Dr. Andy Galpin - Why Performance Beats Longevity - and How to Coach Both

Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice supporter review wherever you consume your podcast. If you're interested in staying up to date with the future of fitness, go to futurofitness.co to subscribe and get weekly summaries dropped into your inbox. Now on to the show. Perfect Gym isn't just another gym management system. They are part of the Sport Alliance Group, Europe's leading fitness software company that has officially entered the US market. Now, I've seen this movie before, but here's the difference. They've opened up a US headquarters in Boston because they understand that the American market deserves dedicated, localized support. After digging into the platform, one benefit especially stood out. They are simplifying the nightmare that keeps business owners up at night migrations. These guys were able to migrate one mega client with more than 250 locations in six different countries in just 20 days between two payment runs. No disrupting operations, no member loss, one seamless operation that simply works. Now, if you have ever switched platforms, you know how terrifying that process can be and how truly impressive that feat is. At a high level, here's their secret sauce. They give the power back to the operator. Instead of forcing you into their closed ecosystem, their Perfect Gym Marketplace connects with over 120 integration partners. So want to use your own app, your preferred payment processor, class pass for booking? No problem. Whether you're running a single studio or managing a multi-location enterprise, Perfect Gym was built from the ground up for multi-club operations. They've invested a ton into this platform, and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. The migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise level sophistication meets operator freedom. Today's episode of the Future of Fitness is brought to you by Flex, the only HSA FSA payments infrastructure built specifically for leading fitness and wellness brands. I have been so impressed with the Flex team and their vision to transform how people pay for fitness. They built a platform that makes HSA and FSA spending seamless, unlocking a new revenue stream for brands and giving consumers easier access to products and services that keep them healthy. Here's why this matters. Flex helps fitness brands increase average order value by up to 50% and boost checkout conversion by 30%. That is not just incremental growth, that is transformational revenue powered by consumer dollars that are already set aside for health and wellness. What excites me the most is that Flex is changing the game for the entire industry. They're bridging the gap between healthcare and fitness by making it simple for consumers to spend their pre-tax dollars on the products and services that help them feel and perform their best. Flex works with fitness leaders like iFit, Johnson Fitness, Tempo, and Aloe Moves. Honestly, this is a no-brainer, and I rarely say that. If you want to see how Flex can drive growth for your fitness brand, visit with Flex.com. That is with Flex.com. Now onto the show. All right, we are live. Dr. Andy Galpin, welcome to the future of fitness, my friend. It is an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, man, it's an honor to be back and to chat with you again.

Yeah, yeah, this is great. So I'm not gonna do this whole long intro. Um, there's too much I want to cover with you. So I'm just gonna do it for you really quick. And uh, so thanks to Thomas from your team, but we're we're gonna summarize it. So Andy Galpin, that's you, is a tenured full professor at Parker University and is the executive director of the Human Performance Center. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics. That's a tough one, and over 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. So, Andy, you work with elite athletes, including All-Star, AllPro, MVP, Cy Young, Olympic gold medalists, major winners, world champions across UFC, MLB, MBA, PGA, NFL, Boxing, Olympics, and Military Special Forces. And you're also the co-founder of Vitality Blueprint, biomolecular athlete, absolute rest, and rapid health and performance optimization. So you're uh all that to say is, man, you've been in the trenches for a while and you're quite a busy dude.

Yeah, you miss you missed a few things. So maybe we could spend the rest of the show filling in the gaps.

Let's start with this. You know, I I first of all, I'm excited that I have the opportunity to work with you moving forward. So we'll kind of talk about that maybe later in the episode. But um I think what you guys, you and your team are doing, A, everyone I talk to who I know and respect in the industry knows and respects you, right? You're you're not loose with the science, you're you're deeply knowledgeable. I'm not here to flatter you. I'm just saying this is what I've heard, right? And I think the products and the services that you bring to market solve very specific problems that you've identified across all the work that you do, and you do it with a highly science-backed approach. So let's start with this. And I know you've answered this question a million times, but I think for context of what we're going to get into today is how do you differentiate performance versus longevity? Because our industry is in love with longevity right now. So differentiate those.

These terms can be defined however you'd like. This is just how I do it. And you know, obviously, longevity has a pretty clear connotation there. It's referring to lifespan in some sort, right? How long are you going to live? A lot of the times we'll smuggle in wellness span or health span within that, right? So most people don't just want to live to a certain age, they want to live as vital as possible and functional as possible within that. So most people are generally defining longevity still pretty much by years and then by functional years. Performance is similar. There's a Venn diagram here. We have some crossover, but really what we care about is none of those things for a bunch of reasons. One being I have no idea what's going to happen 75 years from now or not. So I don't really care about that. Performance is now, right? So performance is also broad spectrum. This could mean physical performance, like some of the athletes you mentioned. Could mean cognitive, could mean you just want to be calmer, you want better control of your emotions, you don't want to be in as much pain, you want more energy. So it is something you want more of or want less of. It is simply you having more control and autonomy of your lived experience. And we want to do that without compromising long term. So I'm not giving you pharmaceuticals or lifestyle habits or training protocols that are gonna make you feel great right now, but are gonna make life worse in the short term, near term, or maybe we don't even know. Maybe it makes things worse or not sure. That's not what we're after. We're trying to say, great, you're after this longevity pursuit, that's awesome. You want to live to 148, cool. But let's also make sure you're feeling better right now. Let's make sure that these are producing and translating in results that are falsifiable, that are testable, that are also aligned with the best practices that we're aware of for successful aging. And so that is really where it comes down to, and so we will always use the term perform. The simplest way to summarize what I just said is the following you can have longevity and perform poorly, but you cannot have the opposite. If you are performing well in our context, you're going to most likely live longer and definitely live better. And so performance is a prerequisite, anyways. So you might as well uh pay some attention to that. At least it should be part of your equation.

