If you haven't seen the BIG news...

Tonal dropped 25 new exercises last week.

The "hero" of the new moves pack is the Barbell Back Squat, which people have been requesting since I first started with Tonal many years ago.

Here's the official post from Jenna of Tonal's Content & Performance Team posted on Reddit.

Credit where credit is due. This is a great update, Tonal users are celebrating across the board, and my clients are pumped.

In the post, Jenna walks through a rigorous 5-part process every move has to pass before it's adopted into the library.

I want to be clear about something: I no longer work for Tonal, and I have no official relationship with them anymore.

I can only speak to the process when I was there from 2017-2022.

This was at the height of the connected fitness boom when the company was hotter than the Chicago Bears last season, valued at $1.6B (and presumably had a much bigger budget than it does now).

Back then, the process was a lot less formal than a 5-part review. It may well be different now, and I hope it is.

But fitness had much less to do with the process than you'd think back then. Potential moves were almost entirely driven by the product team, not the coaching staff.

But whether a move actually made it into the library really came down to three things:

1. Safety
2. Liability
3. Budget

Safety is the floor, liability is the gatekeeper, and budget is the final boss.

This week, I'm pulling back the curtain on all three and giving you an insiders view into how decisions were made at Tonal on the exercise library.

Next week, I'll give you my take on all 25 new moves.

Safety: the floor

Every move has to clear it, but it's not what makes the final call.

If it were, the Barbell Deadlift would start at the top instead of the bottom.

There are more injuries on the initial pull of a deadlift than at any other part of the movement. While I was there, I (along with numerous other coaches) pushed to have the move start at the top for exactly that reason.

It never happened.

Not because of safety, but because of budget. Between re-shooting and updating the software, the cost would have been enormous.

As a business owner, I get it.

As a fitness coach, it's a tough pill to swallow.

But here's the bigger point: strength training is never going to be completely safe.

No form of resistance training is. The benefits are absolutely worth it, but the risk is real.

An estimated 36,640 people died in traffic crashes in the U.S. last year, and we all still get in the car. There were 992,677 divorces in 2023, and I still got married.

(Best risk I ever took. I love my wife! 🥰)

Risk is part of the game.

That's why safety is the floor, not the final call.

Liability: the gatekeeper

This is where a lot of cool moves go to die, or at least sit in limbo for a few years.

The ankle straps are the perfect example.

We live in a very litigious society, and everyone is scared of being sued. It's why Anya and I carry a $1M umbrella policy, and why I pay for business insurance every month.

For Tonal, the fear with ankle straps is pretty simple...

You're strapped to a machine that could short a microchip, go haywire, and tether you to the ceiling. The odds might be one in a million, but that one in a million can bankrupt a company.

Recently, Tonal seems to be figuring this out. Maybe they hired better lawyers, or maybe they are just getting more comfortable with risk.

Either way, I like it. 👍🏻👍🏻

Budget: the final boss

Even if a move clears safety and legal, it still has to get past budget. Adding a single move to the Tonal library costs a lot more than most people think.

Every new move runs the same gauntlet:

• Legal: Depending on the move, lawyers assess the risk and sign off. Lawyers are not cheap.
• Production: Coaches, a production crew, and studio time to film the demo.
• Post-production: Editing, uploading, and storing every clip in the cloud.
• Programming: Filming several new workouts that feature the move.
• iOS App: Additional moves have to added to the app and tested.
• Software: Updating the library so the system recognizes the move and pulls the right clips at the right time.

That's dozens of people across content, coaching, production, editing, legal, engineering, and product, each spending hours on what's often a single exercise.

One day of filming at the L.A. studio was costing Tonal $10K to $15K. I know because I asked one of our producers. New York is even pricier. And that's before anyone even edits a single clip.

These are just the cost you can see.

Here's what I think about as a business owner: every hour spent on a new move is an hour not spent on something else.

A coach filming a demo isn't filming a new program. An engineer updating the exercise library isn't fixing bugs or shipping a feature. Every new move has to beat everything else competing for the same people and the same dollars.

That's also why the deadlift fix never happened...

Changing a move that already "works" means paying the whole bill again for something that's technically done, and that's the hardest spend to justify.

So when 25 moves drop at once, that's not a small thing. It's a real investment, and there are no complaints from me.

Plus, the slow rollout gives me more reasons to make Tonal Hacks 😉

Next week: my take on all 25 moves

Which ones are worth adding to your custom programs, which ones you can skip, and how I'd use the best ones.

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