BJ Interviews Alwyn Cosgrove: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is BJ Gaddour with workoutmuse.com.  I’ve got a very special guest today, Alwyn Cosgrove, one of the top fitness pros in the business.  I’m a big fan of his personally.  I own a lot of his products.  I remember when I first started getting into the business, I wanted to make sure I got my head focused on the best people in the field and he was definitely one of the people that came up first.  It’s an absolute honor to have him today to talk about one of his many specialties regarding running a very successful fitness facility.  He’s also very well known for designing crazy, effective, semi-private workouts.  Being that we have a lot of bootcamp owners here that are looking for different ways to add multiple revenue streams to their business or maybe have a semi-private profit center to add to their bootcamp style workouts, this is the guy that you want to go through.  Alwyn thank you so much for being here today.  For people that might be living in a cave, can you let us know a little bit about your background  and what you’re best known for in the fitness business?

I’m best known for having a funny accent, I think.  I was born in Scotland, went to college in England and when I was in college, I was working in summer camps and teaching martial arts classes and soccer.  At the end of my  last year in college, and this is way before September 11, I was given an extended work visa for 5 years, so I was allowed to stay in the U. S.   So after I finished a college job, I started working at a gym in New York city.  Shortly after that I met my wife Rachel. From there we opened a gym – a small place in Southern California called Results Fitness which has now become one of the top 10 gyms the United States as voted by Men’s Health magazine for 3 years in a row now which is pretty exciting.  We’ve expanded and as a result of the gym’s success I’ve got a couple of books published, I’m on the Perform Better tour.  What else have I got going on BJ?  I just signed on a deal as a consultant with Nike.  Yeah that’s about it.  Not much else going on.

All well deserved!  I’m thrilled to hear of all the recent successes.  It couldn’t happen to better people.  Some of the top people in the industry call Results Fitness which is the facility that Alwyn and his wife Rachel own.  It’s the most profitable fitness center per square unit in America – potentially the world, if would be researched I wouldn’t be surprised.  So do you want to share – and obviously it doesn’t happen by accident.  There are a lot of great systems in place both business and training wise, behind the scenes.  So let’s just start with the training side of things and again Coach Cosgrove is one of the first people to really propose training people in a semi-private setting.  Sure it’s been done in the past, but no one before Alwyn really modeled it in a way that really made it extremely profitable and something that can be rolled out anywhere, anyhow.  I was blown away by the system.  Everything’s got to have a system in place so that no matter who is there you can deliver 80-90% of what people would experience even if the business owner isn’t there.  I love how you kind of went through your Perform Better presentation this year and went over each component of what that workout needs to look like from the preworkout routines to some core training to strength training to metabolic work and a postworkout section to finish.  I know that people here listening are going to be really interested to hear you break down each section of  an effective semiprivate workout and please give a bullet point or two for the importance of each section if you could.

