Ep 601: Train for Life to Stay Strong & Adventure-Ready at Any Age with Tyler Bramlett

Podcast Intro and Tyler Bramlett Introduction 0:00

Welcome to the Health Fix Podcast where health junkies get their weekly fix of tips, tools and techniques to have limitless energy, sharp minds and fit physiques for life. Hey, health junkies on this episode of the health fix podcast, I'm interviewing Tyler Bramlett from WeShape. It's an online fitness platform that ultimately is more about movement than really about fitness. And it's breaking all of this. Stigmas of fitness, so Tyler had a great conversation all about how sometimes in the fitness industry, you can just be left feeling like you're not good enough.

You're, not thin enough, Youre not ripped enough And it kind of turns you off when it comes to fitness. And Tyler has a bigger why behind this. He noticed that one of his daughters was starting to pick up some of habits that he had learned from being in the fitness industry for a long time. So in this podcast, we're going to be talking about the concept of the why behind why you wanna be fit and what you want to be for. What kind of adventures do you have in life and things you do? I talk about my obsession with wanting to walk on my hands because my dad did it and I haven't been able to do it.

And Tyler brings in a little tidbit for me on what I might be missing out. Gotta stay tuned to learn on that one. But ultimately, Tyler was in the fitness industry for a long time and he really saw The downfalls, and I can resonate.

Tyler's Injury Story and Shift to Movement-Based Fitness 1:28

So, if you are someone who's like, I really don't wanna step into a gym, but I wanna learn how to move better in my body, this podcast is for you. If you're someone whose a former athlete, you fit right now, But you starting to question like do I want to be doing the same things over and over again? Maybe you've lost interest, maybe you feeling like I don't know, I'm getting older, what do I need to do? Or maybe you're in perimenopause and menopausal and you are listening to all of the noise out there as to what you supposed to be doing for your fitness.

Well, Tyler has a different perspective and I am kind of aligning in terms of fact that we want to go back to basics and be thinking about movement for longevity versus banging out these hard workouts and really potentially hurting ourselves. So if you're into fitness, you are wondering about movement, thinking about how you can move for life and to move in a way that you could do all the adventures you want to for your life, this is the podcast for you. So let's introduce you to Tyler Bramlett.

Coach Tyler Bramlett, welcome to the Health Fix Podcast. Thanks, Dr. J. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. You know, when I was pitched to bring you on to talk about an AI tool for folks to help them with stretching and mobility, I'm like, this is nice. This is good. Because a lot of people are going to sit there and they're going be like I need to move better. I sound like Saran Wrap. But I can't sneak up on someone anymore. What do I do? What do I do? And for folks like me, as a doc, it's easy because I can be like, hey, why don't you go over to Coach Tyler's site there and see what we can do.

So of course, I'm sure there's a story behind this in terms of why you were like I really need to create an AI tool to help people with this. Let's dive into that first and then we're going to geek out a little bit on coaching. Yeah, you bet. Well, I had an early experience that really set me on a different path in the fitness industry and then seems like life just wants me to have more of those experiences to continue just trying to challenge the status quo. But I was like a lot of people who didn't have good examples early on.

My parents thought diet soda was a health food. Nobody was good example of fitness or nutrition or anything like that for me. So I ended up in a pretty unhealthy place by time I even my mid to late teens. And as luck would have it, I thought to myself, you know what? I'm gonna go to the gym like most people do. I'll look in the mirror, I will shame myself and use that as motivation to go the to gym. And then, like I said, as luck would have it I got hit by a car and I broke my femur. Ended up in a wheelchair for three months and then I had to learn how to walk again when I came back.

And what was interesting was, is when I started going to the gym again, everything hurt. You know, the typical things that somebody tells you to do doesn't feel good on my body. So immediately I think I had a connection with people who are a little bit older, who've had eggs, pains and injuries, have arthritis and things like that. And I have that connection at a very young age. And so I spent years stopping, focusing on how I looked and started focusing, on I felt and learned all the different ways to move, learned how to use my body weight more effectively, became a personal trainer, started taking people quickly became known as the guy where a lot of hard cases would go to because they needed someone who could actually help them out.

And I feel like I really understood them. and along the way, I noticed a pattern. Okay. I started working at a local gym and all of the personal trainers were like, ex-athletes. Most of them didn't have any injuries. They don't understand how somebody should feel when they're in their 40s, 50s and 60s.They don t understand what movement restrictions are. And most of the time, they re just giving you like a generic routine on the treadmill for warm up, doing some machines, maybe some free weights, and maybe move that you should definitely not be doing if you have aches, pains and injuries and then getting you back on your cardio again at the end.

You know, most the times they are just looking down at their phone, texting their friends and counting their reps and acting like therapists more than a personal trainer. And it was in that moment I was like, that's not right. I know better and these people just got a weekend certification and I don't think it's fair to their clients who think they're coming and paying an expert $100 an hour to do personal training sessions with them. Think about that. That's like $1,200 a month if you want to three days a week.

And I'm going to tell you straight up, nine out of 10 of these maybe even more probably shouldn't be a personal trainer. They should not be telling you what to with your body. So, uh, at that point, I really wanted to do something different. And eventually many, many years later, when I finally had the, the knowledge and the resources do so, we started WeShape with the goal of giving everybody the experience of having like a really qualified personal trainer, but without that hefty cost and that you could do from your phone or from the comfort of your own home too.

So that's the. How do we make sure that we're not giving you a cookie cutter routine? That's generic, that were giving us something that specific to your body, and then we are teaching you how to move better so that she feel better, so you feel safe along the way. I can unpack a lot of different things that you mentioned there. Especially with the person holding their cell phone, texting their friends, doing their selfies.

