Spencer Tatum of TCU on Markerless Biomechanics, Wearables, and Athlete Engineering

A lot of people forget like like most PRs and elite athlete performances happen under three conditions fatigue, sick and dying. You're just extremely sick, like Michael Jordan flu game. Walter Payton, right? Walter Payton was had the flu so bad when he rushed the NFL rush over 275 yards. He didn't even warm up. He was throwing up all pregame, barely got his pads on, right? Or they're drunk and hung over. Right? A lot of throwers and discus throwers went out there before didn't think they were going to throw the next day. They came out and threw an amazing event because they can't think technically they can only think, okay, I gotta do this. They can't live like that. It's not a good way to live. But a lot of people don't understand that helps sometimes in league performances.

We can talk about hockey players specifically, right? There's a term for it called playing guilty. It's like basically playing guilty is like you got three hours of sleep and you're hungover edge. And they play well. Hey friends, today's episode is proudly brought to you by EGIM. The fitness industry is entering into an exciting new era. One filled with smarter technology and clearer paths to wellness. We are finally seeing the potential for deeper connections and more effective, data-driven wellness results for everyone involved. That's operators, trainers, and members alike. EGIM is at the heart of this shift, building the ecosystem for health. By connecting their smart strength equipment to the entire fitness floor, members stay motivated and engaged. And with AI-generated training plans, trainers are free to focus on what matters the most building relationships with their clients. EGM is turning fitness into a measurable, repeatable, and actionable science. Now what really excites me about e-Gym is that they are democratizing fitness. They're making gyms accessible to everyone. E-Gym is listening to what the market wants. With their newest longevity training program, operators are primed to meet the evolving needs of the modern gym goers. Their mission is simple. Shift the healthcare landscape from repair to proactive prevention. It's time for progress that actually counts. See how they do it at eGym.com. That is e-g Y M.com. All right. Spencer Tatum, welcome back to the Future of Fitness. It is uh it has been a minute. How are you doing, my friend?

It's gonna have been a minute, man. I'm doing great, brother. How are you?

I'm doing great. I'm I'm very good. I'm excited. We you know, you and I go way, way back. And you know, had you on in 2018, 2022, and now it's time to really talk about something interesting with what uh all the work you've been doing on the world sports performance, athlete development, gm ownership. So let's start with this, man. I'm gonna ask you a question because it's gonna be a big focal point what we talk about today. You're sitting next to someone on an airplane and they ask you, hey, because I'm sure they would ask you this randomly, right? Sure, of course. What is athlete engineering? What what is that?

We are engineering human potential. We are turning possibilities into performance. So we are understanding how your ecosystem works, how everything works together from technology to the coach intervention to you know the environment you're putting it in. How is that whole ecosystem to work to create systems integration? Because that's what we feel is the biggest missing opportunity right now is how does everything integrate and how do we all work? We're drowning in data. We have more tech than we ever had before, but our systems are still the same and we're not integrated. So let's integrate everything to optimize performance and unlock human potential.

Yeah. I mean, you and I, I think you we talked like two, three years ago, and you had asked me about um if I was aware if there was anything like a single sign-on, right? For all the, you know, you look at, and maybe we could we could talk about that. Like what really dive into like what is the problem that you guys are solving? Like you mentioned a lot of data, right? You mentioned a lot of there's no interoperability, uh, which is a new word that I use a lot. Now it's really hard to say. So like, yeah, lay out the problem. Like, what what is the thing, what is the pain that most people within the the sports performance or the health club or gym industry or coaching industry are feeling that you guys are solving?

Yeah, it's really the integration side, integration side interpretation. Like how does everything work together? You know, how does the user experience work and human factors of design? You know, like we we got founder, uh, one of the guys who founded Dr. Ruben Birch is an inventor. And, you know, one of the systems he's one of the things he specializes is in human factors, right? So how does the human factors work to like, you know, when an athlete, whether it's an industrial athlete, a sport athlete, a tactical athlete, or just you we call the at-risk or clinical athlete, like they're all athletes. So, like, how do they interact with technology? How do they interact with the operator or the practitioner? How does that interaction happen? How does that interaction in our environment? How do we make it just so like it just you just have you walk away, I feel like you can't explain it, you're just like, wow, that just works. And so that's what we're really trying to get into is you know, the how do we create the right environment from all these different factors of design to really unlock or really, really get to the potential that that everybody's looking for? Whether it's the a repetitive athlete going over and over again, how do we reduce workers' comp and make it easy without adding more wearable tech to them? To a sport athlete on the field, like like you know, we have a huge epidemic right now in ACL and Tommy Johns in the youth sector and and the pro athlete sector. Like, how do we help reduce those? You know, looking at like not just looking at like we need more tech, like what about the services we're playing? What about the shoes we're wearing? What about the equipment we're wearing? How does that all interaction work? You know, we're dealing with sales best operators, like they may look at one way, move a certain way one way, but when they're in full kit, they move a different way. So we have to understand like how those ergonomics work.