No problem.  The concept came from in the past.  We used be able to do body part splits because people were active.  They were golfing, they were playing racquetball, they were jogging.  So the people that came to the gym were an active population looking to do something else.  So we modeled body builders and that was a fantastic idea because that type of training is very effective – getting some strength, getting some muscle.  The problem nowadays is that people are doing nothing else and they can’t come to the gym 4, 5 or 6 days a week.   If you’re killing it, you’re getting somebody 3 days a week, right?  So I started realizing that there was gaps in fitness.  In first grade education you get told that you should train in flexibility, endurance, strength, power and speed – these are all factors of fitness that you have to train.  We have sort of ignored everything but the strength and cardio component but we can’t do that any more.  So we realized that people need flexibility and mobility.  I have to address that somehow.  They need direct core training.  The science is showing us that this idea that you can just squat heavy and press heavy and work the core is not correct.  Anybody who is saying that stuff is not current on the research.  You need direct core training.  You definitely need some sort of power and elastic work so people lose power as they age very quickly.   We still need strength training, we still need metabolic training and people are so beat up we need to get them on the foam roller and get them to do some type of soft tissue work and we need to do some type of regeneration.  So your first thoughts are ‘how am I going to get all this done?’  So what we came up with at Results Fitness was a sequencing model where we built on the previous sections.  So someone comes in and we’re thinking, this person arrives and they’re tight so we are starting them on the foam roller and we go after the key areas so once we stir up that tissue we are starting to stir up the physiology.  If you look at core temperature it will start to increase after foam rolling.  So I’m already getting somebody warm.  Boom, I’m moving into my dynamic workout which appears a little elastic work, a little plyometric, a little power with some sort of dynamic range of motion.  So there I’m knocking off my two things.  I’m getting a little bit of my  power and elasticity in there, I’m getting my range of motion in there and also, because I structured it with a fast tempo, there’s not a lot of downtime I’m getting my cardio done too.  So you have all that stuff and somebody’s warm.  Then there’s a lot of stuff on corrective exercise.  With corrective exercise, a lot of guys get freaked out by this.  It is strength training or exercises that are designed for your weak areas or your weak movement patterns.  So right after that, we have a couple of corrective exercises with these people.  The beauty of that is because these are so hard you don’t need a lot of warm up for them because you’re not going to go heavy, but metabolically it is still demanding.  So now, I’ve knocked off foam rolling, a little bit of power lifting, a little bit of mobility, I’m moving in a corrective exercise at that point, bang, I hit the core.   I’m usually hitting it with some plank or Valslide work.  From there you are now half way through the workout.  Then we have what we call the traditional strength portion.  If you’re doing bootcamps, obviously you don’t have a set of dumbbells for everybody but you might have a kettle bell or some body weight.  So what we do then is we pair everything up.  We pair a lower body and an upper body because it takes out my down time.  It takes out my rest and we work that as heavy as we can.  So let’s say I do a set of lunges as heavy or as hard as I can.  Then I take a short rest, maybe 30 or 40 seconds.  Then I do a set of push ups or presses as heavy as I can.  Then a short rest 30 to 40 seconds.  My actual set between lunges might be close to 2 or 3 minutes which means I can go very heavy because that’s a long rest.  Metabolically, I’m only resting 30 seconds so I’m hitting cardio again.  I’m getting a nice fat loss effect, I’m getting a nice thermogenic effect because we care keeping an unrushed, solid tempo.  At the end of that I’ll add a little cardio if I want to do a little extra.  A Valslide, maybe some pushups or do some stuff with the ropes, we do some circuit stuff, purely metabolic.  At this point, if you structured your workout correctly 10 minutes of hard cardio is maxing people out.  At that point we do regeneration and stretch people out, cool them down.  At our facility we recommend that they take a nutrition shake.  If you think about it in your head, I want some type of foam rolling where everybody starts a dynamic warm up, corrective exercise, core training, strength training and metabolic.  But if I was to stop any part of your workout I wouldn’t really be sure what you’re doing because your warm up will be cardiovascular and it will have some lunges and squats in it.  Your core training will be demanding and I’m not sure is it strength or is it core?  Is that corrective?  I don’t know.  So in your head as a trainer you’re got these different stations that you’re moving people through.  The client doesn’t really feel it like that.  They just feel like it’s a whole workout.  The key is that sequencing.  It builds so nicely on top of each other that if I was just to do a sit-down stretch to begin with, sure, I would get the flexibility.  But now before I do weight training, I’d have to warm up more and before I did cardio, I’d have to warm up more.  If I sequence it a little differently, they all build on each other so by the time you get to your metabolic training in an hours workout, you’ve done 50 minutes of elevated heart rate.  At the Perform Better seminar that I did in Long Beach this year, Ekho, the heart rate monitor people were very generous and gave a bunch of people in my group a heart rate monitor and put them up on the screen.  So i was looking at guys having maximum percentages of heart rate during the warm up, during the core training – it wasn’t like we lost the whole cardio effect by not doing pure cardio training the whole time  because the whole thing was cardio.  That’s a fun weekend to finish with something that’s hard core.

That’s world class programming right there!  There’s a lot of gray zone.  You look at doing the tissue quality first which is going to allow you to break up some restriction to get a better training effect of working flexibility and mobility.  If you look at strength, in most cases, it’s high intensity mobility work.  I think one of the biggest questions … obviously metabolic training is one of the hottest things right now.  You touched on this too.  You can work strength and get a huge metabolic effect at the same time though there are clear differences from a pure max training power type perspective and then making that metabolic.  CAn we talk about  strength training versus metabolic training and how they differ and also how they can be integrated?