Why Fitness Culture Fails Many People 6:34

And then sometimes this will happen too. Like if they do have an older client that can do some things cool, then they're on their Instagram doing things, cool with terrible form. I've also seen that happen. Cause while I am not officially in the industry of fitness, I have a of friends who are and kind of worked out of a gym even for a while. And it's a very interesting space because one of the things that you also mentioned is we've got someone who maybe was a former pro athlete or maybe played baseball in high school and really liked hanging out at the gym.

So now we have it becoming their gig. And I'm going to speak a little from my experience, not necessarily myself, but my husband, he was also hit not by a car, by truck while on his bike. And hubby was a mountain bike racer, did all those things beforehand, But then had the great lesson of like, yeah, I don't know what to do here. When he went back to the gym, He had a physical therapist that could help. But once you get released from physical therapy, then what? And this is also what I'm hearing, you know, and kind of thinking through here because a lot of times the transition from physical therapy into a gym isn't seamless.

Yeah, absolutely. I could definitely speak to that because I wish my story ended with getting hit by a car. By the way, it was an SUV, so not to compete or anything. About a decade later, I had been focusing on performance for that whole decade. It's almost like my ego shifted from I want to look good naked to I wanna perform and that's what it's all about. I learned a really valuable lesson because as luck would have it again as I was doing this adult gymnastics class and my body was telling me, this hurts your knees right now.

This move you're doing hurts you knees. and I listened to my body, I was like, oh, that's interesting, and my coach said to me, punch harder on these big spring floors, right? And I remember telling my intuition, you shut up, intuition. I'm not gonna listen to you, body. i'm gonna punch so hard, this coach has never seen a punch this hard in his life. And when I did, it came down on my knee collapse sideways, my other knee this time. So I tore my ACL, MCL, LCL, quad, meniscus all in one shot. It was a much worse injury than the first one.

I've had four surgeries on that knee now, one on the other, so five of them. So why I share this is it pivoted my focus away from even performance towards longevity, right? I ignored what my body told me to do. And I think even if you can shift away from vanity-based fitness towards performance- based fitness, there's another trap behind that wall, which is like pushing too hard too fast and not listening to yourself. And my goal at this point is how do I stay active and mobile and free in my movement for as long as possible so I can enjoy my body as much as I possible.

Sometimes that means not doing so much. So, you know, why I'm saying all this is you said bridging the gap between physical therapy and fitness. I've spent almost a year of my life in a bed trying to recover from knee injuries and knee surgeries. And while I was in that bed and while was designing the program, I wanted someone to be able to use that program while they were lying in bed, if that's all they could do. So if you look at the way we do the WeShape program. You know, we have levels on all the different movements.

We're very much into calisthenics and progressive movement because I really believe it's the best way to train because not only does it require more strength and flexibility as you scale the difficulty of movements up, but it also requires more balance and coordination, which is something I don't think very many fitness programs are talking about, right? But in any case, everything that we do starts in bed. You can do anything in bad. We do basic isometrics, basic mobility movements, because that's where a lot of people are.

They start there. And so the goal is, how can I have you leave the physical therapy office and start these really basic movements? And as you start to develop mastery in those movements you scale them up. And then we give you a movement that's a little bit harder. And we just keep down that process. What we found is, WeShapes has been around now for four years. People who have been with us for several years, it is absolutely incredible the results we've seen in them and how their body moves differently and feels differently, and the strength they have.

things like going on long walks or hikes. We had one member recently, I was on a call and she said she had this goal of being able to do this. It was a three mile staircase in Europe that she was going to. And this is a person who couldn't walk up one flight of stairs without pain a year before that. One year later, did three miles up and three down this giant hiking on the staircase and was just blown away by it. So yeah, people really need that, they need to not just go from physical therapy or complete sedentary lifestyle to like lifting weights and jumping and running.

Like it's a recipe for disaster. And most of the people who come into WeShape were like, let's take 10 steps backwards and let us build a strong foundation so we can take 20 steps forward. What most people do is the opposite. They take one step forward, push too hard, too fast, get burned out or hurt, and then they take 1 step backward. At WeShap we call that the one-step forward one, step backwards game. what happens when we get stuck in that game? You go nowhere. Yeah, you go nowhere. Sometimes you take more steps backwards than you do forwards, right?

So people really need to slow down. They need focus on making movement a practice, not a workout routine where you're trying to kick your butt because you hate yourself anymore, and we do a lot of mindset stuff too, as you can kind of tell. I'm peppering underneath this. And to really show up and learn how to care for your body. That's what's important. It makes sense. I mean, I think, a lot of folks who are, let's say 30 plus living on this earth right now have either been inundated with the whole performance thing, like push hard, do this.

Crossfit, how many people are crossfit injuries? I'm mean let us go there. Then you take the mental side of the ego and more cross fit injuries, because I'll call myself out. Like I am trying to compete with 20 year olds when I was 40. It's just a bad idea.

Mindset, Self-Criticism, and Building a Movement Practice 12:14

That idea and if you're competitive at all and you are, you know, You were an athlete or or you aren't athlete, or however you identify. I mean, the bottom line is, is there is that mental thing of like, well, I need to be kicking, button taking names here. Like I'm not doing what I needed to do. And I've been finding myself in this, and I think a lot of people probably can resonate. We're kind of brainwashed to think that we have to all be internal bad asses. and like I'll even be doing some Tai Chi or even some of the Kung Fu.

big classes and I'm like, I am going too slow, you know, like I not doing this strong enough and it's like not hard enough. I didn't break eight plates today with my mind. How did this happen? How do we get so brainwashed into thinking like we have to push so hard versus like oh this is awesome, bed exercises. Like I know a lot of people are like but I so much more advanced than that but maybe you're not. Anybody could do bed exercise is what I imagine. Well, here's what I'll say about this, okay?

