Marc Zionts: Building Resiliency In Your Coaching Business

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 InsightTracker. Do 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 in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Tufts in Harvard, Insight Tracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's their secret? First, 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 you. 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 storewide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try to Insight Tracker today. InsightTracker, because change is an inside job. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas. Time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal. Yep, that's right. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's levelfivementors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. 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 until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to 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. 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 trainwithmorpheusmo r-h-us.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. Mark Zionce, welcome to the Future of Fitness podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's, you know, I was preparing for this conversation, and you your experience is you've done a lot. You've been across a lot of different industries. You're now executive precision nutrition, which many of our listeners will be very familiar with, but you've you've walked a lot of different paths, and it's going to be great to get your insights given that your experience is more than just the fitness industry, right? The fitness and health industry. And I think a good place to always start, Mark, is can I give us a little bit of a synopsis of how did you get to where you are now sitting in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina?

Great question. And thank you for posing that. Because I think I likely have a different background than many, many people that you talk with, in that I do not come from a background of health and fitness. In fact, my background really comes out of technology, technology-enabled businesses and software businesses. But through that process, I've worked a lot with institutional investors, including private equity firms. So my professional experience is outside of the domain of health and fitness. What made this all super interesting for me and works well for me is that I have a lifetime experience of being an athlete, being interested in my nutrition. So all of my expertise is advocational. My vocational expertise happens to mash up well, though, with this interest. So you put the two together. And I was thrilled when I joined PN a couple of years ago. But it's really the combination of my personal passion and my professional experience that I think was A, attractive for me, and B for the private equity firm that brought me over to partner with Tim Jones in running the business.

Let's talk about that personal passion first, because you I think you're the only person I know, maybe Menachem out of Barodia of Israel is someone I've had on the show. But you you train and race in the Velodrome. How did you get into that? How is I've seen it in the Olympics or the rare occasion on television? It looks fast, I have to say it looks dangerous. But tell me, how did you get into that? What's that spore like?

Yeah, so I've pretty much moved past the velodrome these days, and I'm mostly on the racing on the road and gravel, but I did race a couple of decades on the track, and maybe I'll return one day. It happened to be that I was living in Chicago for about 30 years, and there is a velodrome there. There's quite a few of them actually in the Midwest. So it was a great way to actually get into racing pretty safely. So a little counterintuitively, it's actually safe in the sense that nobody has brakes and they're fixed gears, so you can't coast. So the flow is a little bit better than you might expect. Um, there typically are not going to be potholes or cars entering a course or animals or things. So, in many ways, it's safer. But the cool thing was that they raced on a weeknight. So when your kids were young, it really provided a way for you to get a lot of racing in without having to necessarily take off uh a whole day away from your family to go race. So it was a matter of location and convenience and lifestyle, and just it's just a great form of racing. And there's actually all kinds of different races on the velodrome that most people just see if they're watching something on the Olympics and it randomly pops up. But that's really where you know it came from was it the velodrome was a few miles from my home. And that made it super easy.

Do you feel uh a certain amount of g force when you round those corners or those turns? I imagine if you're flying fast enough, you're gonna feel it, right?

You do, but it actually depends on the track design because there's no standard for what a track looks like per se. So it depends on the length and the banking. So the the Chicago one is fairly mellow. And by mellow, I think the maximum grade, the maximum gradient was maybe 23%. And it was a long volatile is 333 meters. Whereas you get if if you go to Colorado closer to you, I've raced a lot at the Olympic Training Center um in Colorado City, and that is uh Colorado Springs, I'm sorry, that is 250 meters with 33 degree banking. And then I've also raced at the Olympic facility, an indoor wood track in Los Angeles, and that I think goes 37%. So yeah, you actually really feel it there too. And it's also odd because if you and I were racing next to each other, I'm actually looking at your feet. Would I look when I look to the right because of the angle?

