What a New Coach Can Do During Covid with Kevin Carr

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 48. Today I'm sitting down with Kevin Carr and we're talking all about what a new trainer can do during COVID Are you ready? Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their their products and services, and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit podcast. What's up, coach? Welcome back to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 48. I'm gonna go ahead and make this intro quick because if you have been tuning in for the last couple of episodes, you'll know that my kids are currently home. So you might hear a little bit of chaos in the intro. But don't worry because I recorded this episode with Kevin weeks ago. He was probably like, beverly, why haven't you posted this yet? But here it is. It's coming and I am super pumped to get this out to you. I sat down with Kevin Carr, the co owner of Movement as Medicine. He is a a master in strength and conditioning. In fact, he worked under Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning in Massachusetts for years, is also part of the certified functional Strength Coach certification. And we talked all about that inside of this episode. He's a licensed massage therapist and a strength and conditioning specialist. He also has his bachelor degree in kinesiology from the University of Massachusetts and numerous continuing education certifications like FMS, SFMA, NK Level 1 and 2, FRC, FAPP, Precision Nutrition, and PRI. He is a movement master and he's got a brand new book coming out which we do talk about inside of this episode. So without further ado, let's roll that interview. What's up, Kevin? Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you doing?

I'm great, Beverly. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Oh, this is going to be such a good episode. I know. I feel like I say that every time, but it always is. It's always just so good. I'm super pumped that you're here.

Yeah, this is awesome.

Let's go ahead and just dive right in. Can you share a little bit with us, a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there?

Yeah. So my name is Kevin Carr. I am a strength conditioning coach and massage therapist. I work at Mike Boyle Strength Conditioning in Boston, Massachusetts, and I have a business Called Movement as Medicine, where I work helping bridge clients dealing with chronic pain and stiffness back to exercise. So kind of on the spectrum with physical therapy. I use my manual therapy skills to kind of bridge people back to training. And then I have a business called certified functional Strength Coach that I run along with Brendan Rerek and Michael Boyle where we coach and educate strength conditioning coaches, physical therapists all around the world. And yeah, so I do a little bit of everything. Therapist, trainer, educator. So wear a lot of hats right here in Boston, Mass.

I feel like I should have worn my shirt. I have my shirt. I feel like I should have worn that. Okay, that's really, that's amazing. What, what brought you there? How'd you get there?

I was really fortunate to find Mike Boyle as a mentor, like really early in my career. I grew up in the Boston area and I took, I was planning to go to school for kinesiology and wanted to go down the route of either like physical therapy or strength conditioning. And I was really fortunate. I met this guy, his name was Clark Evans. I always say I thank this guy Clark because I was working at a Gold's gym as a typical like 18 year old meathead and I saw him doing stuff like single leg squats and doing stuff like single leg deadlifts and hang cleans and stuff. And I'm over there on like the old pec deck machine, going to town. And I remember working out with him one day and he said, he said to me like, oh, you really got to look at this place. Mike Boyles, I just did this mentorship. I think it would be good for you as someone who's going to go into this career. And I was like, thank him because I was able to start in a really great place. So I applied for an internship here when I was about 18 years old. And now fast forward, I'm 33 and I'm still here, so time flies. And it's been a really, really great place to kind of grow my career and then also help build multiple businesses kind of through this same pipeline. So very fortunate for that. That start early in my life.

That's amazing. So you work primarily with general population or do you serve because you also have the certification for trainers as well. Do you work both or is one the primary?

Yeah, I mean what I like about my job is I spend a little time with everybody. Like if I took you through my day like I had today, I mean I came in early, I had a general population client. I might see people, you know, ranging from 30 to 70 or 30 to 80, like just working on general fitness goals, trying to feel better, trying to lose weight. Then we'll also see professional and collegiate athletes on a daily basis. And then I'll also work, you know, educating and mentoring with coaches and therapists and people who are trying to build their education. So it's nice. It keeps my day fresh in that I get to work with a little bit of everything over the course of a day, over the course of a week. So that's kind of what keeps me motivated and keeps my, my energy going.

You know, what would you. I do know. And what would you say are most common differences? Like, what are, you know, what are the differences, see, between the collegiate athletes that you train and the gen pop people and the trainers? Like, what are the big difference, aside from the obvious and then also the.