Yeah. It's it's really, and as I was telling you before, I think longevity is hitting a branding issue. People were really excited about it for a while. But now with all the articles and case studies and documentaries that are coming out, people are really starting to relate it to. And this is my words, no one else's, but it's just what I see. It's kind of rich old white dudes. Um, you know, like that's that's what it's framed at. And they have a ton, they have a lot of money they're thrown, and they want to live forever, right? Like, you know, it's uh reminds me of the movie Prometheus or something like that. But I don't have to get into that. I'm a little bit of a sci-fi nerd. But yeah, that that seems to be a branding problem that it'll overcome because I think the category is obviously huge as far as the trillions of dollars that it represents. But uh yeah, I mean, when you look at a you know, coach or trainer, independent gym owner, when you're talking, like the the words you use are very important. So when you're talking about performance versus longevity, what suggestions do you have for them when they're sitting, you know, one-on-one in those magical moments, right? When they're talking about someone's goals and things like that. How would you how would you tell them to approach that?

In terms of trying to get them to promote more the performance side versus the longevity.

Yeah, so getting them to understand that really if they come in asking for longevity, there's probably a good chance they really want performance, right? So how do you how do you tease that out with them?

Right, great. So I think that there's a couple ones that I used earlier that I'll come back to maybe as something we can hover over on a bit. When we when we have these conversations, because we get them a lot, we have loads of people come in, and it is the we've we've had phrases like this for every genre, every era in human health and performance, right? Different words come in vogue, they come out, and you always end up translating it a little bit. So, like, okay, when come when someone from the general public comes in you and says longevity, what do you think they really mean? So, step number one, I always ask, and this is honestly just from me actually coaching as a strength coach for many years, is awesome, we can do that. What's longevity mean to you? I don't even care how I define it. If they define it as something weird, great. And you know, in the strength editioning world, we would have things like this of saying, Hey, I'm getting tired, I need to work on my endurance. Okay, great. What do you mean when you say you're getting tired? Can you give me an example of when that happened? And now you'll give you wildly different explanations of what they perceive. It might be the coach saying, We got tired. You might hear we faded towards the end of the season. Oh, that's totally different than you getting tired in a game. Or, yeah, my endurance is there. I just feel weak at the end of the game. All these could easily be encapsulated by somebody coming in saying we got to work on our conditioning, our endurance or whatever, right? But three entirely different problems, entirely different solution sets. So I would take the exact same approach with longevity. What's that mean to you? And you'll get the spectrum of I just feel old and weak right now. Oh, to feel great, but just really want to make sure I'm doing proactive health, not reactive medicine. Okay, awesome. To the third kind of big bucket would be something, you know, geez, I got a health scare recently, something happened to somebody close to me, something popped up on a blood test, and I'm stunned, I'm young, I thought I was healthy, I'm not. No, I'm just need to take my health seriously. Three, and there's probably a million different avatars I could just put in there, right? But very, very different solutions, problems, results based on the exact same phraseology. So step number one is always awesome, you can do that. What does that exactly mean to you? Is there something specifically bothering you or concern? Give me context, right? Eric, this is classic coaching. Ask why three times.

It's classic, yes.

Right? Why? Yeah, why? Why? And then you'll get to like real answers, right? So that's step number one. Then after you've got that answer, what we would phrase with performance is saying, okay, great. Well, do you want to feel great 60 years from now? So what day in this next 60 years do you feel like you would feel good on that day? In other words, if you're gonna feel good in 60 years from now, at some point you have to feel good now, right? When does that good now feel start? Is there any reason why that feel good now can't be six weeks from now? Or does it have to be like for 40 years from now? At some point in this journey, you will feel good if you ever feel good, right? So, what we're going to do is, and then I would go right back and I'll explain it. Like, we're gonna look at what makes you perform in your context again, get their words. I want to be a better leader, I want to think faster, I want to make better decisions, whatever, right? And we're gonna do that, and we're gonna do it in a way that does not compromise long-term health, that doesn't take shortcuts, so on and so forth, right? So we're not gonna put you in a position where we're chasing fast gains. I'm not looking for a 60-day protocol or a priest post picture six weeks from now, whatever the thing is. But if you don't feel good, or you know, whatever feel good means, right? At some point, then we're not doing long covet either. Because then you'll never feel sort of good. So feeling good at 60 means feeling good now, too.

Yeah. So what I'm hearing, Andy, is that uh nothing's really changed. And this industry does love its buzzwords, right? Like this is the same conversation when I was coaching people and and running the gym, was like I would sit down, we would do this this ask why three times, right? And I remember one very clearly is, you know, well, why are you here? Why is why is this important to you? Well, I need to I need to get in shape. Okay, well, well, why? Well, I need to lose weight. Well, why? Because my wife doesn't look at me any the same anymore, and I don't think she wants to sleep with me anymore. And I was like, there it is. That's perfectly fine. That's a great goal. Like, that's the emotional tap in right now. And we we love our our buzzwords and the trends, you know, wellness, longevity, all those things, but I don't think anything's really changed. It's just new words.

No, man, and it's honestly it's the same when you and I go to get a haircut or go to your finance guy or go to your auto mechanic, and you're like, my car's making noises. I want it to not make noises. It's like, all right, like you don't even know what you're saying, right? Like, I just need help with my books. Uh, do you need finance, do you need accounting?

You're just like just make it better.

My books better. What is book? So you're always translating when you're outside of your expertise. So they're they're doing the same to you, and you're doing the same to them. Well, that accountant comes in and hires you, then when you hire them, you're looking like the same idiot saying the wrong terms. Everyone's talking about blah, blah, blah, blah. Now you're like, Yeah. Let me let me translate. Great. So you can say nothing's changed in the last 30 years, Marfield, but it's it's really it's quite human nature.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad we got we got that out of the way. So now we can talk openly about the advancements. And I know you're you're at the cutting edge of technologies and and advancements in science. And there's a lot going on there. Now that is changing, right? You know, the conversations are not, but how we get from point A to point B is being augmented quite quickly. So I want to get your take on like immersion technologies within the performance space or coaching space or whatever you want to frame it. But what are some of the big ones that are getting you excited right now that maybe you didn't have access to three, five years ago that are changing the game?