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. It looks really cool. I I'd be curious to to know too, when you know you were really, I don't know, maybe you are at the height of your training, but we were as you've gone through the the training for this type of sport and the other cycling sports and all the things that you've done. Did you develop a personal nutrition philosophy? Or have you been always playing and tweaking, or what's been the nutritional journey for you?

Yeah, so that's it's a great question. I I I probably started off like a lot of people where I wasn't super aware of my nutrition when I was younger. Today, people I think learn about nutrition at an earlier age, which is good. But the bad thing is bad and good is when you're young, you can do just about anything. But as you start getting older, I think you become more mindful about it. So for me, it was actually a journey of figuring out what worked best for me. And that actually went from giving up red meat and then giving up poultry, then giving up fish and becoming a vegetarian, then becoming more mindful about how much you know, wheat I would take in or how much dairy I would take in. I kind of evolved it over a couple of decades to being a vegetarian for quite a while now. And what I would just say is low wheat, low dairy, focus as much as possible on unprocessed foods and just really keeping healthy eating in mind, if you will, because you know it makes me feel great. And I still race just about 60, and I feel pretty, pretty awesome. So it's working for me, and that works for me. And I just want to be careful here to say that's not the formula for everybody, it's whatever works for you, but that's what works well for me. And there's no one way to achieve nutrition that works for the individual and in their life.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that. I think over my career too, I found actually the the previous episode to this one for listeners was is Rob Wolf. And we talked a little bit about metabolic flexibility and kind of figure out what works for you. And ultimately, after so many years coaching people in the trenches, I found that the only honest answer that I have to their questions is it depends. That's well, which what do you think about wheat? It depends, right? Should I should I eat meat? It depends. There's so many that it it seems to be there's so many variables that really becomes down to the honest answer. And uh actually that answer is great for most questions in life anyway. It's a great, it is a great answer.

Yeah.

The meat of what I would love to tackle with you today, because I think having someone like you on the show who has a very strong background in tech and now is really bridging the gap into one of one of your passions, which is health and nutrition. 2020 was a fascinating year for the fitness industry. And as we discussed, the goal of my show is to help the industry skate to where the puck is going. And we can certainly wax poetically on what we think that could be. But resiliency is a word that popped up in prior conversation to this recording with you. And let's get into that. Given maybe reflect on what you've seen from a technic a tech a technological investment viewpoint of 2020 and how you're seeing what the rest of 2021 is going to unfold and look like.

Yeah, so I think that there's a you look back on 2020, and resilience is a good word. Hey, we all had to survive it.

Yeah.

But I think some people were well equipped to survive it, and others were ill-equipped and struggled, and indeed some didn't make it, and some may have left the industry. And what I think and I think what the future holds is nobody wants to be vulnerable in the future like they were in 2020. And that's where the I think of resiliency. They want to have a model in their business that works, whether it's physical, whether it's virtual or whether it's a hybrid. And you had the businesses that struggled the most were those that were 100% physical. And the ones that prospered the most were the ones that were already 100% virtual or online. And people struggled to get to the middle or to get you know all online with their business. And I know people just don't want to be in that position again. Lesson learned, we don't know what the future holds, but what we know is the future will be different than the past. And it's not going to be all one thing or the other, but I think people want to be flexible in their business model. And if we see another crisis like this again, that they're not caught from scratch trying to figure out what to do with their business. So, you know, what does that mean for technology? If somebody was a classical trainer and worked with their clients on nutrition and got all their business through a gym and through people walking in the door, whether that gym closed or not, they still may have struggled. If their gym closed and they were on their own, even if they had good clients, they may have been struggling to figure out what tools do I use, how do I coach my clients remotely? How do I interact? How do I build business? You know, how do I market myself? They didn't necessarily have all those digital skills that, which is understandable given where they came from. So I think people have learned a lot if they've if they're still around. And the industry I think is trying to help people get there so that they do have that ability to work uh under any situation.

