Josh (00:01):
Welcome to Two-Brain Radio. My name is Josh Martin. And today I have the pleasure of speaking to Mike Watson, who is a coaching mentor on our team over at twobraincoaching.
Chris (00:13):
Hey guys, it’s Chris Cooper. Your members are buying supplements somewhere, so they should buy them from the person who cares about them the most: You. And you should work with my friends at Driven Nutrition. Jason Rule and the Driven team put customers first, every time they’ve got a ton of products with high margins and they’ll even train you so your retail program adds revenue to your business. Kirk Hendrickson from Iron Jungle CrossFit says Driven Nutrition has some of the best support I have seen from any company we’ve partnered with. To make more money with supplements and retail sales, visit drivennutrition.net.
Josh (00:45):
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike (00:47):
Thanks Josh.
Josh (00:48):
How you doing, man?
Mike (00:49):
I’m good. Yourself.
Josh (00:50):
Good. This is your first time on the Two-Brain podcast, right?
Mike (00:54):
First time. Yeah.
Josh (00:55):
Awesome man. So I think, you know, what would be a great thing to do, a good place to start is just for you to let us know what your journey in fitness has been like, you know, where did you first find fitness? What’s that been like? And then where are you today with it?
Mike (01:14):
Yeah, for sure. I’m in Sault St. Marie, Ontario. So I’m working at Chris Cooper’s gym, Catalyst Fitness. I mean, I was always an athlete that was OK. I was kind of the OK-est athlete at every sport I played. But I loved being active. I love playing sports, but never good enough to take that anywhere, even though I had dreams maybe of doing that. So I wanted to parlay that into a career. Originally I thought I was going to go into physiotherapy and kind of got sidetracked along the way. Did a four year exercise science degree at the University of Windsor and kind of got hooked up with a guy there who had a small kind of personal training studio, is still—the guy I worked with at the time is still very prominent in the bodybuilding community, which at the time wasn’t necessarily our focus or, you know, where I wanted to go with things. Left there.
Mike (02:10):
Worked as an athletic director at a large summer camp in the States for a couple of years, traveled for a couple of years. And then as most people from Sault St. Marie do, I ended up back in the Sault and kind of hanging out and looking for something to do and met Chris. So we both worked together at a small personal training place as well. That was kind of half cafe, half personal training studio. And we got along really well, started powerlifting with Chris, Chris left after a year to start his own place. And I got offered a bit more money to stick around the old place, which I gladly took. But I was finding I was going, you know, a couple blocks down the road to work out with Chris on my lunch breaks, because that’s where I was learning, you know, about lifting and about coaching and everything else.
Mike (03:01):
And so eventually the relationship at the old gym kind of fell apart and I let them know that I was leaving and immediately went over to Chris’s gym. And we, I mean, this is dating ourselves, but he put a phone book down in front of me and said, OK, we’re calling your clients. You start today. And the rest of that’s kind of in history, I’ve been with him since then in various capacities. I worked for Chris full time as a personal trainer for 10 years. And then kind of have been with Catalyst in different capacities since then.
Josh (03:36):
Awesome. And so what do you remember like around the year it was that you left that PT studio and started working for Chris?
Mike (03:44):
Every time it comes up, I think we say a different amount of years, but it was about 17, 18 years ago.
Josh (03:51):
Holy smokes. Yeah. I mean, like you said, the phone book, that’s gotta be like late nineties, early two thousands, so right around there. That’s incredible, man. Yeah.
Mike (04:01):
Definitely early two thousands. I graduated in 2001. So it would have been around 2001, 2003 ish. That range. Yeah.
Josh (04:10):
Yeah. And so you’ve been, you know, at Catalyst for, you know, a number of years now, and then, you know, we got introduced to one another and now you are a part of our mentor team on the Two-Brain Coaching front. So we’re going to get into this in a minute in terms of like, what role that you play, but like, how has that been for you because you’re going really from training clients, you know, in the gym to now you’re training, other coaches. Yeah.
Mike (04:40):
It’s been a fun transition. And honestly the calls and having the mentor calls with coaches from all over the world is literally the best part of my day. It’s super, super exciting. I really thought it was gonna be more of a shift in the way that I think, but I think, I mean, if I want to pat myself on the back and I don’t really like to do that a whole lot, but I think I’ve taken a leadership role in Catalyst over the last decade or so, where if we have new coaches come in, I’m definitely invested and involved in their development. So it hasn’t been a huge, huge shift except that I’m doing it now more. And, you know, and I’m getting to talk to new coaches almost every single day, which is really exciting.
