Mentor or Martyr - Eric Chessen

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and the health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level 5 Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, Certified Course Creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to level5mentors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Oh, we're live. Mr. Chatson, welcome back.

Hey, thank you. I love your podcast. I love your interviews. I love the free flow style in which we can operate here. So I'm happy to actually be sitting down with you right now.

Yeah, me too, man. It's it's always really fun. I I really enjoy our conversations. And you've been in the fitness and health industry. You've you've really devoted your life and your career to the development of fitness for autistic community. And it's uh it's great to highlight you here. And I guess the the first question I I have is you know, being recording May 1st, 2020, how has your life and business changed over the last two to three months since well, I'll I'll give the quick version of it.

So my wife and I had relocated. I've I've spent my entire life, all 39 and a half years of it, in New York. And we had decided that we wanted to make a big life change and that we wanted to live elsewhere outside of New York. So we chose Charlotte, North Carolina, and we moved here on March 1st. And about three weeks after that, everything changed. And in that time, going into March, I was supposed to teach three of our autism fitness certification, level one courses, and those were two-day events. And we had three coming up. Two of them were in California, one of them was in New Jersey. And as days went by, my business manager, David Blumen, and I were saying, all right, well, let's see, we're we're adopting this wait and see attitude, and then it was abundantly clear that we weren't going to be able to do these seminars. And we had two things going on in our heads and in our conversations there. One was from a purely business perspective, we want to continue to have that revenue coming in because we need a viable business. And two was the information that we're delivering and what we're providing to people is something that they can't get anywhere else. And what I stand behind and what I stand for with autism fitness is bringing people the best possible fitness programming principles, concepts, and strategies for the autism population. And we knew this is something that can't it can't just stop. It seems obvious, but if it stops, then it can't continue. But we have momentum and we realize how important the information that we are delivering is to people to serve that community. So in three weeks, we I won't say completely redesign the level one certification because a lot of the information we already had, but we restructured it. So now it's a four-week online training we do through Zoom for the attendees, and then we're setting up one-day live practical hands-on events regionally once travel restrictions and once lockdown restrictions begin to fade and people are able to travel safely. What emerged from that was a course that, and I I will preface this by saying I was averse to doing anything online because I like being live. I like being in front of people, I like demonstrating, I like walking around a room, but we invited some of our current certified pros to join the Zoom calls each week, and they said this is better than the original course because we have more time to spend on each concept, we have more time to ask questions, we have more time to go back in between Tuesday and Thursday, and then Thursday to Tuesday to go back and reference the material and look at the videos and read stuff. So, what came out of this was an optimized course that, you know, it was diamonds from pressure theory, where we had these constraints we had to work under, and what we produced was something that was better than the original version. And it's more accessible too, because now someone doesn't have to wait six months to take the course. They can start, like our next one we have May 5th, starting, they can start online, and then when we can do the live events, we'll we'll do the live events.

The interesting thing about what we have going here, and and congratulations on making that pivot, man. I think that um, you know, within the fitness and health industry, one of the things that's become quite evident to me and hundreds of people that I talk to every month and and get connected with is that, you know, if you had asked someone in the fitness industry, maybe a gym owner or trainer five, six months ago, be like, hey, if you had to force yourself to go online, what would that look like? And they'd be like, well, it's gonna suck. Everyone's gonna hate it. I'm gonna hate it. My clients will run from it, all of these things, right? But then once you put the constraint, once this fundamental universal constraint came onto the the industry, now you're starting to see people, you know. I was talking to a client whose business is thriving, Erica Suter. Um, she's uh, you know, online, she's a soccer performance coach, and she's pivoted and she's prepared herself for this unintentionally for years. She's like, you know what? I kind of like this. My clients like it, right? And then you're starting to get the creativity. And the beautiful thing about what we have is the constraints. There's actually a book called The Beautiful, A Beautiful Constraint. I don't know if you read that one. No, but it's great and it's very timely for what's going on now, is that you put the constraints on, and then all of a sudden the creativity and the collaboration flow through one direction, right? And and to how to okay, now this is what we're limited to. How do we make it better and better and better? And I think it's gonna come out of this. You know, I'm a hopeless optimist and also contrarian realist that this is gonna happen. People are gonna find the ways to make the best out of what we have right now, and I think it's gonna stick for a while. What do you think?