One of the the interesting things that happened in 2020 is you started to see so much investment money come into the fitness industry. It felt like the fitness industry never really got a whole lot of attention, attention from investors, Wall Street, Ivy League type people, right? But it it's changed. Do you why do you think that happened? Was it the pandemic? Was it just the right timing of connected fitness and digital fitness? Or why do you think investors took such a huge interest last year and moving forward into this uh into this year?

I think I think what happened last year is you just saw some trends already that were already underway accelerate in by three, five, or ten years, depending on the business, perhaps. So I think it was an acceleration, and that's where it attracted so much investment. What primed this was connected fitness was maturing, it was coming into prime time, it was becoming cost effective, bandwidth is ubiquitous, the the technology was there, lots of product options, models proving themselves out. So the tech arrived, the businesses were at various stages of development, but through the pandemic, that forced people into looking at those virtual options. Now, many of these businesses started though as a software business, as a connected business, in which their business was also a recurring revenue business, which also aligned a lot with the way I think institutional investors like to look at a business when possible. Is rather than a one-time transaction, I sell you a barbell, I'm done. If they can sell you something every month, that becomes a predictable cash flow, that becomes much more bankable from an investment perspective. So I think what you had was caught a perfect storm of the the tech was there, the business model was there, and now the requirement instantly accelerated. And this attracted massive investment, whether it's companies going public, companies raising money with private equity firms, lots of MA activity. So I think it was that combination that accelerated 2020 investment.

Interesting. Who do you think were some of the big winners in 2020 within the fitness and health industry? Oh, we'll just say fitness.

Yeah, the easy one to point to, of course, is somebody like a Peloton.

Yeah.

And what's super interesting about that is it's so I'm a cyclist and I want to be outside. And I it's one of the safe things you can do in the pandemic. And by the way, bicycle sales went through the roof in 2020. Right. You know, so that happened. If you're urban, you might not be able to get outside. And the Peloton, of course, was happening. And for many people, they don't want to be outside anyways because of safety or whatever reasons. It's a different experience, too, the connected experience. But it's really interesting. You could take three industries and say one's 100%, you know, two are 100% physical and one was 100% virtual. And how did 2020 fare for them? So one would be Soul Cycle, one would be Peloton, and one would be the bicycle manufacturing industry. So biking, it was a banner year. People could do it. Bike stores were sold out. You couldn't get bikes, low end, medium end, high end. It was crazy. But so biking did Peloton, we know the story. What's the difference between a soul cycle and a Peloton? Location. They do they're trying to deliver the same experience. This motivational group experience of indoor cycling. They just there was only one difference, and that was how they did it. It wasn't what they did, it wasn't the end user demand. But in this case, the how made the difference between shutting the doors and becoming a multi-billion dollar business. So I think you can actually go through many businesses this way and just look at them and just say the how of their business. Were you a yoga studio or were you an on you know online? Were you able to take your classes outside, or could you not make that pivot? Yeah, and and I think it's there were those that clear winners, clear losers as a result of the situation and how people, what their business model was and how they adapted if they could adapt. Interesting.

Yeah, it's great. I would have a follow-up question. I I do know a lot of people within the industry. I work with some now tech enabled companies. And what do you think investors are looking for now? Like what if you were gonna give someone advice who maybe is building some sort of software solution or connected fitness model and they want to get bought or they want to get acquired? What advice do you give them on how to build their business?

Number one, don't think about getting bought or getting acquired. Okay. That's where I'd start. I would just think about how do I create an awesome business that I can run forever, that can grow, that is meeting uh a need in the marketplace that may not be being met right now. How can I do, or if there is a need being met, how can I do it better? What's my differentiation? Is it sustainable? Can I create a business model that makes sense, that is viable? And can I build this business this amazing business and launch it and be successful? And I would pour all of my energy into that. Because if you do that, the outcome may be other people get very interested in your business, whether it's an investment, whether it's an acquisition. I think those are those outcomes are more likely if you concentrate on the business. And the other is much more of kind of the Hail Mary. You're just you're not necessarily designing something for the long term. It may or may not work. The outcome, the outcome is probably more likely uh less probable to be good than focusing on creating a good business. I think PN's a great example. We were acquired by a private equity firm in late 2017. Our founders, Dr. John Barardi and Fo Capagio, they just were building an awesome business. I think they had it wasn't with any intentionality that they would ultimately be acquired by a private equity firm, be grow to the level it did. They just were trying to, like most people in the health and fitness industry, they were just trying to create a business that could help as many people as possible to live a better life. And you know, when they ended up with this really valuable business, I think you they were almost as surprised as anybody, you know, because that's not where they started. It's just where it's how it worked out because they built such a great business.

