Justin Tamsett - The Future of Fitness Leadership: REX Roundtables and Industry Evolution

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. Spanning over 4,000 clients in 40 plus countries, TeamUp has a vast global network with its roots right here in North America. Whether it's AI, new features, new partnerships, and new markets, TeamUp's sites are set on raising the bar of the industry to enable their customers to perform and operate at the highest level locally, nationally, and overseas. However, the most reliable APIs in the market, you can deliver premium customer experiences and scale your fitness enterprise with the strongest technological infrastructure our industry has to offer. Empower your staff, engage your members, and unlock your next chapter of growth with software design for you. For a limited time, get a very generous 50% off your first month. To redeem the offer, simply contact the teamup sales team and use the promo code the Future of Fitness. Head to go teamup.com. That is G-O-T-E-A-M-U-P dot com. Hey friends, this is Eric Malzone, and this episode of The Future of Fitness is brought to you by the Podcast Collective. Since our inception in 2023, we have emerged as the fitness, health, and wellness industry's premier podcast placement agency. We're honored to work with many of the industry's most prominent technologists, thought leaders, startup founders, and business executives. Why? Because they recognize that being on podcasts is the most effective way to authentically connect with their specific target audiences and rapidly grow a lucrative professional network. From podcast placements to speaking engagements, go-to-market strategies to investor relations, and media kits to press releases, the podcast collective brings a level of professionalism and deep industry expertise that can only be achieved by spending decades in the trenches. If you are a startup founder, business executive, emerging thought leader, or simply a savvy operator that understands the power of authentic media, learn more at podcastcollective.io and feel free to book a 30-minute strategy session with yours truly. Traditional media is dying on the vine. Podcasts are rising quickly to fill the void. Do not miss the boat. That's podcastcollective.io. All right. Justin Tamsett, JT. Welcome to the Future of Fitness, my friend. How are you doing?

Thank you, Eric Malzone. It is a pleasure to be here. The future of fitness. What a fascinating conversation this is gonna be.

Yeah, it is. It's this has been a long overdue. I you you have to been, I think you were on the show years ago. You must have been. I mean, I, you know, I've talked to you, I feel like so many times over the years, and you and I have been in the industry for for quite some time. And I I want to get a little bit of your background, actually, because it's it's gonna be an education for me. You know, I think you've been in this industry for I'll let you date it. I'm not gonna say it, but you're also you know, the host of the fitness business podcast, which is something that's always been a great motivation, motivator for me. And you know, I think it kind of set the mold for what this industry can do when it comes to B2M Media. And you guys started that in 2015. So really the OG, right, in the industry podcasting space. You work a lot with the uh the Rex Roundtable. So I'm gonna dive into that because I have a lot of curiosity about what you guys do and how you serve the industry and active management. You've been a consultant for a long time. You're a trainer, an operator, a multi-gym operator. Man, you've seen a lot of things, JT, in this industry. So uh I'm gonna try to extract as much value from you as I can. So, with that being said, let's say, because you're just on a flight, you're in a flight right now, or you're in a conference right now in in New York. So, on the flight from Australia over here, let's just say you sat down next to someone and you struck up a conversation and they ask you, so what do you do? What do you tell them? Well, that's a really good question.

Because when you tell them that you work in the fitness industry, they say, Well, when are you gonna get a real job then? And I was like, Well, it is actually a real job. It's a real industry and you have a real career. So I kind of I struggle a bit with explaining what I say I do. You know, in in in in the old days when you went through training, Eric, someone said you've got to have a really good elevator pitch. So my elevator pitch is I reduce the healthcare costs around the globe by getting more people moving and more moving more often. What does that mean? Pretty good. That kind of that gets the door open, doesn't it?

I like it, yeah, it's pretty good.

And that's that's really what I do do. To be to be frank, my job is to help club owners all over the world get more people through their front doors and keep them through their doors and keep them coming back as often as they can. And I know, as you know, how busy ownership is, you just don't have time to do everything. So my job is to go and find the information that can help owners achieve their goals. Now, if profit is one of their goals, I'm not all for helping them make profit as well. I'm not a bar humbug in that sense, but really my job is to look at out-of-industry trends, out-of-industry skills, movements, and then translate that after 35, six years in the industry. I think I know the industry well enough to be able to translate what's happening outside the industry to be relevant back in our industry. So that's I guess that's it in a nutshell.

