 You often hear us talk about the negative aspects of the fitness industry, health, fitness, and wellness industry is failing. 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 in this industry. We can only figure out five. It took me forever. We're not always heavy doubters. Yeah, we spent four hours just to find five. We were going to do this episode if it was the one positive change. I mean, there's none. You know why? Because I have to think back. Literally what we did is we thought back to when we started, because I started in 97. When did you start Adam? 2000? 2001. 2001, and when were you? 2000, probably two. Okay, so we've been doing this for a while. Yeah, a long time. And if I really think back to when I started, it is very different. Gyms 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 things, even beyond this list of five. But what the space tends to do is to bastardize it. So it had good intention, or the idea was good, or it was something positive that ended up turning to be negative because they bastardized it. An example, which is not on our list, would be something like fasting. Fasting has 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 loss 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 top five things because of that. So I think there's examples of quite a few things like that in the space. But the five that we're going to cover today, I would say are, for the most part, really, really positive. Yeah, you know what they do? I'm going to make up a word. The fitness industry trender-izes things. So it's like, here's the thing. How do we make this a trend? Put that in Adam's library. You like that? How do we make this a sellable commodity and then all the crap that falls 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 is it takes these, it'll 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, attach something to it. Yeah, I mean, look, 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 become, 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 oil-ish type stuff, but it's not like it used to be because I think over the 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 too, 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. 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 is going to be crucial for you to really get a good understanding of the subject. Subscribe to this channel and then turn on your notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. We also have a sale going on this month. Our beginner strength training program, MAPS Resistance is half off. And then MAPS Prime Pro, our correctional exercise program, is also half off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. So I think the single greatest thing that's happened is just strength training getting popular, especially in women. 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 freewayed area, even the machine area, prime time, how many women would you see in there versus men? There was almost none. The freewayed area, there was none. There would be no women in the freewayed 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. Yeah, a little group training session. With purple colored machines that were the same machines that were outside for everybody else. Then the breaking down of those walls and then it's just everybody. We watched that evolution happen. Then here we are today. This just happened not that long ago on the podcast where we heard the term muscle mommy. Combine those two words. Yeah. It's a good thing. Yeah, the fact that it's become so popular and so widely accepted that there's terms that women are excited to build muscle. 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 decades. 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. Unless they're anomaly. 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 remember what the organization was. I want to say Ursa, but I'm not sure, but there was an organization among gym 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. No. When we first started strength training was, yeah, it makes you strong. You get better performance. And if you did a good job and can you could convince someone easy for guys, cause guys want to look like Arnold and Sylvester Stallone. But if you're really good at communicating, you could convince a woman that strength training will shape her body, make her look good. 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 or cardiovascular based. There was no studies on the strength, the benefits of strength training. 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 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, oh, okay. I think I'm going to go start lifting weights. No, go for a run. Yeah, do something else because we want to improve your health. So strength training has become, in comparison to 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, men and women. It's literally half and half. Yeah. And to your point about the, I mean, even though we still have a long way to go with doctors recommending it as a 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. Like, hey, that's, 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 from on the medical side that we're moving. It's like, that's a very positive trend that I can say about the space. I would say that all you may 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 going to 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, you know, in terms of like 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 run, do something movement-wise, but now to get more specific with that. That's 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 gym. And I remember how one of the ways that they would attract new members is they would get a new piece of cardio, right? 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 want to see the free weights. They want to see bumper plates. Wow. They want to see- That's completely different. They want to see, you know, platforms where you could drop the weights. Crazy. Yeah. That's so different. And 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 back squatting, 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 exercises 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's unbelievable. 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 swore to 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 new 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 use it. Yeah. It was literally when Adam says it had dust on it. It would be in the corner, typically if you wanted 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. But 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 Capitol 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'd get to the club, we would tour our club and he basically we would, he would pick apart where the equipment was laid out or the, 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. Yeah. 