Summary
In this episode of HQAF Radio, Francis and Alana interview James Higgins of Your Coach James. He describes what the Functional Movement Screen is and helps Francis decipher Alana’s results from her first screen in January and her second one in July. Visit James’ website at: https://yourcoachjames.com. If you enjoyed this episode and want to try out personal training with James, use code HQAF Radio to get 10% off your first package of sessions!
Transcription
Interview with James
Alana: So all of this will contain really hilarious stories about me and my personal journey through PR to personal fitness and becoming an average human being in terms of strength.
Please always feel free to just communicate with us and let us know. Oh, that’s maybe not something I want exactly. Three people to hear. Um, I can’t preface this enough or lean into this enough, how very few people listen to this. But. But, you know, you never know, honestly, we got a lot of engagement with our last personal fitness episode. This may reach a lot more people than you might find. So very excited.
Before we get into the interview, I did have a funny story to share. So I’m not sure if it was last week or the week before, but I was working out with James, my amazing personal trainer who’s online today.
And he was walking me through this new exercise and it was. A very different kind of exercise. And, I’m being held up with these straps and I was doing this sort of exercise to go and worked out my legs, but in this different kind of way and where I had support by using my arms and the straps.
So I was in the standing position and James was trying to explain to me how to move in the motion for this workout. And it just wasn’t a landing. And so James being the incredible personal trainer that he is, he’s using different ways to explain it to me. And so one way he explained it to me was, have you ever jobs before?
And I said no. And he said, well, have you ever, gone for a run? And I said, absolutely not. I don’t run or jog to anyone or anything, people or things jog to me. I just started laughing and that truly is how I lead my life. I don’t go to very many things, if anything, at all, most things come to me because I’m that kind of person. I bring out that kind of energy, but I was excited because two days ago I realized I was on a walk and it started to rain.
This crazy thunderstorm. In a blink of an eye started coming down and I started to run and then I excitedly emailed James seeing, oh my God, I ran today for the first time of my own volition to get out of the rain. And I just thought, James it’s working, obviously look at me, bawling, tiering to run and jog on my own time.
I mean, wow. I didn’t run for very long. Be endured. Not there, but I felt like I could’ve, if I wanted to maybe stretch it a little bit longer, if I had willed myself a little bit more.
Francis: Alana and I have this sort of joke where we talk about how she’d be the easiest person to kidnap, because she’s just so weak and she’s just so slow.
Alana: Yes, I would literally die if someone attacked me. Because I would just go, okay, game over. I’m done. I’m just like, this is it. It’s over. No rhyme or reason.
James’ Background
Francis: And so this is why it’s exciting for us to have you here today, James, especially me who knows Alana’s backstory. You know, she tried to help me move once and all she could muster was six pillows. Um, and so for her to undergo this journey of becoming a fitter person this year I wanted to bring you on to show.
Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about where you see her as the professional here. So to start things off, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and your focus as a personal trainer and what your certifications are?
James: Sure thing. So first off let me just say that while I am a member of several organizations, I’m not here to represent either of them, that’s just a disclaimer that I feel should be announced and put in front of me before I go to the detail there.
So, I had been working at a physical therapy clinic Advantage Physical Therapy in Falls Church, for close to about six years in September. So for half that time, I was a PT technician. I would assist patients going through their exercise, get them set up on different machines, teach them new exercises, teach them correct form with either new exercises they’re doing or how to correct. If we identified any errors while they’re doing exercises, they were reassigned. So that really was the start of my kind of journey into being a personal trainer because it taught me an appreciation for how critical good form is and how critical it is to be in the right position, to do the right motions, to get the right results. So, first and foremost, I see myself as a clinical slash personal trainer because I try to incorporate my personal training certifications into that same practice. So I still support the clinic, even though I’m the clinic manager.
Now I do support them with patient care a good deal amount of time. And then I also approach train my clients with that same kind of philosophy where it doesn’t matter how much we’re lifting. It doesn’t matter how many reps we do necessarily as long as we do it well. And that’s why quality of movement is so important.
And now kind of become a kind of common theme as I go into detail about some of the certifications I have. First and foremost, my principal certification, the one that I practice under the most is what’s called the CSCs hyphen and S. Uh, lots of letters in there. That stands for Certified Strength Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength Conditioning Association.
That’s considered one of the gold standard certifications for personal training simply because it is a postgraduate level certification. Really almost on the level of almost like a master’s level. With the NSCA, we consider every person in the athlete. It doesn’t matter how old, how young or what their training status is. Everyone is an athlete just at various levels of training status. So even Allana who came to me. When we did our initial consultation, just to get some more information of what her goals were, where she’s coming from.
And she looked at me dead pan and said, I have never worked out in my life. And I said, come on, you have to have done something. You had to maybe do like a sport in school or maybe like, just play around with friends when you were younger? She’s like, I do nothing. Um, so I was like, okay. She’s like, do you think you could train me? And I was like, I know I can. We’re probably going to start on a lower level and work our way up. And that’s the approach I take with all my clients. It doesn’t matter how old or what level of training we have. The important thing is we address the goals of the client.
And first and foremost, we look at them and see, where are they now? And how do we get from point a to point B.
Clients
Francis: What kind of people do you deal with on a day-to-day basis?
James: I work with a variety of clients. Most of my clientele comes from patients who have graduated from physical therapy especially from our clinic and they get siphoned to me. That’s not to say that. Yeah. Totally upheld by my dealings with the clinic, but I do see myself as a post rehab personal trainer.
And so the distinction, there is a lot of my clientele have some form of orthopedic condition, whether that’s a hip replacement, knee replacement, shoulder replacement, rotator cuff tear, you name it, I’ve worked with it, whether it was in the clinic directly assisting with patients. Or after they graduated from PT and started seeing.
One of the number one reasons why I see clients right, is unfortunately a lot of insurance companies may limit access to physical therapy or restrict benefits, physical therapy. And I’d rather not go into that kind of detail there, but suffice to say that sometimes people have limitations.
That’s not necessarily determined by the individual. The whole that my Clinic and I determined is there’s a lot of these patients who have to stop doing physical therapy, but may not be ready to stop. And so I became the bridge between function and performance, where a function is.
Are you able to do the things you need to do and performance being? Are you able to do the things that you want to do? And so once they meet those functional limits or functional capacity measures for insurance and turns basically would discontinue coverage, because it’s like, ah, you know what?
