Get Up And Code 40: Interview With Rami Alhamad From PUSH

Iris:                  Hi and welcome to Get Up and CODE podcast.  We are at number … well, we’re not saying numbers anymore.  We have so many podcasts now we probably lost track of them.  We’ve decided not to give them any numbers anymore and we’re just going to focus on the topic itself.  We’re going to talk about some really interesting new groundbreaking technology today, but before we do that let’s give a little shout out to our podcast hosting service SignalLeaf which is podcast audio hosting and it’s really easy to use and we recommend it to everybody, so just a little shout out to our sponsors.

It’s me Iris Classon, John Sonmez and with Rami today.  Rami is the CEO and also an entrepreneur and he has PUSH strength device which we’re going to talk about today.  Rami tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Rami:              Hey guys.  My name is Rami I’m the CEO and cofounder of PUSH.  PUSH is a wearable device, an arm band that you can use at the gym to help track and optimize your training performance.  The goal of PUSH and the mission of it is to really make sure that we move away from subjective methods of analyzing how people are training and moving more into an objective scientifically backed approach to analyzing training at the gym.

My personal background is I’m a mechatronics engineer from the University of Waterloo.  I did a masters in biomedical engineering and I worked for a few years in consulting and mobile app development.  I started PUSH along with 2 cofounders Mike Lovas and Suresh Joshi.  Suresh is a mechatronics engineer from Waterloo as well and Mike is an industrial designer from Canada’s OCAD University.  Actually the 3 of us have a masters in biomedical engineering.  We’re really passionate, driven by the mission of the project.  What’s really exciting is over the past year of developing the product we’ve connected with a lot of sports scientists and from sports scientists we’ve also managed to connect with professional teams.  So we have a really amazing beta testing group right now that’s working with us to make sure that we develop the best product that it can be by our May/June deadline.

Beyond that what’s really different about what we’re doing here is that we’re not trying to develop a device that you have to wear throughout the day.  It’s really meant to be something that you can strap on when you walk into the gym and you could take off when you walk out.  Everything from the hardware to the software has been built to really just make the gym experience more interesting and more gamefied and more fun all around.  That’s PUSH.

John:               That’s awesome.  I have to say the thing that caught my attention about PUSH when I had seen it, I think I had first seen it probably on a Facebook ad, I think that’s where I saw it, anyways, the idea of tracking the speed at which you’re moving the weight because it’s something that a lot of people don’t even really pay attention to.  I thought that was really interesting.  That was one of those things that was – I mean doing a lot of lifting for the last 20 years or so myself I’ve noticed that – and I’ve talked to a lot of people that said how quickly you move that weight is going to determine a lot of things including how much you can lift.  I know from my own personal experience I have always struggled with the idea of, “Okay, should I move it really slow and controlled?  Or should I be doing fast?” because it’s going to affect the amount of weight I can do and the amount of reps.  I think I’m really interested to hear about how PUSH works with that and how that affects your lifting and workout.

Iris:                  Give us the secret ingredients.

John:               Yeah.

Rami:              You’re dead on John.  Honestly, it’s really amazing because it does make intuitive sense but what’s even more incredible about tracking speed and velocity of the bar while you’re training is that it does have a lot of scientific validation behind it.  The new methodology now that’s being implemented with professional athletes really kind of cutting edge facilities is that instead of prescribing training based on number of reps and sets that’s fixed you actually tell the athlete to train to move the bar past a certain velocity.  The idea there is that you’re really training the athlete to be able to activate his muscles as quickly as possible and be explosive which typically translates to really amazing incredible performance on the field.

This is something that they’re already trying to implement.  The only difference is that the way they’re implementing it right now is with these difficult expensive cumbersome tools that cost thousand dollars on the cheap end and they can go all the way up to $20,000.  We’re developing a device that at $149 can do the exact same thing.  That’s the reason they’re really excited because it’s much easier to use and at the same time now we can open it up to everyone, just regular guys.

