Treating movement as a vital sign of good health

Andrew Menter: [00:00:00] Just being able to go for a walk or pick up your kid or take your groceries. We take some of that stuff for granted. And the thing is, whether it’s glucose or cholesterol, if you have bad results, you can do something about it. We can do that with movement.

Peter Bowes: [00:00:22] Now we’re all familiar with our vital signs; body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and so on. But have you ever thought of movement or our body’s ability to move as an equally important, vital sign? In today’s episode, we’re going to explore how new technology is revolutionizing the way that we can optimize our well-being and our ability to move in particular. Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long podcast, I’m Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. Andrew Menter is the CEO of Physmodo, which uses cutting edge computer vision technology to help us with mobility, stability and posture. All important components of personalized exercise protocols. Andrew, it’s great to meet you.

Andrew Menter: [00:01:14] Likewise, Peter, great to be here. Great to meet you.

Peter Bowes: [00:01:16] Yeah. Before we dive into this and the importance of mobility in particular, let’s just talk a little bit about you and the journey that you’ve been on to get to this point in your career.

Andrew Menter: [00:01:27] I’ve a lot of passion around the topic of longevity and always tracking my biomarkers, and kind of came to Physmodo by looking at the fact that we believe movement is a vital sign as you alluded to in the intro. So I’ll start with what I’m doing now is a big, big passion of mine, and I’m really excited to be on here. But I think, just, just a bit of the journey. Professionally, and I tend to try and stay away from this because it turns people off. But I am technically a lawyer. but, licensed, but never practiced. I’ve, got a bit of a finance background to doing a JD, MBA, but in talking about passion, it wasn’t really on the finance legal side, but more entrepreneurial and now specifically doing, what we’re doing at Physmodo. So it is very personal to me too. I have had a number of injuries through, you know, playing college tennis, rugby, Iron Man, all that stuff. The worst being I tore a full rupture of my Achilles, which happened on the left side. You know, I became I was asymmetric slab tear, ruptured bicep tendon, meniscus, all on the left side. And these could have been prevented. That’s what we’re trying to do at Physmodo is, is see how one moves, see where there’s some problems and have some intervening strategies.

Peter Bowes: [00:03:03] If a lawyer is a switch off, maybe a switch on for this podcast is the fact that you’re also an accomplished triathlete.

Andrew Menter: [00:03:09] Yeah. which led to some more injuries. I think that bike ride for 112 miles is not very helpful, nor is the 26 miles on the knees. But yeah, that was,super fortunate to have the opportunity to to participate and thought I’d, I’d call it quits. And a buddy of mine said, hey, you got to come try this one in in Germany with me. It’s a great race. And so did it in Frankfurt. Just had one of those great days where everything was on and qualified for Kona World Championships and did that. Had a great race there. And I and I said, you know, this is definitely the time to call it quits. And then you know, 2 or 3 years later, overuse led to, a lot of the injuries that I’m dealing with today.

Peter Bowes: [00:03:57] How does your athletic life look now, it’s clearly very different to those days of Iron Mans?

Andrew Menter: [00:04:03] Well, I’m. Yeah, I’m taking a lot of essential amino acids to compensate for the fact that I can’t be as active and, and do the things that I like to do. You know, for instance, I switched a few years ago to Muay Thai, and, you know, I just I can’t kick right now or certainly do you know, a couple of things that are, you know, preventing me from doing that. You know, squats and things that are super, super important with, with my knees and back issues. You know, deadlift some of the basic bench press with, with my slap tear and ruptured bicep tendon. So it’s difficult. And, you know, when talking about longevity, if you look at some of the research that Gray Cook and Lee Burton have done it at FMS. It’s not just movement as risk factors.

Peter Bowes: [00:04:57] Just for our audience FMS?

Andrew Menter: [00:05:00] Oh I’m sorry. FMS was is the preeminent movement screen that’s been around for, for 30 or so years. So Lee and Greer are the pioneers I’d say in in movement assessments. And the FMS is a series at seven movements. You’re scored from a zero to a 3 to 21 being the max score. And there’s a lot of research showing that, you know, if you’re below 14 you have a higher propensity for injury. But these guys have have evolved and understand through the research. It’s more than just, you know, how you move and and also really what the studies will show about movement can do to some of the things that we we measure on wearables. So it’s not a correlation. It’s a causation that many who have poor movement, soreness, injuries, something that prevents you from activity, which I’m dealing with now, does lead to worse sleep and is not good on for behavioral health. So these things are not mutually exclusive.

Peter Bowes: [00:06:06] And crucially important for everyone, not just for elite athletes or former elite athletes. Movement, at its most basic, is crucial for every single one of us and often underestimated.

