Joel Jamieson & Natalia Karbasova: FitTech Summit Edition - The Future of Data Driven Coaching

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. Hey listeners, this episode of the Future of Fitness is brought to you by our good friends at Insight Tracker. If you want to add more years to your life and more life to your years, of course you do. Which means you need to make a change. And that is what Insight Tracker is all about. Founded by leading scientists on aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Top to Harvard. InsightTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's our secret? First off, Insight Tracker uses its patented algorithm to analyze your body's data and offer you a clearer picture than you've ever had before of what's actually going on inside your body. Then Insight Tracker provides you with a concrete science-backed action plan for living a longer, healthier life. And it tracks your progress every day, every step of the way. For a very limited time, Insight Tracker is offering future fitness podcast listeners 25% off store wide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try to Insight Tracker today. This episode is also brought to you by Morpheus, the world's first and only fitness intelligence platform built by coaches or for coaches. Look, there is a ton of fitness and health data being collected on you and your clients, but are you leveraging it? And perhaps more importantly, are you saving yourself time and making more money because of it? Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights that save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. But wait, it doesn't stop there. The Morpheus platform also provides live heart rate training for your clients that can be tracked and shown anywhere. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's trainwith Morpheus M-O-R-P-H-R-E-U-S.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the Future of Fitness. This is another special edition of the Future of Fitness with the Fit Tech Summit coming up this May. And today I have the absolute pleasure of talking to Joel James and Natalia Karpasova. And uh you guys, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's great to have you guys. There's uh a lot of brain power uh in this call today. And uh I know Talia, you and I are both uh really excited to dive into Joel's wealth of knowledge when it comes to the area of recovery, right? And regeneration, as you would say. So let's kick it off there, Joel. I think your backstory and how you came across HRV and recovery and how you've applied it to be one of the best really data-driven coaches in the world, um, seeing a ton of successes. How did it all start?

You hear me? Yep.

All right.

I started a long time ago, honestly. It started back in like right around 2000, 2001. And I have to credit the Russians actually. There was a Russian guy uh named Val, and he introduced me to the first heart-rate variability system out there called a megawave way, way back in the day. And really quickly, you know, he connected me a bunch of electros and put a bunch of stuff in my head, and plugged me into a laptop and sat there and told me to sit down for two and a half minutes where we did this test, and all his numbers were on the screen and graphs. And I was like, what the hell is this guy doing to me? Like it just seemed crazy at the time. This is before any fitness tech really, this is mobile phones or even early days. And then after a few minutes, he was telling me essentially what my recovery was and what my HRV was and what sort of training I had done, and just basically telling me all these things that sounded like it was voodoo magic or something, but he was spot on, like he was right. And so I was just completely blown away. He explained that the Russians had pioneered heart rate variability for the purposes of the space program and they'd used it for athletic development in the 80s and kind of just told me this whole backstory of how the heart rate variability technology had been developed. And so I was just like, I have to have this thing. This is unbelievable. This I I basically instantly had this feeling that this was the future of fitness, steal your name for a second, but it really was incredibly impressive to me. And so I said, Awesome, how much is this thing? I have to have this. At the time, I was like 21 or 22. He's like, Oh, it's 35,000. And I was like, 35,000 ruples, dollars, like what? 35,000 dollars for this thing. I mean, it was just it was crazy expensive at the time, but I just really saw that this could make me a better coach and I wanted to understand how to use this thing. And so I worked a little negotiation magic with him and helped them introduce to the US market back then and introduced him to some coaches I'd already uh known and started using it you know very early on in my career.

I believe the negotiation magic consisted of a couple of vodka bottles.

Yeah, exactly. That's that that that's the magic you eat most Russians, right? So, no, not me. Maybe someone else, not me. But yeah, I would have done whatever Chuck, honestly. If he asked me to dance at the table, I might have done it. Because it was so impressive to me to see this technology and to think I just could I couldn't believe that you could have real data from someone by plugging their plugging them into a computer. It was just mind-blowing at the time. But I like I said, he was convincing that of the backstory of how this thing had been developed, and he he wasn't wrong with what he told me about my own fitness and my own recovery. And I ended up getting the system and and the rest of his history. I started using it pretty quickly. And the the funny thing was he didn't really give me a ton of education. He spent like half a day walking me through it because I did get a discount. Part of my magic was not getting a whole lot of education on it, so I had to teach myself.

So, how does this make you a better fitness coach exactly?

