Josh Clemente – A Former Space Engineer Talks About How to Hack YOUR fitness
Episode introduction
Outer space is the most hostile environment there is, explains Josh Clemente, former mechanical engineer for SpaceX. Ironically, research about life in space is what turned Josh on to the power of diet for those of us living on Earth. His research into blood glucose — and how people who are the picture of health can still be suffering from metabolic disease — led him to found the metabolic health company Levels. Here, Josh talks with Pete McCall on the All About Fitness podcast about his obsession with motors and vehicles, his passion for doing a job well done, and all the nitty gritty details of blood sugar metabolism in the body — which Levels can translate into useful personalized data to help combat the raging metabolic disease epidemic in the US.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
10:24 — Kids at work
An industrious teen who’d picked up renovation skills from his dad, Josh and his friend ran their own small project construction business in high school and college.
“My dad was a home builder. And he’s done many things with his career, but when I was growing up — you know, single digit years old — I was helping him on home construction products and on his renovation projects. And so by the time I was in high school, I was doing it myself. My friend and I had a pretty successful small business. We were contractors doing mostly bathrooms and flooring. I actually supported myself through college with this work, nights and weekends. It was my alternative to the bartending gig. And yeah, it was my first foray into entrepreneurship.”
11:32 — Autograph your work with excellence
The value of a job well done — and how it reflects on your business — was drilled into Josh as he worked with his dad in construction.
“My dad had a tagline when he was doing this stuff: autograph your work with excellence, which I really took to heart. And mostly it’s about personal accountability, but it’s also about delivering the key to repeat business and enthusiastic supportive clients. So like you said, tile work is an aesthetic job. People are going to see this, they’re going to see the lines and the grout work and all of this has to look really good. And it has to hold up for years and years of abuse. And so quality work is key. It’s the foundation to a successful business.”
13:00 — A laser-focused career path
Josh’s obsession with machines and motors and all things that go was what drove him to study engineering.
“Leading up to deciding on engineering — there was never a choice. So I really don’t recall a moment of discerning between different paths in life. There was only ever one option and that was engineering school for me. And the reason for this is just I’ve been obsessed from the earliest days that I can remember it with tools and machines and especially motors. In high school and college that led to an obsession with cars and off-road dirt bikes and four wheelers. And so this appreciation for machines and constructing things — I wanted to make this a career where I could dream up and build the next generation of crazy machines.”
16:34 — The most hostile environment in the universe
Creative and complex problem-solving for life in space has led to innovations that benefit life on earth.
“Space is the ultimate testing ground. It’s the most hostile environment in the universe in literally every sense of the word. You’re completely detached from support resources, troubleshooting opportunities; everything that you use, you have to bring with you. Things have to work right now or you’re going to die, essentially. These extremes really force out-of-the-box thinking. You have to make large leaps in technology to go from earth to orbit. And it’s only a hundred miles up, but the distance is much greater in terms of what the technology has to accomplish. And so, some of the major things that have been scaled on or innovated by the space program would be cat scans, MRIs, LED lighting, wireless transmission technology, solar panels, filtration systems — the list goes on and on and on.”
20:45 — What’s going on inside?
The goal of Levels is to give people insight into what’s happening in their bodies and how they can optimize that by changing their behaviors.
“Levels is the first real-time metabolic awareness program. We use glucose technology, continuous glucose monitoring technology, to connect people with the responses to the actions they take each day — the metabolic responses that your body has to the lifestyle decisions you make each day. We’re operating, kind of flying blind for the most part in our day-to-day life. We don’t really have feedback from our bodies on how the decisions we’re making are affecting us. And so the goal with Levels is to provide a data stream, a user interface, and actionable insights to help you understand and interpret how to improve your diet, exercise, sleep, stress, all the environments that you experience each day and and optimize those.”
21:36 — Diet as a superpower
Diet wasn’t all that important to Josh until he read a paper demonstrating its power to protect the brain from a toxic environment.
“I was working on life support systems and it became quite clear to me that there were some really powerful effects of diet. So I’ll give you an example. So, some of the circumstances that astronauts can be exposed to can be quite dangerous. One of those would be a high pressure, oxygen only environment. So what this can lead to is — you can actually toxify the brain because of the high levels of oxygen and high pressures. This is called central nervous system toxicity. And I was reading some papers by Dominic D’Agostino on the benefits of a ketogenic diet in delaying the onset of central nervous system toxicity under these circumstances. I vividly remember this because it was the first moment in my life that I had a profound realization that diet can physiologically — it’s like a super power in certain cases — the power of diet in this specific example that I was sort of working against was shocking to me.”
23:19 — All day sugar high
After (finally) obtaining a continuous glucose monitor and seeing his pre-diabetic numbers, Josh had an epiphany: if the public at large had access to this kind of data, they could make real improvements to their diets…and their lives.
“One of the first things I started measuring was glucose, because I was aware that it’s upstream of this cascade of hormones that drive your daily experiences. And, long story short, I had some trouble getting myself a continuous glucose monitor. When I did eventually get one, I found that I was spending a large majority of my day in a pre-diabetic blood sugar zone. And so this sort of all coming together: there’s an access issue; there’s this high value data stream; there are potentially underlying conditions that you may have no idea about — it showed me that there’s an opportunity to really leverage this and bring people an awareness that they can use to improve. Not to mention, we have a real metabolic health crisis in this country and abroad.”
28:57 — Put your blood sugar on cruise control
Think you can’t fast because it will throw your sugars awry? A continuous glucose monitor sheds light on the flat, controlled glucose levels that actually result from intermittent fasting.
“A lot of people are concerned that they have to eat at a very high cadence or their metabolism will crash, or they’ll go hypoglycemic, or there are all these risks to not eating enough. And what you see when you have a glucose monitor on — during intermittent fasting periods — you see your body in action. It is tightly controlling your blood sugar levels. All of your hormones are under control because glucose signals to the body what your energy needs are, and it sort of triggers this cascade of downstream hormones. So when you aren’t fueling up, when you’re not pumping exogenous energy into the system, it can just hit its baseline and cruise. And what you’ll see is this beautiful flatline where all of your energy needs are accounted for and your body is operating and all of its energy resources are dedicated to the functions that you need.”
32:06 — No one-size-fits-all diet
Levels isn’t out to get everyone to follow a specific diet; rather to use their own data to follow the best diet for themselves.
