#15 - C.J. Watson

C.J. Watson tells an inspiring story of a Marine Corp Veteran who faced challenges after active duty and endured many common outlets to lessen the pain. C.J. tells the tale of how he overcame it all and is now an inspiration. He used his deepest, darkest moments to channel the energy to create a happy and successful life where he is able to help and inspire others to be the best versions of themselves.

C.J. is the proud  owner of Transformation Fitness in Palm Coast, FL, where his business thrives due to his no nonsense approach to training and his experience with training people with injuries that include both physical hurdles and mental hurdles as well. He provides individualized personal training and small group classes by other talented local instructors. 

C.J.'s fitness journey started at the age of 13. He was always the little guy and loved watching his muscles grow. Upon getting out of the Marine Corps, he worked various jobs until he had spinal fusion surgery and was out of commission for over a year. Luckily, he started working for a chiropractor as a trainer for clients with injuries. He eventually made a transition into full time trainer and gym manager at a few facilities until COVID hit in 2020 and everything shut down. After a lot of thought and prayers he decided to launch Transformation Fitness.  

C.J. continues to train 5-6 days a week in order to maintain his low back. Training has been a part of his life and will continue to be a part of his life until Jesus calls. He has a passion to help clients reach goals or just maintain their lifestyle, whether with personal training or classes. At Transformation Fitness, we all have the same mentality, to give clients a great, safe and fun workout every day!!!! 

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Chapters

• 1:24 Early Workout Influences, Experiences &Impressions
• 3:18 Training for the Marine Corps
• 5:49 Post Marine Corps Struggles
• 7:48 Back Surgery & Recovery
• 10:42 Rehabilitating People with Injuries
• 14:12 Struggles of a Personal Trainer Lifestyle
• 15:48 How C.J. Decided to Open His Gym: Transformation Fitness
• 17:44 What Sets Transformation Fitness Apart & Why His Clients Love Him
• 19:08 C.J. Realizes His Meaning of Life through Hardship
• 19:46 C.J. Helps His Clients Maintain Healthy, Functional, Active Lifestyles
• 22:16 Tips for Maintaining Fitness During Vacation
• 24:50 Overcoming Veteran Transition, Alcoholism, Divorce, Death and Helping Others
• 28:11 Prioritizing Self and Workouts Helped Overcome Alcoholism
• 33:12 Importance of Individualized Workout Program & Specific Examples for Specific Needs
• 38:00 The Classic "I just want to lose weight" THE TRUTH and Help Using My Fitness Pal
• 48:06 Don't Wait Until it's Too Late!
• 50:44 Most Memorable Client Success Story
• 59:14 C.J.'s Advice to His 18 Year Old Self

Transcript

0:11

This is Angela Grayson from the Living Life Fitness Podcast. To help others in their fitness journey. It's All Possible! It’s time to wake up. Here we go. Hello, everybody. This is Angela Grayson, your host of Loving Life Fitness, where we talk to professionals and everyday people just like you. To help everyone live a better life through a healthy lifestyle. Today we have on board with us C.J. Hi, C.J.. I everybody. So, C.J. is a business owner who owns his own gym Transformation Fitness in Palm Coast, Florida. And he's a personal trainer. And we're going to talk about his journey through life. So, C.J., let's talk about your background, where you came from way back when your interest in fitness and what brought you to where you are today. Well, I basically started training at a very young age. I'm from New Jersey, and I started training with my stepfather when I was about 13 years old. And we just had a little gym set up in our basement. And I was just learning basics and really liked the way weightlifting made me feel. I was always the little guy, so I knew I wasn't going to get very tall. So I figured if I couldn't get tall, I could get wide and little short guys. When we put a little bit of muscle on, we tend to look a little bigger anyway. So I really liked the way I started to look when I started to put on a little muscle. When I moved down to Florida, I was 16 years old and as soon as I got into high school, I came down and I was in my beginning of my junior year and they had a class down here called Weight Training. And I was like, Oh my God, I can take a class and lift weights and get credit for it. Outstanding. So I took the class and lo and behold, I happened to be they actually had a board up in the classroom for the top lifters for the week And first week I was in there. I was on the top five of the board. It was like, okay, you know, I started getting a little, little notice from not just the guys, but of course, the ladies. So that helped. So it helped me break out of my shell, I guess, a little bit. And I just basically I've been doing it ever since. I mean, it's just become a part of my life. I feel horrible when I miss more than one day at a time. It's just one of those things where I just really enjoy to work out. Some people don't really enjoy it and I just I don't know how they don't because it's a