Yeah, yeah, I like it. There's a lot of things we can take that to in this conversation, but let's focus on the Rex roundtables for a minute because it's something that I've heard it so many times. I've known people who are you know contributors and part of the Rex Roundtable. So, what exactly is it? Like what is the organization? How long hasn't it been around? Who do you guys serve? How do you benefit people? Give us the the high level and then we'll we'll dig it.

Well, in simple terms, we've been around since King Arthur. King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable. So basically, he brought together all his knights and said, I've got a problem. I want to hear from each one of you what the solution is, and then I'll make up my decision on what we do. And Rex is very similar to that. We bring together non-competing business owners or department managers, depending on what round table we're actually talking about. We bring together for two and a half days, three times a year, where we analyze the challenges that businesses have, and we try to work out the solution for those businesses through peer-to-peer support and peer-to-peer conversations. It's pretty rare to be honest, Eric, after all these years, you you come in and someone has a unique problem. Generally, there's there's an issue or a problem that someone's had pretty similar to that. So all of a sudden, when you're in a room with your peers, there's empathy, which is a pretty cool thing to have with people when you're looking to problem solve. So I guess that's one aspect of Rex. Did I lose you? No, still got you. Um that's one aspect of Rex is that peer-to-peer support to problem solve. Do you remember when you're a club owner and you did something really, really well or something just absolutely flew? Who ever said to you as a as a club owner, hey, great job, Eric? Anyone? No, man.

No.

No one. That's another part of Rex. Is this an opportunity where you can come in and your peers who really understand what you do and you go, Hey, I did this. All of a sudden you're getting this peer recognition of great job. Um, in fact, could you tell me how you did that? Because I wouldn't mind copying that as well. So, again, that's another part of Rex, is there's this place where you can you can be open, you can be vulnerable, you can say, I did this idea and it just completely screwed up, or I did this idea and it flew, and you get your respective response from people who have walked a million miles in the same shoes as as you have. We are always looking outside the industry and how how our Rex members can actually get better through what's happening outside the industry. I took a group just the other day, the other day, last month, to a company in Dallas called Textamall, and their company, all they do is group texting. That's it. Nothing exciting product-wise, but they have the most amazing culture. They're a hundred percent employee-owned, average person has been there five years, and they're nationally known, obviously, outside the fitness industry. So we went out to look at how they run their culture and what can we learn around that culture. We've done we've gone to a mixed pizza place in Chicago, we've gone to Savannah Bananas, where it's a fan-centric program to make sure people love baseball but love the experience of going to watch Savannah Savannah Bananas. So, again, that's what we do at Rex is you know, we we kind of have this belief that if you just look at health clubs, you only get as good as other health clubs. So our job's to look outside the industry and go, all right, how can we get better? Both not so much from an operational perspective while we talk operations, but from a strategic and innovative perspective as well.

What's out of curiosity, when you look at other industries, and you're the point of, of course, is to pull in value and see what we could apply here. Well, what are some of the industries that have surprised you a little bit or ones that you found the most value in so far?

Yeah, it's a fascinating sort of question, that one. I would say the most interesting is hospitality because it's the most similar to what we do. So hospitality would be sit hours and shit pay, and probably dealing with Karen's once a day. So when you when you look at how five-star hotels operate and what do they do to onboard their staff, and what do they do to train their staff, and how do they keep their staff motivated? That's a really interesting industry for us to compare and look at what they're doing from best practices, particularly around staffing. But in all honesty, Eric, you can look at any industry and you can find the champions of those industries and pick something out. It could be around innovation, it could be around, like we just talked, staff culture, it could be around how do they retain their customers? What are they doing to retain customers? There's there's just so many aspects of our business that we can dive into at any stage to get better.

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's interesting. So it sounds like you have a mix of what would be traditionally called a mastermind group, right? Plus, you you take um, you know, very specific, you know, tours or investigations into other industries and looking for value and insights. Uh, you also have your you're just telling me about the Rex Leadership Academy, which you're at physically right now in New York. And how how does that differ? Is that similar? Yeah, offshoot of what you guys could do at the core.

