Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2197: Five Positive Changes in the Fitness Industry

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Why real fitness & health is rooted in behaviors and consumer demand. (2:00) Five Positive Changes in the Fitness Industry #1 - Strength training is popular (especially for women). (6:18) #2 - More people squatting and deadlifting. (13:16) #3 - New media takes out the old guard. (19:37) #4 - Wearable fitness & health tech. (26:02) #5 - Functional training awareness. (33:47) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Promo code MINDPUMP23 at checkout for 15% off your first order!** Create a Living Trust for free – in minutes! Dynasty Trusts | GetDynasty November Promotion: MAPS Resistance | MAPS Prime Pro 50% off! **Code NOVEMBER50 at checkout** Mind Pump #2105: How To Become A Muscle Mommy Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is The Best Form Of Exercise For Fat Loss And Overall Health Americans have changed the way they exercise. Here's how gyms are adapting My HONEST Thoughts On Crossfit – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #2060: Maximize Fat Loss With Continuous Glucose Monitors: Kara Collier Visit NutriSense for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code MINDPUMP at checkout** SnapCalorie taps AI to estimate the caloric content of food from photos Mind Pump #1157: Seven Ways Functional Training Burns Fat & Builds Muscle Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we talk about five big positive changes that we've seen in the fitness industry over the last decade or so. So it's a fun episode and we talk about how it's moving in the right direction, although sometimes it feels like it's not, it truly is. All right, so this episode is brought to you by some sponsors.

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Both of them are 50% off. You can find them both at maps fitnessproducts.com but you have to use the code November 50 for that discount. All right, here comes the show. You often hear us talk about the negative aspects of the fitness industry, but here's another side. Look, we've been doing this for over two decades and there have been some very positive changes. It does seem like things are trending for the better. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about the five big positive changes that have happened in our space. If you don't

industry, we can only figure out five. We're not always debbie downers. Yeah, we spent four hours just to five five. We were going to do this episode if it was the one positive change. That's that. I mean, there's no. You know why? Because I have to think that things. Literally, what we did is we thought back to when we started.

Because I started in 97. When did you start? I'm 2000. 2001. 2001, and when were you? Just in... 2000? 2001. 2001 and when were you in just- 2000, probably two. Okay, so we've been doing this for, wow, a while. Yeah, a long time.

And if I really think back to when I started, it is very different. James are different, a lot of things are different. And the differences that I can think about, many of them are positive. Many of them are positive. You know what it is to sell is that there's actually quite a few thing even beyond this list of files but What the space tends to do is to bastardize it. Yeah, so like it had good intention or the idea was good

Or it was something positive that ended up turning to be negative because they passed it. An example like, which is not on our list would be something like fasting. Fasting's been around for a very long time. It's just recently become more popular. There's a lot of really cool benefits of practicing fasting for your health. But unfortunately, we have bastardized it so much and we've turned it into a fat lost diet Which is the worst way they could do it. So now all of a sudden I would not put this in the category of like top five things because of that So I think there's an examples of

Quite a few things like that in the space, but the five that we're gonna cover today I would say are for the most part really really positive. Yeah, you know what they do? I'm gonna make a word, the fitness industry trenderizes things. So it's like, here's the thing, how do we make this a trend? How do we turn that in Adam's library? You like that?

Yeah. How do we make this a sellable commodity and then all the crap that follows along with it? Because real fitness and health is really rooted in changes in behaviors. Your approach, of course, is part of it, like the techniques and things that you use. But it's a lot deeper than just like this one trick, right? The secret thing or this trend. And that's what the fitness space does.