When it comes to the mindset side, most of the people who are really influential out there at the pinnacle of fitness, if you really get to know these people, they've got an inner critic and a demon inside of them that's pushing them forward. And guess what? They're never happy. Look at Michael Jordan, like talk about like the goat of basketball. If you look at that guy, you watch his documentary, never satisfied, And I want to ask people who are on this like a question. What's your goal? Do you want be the pinnacle of fitness and hate yourself and never be happy?

Does that sound like the life you actually want for yourself? Or have you been told that if you get that, then you will be Happy? That's what the industry says to us, right? You should hate Yourself unless you look like this or unless You can move like This. and, oh, you should buy my program so that you can do this so you that can finally like yourself again. And what I tell people is, listen, I've been in the fitness industry for 20 years. I watched hundreds, maybe thousands of people lose over 100 pounds, get to their goal weight, and you know what happens when we got there based on self-criticism?

All they do is look in the mirror after 100 pounds, they don't go, yay, I'm at my goal, feel so good about myself, or like me. They say, oh, gross, this part of my arm needs more work. they continue criticizing themselves because that's all they've rehearsed. And so what we try to do at WeShape is something different. We say okay, first of all, let's quit exercise. Exercise has so much negative association with it. It's, all the I ate this donut, so I need to go exercise, Let's start practicing movement.

Right? Let's start practicing movement. So that changes it from, I need to disconnect from my body and push myself as hard as I can to I needs to reconnect with my buddy, listen to it and take care of it. Okay? And then we also get them to start paying attention to that inner critic inside. We all walk past the mirror, we all put our clothes on and we go, oh, gross. And we hate parts of ourselves. we teach people how to recognize that, how, to pause, How to repattern it so that we can hopefully get to show up from a different place.

And probably my favorite way to describe this is, you know, right now you don't want to work out because you're stuck in this cycle of using shame and self-criticism to workout. This is our thesis overall when it comes to mindset. People get stuck into this trap because if you use fear-based motivation, it doesn't feel good. And if something doesn' t feel go,o you want t keep doing it. right? So we want to flip it on its head. How do we teach you how to care for yourself? And the way I want you to feel about fitness is this.

If I took your toothbrush away for five days, how badly would you want it back so you could brush your teeth, so that you can take care of your tooth? Like really bad, right. And if I gave it, back to you, you'd probably walk right over to that sink. You start brushing your tea because you wanna take of it because it feels good. And so that's what we want to do with WeShape is develop a fitness practice, a movement practice where we start to recognize that the purpose of this is to help us feel good, to helps us build confidence, help be stronger, more flexible, and more capable with what our body can do again.

And when those positive feelings come up, what happens? We want do it more. It becomes our identity. Now we're someone who takes care of ourselves. So on top of wanting to give you the right movements, the rights, stretches, right levels, The right form cues to support you also want to shift people's mindset because I think the fitness industry has done a number on people. I mean, it's made a lot of people feel really crappy about themselves. And I feel like that that's what motivates people to push too hard, too fast.

Then we get stuck in this shame based cycle that we can never get out of. So I want things to be different. I can totally resonate. I mean, like I said, I worked inside of a gym doing my acupuncture and bodywork stuff. But at the same time, always felt like, was never like ripped enough, jacked enough fit enough. Yeah. Like hanging out in there. And so I always thought like you know, oh, there's the chubby semi-fit acupuncturist over there in the corner. Meanwhile, we've got, you hardcore folks.

And so you're so right, because I'm thinking it through like all my years in the gym and I am sharing experience. I m sure a lot of folks can probably resonate with this, especially if you've been around in fitness space. You know, I was a competitive swimmer, ice skater, you know a lotta stuff in in, in background. So you look at it and you think it all through and your like, dang. And then I was also thinking about the other thing, mirrors in the gym. Is that like the sickest joke ever for people?

Yeah, they're like, that's so you can look at your form. Sure. That's so you can pick apart every little piece of you that looks funny when you're, you know, doing a squat or whatever. I mean, I once had like one of the gals I was working out with, like she's looking at her belly in the mirror while she squats. She's like, Oh my God, my belly hangs over so bad. And like. she is like squatting 200 pounds and like Oh, it looks so. Bad. What is it is mindset like that negative while you are lifting weights in like a push go, what does that do to your nervous system?

Yeah, it stresses you out. Right. And again, what we're doing, the mind, The thoughts you have work the same way as movement. Okay. So if you, if You practice movement, let's say you do squats perfectly 10,000 times. Well, guess what? Number 10 thousand one is going to feel like you can do it automatically, but we never think about our thoughts like this. Okay, if all you do is constantly go, oh, my belly looks gross when I'm doing this and you're trying to use that as fuel, you are activating that adrenaline side of your nervous system, your dumping cortisol and your rehearsing that negativity.

So now what happens? Your beliefs about yourself change. So what do you believe about yourself? You believe you're disgusting. You're gross and you have to punish yourself in order to try and not be that. And again, you can get to that goal weight. I have gotten the privilege of hanging out with, meeting, interviewing, all these different fitness models, bodybuilders, people at the pinnacle of what you think that you want to look like, they're miserable. They're misery. And what I want people is to stop thinking that your worth lies in how you look.

Your worth lives in the number on the scale. That's not the truth. You're worthy just as you are right now. The more people can recognize that, the more they can really feel that. and that's something we do at WeShip is try to teach people how to feel worthiness. the More you'll say, I deserve to take care of myself and you prioritize you. If I can make that shift, then I don't need to be your guru anymore. I dont want be a guru. I want to teach you how to be your own, right? And so I think it's really important that we don't just give people the things to do, but we teach them how, to change the way they think about themselves.