The question is, does the body actually know?  So if I give you a set of lunges for 8 reps, obviously, that’s strength training because you can’t do any more.  But what if I give you lunges for 15 reps?  It’s still strength training, but it starts to become a little more metabolic.  What if I go to slabtouches?  Same pattern.  That’s purely metabolic, there’s still some strength.  What if I go to hill sprints? So the continuum on one end you’ve just got heavy load, which is more mural.  On the other end, you’ve got purely metabolic which would be running.  But I think for our target market, BJ, there’s a zone in between where we need to be surfing a little bit, where maybe we’re stepping around it.  We are at the 8 rep range with most of our clients and we’re going up around the 15 to 20 range, but we’re clear in this zone and maybe in our program, we’re surfing back and forth. My problem with pure metabolic training traditionally has been running.  So if I run a mile, it’s 1500 reps.  That’s 1500 ploymetrics.  A plyometric in the running fashion just running forward will result in joint forces 2 to 4 times your body weight.  So let’s say you have a 200 lbs. deconditioned guy.  Are you going to give him 1500 ploymetrics with forces of up to 800 lbs going through his joints just to get a little cardio effect?  That’s just stupid.  So let’s look at some of the programming.  What if I took him back and I did some squats in place or I did a kettlebell swing.  I can do 10 reps, then have a short rest and do 10 pushups so the lower body gets a break in terms of the loading.  I don’t get the plyometric.  Let’s just say I go back and forth between those two for the same time it would take him to run a mile.  Look what happens – I do far less reps.  Let’s say he does 20 sets of each, that’s 200 reps at less than body weight in the lower body, no ploymetric,  200 reps for the shoulder girdles.  I’ve split it 400 reps for the whole body.  I’ve burned way more calories, I’ve cranked metabolism way up and it’s probably safer than the deconditioned  person with the cardio.  So my question is maybe metabolic is a response to something we’re doing and not a category of exercises.  I can take anything and make it metabolic and all I’m going to do is adjust the load.  If I have you do your max in a squat, BJ, your body is going to feel like maybe shocked.  If I give you 30 seconds of rest and say, “now we’re going to do 80% of your max” and go again and go again.  At the end of that you will have gotten stronger because metabolically, you’ll be challenged.  I always say that metabolic training is a response to a stimulus and not a category in and of itself.  As you said a good strength training program with a lunge or split squat, we’re getting a nice stretch and mobility there.  We’re doing a lat pull or a chin up and that’s the same as a lat stretch and a contraction.  With smart programming we’re getting a nice gray area.  A lot of guys don’t like it because they don’t have these clear categories.  I love it because it’s big bang for my buck stuff.  Let me get a little more lunging with this person and open up the hip flexion.  Let me do it in the form of a sled push or let me do it in the form of a lunge with an overhead reach and let me do it for time with short rest periods so I can take care of my cardio at the same time.  The idea is that the gray area is a good thing.  A lot of guys want to know where does strength training end and metabolic begin?  You can’t do a single rep heavy without your metabolism being involved.  Metabolic training is a response that we get based on our programming and not a classification in and of itself because we can get the same response through super setting, kettle bell swing, ropes or slide pushes than  we ever did jumping rope.

Absolutely!  A lot of people in the group exercise world operate on time because of the fact that you got to get people in and out at the same time and you gotta perform repetitions at different speeds based at fitness level and a variety of other factors.  To use that example, I think a lot of mistakes can be made in group exercise and there are times when it’s alright to incorporate stuff like this but let’s say just doing pushups for 3 minutes.  Not that it’s necessarily something bad to do, but if we’re talking about really jacking up the metabolism, getting strength work and making it as metabolic as possible you’re better suite to let’s say a 20 to 30 second work period there and then sequencing the movements in a noncompetitive format so, like you said, you’re constantly working and moving with short rest periods.  Bt the time you come back it’s all out intensity.   Let’s say you’re doing a 15-45 power interval circuit.  You’ve got 5 power movements addressing the entire body and the cumulative fatigue of doing that for 20 minutes and in the first 5 minutes, 45 seconds seems like a lot and after a couple of rounds it seems like that 45 becomes 15 and now we found a way to get not only that really high level power output, but also a great endurance component  and an incredible afterburner affect.  Can you touch on the time-based stuff?

All a repetition is is a measure of time and a range of motion.  So if I say “10 reps”, I’m assuming that you go from point A, which maybe the top of the push up, point B, the bottom of the push up and back.  That would be 1 rep.  I’m also assuming that that takes a certain time.  Maybe I’m doing 2 seconds down, 2 seconds up.  So there’s really no difference in terms of what the body experiences.  The body just knows 2 things: time and tension.  If I said, “do 30 seconds of push ups.”  If you got 6 reps or you got 10 reps the body feels 30 seconds of push ups.  A lot of the time based programming is really smart because if you’re feeling good that day, we crank it and get a lot of sets done but if you’re not feeling so good, we still get some quality work done.  When a guy goes from 10 to 12 reps, all he did was move faster and didn’t actually do more work.  Work is time times distance.  With metabolic clients, I want more work so the time based programming is actually superior because I know how much work they are getting done.  Studies came out earlier this year that showed that doing straight sets, either bench press or pushups, rest, repeat burned X amount of calories.  Pairing them in a noncompeting format, which is the way we like to do it, you did the same total work in the same time, but the metabolic cost was higher.  I always knew the metabolic cost was high and it was smart programming but it didn’t occur to me that it was higher than doing the same amount of work in straight sets – but it is.  That’s one of the advantages of this type of training.  As you say, it’s funny that you do 15-45’s, people like the first round but by the last round they’re just like “dear God!”  The idea is it’s not 15 of carefree exercises, it’s 15 of a big bang exercise to crank the metabolism.  We go after that with the time.  The time works really well because you go as hard as you can.  We’re not counting reps, we’re just counting quality movement for that whole time.  It’s like a hybrid between strength training and interval training.  It may be the purest form of training that we have  right now.  The key with the sequencing is with exercise 1.  If I go hard, I cannot negatively effect exercise 2.  For example if I go hard on bodyweight squats for 15 seconds and then the next exercise is lunges, those lunges are going to be negatively effected by the squats.  The loading will have to go down, the movements will have to go down, the reps will have to go down.  But if I do squat, break, pushup, break, something else, that way, the local muscular fatigue isn’t a factor.  We’re getting a long rest between the same muscle group so the quality stays up.  A lot of guys are running bootcamps and semi-private classes have… not a fear, but they are trying to make up in volume what they are losing in quality and that can never be done.  Let’s keep the quality high.  Change the sequencing so people are still getting that quality rep.  I actually prefer time based programming and once you get over a certain number it’s the easiest way to program.  The other way to do it is to do a hybrid system where we’re like “Hey, we’re going to work for 60 seconds, but I want you to alternate between these 2 exercises for sets of 6.”  So that’s the hybrid method.  We’ll do 6 lunges, 6 pushups but meanwhile the work interval – the Workout Muse stuff is going on in our background at the single set.  So that’s a hybrid method if you’re looking to change it up, but we can use both methods.  I think it’s the coolest form of training that we have for our target market right now.