Yeah. And maybe we should back up, man, because I think people need to realize that like you've been you've been doing this for a while to really know what the pain points are here, right? I mean, you and I first met, I think at the training floor at an OPEX back when you and I were both learning under James Fitzgerald, who just got honored um this year, uh, the 20-year anniversary of him being the very first CrossFit Games men's champion. It's kind of cool. But he's been influential, obviously, in our lives. And but you you've you've you've devoted your life to to sports performance. I mean, you work with John Rom, you work with a lot of high-level golfers, just a high-level athletes all across the board. So maybe summing up like how has your career arc kind of gone along and seen this problem over and over and over again, and now you're finally tackling it.

Yeah, it it's just, you know, even as a an athlete that they got hurt, there's a nine, you had non-contact injuries that just they couldn't explain why. You know, that was as one of the things that really started this whole journey. And then that was you, right?

Like what happened back then.

Yeah, I had uh non-contact ACL and them having a labum tear in my hip. And I was, you know, kind of did everything right, you know, like you know, didn't didn't live, live to everything that, you know, but the NSA model should have worked, you know, from a strength physical performance, right? That having these injuries and no one could explain why. So that really started me driving down my my why path to hear is what's going on. So, you know, we didn't understand movement, we understand patterns and and how does patterns affect load and dysfunction and the capacity. So then looking at that, and then moving into elite performance sports, we're going to NFL athletes, MMA, uh, was big in pro tennis, uh, and then in the golf again on the golf side and rotation and looking at all those different spectrums, and then moving into managing 80,000 square foot health clubs and and how do the operations work from that side to building and designing full wellness programs to manage 6,000 people in the state of Alabama that worked for casinos and tribal members. So that was an amazing project that we made huge community change there to then designing 25,000 square foot human performance center and it was in a 320-acre sports park, and how does everything all operate and function in those levels? So, you know, it's been a fun journey to work in all these different levels. And in reality, like a lot of it comes down to behavior change, feedback loops. You know, I know we too we've chatted about this is how do we create a better understanding of our feedback loops than drive behavior change? And that's what tech's giving us is giving us unique insights that we couldn't see. And so at Athlete Engineering, we're looking at okay, how do we take those unique insights and how do we apply them and and into all these different spectrums of the athlete? Right. We're really bridging the gap between, you know, it's kind of interesting that no one had ever thought about putting how we take kinesiology and engineering and put them together. Like they should work together, right? Like we we should be working with the engineering department and put it together because if tech's making one thing on the engineering side and kinesiology is looking at things from the physiological side, we're gonna bring those worlds together. And we started with the sport alpha, and that has branched off from the tactical alpha, the industrial athlete working with Eagles of Warship to police forces to firefighters. So it's been a very cool ride to see you know all these different problems exist, but they're all kind of in the same sectors.

Maybe give me like a typical use case of like what you guys are doing now with like a specific I don't know, avatar of an athlete, right? You can choose how what you guys are doing now is different than what we were doing in 2016, 10 years ago, right? Like how is the technology and what you guys are doing, the engineering side and getting the data together? And of course there's new data now than there was can be a lot more data now than 2016. But yeah, how's how is that how do those two worlds and those two different timelines look different now?

Well, the timelines are different because it's just the amount of data we have, right? Like everybody's got wearable devices. I mean, force plates are now, you know, used to be some people had them, but now everybody has them. Every private training facility probably has some form of force plate going on. I mean, Marco's motion capture now is is coming into the market, right, at an affordable price. So having, you know, understanding biomechanics. So all these different data sets are coming in. And so what we've really been able to look at is, okay, help people identify are you solving the right problem? Is step one, right? A lot of people think they had like uh think they're having a workers' comp issue when it was a heat mitigation issue, right? So Ingle's Ingall's worship, where they were having a they were looking at workers' comp issue, really identified as a heat mitigation issue. So then, okay, what exists? And so we then looking at their existing ecosystem, what the athletes are wearing, the industrial athlete was wearing, we were able to integrate a little sensor into their into their headphones that they're already wearing, their earbuds, and then that was able to track their heat. So we able to reduce workers' cop, help them manage their workforce better. That's on the industry side. On the athlete side, is you know, a lot of the things that are going on is that these coaches just don't have time. They just needed to be told what to do, right? They're having so much data coming in. So we're really making a systematic approach and then adding recommendations to help them understand what this data means? How do I use it? So I got to do counter movement jumps in the force plate. What does that mean to me? Like, how does that help me with my readiness? How does it help me with my next decision into making this athlete play longer, stay healthier, and win more games?

Yeah, man, and maybe give me an idea too. Like, as you're a role now, you are the um, let me get this right, the chief athlete liaison, right? It sounds cool. I didn't make one. I mean, it sounds like fun, right? But maybe give me an idea of like, because you're the one in the middle, right? Kind of helping with the engineering, like you're and making, yeah. Maybe explain how how that role works on the day-to-day for you and what that means for the overall mission here.