The really simply, as soon as I started realizing what was happening, I realized that my my workout was like one piece of the puzzle, and everything else happened outside the gym. So, for example, I have Microsoft executives I was training, and I'd put them, they were not in the best shape in the world, put them through a relatively easier market workout, and they'd come back the next day and they would just look like I had put them through World War II. Like they just looked absolutely uh fatigued and their recovery was terrible, and think, okay, maybe it's because their fitness isn't very good. So I trained them and I improved their fitness a bit, they get in better shape, they train more frequently, and then the same thing would happen. I'd put them through a relatively easy workout. The next day they'd come back and they would look absolutely terrible. And then I started to understand, like, what we guys do, what were you doing last night? You know, oh, I was up until four in the morning playing video games, or oh, I had a big uh deadline for work, so I've been working 80 hours a week. But you just started to see these things that were outside the gym controlling their results far more than my workout was, and it had a much bigger impact than their HRV. And I think a lot of people don't realize because they don't have that data. So once I saw that, then I started taking a very different approach to coaching. It was no longer just thinking sets and reps, it was thinking, okay, how well, how much is this guy sleeping? Is he recovering very well? What do I need to change if he's not recovering? How do I help him improve his diet or nutrition? It just started opening up all these other areas of fitness because I was realizing they were the most important part of actually getting somebody consistent results.

So it's a fitness coach, you're telling us that the fitness coach has to guide guidance through the training, but also be with them in bed?

Maybe not be with them in bed. That's what we use technology for to measure that what they're doing. So you don't have to be there personally. But if you're really committed to your clients, you do what you do as doing it. I don't think that would work in America these days.

You might get in trouble for that's that's the right commitment.

Yeah, yeah. That's where a lot of trainers have gone wrong. Not for me. I met my wife in the gym, she was a client, so it worked out well, but that's a rare story.

That sounds like a really bad excuse, honestly. Oh no, I was just making sure she didn't get enough sleep.

Yeah, when you look forward now, recovery HRV, you started Bioforce, what was it back in 2013, which was actually so what was it? Step us through that evolution as well, because that became more accessible to more people.

Yeah. I mean, so like for the first system I got was obviously uh cost prohibitive. Most people weren't gonna spend thousands of dollars, they weren't gonna connect themselves to electrodes. So it was really meant just for the coaching community and the research world. But as technology became more prevalent in the fitness world, and then mobile apps started being out there, there were most people had mobile phones obviously back then, they didn't in the early 2000s as much. So I realized that there needed to be more access to the same sort of tech I was using. And when I actually tried to get a makewave back then to develop a mobile version, and they unfortunately just it's fortunately for me, they didn't. So it took them a couple of years, and then I went back and forth and we were talking about building it, and I wanted to be a part of it, and it just never happened. And so I said, okay, well, I'm gonna do this on my own. And basically partnered with a guy named Simon over in the UK, and he had his own HRV app, and I basically made my own version of it and changed it a bit and just launched it out there to get it essentially in the fitness world and put some education together. I wrote a book called The Ultimate Cat to HRV screening. I started speaking about it, writing articles, and really I just wanted people to understand the value of it. But the funny thing was it was just so new. People are like, what the hell is this thing? HRV? What it was it was a very unfamiliar thing for people to think about data that way or to take a measurement with their phone and then have it tell them about their fitness. So it took a lot of explaining, it took a lot of just answering emails and calls and really trying to get out there and get it into the fitness world. And at first, you know, it was somewhat slow because people didn't get it. It was just like didn't make sense to them. And I'd say HRV, and they'd think I was talking about a S T D. And so I had to make it clear what HRV was and how it worked and explain it. And then it was difficult to sense that HRV itself is reflective of a lot of things. You can't necessarily tell from someone's HRV whether or not their stress came from lack of sleep or too much training or poor nutrition or biogenetics or like all these things, you know, are the results of what uh you're doing and what your background is and everything else, but you can't figure out what it is that's causing that necessarily in HRV. So I had to try to help people out in a lot of education, but ultimately the limitation of it in that regard is why I created my next step, which was Morpheus, to help people see the big picture of all these pieces so they could help understand what it was that was holding the recovery back. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to is you have to understand what it is that's impacting your recovery if you're gonna fix it, if you're gonna make a change. So the HRV would show you that you had a lack of recovery or whatever was going on, but you didn't necessarily know how to fix it because you didn't know what was causing it. You just had to make your best guess. And that was something that most average fitness people weren't necessarily great at and they couldn't really pinpoint it, so it was harder for them to fix. And HRV can go up or down, it can mean good or bad things. It takes a lot more to interpret that. And uh, so that was why I created Morpheus. But it's been a crazy journey to think I saw this thing in a laptop 20 years ago, now it's an Apple Watches.

