What is Fitness Lab?

Philip Pape 0:00

Hey Wits and Waits family. Today is the big day. This is a bonus episode to announce that Fitness Lab is live as of this morning. I'm going to walk you through exactly how it works, what you'll be doing every day, and how to get it with Black Friday pricing now through Black Friday. Now, in my opinion, this app could replace everything else you're using: food loggers, workout apps, anything like that. But I would encourage you to use it alongside those initially to compare them and just give an honest assessment in the app of your feedback because I'm the guy that's working with developers who's going to take all this and continue to make it better and better and better. And if you guys are like, where the heck is this feature? Why isn't it in there? I guarantee you there's a good chance we're going to be able to get it in there and in pretty short order. So, Fitness Lab, it's my new app. It does all of the things that you think fitness apps do now do, but very differently and all in one app. It tracks your patterns. It's not just numbers. It tracks patterns. It does have a lot of numbers, but it tracks your patterns as a human being. It uses conversational feedback. It adapts to you every day, every night. It creates all of your activities for the next day based on what you've been doing, how you're recovering, the conversations

Onboarding Before You Pay

Philip Pape 1:16

you've had and your data, including Apple Health. There's a lot of data that gets sucked in automatically if you want it to do that way. And like I just mentioned, you can keep using MacroFactor, Boostcamp, whatever if you want. This can work well alongside them, or you can use this as your complete system. Give it a shot. And if it doesn't quite work for as a complete system, we want to get it there. So if you're an early adopter, you're going to have a say in that. And no matter what, you're going to get a coaching layer that, in my opinion, has been missing from fitness apps all this time. It's what yesterday's episode was about. But today I want to tell you exactly how the app works. This is literally a shill for my app. This is kind of a pitch. However, it's going to explain everything because I like you to know what you're getting into before you even consider spending a dime because maybe it's not right for you. All right. So what happens immediately when you go to the link witsandweights.com/slash app? Well, you're going to see a nice pretty marketing website that kind of runs you through a lot of these details and it looks nice. And I have some videos and all that fun stuff. But then you're going to go in to the next step and you'll go through onboarding. Now, the cool thing is I designed it so you can onboard before paying for the app so that it can give you a plan first. And by plan, I mean literally a detailed three, four, five, six month plan to get you from where you are today to what you say your goal is. And by the way, the

Daily Flow & Apple Health Sync

Philip Pape 2:40

goals aren't just a fixed list, it is interpretive. So you can tell it, hey, I want to have a wedding and I want to have a six-pack. You know, like you can be that specific and it's going to design it for that. So you go through the onboarding and it's going to ask things like, hey, what's your main goal? Where are you with strength training? What's your experience with that? Where are you with nutrition? What struggles are you facing? It doesn't take long. It takes like three minutes. Okay. They're very quick questions, a lot of multiple choice things like that. It's going to ask you about your equipment, full gym, home gym, you know, no equipment. What do you have? What your training schedule is, whether you want the app to create your program, or if you're following your own. It's even going to ask, are you tracking your food somewhere else, or do you want to use this app fully for that? It also asks, like I said, what success looks like for you, right? And that's whatever you want to say. It uses all of that to customize the activities that are to come, but initially it gives you a plan. And then you're like, okay, is this worth it for me? And then you feel feel free to buy the app. Then what happens? Okay, well, the first day or two, it's going to help you get acquainted with the app. It's going to try to gather some other info based on what you said. Uh, maybe on hormones, if you said you have hormonal symptoms or taking HRT, which is part of the onboarding process. Yep, we're over 40, so hormones are important. It's going to, you know, ask some other, some other qualifying questions that drill down one level further so it can better personalize for you. And it's going to teach you a few things here and there, and you get to explore the app on day one. The goal is that every day,