Many years ago, uh Ursa used to run the Ursa Leadership Academy, uh, also Ursa Institute. And that was really for up-and-coming leaders to upskill them to be in a position of leadership. And Ursa dropping that as a program, we decided we would pick up on that because we had many of our Rex members saying, I've got these up-and-coming leaders, up and coming managers who need to step into leadership. That's probably the best description. But there's nothing really that's industry relevant now that the institute's not there. Would you guys do something? And and we kind of pontificated for a good eight, 24 months whether we would do it. And we we finally pulled the trigger the back end of last year. And yeah, we're we're we're running it this year. I think we've got 55 people here for the the first class of 25. You know, it's we were hoping we get 100, uh, but we're we're happy with 55, and we're really diving into lots of aspects of leadership and particularly the difference between leadership and management.

I'm glad you guys are doing that. You know, I had I do these quarterly reports with Alex and Juliet, and on one of the things we've noticed, and we we talk about the the big publicly traded companies, right? The um, you know, the Pelotons and the exponentials, and not so much lifetime in this particular context, but what you see is at this level, a lot of leadership coming from outside the industry into our industry. And I'm always wondering, what why aren't we grooming from within? Why aren't we taking people and elevating them up to the level of a CEO of Peloton, right? Or why do we have to bring someone from Taco Bell to go to exponential? Like, you know, what is it about our industry where we're not creating from within? I'm I'm curious. I mean, you probably thought about this as you're working on the solution right now, but why do you think that is?

Well, I think I think in all reality, lots of people see the fitness industry as a transitional industry. Like we joked before about whether you're going to get a real job. There's not many of us that have been in the industry 30 plus years. And what we do know is we seem to turn over staff pretty quickly, I remember. One stat just after COVID was a personal trainer would last in the industry on average about nine months. So why? Why are we losing them? That's an interesting point in itself. But simply based on that, after nine months' experience as a personal trainer, you can't be the CEO of Taco Bell. So you might you might go somewhere else, do this, do this, do this, and then you get to be that CEO of Taco Bell. Um, in our industry, we we we have people like me that are lifers or losers, one or the other. I'm not quite sure what it is, but we um we can get into that role. But I still I do think private equity still played a lot of credence on out of industry experience and parachute them in. But what we do see is we do see a lot of issues with that because they they don't understand the nuances of of the fitness industry.

I see a lot of value in both. Like I I love that when we get talent from the outside of the industry coming in and bringing in new perspectives, new business systems, new ideas, new ways of doing things, right? I think it's really good for the maturation of our industry. But then also I worry because and I've said this a couple a couple times, I'm sure I've never met the man who I'm dropping his name right there, former CEO of Taco Bell came in and ran exponential for a short while. I don't know, I've never met him. I can't judge him, but I would imagine it's a lot easier to sell tacos than it is to sell fitness, right? Because it's hard. You're asking people to engage, you're not just wafting the smell of taco meat or french fries over, you know, a street block and people will just come in. You have to sell the vision, right? And and the work and the the process and the self-satisfaction of doing it, you know, having a healthy life. So it's different. I think you have to have an understanding. Like I, you and I have done enough time in the trenches where I know what it's like to change human behavior. It's not easy, right? It takes a relationship, it takes empathy and it takes all these things and training. Of course, we all love training, we all love to write the best programs and da-da-da, right? But there's so much and there's hospitality to it as well. Like it has to be a place where people want to go, they have to want to be at the gym. So it's it's uh, I understand, I think it's there's value to both sides, but I would love to see our industry kind of step up and move people through the ranks, or maybe our industry goes somewhere else, right? Be the CEO of a major company, then come back and take those applications, right? I think that would be ideal. I don't know if that's happening. I'm sure it's happening somewhere. I mean, people can email me and let me know what the the case studies of that, but that would be really cool.