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 got to keep it clean. This is disgusting having, having dust on it like that. I, so I, uh, luckily I met power lifters as a kid, uh, in a gym and they taught me how to squat and deadlift at the age of 16. And I remember, uh, as a gym manager, remember I'm 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 going to hurt yourself. And you're going to hurt a young man. Every time I did lift. Yeah. Oh, you're going to hurt yourself. You shouldn't be doing that. So deadlifting, in fact, this is how unpopular, so squatting was nobody did squat deadlift. Nobody even knew what a deadlift was. Yeah. If you deadlifted people thought you made something up. It was so unpopular that again, the biggest gym chains in the world bought hexagon shaped plates. Yeah. Yeah. You don't, you can't. Terrible for deadlifts. Terrible. But you put the weight down at twists and whatever. Yeah. But that's, no, they didn't think about it because nobody deadlifted. That's how incredibly unpopular it was. The bars weren't even designed to handle load on squats and deadlifts. You know, obviously that's, those the exercise people will lift more. So you'd bend a bar quite often. It was just, it was, it was, it was crazy. Yeah. That 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. Yeah. And recreate their gym to, to fit that demand. It's actually gotten to the point where when you go to a major gym, there's, there's a, typically an area that's segmented. Yeah. 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 that have to give credit to this change, but the largest, the biggest piece of credit for this squatting and deadlifting, you know, coming back into the foray. Great exercises that are just so valuable is CrossFit. Definitely. CrossFit 100%. Definitely. Change the industry by popularizing squats and deadlifts. It's the single best thing they ever did. That's it. That's it. They made certain free-wit exercises popular and it was in squatting and deadlifting didn't start happening en masse until CrossFit became a popular trendy thing to watch on social media, whatever, or just to follow. All of a sudden, gyms had to figure out how to accommodate members that wanted to try those two exercises because now you 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. 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 deadlifting of women in CrossFit gyms. You know why? You know why? Before CrossFit, the only representation in media of women who strength train 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 them and go, I want to look like that. And you're right, I agree with you. I think they made the biggest impact with that. It goes hand-in-hand with the squatting and deadlifting. I mean, what built those amazing physiques on those women who 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 at not an extreme level of like 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 going to be controversial, but it's true if you really think about it, 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 it just, they took out the old guard. Now people, you know, of course we could talk about social media and its potential negatives, but social media, like any powerful tool is double-edged sword, like fire, right? Fire can burn. 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 going to let you in. 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 Ironman or whatever, ain't going to happen. There's no way. We'd have to sign the contract to 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, you know, that made that possible. It makes information accessible to everybody, which means bad information, but also means good information. We'd still be on low-fat diets, you know? Yeah, eating, I can't believe it's not butter. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there was just a whole lot of gatekeepers back then. And, you know, from every kind of direction, and definitely from the supplement companies, if we had a lot of control over, like, what we were kind of taught and also regurgitating with our clients and, yeah, this new media wave was really a way 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 astray. So, but I think at this point now, we're in a better spot where you can at least get into the filtering, okay? Yeah. Where the good information is out there. It's just a matter 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 out-compete 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 charlatans are. People will eventually find out what's not working and then they'll find their way to the good, where when you have, you know, 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 out-compete those people. We're here. I love it. 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%. 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. They actually, I mean, the stuff that we just said, I think social media played a huge role in that. I don't see how, 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 that's the information you got. And the women's health and fitness, you know, outlets were even worse. What, did they have Cosmo? I mean, some of the stuff in there was just... Like, jazzercise, like, infomercials. Terrible. 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, we're with like, we've said this before, it's like, listen, you could go through all of our podcasts or buy any of our programs. It's not like we don't give 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, you know, a 60 to $80 digital program. And so, they listen to the show and they take that information and they go apply it and it changes their life. Like, 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 free information out there that you can build the answer for yourself. Yeah, it's crazy. It's like when we were training, you'd have to spend thousands of dollars to go to these. Yeah. Yeah, these certifications or these like clinics and, you know, to be able to convey that now to just your small group of clientele in hope that that kind of spawns from there, but now it's like the smart... YouTube. Yeah, YouTube. You go to YouTube and 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 is wearable fitness and health tech. This one, you know, when we were talking about this episode, Adam brought it up and I thought, at first I was like, because I'm not a huge fan of wearables, but you know what, this is such, 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 King. It's like a big ass book. Yeah. 