Hey everyone, Kumar Dattatreyan here with the Meridian Point. Thank you so much for joining us. Today, we're joined by Josh Wood, a Tasmanian-based fitness expert and TEDx speaker who's disrupting traditional fitness approaches with his "thin edge of the wedge" philosophy. I got it out right. So we're definitely going to be talking about that. Just the sound of it is interesting, isn't it? As the fitness industry undergoes a digital transformation with virtual coaching and personalized wellness solutions becoming mainstream, Josh brings fifteen years of experience helping busy parents and professionals make the smallest disruptions to create the biggest changes in their health journey. His holistic approach focuses on longevity and lifestyle integration, proving that you don't need burpees or ice baths to become strong for life. So without further ado, here's Josh. Josh, it's so good of you to be on the show. I'm excited for our conversation.
Thanks. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again.
Likewise. So before we get into the meat of the interview, I learned that you just put out a cookbook.
Yes, it just came out two days ago.
Can you tell us about that cookbook?
Yeah, it's funny. You know, I've always got projects going on, and every once in a while, something actually gets finished. And that was supposed to be like maybe a three to four month project late 2023, last quarter 2023. I got in contact with a friend of mine who trained as a chef and used to teach cooking classes and stuff. And I was like, "Hey man, you want to help me put together a macro-friendly cookbook?" So macros is focusing on the macronutrients in food and something that's going to focus on actually having good-tasting food for gym-goers and families, but make it simple enough that it's doable, but also delicious because most healthy cookbooks are boring. And he's like, "Yeah, yeah." I'm like, "Okay, well, here's the deal. I want to make an Indian food cookbook that's nutrition-focused." Thing is, he trained in India as a chef. So he's like, "Hell yeah." And so anyway, this three-month project took eighteen months and we finally got it finished and published on Amazon two days ago now, two and a half days ago.
That's amazing. Well, I'll definitely put the link to that book in the show notes of this broadcast so that people can get a copy of the book. I'm definitely going to get a copy of the book because I don't know if you know this - I used to run restaurants back in my day.
I do, yeah.
And when I did, I mean, I still love cooking. It's just that I don't get enough time to do that. And I'm also focused on nutrition and exercise and health and wellness and all those things that I don't get enough time for. But I recently learned maybe six months, maybe a year ago about macro nutrition, as you put it. I didn't know anything about it. It was always more about, "Am I getting enough of whatever nutrients?" But I started to learn more about that. So that piques my interest even more.
Yeah. A lot of people focus on the micronutrients, but it doesn't matter how much vitamin C you're getting if you're not getting enough protein. It's an order higher of importance because it's the essential parts that make up your body and give you energy.
That's right. Yeah, I started using this tool. It's this little device that you breathe into and it measures your metabolism, really - if you're burning fat or you're burning carbs, essentially. And so it's sort of changed my outlook on what I eat and how I eat. And it recommends what you need to - certain days you need to eat more carbs so that it gets your body trained to be more flexible, metabolically flexible to burn carbs and fat when needed. Yeah. Right. So you don't get kind of stuck into burning one type of food source. And it's cool. I feel better. I think I look better. I don't know, but I feel better. So that's all that matters.
Yeah. Very cool.
Yeah. So let's get to the meat of this. This show is all about disruption and how people have disrupted themselves and maybe the industries that they're in, the companies that they run and so on. And for you, your whole life, at least from what I understand, has been revolved around fitness and nutrition in some way, shape or form. All right. And so if I remember from our conversation, the pandemic sort of turned things around for you in good ways and bad ways. Do you want to kind of take us through that? How did the pandemic force you to disrupt yourself and the model by which you were making money pre-pandemic and what happened after?
