Barbell Shrugged - How AI Is Changing Nutrition Coaching with Rami Alhamad with Doug Larson, Travis Mash & Dr. Mike Lane #844

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

In this episode, Doug Larson and Dr. Mike Lane sit down with Rami Alhamad, founder of Alma and former creator of Push, to explore how AI is changing nutrition coaching and performance tracking. Rami shares his background in engineering, strength training, and startup building, including the journey of creating Push, the velocity-based training platform later acquired by Whoop. The conversation covers how that experience in sensors, data, and coaching systems led him toward a bigger problem: making personalized nutrition guidance dramatically easier and more useful for real people. They also dig into what makes Alma different from traditional food trackers, including logging meals by voice, text, and photos, along with coaching features that help users spot patterns and make better decisions without getting buried in manual data entry. The second half of the conversation expands into the bigger picture of AI in coaching, health, and business. Doug, Mike, and Rami talk through how tools like wearable integration, supplement tracking, micronutrient guidance, weekly coaching summaries, and coach dashboards can help people stay more consistent while giving coaches better visibility with less friction. They also discuss the future of AI in human performance, why great coaches are more likely to be amplified than replaced, and how the real opportunity is using these tools to automate low-value tasks while preserving the high-trust human relationship that makes coaching effective. For coaches, athletes, and performance-minded listeners, this episode offers a practical look at how AI can improve nutrition and decision-making without losing the personal element that matters most. Links: Doug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, Doug Larson here. And this week on Barb Bell Strug, we sit down with Rami Al-Hamad. He's the founder of Alma, which is a best-in-class AI nutrition coaching app. He also previously founded Push, which is a very cool velocity-based training app that he sold to Whoop in 2021. And in this episode, we talk about how AI is changing nutrition coaching, specifically why people fail with food tracking, because the process has historically been very tedious and challenging to sustain over the long term, which leads into an interesting conversation regarding how tools like voice and voice and and or photologing are the two most convenient tracking methods available in the world today

and how giving AI secure access to your nutrition data can give you very inexpensive and yet hyper-personalized feedback to make eating healthier a whole lot easier. So if you care about performance, nutrition, coaching, and you have a strong curiosity about the world of AI and how it's going to change the world for us all. This episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell Strug. I'm Doug Larson here with Dr. Mike Lane and Rami Alhamma.

CEO of Alma or Alma nutrition what's the right way to say is alma nutrition Alma all the way alma all the way alma right on my friend you know dig into your background tell us how you got into the world of technology business nutrition all the things and then I've been using the Alma app lately very impressive I'd love to hear more about it but start with your background and we'll take it from there yeah that sounds great man I'm happy to so yeah I grew up I grew up in Canada in a little town called Waterloo went to school there studied engineering so I was one of those guys that my parents would give me a toy and my first instinct was to take the toy apart and see how it works on the inside.

And so naturally I fell into engineering. I immediately wanted to learn how things work. I studied mechatronics engineering, so I had to do with this computers and hardware and sensors. And then after graduating, I worked in a couple of technical roles as software engineer and hardware engineer. But very quickly afterwards, I caught the startup bug. So a couple of years out of school, I decided I want to jump. I want to learn how to build a business from scratch. So I started the, I still remember back in 2012, I just started the spreadsheet and I would put down all the ideas I had.

And at the time in my 20s, I was a total gym rats like Mark Ripitoe, power lifting, day in, day out. And one of the ideas that just kept coming back to me is like, man, all these, all my buddies in the gym were all kind of training, training programs and giving each other feedback. But, you know, I'm looking at the space. I'm thinking like, this is a giant physics problem. How come there isn't any metrics that can actually give me direct objective feedback every day? So instead of guessing what I should be lifting or just relying on purely RPE, what could be a useful metric for me to do? And I started digging in.

I immediately kind of started Googling, going on Google Scholar, trying to figure out what's going on. I discovered this whole world of Lossie-based training. And that was kind of like my aha moment. I'm like, this makes so much sense. This needs to be out in the world. And I started looking at what's out there. And at the time, it was pretty much a Tendo unit.

So I saw that, I knew I'm like, there's got to be a better solution out there. And I started digging in and kind of worked back from first principles into coming up with this first startup idea, which was called push. It was basically, could we build a wireless high-speed motion sensor that you can put on equipment and have it track what's going on and give users velocity readings, rep after rep, and then from there, be able to give them direct feedback. I knew this is something I would personally use 100% buy. So I started doing some research.

and dug in, I clearly could tell there's a lot of interest in it, then I just dove right in. And then, yeah, that was like, that turned into like an eight-year journey of basically diving super deep into the world of strength conditioning, understanding the levels of it, the entire athletic pyramid, working with Olympic level teams, pro-level teams, college, sports, high schools, private training academies, you name it. So it was one hell of a ride, traveled the world, got to hang out with, you know, teams like the Tokyo Giants and India's national Cricket team and so many teams in the US, I lost counts and it was kind of a really, really cool ride.