Coaching Briefings That Adapt

Philip Pape 4:15

it only takes a few minutes of your day to use the app. Obviously, it'll take you time to do activities and things outside the app, like get your steps in or workout or whatever. But the app itself is super low stress and easy to use. So every day there's gonna be some things that happen every day and some things that get personalized based on the specific day, like are you training or is there something you're working on for your routine? And every day you start your morning by logging a few things. You're gonna log your weight. If you use Apple Health, you can integrate to Apple Health. This is this is a brand new feature right on day one. And I'm sure we're gonna keep improving it. Right now, it can pull in sleep metrics, it can pull in weight, it can pull in, let me think here, resting heart rate, and a few others. It can pull in more than I'm using because I don't need to use it all for you. Uh, it can pull in your step count, et cetera. And of course, if you see any bugs, you're gonna be able to report this and we're gonna get them fixed. But it you you log your weight, you log your energy levels, and there's basically things that it asks you about every day just to see how things are going. Just takes like 10 seconds. Every day you get a coaching briefing. Now, this is like the hero feature. This is the kind of like a human coach amazing stuff that happens in the app. Every morning, the app is gonna generate a personalized lesson based on my content and based on your data. So if your protein's been low, you're gonna get protein strategies. If your sleep's been terrible, you get recovery tactics. If your workouts have been feeling hard, maybe you get a programming adjustment, right? It could be any of those things. So it's not generic, it's not blog articles, it's not PDFs, it's actually a dynamically generated briefing based on what you need right now. And they rotate between all the things that are necessary: nutrition, training, mindset habits, all of it. They don't repeat, they're always contextually relevant to where you are in your journey. And then often they include little pop quizzes or reflection questions to make sure you don't just passively read, but you're thinking about it and confirming that you understand it, right? So that might take a minute

Programs, Form Checks, Adjustments

Philip Pape 6:11

or two. Then there every day that you is a training day for you, the train the app is gonna go in one of two directions. Either it's gonna generate a program for you because you said you wanted it to, and it is a periodized training program based on strength training and hypertrophy principles. I have spent so much time training it to follow the right principles here. It is not like YouTube workouts, okay? It is good, solid strength training principles. There are gonna be demo videos pulled in from YouTube. It's gonna walk you through the warm-up as well for the lift, and it's gonna suggest what you should do this week based on what you did last week. And so instead of just logging, you know, weight and sets reps, it's gonna ask you more conversational type questions about how hard it feels. Did you add weight or reps, any discomfort, issues, things like that, and then interpret your feedback and adjust workouts. It also has a form check. A form check. So you can upload a video of a lift, and yes, it will analyze it and it does it pretty damn well. Let me tell you. It will analyze the things you're doing well, it'll analyze your range of motion, your grip, your how how well you're pulling or your length and you know, the length and position, all the things that we really care about. It's it's incredible. Let me just tell you so, just for form checks alone, like having a personal trainer, using AI, which has come to this point where it can do that, you're gonna get that. Okay. And and it just interprets all that data and then it adjusts your future workouts accordingly. It doesn't totally give you new exercises necessarily, it depends, but it's gonna say next time, okay, your squat, you said it was a grinder. Here's what I want you to do this time. Remember what you said last time. And by the way, you did a form check, so I'm gonna remind you to get deep this time with your squat or whatever. Right? And so it's gonna, it's gonna help you with progressive overload. That's the that's the more important part, not just the numbers, it's it's the recovery, it's your joints, it's a progressive overload. Now, the second option for training is use your own program. If you said in onboarding, I'm just I have a trainer or I'm running my own thing. For all of you advanced lifters out there, many of you listen to the show, you might be running these on your own. That's cool. Well, what you can do is reflect on that in the app. So it's a very simplified conversational version. Hey, what did you lift today? Any PRs? How did it feel? Do you want a form check? Stuff like that. So it complements what you're doing. And by the way, you could skip any of these activities. You could even tell the app, hey, I don't want you to give any more, give me any more workout activities. And guess what? It will listen to you and it'll stop creating those activities. Or if you're on a non-training day and you need a training activity, it can add it for you in the moment. It can create that activity for you. It's incredible. All right, so this is what I mean by adaptive conversational style coaching. So that's training. Now, let's talk about food because this can be super controversial.

