While shifting to an all-virtual version of Composite has been going better than expected – it’s only sort of a total clusterfuck – I know a bunch of our beta-testers, like me, are looking forward to returning to in-gym, fully-equipped workouts. While we’ve gotten creative, and made do surprisingly well with whatever odds and ends people have on hand (even if that’s, frequently, just their own bodies), it’s just far more effective and efficient to train using barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, and other purpose-built tools.

That said, in the midst of this pandemic, gyms definitely can’t operate as they did before. And though I’ve seen a bunch of gyms’ prospective sets of post-opening changes and accommodations, I don’t think most go nearly far enough. Or, put another way, I don’t think I’d feel safe working out in those gyms myself in those conditions, much less recommending it to anyone else. Which, frankly, isn’t surprising; given the constraints of existing business models, there’s only so much they can do before they bankrupt out in the process.

So, my team and I are working on a skunkworks project: seeing if, starting from scratch, it’s possible to stand up a solution that works. Though it would be inherently temporary – only operating until the viral risk recedes – we hope it can get us and our clients making progress, safely, in a way that we can’t elsewhere.

It’s definitely still a work in progress. But here a few of the things we think a gym would need to sanely operate in this environment:

Space. Simply put, the now-proverbial ‘six feet’ isn’t nearly far enough, especially in an environment where people are breathing hard. (See, also, also.) Based on our probabilistic modeling, we think people need more like 15 feet of mean separation – or a whopping 225 sqft per exerciser. In other words, you need a ton of space, and a very small number of simultaneous members.

Masks. We’ve seen several gyms put up regulations requiring masks, except when people are ‘exercising vigorously.’ As my father, a pulmonologist at Stanford, put it: that’s a bit like requiring condoms, except for when people are actually having sex. In other words: masks, for everyone, all the time. Additionally, not all masks are created equal. Though there’s a balance between filtration, breathability, comfort, and liquid resistance (especially important when people are sweating up a storm), we think ASTM-2 or ASTM-3 surgical masks strike that balance best, and they’re tested / certified for consistency in a way that most masks aren’t. As people probably can’t round those up on their own, gyms would need to provide them to members coming in the door, for single workout-use.

Ventilation / Filtration. Even after cutting down viral emissions with a mask, and separating people in space, air flow patterns within a space are a huge issue, able to quickly carry particles clear across even large rooms. So, in short, gyms need ventilation modeled after operating rooms: designed to pull air out of the room as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, most AC systems are built with the opposite intention: spreading a body of air throughout an entire the space, rather than sucking it directly out. Minimally, we think a safe gym needs ten air-changes per hour, supplemented with an equally robust HEPA filtration system, to get viral particles out ASAP.

Sterilization: Depending on members to wipe down equipment just isn’t going to cut it. Is someone supposed to wipe down every barbell, plate, collar, dumbbell, bench, etc., etc. that they touch throughout their whole workout? Instead, we think equipment management needs to work more like, say, provided gym towels do currently. After anything is touched, that equipment is set aside as ‘dirty’ until staff can completely sterilize it, and replace it for use by a subsequent member. Doing that at scale probably involves electrostatically disinfecting everything between uses, the same technique used in many hospital ORs.

Managing that all is incredibly tough. To make it work, you probably need about a thousand square feet to handle just three members and a trainer on staff. You probably need three separate, fully-equipped ‘zones,’ one for each of those members, so they can stay entirely in their own zones, just using the stuff around them. You’d need to schedule their workouts, so that after their hour or 75 minutes of working out, there would be 15-30 minutes for someone to sterilize and reset the equipment before the next member came in to use that zone. And you’d need to have ASTM masks (along with temperature scans) waiting at the front door, as well as a constantly-operating ventiliation/filtration system.

So, fiscally speaking, probably not the best model in terms of maximizing profit. But, at the same time, running the numbers, we think it absolutely works. And, at the moment, we don’t see any other safe, sane choice.

Still on track to expand to a larger beta-test group for Composite, starting next week.  Getting there required a bunch of changes to the alpha – most notably, shifting things up to deliver it all remotely, rather than in-person with a coach.  But, secondarily, revamping movement and exercise selection in the algorithm; it can now account for the equipment that people have (or don’t), and build workouts accordingly.

In the process of setting that up, I also quickly realized that I had waaaay more equipment-based movements (whether with dumbbells, kettlebells, and barbells, or just pullup bars, boxes, and rings/TRX’s) in the library than bodyweight-only stuff.  So, lest I end up assigning people nothing but pushups, sit-ups, and air squats for the next several months, I’ve been testing out all kinds of crazy bodyweight-only movements, to see what which I can add into the lineup.  Stuff like glute bridge walk-outs, single-leg-elevated hip thrusts, inverted table rows, and kneeling squat jumps all made the cut.  A variety of even crazier stuff very much didn’t.