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to talk about here that's interesting. It's very funny. My I have a five-year-old and he is sick right now. And my wife is going ballistic because we had to run some tests on him, and they won't release the test. They're like, yeah, well, it takes five to ten days to process. Like the samples are in, the results are in. But it's like five to ten days, or you can drive in and we'll hand it to you. And we're like, how is the medical system when we have a pretty good emergency going on in the ER situation? And like it's 10 days to process a result oriented.

That's wild.

My point being that type of stuff is not gonna be around much longer. The the distance between manual entry, scraping, doctors having to prescribe from the medical side of the equation, there's so much of that fluff that is going away. It's the same if you're a strength coach. I was recently in um uh at SummerStrong with you know Sornex and Bert. One of the things I talked about is if you're a strength coach, you don't necessarily need to be using Excel to write all of your training programs for your entire volleyball team anymore. Do not at any form or fashion use AI to write that program in terms of understanding what should be in it. So the decision making with AI for our health and human performance field, for medicine, it's a little different, for health and human performance, is nowhere in the stratosphere of ready to make decisions for you. But it absolutely can take the physical task off your list. What I mean by that is if you have your training programs, and say you got an entire volleyball team you work with, and you go, man, we're noticing A, B, and C going on. I think we need to work tone down the amount of overhead work we're doing in the weight room. Great. Instead of you manually going into every single individual person's spreadsheet and changing out overhead pressing to incline pressing and having to copy paste, copy, that is absolutely something AI think can do. Okay, update this program over here. Boom. You can ask it smart questions. Hey, here's our data set. We want to know will you look back and see any? We've noticed an uptick of injuries going on, or man, we got better, whatever. Anything different in the program that would potentially explain this improvement in max V load for our pitchers this year. So that it can recognize patterns, it can look at large data sets. We actually did this recently and it came back, and we're doing this with a bunch of blood stuff, and some of our stuff came back and was like, you're seeing a huge seasonal effect. And we were like, what? It wasn't just like vitamin D, right? Like it's pretty easy to look at multiple years and be like, oh, vitamin D is higher in the summer, lower in the winter. Like, okay, that's that's a pretty obvious one we look for. But there was a whole bunch of other stuff, and we were like, holy sh, and then it got a bunch of stuff wrong. But it gave us a clue to be like, wait a minute, and then we went back and manually did stuff, and we were like, oh my god, we didn't even think through this at all.

So what was it? What was the seasonal changes?

I can't really get to the details too much. Um a lot of NDA with this particular situation going on, but you can see there's more than ECI with being in the sun a lot and being not in the sun a lot, particularly in the area of the world that this this data set was coming from, air quality. It's not just the sun and like the like things like that are happening. And you can look at weather patterns. So then we were able to ask it like, was there anything going on? And they're like, Oh, yeah, a very substantial change in the weather over time in this region relative to historic. And we were like, okay. Then we went back in and asked, like, had to look at a bunch of actual questionnaires and like individual data, not just being like, oh, it was this, and was the person actually there, or were the people there in that time, like, what was going on? And so just enabled us to make number one smarter questions, and then number two, quickly confirm big data sets, right? Those types of things are really good use of the new age stuff, whether this is from the medical side of the equation or again, like I'm trying to juxtapose that with you know, strength coach or a personal trainer, or uh running your own gym, you know, if you're a small business owner, that that kind of thing. Like you can ask it really interesting questions like here's my attendance records for the last three years. Here's the sales scripts we've run, here's the price points we've done. Anything popping out is like seemed to be most effective, least effective. It's gonna give you a ton of what are called spurious correlations. So these are correlations that might come up as like statistically significant, but they're not real. This is like if you run enough data, the classic example in science is astrology and astronomy, right? So if you run enough calculations, you will see something like yes, it does appear that there are more people go to the ER during the winter solstice, and you're just like, okay, yes, but that's not actually real. So there's a it's a correlation, but it's not a real fact. I could probably make more egregious ones, but you you get the point, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So big data sets, we all find numbers that match. AI can't tell you if that's like it's getting better. It'll like be like, ah, this is probably not a real thing. Um, but you still need to have tremendous oversight over that stuff. So, regardless of the technology you're using in your current space, whether that technology is you know wearable stuff or just things like I'm talking about, it's like frequency or adherence. And it just allows you to process that stuff better because the vast majority of people are really have poor to no training in statistics. So if you have like all your files, even if you do document them, you'll have no idea to how to run a code in Python. And like, so you're just not gonna so you're kind of like looking with your eye. Where technology can allow you to do that, and so maybe I'll wrap this at this point by saying what that allows us to do is to become pretty technology agnostic. So I don't have to just assume that my watch or my thing is perfect and rely everything on it because we know that's a that's a f a problem, right? Watch changed, their algorithm changed. Okay, great. Or my team, my situation, my question, my interest. AI in general will allow you to be able to work independently. You get a new job, they use catapult. Okay, we were using something else before. Or we got Hawk. Cool. Now I can manage and handle these big changes and platforms pretty easy and still be able to personally comprehend what I'm looking at with enormous data sets across multiple platforms.

What do you guys use? What do you use the most? Are you like training your own chat GPT? Are you using are you doing a custom one? Like how are you guys all the above? Okay.

You know, really everything. Like sometimes I use Grok, you know, on Twitter. Uh, then of course we've built our own for different across our different companies. We'll still use Python on R. Like my data scientist or my research scientists will do that pretty awesome. Sometimes the new GPT, sometimes Claude, Gemini, like they actually have kind of like different strengths and weaknesses. And then we have uh what you're seeing most of the time, most companies will just stack an AI, a pre-built AI, on top of their stuff. So like you're running through that company, but they're just stacking on GPT or like something on the back end. So we will do that too in the appropriate occasion. But then we have like especially at Absolute Rest, where our technology team is legitimately world-class, so we just build our own.

