Barbell Shrugged - 115- NPFL President Jim Kean Details the Future of the National Pro Fitness League

Episode Date: April 30, 2014

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview COO and President of the NPFL, Jim Keene. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here. With Doug Larson and CTP, we have traveled to Atlanta for the NPFL Combine. If you don't know what that is, go to NPFL.com, check it out. We are standing here with Jim Keen. He's the COO and President of the NPFL. Howdy, y'all. And he's come on to explain to us exactly how this NPFL thing is going to work. I know

there's a lot of questions out there. This has moved really fast. We podcasted about this a little while ago, quite a few episodes ago, and we did our best job from looking at the website. I got to talk to Tony a little bit. Might not have had all our facts correct. Yeah, you know, yeah, we most definitely probably didn't have all of our facts right on but uh we've got jim here to clear all that up and you were brought on to the npfl i guess you were you were approached by tony to kind of change yeah make it change the game a bit well he didn't know uh that he wanted to change the game but you know i had the whole silicon valley thing going on and it was kind of interesting story december 3rd of last year, I sold Wellness FX.

And literally that day, I was running around trying to find a bank account to deposit some escrow money to drive some weird LLC thing to support the transaction. I hate it when I can't find bank accounts to put large sums of money in. Happens all the time. I was supposed to go meet him, and I apologized because Wells Fargo couldn't get it straight. But I finally got down there, and we were talking about the league and whatnot. And I started saying, well, you know, it's not a website, actually. This is an unparalleled opportunity to design a sport from the ground up. Because if you think about football, that was 100 years of making,

and only in the last 30 years have you grafted this digital interface on top of it and all these other tools. So you kind of had to adapt to the sport versus build the sport from the ground up with game mechanics, fan engagement, all these different things that the last 10 years, the internet and Silicon Valley has really popularized.

It's kind of like the NBA. They changed the sport. I know they even changed some rules to make it more spectator-friendly, to make it easier for people to watch on TV, all that kind of stuff. But this is a sport that's being started with the technology already in place, so nothing has to change. You can build the sport around the technology and the fan base. Pretty much. I mean, the kind of golden frontier for this sport is to make it more approachable.

Like if you see somebody and they're supposed to do 100 pull-ups and you can't quite decide how many he's on or this and that, or let's say you talk to your buddy for a second about his girlfriend or grab a chip, you look back and go, damn, who's in the lead? Yeah. Or it has to pass the beer test. Can you look back and go, damn, who's in the lead? Yeah. Or it has to pass the beer test. Can you walk away and come back and see who's in the lead? Can you?

And a lot of this stuff, the sport's not that unapproachable if you think about it. You have to do some infographics. You have to do things that allow somebody to instantly look at it. And we're really trying to make this more mass appeal versus just for the hardcore fan. Hardcore fans fans going to find a ton of stuff they love because it's going to be statistical and you know crossfitters like to count everything right yeah so what kind of innovation have you guys done where you can tell who's winning no matter like if you show up halfway

through through an event or through a but should we should we go rewind a little bit and maybe explain exactly how the whole event works? Yeah. Maybe from an overview, what the spectator or an athlete could expect from the NPFL, how this sport might be different than anything people have seen before, and then maybe get into that. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

People probably are like, these guys just jumped right into the weeds. So we patented something called the start line and the finish line. No, wait. That's already been done, right? But anyway, you do take a couple things that people have to have anchors that they can walk in and say, hey, I kind of recognize this is a sport. So in a race, there's always a start line and a finish line. So if you look at our grid, there's a start line and there's a finish line. So it passes the beer test, right?