“Ultimately what Levels does is — we want people to be making decisions that are grounded in their data. And so, certainly as you said, intermittent fasting, for example, could work exceptionally well for a certain demographic and really poorly for another. And we can at least show some data that underlies the fact that your decisions as you’re making them do have an effect on you and you can see this effect with the Levels program. And so if there are specific goals that an individual brings to us — they say, for example, I’d like to lose weight, or I’d like to optimize for exercise performance, we can make recommendations to direct them into these guided explorations. So that they can learn the effects of these things like intermittent fasting. It’s more of an exploration and a metabolic awareness program than it is a rigorous prescriptive approach to diet and exercise.”
36:14 — Too many carbs ⇒ too much insulin
Eating more sugar and carbs than you need reduces the cells’ sensitivity to insulin (AKA insulin resistance) which brings about a host of other health issues.
“Insulin resistance is essentially the numbing of ourselves to the effects of insulin. Our body stops being able to use that insulin signal and stops being able to pull glucose out of the blood. So now you have high insulin, you have high glucose, you start to gain excessive fat, particularly visceral fat around the organs. And this starts to lead to real complications for cardiovascular health, a host of others: PCOS, sexual health, mood. The effects of insulin resistance are very widespread. And so this can all sort of be tracked back to the overconsumption in particular of high carbohydrate foods…Tapping out our glycogen stores and not depleting them through periods of either intermittent fasting, or exercise does lead to this complex and vicious cycle where you end up trapped with stubborn weight gain and ultimately a high insulin resistance.”
40:41 — A dashboard for your health
Levels processes your lifestyle data — the food you eat, how much you sleep, your stress level, along with your glucose — and shows you how you can make changes to improve it.
“Consider it like a dashboard. So like you’re saying mission control for space launch — you see all the data and you’ve got the person right in front of them analyzing and making sure: are we go? Are we no go? Where do we have to focus our attention? Same thing when you’re driving your car, you have all these complex components under the hood. And there’s a lot of sensors and they’re pulling data off and displaying it in an easy-to-understand dashboard right in front of you. So that’s one way to consider Levels. We are under the hood, so we’re doing analytics, deep analytics on the lifestyle logging that you’re doing and on the glucose data stream. And we’re compiling that and succinctly displaying it for you in a way that is actionable. ‘So here is how you can improve.’”
Episode Transcript
Josh Clemente (00:05) I have to point to what space is as the reason for all of this innovation. So space is the ultimate testing ground. It’s the most hostile environment in the universe in literally every sense of the word. You’re completely detached from support resources, troubleshooting opportunities. Everything that you use, you have to bring with you. Things have to work. They have to work right now or you’re going to die essentially.
And so these extremes really forced out of the box thinking. You have to make large leaps in technology to go from Earth to orbit, and it’s only 100 miles up. But the distance is much greater in terms of what the technology has to accomplish. And so some of the major things that have been scaled on or innovated on by the space program would be CAT scans, MRIs, LED lighting, wireless transmission technology, solar panels, filtration systems. The list goes on and on. And these are all necessities for spaceflight to be possible. And I truly believe that without the harsh reality of space, the breakthroughs that we’ve seen, would not have necessarily happened.
Pete McCall (01:15) I’m Pete McCall. Welcome to this episode of the All About Fitness Podcast. That voice you heard in the beginning was Josh Clemente. He’s the guest for this episode.
But before I get into the full introduction for Josh, I want to talk a little bit about a previous job I had. I don’t know about you, but sometimes we have to do jobs that maybe we’re not successful in to find out what we’re good at. And that’s exactly what I went through. It took me a couple years before I found the fitness industry. I had a couple of different jobs. I worked on Capitol Hill. I worked in politics. And one of the jobs that I had, though, is where I – It was the toughest for me, but I learned an awful lot from it. It was a sales job. It was in 1995, yeah, 1995, I was living in the LA area. I moved back from DC, back to Los Angeles for a girl. That didn’t work out that well. But hey, that’s water under the bridge. And I got this sales job. It was a high pressure sales job for technical temporary services. What we did was we sold temporary workers. We did contract workers. It was a very high pressure sales job and I wasn’t cut out for it, but I learned a lot of good sales techniques. I learned a lot about business from doing that job. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to take it. I was working as a recruiter, finding people to take these jobs and we were getting the contracts. I got to work with companies like Xerox, Gulfstream, are ones that I remember. And it was a really cool job to have in my early 20s. But it was a high pressure sales job.
And the reason – Where I’m going with this is we had to read – Every week we were supposed to read a book, or listen to a tape and I really got into a sales consultant or a sales guy named Zig Ziglar. He passed a number of years ago, but if you know the name Zig Ziglar, if you’ve done any sales training, you might recommend it. But one of the one of the talks, one of the Zig Ziglar tapes I had from back in the day, is he talked about goals, setting goals. And Zig Ziglar is from Mississippi, Yahoo city, Mississippi or Yazoo City, Mississippi. And he had this southern drawl about him and he had this talk about goals. And he said you can’t hit a goal you can’t see. You got to set a goal and ought to know what you’re working for. And I’m doing a horrible Zig Ziglar impression.
That’s what we talked about today with Josh Clemente on All About Fitness. Josh was a space engineer. He has a really cool background. And the funny thing is he actually played – again another rugby connection here. He played rugby at Catholic University in Washington, DC and I’ve coached rugby there back in the late 90s, early 2000s. So we have that connection in common.
But Josh is a mechanical engineer, he ended up working on the SpaceX space program. And this was a fascinating conversation because, as you know, I’m a geek. I love exercise science, if you listen with any regularity. And you have to understand, a lot of what we understand about human physiology, about the way the body adapts to different stresses is from the space program. If you’ve seen the movie, “The Right Stuff” you know about that. We study, one of the reasons we understand as much as we do about human physiology and metabolism is we have to study it in depth to understand how the human body survives in space.
And Josh worked on that. That’s why I was fascinated. I got this interview request coming across my desk and I was like, “Oh, this is awesome. I got to talk to this guy.” But what Josh did is Josh created a system called Levels. And he’s here to talk about it today because levels allows you to measure – That’s why I talked about Zig Ziglar. Zig Ziglar who says you have to set goals so you know what you’re working towards. Well, you need to have ways to measure input of what’s going into your body. If you can measure the amount of glucose or glycogen or carbohydrates – they’re all the same thing. Carbohydrate comes into your body and it’s glucose once it gets metabolized into your system, carbohydrate travels through your bloodstream as glucose, but it gets stored in muscle tissue in the liver as glycogen. So it’s all carbohydrate, glucose, glycogen, just three different forms of the same thing. It’s energy that are entering the body. But what Josh did was create a system for measuring the amount of glycogen or blood sugar coming into your body.