Yeah, that's really good advice. So can we dive into precision before maybe people, and there's probably very few who aren't familiar with precision nutrition, what is in its current form being today's recording is January 26th, 2021. And I haven't stated the date of recording so many times. I have in the last six months because everything changes so fast. But what does Precision Nutrition do? Who do you guys serve? Give us some insights on it.

Yeah, so Precision Nutrition focuses on working with the health and fitness professionals. We focus on education and certification and providing software and educational tools for professionals to use in their practice. That is the vast majority of our business. We have a small component of our business where we do two cohorts a year of direct coaching online. We primarily do that to test the efficacy of our curriculum and our software, and then gather a lot of data that we can use in research and improving our offerings. If I go to the professional products, it starts around education and certification. We have a level one course, which is our self-paced 100% online course that is very popular. We have a master level class called a level two class. It's a one-year mentorship program. And then we have software called ProCoach, which is a tool for coaches to use to help their clients achieve great outcomes. So it allows them if you know to really leverage their skills and leverage their programs for their clients. If you have a few clients, you can keep track of it on Google Docs or however you're doing it. If you get to 10, 15, 20, 50 clients more or more, you need some software. And we provide that to coaches. And then something that was super exciting is that at the end of last year, we launched a new product called PN Academy. And PN Academy is an on a continual education software subscription service that gives you access to specializations, webinars, research reviews that come out twice a month, an exclusive community of coaches that like-minded people to interact with, as well as a number of other features. And that's a monthly subscription program. So for the professionals, it's education, it's ongoing education and resources, and it's software tools. So those things collectively make up the offering from precision nutrition.

That's I've heard you use the word both written and in this conversation of community and the precision nutrition community. And that's community really, I think if there's one thing that we've learned in the fitness industry from CrossFit, people can say what they want about it, but it doesn't matter because they did show that community is extremely important in the worlds of fitness and health. What do you think makes the community of precision nutrition so dynamic and so loyal? Like where what do you think the quality is? How did that get started?

I think we ourselves are a mission-driven company, and I think people connect with that mission quite well. It's all about you know helping people live a happier and healthier lifestyle. So I think people come in with open minds and open hearts, and we've tried to create a curriculum that is designed to help instruct coaches on how to help their clients get a great outcome. So it's all about how do you help people change their behaviors? How do you help people change their habits? How can you coach effectively? There's a lot of knowledge that we impart there. Knowledge is not action. We try to help teach the action of coaching around nutrition. And so I think people really, when they get in that curriculum, I think that they read a lot about us, they've learned about us, and they're prepared for that approach and that philosophy. I think people uh appreciate the fact that we're not prescriptive. You've mentioned the word earlier, it depends. That's a great word. For us, everything's a continuum. This is better than that. You can, you don't have to, it's not all or nothing. It's not one diet or another diet. Everybody's different, and food's a lot more than nutrition. So I think people connect to that. And then what they find is a like-minded people. So we're able to set up communities. And so we have communities when students are going through their course that they can be in a student group. They we set up study groups, we have graduates, we have people that are subscribing to the PN Academy, we have ProCoach user groups. So we have many closed user groups, if you will, yeah, as well as a general community that's on Facebook or Instagram or in other locations where we're always trying to share a lot of great information. So it it's, I think it comes from a number of different places, but I absolutely agree with your comment. People are hungry for support, for community, for interaction, for help from um wherever they can these days. And they may want it even more now than they did before because people are yearning for contact, you know, in during these times.