You got it!   I get a lot of questions from bootcamp people about how I would do things differently from a semi-private standpoint.  I’m sure you probably get that from your semi-private people, “How do I bring this to the bootcamp?”  Really all we are talking about here is that fitness pros panic about the details.  In reality, it should be the same programming except for the semi-private people are getting more personal attention, more  progress tracking.  You can take the clip board out and  get 6 people accounted for and that’s a bit tough in a 30 person setting.  Maybe that semi-private workout is a bit longer because you need more time and that’s part of what they are paying more for because you’re paying more for semi-private than you are paying for bootcamp style training because of the personal attention and maybe it’s just a longer workout with more pre and post routines.

I think you’re right on.  Physiology doesn’t change.  The concept doesn’t change.  The sequencing of these exercises doesn’t change.  With a group of 30, I’ll have everyone do lunges, grab a medicine ball and if it gets too hard, put it down.  In a semi-private training I can have Jane grab the 15 lbs. dumb bells I know exactly what you need to do and Mike you’re not ready for dumbbells yet, you’re going to go on the floor.  Karen you’re ready for dumbbells and we can actually make this exercise a little harder, I want you to do a 2 second hold at the bottom of every rep.  Basically, it’s better for the trainer because I can customize the workouts a little better for the client.  The downside is that it’s a little more expensive, right?  We have to think of training as a curve from one on one where I supervise every single rep and can make adjustments all the time to group training where I don’t get to be lazy or idiotic with my programming, but I  can’t see everybody’s every single rep.  Semi-private is sort of a hybrid – the best of both worlds, but also the worst because it’s still expensive for some people, but now I get to individualize it.  Don’t get caught up on the details.  You should be able to take a bootcamp class and take it to one on one and do it and just give them a little more.  You should take that to a semi-private and give them a little more than a bootcamp and a little less than a one on one.  Our problem is that we’re always trying to pick the best.  Just help people!  People don’t care whether its one on one, semi-private or small group or large group training.  My idea is that we want as much attention that we can give them.  As soon as your bootcamp gets too big for you to actually help people.  You’ll be at Perform Better BJ and you’ll walk in the room with 200 buys in it or 180 guys.  As good as I try to be, I can’t see everybody.  When your numbers are getting that high, you need staff or you need to limit your numbers because you’re doing people a disservice.  That’s my only caveat with that stuff is that you want to help a lot of people with that stuff but make sure that you’re helping a lot of people and your’e not just crushing them in and breaking people and breaking their backs in the back row.  So, don’t over think it!  Right smart programming!  At my gym, I have all this equipment and as soon as we go out to the field with somebody we have less stuff.  If I do something at a local volleyball team at a school and I got to train them on the court and often I’ll have no stuff.  I have my Workout Muse track, which is my extra pair of hands as it’s doing the timing for me.  You look at this situation, what do you have?  I have to make adjustments.  At my gym, I can go from half a lb. load to 100 lbs. dumbbells and quarter lb. jumps.  Can’t do that on the field.  It actually makes your programming easier because you have less stuff to look at.  So don’t over think it.  Same philosophy with all these stations and they’re all building on each other.  Same idea as this hybrid of metabolic acceleration training.  It’s a hybrid between strength and cardio.  Same ideas. As you have smaller groups you individualize it even more.  If you have bigger groups you try to individualize it as best you can but just be aware that there’s limitations.  it’s still the same philosophy.  I don’t like to hear people say, “That doesn’t work because I do bootcamps.”  B.S.  You can give people good programming and it doesn’t have to be random.