If you like learning about fitness, if you like learn about exercise science, I have a killer deal. I have a great book called “Dynamic Anatomy”. It’s a compendium of a number of articles I’ve written over the years on anatomy and how your muscles work. I’m actually hosting a live webinar on “Dynamic Anatomy” on Friday, May 8 – 11AM Pacific, 2PM Eastern. Let me say that again. 11AM Pacific, 2PM Eastern, I’m going to host a live webinar called “Dynamic Anatomy”. If you sign up for the webinar, it’s going to be about an hour long, you’re going to get a copy of the eBook that goes through how your muscles really function during exercise.
Because here’s the thing, a lot of the research that we did on cadavers are on a dead body and what the early anatomist did was they saw a muscle connected from point A to point B and they said, “This muscle starts here and stops here, so we think it does this.” For example, a lot of people think the abdominals flex the spine. They do when you’re laying on your back, but the human body was designed to be most efficient when we’re walking upright on our feet. Muscles function much differently when we’re moving on our feet than when we’re laying down when they studied us as a cadaver. That’s exactly what I’m going to cover on that dynamic anatomy course.
Now if you’re listening to this, after May 8, it’s going to be recorded. I’m recording the webinar and you can purchase the package of the recorded webinar and the eBook down below in the show notes. I’m not taking any advertiser dollars. I’m not putting stuff behind a paywall if you want to support the podcast. I’m trying to help you learn how to your body functions during exercise and you can do that with some of the content down below.
Or you can get into this conversation today. It’s a little geeky, but it’s a great conversation. Josh is a great guy. He’s a mechanical engineer by training. He created a system based on his research in the space program with SpaceX. He created a system for measuring glucose and glycogen and carbohydrate in the body. That’s very important for your fitness goals. We need to know the amount of stuff we’re taking in the body, so we know the best way to train. So let’s get into the conversation with Josh Clemente.
Today I’m speaking with – When this came across my desk, Josh, I thought it was very interesting. I’m speaking with Josh Clemente from Levels. Hey, Josh, can you give us a little bit of a background about, a little bit of information about your background and what you were doing before you started Levels?
Josh Clemente (07:31) Yeah. Thanks for having me on, first of all, Pete. I’m really excited to get into this. So my background is I’m a mechanical engineer. I have a focus on thermodynamics and aerospace and I spent about six years working at SpaceX, working on the next generation of astronaut carrying spacecraft and I was the lead life support systems engineer developing the technology that will support astronauts in orbit. Actually, this coming year is when that vehicle will fly. I’ve worked on the Hyperloop system, which is a high speed evacuated transportation maglev train, essentially, and I’ve done a little bit of entrepreneurship on the side with some other crazy mechanisms and machines. And that all led me to where I am today starting Levels.
Pete McCall (08:16) So real quick, you were with SpaceX for how long?
Josh Clemente (08:20) About six years.
Pete McCall (08:21) Okay. Can I tell you? You guys, and I didn’t even think about this, so you were just saying that. You guys freaked me the heck out in December of 2017. There was a launch. You had the – was it the Falcon?
Josh Clemente (08:33) Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pete McCall (08:34) Going across the sky in Southern California. Did you hear about that?
Josh Clemente (08:36) The plume you saw the plume expansion. So I was actually in California at that time. Yeah.
Pete McCall (08:40) Oh my god! It was right before Christmas and all of a sudden my ex-wife looked up in the sky. She was, “What’s that?” And it was the craziest thing and I –
Josh Clemente (08:48) Like “War of the Worlds”.
Pete McCall (08:50) Dude, you have to understand it looked like something – It looked like it was right out of the Avengers. Like when there’s that scene, the Avengers when they’re coming into a different galaxy. Did you guys get a lot of flack from that?
Josh Clemente (09:01) So it was a huge event. Radio stations and emergency lines were just lit up and it’s really funny. So that plume, that same effect happens on every single launch. These are happening from the West Coast pretty commonly. It’s just that the timing where the sun had gone over the horizon and so you had – Basically the upper atmospheric plume expansion was getting lit up by the sun that had just set. So it was all about the timing. It was probably a five minute window of opportunity for that effect to happen and we hit the window and everyone saw it and it was like this crazy burst of ethereal light in the sky. Honestly, it was a huge thing the whole next day.
Pete McCall (09:42) I didn’t even think about that. It’s just I was thinking you said that and it just triggered that. And for listeners, I’m going to see if I can find a good YouTube clip to link below, because I seriously thought that it was – Yeah, it just looked so crazy because they’re also shooting rockets off it. So you saw this plume go across the sky and then you saw these two or three things come out of the trajectory and I was sitting there thinking, “Oh, my goodness! This is, you know?” And I’m sure you heard that. Anyway, sorry. It didn’t even occur –
Josh Clemente (10:07) No. No. That’s great. That’s a great, great segue.
Pete McCall (10:10) Yeah. Before that, we talked a little bit before we hit record. You had a little bit of an interesting background before you got into space engineering. What were you doing? You’re were a home contractor before you got into engineering?
Josh Clemente (10:23) Yeah. So my dad was a home builder and so he’s done many things with his career. But when I was growing up, single digit years old, I was helping him on home construction products and on his renovation projects. And so by the time I was in high school, I was doing it myself. My friend and I had a pretty successful small business. We were contractors doing mostly bathrooms and flooring. And I actually supported myself through college with this work, nights and weekends. It was my alternative to the bartending gig. And yeah, it was my first foray into entrepreneurship.
Pete McCall (10:53) One thing about that, and I don’t want to make light of it because we need, the country needs good skilled trades people. And you went on to get your mechanical engineering degree and I want to ask you one or two questions about that in a minute. But when you do, and I didn’t realize you did bathrooms and tile work, because when you do that type of work you get to be very precise, correct?
Josh Clemente (11:12) Absolutely. Yeah.
Pete McCall (11:13) And so what did you learn? What did you learn from doing the contracting home renovation that helped set you up for what you’re doing now?
Josh Clemente (11:21) Yeah. Great question. I would say that the three things that I really learned from contracting work is, first of all, the value of quality work. So my dad had a tagline when he was doing this stuff, ‘autograph your work with excellence’, which I really took to heart. And mostly, it’s about personal accountability, but it’s also about delivering the key to repeat business and enthusiastic supportive clients. So like you said, tile work is, it’s an aesthetic job. People are going to see this. They’re going to see the lines and the grout work, and all of this has to look really good and it has to hold up for years and years of abuse. And so just like quality work is key, it’s the foundation to a successful business. And then the trickle down effects of a strong work ethic. So obviously, juggling an engineering degree with weekend work doing construction was challenging and it’s easy to burn yourself out. But it teaches a strong lesson about having the right balance. So with enough items on your plate, you’re forced to focus. You can’t get lazy. You can’t slip up. You have to keep executing with precision and high cadence. And so it just played really well with teaching me some life lessons that I’ve used ever since.