Because if you value yourself, you'll take care of yourself. I know that to, be true for sure. Absolutely. Now, along those lines, I'm also thinking about like, all right, so you're giving people some guidance, you're stepping up, taking initiative with the movement, kind of moving the mindset away from punish and go, go go. What happens, where am I going with this? What happened when someone, because I'll see this happen a lot, they'll get motivated, perfect time, it's February.

Consistency, Movement Snacks, and Daily Mobility 19:48

January, everyone's like, new year, knew me. February comes in, we get a little bit down, like you said, your teaching folks, how to think through and be like, I deserve to work out. I deserved to take care of myself. What happens if someone starts to falter a little bit on that? What kind of stuff can you teach folks about? Like, what do you go into the mindset with there? like what's going on? How do change that. I'm happy you asked that question because I think there's also this belief that your progress is linear.

It's just all uphill. You're just going to get started, it's going be easy, the ball is going get rolling, and it is easy to keep it rolling. Life happens. I've got two kids, I have a business, these injuries, other injuries along the way that usually stem from my first injuries. Give yourself a lot of grace. This is one of the hardest things about what we do at WeShape is the fitness industry tells you, things can change in two weeks, things in 30 days, in six weeks. They do that because the shorter the time they tell you it'll happen, the more excited you are about it.

Then you want to go buy a program or join something. One of the things that we tend to do is say, this takes a long time. It's a journey of your mind and your body and really your spirit too. Life's going to get in the way. People you love are going pass away and you're going have to be with them and their families. You're like, people are gonna get sick, you'll get injured, stuff's gonna happen. And it's not about what you did this week and next week. It's about, if you look at the last year, how'd you do?

Were you consistent enough to make progress? Great. Then a month down, it not a big deal, right? Just get back on. And so a huge part of that is teaching people to give themselves grace, give ourselves grace. Like we don't do that. We let our inner critic take the best of us. We, let it come in and say, oh, you're a failure because you, said you were going to do five days a week and now you only did two this week. Right? So stop that. Give yourself grace. All movement counts. Okay. So that's step one.

Second piece is we always tell people to, do way less than they think they should be doing. Everybody starts out a new fitness routine, feeling like it's like, this is the one, This is, the time I'm going go five, days, a, week, and then everything's going, to change for me. It's not sustainable. Right? And so one of the things that I think people with WeShape really love the most is we created 10-minute routines. You can select, by the way, if you want 10, 20, 30, 45, or 60- minute routines each day.

And then we ask you, how'd you sleep? How does your body feel? Based on all those answers, we actually build you a custom routine for that day So if you're tired, it's going to be like a lot of stretches, a little more mobility moves, little bit of strength stuff. If you feeling really rested, we're going hit some high intensity intervals. It's gonna be more challenging for you. So it really, again, trying to make sure we meet you where you at. But at the end of the day, I tell people, start with two 10 minute routines a week.

if You can't find two, 10 minutes gaps to work on yourself and take care of yourself. I can help you, you know what I mean? And guess what? Some weeks you won't have any, right? It is okay if those two go away, but if I could just say two. 10 minute routines a week. That's a hundred routines in a year. Okay. If you do 100 routines that are designed for your body, that have a progressive component to them, That are teaching you how to move better. There's 0% chance that at the end of that year, barring any like acute injury circumstances or something like that, you're not going to feel a whole lot better in your.

Right? And I think people don't think about the long-term there. Like a hundred routines in a year is just two routines a week. It's not that much. And you can make a lot of progress doing that. Sure, more will be better to a certain extent, but starting there and building that as a habit, as an identity, is who you are. I'm somebody who takes care of myself. This is my minimum standard. That's the starting point. So oftentimes people do way too much too fast. They bite off more than they can chew.

The final thing I want to say about this is all movement counts. Something we try to teach people is something called movement snacks. Right? So you're listening to this right now. Stand up from your chair five times, 10 times. Right. Here's another cool math equation. If you do three sit to stands a day, just three mindful squats a. That's a thousand squats. A year. if you. Do three sets of 10, that's 10 thousand squats that you added in a year and guess what? That'd probably take you two minutes a, right?

Probably take two. Minutes a Day. So we also encourage people that it's not just about Using a workout routine to learn how to move better, feel better gain strength, flexibility, balance and coordination is also making your life more about moving throughout the day. Work on the floor in your laptop. I spend a ton of time in what I call adult tummy time where you're on your belly and your laptops in front of you. It's great for. reversing all the effects of sitting, right? We're working on thoracic extension, shoulder blade retraction, you know, all these different things.

And yet we just sit in a chair all day long, set an alarm on your phone. This is the one thing phones are useful for every hour. It just says move and just get up and do something for 30 seconds. Right? If we do that, we can accumulate a lot of movement and that movement really counts in the long run. I love the concept of Movement Snacks. So I think it's the genius thing because people, You cannot argue it. Like no one can get out of that. Like you're going to go to the bathroom, maybe add a couple more up and downs off the toilet.

You know, no one can argue it and I love it. I loved that. It's my favorite concept. And you know what's cool too is one thing I've been saying a lot more lately, which I think is resonating with people is I say if it's in the way, you'll do it every day. And so people will often get things around their house for their fitness and then they'll hide it under their bed. They'll tuck it away somewhere. I'm like, no, let's like take a piece of masking tape and put it down the middle of your hallway.

When you get to your hall way, do a little balance beam practice on the masking, tape every time you walk through it, pick a door in your house. Every time we walk, put your arms up with your elbows slightly higher than your shoulders, your thumbs pointed backwards, stretch your chest, improve your posture. You go to stand up from the chair, Do it three times instead of one time, right? You know, before you get out of bed, stretch your hamstrings with a towel over your foot. So the more we can start to like put reminders in our day, if it's in the way, we do it every day.