It's yeah, but I was just wondering because HRV is nothing new, not anymore. So, what's so new about Morpheus? What are you doing differently?

Yeah, the biggest thing we're doing is like I said, when I first came out with BioForce, we give them the HRV score, and then we try to help them a little bit understand what it meant. But you again, you couldn't see what was happening, the cause, the changes in HRV. You didn't know why it was going up or why it was going down or what your why your recovery is high. You can guess. Maybe you did a hard work out, you think that was it. But our water with Morpheus, so I want to give them the whole picture of their life. So we wanted to pull in their work data, we want to pull in their activity data, we want to pull in their sleep data, uh, we wanted to take some subjective measures of how they they felt and show them essentially how all these pieces are working towards their recovery and their fitness so they can help see, or we can show them what are the biggest things that are limiting your recovery, what can you do to fix your recovery? So, for example, maybe it was your sleep. Maybe you you see your HRB go in the wrong direction and you look at your sleep during six and a half hours. It's pretty obvious one of the biggest causes was probably your lack of sleep, or maybe we pull your heart rate data and we see you spent a whole bunch of time in your high intensity zones over the last three days, it was probably too much, and that's causing the problem. So I just want people to be able to see the big picture of what was impacting their recovery rather than just seeing what their recovery was. And then we give them some heart rate zones that are specific to them on each day. So they have their own intensity, their own heart rate zones based on that recovery. So it helps them also figure out what's the most appropriate level of training load or uh stimulus on a given day based on their recovery. So we're just trying to pull in a lot more pieces of data. We're trying to help them put together all the pieces of their lifestyle rather than just kind of showing the end result of their lifestyle, and then we're helping them dial that their training in to hopefully be smarter in how they approach the intensity and volume of whatever they're doing.

Yeah, it's it's interesting to me too, as Morpheus gets out there and more people are seeing it and it's gaining a lot of interest because it's solving a problem that I think in me being a fitness professional who was in the trenches for such a long time is we didn't necessarily see the problem, but once it's made uh quite visible, it's so obvious. And and what I mean by that is like how many times would you have people come in for a consultation and maybe their results are lacking? So you ask them subjectively what's going on, or do you feel stressed? Do you do this? And they don't really know. And one of the things that we found is they're not necessarily lying to their coach, they probably may be lying to themselves. And what we're doing is we're getting an attractive view, which then connects the other uh 23 hours of the day into what people are doing in the gym. And I'm I'm curious from your point of view, because I know you've worked with MMA champions, right? You work with the everyday Joe and Jane, but how have you seen those aha moments when the coach is able to connect everything else outside of the gym to what happens there?

You see, you see that both sides. You see the person have a holy shit moment when they see what they actually did themselves when they had three glasses of wine last night or whatever it is they're they're doing. And then you see the same thing the coaches side to realize that the workout was not really the biggest driver of someone's recovery. So you see it all the time, and both both the coach and the trainer, which I think is other the clients, see those things. And that was really actually to me. I was lucky and I thought 20 years ago, and I've been seeing it over and over again for 20 years. But the average person, to your point, they're people are very bad judges of themselves, and we're biased, we're heavily biased towards ourselves, and we overestimate everything that we can and can't do, and we underestimate the other people. But in general, it's that once people see the impact, like you said, it's you can't unsee it, you can't stop, stop seeing it, you realize how much all these things matter, and then your behaviors are more likely to change, which is ultimately the point of technology. The point of technology shouldn't be to show you what your behaviors are, they should be to drive change. And I think that's where the the layer of having a coach and a person who's being coached working together and seeing the same data and having that accountability will make a much bigger difference than just what wearables have been for the last five, 10 years of just showing you what you did, which you know what you did if you're active or on the couch. But it's how did what you do impact your recovery? And then how do you change it? How do you drive fitness for it? How do you do all those things? So that's where I think the power of data is and what Morpheus really is going to be, or is that connecting piece between lifestyle training and the coach that makes everything work a whole lot more effectively?

You know, let's get back to Morpheus in a second, but I was just wondering how this comes comes together with a quote that you once wrote that today's generation of fitness technology hasn't solved problems but created them. Because obviously, fitness technology also helps you to visualize things that you haven't weren't aware of before. So, how did you mean that exactly?