release for a lot of people, including myself. It helps me at the end of my day or beginning of my day, wherever I can squeeze it in. I just feel better when I get done doing it. Absolutely. And so after high school, what was your direction then? I graduated high school, giving away my age, in 1987, and I went directly from high school into the United States Marine Corps so that once again, the fitness level in the Marine Corps. I went home to train for the summer beforehand and which was back to New Jersey. So I was basically I was running probably ten miles a day. I was doing approximately 500 pushups a day. I was doing about 300 crunches hanging upside down a day. And by the time I went to boot camp, I thought I was ready. And then you go into boot camp and you realize you really weren't ready. The physical part is one thing, but the mental part was the harder part to get through. So I'm glad I was somewhat ready physically because the mental part kind of breaks you down both sides. So I would I would did six years active duty in the Marine Corps and two years inactive ready reserve, which basically that's if we happened to be at war and they need you for your specific job, then they call you back in. I happened to be a jet mechanic and I ended up doing that because my mother hated the fact that I was going in the Marine Corps and I would happen to be living down in Florida at the time when I signed and you couldn't really sign and go in at the age of 17, you had to be at least 18. Well, you could get parents consent at 17. So my mother there was a couple of Marine recruiters that showed up at my mother's front door in New Jersey, and she calls me on the phone crying, basically saying, why are these two jar heads outside my front door? And I told her, I said, look, I said, here's the deal. I'm going in the Marine Corps. I said, and you need to sign the paperwork. I said, If you don't. I said, If you find the paperwork. Now, I go in, I become a jet mechanic. I said, If you don't sign the paperwork, I signed myself and was either eight or ten months when I turned 18. I said, I run around and I shoot people. And she liked the fact that I was going to be a jet mechanic and not run around with a gun in my hand. And so, needless to say, my mother signed the paperwork and I went into boot camp in October of 1987, and I graduated boot camp in January of 1988. Very good. Thank you for your service. Absolutely. It was my pleasure. And so once you got out of the Marines, then what was your direction? Honestly, I got out of the Marine Corps and I didn't know which direction to go into. I was kind of lost there for a little while. I basically had about three jobs cause I moved into my parents house down here in Florida, but they were still living in New Jersey. So it was one of those, okay, you're out of the Marine Corps. You have a month to get your act together because you got to start paying rent. So I was like, okay, So I didn't have a whole lot of time to think about things. So I was working some odd jobs. I worked a side construction job, I worked part time at a Beals, the original Beals here in Palm Coast. I was unloading trucks and I was the bouncer at a bar, so and a marine, a former Marine or a marine veteran, I should say. Working at a bar is, I guess, it kinda fit, because we tend to overindulge in the Marine Corps when it comes to alcohol. And me working at a bar at this time, it was one of those things. I basically worked at the bar to pay my bar tab. It's kind of how it equaled out. So it wasn't a great way to go about things. Even though I was doing all that, I still continued to work out. I mean, like I said, it's just always been a part of me, even though a lot of times back then my workouts weren't fantastic. I was still maintaining what I like to do after work in those type of jobs and really run them myself into the ground. I finally got a job at Sea Ray. That used to be Sea Ray here in Palm Coast. And I was there for ten years, had a lot of different jobs while I was there. Working for that place wasn't bad. It was just it was hard because especially during the summers, you know, it's just hot. I mean, it's Florida, it's hot. You're working indoors. We didn't have air conditioning. It was basically just big fans blowing heat on you all day. So it was a brutal job. I didn't mind it. I never mind working with my hands. Like it just seemed like it was something I was always good at and once again continued to work out throughout my whole career and then started having back issues. I had degenerative discs in my back and by the time I was 28 years old, I was told I had the back of an 85 year old man. And I think a lot of it when I was younger, I did lift really heavy. I did real heavy squats, I did real heavy seated shoulder presses, a lot of things that would compound and condense your lower back, especially because of all the pressure on things. So I started doing chiropractic care and I did injections and I did everything that you that they run everybody through before it. Finally got to the point where it was so bad. I mean, I had a doctor that came to my house a couple of times just to get me off the floor. The pain was just unbearable and I went to a