Common threads As a coach, I think training athletes is just a little bit more straightforward and simple. There's usually a short timeline that they're with us. So like, I'll be seeing them for, you know, 12 to 16 weeks in an off season. And so we have a finite time and it allows for a simple goal. So I don't have to worry about entertainment. Right. When you're working with general population clients for years at a time, you have to do what I essentially call enter trainment. You have to keep them attached to the process. You have to keep them excited about what they're doing over the course of years. Right. Because fitness is one of those things where everybody walking through the door has this preconceived notion of what exercise means to them because of pop culture and the media telling them, hey, this is what they should be doing. Whereas with athletes, it's pretty much a means to an end for them to get to a goal. So the biggest difference is with the athletes, I can lay out a program and that get us from A to B. And there's really not a question of, hey, should we be doing this or should be doing this or having entertainment? Where with general pop, we're really trying to work on the psychology of that whole process continuously over the course of, you know, months and years. Right.

How do you combat that? Because I, first of all, I laugh so hard when you say edutrainment, because I talk about edutainment. Right. And I feel like social media, it's for the, for better, for worse, for good for me, I love it. But, you know, the cons are going to have this, you know, short attention.

Exactly. And, and so with my gen pop clients, the way I Battle that is really try to bring it back to goal setting. Because although, like, they might not say they have a goal if they're paying X amount of dollars for you, like, training is a luxury I would say most coaches probably can't afford themselves. And so if that person's paying that good money to come in and see you multiple times a week, there's obviously something they want. They just might not always be willing to verbalize it. So if you can do a really good job having that intake conversation with them and say, like, okay, do you actually Want to lose 25 pounds? This is the process for us to do that. Like, I can lay out very clearly, and then the means and the method, they won't be as attached to being entertained with it because they want to get to that endpoint. And so I always bring it back to, you know, what do they actually want out of this process? And then that gets them less attached to doing that thing they saw on Instagram or that thing they saw on the Biggest Loser, and much more attached to what they need to do each session to get to that goal. And so I always bring it back to goal setting and connecting it to whatever daily behaviors we need to do to get to that goal.

That's so true and so important. I think, too, for me, you know, one of the things in addition to the goals, we need to know the why behind the goal. Because when you can elicit the values and attach a value to the goal, you'll be able to overcome the objections and the boredom. Because people get bored.

Yeah. So I'll start with why idea. Right. And that's why, like, that book was so powerful for me in my career from a coaching standpoint and a programming standpoint, because it helped me make better coaching decisions. And from a career standpoint as well, it helped me focus on what really mattered from, like, where to put my energy and where to put my focus in my career. And you're right, you bring that right back to the client for them to put the why behind what they're coming in the door for and what they're paying for. And it makes the. The focus for them much more easy to define each training session that they come in.

So true. Now, I'm curious, because you. You guys do work with collegiate athletes. How do you get in front of the general population? How. How do they find you?

You know what, it's funny, this. This business has really transformed in the time that I've worked here. When I first started, there was much less general population training. It was mostly athletes in the personal training or adults that came were really just parents who were hanging out while their kid worked out and decided they start exercising. And in the time that I've been here since, you know, like 2008, we've seen adult training balloon to about 50% of our revenue and 50% of our business in the gym. And what that has really started with was just word of mouth. I think initially people were intimidated by the name strength and conditioning. Like the average consumer didn't come walking through the door looking for that. But I think over the last few years, I think one of the benefits you've seen because CrossFit did get popular is you saw regular people willing to lift weights. I say the one thing I could thank them for is popularizing the idea of people going and doing Olympic lifts or people swinging kettlebells or people throwing med balls. And to the average consumer that looks through the window, they might think that that's what we're offering in here. And so I think that that was a big part of it. And then word of mouth, I think, has really been our best marketing strategy. We don't honestly spend that much money on advertising. We're at a dead end street in Woburn, Massachusetts, in an industrial park. So if you found us, you probably meant to get here, unless you were going to the mechanic shop that's across the street. And so I think that's doing a really good job with the people that we have. And then straight up asking for referrals saying, hey, if you know anyone looking for training, I'd really appreciate you sending someone our way. And that has, that has really done wonders for our business.

Oh, that's hysterical. That's hysterical. I'm dying laughing. But that is, that's true. And it's so. It's always a little bit interesting. Just for me, from, you know, for the, for context, I became a personal trainer when I was chasing musical theater. I'm in New York. And so for me, I've noticed over my years of training that there is a high population of really popular and very smart coaches in Boston, in Massachusetts. Is that, is there a reason for that?