Yeah, no, it's it's it's super rad. Uh what's what's cool about it is that we are now integrating campus, athletics, and all the resources at campus in. So my role as the athlete liaison is, you know, how do we we have a complex human problem, right? If if Eric came over and said his health club, you know, they're trying to improve their membership usage rate and their member retention, we're like, okay, let's look at all the data you have. And so we're bringing now, and my role is help bring in the external partners with the internal partners that we have to co-combine a solution to deliver with the speed of industry, with the rigor of academia, to really hammer that home to find solutions that help them attract more, have more member retention, have more, more attrition, right? So now they're getting better results to clients. That's it's one of the things that we're doing. So my role really is like, how do we how do we bring in the right partners, the right resources? Because when you integrate with athlete engineering, you work, we're we're applied institution, we're not a lab, we're not uh your traditional research, we're really just on the applied world. So I bring in all the resource partners, whether it's the ELA business school, which is a top 20 business school, or I'm bringing in the research uh side of kinesiology, or bringing in engineering, or bringing in some of the lessons that we learned from athletics and bring them in to solve problems for industry professionals, whether it's DOD, whether that is the technical side, whether it's industrial side, or it's a it's a sport program. We have a collaboration going on that we're wrapping up to do something really big in the sports performance side with the uh private private facility owner to really help them be the research arm of their of their community.

Yeah, and that's something I want to dive into in in in a little bit is like how you know operators can can become research centers, right? And therefore also access research money. Um when you're approaching like the the things are are do you start so that's where like, okay, here's the problem, and then you try to figure out who needs to be at the table, or is it kind of like you have a table and now you go out and start looking for the problems?

Well, I think first of all, we got to understand the system, right? How does it all operate, right? So then we have to identify the the problems, rank and prioritize one. Then we need to design an integrative approach. And then once we design the integrative approach with the right people on the at the table really discussing the biggest pain points, uh, then we look at the testing and validation of it, and then we look at a scalable model that we can deploy and scale out. That then we can then re-in-re-get the flywheel back going again. Then the funding thing comes out. We keep improving, you know, phase one, phase two, phase three of that project. So it really makes the project very engaging and dynamic. That it's a free-flowing agile module that we're adjusting and removing. It's not like your traditional research where it's very rigid, very stale. So we're really working as a systems integrator for these companies.

So you're bringing in like engineering researchers, academia, a lot of different people domain. Sports scientists, coaches. Yeah, yeah, and the sports scientists and coaches, of course. Um, I would imagine the sports scientists and coaches are probably already very excited about the project. But when you start working with these other groups and bringing them in, are they fired up? Like, are they excited to get into this world of human performance and sports science? Is this you know outside what they may typically have researched in the past or engineered on?

The super force is a new model, right? They never have seen this done before. We're also a validation company, right? So we can validate technology, right? So we validate a lot of wearable technology. So, like, you know, that's what's really cool about it is they they've never seen this before. It's kind of a new concept for a lot of people to understand is that we're being a being a private institution at Texas Christian University, TCU, we can do things a little differently. Well, still we have to stay in rigors and guidelines, but we can do things a little differently. We can really make it dynamic and innovative, and we can really become that service on that RD. Because think about it, like you as a company now are getting access to a multi-million dollar RD center that you don't have to pay for with years of experience with PhD professors, masters in their craft that we are now bringing in to solve your your problems that you're looking at, whether it's validating your tech, whether that is understanding your data and creating more better dashboards, or you know, we're athlete engineering. So we're we sit above sports scientists in that we can actually invent stuff and make things really cool. We we're in the inventor space, not just the innovation space.

Yeah. Side note, what's your I mean, with when you guys are validating wearables, what do you have a favorite wearable nowadays? Do you have something that's kind of leading leading the pack?

You know, that's a tough one. Um it is. And there's a lot of different opinions. I'll be honest with you, because of what Apple can do is not me what I wear the most, but or it's probably right there with them. I I think on the wearable side, you know, we've actually seen this interest. It's an interesting thing, Eric, on that. We've we've had this discussion, I think. But the wearable sometimes I find is great in the beginning. It's a great feedback loop. It really helps people understand like how much drinking is affecting them or their poor sleep is affecting their readiness or their injuries and how that's tying into low HRV or low sleep or whatever. But on the other side of it, we've also found that when we're in comp when athletes are in competition, we've actually stopped wearing them because that may have an effect on their play. You know, when you're looking at stress and adaptation, when you start putting stress to the body, you're gonna go down. And that's that's what we want. But then we want to come back up into the adaptation cycle. And so sometimes we found that them knowing like there's 75%, even though it's good, right? It's not bad, everything kind of looks bad. It's just in their head, they're not in 80 or 90 percent. So it kind of we kind of have stopped wearing them in competition, really, just wearing them during the training cycles. Now we will put them on, like if they get a week off or something like that, we'll wear it. But like we have found that, you know, sometimes people stop living life because of what their wearable is saying. And like, you know, if if you go out and have a hard bike ride in Montana, you go ride, you know, 20, 30, 50 miles, right? Like you, your HRV should not be good the next day. And that's okay. It should be maybe it's down for a couple of days. As long as it doesn't stay down and you come back up, that's great, right? So we got to under sometimes it's just people understanding what they're really looking at. I think we've kind of have have given people a lot of data without the right interpretations.