Andrew Menter: [00:06:19] Yeah, I mean, you asked about how it’s affecting my training. I can’t even play golf, which is pretty poor. I don’t love golf, but it’s sometimes effective on a professional level. It’s just I can’t I can’t with my knee. It’s I can get through a round, but I won’t be walking very well for two weeks. But it’s not just weights or any type of sports. It’s can affect you know, I think this leads to the behavioral health. Just being able to go for a walk or pick up your kid or take your groceries. We take some of that stuff, or at least I do take some of that for granted. And the thing is, just like the things that we’re measuring, whether it’s glucose or cholesterol or you name it, if you have bad results, you can do something about it. We can do that with movement. It’s just it just hasn’t really been done because it hasn’t been scalable. You can’t wake up and see how you’re moving that day. You can’t wear a strap and wake up and see how your how you’re moving or wear a patch or anything. And that’s been the challenge.

Peter Bowes: [00:07:28] So tell me about that challenge and Physmodo and how it has developed and essentially what you’re doing with it.

Andrew Menter: [00:07:34] Yeah. So again coming back to FMS, fantastic screen. The challenge there is that you have to have someone do that screen for you and put you through it. So in today’s day and age of remote training, medical care and so forth. That’s not practical for for scalability. What we looked at doing was doing something that’s really quick where you can self-assess. You have to measure your movement frequently because imagine you’re just measuring your sleep once every few months. That’s just not good data. There are too many variables that go into one night’s sleep. Same with movement. If I just measured it the day after I played that round of golf for a couple of days after my triathlon, that’s not my baseline. So how do we measure it consistently? So it’s good data. And that’s going to require super quick screen. You’ve got to be able to self-assess. And that’s why we picked just the deep squad. Overhead squad. Hands over your head. Do three squats. And from that we’re not getting everything that you need. But we’re getting enough information that we can have protocols to to try and improve your movement and prevent injury.

Peter Bowes: [00:08:55] So just explain to me then, in a practical sense, how we can use your technology. What does it actually involve?

Andrew Menter: [00:09:01] Just kind of going back. It used to be the Microsoft Connect camera. For those that don’t know, it’s the it’s the camera that you would see in the Xbox. So it’s the piece of hardware. And then also the body pose estimator which is basically taking a skeleton, looking at the skeleton and looking at your joints. So in the video game, if you’re if you’re throwing something, the camera recognizes your wrist and your elbow and your shoulder. So when you’re doing a throwing motion, you know, in your baseball game or whatever it is on the video game, it it can emulate that, which was great until the technology became available on the iPad. That made things a lot easier to us. Now we do the same screen, but on an iPad or your iPhone. It’s the same three overhead squats on the iPhone and iPad. The challenge was we want we want to again a self-assessment which means you have to see the iPhone for for the guidance of how to do it versus having the phone turned away from you, which would be better theoretically, since the back camera is 3D. The front camera is 2D. So again, facial recognition is really what’s needed there. What we were able to do is use something called inverse kinematics to have an algorithm that effectively makes that front camera capture all three planes of motion. And so we’re able to get the accuracy with that front camera, just as we would if we’d use the back camera or that separate depth camera. And now we’re able to get the scalability and reach the end user, not just within the four walls, but at home as well.

Peter Bowes: [00:11:02] And to be clear, this is technology that is designed for the end user to use alone. It’s something you can do by yourself as opposed to working with a health professional.

Andrew Menter: [00:11:13] Yeah, it’s intended to be both. We’ve started on the B2B side and as an example, we’re in every single StretchLab, which is I think they’re up to about 540 in the US. I think it’s about 25 in Australia and some in Japan and Mexico. But we want people using this remotely. But it’s not so much just someone organically goes on the App Store and downloads this. I think it’s more effective if someone is working with a trained professional. Yeah. We give corrective protocols based on how you’re moving. So there’s there’s a software that can be used, for instance that stretch lab. There’s the consumer app that you can get off the App Store or Google Play Store. The middleware is a dashboard that lets the trainer practitioner communicate with the client patient to say, all right, Peter, I just see that you’ve I want I wanted you to do a screen. I see that your shoulder score is down today. Hey, what’s going on? Something happened there. I want you to pull back, and I don’t want you to do, you know, shoulder press today or I want you to scale it. Or maybe here’s just as a as a, you know, practitioner. I know we were doing a couple shoulder things. Maybe that’s not working. Here’s a different protocol. It’s a great tool for connecting the two. But by all means, you can. You can use it by yourself.