specialist up in North Carolina, and he was the best doctor in the United States at the time. I personally still think he is because of what he has done for me. But he basically told me, look, this is what I can do for you. This is how we go about it. And they told me, like I said, I had the back of an 85 year old man, so I needed to make a decision. I was married at the time. My son was very young and it was hard to make that decision because I knew it was going to put me out of commission for a long time, which it did. I ended up going through my back surgery in ‘03. I was fuzed from L4-5 F1. They basically took those what was left of the discs out. They put cadaver bone in between there where the disc used to be, and they put two plates, basically a belt holding the two plates together. And I have six screws going right into my vertebrae. So basically that part of my low back really doesn't move anymore. So I still have some issues with it. My back tends to every once in a while it'll have an attitude. My mid back basically goes in the spasm where it decides to lock up on me, but I don't have knock on wood, I don't have the disc issues anymore, thank God. But it was a long road to recovery. I started feeling a little bit better and the last doctor visit that I had, I went up to see my doc and basically he said, okay, well you can start doing something now. And he basically looked at me, called me Fat Boy, which really bothered me. But because I did get up to about 250 lbs. now, somebody my height, which I used to be 5’9” they took a little bit of height away from me. So I still say I'm 5’9”. But a 5’9” guy at 250 lbs. is not good. It wasn't good for the rest of my body, for my joints. Once again, what was left of my back and so I started working out again and got myself back down into fighting shape. And I had gotten a call from my former chiropractor. He basically said, Well, what are you doing for work? And I said, I don't know. I said, Right now I'm kind of in limbo. I said, I obviously I couldn't go back to Sea Ray because of the type of work that I was doing. It would have just put too much of a tax on my back, so he basically said, Why don't you come to work for me? And I said, okay, well, what am I going to be doing? And I would basically run patients through basic workouts. So we would do if somebody had a back issue, we might do some lat pulls, we might do some rows, you know, just some basic things to work that that particular muscle group. And then they would go in and do the rest of their therapy. So I would basically just want people through about a 15 minute workout. And I learned through him and through physical therapists that I was working with how to work with people's injuries. So a lot of people we had were car accident victims, so knees back, neck, shoulders. I mean, all shapes, sizes, ages, everything. Well, I learned how to work around the injury and work the muscle group to build up around the injury. So when you did do rehab and you did recover from it, things stayed the way they were supposed to stay. That was the one thing I really did like about the guy I was working for is we did it different than the way other people did it, the way other chiropractors that I had been to have done it were basically you just go and they crack you and they send you out the door. This guy didn't do it that way. And I learned that when I was a patient of his, of how he took care of me. That's basically what I was doing with with these patients. I was working with him and he had built a building here in town. As a matter of fact, and we transformed over from just doing chiropractic care. And he had built a gym onto the building. So we had chiropractic care, physical therapy on one side of the building, and we had a full facility gym on the opposite side. So what ended up happening was a few years into it, the people that he had running the gym facility, let's just say they weren't fantastic at what they did. And he came to me and asked me if I would like to transfer from working with him on the doctor side of the building and transfer over to the gym. So I was like, Sure. And I would just sounded like a like a smooth transition for me. A lot of the people I ended up having as clients were former patients. It worked out good because they were actually able to still use their insurance and train with me in the gym facility. So basically everything we did with them rehabbing their injuries, I just took it to the next level as far as their fitness, as a matter of fact, I mean, that was 12 years ago, 13 years ago, and I still have clients now that I worked with back then. That's where I met them. And they've been with me ever since. I have fantastic clients. They're very loyal. I'm loyal to them. They've always been loyal to me with what I do and this type of business, you don't have a lot of free time. I can honestly say, I don't have a lot of close friends. I think my clients have become a lot of my friends, you know, just because of the time we have spent together and the years we've been together. We know each other very, very well. So I was working there and I became the gym manager there for a while. Let's just say we had a little bit of a falling out and I