Yeah. Tell us about Absolute Rest. I think a lot of people aren't aren't familiar with that one.

Yeah, so that's one of the companies that I started uh about three years ago. And this is by far the world's most advanced at-home sleep testing and solution. So it's not a daily wearable, you don't get fun scores, we don't gamify it, we're not interested in any of that stuff. We have brought uh clinical sleep studies into the home without any wires.

Yeah, that's incredible.

So we we can run, we are the only, to be really clear, we're the only ones that have FTA clearance to run medical sleep studies on people without wires and stuff everywhere at their own home. And so that program is effectively going to look at the highest fidelity and accuracy testing of how you're sleeping on the planet. It's not just that. We do psychological screening, we do blood screening, we do environmental testing. So there's sensors we put in your room, we're measuring air quality and mold and particulates, and we test every light in your room, in your bedroom, in your living room. We run individual scans for not just how bright they are, but the very specific wavelengths that will potentially interfere more or less with sleep. So it's an incredibly comprehensive SA system. And we're doing all that because we want to know exactly how you're sleeping. That's what the sleep testing itself does. Not just you have apnea or you don't. Like really granular, and by the way, not just sleep staging, deep sleep, REM sleep, like way beyond that. The rest of the testing tells us why. And that's where we have really differentiated ourselves because we can have a far higher likelihood of succeeding in improving your sleep when we know not just what's happening, but why exactly is it happening? Is it psychological? Is it behavioral? Is it lifestyle? Is it this particular light? Is it something in your food? Is it something in your air? Like, what is actually causing that problem that we just found, or that limitation or restriction? And then from there, those data go directly to the world's most published, highest research MDs, and PhDs in the area of sleep. So Jeffrey Dermer, Matthew Walker, uh like the biggest names in this field, the folks that are responsible for world leaders and the International Space Station, and there's more, like Jay Wiles, like really elite level people. They all individually go over your data and then build the custom solutions, and then we'll actively continue to track and measure and monitor these things while we're coaching you through it so that we know what's working and what's not. And it's not just like, oh, go try this and track it on your wearable. Like, no, we want to know with precision what's working, what's not working, and all that. So I'm sorry, that was longer than I anticipated. I get fired up by that one because this is really, really cool. We have the ability to do this and very long-winded here, but maybe the I'll finish by saying the reason we built this is because years ago, you know, I was working with some of these people you mentioned at the intro, and I had the same issues with sleep for them that I had with everybody else. Like I gave them a $300 wearable, or I sent them to a sleep clinic. And that takes like four weeks or more, and it's you sleep in a weird bed one night, and it's terrible, I've done it.

Yeah, it's awful.

And I was like searching the whole world. I'm like, somebody's gotta have something better.

Right?

Like, what if you had to get better at sleep? Like, this is your only option, and it wasn't, it didn't exist. So I'm like, this is too big of an area to not have better solutions. So we we built this company and it it turns out quite popular. So it's like we're really good at um the way I reason I said all that is because we built this because I come from a space where testing doesn't matter. No one's ever paid me for a blood test, no one's ever paid me to look at their data. They paid me to be like, we have a world championship in this day. Like we have to win, or this is happening. And so then you whatever it takes to get that outcome. So it's a results driven. Professional sports are results driven. It's not, it's not you're not paid for process, right? You're paid for result. And so I was like, man, we have to have a thing that works. Like we have to be able to build sleep, things that solve the sleep problem. If that was the case, what would I do? If money didn't matter, it always does, but like you start off with this conception principle, right? What would it look like? And I'm like, man, you'd build the best scientist, you get the most accurate data, you would track, you would always make sure things were blah, blah, blah. What I so that's how we built opposite rest. And we've been able to bring that down now to really, really affordable prices at you know different levels in that company. But yeah, so like really, really proud of that. Sorry to be so long, just super proud of that because uh, this is nothing like it in the world.

Well, the first time I heard about it, I got really excited because I've done that sleep test in a lab. And I to me, it's you get some actionable, relevant information and feedback, but a lot of it just felt like BS because you're in a foreign place where you would never sleep. There's a person literally watching you through a glass window, at least this is my experience, right? And uh you got wires everywhere, you can't get comfortable while you're sleeping. So I'm like, how is this? Like, I just didn't get it. I'm like, I I don't I don't know how much I spent on it a lot to get it done. And I felt like I just walked away with like, hey, you can't you may or may not have a problem. Well, what what the hell? Like, okay, well, yeah, and now I'm just paranoid, and now I'm gonna sleep worse because I feel like I'm dying, right? And I'm still alive. That was four years ago, and I'm actually sleeping better now than ever. But actually, you know, I've been talking directly, texting with some people on your team, and they've been very helpful with with my sleep stuff. So yeah, it's anyone who's done one of those tests knows like it it has to be better. It has to be better.

Yeah, it is, yeah. And the the other part about it is it's like you may or may not have something wrong with you. And then if you do, go ahead, either take this drug or buy a CPAP machine.

And you're like, this is I'm too young for a CPAP, man. I can't do it.

It's like this is the best we can do. No, that it's not the best we can do. It's it's not a shot at anybody in the medical system. They do the best they can, of course. But you're like, I waited four months to get in and my insurance got billed $8,000 for this. Like, you're like, what, what in the world? If you didn't, you know, that's if you didn't pay cash, right? But you probably did. So yeah, it's um, there's just a lot better things. And we we focused these first three years on that coaching program, that in that elite, like full immersion system. But now we have we have very, very scalable solutions for companies, for teams. So we have a number of full teams that we do, and we're able to run some stuff. And I can't I can't tell you too much about it. It's not a consumer, you know, part of our business. We don't sell it to consumers, but if folks have companies or teams or whatever, and you want to know more about that, I'm I'm happy to share that with you, you know, privately. But that that is we're excited, man, because like I get the days. I mean, I'll be so bold to say like the days of sleep hospitals are incredibly numbered, not just because of us, but because like all that you just laid out, okay, there has to be a better way. So many of our clients will have legitimate, there's somewhere between like 70 to 80 million medical clinical sick disorders in America alone.