Yeah, I think you're I think that's a spot on statement. Uh and I'm sure there are people that have disappeared out and and have come back. I think I think the challenge with our industry or our product is twofold. Number one is it's an intangible product. So if I'm if I'm the boss of Taco Bell, I'm selling tacos. Now, he might say, well, I'm selling a eating experience inside the restaurant, but the reality is I hand over five bucks and I get a burrito or taco or whatever the case may be. When you join a gym, you hand over 20 bucks a month or a hundred bucks a month. What do you get? You you you tangibly don't get anything. You feel better if you use the the membership, but you don't get anything. And then the other part of our issue with our product is let's be honest, Eric, it's fucking boring. You know, wandering around the gym, picking up heavy things, putting them down, running on a treadmill when you could be running outside. There's just so many bits where it's just not fun. Um, I was did an interview on for a podcast recently for a dance, dancepreneurs, would you believe? And they said to me, Well, why are we so different in the fitness industry? I said, You're fun. Like, you don't see anyone grumpy in a Zumba class, but in a body pump class, you often see people grunting and groaning. So I think our challenge is actually our product. And you know, mouth males salivate when we talk about, oh, you're about to eat a chocolate bar before it even hits your mouth. There's already the brain chemicals going off. But there's a different type of brain chemical going off when I say, well, I want you to go to the gym and you've never been to a gym before. So I think our challenge to genuinely believe gym timidation still exists in our industry. And until we can get rid of the thought that you need to get fit before you join a gym, we will continue to have somewhere between 20 and 30 percent penetration.

It's an excellent point. And that's where I think the biggest advantage and the biggest shift, and I want your thoughts on this, JT, is uh in our industry over the last year or two, really, and where I see it going now very distinctly into the future is you know, we're not really fitness anymore. I don't think. I think we're not wellness, not mainly because I don't I'm not a huge fan of the term wellness, and I think it yeah, it's more it's more CPG than anything. Uh, you know, I know Pete Moore is is pushing the the concept of halo as kind of like the rebrand with you know health, active lifestyle, outdoors, like it's it's cool. I like it's catchy. It is catchy, but we're changing. And I think what the point is like you look at look at lifetime as an example, they are a healthy living destination. So they have the fitness stuff, right? They have the place where you can just go work, right? They have the cafe, they have the pool, they have all these things. And sure, not everyone can afford a lifetime. Most people don't have access to a lifetime, you know, physically because it's not around them. But I like that model, right? And kind of starting to sell, like, you know, it's more just feeling this is a lifestyle thing. Like we can, it doesn't have to hurt. You can, you can do recovery stuff, you can just hang out by the pool, you can, you know, get a nice cup of coffee. And I'm when you look at the operators that you work with, are people recognizing that as a potential shift or an opportunity? Is it being talked about enough? Are people brainstorming it about it? Like, how are people feeling about that? Or are they really just more concerned heads down with what next quarter's numbers are and and what we got to do there?

There's no owner in the world that doesn't stop thinking about what next quarter's numbers are.

Of course, yeah.

And and numbers make make it businesses. But I think the interesting thing is there's a clearer delineation that we're seeing, I think we're seeing in the industry between the low-priced operators and the high-priced operators. The high-priced operators are the clubs like you described, which really is the third place or even a morphing of the second place between work and working out. I went into Club Greenwood in Denver in June and looked in there and I said to the owner, wow, this space is great. Look at all the people using the computers here as their kind of their workspace. And he said, When we ripped out the cardio equipment and we put this in here, we had complaints galore. He said, But now they love it because they come in, they work out, they sit by the pool, there's a cafe, and you know, that they're using the computers. And I think that's perhaps that's a result of the the the coughing that we did in twenty twenty. I don't know. But I do think there is that. But then at the other end of the spectrum, where mum and dad may not go, but the kids go the the the lower priced places, which I know it's not and I don't mean this disrespectfully, but sometimes I think it's those members are just paying to rent equipment every month. Nothing wrong with that. Because at the end of the day, what we want is people moving, how they move and what they do to move makes them healthy. It doesn't matter, it's irrelevant what they do. But I do think there's becoming that clearer line, and if you're caught in the middle where you're trying to be a bit of everything, you're not really nailing it because you're not good enough at that top end and you haven't got the equipment selection, so you're not good enough at that bottom end, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, it makes total sense. I want to get into something because this is dovetailing nicely, but but right before recording, you and I were discussing potential cop topics for our conversation. I asked you what's one of the biggest challenges are one of the biggest challenges of operators nowadays, and I'll let I'll paraphrase this and I'll let you explain a little bit more. But basically, there's there's more service providers, there's a the growth of the amount of service providers is outpacing the growth of the penetration of the market for consumers. The slice, the piece, the piece, the pie is not getting as big as how many slices are being taken out of it. So maybe explain to me what you see going there because that's a little bit contradictory to some of the reports that have recently come out through HFA about hey, we had you know record penetration into the market, 24% or 25% of people use it, more people use it than ever. But that doesn't mean at the operator level, that's what they're feeling. You know, reports are reports, right? But ultimately you want to hear from people at the ground level. So explain to me those conversations and what you think is driving that.

