moments in range of motion, and we've given them to mover, and basically a sense of mover, what do you see? What do you think? And I'll let you take it from here and then pass by to me, Aaron.

Yeah. Well, and so what we built was an ability to take in any assessment information, and what Steven just described was in a warm-up or in the beginning of a movement experience, someone uh being passively monitored, so they don't, you know, they they're just doing their normal workout. And then what Mover does is we take that information and we make a prioritization and a huge map of the body saying if hips, if we have information on hip flexion, hip rotation, hip extension, both mobility and stability of this person, which the end consumer doesn't care about, but they do care about my hips feel crappy. Right? We know what the specific thing is in relation to all the different moving components. And we say, actually, this person needs one external hip rotation mobility drill to then go do squats very successfully later in the workout. We don't have a deployment of how to coach that recommendation, but we do know the cataloging of it and saying, hey, a sensei, this person should do X and they should do it before they go into a more dynamic, more challenging, more load-based part of the workout, and we can make those recommendations throughout the entire workout. So we would find the specific thing that Eric needs in his favorite application, map to their content, and then say, Asensei, here, here's the information you need. Go tell them. Back to you.

And so I'm gonna I'm gonna be a sensei again, yeah. So I'm gonna take that data. So I've now been given almost two things. I love this, Aaron. This is how we should do this. Um so we're gonna you know, we're gonna get two lists from Aaron. It's like, hey, here's a list of exercises you or three things really. Here's a list of exercises you can do, here's a list of exercises you should do, and here's a list of exercises you should not do uh because of what we've observed about your movement. And we can map them to what's about to happen, right? Um now let's start talking about a personalized digital experience, just like uh uh which is an analog of the personalized in-person experience. So now the kind of form tracking powered experiences that Asensi can now deliver are do we want to do a smart warm-up? So do we now want to inject into the warm-up some of these you should do uh kind of prime priming exercises that Mover have just told us to do? And so if that's what we choose to do, we can be like, okay, before we go any further, I noticed X, and and Mover give us that information as well. It's like, I noticed that you have like whatever, I noticed the following thing. Therefore, I'd like to just let's spend two minutes doing this exercise. Now, with our form tracking technology, if you don't know that exercise, we can coach you that exercise, like part by part, we can get you into the posture, we can move you through the posture and be like, there you go, you're doing it correctly. Now do five. I really want people to stop thinking of form tracking as rep counting. Rep counting is like the easiest like party trick to do, but most people can count for themselves, and so it's not necessarily the most compelling consumer experience. Um, but when you can hold part whole or guide and coach people through a movement until they're consciously competent and able to do it if they think about it, and then you can cue them as you see them hit each movement, that's a really powerful personal training experience. So that's number one, that can be a smart warm-up. Um, or um, we can do a smart cool down given the work that we know you've done in the lesson or in the class, and combine that with the context of the immobility or instabilities that we've saw. Maybe there's some cooldown exercises that we similarly want to take you through, uh, powered by a sensei. Um and then I think you know, I could I could go on for days about this, but the other experiences we're offering our customers is like, you know, in the moment, in an actual workout, um, what are the smart cues or the smart regressions or the smart progressions that we can offer based on the mobility information we derive between the movement assessment with the Sentian mover? And I like to use this in this example a lot. If you've seen me with very tight ankle flexion and I'm about to get on a rowing machine, well, the the foundational position at the front of the rowing machine, often called the catch, right? You want to have your knees vertical, sorry, your shins vertical, uh, your knees under your armpits. And getting into that position with poor mobility in your ankles sucks. You're you're fighting against your own immobility to get into the catch. The easiest fix is just drop your feet down one extra notch in the foot stretcher. Just, you know, the usually we say, you know, have that strap going across the you know the ball of your foot. Just drop down one more so that you're not, you know, so you've got we've given you a bit more ankle flexion, if you like. Um, what an amazing digital experience. Like, hey, I noticed in your warm-up, your ankles are a little tight. So I want to I want you to drop an extra notch down in that foot stretcher. Um, now let's get rowing. I mean, how did you know? Uh so these are the kind of experiences we want to deliver uh with form tracking, not counting your rowing strokes or counting your squats, but adjusting your practice so you have the best chance of moving correctly and efficiently and performing what you're doing. So, yeah, you know, just to recap, um, computer vision form tracking, which feeds all this data to Mover, which gives us back a whole bunch of like could do, can do, shouldn't do exercises. And then on the back end, a sense is just able to deliver these really customized coaching experiences uh informed uh by the athlete's mobility. Uh and we're putting this in other people's products, we're making this as a capability that other people's can have in their products. So it's like it's a truly smart, connected, personalized workout buzzwords.