All of a sudden, oh man, I get, five, 10, 15 minutes of movement. That's like, feels like I barely added any time to my day right. Just by putting it in front of me. I think it is really important for people to do that too. Wondering if you have like a ninja warrior like set up in your house where you can swing from things the way. I do. It's funny. When I'm in this little podcast room, I can show you the office too. We got monkey bars and balance beams and weights and stall bars. So I am a total movement junkie.

At my house I got a lot of stuff outside. If I don't have a foam roller within 10 feet of me, I get nervous, so I try to have foam rollers in every room as well. There you go. She's got one too. So you get it, right? Like the more you can put that stuff around you, again, it's an identity shift, like I think people want the benefits of feeling fit and mobile and strong.

Training for Menopause, Longevity, and Movement Quality 26:18

But then when they think about fitness, It's all wrapped in negativity and shame and self judgment and criticism. And if we can shift our identities towards like, I'm going to take care of my body. I'll put stuff around me that remind me to care for my own body, movements next, routines now, all of a sudden it can snowball. And a year from today, you could be looking at yourself, maybe your inner critic's still there judging you, but you've got enough wisdom to pause, turn down that volume knob and say, You're doing a great job.

That's what I really want people to do. I think that's wonderful. I don't know, like you said, it just takes the brain damage out of the concept of fitness for so many people because it's the barrier, right? And movement, if we focus movement it is just so much more fun. Now I'm curious, you've got a foam roller like me within 10 feet of you, the Ninja Warrior department. The biggest thing I get asked by folks, all the time, like hands down all the time. Doc, so-and-so says I need to do this kind of workout because I'm over 40 and I am in menopause and shouldn't be doing HIIT workout.

I should be lifting heavy. Well, have you ever lifted heavy? And most people don't understand what lifting heavier means either. So anyway, my point is, what do you tell folks? I kind of already have the idea of what the answer is going to be, but I just want to hear kind from you. When folks are like, But Coach Tyler, I'm this particular age and I have hormones that are declining. What am I supposed to do? Are we ignoring that and going, let's do you and a one? How do approach this? Yeah, I love this.

You said a lot that I want to touch on here because one thing that is problematic with our social media culture right now is trends come in and trends. And what happens is people go squirrel. I'm supposed to do strength training. Squirrel. squirrel, you know, whatever it may be. All of that stuff might be true, but here's the reality. If you don't do anything consistently, if you bounce from thing to thing and idea to idea, You get paralysis analysis. Guess what happens? Nothing changes. Okay. if You want your body to change, have to progressively expose it to slightly more challenging things.

Weight training is a great way to do this. But one thing I will say about weight training that I feel personally is limiting. is that let's pretend you take up weight training. You start doing squats, right? You started adding weight to the bar. I'm strengthening my muscles. i'm building my bone density. What if you're squatting poorly? What If nobody really knew how to coach you to squat really well? And now you are adding resistance to your crappy squat. It's just a matter of time before you gonna end up hurting yourself.

And you going to say, I should have gotten stronger. Are you getting distracted? Now I got to do yoga instead, Right? So the whole point of this is there's something that supersedes strength. There's something that supersedes pretty much everything in fitness, not cardio, balance, flexibility, strength. It's movement. The quality of your movement and I'm going to be honest with you, I rarely meet coaches and trainers that are really great at this. I am not trying to put myself on a pedestal. There are plenty of people who are great and way better than me at it.

But they're like the one out of a hundred, one of out a thousand coaches out there who can watch somebody squat and go, the weight distribution on your feet isn't right. Let me fix that. Your hips aren't on the way they should. let me fixed that, your core isn´t acting the right way, let´s fix it. your posture isn ´t moving the same way it should, lets fix this. And so, over everything is movement. If we don't learn how to move properly the ways that your body intended to, you're gonna end up hurting yourself.

So you have to serve that as a strong foundation. Now, when I say that movement exists on a spectrum. Okay, so let's take the squat as an example. It's a really good example here. A lot of people will think they have to go to the gym, they'll start barbell squatting, but they can't even stand up from a chair well. And so what we shape what I'll do is I will say, okay, let us take you back down to basics. Let us have you learn how to stand from chair really well with good weight distribution on your feet, good alignment with the knees and the hips, and good activation of the core and posture.

Now, if we can get that right, some people will say now it's time to go weightlifting. I don't necessarily believe that's the best way to. Go I want to sophisticated the movement to make it require more flexibility, more strength, More coordination, balance, and sometimes more power and capacity to absorb impact. So, for the squat progression that we use at WeShape, if you can't do anything, let's say you cant even stand up from a chair, you cannot even sit up form bed, all we're going to have you do in bed is bring your knees up, lift your toes towards your nose, and press your heels down into the bed to activate the glutes and the quads.

So we start with mind-muscle connection drills like you might typically see in something like physical therapy, okay? Once we can do that, we swing the legs over, come to a seated position, do the same movement in a seat position. All right, so we're not even moving yet. We're just doing isometrics. Then we teach people how to do a partial range of motion squat with hand support. If you can do that, we'll teach you how do do full range motion squats with hands support, then we take the hands off and we do sit to stand with no hand supports, and then a slightly faster sit-to-stand with a no-hand support and add a toe extension at the top so that we start conditioning the ankles and a hop at top.

Then we add a jump, then we remove the chair. Then, we do slower jump squats, than we'd do faster jump squads. And if you look at that progression, every single step is going to require a little bit more strength, a bit of more power, little more flexibility, more coordination, and a lot more balance. If you're worried about osteoporosis too, the best thing for strong bones isn't necessarily strength training, it's absorbing impact. So we really take people from not being able to jump, for example, to being to be able jump again.

