50 Plus? Before You Pick Up That Dumbbell WATCH THIS

The vast majority of adults don’t do any form of strength training. Like zilch. Zero. Zip. And until very recently, that included yours truly. I have a lovely gym in my building, like four stories that way, and I still wasn’t going in there. I just wouldn’t do it.

Let’s get moving. And not just “let’s get moving,” but let’s feel safe and comfortable moving in the bodies that we have. It’s not about weight loss. It’s not about getting jacked, like you said. It’s just about, again, regaining control over your body if you didn’t have it before.

The vast majority of adults don’t do any form of strength training. Like zilch. Zero. Zip. And until very recently, that included yours truly. I have a lovely gym in my building, like four stories that way, and I still wasn’t going in there. I just wouldn’t do it.

I became really interested in how to parlay my love of cycling into more of a longevity play. How might I live better because I’m physically fit due to the sport I love? There is no substitute for lifting heavy weights. You can do all the cycling you want, but it will not provide the strength training that you need.

So this year, I waved the white flag and decided I’m going to start strength training. And now I’m six months in. But the way I was going to approach it was all wrong. Completely wrong. But luckily, a friend put me onto a company called Move Daily and my strength coach, Roshan Chopra, who we’re going to talk to today in today’s interview. They really provided a process. And I think it’s so important for people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s to approach it the right way so we don’t end up injured. That’s what we’re going to talk about today with Roshan. And just to give you a little bit of background on him, he is a Canadian athlete. He was a gymnast and then he went on to perform with Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. How cool is that? He has a degree in psychology. He’s an animal flow master instructor, and we’re going to get into what that’s all about in the interview. But without further ado, let’s jump in. Here’s a crazy stat:

The most recent survey of people 17 to 19 says that they do strength training. But it’s even more interesting to hear the converse number: 82% of adults are not doing any form of strength training, which I find really shocking. Maybe that’s going to change because of all the longevity stuff that’s coming out right now. Knowing what I know now, that you could tune in and say, “Here’s what to do. It’s an approach. Here’s an approach to strength training after 50.”

I thought what a good way to start this off was with my bone-headed assumptions about what was going to happen. Okay, okay, you down with that? Yeah, okay. So first of all, I always thought, “I’m a mountain biker. I have to do these Rudy Rocky climbs. Some of them are like 20%.” That is both cardio and strength training. It’s all in one. Yeah, so the more I listened to these podcasts and I’m reading these books, I was like, “I gotta do this because it’s so correlated with longevity.” And also, you know, like I want the intervening years to be really good. So I went, “Okay. And for God’s sake, I’ll do strength 3D.”

I reached out to Move Daily with the expectation that I was going to spend about 350 bucks. I thought I’d come in once or maybe twice at most. You’d tell me what to do, show me a couple of things, and then I’d peace out and go to the gym in my building, right? Well, none of that happened, and it did not play out that way. Thank goodness that it didn’t. So maybe you could explain – it’s not called “Get Jacked,” the company you work with. Absolutely not. It’s called Move Daily. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about the philosophy you guys approach people like me with.

Well, Move Daily is just that – we’re trying to empower people to move, right? Because, like you said, a lot of the population doesn’t even do that. So regardless of strength training, it’s just about getting moving. And not just “let’s get moving,” but let’s feel safe and comfortable moving in the bodies that we have. So it’s not about weight loss. It’s not about getting jacked, like you said. It’s just about, again, regaining control over your body if you didn’t have it before. Maybe you’re coming off an injury. Maybe you’re coming off a very sedentary lifestyle, and it’s time to just get you moving. So we’re just there to help empower people to move in their own bodies and just feel safe and comfortable being in their own bodies.

Many people over 50. Everyone and anyone, yeah, we get tons of people. But over 50 could mean someone who is in quote-unquote shape, who is more fit than a 20-year-old. We get 20-year-olds that are completely unfit or not fit, to some 70-year-olds. So I get the number that we want to throw out there, like, “Oh, it’s over 50,” but it all depends on who’s coming in and what background they’re coming in with and what athletic background or non-athletic background or any type of background that they’re coming in with.