Before before we wrap up fully up, Eric, I think like what's important is that you know, this is this solution is what as a gym owner, where I saw a hundred thousand people come through my gym, this is what the personal experience needed to be for someone to not only have a Very positive physical experience, but for them to stay in their fitness routine because we were meeting them where they were in their body. So that's where that sort of came from. And then from a how does it work? Like we built this into an end-consumer product where we've seen 50,000 people come through and do movement assessments and connected them to the right exercise at the right time. And so when you apply that to a personalized communication model around your fitness experience, like we're talking about driving a Tesla when you could be driving like a 1990 Honda Civic. Why wouldn't you drive the Tesla and have this premium experience in your body instead of choosing this, you know, kind of like clunky gas pipes falling, you know, exhaust pipes dragging behind you, um, fitness experience? I think like the the component of health is just so uh tangible uh when when meeting our technologies together. So I mean clearly Steven and I are very excitable about this.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's exciting, you guys. I think it's really cool. And uh, I mean, I had Simon Solberger on on the show from Pair Sports as well, and he has a great he he goes at it very well. He just calls we're we're making dumb fitness smart. Like that's what we're trying to do, right? Is we have you know, traditionally it's just been very, you know, um we've had some data, but we haven't done anything with it, and now it's time to make that smart, smart another buzzword as well.

Um so and yeah, you you you you just saw uh you just pushed another button of mine, so I have to like hit reset on the stuff. So uh, you know, I mean we've used a lot of I think one of the frustrations I've had in the past is we have a tendency to try and use uh data that we wouldn't have used if we were coaches. Um, you know, I I mean I coached, you know, I coached karate at the University of Edinburgh for like 15, 16 years. Um, you know, some of my competitors made it to the international stage. I never knew their heart rate. I never knew their heart rate variability. Um, you know, I didn't know the radiance per second of the reverse punch. Um, so I I think in the past we've had a tendency to like, what do the sensors tell us? And then how can we feed that in and say it's AI and say it's smart and say it's adaptive? Um, but coaches look at that and say, like, but that's not how we, you know, um, and you know, we we have a tendency in this in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area to be like, oh, but we can make something that's smarter than a coach. And I don't believe that. Like, I don't believe that technology will replace coaches. Um, I do choose to believe that coaches who use technology will replace coaches who don't. Um, and so yeah, I think what's so exciting about what Asensi and Mover are doing together is we're working back from the human experience to make it a scale digital experience, but we're replicating what the coach would actually do, and we're saying we need to be able to observe posture and form. We need to be able to look at hip hinge at the bottom of a squat, um, not ingest new data that we could never capture before, but find digital ways uh of observing analog data the same way a coach would. So um, you know, so when you know, I'm sure you're gonna get into the buzzword of personalization, but when we get into personalization, I always go back to like how does the human personalize the experience and how do we replicate that human experience digitally?

Yeah. And I guess that brings up an interesting question for me is like, do you see applications for in-person experiences with coaches with what you guys are building as well? And maybe give us an idea of what that could look like. Can I go first on that and our yeah, go for it, yeah.

