LIFTS Episode 112 – Why 60-Year-Olds Are Stronger Than 30-Year-Olds (Data Shocked Us) | Strength, Longevity & The Future of Fitness | with Troy Taylor

22:26Mohammed Iqbal:And so I think the exercises that we need to do or think about from a training, from a longevity point of view, from my point of view are twofold or threefold, maybe. Number one, yes, we want to preserve muscle mass for as much as we can. We can build it at any age, but we want to build it earlier. It's much like retirement, right? It's never too late, but it's never too early either. You want to build it and you want to have big reserve capacity. If it does start to decline, you want to decline from the biggest bank balance that you can occur. How do we do that? Well, yeah, in order to build muscle mass, you know, training relatively hard, relatively close to failure.

23:03Mohammed Iqbal:Could be lightweight, could be heavyweight. It doesn't matter necessarily on the load, but you want to go until you're close to failure. That point when you try to move the barbell or the dumbbell or the tonal fast, but it slows down by 20 or 30%, right? It's a little difficult. Those are how you want to make your sets. Number one for sort of muscle mass. For strength, strength is best built when we're lifting relatively heavy for our percentage of our 1RM. So we want to be at 70 or 80 % of our 1RM. Something that I can list for five to 10-ish reps. I don't necessarily need to lift singles. It doesn't need to be maximal clean and jerks or anything like that.

23:43Mohammed Iqbal:But in the five to 10 rep range, maybe a kind of things is how we're going to best build strength. But if you're relatively weak, my mom, that might be sit to stands, right? She's doing 10 sit to stands. That's strength training for her and to do that. And then the power component is really about trying to groove those movements fast, do them explosively with that concentric movement. So those sit to stands become how quickly can I stand up and then slowly sit down? How quickly can I stand up? Then it might progress into something, you know, like a step up. I'm trying to explode on a step up. And maybe if you want to, you could try plyometrics.

24:19Mohammed Iqbal:You don't have to jump training type kind of stuff that has avid benefit for bone mineral density. Um, and, and kind of there, but I think it's about starting where people are. The smallest workouts you can do still make a big difference. And then, you know, we want to hit ideally on those three parameters or those three underlying physiological concepts of is it is it close enough to failure to build muscle mass is it heavy enough to build strength and is it fast enough to build power and you could do one set of each per exercise that's how sometimes i train and i think you can get really benefits the only other thing i'd add to that is i think single leg strength particularly for full protection full prevention is really important so our ability to be stingly leg dynamically fast, right?

25:05Mohammed Iqbal:You think about most falls happen when older people, when you trip, right? You trip, your leg goes out and you don't have the reactivity or the strength reactivity, ability to apply that force quickly enough. And then you fall and then you get the fracture. You know, yes, we want strong bones, but it's even better if we don't fall and have to test those strong bones. And so the ability to do single leg stuff, I think is really important the older we get.

25:28Matthew Januszek:In part four, you refer to the adoption of eccentric overload and drop sets. It's one of the things I've been experimenting with myself recently. I did it years ago when I was a bodybuilder and used to get a lot of results on that. And obviously it was more bro science than real science. But it does seem to indicate that members are increasingly adopting advanced methods like eccentric overloads and drop sets, tools that were once reserved for elite athletes. And I was curious, two things. One, what do you think that says about the future of strength training in general? not just for tonal, but do you think there's more people are going to start thinking about that type of training?

26:06Matthew Januszek:And then secondly, from your perspective, what are your thoughts about this eccentric overload and drop sets? Is it something that you really believe in? Is it something that probably many of us have been missing because the technology or a lot of the equipment in gyms doesn't really allow you to effectively deliver that kind of movement on a typical machine. Give me your overview of that, please, Troy.

26:34Mohammed Iqbal:Are these things needed? Are they foundational to building? No, absolutely not. I'm like, I love them. I think they're great. But these are additional tools. Like you're 100 % believe you get in, you lift resistance, you do it repeatedly. that's your your your base of your cake or your your bread and butter and what you you need to be doing what we're seeing with the advent of digital resistance whether it's tonal or competitors in the home space or think about e-gym or techno gym in in the kind of virtual spaces these tools that were only you know i had to set up these weird chains or had to have these weight releases or like i had to monopolize the whole dumbbell set because i was starting on the 50s and working down well now these are a touch of a button right an electromagnetic resistance motor can do these.