Yeah, well, here in Australia, the response to COVID disrupted the entire health and fitness industry. I don't know if people were following what was happening over here, but places like Melbourne, one of our biggest, most metropolitan cities where I lived for ten years, they were in rolling lockdowns for two years. They had the longest running lockdowns in the world. And I'm glad I'm in Tasmania, where we had very little of that. But, you know, in some places like gyms, gyms never recovered. Fitness centers never recovered. Massage studios never recovered. They were just done, shut down. And everyone had to figure out something else to do. You know, we had some limitations here in Tasmania, but nothing quite as bad as it was on the mainland. And for those that don't know, Tasmania is an island state off the south of Australia. From the top of the island, if you want to come from Melbourne, the next big city, which is a big southern port in Australia, you know, it's about ten to twelve hours by boat and then a three-hour drive down to Hobart, where I live. Well, it's an hour flight, you know, but we're about a hundred kilometers. It's a bit of distance. So a little bit different from the mainland. The environment and atmosphere around the whole pandemic response stuff was a bit different down here because we had a moat. We just didn't let people in. But we still had issues with gyms, and we had the social distancing stuff, and gyms were closed because they're not essential for a lot of stuff. Even though we look at all the research now and go, "Well, it looks like people who had lower body fat and were generally healthier and had higher vitamin D levels dealt with COVID, along with every other illness, much better." That was essential. So we all had to adapt. And that, I mean, that was just a major spanner in the works, you know? I've always worked in gyms. I've been in gyms for fifteen years now, about, and that hadn't changed. A lot of folks went to virtual sessions, and I tried that for a bit, especially when we had lockdowns. It's like, "Well, I can't train people in person, social distance or not, because gyms are closed. So how do I train my clients that I've been working with for ages?" It's like, "We're not going to stop. They can't stop. Like, why would you stop just because gyms are closed?" All right, well, we're going to adapt. And so I started trying to do virtual sessions, which is what most people think of as online training. Okay. We book the time, both hop on Zoom, and then I'm going to talk to you through Zoom and you're going to put your camera facing the wrong way. And you're not going to hear - it's going to fall over because you don't have a tripod and I'm not going to be able to hear you. And you're not going to - it's going to be awful. You know, even if you get the technology right on the coach's side, the average person just doesn't do that well. And it just takes away so much of the quality of the coaching experience. And so I went all in on online coaching in a more flexible way. So I do everything through an app and everything is based around, well, you do things in your own time. I program, I put together your nutrition. We look at your lifestyle stuff. But when you're training, it's when you want to. I've got coaching videos for each and every move that you do. You record what you're doing, send it back or upload it straight into the app, and then I come back with coaching videos. And so, you know, Monday to Friday I'm on my computer getting back to people's coaching videos, commenting on what they've been doing, cheering them on, updating their metrics, updating their nutrition information. And so it's back and forth because about half my clients are in the U.S., so it's like U.S., UK, Canada, and a few other places spotted around. But it has to be flexible. And that all - like the only reason I went all in on that is because I had to. Like I used to do a little bit of online stuff as an adjunct or like an add-on to in-person. Here, I'll write you a program you can do on the days you're not here in the gym with me. Cool. Okay, now I've got this app that I'm using to do all my programming. I'll put you in that and I'll add in a couple extra sessions for you. And then through the whole COVID time stuff, I went back into the gym. I went back to full-time PT after that let up. But only for maybe a year or less as I started shifting everything to the online platform and just never went back. You know, I train - I think I have two clients that I'll train a couple of days a week here just because I've been working with them for years and they're local and it's fun. But other than that, it's all online these days. It's all app-based.
So I'm curious about that. So you have your clients upload videos - that must take a lot of time and space, of course, to store the video content and then time for you to review it. And if you have, I'm assuming lots of clients around the world, how do you find time to sort of do that review work? That's actually a really good question. Most people don't think about that side of stuff.
Yeah. So it's pretty - the system's streamlined. So I use an app called TrueCoach and this is the big thing that kind of came out of the pandemic. I think a lot of these companies that were working on coaching apps and websites and platforms really had to like make it happen. Yeah. And I've used a couple of different other apps, but the TrueCoach app is the one that I've used for years now. And it's great because it's all integrated into the app. So you get your little notification. It says, "All right..." I lost you there for a second.
