New Year New You SERIES (B) Physical Freedom with GMB

Welcome to the Mike Hartman Show. Mike is a performance coach and former Stanley cup champion with the New York Rangers. Topics on this show are focused around stories, mindset and champions. Mike will also go into details about helping you with your pain points and struggles and finding motivational solutions on how to have the mindset of a champion. Now, here's your host, Mike Hartman.

Welcome to another episode. Today. My guest is Andy Fawcett. He's the co founder and CEO of GMB Fitness. And we're going to start this episode out. We're going to do three series called the New Year and New you. Andy, it's so great to have you here today.

Thank you, Mike. It's definitely good to be talking.

So how I heard about you was I have a friend, a very good friend of mine. He's a mentor of mine. He went to Harvard and Wharton, and he's all about finding, like, the next best thing. And he's been sending me your videos. He says, you have to watch these guys. This stuff's incredible, what they do. So I start watching, and I loved it. And I wish I had this, you know, one time I was an athlete, and I wish I would have used, like, this type of training when I was an athlete. So feel free. We just want to hear a little bit about your story, a little bit about you and how did you get going with this?

Sure. I mean, it's great to be described as the next thing, as what's coming up and something that is necessary. I think that really where we came from is I have two partners. One used to be a competitive gymnast for about 15 years before he had an injury that ended his career. The other is a physical therapist. And all three of us have done martial arts, various martial arts, for several decades now. And what really happened with this is we started getting together and training together. And what we realized is that a lot of what people are trying to do in fitness is mimicking what real fitness is. Right. They're doing things that mimic the results of fitness rather than the things that actually build capability. And I think people who are athletes understand this intuitively in a lot of ways, like dancers, martial artists do, too, is that building strength and endurance are great, but they don't necessarily always translate to improved play or improved performance. So what we did is, when we were getting started is we were looking at all the things that got left out by most workouts, and that ends up being a lot of mobility, a lot of motor control and agility, and also strength in unilateral movements, like One arm, one leg, movements and strength in different directions because your traditional weight training workout tends to be fairly linear. And so that's the kind of stuff that we do. And we do that with exercises that come from gymnastics, from physical therapy, from martial arts, from yoga and that sort of thing. So that's kind of it in a nutshell is that we've always just tried to offer what gets left out by a lot of things. And the stuff that especially people who are athletic and are trying to perform in a specific context, they end up needing a lot more of, than just trying to meet the markers for health or the markers for, you know, cardiovascular health or enough strength to lift a certain amount of weight.

That's fantastic. And I really see, I've watched a lot of the videos and what, what a lot of people has to understand is athletes, you know, we just don't pump iron and do bench press and that's, that's a cross check in our sport. In hockey or you know, baseball players move like, like you said, everything is, is, is like around movements. And I know a lot about what you talk about is what the body is really capable of doing. I, I looked at your website and that, that one, that one thing stuck out. Can you go into that a little bit about what your body is capable of doing?

Sure, absolutely. I mean, the main thing is that we have so many capabilities with our bodies. Like look at your shoulder joint, it can move in so many different directions. But in an average day you don't really get to exercise that much. You, you pick things up, you put them down, you grab your steering wheel, your coffee cup, your keyboard, your mouse or whatever, the remote, you know, and most of these things you're grabbing with the same hand and not using the other hand. And so you have a joint like your shoulder that's able to move in a huge range of degrees of freedom. But we don't really move it through all of those every day. And this is the same for most of our body. We walk in straight lines, we stand up and sit down, but we don't really twist our hips unless we get on the court or on the field and are playing our sport. And then we notice that we're doing these movements that aren't, that are very far outside of our day to day routine. So what we find is that it's really important for people to, for one just explore what movements they're capable of because we don't really have an opportunity to move in unexpected ways in the day to day. And if we don't use those things and don't explore what we're able to do, then we have no idea of what we can really train ourselves to do, of what capabilities that we might have latent or accessible to us if we go after them. And so first step for us is really that it's self knowledge. And you know, we have now we have like a GPS on our phones, right? But 50 years ago, I mean even 20 years ago we had maps and we could see the destination and we could see the roads, but we didn't always know the starting point. And we think that one of the most important things is to figure out your starting point to begin with self knowledge and then you can plot the right course to your goal. And the best way to do that is to really explore what you can do as a starting point. And so we give people a lot of exercises that let them try different things and see what works for them, see what they can do, see where they can't quite move a certain way. And that gives you a better idea of what you might need to work on or what you might need or what you might just feel is a lot more fun than what you've experienced before and want to try more of.