And when you do, that reacts on your bones, your tendons, ligaments, and your muscles in a way that I think has a lot more benefit than just traditional weight training because we're learning how to do dynamic movement and life is dynamic. It really is. So that's how I like to approach things. If you're wondering, how do I approach this for each individual? What we do at WeShape differently is when you come in, I don't give you a program not knowing who you are. I ask you 40 or more questions about who are you.

Where are your tight? Where you're weak? What injuries you have? what struggles you've had? I show you some movements and say, which one can you do, right? And we use all that data to create a personalized program for each individual. And then like I said earlier, we actually ask questions every day to further personalize the program. Because I like to think about it like if I was their personal trainer, if you walked in, I would know what movements, because I already screened you, right? I should know.

What movements you're doing, what levels you should be doing. I have an idea of what I want to do with you that day. But if your like I didn't sleep last night and I feel horrible. And I just gave you the routine that I thought was going to be perfect. That's, that's a really poor way to design. So I wanna be able to pause and say, let's adjust each and individual day and meet you where you are at. Right. so I guess that is a long winded way, to say everybody needs a unique routine because you got a, unique body.

and our goal is to give you. Makes sense, makes sense. I mean, that's kind of where I've started to come to with. It's everything really, it's not even just fitness. Everything. Yeah, It is your mindset, your blood panels, hormones, everything. So with training and fun movements and things like that, what's your favorite movement to recommend? God, that's a tough one. You know, like I said, I've been in this game for a long time and I have done a lot of different things over the years. I'm particularly fond of working on handstand work myself.

WeShape is not a program that focuses on the hand stand. And we work with people who are in a different place than that, let's say. But if you want to come to our coaching calls and stuff, So I've spent a lot of time on that. I am by no means a great hand balancer, but I can hold my own upside down on my hands a little bit. So, I enjoy doing that a lots. You know, one of my favorite things to do is experiment with movement. One thing that you might find if you poke into my house after I get my kids to bed at night is me with a pair of headphones on and some abstract music.

And just listening to what my body needs. Like what does my body want to move this way and this? Way? I'll do some subtle movement So it's almost like um, you know with we shape we teach you the rules of the body and how to Move well and the ultimate goal

Calisthenics, Gymnastics, and Progression-Based Training 34:18

for me is you learn the rule so you can break the Rules. It's like music, right? You can't play jazz on day one first. You got to learn how To hold down, You know a beat you got learn How to hold Down a rhythm and a melody and then eventually get so skilled you Can break through rules and it still sounds great But if you tried to break those rules on Day one is to sound crappy same thing with movement If you're trying to break the rules on day one and do movements that people might not think they should be able to do, uh, you probably hurt yourself.

But if you learn how to move perfectly as much as possible, then you can start applying that in ways that are a little bit imperfect and break. The rules. I really enjoy, um, just having a free flow movement practice like that and not really thinking like, what's my next move? Just experimenting with movement. I had a friend of mine challenge me to that and I have to move really slow. It was really hard, but it was fun in the end. I mean, I can see how free flow movement would help you to, to moving different directions, different planes too, because it is one of the things that we get caught into with fitness is moving forward and backward and not rotational, not doing You had mentioned balance, but you had also mentioned at the beginning calisthenics.

And my father, who's 90, still does his original calistethics workout from when he was in gymnastics, when was like a freshman in high school, which is crazy. But the man moves incredible. Like he has virtually minimal pain. and no replacements of any joints whatsoever. This is a great thing to touch on. If you look at all the people lifting weights, especially if you're looking at people who are over 50, you can have a lot of people that ended up with injuries. Because most of the time, the focus is on how much weight can I lift, and the ego gets ahead of us, we start sacrificing movement for perceived strength.

Gymnastics, barring somebody hurting themselves doing the sport itself, if you find a gymnast who didn't have any acute injuries, that person is going to carry that strength, flexibility, balance, coordination forward for a very long time, into their old age like you're describing. I had a client, I'll never forget this, years ago I used to run a local boot camp program and This lady came in, she was in her mid-40s and completely deconditioned, hasn't done anything in like 20 years, right? I used to be a gymnast back in college.

Okay, great. Let me see you do some movements. Oh my God. I've never seen anybody move better on day one. She did not forget how to properly activate her core, how hold her body in good alignment. And more than anything, I think people don't realize gymnasts do well. It's not like they have like a stronger shoulder or a strong arm. They have a really good sense of muscular cordony. They know how to make their arms strong by making their core strong. they know, how, to, make, their legs explosive by, making, the, core, explosive, right?

Everything starts in the middle and works outward and that's how the body works. And so calisthenics is really just a fancy way to say gymnastics, at the end of the day. If you understand movement progressions, which kind of like we talked about earlier with the squat or the sit to stand, that is how gymnasts train. Right. They start with a basic movement until they achieve mastery. Then they make it a little harder. My time that I've worked in gymnastics is what inspired me to train like this and to make the Wii Shape program like.

Because when you sophisticated the movement, it does so much more than just making you stronger. If I add weight to my squat, I just get stronger at the squat. Or let's pretend I start jumping and rotating 90 degrees in landing. That gives me so much more resilience for real life circumstances that might happen versus just lifting something heavy on my backs. Huge fan of gymnastics and huge fan making it really palatable and simple for people starting with things that are like in bed or in a chair and gradually working out from there.

That's cool. I mean, the more I look at things like handstands, hand stand walks, you know, I actually have never been able... I can do hand stands, but I cannot do a hand-stand walk. Cannot do it. Don't know what malfunctioned with me and maybe my core is not as explosive. My dad used to do that all the time. It intrigues me because where I'm going with this is that I really want folks to look at, where do you want to be? Like, what kind of cool stuff do want do? And let's do it. Let's figure out how you can do at any age.