You were talking about TrueCoach.
Yeah. Yeah. So the app integrates everything. So you get your little notification in the morning and it says, "All right, time to do your workout sometime today." You go in there, you do your exercises. You can record directly in the app. It stores in the app. And I keep normal-ish office hours. I mean, I kind of sometimes work weekends and evenings too, but I try - because I got young kids, I got things I want to do with my life - I try to keep office hours. Monday to Friday, nine to five. And so during those hours, I'm catching up on everybody. I'm checking these programs that they're going through. I see their videos that are uploaded. And then I use an app called Loom. And I'll bring up their workout and their exercises and screen record me providing feedback. And then I can draw on the screen like they do in those football videos and be like, "Okay, I need you to do this. And your hips need to go further back here" and provide this customized coaching video based on what they're doing. And then that saves forever too. And so the reason that I like using the app too is because I have a history of everything. I can go, "When did they - what was their deadlift six months ago?" And I go in there and I search for it and boom, it's like, "Okay, this is a video of what they did. This is how much they lifted. And this is where we're at now." And it allows me to track and measure changes over time, whether it's body weight or whether it's weight lifted. I can measure anything and then have these ongoing records. And I think that, I mean, from a nerd perspective, I think that really makes a massive difference in my ability to track and customize what people are doing. And it's all built into the apps and there's lots of apps, you know? I like TrueCoach. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to sell TrueCoach, but it's like there's other apps that came out of this time period where, you know, they've been around for years but it's like that's when people really started adopting those systems. And each one's a little bit different, but it's just - it's been a game changer that the change of technology is what I say has really changed how online coaching works because it used to be all spreadsheets.
That's amazing. So with all that data there, I suppose you awaken the inner nerd in me too. So with all that data that you have access to, you can also look at the efficacy of your coaching. How is your coaching improving the lives, the fitness and so on of your clients? And you could sort of make adjustments. "I did these things and it resulted in this type of an improvement. And with this other client, I did these things and it wasn't quite as much. Why was that the case?" And that's what's going through my head anyway.
Exactly. There's a big data analysis part of the job looking at what is happening, how it's been happening, and what we can do to change the trajectory to where we want it to be. Yeah. I'm very confident in my systems. Like I have a guarantee on my systems. It's like, you know, I never set out to be like a weight loss guy. But, you know, when seventy percent of the population is overweight or obese, it tends to be the number one thing that helps people. Losing weight tends to make most people happier, healthier, get more out of life. So it ends up being a big part of what I do. And I have a guarantee on that. Like I have a guarantee of four kilos weight loss in your first twelve weeks or I just keep doing it until you get to where you want to be.
Like, yeah, four kilos - just to do the math - is about ten pounds.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Just for our American audience that doesn't think in metric terms.
Yeah. I've been over here so long, I do everything in metric.
Yeah, I get it. Yeah. When I lived elsewhere, it was Celsius and kilograms and kilometers and so on and so forth. That's fascinating. So there's a whole data element. And I suppose if you wanted to or if you paid someone the money to, you could use AI to analyze the data and get even more sort of fine-tuned research into the types of programs that are the most effective for certain types of people, right? If they want to lose weight or if they want to build muscle or whatever - just general fitness. I suppose you could do that. Have you thought about that?
Yeah, the problem is there's so much that's personal because the number one thing that gets results - it's not the program, it's the effort. I could give you the most - and I teach personal training courses here. That's like my secondary job. I've been teaching the personal training courses for years.
What's personal training? Sorry.
Personal training, like the certifications. Certifications for new personal trainers. And so often I have this conversation with people. It's like, "You don't need fancy programming. You don't have to have the best systems. You have to buy in. If clients buy in, if they put in the effort and they believe in the process and they put their time and energy into it, that is the number one thing that gets results." You can have simple programming, basic nutrition, and if they put in the work, they're going to get results and they're going to get way more results than people who half-ass all the training. Will that data tell me what program works best or will it tell me which clients have worked the hardest?