I just meant that there's we got overloaded, I would say, with fitness technology. And you saw this more than anywhere at the sports team level. So there was a time in 2012 through maybe 16 or 17 where every team was buying every technology known to man and they were paying for five or 10 different systems and they were recording a thousand different data points for each and every practice, each and every session. Then they had one or two people whose full-time job was to just interpret the data. And then at the end of the day, they'd go talk to the coach, and the coach's like, I don't give a shit. This guy's playing today. You know, they just completely discarded their half million dollars in tech what it was telling them. And the same thing I think happened to the consumer on a smaller level, they'd be taking measurements with two or three devices, they'd be tracking all kinds of different stuff, but they didn't really know what to do with it. So they were just spending a bunch of time and spending a bunch of money measuring data. Half the time it was inaccurate, or half the time it wasn't telling them what they needed to know. They weren't sure how to interpret it. So by creating more problems, I just mean they were spending time and money and not really changing their behaviors. Because to me, if if technology doesn't help you change your behaviors, like I said, a lot of times it just tells you what you did yesterday, it's not necessarily enough for a lot of people to know what to do today or what to do tomorrow. So it's like if I'm driving on GPS and I can see where I was where I have been, but it doesn't tell me what's ahead of me, it's not super valuable because I already know where I came from. I need to know how to get to where it is that I'm trying to go. And I think that's been the biggest problem. Is we've had this tech and this tool to show us what we did yesterday or or maybe what we did this morning, but they they have not yet, at least up to this point, given people a very good direction of where to go. And they definitely have not helped a coach who's in a much better position to steer the ship in the first place to help the person understand where to go, what behaviors to change, what actions to take, what actions to avoid, and all those sorts of things. So I think the the next generation of fitness tech is is doing that. And I also don't think we want to replace human beings. We don't want to coach purely by data. We don't want to have you know, necessarily at this point have uh an app that's just an AI coach that's telling you what to do every day. Because that's not the way I think it's gonna work effectively. But we can help the coach have much more information to make decisions from, and then we can have the coach build that relationship, have more accountability, and ultimately be able to be a better coach because they have the information to help them make better decisions and they have a way to hold their clients accountable. You know, you can't say, Oh, I slept nine hours last night, and then you can pull up the data and say, No, no, you didn't. That wasn't sleeping, you know, they can figure that out pretty quickly if they look at your numbers. And so I think just adding that layer of accountability and that layer of data in decision making and interaction with the coach and the client is going to have a big impact on actually influencing their behaviors and getting people to change their behavior. It already is. You know, we already have people using Morpheus, and as soon as the coach sees something, they call it out on it. Yeah, we do. We have people coaching. So we have several thousand individual people, but we just rolled out the the coaching to beta testers. So I think we have around 30 to 40 right now that are using it, but we've had some using it for the last four or five weeks. And of course, our our questions are, how's it working for you? What are you seeing? And I was literally just down at a friend's gym last night until two in the morning getting his system set up to run classes today. But he'd been using it for the last week. You know, it had stories of people who came in and were amazed at how much he was seeing. They'd walk in the door and say, Oh, I know what you did yesterday. And all of a sudden, it's it's a different dynamic when you know that somebody's monitoring your data and they're paying attention to you. And so you're, I think you're just always more likely to do something if you know somebody else is going to see what you did or know what you did. It's just human behavior to be more accountable to somebody if you know that they're paying attention to what you're doing. So maybe you don't watch Netflix, maybe you get extra hours of sleep.

So, does this have more psychological effects or more like real physical effects on training?

Well, I think it's both. I mean, the psychological effects is about driving behavior, right? It's about getting enough sleep, it's about eating enough food, it's about avoiding too much caffeine and poor poor food choices, it's about doing all those things that you get outside the gym that are going to help you get the most out of the results inside the gym. But then I'd say inside the gym, we give them the heart rate zones and help them personalize that process of training and give the coach a gauge of the recovery so they can make smart decisions about how hard they should be worked or how hard they shouldn't, or whether they focus on regeneration or whether they focus on high intensity or anywhere in between. So it's both. It's always making the right decisions and then following through with them. So you've got to do that across the board of move, train, eat, sleep, regenerate, all the big pieces have to be coached effectively and they have to be the right direction. So I'd say we play a role in both. It always starts with the psychology, because if if you can't get someone to do something, then I don't care what you if your plan was good and if they won't follow through with it, it doesn't really matter.

It's interesting to me too, and anecdotally, I didn't tell you to answer that question is I've been using Morpheus almost daily since December. So what six months now, five or six months exclusively. And what I found that, and I have been training for a long time, I have a gym membership here in Montana and Whitefish. And what I found is that my attendance in the gym has gone up. And here's why is that I now traditionally would have trained hard two days in a row or two days of the week, probably somewhat crushed myself and then not showing up the other days in between. Now, when I'm watching my data and seeing how I'm sleeping, how I'm recovering, I will now make a conscious decision to go into the gym on a day I may have taken off to actually do a recovery-based workout because now I know how to do it. And that to me is a huge change in my own personal behavior for someone who's been doing this a long time. And I see those shifts starting to happen in the consumer end too, is there's reasons to come into the gym all the time because we're not just uh teaching you how to train, we're showing you how to recover so you can get the results you want. And I think that's something that's really exciting for operators and coaches is uh we just become a bigger part or more consistently in their lives. And that's the huge behavior change based by uh the actual physiological information that we're getting.