You walk away to get a beer, you come back, you go, who's winning? The guy who's closest to a finish line so it passes the beer test right yeah walk away to get a beer you come back you go who's winning the guy who's closest to finish line right so this is a team sport yep two lanes uh-huh rigs between uh the new rig that's coming up is going to have more angles from both sides of the audience so everything we're doing is designed to provide a spectator fantastic angles into looking at the sport. All that's going to be supported with infographics. So we have a couple of screens for our users that every combine now we've run tests, just started out really Rube Goldberg or kind of MacGyver type of, you know, paper tests as well as PowerPoint and all that. But then we take those, we go back, iterate, write code against it and come back. And this week we're going to deploy on a couple races some infographics so

we have one that has just an ungodly amount of reps and the athletes three of them are really close together so it's one of those typical kind of workout races where you're going who the hell is in front all right so what we're doing is kind of a gas tank principle where you start with a full tank and as the reps get done and the scorekeeper on the side inputs it into our system you'll see this tank depleting and you'll see who's in in front and who's behind so just look at the screen and it'll be obvious absolutely you'll say oh wow team a's in front look at their tanks less so uh people essentially consume information the most efficiency efficiently with pictures yeah all right so i know i do yeah so if you have a picture that

graphically represents a number boom you just go that i totally understand who's in front what's going on everything like that going forward was interesting is uh we're going to experiment things like uh radio frequency devices called rfids so you can have each athlete with an RFID, right? Like they do in triathlon races. So when they substitute, you can see if they committed a foul by going on before they should have, like before they were tagged. Kind of like hockey.

Yeah, exactly. So the coaches are going to have the freedom to be like, you know, they can pull athletes at any time during the event. You can pull an athlete, throw another athlete in. Yeah, but they have specific rules how they tag in and out. And on a couple of the workouts, they have to stand in particular parts of the grid,

which is the flooring that we talked about. And the grid basically is the same size as a basketball ring, so it's 50 by 94. So one thing, you guys actually did a fantastic job with almost zero information on your last podcast. I was sitting there blown away. I mean, you had, like your comment about this could be in high schools. Right.

Well, it's interesting. If it's standardized, one guy out of the Dallas Combines said two of his athletes, they're advancing to Vegas. And he writes me. He says, I'm setting up my own grid and my own knockoff rig. I want your dimensions, this and that, because I'm going to start having pickup games and I'm going to train my athletes on the grid. So you can really see how once you standardize like that across a certain dimension, then it allows you to capitalize and piggyback on existing athletic facilities.

Yeah, I think it's really great because people always want to mimic after, like, say, the CrossFit Games or something, and they think that it has to be a three-day event, and it has to have, like, it has to, you know, part of it has to be inside and outside and all this kind of stuff, and you guys kind of change the game, make it more accessible to the average person because it's only a two-hour event.

I don't have to commit a whole weekend if I want to go watch it or if I want to have a pickup game. I could bring one gym versus another or something like that. It makes it very hard to scale. And we could just use the rules that are provided by you guys. You guys create the rules and y'all are testing it and we don't have to try to make them up as we go. Well, because it's standardized too, going forward, we can sell the rigs.

And then increasingly over the next three to five years as we go, Well, because it's standardized, too, going forward, we can sell the rigs. And then increasingly over the next three to five years as we go, we can embed electronics, for example, in the flooring. So you'll have LEDs. So as I was telling Mike,

you know, one thing that you can possibly do is if you're tracking somebody with a GPS across the grid, this athlete, when they're doing double-unders, right, imagine you're standing there

double, double, double, double. It goes 19, 20, 21. Right. Audience can see it, but so can the athlete. And maybe you color-code it like it's red if you're behind. So there's all kinds of ways that you can kind of enhance the experience for the athlete and the fans, make it really approachable. In a way, it's almost like a gigantic video game.

Yeah, so when you were brought in you saw this huge opportunity to to kind of tweak things from like a you have that you have that silicon valley background it's like oh how can we use technology to to make this more fan friendly you got you were telling me earlier that you would you're gonna do an experiment on sunday yeah right you're doing an experiment. Sunday is the day. So the ladies go on Friday here at the Combine. If you want to, you know, they've got a one rep max on a lot of lifts.