The vast majority to 80 million?

The vast majority will go undiagnosed. Now, do you know how many certified providers we have in America? So, like you're gonna you're gonna look on the neighborhood of 7,000, 8,000. So we're on some quick math there, you're gonna see something like every individual sleep uh certified, I forget the term for them, is gonna be responsible for about 10,000 per year. I mean, it's not my company. It's like, okay, this is a medical issue that like we we can have some better solutions for that. That's why the sleep hospitals take so long and why they like just look at severe apnea, severe insomnia. If they don't have that, you know, it's not like they don't want to help you, but it's like we have to focus on these people who are are at risk of dying really soon. We and we've had that a number of times where we're like, stop what you're doing right now. We need you need to go see an MD immediately. So it's not everybody, but this has happened many, many, many times. So when you think about it like that, it's not the system's fault. It's like they're all those poor physicians and stuff are insanely overwhelmed. They're just insanely like that, those numbers are audacious. And then you have the fact that uh you will have multiple states that have a single-digit number of people in the entire state. So you're like, yeah, I gotta drive six hours to go do this weird test and come back and get with where technology is now again, independent of I feel like we're just doing this a big promo for AO. I hate but Yeah, it's okay. Now we can put you in your home for a couple of hundred dollars. All right. Like, how how much longer is our sleep possible gonna survive when this gets ramped up and you know it's just over?

So the uh what what I hope out of this conversation is that people within our industry will this will capture the imagination because these things and also like if you look at what you guys do at at Rapid Health, right? You charge a uh you deliver a high-end service that gets outstanding results for people, right? It's super hyper personalized. And in order to do that, and personalization is one of the big buzzwords, but I actually like personalization as a buzzword for an industry because I think it's exactly where we're going. And I think people who are starting to pay attention, who see the opportunity, will start looking at models like yours because you guys essentially absolute rest was built to serve that rapid health, right? Like you built Vitality Blueprint because you guys wanted a better blood and biomarker tracking. So it's all feeding up into delivering hyperpersonalization, which is now being tech enabled. And so you guys are just offering tools, right? Which I believe are you know best in market. That's my words, not yours. So when you're addressing the industry overall, and we're talking about personalization and AI's role and how we can pull all this stuff together, it's a very exciting time, number one. But like, where do we start if we want to start heading down hyperpersonalization for our clients? Where do we get traction early?

Yeah, this is actually you can go back to 2015. So President Obama, I think actually Michelle technically led this, announced this huge precision medicine initiative. Why this matters is that enabled science to do research to figure out personalized solutions. Prior to that, you were in real trouble if you submitted a grant that said we want to start to figure out person by person responses and create systems and technologies and databases based on individual reports. Fast forward 10 years, boy, that investment paid off. This is clearly the future. You're saying that for multiple reasons, but you you you have to give science a little bit of time to work. And so what we're seeing now is a direct byproduct. It doesn't matter your political affiliation. My point is the fact that when you invest in this type of stuff, it comes. Okay. You factor on top of that, they then put several hundreds of millions into digital twin products, digital twin research. You see digital twin everywhere in the medical space. It's already being utilized in hospitals. Digital twins have been used for decades, since actually the I forget which one it was, but the um the NASA mission that went bad. And they had to recreate that entire model on Earth, run a bunch of sip, run up like physical tests on it, figure out what it was, send it back up to the crew members in space, told them what to do to fix it and they came back home. I forget what that was 80 or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

So when industry is being used, now it's transferred to healthcare, and this is actually the new norm. So this is the standard of moving forward. This is also most of the standards for most federally funded research that changes every day. But like my point being, you said this is the future. There's it's it's already the past, it's non-negotiable at this point. In fact, even last year, federal regulations basically said we no longer can provide general health recommendations because it's it's just too irrelevant. We have to get people enabled for their own precision numbers. So, what that looks like is it's a you know, it's a five-year, it's a 10-year sort of thing, but this will become part of normal medical practices in the very near future. Right now, the average person kind of has to do this themselves. This is stuff we do, though, and this is why you mentioned rapid. We are the kind of like, hey, you care about all this stuff, but you don't have time to manage. You have a different sleep coach and a concierge medicine guy and a personal trainer. How about we put that under one umbrella and put your entire health and performance in communication and so on and so forth? So, like, that's why we built that. Some people are like, no, I want I can't afford that, or whatever. It is way cheaper to you to do it all yourself. And that's totally understandable. But some people are just like, I can't, I'm trying to build my company or whatever, you know, whatever you're doing. So as these products get better, this will become cheaper. Everywhere in the world, if you ever try to raise money or funds, if you don't have AI, if your product isn't synced to Apple Health, you have you're not going to get any funding of it's because it's solving this problem. It's trying to say we will be your personal help. We want all your information flowing to us. So everybody's racing to try to steal. I steal is the wrong way, but to make sure all your data is housed in that same spot. And so if you want to outsource, you can. Every company has that, it's gonna offer that. If you want to manage it yourself, you the tools are there, the tools are absolutely there. It's just you have to invest a little bit of time. So it's kind of comes down to the aptitude of what is your personal finance exchange for time scenario. So, and that's a different answer for every person. You can start with the simplest wearable, start with you know, routine blood work covered by your insurance and whatever. And you can pick any AI model you want, have you know, imprompted daily, weekly, whatever, and it'll it'll get pretty good at knowing what's going on, still be insanely limited. It's only looking at reference range data, right? So, what this I can explain more of that, but basically saying, like, what is disease number, what is not disease, and then we just assume optimal is the middle. Because it doesn't know, right? We we don't it doesn't have databases to pull from that are highest performers, best health. And so what it looks like, vitamin D is an easy example. So if you look at a reference range for vitamin D, it might tell you like 35 to 80. You're like, well, that's not helpful. Like this much of a range, fine. If you throw that into ChatGPT or whatever, it'll say, Oh, okay. Yes, technically 36 or 40 is within the reference range, but you want to be closer to 50 or 55 to be great help. All it's doing is saying, this end of the spectrum is right here, this end of the spectrum right there, I'll find the middle spot. So if providing a D it actually works, it's not that far off, it's fine. But once you get past the really simple blood markers, then it gets way more complicated and it doesn't know what it's looking at. Even if you train it and give it prompts, it still is not going to know because it doesn't have the information to go off of. So the starting point of your original question is it really depends on your aptitude and critical thinking and how much time you want to put into this stuff, or you choose a company tab source and say you use sort of manage all this stuff, and there's lots of options for that. And I'm gonna go, you know, go over here. So I don't know if that answered your question. I hope it did, but I think it's like a starting point, we have to figure that out. Like, how much time do you have? And then you can use a ton of different tools that all have individual pros and cons, but it kind of depends on what problem you're trying to solve. It goes back to the you said early, like 2000, 2010s, when technology first started really moving into weight rooms. The thing we would always tell all people is don't measure any data that you don't have time to really process and think about. Just don't do it. Like you're better off just like you can track it, but don't even look at it. Track it for historical reasons five years from now or something, but like don't make decisions because that middle ground is is when you you know freak yourself out too much or make changes you don't need to. So if you have a lot of time, cool. If not, like just maybe just don't do it or do it very, very, very lightly.