It takes these, it will take truths like fasting, like spiritual health benefits. How can we market this more effectively and get you to spend money in this direction? Or attach a supplement to it. Yeah, like spiritual health benefits. How can we market this more effectively and get you to spend money in this direction? Or attach a supplement to it. Yeah, attach something to it. Yeah, I mean, the fitness industry is an industry. It is a market and it changes often. Like all markets do because consumers demands change

and consumers become more informed over time. That doesn't always necessarily mean consumers are more properly informed. They just have more information as an industry gets older. Now, I will say that if you look at all industries, even old industries, especially old industries, over time and generations, consumers do become more properly informed. Like, you know, snake oil medicine is not really a thing like it used to be, right? Where someone traveled from town to town and would literally sell some bogus thing to cure all kinds of ailments. You still have snake oilish type stuff, but it's not like it used to be because I think over generations people kind of got hip to

it. Fitness industries like that as well. So it is driving a lot of changes and there have been, I mean, if we're quite honest, it's very different than it was when we first started. Yeah, I think because there's so much information out there, I think, you know, sort of a good North Star is to look for the long form content that's out there. Yeah. And because you have like multiple options,

and you get hit a lot with marketing, with the short, kind of grab your attention type content out there. Sometimes it's decent, sometimes it's okay, but for the most part, to have somebody explain their way through all the nuances, it's going to be crucial for you to really get a good understanding of the subject. So I think the single greatest thing that's happened is just strength training getting popular, especially in women. This is a huge, like, it's been a long time since we started. But think back, think back to all the conversations you had to have with female clients or members, or even beyond that.

Think about walking into those gyms, going into the freeway area, even the machine area, prime time, how many women would you see in their versus men? It was, there was almost none, the freeway area, there was none. There would be no women in the freeway area, machine area, you might see one woman for every 10 men. That's what it literally was like. Well, really the evolution for all of us was exactly what you just described. There was none.

Then there was a small percentage, but enough of a percentage that they decided to make a little private room. It was tiny. That was, yeah, a little group with purple, with purple colored machines that were the same machines that were outside for everybody else. And then the breaking down of those walls, and then it's just everybody, I mean, so we watched that evolution happen. And then here we are today, I mean, this just happened not that long ago on the podcast where we heard the term muscle mommy.

I mean, the fact that... Combine those two words. Yeah. And it's a good thing. Yeah, the fact that it's become so popular and so Why leaks accepted that there's terms that women are excited to build muscle I mean, I think that's I think that has to be the most Positive thing that comes to mind when I think of all the positive things that's happened over the last couple

Then no woman would have wanted to be called strong 25 years ago if you told a woman, wow, you look strong. She's like, oh my God, I look bulky, I look like. Now if you say you look strong, women really like it. Let's say they're anomaly, yeah. Yeah, so there's that, but there's also just in general, strength training has become more popular across the board.

There was a report that I read, and I don't remember what the organization was. I wanna say Urshah, but I'm not sure but there was an organization among Jim franchises, okay, and the trend right now is to take space away From areas that were typically designated for more and more different cardio machines to move towards Strength training strength training is where more and more of the footprint of big gyms is being delegated now to strength training because it's popularity. It's also a form of exercise now that we recognize as being considerably healthy, if not one of the healthiest ways

to exercise. That was not the conversation. When we first started, strength training was, yeah, it makes you strong, you get better performance, and if you did a good job and you could convince someone, easy for guys, because guys want to look like are an old and so that's just alone. But if you're really good at communicating, you can convince a woman that strength training was shape her body, make her look at. But nobody was thinking strength training for health, except for people in the space in the industry, nobody, there were almost no studies, first of all. All the studies on exercise and health were walking

or cardio. Oh, cardio vascular based. There was no studies on the strength, the benefits of strength training. Then little by little they started trickling through, oh, it improves bone density. Oh, wait a minute, it actually improves longevity. It's anti-cancer. Oh my God, it's good density. Oh, wait a minute. It actually improves longevity. It's anti-cancer.

Oh my God, it's good for blood glucose levels. It's good for the brain. It prevents Alzheimer's. But it took a long time to get those. So definitely no doctors were recommending strength. In fact, if you went to a doctor 25 years ago and they recommend that you exercise and you said, okay, I think I'm gonna go start lifting weights.

It's a no. No, go for run. Yeah, do something else because we want to improve your health. So strength training has become in comparison to where how it was way more popular. And now when I work out in gyms now, the free weight area and the machine area is pretty damn busy. And it's like a no joke equal mix. Man, a women, it's literally half and half.

