Barbell Shrugged - [Active Life] Client Centric Programs to Build Practical Fitness w/ Dr. Sean Pastuch, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #687

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Dr. Sean Pastuch is a chiropractor, coach, and entrepreneur who is known for his work in the fitness and health industry. He is the founder and CEO of Active Life Rx, which is a company that provides fitness and health coaching services. Dr. Pastuch's mission is to help people move without pain and reach their full potential in fitness and life. He has worked with professional athletes, coaches, and everyday people to help them overcome injuries, improve their movement quality, and achieve their fitness goals. In addition to his work with Active Life Rx, Dr. Pastuch is also the author of the book "Turn Pro," the Fitness Professional's Guide to Ethical Sales and Career Fullfillment. He is also a speaker and has given presentations on fitness, health, and performance at various conferences and events. To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Dr. Sean Pastuch on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Sean Pastuch is coming on to Shrug. What's super cool about Sean, we've been around him for, god, four, five, six years now. We've always been in the same circles, done a bunch of work together, and actually done some traveling, did the Spartan World Championships together, all the fun things in life. But then it was like, it's been like three years since we've all hung out. So, wanted to get him back on today so we could figure out everything that's going on with active life and active life professional. Really, he is building a stable of coaches across the country that are really kind of blending a lot of the chiropractor assessment, physical movement and pain elimination side of things and meeting a population that is

in definite need of understanding how to move better, how to empower themselves, and work through a lot of the issues that hold people back and some of the mental side of things of overcoming struggles, of just not understanding how fitness can be such a large, important role in people's lives. It's fantastic catching up with him. Always grateful when he comes on to the show. As always, friends, you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where you're going to find Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin, analyzing lifestyle labs and performance. And you can see what a product, a 90-ish minute video looks like inside of rapid health

optimization and what you'll be getting when we run the full labs, performance metrics, lifestyle tracking, and really all the questionnaires that we're gonna put you guys through so we can uncover what's going on deep inside your physiology. That is over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Douglas Larson, Dr. Sean Pastuch from Active Life. Yo, welcome back to Barbell Shrugged, man. It's been like two years. Look, the only thing that I long for right now is that we were in the same room and I could smell you guys. Because I miss your musk, but I, you know. That was at Strong New York the last time. Was that the last time you're on the show? No,

I wasn't. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was, it was strong New York when they did it at solace. Yeah. But probably in Tahoe for Spartan worlds. Tahoe hung out.

Yeah. That was after that. That's right. That's right. Okay. That was like, wow. Pre pandemic.

Oh yeah. It was, it was November of 2019 or September of 2019. Yeah, sounds right. Every time you think, oh, the pandemic didn't affect me that much, and you realize we haven't hung out in three years, you're like, oh, my gosh, my life sucks. I don't ever see my friends anymore.

Yeah, I wasn't getting on a plane wearing a mask. That's a long time to wear a face handkerchief. I mean, if there's ever been a scenario in which just making the rules bend the mask was like the ultimate, like, F you. Like, are you really going to ask me if it's under my nose so I can breathe like a human? You really going to say something? Because if you do, as soon as you walk away, I'm going to take it off again. Guess what? I'm not listening.

I'll wear this goofy looking thing, but not the real way. I would be on airplanes just like slowly snacking the entire time. Every two minutes putting like a crumb in my mouth. Well, you know, it's, I regret not being the guy who came up with those masks that don't actually like like a fishnet mask that allowed people like something's on my face i don't know like do you have a standard of what what works and what doesn't here but uh crazy missed opportunity what are you gonna what are you gonna do you know um yo i wanted to kick it one you reached out two i had i realized i hadn't talked to you in so long. And then all the changes that are going on with Active Life and give us like a, I'd love the bird's eye

view of what's been going on. Cause you guys just opened a gym right down the street from where you are right now. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that you're the kind of friends that I can always reach out to and that I hope that, you know, if you didn't have a spot available, if there wasn't something for me right now that I would have, I'd still be your friend. I'd still appreciate you. I'd still be sending people your way. And that's something that genuinely I struggle with is like, how much do you ask your friends for when you haven't talked in a year or two years? Like we've texted back and forth a little bit, but so here's the answer. Anytime we all get to hear each other's voice and we make it work, that's the best way. Well, I appreciate you guys.

Yeah. You're the man. So, um, a lot has changed, you know, the, the, the biggest change I think that, that fundamentally explains the overarching theme. And then you can ask questions about it is that when we last spoke, I saw active life as the bridge between, and then you can ask questions about it, is that when we last spoke, I saw active life as the bridge between fitness and healthcare, meaning people want to either get back to fitness or they want to leave healthcare. It's one or the other. And we were the communication between the two, kind of like a wire that connected them. And I've come to understand over the last year and a half to two years that we're not the bridge between fitness and healthcare, because the bridge implies that you're a conduit to and from,

and we're not a conduit to and from. We're an off-ramp for many of the people who come to us. And the off-ramp is to a totally different value set around why we exercise, what we're doing it for, what we want to ask of our doctor, how we want to talk to them, who the doctors are that we want to see, what kind of care we want to get. And it's been really refreshing. It's been a big load off of my back because the question was always, who's the fit for us? And it was, well, the person who can't do this, this, this, this, this. Well, no, it's not. It's the person who wants to do this, this, this, and this. And that's a totally different person. We have people now who come to us who they could be.

