Rick Mayo - Strength First: Simplifying the Modern Fitness Prescription

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[00:03:32] I was telling someone this morning, because I'm out of town, so I was telling somebody this morning, I think this is my third, maybe my fourth time on the podcast, and they're like, wow, four times. I'm like, well, Eric's a really cool guy, so sometimes we just catch up, and why not film it as we do so? No, it's like a filmed catch-up. It is. I think it's third or fourth. I'm not really sure exactly, but I try to get you on once a year, because I always learn a lot, too. I just really enjoy the conversations, and as the numbers show, people like the conversations as well.

[00:04:01] So give the people what they want. Isn't that what they say, right? That's right. That's right. Oh, man. So let's get caught up. It has been about a year. I didn't check the exact date of our last publishing, but I think it's been probably closer to a year and a half. I mean, you've been busy. Alloy is still growing. You've still got great names like Mark Fisher coming on board and people like that. So yeah, give us an update. What's new and good? Yeah. I mean, to your point, it's still moving at a pretty good clip.

[00:04:28] But as far as I understand, we may be, again, this might be a false claim, but I think from what I've heard that we might be the fastest growing fitness franchise. Period. You know, hard to dead stop. So it's like, that would be interesting. It doesn't really matter. It's kind of like, you always laugh at Elon Musk's post when he was the wealthiest man in the world several years ago. And he posted it and then he put, isn't that interesting? Dot, dot, dot. Back to work. And that's kind of how we feel. It's like, there's so much left to be done. You know, so many people to help and so many entrepreneurs to develop and those types of things.

[00:04:58] So, but yeah, it's, we're up to 335 or so locations awarded, which is sold for the franchising. You say awarding because you're, you know, you're choosing. It's a double vetting process. And we have a hundred, over a hundred open or in presale right now. And so our pace is about five or six clubs opening per month. And our, our budget for this year was to award another 100 locations, but the Q1 was crazy.

[00:05:26] It was like nearly 20 in January and February was big. March is big. So it's moving a lot faster than our budget, which is fine. Obviously, you know, we budget conservatively and if we can grow quicker than that with integrity, then we'll do it. So yeah, man, it's a tiger by the tail for sure. But it's a ton of fun. I'm really enjoying it. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it only took you 35 years to get here, right? It is funny. It seems like it just jumped up all of a sudden. It's been, oh, it's so sudden.

[00:05:54] It's like, you know, I feel a little bit guilty because it quite honestly, it doesn't feel that difficult. And I don't mean that in a way like it is difficult, but like when you've been doing it forever, it doesn't feel the perception is it's not that difficult. But to your point, there certainly were plenty of difficult times in the prior three decades, right? And so you sort of earn your stripes, I guess, to get to a point where it doesn't feel that complicated or difficult. And so, yeah, 30 year overnight success, I guess. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things where it's just business.

[00:06:22] It's never linear, right? You never get a linear growth. And one of the big questions I would have for you is over that span of time, what gave you the confidence with that duration of timeline, right? Like, okay, this is taking longer than I thought. What gave you the confidence to like, no, this is the path. Like, we're going to stick to it. Like, this product is good. Like, this is a good product market fit. Our time is coming. Like, what kept you going? I think just, well, first of all, I love the work. So it never really felt like work.

[00:06:51] Whether I was in college and opened my first gym when I was in college and I was working in it, you know, 12 hours a day. That even didn't feel like work. And so I've never had a phase of any of this that felt like something I didn't want to wake up and do. So that part is easy to keep going when you actually enjoy the work, whether it's traveling all over the world. And, you know, when we were doing our white labeled version licensing or even now franchising, you know, or just working in the gym.

[00:07:18] Like I said, none of those phases were something that I did not enjoy. Enjoying all of it really helps. And I don't think it was any real phase. I think, you know, when you, it reminds me of the old Bruce Lee quote business does sometimes where he was like, like when I first started doing martial arts, punch was a punch and a kick was a kick. And then I learned more and it was like, whoa, there's angles and there's all these things going on. Right. He's like, but then once again, when I became, let's just say third degree black belt, I'm not sure where we ended up. Once again, punch was a punch.

[00:07:48] Kick was a kick. So I think, you know, over time it does get simpler. Right. You almost go back to reverting back to like the few main things. Like you can kind of zoom out from crop duster, how you look down and you're like, all right, here's the main, the main thing. So we just put more juice here. And so I've enjoyed the work the whole time. And there's been iterations and phases that we've been through that led us to where we are.

[00:08:13] So as an example, like the white labeled version of what we did, we 500 door fronts all over the world, right. From like cricket training centers in India or aqua training centers in Tasmania. I mean, you name it all CrossFit, you know, boutique fitness, Gold's Gym, anytime fitness, you name it. All these big brands that we had worked, you know, lockstep with for all those years. It wasn't difficult to understand like how franchising worked or to identify a gap in the market.

[00:08:40] And did we have the right machine built to fill that gap? And we just had massive amounts of empirical evidence. So there was no like, you know, I would love to say like a business savant. You know, I looked and I could see, I could feel it. You know, there was something coming. It's like, nah, it's just 30 years of observations, simple observations to say, okay, there's a gap in the market here for to launch the franchise, which would be the 45 to 65 year old age group. They hold 70% of the nation's disposable income. Not a bad group.