Hey friends, artificial intelligence is moving faster than most of us can keep up with. That's no secret. We can all feel it. The pressure to keep up is very, very real. And no, I'll get to that next week is not a strategy. So I am proud to say that our presenting sponsor is Perfect Gym. The people building tomorrow's infrastructure for gym and health club operators. I have sat down to talk to thousands of leaders across the fitness industry, and one theme keeps coming up the right tech can make or break your business. Perfect Gym isn't just another management system. They are part of the Sports Alliance Group that is Europe's leading fitness software company, and it's now all in on the U.S. market. So in the age of AI, being data ready isn't just a buzzword. It is critical for survival. This, my friends, is the disruption we have been waiting for. Member management, billing, scheduling, reporting, one platform, zero duct tape, single studio or multi-location franchise that scales with you, zero growing pains, and their open API connects to over 50 technology and payment partners. No closed ecosystem, no getting boxed in, just better data, better decisions. PerfectGM is trusted by international fitness chains because they focus on what actually matters. That's operations, retention, and growth. The European market has spoken. Now it's America's turn. Check it out at us.perfectgim.com. It's uh it's interesting because I I learned a lot when I was working with Joel Jameson, who I know you're friends with as well. And um, you know one of the things like sometimes if you have an event, like you want your HRV a little lower. You want to be activated, right? And I think that's the misrepresentation of the wearables, you know, especially for you know someone in athletic or performance domain, is like like a recovery score may not be the best term. Like you're it's it's you know, HRV is a very unique thing. So I don't know if people are following that, but like, you know, you may have an extremely high HRV one day, and that just means your body's in a deep state of recovery. Like that doesn't mean you're necessarily like go get them. Like you have to still activate, but if it's in a low form, it might be like your your CNS is fired up. Like you could be ready to go. And it's very confusing and it's very nuanced, but um, I think you're it that's a good play, is just removing it from the situation when it's most important for them to get ready for game time.

Yeah, a lot of people forget like like most PRs and elite athlete performances happen under three conditions fatigue, sick and dying, like you're just extremely sick, like Michael John Michael Jordan flew game absolutely. Walter Payton, right? Walter Payton was had the flu so bad when he rushed the NFL rush over 275 yards, he didn't even warm up. He was throwing up all pregame, barely got his pads on, right? Or they're drunk and hung over. Right. A lot of throwers, discus throwers went out the night before, didn't think they were going to throw the next day, got banged up too much, but then came out and threw an amazing event because they can't think technically they can only think, okay, I got to do this, and then you get back to that bench, right? And they put the least amount of effort and I need to do to get back and recover. So it's it's an interesting thing. You can't live like that. It's not a good way to live, but a lot of people don't understand like that helps sometimes in leak performances.

Yeah. Well, and I mean we could talk about hockey players specifically, right? Like there's a term for it called playing guilty, which also happens to be a great podcast hosted by our friend Brandon Cullen. But uh, I learned about that term. It's like basically playing guilty is like you got three hours of sleep and you're hungover as shit. And they play well. I mean, that maybe that's just hockey culture, but you know, you oftentimes step it up too. Okay, circling back. What are some of the most expensive problems that you guys are looking at right now? Like you had mentioned ACL injuries, right? Non-contact ACL injuries seem to be very um common, especially among young female athletes, I would presume. I mean, you mentioned like in the, you know, the uh industrial athletes, like those are very expensive problems, right? And I don't just mean like money, but I mean expensive to people, you know, in their lives and you know, the quality of their life. It's just it takes a toll. So when you're looking at some of these bigger ones, like what are some of the the ones that you'd really like to focus on and come up with solutions for?