Well, I think we are, you know, there are there are people joining clubs. There's no question they they're joining clubs. There's still a big question on how many actually use their membership. You know, I you know, probably the greatest marketing campaign is that through osmosis, if you keep your gym membership on your key ring and keep that in your pocket, well, that'll help you get fit and healthy just by being a member. Don't worry about going, just be a member. And that's where we can really improve as well. I think we have to we have to focus on behavioral change and teaching behavioral change for our new members when they join. But I do feel talking to owners that we are not growing the pie exponentially as quickly as upon intended exponential fitness listeners, exponentially at the rate that we're growing service providers. So we might be growing at one or two percent a year, but we might also be growing service providers at 10% a year. Or there's more options, you know. You think the online Peloton or Apple Fitness or Nike, there's so many online things that I can do now as well. So we still need at the bottom line, is we need to get to high 30s into the 40s percent of our population to move.

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And I think, Eric, one thing that we do really well in the industry is we pat ourselves on the back when we are around industry people and we look and we go, look healthy and fit everybody is. But when you go to a rock concert, or if you go to an NFL game or an NBA game, and you are with the greater public, the greater community, all of a sudden you look and you go, Wow, we're not that healthy. I went to I went to Fenway Park for the first time earlier this year. Never been there.

Oh, it's beautiful.

Gorgeous. I went and watched the the Red Sox play the Yankees, which of course is like a traditional rivals, and we won't go onto the the new words that I learnt from the Boston Red Sox fans. I'd never heard that language before. But I sat I sat just behind one of the the dugouts of the the Red Sox and we're in the old original Fenway seats, and you kind of plonk your bum between two wrought iron things that you can put your hands on, I guess. Late I'm I squeezed in there, and I'm thinking, what the hell is gonna happen in another decade? They're gonna have to rip all of these traditional seats out because the average person is not gonna fit in here, and that's just a sad state. And then you go to you take that further to movie cinema seats, or you take that to bus seats or aeroplane seats. We as an industry, we can do better. We absolutely can. Now I'm not convinced, by the way, Eric, I'm not convinced weight loss is what we're good at. What we're good at now is absolutely changing people's mental health. And that in itself is an epidemic. What we're really good at is reducing loneliness by connecting people in our clubs through communities, and that's a huge asset to the mental health of our communities as well. So to me, that's it's yes, we'll help them lose weight, but we will also improve people's heart rate, the strength of their hearts, and we'll also improve their mental wellness by connecting them with other human beings, which is such a critical part of us as humans being social beings. When we get that right and we tap into 40% of the market, golly gosh, our world will completely change.

I'm glad you brought this up, JT. It's something I talk about often. I first of all, you're right. Like I was recently at the Athitech Innovation Summit just about a month ago, and damn, that was a good looking crowd. Like those people are healthy, fit, and we're almost kind of leaving the rest of everybody else behind. I was very impressed. But but and we're sitting there talking about, and rightfully so, the conversation needs to be had is like, well, how does this industry take this ripe opportunity, at least here in the United States, there's so many different factors, right? You can talk about uh the Maha movement and legislation and all these things are taking place and you know the focus on wellness and and mental health. And so, how do we take this fitness industry, morph it into something else, and then shoot to the forefront of preventive health care? Now, everybody was super stoked on that. We were patting each other on the back, like, yeah, this is our time, right? I'm pretty sure if you go into the healthcare industry and you say, hey, the fitness industry is gonna be at the preventive, at the forefront of preventive health, they're gonna laugh to me like, what? Those guys? So I think we we need to have a serious conversation about this because it's it's we can get there. I don't think it's as easy as everybody. Now I've seen some really cool models, and this is when I ask you about. I mean, I've seen like I really like what Dr. Glory Winters is doing, the chief health officer at YMCA. YMCA. Like her model, right? Like she's got a plan, she's got a distinct plan. Her her, you know, her medical background, her insurance background, everything, she she knows how this thing works. Jeff Sweefle at you know, Lifetime and the Mi War program and kind of you know, taking longevity as a category, but really it's preventative health, right? So they're they're pushing for, they're trying, they're working on the problem. What are you seeing? Is there any models or specific calls to action that will allow us to kind of take this next step of evolution in the industry to start moving more into the the front conversations of actual health and healthcare and disease prevention, right?