ended up leaving there and I went to Fitness One, which is where I met you, as a matter of fact. And I was at Fitness One and actually a handful of my clients followed me there and I was a full time trainer, over at Fitness One, and was there for a couple of years, maybe about three years. And then there was some things that were going on in there. I had found out that basically the the business was put up for sale, which kind of scared me because me being my own entity, I live alone, I pay my own way. I, you know, I don't have I'm not married, so I don't have a second income in my household. So it kind of really made me nervous about the building being up for sale because it wasn't being sold as a gym. And I was worried that if somebody came in, bought it, didn't want to keep it as a gym, then I'm out of a job and I needed to figure out, okay, well, where can I go? So I ended up at another facility here in town, which will remain nameless. They are still in business, but we don't get along too well. I guess we had a little bit of a falling out, which is okay, things happen, you know. So in 2020, when we did the shut down and Florida basically we only shut down for a short period of time when COVID came in, when we reopened once again, I have a lot of clients that have been very loyal to me. It became very apparent to me that I was going to have to choose between my clients and working at this particular facility. And I mean, I knew what choice I needed to make. I was going to stay loyal to my clients. Their safety to me was paramount. I have a lot of clients that are cancer survivors. I have a lot of elderly clients. Matter of fact, my oldest client is turns 93 this year and she is absolutely phenomenal. I mean, she does things that I have a 17 year old client can't do. I mean, it's it's unreal to see what this little lady can accomplish. But I knew, okay, well, I need to figure out some things. So I found out about this building over here and they had an opening. And I came over and I looked at it and I just kind of figured, you know what? I'm going to take a shot. I actually talked to my clients about it. They were all up for it. So I did a build out and I was actually two spaces down from where I'm at right now. But I did a build out in 2020 and I opened up Transformation Fitness and I just kind of took off. I mean, it's really worked out well for me and my clients. They absolutely love having truly personal training. It's really hard in a gym atmosphere to do what we do and do it correctly because of the distraction around you. When you have a gym full of other people doing other things. One of my main pet peeves is doing things correctly. I've always looked at it like if you're going to do it in a gym, do it right, or don't do it at all because one, you're not going to get the benefit. And two, you can really get hurt. And I've seen it. I've experienced it myself. So I would always take the time out if I was training somebody in the big gym facility and I saw somebody doing something wrong. It just irked me because I didn't want to see them get hurt. So I would always go over there and correct them, you know, which took time out from my clients. And here when I'm in here by myself with my client, they have my undivided attention. Every rep, every exercise. Like I said, I'm very strict on what we do, how we do it. That's the reason why my business has grown. I have small group classes in here now with fantastic instructors that all of us have worked with throughout the years, like, you know, a handful of them yourself. And it's great for me because I don't have to micromanage things. I hate to do that anyway. I know that they're so good at what they do that I can be on my side during my training. They could be on their side doing their classes and I know people are getting taken care of. That's kind of where I'm at now. I mean, I opened my second one, not second facility, but my bigger facility here, I guess we started beginning of this year. I moved and it's been going really, really good. The classes we have going on and my training, I have a I have a couple other trainers that in here now that work through my facility. They basically run their own businesses through here. So it works out nice for me because if I do have clients that call and I can't take them on my schedule, I can transfer them to one of the other two trainers because once again, I know that they know what they're doing, you know, and that's the whole thing. You got to know what you're doing in our business. So it's pretty neat that your injuries is what actually sparked your life path. Yes. To go to business, work on your body and then go into business for yourself eventually. Sometimes when you feel like something happens to us and how are we going to get out of it. It's a situation you feel like you can't move forward and then you find your way and you're doing what you love throughout your entire life, and you're using that as talents now to help so many people in their lives. Yes, absolutely. I mean, nothing gives you more satisfaction, at least for me, in this business, when I get feedback from my clients and they tell me I just something basic like, hey, you know what I was able to do