You can walk in your community. You can walk between rooms and your house. We don’t really care about stairs, whatever. You can do the things you need to do to be alive.
Francis: Yeah. You can do the bare minimum of living from day to day.
James: Exactly. So you can do the bare minimum. So you’re good. And then I’ve had clients who, especially older clients who are like, I really want to play pickup. And that led me down an interesting path of quite frankly, what the heck is pickleball is kind of like wall ball mixed with squash mixed with tennis. It’s an interesting kind of mix there. Um, but I, yeah, I’ve had two clients who were in their late fifties, early sixties. They’re were like, we still want to play pickleball together. And our insurance going to cover more, it’s like, Let’s start training for pickleball.
Let me watch a few videos of it and see how I can help you.
Francis: so, in that situation where they at a certain level of fitness that they just didn’t feel like they could play pickle ball, like I’m like, where are you helping them achieve? Okay. So w at that point it was more like personal
James: Exactly. It was, it was more like personal training because as we identified, yes, you can stand up and sit down. Yes, you can walk on flat surfaces, but you can’t go into a deep squat. You can’t go into a side lunge. You can’t maybe coordinate the movement of swinging the racket while at the same time doing a squatter lunch.
And so that’s where we started working. We started to identify where your, where you, we. And then how we build up those weak spots to the point where we can train and really focused on sports specific or activity specific training.
Alana’s First FMS Screen
Francis: I’ve got the first FMS, uh, is it a test test assessment, um, that you did of Allana and I guess just based is what you’re talking about. So do you use this to assess a person’s, um, sort of functional, like seeing if they can do all dysfunctional movement that you were talking about and then if they score a certain point in this report, then that’s when you moved them over to the personal training.
Is that how that works?
James: Not quite. Uh, so the FMS, the functional movement screen is used to identify an individual’s global stability and mobile. As well as local mobility and stability. And so when we look at the movement pyramid as set forth by functional movement systems, which is the foundation that created the functional moving screen. We look for general mobility and stability.
Can you move, can you balance, can you stabilize in and out of movement or through ranges of motion affecting. And if yes, great. We go to the next tier, which is general conditioning. Do you have the capacity to train, whether it’s strength, endurance, stability you, can you train effectively for this?
And if yes. Great. Now we go to the tip of the pyramid, which is movement specific or sports specific or activity specific movements. So in order for us to progress up to the point, Yeah. Say Alanna’s only goal was I wanna be able to lift that heavy Amazon box and walk into the house. Well, we will assess that, right?
The FMS has meant to assess, can you move as well as the average person so that we can even start training for that. And quite frankly, when I first met with with Alon back in June, The answer was no she did fail the FMS the first time round, but failing is never a bad thing.
Failing just tells us what do we need to work on in order to get you to the average mobility and average stability of an individual. So that way we can focus on more general strength conditioning so that we can progress into that specific goal of what you want to get done.
Francis: I see. So in terms of Alanna’s goal of, and I’m looking at the different patterns that are on the report right now what would you focus on in terms of trying to get her to lift a package from her doorway and going up the stairs?
James: Before we get into that, let’s actually talk about him yet to score the FMS. All the FMS is scored on a four point scale zero to three, a zero indicates that there’s pain with a movement. And thus it’s not within the purview of a personal trainer to really work on.
There’s some wiggle room on that, quite frankly. I mean, it’s supposed to be a referral to a medical professional. I’m not saying that I’m a medical professional or practitioner but I’ve worked with enough PTs that I know some quick fixes on how to adjust, move and patterns in order to help mitigate or decrease pain like symptoms or pain generating movement patterns.
So right off the bat. That zero means we should definitely have her take a look at, and I would always recommend going to see an orthopedist or a PT if we have consistent pain with a movement pattern, because that means there’s something that’s not working effectively or efficiently, and we need to get that addressed. Now a one on the test means that you cannot do the movement pattern while even performing compensations. So the classic one, there would be for your deep squat. If you’re having your hands above your head. And the goal is to keep your hands over your ankle while at the same time, maintaining a parallel line between your torso and your shoe.
If you’re completely unable to do that, you keep bowing forward and the stick keeps dipping forward. While you’re holding your hands above your head. We’d have to score that as one, even if we adjust your position by putting your heels up on us, a supporting structure, like the board, the testing board, if you’re completely unable to do that, we mark it as a one.
And that tells us, okay, this is going to be a critical pattern. We need to. Because you can not deep squat as an average person. And then if squat, arguably is one of the most fundamental patterns for Alana’s goal of picking the package up, because the safest way to get a package up is to squat down, have the package right between your legs and row that package to your chest.
So we can stand up and walk that package in the door,
Francis: Right.
James: the RAF, the bat, that’s one of the ones we want to look at, and that’s why we have the big three as they’re called the deep sea. The hurdle step in the inline lunch. Cause those are global stability and mobility patterns that we want to take a look at.
And the important thing there is, yeah, we talked about deep squat, the hurdle stuff, the inline lunge. You’re not often in these positions. You’re not often. Having to go with a narrow base of support, trying to do a lunge, like pattern or in the hurdle step. We have to pick your foot up over a certain height and control it back and forth.
But that’s also the purpose of the FMS. We don’t want to give you patterns that you can easily train. Instead, we want to put you in a position ones that are awkward or at the extreme ranges of motion, because when you display your errors in those patterns, it makes it abundantly clear. Yes. This is where you have an energy leak or an energy block.
We can’t move that angle more because of X, Y, or Z, and that X, Y, or Z reasoning, it gets broken out further. When we do our smaller tests, our shoulder mobiles. Active, straight leg, raise our trunk stability, pushup, and our rotary stability tests, because if you’re doing a deep squat and all we can say is you can’t squat, but is that because the hip is restricted, the ankles restricted, or the hip or ankle stability to control you as you go through that squatting pattern, those are all very critical, but it’s hard to tell exactly from that one test.
And that’s why we give a back.
Francis: I see. So this is meant to be very comprehensive to see where you might need to focus on the body that’s really causing you that issue.
James: Exactly. And so that’s why I love the FMS too, because I’m a certified functional movement screen level one and two I’ve accessed their pro app, which allows me to conduct these evaluations very easily, type them into the computer, generate these score.
They also have to give feedback on it. So one of the things we look at out of the report is the inland lunch, right? She passed, she got a two on the right, but she got a one on the left, which means she is not ready to train in that pattern because the left side one, we have an asymmetry. If your left and right side are not congruent, not have the same score, that right there is a warning light for, okay.