Still, by now, the algorithm can generate home workouts with nearly as much variety and progression as it could previously in a fully-stocked gym.  And at only the cost of a small number of broken household items, a handful of minor injuries, and some likely extremely pissed off downstairs and next-door neighbors (who’ve had to put up with days full of jumping, thumping, and cursing) along the way.

Calling that victory, and charging ahead.

As I mentioned previously, I recently started testing Composite with clients in the real world. Which has gotten off to an excellent start. Enough so, in fact, that I’m already putting the pieces in place to start doing small-group classes there by the start of next month.

Fortuitously, Jess is off in North Carolina for the weekend, celebrating a belated Mother’s Day with her mom, sister, and two adorable nieces. And though I’m sad not to spend the weekend with her – because every day is way more excellent when I’m by her side – I’m also grateful for the 72 hours of nonstop work time.

So, while the rest of the world is barbecuing and enjoying the pre-summer sun, I’m on lockdown indoors, brainstorming and planning and coding away. And I’m totally thrilled.

Old joke:
First fish says, “how about all this water!”
Second fish replies, “what’s water?”

I know, not a great joke. But, actually, a pretty good reminder when starting a company.  And one I overlooked in the case of Composite, until Jess made some wise comments a few weeks back that helped get me onto a better, broader track.

I should first note that the startup/fish/water problem already gets a lot of coverage, at least in the San Francisco tech world.  There, 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps apparently gradually forget that there are other people in the world aside from other 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps, leading them to focus their energy solely on startups that solve their own problems.  Hence the spate of companies focused on becoming an Uber for laundry, and the like.

But, in fitness, the same kind of thing tends to happen.  From my observation, I’d estimate that about 5-10% of the US population sees exercise or fitness as a primary hobby, or a core part of their identity.  And I’d guess another 5-10% aspire in that direction, even if they’re not currently fully immersed.  And then there’s everyone else: the other 80-90% of the country who would like to be fit and healthy, but for whom that’s just one priority among hugely many, one obligation they can try to wedge into an already crazy busy schedule and life.

When fitness startups pop up, however, they tend to come from people already entirely surrounded by other people in that deeply fitness-committed 5-10%.  And so they essentially preach to the choir, solving the problem of how you might make that 5-10% even fitter, more deeply engaged.  (On rare occasion, companies do pop up targeting the non-enthusiast majority.  However, they tend to do that through savvy branding and messaging, rather than actually tailoring the underlying product or service.  Consider Planet Fitness, which has been hugely fiscally successful, yet whose members I would guess make even less forward progress as a whole than the already dismal results for gym members overall.)

Anyway, as I’ve been putting together Composite’s algorithm, I’ve too much been a water-ignorant fish, solely wearing my fitness-insider hat.  I pondered questions like: will members want to come in to the physical gym three or four times a week?  And what if they’re avid runners, and want to do some 5k or marathon training on top of that; how many times should they do that each week, too?

All of which is excellent and valuable and will be greatly appreciated by the insider crowd.  But the real question is, what about someone who can only commit to coming one time a week?  With the right guidance, maybe they’d also be willing to do two more 15-minute sessions at home during the balance of the week.  So given those parameters, for that person, can we still make a big impact?

Fortunately, I absolutely think we can.  It just takes a very focused, scaled down approach.  And the big upside of the AI-plus-human-coach model is that we can seamlessly go in either direction, personalizing to individual needs.  In fact, we can even scale up and down over time for the same person: maybe you have a busy stretch at work this winter, and want to pull back, but then in the spring, you’ve always wanted to do a Tough Mudder and you want to look good for a big upcoming beach trip at the start of the summer.  Perfect.  We can do any and all of that.  Or, at least, we should be able to.

And that’s what I’m working on at the moment.  Though the Composite algorithm is getting better and better, this week I went back to the drawing board, to start thinking about the changes and additions we’d have to make to expand it to really work for EVERYBODY, rather than for just the hardcore fitness few.  Sure, we may still start out with a beachhead model, bringing in the fitness-obsessed first and expanding out over time.  But just having that goal in mind gives me all kinds of ideas, things I want to work on, and small tweaks to the setup that I need to bake in from the start.

If I had to come up with a Good to Great-esque Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal for Composite, it would be to eventually make a statistically significant impact on health outcomes for the US as a whole.  And making sure we set out from the beginning asking how we’ll one day move beyond the NYC workout crowd is certainly the only way we even have a chance of getting there.

