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Unlocking Elite Fitness: Insights from Olympic Performance Director Troy Taylor
Ever wondered how to stick to your fitness goals like an Olympian?
Unlock the secrets to elite fitness with insights from Olympic Performance Director Troy Taylor. In this episode, Troy and Anthony Hartcher dive deep into the power of tracking progress, harnessing big data, and utilizing AI to revolutionize human performance.
Discover how consistency in training can be the game-changer for achieving optimal health and fitness. From setting realistic goals to understanding the nuances of protein intake and muscle re-composition, this conversation is packed with actionable strategies. Whether you're an athlete or just starting your fitness journey, these expert tips will elevate your approach to achieving your fitness goals.
About Troy Taylor
Troy is an internationally recognized leader in human performance, with a track record of developing elite, multi-disciplinary teams. Currently, as Senior Director of Performance Innovation at Tonal, Troy drives evidence-based fitness thought leadership and spearheads research to enhance human potential through resistance training. Previously, he led U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s High Performance team, contributing to 500+ major international podiums and 15 Olympic medals. With experience across 7 Olympic Games and mentorship of sport tech startups, Troy is at the forefront of integrating AI with human performance.
Connect with Troy Taylor
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TonalStrong
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tonal
X (Twitter) - https://x.com/tonal
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbiYlM8W87Sn-bmQrgF5GLQ
About me&my health up & Anthony Hartcher
me&my health up seeks to enhance and enlighten the well-being of others. Host Anthony Hartcher is the CEO of me&my wellness which provides holistic health solutions using food as medicine, combined with a holistic, balanced, lifestyle approach. Anthony holds three bachelor's degrees in Complementary Medicine; Nutrition and Dietetic Medicine; and Chemical Engineering.
Podcast Disclaimer
Any information, advice, opinions or statements within it do not constitute medical, health care or other professional advice, and are provided for general information purposes only. All care is taken in the preparation of the information in this Podcast. [Connected Wellness Pty Ltd] operating under the brand of “me&my health up”..click here for more
A podcast decoding young brains and behavior in a digital world.
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Tracking your progress is a really important one, or shows up consistently within our data, that the more that you're, you're, you know, you're checking your progress. I lifted more. How much did I lift this week? How long did I work out for? Just showing that improvement. Because if you work out, you will improve. The like, the growth in muscle mass will be slow, right? Unfortunately, physiological changes take some time. Like, the mirror doesn't immediately change, the scale doesn't immediately change necessarily, depending on what your goal is. But you do get stronger, but you just don't necessarily notice it. So being intentional in tracking progress is also a really good one.
Anthony Hartcher:That was Troy Taylor, and you've landed on the me&my health up podcast. I'm your host, Anthony Hartcher, a clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist. The purpose of this podcast is to enhance and enlighten your wellbeing. And today we have Troy Taylor, who is an internationally renowned human performance leader. Troy was the high performance director at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard. In that role, he led the world renowned U.S. Ski and Snowboard High Performance team, supporting their athletes in winning more than 500 plus major international podiums between 2015 and 2021 and 15 medals, seven being gold medals, at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games. Over his career, Troy has worked with seven Olympic Games, supporting more than 500 Olympians and 50 Olympic medallists presented at major international conferences around the globe, as well as mentored many Olympians to achieve high performance outcomes. And you've got Troy Taylor on the show today to share with you insights in terms of what he knows around human performance, exercise, remaining consistent, and achieving your goals. So without much further ado, I'd love to welcome on the show, Troy Taylor. Welcome on the me&my health up podcast. How are you, Troy?
Troy Taylor:I'm doing awesome, Anthony, and yourself?
Anthony Hartcher:Fantastic. So great to have you on the show and really looking forward to this conversation around health optimisation, exercise and remaining consistent, and then how we can tie in or leverage big data or AI to really help us propel out, I guess, our fitness forward. So I look forward to this conversation. But before we get underway, I'd love to hear how you have arrived at what you're doing today.