Well, calling it the new year, new you. So people are going into the year, a lot of people are at home. And one thing that, I mean many things that I liked about, about what you stand for and what, and what you have is anybody could do it because you start off at a level that could be best for you. So some people can't do every movement. But I know you walk people through the basics. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Sure. I mean, I think the big thing is that, you know, even people that have been athletic in the past, if you take about 10 years off of daily training, you realize that your body can't do a lot of the things that you used to. Even if you are strong or do have a lot of, you know, motor control, you might have lost some of your mobility. And so everyone's at different levels and everyone's starting from different places. But even people who are pretty advanced a lot of times they got there by taking a very efficient route towards a goal. You know, people get very good at sports by practicing the skills of that sport fairly exclusively a lot of times. And so there may be other things that are very fundamental that they have not actually spent a lot of time practicing. So we start with really basic stuff. And I mean to not to point put to fine a point on it. But we start with crawling. We. We start all of our people off with very basic movement patterns on the floor. Biomechanists call it quadrilateral movement, but basically it's crawling on your hands and feet. And this has a lot of benefits. You're. You're. You're coordinating left and right arms and legs. You're stretching out the backs of your legs that you don't really do very often. You're building shoulder stability. And we do all of this in a lot of different ways, but we start at very basic levels, and then from there we add variations. So we can add. We can bend the arms to add more strength challenge to people who are ready for it. We can deepen the angle of the leg by trying to put the heel close to the ground. For people who need to increase their mobility, we can move in different patterns to increase the. The motor challenge. So we can actually do variations of even simple exercises as are appropriate for the individual to give them the specific challenge, they need to be able to shore up the things that they've left off or the things that they haven't practiced enough of. So even somebody who has been very athletic and is maybe very strong might not have done a lot of complex motor patterns. So we can find a way that challenges them in the part that they need that's at their appropriate level. And these things start at very beginner levels. Like I said, crawling. Almost anyone can do it.

Yeah, well, they say you have to crawl before you can walk, but I think the really cool part about what you have is you don't need a lot of equipment now. I stopped lifting weights many years ago, and I started with bands. And then I do a lot of body weight work. I do yoga. I do, you know, I do boxing and different things, but without me getting hit. But I. So the thing that I like about what you have is you could do it without really not a lot of equipment, and it could be in a small space to start.

Yeah. You know, it's funny. We've. We've been training for a long time, so both my partners and I, we, We do all kinds of different things. Personally, you know, we. We all go through phases where we lift or where we do, you know, cardio exercise or whatever. But we feel that it's not always necessary, and especially for people that are just learning how to use their bodies better or just relearning how to, you know, get back some of the skills that they used to have. Starting with just your body weight is a really, really Solid choice for one. Like you said, you don't need equipment and you don't really need a whole lot of space. We have programs, we have a few programs where we use a pull up bar or you might use a chair or a prop or something. We've had programs in the past and will again in the future that use things like gymnastic rings, but those aren't necessary for most people and they're definitely not what you need for a starting point. Really just explore in yourself are a very, very, very solid starting point.

And a lot of people will say, well, how am I going to get strong? How am I going to get in shape? And I never understood the person that goes in the gym and they start pumping iron but they, they can't do like basic push ups. Their, their body can't like we call it proprioception or time and space and they can't balance on one leg and how can they do other things? So this is just a really great start. And we used to stay in, say in sports, your body's like a machine and not properly taken care of it will break down. But I think this hits all the fine points of your body from head to toe.

Yeah, it's true. I mean I've, I've met some very strong people that could squat, you know, more than double body weight, you know, 2.5 body weight, but couldn't do a single leg squat like a, like a pistol or something. Right. And it's not that they don't have strength, it's that they, they have the strength in the prime movers, but maybe not enough strength in some of the smaller muscles that aid in stabilization or they might not have the, an mobility to be able to move forward or something like that. And the thing is, if you only judge yourself by the, the amount of weight on the bar or the amount of time on the clock, then you're not paying attention to a lot of other markers of health and performance. And so it's really important to be able to back way up and really look at simple movements. But what those simple movements reveal about your actual ability and you know, like you said, balance, proprioception, all of these things are super, super important to be for health and longevity as well. If you look at what correlates with longevity, it's things like grip strength, ability to sit and stand without touching your hands to the floor, hip mobility and muscle mass in the legs, these are the things that are most correlated with longevity and healthy long life. And just being able to have the hip mobility and leg strength to sit down and stand up is actually a huge thing that a lot of people don't think about until it's far too late.

Exactly. They end up wrenching their back out or they're doing something to their bodies, they do a faulty movement. Next thing you know, they're. They're having hip problems. And so this is even a preventative now, we're not making claims, everybody, but this is a per. This is a preventative. I think, for injury. This would really help people because once you're. You're practicing movements and you're. You're increasing your own body strength, you're going to be able to do more in your life.

Yeah, I. I'm always really careful about, you know, making any kind of, like, miraculous claims. I think there's enough people in fitness that will make those claims for us, whether there's any veracity there or not. But the fact is that, you know, you mentioned baseball earlier, and I think in most sports, too, you have so much rotational movement, twisting of the spine. But we don't do this much in the gym. And so it's really important to practice these things. And we have a whole program that we made around these rotational transitional movements, changing from, you know, low to high, high to low to medium, and twisting and stuff, because really learning how to express strength through rotation in a safe way and to be able to move powerfully in different directions and while changing direction, that's something that comes. That comes out in sport a lot. And this is also the same thing where, you know, the strong guy who throws his back out helping you move a sofa. Right. It's when he tried to bend down with one arm and twist that the back gets wrenched. And those twisting movements, really learning how to. How to do those safely for yourself can be really, really important.

Well, you mentioned, you know, people say, you know, it speaks for itself. And I, you guys, I've listened to your podcast. I've done some research, and it's like, I'm intrigued. I'm not gonna. I'm telling you, I've done a lot of different things. I owned a gym. When I retired as an athlete for eight years, we did circuit training, how they would do it in the old Soviet Union. It was a recovery that we did after hockey. We had 20 stations. And we always believe the definition of fitness is the ability to recover. So I do 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. We did like a hit program. And I, I ended up selling that and got involved with. With coaching many years ago. But it's your record speaks for itself. I know you have over 75,000 different people. You're in 102 different countries all over the world. So when you have that kind of traction, you're doing something right.