Well, I referenced that year 2010, and I think this is um an actionable point for a lot of people in the industry is that I I distinctly remember sitting in my office during a consult. One of my clients came in and said, Hey, hey, what do you think about this data that I'm getting for my Fitbit or whatever it was at the time? I can't remember. And I was like, I don't know. Let me let me get back to you on that, right? And now I was like, okay, and then it's then it happened again a few months later. I'm like, okay, this is something's happening here. So I should probably go get my own wearable or two, right? And then that's when I start with BioForce, start doing some of this other stuff, right? You know, start doing the wake up in the morning, read Joel Jameson's book. Uh it was great. And I think we're at that point right now where if not even more past that with this personalization thing, where if I'm in the industry, if an operator or a coach or trainer, you need to go about, I would go self-experiment on this stuff immediately to whatever your budget allows in time, because the more you get to know, and that's how I started to learn about wearable data. I'm like, okay, I started using it. How does this relate to my training and you know, my stress at work and you know, my body composition? Like, is there's got to be something here, but I was self-experimenting the whole time. And right now, like I would urge people to go invest in a vitality blueprint, like get it done yourself, like see what it is because it's a it's a very nice thing to have personally. I attest to that. And the the scope of practice issue, which you guys have resolved, I think is is incredibly important, right? Like, if if I'm a trainer coach, I'm like, I don't want to work with blood work because I don't really know what I'm doing. So neither did I. And I still don't qualify at all. Like, you know, I did my FDN, the functional diagnostic nutrition certification, and then I'm like started working with black, and then I realized this is today's episode of the Future of Fitness is proudly brought to you by EGM, a vertically integrated market leader in the fitness and health industry with an incredible vision, transforming healthcare from repair to prevention. I've been a huge fan of EGM's team and technology for years now, and I can tell you that their commitment to innovation is unparalleled within our industry.

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This is endocrinology. Like I shouldn't be touching this. So I washed it away from my practice. But now it's very different because we have the technological means to actually not worry about scope of practice, get really good assessments that we can sit down and talk to our clients, have a reference point for an actionable conversation. Like, hey, this isn't me telling you that your lifestyle sucks. We're just looking at your data, right? Objectively.

Yep.

Right. And now we can go through and have a starting point. So um, and same with like, you know, if if you have sleep issues, like try absolute rest or try something else on the market. I don't know, but go self experiment because I think that's how it all starts. You get a deeper understanding. So I don't know. That's me talking a lot, but what other advice or would you? Disagree, agree with that as far as what people should be doing right now in the industry.

Yeah, it's always best to try, no matter the situation, right? There's some things you'll be able to have access to, some things you want. You always want to remember a handful of things. I hate to bring up another phrase that is overly used right now, but first principles.

Okay, that's a good one. Yeah, if you like that one. Yeah.