Josh (05:26):
Yeah. And something that you touched on just briefly, there is these coaches are coming from all over the world. I mean, it’s one thing to train up a new coach, like in your physical space, but the opportunity to do that with coaches from all over is pretty remarkable.
Mike (05:41):
Yeah. It’s pretty cool. I mean, this morning alone, I talked to somebody in England, one in Belgium and one in Georgia. So taste of the world this morning. Lots of days are like that. And it’s really cool to see the similarities that everybody’s dealing with going back to March when a lot of the world’s shut down to see how everybody is dealing with it, and just really persevering through the challenges that we’ve got, you know, operating a gym on a regular basis and making a career as a personal trainer, but also having to deal with, you know, the other challenges that are there. And it’s really cool cause it’s, I mean, the overall mentality and the overall attitude is super positive. So that part is really nice to see.
Josh (06:27):
Awesome man. So what I’d like to do is just talk about the course itself to give people an idea of, you know, who it’s for, what the goal of the course is. And just for those of you guys that are listening right now, wondering what the heck we’re talking about, Mike’s role at to Two-Brain Coaching, is he mentors new and veteran coaches in what is now called our first degree course, but really the idea of the course is that it is to help somebody coach one on one.
Mike (06:59):
You got it. So I think, I mean, I think overall the course really, really works well for new coaches. And I think if we looked at, I don’t know if we’ve ever broken it down in terms of numbers or percentages, but I would say, you know, 90% of the coaches who are coming through the course over the last year have been new coaches who have got an opportunity either because a gym owner has realized they need some more help, or they lost some staff. I kind of joke that, you know, a lot of opportunities are coming because the coaches, either the coach or the owner got pregnant and now they need somebody to fill in because there’s an opening. But a lot of new coaches coming through, I’ve had a lot of, you know, a couple of veteran coaches come through as well.
Mike (07:41):
I mean, I just finished up our third call with a guy in Georgia who’s a level three CrossFit coach. And he kind of went through the course to see what his coaches would get out of it. And I’ll be honest. It was the best three conversations I’ve had in a long time with a coach. It was really kind of high level stuff. So we can adapt the course content to where the coach is in terms of their journey. You know, really some of them have never coached anybody at all. Some of them have come in with it seems like we have a lot of coaches who come from say a gymnastics background who now have an opportunity. But a lot of these coaches are being recruited from in house. So they’re coming, they’re a member of the gym and they have a personality that shines through and the gym owner says, we need you as part of our community.
Mike (08:28):
So in terms of a coaching course, we start off looking at the soft skills, right? The people skills that we overlook, I think, as coaches. And certainly when I know Coop/s admitted to this and I look back on it with a bit of embarrassment as well, when we started coaching 17, 18 years ago at Catalyst, we really prided ourselves on being the smartest people in town,and really kind of over-explaining things in terms of physiology and biomechanics and lifting technique and things like that. And we were just boring the heck out of people, right. You know, we had clients who were just saying like, I don’t care. Let’s just, can we just work out? I don’t care how smart you are. And that kind of is reflected in the course in that’s not really how much we show people.
Mike (09:14):
It’s not that we show people how much we know, it’s how much we show them we care. Right. So we go through the three modules, the first one is the social aspect of fitness. The second one is psychological, and then we get to look at some biological stuff. So some energy systems, breaking down movement, some beginner programming gets talked about so that when that coach goes out and starts working with some clients, they have some really solid templates with which to start programming for a client. But it really takes that technical aspect out as an importance and adds in the people skills that I think really are the things that are needed as a successful coach for any sort of length of time.
Josh (09:55):
You know, something that I’d love to hear your thoughts on is because as a gym owner myself, but then I also know that we’re going to have a lot of other gym owners that listen to this. One of the things that I can’t help but think of is I always wonder, like, is it enough? Like, are we giving them enough to feel what I like to call as confidence in your competence? Are we giving them enough or is it too much? Like, what have you found, you know, to be that sweet spot, you know, with this course.