We need to address this. . To make sure we can train the individual up and get equal balance, equal stability and mobility on both sides.
Francis: I think you said there’s this scoring from zero to three. What would it mean if she had a three in any of these? Because right now the highest score I see is two.
James: Yes. So a three means you move above average, right? Well, you’ll see you later on in her July assessment Elena’s got a three on both sides of the shoulder mobility, right? So while we were training her shoulder mobility improved from a one to a three, which is a pretty significant jump. And that means that she’s got above average shoulder mobility now, which is great.
It means at some points we might be a little worried if we see consistent mobility testing above Cause that might indicate something like a hypermobility issue. But the fact that we saw improvement means that we got her thoracic spine and her lumbar spine and her cervical spine to all loosen up in terms of range of motion and accomplish that task of getting the hands as close as we can behind her back.
And that’s the testing measure there?
Francis: Oh, awesome. Okay, cool.
James: Yep. And so you just means your average, which is all we really want for the FMS. If you’re average, if you score two in each of those subjects, awesome. We can train with no issue.
Francis: Okay. So, based off of her January score and let me know if I’m maybe reading this right basis of what you told me, it looks like you would want to focus on the inline lunge. It looks like between her left and her right, there’s a little bit of a strength discrepancy there. You were going to focus on her shoulder and mobility and then also on the active, straight leg raise, those are the focus areas that based off of this report that you would work on.
James: Exactly. Yes. So we would address the asymmetry between her inline lunge with the right and left. And then with the shoulder mobility and active straight leg raise, those are also the two mobility based testing. For the FMS. So the fact that she scored one on both of those told us that she had a lot of restriction that walked motion, whether that was true muscular tension, where the muscle is shortened and needs to be lengthened over time through stretching, or if there is a kind of an event called gardening, which is a neuromuscular phenomenon where the nervous system hyper regulates, or basically turns the muscle on so much that it restricts motion, even though there’s no tightness. And actually what we found out during the consultation is that Alana did actually have an injury to her ankle. She had to be in PT for a while to get that addressed. But she still always said she felt tight and stiff on that one side, which actually perfectly describes why she would have a discrepancy between her left and right side on the inline lunge.
Francis: Yeah.
James: And then that also tells us that, okay, if the ankle is tight or I should say stiff because we found that was more neuromuscular driven. That in turn can put tension on muscles upstream. It could also be an explanation why her active, straight leg raise was a lower score because the tension in the fascial connections between the calf and the hamster.
For the fact that she has a naturally tight hamstrings would have prevented the active, straight leg raise to improve.
So quite a lot. I was expecting to hear from you.
Alana: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is just all confirming all of the stories that I’ve told him. Um, so I’m like living for this because, cause he was like, how can you have, how can you be mentally blocked from exercising? See the professionals. I literally willed myself to never work out or like exercise or exert my energy in any capacity.
And 30 years later that has been detrimental to my ability to even baseline be an average person. But yeah, no, I’m just like grinning all kinds of ways. Like, see it’s real.
Francis: Um, okay, well, so I did want to ask you Alana what is, what was your reaction after you getting this report? Like, how did you feel about what you had seen or what you and James had gone over at that point?
Alana: The first report or the second
Francis: The first one, uh, we’ll get into the second one in a bit, but you, I, and you, and I never really talked about this report?
Now that I know more. Yeah.
Alana: Yeah. Yeah. So the first report, the results did not surprise me. So ultimately I did fail. I think you have to get, what is it, James? 14 points two
James: 14,
Alana: right? 14 out of 21. And I think I scored a nine in that initial
11. Oh, okay. Yeah. Look at that. I’m stronger than I realized.
Francis: hold on. I actually, I didn’t even realize that you could have a total score. So what does it mean if you fail altogether?
James: Yeah. So that’s a great question. So if you fell together, we start with moving. So the food pyramid dictates that we do mobility and stability training first. So we just mentioned how we use the big three, the deep squat hurdle step in inline lunge in order to assess that global mobility and stability where the remaining four shoulder mobility active straight leg raise trunk stability, pushup, and rotary stability, assess local mobility and stability. So if we had somebody who scored once across the entire board that tells us, we start at the very base of the pyramid and we only work on mobility first. So we would have a stretch stretching base program and maybe some light, core strengthening and balance training, just to make sure that we’re reinforcing good movement patterns.
And when I say good, I mean, effective and efficient movements. And making sure that we’re making the most use of what we can do. And that’s quite frankly, that’s where we started with with Alana is because of those ones, the mobility, shoulder mobility and active straight leg raise. Easily half our sessions were teaching her different stretches, different ways to help mobilize the tissue around the edge.
Um, and, uh, uh, I can quite, uh, what my philosophy there is. I want to spend the least amount of time on that because techniques, there are, I would say fairly remedial and that’s not a bad way. That’s not saying like, oh man, like, why am I wasting my time doing this? But it’s much more of these are things you can do on your own at home.
And what I typically do is I’ll introduce these techniques to my clients and have them, work with me once. Well, definitely two or three times before. I say like, all right, here’s your home exercises in order for us to progress, you need to do these at home while you’re not seeing me so that when you’re here seeing me, we can do the higher level training.
And so that’s what I did with Elena. I sent her home with probably about a three or four page document that just had detailed pictures and explanations of the movements I wanted her to do. And when you look at the inline lunge, the biggest thing we talked about is doing We call half kneeling, uh, half, half kneeling, ankle rocking.
So if you picture yourself with one knee down to the ground and the other foot in front of you. You just rock back and forth over the ankle while holding yourself upright with a pole. So the idea there is you’re in a very stable position, your foot’s planted, you’re holding on to something rigid.
You’re pushing down on that pole in order to help get your stabilization of your core and your lats. And you can just focus all your effort over just sliding and gliding over top of your ankle.
And so that’s important because that right there that’ll tell us, do you have. A tension in the muscle. Do you have tightness that needs to be stretched out or do you have that neuromuscular guardian? Okay. The distinction there is if you stretch, right? Whether it’s a passive stretch, like I’m doing the stretching for Alana, or if I sent her home with a bunch of stretches and she did them on her own, and she has muscular tension, those muscles are tight for whatever reason, maybe she was working in an office setting where she had to wear heels.