That's a very good point. And that's true with any kind of a change program that you're implementing, right? Whether it's with an individual on a fitness routine or in my world, I do a lot of coaching within organizations and helping people change the way they work or the way that the relationship that they have with the work. And like you, I've found that the simpler the system, and of course, the greater the buy-in, the greater the desire for the change, the more effective that change program happens to be. So I'm totally with you. Speaking of change, you talk about the "thinnest wedge," right? What did you say? The "thin edge of the wedge" philosophy. Can you describe what that means?
Yeah, so the people I work with are what we call general population. I work with a few athletes and a few tactical athletes - military, fire, police, that kind of thing. But it's not the bulk of what I do. I work with busy parents and professionals, people who are time poor. The number one issue is getting that adherence. If I take someone who is running three companies and has a handful of children and has zero free time during the day, but if they don't get healthy, they're going to have a heart attack at forty, well, I can't just give them a Schwarzenegger seven-day split and put them on a bodybuilder diet. They can't upkeep their entire life to eat and live off of chicken and broccoli. So I have to find the smallest change that elicits the greatest change, the greatest result. So it's like this idea of a thin edge of a wedge. It's about mechanical efficiency, or in this case, lifestyle efficiency. It's like, "What is the smallest thing that's going to make the biggest change that you can do consistently?" And long enough that it becomes a habit that we can then stack the other habits on top of, or then widen the wedge. And so for a lot of people, it's like, "How do we get someone moving?" Well, in the simplest way possible. All right, "I need you to start walking. You can't make it to the gym, that's fine. But I need you to walk." And if I told someone, "I need you to walk three and a half hours this week," and you're like, "What? No, how do I do that?" It's like, "Okay, I need you to walk for ten minutes after each meal. Can you do that?" "Oh, yeah, I could probably do that. I could take some calls and go for a walk or, you know, have a walking meeting or I can listen to a podcast or whatever it is that you need to do." Well, ten minutes after three meals for seven days is three and a half hours. What do you know? We found three and a half hours in your schedule and we did it in the smallest possible unit. Yeah. And then eventually you don't think about it. Yeah. Eventually it just becomes habit like brushing your teeth. You don't think about the effort involved in that. But if I said, "You need to do three and a half hours of activity this week" from day one, people will be like, "I don't have that time." Yeah. But if we can find the thinnest possible bit of leverage and slowly expand that over time, well, then we change your life and you're a different person in a year.
I love that. I mean, the image that comes to my mind is of a sculptor. You know, they're taking their wedge and they're sort of chipping away at this block of wood. And it's a slow process. You don't know what's going to come of it. It's in the artist's mind, but to an observer, it's just a block of wood with some chips cut out of it, right? But over time, it's going to transform into something. And that something is whatever the vision is in that sculptor's head. And in this case, it seems like the thinnest edge of the wedge is helping sculpt whatever the future is for that client of yours. Right. Over time.
I like to think of it as Kaizen, the Japanese word for small change. Right. So the Kaizen moments, what are the small things you can do that over time are going to accumulate to something big?
Love it. Yeah. And because, you know, the marble doesn't notice the one chip, but you keep adding those chips, you know, a year or two years later, it's a completely different thing. It's not just a block of stone anymore.
Yeah. So, you know, speaking of AI and you had a great answer that simplicity is going to win every time, buying is going to win every time. But the fitness industry, like any industry, is shifting to AI-driven coaching. How do you stay ahead of that? How do you respond to that? Or do you - does it even bother you at all that it's even there?
Well, I mean, it doesn't really bother me because the people who were going to do their own thing and figure out how to do it on their own, they were going to do that through YouTube. They were going to read articles. They were going to watch videos, but now they can do it better. Great. Yeah. It's better for everybody. But the people who do that were already going to do it on their own. The difference is the people component. The difference is getting that buy-in. AI is not good at that because it doesn't really have a personality. You can kind of do that. It's really good for sourcing information and taking large amounts of information and simplifying it. I use it. I use it with my clients. Not so much that I use it myself because it doesn't - it can add some things to what I do, but more so it's like, "Hey, listen, I know you're having some problems with meal prep. Instead of you telling me everything you have in your pantry and I'll give you some recipes, take a picture of your pantry and your fridge and put it in the ChatGPT and say, 'Give me recipes for what I have based on these target calories and macros.' And boom, it puts out meal plans."