So I ran that business for about eight years, really, really enjoyed it. At some point in a founder's journey, you kind of get to a point where you feel like you've kept the learnings. And I got to a point where I just felt like, okay, I understood the space really well, and we were still making progress and innovating. But to me, it started feeling like, okay, there's now what else is out there? So my immediate instinct was, let's see if we can go down the consumer route and build something totally different. I started tinkering on the side and around that same time,

got introduced to WOOP and a few other companies ended up getting acquisition offers from few of them, ended up going with WOOP towards the end of that journey and exited to them in 2021. Yeah, and that was kind of like to wrap up my first startup. It was a good outcome for everybody. felt really good about, you know, the move from a culture perspective had made a lot of sense for us. It was a great fit. Spent a lot of time there making sure that the technologies were truly integrated. And then once we kind of got them all integrated, I wrapped up my time there and left in 22. Took some time off. I love camping. So I just went on a bunch of camping trips around the world. The highlight for me was Oman. This is a little bit of a hidden general.

a little bit of a hidden gem, but it has the second biggest Grand Canyon in the world, and nobody knows about it. So imagine the Grand Canyon, but it's you on like two German tourists. So we rented an SUV off-roader and we just camped to the top of the canyon. You can camp anywhere, like New Zealand, there's no permitting required. We just camped in a whole bunch of really amazing spaces. So did that for like four or five months and then kind of jump back into the ring right after I just couldn't help it. Yeah, that's kind of where. where I almost started. I just kind of do it right in.

I'll tell you more about that later. Yeah, I feel like that's the classic story. You have an exit, you got money, you got freedom, and then you start to get itchy after a couple of weeks or months. You're like, man, I can do whatever I want. And what I want to do is go start a new company. It's like the founder's way. Yeah, my wife called him, and I told her,

I'm like, I'm going to take at least a year off and go chill out and do whatever. And like four months in, I'm like, okay, I kind of, to say I stuff looks really cool. I want to see how I can apply it in health and do something interesting again. So yeah, barely lost it six months. Yeah, dude, 100%. Like, it's a bummer. MASH isn't here right now.

He's a huge fan of velocity-based training, as we all are. I don't think I've actually used the push app. MASH is tied in pretty close with Jim Aware over here. But I'm totally going to go look that up and go try it out. Now I've been a big fan of velocity-based training before it was called velocity-based training for 20-plus years now. Yeah, no, that's really awesome. Yeah, Jim-aware.

Jimor has got a wireless system. They launched towards the end of my time with push, I remember. So they've got the Nintendo unit competitor, and they've got another one accessory that goes on the bar. That's really cool. So what happened with the acquisition of WOOP is we effectively merged the hardware because WIPP had a motion sensor. They weren't really using it for much.

We ended up transporting all the algorithms, all the data to run off their hardware. So everything you see in WIP right now, that's strength training related is powered by Porsche algorithms. Yeah, dude, very cool. And then did you compete in anything back? in the day? I played rugby growing up. So that was kind of my sport of choice. I'm in Canada, so there is football here, but it's not the same. So rugby was just kind of drew me in.

I played rugby throughout high school, undergrad. And then in my 20s, I just got seriously into the gym. I just started power lifting nonstop and really focusing on that. And then as I got into my 30s, I just decided like, I still remember the time. I went with my buddy. of mine, I was like, hey, let's go for a run. And I couldn't run like a 2K. It was just completely gassed 500 meters. And I'm like, ah, it's probably not the right way to manage. So I became a little bit more of a, you know, what I call like a well-rounded athlete. So at this point, I run, I bike, I swim, done a triathlon last year. And I still lift. So I try to kind of combine them. Biggest challenges, I'd love to get your thoughts on this is when you try to, like,

your heavy lift days, trying to like sequence that with endurance is, really challenging. Like my my pace falls off cliff the day after and I can't keep up the same pace. I'm curious, I need to like spend a little bit more time to think about how to sequence my week a little better. Yeah, I've been doing most of the talk and so I'll kick this over to Mike. Yeah. Well, first off, you were talking about push and whenever I was at Kansas doing my PhD, we looked at that sensor as well as was the laser rack they tried to do through like power lift or otherwise for a little bit, which was. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you'll, Everyone sees the cringe so you can put together how I felt about using that.

But then that was before Perch, but that's when elite form had just come out for another camera system. And so that was what was neat about your method. And there was a there was a predecessor. It was like, was a Mayo. Yeah. The Maya test. Yeah. And that thing was like, it was like strapping an iPhone to a barbell.

Yeah. Like it. Oh God. And like if your positioning wasn't perfectly there, it was such a, it was, yes. Capturing barbell velocity and doing it in a way that. that isn't like the athlete forgot to put the peather on the bar. So you lost the set. Or camera perspective, it's such an interesting but cool problem

to look at because you can do really, really fun things about programming. So my advice to you for kind of optimizing the sequencing for the lifting and the cardio is just don't. Just lift. If you're going to lift, then I would say for the sequencing there, I'm always a big proponent of your head heavy lift, you know, brick it.

So you could always do the upper body lift and go run. So you shouldn't really have it. Or good old, it's your zone two capacity today. So who cares about your pace. But if you're going speed, that is a weird spot to be in. It's like, okay, where do you want the fatigue to go into? And, you know, it's a, yeah, that is a fun problem. But more to, because we've been using your platform with some of the folks that we work with.

It's such a, when you hear somebody, say you're like well that makes sense which is like as far as the taking the picture and starting the analysis what was kind of your first little like we know how big things are excuse me i'm i have a small human who's learning how to fight diseases so first she has to give it to all of us that way you know she can beta test it with the entire family but when uh when did you kind of first start thinking about the idea of building a system that could use you choose, you know, pictorial evidence of what the individual is consuming and then start the analysis because not everyone is potty trained at gunpoint and wants to weigh and measure every single

ingredient, much less be that person on the road and be like, I'm sorry, I would like 6.5 ounces of chicken breast and 8 ounces of only steamed broccoli, no added anything. Yeah. It's a really cool. So this is one of those problems that, honestly, gosh, it's amazing how technology. works. We've spent probably billions of dollars trying to crack this one over the last 15, 20 years, and then this transformative technology came up, large language models and the technology beneath is called transformers, and it pretty much solved it overnight. So the problem of taking a photo

and turning it into an analysis is actually much more straightforward than it's ever been, which is really cool. I'll tell you, let's kind of jump right into Alma now, since you're asking about like the photo taking of food. So with Alma, the venture I started last year, like a year and a half ago, the vision is really not to build a calorie tracker, is to build a nutrition AI nutrition coach. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of.