I talked to a guy last week. His name was Rashaun English. He asked for help with his entrepreneurship journey. The guy's crushing. He's a fantastic personal trainer in Manhattan. I'm like, what are you, why are you talking to me? He's like, I'm just inspired to be able to help the kind of people that active life helps. And I don't have the education or the skills to do it. And I wanted to know when you thought it'd be appropriate for me to start. I'm like, that's, that's cool. That guy doesn't need us. He wants us. And on the other side, we have people who are working out with us who are like, look, I've done all of the things now that I'm, you know, aging out of wanting to compete in sports and CrossFit and all these things. I want a professional who's dedicated their lives to understanding my physiology and my, my communication to be able to guide me towards what I'm looking to get to. Yeah.

And that's cool. Anytime I hear things like this, where there's this kind of like, maybe not like a shift, but like a different framework for how you're presenting what's going on at Active Life. Do you feel like a lot of that stuff comes from really call it like the founder and you finding yourself and what your actual, um, maybe like personal mission or like how you, a frame that can last for 10, 15, 20 years for yourself and the problem that you're solving for you. Uh,

cause we both came out of really like the, the high intensity CrossFit space. Your gym went to the CrossFit games. Like you don't go to the CrossFit games without doing some totally ridiculous stuff and potentially needing to solve these problems, which is being a chiropractor and all of those things align. Has there, has that been a part of the journey of like you're doing one thing and then you realize,

I kind of missed a little bit because that doesn't fully solve exactly kind of like where the problem that you're looking to solve and realizing like everybody else is in the same boat looking to solve this problem. But you, you kind of like, you were just slightly off. And now you're able to realign. I'd say it's at least 50 of that have you ever heard the um i don't remember who said it but it's the idea that like if you started in new york and you set a course to san francisco and you were one degree off you end up in san diego Which is a solid spot, by the way, compared to San Francisco. That is a bad. Yes. Send me one degree off. Seriously. Tell me where the detour is.

All of that to say, yes. What was happening was my values. My values came from my education and my experience. And I'm the leader of my company. And so our values were a reflection of mine imposed upon our team and then translated through the group filter. It's still that. But what I've come to realize through allowing people into my life, like you guys, like the mentors who I hire and pay to do it, like the guests who come on the podcast, you know, as I get older, I've started to really take conversations with my parents as hyper valuable instead of like, oh, you guys don't know anything. You like it's a different age. Like, no, no, no, no, no. I see it now. And I was wrong for 38 years. And when you start to allow those

influences really permeate and help you make decisions, values have to shift and that's okay. And that's where I found myself doing that. And then the way I like to exercise, I can't, I used to work out twice a day, an hour and a half in the morning, like 45 minutes to an hour. And I was like, all I want to do is a four X body weight deadlift and a two and a half to three X body weight back squat. And then I'll be a happy guy. Like, what are we, what are we talking about?

Yeah. I have no idea what I squat now. No, I do. Hold this 255 right here for five. That's why it's there. And that's why it's there. Are you like Rob Orlando walking out of your bedroom in the morning and just hitting the rep to make sure you still got it? Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be

guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program.

And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me

on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. That is, um, that's actually not too far off. Maybe not like first thing in the morning, but I'd like to know just how strong I am, completely cold, because the idea of warming up, who's got time for all that? Nobody. Yeah, I got kids in daycare creeping on me at 5 p.m. and I don't have the time to do all that mess. But yeah, it's hard. It's really challenging because you start asking different questions as you progress in the wisdom you possess and the experiences. And you have to like the game that you were playing when you're the 38 and 40, uh, and realizing like how long of a ramp can you build for the rest of your life?

And really that comes down to like, uh, health and staying injury free. And those are like really, uh, and I'd love to kind of understand, uh, where your brain is on. You've obviously had so many different versions of strength and conditioning in your life. What is like the framework that you view strength and conditioning through now? Yeah, I got that. How do you build systems around that? So what I've come to land on as a result of one of my neighbors dropping it in my lap,

or just handed it to me. I'm like, oh, I want to be my marketing lead. And he's not a marketer, right? He's like a financial guy. He says to me, I want to work with you guys because I just want a practical level of strength. I don't want to be super strong. I don't want to have endurance to run marathons. I just want a practical level of endurance so that my kids get tired after I do. And I was like, holy shit, like that's, that's it. It's not functional fitness for me anymore. the term functional fitness is understood in some way, shape, or form as an expression of power, as doing big compound exercises and more and more and more and more. And when I give thought to what that means, it's, well, when does a functional exercise become dysfunctional? Well, to me, when it's no longer practically applicable to your life, right? Like you're squatting 255 in the morning.

