WARRIOR MINDSET

NEVER GIVE UP.   NEVER QUIT.   KAIZEN.

You are who you surround yourself with

You are who you surround yourself with

You know the saying: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room…” This is true on many levels, not just with intelligence.

The startup scene likes to produce this type of quote when it wants to instill good leadership qualities. However I have found that this isn’t just about leadership of others, but just as important, if not more so, for personal growth and maturity.

Make sure you are surrounding yourself with the types of people who make you want to elevate your own personal growth just because you are around them. I’m not just talking about the people in your life that you go to for advice, those are necessary as well. But the types of people that you want to emulate in whatever area it is that you respect about them. This extends to your circle of friends as well. How many of us have a ‘friend’ that holds us back because of their own insecurity or jealously… it’s common so don’t feel bad for your success even if your ‘friend’ can’t get excited for you.

Think of these people as personal areas of life mentors. It doesn’t have to be official and you can do this from afar as well. The reality is modeling your behavior around people that are where you want to get to is paramount to you actually getting there.

I surround myself with those who inspire me and elevate me and that I want to be around. The more i’m around them, the more I want and the more I can give to the people who are around me.

Dennys Lozada

So how can you tell if a person is genuine in what you admire. Well, the reality is that most of us have our flaws. No one is perfect and you should never meet your heroes… But you can sure tell a few things about a person by how they react to things. Like your success or the success of others. A true friend or mentor will genuinely be excited for you when you win. But someone who is insecure or not really a ‘winner’ will ride on your accomplishments and never really add anything to your effort. In fact they will tear it down with snarky comments, jokes or maybe even disengaging from you while you are doing your thing.

The thing is, if you’re busy working on your goals or being a better version of yourself, you won’t have the time to spare to give in to negativity especially negativity directed towards others. These types of people are spending their energy on their own growth and learning as much as they can from their environment and those around them. Including you…

Heck if you’re one of these negative people you may find yourself being dropped from your own friend-circle. It’s like T-Pain says:

This is a real thing. There is even a subreddit dedicated to this subject, know as “AITA”.

Being an asshole aside, if you find that you have a ‘friend’ who is marginally supportive of you, or if this is you. Then you’ve got some work to do on yourself. Don’t despair, you’re not too far gone, I promise. You probably just need to start with some self-awareness.

A great place to start is to look at those you surround yourself with on a daily basis. If you find yourself is daily sit-down bitch sessions or aren’t talking about the good things happening in your lives then you may just be associating with someone who can’t help you get to that next level just by being around them. Find people who make you feel good and those that can help you begin to see things in a positive light, or simply those that will hold you accountable to your emotions and outlook. It can be uncomfortable at first, but if you are truly looking to walk the warrior’s path then you won’t mind getting a little better.

WHF Podcast 4: Dr. Tom Stetson of Columbia Family Chiropractic

If audio only is more your thing, here you go:

[spreaker type=player resource=”episode_id=19660352″ width=”100%” height=”200px” theme=”light” playlist=”false” playlist-continuous=”false” autoplay=”false” live-autoplay=”false” chapters-image=”true” episode-image-position=”right” hide-logo=”false” hide-likes=”false” hide-comments=”false” hide-sharing=”false” hide-download=”true”]

Dr. Tom Stetson

A deep discussion on health and wellness with the Dr.

Dr. Tom Stetson graduated from one of the most well-respected health and wellness doctorate programs in the country, Palmer College of Chiropractic, with high honors. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh, where he majored in Chemistry. He is the owner and found of Columbia Family Chiropractic that he and his wife started in 2010. Dr. Tom focuses on functional, natural medicine.

Dr. Stetson has invested over $300,000 on  advanced training in spinal correctiontoxicityexercise and nutrition from some of the largest and most respected health clinics in the country. He spends countless hours training and traveling all over the world to get the most cutting edge information on health to bring to his patient base in Columbia, SC. Due to his training and expertise, he was chosen to be a member of the Wellness Advisory Council and has traveled the world working with athletes of all ages. He has worked with six World and USA Championship teams including USA Wrestling, Judo, Weightlifting and Martial Arts. As a team chiropractor he traveled to the 2012 Olympic Games held in London, England. In his early years he hosted the popular radio show, “Maximize Your Health” on WIS 1320AM in Columbia, SC.