Mike (10:29):
I mean, I kind of want to throw the question back on you and say, is there any coaching or exercise certification that you’ve taken that’s completely prepared you to be a personal trainer? And I think the answer is a resounding no. But I think there are some really good things that coaches will take out of our course, that’ll help them to come out of the course and be productive as a personal trainer and as an employee for a gym owner. So we really stress the importance of creating your own opportunities, finding your voice. And we provide some opportunity within the course for not only coaches to shadow people in their gym, but also we have some unique kind of homework assignments where they’ll do some video coaching and send it to me and we’ll review it together. So it’s really finding that confidence. And I really have them teach me a lot of the content of the course, especially the technical stuff in the biological module, because if you can teach something to somebody, chances are, you know it pretty well, right?
Josh (11:26):
So you’re telling me, I don’t want to, you know, overshadow the importance of what you just said with the biological step in teaching, but I do want to back up and highlight something that you said is you’re actually having these coaches create content as they’re going through this course. Wow.
Mike (11:45):
Yeah, we talk a lot about for module one, we talk a lot about content creation, but also the video. One of the video assignments that I have them do in module one came out of the pandemic where, you know, we have coaches who are required to shadow as they go through this program. Back in March, March to June, nobody’s gym was open. There was nothing to shadow. The shadowing is, you know, pretty nonexistent. So that assignment came out of that, but it also kind of allows them to use that same content to create their own social media posts, or get the confidence to do that, you know, by being thrown into the deep end, in terms of video editing skills and, you know, being confident with themselves on camera and sounding, you know, hearing what their voice sounds like. And if that’s a written content, then we encourage that written content as well.
Josh (12:37):
I can say this definitively. So you mentioned back to me earlier is like, well, what certification have you ever taken that has truly prepared you? I don’t know, except for this one, obviously, but I can tell you that there has not been anything that I’ve ever taken that has prompted me to actually create content that is going to be valuable for the gym that I’m working at or for my business as a coach. So to me, and again, this sounds very self-serving, but like I’m looking at this from a gym owner perspective that is worth its weight in gold, 10 times over whatever the course costs, having a coach comfortable creating content, establishing their authority, taking initiative, like these are all the pain points that we hear from other gym owners. Oh, I wish my coach was more of a self-starter. They just won’t ever create content. And here you are saying like, look, from module one in this course, we’re having your coaches do this.
Mike (13:38):
Yeah. I’ve said it a thousand times to coaches, but the sentiment I give them is that there isn’t a coach or sorry, a gym owner in the world that won’t lose their mind with excitement if you come to them and say, can I publish this article on our website? Or can I post this on our social media? Because that’s what they want you to come out of this course being able to do. I talked to the CrossFit level three coach there today, and we were talking, you know, we’re both around the same age. So we were talking about content creation when I started and when he started. There was no social media, you know, I’m 42. I’m not ancient. But at the time I started coaching with Chris, there was very little in terms of social media. And I kind of told him this story, that my wife Eden, who works for Two-Brain Business as well.
Mike (14:25):
So a lot of people may know her. She kind of, it’s kind of a running joke that whenever we go anywhere in town, I know somebody who’s there. And the reason I know somebody who’s there is because when Chris and I were trying to build business, especially personal training business for me, I went to talk to every single business and group that would allow me to walk in the door and spend 15 minutes of their time working it out in front of a crowd, like a stand-up comedian. Right. And so now when, you know, it’s almost flipped now where the social media stuff should be the easy stuff to create, but you can’t lose sight of the fact that you really still do need to get out. And even in a COVID world, look people in the eye and shake hands and develop those personal relationships. And that’s a real focus of our course is developing those relationships with people so that when you do bring on a personal training client, you have the skills to understand what makes them tick and what their, you know, their hidden intrinsic motivations are so that we can work towards really achieving a goal instead of, you know, kind of arbitrarily moving towards something, because it seems fun. Yeah.
Josh (15:34):
You know, we’re talking a lot about this personal training or what we refer to as one-on-one coaching. Why do you think that’s so important in a kind of small micro gym?
Mike (15:45):
Yeah. I mean, if you can flash some dollar signs up on the screen, I think that’s first and foremost, right. It’s a great revenue source. You know, you can only run so many CrossFit classes per day in a CrossFit gym. You know, there are time gaps, some gyms will do open gym, which is not a great revenue generator. You know, we all, I think have experimented—
Josh (16:08):
We’ve all made that mistake.