Troy Taylor:Yeah. Well, number one, thanks for having me on and two, looking forward to the conversation. My journey is one of sort of, I guess, two parts. I spent the first 20 years or so of my career in elite sport. I did an undergraduate degree in sports science, a master's in exercise physiology. And when I was doing that master's degree, I got to volunteer for the British Olympic swim team back for the, I want to say, Athens Olympics. I date myself, a while ago volunteering actually with an Australian head coach, Bill Sweetenham, who was the head coach at the time. And essentially that was my start. And over the next 15 or 20 years, I kind of spent most of the time crisscrossing the globe, worked for the British Olympic team, the Canadian Olympic team and the US Olympic team as a sports scientist, as a physiologist, as a strength and conditioning coach, and later as a high-performance director, so running Olympic teams. And so from 2015 to 2021, I was the high-performance director of US Ski and Snowboard, the Olympic team there. And a lot of that role is about seeking new innovations. Like there's a quite large support team. It's a, it's a big NGB or national governing body. And a lot of that role is, is forward thinking. And so I was in the US. I don't have a tonne of government funding necessarily. And so my innovation inspiration came from Silicon Valley. It came from startup world. And so I started forming these relationships with early stage startups around. We did projects in brain stimulation, transcranial direct current brain stimulation, projects in virtual reality. We filmed the 2018 Olympic course in full 360 video. But just basically immersing myself in the startup world and I got the buck. I absolutely loved the startup world. And then in 2021, well, actually in 2020, in the pandemic, we're getting a Tonal for my Olympic training centre. The training centre closed down with lockdown. I ended up giving that Tonal, installing that Tonal into Michaela Shiffrin, a very famous skier, arguably the best in the world ever, into her house. I got to try it shortly afterwards. Loved the project. Loved the machine. And then the sort of the combination between, hey, this startup fitnessy world and kind of thing that I really enjoy and my expertise in performance, maybe there could be some synergies here. And about a year later in 2021, I was asked to join the company to head up their performance innovation team.
Anthony Hartcher:Wow, what a journey. It's uh incredible. Yeah. Yeah, an exciting roller coaster you've been on. And, you know, you've really got a lot of insight in terms of elite performance and how to help those that are chasing big dreams, how to help them optimise their journey and get them as fast as possible to what they're seeking to achieve. And for the listeners, obviously, we probably don't have the elite Olympians listening today. However, we've got listeners that are really keen on health optimisation and improving their fitness. And, and I mentioned before how important it is to stay consistent in order to stay on that journey. So based on your experience in this field of, you know, elite optimisation, what can you share with the listeners in terms of how to remain consistent with your training? Because there's no doubt that Olympians also have troubling periods through injuries, through just workload, that they're just sick and tired of keep doing the reps, right?
Troy Taylor:Yeah. No, absolutely. There's uh whether it's an elite athlete or I'm a 45-year-old like you have aspirations to stay healthy, fit as long as I can, to do the activities I love to have, you know, see my kids grow up and their grandkids. And that's what our membership base is about. And that's actually one of the reasons why I switched, is you spend 20 years helping the best athletes in the world. And that's awesome. But really, you're making relatively small differences. You know, if I did with the 99.9 percentile before I ever started, I did anything. Hopefully, I had an impact in my career, but you're talking the margins. Whereas a product like Tonal or looking at more general consumer fitness, the opportunity is just so much larger to have a much bigger impact in hundreds of thousands and millions of people, but also the magnitude of impact that you can have and really be life-changing, whether it's in, you know, people who are type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetic or have cardiovascular disease or, you know, struggle with sarcopenia or osteoporosis and the role of exercise within that. And so how do you start? Well, it doesn't matter whether you're an Olympic athlete or an everyday Joe, you have to stay consistent. Like no one out bout of exercise is going to be a magic pill, right? It's the repeated bout of doing it time and time again. And so mining some of our database at Tonal, one of the things that I found really interesting was people that sign up to a program versus just do one-off workouts are, on average, 12% more consistent. So just the act of joining a program, right? And that also makes sense when you think about Olympic athletes. We plan out quadrennials, what you're doing for four-year cycles and then a one-year macro cycle. You don't need to do that. But having the next four weeks, I'm working out, you know, with a reasonable schedule, as