You know what, I've been, we've been really fortunate. I remember saying that when I was growing up, like, it was great because I could go and like, reach out to like Jason and Lauren at Achieve, who do an awesome job. Or, you know, there's just so many, I think, like Steve Bergeron who's in Boston, or Eric Cressy who's in the Boston Area. Tony Jennelcore, like all these people to grow up in an atmosphere here where you could actually go and talk to them and pick their brain a little bit, it was really fortunate. I don't know if that's because of the universities that are here or if it's just because it was contagious in this area with people learning from one another in the same coaching tree, but it is a really fortunate set of circumstances for us, for sure.

That's a gift, you know, every. Every person I talk to. Oh, Boston, Boston. I think that's, that's a gift. I would love. I would have loved that. So I'm curious, you know, given, you know, our. If you're listening to this podcast right now in 2020, how has your facility been impacted by the pandemic? And what are some of the things that you guys have done to pivot in your brick and mortar business to combat the impact?

Yeah, it's been really crazy. So obviously we were shut down from mid March to like late June completely. And then the end of June we were able to start training outside. So what we actually did is we, we rented this giant tent, massive, looked like a circus behind the gym. And we have this outdoor turf area, thankfully, and we covered it so that way at least gave us a little shade. And when it rained, we were still able to train under there. And then second week of June, we were able to start going inside. And the way the guidelines are In Massachusetts, it's 14ft apart, in between people, if they're inside. And so fortunately, if you've ever seen mbsc, it's a really big facility. We're at like almost like 30,000 square feet in size. It's big industrial building. So we're lucky enough that 14ft apart means we can still have eight person groups running at one time. I mean, if we were a smaller facility, like, I know a lot of facilities have been squeezed out because of that. Cause that means 14ft apart, you're running maybe two or three people at once in the gym. But we actually set up a system where every 15 minutes we have an eight person group coming through from about 5am on. And so we just had to cut our capacity. We're probably about 75% of what we normally are because of our square footage. But the big thing that we had to accept early on was like, this wasn't just going to be a temporary thing. So we had to start making adjustments to the programming into the way the facility was set up that were more permanent in that we moved all the Kaisers that were bolted into the ground, we bought more of them, we bought more racks to space them out and change the whole layout of the entire gym so that we could meet those guidelines and run groups efficiently. Because to give you an idea, in a normal summer we might have three to 400 athletes come through in a single day. And obviously we were going to have to change that. So the way we did it is going from like a 90 minute program that we would normally run for athletes down to a one hour. So cut the time down so then we could fit more groups in throughout the day to still service the same amount of athletes, just in a smaller time zone with groups more spaced out. And so we just had to go back to the drawing board and go back to logistics and say, like, hey, there are some things we can't do in the program, like sled pushes, they take up too much space. We had to move our sprinting outside, things like that, where we really had to sit down as a group and go on a whiteboard and literally write out like, hey, if we can only have so many people in this room at 5:30, that means you have to be out of here by 5:15, no questions asked. So what exercises can we do in that 15 minute block and really go down to the minute to ensure that we're going to follow the guidelines effectively but still be able to service our population the way that we wanted to? And we've been very fortunate that our community of members that come here have come back. The majority of them have come back. There's still some that are not here, but they're mostly seeing us on zoom if they're not coming back inside. So the support from our members has been amazing because without them, obviously the lights wouldn't be on and the doors wouldn't be open right now. So. And I know obviously there's a lot of gyms that probably aren't as fortunate as us, mainly from a size constraint standpoint, so. So we're very, very lucky in that respect.

Yeah, for sure. And I'm, I'm just out of curiosity, what are some of the ways that you have been innovative in this time? I feel like so many people, as personal trainers, we get especially seasoned personal trainers, we become almost dogmatic in our approach and think that this is, you know, that we have to do it. And I feel like it's a blessing in 2020 to push the boundaries of innovation, essentially. I feel like we've had to like, really think about different ways to approach training. And so now for you specifically, when you're condensing these 90 minute programs into 60 minutes, did you have to deal with any type of efficiency or any type of, you know, impact it had on the actual athlete?