That’s a very common issue for women. Why women might have tight calves, right? Because those calves are continuously in a shortened position they’re activated. And if you’re wearing heels for eight hours a day, you’re wearing heels for hours. That’s eight hours a day of those calves being shortened. So yeah, that’s little lead to tightness there that can be resolved through stress, but in the event of neuromuscular guarding, that is actually counterintuitive, right?
If we give you a lot of stretches, your body is actually probably going to tense up more because gardening is your brains ability and safety mechanism to basically make sure you don’t go into dangerous ranges of motion. And so it’s very common, especially with post-injury post-surgical patients and clients alike because your brain has recovered from an injury or I’m sorry, your body’s recovering injury and your brain’s thinking, man, it really hurt that one time.
So we’re going to make sure we can’t do that again so we don’t get hurt. And the trade-off there is yes the muscle stiffens and locks down the joint to prevent movement because it thinks its helping the muscles is thinks it’s helping the joint. But in reality, by restricting that range of motion, you’re going to lead to compensations in other ways.
So one of the things we found is a Alonda is very prone to pain in the knees. And that can be because if her ankles not, we call translating or gliding appropriately. That means the hip and knee had to do more bending in order to get the same amount of. Which means you have to bend the knee more. You have to flex at the hip more just to squat down and reach that package on the ground.
As opposed to, if the ankle is moving freely, you could rely on the ankle to do most of the work and get you there. And then the knees only have to bend once the ankle runs out of motion than the hip bends. When your knee runs out of emotion.
Francis: I see it. It’s almost like you’ve conditioned yourself to move a certain way because you’ve learned like one way of movement is just too painful or what have you.
James: That’s actually a perfect way of describing it. Yeah. Conditioning, because it very much is a condition process. Your body is in the mindset of this is the way you do it. We have to do it this way. And then the only way to do that is to trick your brain and say like, Hey, look, you know how you said you, we can’t glide.
I’m in a stable position and I’m gliding just fine. And then your brain is like, oh, um, we can’t do that. Okay. Now we’re going to reduce that neural tone. And now those muscles are going to relax a little bit and allow for more range.
Alana: At the beginning of our journey together, James, I remember perfectly our first couple of sessions, how we were just we’re focusing on and working on very basic things. I remember one of our very first sessions was me just sitting down and standing. Because that range of motion and because I’ve just never really been introduced to any personal fitness in any capacity.
And also I had an injury that was the baseline. That those were just some of the extra layers you have to work your way up and teach yourself to learn that you can make those motions, that you can function in other ways, other than a purely existing as I had for 30 years.
Mental Blocks
Francis: So James since you’ve been working with a lot of, since January, and it actually gets me to my next question, because a lot of that, I talked about this in the last episode. Last time we had talked about physical fitness and she thought she might have a mental block in general, a very general mental block to physical activity.
She recalls a time that gosh, what was it? A lot of like, you, you almost try to have you had her like carry 15 pounds, like up a step or something like that. And she reacted very negatively to it.
Alana: Yeah. I said, what is that? What am I, what, why are you lifting and putting that there? Am I going to be interacting with that? And then you said, no. Have to hold it and step up. And I said, why? And then I said, no, I’m pretty sure. And he had said, come on, let’s at least give it a try. You didn’t even step up yet.
You don’t even know if it will be, it may not be hard at all. You don’t have to live to your you’re not doing like a curl or anything. You’re just holding it up as you step up.
James: Just walk this, hold the weight and start setting.
Alana: And just lift yourself. Yeah. So to that end James is, do I have a mental block? I have been saying yes. And that is what has led me to the way that I am today and what you were undoing now. But yeah. What is the professional opinion on.
James: So it’s a little outside my scope to definitively say, yes, you have something in your, something in your brain is definitively blocking your ability to do something. Cause quite frankly, right. That’s the purview of, of a psychologist or it’s like, yeah, it’s like, high-trust right. Not saying you need one, but in my experience, and in working with clients, Um, you can absolutely have a mental block to activity, right?
It’s not so much that you’re thinking, oh, I’m just never gonna do it. Why should I bother necessarily? It can be much more of that. What we call fear avoidance in physical therapy, right. You’re afraid that a certain motion is going to cause pain or going to cause a stretch or going to cause some kind of negative.
Emotion or negative effect and therefore we avoid doing it. So fear avoidance, again, it goes hand in hand with muscle guarding. It’s super common with patients and clients who have recovered from injury or recovered from surgery because, it goes back to I’ve been hurt before, or I have felt pain before and I don’t like pain, so I don’t want to do.
And it goes hand in hand with the waiver release those muscles under neural tension. When you have the guardian, you have to start small and just demonstrate to the brain. Yes, you can do this. And actually that’s a very interesting segue into, is it all in your head, right? Again, it’s outside my purview as a personal trainer say, yeah, it’s all in your head.
Just, deal with that kind of thing. But what I can say is even though that may sound like it, even though it may say it sounded like, yeah. Okay. Just get past that block and we’ll work through it. That’s definitely not the case. And this really speaks to a relatively newer philosophy.
That’s been adopted to a lot of medical fields. Is that mind, body connection, right? Not to get super new agey, but there’s a lot of credence and a lot of research that’s backing up. That’s the idea that your brain, your unconscious or conscious brain can affect your physical body. And in this case, it’s the guardian.
It’s the fear avoidance. that’s not to say like, okay, well just, you know, think you can do it. You’re good because that’s not how it works. It’s you have to teach the brain to do something. You have to teach the body to do the same thing. So they w they can communicate effectively. And that’s where you get that crossover of, is it in your head?
Okay. Maybe is it solely your body? Probably not. It’s some combination of the two,
Francis: I guess, you know, I’m thinking back to my own, exercise experience. And so how would, you know, when you’re exercising that you’ve truly hit the limit of what your body can do? Like to the point where you’re almost about to injure yourself too, maybe you’re just on a very hard run and you’re just Exercising, maybe to your limits, but not to the point of injury.
Cause it seems to me like there’s probably a very thin line there where it’s your mind just telling you. Okay. You, you’re very, just very uncomfortable right now. You can just keep going, um, through this run for another minute to, you know, like you’re, you’re really approaching dangerous territory.
James: That’s a really question. Right? And so the answer to that really is listening to your body and understanding your body’s limits, right? Pain is always going to be the biggest teacher, because if we have pain, that’s your body’s way of saying we did too. Even if the brain says, oh, we probably could have squeezed another repor two out.
