Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 560: Rob Dionne of the Open Sky Fitness Podcast
Episode Date: July 27, 2017In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin interview Rob Dionne of the Open Sky Fitness Podcast (www.openskyfitness.com). Rob is a former actor and runs a successful fitness business in Los Angeles. In this e...pisode Sal, Adam and Justin talk with Rob about his acting career, the fitness business and achieving success in the industry. Get our newest program, MAPS Prime Pro, which shows you how to self assess and correct muscle recruitment patterns that cause pain and impede performance and gains. Get it at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Got a beard? Condition your beard with Big Top Beard Company’s natural oils and organic essential oil blends to make it not only feel great but smell amazing! Get Big Top Beard Company products at www.bigtopbeardcompany.com, code "mindpump" for 33% off. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts.
Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.
In this episode, we interview and talk to and get interviewed by Rob D'One from Open Sky Fitness.
Hant some guys!
Some very good looking guys. Some of the hant some nness going on here. Some of my favorite people to talk to
when we do our podcast or other fitness podcasters,
because we love to see what drives them to do what they do,
what their belief system is,
and methodologies are when it comes to fitness and wellness.
And a lot of what we talk about lines up very well with Rob.
So we had great conversation, which is unique to coming from L.A.
where there is a lot of shenanigans down there
like based off of vanity and all these other
like interesting ideas floating around from celebrities.
Yeah, he definitely is, he's, he's in that world.
Yeah, he's in the extreme of what we talk about.
What's wrong with the industry?
He lives in the heart of that and share some pretty cool stories, some of the trainers
that around him, some of the things that he's seen, and also why he's inspired to present
the message that he's presenting, which is very similar to a lot of what Mind Pump talks
about.
We didn't really know this until we got on the show.
It was really exciting to get to know him and find out more about him because if you
just take
a quick snapshot of you see a really good looking guy who's out of you. I think he has an
actor background when she talks about on the show. We watched his commercial there. Right.
And you know, and you're not sure is this going to be like a Julian Michael type of somebody
who was casted to be a personal trainer is he legit and he's a legit personal trainer.
And he has a cool story on what took him down that path
and he has a beautiful fit wife and they share all kinds of their recipes and health secrets
on his Instagram too so make sure you check out all his stuff.
Yeah, so his podcast is OpenSky Fitness.
Their website is OpenSkyFitness.com and his Instagram is at OpenSky Fitness. Also, we have put together Maps Prime
and Maps Prime Pro together in the Prime Bundle.
Now we've had people ask us
what's the difference between the two programs.
Maps Prime, which we put out first
and we put that out a little while ago,
is really your, we consider it like your pre-workout.
It helps you design what you do to prime your body
for your workout so you could squat better
and more effectively, you could deadlift better,
more effectively, bench press better, more effectively.
Basically, add it to whatever workout you're doing,
do it right before your workout
as your quote unquote warmup
and get far better results from your workout.
And then Maps Prime Pro, well, that's just pure correctional.
I mean, it's got a self-assessment tool
that covers, I mean, the entire body,
but really parts of the body that you don't learn how
to assess anywhere else, really.
In fact, the movements in Prime Pro,
many of them were even unfamiliar to me, Adam and Justin.
We've been in the industry for 15 to 20 years.
That's because we recruited Dr. Justin Brink, who's just this incredible movement specialist.
He really helped us design Maps Prime Pro.
It's cool about Maps Prime Pro.
We just provided another sort of an answer, sort of a bridge between, sometimes people may feel a little bit
helpless, like I really want to get into the swing of things
and get into, you know, working out the way I used to work out.
And, you know, a lot of times like they need to dig deeper
and they need to find out, you know, how their body,
what the current state of their body is right now.
So think about this way, you know, you have wrist pain, the current state of their body is right now. So think about this way, you know,
you have wrist pain that's kind of chronic
and it happens sometimes,
or my neck tends to bother me sometimes,
or you know, I can't do that exercise anymore
because my shoulder kind of hurts,
or when I squat, I notice some knee pain or hip pain,
or I just don't feel these muscles firing
the way they should, like,
this is what Prime Pro is designed for.
It literally has a self-assessment tool for the wrist and hands, your neck, your shoulders and your shoulder blades, your
hips, your feet, your ankles, your toes, areas that are almost never covered that have huge
impacts on just how you feel, how effective you can make your workouts, your aches and pains.
I'll tell you what, if you're a personal trainer or somebody that works with people
in that particular regard, a chiropractor or a physical therapist or whatever,
this program is absolutely invaluable.
And so what we've done is we've taken Maps Prime and Maps Prime Pro
and we've combined them together and discounted them in the Prime bundle.
And you can find this at mindpumpmedia.com.
And without any further ado,
here's our interview with Rob D'Eone
from Open Sky Fitness.
The way it works is,
is like Doug's kind of like the father of the podcast,
and you know when you have kids,
do you have kids, Rob?
I don't have kids.
Okay, so when you have kids,
if you have multiple children,
as a father, as a good parent,
what you do is you identify.
Your favorite.
Which child, no, not necessarily.
You identify which child.
You know what, you should be a father.
Yeah.
Shit.
You identify which child needs more help.
God, you know what I mean?
So it's Adam and I.
Yeah, so, so, so, don't give the expensive,
which is good.
Yeah, right, it needs to sound good.
Cause I don't need it.
Says the guy hands all over.
Says the guy who sounds like fucking kermit on here, right?
That's my big tonsil.
I got that right tonsil.
He turns it up and EQs them all perfectly.
Where are you flying in from right now?
I'm just fluent from LA.
It's like a $97 round trip ticket and it was like, I can't fucking pass that out.
LA is fucking great by the way.
What a great place, huh? Yeah, well
I love I love selling Southern California. I can't say that I love LA. No who likes LA
I don't think that many people like it. I think only the people that grew up there like LA
Maybe yeah, I mean, I think everybody that moves there falls in love with the weather
But then after that you're maybe 10 years. You're just like wow, I need to get the fuck out of here. Are you born and raised there?
No, I'm born and raised long Island. Oh
Where are you guys from? We're i'm born and raised long island all right
where you're all from here sandals
yeah
long island that's my people you're on my people that's right i look at you i'm
like uh... you know it doesn't look like it's from a way yeah that's right
that's right that the wall i you know i grew up out there i i moved when i
was i moved into queens when i was uh... i don't know twenty years old twenty
no twenty five years old
and i lasted there for about three years and i got sick of it i came out to all i originally i don't know you i don't know, 20 years old, no, 25 years old. And I lasted there for about three years
and I got sick of it.
I came out to LA originally, I don't know,
I don't know if you guys know this about me.
So I was an actor.
I moved to LA to be an actor.
Your hands, I can tell you should be doing it.
And that's why my voice is very nice.
It has nothing to do with this microphone right now.
I've got this locked in.
So I moved out there to be an actor
because I spent the month of February out there
for pilot season.
The weather was ridiculous. I came back home to Queens and it was, the month of February out there for pilot season. The weather was ridiculous.
I came back home to Queens and it was, you know, the end of February to slush, sleep rain.
It was disgusting and I told my wife or who was my girlfriend at the time.
We're getting at a dodge.
We got to go.
So we moved that summer.
We literally moved just on a total whim.
Let's just get that out of here just because of the weather.
So what kind of work did you do as an actor?
Was there anything we know?
I was on film.
Like Justin. I was just like Justin? I was on film, like Justin.
Just like Justin, I was on lots of, I did lots and lots of adult films.
I was on guiding light for just like as a guest star there for a couple of episodes.
What is that? I don't know what that is.
Guiding light? Soap opera.
Oh, okay. You don't know soap opera?
That's since then since I've been on a cancel that it could be up,
because of me, but you know, I'm not exactly sure
But yeah, this is it was like a true soap over like married with or what's the children all my children all my children as
World turns all like crap. Yeah, I remember those ones my mom watched those when I was a kid
Yeah, guiding light was huge my mom watched it when I was a kid and and they my sisters and my mom could not be more
You know happy that I was on that show were you the Were you the hot trainer boyfriend that was banging the wife?
You know, no, unfortunately, that would have been awesome.
I would totally love to do that.
But at the time, I wasn't even, I wasn't really in that good shape.
I was just, because I was just an actor who had, had like a history of being an athlete
when I was a kid, but I didn't really, that wasn't, it was like a middle ground in my life
where, and we could talk about this, because my 20s was just like a shit time in terms of being healthy, but at the time I got married at 30, I was like a middle ground in my life where, and we could talk about this because my 20s was just like a shit time
in terms of being healthy.
By the time I got married at 30,
I was like 30 pounds overweight.
I just, I look like crap.
So, but anyway, I was on that show
and I played a detective for, you know,
two episodes, three episodes, and that was it.
But I mean, I did little things here and there,
but, you know, my epic career,
you wouldn't recognize me in anything.
Oh, you know what I'm on?
Actually, if everybody wants the Google this
If you go Google centrum silver strip poker commercial strip poker commercial
swear to God if you guys want to Google it you could totally Google it
I was on that and it's got millions and millions and millions of downloads because it's like it the guy who created this guy Eric
Who it was a spec spot you guys know what that is?
No a spec spot is when a director or some guy,
somebody makes a commercial for free.
Like they make it, they pay for it themselves
and then they try to sell it.
As like, hey look what I mean,
as look what I can do.
You know, so he made this spec spot and it crushed.
It was the coolest commercial,
it was about us like sitting around playing strip poker
and it's got a really good twist at the end,
so you gotta check it out. But they sent from silver wouldn't buy it on YouTube
Where can we look at you you can literally look it up on YouTube? It's on if you can Google it'll it'll pop up anywhere
Doug's pulling it up right here. All right, so here it is. There I am. That's me right there. Yes, so I got a
Quick quick little backstory if you're gonna play this it's
Orson is what I see yeah, so quick little backstory
So I got I got cast as the other guys' role
when, and I hope he doesn't hear this,
because it sounds like I'm talking shit about him.
But I got cast as the other guys' role,
and he couldn't do, he couldn't just do like a look back and forth,
and you'll see it, it's like a little joke at the end there.
He couldn't pull that off.
So I got swapped out and actually did that right there.
He's that little one, dude.
That was it, and then, you know, but you saw, okay, let's watch this thing. That's my that's my lead it. Yeah, and I got to release
How old are you right here?
That was 2006 so that was that was a well 39. Yeah, oh
You're 40 39 40. I just turned 40. Yeah, happy birthday. Thank you very much. Yeah, you have dark hair there
Yeah
And you can see it and you can see I was this before,
this before I became a personal trainer or anything like that.
So I actually, I'm not in great shape
because they don't make fun of me.
So you're in guiding light, you're like, I fucking made it.
That's right, it's all now.
I'm gonna take off now.
I thought I was just like gonna be vacationing.
It didn't work out for you.
When did you make the pivot to fitness?
Well, I was doing, it's a good question.
I was doing a play and I had to take my shirt off in the play.
And so I was like, fuck, I can't look like a total douchebag
on stage.
I was trellis and crescent as Shakespeare.
So, I was trained.
I went to a conservatory.
I went to an acting conservatory.
Oh, good deal.
So I had to get in shape for this.
So I was.
I mean, I knew how to work out.
I knew how to diet kind of at the time.
And I got ripped for this for this role.
One of the guys that was in the show with me,
I was playing Achilles and he was playing Ajax.
And I got, and he was like, how did you fucking do that?
Like, you look insane.
And I said, I just, you know, I worked out.
I just dieted and he said, well, can you train me?
And I'm not a trainer.
And he said, well, I'll pay you to do it.
And I said, okay, well, sure.
And so I did it and I felt like a total hack
for the first three months, six months I was training.
And he was getting good results.
And then I went and got my certification
and I got my advanced certifications all through NSM,
but also CrossFit got into CrossFit for a while
and we can talk about that.
No, you guys feel like that?
You're 100% right.
That's why I stopped.
I totally blew my shoulder up and I had like a, yeah, I see 67 herniations.
Oh shit.
Totally fucked myself up.
Sorry about that.
No, that's all right.
So, yeah, so that guy asked me to train him and that was basically me off and running.
He actually lost 100 pounds in the first year and a half.
He's one of my best friends.
I was at his wedding.
He's a fantastic guy.
So.
Now, do you have you fallen now in love with training
as much as you were with acting?
Or is this something like you do on the side
while you still want to do acting?
How do I mean?
Yeah, well, do I want to do acting?
Not really.
I mean, I love doing podcasting.
I love being able to talk like this
because I feel like I get to perform.
And that's one outlet.
I feel like you're too good looking for podcasting. I do.
I've got a face.
You guys have faces for radio.
Yes, but thank you, asshole.
You just got out of here.
We're pointing out the obvious here.
But you know, it's like, you know, if I could, if I literally could, Doug, if you want
to sign on, you know, if I could afford to spend the time doing videos and stuff like
that and YouTube work, I would.
It's just, there's so much.
I'm trying to juggle my personal training
career as well as my online post, you know,
my podcasting and all that content.
It's a monster.
It's a monster of amount of work to do.
And also then be healthy at the same time
and try to figure that shit out, you know,
which we all do and actually I have remind me
because I posted in my Facebook group
that I was coming on the show today
and they peep some of the people, they're like, oh my god, my two favorite podcasts are coming
together.
Which is actually kind of cool.
So, so they there's a couple.
So, if you guys have any questions, let me know.
I'll throw them in the show and these guys can answer.
Oh yeah, pull them up, dude.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll fire those up in just in just a little bit.
Yeah, we do Q&A's all the time here.
Exactly.
No, that's a really good idea.
That's cool.
So, good deal.
So, with fitness, you got into fitness. Did you fall in love with it after you started
Training this guy? Yeah, I did and you know, I fell in love with the fitness aspect of it
I also fell in love with the business aspect of it. I really did I I ended up doing this
That's got to be tough though because you're in I mean the fitness in it we tell we rail against the fitness industry quite a bit
And of course all the whole fitness industry isn't the same,
but a lot of the fitness industry that gets the attention
that makes the money is the parts that we really don't like.