Yeah, to your point of the dot, I mean mean even though we still have a long way to go with doctors recommending it as the first line of defense, both with like physical strength and health and but also mental, but the fact that that's even becoming a thing like there are doctors. We have in fact we have plenty of doctors in our forum and then listen to our show that they say all the time, okay, I always tell my clients, first thing, or patients, first thing to start to strength train and clean up the diet.

And so it is becoming a conversation that didn't exist just 20 years ago. So I would say that the general strength for general population, especially women, especially what we're seeing on the medical side that we're moving, that's a very positive trend that I can say about the space. I would say that, I'll even make say this,

it is going to be all signs are pointing to the fact that strength training will be the primary form of exercise that will be recommended here very soon. Very soon, that's what people are gonna be recommended to do in order to improve the health regardless of age, regardless of gender or goal, which is a very positive change because if you listen to the show, you know how we talk about strength training and just how profoundly beneficial it is

on a time for time basis, meaning the time you spend strength training, you get way more in return than you do with any other form of exercise. So it's a huge positive. It's great. And the thing is, I mean, there's a little bit of an education process to that. So the more that this gets promoted, the more likely people that are unaware of how to get started are going to be able to find their way to figure out their first steps with that. And I think that's in terms of the physicians and people back in the day, it's like the easiest thing for them would just be to tell them to go walk or go around,

do something movement wise, but now to get more specific with that, this is going to help you so much further if you actually take the time to learn how to wait. I was talking to friends of mine that still work in the gym space. And I brought up that article that I told you guys about about how gyms are dedicating more space to weights and machines than ever before. And I asked them, I said, so I told them, I said, I remember when I was managing Big Box gyms

and we're talking, I owned a wellness studio for 15 years. So at least 15 years ago that I actually managed a big box shimp. I remember how one of the ways that they would attract new members is they would get a new piece of cardio, a new different form of cardio. And then we would highlight that and would give tours. That's what people are interested in.

And I asked them, I said, is it still like that? They said, no, people now wanna see the free weights that wanna see bumper plates. Wow. They wanna see. That's completely different. Yeah, they wanna see platforms where you could drop the weights. Crazy.

That's so different, that's such a big change. So along those lines, I think that's the second, the best thing that I've seen happen, which is we have now made squatting and deadlifting popular again. And I mean, that used to trip me. I mean, I was guilty of this as a trainer. I mean, I was a trainer for well over five years before I ever even attempted a deadlift myself personally. And Barbell Baxquatting, I barely ever did. I was not somebody who did that. And so I didn't teach it that much. And that was like the first five years of my career, like leaving out to what I think now,

I would argue is the most important exercise is yeah. In a routine, I completely left that out of my own and my clients for a good portion of my career where that is the opposite now. Like every gym has got four or five squat racks and there is always a weight to get it, which is crazy to think that we've come from one squat rack dust all over it, nobody using it to four or five in a gym, people are waiting or scheduling their workouts around when they think they'll be able to get a squat rack is that some believe in it. People don't know, okay, so unless you've been doing this for a long time, like we have, this is not an exaggeration. Not at all.

Like this swathe god 100%. The most popular big box gyms, okay, we ran them. You're talking about 35, 45,000 square foot facilities. These are massive gyms producing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, and you would have one squat rack, one. And I think the reason why they put the squat rack in is because the original owners are like, we got to have this in here because nobody used it. It was literally when Adam says it had dust on it, it would be in the corner, typically if you want to find it, and there was, and nobody ever

touched it at all. In fact, the only time someone would ever touch it would be if someone wanted to do curls in it. That's a joke now. It's, it's not. That's how it was. It's so not an exaggeration that when you, and I don't know if you said that first or I said it first, but I actually have a moment when I was, okay, so my first club was Capital McKee that I managed. The squat rack was in the corner by itself, like you're saying. There's one of the things that my district manager would do is we would, as soon as he get to the club, we would tour our club and he basically, we would pick a part where the equipment was laid out or if my trainers were talking to people,

and on that many times he's looking at equipment and I have a memory of him wiping his finger on the squat rack and showing me how dusty it was. You know, he would go there on purpose. I mean, so I actually remember that, like that visual of like it being that dusty because nobody ever used the damn thing, and I remember being checked as a manager,