Pete McCall (12:30) And so when you were studying, because you went to Catholic University, and for listeners, we were talking a little bit before we hit record, because I’m from [inaudible 12:37], he’s from little bit south of Washington DC and I actually coached rugby at Catholic a little bit. And so we have a little bit in common there. But you went to Catholic University, you studied mechanical engineering. What did you want to get into by studying, by being an engineer? What type of field did you want to go into studying mechanical engineering?
Josh Clemente (12:56) Yeah. It’s funny. So leading up to deciding on engineering, there was never a choice. So I really don’t recall a moment of discerning between different paths in life. There was only ever one option and that was engineering school for me. And the reason for this was just – I’ve been obsessed from the earliest days that I can remember with tools and machines and especially motors and high school and college led to an obsession with cars and off-road dirt bikes and four wheelers. And so this appreciation for machines and constructing things, I wanted to make this a career where I could dream up and build the next generation of crazy machines. And frankly, I’ve never been the most exceptional student. I have, I think, a strong work ethic, but I didn’t consider that I would have an opportunity to go into the space program or any space program when I was studying.
Josh Clemente (13:46) So my plan was to get out and work in the automotive world after school and companies were coming up like Tesla, for example, that were really catching my eye and I was getting excited to work in this new generation of automotive. And ultimately, I did have the opportunity, of course, to work in the space program and that was a realization of a childhood dream I never thought that I would be able to achieve because spaceflight and exploration have also been just core passions of mine, for as long as I can remember.
Pete McCall (14:12) When you were a kid growing up. You grew up pretty close to the DC area, as I mentioned. Did you go and spend a lot of time with the Air and Space Museum in DC?
Josh Clemente (14:22) Yes. And actually prior to that. So we moved to Virginia when I was about seven years old and prior to that we lived in St. Louis. And there’s this fair on the Fourth of July, it’s called the VP Fair and it’s an air and space show and the Blue Angels come in and – Those were the earliest moments from my recollection, where I just could not stop just staring in awe at the machines flying overhead and the concept of just high speed flight and spaceflight, these things have been rolling around in my brain since, yeah, before I had thoughts, I think.
Pete McCall (14:54) So what was it like when you ended up working on the space program? Was it one of those, pinch yourself moments like, “Goodness! I can’t believe I’m doing this every day”?
Josh Clemente (15:02) Absolutely. Yeah. It was a life changing experience, to be honest with you, and something that I will always look back on with fondness and I hope to contribute to the space program in the future as well. It was an extraordinary opportunity to get in at the ground floor at SpaceX with a team of people that are just exceptional at what they do and with a mission that you just couldn’t pick a better one to get behind. And so being able to, in those early days, take an idea right through to installing it on a rocket and sending it into orbit within the span of just a matter of weeks was something that you, honestly, can’t beat from, if you’re someone like me, who appreciates the process of building iterating and testing your work, not to mention the successes of the team, have just been extraordinary. So being able to just share in that and be a part of that has been just – I’m very blessed to have had that experience.
Pete McCall (15:56) And that, to me, that’s amazing. That’s why I wanted to follow up and have this interview because I think a lot of people don’t realize that a lot of the innovation we have, a lot of the technology we use today came from the research that was done on space programs. And that’s the question. What drives the technological innovation? Why is space research so important? What is it about researching specifically for space that creates this new technology or all this technology we use today?
Josh Clemente (16:27) It’s a great question. I have to point to what space is as the reason for all of this innovation. So space is the ultimate testing ground. It’s the most hostile environment in the universe in literally every sense of the word. You’re completely detached from support resources, troubleshooting opportunities. Everything that you use, you have to bring with you. Things have to work. They have to work right now or you’re going to die, essentially.
Josh Clemente 2(16:50) And so these extremes really forced out of the box thinking. You have to make large leaps in technology to go from Earth to orbit, and it’s only 100 miles up, but the distance is much greater in terms of what the technology has to accomplish. And so some of the major things that have been scaled on or innovated on by the space program would be CAT scans, MRIs, LED lighting, wireless transmission technology, solar panels, filtration systems. The list goes on and on and on. And these are all necessities for spaceflight to be possible. And I truly believe that without the harsh reality of space, the breakthroughs that we’ve seen would not have necessarily happened.
Pete McCall (17:34) I never really thought about it. You said 100 miles up, and you think of space as being really far away. But 100 miles is a distance from where I live to downtown Los Angeles.
Josh Clemente (17:45) Exactly.
Pete McCall (17:45) So in one sense, it doesn’t really seem that far, but yet, when you go up in space, it’s completely limitless. What type of systems did you work on with SpaceX? What was your main area of expertise?
Josh Clemente (17:58) So I did quite a few things. I had essentially two careers inside of SpaceX. The first was working on composite mech systems. So aerodynamic systems, things made of carbon fiber and Kevlar that would give the rocket its shape and allow it to cut through the air on the way up into orbit effortlessly. And so these are – With spaceflight, in particular, every pound is extraordinarily expensive. So you need the fuel to lift that pound into orbit, and then you need fuel to lift that fuel to lift that pound. It’s this nightmarish equation of physics that that drives it. So things have to be light and strong. And so that’s what I started out working on. But eventually, I transferred over to what became really the crowning achievement of my career there, which is the life support system development. So I led a team that developed the pressurized life support systems, which include the controls that keep the cabin of the spacecraft at the appropriate pressure, the breathing gases that are delivered to the astronauts for them to breathe. This includes oxygen and nitrogen, to keep them breathing appropriately and keep the environment controlled, fire suppression systems things like this. So it was the pressurized systems that would keep astronauts alive on orbit. And so I was able to lead that team and that was the final phases of my time at SpaceX because it was closing out that project and getting it delivered to NASA for the Crew Dragon space vehicle.
Pete McCall (19:17) And see, I find that fascinating because you have to take – How do you account for the fact that if we’re breathing in a pressurized cabin, we’re expiring carbon dioxide, and how does that get converted back into oxygen for continual breathing, for somebody that’s going to be up in a cabin for an extended period of time?
Josh Clemente (19:35) It’s a great question. So there are many systems out there and many complicated systems to perform that conversion. But what we did on the Crew Dragon is that we just captured carbon dioxide. So we would use lithium hydroxide which would essentially pull carbon dioxide in and convert it to water. And so that would allow us to just capture and contain carbon dioxide and scrub it out to the atmosphere, and then we would release additional oxygen and tightly control the atmospheric concentrations of oxygen using pressurized gas that we flew up with the vehicle. So this is a good solution for shorter term missions.