Use Your Own Program Too

Philip Pape 9:00

This is where it gets really different from traditional tracking. So, as I went through this design, I went back over the last five, six years of content out in the world and I re-reviewed macros, intuitive eating, tracking. You know, what does the evidence say and what are people doing out there? And there was an interesting series by Eric Helm's team through DMJ. This is way back in 2019, before I even got into this stuff, that was talking about how do we transition away from tracking. Now, they were talking about people who have tracked in some way to begin with, and they've trained themselves, and now they want to track less, but still have the intention and awareness. You guys have probably heard me talk on the show about macros and calories and micros. I'm gonna do a whole episode that digs into a framework for breaking each of the aspects of food up and prioritizing it in a way that's more natural and will help you be more successful. And I kind of went through this on yesterday's episode a little bit, but essentially what I've what I've come to the conclusion at when as does as I design this app

Rethinking Food Tracking

Philip Pape 10:05

is that if AI is powerful enough to analyze everything in your food and has access to all of your other patterns and data, then it can intelligently infer where you need help in such a powerful way that it's like having a human coach walk with you. I joked, I joked that like when Will Smith gets ready for a movie and he has his nutritionist there on standby. It's like that. Okay. You're going to upload just one meal photo a day. Now, people may use this and say, I hate this. I actually want to log everything in the app. I'm not ruling out the possibility that we can make that a pot make that partly how it works or an option for how it works. Like in the future, you say, Hey, I want to track everything, I want to do this this newfangled meal pattern analysis instead, or I don't want to track food at all, right? I mean, you got to track something, of course. But the way it's gonna work on day one is one meal photo and it's gonna ask you a bunch of prompts that are contextual. Like it might say, is this typical for you? Yes, no. How did you feel before? How did you feel after? What was your hunger level? Now it's not gonna ask you 20 questions, it's gonna ask you like two or three, but every day it's gonna rotate through different questions. And what by rotate I mean it's gonna dynamically generate them as it sees what your patterns and struggles are. Maybe it is just protein, maybe it's the diversity of foods on your plate, maybe it's whole versus processed foods, right? It is gonna be able to estimate calories and macros from those meals, but since you're not logging every meal, it's not gonna estimate your total calories for the day. But that's okay. Okay, I've gone through this a lot of testing. And what ends up happening is the app is gonna help you improve your self-efficacy when it comes to choosing foods and putting together meals. And at the end of the day, if you can construct meals that are full of nutrients, that have the right macros, and are a satiating level of quantity because you're eating mostly whole foods, then the actual quantities of those things are quote unquote easy to scale. And the app is gonna help you do that because let's say three weeks in, four weeks in, you're supposed to be in a fat loss phase and you're not losing as fat fat as fast as you'd like. Guess what? That is data the app's gonna use to say, you know what? I'm inferring that you are in a hundred calorie a day deficit, but you really want to be in a 500-calorie day deficit. What we need to do is scale down certain foods. Here, here, here are some strategies to do that. So, in relative terms, your data is still gonna help the app give you highly precise suggestions that are going to help you hit your calories and macros anyway. Okay, I look, this is the controversial part about it. I might get some flack on this. Those of you who are picking up what I'm putting down and understand that this is a completely innovative new way to do things will understand what I mean. Okay, because it's not about starting with targets and blindly hitting them. It's about building awareness of your eating patterns, getting the feedback to improve them and going up from nutrients to macros to calories in a more natural way, where now you actually enjoy what you're eating. It's flexible, it's satiating, and now you can scale the right direction

