How Building Muscle Can Add Years to Your Life & Ozempic's Long-Term Effects w/ Krystal Zell | EP #110

0:00What do you think the number one reason that people don't work out is? That's a great question.

0:09People who are going on a weight loss journey think about cardio because that's kind of the dominant narrative in America is get out of the bike, you know, go to a cardio class and now tell you lose weight, go for a run. Sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, the right, you know, supplements and meds. If you have to do one thing, it's muscle mass, it's strength. The bottom third of the population from a muscular perspective has a 50 % increase mortality rate. The number one thing to do in terms of reducing all -cause mortality is building muscle. Welcome to Moon Shots. Today we're going to talk about one of the most important aspects of longevity and that's building muscle mass.

0:51It's building strength. If you could have a single thing to do that extends your health span, not just your lifespan, It is building muscle. My guest today is Crystal Zell. She's the CEO of Tonal, an AI -powered at -home training system. She previously was at Bain, at Starwood Hotels, at Simon Property Group, and recently the Home Depot. And she's running a company that is making your ability to get in great shape to build muscle and strength really easy. If you believe that time is your problem or knowledge is your problem or money is your problem. Listen up. This is an important episode. Her moonshot is really to make this accessible to everybody.

1:35All right. Let's jump in. And if you enjoy this podcast, please like this. Please share it with your friends. Share it with your aging mom and dad because, you know, the number one thing you could do if you're Over the age of 60 is work out. It reduces all -cause mortality by 50 % reduces cancer, reduces falls. It is your number one longevity supplement and therapeutic. All right, let's jump into the episode. Welcome to moonshots. I'm here with Crystal Zell, the CEO of Tonal Company. I have admired and in full disclosure, I've got my Tonal Ordered for installation shortly. Crystal, good to see you.

2:18Welcome to moonshine. Thanks to see you. Thanks Peter, thanks for having me. Yeah, and I see the tonal in the background over your left shoulder if I've got the directions correct. So I want to start with an assumption. What do you think the number one reason that people don't work out is? Well, that's a great question. I think it's a competition of things. I mean, I think part of it is the habit formation. I think what we know is people who work out consistently, they form a habit and then it just becomes built into their lives. And when you talk to them, they can't imagine not working out. But formation of a habit is so hard.

3:03You have to have the intent to have the habit and you have to have the time and then you have to have the solution and the plan of what you're going to do. And I think for a lot of people, they could have a time problem. And we can always create time, but sometimes there are periods of life where time is really challenging. And then for others, it's the what do I do. So an example is I was talking with a fellow mom the other day of a friend of mine, and my son's a mom who we were talking about the importance of strength training as you get older. and she says, you know, I know I am supposed to do it, but I don't even know how to start.

3:44I don't know what I'm supposed to do, which was a great way of having the conversation to begin the process of what should you do. So I think it's a lot of things, but I definitely think time and know how are two critical ones. I think you're right. There are three in my mind. I think the number one reason people don't work out is they say, I don't have time. I'm busy, I'm up and running, at the moment I get up and God, I can't get to the gym and do this. I think the second reason a lot of people don't work out is they don't realize how critical it is in their lives. And I think, you know, I've heard you say this, I've said this on stage, if you had to do only one thing, right?

4:25So it's sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, the right supplements and meds. If you had to do one thing, it's muscle mass, it's strength. It is, especially if you're over 60, so I'm 63 next month. And it is the number one thing I'm focused on doing over everything else. So number one, people think I don't have time. Number two, they don't know how important it is in their life. And the number three is probably, like you said, knowing how, or what's the right way to work out, or how should, what should I be doing in a workout? And if you're listening and that's you, if you're just like, I'm gonna sleep when I'm dead, I'm gonna work out when I'm dead, if that's your mindset or you just haven't clicked in with how important it is, because for me, Crystal, this was not always me.

5:20I was in reasonably good shape, but I never had a focus on physical strength training, on weightlifting, on those practices, because I didn't realize how important it is until I really went on this longevity journey and longevity moonshot for myself over the last 10 years. I was like, oh my God, I have a lot of catching up to do. And the numbers, we'll talk about the science there and a little bit are extraordinary. And then what to do, right? You can hire a coach, a workout coach, which I do, I belong to three gyms, and I have two workout coaches. I have zero excuses other than, oh shit, I woke up too late.

6:03I've got 20 minutes or 30 minutes and I'm going to get you some push ups, I'm going to do some pull ups and stuff like that in the bedroom. But total solves a lot of that, doesn't it? That's right, yeah. And let's dive into... I want to dive first into the science. I want people, I want you to understand if you have not committed to your workout, right? And we've had lots of different podcasts on sleep, on diet, on meds and supplements and so forth. But let's get people hot and bothered about the need to work out. So, chair, what's your number one convincing data here? Well, I think the first one I would share is that as we age starting at 45 or so we lose 1 to 2 % of our muscle mass a year.