opposed to I'm just turning up and kind of winging it as I go into the gym or into my home gym. But having a plan and having a program, 12% more consistent just by doing that. And this is association data. This is not necessarily causality. But certainly, I think habits leaves, you know, clues. So signing up to a program, I would certainly say is, is one. I would say number two, looking at the data, people who have a narrow exercise window, if possible, in terms of the time. To have a set schedule of when you work out is going to help you, if you're, you know, not everyone can do it all the time. We have work, we have commitments, we have family life. But if you have the luxury of saying, hey, I'm going to dedicate my workout is at this time. And for me, that's very much like I drop my kids off at school and I come and I work out. And if I don't get to that, like in my home gym, if I don't get into the gym by about, you know, 15 minutes after I get home from dropping the kids off, my workout day is somewhat done. I won't get into the habit. Things will come up, email starts coming in. So having a small exercise window, our data really says, and it doesn't matter whether it's morning or evening, it matters whether it's a small window. There is a slight bias towards morning being more consistent than evening. And my, my estimation or my guess on that data is less things come up in the morning, right? If you're exercising, you didn't have the bad day or the email from work that came and distracted you or the kids had a bad day. So very much about sort of small exercise window. And then a couple of other things that I found interesting, some of our data was the the role of social interaction, even in something like Home Fitness. Like I think there's a lot around, you know, strong evidence based around accountability buddies and having someone to work out with, and I'm super supportive of that. But also just even, uh, we find that members that on the app and follow another member, like, they have, they follow their workouts, you know, give them a high five, that kind of thing, virtual kind of things. If you have between one and ten friends, you're like, 10% more, more consistent. And if you have like, 10 or more friends, you suddenly grow like about 20% more consistent on average. So that idea of interacting becomes really important. So follow a program. With that, give yourself a little flexibility. Like, if it says three times a week, make it like, hey, I'm going to work out two to four times. If you do two, don't fall off the waggon, but have a program to set with and then give yourself a little flexibility within that program. Definitely do the the social piece and then try to keep your workout window relatively small if you have that luxury. Those would be three tips to be more
Anthony Hartcher:That are great tips. I can see how they would consistent. be relevant in terms of, you're signing up, you're committing to something when you sign up to a program, and then you allocate time, booked it in, it's, it's going to happen generally. And as you said, morning times more likely because there's less things that are going to come in and disrupt us and take us off course. And then having that community, that tribe that we go along with on a journey, uh, sharing similar goals, I can see how that would all support us.
Troy Taylor:Yeah, it's, this is not rocket science. One of the things I like about our data is it's on 175,000 people training in the real world. So this is not like a training study in terms of, this is just what, these are the associations that come up. So it's nice to see those core, core pieces come out, you know, that we see in smaller, smaller, short 12, 16-week training studies, and you see it out over 52 weeks, over hundreds of thousands of people. One other one that I will say is tracking progress. Tracking your progress is a really important one or shows up consistently within our data that the more that you're, you know, you're checking your progress. I lifted more. How much did I lift this week? How long did I work out for? Just showing that improvement. Because if you work out, you will improve. The like, the growth in muscle mass will be slow, right? Unfortunately, physiological changes take some time. Like the mirror doesn't immediately change. The scale doesn't immediately change necessarily, depending on what your goal is. But you do get stronger, but you just don't necessarily notice it. So being intentional in tracking progress is also really good.
Anthony Hartcher:Yeah, it makes sense because, you know, seeing those changes in terms of body shape and things that, that takes time and, you know, focusing on more of those incremental gains going from workout to workout, as you said, you know, are you lifting more or how you do you feel? You know, is it showing that you're pulling more forces or whatever, Newtons or whatever, out of that? I'm not sure how you measure the resistance. But in in terms of like that that really brings in data because if we know where, or we know what our goal is, what we want to see is that we're tracking towards that goal. So based on all your experience, you know, with human optimisation or sports optimisation and startups with data and AI, what can you share with the listeners in terms of what they should be tracking?