Oh, oh, completely. Well, no number one, it it it has to, because someone who's going to be successful in a in a space also has to understand different ways to be successful in in that space, also. And rather than looking at things as better or worse, you have to look at what is and what isn't. And one of the things that I look at is the psychology of choice, too. And and this is not an emerging field. This has been around for for quite some time. And it's been routinely demonstrated that when people have too many choices, not only is there a fatigue based on those choices, but people are never as satisfied if you give them a choice between six different things. So even with fitness programming or with you can you can assign it or ascribe it to anything. If you have too many choices, what happens is people get confused about which one they should choose, and then ultimately they're they're less satisfied with their choice because there were so many others. When you start putting in constraints and you say, well, you only have these variables to use now, there's a certain amount of focus that needs to happen. And also I think it eliminates a lot of what could be called noise. So you don't have these choices anymore. And so you have to pick one of these two and just go with it. And I think for the entrepreneurial spirited, it's now you have to make it happen given options that you that you that are no longer available to you. And and there is something to be said about that because it it doesn't give you the perfect course of action, but it definitely takes away a lot of uh a lot of variables that were there before that aren't now.

Yeah, that's really well put. You know, it's I I always go back to I think it's Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books, talks about the difference between ketchup and mustard and why you walk down the aisle in the condiment section and you'll see 50 different types of mustard, but you'll still only see one or two types of ketchup, right? And why is that? Well, it all started with Dijon. They may try to make mustard fancy, right? But then ketchup kind of stayed the course. And now everyone just it's a lot easier to buy ketchup than it is to buy mustard. You know, I have five different types of mustard in my fridge that are half or three quarters full, and then I only have one thing of ketchup. I don't know what's what's around that, but it's a really interesting model. Like, well, let's just make the ketchup better, or let's just stay with the the formula that works, right? Then they try to get all fancy with mustard. So hey, let's talk about autism fitness a little bit. Yeah. So obviously you serve the autism community, yeah, but you also serve coaches and trainers, right? Let's talk about who who are kind of the the people who are enrolling in your program. What do those people look like? Who who are they working with? What what is the ideal to enroll?

What continues to I and I don't use this term lightly, but what continues to uh astound me and really make me proud of the work that we do is the high caliber of people who wind up in you don't you don't wind up in the autism fitness certification by accident. You know, it's not it's seldom is it a, oh, I need, you know, three more CEU credits for my certification, so I guess I'll take autism fitness. So there's almost a barrier to entry. We get a cross-section of the fitness and the wellness community. So we have fitness trainers, we have a lot of adapted PE coaches, behavior therapists, we get an awful lot of physical and occupational therapists, speech pathologists, a lot of parents too. The parents who are in our course are some of the most remarkable, dedicated people that I've met, because not only are they doing on this on behalf of their own children, regardless of age and a lot of their kids or teens and young adults, but they also want this to be possible for other parents and other families as well, which is something that we take very seriously. With respect to fitness trainers, it's uh trainers who are really interested in working with this niche population, but know that they need more information on how to do it correctly, and or it's fitness trainers who have been uh approached by families or approached by a school. They say, Hey, would you be interested in developing a fitness program for my son or my daughter or this class? And so those are the professionals who wind up in our certification. And and we've also had two developmental pediatricians go through the course in the last year also.

Yeah, so it's it's kind of a um a little bit of a diversity in there, but it seems like the biggest thing is that they're probably already working with autistic populations.