Pete McCall (20:10) What a lot of people might not understand is a lot of our understanding about physiology comes from the work that was done on the NASA programs in the 60s and 70s, when there was a lot of work done on space. And so this led to your work now, because obviously I’m not a podcast about space. I’m a podcast about fitness and you’re doing something a little bit different now. You started a company called Levels. Can you describe what Levels does and how your work in space related to or got you interested in what you’re doing now?
Josh Clemente (20:42) Absolutely. Yeah. So Levels is the first real-time metabolic awareness program. And so we use glucose technology, continuous glucose monitoring technology, to connect people with the responses to the actions they take each day. So the metabolic responses that your body has to the lifestyle decisions you make each day. And so we’re operating, flying blind for the most part, in our day-to-day life. We don’t really have feedback from our bodies on how the decisions we’re making are affecting us. So the goal with Levels is to provide a data stream, a user interface and actionable insights to help you understand and interpret how to improve your diet, exercise, sleep, stress – all the environments that you experience each day and optimize those.
Josh Clemente (21:32) And so the way that this all rolled out is, like I mentioned, I was working on life support systems and it became quite clear to me that there were some really powerful effects of diet. So I’ll give you an example. Some of the circumstances that astronauts can be exposed to can be quite dangerous. One of those would be, for example, a high pressure, oxygen-only environment. So what this can lead to is you can actually toxify the brain because of the high levels of oxygen and high pressures. This is called central nervous system toxicity. And I was reading some papers by Dominic D’Agostino on the benefits of a ketogenic diet in delaying the onset of central nervous system toxicity under these circumstances.
Josh Clemente (22:12) I vividly remember this because it was the first moment in my life, that I had a profound realization that diet can physiologically – It’s like a superpower in certain cases. The power of diet in this specific example that I was working against was shocking to me and I had never realized – I always dismissed diet as secondary to physical fitness. And so this got me thinking, personally, “What data am I using? What optimizations am I making daily to better myself and be sure that I’m optimizing for longevity and health span?” And I was frustrated to see that it was all qualitative. I was judging myself based on feeling and thoughts and sensations and Google searches and such. Meanwhile, I’m working on this program that is hyper data intensive. Every decision we make is optimized and there are these crew members who – You can’t get sick on orbit. You have to be functioning. And so they are also taking data and lots of metabolic characteristics and lots of long term medical conditions are being tracked.
Josh Clemente (23:13) And so it started a period of self-experimentation and one of the first things I started measuring was glucose because I was aware that it’s upstream of this cascade of hormones that drive your daily experiences. And long story short, I had some trouble getting myself a continuous glucose monitor. When I did eventually get one, I found that I was spending a large majority of my day in a pre-diabetic blood sugar zone. And so this all coming together, there’s an access issue, there’s this high value data stream, there are potentially underlying conditions that you may have no idea about. It just showed me that there’s an opportunity to really leverage this and bring people an awareness that they can use to improve. And not to mention, we have a real metabolic health crisis in this country and abroad. And so it was all just became clear to me that this is an opportunity that I would love to work on.
Pete McCall (24:04) Let’s take a step back, because – and I hadn’t heard it. I hadn’t really thought about it like that because you’re saying you read some research on a ketogenic diet. And first of all, what exactly is, if you can give a quick detail about what a ketogenic diet is?
Josh Clemente (24:17) Absolutely. So for modern humans, the primary molecule that we use for energy in our bodies is glucose, which is sugar. Now, there are alternative mechanisms that our bodies have evolved that allow us to produce this alternative molecule which is called a ketone, which is essentially a fat. So it uses fatty acids and converts them into these water soluble molecules called ketones, which can get across the bloo2d brain barrier to fuel our cells. This ketone molecule is really powerful because it allows you to supplement and/or replace glucose as the primary energy molecule. And so to be in a state of ketosis is to be operating primarily or in an environment of elevated blood ketones. So the process of producing those ketones is called ketogenesis and ketosis is the clinical state where you have a certain level of ketones in your blood and you’re said to be ketogenic.
Pete McCall (25:15) And so is there a correlation between glucose levels and toxicity. And the reason why I’m thinking about this is because you were saying pound for pound or kilo for kilo (I’m surprised you still use the traditional units), but kilo for kilo is probably very, it’s probably much more expensive to send carbohydrates up into space, as opposed to fats, because fats are more energy per gram. So was that where this data came from? You’re looking at, “Okay if we can only send one kilogram of food up, why not send up a high fat food as opposed to a high carbohydrate food?”
Josh Clemente (25:47) Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I love the direction you took there. So that’s actually not how I ended up researching this. It was more – so the circumstances that my system, the oxygen system – In certain emergency scenarios, astronauts could be exposed to high pressure oxygen and so there was this concern about central nervous system toxicity and trying to understand physiologically, are there ways that we can eliminate this? So that’s what led me to the ketogenic research.
Josh Clemente (26:10) Now, your point about energy density is really fascinating because you’re absolutely right. We have to bring our food up into orbit and I think the – So just for a little background, a gram of fat contains about nine calories of energy. A gram of carbohydrate contains about four calories. Basically, you have twice as much energy density in a gram of fat as you do in carbohydrate. And so that’s the underlying assumption here is that, can we bias towards a ketogenic diet and decrease by half the amount of food or mass of food that we have to bring into orbit? And it’s a really good question. It’s one that I think the space program is definitely considering and eventually, we will almost definitely see some orbital ketogenic research. It’s actually already underway, but we’ll be seeing a lot more of this.
Josh Clemente (27:00) And it actually leads to another question on Earth here. If you look at how the human body stores these two macronutrients, you have the ability to store sugar as glycogen and you can store about 400 grams of glycogen, so about 400 grams of sugar on the human body. Now, if you look at the fat storage capability of the human body, you can store a few 100 pounds of fat.
Pete McCall (27:22) It’s almost limitless if you walk through any amusement park or any airport, you can see the password is almost any size.
Josh Clemente (27:29) The sky’s the limit.
Pete McCall (27:29) Yeah.
Josh Clemente (27:29) Yeah. No. And it’s fascinating because it indicates that the human body solved the same equation already. It decided, so the energy density of fat is so much better than sugar and the human body seems to have evolved to opt for the higher energy density molecule being the one that it stores primarily and then the lower density sugar molecule is stored in lower quantities because it requires more volume to store. So it’s a really interesting question and I think it’s one that nature has also grappled with.
