You know, every once and a while, you make a mistake.
You miss a typo. You get a fact wrong. You misread a study.
And, occasionally, you hit the send button on a post about 21 hours before you mean to.
And such was the case with today's blog which, as you may have noticed, actually came yesterday.
It's not that I don't trust that it hit your inbox and you would have read it anyway (even, perhaps, as an early treat on a beautiful Fall Sunday) but, you see, I've had a blog post hit your inbox at 9:05AM every Monday for the past 211 weeks and, goddammit, I'm not going to break the streak now.
So, below, you will find a repost of what was meant to be today's blog post that happened to come out yesterday.
Because sometimes, even when things don't go the way you want, you can always rely on your dedication and consistency.
Perhaps there is a blog post in that.
Is there a cooler movie hero than James Bond?
I mean, sure, Superman can fly and Rocky always overcomes the odds.
But Bond has the coolest cars, the highest tech gadgets, the hottest girlfriends, a license to kill and I’m pretty sure he can emerge from the ocean in a perfectly tailored tuxedo completely dry.
I think Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever (sorry for all you Sean Connery lovers out there) though I grew up in the super-campy Roger Moore era.
I still remember my Dad, who did not and still does not like going to the movies, taking my brother and I to the discount movie theater to see “Moonraker” and “The Spy Who Loved Me”. Even he realized Bond was cool enough to warrant a trip to the cinema.
Speaking of spies, I think we had one in the gym recently.
(Weird pivot, I know but I have to admit these blog openings aren’t always the easiest to come up with and I realize this “James Bond as spy - spy in the gym” connection is tenuous at best, but here we are.)
I want to make this clear right from the beginning, I absolutely do not mind if other trainers, gym owners, gym general managers or whoever come in and check out the gym. In fact, I welcome it.
Let me know you’re coming and I’ll show you around, tell you what we do, how we do it and even try to help you solve a bottleneck in your business if I can.
Because while we have a certain perspective and philosophy and process when it comes to our business, just like training, we haven’t really invented much.
We are just organizing things in a way that makes sense for our community of trainers and clients. So, unlike your favorite energy drink, I don’t really feel like there is any proprietary formula here.
Secondly, the fitness industry as a whole is lacking two things.
The first is gyms that actually offer thoughtful, progressive training that drive results are few and far between. If we improve as an industry and actually deliver outcomes more people will be willing to invest their time and money into training and that allows all of us to win.
The second is gym owners that actually make a reasonable living from owning their gyms. Sources differ but according to a pretty reliable one, the average gym owner takes home $36,000 per year. And it’s not like owning a gym is easy work. Hours are brutal. Staff and member turnover is high. Burnout is common.
If I can help gym owners think about their gyms in a way that might be more beneficial to them, I’m down. We need these people to be happy and successful and ready to save the world.
Interestingly, staff and members get very worried when people come in with the sole purpose of seeing what it is we do.
“Dan, they are just going to steal your ideas and do it in their gyms!”
Perhaps. But it’s honestly not that easy. Seeing what we do and systematically implementing it are two very different things. It’s not like you build a search engine and all of a sudden you’re Google (that’s right, I just compared myself to Google!).
But there is an etiquette that accompanies snooping around and seeing what you can learn. And that is being above board with the whole thing.
Remember that scene in the movie “My Cousin Vinny” where Pesce thinks he’s a charismatic genius because he got the opposing lawyer to give him all his files.
Until Marissa Tomei informs him “It’s called discovery, dickhead! He has to share his files!”
In a weird way it’s kind of like that. I’ll show you the files if you ask but I’m not going to be too happy if you secretly hack into my computer.
Back to the spy in our midst. It all started when Kyle pointed me towards a website of another local gym that was using suspiciously similar language, methodologies, videos and color schemes to what we’ve created over the past few years.
I brushed it off.
Sure, there were a few things that were too close for comfort but, as I said earlier, good training lives in a fairly narrow set of parameters. It’s not like someone else can’t do something similar.
But as I scrolled down the page, something caught my eye.
It was a headshot of their head coach.
“That dude looks familiar,” I said as I scratched my freshly shaved head. But I couldn’t quite place it. Did I meet him in a seminar? Did he come in for a job interview?
Turns out this guy came in for a trial with us. Presented himself as a client and never said he worked for a competitor or anything like that.
He did his four sessions, came up with an excuse as to why he couldn’t continue and ditched.
Now, could this have just innocently been a trainer looking for a place to train outside his place of business? Sure.
But when you add everything up, I don’t think that’s what happened here.
I fully think he was trying to get an inside evaluation of what we do and how we do it.
But after being pissed for about 8 minutes, I came to realize this was actually a good thing.
If you are viewed as a threat for being great at what you do, that’s a very solid position to be in.
Not to put on rose colored glasses here. Competition is competition and you need to be concerned with others in the market. But I’ve never once felt the need to bend my approach or methodology from a training perspective based on what someone else was doing.
The fact that someone else might have is actually kind of flattering.
And if I’m going to put a really altruistic, 10,000 foot view on the whole thing, if this trainer learned something in our gym that made his gym more effective, I think that’s great.
Because the real issue in the fitness space is not that there are too many gyms offering effective training, it’s that there aren’t enough.
So if we all raise the tide, we will not only build more trust that people will actually be able to get value and results out of training, we will also be a stronger, fitter, more bad-ass society as a whole.
And if that means I end up with a couple of spies in my squat rack, so be it.