What Tonal performance scientist Troy Taylor says about training smarter as you age

As Tonal’s Senior Director of Performance Innovation, and the former High Performance Director at U.S. Ski & Snowboard, where his teams won 15 medals at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games, Troy Taylor has spent two decades inside elite sport. In it, he’s found that the people who hit outcomes within their sport don’t focus on them at all; they focus on what produces them. His argument is that the discipline most Olympians share, and anyone training outside elite sport tends to skip, is breaking long-term goals into the small weekly habits that build them.

We talked to him about that core principle, what the data says about training for capability and what evidence-based recovery looks like.

The core principle Olympic athletes share

Taylor frames Olympic-level achievement as a multi-decade project. “No one becomes an Olympic champion in weeks, months, or even a couple of years,” he says. “It often takes decades of consistent execution on daily, weekly, and monthly process goals.”

The gap he sees outside elite sport is that most people skip the translation step, focusing too much attention on the outcome itself instead of moving to the weekly habits that produce it. “Regular gym-goers would see dramatically better results if they focused less on the distant outcome and more on translating their goal into clear training targets and habits they can hit every week.”

The long-term goal can be playing with grandkids without pain, hiking confidently into older age, or losing 50 pounds while building 20. Those goals are real if they matter to the person setting them. The work, Taylor says, is more pedestrian: turning the goal into the daily habits and weekly training targets it requires.

The strength training shift

The shift Taylor sees in how people train shows up in the data. Tonal’s State of Strength Report 2025, which draws from more than 32,000 members, shows that aging well has become a stronger focus alongside looking good, and that shorter workouts are increasingly being alternated with longer sessions to support continued progress.

“There’s a clear shift from purely aesthetics to aesthetics plus capability,” Taylor says. “Being able to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want. People still want to look good, but they also want to feel capable and stay independent as they age, with more focus on strength for bone density, balance, long-term metabolic health, and overall function.”

What makes shorter workouts work, in his view, is behavioral. “Time is still the number one barrier,” he says. “When workouts are 15 to 20 minutes two to three times per week, consistency goes up dramatically, and the data shows that dose is highly effective for building muscle and supporting long-term function.” The shift, in his words, is from heroic effort to sustainability.” In other words, when training is realistic and repeatable, consistency wins.

What evidence-based recovery actually looks like

Recovery has become a category of its own in wellness, full of cold plunges, and percussion devices. Taylor’s view of what evidence-based recovery looks like is far less elaborate than the gear suggests.

“For most people, evidence-based recovery is simple,” he says. “Appropriate training volume, sleep, adequate protein and energy intake, light movement on non-lift days, and planned variation in intensity. Some tools can help, but they’re usually the last thing to add.”

Active recovery has a role too, in his framing. Low-intensity movement, mobility work, and light aerobic exercise can support tissue repair. But it only counts when it’s done intentionally. The bigger principle is that training disrupts the body’s systems, and the body needs the conditions to restore them. Most of those conditions are already on his list.

His test for whether it’s working is unsentimental: “If performance is improving and you feel ready to train, recovery is working. If not, adjust the load before adding more.”

The compounding effect of daily movement

When it comes to the growing conversation around longevity, Taylor says the science supporting strength training is overwhelming — and he is quick to point out that capturing those benefits does not require an elite, complex protocol. The biggest return, instead, comes simply from moving from low to moderate strength.

“The required dose is modest,” he says. “Two full-body sessions per week, 15 to 30 minutes each, done consistently and progressively.”

That same pragmatism drives his own routine. Taylor relies on Tonal to eliminate the friction of commuting and prioritizes five minutes of movement between Zoom calls over the occasional perfect hour in the gym.

Consistent daily movement, he says, does more for him than the occasional perfect hour in the gym because frequency naturally compounds over time. The secret to aging well is not found in an intricate biohack. “The foundation is simple,” he says. “Lift, progressively, for years.”