Acting upon what we feel passionate about and pursuing good ideas is not just for those who hate their jobs or are desperate for a new source of income. Joe Comsti and his co-founders Vince Ruggeri and Robbie Hall identified a new way to look at one of the most important aspects of the human experience, physical fitness. Their program, Habit of Health LLC, combines aspects of many popular health programs alongside other components of our health, including nutrition and good mental habits. In this episode, they join Stephen Jaye to discuss the importance of taking care of our bodies, the current state of the fitness industry, and the importance of building a brand. They go deep into the struggles that keep people unmotivated about being healthy and then offer some tips on overcoming them. Imparting wisdom to those trying to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, they also share the things they learned best about building a brand that can support your life and, at the same time, help others. Join Joe, Vince, and Robbie in this engaging conversation to learn more.
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Habit Of Health: Building A Brand That Keeps People In Good Physical Health With Joe Comsti, Vince Ruggeri, and Robbie Hall
One key aspect of anyone’s life is our physical fitness. Our ability to take on whatever challenge we’re looking for is limited by how much we can handle in our bodies and being in good physical shape does help us maintain and increase our energy level. I’d like to introduce Joe Comsti along with Vince and Rob, who have started their own LLC around keeping people in good physical health called Habit of Health. How are you all doing?
We are good.
First, tell me the inspiration behind Habit of Health. What made you decide to take on this venture?
“If your #1 goal is to make money, then I think you can quickly get away from what your actual goals are.”
During COVID times and everything, we just hung out with people in the neighborhood. Rob is our neighbor and we’re all fitness junkies. That was the closing of the gyms, I went to CrossFit and I had a running coach. Rob coaches at CorePower Yoga and we taught fitness, we love working out. I had a nice home gym built which has expanded into what Habit of Health is now. We talked about it. Why do I CrossFit? Why does Vince power lift? Why does Rob do yoga? Is one better than the other? I think and we believe that the answer is that one isn’t better than the other. All fitness and being cardiovascular or being healthy in general is about getting out there and moving.
That’s a problem with a lot of the fitness industry, that if you go to CorePower Yoga, you get CorePower Yoga, if you go to CrossFit, you get CrossFit, you go to Orangetheory, you get Orangetheory. CrossFit and CorePower yoga isn’t for everybody. The idea of Habit of Health revolves around that idea but instead of telling you how and what you should be doing, it’s, “Here is everything.” We do a little strength, HITT, yoga, running and we’re slowly adding to our arsenal of tools that we can teach people how to do. We will never tell anybody that you have to show up to yoga, you have to show up to HIIT or you have to be doing strength stuff. It’s about moving. Being healthy is all about getting out there and doing something.
That’s one of the challenges of our current times. A lot of us have jobs and lifestyles that are quite sedentary. We see it all around when the human body was meant to move. I’ve had periods where for one reason or another, a cold snap with temperatures below zero, I didn’t move for several days and all of a sudden I realized, “I feel crappy. I don’t feel well.” The human body wasn’t meant to just sit in front of a computer or some screen for 12, 14, 16, 18 hours a day. It was meant to move. Can you tell us a little bit about this conversation that led to the revelation about what Habit of Health became? How did that conversation go as you were in your home gym talking amongst yourselves?
I don’t even know where we were at but for me, I lived up the street and I would always see Joe and Vince working out. I’m very active myself and I was always peeking around in the gym. I’d show up shirtless, trying to show I’m in good shape. We started talking and we realized that we each had our own routines that we were doing and when COVID disrupted that, it forced us to get outside of our comfort zone. That was what inspired us. The fact that we overcame that I had gotten into the best shape of my life after COVID. I was a gym junkie. I was there at 24 Hour Fitness all the time and it was a shock for me to lose that.
I don’t know exactly how it happened. I started squatting with them and we brought our desire that we wanted to share this with other people because we felt like the industry is broken. They’re trying to take your money. This 24 Hour Fitness wants you to go to them and doesn’t want you to go anywhere else. Orangetheory, CorePower Yoga, they want your money and they want you to go there. When we decided that we stepped outside of our comfort zone and realize that we didn’t need those entities anymore.
We didn’t go to a gym anymore. We wanted to share this with other people. I had been in a few challenges that were neighborhood challenges before this, 5, 6, years before. It was something I brought up and I just said, “I think that there’s a way that we can start this journey and it will be outside of the box. It’s going to be something different.” It was this challenge. We decided and said, “Instead of trying to get a weekly or a monthly membership, what we can do is get our friends and family involved and try to make an impact on their lives and say, ‘We’re going to give you an eight-week challenge. We’re going to give you some tools and at the end of that, we’re going to be able to have some people give us honest feedback. They’re going to be able to give us reviews, they’ll be able to spread the word.’”