Iris:                  I know a lot of people are really skeptical about this type of technologies, wearables.  I do remember quite a few years ago when heart rate monitors were introduced to the average person.  People were really skeptical because before that they were really expensive and not everybody could afford one.  You would have to fork out quite a lot of money.  Today, you see heart rate monitors, you go to spinning class at the gym and everybody is wearing one.  They’re pretty much handing them out for free for that one hour.  I really like the idea of taking this medical device or the devices that only has been accessible to professionals and bringing them out to the masses, but a lot of people are skeptical because they’ve never heard of them before and never seen them before either.

You’ve managed to get quite a following regardless of people having a bit of problem of adapting to changes.  How have you managed to reach out to people and convince them that this is for real, this is for real?

Rami:              Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right.  We’ve really looked at companies like Polar or Under Armour and Nike and try to understand how did they reach the scale that they’ve managed to get to.  I think a key component is really education.  It’s something we’ve really started to focus on very early on was to make sure that we are publishing material that can explain, take some of these – relatively speaking complicated concepts and quickly scale them down and make them much more easier to understand if you don’t have a background of sports science or kinesiology.

We published about 8 infographics back in September and we published them on our Facebook page and we really focused on interaction if anybody asked any questions about what do we do, what do we measure.  We immediately took the time to explain the concepts and that’s why I think we have a lot of positive interaction and a solid network on Facebook of followers.

It’s really about making sure that you explain the value of the concepts, how do they relate down to the bottom line, how can they actually impact people’s performance on the gym.  Something that we’ve really focused on is we emphasize time and again that we are not coming up with any metrics here.  We’re not really developing new scientific methods.  We’re simply taking something that’s already been accessible to professional athletes and just making it accessible to you.

There’s a certain element of trust there when you know that Lebron James is using similar methods in his training using expensive equipment and now you can do the same thing.  There is a certain appeal and trust factor I think that comes with that.  That’s generally speaking been our approach.  This is the approach that we’re going to continue to have.  What we did in Toronto and I think it really helped people grasp what we’re doing is we started doing these competitions called Measure Your Strength, MYS.  I think we need a better name to be quite honest, but we’ll get there.

What we basically do is we run these competitions at different gyms in the area and we’ve noticed that as soon as people put it on and see the metrics and try different reps they get it, they get it immediately.  They can see when they’re really applying themselves and when they’re not.  If you move really slowly you can see immediate impact.  In terms of the metrics or the device measures this is when you really move quickly.

I think John alluded to that earlier.  You really want to make sure that depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with your training like if you were into bodybuilding you’re going to want to move slowly and you’re going to have to have more controlled movement and the device can help you do that.  If you’re more focused on just growing and increasing the weight then you can use the velocity metric to really figure out if you’re the right weight and should terminate an exercise or keep going.

The ultimate goal really is just to make sure that when you’re training optimally, what does that mean?  It means that you’re not lifting too much and potentially risking injury and you’re not lifting too low and just wasting your time at the gym.  The metrics that we provide just help you get rid of the pseudo science and the subjective aspect of it and make sure that you are actually doing things based on what your body is outputting.  That’s more or less – and it counts reps which is nice.

John:               Yeah.

Iris:                  Yeah, absolutely.

Rami:              I think that’s my long answer.  I was going to say short answer but there’s nothing short about that one, so long answer.

John:               Tell me about like when I get the device, I go into the gym, how does that work?  What’s the process of using the device interactive with my phone doing the basic routine when you’re using PUSH?

Rami:              The way it would work is you’re walking into the gym and we really made sure that the software that we’re building right now it’s not just – what I found to be deficient in a lot of the quantified self devices is that you log in and a lot of the early apps, now they’re much better, but when you log in you would immediately see just the metrics basically that they device is collecting.  What we tried to do instead is really make sure that it’s catered towards that gym experience.  So when you walk into the gym you see different routines.  You can either pick a routine or you can create your own or you don’t even have to do that.  You can just walk into the gym and as soon as you see a free machine and you want to do something you can quickly select the exercise and you just start training with the device on.