To add to that, further, endless variety sells to people because at the end of a  long day of work and stress, you don’t like to think about much.   I think in a bootcamp environment we try to push this as much as possible.  When I look to program my bootcamp workouts and I look at the best in the field of doing semi-private personal training.  The Mike Boyles and Alwyn Cosgroves, the Dos’s out there and Todd Derkins.  Most of these guys are doing 2 and 3 rotations on a monthly or per phase basis and that’s the same approach you take for that bootcamp because most of these people…  it’s just a neuro adaptation for the workout and if you’re changing it constantly they never allow themselves to make a true muscular metabolic adaptation because they are just figuring things out with that first work.  So we just go to mention that we have to bring that adaptation.

That’s beautiful!  That’s the biggest  problem I see is that these clients do not want variety.  The trainer is board and wants to do new workouts.  These clients want success.  Let’s bring you into these hot thing, it’s called XMA, Extreme Martial Arts.  The opposite of Mixed Martial Arts.  It’s like all forms and gymnastics and it’s really after the nonfighter element in martial arts and they’re really doing a lot of great stuff with kids .  If I take any of us to that class and we try to do a 360 spinning kick and we learn it in one class  and then next class we’re like forget that, we’re trying something new the next class, all you’re going to feel is frustration that you’re not improving.  Your body is not improving and you’re not getting any better and you’re thinking it’s constantly new stuff so how can I improve?  It’s because the trainer is bored.   So when you’re in your bootcamp, I like using the A, B or A, B, C rotation.  For the workouts, the philosophy remains the same and it’s the exercise or the timing that changes.  My overall philosophy remains exactly the same.  It’s lunges and pushups again today remember what you got the last time and try to improve upon it.  These people got to have a stimulus in slightly increasing doses.  It’s like a drug in the medical field:  you give people a dose and you see how they respond.  You don’t constantly increase the drug or change the stimulus.  That’s a myth.  You’re going to have a really hard time convincing me from a physiological basis that you’re doing better work by changing your programs all the time and I don’t believe that your business is as successful as it could be if you’re allowing….  I’m not saying all the same workout all the time, I do like to change it up.  I’m saying 2 or 3 tops within a month and then a bigger change.  Give people a chance to learn and improve and get the adaptation and not just change it.  We’re doing training we’re not doing “entertaining” right?  It has to be fun but people want to learn too.

This is one thing that really gets me fired up because you will hear that people are doing the run of the mill, will change things every day thing, they are going to come… I do a lot of coaching for bootcamp owners and they come to me and say they don’t like it and they want to go back to what we were doing before.  Well, how did you position it in?  Did you position the benefits of doing things this way versus what you have done in the past?  Also, how did you present it?  One thing I love about your presentation is, you say, you should never, ever, ever as your clients feedback on workouts because you are the pro.  Now feedback on how you like the way the place smells or the new shirts you are putting together that’s different.  On the exercise programming side of things, you should not care what they think because they are coming to you because you are the expert  and I think a lot of people out there are so insecure in terms of what they are doing that they feel that they have to constantly change things because the results aren’t there or they are just too concerned about, like you said, “entertrainment” instead of really providing results based culture.

The only reason that we are successful at Results Fitness is that we change people. We change their lives, we change their bodies, we change their performances.  That’s my belief in my program.  I’m going to listen to people if they say they have an injury, then we’ll make adaptations.   But if you say “Hey dude, I like doing chest and upper body and get the pump” and if you stop listening to me and that’s all you give me, you may enjoy the workouts, but you’re not going to get in shape.  I require more than just rep sets of pump exercises to change your body and help you feel better.  If you don’t you’re going to leave me inevitably and that would reflect upon a trainer who doesn’t have faith in their programming and the results.  I always think it’s dumb when you hear that somebody says to the client, “where do you feel that?”  That’s just made me completely aware that you have no clue what you’re doing because you just asked me what muscle does this exercise work.   That’s what you’re asking me.  It’s like your asking the client to have zero stimulus from the programming.  Or even worse, “where do you feel it?”  because your’e asking the client because you have no idea what this does.  My idea is to stick with the program.  It’s not magic what we do, we have to work but if you’re asking them for feed back about what workouts they like and enjoy, that’s  OK as long as you don’t lose sight of effectiveness.  My answer every time a trainer asks me that I like doing upper body for higher reps to get pumped up, I feel good when I do that.  I might feel good and be your greatest fan for a month but a month later when I haven’t lost any body fat and I don’t feel any better and I have more imbalances and more shoulder pain because of the dumb programming, I’m leaving and I’m badmouthing you everywhere I go.