They've got to do rep maxes on some gymnastics movements. And there's just a couple other things. They're going to do a couple of individual wads, Metcons, and then the guys are on Sunday and then on Saturday. And on Sunday, or Saturday, and on Sunday they team up. So you're going to pair people up, and they're going to actually compete, and we're going to be able to see what it looks like,

what an NPFL competition might look like. But you guys are running an experiment, and you're trying to figure out during the combine how to get more fan engagement. Yeah, so I want to make it instantly approachable so i imagine uh when you're developing uh computer applications and and user-friendly games and whatnot uh what you do is create what you call personas like uh my average fan is 36 year old woman well educated has two kids uh and would love to have a sport that catered to her. And maybe the way she brings in new fans is somebody goes, wow, I'd like to date her.

And then somebody goes, wow, she loves the NPFL. And some guy goes, what is the NPFL? I don't know what it is, but she likes it. I'm getting into that. I'm going to go tell her I like it, right? So then he goes in and sits down. He may not know anything about the sport. So that's what we call, if you have this continuum of naive to really super nerdy moneyball fan, right?

Yeah. So on this end of the spectrum, you want to bring that person in, have an easy on-ramp where they immediately have some sort of subconscious attachment and delight to the sport. And then what you want to do is then migrate them to a higher point as a higher level fan where they're constantly consuming more statistics, they get involved in fantasy, all the different things. But you usher them along, kind of basically an addictive path. Right, yeah. I mean, I know a lot of baseball, football, basketball fans.

I mean, they know all the stats of all the athletes. And that's something we don't do now. We don't know the stats of the athletes. They can say, oh, I do this or I do that, but people are going to show up here to the Combine and their stats will probably start there, right? You guys are collecting their stats here? Yeah, no, we're

going to be a completely stat-driven engine, but the other thing is we see ourselves as essentially an open-source company, so we'll have these stats collected, but then we're going to make them available to all of our legions of followers in really easily supported data structures. So what that means is you can pull these numbers down and begin because a lot of the moneyball stuff and baseball happens by a lot of rocket scientist guys who decide to devote their lives to wasted and non-sports versus things for humanity or whatever, right? But then they compete with each other to who has the most useful statistical analysis. And then teams go out and actually live for guys like that.

You were describing to me something that happened, I think it was in LA. Yeah. That was the two guys started at different weights. Oh, so the barbell ladder was fascinating so um i ran that as an experiment on the last race collected a ton of stats and then i fed them back to the coaches afterwards and so we were having a debate about who's more effective because they said wow this guy started higher on the barbell ladder his total poundage was better but then the coach says yeah but i allocated a minute to him and athlete male athlete three uh the one who had the third highest total of the

four athletes uh the male athletes he actually only had 40 seconds but he was so efficient and fast even though he started 135 into the 210 uh he actually did 25 pounds a second. And this other guy did 21. So he actually was a far more useful athlete during this match. You're trying to see who can get to the highest total poundage in a certain specific time or who can get to the highest weight or I missed what the event was. So race seven is always some sort of ladder. In LA, it was a snatch ladder. And this one was a power clean

to a snatch clean or a squat clean, I'm sorry. It's still a ladder. The way that one scored is you get two points in that race for your total. Whoever has the subtotal,

the highest female total gets another point. So you kind of got to use everybody on your team correctly. Can you move the ladder as fast as you want? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, like you can even run somebody through and tell them, look, you suck at barbell sports, so we're going to run you through,

and our other guy is going to get more time on there. And you have a seven-minute time cap to see who can get the most poundage. Gotcha. What are some other things you're going to do with the stats? Like you see maybe people using these stats for, because, you know, people, people create games and stuff out of these stats. Well, you know, I'm actually, so here's, here's an idea. Memphis, Tennessee, you guys just got awarded the team ownership group there. What kind of skills do you put together to have a fast twitch workout team that can go out and kick ass?