Dr. Stetson is a sought after speaker in the community. He is regularly asked to speak at churches, corporations, community groups, and the military. His goal is to see the city of Columbia, SC become the healthiest city on the planet.

Find him on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/thomasstetson
Columbia Family Chiropractic: https://www.facebook.com/CFChiropractic/

Self-Made Summit 2019

Self-Made Summit 2019

Self-Made

Name Tag… WTF?!

I am co-owner of a gym; Workhorse Fitness, located in Columbia, SC. I had a great opportunity to attend the Self-Made Summit in Charlotte, NC this past weekend. One of my other businesses that I founded and have run for almost 10 years is an event production company. We created and produced a multitude of events, meetups, conferences and workshops; http://convergese.com/, http://frontenddesignconference.com/ & https://bdconf.com/ to name just a couple. Different industry than ‘gyms’ and ‘fitness’ but the event production aspect is related. 🙂

The Self-Made Summit was a very well run, very content intensive two days. I first thought that it was a little light on speakers but after the first day I realized that Stuart Brauer, the founder of the event was spot on and hit all the right notes for the subject matter. Now, we already work with Stuart via his WTF Gym Talk consulting services and have already gotten a ton of great insight and help from him in the micro-gym world of business. But this Summit was spot on and has us charged. There’s nothing quite like gathering like-minds together to share knowledge, frustrations, fears, wins/losses together in as honest a setting as it can get like this.

There are still plenty of things rolling around my skull right now. Here are some notes I took during the two days. This is not exhaustive nor is it meant to be. Consider this just shorthand highlights through the filer of my brain:

Day 1

Brandon Cullen, co-founder of MADabolic, opened up the day/event with his backstory and overview of how they are currently working on their expansion into Franchising. A lot of his insight is into the business side of franchising and there is just a ton of intel there to comb through. That said the current status of where I am in almost all of my businesses, is not, relatable to franchising or opening up multiple locations. Regardless of how good that insight was I found myself really excited by the straight up trainer talk he was dishing out in the first half of his talk. His background as a pro-athlete and hearing that he has experience in training as a fighter and within the fighting world peeked my interest a great deal:

Some Takeaways:
Intensity in training is a goal.
Strength is relative.
“Gameday” is not how you should train every day. Training should prepare you for Gameday.
They program in Quarterly Cycles (actually all 12 months at once) then program the specific WODs weekly or bi-weekly.

John Briggs of Incite Tax wasn’t really a speaker per-se but had some pretty insightful thoughts he shared with us. He is also a very cool human. He’s coming out with a book soon too: https://profitfirstformicrogyms.com

Steve Pinkerton founder of Vitality Fitness spoke on evolving his CrossFit affiliate into a more all-encompassing ‘overall’ fitness centric foundation. EvoFIT he calls it and he runs every new member through it, then graduating those members up into more standard CrossFIT as desired/capable. The most notable thing that stuck with me was when he said not to just call it a ‘bootcamp’ and slap it onto whatever you have going on. To treat it with the same respect and approach as your main program and actually sink full effort into it and it will work.

We sat in on a great table discussion with Brandon as the last session of the day and were able to ask him and his team direct questions and get into some more detail with him.

Joe Tebaldi founder of Flexx was the last ‘speaker’ of the day. He really blew us away with his approach and tactical mindfulness for sales. He is probably the most quotable speaker of the entire event too.

Communication. Validation. Relevance.
This is the basic set of ideas he bounces all banding, messaging and sales off of. And boy is that relevant to where we are within our business’ process.

Quality depends on the customer’s frame of reference.
In this vein we need a 1 sentence, 3-4 sentence then a 5 minute sales pitch on our business. This is pretty common branding 101 stuff and i’ve been in and done it a thousand times when consulting with start-ups in the past, but the way Joe does within the Gym/Fitness space is mesmerizing.