6:55I mean, we really start to lose muscle. And then if you start with that starting point, what you see in the data is that those individuals with stronger starting points from a strength perspective, they do what they do better from a mortality perspective. So I think for me there's a very staggering statistic which is that the bottom third of the population from a muscular perspective when you sort of test muscle strength has a 50 % increase mortality rate. So when you think about longevity, it's incredible. And then the other thing, there's a ton of science around how strength as you age prevents falls and falls are incredibly detrimental as all of us know who've had parents or grandparents go through the news experiences.

7:47There's nothing like a fall to really ruin your quality of life as well as potentially your lifespan. And I think even just getting injured we know this like as we go through our lives and one little knee injury, one little elbow injury, it can be minor can have a massive impact on your life. And so the best way of preventing any of those things from happening is to have strength and have a strong focus on balance as you go through, as you go through your life. So the statistics are so clear. The data and the science is so clear about how absolutely crucial strength is for you doing. Yeah, let me echo that.

8:25There is a direct correlation between the amount of muscle mass you carry on your body and your longevity. And that comes from a multiple areas. Like you said, if you fall and break a hip or pelvis over the age of, I think, 65, your one -year survival rate is relatively low, which is crazy because you end up in the hospital with a pneumonia and that's how my dad passed, right? He was in his 80s, but it was a fall, broke his pelvis and ended up in the hospital and it was a downward spiral. I know so many folks who've done that and muscle mass and strength allows you to catch yourself and prevent that.

9:04And also, by the way, the stress that weightlifting strength building puts on your bones helps maintain your stronger bones. The other thing is, and the data is very clear that if you're over the age of 60, the number one thing to do in terms of reducing all -cause mortality is building muscle. And it doesn't take that much each week, right? It's like it's an hour, twice a week, or half an hour, twice a week. Let's talk about the simplicity of tonal. And I want to get into how does this just work, how is it installed, how do you use it? I want to paint a picture for folks around this. But what I love is the ability to get rid of excuses when you only have a small amount of time.

9:54Yeah, that's right. So, absolutely. And then the only thing I wanted to add one last comment to you before sort of transitioning to how tonal solves that is, as a female sort of sort of in this space, which is very mostly men, I think, really very much focused strongly in the fitness and the strength space. And I want to use that as a platform, the fact that I am a female for the women out there because for men I think it's even a bit more part of our culture around driving to doing strength training for women and it isn't and it's almost more important for women because as we go through like from a menopause perspective and the shifting in your body that you have to do the strength work because you're not naturally getting it any other way and you're losing muscle even more so so I say this because I just think it's important that I use this platforms to help also educate women about the importance of strength training because we do see it's a harder adoption cycle for women to decide to do it.

10:55So and that's why my tone was great because from a practicality perspective there's a bunch of benefits about it. So I'll just kind of describe the product. The product itself is a digital weight system. So it essentially replicates a gym of weights and free weights and it puts in a very small space 7 by 7 because it goes on your wall and on your wall you basically see if you can see behind me the device you know you see a screen behind the screen is basically sort of some motors and cables and computers and what the device does is it allows you to have a very personalized and tailored weight training experience so it will respond to your body, it will understand what you're able to do, it will set weight appropriate for you.

11:41Then on top of that, you pair great content. So you'll choose a program, a class, and you'll have an instructor come on the device and walk you through everything you're supposed to do, and then the weight will automatically adjust for you. And so it's just completely personalized and tailored to you in your home. It's definitely home device. You won't find it in a jam. This is a home device. And the intent of it is to be super convenient. So you can go from rolling out of bed to getting your strength routine in very quickly. You don't have to worry about going to a gym. You don't have to sort of take back to the kind of concept of time as my problem takes away the time issue.

12:20You can do honestly 10 minutes goes a long way. You can do a lot in 10 minutes. You can do a full lower body set of squats and lunges in five minutes or in 10 minutes and it has a huge impact. So you can do that 10 minutes at the beginning of the day, 10 minutes at the end of the day, which is not a whole lot out of your life and you can get your strength training in. So it's incredibly convenient, super personalized to, you know, and also to your whole household. So you can have my husband has an account. He does a totally different set of things and what I do and how I focus. And so it serves the entire household, super convenient, super personalized.

12:56And that's really the power of digital weight. Yeah, I love that. How long does it take to install and how is it installed? You order what happens? The first thing you have to do is a little bit of a survey so we know what kind of wall work in install and we can pretty much install on any wall. There's a few exceptions, but pretty much any wall. So we have to understand like your home and make sure you have the right space, but pretty much everything is pretty straightforward and easy on that regard. Then within two weeks you're going to have an appointment to have your tonal installed and you'll have professional show up.