So what maybe we just can make one step backwards. And I don't know if we explain to the audience what what Morphus actually is. this is a wearable this is just simple bench but you guys can also integrate internal wearables like Garmin Pola, Fitbit, Google Fit, and so on and so forth. Why do you think, or where do you think would the future wearables like lie? Would that be would there be more wearables on the fitness training side? Or would we see a surge in the recovery wearables or would we see something in between?

Yeah, so what we use Morpheus is we have our own device, which is primarily usually HRV piece, because HRV itself is a very tricky measure to metric, to measure accurately. And it was important to make sure that the data we are getting is good data because I think there's a lot of systems out there that'll just throw numbers in their screen even though they don't necessarily have a whole lot of validation or accuracy behind them. We use our own device to measure HRV and then we use almost any other device out there for the activity, for the sleep, for the workouts, and the other side of the equation. So if people do have a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or you know just the phone itself that tracks these things or polar, we can pull that data in. And so it was always important to me to take that perspective of not forcing people to only wear our device, not forcing people to throw away their $600 garment band, which is a great product and make sure that we were using the data they were already getting from these bigger companies that you know have good products. And so we take that data in and that's where we generate the recovery scores from all that data put together and then the hard resones. That's the core of how it works. And I think as fitness technology improves, we'll just be able to measure more things. I think we'll get more accurate in terms of understanding where people's body is and we'll get more accurate predicting where the recovery is going to be. We'll be able to test more things internally without having to do blood tests. We'll just have a much better picture over time of how the body really does adapt to stress and then we'll have much better decision making potential of okay we really here's where you're at. Right now we're making really good educated guesses and really good data driven guesses or data driven decisions for Morpheus. Over time I just think that'll get easier and easier and I think the devices will become more and more I guess smart for a lack of a better word they'll become smarter in terms of being able to get the data without us having to do anything. So you know for example there are devices out there in the HRV right now that you just wear overnight and the reality is they're not accurate. So you right now you need to do a couple minute recovery tests using HRV to do it correctly according to the research that's been out there. But I think over time we'll just get better sensors, we'll get better devices, they'll work more seamlessly with less effort from the end user. They'll do a better job of synthesizing the data and they'll just make the whole process a lot easier. So you just kind of get used to having some sort of sensor that you wear around that's very convenient. And it's going to be sending a lot more information than we're getting now and it's going to be synthesized down to be much more usable. So I don't know that we're going to get massively different I guess different data like we're we're going to get new data but it's going to ultimately just be able to be more effective and collected I think a lot easier. There still is a there still is a bit of work you know at the end user level they still have to we still have to have some time and effort into into looking at it. We still have to have something on our body that we notice we have to take care of our watch we have to charge it. We have to do all those things but I think over time that will probably be eliminated you know we won't have to put as much work into it and we'll get better and more varied types of data out of it. And the and the coaches I think will ultimately get better using it which is the big important thing as coaches right now they don't know that they have no experience using this data because they haven't seen it. They have no concept really of how to drive training with this data very effectively because there's been no tool out there until Morpheus that's given them access to it, made it easy to understand and use. So I think there's gonna be a big steep learning curve and just getting the fitness industry to be more proactive about looking at someone's recovery and better at making decisions at what to do based on the recovery and offering more tools around recovery. So I mean we're seeing recovery studios and we're seeing these things pop up into gyms. So we're we're seeing more of an emphasis on recovery which is definitely a good thing. But even that side like we want to be better at coaching the individual aspects of recovery it's the same thing as training recovery is not just recovery and training is not just training. There are details there that matter just like sets, reps, exercises and weight matter on the training side how you do recovery and regeneration matters the same as there's details about how you build a recovery program, about how you stimulate regeneration and how you do that makes a difference.

Over time the the technology will improve to answer all those questions more effectively with less effort on our part Joel I got a question for you because I I get this question all the time from like friends, family like my brother just got a Garmin Phoenix five right and he's starting he's so excited about all the data. He's like, oh I'm gonna today's my goal is to burn 4,000 calories, right? And I kind of laugh I'm like here's the question I'm getting at with like calories, sleep, HRV, all these things, how much of it what do people need to know about the accuracy of it in the current market? And how much can you be depending on it?