Peter Bowes: [00:12:42] Yeah, that’s interesting, because it’s all very well, isn’t it? Getting the data, getting the initial analysis, but it’s how to interpret it and how to use it to your benefit that ultimately is going to be useful to you.

Andrew Menter: [00:12:55] Exactly. I mean, that’s what I don’t say it was a struggle early on, but we were this is a poor business mistake of mine is we concentrated so much on getting the information about how your mobility or symmetry or whatever it is, but we needed a partnership with those who really knew what to do with it. It was. And we partner with TRX and and we’re fortunate to work with a PhD, sports science, [00:13:24] guy [00:13:24] named Chris Frankel, who was just fantastic. And he would always say, now what? So what type thing? I mean, great data. What am I supposed to do with it? So we do have it as simple as possible. And, you know, again, you do a screen at home if you’re not working with anyone. Here’s a protocol based on your most recent assessment. And that’s there’s that’s fine, but if you’re working with somebody else, they might say, okay, you can look at that, but I want to give you a specific 4 to 6 week program because you really need at least four weeks to to groove any patterns and make the improvement.

Peter Bowes: [00:14:01] And what feedback have you had? You say it’s widely used now around the world. What are people saying to you in terms of results and benefits?

Andrew Menter: [00:14:10] It’s in really the personal training boutique studio, even on, you know, chiropractic side. Go to a pop up event like a, you know, a running group doing a their 5K for the day and do a screen. People tend to have no problem doing this, and some may, for instance, not want to do a body comp because that’s somewhat invasive. But people tend to be fine. I don’t care if I move badly. I don’t have a problem doing a movement assessment. So that becomes more lead gen and then it becomes, you know, a sales and then a retention tool. So on the other hand, if you’re looking at, you know, companies or high performance, you know, level sports teams, they’re not looking to sell anybody in the same way that personal trainers are. That’s it becomes a preventative tool at that point. Now prevention doesn’t sell. If you go to a gym and say, hey, this is going to keep your members from getting hurt and that’s why you should purchase it. We would make zero sales, but now we can say this can drive personal training business. Great. Again, two really different ways to to look at it. But the good thing is it’s the same software.

Peter Bowes: [00:15:26] Why is prevention looked upon in such a negative light? It seems to me to be the most important.

Andrew Menter: [00:15:34] I’d agree with you, I, I think it comes down a lot. What we’ve seen is to this feeling of infallibility. Well, I’m 51, so I realize now, like, I need to really pay attention and I need to do a better job on my corrective protocols. But before I turned 40, I didn’t really care. It just I was fine. I wasn’t as susceptible to injury, so why should I worry about that? I think it takes someone. What we’ve seen in our experience, once they get hurt. Okay, now this tool becomes more effective. I also think that, you know, kind of going back to a lot of the guests that you have in talking about people know that it’s important to know. I think for the most part, your glucose levels, your blood pressure or cholesterol, that’s kind of been ingrained. Eight. Let’s find out where our levels are. If they’re bad. Do something about it. I certainly don’t think it’s ingrained that, hey, we really need to measure your hamstring flexibility and hip mobility, because if those are bad, that could lead to a back injury. I think that’s changing. And part of that is because we now have means to be able to test so we can do something about it. But I also don’t know if people, for the most part, realize that if your hamstrings are really tight, that’s what’s going to cause your back injury. It’s not because there’s something that’s really fundamentally wrong with your back. Your back is just carrying too much load because the rest of your body is not doing what it needs to, needs to do. So I think now that the tools available to measure movement there, the those the research and the discussions that you and others are having about how important this is for longevity. I think that’s changing.

Peter Bowes: [00:17:35] Yeah. And I’d agree with you. And I think that goes to the heart of the matter. It is access to data, whether it be the wearables that we’re using or access to technology in the gym or whatever it is that we’re just beginning to understand, like whoever understood HRV, heart rate variability that we can get through the ring that we’re wearing. But it’s all very well getting that information, but understanding what it is and how it can help us to know the variability in our heart in terms of how our heart is operating and how to just to be alerted to the data that it when it isn’t quite right, you know, what does it mean otherwise? There’s no point in having this data, is it?