It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Artae is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre-imposed pictures. Arate is something completely different. Aratee is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature,

find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Artae isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit Arteelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. So our vision, and I'll tell you quickly about the origin story here,

our vision is we want to get to a point where every single person in their pocket can quickly whip up an app and have direct insights and feedback about everything they need to do with nutrition, whether it's meal planning, meal prepping, figuring out how they're doing on a regular basis if they're training for a sport or a marathon, know how to fuel properly and just have it all 24-7 available. And, you know, this was always a dream, but it was really, really hard to do it before. with thanks to AI now with this technology and what's happened in the last couple of years, it's finally here. And that's kind of what we're very focused on.

But when you think about building a great nutrition coach, that's AI first, the number one thing you need to do is figure out what people are eating, right? You can't actually coach somebody without understanding. You can't improve what you can't measure. So for us, we wanted to focus on making sure the nutrition tracking aspect is dead simple, as easy as possible, because we've all used different apps.

I used my fitness mouth for years, but they're painful, right? You sit there, you type apple and you get 50 apples, and they have insane variety in calories and some of grams and whatnot. And it's really challenging. So we wanted to make it just super simple. And we worked back from the idea of if you had, if your best friend was a nutrition coach, and you were texting them what you're eating every day,

and they just volunteered to help you out, what would you tell them? And that's what Alma needs to be able to invest, right? So that's kind of the modality. That's how we think about it. So okay, so in that case, if I have a buddy of mine that's helping me out, then what am I doing? I'm sending them a photo of whatever I'm eating, right? And they should be able to just figure out what's inside.

I should be able to quickly tell them for lunch I had this and for breakfast I had this and I had a handful of almonds and it needs to be able to figure that up, right? And that's kind of what we've obsessed with over the last year is making sure that experience is that simple. So like you said, Mike, we do really easy photo tracking. there's a number of apps that do this now. It's not like really cutting edge technology per se, but we took our own twist on it.

So with others, you take a photo and you're kind of stuck with whatever is in the photo. With Alma, you can take a photo, add a little bit of text beside it. You can take multiple photos. So my favorite way to use it is to, if I'm at a dinner party, I'll take photos of like three, four dishes that I sampled.

I'll just say I had a little bit of everything. And it'll figure out what's in the photos. It'll figure out that had a little bit and estimate it to the right portion for an individual based on that description. So it's a kind of really cool way to get your intake in without having to obsess over every calorie. Of course, the flip side of that is we do have people who are like hardcore

and they really want to get everything dialed. And for those, they can say, I had 6.5 grams of almonds, and Alma will find that for you. What's happening behind the scenes is Alma is actually not inventing calories. It's straight up going to the USDA database and a number of trusted databases we've partnered with, and it's trying to find the best match. So it's trying to find the best match.

It'll tell you and it'll estimate the portions based on what's available there and based on what you're describing. And it'll remember that over time. So it's like a really convenient, consistent way to track. So yeah, we're really excited about what we built. My favorite way to track with Alma is actually voice. I find it to be the most natural.

I'm walking the dog. I'll pop open. We have a cool feature where you can, without opening Alma, you can track. You can just press the action button on your phone and say for breakfast I had this for lunch I had this and boom I'm done so five seconds I've tracked my whole day up to that point and I have a good sense of what I need to do for dinner so yeah I also like that you can just say like yesterday at six o'clock I had this

yeah you know like dig through the app and figure it out and go to the scheduler and on and on it's just that fast that convenient yeah you can do that in if you can even do future login you can say tomorrow I'm having lunch this is like if you want to plan out your week it's really easy to just talk to it. That's what I keep reminding people. And users that end up loving Alma are the ones who figure that out quick. And once they struggle a little bit, and this is what we've changed in our onboarding now to make it more obvious,

are the ones who don't figure that out and try to use my fitness bell. So like my telltale sign you're not using Alma right is if I see a log where you're saying something like one apple and then a minute later, you're logging one orange or whatever. Like that's what I know. I'm like, you're using it like my fitness valve. That's not the way it's intended to be used. Yeah, I haven't actually tried this yet.

Tell me what the best way to do this is. As an example, it's very common that if I'm driving, I have like meat sticks in my car and I have like mixed nuts in my car. And so I saved a meal that's a meat stick plus like a handful of mixed nuts. Right. And so I can say I had two of those. But can I auto with through the audio input say I had and then name name the meal and it'll still know the saved meal by name.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can say, yeah, it's Doug's car snack. And he'll just say, I had Doug's car snack. And I'll pick that up right away. So it looks through your entire history. It looks at things that you're eating.

It looks at your saved meals. And it just figures out what's in it. And I'll clone it for you directly for today. Yeah, dude, very cool. So again, it's supposed to be, not supposed to be it is an AI nutrition coach. And so there's the fact that you are logging your meals and it says calculating calories and macros, et cetera. But the more impressive part of all this is that now you can go in and say,

you know, I have a question about what I'm eating or tell me what I need to focus on, et cetera, and it's going to start training you and coaching you and walking through how to make improvements. Exactly. Yeah, so the way it works is this is actually a two-way street. So Alma, when you join Alma for the first week, it'll touch base and reach out to you to check in and introduce itself. But then afterwards, once you're kind of up and running, you will check in on you a couple of times every week. And then on Sunday, it'll do a review. So on Sunday, you'll get a longer message from Alma. It'll kind of explain the patterns that spotted issues and challenges it saw, opportunities,

things that you've done really well, and I recommend changes or potentially maintaining the same plan for the week after. So it's constantly reviewing it, and it's going to give you one weekly focus to focus on every week. And you can see that on the home screen. So it's like a really dynamic way to engage with Alma. And then at any point in time, you can ask Alma questions. And it's kind of, like, it's gotten so many skills already that's kind of crazy. but you can ask it, hey, I'm in, I'm at this airport. Help me find the best meal that hits my macros.