Yeah. So there are a few things. One, we just had to shorten the warmup and power section at the first half of the workout a lot. Like, much less skill work than we normally would do, a little bit less warm up and prep work that we normally do, mainly because we had to cut the fat to fit everything in the hour. And we had a really funny conversation at one of our staff meetings when we were building the program. And so since we had to have stations where like, hey, we would hang clean here, we would bench press here, we would split squat here. The only way it worked is if we move bench press to like the very end of the workout, right. The last block. And I remember us all being like, why would we bench press last? Like, we want to like get the main lift in first. And the kids always kind of expect it. And we had to say, like, listen, see, it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things for this 14 year old kid to bench press at the end, but it really matters from a Covid setup standpoint because we don't want people walking across the gym to get to the racks and to walk back. So we had to kind of just reorganize the whole flow of things. So things like that and really being on top of our coaches to, you know, corral the groups and be like, this is how we're going to do things now. Because we have so many repeat athletes that always come back and expect the same flow and consistency. So like, we become dogmatic, but so did the athletes and so do our adults. And. And we always say with like our adult clients, they're almost like the dog that always goes, you know, pee in the same place. Like they want to do their goblet squats in the same spot in the gym. Like, I would be like, okay, these are your stations now. And then I'd look over and they'd be like wandering off to their old place where they did their kettlebell. So you throw all day with their squats. I'm like, no, you have to stay in this box the whole time. I'm sorry. But now that now they've been trained, and it's actually funny in discussing it with a lot of them, they don't want to go back. The adult clients don't want to go back to the way it was. Mainly it's going to be. I don't know what's going to happen if we get through this, what we're going to do. Because they like having their own station. Like, we bought power blocks for every single station, so that way we didn't have people exchanging dumbbells and cleaning dumbbells in between. And so now they're like, I have my own station with my own power blocks, my own bench, my own trap bar, my own Kaiser. Like, it's like there's no sharing of equipment anymore. And so they kind of like it a little too much now. We've kind of trained them to that. And I'm not sure if we're going to be able to go back in the future.

Oh, that's funny. That's funny. Have you noticed an impact in their results?

You know what? I think that they're probably a little bit more focused in that time because there's less socialization. I run an adult group where all these people have been trained together for a long time. And so as much as it's training, it's also their social time. Like, they love to see each other, but now they're all spaced out in their own place. And there's some people who are like, complete other ends of the gym where normally they'd be talking. So I find myself, like, one coaching a little bit less because I'm not always like, all right, hey, you gotta go here, you gotta go here. And they're not standing around shooting the shit in between exercises. They're just working. So I think it's helped them have a little bit more singular focus to their workout. Focusing on what they need to do without. Sometimes the back and forth that goes on. Sometimes I feel like the school teacher trying to get kids to stop talking in between work. So I think that it kind of has forced them to focus in a little bit on the work that they need to do, which has been great.

Yeah, it's made them essentially more efficient. A little less fun, though, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's less banter they have to get. Well, it's funny, like, when we warm up, we all have these pods in this big room that we have, and they're all spread out, so now they just, like, yell to each other from across, which is kind of funny. While we're rolling and stretching, like, they'll kind of chirp each other from across the gym rather than be like, in a pow wow in a circle. But there's still a lot of banter going on, just probably at a distance.

Yeah. For sure. You know, I'm also. We've talked a lot about your experience, like working with your adult population. Is it a huge shift for you for when you are working now with your trainers? So I'm assuming that the process is that you've got trainers that work as interns for you in the. Okay. So that's how. That's how they learn. But you guys also have a certification.

Yes. Yep. So we have interns that intern for us three months at a time at the gym, and that's how we hire our entire process to the gym. We don't really take any outside hires. You go through the internship program, and then we select from that internship program into our staff. So we're pretty much always educating. It's. I always liken it to being at, like a teaching hospital. There's, like a teaching gym. So we always have people that we're working from an educational standpoint with. And that's really what CFSC became in the long run, because long time people were asking Mike to put together a certification company. And it was. He was very resistant to that idea, mainly because of the fact that we didn't really care about what specific certifications people had when they came to intern for us. Because we always said, you know what? I'm going to teach you how to do it the way that we want anyways, so you can come in with whatever you want, but we're going to essentially give us give you our own version in house. And so over time, when it came like this was about six years ago, when Mike was asking us to. People kept asking him. We said to him, like, we'll put it together if you give us our blessing and give us your blessing and some guidance in that process. And we built CFSC out of that, essentially packaging the system that we use at MBSC every single day to deliver education to the people who wanted it. And really that was born out of us finding that there wasn't a certification out there that was rooted in practical application the way that we wanted it to be. There's a lot of people that can read a book and take a test and get their certification. Like, I got my first personal training cert the morning after my high school prom when I was like, 18, because I had studied for like, a few weeks like it. So. But I had no idea how to train people until I showed up here, really. And so we wanted to be able to package that internship experience into a condensed, practical version like cfsc, where people would not only have to go through the Theoretical exam, but also have to demonstrate the ability to coach and demonstrate exercises and communicate. Because as you know, that's the most important part of your job as a personal trainer, strength conditioning coach or physical therapist.