Do you need like four or five Swiss Army knife type athletes who are pretty darn good at everything? Maybe a guy who was 28th in the world in the open? Or do you run over to Eastern Europe and grab some sort of Kazakhstani who... Probably grab the Kazakhstani for sure. 63 kilogram women who can clean and jerk 308. And you say good strength to weight ratio. I'll teach you how to do some of the other stuff to get by. I mean, how do you put all that together?

So one of the big debates going on right now, as far as between fans and coaching staffs, is who's a more effective athlete and who's going to allow you to run these races efficiently and quickly. So there's a lot of factors. The other thing we're really starting to see is you can be a spectacular athlete, but if you're a knucklehead, you may not do well on the team. No, I mean, cause you have to have this kind of certain amount of proprioception about your teammates. Like there's one workout where it's three guys going at once or three girls, and you can tap out when you're on the field. So like the very last part of that workout is deadlifts.

So this one event, this guy, these three guys run up, and this one guy, just huge, strong guy, crushes the deadlift 15 reps like that. The other two guys were maybe on their third or fourth rep when he's done and he was smart enough he actually went over to the guy who even though it looked like he was uh ahead he was the weaker deadlifter and he's fading fast so he tapped him out finished his reps and then tapped out the other guy got his last five damn so gotta let the ego go there if you're an ego driven athlete, man, you may not do well in that arena. And interestingly, the team they were competing against, they were ahead when

they hit the deadlifts, but they lost on athletic smartness because one of their guys tried to tap this guy out and he waved him off like, no, no, no, I'm going to crunch out all the reps and this and that. And that was totally wrong move. He didn't have athletic proprioception about what was going on around him. Yeah, how involved are the coaches going to be during the matches? And it sounds like you're going to be able to move people in and out. Are the coaches going to be, can they, like, not step onto the court? Or, you know, are they going to have to yell? So right now we're letting them sit in there.

But we're debating things like maybe it's like basketball where they have to be on the sidelines. They can run up and down the sidelines. Right. Uh-huh. But right now coaches are pretty involved. I mean, you'll hear them say, okay, go to 12, go to 12. Like he'll be on rep eight. And so really good coaches are going to be really awesome at figuring out what the capabilities of all the pieces they have and be able to figure out who has got the most in the tank

or who's particularly best for a particular situation. We actually, being kind of fiendish game guys, we see coaches as being almost polarizing subjects full of debate. So I think we will have won. If afterwards on talk radio somebody's going, that guy needs to be fired. He is the biggest fucking idiot in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Blah, blah, blah. He should have never subbed that guy off. He lost 10 seconds. They lost the match because of that. And there's a lack of discipline about tag outs. It continually penalizes them. I mean, you can imagine the debates. And then you can see the debates. And then

you can see the afterwards, maybe the guy has the kind of stony face Bill Belichick. He says, so coach, why'd you do that? Well, I really know the physiologic capabilities of my athletes and my best judgment team that we needed to sub out athlete A for athlete B because, you know, his skill set isn't beyond that, you know, anything like that. In a sport like this, I mean, we'll compare it to CrossFit quite a bit for, I think, maybe obvious reasons, but, like, you know, the coaches aren't involved in the sport while it's happening.

You know, most coaches are looked at as, like, the strength and conditioning coach, you know, the program design. But now you've got coaches that, you know, they're actually coaching the sport itself, which a little bit different yeah completely i mean i i think it takes them up to another level of how much they need to know about their athletes and uh what they can do when to sub them out too and if you think about it it's it's kind of i mean i'd love to get your guys's take on after a two-hour match with 11 races with breaks between. So you get to sub out, but there's only one speed, as Tony says, is full speed.

Yeah. And I've talked to a lot of the athletes afterwards who are pretty good friends of mine, a lot of games athletes. They said, what was the difference for you in these races? And they go, you know what? It is a completely fast twitch sport and maintaining kind of being warm. Oh, yeah. And just going. Staying warm for two hours.