Pete McCall (28:03) I haven’t even thought about that because I can’t remember if it’s one molecule or one gram of carbohydrate or glycogen. The muscle holds on to two to three or two to four grams of water.
Josh Clemente (28:12) That’s right.
Pete McCall (28:12) So if the muscle is storing it, if you’re storing 400 grams of carbohydrate, then theoretically you have to store 1200 to 1600 grams of water. Correct?
Josh Clemente (28:21) Exactly.
Pete McCall (28:22) And that’s one way that bodybuilders poof up. And this ties into – And I know you’re not a nutritionist or a dietitian, but as you’re talking about this, Josh, I’m thinking about, intermittent fasting and some of the benefits of intermittent fasting. What is your research with Levels? How does that support the concept of intermittent fasting?
Josh Clemente (28:41) So the intermittent fasting piece is really fascinating to me because I think – One of the benefits of the Levels program is it gives people concrete data, objective data about how the impacts of their lifestyle decisions actually play out. So you have a lot of people that are concerned that they have to eat at a very high cadence or their metabolism will crash or they’ll go hypoglycemic or there are all these risks to not eating enough. And what you see when you have a glucose monitor on is you see, during intermittent fasting periods, you see your body in action. It is tightly controlling your blood sugar levels. All of your hormones are under control because glucose signals to the body what your energy needs are and it triggers this cascade of downstream hormones. So when you aren’t fueling up, when you’re not pumping exogenous energy into the system, it can just hit its baseline and cruise and what you’ll see is this beautiful flat line where all of your energy needs are accounted for, and your body is operating, and all of its energy resources are dedicated to the functions that you need – so your brain function, physical function, what have you.
Josh Clemente (29:45) And so intermittent fasting, I think, is a is an excellent tool. It may not be a cure-all for everyone’s needs. Certainly, we’re all individual, but what it certainly is a great tool to use to be able to take back control of your day-to-day lifestyle and also exercise a bit of what I like to call these depletion periods where you tap into the stored glycogen, tap into the stored fatty acids, tap into your body’s stores and deplete a little bit so that you’re not constantly topped off. We live in a somewhat sedentary environment in the modern era and so we’re often fully topped off and just layering on, on top of that. And so intermittent fasting allows us to pull down some of those stored resources.
Pete McCall (30:31) And we’ll off of this topic real quick. But I’ve read some research on IF and I always thought it was a little bit of, just one of these trendy things. But my primary care physician is a big fan of it and I’ve been playing with it for the last six or seven months and have dropped a little bit of weight myself. And so it’s one of those things where now I’m like, “Okay. There’s something to it.” But then talking with a nurse friend of mine, she was saying she experimented with it and from the research she had read, it appears to be more effective in men, especially men in their middle ages, like myself, as opposed to women.
Pete McCall (31:02) So that’s just a side note. It’s one of those areas, Josh, where I’m like, “Okay. There’s something here and I’m trying to learn more about it.” So does Levels support the use of IF? Is that one of the ways that it helps somebody monitor their overall intake?
Josh Clemente (31:17) Yeah. So the key to Levels is that we embrace all philosophies of diet and exercise and lifestyle. So it’s not necessary that we force everyone to adhere to a rigorous philosophy of eating. It’s more so that we want to meet people where they are and show them the data that underlies the decisions they’re making. So there are all these dietary philosophies – vegan, carnivore, everything in between, there’s intermittent fasting, there’s all this –
Pete McCall (31:45) We can open up a whole can of worms and I’m laughing just because it’s just like, you say one trigger word and all of a sudden you’re going to get flamed by all the opponents or proponents on whatever side it is. So I appreciate your saying that.
Josh Clemente (31:58) Yeah. It’s borderline religious. We have this emotional attachment to food and it makes a lot of sense evolutionarily. But ultimately, what Levels does is we want people to be making decisions that are grounded in their data. And so certainly, as you said, intermittent fasting, for example, could work exceptionally well for a certain demographic and really poorly for another. And we can demonstrate, we can at least show some data that underlies the fact that your decisions as you’re making them, do have an effect on you and you can see this effect with the Levels program. And so if there are specific goals that an individual brings to us, and they say for example, I’d like to lose weight, or I’d like to optimize for exercise performance, we can make recommendations to direct them and into these guided explorations so that they can learn the effects of these things like intermittent fasting. It’s more of an exploration and a metabolic awareness program than it is a rigorous prescriptive approach to diet and exercise, if that makes sense.
Pete McCall (32:59) I’m really enjoying this conversation, especially from an engineering point of view. And from that, as a mechanical engineer, how would you describe the human metabolism and metabolic health? Why should we be paying attention to that?
Josh Clemente (33:12) Great question. So if I was going to describe metabolism in a single sentence, metabolism is the set of cellular mechanisms that produce energy from our food and environment to power the processes in the human body. So think of this as the way that your cells take in food, breathe in gases like oxygen, sunlight – all of the environmental factors – and turn them into energy. That’s essentially what metabolism is. And if you think about it that way, you realize, metabolism is actually the foundation upon which any health, physical mental, has to be built. You don’t have the energy to power mental processes or physical processes if you don’t have metabolic function. So that’s the way we think about it at Levels is that metabolism is the underlying foundation to the pillars of mental and physical health.
Pete McCall (34:01 And so what happens if we take in too much glucose or taking too many carbohydrates? Because I think this is where a lot of people will get into, coming into trouble. They may not realize how many carbohydrates they’re taking in, whether it’s via food, drink, or whatever. But what happens when we have an overconsumption? You referred to it a little bit earlier, but again, from an engineering standpoint, what happens to our energy production or our energy metabolism when we oversupply with carbohydrate?
Josh Clemente (34:29) Yeah. It’s a relevant question. So again, we have these limited stores for glucose and these are our glycogen stores. We can store glycogen in the liver. We can store it in the muscle and we can store little bit in the blood, yet you can actually only hold about a teaspoon of sugar in the blood at any one time, which is actually far less than most people assume. So carbs are just sugars. They’re in a matrix. They’re starchy or maybe they’re simple, but ultimately carbs or sugars. And so when we consume carbohydrates, they break down into glucose in the blood and this can happen quite rapidly, or it can happen more slowly depending on how complex the carbohydrate is. But ultimately, it’s all sugar. And so if you’re consuming large quantities of carbohydrates, in particular, in a sedentary environment where you are not expending energy.