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 like 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. Yeah. It'll tell you what exists. I remember when the first like big wearable came out was the body bug. This was a product that you wore on your arm and it told you how many calories you burned. It counted your steps, but also with pretty decent accuracy, something 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, she didn'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 go hiking? Did you go around? Like what did you do? So I just went, I went shopping with 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 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 health and fitness. That's just one silly example too. Yeah, no, 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, 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, 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 does yard work 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, like their body weight's staying the same, they're not changing. And you have another data point to go look at and go, oh, well, it kind of makes sense. 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 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. I was going to mention 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 to 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 much, 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 answer 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. You know, 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, wait, 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 I get another 5% out? And then what does 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, with like a NeutroSense.io. Now we have CGMs that you can wear, measures your glucose, your blood glucose in real time. And you work with a dietician on the other end. Why, this is a big deal because, you know, 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. You know, I could look at it. There's certain foods that are low on the glycemic index, but 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, 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 would anybody, no expert would ever say the avocado was causing your energy crash in the afternoon. But these wearable tech, and it's going to get better. It's going to 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 it. 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 how before you had to input it all. That's crazy. Yeah, so it's just getting better and better. All right, the last one, and I remember when this first started happening, now we've come full circle and it's going great. That's awareness around functional training. Functional, the way it was really defined when it became a thing was, I guess, exercises that make you more functional in the real world. Exercises with carryover. Real-world strength. Yeah, allow you to move well in the real world. Now, I remember this became a trend when we were trainers. I remember it went from... It was all like a lot of balance. Yes. Which was heavy. There was that study. I don't remember what basketball team it was, where they had them train with stability in mind and their injury rates went down. It plummeted. And so that became like this big thing. And all of a sudden we had dyna discs and physio 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. 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, bend over. You want to also train. Don't just get good at the exercise that makes 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. Okay, so full circle with this because we kind of started out praising CrossFit. And they were great about... So the conventional gym was geared towards making it safe and so you could get more people to sign up. And so they would be able to do machines and everything was sort of nice and sagittal, plain-based and controlled that way. And so gym owners liked that. Then we started including squat racks because CrossFit became more popular and so that became a thing. However, the sport of CrossFit sort of emerged with that, which then took a lot of functional type exercises and completely bastardized them, in my opinion. And this was because they wanted to make it more about time and about reps and hitting all of these specific metrics and less about 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 sort of a standardized like progressive fashion. And so you started to see gyms 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 so we can add in sleds. We can have more multi-planar type exercises, which is really what this is, to me, functional training is sort of geared towards is more just movement specifically that you train outside of just in front of me and behind me. So I'm going left to 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 want to 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, here's, and I feel like foam rolling was like that. 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 in application to training the general population. But like many things that the training world got excited about, then it turned into like every client was doing that and that's like, Every exercise, Dynadis. Yeah, every exercise was balancing on something and every trainer, every trainer, the way they were peacocking was who had the client that could do the weirdest, craziest, you know, trick is what it became. Start 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 know what I'm 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 the spiel, you'd 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, 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 that but not that often and then now we've, we've readopted like, okay, listen, we're not going to 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, it's balanced itself back out. That seems to be the way that the space goes, right? Something new is introduced. Then they, the argument is this is better than the old thing. Stop doing the old thing. Yeah. 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 was like the kettlebell only trainers. And then now, now everybody uses it. You couldn't do anything other than kettlebells. Yeah. Their opinion and just 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 moves. Carrying things. Carrying things, like all tons of value when you program it properly. Like you, 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, why do we have, what are we doing here? You lose the money. What's the space? Yeah. 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 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 Mind Pump, Justin. I'm on Instagram at Mind Pump to Stefano and Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam.