A Conversation with Jeff Halevy – How AI Will Affect the Future of Fitness

Jeff Halevy is the CEO of Altis Movement Technologies, a venture-backed technology startup bringing its AI Personal Trainer to consumers in the coming months.

Jeff is an internationally recognized expert “celebrity trainer,” healthy lifestyle spokesman, keynote speaker, and public health advocate. His work spans clients from esteemed medical institutions like Human Genome Sciences, Hospital for Special Surgery, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, to associations like AARP, brands like Asics and Dove, and individuals like Tiki Barber and Frank McCourt.

Jeff Halevy regularly delivers cutting-edge, motivational, healthy lifestyle keynotes at/for esteemed associations and corporations like Bloomberg, UBS, AIG, AARP, and Entrepreneurs’ Organization.

While Jeff Halevy’s time is no longer entirely spent on the gym floor, Jeff cut his teeth in the fitness industry as a highly sought after celebrity personal trainer in NYC, with clients ranging from Hollywood royalty to members of the Royal Family.

Since 2009 Jeff has actively participated in both regional and national public health initiatives, most notably by being handpicked to join Michelle Obama’s childhood obesity campaign Let’s Move! for which he created the most demonstrably effective technology-based program.

We had the reach out to Jeff Halevy and learn more about his latest venture and get his ideas on how AI is going to change the future of fitness. 

Now that the pandemic is winding down, what should people be doing right now to stay healthy?

I don’t like to give public health advice, but from a fitness perspective, I think it’s time for everybody to get out there, move their body, and do something.

According to some recent survey I read, Americans gained an average of 15 pounds during the pandemic, what they’re calling the “COVID 15.” I think that COVID crisis was shocked and surprised a lot of people who didn’t really factor in how much lifestyle choices have on immunity. Eighty percent of those people who were hospitalized or had serious infection were either overweight or obese. It is a reminder to all of us how our lifestyle decisions that we make every day has a profound impact on our ability to live and on our body’s ability to fight back a highly contagious, and potentially lethal virus.

I’m excited for what you’re doing with AI and helping revolutionize fitness for the 21st century using state of the art technology. What will the future look like?

Altis is doing something that nobody else is doing. There are some very innovative connected fitness-related companies like Peloton, Tonal, Tempo, Mirror — all excellent companies. But, they still didn’t find a way to replace a qualified personal trainer or being able to really make decisions based on you. 

Altis uses 3D imaging technology and is able to see you, understand you, and provide personalized instructions and correct your form and provide actionable recommendations, in a format that plugs into any screen in your home through an HDMI connection. So what I think you’re going to see is other companies try to do what we are doing. Computer vision is now able to present discernible value to the end user. I do not think that up until now the hardware or software technology was there yet.

I expect that there will be quite a lot of activity in this space. I think that despite everybody saying that they’ve got AI inside, very few actually do. We have a very robust machine learning model in which we’ve distilled all this exercise science from the best health, fitness and wellness experts in the world, people who train clients such as LeBron, Kevin Durant, Ryan Reynolds, and so many others. And what we’ve done is create a robust machine learning model that is able to customize decisions for you, not only in the moment of, should you increase or decrease weight — but longitudinally, what will your actual growth trajectory look like over time? I think you’re going to see more innovations like this emerge over time.

The third thing I have been noticing is that people are not really taking advantage of APIs. In the world of future connected fitness, I see a convergence of API and IOT. 

Imagine for a moment you are driving to your destination and your car tells you to park a little farther away because you haven’t completed all your steps for the day. Now, as soon as you complete those steps, because you have an IOT connected device that may also be operating on blockchain, maybe as you’re completing those steps, you’re able to reduce your health insurance premium through a smart contract running on Ethereum. This sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but all these technologies are currently available, it’s just that it takes alot of work to create an integrated system. This is exactly what Altis is trying to do.

Altis is already an incredible success story raising money for a fitness start-up during the height of the pandemic.

We raised a little under $4 million which is kind of incredible given the uncertainty around the economy and COVID. A few years ago, if you would have told me that it would be possible to raise money via Zoom and doing due diligence via Zoom, I would have said, you are out of your mind, no one is ever going to do that. But that is exactly what happened!

It’s been an incredible career so far and I am most excited about this next chapter with Altis. 

Can you tell our audience where they can learn more about Altis and some of the other interesting things you are up to?

Absolutely. It’s a little difficult to learn much about Altis just yet, because we’re trying to keep it real quiet, but our Website is: altis.ai. 

You can find me on Twitter, Facebook and then Instagram but I don’t post actively. Look out for more news from Altis, because it will be absolutely transformative!