And one of my things, because of dad a little bit, but also because my interest in walking on my hands, you know, holding different positions, kind like gymnastics, yoga stuff, I am like, this kind cool. I kind into it, like. Can I do any of it? Not really. And so this is intriguing to me because I'm like, I see the different programs online, but what you don't see is the progress, like you'll have beginner, intermediate, advanced programs. You have three levels. Yeah, you could purchase online and then you're like but wait, what if I like somewhere in between intermediate and advanced and I am not progressing from there.

So I've seen like this how you would be bridging that gap too for folks who are trying to get to a certain stage. 100%. So most of the movements that we focus on, right? We're going to dice that down to 10 to 20 levels. And the goal is not, if you go from, like you said, you from beginner to intermediate, that step can be huge. That step could be detrimental. The step that can really cause a lot of injuries. If you take 20 steps to get from point A to point Z, instead of three steps, the progress is faster, it's safer, and it is much more palatable.

Because what we try to do is we almost try and make it so that when you scale a movement up, You're like, what changed here? It was just like okay, my arms were on my hips and now my hands are on the back of my head, right? Like subtle little things like that. And just to speak to your story real quick, there was this champion gymnast, I can't remember his name, but he was working on a really challenging move. It's called a victorian. So basically your arms are out to the side and you're holding yourself parallel to iron cross on steroids.

Just absolutely incredible. Wasn't able to do it. And so instead of him practicing that move over and over again, you know what he did? He went back to the very first level of gymnastics back when he was a kid and said, I missed something here. For 18 months, went through hollow position holds, shoulder contraction holds. Went through static holds went, through iron-cross holds and by the time he got back at the top, was able do the Victorian. It's this really good reminder that if you're trying to do moves and you can't quite do them, a lot of people think I should just keep trying.

And some people succeed with that, some get injured with it, and some don't succeed. The surest way to succeed is to take enough steps backwards that when you do the movement, it feels like you've mastered it. It's not about doing things that are challenging that you don' have control over because that's where the risk comes in. it's about things challenging things you DO have to control. sitting on those long enough until you achieve what feels like I've got this down and then scaling up to the next available option.

And usually, again, not taking such a big leap that that next, available options starts to feel like, I don't have control over this. Makes sense, makes sense. Yeah. I think for a lot of people, it's humbling to go back, right? To the beginning, but it is also at the same time, maybe what some of us need to be considering because at, the end of the day, movement is what is like your life, but it's, you know, I'm always telling folks like you can eat clean.

How WeShape Works and Uses Personalized AI 41:28

You can, do all the, take all your supplements, follow all of the trends, all do the detoxes. But if you're not going to commit to consistent movement, like, what are you doing? What's going on? What is going here? And so it sounds like you're also able to kind of take different goals and put them into play for what folks would want to do. Now, I am curious because I was kind sent over the just basic movement analysis. How do folks move from that and, and like, take us into your website, Take us in to how folks interact.

Because I was only introduced to the AI component, not the like advanced level stuff. So, so help us understand that. Yeah, so I'll nerd out with you for a minute on this because there's a lot going on behind the scenes here. We've spent four years and several million dollars just building out the technology behind WeShape. And most people don't care about this all that much. They just need to know if you scale up and you're consistent, you are going to make a I mentioned earlier that the first thing we do when somebody comes into WeShape is we take them through our client onboarding quiz.

So we ask you a bunch of questions about what your goal is, whether you're injured, where it is. We show you movements to tell us where you can do different levels of those things. With all that, what we're going to do is two things, we are going decide which level of the movements we have in our program you should be starting with. And then we're gonna decide how much you should be exposed to these movements throughout your routines. So if somebody is really tight in their hamstrings, let's say, and then let say they have really loose hip flexors, I don't need to give you a bunch of hip-flexor stretches because you already have loose-hip flexor.

The system is always looking for where is the weakest link, where's the tightest part of your body. Let's expose you to that more throughout routines so that we can get you more flexible. or strong. And as you scale those movements up, so let's say you scaled this hamstring stretch movement up over time, which usually involves more range of motion or more coordination, we'll start to de-emphasize that hamstrings stretch because now we start seeing you're making progress. You're getting mastery over that.

So the system's always looking for where are you tightest, where you weakest, and let bring those things up overtime. How it's actually working is you answer these quiz questions, you go in there and it says, how'd you sleep last night? How's your body feel today? how much time do you have? And then you get started and then it starts to work out for you. During the workout, it is a follow along video workout you can do from home, no equipment, just a chair and some floor is what we need. And after each movement, It says you want to scale up or scale down.

In real time, You can say scale, up, or down and will make the movement easier or more challenging. So the way, again, I like to think about this is if I was a personal trainer next to somebody and they were doing a movement and he said, this too hard. I say, okay, just scale it down to this, right? So it gives them that opportunity to have that flexibility within a follow-along routine as well. So, it's interactive. And the best part about, is the more you use it, the smarter it gets. The more it knows about your body, The, more, knows, about the progress you're making.

the, More, It knows the areas where you need more progress and the More it adjusts to you over time. So yeah, it was our best stab at this point and we're constantly improving it to try and make it better. Again, my goal as you kind of maybe gathered by my story is like, I want somebody to feel like this is better than that personal trainer that stares at their phone and like pushes them through it. I wanted them to have a better experience. And of course, for a tiny fraction of the price that you'd normally pay a personal trader to do this kind service for you.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. I think my question now is like, okay, are you training your own like personal bot basically in this case of sorts? Yeah that's right. We have an internal algorithm that we've created and we ingest all the data and continuously improve it and try to tweak it to just give people a better experience over time. That makes sense. And of course I'm going to get the question, so I got to ask it. Where does the data go? Well, you'll be happy to know that I have a CTO that used to be in cybersecurity.