Yeah, I think the good the one thing that is kind of an interesting one is the vision and cognitive function, right? A lot of people are dealing with mild mild TBIs, traumatic brain injuries, and they're not really getting them from concuss in concussion situations. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts. Like they're riding on a high speed boat over and over again, and they're constantly banging, banging, banging, banging, right? Or retraction of a gun they're shooting. So, you know, that low-level TPI is causing problems over time. And right now we don't really have a good way of they're not concussed, and then they are concussed, but if they're not concussed, how do we measure cognitive function? How do we improve cognitive? The next step is, you know, whether you're concussed or you're not concussed, but how do you improve cognitive function to get them back to where they're at? Right now, it's kind of like you're diagnosed, you're messed up. I don't know what to tell you. Like go do some laterobic activity, do some stuff on, you know, or you know, looking at is there what are other ways we can do that? Looking at the eye track and eye vision is is a big one because like, you know, your your your eyes, and I'm not just talking like your 2020 eye test, but like how well you can converge, like bring your eyes in and expand your eyes, conversion, diversion, like those types of things really have a lot to do with readiness, eye tracking, people dilation we're looking at. immersion VR stuff, which has been really, really cool. Like we have a partnership with Deacon University out of Australia. They've been the leaders in number one, the sports science university space the past seven years. So Deacon's done some really cool stuff. They made a full immersion VR system that looks at eye trapping, pupil dilation, eye velocity that can predict you know cognitive function. It can also predict readiness, how readiness you are for mission readiness. And they also have a recovery modality in there too. A few other cool things we looked at as an EGM concept to looking at you know all these different metrics and how well you're performing. So like the cognitive brain side's really, really important. There's also a tie-in to pattern recognition and ACL tears because like if you think about it when an athlete's tracking another athlete, if their pattern recognition, their vision's off just a little bit and they had to change directions when that ready to change directions in a bad position across the feet across that can lead to non-contact ACLs and not be able to mechanically change directions properly. So like there's a lot of tie-in to the vision of cognitive side has been been interesting for us. I mean the other thing is it's like this you know the overall musculoskeletal health right how do we help improve musculoskeletal health right from a mechanical standpoint to you know we worked talking yesterday cool mid which is really really cool they have the there's a lot of interesting research going on into when you're when you're training in between sets you can kind of put your hand in this cool this mitt that that would put your hand there because it stimulates the nerves in the hand it cools you and brings your nervous system down which allows your heart rate to come down HRB to go back up get back more parasynthetic in between sets and we've seen a significant increase in performance whether it's strength, aerobic capacity, overall power output and they're making a cool like tumbler idea that you can put a hold a handheld tumbler that then you know it's just like like you're holding your your Getty right the in between sets or on your bike ride it'll last like two and a half hours using just conventional ISTs and thermodynamics. So like that's like another really cool product of you know how do we cool our bodies off in the heat of battle or while we're training to improve our performance cognitive mentally emotionally so that's like another cool one too is you know those little things that make the big difference.

That sounds like a lot of fun man it sounds like you're having a lot of fun um never boring. Yeah you know what's interesting too and it reminds me of like when you talk about data and readiness and all these different things, you know, I had Andrew mentor who I think you maybe know he's the founder of Fizmodo which is a really great tool right it's it's an easy movement screen can be done through the phone or an iPad pretty accurate right it's never going to be perfect. Well not you know with a device like that but it's pretty it's pretty impressive. And we always say like okay well you always have your readiness scores or whatever your sleep you got your HRV you got all these different things but like you could have all that stuff and how many times have we woken up in the morning and you're just moving like shit right you're sore right something doesn't feel right like there has to be like a movement readiness as well and that's not just done by an assessment by you know a professional who can do FMS or whatever they're going to do. Right. It has to be like easy and repeatable and things like that. Have you guys started to look at that as an opportunity to add on to kind of like the base premise of data yeah I mean that's one of the really cool projects we're working on is we want to bring biomechanics to the masses.

That's one of our next big things is how do we bring biomechanics to masses? So we we've been working with a couple of companies that are research validated third party validated one called Swerry Southwest Research Institution at San Antonio but they can now do with off the shelf cameras we can do full biomechanics right research grade biomechanics off the shelf biomechanics now so now every place here it becomes a lab you know so we can look at any pattern you want to move or check we can do it it is it's really cool inside outside doesn't matter so we're bringing a $500 lab basically in for like a significant low cheaper than a track mail which is like $20,000 so you can now get you can move it you can move it around you can do multi-cameras single cameras rotation because a lot of times what's happening on the this these camera spaces and the single camera mode is because of that multi-camera you can only measure what you can see. So if you can't see the body like in rotation they can't see the backside mechanics of what's going on there's a whole missing segment so that really just kind of becomes limb tracking just tracking where limbs are in space but having research grade biomechanics now we can look at not only performance standpoint but you can look at onset Parkinson's disease and dementia because changes in gait so imagine you're walking down a hallway and you're seeing a change in gait like huh it's kind of like your blood pressure check for for that and you're like hey like I think you need to go see a neurologist right and we can catch stuff onset dementia Parkinson's before it even happens there's also been a lot of research going around talking about mental health by doing a sit and stand test. So how long it takes me to stand up and how far my torso goes forward is a direct indication of your mental health. So it transcends across the the industry from you know medical side into return to play, return to work, you know, what were you like because a lot of people when we look at return to work return to play mechanisms if you don't have what you look more like prior to you got injured, then you just have return from injury. So now we're going to have massive amount of data to say okay what did Eric look like before he got hurt and where is he now and how far off is Eric not just how far off is these norms that are just kind of generic, right? So that's a that's a whole nother thing and then looking at you know like we've done stuff with pitching as they're throwing they're like okay what does this pitch need to do that this is like elite pitchers like they're throwing like 89 how do we get three to four miles an hour faster on him he's dealing with some shoulder stuff and some shoulder injuries are going on no non-contact so we're like okay what do we need to do by having Marcus biomechanics and and being able to look at force and pressure on the ground we were able to say okay what he needs to do to throw the baseball faster is move his pelvis faster. He doesn't need more disassociation from his upper body and lower body he just needs to move his hips faster and that's what take that took stress of his arm and we increased you know our model from 89 to 93 just by getting him to move his pelvis faster. So now we're going from what's really cool is we're going from an intrinsic field model to now a more of a sniper precision model. So now we know like what do you need to do to get stronger? What do you need to get faster? What do you need to to at least help reduce or injury mitigate those injuries that are going on by using markless biomechanics. So one thing that's really really cool that we've been working on is can we using Markless biomechanics can we can we get grounded force pressure force plates using markless biomechanics so you won't need necessarily you still need force plates but you may not need them all the time because we'll be able to crack late a lot of the same stuff that you're getting from a force plate with markless biomechanics. So just the cameras.