[00:09:10] They're somewhat insulated from the ups and downs in the economy. And they're quite honestly just underserved. And so they're easy to market to. They understand, you know, you work really hard to make the message simple so that they understand it. And so far, so good. Like we've yet to go into a market where it was not well received. As a matter of fact, we've yet to go into a market, Eric, where during the presale, we didn't produce enough leads to open, you know, making money in any of the facilities.

[00:09:38] Now, operationally, some folks, you know, they might lose a person or they stumble out of the blocks, then they get it together. Some people nail it right out of the gate and in five weeks, they have a full facility. So there's extremes, of course. But yeah, I think just empirical evidence over time. And thankfully, it's proved out to be what we thought early innings, but so far, so good with 100 open. So yeah, I don't know. There is no, there was no foresight. There was no plan to end up here.

[00:10:04] It just sort of, you know, you've said, put on a set of lenses, you do the daily work that's in front of you. And that way you can also, if you have the right lenses on, you can look for those opportunities. And you just have to have enough knowledge to be like, okay, is this a direction that we should go to? Every time we pivoted, there was a huge cost, opportunity cost, right? Like moving from like a minor version of that was moving from a one-on-one personal training gym, ripping the bandaid off and changing all of our customers to this personal training in a small group, which is what we do now.

[00:10:34] And we've been doing it since year 2000, right? Well, you know, we were doing 3,000 one-on-one sessions a month almost when we did that transition. So it was a risk, right? To leave a 2,500 door front licensing business to pursue franchising, which is really front end heavy and need a lot of capital to get from startup to what we call royalty sufficient, where your royalties are covering your base expenses, which we've been there for a minute, right? Which is great.

[00:11:00] So each one, I think the crux move was at least the face that you had enough information to know that you could abandon something that was working really well to pursue something that might even be better, right? Which is not easy to do, but I think just tons of empirical evidence, really. Wow. You mentioned that you haven't found a market yet that wasn't well-received. Is there any, and you don't have to name the specific market, I don't want you to do that to a franchisee, but like, is there any types of markets where you're like, I don't know if this is going to work?

[00:11:28] You're a little nervous about it and it panned out. Like, what were the ones where you're like, you're questionable at first? We really haven't been there yet. And, you know, we use the most advanced software that we have access to in franchising. We mapped out the lower 48, 150 major MSAs in the lower 48, which gave us a runway of like 860 locations. That was just home run locations. Think about that.

[00:11:54] And then last year alone, we mapped new locations and awarded them to franchisees. 40 locations just last year were not even mapped in the main grab that we did when we went through, right? And grabbed the real estate. But you can imagine if you have your archetype nailed, it's like they're buying shopping habits, their immediate household income, some of the basics, right? We've yet to go into a market because the avatar is the same, whether they're in Seattle or Long Island or San Diego or Miami.

[00:12:24] And those are the four corners, if you will, right, that we're in now. The avatar is the same. So there's no cultural differences. There's no socioeconomic differences. And so while some markets might be nuanced, the avatar is the same regardless. And so with those metrics, it's just math. It's an algorithm. So when we land in these markets, we've yet to have a market where it just wasn't good. I tell you, maybe a different answer to that would be some bright spots that we found. And some of the markets that we're in do really, really well.

[00:12:54] So I'll give you an example. Like our franchisee of the year last year was from Greenville, South Carolina. You know, it's like, that's kind of, it's a great city. It's got the economics to support three or four alloys. But it's, it's a B market, right? It's not Atlanta with seven and a half million people. And so some of those markets like that do really well, mainly because as you can imagine, your digital marketing goes a lot further. It's less expensive for lead. You get more leads, better quality, just because there's not as much noise on the channel, right?

[00:13:20] And so those markets are really, we've been, we've been very successful with. But again, the customer avatar is the same. Those markets just have way less noise going on. And sometimes the, because Alloy is a small number of people, 130 to 150, community-based, that almost fits the profile of a city like a Greenville. Small, tight-knit community, right? Quality relationships. And so those markets have been really, really good for us. So it's not like the major metropolitan markets aren't good.

[00:13:50] It's that the B markets are surprisingly really good. Yeah. I don't find that too surprising, really. I mean. Yeah. Well, with your knowledge, yeah, you're probably like, oh, I don't know about that. I don't know too much about franchises. I mean, I know a lot of franchisors, but Metabolics is the same thing. They're really strong in the B markets and it tends to be their first choice. I mean, my word's not theirs. I want to talk in the actual fitness prescription. And that's something that you identified as a really cool talking point today.

[00:14:16] Man, I look at where most people are as far as consumers and there seems to be a wellness fatigue, right? It's like everyone is told like, okay, you got a sauna. You got a cold punch. You got to get your sleep. You got to get your aura. You got to, you know, carnivore, paleo, carnivore, paleo, veggie, vegetarian, like you name it. Like everyone's like, everyone's just exhausted. Like they don't know what to do. Like what supplements should I be taking?