With the people who are like 40 or 50 plus, in their 50s, 60s, 70s, are they entering strength training because they have a problem or is it more proactive and it’s like, “I gotta do something good for myself”?

I wouldn’t say there’s one reason that they do that. It could be they have never done it. It could be that they’ve been doing it for so long, but they haven’t been seeing the progression they want to see. It could be that they’ve been told they need to start doing this for long-term health and injury prevention. So there’s no one thing or one reason why they do it. It’s just like there’s no one reason why people under 50 don’t do it. It could be anything and everything in that sense.

One of the obstacles for me is that a day that I’m in the gym is a day that I can’t be on my Peloton or my bike in the good weather. Yeah, and so you’ve got to carve out… I think there’s just a mental thing that you’ve got to start carving out time for this other aspect. Yeah, for sure. It does take away from something that you were doing before, but that break can also give you a lot of time to recover from the mountain biking as well, right? Right, so if that’s your one thing and you’re doing something else, you’re giving yourself time off to recover for the thing that you like to do, right?

There’s a climb – one of my favorite places to ride here in Ontario – has a couple of really awful climbs. They feel like they go on forever. They’re really steep. They’re rooty, they’re rocky, they’re technical. Yeah, and if you hear the audio when I’m doing this climb, I feel like I’m coughing up a lung. Okay, but this time, that’s my benchmark every year: “Will I make that climb?” And this year, I texted you and I said, “I have a new gear.” And the new gear helped the cardiorespiratory part of it, because all of a sudden, I had a strength in my legs that I did not have before. And so that was like, “Oh, that was a revelation,” because it’s now contributing to the sport that I like to do. Absolutely, right. So it’s such a net gain. And now I realize that, you know, I really was boneheaded. I wouldn’t say boneheaded, but there’s just a lot of misinformation, or sometimes it’s too much information. And once you really get into it, then you see the benefits, rather than, “Oh, I’m only going to do it for this much of my life or just this much. I’m only going to need this much.” But now I don’t want to miss a day. Yeah, I don’t want to miss a day now because I’m seeing it takes time, and we’ll get into that.

Okay, let’s jump to phase one in our journey together. So, you know, I don’t think that Freya at Move Daily was going to take me on, saying, “Here’s 300 bucks, tell me what to do,” and I’d “peace out.” So phase one in our journey together was the intake form. Can you kind of describe that form and what you’re looking for in it?

The intake form is pretty extensive, as you saw. I think it’s three or four pages, and it covers basically your entire lifestyle. Not just your movement history, but also your day-to-day life – what you eat, how much you’re sleeping, all that stuff. Because all that goes into your health history. The intake form also gives us a good picture coming into the assessment. So the assessment we have, maybe 60 to 90 minutes to get done. That intake form cuts down on a lot of that time. So we see part of the picture before we even see you, so we have a little bit of an understanding of what’s going on. Yeah, like I mean, there’s everything from eczema to bowel movements in there.
it is. You know, I think one part of this, it did take a little while to fill out, but it really made me think about because one of the sections is about goals and purpose. It really made me get clear on why are you doing this, what do you want to get out of it? And so for me, that will help me understand what success looks like when and if I get there. Exactly. I think the biggest thing with the “why” is some people have – I will take weight loss for an example – but the “why” of the weight loss sometimes isn’t enough. It’s not intrinsic enough to really get to that goal. But if you have something like, “I want to be pain-free, and I want to be as injury-free as possible for as long as possible,” now that “why” is pretty deep, can be deeper, and that will lead to the weight loss, hopefully, if that’s one of your goals. But that “why,” because it’s so much deeper, will let you train for that goal longer, right?

Yeah, I went back and I looked at what I initially put as my goals and purpose, actually. And so, I had graded the whole “if it makes me better at my sport, that’s great, but not a necessity.” And it has totally had an impact, and now looking back, I go, “I would have ranked that as a bigger priority had you known.” I thought I was kind of already there. No, it’s always that next gear.