Yeah. Even though it keeps cycling and all that, you know, it's just a completely different mentality. So there's a lot of different things. And I think the coach is going to have to be really smart. I also think this year is kind of everybody's pretty friendly. Of course. We're all in this together type thing. But next year you start getting big TV contracts,

sponsorships, things like that. When every half money come in, you start getting blood in the water, right? Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun to watch. No, it's going to be great. Controversial sales. It's funny, in 2006 I was actually involved in MMA. I was actually involved in MMA.

I was filming a documentary. So I got to know a lot of the fighters. And that was the year that Dana White got that first big TV contract. And it was transformative. I mean, the athletes all of a sudden weren't working three jobs to support training. If you even had one or two fights, you're getting $50,000, $60,000 a year. And you could support that. And then if you moved up even a little bit two fights you're getting 50 60 000 a year and you can support that and then if you moved up even a little bit more you got a bigger pay scale and so what happened is actually all the old school uh mma guys got cycled out because you had this

huge influx of like xd1 players who just missed the nfl draft yeah yeah you know the the athletic potential went way up and i actually think this is going to be kind of a vacuum that draws people in. You're going to attract athletes which would normally not compete in the sport of fitness. Yeah, and it's truly a worldwide sport too because if you're going back to the Memphis team, you know, Memphis Grizzlies. Oh, wait. You may be thinking, I need that Kazakhstan-y person who is going to look at this as living large just for a three-month season.

It's not like you have to grow up playing American football to play the game here. These are all basically transnational skills. Yeah, especially if you don't have to be well-rounded. That expands the pool of athletes exponentially. Yeah, a lot of guys don't get past regionals if they have even one hole in their game, but might be just spectacular athletes. Yeah. I'm interested to see how, and this is one of the things I want to talk to the,

I mean, I'm sure you already have, like, your ideas on it, but I want to talk to, like, all the coaches, managers, and owners, and how they want to round out their teams, you know. Do they want all specialists? Do they want, you know, what's their ratio of specialists to generalists? Because it's probably going to benefit you to have you know the generalist you know a rich froning you know yeah so how do you how do you how do you rate a draft board so imagine we get through vegas right yeah you have about 200 athletes on there um and you so you have uh you know strength

you have body weight a couple categories let's say you design a, because Americans love zero to 100 scales, use it for school and for wine and whatever. Right. So you start saying, all right, that athlete's a 90 because of this, this, and this. I mean, whoever comes up with that scoring mechanism, those are all things that right now NFL teams pay for as far as analysts who do that so there might be an opportunity for uh jobs created as analysts yeah if you're a good statistician mel kuyper's draft board you could have the barbara shrugged uh in a draft board and you could put something

up there and probably have 10 000 people calling in to complain about how badly you organized it if you're if you're a superb statistician, just shoot, hit me up on Twitter. We might have a job for you. We'll figure out how to monetize that. All right, let's go ahead and take a break, and maybe we'll bring Tony on next. And thanks for joining us, Jim. Oh, you bet. Always great to see you guys.

Appreciate it. And we're back. We thought we were going to get rid of Jim, and then we were like, oh, we. Oh, you bet. Always great to see you guys. Appreciate it. And we're back. We thought we were going to get rid of Jim and then we were like, oh, we should talk about more stuff. So what we didn't get to,

we started talking about in the first half and we didn't get to is you're running an experiment every single combine. So you're running almost like behavioral experiments with the fans

and experiment setting up each one of the sunday competitions uh differently what's the experiment uh you're doing here this weekend in atlanta so uh there's 11 races in um in a workout or in a match as it were and it's a weight so one of the things i'm experimenting with is how do you keep score? Because one of the hidden frontiers is how do you translate a judge's interpretation of either a good rep or a fault and then get it up there, right? Yeah, that's a tough part. I've seen this in competitions where you've got the announcer who might be a little overzealous

counting reps out loud for an athlete and he's done. And no, he's done. The athlete's confused, the judge is confused, and everybody's confused, and then everyone gets mad at the announcer. I know because this has happened to me. Well, they've been trained by a bigger sport. The score's