People remember the emotion they had. Emotion matters, be positive! Don’t sell fear or fear of sickness. Sell the cool aspects of the community and how you will be validated by your peers for making the right choice with us.

Gym sales are based on 3 things: 1) Proximity to where they live or work 2) The person wants to look better 3) They will validate you on social and by looking at your website. Then “educating the consumer” is your job #1. If you are a CrossFit affiliate, then CrossFit does this for you with your $3k affiliate fee as part of their overall worldwide branding and marketing. But as a micro-gym owner, you don’t really get to leverage this…

These things aren’t like only for gyms, these are for just about any product or brick and mortar business that sells things, but i’d just never applied them in the ways he was discussing it to our gym members.

Day 2

Mike Jones, founder of Alchemy 365, went through the beginning to current status on the evolution of his business. Starting out as a CrossFit affiliate owner, owning something like 5 affiliates then developing their own approach to fitness based a lot off of Core Power Yoga and Orange Theory’s model and approach. It is largely a mixture of no-barbell based functional fitness and yoga fusion.

By the way, he also invented the Torpedo, which is a pretty interesting Kettlebell + Dum Bell thingy. I’d like to get my hands on one soon…

Going from his roots to his corporate owned locations his story if fascinating and I couldn’t help but notice his humility as he was talking to us and it made me wonder if this guy practiced any type of martial arts and sure enough, yep, he’s a Jiu-Jitsu Blue Belt.

Takeaways from Mike:
C.A.R.E. Consistently Acquire and Retain Excellence will lead to Customer Acquisition, and Reduce Attrition…

Removal of Non-Core products and services. A-la Apple computer/Steve Jobs.

Net-Promoter Score – How likely are your customers to recommend you.
– How can we make things better?

They run a “Fresh Start” challenge:
4 Weeks, Weekly Check-ins, Diet Planning and Coaching- For New-Customers & current members
They run a Free-Week intro that they up-sell memberships into.

Stuart Brauer
Along with his WTF Gym Talk podcast and services he produced this event as well as owns and operates Urban Movement his micro-gym. He gave a really great run-through from start to finish of his rebranding of UM as well as the current situation of his branding by showing off the brand book he is about to roll out in his gym. Very thorough and thoughtful approach to how to share that intel with us.

Another great table discussion today with Joe Tebaldi where we went through a lot of what he spoke about the day before but more one-on-one. The way he sized up an attendees ‘1 sentence’ was amazing. The speed he showed with knowing his audience and business was awesome. Quite honestly Joe inspires me to get better at aspects of my other business roles in a huge way. Thank you sir.

Panel Discussion
We wrapped with a panel discussion with all the speakers they went through a TON of Q&A and covered some big ground, the coolest take away I had was when they went through their ethos statements:

Mike’s was:
Yes is the answer; what is the question?
Be F&%king awesome.
Be a Pro.
Pursue your legend.

Stu’s was:
Why not, not why. “Hold my beer”
Do what you say you’ll do, when you say you’ll do it.
Be endearing/enduring. Via Glassman. 🙂
Be Positive.

Sponsors/TRIIB
One of the coolest things was the access to the sponsors. This is apparent in a small, by small I mean less than 100 people. In the past my events have had up to 800 people – not small enough… I prefer the smaller more intimate events like this greatly to the larger more Expo like ones. I sincerely hope Stu keeps it small next year again… Because of this we were able to get lunch with TRIIB and have them go through several things with us in regards to our business and how we use the product that we were up until then largely not able to accomplish with phone confs and online help tickets. Bravo in a HUGE way to that and TRIIB’s willingness to do that. So cool.

The other sponsors were top-notch. You could tell Stu personally endorses them and it shows. They were all very solid humans behind the companies and were all people that we made the rounds and spoke with one on one. Something iv’e very rarely done at events.

Wrap-Up

In many ways, I want this type of event for every day business people. I know they are out there, but in order to do that you’d dilute the message. The fact that the attendees were all Gym/Affiliate owners looking at change in their business was inspiring and what puts us all on the same footing which allows us to be honest with each other and the speakers. It’s intimate and true. Something you can’t say for many conferences and/or workshops that sell you the same lines about what it will do for you. Probably because Stu walks the walk with this consulting and in his own micro-gym.