Like you really want to think through this. So if you go all the way back with your scope of coaching or your scope of whatever it is that you're doing, you want to think through this technology piece and think, okay, timeout. Am I just getting caught up in solving a problem that doesn't really exist? Right? Am I adding something on top here that is maybe taking something I'm at a 95% on and taking it to a 97%? And like sometimes if you're a who's the I think I heard John Berardi say this years ago. Like, you have the T. Right? And so like the whole horizontal part of the T are people that have a like a little bit of skills on a ton of areas. And then the vertical, you know, people or businesses are the ones that don't have much, but they're the one thing that they're at is you know insanely deep. So if you're doing the insanely deep thing, then don't even maybe touch this stuff. Just get like continue to go from 95% to 97% and actively disengage these things and just like really the there because as I mentioned, everybody's trying to do this. Every personal training gym, every coaching practice is trying to be like, yes, we integrate, you're wearable, right? So you have all these horizontals going, and then when somebody's like, Man, I wish I just knew somebody who specialized in big toe pain, but also knew how that worked for boulder climbers. And you're like, actually, I'm both of these, and you're like, holy shit, like you're the person, right? So it's like really that's that's how you cut through the social media marketing campaigns and the blah blah blah. Because you're like, you have this insanely clear and very specific thing, right? The inverse is saying, okay, yeah, like you want to have a little more breath in your practice, that's fine too. But now you you're gonna have to kind of dance in all these areas enough to where then you can find your client's issue and go, you know what? I think this is all boiling down to your big toe. And I know somebody who's the world's foremost expert in big toe pain for clients. Boom, team up with that person, right? Like that is what you're after. So when I say your first principles, it's zooming out, saying, like, okay, yes, this is this pitch is cool. This thing is great, it does add data. But is it really solving an issue for your business, for your client, for yourself? Have you done a really have you done an appropriate assessment of the business model of your personal stuff? Like, is there a bigger gap you should go fill? Right? Are you over here trying to get a 3% improvement by wondering if your wearable can predict your training volume when you have sleep apnea? Okay, don't go tinker with product, like you're over here, right? Or your client's not showing up, or your attention's terrible, or whatever the case is. This is something I've actually been preaching for this was in our book like 10 years ago. Because like this wave was clear that it was coming. That's what I would say when it comes to like the tinker self-experiment. Okay, great. Man, this this AR thing, this absolute rest thing sounds incredible. But you're working with a bunch of 14-year-olds. All right. Maybe don't worry about trying absolute rest. Like maybe there's something else that's more interesting, more relevant, that's a bigger gap. Hopefully, that a point is coming through, right? Where you're like, okay, which thing do I choose to tinker with? What is the biggest thing? Are you writing programs manually? Are you still having it? Whatever's happening, and then try to choose one thing that can improve that. Maybe that's just spending time learning how to use Chat GPT more effectively. And if you dedicate 30 minutes a day to asking ChatGPT, hey, this is what I do for a living, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't even know how to use you. Teach me. I mean, I want to do 30 minutes a day. Give it a prompt like that. And maybe you don't try anything else. Or maybe you ditch all that stuff, you don't want to use it, and you just want to go, you know what, I'm gonna do an in-person clinic. I really want to get my hands on and feel, and so I know what it feels like, because I want to be not the technology person, because everybody's going there. Remember, actually being able to coach a person in person to be able to put your hands on their body or whatever it is in your earth, that that that is dying away, like an alarming clip. So actually, I'm like, you will actually be really good at that stuff, and you might have a really and your price point's gonna go real high real fast. So that's that I would say uh hopefully that's some concept of like what to tinker, what to try with or whatever. Think through it really careful carefully. Don't overwhelm yourself, don't do 50 different things, overhaul your model. Like, try think about the problem you're trying to solve, and then adjust if you need to, but that's the only way that you'll survive an avalanche. I mean, ChatGPT, Groc, Tem and I release new versions like every month. It's insane. So now, like, you're trying to learn the new Instagram algorithm, and then you're also like trying to figure out the plumbing problem, and you're like, what are we doing here? Like, then you forgot to actually have to coach, and you you're 10 years behind the newest like actual advancements in the field that you're actually in because you're worried about how to make Instagram posts faster. And it's like, all right. Like you're gonna lose that race. Like, don't tinker with that because it's actually just a waste of time for you.

It's I I wish we could hit a collective timeout, right? Like, can we just stop the clock? Yeah, let's just take a halftime break and just wait a little bit because it is it's overwhelming. And I think you know, one of the things I cover so often, and I'm almost tired of myself talking about it, but like it's so important is don't just start adopting AI and technologies for the sake of adoption, right? Like go out there and look at the biggest, like really, like you're talking about, take an assessment of what are the biggest challenges I have as a business, as a coach, like what's limiting me in the service that I provide. And you know, for operators, you know, most gym operators, it's gonna be retention, right? Or it's gonna be internal systems. Like Chris Crater from ACAC talked about how he built their own, you know, just internal GPT that was had all of their employee handbook and all these documentation. So that if someone needs to reference something really quick about hours or pay rates or whatever it may be, it was click, like that's not sexy, but it solved a huge problem and it was really quick and not hard to do, right? So it's like you don't have to get the sexiest shit all the time because someone else is telling you to do it. Like you you can you can do it systematically.

That's an excellent point. Do you know um Sam? Sam Korsko, the um founder of Levels, the continuous glucose monitor.

No, no, no, I don't know. Maybe I met him.

Yeah, he has a wonderful podcast with Tim Ferriss from a year a few years ago. And I know Sam. He took the time when he started the company to basically just turn Loom on his computer at all times. So Loom is just like a screen record software. He just put it on and he would work, whatever, and he do that. Well, now he can take these hundreds of gigabytes of videos and throw it into that stuff and say, hey, look, make me a standard operating procedure for fill in the blank here, right?

Yeah.

So now when they onboard a new employee, it's all condensed in, and this these employees actually watch Sam do it. You know, there's the training, it's condensed, of course, and it's all organized and does whatever it's like, okay, here's the reading stuff, and then here's how you do A, B, and C. And when that's that, you're watching Sam enter the data and whatever from his actual screen and all that stuff. So, man, Eric, you're totally right on that stuff. It can be very simple things like that, where it's like, just make employee training easier. Just make what do I do? Make your own FAQs. Client said this. How should I respond? You put that into your own internal GVT and it has your pre like written answers. I'll give you some like some top secret stuff that I'll tell you about.

Oh, yeah, please.

You can train models really easy on any of your public-facing stuff. And so what we've done is we have a lot of these ready to go. So when our coaches get a question and they need to ask me, they can just ask me, I Andy. And they they because I've probably said it on a podcast somewhere, but they have my coach wouldn't they have no idea, right? Like, oh, you covered this three years ago on your episode with Joe Rogan. Okay, how is my coach gonna know that? But it's it's only literally built on things I've said, published papers, my podcasts, so on and so forth, right? But it makes it way easier for our poor coaches and staff to like not have to listen to every darn thing I ever do. And so this gives them, and you'd be really clear here, because there's a landmine you can walk into with this. We never represent that as I talk to Andy ever, right? Like we don't ever lie or deceive, we don't send like an AI video from me, that's not really me. Like, we'll we'll never ever do that. But they can go, fuck, I wonder what Andy would say. Look at that. Oh, Andy would say this. If they really let a Joey and talk to me, then they'll be like, hey, I this is what I got asked. This is the response came up with like, you know, green light that yay or nay or whatever. Or actually talk to the client yourself, whatever kisses. But it just gives them a lot of confidence moving. I think I would do this. What would Andy do? And it saves me time because I'm like, I already answered that, it's already over there. So again, like you really don't want to just like absolutely never deceive the client, all that stuff. But that can be really, really, really helpful, right? So if all your coaches and all your staff are doing all that themselves, and then you want to ask, damn, what would the personal trainer think about that? What would the dietitian think? What would the the general manager? That's all in a system there. That's like not that hard to do. I think I want to say that costs us like nine dollars a month. Like, like it's really not or and it took us a few hours to build the first time.