As soon as you launch the app we scan for the device.  They sync immediately.  There’s an initial set up process but you do that outside of the gym only once.  As soon as you’re connected to it all you have to do is you walk, you have the exercise selected on the phone and then you start training.  You press the button on the device when you’re done and then there’s a light indicator on it that basically acts as your rest timer so it will change color when you should get back and start doing your second set or your next exercise.  As soon as you’re done again you just press the button and so on and so forth.

It’s really meant to be – we try to introduce the least number of interruptions to typical training exercise.  There’s very little that you have to do outside of just pressing a button on the actual arm band.  The way it is placed on your arm it’s really easy for you to just quickly press the button and keep going.

We have a lot of cool ideas for the future of how we can make it work even with less interaction with the phone, but for now I think this is going to work out really well.  The nice thing about it is as soon as you’re done with sets or an exercise you have the choice of quickly reviewing how well you did.  The way the app is formatted is all based on regions and gyms and locales.  You can immediately share anything that you’ve just hit.  If you had a new personal record you can immediately share it with anybody within that circle that you have chosen.

John:               That’s cool.

Rami:              Let’s say you have a couple of buddies of yours that you train with at the CrossFit gym that you’re at or whichever gym, you can immediately share it if you hit a new personal record.  You don’t have to make sure that your friends are there.  You can always just share it and you guys can check in on what you’re up to without having to synchronize when you’re all training.  Yeah, that’s something that I found to be extremely motivational for me making sure that my friends are aware like if I hit a new personal record or if they did something really well we immediately share it.  It inspires us to keep going.  We wanted to make sure that the app can reflect that.

John:               That’s cool.

Iris:                  There seems to be so many things that have to work together really well.  Which one of those was the most complicated or painful to implement out of those features if you can pick just one?

Rami:              Yeah, I would say definitely the algorithms.

Iris:                  Oh yeah?  Who was in charge of that actually?  I have to ask, who was in charge of the algorithm?

Rami:              Suresh Joshi our CTO really, really sharp guy.  I’m very happy to have him on the team.  Yeah, really knows his stuff and he kind of dug in very early on and spent the first really 6 to 8 months mainly focusing on how do we make sure that the algorithms are reliable, how we would make sure that the way we’re interpreting repetitions is consistent, can account for different styles of repetitions, can account for different body types, motion patterns and also making sure that the output of the device is reliable.  Right now we have 2 units with professor, a sports scientist in Wales out of a university called Swansea University and he’s working with 30 rugby players testing our device against the elite devices that I’ve mentioned earlier that costs 10 grand, 10-15 grand.  He’s testing both devices at the same time, our device and the expensive units to make sure that we can compete in terms of output.  Are we as reliable?  The results so far look really good.

Iris:                  Is that the graphs I saw?

Rami:              Yeah, sorry?

Iris:                  Is that the graphs that I saw on the Indiegogo?

Rami:              Yeah, exactly.  Exactly, exactly.  So the devices I was mentioning earlier are force plates.  Force plates are literally plates that literally plates that are put on the ground that when you step on it have force transducers across different points and they just measure how much force you’re applying on the ground.  Usually those are the devices that you use intermittently as an athlete to gauge how much stronger are you getting over time.  Is my training regimen really impacting my overall body strength?  What our device does is basically – are doing right now is we have 30 rugby players there working with a professor and his associates and students and they’re just running tests, hopping on the force plate, using our device at the same time, making sure that the output is consistent.  The plan is to take all the data that we’re collecting right now and for the next 4 months and publish it into a general article so that we have that scientific backing behind our device.