[00:14:44] You know, it's, that's a great, yeah, it's just true. And I feel like a lot of people are just kind of checking out and I feel like people just need to settle down and get back to the fundamentals. And, you know, similar to your, your Bruce Lee quote, which I love anytime we can quote Bruce Lee on the show. It's an amazing day. But the, I call it the coach's journey, right? Which is like, and this is me. And I know a lot of people who are at the top, right? The Kelly Starretts and the Rob Wolves and all these people. And they say the same thing. It's like when they first started, they're like, no, we just got to get people moving. Right.

[00:15:13] And then you start down this educational part. Like for me, it was, you know, I joke, it was CrossFit and paleo. If I could just get people doing CrossFit and eating paleo, I could solve all the world's problems. And as I started to learn more, like it was probably five years of like, oh God, like, oh, but there's so much more to learn. And there's so much to nutrition. And there's all these different programming modalities. But what about the aerobic system? Are we training that? Like, right. And I just want to burn it all down and start over again. And then you come back after years and years on that journey, you come back to, you know what? Like we just need to get people to drink more water.

[00:15:42] We get them to move three times a week, you know, get enough sleep. And it's just fundamental. Right. And that's what most people need. So when you look at like the modern fitness prescription, like where are you guys getting it right? Where do you think a lot of the market may, may be a little off target? Yeah. I think, you know, when you look at the, the modern prescription, there's plenty of experts to your, to your point. There's no lack of information out there these days, which can be maddening at times.

[00:16:08] And, you know, people are worried about getting an NAD drip when they really just don't even eat healthy food. It's like, okay, let's, let's not focus on that so much. I was talking to some guys about business the other day, like, and they're a group of, it's a group of high level entrepreneurs. You have to have a certain threshold of net worth to get in the group. And they were doing the same thing, you know, and I'm like, it was about business. I mean, some of them are all with franchisees. So like, what about this? What about that? And like, look, hold on, hold on. And they're all into their health big time.

[00:16:35] And I was like, this is a bit like talking about cold pledges and NAD drips when you haven't even started strength training. Right. Like that's what you guys are doing in business, in this business. Yeah. So we all got to chuckle out of that, but it's true. And so everybody got it right away because to your point, everyone's observing the same thing. And so I think empirically, we've always known that strength first is a good, is a good option for most people. Certainly if you're over 30, you know, you're suffering from some level of sarcopenia, which is just muscle loss essentially.

[00:17:05] And so that becomes a really big driver for your longevity is your lean tissue, your strength, right? Your balance, your mobility, all those things are tied to just being a little bit stronger. Right. And so we've known that now, if you really follow say Peter Atiyah, right again, can those guys get in the weeds? Sure. But when you have the foremost anti-aging clinic in the world, you know, and he was an oncologist who went into the financial realm, made a bunch of money, came back to medicine as sort

[00:17:34] of early retired and was like, I don't want to be on the sick side. I want to be on the prevention side. So he starts essentially the foremost anti-aging clinic in the world. And essentially the prescription is dead on currently with what we would prescribe and have always prescribed, which is essentially strength first. So let's just zoom out a bit. It's like, okay, how much do I need to exercise? How about that? Like we're, you and I are sitting down with a third party that knows nothing about exercise, right? How much do I need to exercise?

[00:18:01] It's like, well, you could do as little as three days a week, you know, or maybe I'm already exercising this much a week. Okay. That's a different person. What should I be doing? It's like, okay, if you're not exercising at all, you could do anything. And I'm a fan. You can walk, you can do a class, you can watch something on YouTube and follow along. Anything is better than nothing. Just move, right? Then you, you make it to this next category, which is like, I'm working out this many hours a week or minutes. What should I be doing?

[00:18:29] And so then you're starting to talk about how should I allocate my time for the most effective use of that time and to get the ideal desired result. And so first and foremost, it has to be strength-based, which is surprising. So I think you would ask as part of this question, where have we been? And I think for whatever reason, we've developed this idea that it matters how hard you work during a session. Like it's an effort-based, you know, measurement.

[00:18:55] And you look at the rise of, say, like a brand like Orange Theory, when they hit the market right at the time that wearables became really popular. And then they rebranded a calorie from like a calorie to a splat point, right? It's cool to rebrand it. And then you jump in a class and you stare at the board and you try to see who gets the most splat points, right? So it's basically like, I'm going to, I'm going to sort of segment this hour of time and I'm going to try to burn as many calories as I can.

[00:19:21] Well, we knew at the time, like, well, that's not really, you know, if it's two or three days a week, that's great. But that's not really the ideal way to exercise. What you're trying to do is set up an ecosystem for health and wellness, right? And so going in and doing a HIIT class, if you will, is kind of puts you in this no man's land. You're really not strength training and traditionally in a way to increase your strength, right? Because the weights have to be light because you're moving. And while your heart rate's getting up, you're not getting it high enough to get the benefits

[00:19:50] of sort of increasing your VO2 max. And so you're kind of in this no man's land, right? And that's what most boutique class-based fitness is, is this metabolic training. A lot of folks will claim, like, we do strength training, but if you're doing it in a circuit with the clock, I promise you it's turning into a cardio class, whether you like it or not, right? And so strip all that away. That's been the modern trends. Now you're seeing people kind of move away from that.