Yeah. You know it's it's so I love how for the good and the bad of technology advancement one of the goods is definitely like this democratization of the tech, right? It's just becoming more and more accessible for more and more people and easier to use. And I you know one of the things I want to kind of dive into here with with a good chunk of our time is you know when you and I had prepped for this interview a couple weeks ago you were very adamant about like you know gyms and health clubs and you know sports performance centers, like they can become research centers. Like there is grant money out there, there's things you can apply for like you can do funded like you have the tools necessary to to be doing research right and be doing some really cool stuff. I think that just people don't realize that that opportunity actually exists. So maybe walk us through that like what what are we missing as an industry that we could be we could be leveraging.

Yeah you know like you know when when I was thinking about this and we started this up and the the the two sectors that don't have a lot of research is the youth side youth sports right which is which is the $18 billion business right now by the way that's booming it's crazy. It's wild um which is the same same amount of money the NFL does and the other side of it is the healthcare business right the reason why health clubs got shut down and fitness right we're supposed to be a place of resource right for wellness fitness health and then in COVID we got shut down. Well why do we get shut down? Because we don't have a lot of research we're not scientifically validating what we're doing which we have a lot of sides of validation in the kinesiology labs but we need to make sure like you know like Bruce they always said like everything is martial arts and martial arts is everything right so everything we do is a martial arts function. Well everything we every every every health club is a research center. Like they don't understand like every time somebody checks in your check-in your usage rate right those are key data points just what you're doing just on that set point can be used in a research study or a behavior change study or you know overall wellness longevity long longitudinal study that we can look at health and wellness saying like okay if somebody came 2.3 times into the gym which is the average gym usage how does that affect their health and how's that affect their well being right so we can look at that and then we started adding into you know some stuff like your Alan or guy Alan connected me too with with Croc. Grow Grow Solutions at Polantheus Tonco Grow Solutions doing some really cool stuff that could really just turn everything into a research center. They're doing some amazing stuff. And looking at you know and then the you then you look at the usage of cardiovascular equipment that you can just pour the usage off of that look at the usage of facilities and classes like all those different things that are valuable data points that we can use in in grants and research studies that they can help fund your staff, can fund new equipment that can they can fund certain initiatives by doing different types of grants that we can work with industry partners. So that's a great way of doing it and then we can also become your service arm of your R and D center to help you make better decisions as an operator.

That's so cool. You know, man if I was going to leave one legacy on this on this industry when when I retire, it's like I want to I really want to help push this convergence of fitness, health and wellness right all together. Like it seems to be happening. And and this is this is the layer that's most critical is like how do we prove that what we do in a gym, health club, sports performance center, whatever you want to call it, brings better health outcomes and the reason why, a good reason why, you know this is probably one of the benefits of the pandemic in our industry is like this really gave us a shot in the arm like oh shit we are vulnerable. Like we need to evolve right we're not just fitness trainers. We're not just counting reps like this is everyone knows fitness is good for health, right? I think that's pretty universal. Exercise is good, but we need to actually get in there and prove it so that we can communicate with you know the health community, the the medical community, like the wellness community so we can show that this proves out I think this is a really huge opportunity like just the simple stuff you said like okay check-ins like how, well how does two check-ins a week into a gym relate to a you know the specific person's health goals and outcomes like what they need to improve like how do we start to draw those lines together? And I think this is what you're talking about. This could be one of those those paths to do it.