Josh Clemente (35:18) So this can lead to a circumstance where we have high levels of sugar in the blood, this is known as hyperglycemia, and when we have sustained high levels of glucose in the blood, this signals to the body that we need to do something with it. It’s unsafe to have high levels of sugar in the blood at all times and so we have to get this out of the blood. And the way it does that is it releases a hormone called insulin. Insulin signals to the cells to pull glucose out of the blood quickly, get them into the cells, by whatever means necessary. So initially, the cells will top off their glycogen stores, after that’s complete, insulin will continue being released and it will signal ‘store this remaining sugar as fat’. And so if you prolong this, you stretch this cycle out over long time periods during sedentary, without a lot of exertion, you end up in this circumstance where you have high glucose and high insulin over long time periods.
Josh Clemente (36:08) And so what this ends up doing is producing insulin resistance, which is essentially the numbing of our cells to the effects of insulin. Our bodies stop being able to use that insulin signal and stop being able to pull glucose out of the blood. So now you have high insulin, you have high glucose, you started to gain excessive fat, particularly visceral fat around the organs, and this starts to lead to real complications for cardiovascular health, a host of others, PCOS, sexual health, mood. The effects of insulin resistance are very widespread. And so this can also be tracked back to the overconsumption, in particular, of high carbohydrate foods.
Josh Clemente (36:44) Now, I’m not a carbohydrate extremist. I’m not someone who says you have to eliminate all carbohydrates, ketosis is the only way. But what I am saying is that overconsumption, so tapping out our glycogen stores and not depleting them through periods of either intermittent fasting or exercise does lead to this complex and vicious cycle where you end up trapped with stubborn weight gain and ultimately high insulin resistance.
Pete McCall (37:09) And that’s why I thought your program and your system was fascinating because it’s not just for people who are diabetic or pre-diabetic. We should be paying attention to our glucose levels in our daily lives. Correct?
Josh Clemente (37:20) Absolutely. Yeah. So we all have metabolisms. For every human being, like I said, metabolism is the way that you take your environment and turn it into energy. And so anyone who’s alive has a metabolism and it’s important for us to think of metabolism and metabolic function as a spectrum where you have, let’s say, optimal metabolic fitness at one end and then you have dysfunction at the other end. And it just gets increasingly worse. There are no thresholds where suddenly you become metabolically unhealthy, so to speak. So it’s very important for everyone to be making these decisions in their daily lives from a perspective of information. So we need knowledge. We need to understand specifically the effects of our decisions. And we have to be empowered to be making better decisions.
Josh Clemente (38:09) It’s insufficient to just say eat better, exercise more. We need to have some data. We need to have a compass, so to speak, to point us in the right direction. And pre-diabetic, diabetic, non-diabetic, everyone again, struggles with the same metabolic functions and the optimization is generally very similar. So there are obviously auto-immune conditions like Type 1 diabetes that are above and beyond – it’s a whole different situation. But for those of us who are dealing with just chronic lifestyle related metabolic dysfunction, that is where we can really step in and make educated informed decisions using tools like Levels.
Pete McCall (38:46) And what’s been the response? How have consumers been using it? Is there a medical component to it? How does somebody get started with that type of program?
Josh Clemente (38:55) Yes. So we’re still pre-release. We’re in what we’re calling the beta phase. So we’re very closely communicating with all of our users and developing the software and analytics program based on feedback. But as of right now, continuous glucose monitors in the United States are prescription-only devices and so we have a partner telehealth network who helps us ensure that we rigorously follow the ethical requirements for the FDA compliance. And so there is a prescription component to it. But really what the Levels program is all about is taking that prescription hardware and opening it up to this new world of informational use where you can get a really deep understanding of not just in mg/dL, these complex terms of how much glucose in the blood, but more so scoring your lifestyle decisions daily. And so the Levels program layers on a deep analytics software set, which brings in the glucose information, analyzes the trends and patterns and gives you things like our metabolic fitness score, meal scores, glucose variability, time and target range – these metrics that you can really orient yourself around day after day to better understand how all of your decisions together are pushing you either in the right direction or the wrong direction. And then we can deliver insights and research to help you better understand which changes you can make to optimize.
Pete McCall (40:18) So just like you’re doing a launch for SpaceX. You have a whole control panel in front of you where the systems are giving you all the data on what you’re about to send into space. Basically, that’s what Levels is doing for the consumer is just giving them more data about how their food intake is affecting their overall body’s metabolism. Is that one way to look at it?
Josh Clemente (40:36) Yeah. I love that concept. Consider it like a dashboard. So like you’re saying Mission Control for space launch, you see all the data streams and you’ve got the person right in front of them analyzing and making sure, “Are we go or are we no-go? Where do we have to focus our attention?” Same thing when you’re driving your car. You have all these complex components under the hood and there’s a lot of sensors and they’re pulling data off and displaying it in an easy to understand, just the dashboard right in front of you. So that’s one way to consider it. Levels, we are under the hood. So we’re doing deep analytics on the lifestyle, logging what you’re doing and on the glucose data stream. And we’re compiling that and succinctly displaying it for you in a way that is actionable, “So here is how you can improve.”
Pete McCall (41:20) And see, for my target audience, my target audience, people above the age of 35. I think our overall glucose and carbohydrate intake becomes one of the biggest challenges that we have to healthy weight management as we age, especially as our metabolism slows down a little bit. That’s why I found this fascinating. So how can people get more information about what Levels is and how they can use it in their lives.
Josh Clemente (41:44) So our website is levelshealth.com. We have a blog, which is levelshealth.com/blog. Definitely read some of the background research. We’re compiling a huge, huge amount. As far as I know, the largest compendium of research on glucose levels in non-diabetics.
Josh Clemente (42:00) And the reason that we’re doing this is: a) because it will benefit our understanding of what metabolic dysfunction is, where diabetes truly starts, and what it means to be normal and what it means to be optimal. These are key outcomes of what Levels is setting out to do, which is to improve metabolic health at a large scale.
Josh Clemente (42:17) So we want to appeal to people at the individual qualitative level. What is it that you’re struggling with day after day. We’re all performers in one sense or another. It may not be in the gym. It may be at work. Maybe as a parent or a spouse. But ultimately, we’re all performing each day. And so we want to give you the tools you need to perform better, to optimize your performance. And you get this side benefit of long-term improvement in your risk of these lifestyle related illnesses.
Josh Clemente (42:41) And so we just want to meet people where they are, give them the tools they need to improve their qualitative and quantitative lifestyles. And so all of that research is being distributed through our social. We’re on the social networks, at Instagram, Twitter. You can follow us there and also on our website, levelshealth.com and our blog. And follow along, sign up for our waitlist. We do have a very controlled beta going on. We have limited slots per month, but we are working towards a broad public release later this year, which we’re very excited for.