The ones that...
Six pack abs, kind of.
Yeah, and they lie and the snake oil and the sham
and all that bullshit and the Photoshop pictures and all that stuff.
And you're like literally in the epicenter of that.
You're in L.A., which is like, that's where a lot of it comes out of.
When you got
into fitness, what made you love it and what made you see that right away? And you also
enacting shit. I mean, acting is right along the lines, right? What that kind of stuff.
Yeah, totally. I was trying to figure out what my angle was going to be as a personal
trainer. I knew that it was right around the time that P90X came out, right? Or maybe
P90X or P90X2. I can't remember at the time, but Tony Horton was huge at the time the P90X came out, right? Or maybe P90X or P90X2, I can't
remember at the time, but Tony Horton was huge at the time and he had all that crap about
muscle confusion and everything like that. I've had him on my show.
But he's great. He's listening to this, right? He's one of your fans, right? Okay, good.
Of course. So, you know, I decided and I knew that I had to do something that really made
me stand out in the community because you're your
Personal trainer starting in Los Angeles with no history, right?
So I was thinking do I want to work in a box gym?
I didn't want to go that route because I didn't believe in those guys
I didn't know I know that you guys started out in that area and maybe would have been a better business choice in order to build a clientele
But I didn't want to go that route because my wife was already working at, it was Sports Club LA at the time, which is now Equinox.
Got it.
And it was, I knew how much money they were taking from her, and I just, I didn't want
to do all the legwork and then have them take a huge chunk of that.
Sure.
So I put an ad on Craigslist and I posted, hey, I'm getting a sort of a new certification
and ASM, they didn't know it was my first certification. And I want to practice on you.
I'm going to give our sessions for 20 bucks.
Nobody responds, it's crickets, literally crickets.
So I doubled the price.
And I got people almost immediately.
Yeah, isn't that funny?
Yeah, it was literally an associate guy.
Yeah, it was perceived value, exactly.
That was my first lesson in perceived value.
It was like, if you...
What a great story though, it's a great lesson right now. so I doubled my price and I started building my clientele from there
And I did all of my training outside in the park zero overhead and I just learned how was that where the name open sky comes from
That's exactly where I came from. That's why I was trying to figure out what is my what is my name?
Going to be it has to be something that shows what I did
I didn't work out with and even though my background was obviously was weightlifting as a kid through sports, but I wanted to build programs and workouts that
were all bands, body weight, medicine balls, things, shit that I can carry on my back, you
know, in the park. And I used the hills there and the stairs there. And we really utilized the
entire area, which was really great for the first five years.
Excellent. Excellent.
It's cool meeting someone like you who's profloved, a professional in the fitness industry
who started later on, almost as a second career.
I love asking, because I've met, you know, I've had a few trainers that have worked for me
in that same situation.
I love asking them questions because I started as a kid in fitness.
It was like the first career I ever had.
And there's a lot of pitfalls you step into
because you're a kid, you know what I mean?
But you came into a little older,
are there moments where you had kind of a-ha moments
where you learned things about fitness,
just training others that you thought maybe were true?
Oh yeah, I would try to take people
through the stupidest shit ever.
Like, you know, I think that a ton of my clients
would probably get injured in the beginning
because I was just trying to do things
that were way too advanced.
And I think that's what a lot of young trainers do as well.
They think that their clients are almost as invincible
as they are.
When they people complain about knee pain,
they just would be like, don't worry about it.
You're gonna be okay.
Instead of trying to find an alternative movement
that doesn't cause that pain or even addressing
what the potential, what their movement pattern is,
and see if they can try to break that down
and see if they can solve that problem.
I used to tell my trainers,
you don't wanna be the trainer that a client calls you
and says, I can't make my workout today
because I hurt my back.
You wanna be the trainer that your client calls
and says, hey, I hurt my back, can I come see you?
So you can help me out.
That's right.
When you provide that kind of value, then you hey, I hurt my back. Can I come see you? So you can help me out. That's right.
And when you provide that kind of value,
then you become successful as a personal trainer.
I think a lot of trainers and just people
and fitness in general confuse intensity,
soreness, and sweating with effectiveness.
And I think a lot of times you're trying to show off
as a young trainer like you're trying to.
All the shit.
Oh my god.
Yeah, with all these fancy exercises
and giving them a really hard workout. So it's like, oh, if you feel this, so it's working, right? And so that's the wow them. Yeah, with all these like fancy exercises and give them a really hard workout. So it's like, oh, you feel this. So it's working. Right. And so that's the
interesting. That's part of what's wrong with the industry and the culture that we have created
for ourselves is, you know, the clients come in with that perspective. They're expecting that,
right? Like I remember being a young trainer, and I remember, you know, trying to program what I
thought was best for the client, but then them not getting what they wanted from it
Which is I already know this exercise like teach me something new show me something different, right?
You know and that so you know at one point as a trainer when you're coming up and you're trying to build a business
You ask yourself like fuck. I know it's best for this person
But then I also know what I got to do to keep them coming and make them you know
So you have this struggle and I think all trainers
struggle with that at one point in their career.
It's just a matter of how many of them actually break through and get better and get better
and get to the point where that's no longer concerned.
And I think for most trainers, their goal is to keep that client as long as possible,
you know, and not necessarily, and not have them ever leave.
So there's a lot of trainers at the gym that I work out at in West Hollywood, and I just,
one of the guys came up to me,
he goes, he's talking to me, he's like,
you gotta do muscle confusion, you gotta really trick him up,
you gotta have him doing a different workout every time.
And I was like, I couldn't disagree with you more.
Like I literally couldn't disagree with you more.
Like there's no way anybody's gonna go through adaptation
if they're doing something different
every fucking time they walk in the room.
Very, very, very true.
How are they gonna get good at it
if they're doing something, if they're never doing the
same thing?
Very true.
There's a kind of, if you look at adaptation, you look at an exercise even, there's this
bell curve of adaptation where, in the beginning you see little, then you start to get good
at it, then you see lots of results from that exercise, that movement or that modality,
and then you start to get diminishing returns at that point that you want to change the adaptation.
This is why with our, we have programs that we sell and our programs are phased where
you're focusing on a particular style of adaptation for anywhere between two to four weeks depending
on our program because we know as trainers, you got to do that long to get the most out
of it before you move on to the next one.
If you change all the time, it's got to be measurable.
That's right. And you got to be able to measure what's working. You one. If you change all the time, it's gotta be measurable.
That's right.
And you gotta be able to measure what's working.
If you change it every single time,
what do you know?
Like you're just shooting it all out there.
And the terminology that we use, muscle confusion,
your muscles are stupid.
They're not smart.
You don't need to confuse them.
They're not gonna figure it out.
Yeah, they're not,
your central nervous system,
you could definitely throw different things
at your CNS, but again,
you need to get good at something to be able to get that type of adaptation.
So I'm glad you said that. What about nutrition and stuff like that? When did you figure out the whole protein and small meals?
Or do you still advocate that kind of thing?
So, are you stupid or are you?
I mean a lot of people do.
My wife is actually a holistic nutrition counselor. Yeah, are you stupid or you? Yeah, I'm not stupid. Well, I mean a lot of people do, I'm really good.
No, we, my wife is actually a holistic nutrition counselor.
So that was a big switch for me.
When I was just working out in New York
before I came out to LA and I was just going for runs
or something like that and working out with my buddies,
I would stop and get a hot dog on the street on the way over.
You know, I would get a slice of pizza on the way over.
And I'd do my workout with burping and farting the entire time,
just terrible, you know,
and I thought that there was like, whatever,
I'm working out, I don't have to worry about that.
So that was my, there's a whole history of, like,
generational eating that I had to deal with,
and basically unpack and then figure out
why I need to change this.
And, you know, just in general,
if I'm gonna give like an overview, obviously,
the most, our whole entire recommendation
is a whole food diet.
That's everything that my wife and I stand for.
We don't necessarily believe that you need to supplement
your supplement, your diet with anything,
unless it's like things like vitamin D,
things that you might be deficient in,
that you're naturally deficient,
that you can't get from your food.
But generally, most people are just,
they're just eating shit.
They're eating processed food all the time,
fast food all the time, and they're just not getting in
enough whole foods of whether it be veggies and meats,
and not since these are whatever.
That makes it hard for you to get sponsored
by supplement companies.
It makes it really hard to make money,
because I'm so middle of the road,
like I do not, we are very paleo style,
but I'm not paleo, I'm not this dogmatic paleo approach guy.
We believe that the ketogenic diet could be very effective
for some people, but it's not necessarily for everybody
and it's not also like a lifestyle
that I would want to live for the rest of my life.
So there's all these different things
that you could potentially take from.
Maybe Whole 30 is a great one, but that's like a 30 day diet.
You know, there's some great diet programs out there,
but in reality, there is no such thing as a program
that's right for everybody.
Everybody has to figure it out on their own.
I'm glad to hear that from another fitness podcaster
because it seems like we're the minority.
Although I feel like it's starting to grow.
I feel like people are starting to have
a little bit of a different approach.
I mean, it wasn't that long ago in fitness
where it was, you know, eat, you know, five small meals a day,
two or three of them are a meal replacement powder,
or a bar.
Here's all your supplements.
If you're fat loss, if you're goals fat loss,
if you're goals muscle building,
your training needs to be, you know,
super high-intensity body parts,
split type stuff.
And now you're starting to hear more people speak out
and say, hold on a second,
this doesn't work for most people.
Here's what the approach should be.
I mean, as a trainer training clients,
every time I would try and apply those approaches
to my clients, because I would do them on myself
and I get away with them,
then I would apply it to my clients
and it's just that it works.
So I'd switch back to something else
and never made the connection.
I never made the connection. That way, I'm in, I'm, I probably a lot more like my clients and it just didn't work, so I switched back to something else and never made the connection. I never made the connection.
That way to me.
I'm probably a lot more like my clients than I think I am.
And if I start doing those things for myself,
I'll probably see better results.
And that's exactly what happened.
So.
It's interesting that the journey that you go on on your own,
and then mirror next to, like you have this juxtaposition
of your client next to you, because all the things
that you're doing, you feel like you want to teach your client.
You know, you want to, and it's same thing for the podcast.
Everything that you guys are working on on your own,
that's exactly what you talk about on your show.
So it's only natural that you would try to influence
your clients based on all the different things
that you're learning.
Now, the problem is, is that if you have clients
for like eight years, and then you told them something eight years ago
and now you're telling them something different,
they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up a second.
Like you told me that I don't have to do this, you told me that that's not a good thing to do. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up a second. Like you told me that I don't have to do this,
you told me that that's not a good thing to do.
And they're like, well, look, science fucking changes.
People learn, people like adapt to new information.
So if you're not willing to adapt and try something new,
then I can't really help you.
But I can't tell you that what we're doing right now,
and it's unfortunate, but for certain things,
but I can't tell you what we're doing right now,
is a hundred percent right
Because I might learn something tomorrow that that tells me that it's it might be slightly wrong You know, here's why I feel like a lot of the advice the general advice
Maybe not the specifics is that tends to change but the more general advice
Here's why I think we're on track this time because it seems like in all of science medicine and health
We're we're kind of making this, it's
coming full circle.
Everything started out, food-based, then it became, take these foods and extract these things,
and it turned into standardized, these particular chemicals, then it came to pharmaceuticals and
synthetics, and now it's coming back around to where we're finding, like, wait a minute,
we co-evolved with food, we co-e, wait a minute, we co-evolved with food,
we co-evolved with bacteria,
we co-evolved with our environment,
and because of that evolutionary process took so long,
it probably is best for us to mimic some of those foods
and eat those natural things.
And there's a lot of it that we don't understand,
but we're finding that it's just better.
We tend to be healthier.
What do you guys think is the impetus for that?
What do you think created that turn?
I have a theory on it.
I'm curious to see.
Turn for the batter, turn for the good.
Turn for the good in terms of us thinking about evolutionary,
eating how we progress.
Oh, I think the pendulum is swung,
just like we saw with cigarettes, right?
I mean, just 20 years ago, you weren't cool
if you weren't smoking.
Just 20, 30 years ago, you could smoke in 20 years ago.
I mean, 20 years ago, people were smoking,
everybody was smoking cigarettes,
and it was a cool thing to do.
And fuck your doctor would take a smoke break
between his patients, you know?
My cousins were delivered by a doctor
that was smoking wildly delivered.
Right, so, there's your...
So what we have seen, and cigarettes still exist.
They still exist. They haven't gone away. That's crazy that they do. Right, and people still what we have seen and cigarettes still exist. They haven't
gone away. It's crazy that they do. Right. And people still smoked them and they will
never stop, right? Probably because the addictive properties, whatever. But the point is, it
has gotten to a point though now where you could be somewhere and be like, oh my God, she's
smoking gross. You know, when people are grossed out by it. So we have seen the pendulum swing
one way and it's coming back the other information.
Well, and what is happening is people, yeah, we know now we know like we're not oblivious
to what is that now we were marketed to 20 years ago that it was even when they kind
of knew it was bad that oh, it's still kind of good. So we are confused. Right.
Or enough information now has came out where okay, we know it's fucking bad. Well, we're
going through that right now with food is there's still some people that are pushing back that are still
Blinded by the advertising and marketing bullshit or PhDs that are giving bad information still out there. Yeah, but there are more good
You got fact check them now. Yeah, there's more good brilliant minds coming forward
And that was a lot of what inspired mind pump was to be part of that movement of helping
Catapult some of these names because what we found was,
man, I would meet people in the industry that are just, they're huge, and I'd be so excited to
meet them, they're all huge following, and then we sort of, you listen to the information that
they're giving, and you're just like, fuck, it's terrible. Then I have a guy who's a brilliant mind
that nobody knows who the fuck he is, giving, that's teaching me all kinds of things, things I never
knew, and I should have known as a trainer in a health professional years
ago.
And I'm learning so much.
How the fuck does not more people get to hear this?
And just because they're not sexy.
They're not sexy.
They're not.
They're not.
They're not.
They're not marketable.
They're brilliant.
They spend all their time in books and labs and learning.
And so that tide is turning. And I I think it's because it swung so far
And now we're seeing all these autoimmune issues and shit going on and we can't put our finger on exactly where it's coming from
Everything starting to lead back to it's probably what we're eating. I it's in my in my opinion
It just takes time. I mean anytime we solve one problem. This is what we do is our history history of humans
We'll solve one problem, this is what we do, this is our history, history of humans. We'll solve a problem with something
that then becomes a problem itself,
because the solution that becomes,
that look, antibiotics, right?
We discover antibiotics, we won the war
against bacteria and germs,
and the over-prescription of antibiotics,
in everything, everything from hand soap to,
cow feed to even the antibiotics we take,
now we're starting to see the repercussions of that,
the unintended, like, we need bacteria in our body.
We not only need bacteria, but if we just obliterate it
all the time, we can create pandemics and epidemics.
We're ticking time mom at the moment
from something that we created.
I just think, look, X-rays, when X-rays got, you know,
discovered and used, you know, I don't know if you guys
knew this, but podiatrist used X-rays when they'd sell shoes.
You would go into buy, you know, a pair of tennis shoes
or whatever, and they'd X-ray your foot and be like,
oh, it fits perfectly, that your kid would go in
and put the shoe on.
Because they didn't know the date.
Absolutely true.
Absolutely true.
Some of the first X-rays used commercially were used
in places that sold shoes.
Shoes to kids in particular.
But we didn't understand it,
and then we started learning some of the negative effects.
With food, we solved hunger.
We really did.
In the modern world, in modern societies, Western societies,
we don't starve.
We used to all the time.
We don't really get malnourished either.
I mean, I know we talk about people who have deficiencies
and we're not healthy.
But we don't see people with rickets and scurvy
and all these other...
Well, sometimes, I do.
Yeah, you'll see some people like that are just eating
gas station food,
and they don't have any nutrients,
and they do.
Still have cases of scurvy and rickets.
You do, but it's rare.
But yeah, it's rare to have.
It's a porc.
Nobody's going hungry. Nobody's going hungry. Yeah, nobody's going to
They're misinformed like our uninformed. I should say uneducated and we and we solve that right
We solve that part of the book but the way we solved it was with mass-produced
heavily processed long shelf life food
We and because we're we live in a market-based society which has got great pluses
There's also some potential negatives.
And one of them is that you're always gonna follow
the consumer, and the consumer just wants
something that tastes good.
And so the engineering, which we've always done,
humans, ever since we started cooking food,
we've engineered meals to make them more palatable.
It's just modern technology really took that to the next level.
And now you've got foods that have flavors in them
that would never exist in nature.
And we're mass producing and you can buy them anywhere
and they're super cheap.
And you've got problems like obesity, diabetes,
autoimmune diseases that are creeping up.
And it just took time.
It's taken really the obesity epidemic
didn't really start to take off until the 1970s probably.
And so that's a good, you know, four or five
generations, four or five decades. And now you're going to start to see, I think, you're starting
to see the turnaround. The turnaround, in fact, I know soda sales have dropped, I know fast food
sales are starting to drop. But we saw all those problems, right? We saw all those problems of,
like hunger and, you know, the immediate needs. And so now it becomes this whole plethora of new
problems that we've created.
And with the internet, create, and all this information,
this vastness of information now that we can access.
Now it's like, we question everything now.
Like let's question the common thought process of like,
okay, how did we get back,
how did we get in shape back in the day?
And what were the methods that everybody was using?
And then kind of peer into that process a little bit more,
bring that back to surface and dissect what was good,
what was bad.
And I feel like just the thought process
of that alone is created.
A lot of people to get interested back into, you know,
either old or methods that, you know, were overlooked.
And again, like if we look at like the industrial revolution, when that really started taking off, nothing
we built could be bad.
It was like, at the time, I love reading about history because we tend to repeat some of
the same mistakes, but at the time, it was incredible.
Here's the industrial revolution.
We're building machines that are doing things that we could never do before.
Every month, every newspaper that came out
was this new advancement with these new technologies
when they were using for steam power
and then coal technology and engine and all these.
It was incredible.
And then they built the Titanic, the Titanic, unsinkable.
It was like a, it was a marvel of modern technology.
And it went down. And people people started saying hold on a second
Maybe we don't have all the answers and I think that's starting to happen now with you know when I was a kid
You go to the doctor and they whatever they said was gospel
People are now starting to question things
I think we've seen in enough times now where things get reversed where they say
Here do this or
take this, or this is perfectly safe.
And then 10 years later, like, oops, it gives you cancer.
Yeah, I have a client right now that she's 87 years old and she doesn't sleep.
She can't sleep.
She sleeps maybe one or two hours a night.
And her husband was a GP.
I don't know, he might even specialize in something else, but I told her, you might want to try talking to a natural path or an osteopath or a holistic doctor or somebody that might be able to try something new because the doctor that she goes to gives her pills, sleeping pills.
She walks around like a zombie all day long. You see it like just her eyes. I just feel so bad for her because she has her brain function is so minimal now, her physically she's just deteriorating
and she's not taking any other alternative routes to figure out how to solve this problem.
And it's so frustrating.
And I try to, I said, hey, do you want me to introduce you to anybody?
Because I've interviewed a bunch of different natural paths and osteopaths and holistic
doctors and just alternative doctors on my show.
And her husband said that they're quacks.
Yeah, well, this generation starting to change a little bit.
Yeah, I think.
I mean, she's 87, so obviously she's still
she part of that other generation.
Right.
Well, I mean, back then, the doctors were it.
I mean, you know, especially if you're around here,
I mean, I'm sure if you were in other, you know,
if you're maybe Eastern, you know, like you were in China or other countries with long histories of different types of medicine, but in America, like the history of medicine was pretty bad up until it, you know, modern medicine started kind of taking over.
Yeah, you said you had a theory as to why you.
Oh, yeah, so I think, I mean, I think that well, obviously the internet is a big thing, but I think the internet can be very overwhelming for a lot of people. It's just like it's a fire hose of information when you search anything.
I think that, you know, and I tie it back to, I think podcasting is one big one.
I think that people can choose their source, and if you stick with one specific person,
you know, like mine, pomp, or open sky fitness podcast, like if you stick with one person,
you can really gather a lot of information from different avenues and have it filter through the brain of those people who seem to be really
wanting to make a change, not just for themselves, but for their audience and their clients.
But I think it's interesting because I think that Paleo was a big, a big needle mover in
that. And I think the thing that brought Paleo to the table was the CrossFit world. And
it's like, if there's anything that CrossFit did bring to us, it was really, it was
Paleo because it was just like VHS versus beta or Blu-ray versus what was the high
death, right?
Poor industry decided both of those.
But I think CrossFit decided Paleo versus the zone diet.
And Paleo really just took over.
And now we have this, now we're all thinking about things in a more of an evolutionary standpoint.
We didn't think about it like that before.
We really didn't.
We didn't think about nutrition from like, I think I heard you mention on a show recently,
but I talk about this all the time.
Whenever somebody says, do you think I should, do you think, well, it was, you know, do
you think the American Heart Association you think, well, it was, you know, do you think
the American Heart Association recently
did that study, right?
That they mentioned on USA Today about the coconut oil, right?
And does it seem, does it, when they recommend corn oil
and soybean oil over coconut oil, does that seem right?
I mean, just from, just from like a natural standpoint,
you can literally squeeze a coconut with like a lemon press
and get oil out of it.
You can't do that with corn and soy. from like a natural standpoint, you can literally squeeze a coconut with like a lemon press and get oil out of it.
You can't do that with corn and soy.
It makes no sense that like from mother nature
wouldn't provide what we needed to be healthy, right?
So if we're, if we start to think about things
from an evolutionary standpoint,
were we able to get our hands on this?
Now obviously food and all that stuff
has changed over the decades and the centuries, but you know, were we able to get our hands on this? Now, obviously food and all that stuff has changed over the decades and the centuries,
but were we able to get our hands on these foods generations ago?
And for a lot of the crap that we're eating now, we don't, but they're touted as being
healthy, as being heart healthy or a better option, which is saddening to me.
And the same approach can be made with exercise, the evolutionary model, where we look at specific
forms of exercise, and we know how to train for particular types of performance, but we also know
that the more specialized you get with your training, the more extreme it becomes with its goal,
whether it's extreme endurance or extreme strength even, which are on both sides of the spectrum, they both have their problems because they're both so extreme.
And evolutionarily speaking, we probably did all of it.
We probably lifted heavy shit when we needed to.
We definitely walked and maybe ran for long distances when we needed to.
Omnivars, Omnixisizers.
Exactly.
Come up with the news.
Exactly.
And when you approach fitness that way, you find your body seems to work best at it.
The big thing with fitness that I think needs the change
that we talk about all time,
and I don't know how it's gonna change,
is this, it's so centrally focused on appearance
and the cosmetic that it really makes it difficult
to deliver the right information.
And the irony of that is when you start to train
for most people now, of course,
I'm not talking about extreme,
like if you're bodybuilding or you're for it,
but for most people, if they went from a health standpoint
and wellness standpoint,
they would actually look the way they're trying to look
while they're training specifically for just appearance.
It'd be a byproduct.
It would be, itproduct. It would be.
It's a side effect.
Yeah.
It's an absolute side effect.
Right.
And you were talking about that.
You're talking about how training people can be difficult sometimes.
Yeah.
It's true because I live in LA.
You know, it's the, it's, this is, that is the mecca, the epicenter of, of vanity.
So people don't train there because they want to get healthy.
They train there because they want to look a certain way.
And if you can't provide that to them, they're gonna find somebody else who can.
There's lots of trainers in Los Angeles,
they're gonna give you steroids if you ask for it.
There's lots of trainers in LA that are gonna tell you
to like to cut cosmetic surgeons.
Yeah, lots of cosmetic, I mean, it's ridiculous.
I have clients multiple who ask me about liposuction
or something like that.
And it's just for like little things,
like just wanna get rid of that little extra something.
I have a trainer that walked up to me the other day
and says, my clients ask him about getting lipo back here
and he knows that I do a podcast
and he knows I do a lot of interviews
so he kind of comes to me with like random questions like that
and he's like, what do you think a liposuction
from behind the arm?
It was like, great,
I'll never have fat behind our arms again
but it'll go somewhere else
because he's not gonna fucking change anything
about her diet.
This woman just wants a quick fix.
You know, I got a story about that.
I had a client years ago who came to me
and we did an assessment and then she wanted a body fat test.
Can we fall had these, dude?
Yeah, and I'm testing her and I'm doing the,
you know, the classic, you know,
the points of the bicep triceps,
I'm scapping around.
I see where this is going.
And I'm testing her and I test her bicep.
And for those you aren't trainers,
every time you test someone's arm,
bicep and tricep, the tricep is gonna measure higher.
It's just we store more body fat back there,
especially if you're a woman.
I have never encountered a person
where the fat turns you in.
When you're in a way of right.
And where the fat measurement on the bicep
is higher than the tricep.
And if anything,
except for this length,
and if anything, they're at most, they're close, right?
They're close, but it's not like a seven and a five
or so far. Yeah, so I tested, and she was, you know,
she won a lose about 40 pounds, so she was overweight.
So I test her bicep.
Her bicep was like five times higher in measurement
for body fat than the back of her arm.
And I kind of knew that when I looked at her,
cause it just something didn't look right about her arm.
So I tested her and right away I said,
have you had liposuction on the back of your arm?
She thought I was a wizard.
She looked at me like, what?
How do you know that?
Of course I played up and I'm like,
well you know, I've been doing this for so long.
I could tell things about the body
that we need to work on or whatever.
But no, it's like listen.
You should be in a carnival fair or something.
I tested your biceps fat and your tricep isn't,
that's weird.
Sorry.
You walk out with like a stuffed animal,
you're a little bit staccidated. I don't think, and I think that's,
it's actually a good story because I think we've all
probably had multiple clients with this.
I remember the first time I encountered it when I was
really young, man, first client that ever went and decided
they were gonna do that and she went and did lipos,
tummy tuck, whatever.
And she ended up gaining the 60 plus pounds back.
And now it just put on a on a weirder shape.
Like she looked better.
It was like SpongeBob.
She was like normal fat.
Yeah, exactly.
Then you get like this oddly fat.
You don't change the root cause of how you got fat
or how you got to that point.
If you don't change that, it's gonna come back
and now it's gonna come back disproportionate.
So I had a guy who, when I finally got to him,
he was all like sutured up, like he had all the scars
because he had had liposuction
and then he had to have all the skin removed
because he was like 350 pounds when he was coming down.
But he didn't change his diet
and I tried to talk to him about diet
but he just wanted to do the workouts
and it was a complete kind of like mental
fuck to try to train this guy and and but he kept he didn't gain any weight when we were
working together actually lost a few pounds which was fine but all of his weight was in
his legs and his ass he literally looked like he had like a woman's body it was all down
like he didn't gain his belly at all yet a flat belly which is really odd when you see a guy
that's slightly overweight and it's all in his ass.
People don't write that.
You know, this is a great topic
because with Lyple's section, we reached it.
We said, no, you gotta realize,
you gotta realize like, of course people store body fat
and you can get fat or most people want to be leaner.
But there is a male way of storing body fat
and there's a female way of storing body fat
for the most part.
Every once in a while, you'll see outliers.
But for the most part, men will store around their midsection or their love handles, women
store it in their lower body, their thighs, back of their arms, and their breasts.
And if you gain weight and you're a woman and you change that or you're a man and you change
that, you're better off not.
Because then it not only now are you heavier, but just something just doesn't look right.
There was another guy at a gym that I managed and I talked to him about it, actually, I actually
asked him about it and luckily he was cool to talk about it, but he came in, he was a
lean guy working out and then he started gaining weight and he gained weight and it was all
in his chest,
neck, and upper body.
So he looked very strange at this fat,
like neck and face kind area.
And I-
The Incredibles.
It was, it was, it was anything.
And I remember thinking like,
is he on like some kind of weird medication?
Or I couldn't figure it out.
You know what I'm saying?
So I went and talked to him about it
and he told me no, he got all the fat
from his midsection removed. So then when he went and gained it, he it and he told me, no, he got all the fat from his midsection removed.
So then when he's went and gained it,
he stored it in this kind of strange way.
You know what you gotta do?
You gotta get lipo in every part of your body
except for where your muscles would be.
So you just look like,
so you have like these tremendous biceps
in this chest that sticks out, but it's just all fat.
So you just, you have to strategically place
your liposuction.
I think that would be the smartest thing to do. Oh, man.
Yeah.
So what are some of the wiggles here?
What are some of the, like, the things that you did as early on as a trainer that you
look back and go, what the hell was I doing?
Oh, well, like, just-
You gotta write yourself out here.
Yeah, I know.
I think taking people through, like, plyometric moves, power moves, or way early, you know, people
that didn't have the stability that you stuff like that was probably my biggest, my biggest
mistake. And I, you know, some of the people,
you know, I don't, I hope that they didn't have like,
you know, lifelong injuries,
but some of the people would get, would get injured, obviously.
I mean, because you're just doing stupid shit.
And it's, you know, this is-
That's all over TV, I mean, that's every information
that you see them do in plyometrics to fucking hell, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So I would do things like that all the time.
And, and, but only because I think we try to,
early on when you're a personal trainer,
you try to have people do what you're doing, right?
It's the only thing you know.
The only thing you know is what you do.
And then you try to kind of,
you know, relate at over to the people that want to learn.
Well, you know, then you realize, wow,
people can't even do a squat without their legs
creating in.
When I learned that, that was like, I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe how that lack of just,
somebody couldn't just sit down as if there was a chair
behind them.
You know, no, no, no, just get your ass back,
start to sit back, don't let your knees crowd in.
You know, and their feet would crick-cave out,
their knees would cave in, and they would just,
and they would just like go down as if their back
was sliding along a wall.
It was like, what is the matter with you?
You know, like I just,
dude, just like I did it.
Yeah, so I'm literally shouting you how to sit down.
Like just imagine there's a couch right behind you,
just sit, actually, you know what, here's the ball.
Just sit back, it's sliding down the fucking wall.
Like, there's some weird shit.
It's like, there's like, you know,
like a matrix thing or something.
It was really weird.
Yeah, first time, those are probably some of the problems.
The first time you see that happen
and you realize that as a trainer,
then when you realize that realize that becomes the majority.
They have like holy shit.
Then there's the asshole.
The asshole is the anomaly here.
And then there's the asshole trainers who load that on someone's back.
You know, you see that all the time.
There's, I mean, even at my gym, which is an exclusive one-on-one gym,
there's, I get really kind of sad for that client
because they're going to hurt themselves,
maybe not today, but it's coming.
They all those patterns are there,
they're all out of alignment,
and their trainer's just locking it in.
Now, do you think that-
Do you think trainers should have a better screening process
with the certifications and stuff?
Because, I mean, we all seen that,
there's a lot of trainers that are just horrible.
There's great ones too, but there's quite a few that are bad.
I mean, the problem is I think you should,
I think most people the way they get their trainers
by referral, so I think that for most people,
you should definitely talk to the people
that have had that person as a trainer,
and don't go to someone who, you know,
who hasn't, because look, even a shitty trainer
can have somebody lose 100 pounds.
I was a shitty trainer when I first started and my client lost 100 pounds.
Doesn't mean that I can't help them.
Good point.
Right?
So I had to learn that process, but you want to find people that you look at and you go,
okay, that person moves really well.
And then they also have a trainer.
And the best thing to do is go on your social media, ask for people to make a recommendation
and see if they have trainers in your area.
And then test them
Go out and try that trainer out if you're I always give a first session for free because I know that the guys gonna stay with me
I have no doubt that they're gonna train with me for the first time and then they're gonna be like, okay?
When do we start a big red flag is if you go to a trainer the first time they don't even do an assessment right?
You'd be surprised how many people show up in the first time they go to a train They're trying to take some right through a workout. Yeah, exactly like you don't even take it
Like a squad assessment or any and just just to see how they move just to see how they walk if there's any kind of misalignment
Maybe like taking your car to the mechanic and he goes, oh, don't tell me. Yeah, I'm gonna fix your car
Donuts someone first someone rip out this engine
Let's get this thing going. I just need a small. I don't know why you guys dude
I got to ask you being in LA,
like with all these celebrities and being,
you know, in the sort of haven for all this stuff.
Like, what's the craziest sort of fad you've seen coming in
that you've had to like, you know, describe like,
why it's so stupid to your client?
Oh my God, I get the, I mean, especially early on
in the podcast, I always get those questions all the time.
And that's a really fucking tough question because there's just so much shit out there.
Yeah.
I feel started there too.
I think like, the HDG diet started there.
And theory or there.
I had that one we read about.
Oh, you just eat mushrooms?
Yeah, you just eat mushroom and magical mushrooms.
No, no, no, it wasn't those mushrooms.
That wasn't magical mushrooms.
Because that might actually work.
I had a client on a show that was doing the HDG diet with, and it's just a low calorie.
I mean, you're 500 calories.
100 calories, ridiculous calories,
and the guy dropped all this weight,
but, and he's going to this doctor obviously,
but that was, I mean, that's some of the craziest shit.
These low calorie have another client that dropped,
she dropped like 60 pounds on another 800 calorie diet
where the doctor was giving her these,
I don't even know what they were.
They look like these brown kind of chalky pieces of cracker
that she was supposed to eat as her carbohydrate source
and fiber source.
It was disgusting and bullion cubes.
That was what like, you would get every meal delivery,
you would get this like-
Electroline.
You know what, it looked like a shredded wheat,
but burnt and flattened out like the size of a gram
Like size of a gram cracker and two bullion cubes. You know, you know, why you lose weight on that
Cuz it's fucking gross
Listen here's I got today check this out I got this diet
Basically you can eat as much as you want of these foods right here. You ready? Yeah. Bullion cubes and fucking and wood pulp crackers.
But you can eat them as much as you want.
Go to town.
Go to town.
I only eat two of those a day.
They're fucking gross.
I lost 100 pounds.
I can't figure it out.
Shit like that is stuff that we see all the time there.
There's you know, you guys did a podcast episode about it.
There's a I think it was the first episode that I heard of yours because Josh was on the show and he posted it and I was like oh cool and then I was scrolling through your
episodes and I hope it was a one of our first no it was the it was your beach body
It was the beach body one that you talked about not beach body. Sorry Baywatch Baywatch Baywatch workout
Zach Efron Zach Ef I I that guy trains in my gym. No, yeah, no joke. And I was just like, I had to listen to it
because I had to, you guys, that's the favorite.
I want you to go up to him and be like,
hey, they did a whole episode of Not You on My F.
I didn't know it, like, I don't want to, like, I, look.
I'm not trying this.
I don't want to be a total dick.
Just get the guy to do something.
I'm just curious.
Yeah, exactly.
But I'll tell you this right now, like,
I chitchat it with him a little bit because he,
he ended up moving to that gym right after
Zach Efron was on Baywatch,
or that movie.
So I don't know exactly what his workout programming was,
but he wrote what he did was after that,
he knew that he was gonna be Buzzfeed
was gonna be doing this article about a Buzzfeed came to him
and said, hey, we wanna do an article about
Zach's workout, can you tell us what he did?
It's on together.
And he's like, and it was actually really smart
on his part, he goes, look, I'll take you through it.
He looked at the guy, he judged him and he goes,
this guy's just like 20 pounds overweight.
He plays ball, the writer of this article,
of this blog, he looks at him and he just goes,
he's a baller, he works out,
he plays basketball like five days a week,
he works out three days a week, lifting,
but his nutrition is shit.
So basically what he did was game like a really simple workout,
changed his nutrition, and the guy got ripped.
I mean, in two months and eight weeks,
he got pretty ripped, but he would've gotten ripped
like that if he had just stopped eating fucking
Panda Express, which was just like his favorite food.
If you read that, if you've read that blog post,
but he was smarter in his point
because then he knew Buzzfeed was coming out with this.
And I think you guys read his,
you were referring to his workout program.
I think it might have been in bodybuilding.com
or something like that,
but he sold a workout program,
a Baywatch workout program.
And he sold at like, he sold like 60,000 of them.
Shut the fuck up right now.
Yeah, it's like, it was like,
He sold 60,000.
No, no, not 60,000.
Sorry, he sold in the first,
in the sorry, $60,000 worth in the first week. Oh yeah, that's true. God damn it. For a hundred, not 60,000. Sorry. He sold in the first in the sorry 60,000 dollars worth in the first week. Oh, yeah, I'm still a
God damn it for a hundred they were a hundred and fifty dollars a piece. So you do the math, but that Buzzfeed that Buzzfeed article got over his
His landing page got over a million hits
But only X amount of people bought it if you do the math like
You guys if we were in LA we're taking this out probably we be crushing in LA right now
Train some celebrity in them.
Seriously, but you know, I think that you're 100% right
because I've interviewed Gunner Peterson.
Do you guys know who that is?
Right, so I interviewed him on my show
and it's interesting because it's a totally different
philosophy on training.
You walk into Gunner Peterson's gym, have you ever?
No.
Do you guys know him personally?
Okay, so we could shit talk.
No, I'm just kidding.
I'm not gonna lie.
But like, you know, if you walk into his gym,
it's toys. It's nothing but wall- I'm just kidding. I'm not gonna lie. But like, you know, if you walk into his gym, it's toys.
It's nothing but wall-to-wall toys.
Everything is orange and yellow.
That's his company.
Colors, everything gets painted orange and yellow before it enters the place.
And he has, like, there's one walkway.
You guys have that green astroturf out there.
He has that small thing, maybe three feet wide, going down the entire run of his studio.
And everything else is machines. Machines and toys. small thing, maybe three feet wide, going down the entire run of his studio, and everything
else is machines.
Machines and toys.
And his philosophy, I trained with him, so I interviewed him on my show, and I trained
with him every Friday for like maybe two or three months.
And he's an interesting guy.
He's very alpha male, not like my kind of guy.
He's just, he's very opinionated.
And I guess he can afford to be, you know, he's,
he's, he's celebrity trainer.
He's a celebrity trainer.
He's the lone trainer.
He's the Kardashians trainer.
He's like, he trains, like he has his facility.
You literally, he has a parking lot just for his facility
and it's just for his clients, right?
And there's only one or two clients that work out
in that 4,000 square feet facility and that's it.
Just those two people.
I don't think he makes any money on his,
on his facility
because he's just gonna, even if it's 250 an hour,
or $300 an hour, you still gotta pay a $20,000,
or $30,000, not every month.
He just needs a brick and mortar location for.
For whatever his, whatever else he's promoting.
But the thing that he told me in that process was that,
look, these people want to know that everything
that you're giving them is the best, is the newest, is the most up to date, is that all of that look, you know, these people want to know that everything that you're giving them is the best,
is the newest, is the most up to date,
is that all of that information, that's what people want.
So when they get there and they're playing with these toys,
just like we were talking about like keeping
it interesting for your clients, that's what it's about
in Los Angeles.
It's about keeping it as interesting for your clients
as possible.
And novelty down there.
They're all about novelty.
Hey, you ever worked out on this bucket machine?
No, I've never even heard of that thing.
Yeah, that's right. You never heard of it
My trainer's not it. Yeah, exactly. I love that shit
They want the new they want the car that no one has they want the shirt that no one has
They want that no one has they want the trainer that has the machines that nobody fucking has. Yeah, that's lost
Angela now you know what that's been happening for a little while now
I wonder if you can go in there now and open up like a cement floor. Like rusted weights.
Yeah, a kennel bells and old barbells.
Like a cartbell, like what those guys have up there.
Yeah, you know, a couple rings and just be like,
I'm taking it back to the old school.
And it's like gymnasium, you know, on the front.
Basically that's CrossFit, but you can't get away with that.
If like one, if an individual client walked into,
like if I had my gym and it looked like a CrossFit box,
the client would walk in there and go what the fuck is this?
Yeah, I'm not a shower. Yeah, where's the shower? Where's the where's the where's the where's the hammer strength machine?
You know like they would they want all those things so they don't they wouldn't I mean I don't know
I think you can make it cool
I think that's what you're in your head. I walk into your
I walk into your facility here and this is the facility that I would create.
Actually, I had a graphic designer, a friend of mine,
a girl who was in my boot camp when I was doing that
back in the day, and she would do all of my graphic design
for free, she designed my logo, she designed my t-shirts,
all that kind of shit.
She was awesome.
And so I had her design, my gym,
because my idea was open sky fitness,
I was gonna have, my gym was gonna be a garage,
an abandoned garage that was like this L-shaped garage on the corner of a,
on the corner of a, of a street, you know, and the outside was gonna be all
astro turf and then inside we would keep all the machines and it would be,
there would be bleachers on one side like it was a football stadium,
we'd run bleachers, it would be like this cool outdoor indoor kind of feel.
I like it. But, you know, and, and sled poles and, and, and pushes and shit like that.
And, and then, you know know my wife does gyro tonics
So we would have a section for gyro tonic. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that
I don't even know what that is. Yeah, yeah
gyro tonic is like across between Pilates and yoga and it's
It's all machine-based. There's gyro tonic and there's gyro canesis gyro canesis is like matte Pilates what Pilates is and then gyro tonic is like
You know how Pilates they have the reformer, right? So gyro tonic has they have the reformer, but gyro tonic has five different machines.
Okay, interesting. They have you got to look it up. It's actually looks like this torture device thing
So it hasn't been around a while or something new. It's been around it's been around for no for like probably
15 20 years
And it's been you know surprise I've never heard okay interesting well
I could tell you why it's not nobody has ever heard of it
It's because the guy Julian who owns it, he's in Germany.
He has such a short leash on everybody that becomes a gyro tonic instructor.
You cannot post videos.
You're not allowed to.
It's trademarked.
You cannot post videos.
It's an interesting marketing strategy.
It really is, but it's only, if you go, it's only in major cities, or maybe you might
be able to find one here in San Jose.
You might be able to find, you to find a couple in San Francisco,
obviously, Carmel, like very wealthy areas,
we'll have them where people have enough money
to get certified costs $10,000.
Just to get started.
And the way that my wife found it was,
she was dancing with the Graham Company,
and I don't know if you guys in the dance world at all,
but Graham Company's one of the...
I was a professional dancer.
I can tell.
Just by the way you move.
The Graham Company was probably one of the
premier modern dance companies in New York,
in the world, I should say.
And that's what they did.
Gyartonic is what they did in the off season
to stay limber, strong, lean.
Interesting.
Yeah, and that's how she fell in love with it.
Well, that's March.
Yeah, into this, especially being the novelty of, you know,
in LA, that's like it's such a hook for that community,
for sure.
But it's hard to branch out.
Like, you've never heard of it.
You guys have never heard of gyrotonic.
And now maybe with your millions and millions of listeners
that you guys do have, you know, that's now everybody's
gonna hear a little bit about it.
But like, you just pissed off the owner.
See what I would do is I'd get certified, I'd learn it,
and then I'd do something a little different,
and then do my YouTube videos.
No, say, they would, they would,
they would,
they would sue the shit out of you.
That's really fucking weird.
Good luck.
Yeah, good luck, man.
I'm posted on YouTube as shikles viral.
Yeah, I win.
So your podcast was after your gym,
did you original, or after you became a trainer?
Right.
Did you start the podcast to promote your business,
basically, is that why it's the same name?
Well, originally I wanted to do YouTube.
And my buddy, who's also a filmmaker,
he worked for How I Met a Mother,
which I was mentioning to you guys earlier.
He worked for How I Met Your Mother, and I said,
he's a great videographer, and I guess that's what you call them,
DP, whatever, the fuck, like a video director, whatever.
So his name's Alec Leff, give him a shout out, just.
But I asked him
I said would you be willing to do my YouTube videos because he had helped me I audition for
some workout video TV show or something like that and he helped me shoot that video. I said
Hey man, would you help me make YouTube videos and just create content because I it's like
one of the best ways to drive traffic. He goes you know what it's a pain in the ass to do
videos. Let's I have all the podcasting equipment. Let's do that and we'll create our content that way
and we'll partner up and do it.
So he was working at Howard met your mother at Fox Studios.
I went there with him, my buddy Jeff Meacham
was also the co-host of my show.
And we started that together like car talk for fitness.
I love how you guys are the Howard Sterns of fitness, right?
But that was, we were car talk for fitness.
So we were guys that were just like trying to solve,
people would call and we would try to solve their problems.
But logistically, Doug, let me ask you this question.
If you have a podcast like this
and you have to have three different people call in
and everybody in the room be in the room at the same time,
call in live and ask questions,
logistically, that's the biggest pain in the ass.
I can't imagine that.
I don't know about that.
It's ridiculous.
Well, we've done one off before just by letting somebody
who's like gone through like the Mav's program because we actually talked about doing this on a regular and it's a headache just to do've done one off before just by letting somebody who's like gone through like the maps program
Because we actually talked about doing this on a regular and it's a headache just to do it with one person coming in
So I can't imagine. Oh, yeah, I mean most of my stuff if you know
I'm not my podcasts is not as big as yours
So but I do get some really great names on my show which is which is pretty awesome
And I and I really I know that I have a good show. I know that I do a really good interview
So I have a I have that but I can't get Mark Sisson to come to my house.
I can't get Dr. Pearlmutter to come to my house,
or people in New York or wherever flying in.
So I can't do that.
But I do get some great people to come to my house
and I can really run that.
But otherwise, it's really hard to reach the mask.
Wow, so you wanted to do this.
You wanted to start a YouTube
and four years ago when you started the podcast
Yeah, so you were a hold on second. I'm not gonna I don't want to crap you out here. Go ahead
I'm about to crap you out had you started YouTube four years ago
I would kill holy shit because like like the fitness people on you
Like the Michael Chang you guys remember when you found out about YouTube. Oh, it was like 2006
Yeah, my buddy goes
Hey, man, you could see any episode of any TV show on this new thing called YouTube
And I'm like what the fuck you talk about everything that you could ever want to watch is on there
Yeah, and I was just like what the fuck I don't get it man. I just don't get it
Well, I mean everybody who did fitness on YouTube when it kind of first started taking off like five years ago even
They're all massive now just because they were the only ones.
Like what's his name?
Six pack abs due to my channel.
God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was longer though.
That was longer.
Yeah.
This is 10 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's definitely we're talking 2006 2007.
Like that's one that's one YouTube really just started rolling.
I was way after the game.
Like I was thinking I wasn't I was no pioneer who was like, you know what?
YouTube, you know, I was no pioneer.
I was the guy who you like, you know what, YouTube. You know, I was no pioneer. I was the guy who was trying to make me do it.
You'd already seen guys like him,
guys were doing it.
And I was trying to figure out how to kind of,
how to mirror that.
Yeah, yeah, but still, still would have been a good start.
Are you doing it right now?
Are you messing with you much as well?
No, I mean, I'm potentially gonna be repurposing
some Facebook live videos.
One of the things that we do on our show is we,
we try to keep our audience really intimate, right?
And so what we do is we offer a Facebook group.
Do you guys have, you have a Facebook group,
but it's only for people who are doing maps, is that right?
No, it's, we have a forum that people enroll in
and it doesn't matter what you're following.
A lot of them do follow maps, but it's a fitness forum,
so they can ask questions.
We have a lot of trainers, doctors, you know.
We're on there.
We create, it started off literally the three of us
with two people.
And we fostered this community where,
and we all get on there.
So we're very active on it.
And so what's neat is that when we first were on it,
we were on it a lot, and we were helping all three,
five, 10, 15 people that were on there,
they were able to do videos of themselves squatting
over in India, over here in Florida, over wherever,
and we could critique their squat,
we could give them coaching tips,
and it really, and Sal was probably the best at this for sure.
This is his baby in the business.
He's continued to foster that community to the point
where now we have these incredible doctors,
PT's, personal trainers that are in that community,
and now they're all, and now they're just naturally helping.
Now you guys are a little more hands off.
You don't have to be in there
because there are people at justice
Hell still in there fucking multiple times a day
I'm so I was taking a dump. Yeah, yeah, he's that's how you know. You know the Lord's work
That's how you know I'm pooping yeah, so he's on the floor. That's it
Very right you know what I was just thinking three times a day and I don't know I don't know how much your your listeners or fans would appreciate this
I know ours do because we actually do talk about business.
And you know, this is kind of a unique opportunity that we can get in this.
We openly are okay discussing.
We share a lot of our personal business and how we make money and what we're doing with our audience.
So, you know, if you want to go that direction where we talk about some of those things,
like we're open to discussing that shit.
Yeah, I mean, I would love to because, you, that's if you're if you are an online entrepreneur,
somebody who's trying to make a business, you know, out of something online, whatever it is,
it's such a, it can be, it can be a very daunting task.
There's so many different aspects of it that are overwhelming, especially for a guy like me.
Now, I know you guys have a team, which is great.
And that's really smart.
I maybe I'm a little more of a solo trinou
or whatever the fuck you call it, right?
I'm usually by myself and maybe that's not a good thing.
But yes, it's really interesting to me to find out
how people do it and how they structure it.
Because the OpenSky Fitness podcast,
going back to the earlier question was like,
I started it because I wanted to create content,
I wanted to have a connection to an audience.
And for the longest time, I didn't even try to,
I was giving away free downloads,
but in doing some kind of lead generation through that,
but I'd also be doing, I started creating landing pages
and all that crap.
And that was probably for the first year or two.
And then I was like, I don't have a real connection,
because you could send out email blasts,
but the response, the open rates usually like anywhere
from 20 to 25%.
And then the actual people who click on things
is even lower than that.
So really the people that are interacting
with you through your email list is minimal.
So I knew that I needed to open up something new,
which is one of the reasons why I started
the OpenSky Fitness Podcast Group.
And that is an amazing community.
Because now, which I think,
and you guys can maybe chime in on this,
is when you know, when you can have a direct access
to your audience, then you can ask them what they want.
But until then, you're just kind of,
you know, taking shots in the dark,
you're hoping to go that maybe what you're doing
is what these people are gonna wanna buy or whatever.
So that's been my first like step,
and I'm trying to now.
How long have you had the group for?
So almost a year.
Almost a year.
Are you letting it get to a certain size?
Well, I mean, I'm trying to, I mean, obviously,
I would love to grow it as much as possible.
Right now, we do have a really great, we have it about 550.
So it's not, you guys, I'm sure.
Yeah, mine's free.
So it's, yeah, it's totally free to get into it. It it's not you know it's free yeah mine's free so it's
yeah it's totally free to get into it uh it's about you know I think you guys have I'm in one of
your forums I think there's only like to around two thousand people in there that must be the private
forum yeah that's the private forum got I don't know you're on there cool yeah well I actually I
requested to join and then I think it was Katrina or somebody said uh did you buy in and I was like
oh no no I'm sorry I just I, I saw this was a mind pump form.
And I just, because I come in, I'm coming on the show
and I want to see what people are talking about.
And then she's like, oh, Sal said it's cool.
You could come in.
So like, and then I was in.
So now I was, I'm in that form.
But you know, you get all the dirt on us now.
Yeah, that's right.
That's where Justin Postor on my way in.
That's where he post all the huge pictures.
I know.
Save it for the privates.
Yeah, so we weren't kidding when you said you do porn.
Yeah, I wasn't. So, so I'm trying kidding when you said you'd do porn. It's not. Yeah, it wasn't.
So I'm trying, I mean, so I'm at the very early stages.
And this is tough because it is, my wife
is on the show with me, but I'm trying
to take anything away from you.
All of this is self-generated.
All the information that we're trying to put out,
we every single week, we're trying
to figure out what people want to know.
We asked our audience, what do you guys want to know?
And we dive in, we don't know everything.
I think that any podcast or any professional
that tells you that they know all the answers,
they get their heads so far up their ass,
they don't know which way's up.
So we do, we dig in, we start doing the research
based on a lot of the philosophies
that we've learned over time.
And that's basically our kind of our focus. But we haven't yet figured out like the big like you guys have maps, right?
You guys have I don't know how many programs is it all together? Do you know?
We have quite a few have maps and a ballic aesthetic. We have performance. We have prime prime pro, which is coming out maps anywhere.
I think that's all of them, right? That's six. That's six. And then we also have guides. We have a fasting nutrition guide. We have a blood occlusion training guide. And what are the,
oh, the no BS six pack form. That's a core workout program that I came up with a long time ago.
So we've got quite a few things. The thing about trying to make a living out of fitness
besides the brick and mortar way, which would be either owning a gym or working in a gym or working as a trainer, is to sell supplements.
Unfortunately, that's the big way to do it.
But based on your philosophy on nutrition, it'd be difficult for you to do that because
you've already talked so much about.
And you would fuck myself.
I should.
You were.
We talk about this all the time.
You could.
You could say it in a lot of sound. You're not totally. You're not totally. You were, yeah. We talk about this all the time. You could, I mean, you could say it in a lot of time.
You're not totally, you're not totally fucked.
Because I mean, it's harder for us.
Let's put it that way.
It's a lot harder for guys like us
that are going this route.
But we also agree.
It's longer road.
Yes, it's worth it.
Here's the thing.
When we started Mind Pump, we looked at the,
because we had so much experience in the industry,
I mean, I've been a professional fitness for 20 years,
and I've been a fan of fitness for even longer,
of like really, really deep.
And we started seeing some trends,
and when we first started Mind Pump,
we had this conversation.
We were actually in Adam's living room,
and we were talking about the direction
of the fitness industry, and I had brought up a point
where I said, you know, four years ago,
if you went into Safeway, there wasn't an organic section.
And now there is.
Actually, it's in every grocery store.
If you look at the market and the way it's shifting, you're starting to see the big companies
that Coca-Cola purchased these organic kind of healthy companies because they're hedging
their bets because, and that's what you want to do.
And you look at the market
It's always a good idea to look at the big players because they spend all the money trying to predict what's about to happen and usually where they start to invest
Is a pretty good indicator of where the market's gonna go and we'd also seen this as trainers and one thing that we realized
That was sorely lacking in fitness sorely lacking and starting to come up a little bit, is the lack of integrity.
There's just no, there was no integrity and fitness.
People would sell anything to make a dollar,
and the real solid good advice just wasn't coming out
because it wasn't making anybody money.
But like all markets, at some point you get a backlash,
and all the three of us sat down and we predicted it.
We said, look, social media is, it's like air.
And that air is going to wash out all the bullshit.
It's like sunlight coming through because with social media,
it's harder to be fake.
The Photoshoppers and the bullshit before and after
is going to start getting called out.
Which we're seeing now.
We've seen it already.
People and now the supplement market has been big enough
long enough to where people are starting to say,
wait a minute, this is kind of bullshit.
There's all these reports coming out of these independent
companies coming in testing supplements and finding
they actually have nothing.
There's a huge percentage of them to have nothing in them
like what the label says or even some have toxic things in them.
And we saw this and we said, okay, and not to mention,
we just were integrity-based people.
We couldn't bullshit anyway, even if you tried.
Even if we tried to really lie and bullshit,
the truth is gonna come out,
because that's just how we talk.
So we knew this, we sat down, we said, okay,
we're gonna bet that the market's gonna take this big change
in direction, we're gonna try and spearhead it, we're gonna head right, we're gonna bet that the market's gonna take this big change in direction, we're gonna try
and spearhead it, we're gonna be honest,
we're gonna have lots of integrity, we're so honest,
we're gonna be raw about it, and we're not gonna make
any money in the beginning because no one's gonna
wanna pay us since we're gonna speak poorly
about all these products, but once we build an audience,
once you have an audience, then you can start
to figure it out, and that's exactly what we did.
We started Mind Pump and for an entire year, we didn't sell a single thing.
Well, and let's talk about how important that piece right there is this is the, I think
where most people make a mistake is they get so hung up on how they're going to make
money that they don't spend the real time in building the community.
Building the community is everything.
If you don't have the right message,
you don't have more than five people listening to you
or giving two shits about what you have to say,
I don't give a fuck how great your product is
or how great your idea is.
It ain't gonna, you're not gonna make any real money off of,
you're certainly not gonna make a living off of it.
So I think a lot of people I see
that try and create online businesses,
they get so cut up and, you know, how I'm
going to make this much money and I need to do this.
They assume there'll be a demand there.
Yeah.
We haven't even, yeah, vetted that yet or even gone through like, oh, what is my audience?
What does it look like?
Right.
And this is some full disclosure on a current thing that we're going through right now.
We just had this topic.
In fact, you can see it on our whiteboard right now.
The July focus and the July focus for us is to work back in the business.
We've gotten so caught up in all the moving parts
in this business and oh, growing this and flying here
and doing that, it's like, man, when was the last time
we worked in the business and really,
what we did the things that we had to do
to grow it to this point.
And so everything that we're creating
and we're building this month is giving back to our audience.
Nothing in return, not making any money.
How do we enhance this process for those that are already in our community now and for
those in the future that are going to be coming into the community?
And I think just not enough entrepreneurs have that mindset.
They're so focused on how they're going to make money and how the next guy is doing it
and trying to mimic what they're doing versus like, do you have a message that anyone gives
to shits
about it's like that quote, right?
Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
And you know, when I focus on that piece of the business first
then the other part, and you said it really well,
which I think is a smart place for you right now,
which is you're building this private form and community.
That's a perfect place to ask those people
what they need, right?
Yeah, and that's what we do.
And actually I post like a poll in there that asks,
excuse me, you don't want to ask you,
like what is the major thing that you're struggling
with right now?
You know, what are your obstacles?
If you were to, if you were to put a finger on the one thing
that you really are struggling with that's holding you back
from achieving whatever it is, the body weight that you want
to be, the physical, the level of physical fitness
that you wanna reach.
What is that thing that's holding you back?
And they give you all the answers.
I mean, literally do.
I'll name, like maybe I'll say,
maybe my problem is, I'm not motivated.
Maybe my problem is lack of knowledge.
Maybe my problem is this.
And then they'll fill in,
they'll just fill in that poll.
And then after that, I follow up.
Great, okay guys, look,
there's hop two ones where you had no willpower,
you had no lack, you felt like you had a lack of knowledge. Okay, okay guys, look, the top two ones where you had no willpower, you had no lack,
you felt like you had a lack of knowledge.
Okay, let's break this down a little more.
If you feel like you have a lack of knowledge,
is that about nutrition?
Is that about your fitness?
Is that about like how to time manage?
Is it like what is it?
And then you can really start narrowing down those things.
The thing that I think I struggle with business-wise
is for one doing too many fucking things.
I do way too much trying to manage everything.
But is not necessarily picking the one thing
that is going to be the biggest needle mover.
And one of the things that I really love to do
over the last 10 years, I love working one on one with people.
That's a big thing for me.
Not necessarily one on one with building up my clients.
I've done that, I'm fine with that.
If I wanted to live that lifestyle for the rest of my life,
I could train clients until I'm 65 years old.
I know guys that do that.
That seems like that would totally suck.
But if I wanted to, I could.
And I could probably do fine.
But what I wanna do is I wanna have,
I wanna reach a broader spectrum.
I wanna reach people that,
so the way that I look at it is,
I'm the in between, between the way that I look at it is like, I'm
the in between between person, a guy that's sitting on the couch is 300 pounds and then
the guy who starts doing the maps program. Like, I want to be the in between. I want to
be the guy who gets you off the couch, gets you to just take a fucking walk around the
block every day, gets you to do it like drinking enough water every single day, gets you
actually eating some vegetables and potentially helping you kind of wean off of all the sugar and all the things process
foods in your diet. I want to be that guy and then they can go and move on to something a little more advanced if they choose to.
Well, you're talking about the most important aspect of a fitness, which is a psychological piece. It's not it's not even close.
It's not even close the information piece. Information is very important, yes.
But the psychology behind it is far more important.
I mean, training as many people as I have,
I would be very successful when I understood that part.
When I was focused on what we're doing
and how we're eating and that's it,
I was not nearly as successful.
Once I really figured out the psychological piece,
then I had clients who never worked out before
would hire me and would train with me for 10 years,
12 years, and now I don't train them anymore.
I still think in contact with them
and guess what they're still doing.
They're still working out
and I was able to make those massive changes.
One of the big shifts for me in that realm
was really understanding
that it wasn't about hitting a target because fitness is so it's so focused on goals,
on a specific goal, lose 30 pounds, gain 20 pounds on my bench press, run faster, you know,
build my biceps, whatever, that we forget that really, if you really want to be successful in fitness,
you have to do it consistently.
That means you got to do it all the time,
and you've got to do it for long periods of time.
It has to become a part of your life.
And the only way that's going to happen
is when you stop focusing on the fact that it's not
about goals, it's about enjoying the process.
That's really about it.
It's about the process.
Once you seek out the process,
every day I seek out my workout,
every day I seek out foods that feel good to eat,
I've made those connections.
Now, like, what are goals?
Like, I lose the weight, it just happens.
I build the muscle, it just happens.
It's about enjoying that process.
And when you look at studies on populations of people, that live very long,
where you see lots of centarians, this is exactly what they do. It's just, you know, the old man that's
110 years old, the reason why he's lived so long isn't because he's goal was to lose 30 pounds
and get stronger. It's because every day I walk up that hill over there that I really, I do that
every morning and I milk this goat or whatever and then I go down to the beach and I go fishing
for a little bit and then I meet with my family
and we have this meal from the garden
and it's just what I do every day and I love it.
Like that's really the key.
And I don't, you can definitely make that impact
on people one on one, but like you,
we share that sentiment.
We wanna be able to share that to a lot of people
make a big impact.
Really the audience we love talking to the most
are other trainers.
We like talking to other trainers
because if we can influence those trainers,
we know that they're gonna mess with you.
Absolutely, yeah, because it's just mushrooms out from there.
The, I have on my wall right behind my computer,
it says the process is the result.
And I say it on my show probably every third episode.
I just remind everybody, you have to be in on this process.
Because if you're not focusing on the process, then you're just, and you're only focusing
on the goal, then you're missing the entire point.
And there's also, I did an episode specifically about goals versus intentions.
And there's a really good example I use.
It's like, you can have the goal to get to the top of the hill. Go for that hike that day to get to the top of the hill. That's
your goal. It's very clear. It's easy to see. But if your intention is to also experience
life as it's happening, stopping and smelling the roses, stopping and actually maybe having
a conversation on that hike, then that's a life to live. If your intention is to enjoy
the process, then that makes getting to the live, right? If your intention is to enjoy the process,
then that makes getting to the goal
that much more enjoyable.
But if you're only thing, if you're only thing to focus on
is that getting to the top of the hill
and you put the blinders on,
you're gonna be a miserable person.
Miseryl person inside and out
and you're not gonna be any fun to be around with your friends
and you're not gonna be any fun to be around with your family.
And you're basically gonna eventually hate yourself.
And that's just the reality of it.
Yeah, we have a horrible success rate in fitness.
It's very, very bad.
People don't stick to it.
We're not solving the health problems.
Overall, you guys aren't talking about yourself.
No, no, I'm talking about-
Confession time to be a girl.
Transparent.
Yeah, that's the thing. No, I'm talking about just the fitness industry just does a very, we, and
I say we because we're part of it. Yeah. We don't do a good job. I mean, we have not
been the answer to the obesity and diabetes epidemic. We have not been the answer to,
you know, any of the ailments that we're starting to get, the penetration into the market,
you know, fitness has penetrated more and more of the market,
but it has not made a substantial difference.
People view exercise in the wrong way
and nutrition in the wrong way.
And we hope to change that.
We really hope to make it something that,
I mean, how great would it be
if that was a part of the culture, you know what I mean?
Well, I mean, I think it slowly be if that was a part of the culture, you know what I mean? Well, I mean, I think it, I think it slowly is.
I think you said that earlier.
I think it's starting to really be ingrained,
especially this millennial generation.
These fuckers don't, like, they won't eat anything
that's not organic, not whole food.
Like, there's some of them that do, you know,
they do kind of fall off track, but, I mean,
some of the most obsessed people about their health
are the millennials. Yeah. But it's great. I mean, it the most obsessed people about their health are the millennials.
It's, but it's great. I mean, it's, it's so cool because they're getting so technical
about how they solve their problems and they're becoming so scientific. They break it down.
Like, that's, that's, that's, that you got to be going to look at yourself as like being
a little scientist and you are that, that, that, that, that, you know, that test subject
and you test it out and one, on yourself, you are that person that is going to and and people are doing that now,
which is so fucking cool.
Now you could think positive a millennial reference.
It's like they're total assholes.
Wow. All right. Oh, sorry.
We got Jordy over there.
But you know, it's I think it's I think it's I think it's true.
And I think that they're, you know, they are that next generation.
So it's we are losing that my parents not good.
My dad's had multiple heart attacks, multiple strokes, lung cancer.
He's got a hard time getting around.
My grandmother's got dementia.
My mom basically has chronic pain in her back and sciatic down her leg and I can't help
them. I try.
It's one of the reasons probably I do what I do because I just felt like I could not
get through to them.
They don't look at me as the expert.
They look at me as the sun.
So I give them information and they just go, oh, okay.
They probably think you're weird when you go over to eat dinner and you know, mom, I
can't have that.
You're on that special diet.
Well, you know, it's funny because we, like I said, we eat mostly paleo. Just, and what I mean by that is I'm not,
we're not hardcore paleo, but we're,
it's mostly meat and vegetables.
And that's basically our diet.
We don't have chips in the house.
We don't have, you know, like all that crap bread
and the house and stuff like that.
That's just not what we do.
And so my parents came and visited me for about a week.
And I said, look, I'm cooking for you guys.
I love to cook.
It's one of my things.
I'm a huge cook. I love it. And I said, I'm cooking for you guys. I love to cook, it's one of my things, I'm a huge cook, I love it.
And I said, I'm cooking for you guys.
Every night I'll cook dinner for you guys,
but you know, we're not serving bread,
we're not serving pasta, we're not doing that stuff.
I said, you're gonna eat fine, you're never gonna be hungry,
the food's gonna be delicious.
But-
They left after two days.
I don't know where they went.
No, but by the end, my dad's mental clarity
was significantly better.
His energy levels were significantly better.
By the end of the vacation they said,
I can't believe how good we feel.
Like they didn't feel like they went on vacation.
They felt like they went to a spa.
Isn't that crazy that it blows people's minds?
Yeah.
And then you tell them like, what do you think?
Like this is what you eat food every day.
It literally becomes a part of you.
Of course it's gonna have an impact on how you feel.
Yeah, exactly.
So they went home and they said,
she's like, my mom's like, what was I eating?
Tell me what I was eating.
I just want to know what should I be doing.
I was like, mom, it's really simple.
Just focus on eating meats.
Don't even worry about what kinds of meat.
Just focus on meats and fish and vegetables.
And if you want to have some starchy vegetables in there,
potatoes and stuff, that's totally fine. Just don't make it starchy vegetables and vegetables. And, you know, if you wanna have some starchy vegetables in there, potatoes and stuff, that's totally fine.
Just don't make it starchy vegetables in meat.
Just, you know, like have a pretty,
like half of that plate's green, you know?
And so they did that for like a couple of months
and they felt really good
and then they started slipping back into their habits.
Shit.
You know, it's like you can't really,
not that you can't teach an old dog new trips,
but as long as you're not making it,
like you said, if it's not a part of the process, right, they were like, well, my mom was looking for the result.
This is, this is also with what we talk about where we try and connect people and getting
more connected with their, their relationship with food, their relationship with exercise
and their relationship with themselves.
And a part of that process is actually learning to accept and understand that there's a lot
of things that have been imprinted into us since we are five six seven years old like yeah I mean I definitely have a sweet tooth and it wasn't like it
it didn't just come out of nowhere well no I was able to eat fucking cereal my whole life ice cream
before bed every now I mean I did that for 20 something years in my life so and even now that's
not something at all that's ever in my freezer but I tell you what if I introduce it into my life. So and even now that's not something at all that's ever in my freezer, but I tell
you what, if I introduce it into my life real quick, you want it. Yeah, I want it. And it's
not. And you know, we got to know a little debate with a buddy of ours about the science
behind the addiction part of this, but you can't deny the behavioral addiction that happened.
So maybe it's not something chemically I'm addicted to and we haven't got the science
to for sure prove exactly that
But I'll tell you right now there's a behavioral part that a hundred percent I'm addicted to because for 20 something years
I allowed that to be in my diet and I'm sure my brains connected to good times
They're having a good time. Oh come on you for sure people make connections to food
Based on when they were kids for sure, I can't go by.
Just smells.
If I smell McDonald's is a shitty burger.
Let's be honest, it's not a good burger.
Depends of what time of the day
and how early it is in the morning.
But if I smell it, I get fond memories
because when I was a kid, I'd go to work with my dad.
My dad does, he's a blue collar worker
and I'd help him when I was 11, 12, 13 every summer.
And he'd get me McDonald's.
That was my thing.
That was like the way he would kind of say thank you to me.
And I loved it.
So I have this like great association with McDonald's
and hanging out with my dad and having this great time.
So when I smell it, I'm like, oh man, I want McDonald's.
If I'd never been exposed to McDonald's
and I went and ate a burger from there, it's shit.
It's not a good burger, but I've got that association.
I actually had, it's funny you're talking about this, Adam, because this happened to me literally
last night. I'm at my mom's house. So my family, old school Sicilians, I'm a first generation
American. And in our culture, especially in my parents' generation, my grandparents'
generation, one of the ways that you show love to people is you feed them, but you don't
just feed them, you feed the fuck out of them.
Like that, you stuff stuff.
You stuff, and that's literally how we chill.
Man, jaman, you come.
And that's how we show love, and especially to children.
So if you have a child in this culture,
in that generation, the more you love them,
the more you feed them, and you're feeding them all the time,
especially your grandmother.
My grandmother would follow us around the house with food.
I'm not even making this up.
This is a true story.
She would follow us around with food
and would just keep just sneaking it in in your mouth
while you're playing or something, like her job,
or her goal.
You're an adult, you're an adult,
her goal was to distract you.
I'm not even big of a distract you with an activity.
You should have something in your mouth.
Yeah, like come on, eat this, not a one,
I'm full, I'm full.
Oh, it's Kenali.
Come on.
And then she say, come on, no, no, I'm full, I'm full.
Oh, look at this, play with this, look at this.
Then you play with it.
And then while you're playing, mindlessly,
she'd sneak the food right in her mouth.
And you eat it, so I met my parents' house last night.
I knew you're not 300 pounds, dude.
A lot of people in my family. So I met my mom's house last night, and I met my parents house last night. How are you not 300 pounds, dude? A lot of people in my family.
So I met my mom's house last night,
and I got my kids there.
And as an adult, I'm becoming more aware
of some of the ways I'm connected to food and exercise.
And it's in phases.
And one of the last phases, or one of the last,
or the newest ones that I'm going through right now,
is because I have kids.
I'm realizing how I pressure them to eat food and how I, you know, if they don't eat,
I'm not loving them and I need to feed them.
And, you know, I'm starting to understand, I'm starting to become aware of this whole thing.
So we're at my mom's house.
We're eating dinner and, you know, my son doesn't want to eat all of his pasta.
So he's sitting there.
He doesn't want anymore. He's like, I'm full.
And so my mom's like, no, you have to eat it.
But I'm full.
You can't go on your computer then if you can't eat it.
And it's back and forth with him and his grandma.
And I'm sitting there.
And now that I'm moral, where, in the past, I'd hear this and I'd be like,
oh, this is great, my mom's gonna get him to eat
because she's gangster at that, right?
She's gonna get him to eat, this is good.
Now I'm listening to some like, holy fuck, like,
she is totally developing this poor relationship
to food with my son.
Like it's really bad.
So I'm talking to her and I'm speaking to her in Sicilian,
so my son doesn't understand.
I'm telling him, so listen,
I said, he doesn't want anymore, don't let him eat anymore.
Oh, he barely ate anything.
I said, I understand that, but he won't starve.
Like, well then he can't play his computer.
She's telling me this is Sicilian.
I said, mom, and then my dad chimes in,
and my dad's like, he goes, Sally goes, he goes, he goes, let your mom do this. She's telling me this is Sicilian. I said, mom, it's not, and then my dad chimes in and my dad's like,
he goes, Sally goes, he goes, let your mom do this.
She's really good at this. She'll get him to eat.
I did. It's almost like he thought he's thinking,
I'm telling my mom to not do this because I'm telling you,
I'm trying to do it. Because I'm telling my mom,
like, mom, it's okay. Like don't, don't, don't worry yourself.
He thinks I'm like, and he's convincing, like, no, no, son,
your mom's really good at this
Let her let her do her thing. So she's like no, you have to eat half then she starts bargaining with him
And I'm watching this I'm like, oh my god like this is really fucked up like what you know
And but she but she loves my kids so much and this is how she shows love to the point where I finally said no
He's not gonna eat anymore and I told my son in English that I said, you can go play, don't worry about it.
And she was angry with me.
And I had to have a talk with her.
And she's like, your kid didn't eat enough.
He's gonna be, you know this, I said, mom, listen,
and I'm trying to explain this to her.
So she becomes more aware of what's,
my grandma used to time us.
We would sit there at dinner,
and if we weren't eating fast enough, she'd set a timer
and be like, okay, the first person to finish
gets like a quarter of a shit.
We fuck, it's stuff, our faces.
You can't tell me that that isn't going to influence new eating habits as an adult.
It becomes wired into you.
Especially at that age.
I got a good example of that too, but it's not only like the experiences, because that
was a total experience that your son was going through it and you were going through
with the timer.
That's fucked up.
But it's like, it's that experience,
but then there's also the food, the generational food
that's being served, that's part of your community, right?
If you're Italian or Sicilian,
you know, I grew up, my grandmother was,
was a hundred percent Italian.
My mom is half-Ukissaladin, half-Italian food
was huge in our house.
And every, every Sunday we would have spaghetti and meatballs
or some kind of pasta dish.
And then every Friday night during the night,
you would have pizza, right?
It's very, it's just you kind of follow those patterns.
And it was meat and potatoes and bread on the table
for basically every single meal.
People don't realize the reason why Italians
eat so much pasta and bread is because they didn't know.
Like Italy was a poor country.
When these foods were introduced,
it was a very poor country and it's very cheap.
You can make pasta very cheap, you can grow lots of,
you can make some Alina, make your pasta,
make your bread and the tines because Italy
is a peninsula and the Mediterranean
surrounded by, you know,
and some of the best weather to grow vegetables
and fruits and whatever, they got,
and there's fish, right,
because they're in the middle of the ocean.
They've got, they just, they just,
very creative with this really cheap food.
And so you've got all these varieties of pasta, whatever.
And so people think, oh, pasta's so healthy,
it's not, it's just, it was a cheap food
that they adopted real quick.
But it's not a Mediterranean,
it's not part of the Mediterranean cuisine,
or at least the traditional Mediterranean cuisine.
I remember my grandmother telling me stories
about Prashetta, right?
So, which is just, it's sliced pieces of Italian bread
with tomatoes and onions and parsley, or so, I mean, all the oil and parsley. Yeah,aschetta, right? So, which is just slice pieces of Italian bread with, you know, tomatoes and onions and, you know, and parsley or so. I mean, I mean, I'm
basically, yeah, olive oil, right? And she's like, this was peasant food. This is what you would do
with your, with your, with the, with the, the stale bread. And now they're serving this as an
appetizer when you go to an Italian place. Why do you guys think it's hard bread? Yeah. Because
that's the style of the stale bread. It's a stale bread. Exactly. Now they toast it and they make
it like a little more
presentable.
And they looked around like, what do we have?
Fuck, we're hungry.
We're gonna scrape the mold off real quick.
Well, well, we got these, we got the staleman bread.
Yeah.
And they know tomatoes grow everywhere.
Yeah.
I got it.
It was a bit addition to tomatoes.
Yeah.
And when you're making meatballs, I mean, yeah,
binding agent is bread crumbs, but my grandmother,
I remember my grandmother would just take all of the bread
and just keep it in like this one space.
Let it go, let it go, let it go,
and she would just grind it up into bread crumbs. That it in like this one space in a plastic, let it go stale.
And she would just grind it up into bread crumbs.
That was what we, she used for her, for her meatballs.
Creative.
It's not creative.
It's just the way they did it.
It was just like they left.
They just kept all, they didn't waste anything.
Oh, that's it.
They didn't waste anything.
So one of the example kind of going back to your,
your example of like how your parents fuck you up
is the, is I remember remember eating pasta, spaghetti, and
meatballs, all that stuff sitting at the table, and my mother would be eating grilled chicken
and broccoli.
So she was always on a diet.
So for me, the way that I interpreted that was, you only eat healthy if you're fat.
You only eat like that if you have a problem.
And so getting older, she wasn't making me eat that stuff.
She wasn't getting mad at me for not eating food.
It was just, I was, that's my experience of that moment.
Of watching my mom eat chicken and broccoli,
you know, turkey burgers and this bland lettuce and stuff
and I was like, wow, man, that sucks.
I mean, I don't wanna ever be overweight.
You know, and that's how I experienced what healthy was.
And so when I tried to start getting healthy,
that's kind of what I started to do in the beginning
until I learned better.
Yeah, you know.
It's, we learn a lot of this as kids,
and then in our culture, it's a, of course,
just like you're saying, like eating healthy
is for when you're out of shape or overweight.
Eating healthy is not, like that's not just the way people eat.
You know, when people go, when you go to a restaurant
with people and you hear someone ordering,
you know, it times people would add,
when I order food, they'd be like,
what do you want to diet or something?
Or, you know, what do you try to do
trying to get cut right now?
Or, yeah.
Well, no, I actually enjoy,
that's just the way I eat.
I enjoy eating that way.
And until we're able to make that change,
I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
I do see what you're saying with the millennials
and there does seem to be a trend reversing.
But then they also see shit like, you know, um,
a batch of millennials now. Well, no, no, then I see shit like, you know, like, like, yes,
organic food sales have gone through the roof, but so have organic candy sales. That's true.
Yeah, you know, or I look at, you know, I'm looking at these treats and stuff and it's like,
non-GMO cookies. Like, oh shit, let's get some of those. There's a girl that sells cookies.
She's a trainer at my gym, which is kind of fucking hilarious,
but she sells cookies and they're all like,
they're all food and free non-GMO.
Food and free non-GMO, all this stuff.
And she comes and she's, and I go, are you serious?
You're putting these out, she goes,
well, they're just the leftovers from when I,
you know, I sold a whole bunch of these
and she goes, my clients think they're healthy.
And she's like, they're stupid as fuck.
I just said, oh my God, it's horrible. Stupid as fuck, they just like, they think that they're healthy. And she's like, they're stupid as fuck. I just said, oh my God, it's horrible.
Stupid as fuck, they just like, they think
that they're healthy just because it's like,
organic sugar, organic cane sugar, non-GMO, you know.
What's the matter with people?
My clients are dumb.
Yeah, I'm just eating.
Well, you know, it's become a selling point
when, you know, I bought a bottle of water,
not that long ago, and I think I took a picture of it.
I almost, I think I posted it even on my Instagram page like non gluten it said gluten free yeah
I saw when was salsa it said gluten free yeah fuck you well they put like they put
like fat free on on potato I mean well that's because that's stuff like that
you know like just it's like why would there be fat in there you know it's just
like they're they're they just put it on there so people who are on a diet
think I can have that yeah licorice on the list yeah the licorice what do they It's like, why would there be fat in there? You know, it's just like, they just put it on there so people who are in a diet think,
I can have that.
Yeah, liquorice, this one's on the list.
Yeah, the liquorice, what do they call them?
You know, you're right, red vines.
Red vines still says it, a fat free food.
Fat free.
I love it.
It's okay.
It's fat free right now in this moment,
and it's form, but you know, it's gonna be.
Yeah, right, right.
So you can get there, you'll get there.
So do you have any ideas that you're throwing around
in terms of how you're gonna grow your business
monetizing?
Yeah, you know, some of the things that I'm doing now
is, and I've been talking about it this on my show,
is my wife and I are getting into doing
more one-on-one online coaching.
I find that, you know, I did like a test run a couple
of months ago on this, and I had really great results
in terms of getting through.
Like when you work as a personal trainer with, you know,, you're at the gym, and you say you work out
with your personal trainer three days a week, right?
That's average.
How much talking do you do about nutrition,
about lifestyle, about the things
you're struggling with psychologically?
None, I mean, basically you guys just chitchat
about the shit you're talking about.
You don't wanna open up in a gym
because most people feel self-conscious.
So that's the things we talk about.
So we'll work one on one with people
and really get to the heart of what the problem is.
You know, like just that example of generational eating,
the way I associate healthy food,
that's really visceral for me.
That makes a lot of sense for me.
And there are a lot of discoveries along the way.
Like I've had clients whose parents have died in their arms
because of heart attacks and they are just like,
they don't want to go down that road,
but they also have an entire lifetime of only processed food
and they don't know anything different.
So to talk to them about how processed food process
is digested in your body,
how it affects you, how it affects your weight,
that is just that we're talking about the lack of knowledge.
People don't even know how to make that leap.
From how that food makes me feel, how that food, you know, makes me digest, how that emotionally
I feel, mentally I feel, physically I feel.
Well, one of the most common things I hear from people when I tell them things like,
okay, I want you to avoid, we're not going to eat any processed food.
And then they'll be like, what am I going to eat?
Yeah, they totally lost.
Almost like they ran out of food.
Yeah, I'm going to starve.
I can't eat anything.
It's like, no, there's a lot of food you can do.
Right, sir.
So that's, I think the difference,
I think the difference to what I do
and maybe what like a lot of trainers would do is
I'd never tell people what they can't eat.
I'd never take anything away.
So you tell them to aim for things rather than avoid it?
So like a really good example would be first, we're setting up our, we want to know where
we're going, right?
Because I usually work with people for three months, you know, if we're talking about
online and then we might extend it longer than that and then we might do more like monthly
check-ins, right?
That's the kind of, that's the, that's the model that I'm building.
Whether or not that's sustainable and a smart move, I don't know yet, but it's going to
give me the opportunity to really learn throughout this process, like what works for people
what doesn't work for you.
That for sure you'll get that from that.
Right, for sure.
So, one of the things, like day one,
I want them to know what they're reading.
So I want them to write down what they're reading.
That's a huge thing for a lot of people,
is they don't even know what they're putting in their body,
and they don't know, like, yeah, I had diarrhea this morning,
but, you know, I don't know, I always have diarrhea,
so what's the difference?
It's like, well, no, now if we know what you're reading,
we can kind of track that and see why.
You know, what's happening there?
So sometimes that'll be like one of the first things.
It's like, can you write down everything that you're reading
and just tell me when you're reading it
and then give me all your energy levels along the way.
I wanna know what your energy levels are,
what your hunger levels are, and then,
so then I get like a real inside snapshot
of what their life is like.
And then we start incorporating things
like drinking 80 to 100 ounce of the water a day,
just getting into the fucking habit of drinking water.
Most people don't drink water.
Most people are drinking sweet teas
or like sweetened coffees or whatever it is.
Now, I'm not telling them not to drink their coffee.
I'm not telling them not to drink their tea,
but good luck fitting in, like, you know,
a whole entire gallon of iced tea or Coca-Cola
or, you know, or a jug of coffee
when you have to get down that much water.
And if they say, well, that's really gonna be difficult.
And what the fuck are we working together for?
If the only thing that I'm asking you to do
is drink 80 ounce of water,
and that's half of one of those things
are not even a gallon of water, right?
It should be, that should be a no-brainer.
And then over like a year,
or if we're working together for three months,
we have 12 weeks to lock in some really solid habits,
drinking water, and if you're 300 pounds,
I don't want you to go to the gym for multiple reasons,
one, because probably you don't know how to work out.
I'm not gonna be there whether to help you work out,
two, you probably feel extremely uncomfortable in a gym,
like just to the point of this,
like you don't wanna even walk through those doors because you're feeling judged from the moment you get there.
So what, you know, just asking the question,
what are you willing to do?
That's really good unconventional advice too,
because most people would think or assume
that a trainer would tell a client who's 300 pounds
to get in the gym and start working out with him,
and then reality, and I dropped this stat
on the Mind Pump all the time,
which is people don't realize that the average American is only
Stepping about four to six thousand steps a day
That's fucking insane when you really think about it because if we walked outside right now for one hour
We would step that much right so in other words the average American doesn't even get an hours worth of just walking not running
Not exercise. He's not jog, walking around for an hour straight.
We're just in our cars, sitting in our desks,
whatever, all day long.
And just by giving that advice, I think,
to somebody who's 300 pounds.
Yeah, I mean, so it's probably around a thousand steps.
I've seen people under.
Yeah, I was gonna say, four thousand
is probably very, very generous.
But there's, you know, there's,
there's a saying in business,
is you have to meet your,
meet your potential client where they're at, right? It's the same thing in fitness is you have to meet your potential client
where they're at, right?
It's the same thing in fitness.
You have to meet your client where they're at.
If I try to tell them to go to a gym,
I'm not meeting with meeting them where they're at.
I'm trying to catapult them into an area of their life
that they are not comfortable.
And what are the chances that they're gonna stick with that?
Slim to none.
So every single step of the way,
it's, what are you willing to do?
What are some of the things that you're willing to try, you know, mostly for the physical fitness part?
But then, then there's the learning process of how does, how does the body process sugar?
What is insulin? How, you know, and then so they start making informed decisions on what they're putting in their body.
I had a client of mine, he drinks this, what do they call that? It's like coffee made, but it's the international delight, right?
So he told me, first day, he goes,
Rob, telling you right now, I am not giving up my coffee,
it's like Christmas.
Every morning, I get to drink a big jug of Christmas.
It was this, I think it's 64 ounces.
It's like a 7-11 coffee, and he would fill the bottom of it
up with that international delight. Oh my god. You know
Like 900 calories. No, it's like it's like calorie free. Oh
Sweet. Yeah, it's like yeah, so you like he would put that in the bottom of it
And then he would pour in his coffee and he would have he would have that and I talked to him about maybe it wasn't
The maybe it wasn't the sugar the the the it's like fat free, but not sugar free.
It's fat free.
So it's a, it's a, it's a,
it's a, it's a, it's a,
it's a, it's a, it's a,
it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,
it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's grams of sugar. How many tablespoons are you putting in? He goes, I have no idea.
I just fill up the bottom.
Don't do it.
I go, what do you mean you fill up the bottom?
He goes, well, there's this section of the bottom
that's like a cup where it can fit
into my car cup thing.
And I just fill that up with the creamer
and then I finish it off with coffee.
I go, do me a favor, measure that.
See how much sugar you're drinking.
So he does it the next day and he took pictures of it, which is going to be great for when we eventually, when I eventually post this,
but like he took pictures of it. It was 72 grams of sugar to start his day. Not only not only that,
but you're getting a nut, you're getting speedy it up with some caffeine. Well, you're getting a
cortisol boost from the caffeine because that's what caffeine does and that's not bad. It depends
on time of day and all that stuff in your body, but you get a little cortisol boost from the caffeine, because that's what caffeine does, and that's not bad, it depends on time of day and all that stuff
on your body, but you get a little cortisol boost,
then you're boosting your insulin with the sugar,
and that necessarily a great company.
And then you probably go sit in your car,
so you basically,
I think, prime,
and then he goes in sitting his office.
He worked from home.
So then you just prime your body for getting right to store.
You know, exactly.
Exactly, one of those unicorn drinks.
So the cool thing was, is he's like, you know what, Rob,
so that, he goes, I can't fucking believe how much sugar I'm drinking.
And I said, yeah, the average Snickers bars, 25 grams, you're drinking, you're
basically starting your day off with 25, with like three Snickers bars.
That's good analogy right there.
You know, so he's like, oh, that's not smart.
Yeah, that's not healthy.
I probably shouldn't do that.
So then he, he cut it down.
He literally just cut it down to like, I think three tablespoons.
And within the first week, he lost like six pounds.
We used three hundred and forty pounds to start. Yeah, but like, I think three tablespoons. And within the first week, he lost like six pounds. We used 340 pounds to start.
Yeah, but still, yeah.
But still, and it was just that.
It was just that and walking and drinking water.
And he dropped six pounds the first week.
Well, and this just goes back to a lot of what we talked about
about awareness.
Awareness is so many people just do not have the awareness.
They are naive to those things.
You just in your head, you think,
oh, it's probably only about this,
whatever, no big deal.
That shit adds up really fast.
I just started practicing being super aware
when I chew my food.
It sounds silly.
I've talked about this a few times down the podcast.
He counts it.
It's a new, are you starting counting?
It's a new thing.
No, I'm not counting.
But what I'm doing,
because I realized the way I eat food,
part of it's my childhood again
You guys told me my story about how I shoveling yeah, and they put the time wrong
So part of it's that and part of it is because I used to eat like seven meals a day
But I used to also train ten clients a day
So in between clients that have about five minutes to eat my meal
And I got this amazing technique that I developed over the years where I'd have my water
I'd have my food and I get this amazing technique that I developed over the years where I'd have my water,
I'd have my food and I get my food on the fork, I throw my mouth, I chew it two or three times,
wash it down with water because I could swallow up a big amount and so I barely chewed my food
and I pound it down. Well now I'm chewed and I because of that I always needed water with me because
I developed the habit of not chewing my food and And then I read an article that said that,
it's probably not a good idea to drink lots of water
with your food because of dilute your stomach acid
and it affects your digestion.
I've always had digestion issues.
So I started doing that.
I said, okay, I'm not gonna drink water beforehand,
maybe 15 minutes before or whatever,
and maybe a little bit later afterwards,
but during my meal, I'm gonna go without drinking. And I realized that I would choke because I wasn't chewing the food
enough. So I started chewing my food a little bit more. And then I started ringing about
that and how you become more aware of what you're eating. You tend to eat less when you do
that and how important chewing is because it's literally the first part of digestion.
It's a big part of digestion. Not a small part. We're not alligators.
We're not supposed to swallow food. Whole. We're supposed to chew it up quite a bit.
And in fact, we evolved that way. So I started doing this and I started tasting food differently
and chewing on it and just savoring it. And I became so much more aware during my meal. I'm like,
I'm on my phone last while I'm eating. I'm actually eating while I'm eating, and it's made a big difference.
It's pretty, so these little things,
the little tiny nuggets of awareness, make a huge impact.
And there was a whole book, I think Adam was telling me,
there was a whole book on this work.
Yeah, they did.
They've been chewing your food loose.
There's a whole diet that's based on, and obviously they take a little bit of good science
like that, and then they expand.
They go nuts, right?
Exactly.
They go nuts, right?
Exactly. They go nuts, right? Exactly. It. It has something to do with chewing your food,
like 52 times before you swallow it
and you're guaranteed to lose weight.
And obviously.
Because you're exhausted.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the real, the real,
600 calories with everybody.
Well, yeah, that's exactly the real sign behind it.
Just if you think about it with the average Americans
eating three times a day or whatever,
and if you're chewing X amount more,
that's X amount more calories burned,
plus now awareness on what you're consuming
Plus you're probably that eating fast enough. Yeah eat all this
So it's just like and then people are like oh my god mind blown
You know like that's all I did it to you know those little bits of those little bits of awareness
They they really make a big difference and I really do it's funny when you work with clients
I'm sure you've seen this as they as they start to become more aware
Of what they're eating and what this, as they start to become more aware of
what they're eating and what they're doing, they start to enjoy foods that they didn't
necessarily like before.
I've had clients that start training, they'd be like, how can you eat broccoli?
It's so disgusting.
How can you, those are so gross.
Two years later, I go over to eat dinner at the house and we're all eating broccoli and
they're enjoying it.
They've just learned to learn to love it
So yeah, there's there's that same guy with the coffee, you know, uh problem. He
It's like, okay, we got to get her vegetables in okay, so we're gonna add one
Let's do let's start off with just one vegetable a day what vegetable can you eat?
And he's like broccoli. I like broccoli. I was like, okay, great
And then I started like I started he sent me a picture of his broccoli and it had like ketchup all over it.
And I go, what is this?
And he goes, oh, it's my broccoli, check it out, man.
Like I had like a huge plate of broccoli.
I go, what is that all on top of it?
He goes, oh, that's ketchup.
I said, why are you putting ketchup on there?
It goes because it makes it taste really good.
I said, you read the sugar content on ketchup.
And he's like, oh shit.
So then he had to, like, and I was like,
he's like, but I don't like it otherwise.
I was like, well, how are you eating it?
Oh, we steam it.
Okay, well, maybe we should try it either roasted
or sauteed or maybe put some, like, you know,
sauteed with something and make it taste good.
Instead of just as bland fucking broccoli,
that most people hate, you know, just boil it.
So there's, you have to give people those options,
but it's totally true.
Like, people are doing some weird shit.
The funny thing is these foods are not actually bland.
It's that we've been eating these extremely palatable
processed foods for so long.
Cause remember, these are, you know,
these processed foods are engineered.
There's lots of money.
In fact, there's more money.
Meaning with pringles.
More money goes into making your food taste
a particular way than goes into its nutrition.
Actually, very little usually goes into its nutrition.
It's mostly how good we can make it taste. So there's all this money that goes into its nutrition. Actually very little usually goes into its nutrition. It's mostly how good we can make it taste. So all this money that goes into engineering
and how we sell it.
Extremely palatable food and your brain actually adapts to it. It actually down regulates
receptors that process taste these taste signals. So that when you do go eat a natural food,
your brain perceives it to be bland.
This is why people will go on a fast,
and then they'll get out of a fast after three days
or whatever, and they'll eat a fruit or something,
and be like, oh my God, this is exploding with flavor.
Well, this is also why high sugar eaters tend
to not like fruit and vegetables.
I mean, I remember, I was somebody who didn't eat
a lot of fruit and vegetables,
and it wasn't until I went through my whole
Competitive phase where I had to eat so strict and I was eating all that and then when I went and reintroduced those foods
I was like holy shit
That was way too sweet that candy is too sweet for me that so does too sweet for me
But oh my god of bite into an apple just seemed so rich
But it took that cleaning that system out and actually resetting all those.
That was a big learning experience
because I did two men's physique competitions
like within the same year.
I just wanted to see if I could do it.
And that was that exact example.
I remember dialing in my diet.
And there was a guy that I was training
that was one of the trainers at my gym.
He had done dozens and dozens of bodybuilding
and physique competitions.
And he was trying to tell me what to eat and what not to eat.
And I just was only halfway doing what he was telling me
because he was telling me to basically just eat
like white fish and asparagus.
And I was like, dude, that's not fucking doing that.
So I started incorporating more stuff.
And I got down to about 5% body fat.
It was really good.
The food always tasted good, but the one thing
that I did cut out was anything sweet,
like no, no fruits, no, obviously no sugar period,
and when I had it got a taste of that afterwards,
oh my God, it was like the world.
That's what I think people must have experienced
when the spring came and some fruit grew on the tree.
So, all of a sudden they got a taste of that
and they're like, oh my God,
and then they would guzzle that shit down
like as much as possible, like they would just get as much in,
but obviously they were much smaller.
If I give you an apple now, it's like, it's huge.
We've bred apples and fruits to be these just sugar bombs.
But my neighbor has crab apples
and those things are disgusting.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
No, we've bred food literally to become more and more palatable.
And so you'll eat fruit and you'll bite into it
and they'll breed the sweeter fruit
with the more meat and the more sugar in it.
And yeah, it's just, it's the world we live into now.
So, it's crazy.
So looking ahead, you know, with the future of your podcast
and what you're looking to do,
where do you hope to be in the?
In the next, in the next like, in the next coming years,
I hope that, you know, building up the one-on-one
online clientele, I'd like to phase out the one-on-one online clientele, I'd like
to phase out doing one-on-one training in the gym.
My wife and I would like to kind of live a lifestyle of, we're going to start having kids.
That's something that's on the radar for us.
I would love to be able to have a lifestyle where we can just work from home or someplace
that's just hours.
A facility like this would be ideal because she does jarotonic and I do the training and if we wanted to build out videos
and more content marketing or content stuff
then that would be amazing.
And then after the one-on-one,
probably get into group training,
just like with the same philosophy
is a lot of the same stuff that I learned
from the one-on-ones and then from there potentially
doing programming and stuff like that.
But I don't know, I just got to, the whole thing is just figuring out what's the best thing to do
for the audience, but then at the same time figuring out what's the best thing to do financially
that's going to be able to sustain this lifestyle.
Well, what's best for the audience will probably be what's best for, you know, financially.
Right.
Excellent. Excellent. It's been awesome talking to you.
It's great that I really appreciate you guys having me on.
Now, where can people find you?
They can find me at openskyfitness.com.
That's my website.
If they're interested in joining the podcast community,
it's called Open Sky Fitness Podcast Group on Facebook.
That's super easy.
And if they are interested in one-on-one coaching,
it just openskyfitness.com slash coaching.
Cool.
For your audience, obviously, mine pump is our podcast.
Mine pumpmedia.com is we have all the programs available. The obviously, Mind Pump is our podcast. Mind Pump Media.com
is we have all the programs available. The ones we talked about on the podcast. And then
Instagram is a great place to ask us questions. So we actually do Q&A episodes, four days
a week, where we answer questions that come from our Instagram page. That Instagram page
is Mind Pump Media. And then our personal pages are Mind Pump Sal, Mind Pump Atom, and Mind
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