One Photo, Smarter Feedback

Philip Pape 13:10

for what your goal is. Now, if you are already tracking food in, say, macro factor, just keep doing that initially. I think this will complement it really well. And you can kind of feed data into it and say, you know what, I'm using macrofactor. Here's some data from there, like here's my expenditure, here's maybe a screenshot of my food log, and it's gonna help you with that as well. So there's a lot of different ways to do this. It's super flexible. All right. And then the other thing that absolutely occurs every day, in addition to flexible activities that come in and out, is evening biofeedback. Now, I used to do this with clients when I first started coaching. I would actually ask them every day, and then I realized it was a lot of work for both of us, and I switched it to once a week for their check-ins, but they were still getting a check-in with me, so it was okay to do that. In the app, I made it super simple. It's gonna take like a minute, and you're gonna rate your biofeedback metrics. Now, any of these activities can be skipped, or you can do part of the activity. It's not gonna penalize you, it's gonna analyze data, even if it's partial data, and it will remind you the next day, hey, we haven't been doing biofeedback, let's at least do it today. Or if you're like, hey, I don't ever want to do this again, it'll say, all right, but we won't have as much context to blah, blah, blah. In other words, it's super adaptive. Okay. But at the beginning, it's gonna help you analyze your sleep, your energy, your hunger, your digestion, recovery, stress, confidence, and your libido. And again, you don't have to answer all those if you don't want. If you have Apple Health, it's gonna start importing sleep metrics. We're gonna improve that over time. Your sleep score, your sleep stages, all of that. But you can rate these things manually. There's open prompts and reflection. And at the end of the day, this is really powerful data. So it knows every day whether you should be pushed a little bit harder the next day or back off or should change something or how this is affecting your metabolism and your fat loss. It's gonna help you spot patterns that you're not seeing. And to me, that's really powerful data for those of us that are over 40, right? It is not just about energy balance. We know that. It's not just about energy balance, it's all the things upstream of that. You recover, your energy, how your body responds. All right, so that's the daily. You will randomly see other activities like a podcast episode, uh, maybe things that it the app thinks you need based on your chats with it. But then every week on Sunday, there's a little bit of a deeper check-in. This is kind of like I do with clients. You're gonna log body measurements and photos optionally, again, you don't have to, but it's able to analyze those over time to see how your body is changing and talk about your muscle development, your symmetry, your fat loss, maybe belly fat if you're concerned, all of those things, and you're not having to share it with a human. So it's it's private from that perspective.

Evening Biofeedback Simplified

Philip Pape 15:45

And there's a kind of some journal prompts or reflection that you're gonna do on Sunday. And by the way, these are separate activities. Again, you can skip them, you could do partial activities. I've designed it where even parts of activities can be then submitted and analyzed. And and the app will then give you insights on that. Okay, it's not just gonna receive the data. It's gonna say, oh, thanks for sharing that. Looks like this is what's happening. We're gonna make sure neck tomorrow's activities match what you need right now. Right? And again, because it's not tracking all your calories, it's not gonna say, hey, here's your TDE or your expenditure. It's gonna say, hey, your weight's been trending down about half a pound a week, which means you're in a 500 calorie or you know, 250 calorie deficit. And where is that relative to where we want to be? If it's off, we can change things to get you closer to that, which is what you would do anyway if you're tracking calories and macros. All right. And then it gives you guidance for the next week. Again, every day it creates new activities. It's awesome. Okay, it's personalized, it's actionable based on your data. It doesn't judge, it has kind of my voice in there. And if you don't like my voice, then you might not like the app. But if you like a little bit of, I'll say empathy, understanding, nerdiness, you know, quirkiness. That's why I tried to build that in there. All right, here's the last piece of the app, which is awesome. And I say last piece, there's actually other tabs in the app, like your progress tab and your plan tab. You can go review your plan and where you are at any given time. And the plan evolves, by the way, as you go. But the last tab is the coach tab and it's a chat. And it's far more powerful than going to ChatGPT because it's trained on all of this stuff and it's linked to all of your data. And you can ask it any question you want. And I encourage you to do that because I want to hear the stories from the early users of what it's giving you. I want you to post it online because I've already used it myself and I'm blown away. I think I mentioned this yesterday. I asked it to create an activity so I can do a form check. Then I did a form check, and then it gave me really good feedback to improve my form. But it can do it, it can do things like that. If you tell it, hey, I told you I was working with a trainer, but I'm not anymore. I need a program. It'll say, all right, starting tomorrow, we're gonna put together your program. Tell me when you want to work out and what your work, what's your equipment is. But you could ask it simple little questions like, you know, why is my weight changing? How do I handle a work dinner coming up when I can't track? I'm going on vacation. What do I do? It's trained on my entire coaching philosophy, as I've mentioned several times. All the podcast episodes,