Can I share one that's not? And I'm about to get on my little high horse here, Eric. So you tell me when I need to come down. Personal trainers who are training clients without writing a single frickin' thing down. So what really drives me crazy is personal trainers who write nothing down. So, how can we do anything to support our members getting healthier and reporting back to allied health professionals or medical professionals when our personal trainers record nothing? Like it just not we can't be taken seriously when when we don't do that. Now, sure, an exercise physiologist might, or there are some, but you know, the c the number of gyms I go into where I will look at a trainer and I'm like, come on, mate, just just write down how many reps or what weight they did so that you've got a record for it. So I think that's to me, that's that's a real key for us, is that if we are going to play in this space, regardless of what Dr. Gloria Winders does or Greg Jones or Peter Smith or whoever it might be, in the trenches, down in the weeds, we've got to improve that service delivery and the reporting structure to be able to get back that information to the to the medical fraternity. That to me is the is the is the key. That's the linchpin. And we've got to have people understand that this is a job and you are changing this person's health, take it damn seriously because they're taking it seriously by paying you extra money to have this done. Or come down now.

Yeah, and I this is a good one. The uh the documentation is an interesting one because you know, if you want that to happen, if you want to integrate with the healthcare system in some way, you gotta have data flowing. You have to, right? You have to have a common language, you have to have interaction between. I think that's the promise of technology at this point is like you look at like a EGIN's genius AI, right? It's like, okay, well, you know, if they're if they're starting to integrate wearable data and you're starting to get, you know, tracking like how someone's resting heart rate is changing or their their sleep or their HRV or any other kind of metric that you can start to track over time, you can directly attribute that. So here's here's the issue, and this is I'm gonna steal someone else's thunder again. Dr. Laurie Winter's on this, but people have said that the incentives for healthcare in this country where more insurance companies is disaligned. Like they want people sick, they make money on people being sick. I actually don't think that's true. They want to make money, so they don't care if the person's sick or not. Now that sounds dark, but it's kind of true. So if you can actually reduce healthcare costs, but yet the premiums are the same, right? So what I'm saying is you have someone paying, you know, X, Y, Z, someone, Susie from accounting is their company's gonna pay the same amount for health insurance no matter what. But if she costs less to the insurer, they're profitable. So that I think that's the key is like the incentives can we can work within the incentives that exist as horrifying as they are at times. But I think that's really important. We have to have a base of like, well, how do we get the digital health information there to prove that what we're doing is actually working? So I think there's a promise here when you look at technology, and you and I had an AI conversation on your podcast not too long ago. So that's what gives me a little bit of hope. But I still need people, I need we need more people out there proving it out because I think we're very close to that capability.

And at the end of the day, Eric, we still are such a tiny industry.

We are.

You know, we we think we're enormous and we think we do incredible things, and we do. You know, I think in fairness, we probably punch way above our weight in what we achieve and what we do. But the reality is we are so small in our contribution to GDP. We're so small in our contribution to employment numbers. Could we have a major impact? You know, and you look at some of the Deloitte reports that were done post-COVID. Could we have a major impact on getting inactive people active on healthcare? Absolutely we can. But then so can pharma and so can all of those farmers that are doing all sorts of interesting things with drugs. But again, I think that just comes back to the budgets and their budgets are huge. Their budgets are huge. And we know that inherently we as probably as humans, we are inherently a little bit lazy. And if there's a pill, well, I'll take that rather than doing the hard work.

Not saying that's a bad thing, but that's probably a reality.