Yeah. It's it's been interesting to see that the last year has proven that community can be built online, like solid community. It doesn't, it's great when it's in person. We can all meet and we can do events and we can meet in the gym. That's amazing. But we can actually do it online. It can be done in a digital way. And there's a lot of models out there. Peloton, of course, being one. I've gotten a couple texts just in the last few weeks asking from friends, hey, do you do Peloton? And because they want to invite me into their classes or whatever it is, I haven't used it. But I think it's pretty fascinating. And it's something that once again we've learned it's here now, it's not going away. So how do we leverage it? Which brings me into my next question. So you've got this amazing community of precision nutrition. And I guess I'm going to ask you to dust off the crystal ball here, Mark. Where do you think the industry is going now? And how and what steps can I'll even make it easier. I'll give you an avatar of a precision nutrition coach who maybe could own a gym or works in a gym, but also has that mixture of people online and in person. What can they be doing right now to build resiliency to any other crazy things that could happen within the fitness industry and the speed of growth? What would you tell them?

Yeah, so I think the advice I would give them is first of all, that they uh that they have all the digital tools they need that if they, you know, if there if there was a snow day tomorrow, that they could still interact with their clients. Let's just say they're they really love working in person and that's their thing. And that's not going away in the future. But if there's a snow day tomorrow that they have all the tools and they can flip the switch and they can still work with all their clients remotely. So I would, you know, invest in the your skills, your tools, so that you have that capability and that if the gym doors close for a day, a week, or a month, you're not high and dry. So that would be one. But I think the other thing I would encourage people to is to think about the whole person. And this is really where we go, you know, from a crystal ball perspective at PN, is you know, when we think of nutrition, it's we have domain expertise in nutrition, but we really think our special sauce is around online learning, teaching how to coach, and teaching coaching for behavior change. And that can apply to adjacent domains. And we think that the adjacent domains are things that relate to the whole person. So it's not just sleep, or excuse me, it's not just nutrition. You know, we know that it's movement exercise, but it is things like sleep and recovery, it is things like mindfulness and stress management. So I think the coach of the future can look very different than the coach of today. If you want to help your client, you probably want to help them more holistically. And I'll give you an analogy and I'll go to your avatar. If your avatar 10, 15, 20 years ago was Michael Jordan, your avatar today should be LeBron James. And let me explain what I mean by that. Okay. I used to live in Chicago. I was around during the Michael Jordan board bulls years, and the whole story back then was this guy's amazing because he practices harder, he takes more shots and practices, he works harder at his craft than anybody else. But it was all about one thing: exercise, the sport, the athleticism. That was it. End of story. It was very single-dimensioned. Fast forward to our LeBron James avatar. And this is a guy that spends over a million dollars a year on his nutrition, his food prep, his stress management, his massages. He's the whole athlete. He's aging beautifully. He's mindful of his sleep, his recovery, his nutrition, his stretching, his exercise, his community involvement, his environmental involvement. This is the whole thing. It's not one dimension. And I think that athletes can sometimes be like the canary in the coal mine. They signal what's coming. So I would encourage as coach coaches to think about how do I know things more holistically? And by the way, that's why a lot of people come to PN in the first place, is they're working with their clients on exercise only. And they wake up to the fact that my client's not really getting the results they want. And then they figure out they learn that, yeah, nutrition's that other 80% of the equation. That's not just exercise. So then they learn about nutrition. So I think you coaches tend to be continual learners. I think this is the future. Being more holistic, being more creating providing more value to your clients. And the beautiful thing is a lot of these other dimensions lend themselves very nicely to being virtual or remote. That's great insights.

I love the LeBron. Even uh just relative to today's Tom Brady's going to the Super Bowl. The guy's 44. And uh he's he's the very similar LeBron in everything that he does. Uh, he's even got his own workout plans. It's pretty incredible the longevity of these high performers now when they focus on, as you said, the holistic view of their health and fitness. It's incredible. Um, it's a great, it's a great example.