Troy Taylor:I think a lot of it, like, what we're really talking about here is sort of what elite athletes would call process goals. There's outcome goals and process goals. And like, the outcome goal is winning an Olympic medal or setting a world record or doing whatever it might be. But like, if you surely, purely fixate on that, you'll, you're unlikely to ever reach it. It's such a big, far away kind of things. And so what are the process or the intermediary goals or data that I'm getting KPIs that I would like that I'm moving towards? And so it's important that, like, you know, if I was working with, say, an elite cross-country skier versus a soccer player, they would have different KPIs. So, you know, I think what that refers back to is, what are your goals and what are KPIs relevant to your goals? So I'm going to pick the ones that are most common for our membership. Number one, the most common goal for our membership is just to build muscle mass. They're not looking to get on the bodybuilding stage, but they're trying to buildmuscle mass mainly for the longevity effects, for the health benefits that come with muscle mass, not necessarily, you know, yes, I'm sure there's some aesthetic-related goals in that. I want to, I want to look good when I go to the swim pool with my kids, but it's not, I'm not competing on the stage or anything like that. And so if I'm thinking about muscle mass, some of the KPIs that I would be tracking would be something like on the Tonal would track for you. But hey, how the number of hard sets am I doing a week? Like that would be a great metric per muscle group. So if I, there's a reasonable amount of evidence-based that says, hey, starting almost real small if you're a beginner, but like, one to four sets a week, you can start to get muscle mass gains. If you're working close to failure, you don't have to work to failure, but you do need to work hard, probably one to five reps from failure so relatively hard, so hard sets, but that would be a great metric to track over time. And you want to increase it, and it's not an, you know, an increasing forever, but you want to do a cycle where I gradually increase 10 or 20% per week up to a point, and then I might de-load or take a little rest or increase the intensity a little bit. So I was lifting, I don't know, let's say 50 kilos for 10 repetitions, and I was doing five sets a week to start with. I increased that up to six or seven or eight, and then I might go back down to six and increase the weight from 50 kilos to 60 kilos. It's a kind of form of double progression. You kind of increase the number of sets and then increase the weight or resistance. So that might be a way that I would track for muscle mass. If I was thinking more about, um, trying to think of what much it might be, but like something like, say, hey, I've got a goal of getting lean. I want to, like, lose some fat mass. That's another popular... We know that calories in, more important, probably, or as important or more controllable than calories out. So exercise can have a useful tool in that, but it is not the only tool in in things. You're not going to out-exercise a bad diet, but you can diet and, you know, have worse or better or worse exercise regimes. So if your goal is into losing fat mass, you want to make sure you're on a calorie deficit. You can do that purely by restricting the calories that you intake, or you can also by restricting the calories intake and increasing the calorie expenditure. And so work, you know, like force over distance is essentially how many calories you will burn. And so something like Tonal would track that on a regular basis. We can know how much work or calories we have burnt within a given workout, and we can steadily increase that, or we can manipulate that more to the point to what our diet is and to make sure that we're in a calorie deficit. If you are not have something like Tonal that will automatically track for you, then you can think about like, just like the amount of work you're doing in your session, the amount of total sets or volume that you're doing. If you're doing roughly the same workout, if you're doing more, you will be increasing your work. Obviously, if I'm doing bicep curls, doing 10 sets of that isn't the same expenditure of doing 10 sets of deadlifts per se. So you want to have the similar there, but something like Tonal would track that metric for you and report it back to you, or you could kind of do it yourself.
Anthony Hartcher:In terms of building that lean muscle mass, that first one you mentioned, and you're measuring that via the strength and the amount of hard sets you are doing. In terms of the nutrition around, like, supporting that growth around protein, because you hear lots of different numbers around protein and what's the right amount of protein, you know, should I be ingesting in order to build that muscle mass? What's your thinking on that?