Do you review them and is it pretty good?
It's pretty good. I mean, I use it. My wife uses it too. We're like, "I don't know what to do with this." Like we just got a quarter cow. Like we'll buy our meat from local farms where we can and buy like a half pig, quarter cow, that kind of thing. So we do all these cuts that we don't normally do. And it's like, "I've got this cut. What are some options for cooking that? And then what's the cooking time?" You know, all that jazz. And it'll give you a recipe. I was like, "Cool, that's way easier than searching through all the cooking blogs and reading twenty pages of life story before you get to the recipe to decide if it's good." You just say, "Hey, this is what I have. This is what I need. Give me a recipe." Boom. And it's pretty good. And then you just add your own spice to it. You know, you add that personal touch. But for things like meal prep, it's wildly useful. Like you can literally be like, "These are the calorie and macro targets my coach gave me. These are the foods I like to eat. Give me a meal plan for three meals a day with one snack and a shopping list." Boom. Pumps it out. And so it's that side of stuff that helps everyone because I can give you a book of recipes and you'll be like, "Okay, well, I don't have half this. I don't like half of this. I don't have the time to do all this." Or you could say, "This is what I have. This is what I like. These are my targets. Robot, give me the answers," and it does.
I say that is great. That is incredibly useful. Yeah. I'm definitely going to try it myself because I have the app, you know, the little breath analyzer thing. It comes with an app and it gives you your macros and I'm always wondering what to eat and the worst part of the experience is having to put my meals in even though I can take a picture of it and stuff, it's not quite accurate or I don't think it is anyway, but the ability to do that, just to sort of take a picture and get some recipes that fit, whatever the nutritional profile is for that day. Right. Because it changes every day. That will be invaluable. I think for me anyway.
Great resource. It just, again, simplifies the busy work, you know, all those things that we can really leverage it for.
That's right. That's right. And that's the promise of AI. I mean, at least in its current form is that it can simplify a lot of the things that take time to do and effort to search for, you know, things like that. So do you see a world in the future where there's like a digital version of you that analyzes workouts and does all that stuff that you currently do?
Where the technology is at right now, no. It's too - I mean, it's impersonal, but even just like on exercise analysis and stuff, I don't think it's particularly good at that yet. There might be a time in the not-too-distant future where that improves, and that would be really, really handy in a lot of ways, especially for people who are doing it on their own. But I think it's only such a small part of the coaching business. Again, so much of it is the person. It's about meeting the person where they're at and figuring out what the best solution is to get them to where they want to be. And that's a personal thing. But for the analysis side of stuff, I think there could be some really good advances in the next five or ten years that make it so much easier and scalable. You know, being able to do more across the day. And then even if I could, I'm just kind of - this is just popping into my head now. It's like, even if I could be like, "Okay, I have these five clients, need to go over the exercise videos today, pop a list together of any red flags, and then I'll review them." Like something like that would be awesome.
Yeah because it would save a lot of time where I'm not going, "Yes, this looks good." It's like, "Yeah, it looks good. I don't need to tell you anything about that. I need to give you a thumbs up," but if I could see all the red flags and go in and do a deeper analysis that would be nice.
Yeah. I love the way you frame it even though it's potentially a threat to your business, at least your current business model. I love the way you sort of - "Okay, that's going to be fine because it'll present another opportunity for me and my business and the way I serve my clients." That's a great mindset to have. And I think that's probably why you're successful and are able to navigate the disruptions through this.
It's not going to change. AI is not going anywhere. This is an avalanche of technology. And the only thing you can do is learn how to ski with it. It's not going anywhere, but it's very, very useful if you know how to use it.