It really depends on the device honestly it's it's buyer beware. There's some studies I've I quoted I did a course called Recovered away and I did a lot of research on the accuracy devices which you know looked at over the years. And it's definitely not always we expect some of the big companies have really poorly accurate devices and some of the smaller companies have really accurate devices. It really just kind of depends. I would say as a whole devices are good at just generally getting roughly your hours of sleep. They're fairly good at that what they're not good at is getting sleep stages for example which is a big thing right now. They're not getting sleep stages because they're not actually measuring sleep to begin with. I mean they're they're not literally measuring sleep they're measuring activity and they're measuring mostly that heart rate and things like that during your sleep and they're estimating your sleep based on those metrics. So no device is actually measuring real sleep it's just guessing at your sleep based on these other correlating variables. So it depends also the activity itself it's going to be more accurate in terms of a heart rate sensor and like an optical sensor which is what a lot of people wear like an Apple Watch or a wrist-based device they're gonna be a lot more accurate in lower intensity steady state things they can pick that up pretty well but as soon as you start doing high speed movements and change the direction and high intensity your heart rate's all over the map and it's very inaccurate for most optical sensors. So it it really is uh it depends on what you're doing depends on what you're measuring depends on the sensor you know you just have to be aware that you're probably not getting a perfect story and you want to be aware of the limitations but if your overall is trying to say in the big picture I think that's the most important best thing I would say is you know it's like it's like your training sessions like if you measure every single set and every single rep and every single rest interval and every single weight and you write that down is that really telling you any more information than having a pretty good overall idea of how many total sets you did and what the overall intensity was you know you you're as long as you're close enough it's probably close enough for most people if it says you were 7.25 hours and you were 7.4 hours is that really going to drive your decision any differently or drive your fitness differently it's just as long as the data that's coming in is good enough you know close and it's relevant to what you need to know I would say that's the most important thing. So pick you know pick things that generally speaking you know have some sort of validation behind them. HRB is the one I would say that's probably the most difficult because those numbers are very important to measure accurately a lot of the companies unfortunately are not doing it. But for just you know sleep and general activity and heart rates you know those things are easier to get I would say wear a chest strap during your workouts that's very going to be more accurate. Don't pay a whole lot of attention to sleep stages and your overall activity should be relatively close enough. Everything else after that when the the some of the new stuff out there it's a crapshoot. So some of it's likely to be accurate and some of it's not so do your homework.

What kind of customers are you targeting first and foremost so like for whom is this is Morpheus the most important device in their lives?

Yeah you know everyone thinks that's we're targeting or that your pit text is built for athletes and that's I mean don't get me wrong athletes use it and it's valuable for them. But it's also the people who hire a coach and who go to a boutique class two, three days a week and they have 40 hour week jobs and they have you know a family take care of and they have bills to pay those people are are equally important in terms of understanding their behaviors and their data to make better decisions in their life. Because again health and fitness are not just a matter of sets and reps it's everything you do outside the gym. So anyone outside that goes to a gym that hires a coach that does a class that's looking to improve their fitness in a sustainable way is is going to benefit from Morpheus. So we're really targeting you know anybody like that because we built Morpheus for coaches, you know, we're gonna get the most out of it if you're working with a coach because that coach is going to help that person make a better decision in terms of how much sleep they need to get or what their recovery is and what they should be doing for workouts and what their diet's doing to them and all those sorts of things.

So you know I would say anybody with a coach, you know, anyone who goes to the gym and does a class anyone who has some sort of trainer that's working with them is is going to be a great fit for Morpheus one of the questions I have for you Joel is you look at the market now and how everything's evolving and now that you know there are you know something like Morpheus exists and and allows the data to flow in so we can get a clear picture of what's going on. What about like recovery technology specifically like tech that helps people recover faster? What what gets you excited in that area?

You know that's a tough one that you you you can't short circuit the human body I mean recovery is recovery. So the biggest thing is always going to manage recovery is better sleep, better nutrition and better stress management. So I think the technologies are out there you know there's some good soft tissue tools out there guns obviously out there and those type of tools which can be can be really effective and helpful you know there's more and more things out there for like float tanks and cryos but to me I hate to put it this term but I'd say those are kind of the supplements of the fitness industry like how many people want to take a million supplements and their diet sucks right like it's unfortunate the same thing with recovery. It's like well you're not sleeping you're not trained correctly you're you know all these things are off but then you want to go spend a bunch of money on a cryo that's not really the the best use of your time or money right you need to get your actual lifestyle in order you know you know before you start adding those sorts of things in there. So I'm sure there'll be more tech I mean there's definitely stuff around cold or stuff around some patches that can have some electrical you know some some I would say some ESTEM good old fashioned electrical stem which is popular in Europe but much more popular in Europe than the US or whatever but electrical stem can help really really it's just about blood flow and it's about rest and regeneration and all the different pieces there's nothing that I've seen that's going to just have this massive impact on recovery because the human body takes time to repair itself and lack of mental stress you can't really you can't really device your way into those things very easily so I don't know that there's this massive push and these huge recovery things that I think are game changing at this point. I mean there you go the short answer is there's so many other pieces to fix first and bigger things that need to be taken care of before you throw a bunch of other things at it that I think that's probably the least of people's concerns honestly.