Great. How does your life get better if that goes up to 300 pounds? If I can just keep muscle mass for the rest of my life, that's literally the sole focus. But what happens in functional fitness, be it CrossFit, F45, arm steer, it doesn't matter, is the pursuit of more for the sake of more and under the gu of more for the sake of more and under the

guise of reserve. Because as I get older and I decay naturally with age, I'll be able to decay back to a baseline. Well, sure. But there are people who are living all over the world who've never even seen a barbell who have no problem getting on and off the floor. So how much do you really need to be able to squat? And so we started thinking about it as practical fitness instead of functional fitness.

And in practical fitness, we have some pillars, right? So the first pillar is we live our lives with a spine in motion, not a spine that's static. So let's prioritize exercises that include a spine in motion. The next is we live our lives with compound exercise, like compound movements. Very rarely are we doing things in an isolated fashion. So we're going to prioritize compound exercise over isolated exercise. The next thing is that very rarely do we see that exercise in the real world is done bilaterally symmetrically?

So we prioritize unilateral or asymmetric loading over bilateral and symmetric loading. And finally, almost anything that we do in the real world that happens in a vertical plane also includes a forward dynamic. So it doesn't finish, you know, arms behind ears, hands over shoulders, over hips, over feet. It finishes in a forward way. You're putting something on a shelf, it's forward. You're pushing somebody off your body, it's forward. You're putting your kid up on a branch in a tree, it's forward. So we prioritize including a forward dynamic in any kind of vertical pressing. And those are really the, or not even just pressing, jumping, walking, running, it's all forward. So there's a forward dynamic that's prioritized in everything that we do. Yeah. You know, from, from my perspective, that was actually the most

unique thing out of, out of all those things. I kind of expected all the other stuff that like, that was intuitive to me at some level, but the, the forward dynamic that you just mentioned seemed to me, seemed to me to be the most unique. From a practical standpoint, what are some examples of how you guys do that with clients in the gym? I should also specify it's not necessarily forward, it's directional. So a pull is not forward, but we're moving backwards with something. We're not looking to just pick something up. A really good way that I can exemplify us doing something like that in the gym would be that we would prioritize a landmine press over a dumbbell press overhead. We would prioritize a sandbag deadlift over a conventional deadlift. We're looking to do things that require you to put your spine in a position that you would have to get into in the real world to do the same thing. And then we want you to do it at a volume, a load and a frequency that is greater than what you should anticipate doing it

within the real world so that you genuinely have reserve in the things that you want to do, not so that you abstractly have reserve in things that might carry over to the things that you want to do, not so that you abstractly have reserve in things that might carry over to the things that you want to do. You know, go ahead. Oh, you can finish your example there. I was, I was also curious about the spine and motion piece, like some more examples there. I got you. So the first thing is they're kind of one in the same, so I can explain them at the same time. When we built out the flagship location, we built it out in two different areas, the personal training area and what we call the autonomous area. So the personal training area is when everything that you're doing is being guided by a professional every single step of the way.

And that they get an educational content drip in their email. They have a log into a dashboard, but real. They're getting that while they're getting personal training. That's less important to answer your question than what I'm going to say next. In the autonomous section, everybody has their equipment at their station. And the equipment that's every station is an ANCOR cable column, a landmine, a barbell that's stored in the landmine, one set of each weight of bumper plates. So a set of tens, a set of 25s, a set of 45s. And that's shared like two and a half pounds up to 50. And the idea of that is if that's the equipment that we have,

we also have a shared station where we have heavier sandbags, lighter sandbags, bands and kettlebells and things of that nature, boxes. But that equipment essentially dictates the kind of exercise that you're going to be doing. So the forward movement and the spine in motion movement, moving a landmine dynamically, but including the feet, the hips, the shoulder, the torso, and a landmine press is different than standing with your torso parallel to the wall and just statically pressing the landmine. We're talking about back foot starts parallel to the wall, front foot starts perpendicular. You move the landmine as a result of throwing your hip forward, pivoting on that back foot and expressing that force through your arm.

The same thing is going to happen with the cable. Those are ways that we're doing things that are moving forward requiring a spine in motion as compared to vertical or requiring a spine stay as static as possible yeah where do you kind of shop putting it in a way is the way to think about that yes yeah i would love to know where do you see kind of like the standard bilateral back squat fitting into a long-term health longevity kind of program like this? And I'm going to preface this by, yeah. So just to add a little context, because I'd love for you to go deeper into that. The more I play the game, that barbell behind me is kind of like this cool baseline that I check in with, but never testing myself.

The testing myself does not bring any return outside of creaky knees over time. And I've also learned that because, as we mentioned at the beginning, we were stuck in our house, which means we were stuck in a garage gym, which means we're stuck with a barbell. I go to Lifetime Fitness all the time now. And I go and do leg extensions and leg curls. And I miss cable so much. There's so much incredible value in all those machines. But you have to break free of like an older mindset of like, well, we have to do this thing because it says do this thing on the internet. And this is the

most important thing. Everyone back squats. Yeah. So I'm glad you asked that question because when I answer this question in text format, it gets misconstrued as I believe back squats are dangerous. You're about to be on, you're about to be a Twitter rant for somebody by saying that. And look, that's fine. Look, clip it out. Back squats are dangerous. Clip it out. Make me viral.