Weekly Check-Ins & Insights

Philip Pape 18:10

all my client work, anonymized intake assessments. We've got hundreds of that from real clients who care about the thing you do, which is body recomposition, right? And then it'll answer based on all that and your data. Okay, so that's how it works. The the briefings, conversational workouts, meal anal pattern analysis, hunger analysis, biofeedback, check-ins, real-time AI coaching. It all adapts to you, it adapts to everything. But here is what actually, if you didn't think that makes a difference from every other app you've ever tried, here's what's going to hit it home for you, I think. Because it's not about losing fat or building muscle. Those are outcomes, right? We talk about that all the time. That's that's way at the end of the line. What you're actually doing is changing your identity and your behaviors. You're learning how to read your body's biofeedback, you're learning how to make better decisions about, let's say, training when you feel X, when you're tired, when you're this, how to spot your own eating patterns and adjust them, how to think like a coach about your own progress. It teaches you the process, not just the tactics. It also gives you motivation, which is a very important thing. Don't let anybody tell you that you want to just be disciplined without motivation. Motivation is a key part of this whole process. So, six months from now, like I've said before, maybe you're not dependent on the app. You've internalized the coaching, you've become someone who makes better decisions about training and nutrition. The app then is just another tool that can help you continue to grow and push yourself. And that to me is the transformation. You know, not just the physique, it's the identity shift from someone who's guessing, who doesn't feel confident, to someone who knows exactly what they're doing and gets what they want. And it's built specifically for adults over 40 who want to do this, who want to build muscle and lose fat, yes. But you're tired of stuff that doesn't work, especially when life gets a little crazy. Okay. And you're tired of the tracking apps that don't seem to work. So if that's you, I think this is for you. And now I'm just gonna give you my pitch. Black Friday pricing is live right now, 20% off through Black Friday. So you got about, what is that, 11 days? And I'll just be transparent about the pricing. For three months, it's $147, so that's less than $50 a month. This is all in US prices. So Black Friday knocks 20% off of that. So it's $117.60 for per quarter. Or the annual plan is even more of a good deal, which is $440 for the whole year. I think that comes out to like $33 a month. And the Black Friday price 20% off, $352

The Coach Chat Tab

Philip Pape 20:35

for the year. So that might be the one that you want to steal right now. After November 28th, it goes back to full price. The link is witsandweights.com slash app. The link will be in the show notes, but it should be easy to remember. Witsandwaits.com slash app. You'll also get that in your email if you're on my list. Go there, take the onboarding, see if it's right for you, see what kind of plan it gives you. Download the app. It is only on Apple right now. So iOS. So if you're not an Apple user, I'm sorry, I just cut out a whole bunch of folks. Maybe I should have led with that. It's only on Apple. Apple Health integration is has just been integrated in the latest version. So there'll be more that uses that in near-term updates. But anyway, start, go do the onboarding, go to witsaweights.com slash app, see if it's right for you. I'm super excited about this if you can't tell. Maybe I've I've talked too much on this show about the app and I'm I'm like just a total shill. I don't know. Hopefully, you guys know I'm like genuinely, I'm I'm genuinely hyped about this in a way that can't be overhyped. Does that make sense? So, so it might sound like I'm overhyping it, but I really am not. This is what it does, right? It's it's like I finally built the thing I wish I had when I was 40 and spinning my wheels kind of thing. All right. I know what it's like to have all the information and still guess to follow the program, but not know if it's working, to follow the diet, the plan, not know if it's working, why my body's doing this, is it my hormones, whatever, to track lots of data and still not know what to do when something gets stuck. And yet you don't necessarily want to hire a coach or

Beyond Outcomes: Identity Shift

Philip Pape 22:05

can't afford it or whatever. It doesn't matter why. That's what this solves. And then more importantly, it teaches you how to coach yourself. So if you want to stop guessing, start getting coached, learn how to coach accessibly, go to wits and weights.comslash app Black Friday Pricing Hands November 28th. I will talk to you soon.