Habit Of Health: Building A Brand That Keeps People In Good Physical Health With Joe Comsti, Vince Ruggeri, and Robbie Hall

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. --- Listen to the podcast here 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. Habit Of Health: All fitness and being healthy in general is about getting out there and moving. 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,...