So, is there anything in that form that would ever be like a real warning sign for you guys that might have you say, “I don’t know if you’re ready for this”?

Not really. I think when it comes to something like that, it would have to be something that the three of us don’t have experience with. So, if we see something in the health history that is extensive enough or maybe it’s complicated enough that we don’t have experience with it, we’d have to refer out in that case. But we usually generally just see, use it for, to see, well, not red flags, but we’ll call them “flags” in case of just what’s going on in your day-to-day. So, like if you’re not sleeping, let’s say we want to pack on a ton of muscle just for argument’s sake, but you’re not seeing that result and your sleep habits are zero, you’re getting three to four hours of sleep every night. Well, that tells us you just can’t recover, so there’s no way you can get what you want because you’re not getting sleep. So, that’s like one of the things we use the intake form for in that case.

Okay, so let me throw you an example – an extreme example – because when you think about it, they’ve done studies that show and they’ve gone into nursing homes and got people doing some strength training with small weights, and they’ve had people move from bedridden to chairs, chairs to walkers, the people on walkers start to walk free of any device. And so, the point is, it’s never too late, right?

Nope. So let’s take somebody like my mom, she’s 83, she’s got osteoporosis, otherwise she’s like really good, at least you know, good balance, pretty mobile given except for like the osteoporosis creates some immobility here and there. Can somebody of that age start to work with people like you to improve some of their mobility challenges, build a bit more strength?

Yep, you would just have to scale it to their capacity. That’s what we always try and do. Right now, as you saw with you and Glenn, there was a huge difference at the beginning where we started. He started in a completely different spot than you did, with different movements than you did, even though we were training together. So, with someone in that, we’ll call it an extreme case, like your mother, the movements would be just completely different than what we’d give someone else. Client A is completely different than client B to client C. But there’s, like you said, it’s never too late. You just start with everybody starts with a different capacity.

That brings us really to the second phase in the journey, and it was both of us, but we spent at least 90 minutes with you. I think it was 90, because it was two of you. Yeah, yeah. So can you describe what that is for the people who weren’t here – which is everybody, ever?

The assessment is like a movement intake form, we’ll say. So, it was about 45 minutes of movements, and they’re very small, they’re very easy. There’s nothing – not like a beep test where you’re running back and forth or anything like that. Just movements to see what your bodies are doing at that time. So, whether or not we have any ranges that are painful, any ranges that are hard to get into, maybe your squat patterns or hinge patterns need to be cleaned up, or we don’t – they’re non-existent to begin with, so we’re going to have to start a little bit, start at a different spot to teach those patterns, that kind of thing. Basically, just how are you moving today and what do I need to do to help your movement so that you stay injury-free and pain-free, right?

And that’s like top to bottom that you looked at, yeah?

Right down to just like walking too. You filmed us walking just to, I guess, look at our gait and, you know, just to see how that – we wanted to see how the heel, the foot was landing and to see how – let’s see if and how the big toe is pushing off the ground. So, you know, we were talking about my mom and where she’s at and where we’re at. Glenn came in with a dislocated an old shoulder – it’s fine, but obviously, that’s kind of lingered. I had a high hamstring issue that plagued me for years that I was terrified that I would reignite, and it’s only become better, I have to say. What I’ve really learned is that by doing this and you’re looking at everything and I assume that you go away and look at all the video and photos that you took and then you come back with almost like a prescription, a physical prescription, what it is, yeah, a plan for us, right?

And so, the big thing I learned is that there was no way I was just going to go on YouTube and find some exercises and I’ll do this and that, that looks good. And quite frankly, if I came to a gym like Fortis here in Toronto and I walked through the door without any guidance, it would be incredibly intimidating, yeah. It can be – I mean, any gym, but this one can be a little intimidating sometimes, yeah, you know, it’s a great place to be. I love it here, one of my favorite gyms in the entire city, yeah, it’s great. But like, without any guidance, you’d really be at a loss to know what to do, whether you’re at home in your building’s gym or a gym like this. So, I think one of the critical things that I learned is that every plan is different, and it’s really based on that initial intake form and your assessment, where you are. Everybody comes in with a different history, so like I said before, with client A, B, and C, they’re all starting at different points and they all have they all bring different things to the table.