27:20Mohammed Iqbal:They can do them not just subjectively, they can do it based on sort of feedback, measures your range of motion, knows when you're eccentric. It can kind of control it for you. The thing you do is it opens up an avenue for training that hasn't been accessible for every people. Do I think eccentric training builds more muscle mass? I think the research evidence suggests that yes. There's a paper came out last year compared standard sort of consistent training. It had compared that to two reps of eccentric training to six reps of eccentric training. And the way you overloaded the eccentric with about 120%.

27:53Mohammed Iqbal:And they saw greater increases in muscle mass and strength in the eccentric group that trained more. You know, was it dramatically different? No, it was small margin. It was significant from a research study. Is it valuable? I think so. Is it essential? No, absolutely. But I think what you're doing is you're seeing that we can bring these in as a way to progress people when they want to. Okay, well, we're doing the same exercise, right? We know that strength training can get kind of boring if you're not super into it. Like Matt and I maybe geek out about this kind of stuff. And like what you're saying, bench press is never boring.

28:30Mohammed Iqbal:But, you know, for some parts of the population that, okay, well, I want to bring in variety, but I don't want to mix up the exercises all the time. Now I can bring in eccentric overload. That's a way of progressing you that still allows you a bit of variety, gives it a little bit of interesting, has some physiological benefits, but also gives you some cognitive kind of engagement. Oh, it's a little different of a challenge here. I need to think about this. And so I think what we're seeing is that. And I think we're seeing that proliferate through our technology as well as, you know, we are. These tools have not been accessible to the average population.

29:04Mohammed Iqbal:my my mom again when she was over from from england you did a deadlift set with chains um you know she's progressed from sit to stand to a deadlift would like she would never go into a gym and do that but she's trying to work on power and change are a really good way of working on power and so we can bring these tools they're not essential but they can be valuable in the right situations one from a training stimulus point of view and number two from a um an engagement cognitive challenge way that just makes training more interesting for people because that's important too.

29:36Troy Taylor:Just looking at the shift in strength training, there's a shift that anyone could notice if you go into a gym or even a hotel gym. And obviously, we've seen strength areas expand. There's been a bigger variety of equipment, which we want to get to in a minute. We've also seen women enter the strength area very comfortably now, right? Like in fact, it may be half women and half men. Then we've seen the growth of high rock and these fitness events come up with strength as a critical component of it. So if I'm thinking about the operator, and so many of our listeners are operators in our category.

30:08Troy Taylor:So if you're like a gym owner or a studio owner, and you're trying to respond to the trend that you're seeing with strength and also planning for the future as consumers think about longevity, how do you think operators should be thinking differently about things like equipment selection and programming and different class formats kind of given what

30:29Mohammed Iqbal:you know about tonal it's always challenging right because you're making capital purchases large capital purchases based on the next 10 years of usage you know that's kind of where you're mapping out and you're trying to crystal ball where it is going my personal bias is strength is not a fad it is not something that is going to be you know pop and kind of kind of where it's going to go away or disappear. I think you're only going to see more of a tendency for people to be showing the benefits of strength training, both for physiological strength, longevity outcomes, so potential mental health and stress and kind of their kind of things.

31:07Mohammed Iqbal:So I think within that space, it's a good bet to make. I do think there is going to be, particularly within the operator space i do think the value of being able to digitize and quantify a lot of that what we're seeing from tonals data and obviously you know techno gym and e-gym are the big players and i don't know their business but we know more about our people that train than anyone in the history has known about training and i think if you can start doing that for your membership and put a layer of analytics on top of that to give that to operators like you know the standard operator model is like how many visits did they come how long did they like what are the high level metrics what classes did they book now i can know are they getting stronger like is there a variation in their types of workouts what are they doing i can see this because the data is collecting the motor data is all that and i can then use that to inform retention engagement upselling tools that are over there so i do think there's going to be a massive proliferation of digital technology within that space um how that happens whether it's purely motor based whether it's computer vision based but i think the data and what you see from like you know retention you guys could tell better than me but your average retention in a in a in a commercial gyms i don't know probably churning at two or three percent a year maybe higher three or four percent a month sorry not a year um whereas it's about three about three percent a month about three percent a month you compare that to tonal well sub 1%, right?

32:38Mohammed Iqbal:Now, that's partly because we've got a device that boulders your wall. But it's also because we know our members a hell of a lot better than any operator has ever known them before. And therefore, we can deliver what they need in a lot more sticky fashion.

32:50Troy Taylor:So what you're really saying is to focus on outcomes, not right. And I talk about that a lot as well. Operators need to start focusing on outcomes as a KPI, not just the things that you mentioned, which is the standard things that we've been tracking. Matthew.