You can ask Chachapy that question, but Chachapy doesn't really fully understand your diet, your history, it doesn't understand how you're doing this week so far. Alma has a lot context, so it can automatically figure out like, yeah, go to this restaurant, this is going to be really good and have a couple of those issues. You can ask it, how's my protein intake over the last few weeks? Anything they can do to potentially improve it,

and I'll automatically give you advice. I'm feeling this weird symptom, anything in my diet that could cause it. And Alma will dig through your entire history and figure that out. Give me a meal plan for the week or give me a recipe and it'll actually generate a custom recipe that we know will hit your targets. And Alma remembers when you talk to it too. So if you say I have this condition or I'm allergic to X, it'll actually remember that.

And anything in the future will factor that into it too. So if Doug starts having GI distress, it might bring up you've been having meat sticks sitting in your car in Tennessee hot days all summer. There might be a possible pathogen here. Could it also like prioritize micronutrients? So like if somebody's like legitimately trying to increase their vitamin K consumption, it kind of gives both recommendations and kind of kind of the play by play just like macros. Exactly.

Yeah, 25 plus micronutrients in the system already. And it does full supplement tracking. So you can track your supplements as well as your nutrition. And all that gets visualized and it's easy to understand over time, yeah. And you can also connect to other wearables that track your training and then it has the context of how much you're, you know, how many miles you're running or how many times you're lifting, et cetera. Yeah.

Man, you guys are becoming product experts here. I don't know. You should be telling the world about I'm more than I am. But yeah, you're absolutely right, Doug. So we have Apple Health integration and we pull in all your activities. Unlike my fitness balance and others, we don't just look at your calorie burn though. We actually import the entire workout. So if you're a heavy lifter and you're doing strength.

training, Alma is not just looking at, oh, like you burned 150 calories or 300 calories or whatever. It's actually seeing that you just did a lift session and it factors that into the coaching. You can also, if you signed up for a competition, you can put that in and Alma will coach you towards that path. That would be aware of like you've got a hierarchs coming up. Here's a couple of things you need to watch up for. Here you've got this new competition coming up and it can help guide you towards that competition day as well. Can it also kind of approach you with a kinder or a crueler hand?

I'm like, talk to me like you're my Garmin watch. Tell me how I suck at everything I do. I don't know if we're ever going to get to the level of garment, man. That takes special expertise of talking to other people. Harsh mistress. Brutal. Grosman. Garmin is like the toughest Russian coach I've ever seen.

But, no, for Alma, we do have, when you're onboarding, and Alma will ask you if you didn't fill it out. But he'll try to figure out, are you interested in short to the point? responses or do you want a little bit more positive? Are you interested in like detailed breakdown or you just want to give me the answer and like don't go too deep? And I'll factor that in as it works with you. So all that's covered. One cool feature that I don't know, Dog, if you've had a chance to check this out, but we've got a coach connect module.

We launched us a few months ago and it's really popular. So if you've got a, if you see your strength coach, you've got a couple of athletes you're working with, you want to get a better. have sense of how they're eating, but you don't want to dive down the deep end. And they can't afford a dietitian assistant or you want to just keep it like lean and simple for them. We have a feature where they can put your email in the app and you'll get a email summary every Monday with how they did over the last week. But it's like a really nice short digest. You can dig in and see more of the data, but you'll just get a little blurb at the top saying like here are a couple of talking points. Here's things you should mention to them. And it just

kind of keeps that communication between you guys going without you having to now become like a full nutritionist on top of being a strength coach right that's a that's a cool feature we built that's really popular and then yeah a few a few weeks ago we built a dashboard version as well so if you want to check on them at some point during the week you can also just log in and see what's going on yeah yeah phenomenal uh i saw i think about a week ago or so you guys launched some type of video chat is that video chat with the AI or is that video chat with your coach? What is that?

I saw it briefly. We should do a special episode on that one. So that was actually April Fool's joke. Oh, really? Okay. Mike, you might like it if you like Garmin's coaching. Basically, we'll like low-key roast you on your diet. We wanted to see, I'm really interested in like playing around with,

they're called voice agents like voice AI technology. You know, last year they just weren't there yet. They sounded to robotic. They were too slow. But I keep track of the companies working on that technology and one of them launched a really exciting feature last week And I'm I'm such a tech geek like I you know my weekends are outside of Alma I'm like tinkering with what else can I build with the stuff within Alma like I'm playing with the cutting edge stuff So I was playing with it. I'm like my god, this is amazing like it can

It can like laugh. It can chuckle and it sounds like totally natural So I'm like going away by it. So I thought you know what it would be really fun to just do like a little kind of April Fool's joke where we launched like a video consult service and it's 90s theme. So if you go to alma dot food backslash call, you can have a call with Alma and Alma will low-key roast you on your diet just for fun. Gotcha. I mean, it's not that hard to find ammo for most people's diets. So fair enough.