Send me viral. Right. Back squats are inherently safe. It's back squats pursued to an excessive performance standard like anything else. Totally. Becomes unsafe by the nature of performing the margins of our capacity, right? So I want to set the record straight with that first.

The second thing is I don't believe the back squat is irreplaceable, right? So the back squat is a replaceable exercise through a myriad of other things that we can do. What the back squat does that is very difficult to replace is going to be the load, the neuroendocrine response that you can generate, and the comprehensive requirement for compensatory patterns of everything to stay stable while some things move. That's something the back squat does extremely well. And so to me, that's where it fits is when somebody needs that kind of stimulus. But that begs the question of who needs that kind of stimulus. And one of the things that I often get criticism from, and I like it because this is a conversation I like having,

is are you saying that a back squat is bad? No, I'm saying that a back squat is replaceable. And that if the only way that you know how to do that thing is with a back squat, then you're lacking diversification of knowledge and experience in your coaching. That's it. Yeah. Probably. And a lot of that, a lot of that stuff comes in just through experience. I'd love to know how you're kind of working on the trainer side of things and getting that, like, like speeding that learning

curve up because I'm, I'll, I'll, I'll just say I'm the dumbest person in the room. And I usually learn because there's some sort of injury that happened from what I was doing over the last six months, eight months, some sort of creaky joint. Obviously, I've gotten better at this. curve up with all of the options that are available to a coaching staff so that they have the tools that they need to be able to help people in many different capacities? The first answer to that would be specialization. So the idea that the generalist is the most valuable person in the room, I believe is flawed, fatally flawed. If you found out that you have to have a valve replaced on your heart, do you want the general surgeon or do you want the heart surgeon? Yeah. My dad had that happen an emergency way in August. And you want the guy that's going to walk in the room and go, just to let you know, guys, this is a life-threatening decision.

And he looks you in the eye and you go, oh, you're the only person in this whole freaking country that I want telling me this right now. Yes. Yes. I know what that actually feels like. And if someone said- You're the guy. If someone said, that guy's a hundred grand, but we got this guy who has done this before.

On the contrary side of that, he was in a general hospital for three weeks and nearly died. Right. And the only way that he lived was to go see that specialist. So everybody has a unique set of value, right? The generalist, to me, has more value to the healthy population than the specialist. And by healthy population, I mean able-bodied people who can walk into a gym today and get results from any methodology that they choose. The person who gets great results at Zumba also would have gotten great results at CrossFit. They also would

have gotten great results at Orange Theory or F45. And the thing is, all of those brands, all of those models are selling the same thing. They're all selling health and happiness to people who already have some semblance of health. And that's arguable because you would say, oh, no, they don't. And I would say, well, I can ask you a bunch of questions that would identify that you actually don't want the diabetic with cardiovascular disease, hip replacement, and a little bit of emotional issues going on to walk into your gym 20 times this week. But you want people who are generally able to follow instruction or a group model. But for that person, the generalist is not valuable. They have almost no value at all. And so to me, the way that we

speed the progression of a coach is to acknowledge specialization. If you're working with active life, the likelihood of you being someone who ends up in a college strength and conditioning room as the lead coach is low. We're not the people to get you there. If you want to help CrossFit athletes make it to the games, you're not coming to us. The likelihood is very low that we're not the people to get you there. If you want to help CrossFit athletes make it to the games, you're not coming to us. The likelihood is very low that we're going to be able to help you do that. So by being able to clearly articulate to the people who come our way that your responsibility through this education and mentorship is to be an off-ramp for people who want out of the general fitness industry, who want out of the healthcare industry as it exists, who are just pursuing enough fitness

to live. I listened to a team member of ours yesterday talk to an extremely well-known client who nobody knows is a client because it's not anyone's business. Everybody would know this person's name. And I listened to our staff member talk to this person about their relationship with their girlfriend and how their relationship with their girlfriend could be part of the reasons why they're experiencing some pain. Because the stress that they're experiencing from that, the lack of sleep, the eating that comes when you're just in a bad mood about it, the negative karma that you're feeling in the room can lead to joint pain.

That's what we do for people. And that's not happening in a general fitness environment. Yeah. What does your intake look like? Someone brand new, like whoever that person is comes in, what does the intake look like? First thing is they're asking for a discovery call. So the discovery call is we're identifying, do we believe we can help? And believe it or not, we've sent more people to other gyms in our town than we've said, yes, we think we can help. Because early on, everyone wants to know what's this new place? What are you guys doing doing it looks beautiful in there you spent sean's life savings to build this out and put the house for a good job you've lost weight because you can't buy food so um you know we get a lot of people who are asking about what we do and we're telling most of those people you should go to these other places in

town for these reasons. The discovery call is we think we should help you. That's the determination that we're making. Those calls are typically 60 to 90 minutes long. Then they come in for a consultation in person. The in-person consultation is designed to identify how would we need to help you? If we were going to get you the results that you're looking for, how would we need to help you? If we were going to get you the results that you're looking for, how would we need to do it? And the awning in front of our building says, education, exercise, mentorship. And it says it in that order. We are looking for clients who value education so that they can reach a point in their life when we become a want instead of a need, right? We don't, we want to avoid being someone they need to have forever.