like, hey, I don't care if this equipment's being used or not. You gotta keep it clean. This is disgusting having dust on it like that. So I, luckily I met power lifters as a kid in a gym, and they taught me how to squat and deadlift at the age of 16. And I remember as a gym manager, remember the guy runs the gym. I would squat and I would deadlift part of my workout

and every time, every time a member would say something to me, they'd be like, what are you doing? You're gonna hurt yourself. And you're gonna hurt a young man. You're gonna hurt that. Every time I deadlift. Yeah, hell, you're gonna hurt yourself. You shouldn't be doing that.

Deadlifting, in fact, this is how unpoppy, so squatting was nobody did squat. Deadlift, nobody even knew what I deadlift. Yeah, hell, you're gonna hurt yourself. You shouldn't be doing that. Deadlift thing, in fact, this is how unpoppy, so squatting was nobody did squat. Deadlift, nobody even knew what a deadlift was. If you deadlifted, people thought you made something up. It was so unpoppy that again, the biggest gym chains in the world bought hexagon-shaped plates. Yeah. You can't terrible for deadlift.

Terrible. You put the weight down at twist and whatever, but that's, they didn't think about it because nobody did lift it. That's how incredibly unpopular was the bars weren't even designed to handle load on squats and dead lifts. You know, obviously those the exercise people will lift more. So you'd bend the bar quite often.

It was just, it was, it was crazy. Yeah, that had radically changed now. I mean, honestly, it's probably planet fitness, the only place left that probably doesn't highlight those two specific lists. Every single other gym has had to redesign and recreate their gym to fit that demand. It's actually gotten to the point where

when you go to a major gym, there's a typically an area that's segmented for deadlifts and it's visible as you walk in. Now I'm going to give the credit because the credit, there's a lot of people to give credit to this change, but the biggest piece of credit for this squatting and deadlifting coming back into the foray, great exercises that are just so valuable, it's CrossFit. Definitely. CrossFit 100% changed the industry by popularizing squats and deadlifts. It's a single best thing they ever did.

That's it. That's it. They made certain free-weight exercises popular and it was in squatting and deadlifting, didn't start happening on mass until CrossFit became a popular, trendy thing to watch on social media, whatever, or just to follow. All of a sudden, Jim's had to figure out how to accommodate members that wanted to try those two exercises, because now we only have one squat rack, and then we have hexagonal plates, and so bumper plates, and platforms and squat racks became the norm.

I would make the case, too, that they could get a little bit of the credit for even the first one, because part of- For strength training? Yeah, I would agree. Part of the movement of muscle mommy and women, getting into strength training more, a lot of that had to do with the squatting and lifting a woman in crossfit. You know why? You know why?

Before CrossFit, the only representation in media of women who's strength trained were female bodybuilders. Nobody wants to look like a female bodybuilder. Not even female bodybuilders want to look like that. But then you had female CrossFit athletes. This is before CrossFit got super big, and even those athletes became performance enhanced, or enhanced with PEDs or whatever.

But back then, you had these really sculpted looking women doing some incredible feats. And then women looked at that and go, I want to look like that. Yeah. And you're right, I agree with you. It was, I think they made the biggest impact with that. And it goes hand in hand with the squatting deadlifting.

I mean, what built those amazing physics on those women were squatting, deadlifting, overhead pressing. I mean, those movements build incredible bodies on both men and women. And I think that that was the first time in media that you had this good representation of what strength training, and not an extreme level of bodybuilding

what could look like for a woman. And I think that that attracted more and more women to the gym to lift weights, and then also to do those type of movements. Totally. The next one, this one's gonna be controversial, but it's true if you really think about it, is that new media really got taken over,

fitness really flourished in new media. In fact, most of the posts and articles that really just take off or many of them are fitness related in new media. And they took out the old guard. Now people, of course, we could talk about social media and its potential negative. But social media, like any powerful tool is a double-edged sword,