Yeah. So uh so uh no for you know for Essensi, this is uh we play in this space as well. Um, you know, we I actually at the one of the summits recently, the Connected Health and Fitness Summit, this was the presentation I gave that physical, you know, digital is getting physical, but physical is getting digital. And as we are at home having these incredible at-home experiences with personalization and leaderboards and the whole experience is wrapped around me, and then you go to a gym or you go to a studio, and now the experience you're getting is actually not as good as the one that you have at home, but you crave the community and you crave the human contact with the coach. And so I think just as much as we're thinking about how do we um bring more of the uh physical in-world experience to digital applications, which is the stuff we've spoken about so far, it's also how do we take the best of digital and bring it into a physical environment. So, one of the use cases uh we talk about, you know, we've got some partnerships uh that we've announced previously where we're actually able to do room scale capture, room scale form capture of everybody in the room at once. So with four to eight uh low-cost cameras on the ceiling of your gym or the ceiling of your studio, um, we real-time capture the skeletons of everybody in the room and feed that into a sensi. So now you can have a whole room of people um, you know, warming up for their yoga class or warming up for their rowing workout. Um and as they're warming up, unbeknownst to them, mover and a sensi are kind of analyzing that data and we're spotting the things we just spoke about, right? It's like you know, Stephen on uh concept two number seven looks like he's got uh tight angles, um, tight ankles, not tight angles. I guess they are tight angles, uh, but they're tight ankles. Um and you know, when uh but but the use case we like we call the super coach, instead of us imagining this dystopian world where everyone's in class and now they're wearing headphones and now they've got a synthetic voice in their ear, instead, we can just route that information to the coach that's in the room and direct the coach to the individual. Uh, you know, when I used to coach um University of Edinburgh, the the karate club, you know, at the start of the year I'd have like 200 students showing up, you know, in jeans and t-shirts wanting to work out. Um, and I'd have six or seven other instructors in the room with me so that there was eyes on everybody. Um, and that's what we can scale. The super coach is like how do we scale the assistant coach and route that information back to the instructor? So, Aaron, I don't know if there's any other.

Yeah, I mean, you from the capture standpoint, that's incredible. And I think, Eric, the important thing that we've been learning a lot, and this is from a lot of feedback we've gotten as we're building out our reporting um dashboard, is what information is the most valuable to the person we're talking to. So if we are building mover capabilities into an end-consumer product, they probably the person who's consuming just needs to see the corrective exercise or their workout, they don't really care how it populated, right? Our goal is to have them experience a transformational experience because the exercise is perfect for their body in that moment. If we're in a uh healthcare product where a physical therapist is using uh the Mover assass algorithm, they're more interested in understanding what area in the body is presenting a limitation or dysfunction. So if we gave them the specific corrective, you could call it, they're gonna say, Well, I I actually have three better ones. And I'm like, great, I don't care. Maybe what you just need to know is that this person has a thoracic uh rotation uh mobility dysfunction. So now you can go apply whatever magic trick you have to that component of the body, which we've identified as the most important thing for you to address. And for a trainer, if you think about a one-to-many trainer, whether it be in military or industrial, and those are two audiences that care a lot about putting dollars behind figuring out how to serve many, many people. It's exactly as Steven just said is here's my dashboard of a thousand people that I'm responsible for. I've got seven that have critical flags that we need to address their motion right now. So I'm gonna go to those seven, and then there's 200 who are in the in the yellow, and then I've got the rest who are in the green who we can apply our sort of general training methodology towards. So you can imagine now that it depends on the audience, but the information given is just the same, different layers, right? And and it's and it's individualized, which is truly powerful.

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And what I love about that, Aaron, as well, and like, you know, you and I are engaged in some of these accounts together around the industrial athlete, this idea that you know 80% of the US workforce is deskless and in a physically demanding job. Um and typically there's like one athletic trainer on site whose job is just to constantly movement screen. And by the time uh she or he has finished movement screening the last person, they're just going back to the first person again. And so all the jobs on the assessment, but none of the time is actually spent on the more important part, is like, well, now that we've assessed, what do we do? And we're flipping that script, right? We're making the assessment something that can be at home, something that can be non-invasive. Like if you know, if your job is lifting and loading something onto trucks, why are we not passively measuring your mobility as you lift and load things onto trucks? Now you don't need to be uh spending your time on that motion assessment, and now you can actually apply the human talent uh doing what the human talent does best, which is actually meet the people uh who you know who need that expertise. So yeah, I'm super excited about um this idea that like you know digital scales human capacity, it doesn't replace human capacity.

Yeah, and I'm really happy to hear that. And I think that's really important for people to understand too. At this point, too, you know, technology is is it's on its at a hockey stick, it has been for a long time, as how we adopt it as humans into our lives. And you know, if people are still thinking, like, oh, this is gonna take over my job. It's it's not like you this is a huge opportunity. You either embrace it or you get run over by it, and that's the way technology's been for the last three, four decades, right?