So if they choose to be with us afterwards, we've done something profound. And we teach our clients, the coaches we work with and the gyms we work with, to do this for their clients remotely. We teach them remotely. They do it in person oftentimes. In the consultation, we're taking them through a different interview. In that consultation, it's talking to you about how this feels, talking to you about how that feels. Why is this important to you? Why is that important to you?

We take them through a very brief movement screen. Maybe we test some balance on a single leg. We're looking for all of these kinds of things, right? All of the basic knowledge that we can get about a person. And then we're giving them a prescription. So we're saying, based on the way you answered these questions, we were filling out this form the whole time. And each of your answers correlates to a value. And that value represents a number of personal training sessions and education curriculum that we believe is appropriate for you based on how you answered these questions to achieve the success that you're looking for. The formula tells us that

you're going to need 84 personal training sessions. I made that number up, obviously. Yeah. Good package. Most people are ending up somewhere between 70 and 90. So you're going to need this many training sessions, but we're not going to tell, we're not going to sell you all of them. We're going to sell you 12 because we want to continue to earn your business along the way. And what you need to know is that we're going to start off doing foundational stuff that is like taking water from 32 degrees Fahrenheit to 50 degrees Fahrenheit in a pot. Everything looks exactly the same, but the temperature is changing. And it's going to look that way until it gets to 211. And then at 212, it will start to change.

But you're committing mentally to the whole thing, provided that we continue to outperform the value that you're paying to us. They come in and now they're a client. When you're a client, you're not working with one staff member. You're working with our team, both in person and online. The education modules that they're going through are meant to teach them why did the injury you're experiencing happen? How do you know if it's getting better or getting worse? What is RPE, for example? How do you talk to your spouse about this? All of that kind of stuff. Because we all know that if you go home and the person you're talking to is like, you're spending $150 on a personal training session. You're doing it three times a week. Are you fucking crazy?

That person's going to stop coming. Especially if the spouse is like, you told me you joined there because you wanted to lose a hundred pounds. You've been there for six weeks. You haven't lost any weight. Well, they need to be able to explain to that person along the way that the plan was never to lose weight in the first six weeks. So we're giving them all of that education. It includes quizzes to make sure that they understand it and can apply it um and they work with a different team member every six sessions so you get so anders would be your primary you work with anders five times in a row then doug comes and performs your sixth then anders and doug discuss you and then anders takes over for the next five and then then on your sixth, you work with

me. And then I discuss with Anders what I learned. And then you redesign and it keeps on iterating for people. Gotcha. So is that the same curriculum for everyone then? Or is that modular in a way where you can say this client really should start with module five through seven or whatever it is? It's modular so that everyone's getting what they need when they need it. It's, it's, it's, um, the coaches on staff are making the decisions about what education is most pertinent to this person right now. And then they're assigning it in a specific order to each person. And when you graduate the program,

when you graduate the personal training part, we move you to the ascend part, which is basically you're, you're ascending out of needing somebody, but you're not ready to write or edit your own program yet, or even follow a program you found online because you don't know how to edit it. So what's going to happen now is you're going to work out in the room at a time certain, like a class, following your own program. And we're going to have a professional coach in the room circulating to make sure that what you're doing is what you're supposed to be doing that day. Everyone has a tablet. The tablet links to a TV. The TV projects what they're supposed to be doing so that the professional working in the room can see that's supposed to be a hip airplane. It looks like an RDL. Let's go

make a change to it. So they get the peace of mind that they're going to do things properly until they no longer need that. And the way we see it is you're effectively done when you can pull any program you want from the internet and say, I should change this to this and I should change that to that for my needs. Now, if you're still coming to us, we've done something profound. You just went and opened a gym as a beta gym to prove this concept. How do we scale this out to wherever the North star is for you guys? Yeah. I don't know that we do. I think so. So, so

we scaled the idea. We don't necessarily scale the model. And so the way that we scale the idea is first and foremost, we have, we're working right now with about, I think 55 really great gym clients, all of whom are somewhere between just having group fitness and some personal training to doing exactly what we're doing. 96%. So our goal is to help all of them get to a hundred percent. And the way that we do that ultimately is by partnering with them, by removing them from being clients to having them come on and partner with us at Active Life and say, okay, this is going to now become an active life. We're going to move you out of the warehouse and put you in a retail location and we're going to fund it. And you're

going to help us continue to develop this until you hit a certain level of KPI that allows you, the gym owner, to leave this location, maintain your income, help us build another location and profit share with us on that one too. It's the true exit plan for gym owners who wants to deliver to this clientele. You don't have to worry about selling your gym to the coach who expresses the most interest, but can't afford it. And if you don't sell to them, they leave and your whole business is gone when you're 45, 50 years old. And so we're truly working to create a financial exit strategy for all of our clients in which we become the entity that's supporting them long-term. The other thing, the way that we really, truly scale it, because doing that is not going to major corporations and hospital systems and obviating for them,