If your body feels pain after a workout or during a workout, it’s telling you it’s too much, right. It’s exceeding its capacity for right now. Now, if you feel sore a day or two after your workout, that’s perfectly normal. In fact, that’s, that’s actually the hallmark of a good workout because that correlates with something called delayed onset muscle soreness or doms.
And that happens. For most people, about 24 hours some people a little bit longer. I’m personally a 36 hour person. I work out say Monday evening, it is guaranteed Wednesday morning. I’m going to feel sore. That’s just how my body reacts to, to exercise. Different people will respond differently and certainly people with lower train status are generally more sensitive to that soreness.
And may even say like, I’m actually in pain. I can’t do it. Because your body’s basically in shock of what we did and that actually speaks to a kind of what’s happening on a physiological level. So in order to build muscle in order to get stronger in order to build a Durham. When you work out and you feel sore, especially appropriate soreness with Dom’s a two to a one to two days later, you’re literally tearing your muscles open.
Now you’re creating, what’s called micro tears, very, very small tears. You ever seen a piece of meat? You can see that there are lines that run in consistent patterns down a cut of meat. Your muscle Australia, the same way. And so in order to grow that muscle, you’re causing tears along those seams, for lack of a better word and they’re cells from what we call the basement layer below the muscle that go in and populate those tapes.
And that’s what causes expansion of muscle. You’re literally filling the holes with new cells. And that’s what creates bulk that’s what creates a leaner appearance or more definition. It’s hard for people of have lower training statuses. And that’s why I always encourage my clients, especially like Ilana to take it easy the first few times.
And I even told her the first two or three sessions, you may be bored. Because we’re gonna do some low level stuff. We’re gonna focus on mobility. We’re gonna do some minor stabilization training. We’re gonna do some balanced training. And that’s about it. The first few times she lifted. It’s like, so that’s all like, that’s like, what am I gonna get stronger?
And it’s like, well, we have a lot of work. Before we worry about getting stronger.
Alana: Well, that’s very sweet James, but that. because when I was just sitting down and sitting up, I was like, oh, really? That’s it. But I did come away. Like I was sweating. I was tired. Like I was sore, which I thought was very weird because I was just moving my body in a different way. Like after I took the FMS test, I was sore the next day.
And I thought that’s strange. Cause I didn’t, I don’t think I worked out. I think I just moved my body in a way that had never been. Before. But yes, I’m sure I did have the reaction of like, oh, like that’s it. But also I did feel the effects the next day and felt like, oh, okay. Yeah, that probably is where my level is at.
No exaggeration or no hyperbole. And I always tell James to when I’m working out with him, Because I, I get very visibly Francis I’m sure is not surprised to hear this. I get very visibly exhausted. And so James will go, oh, just one more. Let’s do this. Or do you have more in you? And I’m very vocal, I’ll say yes or no.
And later on, I may say, I’m sorry, James. Like I hope you don’t think that I’m faking you out or that I’m not trying to do the most out of these and James will say, no, I can see that you’re visibly. You know, there’s like physical sign that this is trying for you.
I’m like, I just want to be, you know, cause I am someone who tries their best. Um, but I just, my, my best is not always like, you know, I’m a lady that’s never worked out. So
Francis: Let’s see, share your emotions on your sleeve. So it’s not hard to determine if you’re done.
Alana: No surprise to anyone.
James: And a lot of you just having a really good point, right? You just said you’re working as hard as you can. And that’s all I asked for my clients. If you can leave a session saying I worked my butt off. I did the best I could. I’m happy. Especially those first few times where I’m getting to know you as a person, getting to know you as a client and what your capacity is, I’m going to rely on you to tell me that, right?
I’m going to rely on you to tell me how you respond, how you feel after the session, how you feel a day or two later. If you recall, the first few times you worked. I was pretty insistent. Like I want to hear from you in two or three days, I want to know what you felt when you got home. I wanna know what you felt the next day.
I wonder how you’re feeling now, because that gives me a few data plots to say like, okay, she felt really sore. Like two hours after she got home. We probably did too much there. Or, Hey, actually I felt really good. And then I felt sore a few days later, but I’m still feeling really sore and that’s okay.
So you’re someone. Makes sense. You don’t have a lot of training experience, so you’re gonna be more sensitive to that Dom’s effect. And that’s why I told you is like, okay, you know what? It’s two days after the fact you’re still feeling sore. Take tomorrow off. Don’t do anything tomorrow, just do something the next day.
And then come see me on that following Saturday, and then we’ll work it out again. And so that’s why I think the best way to work with a client is to understand who they are as a person. And get in their head. Okay. I need to know, I need you to know what your limits are and I need to know what your limits are based on that.
Alana: Yeah. I recall one time after a workout for a couple of days, this was a very much a prolonged muscle soreness that my left leg or left thigh, I think specifically was very sore for way longer than it usually is. And then additionally, there was pain when I sat down or interacted or walked even have just felt like, oh my gosh.
And so I came to you that next Saturday, that next workout saying, oh my gosh, I think I did something wrong. I don’t know what happened or maybe I did something, but it was just like really in paint, I think like a weekend pass. And by then it had fully healed, but it was just so prolonged and so intensive.
And then James said, I think one, it could be that we did work on that a little bit harder too, but to also, my left is weaker than my right, which makes sense from a dominant standpoint. I’m right-handed. And also I had the injury on my left too.
And so, you know, there was just that this a larger discrepancy, I guess, right. Teams, or I’m probably not describing that correctly, but I feel like you remember that. Right. When I
had the very sore, I was like, oh my God, I broke by calf. I don’t know. I was like really freaked out by the pain, even though it had resolved itself within a week, but it was strange.
James: Yeah, you definitely hit on most of the big points there. We traced your injury history. It did happen on your left ankle. We did try new exercise cause that’s when we started doing the walking lunges, which are a very quad dominant activity in the first place.
So it’s like, okay, you combine that, the fact that your left side is going to be your non-dominant side because your right foot is. Okay. That’s going to be harder for the left side. You the integral, the left side. Okay. Yeah. That’s gonna be a big issue too, where it’s gonna be something we want to look out for and dear where the third point was.
Alana: I’m fatigued easily. I don’t know which
James: So, uh, kind of, I was actually looking forward. This is where we talked about your limb length, right?
Alana: Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Oh, tell Francis all about it.
James: Yeah. So, with the FMS we do use anthropometrics in order to standardize the scores from person to person and anthropometrics are basically measurements of the body, but specific to the individual. So the two measurements we take our hand length, which is from the heel of your Palm to the tip of your longest finger.