Yeah, exactly. Yo, for tracking my workouts as an example, like I'm pretty old school. I don't do it inside of any fancy software. I just have a Google Doc and I just write my workouts at the top of the Google Doc and it pushes all the other workouts toward the bottom. And that's like the simplest, easiest way that I track my own stuff. For something like that, can you like API to Google Docs and or like can I just, can I just copy, paste that into the app or just dictate what my training was for that day

into the app? That way it has context and it'll understand what I'm doing day to day by just telling it. Yeah, absolutely. Or you can just take a photo. Like, just take a picture of your Google Doc and just say, here's my workout for the day. It'll create a workout for you based on that. I'm terrified because if I took a photo of my workout log, they'd be like, are you the Zodiac Killer? All I see is a bunch of small print and dashes and numbers.

Yeah, exactly. Man, I've actually been looking for a great strength top. I'm using heavy right now. I think it's a good app. But I haven't found, I feel like I have not come across an app yet that blew me away in terms of strength training at this point. Like just for basic tracking, no sensors, no data, just to have something that can kind of keep me on top of it. I work in tech, so I'm not sure always looking for apps. I mean, I think that's fair because, you know, different companies of, you know, Juggernauts got a good platform,

RPs got there, like there's a lot of companies out there in that space. But then it's also, and this is not to denigrate any of the people at those companies, they'll have kind of like this is how they conceptualize their programming and it's how they like to lay things out like the reason back to like maybe I'll send a picture to Doug so he can be like that is terrifying I write small so I can have literally one full months of training in between two pages so that way I don't because I'm lazy I don't want to flip pages for that mezzo cycle I want to be like okay week one I do this week two week three week four and you know and that's one of those things of like for some folks they like to see the entire four of some folks, they only want to see the individual tree. So it's kind of the, what's your predilection? So I know guys that still run Excel sheets, you know, just like your Google Doc. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, Doug, whatever. And I think, and there lies what you're doing with Alma, which is when you build something

that people can use sustainably and it's going to work well, like, then cooking with gas. Yeah. Yeah, the reality is, like, I looked, part of the reason I jumped into this is, I'll tell you a bit of the backstory. So my mom had bypass surgery a few years ago. It was a bit of stressful time of the family. And it kind of opened up Spandora's box because we realized, like she seemed fine, but then she did a stress test.

And it turns out there's five valves are totally blocked. And, you know, she could have technically died any minutes. So it was a pretty stressful few months until we got her into OR and got her out. And one of the things that really caught my eyes after the surgery, you know, my mom, bless her heart, immigrant mom, like just makes delicious food all the time, but doesn't have enough nutrition knowledge or anything. She's just kind of been eating and doing her thing over the years. After the surgery, they book a one-hour call with a nutritionist.

And we hop on that call. She gets a bit of advice. And it's completely out the window the next day. There's no follow-up. There's no sequence. You're not going to change somebody's life or patterns in one-hour consult or even two a month, right? Like, realistically, that's just not going to work. So for me, the big motivation for launching Alma was for people who don't,

don't have a lot of nutritional knowledge, right? If you're not a nutritionist and you don't have that foundation and you need some basic guidance day to day to kind of coach you through and help you spot the patterns in your diet and motivate you to change, you need a lot of touch points throughout the week. And this is kind of why I was motivated to launch Alamo. On a personal level, when I said to open up the Pandora's box, I ended up getting my LPA test done and I found out that I am in the 95th percentile in terms of heart disease risk. So I had to also wake up and realize, like, for me, I got to dial in my own diet and be

much more aware of not just macros, but actually micros, right? That's kind of what led me down the road of like, okay, it'd be really awesome to have a personalized tool that's like filtering the noise on social media, right? Because we're all watching the same videos on social media and Dr. whatever Berg is saying, do this or do that. But does that really apply to every single one of us? Like, we all know that we're extremely unique from a biology perspective. So my goal with this technology is just to make, make have one AI that has enough knowledge about you and is always up to date on the science so that you can always trust that it's giving you the personalized knowledge that fits your specific need and not just, you know, uh, templated advice on social media. It's meant for millions.

And at the same time, you know, bringing up the contextual effects of dietary culture, like that's something that a lot of people don't appreciate. Like, yeah, the bodybuilder, I'm a new chicken, rice and broccoli. You know, depending on, you know, depending on. the food you're raised around, you know, you know, there's different cultures that have, there's certain macros that are leveraged a lot higher in certain diets and others. I mean, I was around people that were doing research in obesity, and I do not remember the exact number, but like the percentage of an individual's dietary intake that is tortilla, that happens to be like from Central America is, it's astounding. It's like over a quarter of the calories.

So if you can have them take a high fiber tortilla or made in different fat and otherwise, you can really help improve the diet by making relatively small adjustments and not making them completely, you know, lose their food culture. And with Alma, I imagine it's learning their food choices, but then also kind of does that kind of one of the thing that gives feedback on it? Maybe we go a little heavier on the vegetable fare of your cuisine and make, does it offer substitutions or how does it like to structure those pieces? Yeah, so it will literally give you recipes.

If you like a specific dish, like I often will ask Alma like, hey, I want, I love ice cream. I'll be honest, it's kind of my, like, Achilles heel. So I love ice cream and I'm constantly like on this endless pursuit of creating like the highest protein, healthiest ice cream possible. That still tastes good, right? So it's kind of, I'm like a, what is that Greek, the Sisyphian challenge? Oh, Sisyphian task. Let's go, man.

Just push that bolder. So, you know, so I kind of, for me, I've been, so I constantly like will find a flavor that I like and say, okay, give me a high protein version of this. I'm like, what can I swap out to drop the fat, increase the protein, but maintain the consistency. And that's something I really enjoy. So how do you take that cultural cuisine that you like or whatever and then try to adjust it? And the way we've kind of designed Alma is it's really meant it's not about restriction. it's about micro behavior changes day over day that will actually accumulate to something radical. So it's never going to tell you, like, stop, do what you're doing immediately and go to this.