Pete McCall (43:10) I think this is so cool, man, because for years, not years, but for the last maybe two or three years, my friends and I have been talking about, “Okay. What’s going to disrupt fitness?” Because the fitness industry has been very traditional, doing the same thing always and we’ve been looking at – Yeah, we understand that probably technology will definitely disrupt how we do things. And it’s really cool to see what your background as a space engineer is allowing you to do. And you’re just taking a different point of view at how the human body and how the human body functions and I think that’s really cool.
Josh Clemente (43:40) I appreciate that. Yeah. Again, I’m very blessed to have this opportunity and I genuinely enjoy what I do every single day. The process of exploration, the process of learning, not just about myself, but about metabolism and physiology at large and implementing some of the lessons learned at SpaceX – the build, test, iterate approach to improvement. I think this is key. Everyone should be out there experimenting and exploring rather than just following the lead and living our lives based off Googled Internet research. We need to take data into our daily lives. I like to compare what we do today to finance. All of us have our mobile banking in our pocket. You’ve got all of your bank account information. You’ve got financial experts giving you projections of your retirement in 40/50 years into the future. But my question to you would be, what data do you have that tells you that you’re going to be around for that retirement or that you’re going to be in optimal health. And so what we want to do is, we want to make it such that you have your metabolic health in your pocket. You open an app. You understand where you are or where you’re heading and you know, and you can feel more confident that you’re making the right decisions.
Pete McCall (44:48) I want to just making a little adjustment to that. Maybe 10 to 15 years in the future.
Josh Clemente (44:52) There you go.
Pete McCall (44:54) Hey, final question, man, before I let you go. I really appreciate your time and I appreciate your joining All About Fitness. You’re a little bit of a gearhead. So what’s your favorite car?
Josh Clemente (45:03) Oh, man, that’s a loaded question.
Pete McCall (45:05) Yeah. What I mean is if you’re going to have one car for, say, to run around on the weekends. You’re not out at a track. You want to have a little bit of fun on the weekends just driving. I’m in Southern California. Yeah. I’m not a huge car nut but obviously, you understand it and you’ve made a few analogies. But if you had a, we’ll say muscle car like an old 60s era muscle car, do you have a favorite type of that?
Josh Clemente (45:24) Absolutely. A ‘68 Camaro.
Pete McCall (45:28) Nice.
Josh Clemente (45:29) That’s the car I’m going with. What was that?
Pete McCall (45:31) What about? What about the Camaro?
Josh Clemente (45:35) I have to say this one. This is another one. My dad’s my role model and he had pictures of a ‘68 Camaro in the garage when I was growing up. And there’s a sharp body crease on that car that it’s just vivid in my mind. I can always picture the ‘68 Camaro. They changed the body styling shortly thereafter, but I think it’s the pinnacle of that mid-late 60s muscle car design and with the right exhaust mods, it’s one of the best sounding vehicles on the planet. And I do have to caveat. Of course, my daily driver would be a Tesla because I’m obsessed with electric cars and I think that they’re obviously the future. But for that weekend warrior, that’s going to be the Camaro.
Pete McCall (46:12) Hey man, that’s an awesome way to wrap it up. So Josh Clemente, with Levels Health and I really appreciate. It’s really cool to hear about what you’re doing. I really appreciate your time today.
Josh Clemente (46:19) Pete, I really appreciate you having me on and I loved our conversation and I’d love to geek out on space stuff or anything else anytime.
Pete McCall (46:27) As you can tell, we kind of geeked out a little bit. It was fun. I could tell he’s a little bit of a gearhead, so it’s fun to ask about the car. I’m more of a Ford guy. I’d probably go with the older Mustang, but I can definitely respect a Camaro. Actually, I’d probably go with an older car. I might go with a Pontiac GTO, just one of those cool 60s cars.
Pete McCall (46:44) There’s a place here in Encinitas, California near where I live, Cardiff Motors. They have muscle cars. My kids who have to put up with me every now and then, we’d go by. I have to stop and then look, and see what they have for sale. I’m not in a position to buy one yet, but there’s going to be one day when I pick up something from the 1960s that goes vroom, vroom, vroom. Anyway, this is not a podcast about muscle cars. This is a podcast about fitness.
Pete McCall (47:06) That was a fun conversation and like I said in the beginning, a lot of what we understand about human physiology comes from how we studied the body in relation to going to space. And you heard Josh say, going up 100 miles. 100 miles isn’t that far. I think 100 miles is about the distance, give or take, between San Diego and Los Angeles. It’s a little bit more, I’m trying to remember, I think it’s a little bit more than distance between Philadelphia and New York. I definitely know it’s a little bit longer than the distance between New York and Boston. But 100 miles is not that far. But think about if you go straight up vertically. It’s a completely different environment up there and we have to understand how the body functions up in that lack of environment, actually. You’re up in a vacuum. There’s nothing there. And think about it. If you have a very limited space in your payload, you have to be as energy efficient as possible. That’s why this was a fun conversation.
Pete McCall (47:56) His PR firm reached out to me and said, “Hey, we have this guy who created a system.” Once I saw he was a space engineer, I was like, “Heck, yeah! I definitely want to have that conversation with him.” So thanks for indulging us and thanks for letting us have that conversation. And thank you for your time with that.
Pete McCall (48:11) Now, if you want to support the podcast, as I mentioned before, I’m doing a webinar called “Dynamic Anatomy: how your body moves when you exercise”, but I’m also selling workout programs. If you want to get in the best shape without needing a lot of equipment, without wasting a lot of time in the gym. And that’s the thing. A lot of times we go to the gym, we don’t know what to do.
Pete McCall (48:31) I’ve been studying this stuff for more than 20 years. I’ve been educating personal trainers for more than 15 years. I’ve been a personal trainer for more than 20 years. I’ve been educating personal trainers for a little more than 15 years. The programs I’ve written, the 8-week dumbbell strength program, the 8-week kettlebell conditioning program, the 8-week functional core training program are based on science. They’re based on how your body moves.
Pete McCall (48:53) Not only do you get the workout program, but you have metabolic conditioning, you get mobility training, you get recovery strategies – all that in an 8-week program. And I’m selling it for a great discount, 60% off. That’s a little bit less. You’re going to pay right around $20 for an 8-week program. So you’re going to pay, not quite, a little bit more than $2 a week for a great workout system that you can do at home. And you can reach out to me if you have any direct questions about the workouts. I’m trying to be here for a resource for you and the cool thing is, if you do those workouts correctly, not only will you get stronger, but according to the science, you are going to slow down the effects of aging on your body. And I’m going to talk about that in a couple future episodes coming up. So again, thanks for stopping by and as always, I look forward to having you join me for future episode of All About Fitness.