It's one order at Starbucks.

Yeah, it's just like nothingness.

Yeah. Well, I'll give uh I'll give an example of that and we'll wrap up because I know you gotta go. But uh, so this what we're doing right now, this recording, is gonna be part of a uh presentation that I'll give to eGim's YMCA partners in two months. I already know this because uh what I'm doing is like it's it's an A, it's a I'm presenting on AI and I'm not a technologist. I don't know if anyone's figured that out yet, but I can't program or design anything, right? But I ask a lot of questions. So I have a lot of experts that I've asked about AI over the last year. I have all my transcripts already uploaded in a claude, and I'm gonna ask it, be like, hey, I need a 30-minute presentation on everyone that I've talked to. What are some of the best points of artificial intelligence that I can now regurgitate to this audience? Credit everybody who is on the podcast, right? I it's all gonna be done. I don't have to sit there and create it because the work's already been done. Like you've already done the work. You've already been on Rogan, you've already been on Kubernetes, you've already done all these things, you've done the research for those interviews. It's out there. Now it's just a matter of like efficiently putting it into something that you know would take us mechanically how many hours, days to do all this stuff. So there's there's a ton of opportunity here if you're just willing to play with it, right? And I wouldn't have known how to do all this if I hadn't been using Cloud for the last year. So yeah, to the point. Well, Andy, what okay, let me finish with this. Out of all the stuff that you have going on for our industry, where are their partnership opportunities for you guys? Like where can they start to work with you and your team? You know, and I'm obviously there's the absolute rest, which you talked about, but yeah, where where are the opportunities here?

No, I thank you for that. They're open for everything. So there is certainly at absolute rest. We, you know, have our main client, our business and consumer program is, you know, one-offs. So if you are you have a clinic and you think you have a lot of people or a coaching practice or something like that, we can work with teams and groups like that as well. There's affiliate models, there's different setups. Some groups do it differently. They cover the cost and then build it into their systems or their platforms, or they don't, they just they sell it themselves, or they just pass it off as a referral, and then you get commission back on that. So there's a lot of ways that we can work with it. Basically, anybody, we've done everything from hospital systems to longevity clinics to professional teams to military group. Like we've done and all, so we have little like setups for everybody there. And then if you have a larger number of people or people that are not at that like man, full immersion price point or full immersion interest, then give us a ring. Because there's again, there's that like you know, a few hundred dollar version that is available only business to business, you know, and groups like that. Um of course, you're helping us with vitality, get going similar model there. That these are all you know, you can go to the website and buy these, both absolute rest and vitality now. But then we have a really similar model. We've done a lot of vitality and absolute rest combo things too. So we've actually done corporate wellness to preventative, like insurance, employee benefits to full teams, to things like that. So if you're a coach, if you're a chiropractor, we've worked a lot at dietitians, personal practice, working with a team. Like we really are set up pretty nicely to let you have your own dashboard and all that stuff, and you can control all your clients, and again, you can make money on that yourself, or you can just use it as a way to get these things to your individuals. Whatever works best for you, we're open for those conversations in any form or fashion. And then at uh last two things I'll mention is at you know, at Rapid, same, you know, similar kind of idea with a little bit more restrictions. So, you know, that's mostly going to be taking care of individual people there. But we've done C-suite groups and we've done some partnerships with resorts. I have actually a thing I do with I'll be heading down here is to the four seasons in Costa Rica. So people can come down and hang out with me for a couple of days personally in Costa Rica at the four seasons. It's kind of like we do like a little bespoke program that we can do there. So it works with you go through absolute rest, you go through rapid, you go through vitality, and then you hang with me in four seasons. So there's like little fun projects like that that we can do. And then wrap up is one thing we didn't have a chance to get into is the new stuff we're building at Parker University in Dallas. So that's my that's my full-time home. That's where I work. We're building a 65,000 square foot advanced human performance center. So we're gonna be running our research out of there. We're working with a bunch of companies running research studies. So if you've got a company that you want some research done, we can have a conversation. It won't be open for a while, but when it is, it'll, you know, you can come in yourself and personally use the facility and get tested and all things like that. But if any at this point right now, if anybody's more interested in like a philosophical alignment, a bigger play, uh, an interesting partnership, we'd love to have those conversations. We're doing some really cool stuff with some different groups there that are that are combining. So a lot of room to play with that. And we're trying to do the stuff different, right? We know how the usual university model has worked, and at Parker, we do we do things different. Awesome.

Andy, man. Uh, thank you for joining me. And if people want to find you, obviously you're very easy to find, just you know, everywhere. You know, if people want to talk about any of the B2B stuff for the proxy, I can actually contact me too. So I'm excited to be working on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm I'm probably more accessible. So yeah, man. Well, uh, I'm sorry we didn't get to everything, but you know, time is time is a limitation. Uh and you know, hopefully we'll get you back and we can talk more about Parker and see how that's going. But yeah, thanks again, man. This is uh I learned a lot today. Hopefully our audience did too, and uh, it's always a pleasure. So ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Andy Galpin.

Yeah, my Parker email address is open. So you can go find that and hit me up. But uh, if you know Eric and hit him up first, maybe.

Awesome. Thanks, Andy.

All right, peers. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minus. 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 and 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.