You know I started a feeling that the pandemic totally accelerated the recovery tech and the overall awareness of the health the way it also accelerated home fitness. So what's your take on what is going to change in the postpandemic world in in terms of recovery?

You know I think if nothing else it well I don't know about over there but in the US people gained a ton of weight actually so we're starting to see people go back to the gymnastics the average person in America gained something like 20 pounds which is uh ridiculous. So I think people realize the the limitations of not moving and and eating too much in a very short order and they saw the the effects of just being inactive and stressed out of their minds and eating too much food. So you know I do think it's brought an awareness that I need to do something to manage stress and I probably should take care better care of myself because I I look and feel terrible after sitting at home all the time and and not doing anything. I think there there just in general aside from the pandemic there's been a more awareness into recovery. There like I said there are recovery centers popping up and gyms are putting in recovery stations and people are starting to offer more recovery classes.

So I think there's just that was it actually because we had more time to sleep at home we don't have to commute?

Yeah probably I mean I don't know they I think the problem is just people's behaviors are cyclical. They do the same things over and over again it's just for habitual people and then you took them out of all their normal behaviors and you threw them at home all day and all their normal patterns all their normal routines all their normal ideas of when they went to the gym and who they interacted with and what they eat and just their daily schedule got come thrown completely out of the window and it screwed everybody up. I mean people had to adapt to a totally different way of life and a totally different uh daily routine and so I think it it had a really big impact on just the way people interacted with their environment in a way that had at least in the US a big a big negative impact on their health and their fitness and their body weight.

No, I was just wondering so how did pandemic um influence you exactly or impact you exactly what did you change in your lifestyle?

As little as possible honestly I mean I can work out at my own my own schedule I wasn't I didn't have to go six months without working out the biggest thing I couldn't do was play racquetball which I I like to play but I was able to get outside and run and bike. I went to Hawaii for a couple months to take care of myself and was extremely active over there did 400 miles over two months over there which is was quite a bit for me and I was able to keep taking care of myself so you know I I knew the importance of all those things and I got as much sleep as ever and mostly it just changed for me all my meetings were virtual instead of traveling which actually is probably less stressful on me. And then just from a business side we had to deal with our partnership with our our big goals gym basically I went down the window and they declared bankruptcy.

So on the business side there was probably more upheaval than anything else but you just Germans for them so it's not lost yet we know that the the pandemic also changed the lifestyle and the business model of lots of personal trainers cannot give any classes in person anymore. So is the device like Morphos something that could help them scale their business model because obviously you can just segment your clients in a way more efficient way in terms of recovery zones and you can kind of talk to way more clients and create way more scalable workouts for them depending on the category.

Yeah exactly I mean the biggest thing is it's a virtual coaching tools is as much as anything else because you do have all this data coming in whether you're seeing them one-on-one or not and I think we're probably going to the we'll probably see more of a high grade model. So people come to the gym a couple of days a week and they're gonna be expected to do more on their own because they might not go to the gym four or five, six days a week like they used to and so for coaches and trainers too, you know they've got to find a way to survive and they have to be able to offer that sort of programming they can't if they if all they do is offer classes as soon as your gym shuts down or you have a loss of membership because of any of this, you're screwed. So you've you've got to be more uh proactive in in being a coach these days I think you have to be smarter on the business side I think you have to be able to have more offerings than just in-person training that's where the virtual coaching works really well. And and to give myself as an example when the pandemic did hit I was in Hawaii and I was on the beach and I realized you know people didn't have access to a gym and they are they were going to need access to conditioning and training without that. So I I put out a 30-day gym free program to to my audience and I only wanted to have 300 people so I could make sure I coached them effectively and I sold that out in like two days. So people were looking for coaching and I think they have to you have to have something for them and you also have to have something effective because right now there's so many free programs everywhere. Everyone everybody started offering free training programs right there's apps with free programs there's downloadable free workouts. So I think coaches have to understand you you just opened up your competition. You know no longer are you competing with just the gym down the street you're competing with the website that's offering free programs that offer for for two seconds you can download something and that's people think that's a workout. So you have much more competition I think because of the online piece and because of the at-home equipment. So you now you have to compete with Peloton now you have to compete with uh total and people that are selling at-home equipment to get them now you have to compete with those companies to get that person to come back to the gym or to pay you to train them. So I think coaches job more than ever is to help that lifestyle piece because no technology on the wall or no technology on your bike is going to help you eat more eat smarter or understand why you need more sleep it's it's you're missing the human interaction. Coaches can play a big role by taking care of not just the workout but this whole lifestyle piece we've been talking about I think for a coach that's the best way to differentiate yourself from these other free programs or from these other exercise bikes or whatever the case may be you're a coach you can help people improve all these things in all these different areas of fitness and the workout again is just one piece of that so if you're going to be successful I think moving forward as a coach you have to look at this big picture and you have to have something more than just a workout because otherwise you're gonna get killed by every company out there offering workouts.