Troy Taylor:Yeah. So number one caveat, I'm not a registered dietitian or a nutritionist. I do think I'm qualified to make this statement, but I just want to, want to clarify my scope. I think the latest meta-analysis, it's James Morton's from a few years ago, would say, in order to optimise muscle mass development, about 1.6 grams per kilo of body weight of protein to 2.2 grams per kilo of protein is I think what most people would say. And it's actually, if you look at the, if you go and look at the research paper, if you're really geeky, Morton, I'm going to mess up the year, but a couple of years ago. And if you look at the slope of the graph, there's an inflection point, but it's not great at 1.6. If you go to 1.2, you're probably not that bad. So I would say at least 1.2, ideally 1.6 grams per kilo, which works out to about 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body mass is a really good place to be, which is, you know, if I'm, what, I'm, I don't know, 80 kilos, 85 kilos, I'm like, you know, I'm eating 150-ish grams of protein a day, somewhere in that kind of region. So I think that's important. And it does, it seems more important protein requirement if we're calorie restricting. So if I'm in a calorie deficit, I probably need a little more protein than if I was in a calorie surplus. And so it seems like that plays a role in it. And it also age seems to play a role in it. And the older we get, we get a little less, little more anabolic resistant. We need a little more protein to maintain, which is actually, if you look at like some of the dietary data, the opposite of what people do, they tend to eat less protein as they get older, not more. And in order to sustain muscle mass or maintain or grow muscle mass, we probably want to be on the upper end of that, 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo. If we're either in a calorie deficit or we're old, or if we're both, then definitely on the upper end. And I would say if you're, you know, have a really high body mass, maybe you're obese, you know, BMI plus 35 plus and a large amount of fat mass, then you might be better looking at, like, a fat free mass calculation, which I won't give now, but more about, like, not just your total mass, but just your muscle mass to sustain that because it gets a bit out of whack. Sometimes, if someone, say, 200 kilos or something, it's, it's not, it doesn't scale perfectly, but that would be my recommendation. And doesn't matter if it's diet, diet, you know, meat protein or vegetable, plant-based protein. I think the evidence says as long as you get the total protein across a wide range of food sources, you'll be in a good spot.
Anthony Hartcher:And in terms of whether you like your goal is, say, toning versus weight loss is on the toning side of things, is training faster good, or should they, you know, have some nourishment before they train? I mean, like when you look at the weight loss side of things, it sort of makes sense that, you know, the more they train faster or, you know, the more, as you said, they're taking less calories in and working out more and hence got that calorie deficit. So what about the toning, if you're building muscle mass around fasting and training faster?
Troy Taylor:Yeah, the, the research evidence, as I read it on fasting, is very much my take on that is it's individual preference. There's very actual little data to suggest that when you exercise, if we take about more aerobic exercise, because I think that's more people are doing fasted, you burn more fat
Anthony Hartcher:Fantastic. Thanks for covering both sides during the immediate bout of fasted cardio. You do a 60-minute steady state zone two kind of effort, you burn more fat in that hour of working out if you had fasted than if you didn't fast, you burn more fat. But actually, if you look at it over 24 hour fat oxidation, actually levels out. The body is really smart. So you don't, you don't actually expend any more fat or burn any more fat totally. You just burn more fat in the workout. And then over the next 24 hours, essentially, if you're fasted cardio, you burn a little less fat for the next, you know, 23 hours that you weren't working out. And if you were fed, you burn a little more fat. And so they come out to pretty much neutral in virtually every research study that I've ever seen from that space. So I take that as if you like to do fasted cardio, go for it, there's definitely no harm in doing it. But there's certainly probably or there's very unlikely to be a significant benefit for fat loss in total because we care about like the net daily change. From a resistance training perspective, my take on the research is you want to we used to be really focused about protein timing, you said you had your anabolic window, if you were really into lifting about 10, 15 years ago, I got to get my pre-workout shake, my during workout shake and my post-workout shake and, you know, if I missed, if I didn't eat 30 minutes before to 60 minutes after, I might as well not train. I think the research in the last three to five years has really shifted our views on that in that it matters most about total daily protein intake. When you take it has much smaller of an effect in that, if you're hitting that 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo over the day, you're probably 90 something percent covered with your basis, you want to make sure it's in at least two feeding windows, I think is what the research evidence would suggest. You don't want to heat just one like massive steak for dinner and nothing else. And you got, I got 100 grams of protein, but it was all in one meal. Actually, even that says you can still oxidise, but probably the data says around two feeding windows are optimal. So whether you do it fasted or not fasted, I don't think makes a huge difference to your muscle mass gains per se. But if I was thinking about like optimising that, I personally, I don't think the research evidence strongly supports it, but I don't think there's enough research really out there. I wouldn't, I would be trying to eat within about a two-hour window of training either before or after or both. I don't think it's like this 90-minute window, where it's got to be perfect. But I would probably go in, you know, having some food and some protein and some carbohydrate a little bit before and a little bit after, primarily to maximise my workout. So I get the best out of my workout, I can push myself hardest, I can do the most amount of work. And we know that most amount of works if I'm doing more hard sets because I'm fed, I'm more likely to get the outcome. So it's not the feeding necessarily that makes the difference, but it's my ability to do the hard work, which I think feeding probably helps. of things, whether you're chasing weight loss or, you know, trying to build muscle masses, and, you know, different goals. So, um.