Absolutely!  This is actually a great segue to the next part of it which is  building a winning culture or culture of results.  Clearly, you guys are results-centric.  That is the name of the facility, Results Fitness.  I was reading a Mike Boyle article on circuit training. Coach Boyle for a very long time hasn’t been that big of a fan of circuit training  but he found that with his hockey guys it was very effective.  The answer you gave to him was  “psychology beats programming every time”  I think that what you guys have done at Results Fitness, as an outsider looking in,  you have done an extraordinary job of is building the psychology, particularly when it comes to weight loss.  We are active therapists and it’s a mind game when it comes to losing weight.   You’re dealing with emotional eating and boredom eating issues.  People that have a lot of stress and a lot of stuff on their plate and people around them sabotaging them consciously or unconsciously.  Can you talk about  what it is that you do at that gym when people step in the door an d they leave, there’s a magic that happens for them.  You talk about you being that third place for them:  Home, work and you, the gym.  Talk about that because people want to market and do the latest, greatest thing and use a good lead generation tool that keep people from going out the door within a month or so because the culture isn’t there.

That’s the entire model.  You have to have a culture and model that sets people up for results.  A lot of trainers… Weight Watchers which just requires you to go to open weigh in, like a UFC fight, and get on the scale in front of of everybody, has a higher success rate than the majority of personal trainers, fitness professionals and group instructors out there.  why?  It’s because there’s a culture of social support.  So our idea is what can we build that results in fitness?  What’s our overwhelming 2 driving statements that we keep in mind?  Number 1 is “Changing the way fitness is done.”  Fitness has a bad rap.  There’s bad trainers out there and instead of complaining about it and writing 400 posts about it.  YOu know, “the girl  in the Biggest Loser was awful and her form was bad.”  That doesn’t help anybody.  Lead.  Lead from the front and change it starting with you.  Number 2, “We are the best part of the member’s day, every day.”  I had stage IV cancer and I didn’t tell everyone.  They could guess by looking at me because I wasn’t around too much.  I didn’t want my place to become somewhere that is negative or sad.  So we have some core values that we go through at the gym  that applies to us as staff  and applies to members and if you don’t fit in to these values, you can’t be a staff or a member.  Number 1, “Bring your best.  Do you best every day.”  Number 2, “Be professional.”  Number 3, “Be honest and transparent.”  Number 4, “Have only good days and great days.”  Number 5, “Be we, not me”  It’s all about the teamwork.  Number 6, “Constantly learn and always improve.”  Number 7, “Have fun and a sense of humor.”  BJ, I’ll talk stuff like, “Body building is one of the goofiest things I’ve ever seen.”  The guys will diet down until they can barely stand and then they put Speedos on and oil and then they stand on stage and just spasm and the judges vote who spasmed the best.  Then I get hate mail from guys on the website who tell me they are going to kick my ass when they see me.  I’m just joking.  MMA, which is my background, is goofy too!  Guys in Speedos lying around on top of each other, right?  Trying to squeezing him so hard he says stop squeezing!  Right?  That’s just as ridiculous but hey, we’re having fun.  I’ve gone out on consults with my group and been at clubs and watched bootcamps and I watch people coming out of their cars and walking over to their training session and they look miserable.  They are dreading this.  Let’s change that!  Let’s put the fun back in it!  We got all caught up in evaluating and measuring angles but let’s have fun and a sense of humor!  Number 8, is that we also want to strive for profitability in our business.  Profitability is your return on your investment.  Your goal is to get a return on your training investment.   Number 9, “Exceed expectations and keep leading.”  So we build a culture of support that is teamwork.  If you come in and you’re having a bad day, I will send you home.  I don’t care if you’re a client or staff member.  Only good days and great days in here.  We want  to create a culture.  People are so busy that they only really have 3 places.  And you can see this based on looking at TV. In the 1980’s it was Cheers.  Everyone went to the bar and everybody knows your name.  You went to work, you went home and you went to 1 more place and that was the bar.   