Yeah. Well, it's it's it's it's just in our DNA. You know, we're not uh we're not meant to live in a world surplus calories, right? We're just not like we're this is this is a modern problem. And we've kind of created a whole new, you know. Yeah, we've created a whole like what we thought we wanted as a species was like it'd be great if we just walk into a store and have as much food as we want, right? And there was easy calories everywhere you went. Literally, like within three feet of me, most days, there's easy calories to be had, right? And that's a that's a world that didn't exist really until just a few centuries ago, or maybe less. So it's it's an interesting problem as a human species evolves and we've got ourselves into this obesity thing. And when you look at like obviously the United States, you know, I'll add another place where I really know. I went to a state fair the other day, and wow, man, like when you start to see like that, that's a really it's a really interesting subsection or section of our population that you can you can see some things. But when you look at the United States, we're all very aware here of our problems with healthcare.

That comes back to what was saying before, doesn't it? You know, when you break out of the fitness industry, you go, oh wow, there are some some big people in the world. There are some unhealthy looking people. You know, you've only got to go to corporate conferences in CBD areas and you see unhealthy looking people. It's like you're a heart attack waiting to happen. All you need to do is walk. Don't even worry about joining a gym, just walk, and things could be different.

Is it the same in Australia? I mean, you are you guys seeing the same problems that we have?

It's the same all over the world. Australia is the same. Uh I was in Europe this in December. It was the same. In fact, in Europe, it's it's pretty cool, Eric, because the ladies all wear active wear, so you think they're at the gym, but they're actually vaping as they walk down the street. And it's like, I reckon I reckon the police should be able to find you if you're wearing active wear and vaping. You know, what could we make it? Like a $300 fine? Yeah, good luck. Good luck on that one.

What about what about like do you do you go to UAE or you know, any of those areas, uh Asian countries?

One of the interesting things that I think from what I hear is the shape of Asians is definitely changing with the movement of Western food into that area. And um and just you know I don't I don't know all the things about nutrition and I don't profess to, but some of the stats that you hear that the orange today is like it's like all of today's oranges equals one orange from the 19th century. Like our nutrients are just uh are gone. And I mean, there's so many, there's so many things that we can improve, but I think again, as our industry, let's not look at nutrition, let's just purely focus on movement. How can we make moving more fun for people so that people want to do it? Now we've added recovery in to give them another reason to come to the club and hopefully reduce any DOMS after a workout. I'm not sure that's the exact answer. It might be helping, but I think the idea of gamifying what we do, teaching people about the change of behaviors that we need to go through, I think those sorts of things can really have a big impact on getting people into the clubs and working out.

Awesome. Last question for you, GT. As an industry, how how can we help you and what you're doing? And what I mean by that is, you know, people are listening and you want people to reach out to you for specific reasons. Like, what do you need help with? What's the challenge you're facing?

Well, what's a challenge I'm facing? I you know, this will sound weird, but I love to hear great stories. I actually get inspired by hearing about members who have got to base camp at Everest after having cancer and it's because they were working out in the gym. I love hearing those stories. I love hearing stories about clubs that have gone into their community and and gone outside the four walls of the gym to be able to get into that community and get people moving. We've got a Rex member in Australia, and I think 15 years ago, he started a fun run in his community with 400 people. He now they now have close to 10,000 people doing that fun run. Like that's the sort of stuff that is I just find inspiring and motivating. So I know what we do, we do as an industry, we do really well. Sure, there are areas we can improve, there always will be. But to weeze, there's a lot that and we do great, and I love hearing those stories because it just reinforces again just how good we do do and how much we do punch above our weight. So yeah, if anyone's out there and they want to look me up, I'd love to hear a positive story about the influence you have in your community.

Awesome. And where um where do they get a hold of you? Where'd you like them to go?

Mate, LinkedIn's probably the easiest. Justin Tam said on LinkedIn or Active Management on Instagram, but I usually forget that someone sent me a message there, so it's maybe not the best. LinkedIn's probably the easiest, to be honest.

Yeah, great, great. And uh, you know, I'd encourage people to uh to listen into the fitness business podcast. You've been putting in a lot of work over that over the last decade, 10 years, you know, of running that podcast. So job well done. And uh JT, it's always a pleasure, man. Thank you for for taking time out of your busy uh leadership training and uh and joining me here today.

Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Menace. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futurofitness.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.