Yes, absolutely. I feel like your cert before I took strong first, that was the first certification that had a practical components to the testing out, which. Nobody learns how to ride a bike by reading a book on riding a bike.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, you have, it's. That's like, you know, let's. Let's learn how to surf without getting wet. It's just not, it's not possible. So I'm curious, you know, in addition to that practical component you talk about the, you know, the CFSC way, what would you say are the components that go into your certification in addition to the practical components that set you apart from all the other certs that are out there?

I think it goes back to that idea of start with why that we talked about earlier. I think we go back and we select our exercises based on the structure and function of the human body. And then the intended result of the training program. We're not just trying to give people a big encyclopedia of exercises. We're getting. Trying to get people to have a systemic approach to building a program and progressing, regressing people effectively. And so what I always say at the start of the course is I don't want you to just take everything I taught you today and try to plug it in on Monday because you are a different coach, you have different clients and you have different logistics. But I want you to go and take this thought process of a systemic approach to exercise and build your own system so that you can have consistency and reliability in what you do. And the real idea behind the progression regression sheet model that we teach at CFSC came from the book Checklist Manifesto from Atul Gawande where he talks about surgeons using checklists to avoid accidental errors and infections and things like that in surgery. And Brendan and I sat and talked and we said, well, if surgeons can use a checklist and airline pilots can use a checklist, it's reasonable to say personal trainers should probably follow some sort of checklist for reliability and standard operating procedure. So what we. That's what I want people to take away from the course more than anything else. I said, you could like the exercise I teach you and you could like the coaching cues. That's great. I want you to build a system. I want you to think about building a system based on what I teach you here. Because far too often when you go into gyms, you just have people programming the flavor of the month. And those, the people that are paying you for their time deserve more than that. And I think it's not too much task for people to have a systemic approach to how they prescribe exercise. And that's really what we want to give you.

That's so true. So true. And that's a good point too. I think so many people forget that while your amount of money that you're making out of the gym is a very different price than what your client is actually investing in, and I think it's hard for people to discern the difference or remember that there is a difference.

Absolutely.

For better, for worse, right? I worked at a gym and I loved it. I learned a lot of things from working in a gym. I don't think it's necessarily bad, but it is something to consider. I think people forget.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm, I'm also curious, what's the number one question that when, when that you guys get when you're working with brand new trainers that come into the facility, they're eager to work with you, what's usually the number one thing people ask you?

The number one thing I get from like interns or coaches that come to CFSC are usually just general programming questions. Like I, this past week I had a bunch of interns like, can you talk to me about programming? And it's such a general question because I, like, I literally get this all the time. And I'll say, well, programming just means you're giving a system to get from point A to point B. But the problem is like, you get inundated with these ideas of like Russian periodization or undulating periodization, these fancy words or fancy systems that I think separate out people. And they have these young coaches who think like, I don't understand what's in that textbook or what's in that. And I said, all that matters is the client in front of you. And so let's sit down and simplify this conversation. Rather than trying to apply that textbook that you read or that blog post that you read about coaching, sit down and have a good conversation with the person that you're about to train. And that a lot of the times the answers are going to show up in a good intake or good subjective conversation when someone walks in the door. So the biggest question I get is on program, and I would say, I think it's kind of an overblown or overhyped topic because if you understand basic principles, you know, moving from slow to fast, moving from unloaded to loaded, moving from assisted to unassisted, in adding joints from the ground up, like basic training principles, you can build a program for someone to get really strong, really healthy over the long haul. And so I think that that's always one of the most overhyped topics that there is. And so I'm always trying to simplify things down for the young coaches that come in to see us so that they focus on the client, not necessarily a technique or a textbook or philosophy that they read, you know, somewhere else.

I think, too, and I'll speak for me that, you know, as. As when I was a young trainer. And by young, I mean just young inexperience. You know, you are combating those group fitness classes or the Instagram trainers that. Or, you know, the beachbody workouts or people, your general population, they have this belief that if it's not new, if it's not fun, if it's not, if it's not, if it's not different than what you did before, then it's going to be boring and then they won't do it, and then they won't get results. Right. Because there's only so many ways you can teach someone to squat. So when. Or so many to squat or lunge or, you know, pull up. Right. So when you're working with someone for multiple years, I feel like that gets intimidating.