It's going to slowly kind of nudge you towards making slight adjustments, micro adjustments that work really well. And this is where the high touch matters, right? Like you're able to talk to Alma multiple times a day whenever you want. It's there to respond to you. And it's also reviewing what's going on with you. So you've got the Sto-Way relationship that's, just really convenient and really easy. So it's able to spot those patterns and help you change slowly.

So that's something that we're really focused on. I think the big thing with Alma, you'll notice, Doug, you've seen it as well at this point. Like when you first launched and land in the app, you'll notice that the Alma score is the highest, biggest thing we have with the macro second. The reason for that is because we really wanted to focus more on quality rather than just pure macro chasing. So for us, the biggest focus with Alma, it's this concept of the Alma. It's this concept of the ALMA score. We have an advisor, his name is Dr. Eric Grimm at Harvard University

to help us develop it. And it's effectively a scoring system that's meant to guide you to food that has been proven to increase longevity. So basically what we did is we looked, there is a scoring system that Harvard developed called AHE, Alternate Health Eating Index. We took that score and then modified it.

And effectively, the foundation of the app is nudging you towards proven things that we know increase longevity and increase health and quality. So that's the primary mechanism that Alma tries to nudge you towards, but the macros are also visible there and can coach you on whatever macro targets you need to head. To dive in a little bit there, because I know the U.S. has had a couple attempts at measuring foods,

and then you look at broccoli is rated like an 80, and then like cranberry juice will be rated like at 95, and it's like, wait, what? Because sometimes it's, you know, it's based on different metrics. And so hence, you know, you can engineer food to be on. high score. So I like the fact that you guys are using that component of it. I imagine that something that's still, it's got to be a bit of a dynamic system in that it's looking at the entire diet. It's like, yes, you're doing really good vegetable sources, but you had three grams

of protein yesterday. And that's from all the broccoli. So is that kind of, yeah, I imagine you haven't have an algorithm. And so it's kind of your special sauce, but things are weighted in different ways. It's actually a really open source. We try to be very transparent about it. We don't try to close it behind the tourism. We're open to critique and feedback. We're definitely receptive to that. So for us in general, the feedback has been really positive on it. It's very simple scoring system. It's all just explained in the app. There are six categories where you earn points and four categories we lose points. And the categories are kind of honestly like nothing that's particularly contested. Like alcohol, you start every day with 10 points. If you consume some

alcohol, you'll lose few points. Process sugar. We all know processed sugars and the damage it can cause, right excess sodium so you'll lose few points depending on what you're increasing what you're consuming in and then you'll earn points for having vegetables for having omega three right healthy fats those are the kinds of categories where you just have some of foods in that direction and you'll get you'll easily crush and get to 90 if not 100 percent 100 is a little bit challenging I've I've yet to head that myself but you know I can comfortably get to the 90 95 on a regular basis when I'm eating well and I feel it the next day when I eat well. With something like sodium that obviously is dependent on physical activity and sweating, does it also, you know, with, I know

you've already got the pairing of the exercise, it's like, yeah, this is a person who's doing, you know, an hour of cardio in 80 plus degree temperature and humidity. So we expect their sodium intake to be higher. Otherwise, it could be deleterious. Yeah, we do factor in workouts and electrolytes obviously have high sodium. So we treat those a little bit differently. So we try to take account for that specific case for sure and then also with the integration of health metrics just it is able to kind of give feedback on body weight and body composition changes in the lens of what they're doing with the dietary inputs as well yeah great question so we don't really do a ton right now with body composition that's something

an area we do want to explore a little bit further and then in terms of body weight we do pull in from apple health if you have a smart scale otherwise alma will remind you once a week if you have a weight related goal to just weigh in so it's informed by what's going on. The number one most popular goal on Alma for what it's worth is actually gut health. So you know, people do pick weight loss goal, but if you just look at the total count, because people have multiple goals, but the number one goal in aggregate is gut health. So that kind of tells you a little bit about the community we're building at Alma. Yeah, I notice you guys have like a few big categories, gut health being one of them.

there was like immune function and some other ones like are, were those were those chosen by you guys or was that like user generated feedback that you guys eventually turned into categories? What's the genesis of those? Uh, well, we work with Dr. Rem to actually our advisor to help develop those.

We because we realize like if we just show you 25 micronutrient and if you're not an expert, you're going to be overwhelmed by okay, now I'm tracking 25 by us seems overwhelming. Right. So we wanted to create simple bundles that we know correlate with like the biggest issues out there. Right? So for example, heart disease,

the number one killer in the world, we have a heart health bundle, right? So it's four micronutrients. You can look at them. If you optimize those every day, you're gonna be in a much better shape health-wise, right? So we try to just bundle them to make it easy, but for the pros, they can go in

and they can disable, enable whatever categories they want. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, dude, very cool. Like, so we've talked through a bunch of features of benefits that we like. We're like, you're obviously creating the app. You're an expert in the feature.

you've been in the industry for a long time. Like me and Mike have been coaching people for decades. Like we have the things that we like, so to speak, relative to like a person who has no experience, no training background, no education and nutrition. What have you learned from your users that they seem to want and they seem to really like that might be subtly different from coaches and other experts? Yeah. It's a great question.

