Hello and welcome back to Chasing Excellence.

Hello and how are you been?

Doing great, thanks, Batcher.

It is good to see you. We are going to go back to the gym.

Are you ready?

Let's go.

We haven't done this for a little bit, but I'm excited to get back to the gym, talk about training. We did do a whole series of conversations. Goodness, I'm going to say it was last year, but I feel like it couldn't possibly have been last year. But I think it might have been last year. With my weird relationship with time, this could have been 10 days ago or 10 years ago. But we're going to talk about training. We're going to talk about fitness. We're going to venture into the Comtrain side of the building over there. But first, I came across an article, and I thought it was a good entry point into our conversation today. This is an article from, he's a writer named Derek Thompson. He's got a substack. He's a well-known writer, written books, and he's a journalist.

And he wrote an article recently about how we are in America, we are in a fitness boom, which

I thought was really interesting. So I'm going to read a little bit from the article and use that

as a way to get into this conversation about training versus exercising. And that's really the

thing we're going to try to get to here in this

conversation. But again, first from Derek's article. He points out there's record high participation

rates across all demographics as it relates to exercise. And he writes this. In the last two decades,

the share of American adults who say they exercise or play sports on any given day has increased by

about 20 percent.

Year over year, the American time use survey data can jitter up and down.

But what's clear is that in the last four years, Americans have been exercising at record high levels.

And he writes this, the share of Americans who say they don't regularly work out or play sports,

which is which the sports and fitness industry

association calls the quote unquote inactivity rate has fallen by more than one fifth since 2019.

But there's a bit of a quality problem hiding in the numbers. And this is what Derek points out. He

writes, as sweaty group exercise classes decline, low impact activities like yoga and Pilates are surging

...