yesterday? I was able to reach up in the top of my closet and take this box down myself without hesitation. I actually had a client of mine that she came in and her and her husband were doing some kind of pressure washing or something. And the hose that they had was really heavy, really long, and her husband couldn't get it from the front of the house to the back of the house. And she basically said, Oh, I'll get it. I got it. And he was like, Oh, you're not going to be able to move that thing. And she scooped it up and she brought it to the back of the house and put it down and just turned around and looked at him like, Yeah, look at that, You know. And he came in to tell me, and he was just absolutely ecstatic about it. Well, once again, when you get feedback like that, you know that what we do in here and how we're doing it is really transforming people into helping them in their daily activities. I mean, I can work with people that want to look to body build, stuff like that. Of course, basically I don't have that going on in here. I help people just maintain their lifestyle, but I'll need to do work functionally, right? I have a husband and wife team and they train separately, but they both train with me and they do what I like to do. They do a lot of hiking, they do a lot of backpacking, they do a lot of just different physical activities, and they're both in their seventies. I help them maintain that lifestyle and it's great they have a pull behind motorhome that they use and they just got back from a kayaking trip and they were kayaking for like 3 hours a day, 4 hours a day, nonstop. My kinda people, awesome! Yeah, it's it's amazing, you know, to get, like I said, to get feedback from your clients like that. Just really makes you feel good about what you're doing. So that brings me to a question that I have here I wanted to ask you, C.J., I know you love to travel. Yes. So when you go traveling, do you have a workout program or do you try to do active travel? How do you plan around that? Because that's something I keep on talking to my clients about. Don't go away. On vacation for three weeks, then come back and expect to still be the way you were three weeks before, right? Well, what I try to tell my clients is what you need to remember is 5 to 7 days of inactivity. You start to lose whatever you gain. So if you go more than a week without doing some kind of work out, you're going to lose some of your strength. So you're going to lose some of this, some of that. So what I do is I do both. I do maintain my workouts when I go away. I've recently just got off of a river cruise over in France, and I took a set of resistance bands with me because I know on the riverboat they only have dumbbells that go up to £15 and the room is about to work out. It is about the size of a closet. They have a treadmill, they have an upright bike and a recumbent bike. It's too tight for me. I don't like being in closed space like that. So I take all my I take my own stuff, weather and I do a lot of push ups. I do crunches on the floor. I used my resistance bands and I can do everything with a set of resistance bands that I could do here in my facility. And I tell clients that also. I basically tell them, Look, at least maintain, though even if you can't take equipment with you, do some push ups, do some air squats, maybe do some air lunges and do some crunches, at least do those things because push ups work a lot of the body shoulders, chest, tris, back the whole thing, and that if you're doing some air squats or some lunges, you're getting the legs involved. Like I said, our vacations, we do do a lot of active stuff. So I do a lot of hiking when I'm away. The vacation really isn't a vacation because I'm not a pool person. I'm not a beach person. It's just not what I like to do. I don't like to just lounge, you know, every once in a while. I mean, every once in a while. People, everybody likes to do that, take a nap, have maybe a day or something like that. But it better be disgusting outside. I better be raining and storm and stuff like that. And then I'll stay on the couch and I'll watch the tube. But I always feel like if it's decent outside and you can go outside and do something from sitting stagnant and not doing anything, you're wasting a day. And this day and age I see it around me. I've experienced it myself Where and I know you have to. Life is short and life is a gift as far as I'm concerned. And you should really give thanks every day. Every day. You should be thankful just for waking up, just for your feet, hitting the floor. And I literally am thankful every day cause I did go through some really rough times. I mean, but like I said, I was lost. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went through a pretty tough time When I got divorced. There were some major issues there which really threw me into Tailspin. And then I lost my father. My father was living with me at the time when I lost him, and that happened very unexpectedly. And what I lost him, I mean, obviously I can remember everything very vividly, but I my the last memory I had of my father for a long time was me. I was doing CPR on him. And that was something that I couldn't get out of my head. You know, it was something that I saw all the time, whether I was sleeping or whether I was awake, any part of it. And it was just it was hard for me and my father. We're really close. We weren't when I was a kid. It was a little rough, but as I got older and as he when he moved in with me, my father was a quad amputee. He was he was a Navy veteran. So I basically got to live with my dad his last six years of his life. We got to see each other every day. So we really grew really close. And losing him was rough. I knew he wasn't healthy, but it was towards the end and the way I lost him was so sudden that it really threw me for a loop and I just ended up in a really dark place in my life. My big crutch was alcohol. It was a real issue in my life for a long time, and I actually decide it the day that my father died, a year to the day I quit drinking. So he passed away in 2011, December 29th, and I quit drinking 2012, December 29th and haven't touched it since. I don't want to have no need for it in my life. And my life has become enormously better because of that fact. Like I said, I've been able to help other people. You know, I've had other people in my life that have had certain issues and have had alcohol issues. You know, me being able to talk to them about my experience and how I got through it and how life on the other side is much better without it in my life. If I can help somebody with what I went through to keep them, to get to the point to where I got, then it's a blessing as far as I'm concerned. It's something that I didn't have somebody where I could turn to and say, Hey, how can I do this? I had a couple of ladies in my life. My girlfriend was one and my mother was the other one. And they're really the only two people that stuck with me through the whole thing, the rest of my family. And I don't blame them for this, but the rest of my family was kind of pushing me away because I was just in the condition I was in and even my quote unquote, friends at the time, which needless to say, I'm not friends with these people anymore because my lifestyle changed, theirs didn't. So I really needed to find myself again. And it did. It took me a long time. It really did. And training and working out was something once again that was always part of my life and it always helped me get through certain situations, including that one. I decided to prioritize myself a little bit more, which I needed to do because I prioritizing drinking was not a way to go. I really feel like I was really in a downward spiral. I don't know where I'd be right now if I if I was continuously doing that. I have a feeling where I'd be, but I'm glad I don't ever have to find out. Like I said, I don't look back on things. One of the best quotes I've ever seen in my life I really like this quote is The windshield is bigger than the rearview. You use the rearview to remember things, but don't dwell on it. It's in your past for a reason. You don't want to repeat a lot of things in your past, but you can still look back and remember. Okay, this is this was this situation. And I got through it or I did this or I did that. And the windshield is what's out in front of you. That next minute or that next day or, you know, you don't ever look too far down the road like in a windshield. You can't see too far down the road, but you can see what's out in front of you. And it's it's your choice to do with your life. And with that time, what you're going to do. There's always two roads to go down. It's a matter of making the right choices in life to decide which road you're going to take. I think right now I'm pretty much making the right choice. As much as I like that none of us were perfect and none of us make all the right choices. But it's a daily battle to try and do the best you can. Yes. And C.J., thanks so much for sharing that struggle with us. And once again, there you go. You had to get into a deep, dark place before you were able to climb up to the top again and become what you are today. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. It was one of those things where you couldn't go any lower, so there was only way for me to go was was up. And it was a struggle and it was a battle. But I've always been one of those people where when people doubt me or people to even even go into the Marine Corps, everybody that I knew from back of my past in New Jersey, nobody thought I was going to make it in the Marine Corps. And I'm one of those people that just goes, okay, watch me. That was the same thing with this battle is I did have the support from my mom and from my girlfriend. And without them, once again, I don't know where I would have ended up, but they were a huge part of me getting to the point to where I'm at right now. All my life they always believed in me and they always believed in the person that I could be. And the person that I used to be, you know, was that guy that was the the in between that had a lot of problems. So he was the guy I needed to get rid of and I need to get back to being me. You know, I tell my clients all the time, you know, you wouldn't have recognized me 15 years ago because I didn't even recognize me 15 years ago. I was such a different person and definitely not for the