33:05Matthew Januszek:The other thing about the looking at some of the future investments that people are making, you reference high rocks in your report. And clearly that's a big trend at the moment that seems to be gaining a huge amount of traction. And in part three, you describe this hybrid training, which is strength, cardio and mobility, which is becoming the new standard with women leading diversification and men increasingly adding this to their to their workout program so i was i was curious about this one because if you think about the trends how things were were evolving before the pandemic you had crossfit and the term that many people were using was functional training which is essentially strength training with some of these other components there was then this huge move to strength training which was probably driven in part by the fact of one of the things that you weren't able to do at home that successfully unless she was able to invest in a tonal was to do any form of strength training so people went back in the gym realized the importance of strength training high rock seemed to come along and they they're really pushing what many gyms are creating or calling these hybrid or or high rock style training areas so tell us a little bit about what you're seeing because again i would as i would think of tonal as being a strength training product or strength training company.

34:26Matthew Januszek:But it's interesting when I read about this, this hybrid training. So just give us a little bit more insight in terms of what that means to you and how that's potentially going to shape what you see people wanting from a workout over the next few years.

34:41Mohammed Iqbal:I find it interesting and amusing how we market and how terminology changes and things come and go around. I want to say functional training was first coined by a coach called Vern Gambetta, who I've worked with quite extensively back in the late 90s or early 2000s. He probably coined that. He's like, I should have patterned the name or trademarked it because I would have made a fortune. But we do see these cyclical kind of events within the fitness industry where it kind of gets like, you know, Hydrox and CrossFit are not the same, but they share some, you know, similar kind of characteristics and patterns.

35:15I think what we're

35:17Mohammed Iqbal:seeing is strength is very much as i said before being the foundation as part of what they're doing but people are realizing that i want to be able to do multiple different things actually a research study came out earlier this week prospective study 110 000 people and they uh looked at um not just how much people exercise but the variety of different exercise they did and people who did more variety, had a hazard ratio, this is a correlation, not causation, of 19 % lower than those that people did the same amount of exercise, but only in a single modality. So doing multiple different modalities was associated with longevity.

35:58Mohammed Iqbal:I don't think people are necessarily thinking about the research study when they're doing, but I think people are finding benefits from doing multiple different stuff. They're getting different things out of that, right? When I do a Pilates class on tonal, yeah, I'm not working on my strength, but my legs feel, my hips feel way better after doing those leg circles than they do after heavy squats. I think what people are kind of working out is, hey, it takes a range of these different things and that's good for my overall benefit. I don't have to just get into, you know, just into heavy lifting or just into cardio.

36:29Mohammed Iqbal:I can kind of mix up these different varieties and get what I need out of them. I think what people are seeing is that's getting them to their solutions. Like Mo talked about outcomes before. I talk a lot about solutions, right? People like jobs to be done, Clay Christensen type kind of, you know, part of a business school, but like people buy tonal, higher tonal, higher their gym to solve problems in their lives. And how do we as a fitness industry help them solve their problems? And let's be honest, most people in their thirties, forties, and fifties, maximal strength or maximal muscle mass is not a massive problem I have.

37:06Mohammed Iqbal:I'm not as strong as I'd like to be. I don't have as much muscle mass, but that's not really moving the needle. What I'm hiring the gym or I'm hiring Tonal to do is essentially give me solutions to help me stay strong, play with my kids, do my thing. Like look good when I put a swimsuit on. Those are all the jobs that I get hired to done. And so I think the more that we can package different varieties of exercise and say how they help solution or help solve problems, problems, I think that becomes a really valuable piece.

37:35Troy Taylor:So Troy, given there's a lot of development on electromagnetic resistance, and honestly, I have conversations with manufacturers and operators all the time about how to deploy it. You talked about Tonal, obviously, and E-Gym and Technogym, but you even see brands like Echelon and a lot of others getting into electromagnetic resistance. How is that different? So I've always wondered, I've been training almost exclusively for strength on tonal on some traveling, which is motorized strength. The first time in my life I've done that. How is that different from just doing free weights or select-wise machines?

38:15Troy Taylor:Should we mix in both? Does it matter? Would love to get your perspective on that.

38:20Mohammed Iqbal:I don't think it makes a wild amount of difference. Like your muscles know tension, they know resistance. what you get with electromagnetic resistance is you get a more constant force tension profile through the range of motion because there's less inertia right if you imagine an olympic lifting you're like moving really fast you're trying to get speed on that bar newton's newton's laws of when some object is in motion wants to stay in motion so you're trying to get momentum because that's helping you through the motion thing it allows you to lift a heavier weight in order to be able to do that but doesn't necessarily challenge your muscles necessarily in order to do that.