the value and the need of an educated professional who's gone through our ALP curriculum and even some of our specialties and basically becoming a head hunting company who mentors the person we installed and saying, how many do you need? 150. Great. We're going to now make our education free to the marketplace. Zero dollars to come on board the education. We're going to charge you, the employer, for everybody who we place in your business. We're going to charge you 10% to 20% of their starting salary. We're going to give you a floor for what their starting salary needs to be. And you're going to pay us that percent for, let's say, three years, four years. And the

number goes down each year until it gets to a very, very low baseline of something like $500 a month, $400 a month for us to continue to mentor the staff who you've hired through us. Now what happens is corporate wellness companies who aren't helping Lucy, who's 350 pounds in the accounting department, who they can't walk over to because they're not allowed to know that she's unhealthy. And she's not participating in their corporate wellness. They have an active life professional on staff. They have our content being dripped out to their entire employment base. And they're actually starting to affect the least healthy people in their company to live more fulfilling lifestyles, reduce their healthcare costs. And we have the person there

to give them the fitness when the time is appropriate. Yeah. Are you guys in companies right now doing corporate wellness? Not yet because- Corporate wellness is a wild one. Well, we're- We've done that for like a year. So I don't think anyone's really doing corporate wellness. And that one. Well, we're- We've done that for like a year. So I don't think anyone's really doing corporate wellness. And that's why we're not- It's hard. Well-

It's hard. I think most companies are doing corporate fitness. They look at fitness and nutrition and they say, this is what people need. Here's an app so everybody can access it. And then the top three to 5% of the healthiest people in the company are like, this is the stuff I value. And now it's even more accessible. So they use it. The part that I found to be so hard was realize I had like the realization in there somewhere that

I was basically a one hour lecture. So people didn't have to go to work. Right. And that's, so we're, we are actively developing corporate wellness and we have some massive partners who either everything is going to fall through and it will have been a ton of time spent learning. I guess that we're learning instead of failing and wasted. Or we're going to categorically change the face of what corporate wellness looks like. That's awesome. Yeah, that was, I did that. I just had that like on my fifth hour of lecturing and I just went, everyone's here just to get up from their desk and just come do something different for their eight hour day. I was like, I don't know if this one's for me. You brought up the active life professional, which I think one I'd love if you dug into that a little bit more. But specifically, the course that you guys have, every time I've thought about you and active life, I've always thought that the core product that you guys do extremely well is the education system around getting coaches to improve their skill set to be able to help more people. And those courses, I've met many people. I've talked to you countless times about them.

I've always thought that education system is something that most coaches should go through because it gives them the tools to be able to assess a client before they sign up and have a real conversation about how they can help them. Yeah, go ahead. We have a slight disagreement there. I don't think most coaches should come through it. I think the coaches who have already decided that they want to serve the audience who's underserved today, the one I described earlier, who want the off-ramp, they want a professional to guide them through their life. They should all do it. And the others, I'll get to that in a second. But it's a 13-month long core curriculum. We built our own 800-page textbook with 996 test questions, two graded assignments a month, a meeting with your assigned one-on-one mentor every month,

every single day, every day. There are open office hours when you can speak to a staff member of hours about something that you're struggling with. And each day there are multiple of those meetings to include different subjects. So we have a subject matter expert on your finances, your pricing, your assessment, your program design, your language. We have a specialist on our staff who's going to help you with that in real time. You're not on a screen, a hundred people to one. You're on a screen, maybe five to one, six to one, because it's offered so frequently that you don't need to come every time. It would be egregious to do so. We tell people the education

takes two to three hours a week dedicated for the 13 months for you to do the minimum and get through it. It takes 15 to 20 hours a week to do it really well. And the 15 to 20 hours is you actually applying it in your training practice and learning from the application and bringing that experience back to your assigned mentor and asking questions about what you experienced. Now you get a phone call, a video call of that one-on-one once a month. But like I said, you have your everyday office hours available and your mentors available to you via Slack, not 24-7, but you can write a message anytime you want. They're going to get back to it. And you're in a Slack community with over 360 other coaches going through the same thing that you are. Some are further along, some are further back. So they're going to help you too. Now to speak to the

audience who shouldn't do this. One of the things that's always kind of rubbed me the wrong way is the idea that, you know, give away your brands. You would say our best stuff is out there for free, right? You don't need to pay us to teach you how to do our stuff, but pay us to teach you how to do our stuff. That always, it never felt right for me because we were one of those brands. We are one of those brands. There's nothing that we teach our clients that we haven't put out public forum for. So I started to evaluate why are people, why is it overwhelming for people? And it's because we put out an overwhelming amount of content. So what we're doing, and it should be released by April, is we're building a platform to better educate the coach, the gym owner, and the individual than most of the companies who are charging them for mentorship right now get, and we're doing it for free. And the idea is when