Mike (16:11):
And we know that, you know, that’s not where our relationships get built and that’s not what pays the bills is having that open gym, but PT does exactly that. It brings people into the gym. I mean, if I look at my longest standing personal training clients or the ones that are always kind of coming back, you know, over the last 20 years, most of them have never set foot in a CrossFit class. Right. Either because they don’t think, you know, they’re not drawn to CrossFit or they have other, you know, rehab goals or different goals that don’t fit into that model. So you’re bringing people into a gym and establishing them as a client outside of your normal, you know, your normal catch all from your, you know, your advertising. So you bring new people in. And I mean, if you’re a fan of affinity marketing, bringing people in and really developing a relationship with them and, you know, having them trust you as a coach leads to those, you know, all sorts of other avenues of recruitment that way.
Mike (17:11):
Yeah. You know, and it really does in terms of a revenue source, it really can save a business. You know, when Chris and I started Catalyst, or when he started Catalyst and I joined on, we kind of have this weird early history where we wanted to be downtown. And the only place to be downtown that was affordable was upstairs. So we had, we started out above a balloon shop, and we scared the hell out of them. We moved above a women’s clothing store. Again, they feared for their lives every time they came to work. And that was around the time we found CrossFit. And so when we found CrossFit, we realized we can’t be on a second floor dropping barbells, going crazy flopping around more than we already were. And so we got a place in the industrial park, but we kept this place downtown because it was a central location.
Mike (18:00):
And it worked well for PT. And I mean, you’d have to double check with Coop, but I know we’ve had conversations about it before where our downtown location that was, you know, 100% PT was kind of paying the bills for the new CrossFit facility until it got up and running. And we got our membership base kind of centralized there.
Josh (18:20):
That’s just mind blowing, that it was carring it, you know, cause you got figure like that the being downtown is not cheap, you know? And so it’s like, OK, not only are you downtown, expenses are higher, but it’s also carrying this other facility that what a lot of gyms are these days is just really heavy into group and very minimal PT.
Mike (18:44):
Yeah. I think if you look at it too, if you want to keep—I mean, we all want to keep our good staff. Because you know, when you get somebody who’s a great coach, you want to keep them. And if you want to have a coach who wants to make a career of fitness, you know, coaching four or five CrossFit groups a day kind of doesn’t pay the bills. You know, and it doesn’t keep that person engaged and around because it’s, you know, it may not be what their overall interest is, but it allows them to go out and work with clients who, you know, maybe they have a passion for powerlifting or a passion for Olympic lifting, or they have a passion for rehab, and helping people get better or lose weight. It helps them to work with that niche population and really establish themselves as an expert in that area. Yeah. So that’s one of the things I talked to. Call one for us is really like, it’s a first date kind of call where we get to know as much about that coach as possible. And one of the questions I really ask them is w what are you passionate about? Cause whatever you’re passionate about is going to be the thing that shines through, it’s going to be the thing you want to do research on. It’s going to be the thing that you enjoy. You know, it’s going to be the thing that you enjoy coaching for a long period of time.
Chris (20:01):
Hi, this is Chris Cooper, and I founded Two-Brain Business to make gyms profitable. Over the last years, as we’ve compiled more and more data, more and more tools, gotten better and better at mentorship, we’ve really made a lot of gyms, hundreds around the world, thousands over the years, profitable, doing better. What hasn’t kept pace is the quality of coaching in a lot of gyms worldwide. There are great programs out there that will introduce you to a method like bootcamp, kettlebells, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, CrossFit, running, whatever that is. And so we can make coaches who know the subject matter, but that doesn’t make them a great coach. To be a great coach, you have to be able to change somebody’s habits. You have to be able to change their behavior and to do that requires deep understanding of their motivations to do that means amazing adherence by the client. And it means amazing retention because as gym owners, we know it’s harder and harder and more expensive than ever to get a new client. Retention is more important than ever. Referrals are more important than ever. Peer to peer marketing, word of mouth is more important than it’s ever been. How do you get those things? Through client results. So I founded Two-Brain Coaching with Josh Martin to get coaches the skills they actually need to make a career in fitness instead of just familiarity with a methodology. Twobraincoaching.com has courses to help you start a career with personal training, to scale up with group training, both in person and online, and to diversify with nutrition, coaching, and mindset coaching. We have the best programs in the industry that will prepare you and your coaches to deliver any method that you love now or you might love 10 years from now. Twobraincoaching is really a project of love for me. And if you visit twobraincoaching.com, you’ll get a ton of free resources, just like we produce every day on twobrainbusiness.com.