like fire, right? Fire can burn, and we could wage war with it, but it also transformed us, allowed us to do incredible things. New media, if that didn't exist, well, first off, we wouldn't exist. There were the gatekeepers to information in the fitness space. It was a club, and you weren't getting in the club unless they were in a

like, like, if we had an idea, it's called Mind Pump and we brought it to the editors of muscle and fitness or flex or iron matter, whatever, ain't going to happen. There's no way. We'd have to sign the contract when we sell your products. We're going to say certain things. We're not going to say certain things. And it would all, everything would stay the same. New media lowered the bar or the entrance, I should say, to the market so much and yes, it does allow a lot of crap in, but it also allowed a lot of innovation, a lot of new voices. And we were able to build our company without having to have sponsors, without having to sell anybody's products or watch what we had to say. And that made that possible. It makes information accessible to everybody, which means bad information, but also means

good information. We still be on low-fat diets. Eating, I can't believe it's not butter. Yeah, I mean, there was just a whole lot of gatekeepers back then. And from every kind of direction, and definitely from the supplement companies, if we had a lot of control over what we were kind of taught and also regurgitating with our clients. And yeah, this new media wave was really a wave

for a lot more voices to get involved and then actually pull people in a better direction. And then also, you know, at the same time, you know, maybe pull people a little bit of stray. So, but I think at this point now we're in a better spot where you can at least get into the filtering, okay? We're, yeah. The good information is out there.

It's just a matter of now of being able to filter through it. Yeah, I don't think this is controversial at all. I think that, you know, the best thing for bad speech is more good speech. Yes. And so, yes, it's brought on more charlatans, more bad actors, but at least we have the free market to come in and outcompete that bad information with more better, good information. And if ours is truly better, then we will win. Ultimately, the cream will rise to the top. People will eventually find out who the Charlotteson Tins are. People will eventually find out what's not working. And then they'll

find their way to the good where when you have three news outlets or three newspapers or three channels of where everybody consumes their content, you do not have that diversification. You don't have that ability for someone with better information or a better answer to outcompete those people. We're here, I love it. I mean, so yeah, there's some bad things about social media, but I mean, for a consumer and for the overall

space, it is a win, 100%. Totally, it's a massive win. Totally. I think the false comparison is perfect speech and information compared to what we have now. Perfect never exists. Really, the competition is restricted, heavily regulated, watched over, controlled speech versus open speech. And open speech is better because exactly what you guys are saying.

We can now get our voice out there, compete, let our ideas compete, and consumers actually become more informed. I mean, the stuff that we just said, I think social media played a huge role in that. I don't see how, you know, I mean, who would have allowed CrossFit to grow like it did in the old guard unless they bought it, right? And owned it themselves. A lot of people don't know this,

but the magazines that where you got your fitness and health information from in the past, those were pamphlets for supplement companies. And so everything was communicated in a way to sell their products. And so everything was communicated in a way to sell their products. And so that's the information you got. And the women's health and fitness outlets were even worse. Where they have Cosmo? I mean, some of the stuff in there was just like jazzy-sized infomercial. Yeah, so yeah, you can find a lot of other stuff, a lot of bad stuff, but new media lowers the barrier to enter. So now, you know, three

trainers, really good trainers from the Bay Area who are hard headed and do not want to be told what to say, have an opportunity to get on and start a podcast and, you know, partner up. And because it is so, there's so many and it's so competitive that also drives down The price for the consumer. I mean or with like we've said this before it's like listen You could go through all of our pockets and never buy any of our programs It's not like we don't give the out the information on how we've built those things and how we write them

And you literally that information exists for free now if you wanted to take the time to educate yourself and listen to everything that we communicate on there, which we have, I know a lot of people that do that. A lot of people are not in a place where they can afford a $60 to $80 digital program. And so they listen to the show and they take that information and then they go apply it and it changes their life. That's, think about that, that's awesome. We have that opportunity as a consumer now to, if you're willing to put the work in and listen and take the time, there's enough good to free information out there that you can build the answer for yourself. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's like when we're training, you'd have to spend thousands of dollars to go to these yeah, these certifications are these like clinics and to be able to convey that now to just your small group of clientele and hope that that kind of spawns from there. But now it's like the small... YouTube. Yeah, YouTube. You do get the same shit, right? It's all the same information.