It's just and it up levels you, right? You know, it takes away the mundanity and allows you to up-level. And suddenly, you know, you're you're not going to your boutique fitness studio and somebody's standing there counting out reps. Uh, suddenly that person's there and they're actually like they're a movement coach because they're being fed the, you know, they're being fed real-time information. Their education is being kept fresh. Um, and so they're able to coach at a higher level.

Yeah, yeah, and really what uh fitness professionals really like to be is just be unlicensed therapists, right? It's kind of what happens at the end of the day. Uh so let's let's demystify a buzzword. Let's talk about personalization. That's something that uh, you know, for conversations I've had, summits I've been involved in, uh, panels that I get to run. There, there's a certain amount of buzzwords, and we've talked about them, we've named them uh pivot, vertical, uh, omni-channel, uh, hybrid. Like, I don't know, it could go on and on and on. And personalization seems to be a big one, but it it should be, right? Because that that's really where we're at is how do we take all the data that we're acquiring um in its various forms and uh applications, and how are we actually improving and personalizing the experience for the consumer so that we can get better health outcomes? And more importantly, maybe we can even take this a step forward, is how do we get to that 80%, right? That 80% who typically don't engage in fitness programs. So let's start with this. How how do you guys define personalization? Give us some insights, and it doesn't have to be perfectly succinct, but just so people have an idea.

I'll jump in. I think uh the thing that I the reason I started Mover was because I was looking for a personalized solution in the fitness technology world. At the time, the Nike Training Club was the only application out in the world. So my definition then was the same as it is now. Personalized exercise or movement experience needs to be based on an understanding of how your body moves in space. So, what information do we have on the quality of the movement? And that's why I was so obsessed in person with the FMS systems, the FMS Correctives, SFMA. You're getting a picture and then you're scaling out best in class recommendations live for that person. So that's I think you need to have information, but then generate an insight and action from that. And if there's no insight or action, it's not actually personalized. You can collect information and show the person the information, but it's like, hey Aaron, you went for a run. This is how long your run was. And I was like, Yeah. Thanks. Like, so what? You know, and and this is where with movement it's been tremendously challenging to see the word personalized across the industry. And then you read into the press release, the financing, the fundraising, or the new product launch. And really there's two categories that have continued to dominate. Well, three really it's biometric wearables, right? So there's data captured, there's new products that are connecting and consumers with a person. So they're just digitizing the scale of someone being connecting from your home, which is great. There's some beautiful products. And then there's personalized, you know, saying we've personalized the fitness experience, but really it's just a new production studio, a new way to reskin the fitness experience, which we've seen for the last four decades, starting with VHS and now over to like, you know, DVDs, then to YouTube, and now into the fitness like app world, where really we're saying, like, is that innovative? Just a new reskin fitness experience that's self-select, or is there something a little bit smarter that we can personalize based on movement information that you're telling us? So that's my long ramble and rant, but I'll pass that over to you, Steven, and hear what your thoughts are.