[00:20:16] Now you look at, like, Megan Orange Theory is still off a significant amount as a brand. Well, one of the reasons is like that sort of mentality or what we're measuring is no longer in vogue, if you will, right? Even from a hard science standpoint. So strength first, then you look at cardio. I'm getting how many days of strength. Two is enough. Do full body training. Two is enough. Three is ideal. And somewhere in that two to three is you're probably working out for 30 to 45 minutes, right? 30 minutes, you're probably having to push it really hard.

[00:20:47] 45, 50 minutes, maybe a couple of days a week would be enough. Three would be ideal. That would be the prescription. And again, it's traditional strength training. You do a set, you know, you might move over and do a lighter exercise, but you're not running around the room on the clock trying to get hot and sweaty. That's not the goal of it, of strength training. So check. Now you say, okay, what about my cardiovascular activity? Right. It's like, well, let's just use the terms that Peter Atiyah uses. If you've got a zone of effort from one to five, one is nothing.

[00:21:16] Two is something that you're mildly winded, but you could do it all day long. So say you and I threw on a, at our fitness level, a rug pack and just went on a one hour walk, brisk walk. Right. That would be like a zone two example. Maybe it's a pedal on a bike, steady pedal on a bicycle. For some people, it might just be walking. Other people might be a light jog, depends on their cardiovascular fitness. That's where we should spend the bulk of our time in working on our cardiovascular activity. So for most clients, certainly an alloy avatar, that's just going to be walking.

[00:21:45] So it's like a step goal. Right. And we have an app that pulls in wearables. Almost everyone has a mechanism. I saw your aura ring. You can have an Apple watch. You can have any of the fitness watches, Fitbit, Garmin, any of those can do this. And you just measure your steps. Heck, you can just have your phone in the pocket, in your pocket. It does the same thing. Right. So get some steps every day. If you look at these blue zones all around the world, Eric, they're not doing hit training. Right. They just walk to town and hang out with friends and they garden and they just, they're just generally more active.

[00:22:13] I saw one that was really interesting on Sardinia and they've got a centurion population there that's pretty strong. And by the way, the diet in all these areas is completely different. So like, what is it? Well, it's probably a confluence of a lot of things, but one of the mains is they're just moving a lot. And they found that the longevity was longer in the villages in Sardinia that were steeper. So the ones that were further into the mountains and they profiled some folks in their hundreds who walk to church every day.

[00:22:40] But if you imagine if you're in a really steep town, you've got to walk uphill, you know, to get to this church and you're doing it once or twice a day. It's like, it's just more strenuous as an example. Right. So you're getting better exercise. So just moving. Right. So let's get you moving more strength range in two to three days a week, move more, set a step goal. You know, I think the threshold that they, that they speak about now is making a difference about 7,000 steps a day. Um, you can think about it in a mileage standpoint, that's probably three or four miles. That might be a lot for a beginner, but that's what you would aspire to get to. Right.

[00:23:10] And you could, by the way, it's just steps. It doesn't have to be put together as one long exercise, but it's really, really good for your heart health. So good zone to cardio. And eventually look, you might start out doing 10 minutes a day because that's, that's your threshold. Right. But eventually you have to pay the piper and you want to build up to about three hours a week total of this zone to cardio. So then there's zone three, four, and then there's zone five. And zone five would be described as something that you could only do for about three minutes maximum.

[00:23:39] That means you're sort of getting on maybe an air bike or something like that. And you're pushing yourself so hard that you can not physically make it past three minutes at that upper level. Right. That would be zone five. And that's really important for your VO two max. And so that is in some ways also a predictor of longevity and of overall health. I mean, you've got strength on the other end, right? Which is grip strength or, or hanging strength or how far you can carry things. There's all these measures that people like to cite, but I think just general strength. And on the other end, you've got your VO two max.

[00:24:08] So how healthy is your heart at the high end? And then zone two is just general heart health. Great. Well, then we have this gap here that we don't talk about, which is zone three, four, which Peter Atiyah would describe it as the garbage zone. Now, again, we're not talking about that versus sitting on the couch, eating potato chips. We're talking about, I'm already, I'm planning the exercise. How should I allocate my time? Three, four zone is where you see most of that boutique fitness going, right? Because I'm certainly higher than a zone two.

[00:24:38] I couldn't do that forever, but I'm also not at zone five because the class is 45 minutes and I have to survive it or an hour. Right. And so a power down from max effort. And I'm also going too hard to get the heart health benefits of zone two. So again, is it better than nothing? Yes. But again, it's in Peter Atiyah's words described as the garbage zone. So when you peel all that back, when I look at that and I'll compare that to Alloy as a

[00:25:03] brand, it's like, listen, we, you know, we do strength first. And then at the end of every workout, there's always some type of metabolic finisher for two to four minutes done at your level. Get your heart rate as high as you can with like max effort. Right. So in its bare essence, if you just went to a brand like Alloy that was doing those two components, that's two of the three things you need to do from an exercise standpoint. And again, not to oversimplify, but to our earlier point, maybe we should, right? So strength training. Yeah. Check.