John:               That’s awesome.  Even in educated circles about fitness and weightlifting there’s so much that’s just myth or just what people think, but they don’t have any proof.  I’ve talked to a lot of bodybuilders and I’ve gotten so many different responses.  Some bodybuilders have told me, “Oh yeah, it doesn’t matter how many reps.  If you continually do the reps you can stop and then pause in between.  It’s just volume.”  Some people swear by doing slow as controlled movements as possible.  Some say the explosive strength is important.  I’ve tried a variety of different things and I do my own in between, but there’s nothing that’s ever backed up that data that I’ve been able to find.  I’m really excited to finally be able to chart and see like okay, this is the optimal way that I should be lifting these weights.

Iris:                  What I find is really interesting is that a lot of people tend to think that there isn’t really a way you can go about it if you want to increase your strength.  Everybody says, “Oh, it’s very individual” and so and so.  There’s a lot of scientific backing up of certain ways of increasing strength and increasing mass.  But I think because people are not measuring it and they can’t compare notes really it’s so easy to say, “Oh, it’s individual so I choose to do this and I choose to do that.”  But there are some sure ways to go about it, to almost have a guaranteed, if you will, have an increase in mass and strength but without a good way to measure nobody is going to believe that which is probably going to change now.

Rami:              Exactly.  That’s exactly it, Iris.  You guys essentially what makes trainers so excited about what we’re doing because now – whenever I speak to personal trainers or in general celebrity trainers that really have established regimens, what they like about this device is it now gives them a chance to really compare apples to apples and really show that their training regimen and their approach actually works and has real impact which is pretty exciting for us because ultimately I think that’s the way we really want to move forward.  We want to make sure that we bring in people who are really passionate about the space, who really want to publish good content.  Now with our device they can have that objective aspect to it which is crucial at the end of the day.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right.  It is definitely based on the individual.  No 2 people are alike.  That’s one thing that I found frustrating with going on websites and finding routines that I need to download because all I could think about is there’s a couple of million people right now downloading the exact same routine.  I really wonder if all of us can do the exact same weight sets.  There are some approaches to figuring out what your one RM is and based on that figure out what percentage you should be training at at different points.  Ultimately it’s still very subjective.

With this device now we’re talking about adaptive training.  So if you’re not doing too well that day from the first exercise we could figure that out.  What’s really exciting about PUSH moving forward is the more users we have the smarter we can make our artificial intelligence AI engine essentially where we could start figuring out what steps you need to take, when you should terminate if you’re not doing too well that day, you could immediately adjust all future steps and routines to change the weight and lower it.  It makes it really exciting because now we’re accounting for your state and that’s a particular day rather than just a fixed routine that’s been outlined for you.

John:               Yeah, that’s awesome.  That’s really what I think is the future for it.  It’s so hard even just when I give people routines and I say do so many sets and so many reps.  What does that exactly mean?  Because people do them differently and then they say it’s not working.  When I go and I take someone to the gym and I show them, “Okay, this is what I mean.  This is the speed at what you’re doing it.”  You can’t communicate that.  Having that feedback mechanism I think is going to be really valuable.

How does this work?  This is the thing that I’ve been struggling with with the devices.  Let’s say I put it on, one to my arms, right?  I’m assuming like if I was going to do bench press that it would be a barbell.  Obviously if I did dumbbells I would need to move it to the other arm or how exactly does it work especially like legs, if you could talk about the different exercises because you’re doing different movements.

Rami:              That’s a really great point.  This is something that we’ve initially struggled with because ideally we’d like to have 6 sensors on your body at all times.  The challenge for that is the price point goes way up and on top of it the friction, the added steps that you would have to go through each day when you’re training becomes even much, much higher.  So what we’ve decided to do with is kind of down the middle road approach.  With the single units, yes, you are restricted to some exercises in a sense that you can’t really do a bench press with dumbbells for example.

Well, you can, and we will measure what you’re doing but there’s an assumption there that you are accounting for your own balance in terms of making sure that your right arm is moving as well your left arm because we’re not expecting you to repeat the exercise with moving into the other arm.  But if you are using any barbell exercise like a squat or a dead lift or a clean, anything that has to do with that then there’s a certain level of consistency right there off the bat.  If you’re doing things like bicep curls you would need to switch the device from one arm to the other depending on what side you’re training if you’re keen on making sure that you measure both sides.