Some guys still do that.  In the 90’s when the show friends came out, it was the coffee shop or on Seinfield, it was the diner.  Home, work, one more place.   In today’s world that still exists.  Starbuck’s isn’t locking in that market for a lot of people.  I want it to be Results Fitness.  I want it to be the other place that you come   where you feel just as accepted  as you do at work, when you come home and everybody says “Hey!  How was your day?”  That’s what I want Results Fitness to be.  The fact that why we do cool programming.  It’s almost irrelevant because my support system…  I could take the worst program in the world and plug it into Results Fitness.  With that social support system, something good will happen.  The magic is when I got world class programming and world class culture in the gym.  A lot of people will hear me – and you can look up our core values on our website at resultsfitness.com – just don’t copy mine.  Some people are like “Have fun and a sense of humor” and say I don’t think you should joke about it.  It’s not a debate.  Just chose what you want.  Create your own core values.  Other guys we’re very big on team work empower my staff.  I’ve got a UFC fighter flying over from England to work with us.  Everybody in the industry will be like, I’m going to train that guy.  No my staff can do it, we’re a team, we’ll be just as good.  So you got to embody that culture.  Other guys will be like I want to do everything, I don’t want any staff.  That’s OK, that’s your culture, your core values.  But the best piece of advise I could give to a fitness professional is to establish what are your core values?  The way to do that is to look at people that you admire and see what their core values are.  One of my business heroes is Richard Branson.     He seems to just have fun.  I looked at his outposts to see his core values and one of theirs is “have fun and be a little lackey.”  So I’m always looking at these things  and asking do these resonate with me?  There was a soccer game shown in the UK and there was a local sports bar that shows all the soccer games that’s owned by a British guy,   I was flying back from the UK, when you add in travel to and from the airport and connections it ends up being an 18 hour day.  I said I’ll be in to see the game that evening because I was going to miss it on the plane.  So I arrive and I’m exhausted and I’m not that huge of a soccer fan, but I wanted to go because keeping my word is very important to me.  Other people would be that there’s no right or wrong core values, there’s only strong core values.  What’s the culture?  I don’t know what the culture is at Workout Muse, but I know when I play it, I can tell that it’s about hard directed effort while having a great time.  So it fits in with me!  If it came in and it was sterile and it was deadly serious and nobody should be smiling, that wouldn’t work in my place.   Similarly it might not work in other people’s places.  I love the circuit training environment.  Mike makes a good point, he didn’t like it.  Mike always comes from a different angle and I think people forget that because of his prestige in our field the.  The guy’s a legend, but most of his experiences are with Division I, elite level college athletes.  He doesn’t have a lot of experience with the general population like the rest of us.  He only started done some personal training a couple of years ago.  He’s only had one real weight loss client.  That’s not a slam on Mike, Mike’s a genius.  For him, he’s looking at hockey performance and making decisions.  I’m looking at making a culture in my environment and making decisions based on that.  One of my primary questions is, “Hey, should I bring in a flat screen TV’s and put them on the treadmills?”  I don’t even have tread mills and I don’t think it will help results and it won’t help the culture because people will stop talking to each other.  If you want a culture in your gym were people are very individualized and it’s like little pods where people don’t talk to anyone  then that’s fine.  My culture has got to be about team work.  Semi-private group training.  If you don’t want semi-private or group training you don’t want Results Fitness, you want another gym.  Everything hinges on the environment including your staff.  When I interview people we go through 10 questions and each question is designed to see if your core values are in line with mine.  If they are, I will train you to be a great trainer.  I’ve got access to 1000’s of DVD’s.  I can get BJ Gaddour on the phone any time I want to talk to my staff if I want.  I can bring people in to improve my people but I can’t improve core values.  You have to come in with them.  We interview based on attitude we train on skill.