you land on that platform, you should be able to build a business. You should be able to assess a client. You should be able to modify more effectively and more intentionally. If someone's still on the row or six months later to get knee pain when they run, your modification ain't working. So what is a better modification that you could be doing for them all of that including what you should charge in your local market how to start a sales conversation how to overcome sales objections in an ethical way all of this is being built into a platform that we are going to give away for free codified so that people can go through it as if they were a student. Because we believe that the generalist does need these skills, but the generalist does not need to pay active life $15,000 for them. That's not what our core mission is around. But if we can elevate the

entire industry so that people are out of scarcity because they're making enough money, helping people in a meaningful way, people will stop pretending that they do what ALPs do. Yeah. There's a level of maturity that I want to talk about when it comes to the coaches that you're coaching. And that my guess is that there's not many like 25 year old trainers that you work with. Um, because there's a level of, uh, bravado and ego that surrounds a 25 year old. What makes them feel like they're going to go like, I can only coach pro athletes or I have to coach the most intense, coolest people in the world. Why would I spend my time with this underserved market that isn't flashy? When are people finding you in their coaching careers?

Because if I was to just make an educated guess, it's somewhere in the 35-year-old to 45-year-old that's like, if I'm going to do this forever, I'm no longer connecting with badass athlete, whoever, yet I love actually helping people. You're almost exactly right. It's a little bit younger than 35 at the bottom end. And it's a little bit older than, I mean, we had a 55 year old nurse practitioner who's changing her career and role last week. So we, you're right. It's the big thing is it's an, a mindset around longevity more than a mindset around performance. Yeah. And generally speaking, people who've been through it have that mindset more than people who are going through it. Yeah. And the difference is I can speak to my own example. I used to climb the mountain for the sake of getting to the top.

It was like, when I get to the top, when Rich Froning is my client, when I have professional baseball players, Olympic medalists as my client, I will be at the top and everybody will be forced to recognize my greatness. That was my ego. Only to find out dot, dot, dot. Yeah. There is no top. Yeah. And no one cares. No was my ego. Only to find out dot, dot, dot. Yeah. There is no top. Yeah. No, I got to the point of working with those kinds of people. And I realized that the top is a direction, not a destination, right? It's like, oh, you're, you're climbing in a day in a direction. Do you want to continue working with professional athletes your whole life, Sean? No. Well then that's not the top for you, right? You're going East. You were meant to go North. So all that to say, we hired a,

for our flagship, we got applications from coaches from around the world and the US. We ended up hiring one of our coaches who was 25 years old. And he has, when he started very big bravado around him and what he learned quickly. And we did a podcast on the active life podcast about this, but she was like, Oh, this is, this is the pros. Like I'm not the best anymore. I might be the worst on this staff. I definitely have the most to learn on this staff. And I think he learned that mostly because we have formal education that we want our staff to deliver to our clients.

And it's through whiteboard lectures and conversational stuff. And one of the simple ones is what is pain? And how do we know if you're experiencing pain or irritation? How do we know if you should keep going or if you should stop? He had a client coming in on a Wednesday and on Monday, it had been a week and a half of him practicing the talk. And I was like, you're not there, man. Like, we're going to have to have somebody else deliver this talk to your client. He's like, no, I can do it. And he practiced for six hours that Monday, all day on Tuesday. And then on Wednesday, he came in with our team lead, gave the presentation and got a passing score of like 75%. And we allowed him to give the lecture to the client. And then we were like, that's the worst you're ever going to give it.

Right? Yeah. You got to go practice. But one lecture, right? They have like 18 of those to present. And he was like, Jesus, this is just so much harder than I thought it was going to. Yeah. When you are kind of looking at this underserved market, how, here's like the kind of like the ends of the spectrum that I look at. And I thought of this very recently because I got stuck in an airport for way too long. And you walk around an airport long enough and you go, how in the hell would I get these

people, the mass, to start moving in the direction? And the brainstorm, as I'm pushing a stroller through BWI for four straight hours, goes from like, well, maybe I should just have them eat more protein. And I was like, they're not going to eat chicken breasts. Like that's not, they're not consistently going to be able to eat chicken breasts in the manner that I want them to. And it was like, maybe they need to build muscle and start lifting. They're not going to be able to consistently like, how do you start to look at this underserved population? Because what I actually came to was my advice at the very bottom level would be just start sitting on the floor more often. So you have to force yourself to get off the floor without the support of a chair. And if you did that, you would probably get stronger and more flexible.

And I could scale that to an entire airport. That's what happens when you get stuck at PWI for four hours, by the way, don't recommend it. But you're, you're not in a, in a game really of like, how do you continue to make the best, the best in the world, or even better than the best in the world? The number one in the, that's, that's like a, the top of the pyramid, your game starts to go how far down to the bottom can we get and then begin to bring those people up? Yeah. So we start in the middle, right? And by the middle, I mean, we start with the people who are already in gyms who are uninspired by what they're getting out of it from an experience and results perspective. Those people inspire the group who is yet to join the gym because they're seeing that their friend who joined is uninspired by the results that they're getting. Why would I start? And our goal is to keep working down, right? The answer to your question is that fitness won't do it. Nutrition won't do it.