[00:25:33] I got my heart rate up. And again, those intervals, by the way, that zone five to back up to that point, it doesn't have to be for long. You can do a 10 minutes a week total and you're fine, right? Maybe even less. It's just about the effort and getting your heart rate that high. Strength training. If you come in twice a week, you get that. You get two days a week that you're getting two to four minutes of really, really high heart rate. So you've got your zone five, you've got your strengths. So the gap was at zone two. So, you know, again, we'll give you homework. Like we want you to get out and walk. Most people can do that on their own. Go walk in the park. Right.

[00:26:02] And we have an app that can pull in wearables and track those and hold people accountable to those steps. That's it. Just from an exercise standpoint. Now you can get more nuance, like what kind of strength training, what type of exercises? And certainly we can dig into that. But at the highest level, if someone's listening and they're like, I need to start exercising, how should I allocate my time? Just keep in mind as a country or as a society, we've really leaned into like, I have to get out there and sweat my butt off. Right.

[00:26:30] I have to get out there and create this Herculean effort. And there may be some self-efficacy and feeling like you really did something, but it may not be the best use of your time. Start with strength, start walking or eventually work in some type of metabolic training. And so it's not that complicated. I know that's an oversimplification, but I don't know if you're seeing the same things on your end, Eric, but it's a hundred clubs open and rolling all the empirical evidence of the corporate clubs we've owned in the past and people have worked with.

[00:26:57] It produces the best results, certainly in the customer avatar that we target that can get a little bit beat up as you get a little older. So going to these HIIT classes and creating all this cortisol, this pool of cortisol and increased hunger. And especially if you're female and your hormones during this age bracket are not quite the same. And so the last thing you want to do is go and jump into these HIIT classes and just create more stress on your body. Right. But it's kind of what we've always been taught to do. Right.

[00:27:23] Work out on an empty stomach, you know, work out as hard as you can burn fat, you know, fast, do all these things. It's like, okay, maybe, but if you strip all that away, the people that are most successful strength move more every now and then get your heart rate up really high. I mean, even, you know, Dr. Stacey Sims has really shed a light, especially on that. You know, I was just going to mention Stacey Sims. 40 to 55 year old age bracket for women and how you have to be very careful with the type of training that you do and not careful. You just have to have a different mindset.

[00:27:52] And I can imagine a lot of people listening right now are doing the what abouts. Yeah. Rick, what about X, Y, Z? What about da, da, da, right? I mean, what about lactate threshold or aerobic capacity training? Like that's all fun to talk about. Right. And. Well, that's great. If you're, if you're a cyclist, if you live in Whitefish, Montana, like you do, Eric, and you want to do a, you know, you want to cruise down to Colorado and do the Leadville 100 on the bike race or run. You need to train for that, but that doesn't mean that's healthy per se.

[00:28:21] That's a sport, right? It's like competing at the CrossFit games. It's probably going to hurt. You're probably going to get dinged up, right? Doesn't mean CrossFit wholesale is bad. Just means at a competitive level, same thing with like cardio exercise. You're going to do some things that aren't necessarily the healthiest, which I know sounds counterintuitive because you see a triathlete or endurance athlete and they are healthy. Sure. But I guarantee you, they have some nagging injuries or something's going on. Right. And so to your point, yes. What about, what about there's a million of those.

[00:28:50] And if you have a specific goal to run a 10 K at a certain time, train for that. That's a sport. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the majority of people who either aren't exercising or a bit confused about what to do when they exercise. That's the people that we're talking about. That includes me, by the way. I mean, I mean, too. And the, uh, when I owned a CrossFit gym and I did CrossFit, you know, fairly consistently and pretty hard for about nine years. And I always joke, I only got injured once. It just kept moving around my body.

[00:29:17] It was, I always had this, I always had this conversation with people as they're joining the gym. I'm like, I just want you to understand that there's, there's, we're talking about two different things and we're talking about CrossFit as a sport over here, which you see on TV, probably, you know, on most of your social media. And then you see CrossFit for health and fitness, general health and fitness. And there's completely two different things. Like we're, we're going to train you over here on, on the health and fitness side. And if you ever want to get into the sports side, understand that it's not healthy. Like they're pushing themselves.

[00:29:46] Like a lot of them have gut issues. There's going to be nagging injuries. You're going to have a lot of cortisol spy. Like there's just a lot of unhealth, but it's sport. And that's what you do. There's a sacrifice. There's a price for admission when you go there, but not everyone should do it. And, and that was really hard because, you know, in a, in a CrossFit class, the competition, no matter what drives people to do things outside. It was really hard to prescribe that type of thing. Like I almost had to always prescribe like every minute on the minute sessions or, you

[00:30:14] know, very specific, you know, tempo training for, for weightlifting, like very, get very, very specific and really have our coaches train well to say like, we're not redlining today. Like everybody stop and repeat what I just said. We're not redlining today yet. Someone's going to redline, right? That's just the way it's going to be. So, you know, when we were doing, when you're writing programs for people, we observed the same thing. So we've never been fans of class-based concepts.