38:55Mohammed Iqbal:What you find with electromagnetic resistance at the base calibration, because we can manipulate however you want, your base calibration is you don't have that same level of inertia or momentum. There's a constant force that you have to push through. So what we find is typically people are lifting about 25 % less as a resistance weight on tonal than they would in the free weight. So 200 pounds on tonal equals 250 pounds of free weight because of that motion. It's not a perfect one-to-one correlation because if you lift slowly on a freeway, it would be more similar to lifting on an electromagnetic.

39:30Mohammed Iqbal:I think that's sort of number one, that there's very subtle differences, the resistance around there. I think what we kind of talked around before, where I think the advantages and the benefits around that are like, you get the data out of it, where it gets you tracking in a way that you couldn't possibly understand all of your movement patterns before, which I think can be really beneficial. but i don't think there's any particular reason why you need to you know only lift on tonal or electromagnetic resistance or only lift on free weights or do do a mix things i don't think it's that big a difference i think we're talking like very subtlety um differences you know we're a cable machine so we tend to be a little more um stabilizer focused um there's a there's a pivot point at the bottom and so if the first time you bench on tonal it feels a little wobbly right it can we kind of think gravity's not pushing straight down on the dumbbell in that sense And so, yeah, it actually really helps my shoulder.

40:21Mohammed Iqbal:I lift a little less on tonal than I would in a free weight, but it fills up those stabilizing muscles and they're getting a work around. So I think there's pros and cons. I think people should do the things that they like to do. What they enjoy doing is going to be the biggest benefit for them getting kind of consistency and then before getting the outcomes. More so than, you know, tiny differences in the benefits or pros and cons of free weight versus electromagnetic resistance from a user point of view.

40:47Troy Taylor:It would not surprise me that as we go through these operator refresh cycles and equipment in the next 15 years, if half of the equipment in the strength area at a gym is going to be electromagnetic driven, it would not surprise me one bit just seeing some of the innovation that's happening and how it just provides so much helpful insights to members and users. Well, we're almost at time. And so one of the things that we like to wrap up on lifts, which you might recall from your last episode, are our key takeaways. So Matthew, let me start with you first. I know this is a topic that is very close to you.

41:27Troy Taylor:You've had a long journey with strength. You've actually owned a business that is purely on strength. So I'm curious to know your key takeaways.

41:38Matthew Januszek:Yeah, well, there's a couple of things I wanted to say. First one, I've just come off, I've just listened to the Andrew Huberman podcast with Dorian Yates. And I interviewed Dorian Yates about seven or eight years ago when he was really mainly known for people that are into bodybuilding or serious training and then a few trainers. But it's quite interesting to see that someone like Andrew Huberman, that's a real mainstream podcaster, interviewed him. And I definitely recommend you listening to that as well as listening to the one that I did with him. But just listening to some of his philosophies and Andrew Huberman, who's obviously more of a comes from a scientific background, almost supporting some of these really old school strength training ideas, which we've spoken about here as well.

42:24Matthew Januszek:So I think that really just goes to show how much, I guess, mainstream and consumer awareness is now becoming around strength. And I definitely see that will continue. A couple of other things I took from the report that I thought I'd share, more so for the operators that are listening to really take note on. But the first one was really one of the most telling stats from this report is that 80 % of tonal members say that they train primarily to age better, not to look a certain way. So that certainly starts to change the conversation or the industry messaging that a lot of times we're putting out to bring people in.

43:06Matthew Januszek:It may be a good time to start shifting the people that you're targeting so that we can, as an industry, potentially grow and attract and bring more people in. The other thing that builds upon that is the report also shows that older members are matching or even exceeding young ones in relative strength and power gains, largely because they're training more consistently, not necessarily that they train harder. I thought that was a really interesting takeaway as well. And there's probably a lot that could be looked into that, but certainly encouraging for people that are a little bit older, worrying about how they will compete with their sort of younger peers.

43:48Matthew Januszek:And then the final one, which I thought was quite interesting, is when training is personalized and they have clear weekly targets, adaptive load, real-time feedback, members hit their goals about 90 % of their time. so again i'm referring this to many people that own bricks and mortar facilities and supporting probably the move towards more personal coaching and training um as certainly being a beneficial way if you are going to a gym how you're going to get results but i i just i think it's a great report um we're going to put a link hopefully to allow people to have a look at it and to take away what they wish but um probably go over to you now troy uh you know what what are some of your takeaways and and if you could slightly build on to that anything that probably you're you've come across over the last six to nine months that may not be common knowledge that but you could sort of share us uh in terms of some of the things that you're thinking of in your brain at the moment?