Yeah, yeah, and and the hub, the hub of it is also, and the the beautiful thing to me is you have these disciplines, or you have people from all of these different fields or all of these different backgrounds, but we're using fitness as a gateway towards either developing or enhancing what they're doing. So, for example, our speech pathologists are integrating language and speech production and all of these higher order verbal skills, which are tend to be a great challenge for this population, by immersing them into fitness programming. Our behavior therapists are finding that there are less maladaptive behaviors when they uh when their clients, when the individuals they're working with are moving around. So to me, it's the highest representation of what fitness can do because we're not looking at it merely from a let's get up and move because moving is good perspective, but we can we can add in all of these other areas of life that are really challenging for this population by using fitness as a foundation or using fitness as a framework for that.

One of the most uh interesting and unassuming certifications that I've ever gotten was the the CrossFit Endurance certification. And I'm gonna circle this back in its relevance, but um I went there because I thought, okay, well, you know, I have a certain interest in endurance sports. But I went through their certification as headed up by Brian McKenzie and his great staff, very experienced people. And when I came out of it, I was like, whoa, this is the most applicable base of, you know, like um the how-to, the programming, the recovery. Like the I took more out of that certification and applied it to the my general coaching career than any. Is that I mean, is there similar things within autism fitness that are just generally applicable to anything?

Damn, you ask good questions. Well one of the first things that I say in the in the course when we start talking, so a basis or or context, our autism fitness methodology is based on something called the PAC profile, which is PAC is PAC, it's physical, adaptive, and cognitive. So the physical is where we're looking at exercise selection, progression, regression, and programming. And one of the first things I say in the course is that there are things that we needed to reinvent and there are things that we don't. One of the nice things that we don't need to reinvent is exercise, because if we're looking at human beings, which individuals on the autism spectrum happen to be, then there are no autism specific movement patterns. There are just movement patterns. And if we take it uh take it from that perspective, then we say, well, there are no autism-specific exercises, meaning that we look at what are what is the basis of human human movement and performance from the perspective of strength, stability, and motor planning. What are what are our baseline skills here and what are we trying to achieve? And there is an applied philosophy to that when we start asking the question of why are we doing this? So we're asking, what do we need to do from the perspective of a starting point? But then on the other side of that, to keep ourselves grounded and to keep ourselves doing what we're supposed to be doing, or in the words of Dan John, to ensure that we're keeping the goal, the goal. So if we're looking, if we're looking at exercise selection, what does this individual need in order to be successful? And when we say success, well, we're looking at developing strength, stability, and motor planning in a meaningful way so that it generalizes beyond the fitness session. And once you have a grasp on the concepts and the strategies, it makes decision making a lot easier. And once you continue, like anything else, it's going to be the experiential that's that's going to really be the guide for skill development. But once you understand the practicals of programming and we're using this exercise because we're using a squat because this, where you and then as a higher order standard or consideration of that, we're using a squat instead of a leg press, or we're using a free squat instead of a wall squat because of this. When you can start understanding the movement that needs to happen and being able to distinguish it from others, I think that ultimately good coaching comes down to having a good filter.

Yeah. Yeah. And I've, you know, I've had the pleasure of uh interviewing Dan John a number of times. I've gone to multiple of you know workshops that he's run. And the the beauty of someone like that is, and kind of what I see in what you're doing here is that he takes a ton of experience and boils it down to the simplest philosophy that allows you to be effective. And that's ultimately what we all strive for. I think in in fitness, we I don't know the industry is just in love with complexity when you know most of our clients just need to move, stretch, drink more water, right? And I think you know, something like what you're doing here is taking very, you know, something that probably seems very overwhelming, like dealing with a you know, fitness in an autistic population, but you're boiling it down to simple principles that people can apply. I like that. So my question to you, Eric, is when what are the expectations? Like if I'm a coach or you know, a practitioner of some sort who's already working with this population, when I come through your certification, what am I going to have at the other side?