Yeah, I mean, we didn't start out knowing everything. I mean, we still don't know everything. But I think what's been really interesting is that we started with what we knew we were good at, but then we really started listening to our clients and finding the things that they found challenging, the things that they weren't prepared for. And we used a lot of our other experience, especially leaning on our partner Jarlo, who's the physical therapist, to really look at what were sort of some of the prerequisites or some of the ways that we could help people build the things they were lacking. You know, it's easy to say, oh, just move more or just, you know, play around or just try to do handstands. But, you know, if you don't have the wrist strength or the shoulder mobility to do a handstand, then, you know, it's going to be very frustrating at best or, you know, you could hurt yourself at the worst. So what we've done is mostly just focused on trying to listen to the people that are going through our programs. And we've been lucky. We've had, like you said, over 70 something thousand clients. And, you know, we've had interactions and emails and social media messages back and forth with, you know, hundreds of thousands of people through the years. So we have a pretty good feel of what does work for these things and where people have trouble. So, you know, we hear if we're doing a lot of crawling movements, people find that they're. They're not used to putting much weight on their wrists. So what we did is we started adding a very thorough wrist warmup and wrist mobility program to the preparation, the warmup portions of our sessions. And we found that that's been really helpful for people. It also cuts down on things like carpal tunnel and, you know, a lot of these kind of rsi, you know, modern life injuries that people get too. So it's just one example, but mostly it's. It's about, you know, finding the things that have worked and finding those patterns. We've been lucky that we've got a ton of data points now over more than 10 years. So we get to learn from all of those experiences and, you know, take the best of what works and put those in our programs.

Well, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I Think I've heard this, I think you said this on maybe one of your podcasts, that you can do other exercises or training programs to complement what you do. So if people do CrossFit, if people do strength training, you said it earlier, you can complement this with your program. Do you recommend that?

Yeah, I think that actually some of our best clients are people that aren't just trying to get in shape. They're people that are trying to get better at something. They already have a thing that they like doing. You know, I think in the case of many of your listeners, it might be hockey. Maybe I'm just guessing here, but for a lot of our people, it's martial artists or rock climbers or we had a ton of surfers for a while. It was really, really interesting. But people that are doing these sports that require you to move in a lot of different ways. And so what we offer is, like I said at the beginning, we're not trying to recreate what you would do in the gym. We're trying to complement that with the stuff that usually gets left out. So we have lots of crossfitters, lots of power lifters, actually, that use what we do as. There's really two main ways. One is it's kind of supplemental mobility and skill work. And the other is they might use some of the more basic stuff for active recovery on off days to sort of help work through soreness and keep. Keep their body recovering quickly, like a recovery day.

One thing I didn't bring up, I wanted to mention to you earlier that another good part about your program is a lot of athlete, especially women. I worked with the women's Olympic team, did performance work with them, and I was told I didn't know this stat, but a lot of women, they have knee injuries because of their lateral work. When? Soon as they start training lateral. That's when a lot of females end up injuring their knees. Males as well. So your program focuses on the entire body. You're strengthening different parts of your body that gets you prepared to do some of those movements.

Yeah, absolutely. And you're right with female athletes, especially those in sports that have a lot of single leg jumping, knee injuries are unfortunately very prevalent. And it's funny. So we hear a lot of people with knee injuries and knee injuries tend to be related to either ankle or hips, stiffness, a lot of times both. And so what we do is, you know, like you said, like we said before, like crawling, for example, or you've seen some of our videos and programs, so you know this. But for People listening. We, we try to make sure that both legs can move independently, that you're not always, you know, letting one leg sort of make up for the other. And we're moving these, these limbs, these joints through as much of their allowable range of motion as possible. And what this does is it teaches your joints to be able to function not just in the normal ranges, but a little bit outside of those. And you gradually build sort of like a safety net around where your knee can move and you build the strength to be able to do that safely. And your joint gets used to moving a little bit outside of where it normally does. And so that means that when you do have an unexpected situation on the mat or on the field and you have to twist a little different or turn a little different, you can improvise knowing that you have a little bit more of a safety valve outside of what you've actually trained.

Well, we have a wide range of clients. So you mentioned earlier, we do have a sports organization that has over 700,000 athletes that they're listeners. I don't know about every one of them, but we do have a lot of them, some 70,000, especially with, with the hockey. So what age can we start this program? What's the earliest that someone could start with the basics of this program?