Josh (21:59):
I never realized this until you and I had had conversations like, you know, recapping how the calls were going. And I never realized that the real improvement in adding mentorship was really about your ability as a mentor to personalize the course, not just for the coach, but also for the gym that they are, you know, a part of because, you know, by and large, all the people that you have worked with up to this point are a part of, you know, a bigger thing, a gym facility. And so I think that’s really missed, you know, a lot of times, because, you know, there are a lot of great certifications out there, whether it’s, you know, online based, you can’t really do much in person now, you know, some of them have, you know, big groups of coaches on calls at one time, but there’s nothing that beats this one-on-one cause you can’t personalize for a group of 150 coaches, but you can with one, you know, and I think that that is something that is just so valuable in what you were doing.
Josh (23:10):
Yeah. It’s something where we trying, I mean, it allows us to have that one-on-one conversation with a coach. I mean, we’ve all been a new employee in a business or at you know, at a gym where maybe we don’t feel like we have the authority or the seniority to ask certain questions without looking silly. Right. And it allows those coaches to do that in a manner where, you know, I’m checking in with their gym owner to give them the plan for the next couple of weeks, but it’s an opportunity for them to ask or to talk about things they’re seeing in their gym that they’re not sure how to deal with, and maybe they don’t want to bring up to their owner or their boss, because they feel like it’ll be misconstrued. So it’s a real open conversation where, you know, it really can go a lot of different ways within the framework of the course. So yeah, no call has been a hundred percent the same, that’s for sure.
Josh (24:10):
So I’ve got a question. I know that the typical pathway for a coach, you know, with Two-Brain Coaching is they take this one-on-one coaching course, and then they’re funneled, you know, to a couple of different areas, you know, based upon like the conversations that you guys are having, they may go on to do group coaching. They may go to online coaching, nutrition, mindset. We’ve got that now with Colm’s brand new course, but I got to imagine that there are some coaches that are like, I love one-on-one and I want to stay with this. So you’ve been a one-on-one coach, you know, let’s just call it personal trainer for more than a decade. Now I can see, you know, sometimes coaches maybe getting burnt out. How have you combated that?
Mike (25:00):
I mean, I think we’ve all, I’ve seen my burnout period a couple of times. And I think looking back on it now, the things that have gotten me throuh, are, you know, not doing the same thing all the time, finding the things that I really enjoy and sticking with those. I know you had Brad, Brad Overstreet was on a while back, one of our colleagues, and I remember listening to his podcast. And one of the things that resonated with me from Brad’s conversation was that he works with the people that he gets joy from. Right? Yeah. And those are the clients that I work with now. You know, if I have a new client who comes in or a friend who comes to me and says, they’re looking for some personal training, if I don’t think it’s a fit for me.
Mike (25:48):
I just won’t do it. I’ll pass them off to the person I think is going to, you know, handle them the best and provide them with the best service. But, you know, I’ve realized that doing the things that I find fun are the best way to keep myself happy in the business. I’ve had a couple, you know, shifts in focus as well. Obviously we started as a hundred percent PT for the first six years. And you know, it can be daunting to go through the cycles of busy and not busy and, you know, finding out and figuring out how to sort yourself out so that not only can you be successful, but you know, that you have that work-life balance as well. So I’ve taken on other projects, I’ve taught at the college here for a couple of years. I’ve taken a spin at actually having a full-time job and doing coaching as a side gig. I’ve got a great opportunity now, which I absolutely love, with Two-Brain Coaching and taking on some responsibility to do some work with the new Two-Brain programming course. So, it’s doing really the more I get into it, the more that I gravitate towards the things I just really like doing.
Josh (26:58):
Yeah. You hit on two things that I do want to circle back to. You taught a college course. What did you teach?
Mike (27:10):
I have a community college here that has a course certificate program where historically it’s been geared towards getting coaches or getting students, some of them will go on and do physiotherapy at the university. Not many of them, but most of them will kind of go in and do it as a gateway to get into like a local big box gym. So it’s really focused around not our group type of coaching, but more around the like aerobics and those types of group classes. So I taught one course called the business of fitness, and then I taught two other ones that were basically beginner PT type sessions, where we were teaching them basic movement. I rewrote the course curriculum because I just didn’t believe in it. Because it was the course curriculum is really centered around Good Life Fitness in Ontario is kind of our big box gym.