Right, exactly. I love that. So in our last conversation, I remember you saying something about burpees and ice baths and how you're just totally against those things, right? And I remember it was an AI-based fitness program that I was using some time ago. And it was, "All right, every couple hours, get up from your chair, do ten burpees, and then, you know, go walk up the stairs, go do whatever, and then come back and resume your work." This for the at-home worker, right? That's sitting in the chair pretty much all day. So why are you so against burpees and ice baths?
Well, I kind of - I put, I wrote a big article, 2017 or 2018 called, "F Burpees," except it wasn't F, but it was "F Burpees" and it's still on my website. I moved it over to my new one. It's been around for a long time. And it basically came out of this frustration I have with the fitness industry. So like I said, I've been teaching personal trainers for years. And one of the things I see is there's this whole aspect of the fitness community or fitness coaching and personal trainers and all that where they think their whole job is to make people's lives harder and to punish them. And the burpee is basically synonymous with punishing yourself. The problem is it gets misused. So it's not - there's no such thing as a bad exercise. There's just bad application or inefficient application. The burpee is a hard thing to do, but if your total purpose in life is to make things hard, well, I could give my four-year-old a list of random exercises and a hat, and he could pull them out at random, and that's hard for you to do. That doesn't mean it's useful. Doing hard things is good for you, but hard for the sake of hard doesn't mean it's useful or getting you where you want to be. Plus, there's a level of risk to reward ratio that we have to think about. Most people going into the gym for the first time are out of shape and overweight. Do we need some twenty-year-old PT telling them to throw themselves down on the ground as hard as they can and then try to jump in the air? No, they don't need to do that. That's not helpful. And the injury rate's pretty high. So there's just not a lot of good - there's almost always a better exercise choice, unless your goal is to actually be good at burpees. It's just a form of cardio. It doesn't make you stronger. If you can do ten bodyweight squats, you're not getting stronger doing burpees. If you can do ten pushups, you're not getting stronger doing burpees. You need greater resistance to increase strength. It's just cardio. And that's fine. And I met a guy on Instagram who was like, "Yeah, but I set a challenge to do X number of burpees a day. And I've been doing it for three years. And I do it because it makes me feel good. I don't need a lot of space, helps my cardio, and it's a mental challenge for me." And I'm like, "That's the perfect application. That's great. It's because it serves a very specific purpose. It solves a problem for you. Awesome." But most of the time, it's punishment and difficulty for the sake of difficulty with populations that don't need that. And that's my argument with burpees. There's almost never a reason to do them unless you want to do them. And nobody wants to do them.
Yeah, good. That's a really good point. I mean, I personally, I haven't done it for a long time because I've developed various ailments, which I'm going to get to next, you know, that I can't really do it safely anymore, right? So for those clients that have those types of ailments, like my knees are starting to bother me as I get older and I've got a shoulder problem, how do you tailor programs for people that have certain physical limitations?
It just depends what those limitations are. There's absolutely always a way you can do exercise. So depending on what they are, like I've got - who am I working with now? Okay, so a good example is I've been working with a guy for a number of years who only has one arm. He's missing his right forearm from a factory accident when he was a kid. And it's like people are always looking for excuses not to do things. But, you know, he's got a hundred kilo bench press. You know, he can deadlift double his body weight. He doesn't have a right arm. There's a solution. There's always a solution if you have a goal. Yeah, I use him all the time because like as an example, because some will be like, "Oh, this bench press is so hard." I'm like, "Dave did it with one arm," you know, and it's like there's always a solution. And he came to me because he had back pain and then we just made him into an animal. And it's like, "Well, OK, cool. He's got his humerus bone and he's got an elbow. So we tie a strap to that and we strap that to the weight and you learn to lift it off the ground that way. He's got a prosthetic arm. We strap that to a bar and we teach him how to bench press that way." If you got a sore knee, you're not doing burpees and you're not going for a run. That's fine. Maybe you can cycle. Maybe you can elliptical. Maybe you can use a reclining bike. Maybe you can use those little hand bikes. There's a solution for every problem. If you got a sore shoulder, cool - maybe we're not bench pressing with a barbell, maybe we're doing dumbbells, maybe we're doing incline push-ups. There's always a solution. We just got to figure out what the end goal is. I'm not going to be like, "Well, your knee's sore and you can't do burpees. I guess you're never going to get in shape."