Yeah and you know a lot of times we look at health and we think it has to be this all or nothing routine and it's not you know you know it's both it's just like stacking habits like just start showing up first, right? And let's build a consistency stack days, stack days, stack days. So there there's there's that outcome but I think like we start looking and how do we bridge that gap between the medical and the health side you know we're starting to see you know health clubs are now partnering with you know stuff like lifetime stealing is is really great and the data they're collecting there's there's a major research studies that could be going on there longevity studies to really prove out to where like honor health here is now opening a health club with a hospital connected onto it, which is also like really cool. So there's certain cool strategies that are really happening in the in the fitness medical healthcare space. So we're really starting to close that gap and I think having the right data because you know humans we're not very good at playing long game we're very good at playing the short game we're not getting results today we're like oh it's not working where it's just you know we need to play five years ten years and think of looking those games and think okay so one of the things that we're also looking at on this side is the digital twin concept. A lot of people some people may know it, some people may not but digital twinning is is kind of the next big step in I feel healthcare and performance is that now we'll take a digital Eric Malzone and we can have all the data on Eric like blood work, training, movement, fitness, performance, blah blah blah blah blah, all these different data sets and then we can run simulation models like FedEx has been doing this for years with their logistic system. But like run a simulation cave if Eric did this type of training with this type of lifestyle, ate this type of food, make this type of supplements and he was on this type of medication, what happens to Eric in five years? Right? It's wearing tearing his joints like if he changed these variables then what happens to Eric in five years, right? So now we can start simulating how your life's going to play out if all these variables stay consistent, right? So that's really, really cool from from that standpoint of the performance side we can look in a performance side okay if we change these two variables what happens right does he jump higher does he run faster? Does he need, you know, and sprinting you know everybody wants to run faster like does he need more acceleration deacceleration if we improve this top end speed by improved his strike length by two inches on his top end speed what happens to his 40 yard dash time which equates to millions of dollars on NFL so there's a lot of cool things that are going to come out as we get enough of the right data sources for the right standing operating procedures that have clean data and clean data hygiene, then the AI models can really this is where it's going to be really, really cool going forward is that the AI models can really help us understand what is his data need, what does his data mean? What are our rank of priorities, what needs to happen? Are we solving the right problems? Because a lot of problems we're looking at may not be the right problems. Like we think we have a shoulder problem, but it's really our left ankle is locked up that's causing our right shoulder problems. So by fixing the left ankle we fix the shoulder then then fixes our stress levels and anxiety because now we're not in pain and we're happier. So this is where it's going to get really cool and and really interesting the next couple of years by having these data sets using AI to digest this to then help us understand our actions.

That's so cool man. Maybe let's I want to go back to I'll just give you like an example. So the the gym I go to here is the whitefish wave great gym right 9,000 members there's only 9,000 people in whitefish so it's kind of crazy. Pretty healthy community I guess but uh you know it's it's kind of like a YMCA it's structured like that. Right. So if the if a if the operator of art the the GM was like you know what I'm liking what what Spencer's saying maybe we want to start getting involved in some kind of research or kind of getting more data on our our users and trying to prove out some some better health outcomes like what's what are the steps that an operator like that or someone who does a sports performance what are some of the steps they can start taking you know this year to to start working towards a goal like that.

Well first of all look okay what are you tracking you know are you are you are you tracking what are you tracking what are you not tracking and and start with simple digestible things that you can consistently do day in, day out, right? So make sure everybody's checking the the person in, making sure maybe you you have a lifestyle goals questionnaire or par queue you're filling on every single person and maybe doing touch points with you know if you can have your trainers or your floor steps start doing touch points and maybe there's like a three or four simple question thing they ask or having a simple form they fill out once or twice a year and seeing how that data is coming in. Like if it doesn't have to be a technology data source it could be subjective sources. Like we started looking at uh we had a a grant to start a very significant grant and one of the first things we did on to build a wearable for a sock, right? So we built a sensor within a sock. So we put liquid wiring within the sock with a sensor tied to it so we can measure force and pressure of the sock. So but before we even got down that that that that route the first thing we did was we went around and we interviewed all the top colleges strength coaches and to understand like do you trust wearable technology what a wearable technology like if it could do this you would love that right so the first thing we did was really just do market research and RD to really understand the problems that were going on. So maybe just even talking to your members and saying like what would you like to know? What what if you if you had this information what would help make a better change or better usage right so just having those simple things where we redesigned the health club to where like the upper body went down the circuit where you had to push pull push pull push pull and then you had a push pull push pull going down the leg side just having that user experience of your logistics of your design of your gym maybe set up a little bit better or maybe you know the sound of the vibrations too loud for some people. So maybe just changing the flooring in in some areas would create a higher usage rate. So even looking at the ergonomics and the lighting of the facility that can maybe those small things can make a big difference not only usage rate but also to improving the outcomes that we're looking for because it all comes down to behavior change, experience what I call the three E's got to have the right ex right environment to have the right experience to involve your to evolve your thought, your mind, your body, whatever that is right so you got to have those three E's all working together.

You know and that's uh I think collectively, you know, to to give Alan from Pro Solutions another shout is like he's finding ways to take passive data right that's not and and making it super useful, right? Whatever that be through the data it's already being collected that no one really realizes and and putting it all into one place. I mean the camera stuff like that's wild. I think that's what you probably talked about referring to a couple people his way for that like just making it more passive, right? So that the stuff can start to run in the background, you get really useful data that you it's actually actionable and you can make improvements. Like I think that's a big promise like you know surveying and stuff can work. I mean you and I know that like it's hard to get people to fill out a survey right I mean I know it's you can say you can make it as short as possible. You can give as many Starbucks gift cards as you want but like getting people to do it is hard. So it's like how do we start to really collect this data passively in a meaningful way and I'm guessing that's something that's on your guys' radar as well.