Well, what we're providing is our methodology and an understanding from a needs assessment. When we go into the PAC profile, so we have physical, we have adaptive and cognitive. So a lot of the fitness trainers or the fitness professionals who are coming into the course already have an understanding of the principles of movement, biomechanics, the exercise selection. They're likely to be very familiar with most, if not all, of the exercises that we're using. The difference between general programming and programming with the autism population in particular is that a really good program on paper. Now, granted, with general population, you know, a really good program on paper is just a program on paper until it's executed. But with the autism population, we also have these adaptive and cognitive variables. And it's not to say there aren't physical challenges, also, because the majority of individuals on the autism spectrum of all ages and abilities that we work with tend to have gross motor deficits and some motor planning stuff going on, too, stuff being a severely technical term there. Um but I can get into some of that. The adaptive and the cognitive are really the areas where we I think we make a tremendous difference for fitness coaches because we're looking at adaptive functioning as motivation. So how motivated is the athlete to participate in this particular activity? And then the steps to take if we have behavior that's off task, if our athlete isn't as motivated, if we're seeing some uh some aberrant behaviors going on, the entire course is set up on a contingency basis, meaning if then. So if we're see if we're observing this, then what is our reaction or or what is the next step to take? And we can do that with all three of those areas of ability, the physical. So if we're seeing this movement pattern shift, or if we're seeing this contraindicated movement or this compensatory movement pattern with a hurdle step or with medicine ball push throw, what is the next step to take to ensure that that exercise is meaningful for that athlete from an adaptive perspective? How do we provide positive behavior support to a population that, generally speaking, does not want to engage in visor uh vigorous physical activity? And then from a cognitive perspective, that's all about coaching and cueing. So, what people coming into the course are going to get, and the feedback that continuously comes our way from the attendees, is that what they're getting is the background information and then the structure for implementing these programs successfully, regardless of whether we're talking about working one-to-one with an athlete who is very high functioning, who meaning that they are really motivated, they understand the directions given verbally, and they can execute that that performance to the best of their ability, or you're working with a class of four individuals of severely varying physical, adaptive, and and cognitive abilities, and you have to make that work too. So I I think that we are giving people a system that is that not only makes sense, but has been validated over and over and over with different practitioners in in different environments and situations. So they're getting the structure and and and the concepts, but it's our promise to people and and what we're delivering through the course is that when you go through this course, what you come out with the day that you complete the live seminar, and even now the day that you complete the online portion of the course, you will have methods that you can implement the next day and they will work.

Awesome. Yeah, that's great. And it's just, yeah, I think you have to have probably the one thing is you have to have some sort of base knowledge of working with people in a fitness, and then you have to have a passion for working with autistic populations, right? Sure. Yeah. Where what's the state of the business? Like how many people have you certified? What does your community look like? What is how's how's the growth?

So so far we have we launched the certification in, I believe it was June of 2017. And since then, we have over 300 certified pros in the level one program. I was planning on launching level two early this year. It's gonna look a little farther along the line because that's gonna be a very experiential program. But we have over 300 certified pros worldwide in 10 different countries, and I I think we're just starting to that this is this is just the start. I think the my my reference point for that is one of our certified pros who's also a parent of um of a young adult who's very, very involved with autism fitness and also writing articles and producing content and videos for us. She is up in New Hampshire, and she had remarked to one of the executives for the school district that we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 certified pros worldwide. And that district executive uh responded, we need 300 in this district alone. And that really resonates with me because you think about how many people are affected by autism, and then how many people could benefit from either receiving a having access to a fitness program or having the information to run the fitness program. So it needs to grow on an on an exponential basis. But and the most thrilling thing for me in teaching the course is our attendees and our certified pros are going to be working with individuals who I will never meet. But because the work, because the work works, they are able to take the same concepts and strategies that I would use with my athletes and apply them. And their athletes are able to receive that same benefit.

Yeah, it's interesting, man. I'm curious too, because you know, as as an entrepreneur, I know you have another company as well. You want to tell us about that company really quick?

