Future of Fitness

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Alberto Perlman (Zumba Co-Founder) on Building a 200,000-Location Global Fitness Empire

July 13, 2026

Alberto Perlman has been trying to get on this podcast for years — turns out all it took was bumping shoulders at an industry event. As co-founder of Zumba, he's built the world's largest branded fitness program: over 15 million weekly participants, 200,000+ locations, and a presence in 185+ countries, all while surviving 25 years of hype cycles, fads, a pandemic, and everything in between. In this episode, Eric Malzone sits down with Alberto to trace the entire Zumba story from the beginning...

Will Bartholomew - From Peyton Manning's Teammate to D1 Training Founder

July 08, 2026

Before he built one of the biggest names in youth sports training, Will Bartholomew was a walk-on at the University of Tennessee trying to survive fall camp with a quarterback named Peyton Manning. In this episode, the D1 Training founder sits down with Eric Malzone to trace the whole arc — training athletes in an open field back in 2002, opening a patio-carpet-and-turf gym with racks he screwed together himself, and slowly turning that into a franchise system now closing in on 220 locations ...

Joel Smith - Beyond Longevity: Aging Athletically vs Just Living Longer

July 03, 2026

Can you actually train yourself to age like an athlete instead of just "aging well"? In this episode, Eric Malzone sits down with strength coach and Just Fly Sports founder Joel Smith — eight years coaching at UC Berkeley, five Olympians, nine medals, a world record, and four national track titles under his belt — to unpack what real athletic longevity looks like beyond the buzzwords flooding the fitness industry. They dig into why "meaningful movement" beats generic training programs, how pl...