Just before that, it was totally behind a paid wall. So cool. Next up, R is wearable fitness and health tech. This one, you know, when we were talking about this episode, Adam brought it up and I thought, first of all, because I'm not a huge fan of wearables, but you know what, this is such a profound change when I think back to just a given example. When I used to have to figure out calories and macros for food, I used to have to buy, I bought a book called Calorie Kings,

like a big ass book. Yeah, and I have to, every time go in and find the food, and if it wasn't in there, if I went to a restaurant and it wasn't in there, then I'd have to figure it out and be like, well, this looks like there's four ounces of chicken. How many ounces is this?

This looks, I'd have to do the math and figure it out. What a pain in the ass, right? Now you have apps, you plug in the food, it populates, and you got it. They even have now apps in the works where you'll be able to take a picture of your food. It'll tell you what's exists. I remember when the first big wearable came out, it was the body bug. This was a product that you worn your arm and it told you how many calories you burned, it counted your steps, but also with pretty decent accuracy,

some like 90% accuracy, told you how many calories you burned. As a trainer, this revolutionized my approach. And here's a simple example. This was the first time when I really had like a mind blowing moment with this. I had a client come in, she wore it, because I sold them in my studio. She came in and we uploaded her information.

And it popped up and I looked at it and so she trained with me Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So Tuesday, Thursday, she didn't work out, Saturday and Sunday shouldn't work out. And I looked at it and I'm like, this was the first week that she wore it. And I'm like, oh my God, what did you do on Saturday and Sunday shouldn't work out. And I looked at it and I'm like, this was the first week where she wore it. And I'm like, oh my God, what did you do on Saturday and Sunday? You burned a lot of calories. I'm like, did you like hiking? Is you going to run?

Like what did you do? Oh, I just went, I'm going to shop in my girlfriends on Saturday. And then Sunday, I cleaned the house, washed the car, and I was like, what? And then I looked at Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And I saw that because she worked a tech like, what? And then I looked at Monday Wednesday Friday and I saw that because she worked a tech job, right? And I saw her activity was like nothing. I saw activity go up the time we worked out, go back down and nothing all day. And I

realized like, wow, we're sedentary all the time. Even the days we work out, because one hour out of the whole day if you sit at a desk Is nothing and then the fact that she was so active on days that she didn't even work out just going out and about her day Doing chores and stuff like that it really blew my mind and put things into perspective in terms of how to approach I health and fitness. That's just one silly example, too Yeah, no, I'm a I'm a huge fan of wearables. And not because I think that everybody should wear them and you should read what they say and then adjust your life according to what the digital feedback is. But what it is, it's just more insight and data that you can start to accumulate to better understand what is going on.

And to your body bug point, like it completely blew my mind, not only with my own personal activity, but all my clients, and then it completely shifted and changed the way that I coach them. So unless you go and figure that out for yourself, and then it changes the way you coach,

like that tool is such a valuable asset for coaches to get a better idea of what it looks like when your client goes grocery shopping and yard does yard work and versus when they train for an hour hardcore with you, depending on their jobs. Or if things not moving, they're not moving the needle. Their body weight staying the same, they're not changing.

And you have another data point to go look at, and go, oh, well, kind of makes sense because... They're talking about the mystery. Yeah, it takes a lot of the mystery out and the guessing out versus we had to just guess on that stuff. And I mean, God, we know how deceiving the mirror and the scale could be, but at one point,

that was mostly what we had, and maybe body fat calipers to go on, which has room for air there too. So it's like just collecting more data that you have to utilize, to better understand what is going on with your current diet or plan that you're on. I'm just, I think it's an incredible thing that we didn't have before,

and I think it's only getting better with these, like, you know, they're less invasive. Like, yeah, I mentioned the, yeah, all the lifestyle ones, like anything that can kind of give us more insight, even as coaches, as to like some of those things you ask about how much sleep they're getting. And they'll give you like a random number, like, yeah, usually six to seven hours of sleep,

but it's like you look at their patterns with that. None of it's like deep sleep, you know. And so you start to ask more questions, start figuring out night routines, start kind of working on that a little more exclusively. You get a lot better results, but you know, it's just, you don't know what you don't know. And so this kind of helps bring a basis point there for the individual and the coach. Well, in a perfect example, right? We talk about how important sleep is. Great example, Justin, and talking about the ordering.