He's what double the age essentially, or almost double the age of his competitor in his 10th Super Bowl. And you're right. And from a he's been playing this year like he's a guy in his 20s. Yeah, it's incredible. That's not that is not, he might have some nice genetic gifts, but this is a guy that two days after winning a Super Bowl at you know, probably five dark thirty in the morning is sending a text out to his whole teams from the gym, you know, full of sweat saying, I'm here, what are you doing? Yeah, it's so get ready for the next season. That's the discipline, right? That's who he is. But I think that's that's wonderful because I think a lot of us we want to, it's not just about living longer, it's about living better. And and I think that's a great example. And as an endurance athlete, I just see friends of mine that I hang out with, people in their 50s and 60s, and they're just in amazing shape. And quality of life is unbelievable.

I am to harp on this point. I I am inspired constantly with the community here in the Flathead Valley of Montana because just the last weekend, I was last Friday, I was actually skiing by myself and I got on a chairlift. And nowadays, in COVID, you have to ask, Hey, do you mind if I join you if it's okay? Then you know, then you get on the chairlift and you keep space. Ended up talking to this gentleman, and it came up that he was 73 years old and he had been there since 9.15 in the morning. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon at this time. And I'm like, All right, great, have a great run. And we get off the chair and I zip down the hill. I'm not moving slowly. And I decide at as I'm finishing my run that this is gonna be my last one for the day. And I only been skiing for two, three hours. And he's right behind me. He is right behind me, and he's and he goes, Ah, I guess I'll do one more. And he jumps back in line, right? I'm thinking, this guy is who I want to be when I'm 73. And I guarantee he was everything about him was energetic, vibrant. And it's pretty incredible when you start, you know, looking at these people who are really doing it well and what they're doing. I guarantee this guy's getting at least eight hours of sleep. He's probably eating well, he's probably taking care of himself and he's skiing five days a week. And that's incredible to me, is that's a thing now. People well into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s are still doing all the things they love. And I think that's the conversation that a lot of people are having is longevity, right? How do we not just have lifespan but health span and how can we enjoy things? Rob Wolfe talked about is if you take care of all the fundamentals in your life, your sleep, your stress, your nutrition, your movement, all of those things that your life doesn't turn into a 30-year gradual degrade. It stays high quality and then it degrades really fast before the end days. And I think that's what we should all shoot for because it's better for everybody.

Absolutely. And the other thing I would just add on to what you said is new studies, and in fact, a new book by Dr. Sanjay Gupta on you know cognitive aging is saying that exercise is actually more important to cognition and aging than doing something like crossword puzzles. So we've all been told do crossword puzzles as you get older. His study in his book is saying it's actually exercise is more important. And by the way, the what's more important than a crossword puzzle, too, is socialization, your conversation.

Yes.

So what's interesting is that guy in the chairlift, he's actually getting both. So you know, his peers may be trying to do uh word games, which you know, again, there's it's not all or nothing. Those are good to do too. But that physical exercise is really proving to be a huge component of cognitive processing as you age.

Oh, that's a great point. So when I I look at here's a follow-up question to all of this, and for the coaches out there, I look at precision nutrition, you guys offer just a great total solution, right? You got the education, you have the community, you have the tool and pro coach to actually go and and do the work. Moving forward, what other tools do you think coaches and facility owners within the industry should be looking at? Well, we talk a ton about technology here on this show, between obviously wearable data, genetic profiling, AI, all of it. We talked, we've probably touched on it all. But where what tools would you be investing in other than the great suite of things that you guys have at precision?