This is a limitation that we have in the device right now but it’s an intentional acknowledged limitation on our end because having 2 different sensors on at the same time would be way too limiting.  The other alternative is to really go down the road of motion tracking and motion capture with cameras and there are all kinds of challenges there too.  We decided to opt for this approach instead and really focus on exercises that are more functional in nature.

The way we suggest using the device is if you’re doing any kind of functional exercises or upper body keep it right where it’s supposed to be, under the elbow.  If you’re doing any lower body specific exercises like leg curls that you just strap it on your ankle.  There are 2 locations that we recommend and beyond that you’re free to switch it between sides but typically if you’re doing a barbell exercise you wouldn’t need to.  Generally speaking this lines up well with – we haven’t really had any issues with professional athletes or teams and coaches we’ve spoken too so far because their main focus is not really on things that are meant for toning and are more focused on things that develop body strength, core strength.  Generally speaking they only prescribe things like squats, dead lifts, bench presses and a lot of it is barbell exercises so it works really well in that case.

John:               That’s awesome.  That’s what I prescribe too.  Those are the core.  It’s funny, a lot of people get distracted by all the little supplementary exercises but that’s it barbells, bench press, squats, dead lift that’s the key things anyways.

Rami:              That’s exactly my approach too, yeah.  I really like that approach in general and that’s something that I’ve also found on other – a lot of apps seem to be competing on the number of exercises they have.  A lot of fitness apps talk about having 2000 exercises.  In my opinion it’s not really about the number of exercises you have, it’s about making sure that you’re helping your users pick the right kind of exercises or the more appropriate exercises for them.  Having 1200 exercises in my opinion is almost a deterrent if anything because it adds a level of confusion because there are so many different ways to do a squat.  Fundamentally when you go back to it it’s just barbell, weights, make sure you’re doing the motion right, you’re going down low enough and making sure that you’re moving correctly.  That’s about it.

John:               Yeah, I just experienced that.  I just downloaded a fitness app because I started tracking my reps again and my weight more meticulously.  In the app I was like, “I just want the 15 exercises.”  I don’t want 2000 because I have to search through it trying to make a routine.  It’s ridiculous.  It gets people in the wrong direction.  I look around at the gym and you see all the people doing the weird exercises and they’re not the people that look the best or in shape.  You see the person doing squats and bench press and dead lifts and those are the people that are actually making progress.  It’s sad because people don’t understand this so I’m glad.

Iris:                  Hey, wait a minute John, let’s be a little fair though.  A lot of the exercises in the 2000 something are very sports specific.  A lot of people that go to the gym do that to enhance the performance at a certain sport and then they will have some very specific exercise to do.  They’re probably not going to track this their own way, but a lot of the exercises that you see people do at the gym might be sports specific.  Unfortunately people will watch them and go like, “Oh, that looks really strange.”  I will do it as well.

John:               Yeah, you’re right.

Iris:                  I mean I do a lot of running.  I know I do some exercises that people are just looking at me and go like, “What?”  If I don’t do that I’ll get seriously injured because I do have some problems because of older strain with my long distance track and field.  Some are sports specific but majority are just idiots.  Oh sorry.

John:               Yeah, I’m pretty sure the 2 guys I was watching yesterday when I was at the gym they weren’t doing anything sports specific I’ll tell you that.  They weren’t athletes, but yeah, you’re right.

Iris:                  You can tell.  The gym I go to here in Sweden in Gothenburg it’s called Nordic Wellness.  I would say about 80% of the people working out there are some sort of athletes in very, very different sports so you see some really strange exercises.  Yeah, as you said unfortunately a lot of people will jump on the band and they want to do the exact same exercises and then they’re going to complain that they’re not trackable with various methods that don’t really make sense.