13:32they'll fully install it. So the customers don't have to do any installation. It's, it's, um, it goes on the wall and it's a large device, but it's really not that different than a TV mount. So there's sort of a bracket that goes on behind it that the device gets installed. You hook it up to the Wi -Fi and then from there you set up your account and then you can start it and that's really all there is to it. Everybody wants to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Companies called Fountain Life and it's company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians.

14:11You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician and they burn in the room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage 3 or 4 going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vascular, an AI -nabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexascan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup.

15:00It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Mice will find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife .com -slash -peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people who reached out to us for fountain life memberships.

15:47If you go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter will put you to the top of the list. Really it's something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. So you, one of the things that has been a recent increase for you is incorporating AI into the system and really becoming a data driven workout system, right?

16:28And I think about the notion that when I join a gym and I'm a member of, like I said, three gyms and two coaches and the coach is the part that is the expert that helps me and motivates me, but you do that with video and with AI in the system. Can you speak to that? And how much data have you collected over people and how you using that data? Because data is the oil of AI systems. Yeah, and we have incredible amount of oil, so to speak. So I'll start with the data collection. So it's, you know, from a privacy perspective, I want to reassure the audience. Like we don't do anything with the data other than make the experience better for you.

17:14So there's no selling, sharing, anything like that around the data. The data is just to create better workouts and to provide personalization. So we collect data on everything that the user does. So the weights that were set, if they were adjusted, how many reps you did, how many sets you did, and then as you get stronger and we add weight, we see all of it. So we also note a note any time that's taken as rest time. So every piece of data about the experience around the individual is tracked. We have over 150 ,000 members who have completed millions and millions of workouts. We've tracked billions and billions of pounds lifted.

17:57And so we're able to take all of that data. And then we also, the benefit too is we've line to to nearly see what happens to everybody. So one great stat is a new member in their first year, their strength score. So the strength score is this kind of calculation. It's a bit of an algorithm that kind of assesses your strength. And the great thing about it is you can watch it grow and you can watch it improve if you get stronger and stronger. But now our average member, their strength score goes up 80 % in the first year of using tonal. And it's just incredible. They grow. And actually a lot of the growth happens in the first several months, which is fantastic to see.

18:34We also see that they're using, you know, there's a lot of use in so we track all of our usage data. We see, you know, as people, we see the cohorts and the patterns, we see the spikes in January, we see a little bit of the dips in March, we see people start to get ready for summer bikini weather, you know, we see sort of all of it. So the great news is we have this amazing foundation of data, and then we're leveraging the data into ways. So the first way I talked about that already It was the original use of AI and the device was to create the weight pattern needed for the member at their point in time.

19:09Right, so we're setting the weights that they need. Then, what we're working on now, which is really exciting, and it's in beta mode, so we've certain numbers, subscribers who have access to it will be rolling this out as we go along this year. But it's truly getting to take in the language models that everybody's so excited about right now. working them with our data so that the member can get direct advice. It's easy to process and they and it also gives the member a way to tell us what's going on with their lives. So you could say something like like for me for example right now. I've had it as a goal for myself that I I've never learned to play tennis from I'm kid.

19:52I have two kids at Lebtonus I have a husband who loves tennis so I was like I need to learn to play tennis. I have to just I have to do this I have to get decent enough at tennis that when the kids are grown, we can all go out on the tennis court and have a fun little family tennis match. So you could say to Tony, which is what we're calling our AI, you could say Tony, I'm training for tennis. I'd like the best set of programs for me to get better at tennis. And then literally the AI will sort of feed back to the customer based upon all the data that we have, and there'll be a logic process to it.

20:29So it's like understanding, okay, if you're going to be good at Sunnus, you need to be good at serving. Shoulder work would probably be really useful because I was like, learned a lot of serving as in the shoulders and the legs. And so we would say, okay, here's, you know, the exercises that you should do for this purpose. And it's super cool. We're really, really, really excited about it because it leaves us to understand. Yeah, Tony, I mean, it's, yeah, it's a full language day. Hi. Yeah, that's true. So we've never before getting, I mean, I've been doing consumer work my whole career and the Holy Grail is understanding the customer.

21:02Like every good consumer executive wants to understand what their customer needs and deliver it to them. And it's always been so hard to understand what a customer really wants and what do they need. So this is so exciting because we can have a conversation and we can say, what do you want to accomplish? Like what's important to you? And then we can go back into our data sets and we can help give that member guidance and a bias and of course it's gonna get better and better over time. So we're truly getting to like incredibly personalized recommendations. I wanna, again, there's a lot of entrepreneurs listening here who are working on their massive transformer to purpose, their moonshots, their starring their companies.