So, you mentioned injury history, sure, but some people have different fear involved in each one of those injuries. So, like between you two, Glenn didn’t think about her shoulder at all, whereas you were thinking about the hamstring quite a bit, yeah, for the first like six to eight sessions, right? You were very focused on no, this is gonna hurt, this is gonna… So, you have to start people in completely different spots in that sense as well. Not just like starting them with the right movements, but with the right approach to the fear they have around those movements as well, sometimes. Sometimes, they don’t have anything at all, sometimes there’s no injury history, sometimes the movements are all great and all gravy, and you’re like, okay, this is easier, my life is easy here in this sense. I’m just showing you regular old movements instead of having to start you in a certain spot.

For many of the exercises that you chose and that have evolved over time, we started several of them with no weight at all, just to learn proper movement pattern, and it took weeks to learn some of those foundational hip-hinging. Can you talk about the importance of not just walking into a gym and picking up a weight, and especially as you get older because a lot of us, especially if we’re active in a sport, we are at this point carrying around an injury or two with us, for sure?

Yeah, you can’t just come into a gym and pick up a weight and throw it around. It’s not – a lot of people do that, but they’re going to injure themselves, usually more often than not. So, what we do is we start with just teaching patterns. The squat or deadlift pattern are big patterns for people to use that they use quite a bit, right? Like, that’s what your hips are designed to do, that’s what your knees and hips are designed to do in the squat. So, in your specific example, we had Glenn doing deadlifts, I think, day one or day two. His pattern for the hinge was a little bit different, so we talked about the fear that you had over the hamstring injury to begin with. With you, we started with this single-leg deadlift, so you could feel comfortable just balancing, getting into the hinge, and allowing the hamstring to stretch just that little bit and then come back up.

So, we patterned you a little bit differently than we patterned Glenn. But yes, sometimes you have to start with no weight just to teach those full patterns before you get the weight on there. Especially with the goblet squat or something, something like that where you have the person learning just to sit, come down to the box because we started with on the box and tap and come back up and come down with those two parallel lines, remember? The torso’s in one parallel line and the shins are trying to be in the other parallel line. Just learning that pattern before we can weight something up and learning how to brace, because otherwise the injuries occur too quickly, too soon, or it can occur too quickly, too soon, like the deadlift. There’s a lot going on there.

To this day, I’m still really thinking through every single deadlift rep that I do, yeah. That’s good, yeah, it’s really good.

So, I was talking to my sister, and you know, her question – I said, “What would you ask if I could ask any questions?” And she said, “Well, is it one size fits all?” Can I kind of jump in with – and obviously, we’ve already covered that, but she said because my back’s a little sore, and so like the last thing I want to see her doing is beginning to do deadlifts, right, without any kind of adult supervision.

Absolutely, so no, it is – you’re like we just talked about, it is absolutely not one size fits all. Everybody gets something different.

Okay, let’s go through these stages again. So, first, it was the intake form, then you did the movement assessment, yeah, and then we signed on to do 12 sessions over 12 weeks with you, and then we have days on our own in our gym. So, we’re on this – this is our 20th anniversary, did you know that? Congratulations.

So, how often should people’s strength training workouts change over time?

Oh, that’s a good question. I think like a lot of answers I’ve given you today, it all depends. It’s like everybody’s a little bit different. Some people might like a little bit more variety and it keeps them more engaged, other people want to be doing the same thing for a little bit longer, and you’re so the changes you make to the program might not be wholesale, they might just be like, okay, we’re gonna up maybe change the amount of sets we’re doing within this program three or four times, we might change the amount of reps we’re doing, we might add a little bit of weight, whatever it might be, just changing the stimulus just a little bit. Other times, we’re just keeping it the same because we need to get someone’s pattern down. So, the weight or the sets might not change, the reps might not change, we’re just making sure that the patterning is happening over and over and over again, so nothing changes for a very long time, right, just to make sure that that stimulus is happening.