It then evolved into our second challenge, which is now has reached outside of that. We’re getting to the point where we believe that we’ve got something to where as soon as restrictions are lifted, we’ll be able to get into a brick and mortar now. Doing that was us realizing that we love what we do and we want to teach other people about it too that you don’t need to go to the gym. You can do this outside your gym. You can create these habits inside of your own environment for years.
A huge part of what made it clicked was before I only power lifted. There’s no deadlift, bench squat but I was very focused on that. Joe introduced Olympic lifting and CrossFit and more so with that is the technique that goes into those. I thought I had figured out lifting. I thought I had hit my maxes on everything. Once he started introducing that technique, I realized those principles of powerlifting and CrossFit, when I apply them to powerlifting, I’m way better. We realized that within these three, the yoga, powerlifting, CrossFit, Olympic lifting, a lot of technique but also functionality that crosses over so that if you learn Olympic lifting, even if that’s not your forte or you start doing yoga, it will greatly improve how well you perform in your other ones. For instance, if you’re just into yoga every day and then you start Olympic lifting or powerlifting, that strength and mobility will end up helping you improve yoga. It was all the more reason to blend all of them and improve that functionality throughout all three habits.
I have my own challenge with relation to that whole idea of cross-training. My big activity is bicycling. I’m going to be training for Ride The Rockies. One of the things is that there are certain muscle groups that bicycling doesn’t do anything for and that’s mainly your core. I’ve gotten a lot better ever since I started incorporating a little bit of core workout, a little bit of planking. One of the things I do is I’m trying to reduce my screen time. For every twenty minutes over an hour that my screen time shows on the phone, I make myself do either five burpees or a one-minute plank. At the end of the day, I look and that’s part of why I was doing burpees before this, to punish myself for the screen time.
One of the things I want to ask you about is this balance between making money and serving a purpose because it sounds like what you’re saying about the industry in fitness is that it’s all for making money. How many people are they bringing in with a membership? It sounds like what you want your fitness challenge and what the fitness world to be in general is motivated by what it seems is your motivation. It’s just helping more people achieve their fitness goals, helping them become active, embrace the cross-training that you’re talking about and embrace the whole idea that you can’t do one thing. If you start doing a little bit of everything, you’re going to get better. How would you say you’re going about this whole trying to make some money? A lot of people have this idea that these things are making money and serving your overall purpose are mutually exclusive.
First and foremost, if you have good intent which is to do something good and for us, it’s making everybody healthier by teaching them how to be healthier. That people will see that it is a good idea. Right now, we all have jobs that pay us. That scale of 40 plus hour a week software developer, I don’t plan on stopping doing that anytime soon because I’ve always seen this as a way to get people healthier. My friends and family specifically first and if it can grow outwards from there then great. Right before we went on the show, Rob, Vince and I were talking about how we’ve been adding these themes to every week. Our theme had been comfortable with uncomfortable. It’s like we were doing wall blocks, I think Monday where you walk up the wall, you’re upside down for a little bit. That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people.
Being healthy is all about getting out there and doing something.
We did it all the time as little kids. I pushed them hard on Tuesday to get to that place where it sucks. A long bike ride at a certain point, it’s not going to be any fun but how those themes like comfortable with being uncomfortable can translate to the outside of the gym as well. It’s doing things that talking to somebody in a bar that you probably want to talk to because you’re comfortable doing that. Asking for a promotion at work when you think you deserve it but you’re uncomfortable talking to your boss. It’s like how these little things that we teach you at the gym and these theories go well beyond the gym. It’s my desire to help and teach people and fitness is a good foray into helping and teaching people to be better, in general, not just in the gym.
The Habit of Health, there’s nothing in it that necessarily says physically healthy. It’s not having physical health, it’s the habit of health in general which includes nutrition, mental and physical health. Being more confident and being able to step out into another realm of something that you’re uncomfortable with. If our goal is that teaching element of making people better then I think eventually you can make money doing that but it’s not and it shouldn’t be with any successful company. If your number one goal is to make money then you can quickly get away from what your actual goals are.
