“Diet, sleep and exercise are the cornerstones and should be for everyone as a baseline. Exercise for me is a non-negotiable component of that triad,” says Dr. Brad Younggren, CEO and co-founder of longevity-focused Circulate Health.
“As a longevity and healthspan physician, I think that strength training is a bit underrepresented in the average person’s workout profile. Cardiovascular [exercise] is important, but I think strength training is important.”
In fact, it’s a critical focus of his field of medicine. It’s “incredibly important for longevity, for a core body, to reduce fall risks,” says Younggren. “If you want to know about something that I am a hardcore user and believer of — I mean, my family gets annoyed with it; my friends get annoyed with me because I love my Tonal. I have people ask me about working out, and I’m like, ‘You should get this device because you can have it at home.’”
For him, working out at home beats the drive to the gym in the mornings. “It’s at home, so it’s a little bit easier to do, I think, than going to the gym and driving to the gym, for me personally,” Younggren says. “I find compliance is easier.”
‘It’s been worth every penny’
What truly stands out and helps make the price tag worth it for Younggren is the Tonal’s ability to make real-time adjustments as your training progresses, from posture to an increased load.
“It actually has a coaching program, so it can look at your positioning as it relates to exercises,” he says. “It can give you feedback on your posture and how you’re doing as far as the different exercises go.”
It takes the guesswork out of working out, which can be great if you’re not sure where to start.
“It’s all just like having a trainer at the gym,” he says. You just show up, and it’s like, ‘Here’s your day. Here’s what you’re doing today.’”
Plus, Younggren adds, “as it senses that you’re evolving and getting stronger, it’ll readjust the strength-tension profiles for you.”
You can also gear your workouts to a particular focus: “You can pick courses like a month-long strength, a month-long aerobic focus, a month-long core focus, and then you can move on to a new program,” he says. “You can focus on different parts of your overall strength and conditioning program.
“If you show up, you’re going to be successful.”
Two-way resistance training
One reason for his confidence comes down to how Tonal designed its machine. “It provides tension both ways: eccentric and concentric mode,” Younggren says. “Because they have this patented tension technology, they can provide tension both ways. You can imagine you can have an increasing weight on a bench press as you’re moving up, but you also can have an increasing weight as you’re going down. That’s relatively unique to the system, which I like.”
For anyone a little nervous about starting off with weight training, or would get uncomfortable asking someone to spot them at the gym, the Tonal makes strength training easy, approachable, and safe. That comes down to the clever (patented) way the weight gets “loaded” on the machine.
“You get set up with a bar, and there’s no weight on it at all,” he says. “What’s cool is that you can get set up, and then the handle has the buttons to engage the weight. Then you press the button, and then the weight engages. When you finish, you press the button, and the weight disengages.”
This nifty feature also helps make the Tonal very beginner-friendly: “What I found introducing other people to it is that it's really introductory, or beginner-weightlifter friendly,” he says. “You’re not having to move the weight over and put it on a bar. For some people, they’re like, ‘I’d love to do weights, but I’ve never done weights before in the gym. I don’t know how to get started in that.’ This is a really approachable way to get strength training into your [routine].”
The machine comes with a bench, hands, bar, and rope, says Younggren, but you can add on to it as your workout expands, too. “You can buy add-ons like leg straps, which just came out last year,” he says. |They’re really cool for leg extensions and abductor and adductor work.”
Younggren notes that Tonal is always evolving, and does a great job of incorporating workouts you might like do in a class setting too, like Pilates: Tonal now has Pilates straps and programs, he says, making the machine a great idea for people who like to mix it up between lifting and classes.
Measuring your vitals
Younggren is nothing if not a data guy. After all, that’s the basis of his work with Circulate Health, the longevity-focused company he co-founded and is CEO of.
“Circulate Health was originally just a research company endeavoring to complete this trial on humans, looking at the impact of therapeutic plasma exchange on metrics related to human healthspan and, by default, translating into concepts of longevity,” Younggren says. “Even today, I tend to focus mostly on this idea that we’re just mostly here talking about how do we improve the quality of human life. Whether it’s plasma exchange, which is what I was focused on the last two and a half years, or whether it’s diet or whether it’s exercise, you want to be able to go back and measure the impact of the interventions you’re doing.”
The Tonal system lets him do just that: Track his data so he can see how he’s performing and progressing.
“It integrates with my Apple Watch, so I get my heart rate integrated with the experience,” Younggren says. “That’s fantastic.”
Unlike a lot of other tracking programs, it doesn’t just take down your cardio stats.
“It has strength scores,” he says. That’s a feature that’s super helpful. You have overall; you have upper body; you have legs and core. You can track those over time, which I find to be really helpful.”
It will even let you know when it’s time to give parts of your body some rest time.
“It’ll tell you which muscles are ready to exercise versus which ones need to be recovered,” he says. “I can see where I’m making progress or where I think I’ve kind of flattened out a bit. It makes it easy to understand and measure progress.”