Yeah. Yeah. So Stronger Than You is the the company that I never intended. It's um to borrow yet another overused phrase, it's organic. Um, Stronger Than You is a company that I started with my co-founder, uh Ryan J. Pitt of Stronger Ground. He was a master welder and and metal worker in the middle of Iowa. And what happened was I had found him through through Facebook and he was making custom Indian clubs and maces and grip tools. And I thought, oh, that's cool stuff. And I I think back, yeah, it seems, I don't know, to me, and this is my perspective, and I may be off, it seems strange that, oh, I'm I'm the autism fitness guy, but I also have this strength and conditioning equipment company. It's because I love the I I love movement and I love strength and conditioning, and I love and this is my world. So I started designing some some things that I would like to use in in my home gym at the time. And we and after designing a few things, Ryan suggested we just form a new company. So that's how stronger than you was uh was born. And now we have uh a product called the Gut Wrench, which is a portable, portable version of a of a landmine which clocks in it under under five pounds. And that has resonated with people all over from those who are in larger facilities, but especially now people who have garage gyms or or smaller facilities or an environment where space is a premium. And the tenants of the company are we always make products that we ourselves want to use. Everything has to be modular or or have multiple purposes, and everything is is made here in the US to the highest possible specifications.

Awesome. Awesome, man. And you were uh kind enough to to offer us a discount code. So what is that?

I was, yes, for 10% off of your order. It is uh Malzone 10, capital M, and you don't have to capitalize the one or the zero.

Um thank you for doing that. I appreciate it, of course.

Yeah, absolutely. And I as I mentioned to you before we got started, that is something that we normally don't do, but I love getting on to chat with you and you know, talking about cultivating culture, which you had asked me about earlier. I I think that you cultivate one of the best cultures in in the fitness, uh especially in the fitness business sphere, which we could go on record or off record of uh talking about some of what goes on in that space also.

Yeah. Yeah, I do a lot of it on record, but but that's that's a whole nother thing. And uh, you know, as as your journey as an entrepreneur, Eric, what's more than one of the bigger personal challenges on this journey for you?

Listening to people's advice. Well, I I am uh labels are useful until until they're not. I would never call myself a a control freak at all. But uh what what's happened over the last couple months has been a perfect example of this. I never wanted to do anything online, and I am I don't think I am unique in that category. I think that's how a lot of people in the um in the fitness space uh reacted to this. But it comes back to that psychology and the reality of choice, is that I had to, if I wanted to have a viable continuous business. And embracing it, once our certified pros, whose opinions to me very much matter and and do make a difference, they came back after the first and and and second sessions that we ran. And they said this is even better than the first course. And I thought, wow, here am I, you know, in my own head thinking, you know, not only how is this gonna work, because logistically it was we made it work. It's how do how do we not take away from the experience of how we had the course set up before? So I think it wasn't embracing the technology, but not shunning the technology and just shutting up and listening to what people had to say. And I'm not gonna argue with people when they tell me that a product I'm producing is better than the product I produced before.

Yeah, it's interesting, man. And it's it's that's why you know events like this that we're going through now are are so critical. Difficult. Yeah, critical to the to progress, right? Because we need to shake up status quo and force us into corners that we need to just to figure things out. And I I asked this question, you know, towards the end of most of my interviews, too, because it it it's had this way of working out really well. Let's put in the the context of autism for fitness. What's the biggest need that you have in your business right now?

The biggest need, I think the biggest need is for other people to recognize the need also. And and that this is uh this is something that dedicated fitness professional or a dedicated professional, if they're willing to learn and willing to practice and willing to you know trust the concepts and and the strategies, that they can do it. Because there's a huge need, and they're also in in the wake of everything else happening right now, there have been a couple research studies published about quality of life for the autism population compared to that of neurotypical individuals. And it unsurprisingly, to those of us who who work with this population, those life uh assessments or or quality of life tend to be pretty low. And what we know about fitness is that we can uh we can elevate certain uh certain qualities of life from the physical to the the psychological. So I think what our business really needs is the continued visibility and and people really getting that if they go through this through the coursework, they're gonna make a difference.

Yeah, awesome. Well, I think there's two things that most fitness professionals want, right? They they want to they want to help, they want to make an impact. Um, and then traditionally for the large majority of our industry, they they struggle to make a living that they're happy with.

Yeah.