No, I agree. I I love that you use the VHS to DVD example because you know I use that in my decks that you know, um, we've innovated the delivery system, but we haven't innovated the content. Like a Jane Fonda workout video and a Cody Rigsby Peloton class are basically still the same experience. Watch the instructor, they can't see you, follow along. Um, again, well, actually, I'll back up. I think of personalization as it's it's it's the intersection between the context of the individual and their needs and their goals and their aspirations. So, who am I? What do I want to achieve and how am I going to get there? And then I think of my job as a coach just to help you get there. So, again, I like I lean very heavily on my coaching background and my own coaching style when I think about what should the algorithm be, right? Um, and you know, when I yeah, I've probably coached, I don't even know, like 50 or so people all the way to black belt um and beyond. Um, and I had a syllabus for white belt to brown belt. Like you came into my class, it's like, here you go, as a blue belt, you should be able to do X. As a brown belt, you should be able to do Y. Um, controversially, and much to the disgust of the governing body, I had no syllabus for black belt. I know what a black belt looks like, um, and I could look at that brown belt that wanted to be a black belt and say, how I'm gonna coach you is gonna be very differently to how I coach your training partner, the things you guys need to work on, your relative strengths and weaknesses, um, and also your passions. Do you want to be a tournament fighter and aspire to compete um internationally? And are you passionate about self-defense and self-protection? That's gonna change uh the how I teach you and the things that I teach you. And so then the job of the instructor, we used to speak about this a lot, the job of the instructor became a sculptor. Like that athlete was in there. We just had to kind of chip away and figure out what were the things that we were gonna do to coach that individual. And so when I think about personalization, I'm thinking on that level. It's how do I look at an individual, understand, you know, to Aaron's point, understand their context, how do they move, what are they competent at? Um, what's the kind of coaching that they respond to? Are they kinesthetic? Are they visual? Do they just need left alone to play and experiment, or do they need kind of so I think about that individual? Um, and then it's my job to basically be in this loop of observing them, um, intervening with some coaching, uh, measuring the efficacy of that coaching, is it moving them and making them better? Uh, and just repeat that cycle. You know, it's just this loop that we go around. And so when I think about personalization, if it's not playing, when I think about technologies for personalization, if it's not in that loop of observe, analyze, decide, and adjust, I just abuse the OODA loop with adjust, let's not attack our athletes. But if it's not that observe, um, decide and adjust the training, you're not really personalizing. So I you know, my high horse is when people say personalization is like I looked at a bunch of data and I adjusted your sets and your reps, it's like I mean, I guess that's personalization, but it's not very clever. Um, and it's not necessarily making me a better athlete.

When you guys look at the market of, you know, well, as we discuss the the future of connected fitness and personalization, uh, outside of what you guys are doing, which is innovative, it's cool. It's cool. And I I and it's not just cool, I think it's actually gonna deliver better results. And that's that's the I mean, if you can make it cool and deliver results, then you got something that that's winning because then it's engaging, right? You gotta get people to engage and and really bring people along, I guess, on their own journey. And that's how I look at personalization is like it's an individualized journey that I'm taking that's unlike most other people's journeys in fitness and health. Uh, because you know, I'm a snowflake, right? I'm original. Um, I'm not, but I want to feel that way. And I think that's really important for people to have, you know, as as they move forward in this personalization. When you guys look at the market outside what you guys are doing, is there anybody out there, any companies, any uh founders or entrepreneurs or people who seem to be tackling the uh the issue the right way and are doing innovative and uh cool things with personalization in in the digital fitness space? I see you guys thinking really hard.

Yeah, I'm happy to join. I mean, I I absorb your podcast, Eric. I I am part of different I'm part of the fit tech community, I listen to the Fit Insider podcast, you know, religiously. And um what I get excited about are some pretty unsexy trends, and that's like hot cold therapies, sleep enhancers, and anyone actually helping people make better dietary decisions, and all of those things are pretty boring basic things in your life. It's like, can you improve your metabolic health because you're sleeping better, you're exercising something that's more uh specific to your body? And then are you doing these things that put your body in a healthy amount of stress recovery to optimize your physical experience? And so there's a number of technologies innovating in those spaces, and what I'm keeping my eye on, so kind of I'm vaguely answering, is who in those spaces is creating true actionable insights around those sort of key areas of putting the body in healthy amounts of stress recover. Um, because I think that's gonna give us more longevity and it's gonna give us some very tangible outcomes for people in how they live a healthy life. Um, and that and that excites me. Like, you know, I'm a I'm a nerd and I sleep with my aura ring every night and I'm building out a sauna right now. I'm looking at my shed that I'm converting into a sauna, and I'm like, how do we make these experiences not just for the nerds who have we've dedicated their life to? Can we scale that sort of things that will help people live better? Uh and that's where I'm I'm inspired and always watching.