A hundred percent that's what they like one of the things we did was like you know we necessarily don't want to add more because people don't want to add more people want to do more work. It's taking existing processes and like you're saying the passive data right so one of things we did with with a a group a firefighter group was we're looking at cognitive load and look and when in the flight simulators and stuff and so what we looked at was their test score data and how their test scores made based on how many hours they were training and how many hours they were in the classroom, how that affect their test scores and how that affected their flight performance. So by correlating those types of those types of data points we were able to without having to add another test and a rating test another wearable so we should I points to give us enough information to help at least make some some assumptions of why things are happening and then made into practical outcomes and they're like oh you know it was right you we were on the right track with that. So just maybe then we tweaked a few things and and cognitive farmers went up fight fight act fights fights whenever farmers fight better. So there's a just simple stuff. You know it doesn't always have to be more yeah I agree man you just had the uh the global human performance forum right was that we did yeah tell me about that oh man that was amazing we had people from all over world deacon university came out we had verm gambetta there who's a legendary sports coach there we had Dr. Peter Whalen on campus who's this is you'll love this Dr. Peel and Whalen is one of the leading spread researchers in in the world in his in his lab on campus we have a hundred mile an hour treadmill that tested the lead spreaders that we try to see what is their true max velocity with bike on cameras all around the high high markless motion capture with force facing the ground to measure force activity. But Dr. Peelin Whalen was was talking about you know data and how we're using data but it was kind of cool like he was even talking about when he started working at Harvard, they were doing VO2 maxes on animals on chipmunks, elephants and he was showing his pictures I mean it was like cool to learn the history of you know how he evolved locomotion from learning from animals and looking at the right signals. So that was pretty great. And then how we brought in we run in different sectors from industry professionals we had the head of Arsenal soccer's performance there just won the FIFA uh championship premiere championship we had a mental a lot of mental health people talking about psychology we had a Dr. Mark from Sydney was talking about talent identification sometimes talent identification happens because of the the how alphabetically the names are that people never really get down to the low level so by doing talent identification and mixing the names up into random order you may actually select better athletes instead of just looking to the top 50 names and never like get to the bottom 50 because you've already made your decisions. That makes so much sense it's so wild right like it's just like simple things these researchers come out with to be like oh my God how did I miss that you know yeah we're looking at all this other data when we just need to mix up the order to make sure we're looking at randomly the right people right so I that was cool you know having you know we had uh my buddy uh Dr. uh Paletti come out who's a strength coach for the Bucs who's now is at Pittsburgh uh doing stuff talking about how how integrating uh athlete engineering in Mississippi State where we started and how that made a big difference in their performance and how they carried on to them winning a successful championship and Super Bowl with the Bucs at Tampa. So you know it's a really cool thing we're gonna make it even better next year. Probably hopefully have it's you out Eric coming you come out of the conference and hang out and integrate I think it'd be awesome. So it's a it's a unique conference and what's cool about it is it integrates all the different industries. You know you have people in the fitness industry people from human performance and the sport performance sector with the tactical to researchers which most conferences never have as you're interacting with and having great conversations.

Yeah that sounds like a blast man look what do you what do you think like is there any lessons for the the fitness industry that came out of that you know not just the human performance side of things but like where do you think the commercial fitness industry could learn from a from an event like that?

I think they can just they can learn like how how your how you can use your data right how you can use your data to make meaningful outcomes right how whether it's you know going after research funding competitive funding and grants and foundations to also to making better outcomes in your own facility how to streamline your data how look at how it connects how the human body fully integrates into mental health into into better training outcomes to better healthier lives to you know how do you implement new programs and behavior change I think that's that would just be a dynamic for a professional operator to come out and learn and really see how to integrate everything together and really get the systems integration within their own facilities.

Yeah awesome man big question which you know I think for you is very valid or very valuable is like what do you need right now dude like you're you're putting all these pieces together you're you're getting the data you're you're pushing this this effort forward you know where do you need help?

Right now we're looking for great industry partners I mean one of the things that we're looking at is how do we take the research that happens on on campus and bring it to industry and be that RD arm for industry professionals, right? So whether it's a tech company whether it is it needs validation whether it is a an organization that wants to understand their data better and have a research arm that wants to improve their employee outcomes, they want to improve their gym outcomes do they want to optimize their performance their athletes and reduce injury mitigation like those those are all things that we're looking for right now is those great research great partners in the industry that want to do amazing things in the field and really grow. Awesome man where do you want people to go if they want to get a hold of you yeah feel free to reach out to me email me at spencer.tatum at tcu.edu is probably the best way of doing it is just reach out and let's have a conversation and let's start chatting and and seeing you know how we can collaborate partner and and and drive innovation and and possibly invent some really cool stuff.

Yeah. Oh man it's such an exciting time and uh I'm I'm excited for you man. I know you've been doing this for a long time and I think you found a you found a real sweet spot that leverages all of your experience and and talent. So it's it's really cool to see. So well done man it's always a pleasure and appreciate it. Yeah ladies and gentlemen Spencer Tatum