I saw for example in Men’s Health, I think there was a discussion about this device, PUSH device and they were complaining that it didn’t track steps, it didn’t have a step count.  They said, “Oh, if it doesn’t have an activity tracker it’s useless” and so on.  I don’t know what people are thinking when they’re making those comments, but how do you feel about that Rami?  I just laughed when I read that.

Rami:              No, that’s an excellent point I think.  The way we’ve really approached this problem is you can be okay in a lot of things, or you can be really good in one particular thing.  Our focus is really on making sure that we’re really good in this.  Just our beta list of users having guys like Toronto Blue Jays and some really well accomplished teams on board is really motivating us and obviously setting a really high standard for us to achieve and reach when it comes to strength training.  We’re making sure that we do that really well.  In terms of looking at overall activity tracking, making sure that you’re running for 30 minutes or making sure that you’re swimming for 20 minutes and tracking that in overall aggregate terms is actually relatively not that complicated because the pattern is very similar.  Once you detect an exercise it’s quite simple to just extract when you’re starting and when you’re stopping.

The more challenging part is making sure that the output of your device is actually scientifically reliable and that’s something that we’re focusing on.  Looking at activity tracking in general and making sure that PUSH becomes more inclusive, the device is something that we can always do down the road, but for now our focus is making sure that we are the best in strength training and tracking that.

Iris:                  Yeah.  I’m just fascinated how people are so eager to find faults and find new things that it should have or shouldn’t have without spending a little bit more time and really looking at how you complicate things and how you can water down the quality of a product by adding a lot of features.  The only features, even if they implemented it really good, they have to be maintained.  At some point it’s going to be really difficult if you have a lot of features.

Rami:              Yeah, no absolutely, I think you’re right there.  In fairness to people also pointing out issues is that it usually also helps you figure out what you are missing and what you should be thinking about including down the road.  I think it’s good either way.  As long as we’re getting some feedback regardless if it’s positive or negative, I’m happy.  Ultimately either of those 2 will drive us to improve and make sure that the product really fits what people want at the end of the day which is crucial.

Iris:                  Yeah.

John:               What technology are you guys using to develop this?  What programming languages and …

Rami:              Yeah, okay, let’s get down to the tech.  In terms of typical development cycle I would say for the algorithms we initially use a lot of MATLAB and then we switched over to R and then we poured all those over to C++ libraries.  That’s more or less the path that the algorithms took.  In terms of the actual mobile development we’ve gone through a very typical startup debate, should we go native or should we go cross platform or should we do a hybrid approach.  I think we decided to go down the road of native, just mainly because our app is so interactive.  Looking at some of our competitors we’ve noticed that the ones that did go down the road of native have a much better user experience in general with their app and we’ve decided to go down that road.  Mainly because we have a hardware component to it we found that working with natives makes a lot more sense.

I think what’s also unique about us is that we’ve surveyed our early base really quickly and we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of android users and I think that’s a general trend right now that android is on the rise.  We are actually developing both iOS and Android at the same time so we’re planning to release both apps.  We have Android developers on the team and iOS developers that are both churning away at the same time making sure that we deliver.  That’s native.

In terms of the web components right now we’re using AngularJS, no JS, we were using Microsoft as well.  I believe we’re still using Microsoft as our backend actually.  Microsoft has a really great program for startups to use, it’s called BizSpark.  They’re trying to inspire entrepreneurs to use Microsoft’s products and they’ve actually been really great to work with overall.  Right beside our office there is a small Microsoft booth that’s – because right now we’re based out of a startup incubator here in Toronto and Microsoft has a small booth here.  We work a lot with the Microsoft guys and we chat back and forth.  They’re always showing us latest tools and gadgets that they can come across.  They’ve actually even lent us some equipment here and there like Windows 8 machines for demos and stuff.  It’s been really good.

Our CTO Suresh is a big, big Microsoft fan.  He really loves Windows and we’re flirting with the idea of potentially doing a Windows version of our app down the road within hopefully maybe by 2014.  Yeah, yeah, it will be fun.