Right, right. That's great. I love it. So there's - it's - this is where a human is better than an AI because you can sort of meet your client where they are and design a program for them that suits them where they are right now in terms of their fitness level. And then, you know, use that thinnest edge of the wedge approach to help them get to where they want to go over time.
Exactly.
So we're getting towards the end of our time together. I just want to ask you some fun questions. You're an American living in Tasmania. Favorite beverage, tea or coffee?
Coffee.
Coffee, yeah. Very, very quick answer.
Well, I mean, I got it right here drinking it. My parents worked in the coffee industry. It's in my blood.
Yeah, there you go. I had a cup as well myself during our call. If you could only recommend one piece of equipment for the home gym, what would it be?
Those cheap interchangeable weight dumbbells, the ones that are just a handle and they got the little screws on the end and you get those cheap weight plates. I got three sets of those. I picked them up from like thrift shops. A friend got rid of some when he moved house. It's cheap. You can do anything with them. That is the number one piece of equipment.
You mean the ones where it's sort of like the little rings you can take off and put on real quick?
Easy. Okay. Yeah. I need to get one of those. I've been wanting to get one. I just haven't done it yet.
Biggest fitness myth you wish would disappear forever?
There's so many. Everything from "lifting weights is going to make women bulky" to "you can't eat carbs if you want to lose weight or gain weight." They're all terrible, but you know what? If we just get rid of ice baths and burpees, I'd be pretty happy.
I love that. Your go-to ten-minute workout for someone who's completely out of time?
Rucking. So get a backpack, put a weighted backpack - walking. Number one, if you have ten minutes, put, you know, ten to fifty percent of your body weight in a backpack and walk up a hill. It is incredibly hard, incredibly metabolically demanding, will build your conditioning, your total body strength, and it's low tech. You don't need anything fancy. I mean, I have my backpack. It's full of all my junk, my computer, my video equipment when I have to go travel. I'll just carry that when I walk my dog.
Yes, yes. And that's how we start compounding things. Cool, you're doing your ten minutes of walking after each meal. Now you need ten percent of your body weight in a backpack. All right, awesome.
I wonder what my next question is going to be. The most surprising thing about coaching clients you've never met in person?
It's amazing how invested in their lives you get. Like, because I've got a lot of clients that are just all over the world and I've never met, I've got actually clients locally that I've never met in person. I do, when I travel, I will try and catch up with clients around the world. I've done that. Or when clients are traveling, sometimes they pass. I met a lady that I trained from Indonesia when she came to Tasmania with her family. And it's just amazing how much you know them, how much about their lives and how well you get to like these people. Like they become friends and it's, you know, all through the internet, it's all through coaching.
Yeah, that's true. I mean, I definitely have some incredible relationships with people that I've never met in person. And you just develop those things, I guess, as part of our human condition, right?
Yeah.
One piece of advice for parents trying to model healthy habits?
Your kids are going to watch what you do more than what you say. So you need to model it physically. If you want them to be active, if you want them to eat well, you need to show them how, not tell them how.
I love that. All right. I think I know the answer to this question. Mountain biking or road biking?
Mountain biking.
Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm an avid cyclist. I do both, but I prefer mountain biking myself. Anything that you'd like to share that I didn't ask you today, Josh?
Geez, not - I think, I mean, that's a - we covered a lot. A lot of really good stuff too. I would just say, check out my cookbook, Macro Masala.
Macro Masala. I love the name too. All right. I'll make sure I put a link to that in the show notes, in addition to your site and how people can get ahold of you, get, connect with you. And thank you so much for being on the show. This is really - I've really enjoyed the conversation. I've learned a lot.
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for watching everyone. See you next week.