Um and I feel like this making the impact, helping a population, that's that's completely one thing. But in order for people in our fitness industry, fitness professionals to stick with it for the long term, enough to make a big enough impact, they need to make a living. Yeah. And I feel like this is, you know, going into, you know, looking at this purely from a business standpoint, is it, you know, going into a niche, um, you know, really specializing yourself in a population that's fairly good size, right? Like what is the autistic population within the United States?

One million plus. And as the the numbers come out, and the the statistics, you know, you can you can argue either way, but meaning that are there actually more people born being born with autism? Is it that the diagnostic criteria has become a a little bit more general or or has included uh more individuals now? Yeah, I there there's certainly some on both sides. But the fact is now, whereas 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the the number was somewhere in one in, I think it was 69, 70 individuals diagnosed on the autism spectrum. They're looking at children age, I believe it was eight or nine, so diagnosed in that eight or nine years old age demographic. And now we're looking at numbers in one in 54. And I I always ask this question, I I like having the research, I like having the statistics, but if you and and you can you can relate this back to COVID too. People see statistics, but then the real question to ask is, okay, well, how many people do you know who have been affected by this? And inevitably, just about everybody you speak to in the US, oh, I know someone who has it, or I know someone, and it's very similar with the numbers in in autism. If you if you ask somebody 30 years ago, oh, do you know someone with autism? Oh, uh, you know, no, or someone now you ask someone, oh, do you know someone with autism? Oh yeah, my cousin, or oh yeah, my neighbor, or oh yeah, so it it's it's so prevalent. And if we're looking at, you know, fitness from a needs perspective as a niche, like there, there's no way you can say that this population is being served in the way that they need to be served with with fitness programming. And we tell people who are professionals in the programming uh in the in the autism fitness certification, we want you to develop a successful business out of this, because sometimes people look at uh people will look at special populations or special needs populations as charity cases, and I don't look at it that way because I want to have a healthy respect for my athletes and say, go, okay, this is the population I work with. It's highly specialized. I am a specialist, therefore I want to run a success uh successful business in practice based on the fact that I have a very specialized and quite frankly unique set of skills. And so too should anybody who comes to our certification. What we're giving you is those that unique set is set of skills to be used. So I never look at it as if you're running a business to the detriment of the business, you're not going to be able to do more because you can't even satisfy the things that you need to run a business. If you're running a successful business, you can do more. So I tell the people in who are in the program when they say, Oh, I, you know, I don't know if I want to charge for this, run a business and run a successful business and you'll be able to do more.

Yeah. Yeah, there's this, there's this weird thing. And um, you know, I had the the author Bob Berg on my podcast a little while ago, and he kind of clumped it all together into the healing arts, right? The fitness, the wellness, you know, all that. There's that there seems to be within the healing arts this thing of, well, I'm helping people, so I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't charge for it. And, you know, it's almost like a guilt thing, which I struggle to understand because there's nothing wrong with money. Money just enables you to have more impact and do more. Money is a tool, it's a very useful tool. And I think it's important that people understand, like, hey, yeah, you should charge what you're worth because it allows you to go out and help more people. And if you're starving, you're not appropriately doing your job. And that's a key thing, too. And you know, it's it's the old, you know, the airplane oxygen mask analogy, right? It's like, well, you gotta put on your own oxygen mask if you want to help more people save their lives.

It's just that you've got to have at a certain point, you have to decide whether you're gonna be a mentor or a martyr.

Yes.

And and the martyr thing is nice and dramatic, but you're not gonna be able to help as many people.

Right. I love that. That may be the name of the episode. Mentor or mentor.

Make a cool tattoo, also.

That's really good, man. Well, Eric, any other kind of uh closing thoughts or comments about what's going on right now, any calls to action for our audience?