And we use that in the measurement for the shoulder mobility. Based on how close your fists are in terms of handling is how we score it. If your hands are less than one and a half handlings away, that’s a three. If they’re between one and a half and two hand links, then that’s a two. And if they’re farther than two hand links away, then it’s a one, the failing grade.
And on top of that, we also look at what’s called the tibial tuberosity length. And so that is the height of which the tibial tuberosity is on the leg. And the tibial tuberosity is just this bony prominence, right beneath the, uh, uh, And that’s just based on the bone, the tibia there is just has a prominence.
So one of the things I was looking at my notes, cause, um, this was now the second time that Alana had reported that she had some knee pain after doing a workout with me. And the first time I was like, okay, yeah, it could just be your, you know, you’re just like, Not a huge concern. You said it faded away after a while.
But then after we went from doing split squats to lunges because her ankle mobility looked a lot better. And she said like, whoa, after the lunges, my knee was really bothering me. I was thinking that’s interesting because your tibial tuberosity height was like average, maybe a little bit low average for a woman of your age.
And that’s not, I think crazy. That’s just, again, that’s what your measurements are as a person. And so then I was thinking the only reason that your knee would be irritated like that is you put a lot of pressure on it.
So what we found was after doing some measurements is Ilana has a very long femur compared to the rest of her leg and the femurs, the bone in the upper thigh. And it’s also where the quads are. So the quads run down the length of the femur and they’re responsible for extending that.
And when you have a very long femur, when you bend your knee, the knee is actually going to travel past the foot faster if your fever is longer. And what that meant for a lot of is because she has a very long femur relative to her overall leg length. It means that she’s going to be gliding her knee pastor. And in that position where the knees are past the toes, it increases pressure on the knee. And a lot of physicians, a lot of old school thinking will say that, oh, knee should never go past your toes ever. That’s just bad. It puts pressure on the knee. Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It cause if you look at.
CrossFit. If you look at professional weightlifters, you look at powerlifters whenever they do a snatch or a hang clean or any really big power movement. Or if you look at weightlifters doing the Atlas ball, where they have to pick this giant stone up and stand up with it, their needs are in travel past your toes.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As long as they don’t have a preexisting. So if we have somebody who has a knee replacement or someone who’s has a lack of either a hip or knee stability or mobility, and they put their knee past their toes, that’s going to be a more vulnerable position. And that’s what we found that was the case with Alana is she needed to work on controlling how her knee moved past her foot, because we found that when she did that consistently, it resulted in some new year, too.
And we can stretch it out. And the stretching her knee generally decrease that irritation, but real life isn’t always going to afford that. So that’s why I wanted to make sure that she knew how to move adequately and appropriately to avoid putting excessive pressure on her knees.
Francis: So. I’m looking at Alana’s July FMS report. And this has done almost six months to the date from when you first did it in January 11th. So this one’s dated July 10th and she actually scored, um, uh, the coverage page has a score of 15 and Looking at the general report, it looks like she did very well. She was in a lot better shape than she was when she came to you in six months.
Are there any sort of improvements that you want to point out here?
James: Yeah, so she scored a 15 out of 11, so right away she passed, which is always great. Every area that she got the red in. meaning that she failed during the first FMS, she either became average movement, a two out of a two out of three, or exceeded it and became a three out of three.
So right away, we see there’s a pretty dramatic improvement in terms of overall performance on the test. And then again, that’s not because we train for the test. The FMS training philosophy is to not train for these specific movements and said, do a more holistic, uh, program so that we’re not teaching to the test.
You’re not going to use these movements on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t really make sense to train for them except to just get a better score.
Francis: Alana, how do you feel about this?
Alana: I was very impressed with myself and pleasantly surprised by it. Granted. It’s not like I wouldn’t. Not trying my best or not working out for the past six months. It absolutely makes sense that there would be drastic improvement, but just being that I spent 30 years never moving my body in ways that I have been for the past six months.
And naturally it was just a surprise to see like, wow, I can do these things because like James confirmed or, well, I guess he didn’t, he couldn’t technically confirm because he’s not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Um, I do think there was a mental blockage there and, uh, you know, somewhat facilitated by my injury, but I think it was always there.
Uh, hence why I carried six pillows and called it a day when I helped you move Francis six years ago and therefore never helped anyone move ever again. And so, yeah, no, I wasn’t very surprised. I was very impressed and honestly, a static. I was very happy with myself. I did not remember. A lot of the test which is good because then the test with truly an authentic view of how I was doing, because, we weren’t training for the test and that way you get a real baseline to compare it to.
And yeah, I was just really impressed with myself and it just very excited that I could pass anything that had a fitness in the name or in the category that it was.
James: Now Elena’s improved dramatically, both in performance and an attitude, not to say she was very resistant to train in the first time, but there was a lot of that doubt. There was a lot of that fear, avoidance and apprehension. And like she said, with the step-up story, it’s like, she looked at me, it’s like, you want me to do what and why? I got a lot of that during the first few times we trained together and that’s not a bad thing. That’s the exact kind of thing you would expect from a client who exhibits a lot of things. They’re going to be reserved. They’re going to have reservations about doing new things and it’s just about showing them you can.
Alana’s Progress
Francis: At the top of the episode, I think we alluded to it, but I gave Alana this challenge of being able to bring in a, did I say a 15 pound package in, from the door and then carrying it up the stairs, uh, at this rate of progress that she’s made so far. How long do you think it would take for her to reach this goal?
James: That’s a really good question. I think that depends on where the package is. If we’re talking straight off the ground, I think we can definitely get there if not we’re already there. Cause we just started going over deadlifts and squatting patterns. And she was shocked when she realized that she could dead lift 25 pounds and.
She could do it with relative ease. We were able to get to a 10 to 12 reps on the first set of doing it after I just, all right, here’s the move pattern. I want you to recreate what I just did. And she knocked him out pretty well. She was tired and she was fatigued, but she did a really good job with it.
So in that front, I think she can do 10 to 15 pounds with little problem. Now it’s combining. That pickup pattern that the stairs? pattern and doing all that together, that might prove a little more difficult, but that actually speaks more to her strength endurance as opposed to her actual strength, because she has the strength to do it.