Yeah, yeah. And I think often the coach gets bored and gets tired of it before the client does. Because we typically are trading, you know, 10 people a day. Right. And so you're doing the same stuff ten times a day. You get mental fatigue before they do. They're only seeing you twice a week for two hours. Right. So you might think like, oh, we've been doing this forever, but, like, you've been doing it forever. And I always remind myself, like, this person probably has a lot of training age to build on before they get to fatigue of whatever it is that we're working on. And then going back to what you said at the start about bringing it back to their. Why I always check back in, like on my Excel sheet where I write their programs, I'll write their goals, I'll write what their motivation is that they're trying to get there. And that helps me make the right choices consistently in their programming to remind myself, oh, yeah, we can still stay on this path. We can still stay on this path. And very rarely do you exhaust training options for people who are in the general population. You can continue to probably get better at those fundamentals for long periods of times and get brilliant at the basics before you have to start going to the next level up.

Oh, I love that. This is a great segue. And I'm curious, how do you determine that? How do you decide whether someone needs to just keep reiterating the basics or they can level up? Like, what's your barometer of, you know, I feel like it's a nuanced conversation in terms of, like, you know, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result or trusting the process.

How do you exactly? That's a great question. So what I find is, like, again, are we moving the needle towards our goal? If I find that we're stalling out, like, if we have to have markers that we're trying to aim for. Right. So objectively, in the weight room, it can be very easy, right. If they're saying, hey, I want to bench press, you know, 300 pounds, are we making progress from a numerical standpoint to get to where we need to go? If it's. Do we need to. Are we trying to lose 10 pounds, or are we making progress objectively on the scale? Are we making progress in our daily behaviors? Like, are we recording our food? Are we managing our sleep? Are we checking all of those boxes? I want to make sure that we're doing those things because you can measure objectively or you can measure in the behaviors that they're doing on a daily basis. From a training standpoint, what I always ask, if we need to continue to change things, is, like, how elite is that person? What is their training age? If you have someone who is, like, a high school kid who's been training with me for three or four years, there's still a long way that we can go there. If you're someone who's, you know, professional athlete, who's been with us for 10 years, which we have some of those, then we might have to parse out how we deliver that training to them differently. Right? Because if I think about some of our, like, NHL guys who are just trying to keep their career going, there might not be a numerical goal for them. Like, they're not trying to lift more. They're just trying to get to the next contract and stay healthy and that it can be a little bit more difficult in that, like, the answer isn't always more weight on the bar. It's maintaining where we're at and just looking for tiny little ways to get better. Maybe we have to work a little bit more on explosiveness. Maybe we have to work a little bit more on mobility. We have to start to go down more specific avenues to try to give them a little bit of edge or prolong their career or keep them healthy. Or maybe it's lifestyle management, right? Stress management, sleep, nutrition. We might have to zero in on one single variable because all those other buckets are filled, right. With a lot of people with lower training experience, you can keep filling all those individual buckets simultaneously because they're all empty, right? So I was to keep this idea that Brendan Ryrick always talks about being a bucket filler. And until all those individual buckets start to get filled up, you don't necessarily have to specify or train any individual quality or focus all our energy into one corner until we start to overflow somewhere. And that becomes usually pretty apparent once that person reaches that level of expertise or experience.

That's good. That's good. That's really insightful. I know. For me, you know, you get. Sometimes it can be hard to navigate. Like I've. Right now we're trying to do at home workouts, right? Everyone's into the at home workouts. Listen, there's only so many bent over rows a person.

Exactly. It's crazy. Like we were just, I was, I just put published an article today on our website about like 7 Ways to Improve your home training experience. And I intentionally didn't write anything specifically about training technique. I published one a while back about like doing ISOs or you know, using tempo, stuff like that. But again, after about a year of that, you're like, all right, I'm sick of doing isometric split squats. I don't have any weights in my house. But again, the big thing I talked about in there is focusing on all these other things that aren't necessarily the training technique for people training at home, right? Like one, if you don't have a coach, get a coach. Number two, you know, find a training partner. Somebody who, they might not be a coach, but somebody you can get on Zoom with to provide you some mental motivation on a daily basis, right? Like you would have a training partner in the gym. Find a training partner via Zoom. Focus on, you know, we only have so much energy to invest into new things, right? It's a finite amount of motivation and self control and discipline. And if we can't push the training goals real hard right now because we're training at home, focus on lifestyle management, right? Put your energy into lifestyle modification right now and just cruise along with your training. That's okay because we can put our energy into something else. Focus on outdoor aerobic activity. Maybe you didn't normally have time to go for walks or go for runs or go for bike rides, but right now that's probably a better option as where less people are spending time in the gym. So it's about kind of moving the target, especially now with the way Covid has sidetracked people, is you need to kind of change your focus. No one wants to be in the situation we're in now, but rather than throwing in the towel, we got to kind of shift our focus and find a new goal or new avenue to work on if we're going to kind of try to continue moving forward, you know?