We’re trying to build a brand and that’s our number one focus. We’re not trying to make money. We’re trying to build a brand that will eventually bring us the means to support our lives. We’re all fortunate right now that we have means of income. This isn’t unlike that we’re putting all our eggs in a basket and we’re hoping that we get this instant gratification now. We’re just trying to build this brand, the Habit of Health logo, the lifestyle and knowing that in time, as long as you’re slowly growing over the years, we’re going to be able to sustain ourselves. That’s why we’re not trying to take income. One hundred percent of the money that we’ve made from all these challenges has gone into getting new equipment, all bikes, it’s all new stuff. That’s what our whole goal is. It’s building the brand and the logo
It formed very organically. It didn’t form because we were like, “I think we can make a lot of money by doing this.” It formed because we were three guys who just enjoyed the activities but also enjoy the community of it. We became good friends by doing this. That same idea grows organically. We’re not trying to get twenty people, charging X amount and make all this money. It’s, “We’ll form this community and spread these ideas.” From even the 1st challenge to the 2nd one, we saw that people enjoyed that.
We weren’t forcing things down the throat trying to get them in this scheme to make money off of them. We were just building this community and this brand. In doing so, the next challenge, people went out and they had their friends come in. People who knew told people they knew about it. I don’t want to say sold it for us but then advocating was more than we ever needed to. We had more people and we were able to reinvest that money into the gym. That’s the idea we’re trying to grow is as we build this brand and community of people, eventually, more will join and money but that’s not even on our minds. It’s building this community of people on the brand.
I’d like to point out a few good mindset points that came out of this discussion. First of all, the fact that it came about organically. You weren’t forcing an idea. It wasn’t four people in a garage saying, “We need an idea to make money now.” It’s what you like doing together and deciding to share it with a lot of people. Also, it’s a different way of approaching a lot of things too because Joe, with you saying, “I have a job. I’m happy with that job. I don’t want to quit it. I want to pursue my passion,” that it isn’t just for someone looking for an out from their job and for the people who are down and out. If you have a passion, you don’t need to wait for that right time. You could have a job and be busy at that and still make time for the things that you care about.
This is going back to the original conversations and how they organically grew. What’s funny is when we first started this, I’ve grown individually more since we started our first challenge in October. The challenge has grown but the three of us together have grown. What’s funny is that at the very beginning of this, we each had different mindsets. I’ll be honest, at the beginning, I believed in my heart, I said, “In order for this thing to grow, we’re going to need to sell before and after pictures.” We need to have people take pictures. Joe pretty much put his foot down right off the bat and there was contention. I disagreed, I went home and I thought I slept on it. I got up in the morning and I said, “I am so blessed to have someone on the same page as me with this because it’s an integrity issue of we’re not trying to sell something because I’ve been in challenges before. If you look online, this is another thing about the industry being broken. Everything is before and after pictures.
One, it’s an absolute gimmick. Two, I want a fitness challenge and I did it. In the end, I dehydrated myself, flex all crazy. He’s like, “Why are we going to use other people’s bodies to sell health? That doesn’t equate to health.” If you look at some of these major bodybuilders, they’re not healthy. They’re dehydrated and malnutrition. Another one was right off the bat, with the way that we were going to track the progress, a lot of it was me coming in. I completely disagreed with the fact that we needed to hold people accountable for doing their workouts.
After that has happened, this is where I took a back seat and said, “Joe has such a high level of integrity and cares so much about the why’s of what we are doing.” That is how everything blossomed out of that. We decided you can’t have three dudes butting heads the whole time and agreed to follow Joe’s vision. I’m pumped about it because it’s changed the way that I teach yoga for the other corporation that I work at and the thing about my being. It was 100% percent organic. I talk about it all the time. I’m proud to be involved in this. We all work together, it is Joe’s integrity and vision.
The biggest thing there too is that I never asked why. Why am I doing something a certain way? It was because that’s how I was shown. That’s the why about it. Rob can attest to that. A lot of the yoga poses, that’s all he was learning but he had to have the action doing this. What Joe brought was that mindset, he’ll say it’s the engineering mindset but no, this is why you’re doing these. These cues that you’re following and when you pay attention to them, it’s like, “That’s how your body works. It’s the physical properties of your body working together and that’s what we were focusing on. Deep in scientific concepts but when you think about, “This is why I squat this way. This is why I want to make sure my foot’s in this position because otherwise, my body’s not going to work that way or I’m going to hurt myself.” His attitude made us start asking that in not just fitness but everyday life where it’s, “Why am I doing this? What’s the actual reasoning behind why I should do this, this is productive and right.”
For anyone reading that’s in the process or thinking about pursuing their own passions, would you say that it’s critical to maintain that focus on “Why am I doing this?” Because sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the details or sometimes in, “What do I need to do to promote? What do I need to make money? What you need to revisit that overall? What was my original calling and reason for doing it?