She has the strength to pick up that box, but she may not have the overall endurance to maintain that strength for a prolonged period of time. And that’s one of the things we’ve been working on a lot lately is in trying to increase our rep count or increase the number of sets we do for all of our exercises to make sure we are accomplishing that strength, endurance goal, to make sure that it’s not just, you can produce the force necessary to move this object or do this repetition or X or perform this task.
But when you do this, a number of times in quick succession, And that comes down to strengthen deterrence. And honestly, it’s just one of those things where it’s going to take time. The average person starts to exhibit physiological changes and adaptations to strengthening in about four, six weeks.
And considering that our first session about two weeks ago is when we started doing debts. Okay. We’re probably about halfway there, maybe a third of the way there, but I definitely expect her to have a lot more improvement just based on that alone. And actually one of the things about the FMS scores.
Yes. They were scored six months apart, but I don’t want to give the impression that it took us six months to get to that passing score. Um, we were, we were both on travel, a fair amount over the summer, or, you know, doing what we could. In a COVID world. But Yeah. so it’s not, we were consistently training every single weekend for the entire six months period.
We were training pretty consistently up until about what would you say a lot, like April or may, and then you were gone one week. I was gone one weekend. We try to mix match. And so there was a little bit more gaps between our regular sessions. And that’s why I didn’t want to give her the FMS until we had some consistent sessions again, because I didn’t want to be like.
You, maybe you did. Well, maybe you did really great on the FMS. You got that 15 right away,
Francis: Okay.
James: but you also haven’t seen me in like two weeks. So could we have gotten that a better score or, Hey, you failed the FMS again, but I want you to think it’s because you’re not doing well. It’s because you haven’t seen me in three weeks, so maybe that’s why like, let’s get that consistent training in there and then let’s retest.
Francis: I see. So it’s almost like a snapshot of where you are at that time. Not necessarily a cumulative effort.
James: Well, I would say that I’d say it’s much more of a, how are we doing right now? And that’s why I always start all my sessions with, how are you doing? What’s up, what’s new. How are you doing it for these last few days? Because quite frankly, and not that a lot has ever come in with a bad attitude or bad mindset.
You know, if someone comes in, like I had a really, craptastic week, I’m really stressed. I have all these deadlines looming above my head. That’s not the Right, day to give that assessment. Even if they’re before it even it’s like, well, it’s been exactly six weeks. We should see some results.
Let’s do this. If the person goes into it with a bad mindset or just a sour mood that can very heavily influence your results. Because again, that speaks to that mind, body connection. It can be like, I’m feeling bad. I’m going to do bad on this.
Francis: right.
James: sure we’re all from more of that feeling.
Uh, you know, uh, just, just going through school and everything. It’s like,
oh, I’m going to fail this test. And so that’s why, I held off on doing the assessment and, but I’m really glad that Alanna actually approached me. Cause she, she told me after the first talk, you guys had the first discussion about her physical fitness journey that she wanted to get reassessed.
It’s like, great. Let’s put into the calendar, let’s work to that. Let’s make sure that we have at least two sessions before. And we did, and we got some spectacular results. And I love that the client came to me with that because yes, I keep track of all my client records. Yes. I keep track of what we’re doing, how we’re doing, you know, when are we progressing things, but it’s really great to see a lot of so invested how she’s doing.
She constantly asked, how am I doing? Is this improving? Do you think this is better? And I love having those conversations with her because you can tell how eager she is to meet these. And it’s not just she’s responding to outside pressure or the kind of guilt or shame basis of I really should be able to do more.
It’s I want to do more.
Francis: Yeah, it shows that she’s intrinsically motivated. And I feel like as with anything, if you have the motivation yourself like to do it, you’re going to see results.
James: Exactly.
Francis: And Alon has always been that kind of persons. Once she puts her mind to it she goes forward a hundred percent.
James: And quite frankly, my profession lives and dies by that adage of you can take a horse to water, but you can’t force a drink. I can show you all the movements. I can show you all the exercise. I can lecture to you about how the best way to train is or how to organize your sets and reps and rest breaks.
But if you’re not going to do it right, especially with a home-based exercise plan because I see a lot of once a week, If you don’t, if you’re not doing the homework, then you know, you’re going to see me. And it’s like, this is still really hard. It’s like, yep. This is going to stay hard until you didn’t worry about it.
Alana: And it also shows that I’m not just doing this for the radio show content, although it is an absolute plus to this.
Advice
Francis: My very last question for you, James. What advice would you give people who are thinking about starting personal training?
James: I will say it’s the one time I get on a soapbox today. Know who you’re getting in with. A lot of states personal training is an unregulated industry and you literally are not even required to have a certificate, to be a personal trainer. A lot of times people will have what’s called a CPT, a certified personal.
A certificate and while yes, that means they have some training. That’s a high school equivalency. There’s no stringent requirements on that. No deeper anatomy or corrective exercise knowledge that’s required. Whereas with the CSCs that I hold and the other certifications I hold, it’s all about corrective exercise is all about form function and the best way to do an optimal pattern to be efficient.
And so that’s why I always give myself a plug. It’s like, yeah I am probably one of the best trainers in the area because in addition to the CSCs and the FMS ones, I mentioned, I hold four or five other certificates and personal training. That are more ancillary and it just means that I have better training background than most people.
And I have no problem saying that because I’ve worked my butt off to get there. So the main goal there is know who you’re working with, make sure they have their standard of who you are as a person, and that they can work with you because personality is everything. I love Ilana. She comes in she’s my last client, every Saturday, pretty much.
Well six months. Yeah, she’s always the last person I see. And you know what? I have more fun during her sessions than most of the other rest of the day, because she always brings a great attitude. She’s always so positive, and I’m going to do this. I’m going to work hard. She might be a little timid or a little afraid of some new movements, but she always gives it a shot.
And that’s the other message I would say is. Always, always, always do your best because as long as you are being honest with yourself and you all, you are doing the best you can, that’s all that matters, right. Maybe a slow progress, especially if you don’t have as much experience working with a trainer working in a gym or, even just working out in general.
Well, you’ll get there investment on yourself. It’s an investment on your health and your fitness much later in life.
Francis: Sounds like a great life mantra to ask me.
James: Yeah, just bring your a game every day.
Promo
Alana: Absolutely. And actually James, I believe. That there was a special promotion for all listeners out there that maybe tuning in that may want to check you out and check out your services that are local or in the area. And really liked what you had to say today. Do you want to give a little shout out to.