[00:30:42] Like, you know, we go up to six, it's personal training. We just figured out a way to scale it a bit and make it less expensive for the consumer, a little bit more fun. There's some sociability to it. Great. But it's really one-on-one training to have done in a group setting. Well, the other inspector, again, in these classes, when we were writing programs for clubs all over the world, some people would hire us to write class-based concepts for them. So we could do it. We could write the programs and tell them how to sell it and do all the things. And which means we felt like with integrity, we had to practice it, right?

[00:31:11] So we expanded our facility and had an area and a whole membership dedicated to something that we quite honestly didn't even believe in because it's like, well, we're building these things, we better have some people coming through that we can put this on to make sure that it works. And I'll tell you, your observations are so true. One of the things I always tell people is like in a class-based setting, even if you're the best coach in the world and you have somebody in there with a shoulder injury and you tell them like, hey, when you get to this station here, because you're normally on the clock or

[00:31:38] EMOM, like you said, or whatever, it's like there's a bit of urgency to it in a class-based setting. And we tell them when you get to this exercise, don't do the overhead press, do this modified thing. And then sure enough, you would look over when they were there and they'd be doing the thing you told them not to. And as you start to understand the psychology of it, it's like, well, yeah, they don't want to feel like an oddball, right? They don't want to be the weird person that has to do something different. They want to be able to keep up with the class. So they would ignore your advice and their injury and do something. And then sure enough, it would aggravate that shoulder.

[00:32:08] And even though you told them the environment didn't really allow you to control it. Right. You just couldn't, no matter what you tried to do or what you said. Yeah. I always woke up in the mornings and I had this inner conflict of like, I have to trick my clients into doing the right type of training. That was like, that's, that's just, that can't be right. Do I really have to do this? Do I really have to like, you know, mask this up and paint it a picture that it's, it's, you know, what they think is CrossFit, but it's really just trying to be good training.

[00:32:37] And anyway, it was, it was, I was very conflicted and that was part of the coach's journey. Right. You know, as I went through all this training and then by the end of my gym ownership days, I was like, you know, I just, people need to strength train and drink more water and eat whole foods. Right. What? But I want to get your thoughts on, you know, we're, we're sitting here in Q, gosh, Q2 of 2025 already. There's, there's a lot of, there's a new administration in the white house.

[00:33:02] There's seems to be a new focus nationally on the country's health. You know, whether that be, you know, the appointment of RFK junior or, you know, seeing a lot of people in the private sector coming in, you know, to, to speak their mind. I mean, they're the consumer, the thirst for consumer wellness knowledge. Is it a high, you know, at a high point that I've never seen before. You know, so when you look at the whole environment of our country's health and wellness, like,

[00:33:30] do you think we're at a serious inflection point right now? I mean, you can throw in technologies and a, and GLP ones and all that stuff. It just seems like everything is really converging right now. Like, what do you think about the next three and a half years? Do you think we're going to see something special and different, or you think it's going to be more of the same? No, I think, I think you're right. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, from a timing perspective for our franchise, we've been very fortunate that what we've known empirically is now like top of mind for an average consumer, right?

[00:33:59] People do have wearables and they're hearing things about sleep quality. And you joked about some of the fringe things, cold plunge, you know, saunas and AD drips, all the things that's typically on the fringe, I think of what we see. But yeah, I think the awareness and look, it does get over politicized. So it's like, you always run the risk of stepping in it when you do talk about anything around anything these days. But I don't think there's anyone out there who would disagree with the fact that like improving our food quality is a bad idea.

[00:34:28] I mean, you know, why could, why is it that you can go to Europe and eat pasta in your stomach is fine and you eat it in the States and you, and you feel terrible. It's like, I don't know, maybe they have, what is it? 700 ingredients. I think they agreed upon a long time ago. Fast forward to today, it's still 700 ingredients that they allow. The U S started with that same agreement. Now we're at like 10,000 ingredients, right? So it's like, it's just not hard to figure out why, how we got here. Right. And granted, you got to feed a lot of people. So it's not always a bad thing. Right. You can get, can get easy calories.

[00:34:58] Probably first time historically that, you know, we have too many calories. Right. And it takes discipline not to be overweight. It's been a very short window of time. Even in the last century that that's even an issue or ever would be. Right. So I think as a backlash to that or a reaction, yes, I think it's a really good thing. I think we're going to see more awareness around health. I wish we could not politicize it so that half the country was not turning their backs on being healthy because it meant that they were associated with a certain political party.

[00:35:28] That seems ridiculous to me, but that's kind of where we are politically. If we can get past that, and I think that we will, then yeah, I think, I think we're in for a really good run of paying attention with all of these measurables, you know, to our overall health. I mean, you can buy a glucose monitor now and you can measure everything that you eat. We'll tell you, you know, and everybody's different, right? Some people eat sushi and their glucose shoots through the roof. Some people eat steak and it goes up. It's really interesting, right?