Josh (28:07):
I’ve heard of that.
Mike (28:07):
So, yeah, so it was really designed to get the students, you know, through the course and into, you know, some sort of job or career in either the fitness side of things or also kind of health promotion working with local, you know, cancer societies or things like that. So, yeah, it was fun. The business course was interesting because it was like I said, you know, Good Life focused. So it almost seemed like it was built around David Patchell-Evans, who’s the kind of the CEO of Good Life, he’s written several business books. Which, I mean, I’ve never written a book, so I’m not going to disparage anybody’s book, but I found I really quickly gravitated towards or shifted towards teaching Coop’s “Don’t Buy Ads” type stuff. And so I’d bring up his articles and we’d have conversations about them. You know, the students had to put together a business plan for some sort of fitness business and a lot of them really were interested in starting some sort of PT. So it was interesting. It was fun for a couple of years.
Josh (29:16):
That is so cool. I, you know, all the conversations we’ve had, I never knew that you taught at the college level. That’s pretty amazing, man. OK. And this other thing, Oh, go ahead.
Mike (29:25):
I was just going to say one step along the way. Yeah.
Josh (29:28):
So the other thing that you touched on is some work that you’re doing with Two-Brain Programming. What is that?
Mike (29:34):
So, I mean, this is something that comes out of, I think, you know, everything, you’re doing the SEMM model at your gym. We’re incorporating the SEMM model at our gym at Catalyst and the SEMM model, essentially for anybody who’s not aware of it is, the acronym is sleep, eat, move, manage. So the idea behind the SEMM model is that we are having conversations, asking questions and providing education around those four pillars of health and fitness so that we can improve our clients’ overall health and wellness, as opposed to just, you know, counting reps and working on thruster technique. So I do a lot of this talking with the coaches who come through the Two-Brain Coaching side of things in that if you’re, especially if you’re working one-on-one with a client and you’re not asking questions and tracking their amount and quality of sleep, if you’re not looking at the quality and amount of their nutrition, you’re not focusing on good quality of movement and you’re not really tracking and providing education around stress management, then we’re really not providing a full-on health and fitness program.
Mike (30:46):
And so one of the things I’m doing with Brooks DiFiore with the new Two-Brain Programming course is writing daily briefs for coaches to have those conversations with their clients about those four pillars of the SEMM model. So one of the things I really stress in the coaches notes is that these conversations are weird if you don’t have them on a regular basis, right. If all of a sudden, I shut off the lights in your gym, Josh, and ask everybody to lay down and play some music, people are going to get uncomfortable, right? Yeah.
Josh (31:20):
It’s not going to be very well received,
Mike (31:24):
But if we’re having those conversations all the time, then that becomes normal. Right? And I know at Catalyst, one of our coaches and partial gym owners Miranda has gotten into the habit of doing that every Friday. And it was weird the first couple of times, but now it’s something that I think, you know, her athletes who come to those groups really look forward to that spending 10 minutes of me time, and relaxing and meditating or shutting their brains off or whatever it is. So not only do they leave the gym feeling better from where they came in from a physical standpoint, you know, they’ve got that 10 minutes of mental clarity as well. So the SEMM model, my involvement in the Two-Brain Programming side of things is to program the daily SEMM briefings for the coaches to talk to their clients about.
Josh (32:13):
Yeah. So crucial. One of the things that I talk to my staff about as we, you know, coach that way currently is if all we’re doing is movement, you could probably get good results, but I have no interest in just getting good. I want great. I want the best. And in that case, if it’s just movement, you’re only 25% of the way there, you know, why not go for a hundred? So, and you’re exactly right, it’s a tough transition if that’s not what you’re used to having conversations about, you know.
Mike (32:46):
Right. Sorry to, I almost cut you off there, but I think with the eat and the movement, I think a lot of gyms feel like they do those things well, but I think there are other conversations that we can have about, you know, aspects of nutrition, and, you know, having a good quality nutrition program, but also having all of our coaches having that conversation. So it’s not just nutrition coach has to come in and intervene. And at the same time, you know, we program good warm-ups and program good movement for people, but talking to people about the importance of quality movement, especially, you know, I don’t know what your gym’s like Josh, but our gym is not a high, you know, nobody’s going to the CrossFit Games in our gym.
Josh (33:33):
Yeah, not my gym either. Yeah.