Yes, I do. And I'll say, you know, as a trainer myself, I'll tell you just the COVID impact for me is that I have now recognized how so much stuff that I used to do on a daily basis I took for granted. I mean, even walking from, you know, the Grand Central Central station to the gym that I was training at and losing those steps. I mean, my. I have to actively. The conscious decision to get 2,000 steps in, which was usually, you know, you living In New York, 15,000 steps, you don't even think about.

Yeah.

You know, and when you have, like, finite motivation and discipline, and all of a sudden you have to move your attention to step stuff you didn't even think about, that has a significant impact. And as a coach, I can't even imagine what, you know, the general population is also experiencing.

Yeah. Their day, like, their routines are completely changed. Right. Like, you have all these people that, like, they were. They had their. Their whole morning, their day, their routine, day to day was always mapped out. Now that gets thrown out. So I think you saw a lot of people initially in those early months, March, April maybe, like, things just kind of went haywire. Right. And at some point, we had to focus back in. Like I said, the way to be successful is to think like, okay, it's going to be this way for a while. So what is going to be my new routine? What is going to be my new way that I focus my energy now that I'm working from home, now that I don't have the gym, now that I'm not going out to dinner or doing these other activities I used to have? How do I refocus my energy for the next 12 to 18 months? Go figure. We could be in this and focus on how to be the most effective person I can in this setting. Because I think if you look at this as something temporary, you're just going to be kind of treading water to stay alive through it as opposed to making the best of the unfortunate circumstances that we have.

Yes. That's such a good perspective. And I'm going to. There is a lot to be grateful for in this 2020 season. I know a lot of people, they get angry when I say that, but it's true. There are so many things that have been, that have. I personally have benefited from despite the. The struggle. But that's just because I operate from knowing that you're either going to get the lesson that you need or the success that you want, period. Doesn't matter the circumstances.

Bingo. Nailed it. That's it right there. And like, I think for me, I found that it identified a lot of weak points or vulnerabilities in, like, our business or things that we weren't doing. And like you said, I got the lesson from it. And now I think back, I'm like, thank you for at least us being able to pivot and learn from these things and be able to grow, you know, the online portion of our business that we didn't put enough energy into before, and now we have that and it's doing well and it's saving us and it's going to be a growing revenue for us. And for me, it changed how I think about spending my time or investing into those parts of our business. So like you said, it might be hard for some people to hear, oh, you know, there was a lot to be grateful for in this, but I think that's the only way to look at it. Because in the reality, as much of 2020 has been outside of our control.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And I'll say too, that what I have recognized, one of the main differences from the people that struggle versus the people that are successful. They face the same problems and they have the same fear, but it's that that ability to look at the positives and to be innovated and to pivot, that's really the difference. Right. It's not about getting it right. It's about testing. Guessing, testing and assessing is essentially the essence of marketing.

Absolutely right.

So I definitely also want to be very mindful of your time. So I'm going to leave you with two last question questions. The first is how now that we are in times of COVID and you've had to implement this virtual training, how is how have you done that or navigated times of COVID with your certification with that practical component? Are you guys just using Zoom now?

Oh, this was talk about fortuitous timing. We launched CFSC Online Level 1 in January, like mid end of January. We were working on this for like a year to have it the way we wanted. So we partnered with this amazing company, Inspire360 and they built a platform for us that was custom to what we wanted. And we were very resistant to doing an online course for a very long time because we wanted there to be a practical component and we wanted it to be the same experience as if you went in person. And so what they did is we had a company come and we did a virtual level one. So I had a camera follow me as I taught a real course. It includes the question and answer, it includes me teaching to the camera as if you are literally sitting there in the group. And it's an eight hour course. Like it's. You watch an eight hour video, you're probably sick of me by the end of it talking. And then you do all the same theoretical work that you would do for our live workshops. And then we built an online testing portal. And so what this is is you have a test prompt of us asking you the questions just like you would for a practical. You write out your answer and then you submit a video for each question of you demoing, coaching, progressing and regressing. The same way you would is if you were at the course. And then our coaches each week go through and grade all those videos and provide feedback just like you would in person so they can have that same experience. So it allowed us to reach people who, you know, if they had economic limitations, couldn't pay, take time off to come and take a course. They can complete this at their own time as well as now with COVID thank God, we had launched it about a month before and we were able to keep going without missing a beat. And what we're doing in addition now, because we're not doing any live workshops, is where every month we're also providing a free live Zoom workshop to accompany anyone that signs up for level one or level two so they can see someone live and in person as well. So that has been a really fortunate circumstance for us. And it's also taught us, you know, how to deliver this product better virtually as opposed to just doing it in person all the time.