[00:35:54] So it's hard to sift through all of that, but I think all of it is good and it's all pointing us towards a healthier place. Look, you mentioned GLP ones and we just did a podcast with, I have a 20% stakeholder that's been a partner of mine for 20 years and she's our COO. So she's awesome. And she did GLP ones and she was brave enough to come on and talk to me about it on our podcast. Cause you know, you could get a little bit of the elitist, like, especially in the fitness realm. It's like, oh, you're cheating. You know, it's like, okay. Yeah.

[00:36:23] Is it easier to lose 50 pounds? Is it better or healthier to lose 50 pounds with a little bit of GI distress than it is to, you know, take this, this, this injection? Look, who knows long-term, but at least early indications are that it's not that bad. It's not as bad as people are making it out to be. And there's dose amounts that, you know, are certainly way healthier. And as we're seeing, it's like, you know, maybe even there's some ancillary benefits for, you know, mitigating cravings for cigarettes or alcohol or, you know, like staving off dementia.

[00:36:53] I mean, who knows, right? And who knows who's driving the studies as you know, but it's not all bad. I think it's a, it's a very limited view to say like, it's cheating. It's a shortcut. It's like, who cares? Right. So then you look at, well, if it's, if it's here to stay, right. And there are some negative effects of it. One of them, which is when you lose weight really quickly, regardless of the mechanism, let's face it, GLP-1 is just a peptide that blunts your hunger at the end of the day. Right. And it's bare essence.

[00:37:20] And so if in fact that has you eating less, it would be no different than some of the diets you mentioned before, or like Adkins or Thelio, or it's just a massive calorie reduction, which results in relatively rapid fat loss, you know, or weight loss. Well, if you listen to, again, the experts, they will say, we will not allow our patients to be on GLP-1s unless they do strength training. Right. And so strength training mitigates the biggest downside of rapid weight loss because of these

[00:37:48] drugs, which is loss of muscle mass. And that's what you don't want, right? Because it's, that's your health, that's your engine, that's your structure, that's your balance, that's your, I mean, look, there's molecules that, and it's ridiculous terms. Like when you work out your muscles squeeze out happy molecules that help your brain. That's the least scientific way to describe it, but it is true. So it's like, let's do, even with GLP-1s, those aren't going anywhere, by the way, because you know, there's been some wild studies as you've seen in the past where people would give

[00:38:17] up 10 years of their life just to live the rest of it at their ideal weight. Sad, but true. So those drugs aren't going anywhere. And so like, can't beat them, join them. Not even that. It's like, well, is there some upside there? If we start to mitigate some of the downsides, which people are already figuring out how to do the adding things to the shots that includes something that helps with the GI tract and the, you know, the negative side effects. Well, does your brand align? If you're a fitness person, do you align with that?

[00:38:46] Like if you're still telling people, come here and burn this many calories in an hour, you might be missed behind the eight ball because we've already controlled the calorie. We don't need to burn more, right? We've already controlled the calorie equation on the front end by taking something that is by default limiting our calories. So it's not about how many calories you burn on the back end. It's like, what does the exercise do for this ecosystem of our wellness? Right.

[00:39:12] And so strength training, perfect back scratcher to GLP ones, which aren't going anywhere. So it's just things for people in the fitness industry to think about. Right. So I think overall awareness to your point, whether it's politically charged or not is a really good sign. So yes, whether, whether any real policy will make a difference. As you know, Eric, it's hard to say, man, you got big pharma, big ag, all these powerful, powerful lobbying, you know, organizations. They're hard to overcome.

[00:39:39] And who knows if this sort of idea sticks in the next administration or the next one? I certainly hope so. I know you do as well, but I think it's a good thing. You know, so far so good. It's really hard to predict whether this will stick, whether we can overcome the lobbying power of these big organizations that quite honestly, it doesn't benefit them financially to move in this direction. So I don't know if I like it because just a general consumer awareness of their health and wellness, their regular doctors are talking about it now. Right.

[00:40:09] You go to the, you know, you're female, you go to the OB and they're telling you, listen to this podcast. You need to lift weights. Right. It's like, that is not something that we've seen historically. So I think all of it is good. But as far as like the stickiness of it long-term on a policymaking side, I have no idea. I have no idea. But as it stands, if you're in the fitness business, like you should be paying attention to it. And do you align with what's currently happening, whether you like it or not? Right. Because it's not going anywhere. Yeah. That's a great message.

[00:40:36] And I think if people are listening and maybe they're, you know, not to offend you, if you're clutching your pearls a little bit about the politics of it all and wondering, you know, just, I would say, look at the bigger picture and think about the health of our youth, especially, right? Like I think we can all agree with us, right? The kids deserve better, right? They deserve better foods, better initiation into exercise and movement, sport, whatever it may be. They deserve healthier lives than what we're providing them right now.

[00:41:03] So think about the kids, let go of your political thoughts and affiliations and, you know, kind of go forward cautiously, but optimistically about what the opportunities are as this whole thing, you know, evolves and comes about. So let that go. You know, thank you. I mean, what do you see, Eric? I mean, that's an overreaching message. I mean, obviously you're, you're in a lots of different, your tentacles are in lots of different areas of the industry and you're, you're strong in the technology side. You always have something new to, to, to, to tell me about.