Iris:                  Do you have developers to do that?

Rami:              Not right now, but I do have –

Iris:                  If you need any developers to do that just ask because I think a lot of people would be so interested in that.

Rami:              Fantastic.  That’s good to hear.

Iris:                  Oh, that would be cool.

Rami:              Yeah, that sounds great actually, yeah.  Absolutely.  I’ll make sure I shoot you an e-mail before we start digging into that.  It will probably be some time in the summer that we’ll start the conversation and we hope to have it done hopefully by the end of 2014.

John:               Yeah, I’d say there’s probably a fairly large chunk, like an unusually large chunk of our audience that has Windows phones compared to the rest of the world.

Rami:              Honestly Nokia phones are phenomenal in my opinion.  The hardware is great.  The OS itself is phenomenal.  I really like the metro layouts in general.  This is a puzzle, one of those puzzles in my head where I just can’t figure out, even Blackberry for example.  Blackberry 10 in my opinion is a good hardware phone.  The hardware is really well made.  The actual software is good and decent but the smartphone world is so complicated these days it’s really amazing to see how it’s all working.  It’s not just about having the best hardware product or the actual product itself.  You need to also think about – it seems like the biggest complaint people have is the lack of apps, but yeah.  I don’t know.  This is one of those things that I haven’t had a chance to dig into as much.  I just review the stats and figure out what people use and what our user base is interested in and I’m just building that up for now.

John:               You guys still have the Indiegogo going on.  We should hopefully be able to get this episode out before that closes.  Where can people go to find out more about PUSH and when can they expect the devices to start shipping if they preorder it?

Rami:              Actually our Indiegogo campaign is over.  It finished at the end of November.

John:               Oh it did?  Oh, okay.

Rami:              Yeah, in November.  We hit 140,000 and our goal was 80K so we’re really happy with the results of that.  Right now we have a preorder page on our website so if anybody’s interested they can just go in, quickly click on the preorder at the top right.  It’s a big orange button.  Then they’ll be able to get their units come summer 2014.

Our main focus right now is delivering the first shipment of units to our Indiegogo backers, our campaign backers and that will be in May/June.  Afterwards the second shipment will be for anybody who preorders now basically on our website.  In terms of learning more in general we are revamping it, but if you go on our website pushstrength.com there is a blog icon at the top, blog one.  If you click on that, right now we’re mainly using it as an educational tool.  Our sports scientist on the team is publishing regular articles talking about the value of the metrics and how to use them, different training regimens that athletes use.  The plan is to also start using that to update anybody who has backed us or preordered a device, but our progress in general as the product moves along.

John:               Awesome.  All right, I think that’s probably it for this episode.  I really appreciate your coming on this show.  I’m really excited about this technology.  This is one of those things that I think is really going to have a big potential to really help people to train better which is just awesome.

Rami:              I appreciate it.  I really appreciate it, John.  Thanks a lot for having me on and sorry for the initial delay.  I really enjoyed my time with you guys.  This was a great conversation.

John:               Yep, yeah, no problem.

Iris:                  Sorry for the audio problems we had a little bit earlier.

Rami:              It’s not a problem.  I can hear you loud and clear now so it’s all good.

John:               What’s funny for the listeners listening to this show, the audio is going to sound pretty crystal clear for you guys but it’s not for us because we’re all recording locally.

Iris:                  I can’t wait to hear what the 2 of you actually said.

John:               Yeah, people listening to the show are going to be like, “The audio sounds great to me” because we were all recording locally, but we’re talking over Skype so yeah.

Iris:                  Yeah.

John:               All right, thanks again for joining us and don’t forget to check out get out getupandcode.com, follow us on Twitter @GetUpAndCode and you can always email us at show@getupandcode.com.  Take care and talk to you guys and gals next time.

Rami:              Thanks a lot.  Cheers guys, bye!