good. It's bad when even the people that are around you that are doing the same thing as you think that you have a problem. So, you know, it's a problem when when even the people you're doing it with think you have a problem. It just got to the point where I just I didn't care. I didn't care what anybody else thought. I didn't care how it was affecting anybody else. When I finally did get myself together, I had a lot of apologizing to do. At least I felt like I did. And I did, because as far as I'm concerned, part of growing up and becoming a man, which some of us, it takes a little bit longer to become a man. You got to admit when you're wrong and you got to if you did somebody wrong or you hurt somebody in your life, apologize to them. I mean, that's part of being a man, as far as I'm concerned. And a lot of times in my life I did because I just didn't care. I really didn't I didn't care what anybody thought. I didn't care if I was hurting somebody else. It was all about me. What it came down to, especially when, like I said, when I lost my father, it just it was it was a spiral, though, for me to be where I'm at now. That is a blessing to me to be able to do what I do every day of my life and be my own boss and have the clients that I have and have the people in my life that I have right now that love me and support me. I mean, I couldn't ask for a better life right now. I really couldn't. Beautiful. Let me ask you a few questions here about working out. When we have imbalances in our bodies. It could cause injury. Right? Absolutely. So how do you help people try to understand their bodies? They walk into your facility and they want to do this kind of a workout, but you're seeing an imbalance in this. And how do you bring it all together for people so that they don't cause any injuries with their programs? Depending on what it is? I do everybody's program different, Every client is different. Everybody's got different strengths and weaknesses. If I have a client that has once again, if they have an injury that I need to work around, we do so. But if they just have an imbalance where certain structure is weaker than another structure, say your back is what are your weakest points. And you can see it especially as we age. A lot of people, especially guys, they tend to get that shoulder roll coming forward. They tend to put on a little too much weight in the belly, which also pulls everything forward. So it's a matter of what I do with I'll focus a little bit more on that area. Like, say, if I'm dealing with somebody with with that issue that I was just talking about, I'll focus a little more and add a couple of extra exercises into their back or routine to specifically work on those areas to get the shoulders to pull back, to get the back a little straighter. Obviously, with the core that is the main focus for anybody's body. I don't care how strong everything else is on you, you can have the biggest arms in the world, the biggest legs in the world. If your core isn't strong, everything else is not. So that needs to be a big focus. I do core exercises with every one of my clients, every workout they do normally. It's at the end of their work out. Some of them I incorporate it during the workout because a lot of times what I'll do with people is we'll do three or four exercises in a row and then they'll do a core exercise and then I give them a break and then back to another three or four exercises in a row, another core exercise and then a break. I don't really give too many breaks. I'm not known for that. I figure they can break when they're done with me. Clients. They pay for my time. They pay for my knowledge as to what I know and what I'm teaching them. And my clients are very receptive to it. I notice you working in bigger facilities. Ladies are very receptive to opening up and learning from somebody, trying to teach them. The guys not so much, especially the older gentleman. You try to correct them on something that I. Yeah, I know. Okay. Well, if you knew, then why were you doing it wrong in the first place? So in here they don't have a choice. Learning from me like I said, you're going to learn how to do it correctly. I'm not going to let somebody do it wrong. I don't care if it's one rep or four reps. I'm going to stop you. I'm going to tell you what you're doing wrong. And I'm going to correct that. Working on specific body parts. I do that too. If somebody really wants to focus on a certain thing, then I'll tailor a workout for if to say, if they're only working out me two days a week, then I got to squeeze in from head to toe. In those two days a week, I would prefer that to do three days. So even if they're doing something on their own, I'll give clients homework, I'll give them exercises to do at home. If they have their own weights and if they don't have weights, then I give them another version of it, whether it's body weight exercises, whatever, you know, depending on what we're working on. And the same thing when they go on vacation, like we talked about earlier, I, I have clients that I'll write workouts up for when I go on vacation that they should be doing while I'm gone. Do they? I don't know because I can't see them. I would hope that they maintain