Troy Taylor:Yeah, I'll do them both simultaneously. The idea of recomposition, like re-comping is the idea of putting on muscle mass while simultaneously losing fat mass was, you know, thought to believe, like, almost impossible. If you're not a complete newbie or you have large amounts of fat mass, it definitely doesn't happen. And actually, there's a really nice research paper out by Chris Barakat, who's out of Tampa, that actually shows that, yes, if you're a bodybuilder on stage, you're probably not, that's not the best strategy. And if you're, you know, an elite endurance runner or whatever it might be, like with, you know, tiny amounts of muscle mass, neither of those end spectrums are best re-comping. But pretty much everyone in the middle can simultaneously lose fat and build muscle, actually a lot, lot easier than we used to think. And it's a strategy that I personally do. I'm not into bulking and cutting stages anymore in my my training career. I'm trying to re-comp. I'm trying to, you know, lose, put on a couple of pounds of muscle and lose five to ten pounds of fat pretty much all the time. That's my, my perfect kind of strategy. And so I go through phases, but that re-comping, and for that, it's like, don't be on too big a calorie deficit, like 500 calories max a day, don't be bigger than that. Like resistance train at least sort of three times a week. And you do that close proximity, that hard training is probably the stimulus as well, eating adequate protein.
Anthony Hartcher:Fantastic. Now, thanks for that sharing. And I just wanted to tap back into the mindset side of things. So obviously, at the start, you mentioned that it's really helpful to have a goal and then to have measures or KPIs to track how you're going against that goal. And then there's that whole thing around tying into programs and having a commitment, which could be a commitment to a goal as well. And then that community. Outside of that, what's really important around the mindset?
Troy Taylor:I kind of touched on it on the bit, but the idea of, like, cognitive flexibility in that you can, you don't have to be all or nothing. I think what most people tend to do is commit to a goal. I'm going to achieve this, hit really hard at it, fall off the waggon once, and then I'm done, right? And it's like, and that cycle of basically, okay, well, next New Year's, I'm gonna recommit. And like, January 1 to like 15 is like perfect. And as soon as you make a mistake, you fall off the waggon. And so that concept of cognitive flexibility is the idea that, hey, I'm going to be in this type of window. I can, you know, I want to work out three to four times a week, but if I only do two, that doesn't mean that I should, you know, I should completely fall off the waggon. Or it allows me the flexibility. I had a bit of a down week at work. My kids were off at camp. I got five workouts in this week. It gives you that flexibility to kind of go up and down and don't tie things so rigidly with such rigidity to a specific thing. I think that's huge because we're all going to suffer setbacks and how we deal with those setbacks psychologically, I think is is really important. Again, I'm not a psych, uh, like I'm not an RD. But I think that's something that we will talk a lot around um would be that flexibility to do that. I think that's probably the biggest mindset thing, I think that people can do just to stay consistent over the long term is a little more flexible in themselves. There's actually a research study, it was the behaviour change for good, Katy Milkman, that did a, she's a Wharton prof in behaviour change, but they studied gym analysis and tested 52 different behaviour change strategies. And the, I think the biggest or one of the top three, at least, strategy, was they gave people a micro incentive, nine cents. I think it was, was tiny, tiny amount of money for returning to a workout after a missed one. It wasn't, don't miss two in a row. That was their whole thing. And that was the most powerful strategy for keeping people engaged was this nine cents, might have been seven cents, but small amount of money for not missing two in the row. And I think it's that same kind of, kind of, I guess, psychological kind of proposition that's playing. But this idea of a bit of flexibility, don't miss, don't, don't fall off the waggon completely if I make a mistake.