I think for us, you know, I think the features that the experts wanted were typically lean towards more data, more analytics, right? And then generally the users that are more average or beginner, they just want simplicity and they want ease of communication, right? Honestly, it's not so different from my push days. I still remember when we were building push, like we would get requests for all these extremely detailed metrics in the app and, you know, crazy amounts of breakdown. And we realized every time we add something to the app, now an individual athlete that's remote coached is going to have to figure out how to navigate that section of the app

and it's going to be overwhelming for them. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we simplify the app experience and make sure that it works for everybody. And then on the dashboard side, we can add all the level of detail that people want. And that's kind of the same philosophy we're applying here. We have a dashboard for advanced metrics or detailed analysis. We try to focus, push it there.

And then in the app, we try to make it very simple, very clean. The nice thing about AI, that really we did not, I didn't have access to push days, is the fact that you can ask questions, right? That is such a radical paradigm shift and how you interact with data. You know, for us as product developers, we used to have to build dashboards and dashboards

and charts and charts every time. And we had to make sure that they work for as many people as possible. And once you make a chart, it was expensive, took a lot of efforts. It's really hard to change it. So if somebody doesn't get it, now you're in trouble. The beauty of Alma being AI first, is that you could literally just tap the action button

and just ask a question. And Alma will go and fetch all the data it needs, which is really cool. One thing that I've been really happy about that we launched actually two weeks ago that I'm really excited about is Alma can file bugs on your behalf and can request features on your behalf, which is pretty wild.

So literally you're using Alma and you come up with an idea, Doug, like, oh. And you can ask Alma, like, hey, are you able to do this? Alma knows all the skills it has and all the features that are there. So if something does not exist, they'll tell you no. That's not, but that's a really good idea. Do you want me to file a feature request for you? And you'll just say yes, and we'll get notified.

And then if you go in the app, we added it in settings now. There's a request feature widget. You can click on there and you can see all the other requests we have. You can upvote existing ones. You can add comments. And then the way we're building Alma is we just start from the top. So right now I can tell you uploading health documents like blood test results is a really highly requested feature. We're going to tackle that soon.

Caffeine tracking is something that is super high on our list, hydration. So those are all things that our community is prospectively sharing with us and we're just actively building and developing. And if there's a bug, you just tell it, hey, this is not working the way I expected. And it'll look and it'll say, okay, no worries, I'll file a bug report. It shows up right in my inbox. and we automatically start working on fixing it as quickly as possible. We really try to make sure we're a young company and for us customer service is number one. So I really want to make sure every single person that's using Alma gets that love and attention that they deserve.

Yeah, dude, what a phenomenal idea to be innovating on the right features. Everything uploaded like that. So cool. I know before the show you said you like to ship fast and that's kind of more possible now than ever. I saw something along the lines of Anthropic, you know, shipped 70 new, features in 54 days or some ridiculous like that. Like things are just moving out a phenomenal pace. You know, what, you kind of already answered this, like what's new and or in or coming

soon, but what things you think are on the horizon that aren't like technically possible yet? Maybe the voice agents and the video chat, like that type of stuff. What other things might come out in 2026 or beyond that just aren't quite there yet? Yeah, it's great from like in terms of AI itself or in terms of. Yeah, like like it not just with all, but like, AI isn't to the point where X features possible. But once it is, it's going in the app immediately. And you're really excited about it or you've thought about it,

but it's just like not technically feasible yet. But things are changing so quickly, it might be in six months. Yeah, it's a great question. Honestly, so I'll tell you my general reflection of where AI is at right now. AI has come such a long way in the last two years that if all progress was to stop tomorrow, we're still going to have five to 10 years worth of catching up to do. The software industry, most companies are not waking up. up to how fast things can change now and how quickly they will change.

So that's kind of my general impression. The technology, as it is right now, is keeping us plenty of busy. There's so much potential to add. In terms of where I see things that I would love for Alma to do right now that it's not capable of doing, honestly, nothing immediately jumps at me and says, like, oh, I wish I could do X right now without going into hardware. I'm a hardware guy at heart, right? So I have many ideas for hardware sensors and solutions.

Those are a lot tougher to build. And none of the technologies there yet for those. But I think over time, we're going to start to see some really exciting hardware pieces come through. So for me right now, when it comes to Alma, the big thing that I think about more than anything is actually like maintaining a bar for taste and not rushing to ship too many things. So this is the balance that both companies like Anthropic is having to contend with. we're having to contend with. I can technically go this week and launch five features if I want, but I have to start thinking,

how are my use, A, are they going to be thoughtfully designed and tested? B, are my members, are they going to be able to take in five new features every week and not feel overwhelmed? So I think this is where,

I almost think of myself sometimes I love food in general, and I think myself as building a high-end gourmet restaurant here with Alma, right? and you know technically you go to a restaurant imagine Doug you go to a restaurant and they give you 30 dishes you're just going to feel overwhelmed it's all going to it's almost like the things that you take out and don't do matter as much as the things that you put in right so that's the kind of fine balance that I try to create between the two but yeah that's kind of where I'm out right now I'm really excited to see where this industry goes in general it's it's interesting because there lies the pro and the con when you have all of these opportunities and you're getting

folks that have been existing users. Obviously, you're trying to develop a larger user base. If the new user comes in and sees 30 pages of optionality, that can be a little overwhelming. But the nice as you can iterate, maybe this person sees the more intense version of the app. This person sees the more like, let's just be kind and slow and we'll iterate until you're ready for it. And that's obviously part of the learning at that scale. And now this is kind of going the avoiding being the John Henry type situation, because it's great. we live in this era where you have machines that are going to be able to outdo humans, just to the nature of the beast of like, I have to sleep at some point.

What would you say for the practitioner, you know, thinking this in the quasi, like as in chess centaur type situation of like, this is how, if I was working with a coach, this is how I would leverage this to be a value add and not feel like this is an adversary. Yeah, for what it's worth, I think strength coaches are in a phenomenal position here, I take advantage of technology and I think they're in a really secure position, right? I've spent enough time around S&C coaches to know like you guys are your therapists, your coaches, your experts in your field. Like it's not like any AI tool can come tomorrow and somehow do all of that.