instantaneous. That's an expectation for a televised sport. If you can't crack that, it's really tough. That's a big mountain to climb. And so with this sport, counting reps accurately in real time, and you have to narrow kind of the latency of when the movement occurs and when it's presented to the audience. So it's actually kind of a tough problem, right? I imagine like a room full of people, like just zeroing in with video and then you also have the refs maybe with a clicker or how does that how are you guys trying to electronic clickers are actually uh interesting but then on these events we found that you possibly are going to

have to put a server in right here because there's so much latency even bouncing off to a server off site uh like a thousand miles away type thing. So there's a couple things you need to consider there. You know, the other things that you're looking at are possibly, for example, Pixar across the bay, the way they developed, like, Woody for Toy Story. They actually took Tom Hanks and digitized him and made him move by putting these points on all his joints. Oh, right, yeah. That's why he looks so lifelike.

That's why he became, you know, and they developed this library after a while. Right. So, for example, classic, is that a good front squat, right, is hip crease. Right, right. But everybody's physiologically different because you have different levers and angles. Absolutely, yeah. crease right right but everybody's physiologically different because you have different levers and angles absolutely yeah i know guys that they're you know their their hamstrings are on their calves and it still looks like they're like right out parallel yeah so um what if you said every time you're uh you have a new athlete come in because about a half hour scanning process you put them

in a pixar type thing where you digitize that athlete and mark where all their joints are. So you could actually then do visual ID types of technologies where somebody does a squat. Basically, it just computes if the hip joint's lower than the knee joint automatically, even a fraction, you know, good rep. So the judge wouldn't need to record the rep. The computer would just count it automatically. Yeah. So that's just count it automatically. Yeah. So that's obviously not happening tomorrow.

No. If it was, I'd be going public and all kinds of good things. But that's the way we're thinking about problems like that is how do you narrow that gap from when the activity occurs to when it translates to a number. Yeah. So a couple of experiments we're running this weekend. First of all, people love statistics. So we have this crude printed out program that we do comparative statistics and circulate that. And so we have people observing how people even leaf through the program. And a lot of times we'll rearrange the pages in different order.

We'll keep some out. So there's a couple of things going on like that. As far as the slides that go up, we put up different infographics and we'll just have people casually go talk to folks, not identify themselves and say, hey, so can you understand that? What's that look like to you?

So type things like that. So we tabulate a lesson. So like the lay person understands it. I mean, that's a big mistake that happens a lot in a lot of businesses is the assumption of knowledge. You work in this so much, it's obvious to you, but you don't realize it's not obvious to the average person. Well, you know, philosophically, actually, we've organized a whole company around this

methodology. We're not doing gut instinct on anything we posit hypotheses on everything from user delight to how people like to sit down in an audience so we're taking it all apart and these combines are big scientific tests and we run a couple different scenarios that are within that each time and whatever one seems to statistically play out the best then that's the one we'll put more resources into and retest in a different way. And that's very classic A-B testing on websites. Right, right. You know, like you ever seen those carousels? So on a front page, you'll see different pictures. Oh, right. Well, actually, what happens on those sites is statistically when a picture rotates up,

if you click on that your database records that and usually on companies are really good at this like you'll have four pictures in your carousel you'll statistically say which one's the winner and loser and then you'll rotate off the weakest one every two weeks yeah and put a new one in but then you keep a library of all the past contender pictures and then sometimes you'll recycle one back in because maybe it was a really good picture going up against the equivalent of the new england patriots and it would have done well by itself so you're constantly rotating that out and it's all statistical it's not somebody with their own because every single one of us has prejudices and biases absolutely about what's going to work and

so sometimes you get it right, but sometimes you don't. But gut instinct is usually a recipe for failure. Yeah. I think it's good to start maybe with gut instinct guesses and then test those. Hypotheses. Yeah. Hypotheses. There you go.