21:46I am curious about the origin story for Tonal. You've been the CEO now for how long? Last year or two? Yeah, that's right. So what is the origin story? And just give us a little bit of background on how this device, what it looked like in the beginning and how far it's it come in terms of iterating your product market fit? Yeah, so Alia Rady is our founder. I'll do my best to channel him. He does such a better job than I do. Talking about his story, because this is really his story. And Alia's story is that he's an engineer incredibly talented, both hardware and software engineer with a lot of phenomenal experience.

22:35and earlier his career, he worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and his health fell by the wayside. So he got to be overweight. You know, he went in for physical, the lab results were not good. He started to think, I have got to do something about this, I've got to get healthier. He quit his job and decided to go on a health journey. And he did a ton of research and he realized how important strength is. It's not only we've been talking about strength from a long term and a longevity perspective and I think a lot of the research he was doing at the time also painted the picture that strength is incredibly important for weight loss.

23:18People who are going on a weight loss journey think about cardio because that's kind of the dominant narrative in America is get out of the bike, go to a cardio class and that's how you lose weight, go for a run. And certainly, there's so many benefits to cardio, not to disparage that at all, but there's incredible benefits to strength training as it relates to weight loss. The more, obviously, the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you're going to burn, et cetera, et cetera. It's amazing. Yeah, and very, very true. I mean, it's literally when you see weightlifters who have built a significant amount of muscle six, seven thousand calories because they're burning so much in their muscles.

24:06That's right. So he said, okay, I'm going to focus on strength. So he was in the gym every day. And he sort of looked around and he's like, I'm an engineer. Everything in my world is digital now. Everything I do is digital, right? We digitized everything and everything has an intelligence kind of layer built behind it. And here he is like, in a gym and he's like, okay. So my options are to hire a personal trainer Kind of do what they say kind of do some research online, but then there's all these gaps in the experience So the muscles I train I have no record of the reps. I do I can't see cause and effect Because it's only going to be as good as like how my bookkeeping is and do I go then take all the reps and I put it in Excel And then I try to see you know, did I see growth?

24:54I mean like I know it's so funny because It reminds me of when I was, I remember being in my 20s, I was before I got married and had kids was in the gym all the time every day. And I remember keeping an Excel spreadsheet of all the things I did in the gym. Every weight, or every move, the number of the amount of weight, the reps, the whole thing, because I was trying to see correlations in outcomes with the work that I was doing. And so here we were even many years after that experience and he's like, there's no, why is there no better way, right? Like why is there no, no better way? And he said, I'm going to create a better way.

25:38And so he got to work on this notion of digital weight, which is I'm going to create the sensation of weight. I'm going to create this experience of weight. And then because it's done digitally, every element of these periods will be tracked. We'll have better understanding, knowledge of how cause drives effect, truly, when it comes to weight training, and then can build a platform for personalizing. Anybody's weight loss experience, their muscle building experience, their aging experience, is all of these different kind of experiences, which can be completely changed really by having this platform.

26:19As humans, especially if you're an entrepreneur, there's a competitive element in your life. You set objectives and you try and hit them. And being able to measure your progress is really important. I mean, so I have a in -body scale that I use that measures my lean body mass and my muscle and my total weight. And I'm like, that's, you know, last year I set a goal of adding 10 pounds of muscle, which is, wasn't easy. But I remember the reason how I met Tonal was I was speaking at an event. And I mentioned this, and your chairman was in the room, and he said, you should do it with Tonal. And I said, OK, I did it by increasing my protein intake to a gram per pound, adding creatin, and going from a couple workouts a week to literally obsessing on trying to get five workouts per week.

27:19And really, in that regard, it consumed a lot of time. And now the challenge for me is maintaining muscle mass, because, as you said, the term, term is sarcopenia and it's the loss of muscle and the ability and the difficulty of adding muscle as you grow older. And there are lots of different approaches to it, but the one approach is actually doing the work. And so I'm excited about getting my tonal installed for the specific reason of getting to from four days a week to five or six days a week so that I can always squeeze in those You know, probably at 10 minute sessions, but probably 20 minute sessions.

28:06Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's, we see, so an average member session is 35 minutes. And that's because we have members doing a full session, 45 minutes to an hour, and we have every variety, as you can imagine, from a time perspective. And then you see, you know, people squeezing in 20 minute sessions in between. And we're still, a lot of us are still in these remote worlds, where we're maybe a couple days weak at home, and you get squeezed in in between a couple of meetings and get it done, which is really an incredible value. Yeah. I remember reading a science fiction story years ago where it was, I forget the end of it, it was basically individuals that were put into these mexuits like an Iron Man suit and the Mech suit could be programmed to become your workout buddy.