Like the emotional intellectual connection you have with the athletes and the trust you build. That's not something that I think people will ever really trust a machine to do the same level. So that's my general impression. You know, I think jobs that are at risk are more jobs where effectively your entire job is a task, right? If you work in a big company and you are effectively in charge of payables, right, where you're processing invoices every day and you're organizing into a spreadsheet, your job is 100% at risk. And, you know, I highly recommend that the way to mitigate that is to learn about AI and see how you can be much more efficient using it. That's the only path you have to maintaining a career in that domain. I think lawyers are actually in trouble, to be honest.

I think about my own spend with legal. And it's kind of crazy how, exactly, how, you know, I think law is in a tough spot right now. So there's some industries that are a threat. I think anything where you have a human connection and a heavy aspect of service, you're going to be in a really good spot. So the question now turns into, okay, so I'm in a good spot. I need to continue to build great relationships with my athletes, continue to build my brand, continue to home my craft. How can AI help?

And I think this is where AI, in my opinion, for strength coaches, can be a really great way to just take your customer service to the 10th level, right? So how can you have, you know, how can you use Claude to speed up your email responses, right? If you have, you own a gym and you've got a whole bunch of people emailing you or contacting you or texting you, how can AI help you just take the basic stuff off the plate, not the high touch stuff where you should take the time to talk to the reply individually, but if somebody's asking, what are your hours? Like, you should not be responding to an email like that ever, right?

Or, you know, if you're going to be closing for some holiday, like that whole email communication should be automated for you, right? You know, I think those are the kinds of things that I think about are probably going to be largely automated. If you run a big gym, I'm really bullish on camera-based tracking. I think Elise Form and Persh are on the right track there. I think this technology is going to get so much better, if not already, that I can totally see like a gym with 100 athletes all being tracked from

pen cameras that are on the ceiling. And if we end up in that kind of world, then maybe the strength coach's job then is to actually like check in on the ones that are struggling and be able to better triage where to check in in deeps more settings, right? When you're working with Olympians, it's one-on-one most of the time, so you're fine. but if you're working with younger athletes, high schools, you've got 50, 60 athletes to keep on top of,

this can be a really nice way to just quickly, like, nip it in the bud, the areas, the athletes that have the highest risk. So those are some ways I think technology can help. I think that's a great thing because, you know, you get both sides. You get folks that start thinking that we're all lamplighters and elevator operators,

and, you know, we're going to be serving the giant AI monster. And then you have others that, you know, that you see, like, what the spreadsheet did for accounts. We're initially, they're like, oh, God, we're going to lose our jobs. And it's like, oh, now we can actually cook with gas. Now we're going a lot faster. And this is a tool like any other.

You know, that's going to allow us to, you know, free up capacities to focus on other components. And, you know, and hence why the velocity-based stuff is a, I did not realize you're working with push. That's wild. But anyone that's been in a weight room long enough can look at a barbell speed. And don't get me wrong. I'm not going to get it to the meters per second. but you're going to get a pretty good idea of like that,

that's close to failure or that's, we're definitely training strength because that bar is slow. And it just allows us to quantify it to a greater degree of precision. And that allows you in turn to make better coaching decisions. So, yeah, and so how do we make the tool work with us not feel like we're going to work in opposition? Because don't get me wrong, John Henry won the first day.

But day two, sheen was right back out there. Exactly. Exactly, man. Yeah, and even going back to push days, That was a realization towards the end of my journey there. Then I realized, I'm like, our job with push is to help coaches just be able to scale their coaching and create opportunities for communication with the right athletes. So one of the things I was really happy about building towards the end was kind of a basically an iPad station set up with a beeping system.

So a coach could literally just walk down the line. You got six rocks. You got all the athletes training. And you can very quickly tell just whose station is starting to beep. the different way, right? And then the coach can program thresholds for each athlete that day on that station. So if he's trying to train strength and he hears the wrong beep, he knows that, okay, this athlete is the weight is off or something is going on, I'm going to go check in on them.

So I think that's kind of where the technology goes, just enables you to scale the service that you have in a much better way and that's the best way to use it. With every technology weight, there's always people that are going to hate on it, right, and try to resist it, and then there's people going to lead into it. If you look at the history of technology of the last industrial revolution days to now, people who lean in end up coming out on top, people who try to resist end up falling behind. At this point, it's like a harder and less,

it's kind of like gravity. We might as well embrace it and think about how to use it to the best, right? Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The conversation within Rapid is that we're all trying to become the AI-enabled versions of ourselves as quickly as possible over here. So I couldn't agree more. Rami, dude, phenomenal app. I've used it for a little while now

and very, very impressed by the whole thing. Very cool. If you want to learn more, where can they find more about you and Alma? Yeah, absolutely. Alma.food is the easiest way. My email is rami at alma. coma.com.

Happy to chat with anybody. We're definitely would love to have more people kind of check out the app and try and give us any feedback they have, especially coaches. I'll be very curious to chat with more coaches on us. Yeah, 100%. Dr. Mike Lane.

Yeah. Mike Lane, PhD on Instagram. Feel free to reach out there as well. All right. Cool. And I'm Doug Larson on Instagram at Douglas E Larson. We are Barbell Shrug, at Barbell underscore Shrug. And if you want to work with Dr. Mike Lane, Dr. Andy Galpin, and the whole team at Rapid Health Optimization, you can go to A-T-A-L-A-B-L-A-B.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.