I think that's a great answer. Um, so I don't want to try and top it. Um, but what I will add is I don't think technology is the solution to everything either. I don't think it's always like it's not more cowbell, right? It's not like what other technologies and and and can we add? Um, you know, if I think about what Asensi enables, uh, we enable the ability to watch somebody move, make an assessment about how they're moving, and deliver a decision and deliver an insight about what do we want to do? Do we want to pause, work on that technique, do we want to teach a regression, do we want to teach a progression? Um what that enables isn't more technology. It enables individuals at the organizations that are creating these products to be more thoughtful around the experiences that they're delivering. I mean, Aaron and I were being a little flippant about DVDs and Jane Fonda, but that's just uh that's a broadcast. That's like welcome to an entertainment show where for the next 60 minutes, you know, we're gonna have your favorite music, your favorite instructor, I'm gonna be an unlicensed therapist, and you know, uh just get you to the end of the class. One of the things I'm really enjoying about my job right now is I get to hang out with a lot of really good coaches who are very thoughtful and methodical about how they teach. And so we spend a lot of time with these coaches. Like, how do you teach? What's your syllabus? What's your curriculum? When you see X, what would you do? So we're able to kind of take that corpus of knowledge, the methodology that the coach has and capture that digitally so that a machine can deliver it on their behalf. Yeah. I remember, again, I'll use my karate club as an example. I went to a reunion back in back in Scotland about five or six years ago. And my white belts, who were now black belts and instructors, they were on the mat and they're coaching at the reunion. And I stood back and was like, you guys are even using my jokes that I use when I teach that technique. It was literally like a mini me on the mat, teaching the exercise the way I'd taught them. But now they were teaching it. And of course, there was their own individual flourish, but you know, foundationally they were teaching the way they'd been taught. And so I'm really excited about that. I'm really excited about the from two of moving away from one size fits no one broadcast video, Nike training club fitness content to something that's like, you know, we've basically got this library of content that we can kind of randomly access in the moment based on what we see the athlete doing, um, so that the experience somebody's having uh is personalized. And so I'm more excited about the content creators than I am about the technologists is their time to show.

Yeah. Yeah, those are great answers, you guys. And I I guess when I uh when I think about personalization as well, just to add my two cents on it, is that uh ultimately what I want is I want that other 80%, right? I mean, we can talk about the 20% of people who like they're gonna they're gonna fully love, like I'm gonna fully love what you guys are doing. But I'm not the person you have to worry about, honestly. Like I'm I'm already exercising, I'm already into it, right? I do my sauna, I do my cold showers, I do all the things, I try to sleep well, I'm aware. Um, but so much of the population is not. And how do we reduce friction to get these people, you know, maybe urge them into an in-person experience so they could get a community involved, you know, or just maybe it's best for them to stay at home because that's easier and that's less friction and it's less intimidating, and they can start the program, right? So to me, like if we can personalize that starting point and get more people in to fitness and health, uh, because that that's one of the biggest problems we have. I mean, let's list let's phase out, right? You know, getting fitter people more fit is awesome. But we have a huge issue. We have a lot of obese and chronically sick people. And that's something where, you know, I beat this drum constantly is like, uh, as a fitness industry, we haven't done a good job. We just haven't. You know, we've got the fitter, fit people fitter for a very long time, but ultimately we haven't done what we set out to do, at least what everyone has different goals. Some people want to make money, some people want to, you know, work with star athletes, that's great. But if we collectively look at what the big problems are, if we're solving the big hairy problems, then we're not doing a good job yet. But I'm seeing a lot of promise in technologies to get that friction reduced and getting those people onboarded into something, into a healthier lifestyle. So I think you guys are are are doing uh a significant piece of that as well. So I I you know kudos to you.