We have many clients that are having their children do this with them. You know, I think that you need to have different expectations for kids doing this stuff. But we have definitely, you know, kids in single digit ages doing this with their parents and it can be a lot of fun for them. We, we've also had clients in their late 90s and sometimes people ask, you know, what were their results. And unfortunately, when you're in your late 90s, your results are not going to be very, very long lived because most people don't live much longer than that. But we, we've had the whole range of ages of people doing our stuff. And you, you might have to change the expectations at the, the very edges of that. But pretty much anyone from teenage up through like mid-50s, you know, assuming you don't have any kind of chronic injury or something, most of our stuff is very accessible and will offer a good complement to the other kinds of things that you'd want to be doing.

Well, we talk about like the show's about stories, mindsets and champions and we have different athletes on. Well, I recently had Dr. Todd Schakken and I do a lot of speaking with Dr. Todd Schack and he owns one of the largest mini dental implant businesses in the world. And we're. We go around and we talk to thousands of dentists. I do the leadership stuff. He's the owner of the company. He's been a best friend of mine. I told him tonight, I called him, I said, every dentist needs this, and he doesn't do a lot of working out. I'm not going to peck on him. In fact, if you look back in one of our episodes, he's talked about. We did. I did an interview with him how he built his mini dental implant. But I said, I'm telling you, the dentists are hunching over in a. You know, they're. They're in different positions, awkward positions. Something like this would be great for athletes. They're dentist. I mean, everybody.

Yeah. It's kind of funny. Like, you, you wouldn't. You wouldn't really think dentists need this unless you're looking at them. But, you know, they probably spend most of their day, like you said, hunched over with most of their weight on one leg and not the other and their arms in. In weird positions. So there's a lot of things that you probably wouldn't think about it, but they do probably need to move their spines and shoulders more, and this kind of thing can be really helpful for them.

So can you go into the programs a little bit? Because I know, I know my program. I've been online. I know exactly what I need to do. But can you go into how the programs work?

Sure. We have one basic kind of starting point that to us is the foundation. We call it elements because it really covers what we think are the three main elements of physical autonomy. And those are strength, motor control and flexibility, or mobility, whichever you want to call it. And what that translates to is, one, the motive force that puts power behind your movements and gets you going. Two, the ability to control that force. And then for flexibility and mobility, that's the directions in which you can move, your freedom of movement. So all three of those elements are in our Elements program, which is the foundation. That's the one that starts with basic crawling motor patterns and has. We have four main movement patterns in that program and a lot of different variations of those. So the idea is that someone will start there, build up the basic sort of motor control and strength in different directions, and find some of the areas that they need more mobility in. From there.

Yeah, no, no, go ahead, keep it going. Love it.

Okay. From there, we have specific programs that zero in on one or more specific areas. So we have our vitamin program, which is designed to increase your Motor control, which includes things like agility, balance, you know, grace, smoothness of movement. And we do this by just challenging the nervous system with a lot of different variety of movements. And these things are sequenced in a specific way to help you improve these things. We also have a program that is based on classic calisthenics and gymnastics strength training, but also focuses a lot on, like I said, the single leg movements and the single arm movements and movements in different directions from your standard strength training. We have a program focused on just mobility for people who are doing the strength training they need and have the skills they need, but just really need to loosen up. So that's what we do, is we start with the foundation, and then we say, well, now that you've done this foundation program, you probably have a better sense of where you personally are at. Like I said in the beginning, starting with self knowledge and exploration. And from there, we encourage people to really focus on which of these sort of attributes is the most important for them to sort of shore up, to remove restrictions from their performance.

Well, what I found too, was very frustrating for, for us. We had a. We had a really great program, but we believed in everything was safety first. So. And it's opening up your hips, your back, your body. We had, you know, people that had, you know, exercise scientists or exercise physiologists that worked with us, and we had a good team. But the women came in and they said, well, when am I going to get the results? And I said, you have to keep training. You have to keep training smart and you'll get the results. So that's, that's what they're going to say. They're going to say, okay, Andy, when do I get results? When are these, when are these results going to come into play?