So I'll get I'm gonna be a little bit more cautionary on tools in the sense that tools are great, but people matter more. Yeah, and so the tools are hopefully they're just to make you you as a coach be more effective, get better outcomes, and be able to scale your business. The tool is not a replacement. I don't think coaches are replaced by AI, but AI may inform a coach on how to coach better. So the special things that coach brings, the coaches bring is that human relationship and that interaction. And I just believe that that's vital. And it's more vital in the future than it has been. People are gonna really appreciate that. Even if you can only spend time with your coach on a Zoom screen for now, I guarantee you people just relish that opportunity to look at them and look in the eyes and have that human connection. So I think all the tools are great, but without a coach to say what does it mean and what are you gonna do about it and help you come up with a plan to do it and work with you on being accountable to the goals that you set for yourself, little else happens. How many devices do people have in the proverbial closet collecting dust? How many workout pieces of workout gear do people have in the closet collecting dust? It may maybe it's more of a wearable device collecting dust in the future than it was an old Nordic track collecting dust. But it's it happens. And what you'll find people having is somebody will get like a new device and they'll be like, I confirmed something. I'm like, what's that? I was sleeping really poorly. Wow. And you had to wear a device for that? They're like, no, I knew that before, but now I've confirmed it. And where they're stuck is so what do I do about it?

Yes.

And that's the and so I think that's where coaches use the tools you're comfortable with and and that help you leverage your business, that allow you to have a business model that works for you and meets your clients where they are. Because even when people are vaccinated and we get past this thing, some people are going to be very reticent to get together in person, others are gonna yearn for it, and you're gonna have probably a continuum across the border of how you work with your clients. So be ready to meet them where they are, how they want to work with you. But you as a coach, I don't I don't think your job's ever been more important than it is now to help people recover from this. And remember, it's been pretty traumatic for so many people. And even if people aren't admitting it right now, I think they'll realize it later. It may be like a PTSD type of a thing. So I think that's what's special. And use the tools that work in your business and that you're comfortable with. But tools don't replace coaches, and coaches don't necessarily replace tools. I'll give you an analogy on cycling. We have all kinds of ways of measuring our performance on the bike. We can we have all kinds of ways of measuring our watts and our and our lactic acid, and we have tons of digital tools to measure everything. But here's the most important thing a coach can ask their cyclist. They can look at all their data, but this is the most important question of all. How do you feel today? That's super important. Yes, you know, because if you're just looking at an indicator like heart rate, there's something called cardiac drift. What's cardiac drift? Your heart rate can vary based on your sleep and your recovery and your diet and your stress, and it can be all kinds of things. The how do you feel today is that's that doesn't really lie. That's that that cuts right to the issue. So it's that combination of tools and coaching that make the difference.

I I 100% agree. And I think I want to finish on this point because it's very positive for the coaching profession. And I've talked about it with many people sometimes on this show, that the rise of the truly professional coach is now here. I think as painful as it is, and it's still ongoing, that the kind of mid-tier trainer, someone who shows up and counts reps, and that's about it, that may not be around. But people who truly invest in their profession want to be a great coach and are willing to be adaptable and understand that their value to their client isn't just counting repetitions or showing up on an hourly basis, but it's holding them to the vision of where they want to be, showing them the steps to get there and seeing the person as, like you said, as a total individual. And I think it's really powerful. So great messaging, Mark, and really appreciate coming on. Where do people get a hold of you if they want to chat, or where do you send them online?

Yes, online. We are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We're we are boosting up our content on YouTube. We just we just went live on TikTok. So you can find us on lots of platforms. You can also go to the Precision Nutrition website, and there's tons of free resources. We give away, I think, awesome content because our mission is to help people. And many people they read our content for years and they never buy a thing from us. That's okay. If we're helping them, awesome. Maybe someday they'll decide that it's right for them and then they'll go ahead and take a course. But in the meantime, we have lots of free resources. We love people to access them. We invest a tremendous amount in building them, and it's for the purpose of helping people. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'm on social media platforms, but they can also email me at markzyencemarc.zio n ts at precisionnutrition.com.

Right on. Marks, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation. I know your time is super valuable, and it's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it, and I'll look forward to to talking with other people if they hear this podcast and I can be helpful.

Right on.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Science.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Futurif Minutes. 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 featurofitness.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 Derek Malzone, and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.