With me, big time, because you changed one thing and suddenly I had DOMS

, that delayed onset muscle soreness. It was real, it was legit. It was like one different thing in legs.

Yeah, and it’s like, I was kind of hobbled in a good way.

And then, is it up to the client at that point to sort of feel like, okay, this is getting a little too easy, so I’ll add five pounds on to whatever it is that I’m doing?

It depends on – again, it all depends. Some clients will say, “Sure, I can add it on.” Others will – it’s my job to do that because they don’t want to. It all depends. I generally try and say, for the most part, you want to be within like that three to five rep – whatever you finish your set, you want to have like that three to five reps in your tank, right? So, if you’re – that is to say if you’re saying do 10 to 12 and on 10 I’m utterly failing, I might be a little – probably too much, yeah. Something’s off there. So, you either have to reduce the amount of reps you’re doing or you have to reduce the amount of weight you’re using, right?

Yeah, okay. So, we’ve focused a lot on things that make our backs and shoulders stronger, I’m going to say, like bring our shoulders back. I don’t know if I’m articulating this the right way, close enough, I think the viewers are going to get that. But I think that’s got to be good for a lot of people, right? Because so many of us are hunched over a desk all day long. I mean, even if you’re not at a desk, we’re humans, we live our lives in the front, right? We don’t live behind. So, all of us are going to be somewhat like this, and as we continue to live our lives, so what we do is try and – or what I do is just try and program enough things that are happening like for back shoulders and the back of the body to counteract some of those day-to-day activities that are the way we live our lives day to day. That’s what we’ve been doing, yeah.

I’m feeling the difference of that. Like, I am feeling my back engage and it’s just – it feels different now, you know, in such a good way.

I remember asking you one question. I said, “Are we going to do like bicep curls at some point?” Because, I don’t know, it just seems like that’s the thing everybody does. But that leads me to my next question, which is something that I’ve learned from you, and that I don’t even know if I’m even asking the question properly, but like compound movements. Like you said, you are doing biceps along with this, this, and this. So, can you speak to that?

So, we – I think like a more old-school mentality of fitness is like doing what we quote-unquote “isolation exercises,” so like a bicep curl is really just – we’re really using the bicep, or we’re focusing on using the bicep. Everything – other things are moving as well, but you’re focusing on using that bigger muscle group here. But when we talk about a compound exercise, that means there are two more joints moving at once. So, like a squat or a deadlift would be a compound exercise because the knees and the hips are moving at the same time. So, in that specific example of you’re using your biceps, when we were talking about doing rows, so any type of pulling exercise, like let’s say a chin-up, your main movers are your back muscles, your secondary movers are the biceps. So, you’re – yes, you’re getting – you’re hitting two big groups of muscles in that case, right?

And so, bang for your buck, while you’re with me – since you’re paying money to be here, I don’t need to be watching you do bicep curls, right, in my opinion. I can watch you do a bigger movement like a chin-up that’s going to help carry over to other day-to-day activities, like helping your scaps and things like that, yeah, and still get your biceps in that sense as well.

I’m not at a chin-up yet.

from the toes, push-ups, yeah, it’ll get there one day. But you know, they’ll bring this is a really good segue into my next question, which is, I think people need to set expectations, right? I don’t care if I ever look jacked, like I don’t care about that. A little less fat percentage would be amazing, that would be good. I’m not very focused on that, though. I’m focused on, like, legit strength. But it takes time, right? And so, I think two things really strike me is that I am signing on for strength training for the rest of my life. I mean, it now for the long haul. This isn’t like we’re doing 12 weeks and then I’m done. Yeah, like, so in that way, you’ve got time to acquire that strength, right?