I love it. Coach is a lifestyle guide.

Yeah I mean to me fitness is lifestyle and lifestyle is fitness it's not just sets reps and weights it's all it's your entire lifestyle if you're a coach and you want to coach someone's fitness you have to understand those pieces and how to help people improve them.

Awesome awesome well to kind of wrap this up you Joel will be speaking at the virtual summit on some big topics. Maybe you guys can give some insights into our audience of what you're going to be talking about.

Well to be honest we don't know yet it's a mystery it's coming soon you're gonna have to surprise it's you have to watch it you have to watch to find out guys you hope that now intrigued you I guess we we know that Joel has lots of things to talk about and I think one of the most important parts for us is like how these new interfaces as wearables for coaches would influence the way we do training in the future and how could uh this concept be scaled in the future in an efficient way.

Yeah I mean that's that's what we can do yeah like I'm just gonna help people understand again how do you actually use technology in a meaningful way? What does it mean to coach by using this data? How do we help our clients make smarter decisions? So I'll give you kind of a simple process and I've approached coaching this way since it started it's always understanding what is what are the single biggest barriers to somebody improving their fitness and we might think again it's they just need more sets and more reps but maybe they don't maybe need something completely different. Maybe there's something maybe there's something holding their fitness back that we have no idea about and if we can understand what that one thing is then we can come up with a plan to help them eliminate that one thing and all of a sudden their fitness improves. So when I was training lots and lots of combat athletes in world title fights that was the way you always improved is you find the thing that's keeping somebody from seeing the results there's usually one or two call roadblocks or whatever you want to call them. There's something that's preventing them from getting better. They're putting in the work they're not getting better. Why is that and as coaches we like to think oh it's just I'm not maybe I'm not doing the right exercises or maybe they need more exercises or maybe they need more intensity but rarely is that the case in my experience there's there's so many other factors that we can influence and we can improve. It's about finding that thing and then coming up with a plan to you know other roadblocks so that's what technology can help us do. It can help us answer questions about what's keeping someone's fitness from improving in a much more efficient way versus just guessing and trying different things and hoping something works. So I'll talk about just that process of how can we use data and technology to answer questions that we necessarily didn't have any way to answer before.

And then they ask questions for us too.

Yeah exactly asked ask the right questions right it's again it's so much more if you're a coach your job needs to be so much more than just sitting down and writing down sets and reps and and an exercise sequence and we sweat these details and you know I used to do the same thing I spent two hours working on one I spent two hours planning a one hour workout and those little details don't matter for most people I mean they just don't there's so many other things that matter a whole lot more and so it's understanding what are the things that matter most how do we track them how do we look at them and then how do we become more effective coaches once we have the answers in front of us what do we do with that information. So we'll give a big talk about how to do that and I'll talk about some of the research I'll talk about my experience and I'll give you an actual plan of how to get started doing it. So I really like to give people something to walk away with so they know what to go do. And so I'll give you some examples of what you can go do as a coach regardless of what technology you use to go see this in action for yourself.

Awesome awesome and Natalia where do people go to find more information about the summit and get signed up check out the fittech summit.com and find them on LinkedIn because I spent my life there um and that's connected awesome Joel Natalia thank you it's a bit of pleasure thank you Eric thanks Eric Hey wait don't leave yet this was your host Eric Malzone and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes or if you did uh 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 or iTunes or Spotify Catbox whatever it may be or number two please leave us a favorable review or number three share or 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 I put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as far as possible. Lastly if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me simply go to the futurofitness dot CO you can subscribe to our newsletter there or you can simply get in touch with me as I'd love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone and this is the FutureFitness have a great day