Anthony Hartcher:Fantastic insight. I really like what you shared there, because that all or nothing approach, it's, it's sort of the same thing with people jumping into programs. They'll jump into the programs. I'll go full hog into the program and just immerse themselves and, or, you know, 100%. And then they finish the program, they think, oh, phew, you know, it's done now, it's done. And then they, you know, it gives them the licensing effect to then take months off and then, oh, shit, I better get back onto a program because I've put so much weight on. And what you've shared is really that seeing it more as a sustainable thing for a lifetime. You know, what can you sustain and keep going for a lifetime as opposed to just jump on the bandwagon and jump off the bandwagon? And, and then I like what you shared around that study, around, you know, if you fall off the cart, just get back on. It's just, you know, like, you missed a day. So what? Just get back on.
Troy Taylor:And I think it's so relatable, like I, I do it with training. I find my like with food, I'm like, oh, like, you know, I'm not a rigid dieter, I generally flexible dieter, which means I have a rough macro target and a rough calorie. But sometimes I'm like, oh, I woke up and I had like, you know, chocolate croissants. I'm like, did that ruin my day or, you know, do I, you know, ruin my day in terms of meal or do I, do I, you know, I can get back on my diet or eating more normally anytime I like. But we have this kind of all or nothing mentality of where we kind of, kind of put things away. So I think that's super important for people to realise.
Anthony Hartcher:Yeah, because it's that, you know, I'm either good or bad. And then when they're bad, they beat themselves up. And then they sabotage themselves more because to make them feel better, right? So it's the never-ending sort of cycle. Whereas if, you know, it's neither good or bad. It's just I'm on this journey. And yeah, so what I've, you know, had a croissant, but just get back on track. And, you know,
Troy Taylor:Yeah, and not that there's anything wrong with a just. croissant. It's just, it's not aligned to my, my necessarily goals of re-comping. It's not a whole lot of protein and doesn't, doesn't meet my calorie requirements, but there's nothing wrong with it. It's not to be demonised in any way.
Anthony Hartcher:Yeah, and that gets back to that labelling things as good or bad, and yeah, and then thinking, oh, you've done the wrong, you know, you've been, you're terrible. So really appreciate the insight, Troy. And I'd love to, um, for you to share a little bit more about Tonal and how people can connect with Tonal if, you know, they're really stimulated by, you know, what you shared around, you know, signing up to a program, having that community support, being able to measure their progress through AI and all the smarts. So yeah, please share.
Troy Taylor:Yeah. So Tonal is essentially it's the device on my wall behind me, but it's an entire gym with elements of personal training that kind of fits in your space. And so, yeah, you can do 250 or so movements. It creates the resistance via electromagnetic motors, so much like a Tesla versus a combustion engine, if you want to kind of think about that way, which means it can be small. It can generate a lot of resistance in a very small, compact space, has TV screens with coaches and interactions, can measure your form. There's programs, 300 programs, 5,000 workouts, and yeah, just just bolts on your wall. So it's a pretty convenient kind of option. So as I say, hundreds of thousands of people that are now sort of training on this regular, and one of those advantages, which is beneficial for the company, but allows us to be beneficial to the users, is every time anyone lifts, you generate all that data off the back end. So about 50 hertz, 50 times a second. So we just passed 200 billion pounds lifted, 6 billion reps, people from 18 to 80 plus years old. And so really learning about how people train in the wild, how we can help them be more consistent with the things that we've talked about. How do I build product features or my team build product features that help us do this? How can we do push notifications or, you know, learn your specific habits you normally work out when you drop the kids off at school? This day you skipped it. Can I prompt you, you know, nudge you back into a way of doing it? So, so, yeah, just a really, really awesome piece of training equipment to fit in your house if you so desire. You can learn more about it. Tonal.com is probably the best way to learn about it. There's also an Instagram that shares lots of our member stories and things that they train.
Anthony Hartcher:Fantastic. Thanks for sharing that, Troy, and I'll include those links you mentioned into the show notes. And I just wanted to give you a massive thanks for coming on today and sharing such insight around, you know, high performance training as well as around, you know, how to basically stay motivated and consistent and help people achieve their goals, whether it be through gaining muscle mass or losing fat mass or, as you said, re-compositioning, doing a bit of both. So I really appreciate your sharing that insight. So thank you.
Troy Taylor:Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Anthony Hartcher:You're welcome.
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