Oh, absolutely. The strength, especially at the very beginning, comes relatively quickly and then it will go slower and slower and slower as you get going. But as you keep going, sorry. But you have the rest of your life to strength train and to get strong in certain places and certain exercises, right? Like that push-up, for example, it might not be happening today, but one day down the road, maybe a year from now, maybe two years from now, you’ll be doing that push-up from the floor.

That’s what’s up. I mean, you’re probably not alone in the world, so that’s okay. But I think people in my family think, you know, she’s athletic and stuff. It’s like, from here down.

So, I am reading Peter Attia, Dr. Peter Attia’s book “Outlive,” which is like outstanding. It is so good. And I feel so good about what we have been doing because it is really checking. I take care of the cardio side of things, but we are checking not just the strength things, but also stability. So, he has a whole – you hear a lot about strength and hypertrophy (and I had to look that word up at the beginning of this – muscle growth), but he talks a lot about the lack of focus on stability. And I feel like that is something that we really addressed early on. And as a cyclist, I was kind of surprised at different things that you gave us early that were – where my knee was shaking or some things just weren’t stable. So, how much is that a part of how you guys are assessing how people progress? I mean, to me, that’s a huge part of progression. Like, when I first started, it was all about how are we looking, how much weight have we lost? And over the years, you kind of realized that well, someone comes in and they’re very wobbly on one leg, like they can barely balance on one. Six months down the road, maybe they can just balance on that one. Like, now, maybe they can do a single-leg deadlift really, really well without falling over. Like, that’s a huge progression for someone to feel safe and comfortable who was not stable in the first place.

But when we’re talking about strength and stability, let’s say you’re someone who can get their hands all the way above their head, but they don’t feel safe up here, like, it’s very, very, very wobbly. That’s like an end range promotion there. So, we can talk about stability in that end range or stability in that very small range up there, but that’s also strength, right? You’re gaining strength in that. So, they’re kind of interchangeable. When you’re talking about stability specifically, I think you’re talking about balance more than anything. But in that sense – well, one of the things that he talks about too is to make sure that you’re focusing both on the concentric, which a lot of people do, and that eccentric, which we do a lot with our four-second – so that that’s under control and that it’s not a stress on the joint either over time. And we – we’ve focused a lot on that. We focus on the eccentric strength a lot because that’s where most of the strength happens. But with something like a – let’s say, let’s take a deadlift for example, the pick-up, I think, is the easiest part for most people. The hardest part is the eccentric, where we’re coming down, exactly. Yeah, same with that squat. Like, it was the hardest part was coming down in the right fashion, rather than standing up, right?

Exactly, exactly. It’s sort of the glory moment of the whole thing, yeah.

Exactly. Okay, so we can’t leave the discussion about strength without talking about animal flow, which I had never heard about, but which is part of every workout that we do that you prescribe to us, yeah. So, can you tell us a little bit about what that is and why we do it?

Animal flow is what we consider quadrupedal movement training, big fancy terms for hands and feet in contact with the ground and moving around in as many directions as possible. So, getting down into the ground and on getting your hands and feet in contact with the ground is a great way to make people feel really safe. It’s a great way to make your body feel safe. So, one, it allows us to open – sorry, get into new ranges that we normally wouldn’t, or our body might not feel safe getting into in an open chain movement. So, open chain versus closed chain, simply like a bicep curl moving a weight around yourself, right? Open chain movement, whereas moving yourself around an object, so moving yourself around the floor, that’s a closed chain movement.

So, when you get down onto the ground in that closed chain environment, it just makes people feel safe so they can open up into different ranges, or more range than they had previously in an open chain environment. Having your hands and feet in contact with the ground as well, it’s just going to help with strength and stability down there, right? And as we talked about getting people into their 50s, 60s, getting up and off the ground is going to be a big, big thing for them. So, coming down to the ground, being able to move around confidently on the ground, and then come back up off the ground is a huge thing for people as they age, right?