44:52Mohammed Iqbal:Yeah, I'll list a couple. I think, number one, you talked about older people and the relative gains that they make. And the research suggests this too. I don't think necessarily, I think it is a consistency thing is what we see in our data, but that we should take massive, massive reassurance from that, that it is never too late and that we can build strength, muscle mass, power at any age. And we've got up to 80 plus year olds that are still doing those types of things and sort of reinforcing that message as much as possible. It would be number one. Number two, the industry's done great in strength training and we're really running on a wave.

45:34Mohammed Iqbal:But while there's not updated data that I've seen recently from the last couple of years, but like two or three years ago when the last government report was put out, it was still only 25 % were meeting the, or 30 % were meeting the guidelines of exercising two times a week for muscle strengthening activities. And if you actually bucket it, there's a detailed report of that and looks at age and then did decline. Once you start getting above 30, it's like 40 % of 18 to 30 year olds and then 30 % and then 25, it's like 10 % of 60 year old pluses. There's still, I think a huge opportunity, both from an industry point of view of there is this beneficial thing and also from an education thing to those people of how we make that change.

46:16Mohammed Iqbal:I feel it feels like that's in the industry that everyone knows about strength training. Dorian Yates is on Huberman. But I still think we're actually relatively early on that kind of wave of what we could do. Now, it's up to us as an industry in order to be able to move that forward. But I think we still have a lot of opportunity. From a purely business sense, there is a huge time there of people who are not currently engaging in strength training who would benefit from it. How do we reach them better, I think is a massive opportunity. And the third one is that I think the more research that is done on it, the more it is showing that power is actually the key for aging.

46:58Mohammed Iqbal:Or not the key, because they're all important and power is built on strength. But it's probably the most important thing. Grip strength is great. It's very easy to do. We can measure it in a doctor's office. it does predict mortality quite well on a long period of time but actually upper body decreases in strength slower than lower body so you lose strength in your lower body faster than in your upper body the research suggests and you lose power faster and what do we want to keep we want to keep lower body power that's the key metric that we need to care about um and so we well grip strength is great dead hangs are fine if you want to be able to do them do them but if you really want to care about longevity, train lower body power is probably the single best thing you can do for your health span and staying injury free or full prevention free.

47:47Matthew Januszek:Fantastic. Mo, takeaways from this week?

47:50Troy Taylor:Yeah, I'm just constantly amazed at how some of these old school strength coaches like Charles Poliquin or concepts like, I mean, I think he made German involved in training popular, but you just look at these older bodybuilders like Dorian Yates, even Arnold, right? Progressive overload. A lot of these concepts that were from the 70s and 80s are actually correct. And we're now using data and science. It's just fascinating how they were able to land on some of these things, I guess just being obsessive over their craft. But if you zoom out, I think strength training may be the most powerful longevity lever that we have.

48:31Troy Taylor:And Troy, you went even further to say that it's power, which is even a more specific metric. And that, from an operative standpoint, has real implications. We know the evidence today. I talked about this at the top. Higher muscular strength is associated with 20 % to 30 % of lower all-cause mortality. Skeletal muscle drives the majority of glucose disposal. So all the things that saying that it is really important in having a good health outcome. For operators, I think this refrains the role of the gym. And we talked about the retention that you're seeing on Tonal and some of the retention issues that we as an industry have.

49:10Troy Taylor:When members get stronger, it's got an aesthetic look. They look better. They age better. They feel better. And that actually shows up in higher retention, longer member lifetimes, and improves our TAM. It could bring in people that are on GLP-1s and so on. So I think when you think about scale and operators who are thinking about how do I prepare my club, my team, my reporting for future, I think operators need to think about themselves as being a part of the preventative health infrastructure that is being built now. and they need to reframe and think about the key metrics that they're using for success and change it from towards some things you mentioned earlier, which is check-ins and time spent in gym and so on, what classes are you taking, to really have it focused on outcomes and focused on longevity.

50:04Troy Taylor:Because to your point, I mean, I think Matthew said 80 % of people in the report stated that they're doing it for longevity. And I think that resonates pretty well and accurately with how gym members are feeling. So I think there's a lot to unpack here. This has been a terrific episode, Troy. Really happy to have you back on again. And thank you so much for all that you do for us in the industry.

50:28Mohammed Iqbal:Thank you, guys.

50:29Matthew Januszek:Well, thank you very much, Troy. That's it for this week's episode. If you got one thing out of it, then please help us get this podcast out to more people. if you could subscribe to the channel, share it with one or two people. And if you can leave a comment and let us know what you think, we'd be very much appreciative. So thank you very much for listening. And I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of lifts.

51:07Thank you.