As research for Composite, I’ve been reading like a madman of late: physical therapy textbooks, Eastern Bloc Olympic weightlifting research, NFL team training manuals, behavioral medicine medical journal articles, etc.  And, from it all, I’ve been generating reams of notes, studded with an almost endless list of ideas to test out.  Because, as I’ve learned the hard way over the years in the fitness space, there’s often a gap between what works on paper, and what’s actually successful (or even implementable) in the real world.  No matter how much intellectual sense a training concept makes, you still won’t know if it’s an excellent or terrible idea until you actually try it out.

Fortunately, I have two crews of brave and enthusiastic Composite alpha-release guinea pigs, on whom I’ve been able to test things out, with great results. And even before new ideas make it to those two groups, they first get filtered by testing on Jess.  As she’s still obligated to like me even if the workouts I give her suck, and as she’s most definitely not afraid to express her strong opinions to me (on Composite or anything else), she’s ideally suited to the job.  But even before Jess, the first wave of trials happen in my own workouts, using myself as patient zero.  I’d like to think I’m sort of like Salk or Curie, albeit with lower odds of a Nobel prize, but possibly with better abs.

Surprisingly, most of the ideas I’ve been testing out have turned out better than expected.  But every so often, one goes quite wrong indeed.  Which is how I ended up on crutches today, with a sprained left knee.  (Lesson learned: depth jump sprint reaction drills = no.)  Frankly, it’s a pretty minor sprain, so I can make do without the crutches.  But based on the amount of walking in my schedule this week, and the ‘pimp walk’ I was unintentionally doing when crutch-less, it seemed taking weight off the joint for a couple of days might be wise.  Still, I don’t imagine I’ll be on crutches for more than another day or two, and by the end of next week I’m hoping to be back to full health.  And, therefore, back to self-testing further crazy Composite ideas.

Generally speaking, I tell people “no pain, no gain’” is a terrible piece of fitness advice.  But, I guess, at least for my specific purpose here, it seems to be the cost of doing business.  As the inimitable Twain once put it, “you can learn certain things holding a cat by its tail that you can’t learn any other way.”

Right now, the US is facing a terrible, relatively new problem: a surge in chronic disease.

One in two Americans suffers from chronic disease (more than half of those from multiple chronic conditions), which is responsible for more than seven out of every ten deaths annually. We spend more than $2.3 Trillion each year (about 12 percent of our GDP) treating chronic disease, and it’s likely only going to get worse going forward, as the rate of chronic disease in kids has more than doubled in the last twenty years.

Our healthcare system wasn’t built to deal with these kinds of chronic conditions. A century ago, our leading causes of death were acute, infectious disease (the top three: tuberculosis, typhoid, and pneumonia), and most other doctor visits were also for acute problems like appendicitis, gall bladder attacks, etc. For those kinds of issues, the medical system is incredibly effective: go see a doctor, get an antibiotic / have surgery, recover. And with new treatments and technologies coming online, we get better and better at acute treatment every year.

But that same system isn’t well-equipped to deal with chronic disease, where doctors’ current tools are largely focused on suppressing symptoms rather than dealing with underlying causes. If you have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, you can get a drug to take (for the rest of your life) to lower them, but rarely a serious look at why either is high in the first place.

Recent research suggests that more than 85% of chronic disease is caused by environmental factors, like diet, behavior (including movement / exercise), and lifestyle. Dealing with the root causes of those chronic diseases, then, involves helping patients build and sustain new patterns and habits over the long-haul.

Given the heavy load we already place on physicians, it’s not reasonable to expect them to accept responsibility for driving that kind of behavioral change, too. The average primary care provider has about 2500 patients on their roster, and sees each for visits lasting on average just 10-12 minutes. That’s enough time to diagnose symptoms, prescribe medication, and then follow up a few weeks later. But while most people will take a course of antibiotics their doctors prescribe, drastically fewer will make wholesale changes to their lifestyle, without substantial ongoing support.

Currently, the fitness industry is failing equally when it comes to providing that kind of support. Indeed, the vast majority of people who start a diet or join a gym today will be no better off (and often worse) a year from now, having seen little results, given up, and returned to their prior behavior. Roughly, the fitness world today is akin to where medicine was in 1850: a lot of new science is emerging, and a slew of potentially helpful tools and technologies are being developed, but it’s yet to coalesce into an effective standard of care.

Which, in short, is what Composite is really about. Our big, hairy, audacious goal is to bring the rigor of medicine into the world of fitness, to try and develop clinically-demonstrable effectiveness in treating the underlying causes of the majority of today’s chronic disease.

There are a number of other companies, too, living at the intersection of fitness, technology, and medicine, developing new best practices, to whom we look for ideas and inspiration. I strongly believe that, over the next twenty years, we’ll see a whole new fitness industry emerge from those kinds of companies, one that can work hand-in-hand with the existing medical system, to help the US address the problem of chronic disease. And I’m hoping that, with the right team, a bit of luck, and a lot hard work, Composite can help drive that change, can become a leader of that pack.