Living healthy and being active and you know, lifting heavy stuff will always be important. Right now it's a little different. Tomorrow it'll be a little bit different. I think we're living in a time where we are what I like about it, and I don't want this to come off as macabre nihilistic, but I think we're really we have an opportunity to consider our own mortality, which is a good thing, not a bad thing, and realize that there are there are things that are important in life. There are things that are important for ourselves, for our families, for our friends, for our businesses, and that having focus and perseverance in any of these pursuits is going to yield results. And uh a business or a relationship is never going to exist 100% uh in reality as it does in our head. So the the whole idea of pivoting or or shifting, again, is is in reference to the completion of a goal. So sometimes it's it's important to think about the goal rather than to think of the uh the mechanism for delivery. Like you look, you can you can argue dumbbell versus kettlebell, and as you said before, it's a tool. There's relative merit, but ultimately it's weight. You know, you come back to asking, well, what is this? Why do I need it? What am I doing with it? And it's it's a way to to ground yourself and refocus and then just take action on it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's that's a I mean, that's a great thought. And you know, first of all, I I think there's not nothing wrong with a little nihilism. I think as a a world, especially media, we all need to realize, hey, people are dying right now due to corona. But we also gotta say, we're all gonna die. Every single person on this plane is gonna die. And do whatever you want with that thought, but let's just make that realization and and talk about it openly. And then we got to look at, you know, whether it's utilitarian or whatever you want to say, you know, what's best for our society and our communities, and then go from there. I'm not saying either way is right. Now getting to your other thought, I think what you're talking about is focused on the result, is ultimately what I'm hoping for is actually gonna be the forced evolution of the fitness industry, is now that we're gonna focus on it's the difference to me between, and this is just my verbiage, it's different between a trainer and a coach. Yeah. Trainer is forced, is use, is focused on the mechanism, right? Coach is focused on the result. If you're a coach right now, you're being creative, your clients are still understanding that you're focused on their outcome, and that maintains your business. If your job was to come in and watch them count reps of dumbbell curls, your job is no longer relevant. But if you're the coach and you're focused on the result and the outcome of your clients, that'll never change. You're able to pivot and change in how you deliver it. And I think that's a really, really powerful thought for people to digest right now, you know.

Yeah, I I I love that because also what happens is I don't know if it's necessarily a leveling of the playing field because the online space was always there. But I think to your point of, you know, of uh fitness trainer versus coach, well, now everybody is teaching, you know, at-home push-ups. And now everybody is teaching air squats. So that's not unique anymore. So it might be the leveling up of the industry, one that you and I very much know is relatively comparatively unregulated, and where it is sometimes difficult for the general population to tell the difference between someone who is a really good marketer and someone who is a really good coach, because that distinction is hard to make when you're not looking at it from the lens of either experience or expertise. So maybe this is a gracious calling that occurs. And it's not to say that there aren't tremendous coaches and practitioners out there who are going to be hurt by it, and it doesn't make them any less a good coach. But at the same time, it also may constrict the industry to the point where people who are getting by by just giving people volume of body weight online, that doesn't become viable anymore because you can get that anywhere.

Yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see how this whole thing plans out. But I think there's obviously gonna be um people who are already set up you know, just by random luck to be successful here. There's gonna be a population that is gonna be able to pivot due to you know having the right mindset or having you know the coach versus trainer mindset is what I call it. There's gonna be a certain population who's just stuck to a particular mechanism that's no longer viable and they're gonna move on to something else. So yeah, we'll see, man. But you know, one thing that's always around is the autistic population is gonna be here um for a very long time and they have needs and they're very specialized, and that's where autism fitness comes in. So, man, thanks again for for coming on. And uh, where do people get a hold of you?

Sure. Um, they can go to autismfitness.com for everything uh certification and and consulting related. And then for the uh the gut wrench, uh stronger than you, and that's t-a-n and the letter you.com. And if you use uh Malzone 10, you will get 10% off the gut wrench. And we are uh also running an a new deal on shipping. Um, if you buy a gut wrench in one of what we call our scullicorn uh t-shirts, then we're doing free shipping on that.

Awesome, awesome. Well, it's always a pleasure, Mr. Chaston. We'll uh we'll be in touch. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Eric. I appreciate it.

Hey, it's your host, Eric Malzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Future of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is futureoffitness.co. Again, that's futureoffitness.co. We've got some big, big announcements coming down the pipe, and we want you to make sure that you are on top of it. Thank you again. Signing off.