That's awesome. And also, I think one of the most undervalued skills I think that this time has given to trainers is the ability or it's forced the issue of being able to communicate verbally, cues instead of tactile, tactile touching, because absolutely do this. And now you can't do that, essentially.

Yeah. Like being able to actually say what you want and get your message out via zoom while that person's, you know, the camera's sideways and they're like doing like, you can only see, like their leg sticking out. Like, being able to get your message, like, you really have to have your verbal cueing on point now, which is. You're right again. Look for the opportunity to get better in the circumstance.

Husband hated being touched when he was a train, like when he was being trained. And so he's so grateful. He's like, now me. It's the best.

That's great.

Okay, so right before we hit record, you were telling me about this book that you're. That you currently have that's coming out. So what is next for you? Can you please share with us? What are you doing? What's next for you?

Yep. So I have this book called Functional Training Anatomy coming out through Human Kinetics. It's due out March 1. Mary Kate Feit, who is brilliant, she's a PhD at Springfield. She helped me put the. Yeah, his wife. Yep. She helped me put the book together. She's been amazing, helping me get my. All my writing to be legible and understandable. So we. Our book is coming out March 1st. It's available on Amazon right now for pre order. And so what it essentially is is it takes the system that we use at MBSC and the system that we use as certified functional strength coach and breaks down the exercise selection in the why like we talked about anatomically. And so what they've done at Human Connects was amazing, is we did pictures of every single exercise. And what they did is they turned them into drawings with the anatomy drawn into a single leg deadlift drawn into a med ball, chest pass drawn into a Hank lean with explanations of why we choose these exercises, how to perform them, how to progress, how to regress, and then the overall training philosophy, going from mobility to warm up to power to strength training to conditioning, all the way through. And so it serves as a really good adjunct to taking the CFSC course. And I hope it helps coaches and therapists make better exercise selections when building their program. So that's something we're really excited about. Like I said, people can pre order now and they'll get their book March 1st.

So the book's done. You've already written it.

Hands off. Like, I don't. I don't have any more to do from a writing standpoint. We're just kind of finishing up a little Bit of artwork proofing, but it is. It is ready to go. Yep.

Oh, that's exciting. March 1st feels like it's a long time away, but it's tomorrow.

Yeah, it'll be here. I mean, trust me, it feels close after about two years of putting this together. So it's. It's going to be here real quick. So that's pretty exciting.

Yeah. What caused you to write it?

It's really interesting. People at Human Kinetics reached out with a few different product ideas and book ideas, and we really narrowed it down to this one. As I thought that one, it went really well with what we were already delivering at cfsc, but I think it added another layer to the ideas that we talked about that Mike talks about in his book, Advances in Functionality Training. It goes right into the anatomy from a visual standpoint, which I think was really helpful. So, I mean, credit to Human Kinetics for kind of getting the ball rolling. And then we kind of shaped it from there into the product that you're going to finally see come out.

Ooh, this is exciting. I can't wait. I can't wait to get my hands. It's going to be awesome.

Yeah, I'll send one your way for sure.

Yeah. Awesome. Okay, so we'll definitely link all of that up. Like, we'll link all your link in the show notes. So for you guys who are here hanging out with us and where can I send them if they want to.

Learn more about me, probably the easiest way is to go to Instagram. MovementisMedicine is probably the easiest way to find our information. That way you can get our website, you can find all our information there about Certified Functional Strength Coach and Mike Boyle strength conditioning. So that's pretty much the best way to get in touch with me. So movementismedicine on Instagram.

Okay, cool. We'll link that up in this show as well. So thank you so much, Kevin, for joining me. I really appreciate this has been so helpful. I know this is gonna help a lot of people.

Awesome. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

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