That's a good word. Makes you sound smarter. It does. Yeah. And it means it's not gut instinct. Right, right. I have this hypothesis that a user is going to want to see things this way. Yeah.

Yeah, and then you test it, and then you might be wrong, you might be right. And it kind of removes the bias. I like it. It's super rigorous, too, because it means that it's kind of evolutionary. It's subject to pressure testing by the people actually consuming the product. Yeah. So your guys' rules aren't actually set in stone yet, are they? Are you guys still refining the rules of the competition?

Absolutely. Everything is, I mean, we have a good structure just from a top-down macro, but we're constantly testing, all right, does this word even make sense? Like one big ongoing thing we have is we're developing the language of our sport. So we carefully consider every single word that we see coming into our ontology or our language that describes our sport. And then we'll actually have some pretty good debates. Say, hey, I heard this word or does this make sense? And if it doesn't, then we'll say, okay, we can't use this word anymore.

If you hear it, make sure you correct somebody saying it until it becomes part of that. A little bit of NLP going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all that is going on right now. And it goes down to like a really interesting, so the grid, right? So, you know, it has four boxes.

It has those hash marks. So one thing that will probably come up is we are probably gonna have to name parts of the grid oh yeah because i was sitting the grid is like the field of play but you guys refer to it as the grid yeah sports language right there it's the grid okay and so the uh i was listening to a spectator in la saying hey, see that player over in, Oh, second box, third hash mark. Yeah. And if there is a number on that, so one approach you could take there is to say box, boxes one through four, and there's four hash marks per box.

Right. You could say the player over by 23. Yeah. Right. So instantly you just shorten the cognitive layer there of how people recognize where somebody is located. And it was interesting. A couple hours later, I was standing there, uh, like listening and making notes about coaches language to players and, uh, listening to the coach doing the same thing. Um, I want you to go sub for so-and-so kind of over by that pull-up station.

So what came out of that is we actually are engaged in an effort of developing our sports language that names the various parts of the grid. Because if the coach could say, I want you to go to 23B, meaning the pull-up bar in block two across from grid mark three, you can start calling plays. Right. So, you know, there's a lot of benefit. And all these things are used to shorten the time from when something happens or when an action happens and making it fast and seamless and crisp and smooth, which is what creates kind of user delight.

It's awesome. Using that speech. To shorten the time it takes to do substitutions and whatnot. You can just call an athlete off and then say, go over to like 4B. There's a microphone right there. Yeah, instead of using four sentences, if you looked at an athlete and said, you know, 41B.

Boom. Yeah. He's out there maybe climbing the rope, the second rope in box Boom. Yeah. He's out there maybe climbing the rope, the second rope in box four. Yeah. So all those things will mean you're a more efficient team. Your substitutions

are better. And over time, these rules are going to be so well understood that the margin of victory is going to be not because of athletic performance. It's what team functions the best as a smoothly running machine. Right. And cuts out those seconds because every second is going to really count.

So you guys started, made the announcement for Masters. Every team has to have one female and one male Masters, and that's 40-plus. Is that right? 40-plus. Is that right? 40-plus. What made you guys do that? Because there is a good-sized contingent of people who want to have that kind of everyman relationship. But, you know, a lot of guys in their 40s maybe are sitting there going, ah, when you're in your 40s, you're no longer an athlete.

And yet there are some spectacular guys and girls who are over 40. I mean, look at some of the Olympic lifting guys out of Europe and Russia and whatnot. They have long careers, and they're super strong. So as a specialist, you can see them go pretty well. And every year you have people in the games who are in their early 40s. Oh, right. They just never, they fade on day three because they don't have recovery. Right, right.