Andrew Menter: [00:18:16] Exactly. And this is, you know, our next iteration of our software really excites me because we’re partnering with a company called Rook. They allow any other app to have the user pull in their wearable data. So when someone will onboard with us, if you know you mentioned the ring, if it’s an Oura ring, you’ll be able to pull in that data into our app. Now where that gets exciting is we’re going to be able to see a couple of things. First of all, your true readiness. So I went on a nice long hike in the summer in Arizona. I slept great that night. I had a 97 on my Whoop. And it’s it gives some template message. You’re doing great. Go out and it’s a peak day for you. But that affected my movement because of my knee and doing all that hiking. So I was about 30% lower on my movement. So what was my true readiness that day? And that’s what we’re going to be looking at to to getting really all the data you want. Because again, kind of going back to what I think I mentioned at the beginning, these are not mutually exclusive measurements, and that one affects the other and it’s movement that it’s affecting a lot of these other metrics. So again, not necessarily it’s more than correlation. It is causation. So if we can prove it’s been it’s been shown these guys at FMS did it. But we can do it more at scale now. Like imagine if it got out there. That’s get outside quickly. Don’t have caffeine for you know 90 minutes. Have your apigenin and magnesium and l-theanine at night. Well imagine it could say hey, do your hip mobility exercises and a couple other things. And that’s going to help your sleep as much as taking magnesium. I’m kind of making a little bit up now as an as an example. But yeah. Yes. You want to improve your sleep, move better. You want to improve your mental health? Yeah. Do your meditation and you know other things that have found to be helpful. But do your stretching mobility work, too. That’s where we’re going. And that’s again, we need to be measuring that. And we’re real close to being able to do that.

Peter Bowes: [00:20:45] And how much of a challenge is it to democratize access to this technology? Because it all comes at a price, doesn’t it?

Andrew Menter: [00:20:54] It’s been impossible. And until recently because of the hardware limitations. But, you know, now that it’s available on iOS and Android, people can download it. I think the challenge is people many times don’t want to oh, I don’t want to add to 47th app. I already have 46. And then again, as simple as maybe just the overhead squad assessment is you’re still trying to get people to do the screen that have not necessarily had any exposure to it. And, you know, we’re giving good direction we think on the assessment. But yeah, just getting people to be able to understand how to do it. it’s still a challenge. And we, we fortunately get enough data that we can keep improving. But it’s having this, you know, having this on a mobile device and then, more importantly, or on top of that, I think being able to assess using that front camera is critical and self assessing. So I think, you know, I think in one podcast someone, the podcaster was asking for potential title. And I said, well, how about democratizing movement? And they didn’t like it. But you know, you mentioned that. And that’s kind of what we’re where we are right now. so it’s sad that you mentioned that.

Peter Bowes: [00:22:27] Yeah. No, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t like that. It seems so basic and fundamental to me that we democratize the access to this wonderful, exciting new technology, but also an understanding of the basics, the basics. And you can’t really get much more basic than than healthy movement. It’s what we’re born with and it’s what really keeps us alive.

Andrew Menter: [00:22:48] Exactly. And I think that as you, you and others disseminate the information of the importance to longevity and just your your ability to not only train but just do basic things in life, I think people will, would, will be more interested in getting the information because they know why it matters.

Peter Bowes: [00:23:09] Yeah, I hope so. Just closing this and in more general terms, Andrew, what are your own longevity aspirations? Is it something that you give much thought to?

Andrew Menter: [00:23:19] I you know, I have a lot recently because some of my previous injuries have prevented me from doing the things you know that I really like. I’ve been doing all the other stuff, you know, with, you know, nutrition and, you know, good sleep hygiene. And I will continue to. But the number two cause of injuries asymmetry cause which I’m experiencing based on everything being injured on my left side. But the number one cause of injury is is previous injury. And so I’m very, very focused on that because I’m 51 years old and I can’t do some of the things I love. I can do everything else right. On the nutrition, sleep, mental health side. That won’t matter. You know, I want more than just to be around for a while. It’s it’s healthspan, not lifespan, I think is.

Peter Bowes: [00:24:12] What it is. Healthspan. Absolutely.

Andrew Menter: [00:24:14] Exactly. And again, the biomarkers and everything is a huge component. But, you know, does that matter if you can’t get out of bed.

Peter Bowes: [00:24:22] Exactly. And I think there’s there are lots of reasons to be optimistic, I think. Andrew, your technology is fascinating. I wish you all the best with it in the future. Thank you so much.

Andrew Menter: [00:24:33] Yeah, thanks for having me. And and helping to disseminate the the importance of movement as a vital sign.

Peter Bowes: [00:24:39] Anytime. And I agree with you. I think movement as a vital sign. It’s, it’s a, an expression that I hadn’t really used before. And I think to get it out there as part of the, the bigger picture, I think it’s hugely valuable.

Andrew Menter: [00:24:52] I do too, thank you Peter.

Peter Bowes: [00:24:53] The Live Long podcast is a healthspan media production. I’m Peter Bowes. You can contact me through our website livelongpodcast.com where you’ll also find show notes for this episode.