I love it!  I think this is by far the most difficult, at least in my opinion as a business owner, the hardest part of any business is finding good people.  People who you can trust to take your business vision and contribute to it and make it their own the way that they are contributing to the business.   This is what most trainers, particularly in the group training atmosphere, struggle with the most.  How do you find somebody that will give that same energy, that same dynamic that will give the kind of performance that you do and most people really struggle with this.  You can never become a business until you can have people that execute business for you while providing 80-90% of what it would be if you were there.  Clearly you have figured this out.  Can you share some insight for the trainer that just doesn’t know, who’s just right on the edge of breaking through and taking things to the next level, but they can’t find a way to get people to help them and take things to that level. So how do you guys do it?

I’m going to try to answer this fast because I could spend a couple of hours on this because this is huge.  Number 1:  If you’re a true leader in your field, you have to get it into your head, you have to empower others to do things for you. You have to give them the opportunity to help train your clients and to run your business.  So we have a rule that if somebody can do it 70% as good as me, I  delegate to them and I train from there.  That’s Part 1, you have to let go a little bit.  The joke is entrepreneurs is a French word for get the hell out of my way, I’m going to do it.  We’ve got to empower people to do this stuff.  So get it out of your head that you can do it better.  You are a trainer  who started off with your first client once too, and somebody gave you a shot.  I know it’s hard to believe that I sucked at one time,  I was awful.  Somebody gave me a shot and I got better.  If someday didn’t give me a shot, I would be doing something else right now. You’ve got to empower and you’ve got to pay it forward.  So the next 2 parts of this are 1.  Only hire people in line with your core values.  you can learn skill.  You can get a black belt in tai kwan do and you can learn jujitsu and a black belt in judo and kung fu in five years.  You can have zero knowledge of how to swim and you can be swimming in a few months.  A course of chemotherapy from start to finish is maybe 6 months of treatment.  That’s massive change, that’s massive things.  If you look at a degree, it’s 4 years.  In actual fact of attending classes, it’ probably about 1 year and a half.  With all the days off and all the personal study time, it’s not 4 years, 52 weeks a year, 8 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week.  You could get a college education in a shorter time, only if they have these core values, only if everything else can be trained.  So we start with core values and we hire people with that same energy.  The last part, I call the Cookie Monster theory.  I like cookies, white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, I like those.  I have no idea how to make cookies.  I have no idea where to start BJ.  But I know that if you gave me your family recipe or Naomi’s family secret cookie recipe and it said, Step 1, Alwyn, go to the store and buy these 4 ingredients, I can do that.  Step 2, come home and turn the oven on to 400 degrees.  I can do that.  I can follow these steps in the recipe and I could come out with pretty good cookies.  As good as Naomi could do?  Absolutely not.  As good as an expert?  Absolutely not.  But 70% is good on my first try, maybe 80% on the their time and maybe 90% on my fourth time and maybe after being coached with following the recipe, I’ll be as good.  I don’t need to be as good today, but I need to be as good after a while. A recipe is just a system.  A system stands for Save Your Self Time Energy Money.  So my idea is that you empower these people.  You hire them based on your core values and you train them well then, you say here’s how I run a class, watch what happens.   Number 1, I’m like hey everybody, line up.  I want you in 3 lines the first exercise is this.  Maybe you have to write it all down like a script for a movie.   If they remade Star Wars with different actors and the same script, different actors can play the same part.  Maybe not as good, but good enough.  That’s the idea.  I wan them to be about 70% as you to begin with because they are going to grow from there.  Then they just follow your script for everything.  My idea is that I don’t need a trainer to do their own thing.  I need a trainer to do my thing.  I need you to be Alwyn Cosgrove in front of the group and just do what I would do.  Eventually, you’re good enough and you got your own style and that’s amazing.  McDonald’s doesn’t hire anybody for their spaghetti recipe, they hire people with their core values who can execute their system.  That’s why a Big Mac’s the same all over the world.  What I want at Result Fitness is a good staff member with these core values and who can execute my system.  I’ll create elite trainers.  I will train them.  In the last year, we brought a bunch of top names in for private training with my guys.  We have 150 educational DVD’s that they can check out at any time.  They should be checking out 1 per week or I’m getting upset.  If I have a question and I need to get you on the phone, I can get you to conference call with my team. There’s advantages of working with me as far as education but it all starts with core values and your ability to follow the recipe.   I don’t want artists free styling right now I need you to execute the steps.  So the 3 things are:  Get it out of your head that you’re better than anybody.  Your job as a leader is to empower people and give them a chance to grow because someone gave them a shot.  Number 2:  Hire based on core values not on skill. Skill can be trained.  Core values and attitude cannot be trained, they are inherent.  Lastly, create the system and have your guys get the steps.

I love it!  Just script out everything.  I read Men’s Health magazine, I’ve got a subscription and I enjoy the magazine a lot and obviously and you and Rachel or your business are pretty much on almost every page of the magazine.  One thing I saw is that it’s also your staff.  The Group Exercise Director or the Program Manager is featured in Men’s Health.  So I think at some point it’s great to have accolades as an individual, we all work hard for that, but there’s no better model of how you take yourself out of the spotlight to do things better behind the scenes that will grow the whole pie and feature your stars.

My whole thing is that I learned it fast because I got sick and I had to step out.  So people, listen, you don’t have to get sick to learn it.  Trust me.  You need to empower people and let them grow.  If 10 years from now I’m still the main guy standing at Perform Better, teaching my thing while my staff are standing in the back of the room then I failed.  That’s not success.  There’s older guys on the tour now and you know we have to be replaced by the next generation or we failed.  Even if you have a bootcamp with 6 people in it in the park if years from now you’re still running it, you may love it but you haven’t empowered anyone to move on and replace you.  I had to learn it because I was sick and it had to happen, but trust me you just have to do it.  I’ve said this to guys that I’ve been coaching all along that my goal is that a lot of guys will say, “Hey, you’ve helped me a lot, how can I repay you?”  You don’t repay me.  My life is fine.  You repay it forward. That’s how you repay me.  Same thing with your business and your staff, you pay  it forward and you help other people to grow.

I know you’re doing all these 1 or 2 day events at Perform Better, you speak at Perform Better, have a ton of great products,  regarding semi-private training.  Where’s the best place for people to, as an enthusiast or a professional, to get empowered with all the cool stuff you put together?

The primary spot is resultsfitnessbiz.com.  and following that is my blog.  My personal website which is alwyncosgrove.com

Alwyn, thank you so much!  This is probably one of the biggest honors to get on the phone with you.

Thanks for sharing your insights with our group and if there’s anything I can ever do for you, please let me know and you can consider it done.

Cheers Brother!  Thanks very much.

Take care buddy!

Bye bye!