What needs to, we need to be collaborative with other industries and we need to identify the reason why that person got that way in the first place. And so if we take an example of Lucy, who I was talking about in accounting at the corporate wellness place before, why is Lucy 350 pounds and feeling like the fitness and the nutrition device you're giving her is not useful. Well, it's because, and I'm not, to be clear when I say this, I'm describing a person, not all people who are overweight. Okay. It's because she's stressed about the money that she's making in her job. That's not getting the ends to meet. And she's got something else that she does at nighttime and she's tired. The next thing is when she's tired and she gets home, she's very likely, if she's in a relationship with somebody who has similar problems to her, they're also overweight. They're also sedentary.

They're also financially stressed. They're also mentally stressed. So their relationship isn't going to be exceptional. And so when one of them starts exercising, the other one is actually going to like a crab in the bucket, pull them back down. What are you doing trying to, you think you're better, right? So their relationship needs to be repaired. And when you say to somebody like that, hey, you're overweight, you're struggling financially, you're not happy. Do you realize how beneficial just eating a piece of steak instead of a cookie

would be for you or eating a piece of broccoli instead of a cake would be for you? They're like, fuck you. You don't understand me. And they're right. So where it needs to start is how do you make whatever the number one linchpin problem that you have go away to the point that it's not consuming you day in and day out. Now you can start thinking about the next level up in your life. If you are struggling financially to the point that you were working two jobs and being stressed out by every dollar you spent, we got to solve your mindset around money and how you're actually saving, using, and spending it. Once that's solved, it's, hey, do you feel a little bit of relief? Yes. Great. How are you and your husband talking to each other?

You guys getting along well? No. Are you happy with yourself? Not yet. Great. Well, let's make you happy with yourself first so that you can now start to have a relationship with your husband. Yeah. A fitness coach ain't doing that. Now, you're good. Great. Your mental health is good. You're now going to start going for walks and eating. Like you're just naturally going to do it because you feel like you deserve it. You have the dignity of, I deserve to take care of myself.

Now let's talk about how you communicate with your significant other so that they can have the same experience that you do. Or let's help them at the same time. Then you get to the point where it's like, hey, we feel safe financially, not thriving, not free, safe. We feel like we deserve to live fulfilled lives. We love each other. How can we do things that are more progressive for our health? I'm glad you asked. How many steps do you take in more progressive for our health? I'm glad you asked

how many steps you take in per day. Let's up that to 700. Yeah. That's it. Like it starts so low on the pole. And when we, when we, I, I, I was talking to Dr. Gabrielle Lyon yesterday, actually about a Dr. Mark Hyman. She's rad. Love her. Mark Hyman is a great doctor as well. And he made a post talking about the benefits of exercise. And he said, one thing in it that to me was, it stuck out as the red herring of why we're failing. And I have the utmost respect for him. What he said was it comes with no risks and no side effects. And that's to misunderstand the perspective of the person who's not doing it, which is the person he's speaking to in the post. The risk is what if it doesn't work? The risk is what if I have to change my relationships because I start valuing myself and my health? The side effect is what if

I get hurt and then I'm further back than I am right now. And when we in the fitness industry and the healthcare industry minimize those realities, the people who most need our help have a hard time believing that we can understand them, which means they have a hard time believing that they can trust us, which means that they have a hard time believing that we know how to help them. And that we need to go all the way back to the beginning.

That's a long way sometimes. This is one of those things where when I see people talk about it, like it's really simple, it reminds me of presidents who suggest they're going to change the country in four years when the problems are generation. Isn't that a weird thing? Every single entrepreneur in the world has probably thought, wait a second, four years four years what are we gonna do in four years yeah right we need to get back to eating food like i barely even figured out what we do in four years right right i have so many things to fix um i always appreciate you sir Where can people learn more about everything you have going on at Ecolab? Easiest way is to go to at Dr. Sean Pastucho on Instagram and everything is linked from there.

Beautiful. Doug Larson. You bet. On Instagram at Douglas C. Larson. Sean, dude, been too long. As we said at the beginning of the show, it's been, what, three, four years now at this point. But every time we talk, it seems like you are very dialed in your execution of your very big ideas. And I always find that to be very impressive.

So good to see you again. And, and I'm super happy for you in this new adventure you're on. Well, I appreciate that. You guys have always been an inspiration to me since before I came on the show, the first time at the CrossFit games to all the times since and yeah you know it's it's there's a responsibility that i feel having friends like you guys to dial in the execution because otherwise you bring me on your show and you look bad or we ask questions you get any in time i haven't thought about that one well then that would be

okay it doesn't go well if you ask me a question i hadn't thought about that one. That would be okay. It doesn't go well. Well, if you ask me a question I haven't thought about, I would be happy to say I haven't thought about it and bring it up as something we need to think about. Yeah. I appreciate it, man. It's fantastic. We're going to do this thing in real life here soon. I'm looking forward to it.

I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. You can make sure you can also head over to Rapid Health Report on Instagram. And then as always, if you would like to see Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner do a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis, you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.