So let's say you get this thing, right? And before that, you've answered just like everybody else, oh, I get pretty good sleep. And then you track this thing. And you find out that over the course of a month, you average on the ring a sleep score of 67, okay? Which is not good, it's not horrible, but it's not good. You average 67, you know, every day,

just that's an average, right? And so now you decide, hey, I've never tried to really make an effort to get better sleep. What if I ate an hour earlier? What if I turned the lights off in my house? What if I stopped the temperature down? Yeah, temperature, like, let me, let me change a few of these things and see what happens.

And then that score goes to 78. Yeah. And you're like, whoa, like a few little lifestyle changes and I'm already getting 10% better sleep than what I was before. What if I just one or two more things, maybe another 5% out? And then what is that impact my workouts and my

Productivity and my day and my results like so and then if you didn't have that you wouldn't have you would have to totally Guess that's a hard thing to guess well now we have like with like a neutral sense.io now We have CGMs that you can wear measures your, your blood glucose in real time, and you work with a dietician on the other end. This is a big deal because we can generally have an idea of how certain foods will affect your blood glucose, which affects your behaviors and how you feel. But on an individual level, you throw it out the window. I could look at it.

There's certain foods that are low on the glycemic index but could cause blood glucose to spike radically in someone. I've seen people's blood glucose spike from non carbohydrate, non sugar containing foods because that food caused an immune response in them. Not allergy, food allergy, but something that you couldn't really tell, except for the fact that Not allergy, food allergy, but something that you couldn't

really tell, except for the fact that, wow, this avocado made by blood glucose spike really high. I should probably avoid this avocado. How would you know that without this device that you could wear on your arm? You would never guess, never in a million years with anybody, no expert would ever say the avocado was causing your energy crash in the afternoon.

But these wearable tech, and it's gonna get better. It's gonna get to the point where it'll be able to measure in real time nutrient levels, absorption rates, inflammation, recovery levels. They've already got, in fact, I forget the name of the company. I think I talked about it a while back. There's already now a company where you can just take a picture of the food and it calculates up

before you had to input it all. That's crazy. Inaccurate. Yeah, so it's just getting better it all. That's crazy. Yeah, so inaccurate. Yeah, so it's just getting better and better. It's well. All right, the last one, and I remember when this first started happening, but I think now we've come full circle and it's going great. And that's awareness around functional training.

So what functional, the way it was defined when it became a thing was, I guess, exercises that make you more functional in the real world. Exercises with carryover. Exercise that yeah give you allow you to move well in the real world. Now I remember this this became a trend when we were trainers. I remember it went from. It was all like a lot of balance. Yes. It was heavy. There was that study. I don't remember what basketball team it was where they had them

training with stability in mind and their injury rates went down, plummeted. And so that became like this big thing. And all of a sudden we had dyna discs, a physical balls and everybody was doing one leg of this and medicine balls. And it became a trend, and it was overused or it was an applied variable. However, the conversation needed to happen. The conversation needed to happen

where trainers and coaches and consumers understood that exercise isn't just about looking good. Yes, and it's also about health, but it's also about real world mobility, your ability to move in the world, change directions, move laterally, rotate, twist, and over. Like you want to also train, don't just get good at the exercise that make you look good, also learn how to move well. And so it really ushered in this new acceptance of different exercises. And now we have people doing all kinds of cool stuff.

Well, okay, so full circle with this because we kind of started it out praising CrossFit. And they were great about, so the gym was conventional gym was geared towards like making it safe. And so you could get more people to sign up. And so they would be able to sign up and so they would be able to do machines and everything was sort of nice and sagittal plane based and controlled that way. And so gym owners like that.