No, I'd love to jump in on that. Actually, I know you know, I hope Maria, Lauren, forgive me for breaking news here on the podcast. So um the the integration that uh Aaron's team and my team are working on, uh, the integration of that movement screen, uh, one of the first platforms that we're gonna deploy that into breaking news Chiron across the bottom of the screen. Um, one of the first platforms we're gonna deploy that into is the Forte platform. Yeah, you I'm sure you know Lauren there. I can uh and so you know Forte is this platform that's delivering, you know, you know, live and on-demand fitness experiences across a tremendous number of modalities. And so we saw the opportunity if like if Asensi is a core capability inside of Forte, Forte can offer that to the yoga studios, the Platy Studios, the boxing gyms. Um, and the first experience that we're delivering with Lauren's team right now is we're taking the integration work that Mover and Asensi are doing and we're integrating that uh into Forte. So every Forte um B2B customer will be able to have this experience that does a passive movement screen of their uh customers and offers them uh mobility. Um one of the customers, again, breaking news number two, uh, one of the customers that we're delivering this for with Forte is a customer of Essence called Honor Yoga. Um I don't know if you know Maria Turco, but Honor Yoga, um they are a very beginner-friendly uh yoga experience. And the two of the biggest uh inhibitors to starting yoga practice, even if you want to, is I don't think I'm flexible enough. And what I like to call gym timidation, that intimidation of walking into the studio. And so we see digital as this on-ramp for physical. So the honor yoga experience, you know, delivered through Forte, powered by a sensi and mover. So all these collaborations of you know, innovative companies will allow honor yoga to basically have a digital experience that's like learn some of the basic asana, some of the basic poses unbeknownst to you as you're learning those poses, we're screening your movement and offering you some exercises, which Aaron doesn't really care what the exercises are, so long as it's a hip opener or so long as it's like putting you into flexion here. So we can use yoga poses as the restroom, but we're not saying let's teach you this pose because that's the way we've always taught. It's like let's teach you this pose because you're locked in your hips and that's impeding your ability to get into this pose. And so now we can think about how a movement screen and how form tracking card experiences can lower that intimidation of I don't think I'm flexible enough and I don't know the poses, so we can stream you into uh a franchise yoga class. Uh so I'm really excited about the scale we can have when we're uh core capability um in a platform like uh like Forte. Uh but to your point, um, it allows us to focus on it 80%. What are the things we can do to make it easier for other people to stream into a class of their choice? So, Maria, Lauren, I'm sorry, I I know we didn't do the official press release just there, but uh that's some of the collaborations we're all working on.

I just text them more. Congratulations.

You know my phone, you know my you know my phone is about to blow up, right?

That's great. Well done. Well done. On the other end of it, Eric, I think like there's a world that is coming and it already exists in some formats. And you've heard, you know, Jeff Bezos has been talking about it a lot, but it's like, how do we understand the movement of our personnel so that we can keep them healthy and ultimately keep them working more consistently and pain-free, right? Because they want to save money for missed workdays and an MSK spend. But if you think about who is on the factory floor or warehouse or moving around on a construction site, if they are weekly, monthly, or quarterly, need to do a one to five minute movement screen and then get a personalized recommendation on a movement that then creates an exercise habit because it's for their body and it immediately feels good, that is addressing the 80% who are not actively engaged with technology for exercise right now. And this isn't 10 years away or five years, this is now, and we are designing into that environment right now. So I think you know, if we watch the next year, the the the we're gonna meet people where they are instead of inviting them to the fitness experience that we've created, right? And I think that's the big difference of how you engage with the population that needs personalization the most. Awesome.

You guys, this is super exciting, and thank you for all the uh the cool announcements that I can publish and let everyone know.

Maybe let Lauren publish, of course.

And you know, uh you guys obviously uh you in a conversation in a three-way, what I call polyamorous podcasts, like you guys work really well together, so you made my job very easy. Thank you. Sometimes I get nervous about multiple people and uh because you kind of it's it can be challenging. So you guys did a great job. And where where if people want to learn more, of course, where where do you send them online? Um where would you like them to go?

I mean I I I I'm gonna jump in because I love I got Steven's message on LinkedIn as well. Or I messaged Stephen on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn does work for me if it's a genuine note. You can email me, Aaron, at movewithmover.com or check out movewithmover.com and you'll see everything you need to know about us. Sorry, Steven, go ahead.

No, no, no. I I I think uh, you know, we're in a small, ancestral industry, uh, Eric. And so I think, you know, uh LinkedIn is actually a great place for me to keep a finger on the pulse of what everyone else is doing, and so that's where I choose to share most on kind of what we're doing. So uh yeah, I just uh just follow Asensi, follow myself on LinkedIn if you want to keep up with what we're doing. Uh and one day I promise assensi.ai will actually reflect what we actually do. Right, Aaron. Exactly. Uh yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Aaron, thanks so much for no likewise, thanks so much. We uh always enjoy your home. It's been a pleasure.

And we'll uh yeah, we'll keep updated with with what you guys are doing and yeah, just keep up the great work, ladies and gentlemen. Aaron DeJoung and Stephen Webster. Thanks, Eric. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Finis. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.