Mike (33:36):
So we’re talking to people about, you know, the quality of movement as it pertains to, you know, you and I are sitting in desk chairs, how do we set up that office space so that, you know, you’re not having to warm up 15 minutes longer because you sat in that desk for eight hours a day. You’re not having to go to the chiropractor. You know, how important is full range of motion in a squat or a deadlift or a thruster towards your lifelong, you know, quality of movement, quality of health, right? Because as we age, we don’t get better at having strength and flexibility in our hips or knees and our ankles. But having the lack of that flexibility as you get older is especially here in, you know, in Canada where it’s winter right now, having that lack of flexibility, it makes us more prone to falling. And as people get older, if you know, a broken hip has kind of a major turning point. So, you know, talking to people about how, especially younger clients about how that quality of movement now is going to impact them as they get older. Yeah. At 42, I definitely have to warm up a lot more than I did 15 years ago.
Josh (34:41):
Yeah. And you know, the interesting thing about that, that you already said so beautifully, it’s like, if we can work on your lifestyle, i.e., what you’re doing when you’re not in the gym, you probably don’t have to spend all that much time, like getting around your lifestyle when you come into the gym.
Mike (35:01):
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, having worked in the gym for as long as I have, one of the great examples from the programming in January is just tracking caffeine intake and caffeine cutoff times. And I have gotten through more days than I care to add up by, you know, taking in caffeine and Coop bought us an espresso machine recently, that’s been key. But it’s a reciprocal relationship between, you know, we’re tracking sleep but we’re also tracking caffeine. Are you having poor sleep because your caffeine intake is going to late into the day or because it’s too much for day. And are you then having to you know, to supplement with caffeine the next day, because your sleep suffered. So we’re looking at the relationship between all of the pillars to make sure that we’re giving you the best possible, not only the best possible performance in the gym, which is important, but also the best possible performance when you leave the gym and you spend your other 23 hours of the day outside the gym being healthy and happy.
Josh (36:03):
Yeah. You know, you said it that none of us are striving to go to the CrossFit Games. So, you know, you don’t want your life to be consumed by fitness. It’s like you want fitness to serve your life. So if I’m a gym owner and I’m listening to this and I’m like, OK, I’m in a bind. I know that I need to get a new one-on-one coach up to speed. This sounds great. How long is it going to take somebody to get through this course?
Mike (36:34):
It really depends on the individual homework assignments that we have. I generally recommend three to four weeks. So a week per module, it allows for some shadowing time, it allows for some work on homework. It allows for them to do some quality thinking about the module I had. I wouldn’t rush anybody through faster than that, and I have discouraged it, because those situations certainly have come up. But I mean, if you send me a coach today, I could hand them back to you ready to roll in a month’s time.
Josh (37:11):
Awesome. Great, man. Well, this has been awesome, very eyeopening for me on a couple of different levels, just in working with you, learning new things about you, that I didn’t know. I’m just so blessed to have you on the Two-Brain Coaching team. So thank you for that.
Mike (37:28):
No problem. I feel the same way.
Josh (37:30):
If people want to get in touch with you, maybe ask you some more questions, offline, what’s the best way they can do that.
Mike (37:36):
At mike@twobraincoaching.com.
Josh (37:37):
Awesome.
Mike (37:37):
And twobraincoaching.com is also our blog, with tons of articles from all of us in the Two-Brain Coaching staff. But yeah, the email address, shoot me an email and we can always jump on a quick zoom call and chat. There is an option in my booking calendar to have just a little 15 minutes, you know, chat if a coach or an owner wants to find out if the program is in fact a good fit for them. Then that’s certainly an option as well.
Josh (38:06):
Oh, that would be perfect. Yeah. So if any of you guys are out there and listening, mike@twobraincoaching.com, you can reach him via email. If you want to jump on a call with him to find out if that would be right for if you’re an owner or a coach, you can do that. Or you can just check out any of the free resources that we have at twobraincoaching.com. Mike, I know we’re recording this just before the new year, so have a happy new year and we’ll talk soon.
Mike (38:33):
All right. This was fun. Thank you.
Josh (38:34):
Take care.
Mike (38:36):
All right, you too
Andrew (38:40):
We have resources to help you grow your coaching business or gym, and they’re all free. Click free tools in the show notes to download a host of eBooks and guides by Chris Cooper. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe Two-Brain Radio for more episodes.