But animal flow, specifically, is just there to help augment whatever you want to do, right? So, it fills in the gap of training for a lot of people. I use it – I love to use it for mobility, strength, and coordination for a lot of people, because that’s what people get out of it a lot. I see the general population getting out of it, yeah.

Do you want to demonstrate a couple of things? Like, do you want to do – do you want to demonstrate, like, a couple beginner things?

So, super simple things that I believe we started with were some base positions like Beast and Crab. So, we started with Beast, and then we started with some limb lifts from there.

So, we started by lifting one foot at a time, and then we got to opposite hands and feet. And then we started – or will start, if we haven’t already – traveling forwards and backwards. So, here, you’re getting the strength of getting off the knees off the ground and holding yourself up. So, that’s all the shoulders, arms, core. And then we’re doing coordination by moving, lifting opposite hands, opposite foot, and we’re coordinating by moving back forward and backwards. You’re getting a ton of different things there. And then we did Crab as well, so the opposite of Beast. And this is one of my favorites simply because we already talked about this – getting out of our day-to-day position of here, right? And activating those shoulder blades down and back in a different position than they’re normally used to. And, like I said, our day-to-day lives, and because we’re in that closed chain environment, these come back a little bit further than they would if we were just doing something else, because we feel safe there. It takes a while for those shoulders to, like, go back easily, yeah, it does. But because you’re on the floor and you have your hands and feet in contact with the ground, like, we have a ton of sensory receptors there. So, you’re getting a ton of feedback, so your body picks those things up a little bit faster than it would in an open chain, right?

Okay, moving – do you want to – I don’t want to put you on this – but do you want to show us sort of like – like a later version of Crab, like where Crab goes?

So, one of the places it can go is – we’re working on this right now, right? – was our Crab reaches. So, we set Crab, and then we’re going to do Crab reach. So, I’ll go right arm Crab reach. So, one hand comes up in front of the face, right? And then right now, we’re on our three-point bridge. We’re working on bringing the hips up into what we call extension, so above the knee and above the shoulder, right? So, eventually, we’re going to reach the arm and rotate the head so we stack the shoulders on top of one another, yeah, and we come into the full Crab reach. So, right now, my spine is into extension, it’s rotated, and then it’s flexed laterally as well. And then we can come – or return to Crab. So, there you’re getting a nice little ringing out of the spine. So, one of my favorite exercises because we get to do something to the spine that it doesn’t normally get, ever, right? And, you know, it looks simple and it takes – it takes time to move to work up to that, for sure.

Oh, yeah, for sure. But you can break it down quite a bit as well, which is one of the beauties of animal flow. There’s regressions and progressions everywhere, yeah.

So, okay, let’s talk about Stage Four. We are 12 weeks. I’m coming once. Tell me what to do. Bye. Then it was 12 weeks, but we’re still together. So explain what this is. My winning personality is what it is. So it is, but it’s a few other things too. So, um, can you, can you, um, sort of describe what the next phase of this journey is? That we’re doing now, what we’re in right now? So yeah, you got, you did your 12 weeks, and you picked up enough that you could go off on your own, and you’re working, doing those two days of strength training now right on your own. So our next phase will be maintenance of those two days, trying to make sure that you’re recovering properly through those two days, um, with the mountain biking on top of that, right? You know, I think that’s going to be one of the most important things for us, anyway, going forward: being able to do all of the mountain biking that you love to do on top of the strength training, but getting the recovery. So that will be always the give and take of our strength training, basically.

So what we’re doing now is instead of just going off on our own, you’re creating our monthly plans for us, what the exercises we’re doing, we’re sharing videos from our gym. Exactly, so that you could continue to monitor what I’m doing wrong, yeah, or what you’re doing right, or what I’m doing right, it happens from time to time. And so that’s a nice intermediate. It’s like it’s not, you know, you’re full on and then nothing, you’re on your own. I think it’s a nice, “Now let’s keep this going.” I think that that’s a good way.