Yeah, 100%. That’s been my methodology about everything as these guys have been saying about life and everything. It’s, “Why am I a software engineer? Why did I originally like this? Why when I was a software engineer, did I go and lift every day? Why do I run every day? If you can’t answer that question then you’re doing it for a growing reason. “Why” for a lot of people, if you go to a gym or if you go on a running trail, it’s like, “Because somebody told me to do it like this a long time ago,” but they don’t have a good reason why. That’s what stops people from achieving goals, it’s because when they stop and think about it, the why is, “I signed up for this race because I saw other people signing up and I thought it would be cool.”
It’s finding the right program, but more importantly, finding the right program for you.
That gets you by for that race but if you go to another race after that “why” doesn’t work anymore. It needs to start being, “Why am I doing this? Because I like it, I’m passionate about this thing that I do every day.” That’s why it’s so easy for us to go out there and lift with our athletes every day because I liked doing it. It doesn’t feel like a job. We all put lots of hours into this every week. Like Rob and Vince were saying, besides the satisfaction of helping our athletes get better.
We just finished up a strength workout. It’s the season for athletes to essentially squat from week 1 to week 6 of this challenge or squatting correctly. Doing it right and saying that they feel good coming to the gym five days in a row. That is the most rewarding feeling there is. That click when you see somebody started enjoying something or start doing something right and they have that a-ha moment themselves, there’s nothing more rewarding than that in the world watching somebody like, “You were talking about your foot position here and breathing in with the motion.” I felt it and how that is supposed to feel. They realize it and they get better from that point. It’s being passionate about myself and trying to teach it to somebody else that had no knowledge of it and realizing what we’re talking about.
From the last few weeks or so we’ve been running this, it’s been the most rewarding thing in the world. I do a small running workshop on Sundays for the challenge also and it’s just people realizing that running can be fun. A lot of people like our friend, Steve always asks, “Do you run every day?” It’s like, “Yeah because it’s fun for me to do, it’s enjoyable and I like being out there.” People don’t understand that but once I’ve explained it to people and they’re running with me, it’s like, “This is enjoyable. I see why you enjoy it.” They’re not going to be running marathons but it’s nice to see people enjoying the things that you’re passionate about.
One question I’ve been meaning to ask you is we all know the fitness industry is an expanding industry, yet our obesity rate and our rate of cardiovascular disease and bad health outcomes continue to go up. What would you say is the reason why that’s happening?
This is what I’m super passionate about. This is why I believe the industry is faulted. There are two reasons. One is they’re trying to sell these mass-produced diets and plans to everyone. We understand everybody’s different. Each individual is completely different. They process carbohydrates differently. They process calories differently, body types, size, height, genders, being in Denver here, living on the east side as opposed to the west side, the humidity and the altitude alone changes. To me, that is the number one biggest thing. Two, not to sound super conspiracy theory but it’s all run by General Mills and Nabisco. They’re trying to get you to buy their products.
One in eight peer-reviewed studies is funded by General Mills and Nabisco. It’s a product. They’re not trying to sell you health, they’re trying to get you to buy their packaged product and food. What we try to do is not trying to tell you how you should eat, how many grams of protein you should eat every day. We view it as you’re in your car and everybody drives a different car. You’ve got your dashboard right in front of you. Everybody knows how to read this mile per hour because that’s all the industry tells you to look at how fast you’re driving down the road.
We’re just trying to show, “You’ve got a heater over here. You’ve got your battery life here. Cruise control works right here too. There are so many different dials and once you learn all the aspects of your car, you’re going to be able to drive and get the most bang for your buck out of the car and extend the life of it by knowing what you do impacts your car. Changing the oil, what kind of gas you put in and how often do you use your brakes as opposed to coming up through a stop sign, going slower as opposed to hitting your brakes. That’s all we try to do. Why obesity rates are high is they’re trying to sell you these gimmicky diets to get you to buy their products as opposed to teaching you. If you would know how to read your dials and know your macros, calorie intake and your calorie output, you’re going to be very successful.
Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach your man to fish and you feed him for life. We have a great story and it’s a story I love telling everybody as our challenge begins. All we make people do in our challenge in week one is track your water. They’re like, “I thought we’re going to do a nutrition plan and all you’re asking me to do is track your water.” I’m like, “Yeah.” Because the idea of it is that it’s hard to track stuff. It’s getting you in the habit of tracking. In week two, track your sleep. Week three is to track what you eat. We use an app and you just literally write down everything you eat. Week three last challenge, one of our athletes was hungry and was going to go get dinner. He went to a pizza place and was going to eat a whole large pizza and realized that the pizza that he was going to eat would have been his whole days’ worth of sodium.