James: Sure thing. So if you’re interested, you can visit my website your coach, james.com. You can also reach me via email at James at your coach, james.com or texting my cell phone at (703) 965-5234. And if you email or message me through my website or text me wanting to schedule a session or a consultation with me, if you mentioned HQ, a F radio, I’ll give you a 10% discount on your first package that you purchased with me. Yeah.
Francis: I feel so official now that we have got. Thank you so much, James, for being on the show really appreciate you giving your insight into Ilana’s fitness journey. You’ve been so knowledgeable and really appreciate the the time that you’ve given us. Thank you for that. We really appreciate it.
James: Well, thanks for having me. I will admit as little nurses as the first time I’ve interviewed, but I was a lot of fun guys. So if you ever wanna, if you ever want another check-in on how Alana’s doing that, just let me know.
Debrief
Alana: I wanted to mention during the earlier part of the show, when we were recording when James said that I was a little bit more reserved during certain exercises or initial introduction to new exercises. That is the only time in which someone could ever call me reserved about literally anything.
I am not a reserved or timid,
Francis: Yeah.
Alana: uh, lifting, holding something heavy. Stepping on something. Yeah. I’m going to be as reserved as humanly possible about that stuff. Oh gosh. Gasa what did we think? What did you feel? Do you, I guess like my number one question and coming away from all of this is, does it line up.
Knowing me for so many years and knowing how I am in terms of fitness and my perception of fitness, like, does that kind of line up with what you thought of my personal trainers assessment of me essentially?
Were you surprised by anything or was everything about at the level you had thought I was at in terms of personal fitness?
Francis: I think that everything that he said in terms of where you were at your fitness?
journey back in. Matches my vision of where you were at. In fact maybe you scored a little bit higher than I maybe would have pegged you for,
Alana: same as, as noted by my oh, I was a nine and James saying, no, you were 11. I’m like really? Okay, great. Look at that.
Francis: but yeah, like everything else I think matches up, he has obviously a more of an ex. Spin on your stuff. You obviously like to talk more about the mental block and the time that you the issues with some of the exercises, but everything he said, mostly fell in line with where I thought you were at in January. Where you’re at now in July, I’m a little surprised that you can carry 20 pounds, 25 pounds. Congratulations alone.
I don’t know that I would’ve seen that for you six months ago, or even now, I mean, granted, I’m not part of your fitness journey. I’m only hearing the stories, but it sounds like you’re just a few months away from maybe being able to carry something up a set of stairs.
Alana: I will say I was equally as surprised because I feel like the deadline. And the deep squats with the added way of 25 pounds. Was just a very recent introduction and even last week, I’m recalling, I, I was like, oh, wow, that was really hard.
And he said, you just, deadlifted 25 pounds. And I said, really. Like even, I am continuously surprised by where I’m at, which truly speaks to what makes James such a great personal trainer is his pacing and his knowledge of, and being so in tune with the client and knowing where they’re at.
Maybe the strategy was to hand me the weight without me looking at the number.
So maybe he just learned how to work around my mental block.
Francis: He did talk about being sneaky sometimes and getting under the skin
Alana: Yeah. He’s good at that. And he really is.
Francis: What was the biggest surprise to you after that interview with James?
Alana: So I think it was just the realization of honestly like how much we, I can carry now and just, yeah, I’m just continuously surprised and impressed with how well I did on that test and that D to really see that there is improvement. Yeah. Obviously instrumental change and improvement over time. Like it’s hard to see the little changes, right?
And I’m continuously surprised even when I work out with him that I’m doing certain things because I’ll constantly ask him, oh, am I doing this right? Is this the right way? And he said, yeah, your form is actually really great. And I’m always surprised because when I initially started, Homegirl did not know how to lift her body or move in any way.
Cause coming from like, Never lifting things and having a mental and physical aversion to lifting anything heavy to now, like I can do lunches without, feeling completely winded and like done for the day, you know?
So it’s like, or taking the test and not doing any form of workout and then feeling sore the next day. And that was
literally. Moving my body in different ways and him measuring or watching me do certain movements, like not lifting anything, just moving. So it probably I’m impressed. I’m honestly very impressed.
And I think I’m doing really well in terms of progress with where I’m at.
Francis: Let me end this little segment with, 20, 21 year of Alana. So many big changes for you as our audience is probably very well aware at this point of a 2021 each QA of radio. This, I think has got to be one of the more impressive. Or I would say more impressive. I don’t think any one life achievement that you’ve had is more impressive than the other.
It’s different from your other ones. I should say in that it is more of a slow burn, right? It’s kind of like therapy in that way, where you are incrementally growing a lot of your other improvements this year have been. Fast they’ve been instant. Well, I didn’t say instant, but you know what I mean?
Like you set your mind to it and you got it. And it’s very much to that instant gratification. Alana sets her mind to something as she does it. Um, I mean, not that man, I don’t even know how to articulate it because you set your mind to personal training and you’ve gotten so far already, but I’m trying to say is just like, you’ve really worked hard at this and the progress is really showing and that’s awesome.
I’m really proud of you for that.
Alana: Oh, thanks so much Francis. And I think it is astounding too, because like you said, I’m a fan. Someone who puts their mind to something I’m an all or nothing kind of person. I’m either invested in something or I’m not, and there’s no middle ground for me, but. A situation or a practice that I literally just was like, I don’t lift heavy things like that is something I literally don’t open my mind to lifting Amazon packages.
That is boy man behavior. That is not me behavior, like not knocking women for lifting heavy things. It was just literally a me situation. So, but like, wow. Look at me going outside of my. Mental block and putting my mind to something I otherwise was going to write
off literally for the rest of my life.
Like I will just have men do everything for me.
Francis: Not even going outside of it, like literally overcoming it,
Alana: Oh, true. Character development.
Francis: No.
Alana: We still my main character energy making me into super and cool. Oh, uh, I am living for this right now. I didn’t even realize it then, but that’s totally true. And wow. It makes it all the more incredible and just me feeling really positive about the whole thing. Well, thank you so much, Francis.
This is so great. And thank you also for just having a personal interest in. Knowing about my journey and turning this into a series because, um, I mean, I am like personally invested in this outside of the radio show, but it’s definitely a plus of course, to have a content opportunity. Right.
And, um, thing for this, I think this is so fun and this is such a great, like first answered. I know it’s an actually sponsored, we talked about this because we didn’t actually receive any money from him, but it feels like a through opportunity because we have a code that we’re promoing. So we love that.
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