And then we started including squat racks because CrossFit became more popular and so that became a thing. However, the sport across it's sort of emerged with that, which then took a lot of functional type exercises and completely bastardized them in my opinion. And this is because they wanted to make it more about time and about reps and hitting all of these specific metrics and less about, you know, quality in terms of like the training and the programming of it. But then we start to realize there are benefits to those exercises. Maybe we just do them more like in a standardized progressive fashion. So you start to see, Jim start to turn more towards opening up. Instead of you having to go to a CrossFit gym to do these exercises, let's do it in a

conventional setting. Let's have some turf involved. We can add in sleds. We can have more multi-planar type exercises, which is really what this is to me, functional training is geared towards as more movement, specifically that you train outside of just in front of me and behind me. So I'm going left the right and I'm twisting as well. Yeah, when I think of the trajectory of the functional training thing, I don't know,

it follows a lot of things in our space that I think are good, right? Like they, when it's something good, and there's enough of science, and there's enough application to support, oh wow, this is something we wanna be doing, and it's beneficial. We tend to adopt it, and then we tend to bastardize it,

and then it comes back to like, okay, what was the good in it? Yeah, and I feel like a foam rolling was like that and stability balls were like that, dynadis were like that, like any sort of one-legged, you know, unilateral challenge, you know, stuff. I mean, a lot of these things, they had really good value to them. And they have an absolute place and application to training the general population. But like many things that the training world got excited about that had turned into like every client

was doing that. And that's like, every exercise that I did. Yeah, every exercise was balancing on something and every pressing, every trainer, every trainer, the way they were peacocking was, who had the client that could do the weirdest,

craziest trick is what it became. So I'm looking like a circus. It did, it did start to look like a little bit of a circus. And there was also a little bit of like, you know, just this is me admitting the bad with this, is that, you know, the average person in the gym would see that and they'd be like, what the fuck is that?

You're saying so you got attention. So people would, hey, I saw you doing that thing with your client, like, what is that? And then you'd have this spiel that you break down the importance of it. And it was an opportunity to sell more personal training. So it fed into that. So it was like, it was already this thing

that we started to bastardize and then people were so curious about it because it was unique and different and new. And so then trainers were selling on it more and then before you know it does look like a big ass circus act when you walk in the gym but now I feel like then that fell out of favor then a lot of people came and mocked all that and then explained how ridiculous it is for most clients and you know there's a place for, but not that often. And then now we've re-adopted, like, okay, listen, we're not gonna throw it out completely. There's a place for it, there's a type of client for it,

there's a type of time, and a client's programming for it, and I feel like it's balanced itself back out. That seems to be the way the space goes, right? Something new is introduced, then the argument is, this is better than the old thing, stop doing the old thing, and then it gets weird and crazy or too much, and then everybody goes, oh wait a minute. Yeah, they go a little far. The old thing was good too, and then it becomes integrated, right?

Like kettlebells, when those first came out, then there were like kettlebell only trainers, and now now everybody is a little... You couldn't do anything other than kettlebells, to their opinion. Yeah, yeah. It's like, get out of here. Totally. But no, functional training is training in rotation, laterally, using things like a sled and kettlebells and, you know, closed chain versus open chain move. Carrying things.

Carrying things, like all tons of value when you program it properly, like you can perform magic. What I love about this is that gyms have opened up their floor spaces. Old gyms, floor spaces were occupied. If you had empty floor space, that was a bad gym manager back in the day. Like, what are we doing here?

You lose the space. What's the space? Fill it with a machine or something. Now gyms dedicate some room for people to do mobility and to have some turf. So it's pretty awesome. These are all changes that have been incredibly positive. And I, because they work, because people are getting better results,

I only see them moving more in the positive. I don't see these, what we just talked about are not trends. There's trends within them, but that's when people go extreme with them and don't understand that they're, you integrate them and that they have a valuable role. But so far, I think, I think we're moving in the right direction. Look, if you like the show, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our free fitness guides. They're free and they're going to help you with almost any health or fitness goal you may have. You can also find all of us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at my pump Justin.

I'm on Instagram at my pump to Stefano and Adam is on Instagram at my pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos. The RGB Superbundle is like having sour,

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