But for bursty type things. Yeah, they're probably just fine. Yeah, they can stay healthy. They can handle that volume. Are there going to be any rules on like how much, you know, you have to have a master's division type individual on your team, but is there any rules on how much they have to participate per match? Well, one has to dress every match. And so in some of the matches, you can't get away with just avoiding using somebody. And as it were, you're going to get some guys who are either really strong

or ex-gymnasts who kept it up. I mean, they're going to contribute equally well. But, yeah, they have to dress. I mean, one issue that came up to me that I was thinking about is, okay, I think Masters over, say, a 16-week season, maybe you're doing one or two matches a week. I think the wear and tear on that. So I wonder how many you're going to have to have in reserve. Right. So how many people have to dress?

So right now we're saying four men, four women, one Master man and one Master female. Okay. But we're considering making that five. So that's another area we're experimenting on is team composition that dresses actively for the match. And you just mentioned having people in reserve. Like how many people can you have on your team that aren't necessarily competing in each specific competition?

So every team has 18 people and there's two men and two women in reserve. So there's 14 that you can choose from to dress for each match and you can basically dress four people four men four women per match and you guys have any rules or regulations on how often everyone has to participate i know you mentioned the the master's athlete but just for everyone in general like can you have the same four people competing each week and just use them until they get injured yeah it's up to the teams who they want to have dress every night. So just like a basketball game, it's like you can play the same five players the whole game

and everyone else just sits on the bench and you don't have to play any specific players? Pretty much. It's all about what team gives you the best chance to win in any given night. All right, so we're in 2014. We have an abbreviated season this year. This is just to kind of kick it off. Not going to do the full season. When does it start and when does it end how many matches are we looking at for 2014 yep uh it starts towards the end of august we don't have an exact date on that but within a week uh you know probably last week of august runs five weeks and then we have playoffs

and then a championship game early october how many matches is that going to be? You said one or two a week. How's that going to work out? Actually, it'd be three. So it'll work out about three matches per team. And so it'll be 24. And this year is going to be more to establish bracket play. Yep. To seed you for the playoffs.

So basically you're going to do all these, and then every team is going to be in the playoffs, but it's just going to be what your seeding is. Okay. How many teams have we got now? So I know you guys, I mean, people are kind of coming on board. Some have announced, some haven't announced. Some people are kind of waiting.

How many are like officially going? Officially we have five. Okay. We have the San Francisco Fire, the L.A. Rain, and the Phoenix Rise. And, you know, for some reason the the West coast decided to go down to, uh, elements of nature. I mean,

the rain is a play on rain, but, and then you have the Philly founders and the New York rhinos, because you know, the rhinos are indigenous to New York city. All right. Uh, got any more questions for Jim?

I think I'm good. He's all out. We'll think of a bunch right after we get off this podcast. Oh, of course, of course. We may try to see if we can get you on with Tony here in a little bit. Or maybe we'll just have Tony by himself and then we'll. You know, pull Tony in because he's been, you can look at him as a guy who's been thinking about building a gigantic

bonfire for about 10 years. So every time he saw something he liked, he stored it away in his brain. And he has incredible detail about what the sport should look like uh you know down to look and feel messaging everything it's been a pretty amazing experience well i said all the hard questions for him yeah yeah i'm like the eye candy the fluffy guy i don't understand that question uh thanks for joining us. Everyone, go ahead and make sure you go to NPFL.com and check it out. That'll work, right?

Yeah. Or profitnessleague.com. Check out that website if you're interested. Website is looking good. It's coming along. In the very beginning, it was simple. I actually did that on purpose. Keep people away.

Yeah. And we still had amazing traffic. I came on and Tony said, how's that traffic? And I went, wow, for a brochure where site I'm just completely stunned. Yeah. It was like, it was like WordPress white. Yeah. It was like turn of the century, black and white newspaper and people read every word. It was unreal. And so we've just gradually upped it. We'll switch off the WordPress scene. We're writing our own application right now. That'll probably happen before the Vegas combine. I was like, it'll work.

Okay. So web app. Excellent. All right. Also, make sure you go over to barbells shrug.com, sign up for the newsletter, and we will update you anytime we visit cool places like this. Later, guys.

Right on.