A couple final questions here for you. Is, um, do you let’s say somebody’s living in an area we were just talking about before we started, we were talking about Cottage Country, not everybody has the luxury of having a gym in their condo building, not everybody has a gym in their town, yep. So how do you feel about strength training coaches? And this, I think this really evolved through COVID, uh, where you’re remote but online together. I mean, my 40% of my business is still online from COVID, is that right? Yeah, we’ve got, I’ve got people that don’t live in the city anymore, so I never see them in person. I have people that I used to see twice a week in person that I haven’t seen in person since we went online or since COVID because the way the new schedule has worked out, they just can’t come down here anymore.

Okay, so that’s one objection now that people can, they have to wipe that off the board, they can’t use that. So what about if, uh, like do you have to stock up a whole gym? Like, do you have to buy a range of kettlebells, a range of barbells? Um, I guess it would depend on your comfort level with things. So, no, because we have a ton of, like, your own body is an incredible tool, right? So you can use that for workouts all the time. Plus, we have animal flow that you can use for the entire hour as well, or whatever time you’ve allotted to yourself for strength training. Um, I think if you’re tight on space and you don’t want to take up a whole bunch of room with a bunch of kettlebells, dumbbells, things like that, right, the adjustable kettlebells and the adjustable dumbbells have been a game changer, might be a wrong word, but it has been very beneficial to a couple of my clients so that they can get a variety of weights and they can get a variety of different exercises.

You know, we bought, so we’re lucky in our gym is relatively well stocked, but we bought, I’m going to do a little video on this, that handle that turns a dumbbell into a kettlebell, and I mean it’s not perfect, but it works, it works. So, you’ll, I think with you guys, you’ll max out past that. That’s something that will get too easy too fast, yeah, yeah for sure. Let’s say your mom or your dad was in a different city and they were going to engage a strength training company or person, how would you tell them to find that person? Like, how do you know when it’s a good fit? That’s a good question. They’d be looking for or what should they be avoiding? One size we talked about does not fit all. So you’re not going to train someone who’s never lifted or hasn’t lifted a weight in the past 25 years and is 70 years old the same way you’re going to train a bodybuilder or someone that’s 20 but still hasn’t lifted weights in the last 10 years or something like that. You have to be able to have a different approach for everybody’s capacity. So someone who is willing to really write that specific prescription for you, rather than, okay, you should, you need to start here, this is what we’re doing, we’re only doing X, Y, and Z, and that’s what strength training is. And like so many businesses, it’s the people, the companies who have a process to reach their success that are generally the people you want to work with.

And for you guys, it’s a really good recap of, I think, from my boneheaded approach to what happened, which is, you know, an intake form where you’re asking all kinds of different questions to really get the lay of the land, yeah, assessing all of our various movement patterns which you did. Then this prescription of exercises specifically for us and taking into account our, you know, where we’re strong, where we’re weak, and where we have injuries, and moving up gradually, learning movements, and then having sort of a next phase too, so that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. We’re either here working with you or you’re on your own. Now we’re in a different phase. So, I think to me that is ideal. And then also people who just really understand that, you know, as we get older, stability and strength, all those things are just so important. So how, if have I forgotten something that is really important for sort of people in their 50s, 60s, 70s to know about this? I think we said it already. It’s never too late, right? You just gotta start moving, find that thing you like to do and get to it. Yeah, just start moving, really. Now I avoided it, I was so good at avoiding this for so long. Yeah, and like, I like working out, I’m not an, but I avoided this and now I, if I had started this when I started mountain biking, I would have been a better mountain biker through my 40s, maybe. So yeah, for sure, because it’s already happening, damn it. But now you need to be a better mountain biker through the 50s, yeah, yeah. So, Roshan, thank you so much. My pleasure with Move Daily. The website is movewelldaily.com, yes. And the website has a lot of the philosophy that we talked about today on it. Yeah, so even if you can’t, if you’re not here in Toronto, but I guess you could work online with people, online works like I said, yeah. So definitely check them out. You guys came to me through a recommendation from a friend. So, um, so check them out. Thanks again. Thank you, thank you. There we go, good boy.