This was hands-down one of the most honest, rewarding and thoughtful conferences i’ve been to in a long time. I’m inspired, charged up and ready to take on my business now. Thank you! Truly.

WHF Podcast 3: What does RX mean, why you aren’t losing weight

If audio only is more your thing, here you go:

[spreaker type=player resource=”episode_id=19574278″ width=”100%” height=”200px” theme=”light” playlist=”false” playlist-continuous=”false” autoplay=”false” live-autoplay=”false” chapters-image=”true” episode-image-position=”right” hide-logo=”false” hide-likes=”false” hide-comments=”false” hide-sharing=”false” hide-download=”true”]

What does ‘RX’ mean?

When we write ‘RX’ in a workout, it has a specific meaning. It means this is the ‘prescribed’ weight or rep-scheme or timing you should strive to be at. Sometimes you may not be able to do the workout with the prescribed weight, and that is very much okay! The overall idea is that this the intended weight, or rep-scheme, distance or timing you should be doing the workout at, so that you get the stimulus we want you to get from the workout.

Here’s an example: if the workout calls for you to do 10, 200 lb Deadlifts along with 10 Burpees as many times as you can within 10 minutes with an expected outcome on this would be 4 or 5 rounds. But you can only do a 200 lb Deadlift 2 or 3 times, so this means you only get 2 rounds out of the 10 minutes, then the workout is no longer delivering the intended stimulus. It has now changed into a max-out Deadlift strength workout for you. It would be far better for you to use 100 lbs in this workout if you are in this range for the lift. Then you’d get the right conditioning outcome that we want.

Why am I not losing weight (Fat)?

We go over a few reasons why you may not be losing weight. Going through the three main domains of; Diet, Workouts and Recovery. There are a few good rants in here too!

As you listen and have questions or comments, hit us up with a comment, post, text or in-person question. We’d love to get into anything you’re thinking about!

WHF Podcast 2: Mobility + MOY

WHF Podcast 2: Mobility + MOY

If audio only is more your thing, here you go:

[spreaker type=player resource=”episode_id=19439013″ width=”100%” height=”200px” theme=”light” playlist=”false” playlist-continuous=”false” autoplay=”false” live-autoplay=”false” chapters-image=”true” episode-image-position=”right” hide-logo=”false” hide-likes=”false” hide-comments=”false” hide-sharing=”false” hide-download=”true”]

Announcements:

HOLISTIC HEALTH SUMMIT

A seminar about how to live a healthier lifestyle because:

HEALTH IS WEALTH BE ABUNDANT IN HEALTH
Learn the ins and outs of healthy living from a number of accredited professionals in our community. Discover all of the options available to you as you walk the path to a healthier and happier lifestyle.

OCTOBER 26TH 9:00 AM – 3:30 PM COLUMBIA METROPOLITAN CONVENTION CENTER

Coach Ib and Heather are doing a session at 11:00 am

Get with a coach or front desk for your ticket!

Mobility & Maintenance

We go over the importance of Mobility and why you need to maintain the bottom line on it. Some insights into how to approach it and why we do it.

Evan Owens – Member of the Year

Evan Owens has been with Workhorse Fitness for little over a year. He joined us at 285lbs and in his short time with us is down to 219lbs. When Evan joined, he could barely run a mile, he couldn’t do a pull-up, and he did push-ups on his knees – fast forward to now and he can easily run multiple miles, do multiple pull-ups unassisted, does toes push ups, and turned a 175lbs deadlift into 315lbs! He recently tested for his yellow belt by our very own coach Gene Crawford. These are just a few of his long list of accomplishments. Evan shared,

I started because I knew I could do better and I had my dad motivate me. Then I kept coming because of everyone’s support from the coaches to other members of the community when it came to creating healthy exercise and eating habits. It’s the people and the community around me that helps keep me coming back every day.

Evan Owens

We love Evan because he is the definition of “Never Give Up”. This man simply will never quit and will always win when you need him too.