So we keep everything in a data warehouse that's encrypted a million different ways. We haven't had any issues or anything like that. so, and we're not a company that does anything with that data outside of build our workouts, right? We're trying to use it to try and figure out how to advertise or sell it, to anybody else like. Our number one core value at WeShape is we care. and I think that a lot of companies say that they care, and they do that just to, I don't know, make people think that they actually care about them.

I spent a lot of years in the fitness industry and part of the reason why I know it's making you feel bad about yourself and shaming people is I was that person. And at some point, I started realizing that people were just walking their way towards misery, even if they got the success that they were after. Most people didn't get the successor after they just quit because they burned themselves out. And when my daughter got to a certain age where I start realizing my orthorexic habits, so to speak, were rubbing off on her.

And I started going, well, I'm building like an eating disorder and a little girl now because of the way I am thinking about this. I was like, everything needs to change. So I really think about my kids a lot because I don't want my girls to grow up in a world where they hate themselves towards more fitness. I don't want them to grow up in a world where their worth and value lies in how they look. I want him to have intrinsic worth in value. And, um, I really want to support others in doing the same so that they can offer that to the people around them too.

So, yeah, we went on a tangent there, but that's, that why WeShape exists is we want do something different. We want take the fitness message that is out there and say, don´t follow this anymore. It's not serving us. Let's learn how to love our bodies. Like ourselves. Care for our body and let's all grow old and happy together, regardless of how we look It's a great way to look at it. I mean, having had the same experience with the fitness industry and always feeling not good enough, not thin enough.

Not strong enough I can see it and that's for the level of folks that actually want to go into the gym. You know, so many other folks are repelled by it. And at this point for a lot of folks working out at home and having the 10 minute, you know workouts is just much more attractive. So let's tell folks a little bit more about how they can interact with you guys, where you at on Instagram, what's going on on the socials, like. Yeah, I believe, but I'm going to let you kind of take over. Sure. Yeah.

Well, we made a special link for you guys. We shape.com forward slash health fix will take you to that client intake survey. At the end of that, you can try out we shape for two weeks for free. No pressure, but at least you can try some routines out based on what we talked about here.

Data Privacy, Company Mission, and Closing Remarks 47:48

I didn't mention this, we also do live coaching calls myself. Dr. Lisa's our resident physical therapist who we have on staff as well. So you could jump on live group calls and ask us questions and get support, right? A therapist that helps with mindset support too. We try to really hit it from all the angles that we've been talking about on the show here, if you want to just learn how to move better and feel better, just go to any social and type in WeShape. You know, I feel so blessed, But we been spreading this message now for a handful of years.

You know, we got seven million followers across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Um, We got a podcast to the feeling lighter podcast. Not as many followers over there yet. It's a little bit newer to us, but you can check that out as well. If you want to hear us talk a lot more freeform about mindset and movement as wells. That's awesome. All right. The Feeling Lighter podcast. We'll make sure we get all of that in the podcast notes at drjcrossnd.com or if you're watching on YouTube, it's going to be down below there in a caption.

So yeah, I'm super curious because of course now I am like, all right, so handstands. Are we going it to help me with finally figuring out why I cannot do hand stand walks? I'll bet you anything it's your wrists. I just want to say that. That's my gut sense. But I might be wrong, but my gutsense screams wrists, yeah. I don't doubt it. I do doubt. Don't out it that makes perfect sense. So, Hey, so if anyone else wants to join me in the handstand and hand stand walk situation, uh, hey, let's jump in together.

And yeah, it sounds like pretty much any goals that you have for your fitness, for future, your longevity, you can work it, work at all together with you guys at WeShape. Yeah, we try to give people a baseline of movement quality that lets you do the things you want to do again. Because it's not about, fitness is not doing more fitness. It's about doing the right amount of fitness so you can go enjoy your body in your life and do fun things with it again, so yeah. It's so important. It is so about the why and connecting to like, why are you doing this?

That's right. We ask that question to a lot of people as well. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Tyler. I appreciate it and enlightening me about what you guys are up to. And I look forward to this podcast coming out. Awesome. Thank you, Dr. J. Hey, Hill Junkies. Before you go, I want to tell you about my upcoming workshop, March 18th, 2026. It's at 530 p.m. Pacific, 730 P.M. Central. And like I mentioned, the end of 2025, started to talk about me taking things to the next level with my health and my fitness.

I'm looking in 20, 26 to have some folks join me with this. If you've been thinking about getting out on adventures, traveling, doing some awesome things while you're traveling or maybe you are wondering how you can stay in your sport or hobby or even try something new at any age, but maybe your thinking, am I up for this physically? Can I handle it? What about mentally? can I still push? I can still drive through hard things? Well, my next workshop has you covered. It's called the art of staying in your sport or hobby and being adventure-ready at any age so that you don't question if you can do something.

It is when you do it. So that's the theme of my March 18th workshop. In the workshop, we'll be talking about how blending the principles of Chinese medicine, self-body work, and the power of peptides and hormone balancing, whether it's herbal or bioidenticals. These can all help you to have all-day energy, a sharp mind, and a pain-free, lean body without handfuls of supplements, strict diets, an all day in the gym. So if this sounds like you and where you're at in life, come join me. And if you can't make it, there's always replays available when you register.

The link to register is in my podcast notes. If you are watching on YouTube, it's below. I hope to see you there. Have a great day, whatever you doing. Hey fellow health junkie, thanks for listening to the health fix podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please help support me to get the word out about the podcast, subscribe, rate and review and just get that word. Thanks again for.