He didn’t get that pizza. That is the essence of what we were doing. We didn’t tell him to not eat that pizza, he realized that himself that was bad. It’s the difference between the South Beach Diet telling you, you have to eat three things and him learning that, “Tracking my food is beneficial because now I can see that this thing I’m about to buy for the fast-food place has two days’ worth of fat in it. I shouldn’t eat that.” We build upon that as well but it’s that teaching, that small ability to teach that athlete that, “Maybe I shouldn’t do that.” It’s him learning that is much more valuable than me saying, “You shouldn’t eat that pizza.” It’s almost a punishment then and now it’s like, “That looks bad.”
I can just say one more thing. It goes into what we were talking about, teaching people. I’ll give you two little antidotes. The first is a friend of mine who was looking to get back and fitness, lose weight so he was sending Snapchats of him on the treadmill all day. This is a smart guy, he’s in pharmacy school. I noticed he was wearing a trash bag, which if you ever wrestled or watched the old boxing movies, that’s how they would lose weight. I said, “Why are you wearing a trash bag? You’re losing weight but don’t you know that you’re losing water weight? You’re not burning any more fat. If anything because you’re dehydrating yourself. You’re not performing as well as you would have and you’re losing less.” He was mind-blown.
That was absolute news to him. If you just are being fooled and, “This is what everyone else is doing. This is what works,” but you don’t have that knowledge to ask why. Why am I doing this? Is there any reasoning you’ll do it wrong and you won’t perform? We try to give people that knowledge. Another one going into how a lot of these gyms are structured. I had a friend who how it was structured was if you kept losing weight, you would get a lower rate. She said, “Yeah. “ The gym would advertise 90% of the people lose X amount of weight so it works well. What ended up happening is they didn’t tell you any reasoning behind it and how you should be so before she had her weigh-ins, she would dehydrate herself, starve and hit a goal but not in a healthy way. They would say, “Congrats, next week you’re this much lower.” What does she do? She did unhealthily. Finally, she wasn’t having any improvement in her day-to-day life. She got burned out. She stopped going to the gym and now she weighs more than she had ever weighed before. It’s these programs that aren’t designed for the person, not teaching the person, it’s this cookie-cutter, “Here’s what you’ll do.” It doesn’t work for people so they stop.
It sounds like the main points about this as first of all, we’re all individuals and all have different things that we need when we get these programs. Second of all, having the right incentive structure but finally, possibly most importantly, a lot of people out there will, “I’m just going to go with what works.” The real thing is asking why. One commonality to a lot of these stories is a curiosity because, in order to be successful with anything you do, you have to genuinely be curious about it the same way you all are curious about the fitness industry and how to make the best experience. For my audience out there, how would they find out about the Habit of Health challenge? How would they get a hold of you?
There are a couple of ways. Where on Instagram at @Habit.Of.Health. You can follow us on our Instagram page and then we have a Facebook page also, the Habit of Health LLC. We have an email address, HabitOfHealthLLC@gmail.com. Either message us on Instagram, DM us on Facebook or email us and one of us will reach out to you.
For everyone reading out there, the expectation from this experience is eight-week challenges but also a level of customization as well as learning. Is that an accurate description?
Yes. It’s finding the right program but more importantly, finding the right program for you. The right program for Steve is going to be different than the right program for Rob and for Vince. We’re going to give you the tools to be able to design that program essentially.
We do individual programs, personal training and monthly memberships as well. You reach out to our school and we’ll figure it out with you.
The Habit of Health is constantly evolving like your gym programming is constantly evolving. The eight-week challenge is here to stay but it might exist in a different form in a few weeks or a few months down the road.
For everyone out reading there, first of all, I hope you all take care of your personal health. More importantly, I hope you all find the right program for you in all areas of life not just your physical fitness, your mental health or your career. You don’t necessarily have to go by what the standard of the day is. There may be even some poor incentives behind what the standard of the day is as we’ve seen a lot of areas of life. Be curious, be open-minded, look at different options and find out what works for you. Once again, Joe, Vince, Rob, Habit of Health, thank you very much for joining us. Have a wonderful day and weekend.
Important Links:
- Habit of Health LLC – Facebook
- @Habit.Of.Health – Instagram
- HabitOfHealthLLC@gmail.com