[00:41:34] Obviously, you know, you understand franchising, you understand big, you know, big box fitness. What do you think about what's happening right now politically and from a policy standpoint? I'm super excited. What do you think it's going to happen? I'm super excited. I think it's, it's all like out of my 17, I haven't been in the industry as long as you have, but I've been in for long enough, 17, 18 years now. And this is the most optimistic I've been about the, the industry overall and our opportunities to really start to make a headway into healthcare.

[00:42:01] You know, like I interviewed Dr. Gloria Winters from YMCA and like, she's a chief health officer. Like YMCA has a chief health officer. Just that title alone says a lot that, and she's looking like, well, how do we become the forefront of healthcare? You know, digital health and data and that's the base of it. And like, it was very, it was really interesting. Like, this is a great framework. And just the fact that that's happening now is something we've talked about for years. And on the GLP one front, I'm still, I'm optimistic, but I'm also waiting for stuff that's more

[00:42:29] than anecdotal to tell me that this is actually driving people into gyms. I think it's, people are losing weight, right? People are losing weight. I've just seen enough to see like, well, someone can take a pill to do things that would accomplish what they thought would have been hard work in the gym. Are they now going to take the pill and be like, now's the time to go into the gym? Now I know a lot of people are anecdotally saying, yes, people are coming in the gym who have been on GLP ones who have not typically been on, you know, been in the gym before.

[00:42:55] So I don't know that I'm a little like, let's pump the brakes and just wait and see how it goes. But I think to your, to your point, Greg, it's like be open to it, right? Be acknowledging that one in eight Americans have, have done a GLP one. And, you know, how do we open our doors, be more, you know, welcoming and be more understanding of where they're at. And how do we adapt things to kind of inch them into, into a healthier lifestyle? So overall, I'm super excited, man.

[00:43:21] I mean, you know, I know I'm going to be at the athletic event in June. Some of the speakers lined up for that already are like, see, this is like heavily like into like politics, like we're integrating into the political system now. And that's got to be, you know, hopefully, I mean, it's better than what we've done before. I mean, God bless people have tried the, God bless people have pushed the FIT Act for the last two decades, but it hasn't got through, you know? And I think now it's like, okay, we can actually do something. So that, that's my overall take.

[00:43:50] I'm, I'm, I'm typically pretty positive. You know, you talk about the GLP ones. I mean, one of our strategies for our in-market location. So if you own an alloy location, one of your strategic B2B relationships would be with some med spas in the area, which in the areas that we go into, which are typically wealthy suburbs, those are plentiful, right? Whether they're privately owned or branch franchised or what have you. But it's a good back scratcher for us because most of those places even, I mean, they're not

[00:44:16] going to not prescribe and certainly get you a GLP one because that's their business model. If you say you're not going to do anything else, but they are very open and they are suggesting, Hey, you do need to do some strength training to mitigate the muscle loss. That's going to happen with this rapid weight loss, right? So those are good back scratching, you know, alliances or partnerships in local communities for our locations. So for us, we have seen a decent amount of adoption from people doing GLP ones, and that

[00:44:44] will be the catalyst for them to then join an alloy. Whereas in the past to you, and I think that the scarcity mindset and logically almost could tell you people join, people hire a personal trainer to what? Lose weight typically, right? Well, this other thing is doing that. But in to your point with the landscape changing where people are looking at their overall wellness, right? Food quality, not just calories. You know, again, what do I do if I'm going to exercise? I've got a person out there who thinks exercise is bad for you.

[00:45:13] So it's like, well, what do I do? Right? I think we're going to see the consumer become a lot more savvy to what's happening out there. And so for us, it has been a positive and it's the GLP ones driving people to the membership at like say an alloy as an example, maybe not so much in like a hit franchise where it's just about calorie burning because they're like, well, I don't eat that. I'm barely eating as it is. Right? So you got to be thinking about if you're in the fitness space, like that's here to stay. What is your message? Right?

[00:45:41] Because that message is going to fall flat to this one out of eight people that you mentioned. Amazing. Well, Rick, I think that's a great optimistic. Tail there to the interview. So let's leave it at that. If people want to get a hold of you or if there's anything you need from the audience right now, what would you like to hear from them about? Yeah. Where would you like them to go? Yeah. Just alloyfranchise.com or alloypersonaltraining.com. It's a consumer and or franchise site. And then, you know, you can find me everywhere on social media. Just look me up, hit me up.

[00:46:10] If you have ideas or thoughts around this, I would love to hear them. Quite honestly, I know you would as well. So leave comment on the video, leave comment on the podcast, on this episode. I would love to know what the fitness professionals that are listening, even at a higher level, some of the executives that are running these big fitness brands, like what are your thoughts on what it is that we're talking about? So I'd love to learn. Fantastic. Well, Rick, we'll be talking. We'll get you on another year and congratulations again on all the success, man. It's awesome to see. It's, you know, I think you're one of the truly the good guys in the industry and it's great to see you being successful.

[00:46:40] So job well done. Ladies and gentlemen, Rick Mayo. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Fitness. If you did, I'm going to 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.

[00:47:09] Number three, share. Put it on social media. Talk about it to your friends. Send it in a text message. Whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to thefutureoffitness.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.