Right? And I think one of the things you have to address here is that when people are in a fitness mindset and they are thinking about results, 99% of the time they're thinking weight loss. And I know that's not always true, especially with athletes, but in general, that's what most people think, is that it means weight loss. And that's a thing that, you know, if you've done a lot of training, you probably know that a lot of that really just does come down to more what you eat than the way that you're working out. So results that are visible, I think tend to be related to loss of fat or growth of muscle. And you can see some of those things. And it takes different amounts of time for different people based on where they're starting. But for us, results usually come through improved balance, greater confidence. But what we find the most visible result is a lack of pain. And sometimes it's a surprising loss of a pain that people didn't even realize that they were having chronically. You know, they'll notice that they feel more relaxed. I never knew how tight my shoulders were until I started doing this. And now after two or three weeks, I feel much looser. So we find that for those kinds of things, within a couple or three weeks, most people are noticing that they move more freely and have fewer aches and pains. And then from there, you know, depending on what they focus on, they might have different results in other areas.

Well, you said the magic word mindset. You have to be in that mindset as an athlete. And I know you mentioned athletes earlier, so when you come from an athletic background, Our family had a very athletic background. And, you know, at one time, you know, like I said, you know, I. This is how we train. But I wish I had you many years ago, because I was the person that would pull my stomach. I had the bad stomachs, the bad hips. I'd always had different issues going on. So where were you? I needed you about 20 years ago.

Well, I mean, that's the thing. We needed us 20 years ago, too, before we had hurt ourselves pretty much every conceivable way and made just about every training mistake possible. You know, I think that's one of the great things about hindsight, is that we. We do get to make the thing that we wish we had had.

Well, I really wanted to make this part of the new year new you series. You talked about the nutrition, and we brought our registered dietitian on, who was just on just before you. It was so great having you on, and I think it's. It's important that you share with everybody. Where can we find you? Tell us your website even. Please share. Share your podcast, because you guys are great. It's. I listen to it on my way. I go to Starbucks now in the morning. Now, unfortunately, we can't sit inside, but. Yeah, but I listened to you guys. I said, boy, I like these guys, and I don't even really know you that well, But I said, these guys are great because you speak from the heart, and what you do is from the heart. Not once did you try to sell. And I've listened to you guys. I've watched many YouTube videos, and like I said earlier, my friend sent this to me, and I said, very interesting. I KE watching, and I'm watching. Hour later, I'm still watching you guys. So can you please share with everybody where can we find you? Where can we get in touch with you? Don't be shy and also share your podcast.

Sure. We're, we're at GMB I.O. and people often ask what that stands for. It use originally stood for gold metal bodies, but now we're GMB. GMB I.O. is where everything lives. Our podcast is I think called GmbH. Very creative. We get really wild and out there with our naming. But you can go to GMB IO show and see us there. If you type GMB Fitness into the Googles, you will find all of our social media and you'll find that we have hundreds of YouTube videos, we have podcasts, we have hundreds of articles and tutorials on our website. And what I would suggest for people is maybe type in GMB Fitness and then one word that sums up what you would like to most improve about how you feel in your body. And I guarantee you we have a video or article or podcast that is related to that topic.

Yeah, and you do. And what's, what's your podcast? How your podcast again?

The podcast, I believe in Apple podcasts is just called GMB podcast or GmbH.

Okay. So yeah, I found you guys because I was watching in YouTube and I said, well, I'm going to listen to these guys. And then I, I heard you guys on the podcast and you guys do a great job and I could tell your energy is everything that our, our listeners like. We have a lot of listeners from all over the world and like you said, a lot of athletic families, people within leadership. And I'm telling everybody to do this because the new year, new you. I am doing this as my main program. Even Andy, you said we could do different things. I'm sticking to this for right now because I'm going to replace some of the yoga and some of the other stuff I'm doing. So, Andy, it was so great having you and thanks so much for being here.

Absolutely, Mike. I appreciate it.

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