a little bit like I try to do. I mean, everything in moderation as far as when you're away. And I think some of us, we all tend to go overboard sometimes, especially when I go away. And when you're eating certain foods and it's just like stuff you've never had before in your life, it's like, Oh my God, you might overindulge a little bit here and there. I get right back on it when I get back into town. I really try to watch my eating regimen because I can put weight on really quick. Just like a lot of people at my age. I'm 54 and it's so much easier to put on than it is to take off. You can gain £10 in a weekend, but it'll take it four months to take it off. It's a lot easier to try and maintain it than to put on that ten or £15 and it takes six, eight months to try to take it back off. Let's go a little deeper into losing weight. So many people, they come us as trainers and the first thing they say is, I want to lose weight. Somebody comes to you with those kinds of questions. What kind of program can you put me on? I'm sure you do an evaluation of where they're at and how what they're eating and also what their workout program is now, or if they're doing anything at all. And then what do you normally recommend to people who just say, I just want to lose weight? Well, I'm very truthful with people. And I tell them that 85% of losing weight is done in your kitchen. You can work out with me seven days a week, 2 hours a day. And if you leave here and you're eating 3000 calories a day and eating a bunch of junk, you're not going to lose any weight. And that's just a fact. A lot of people try to do this intermittent fasting thing or they try to do these different diet plans. So they try to do these different meal plans, stuff like that. And in my experience, it just doesn't work. If you go on a super diet and say you lose £20 as soon as you go off that diet and go back to your normal eating, you're going to put that 20 back on and you're usually going to put on more than that. 20. So the best way to really see what you're doing is you have to track what you eat. A great way to do that is there's an app called MyFitnessPal. You can use it for free. You put in all your information, your height, your weight, your age, everything, your fitness level, and they give you basically, okay, you want to get down to this amount of weight. Say if you want to lose £10, they gave you a healthy way to do so. They give you the proper calorie count per day. They give you your carbs, they give you your proteins, they give you everything, and you can look at it. You punch it all in during the day. So you go through every meal, every thing you put in your mouth during the day, you punch it in, including what you drink, including your exercise, and it basically registers it for you. It's so easy to do, but you have to be strict about it. You have to be every day, every meal. You have to put it in there and you can look through it and say, okay, hey, well, during lunch I ate too much, my carbs are too high or my sugar level is too high or my sodium is too high because that's your four main things that can destroy whatever you're doing at a gym is your calories, your carbs, your sugar and your sodium. If you're overboard with those four things, you're not going to lose any weight doing it. Just somebody going in and doing 2 hours on a cardio machine that ain't going to do it for you. First of all, most people do cardio wrong because they go and get on a treadmill and do an hour on a treadmill and they do it at the same speed and the same level. Now, are you gonna burn? Absolutely. But as soon as you hit that stop button, guess what? You stop burning. If you get on a treadmill and you do a mountain range and you do a program where it's speeding up wall and down inclining the whole thing, you're going to burn even after you've hit that stop button because your body doesn't get stagnant, your body doesn't recognize. Okay, Yeah, you started, you stopped. You got to keep your body guessing because the muscle memory, they call that for a reason, because your body remembers that once again, with my workouts with my clients, I change things every time they walk in the door. We might do the same exercise like, say, chest routine. Say one day I have you use a bench, press the next week. If we do a chess routine, you might do bench again, but you might be using dumbbells or you might be using my cable machine, or you might just be doing push ups on the floor with a set of pushup handles. So you got to keep things guessing because your body's not stupid. People that go in a gym and do the same routine over and over and over, you can see them. You can tell that they've been doing the same routine for a year. And did they look any different? Absolutely not. They don't change. They might maintain where they're at. And if that's all they're looking to do, that's fine. But if you really want to change parts of your body and especially the weight loss thing, you have to change your routines. You have to keep things guessing. Excellent, excellent advice. And when doing cardio too, we need to keep our heart rate up at a level to where we're going to be burning calories for a period of time. You can't just get on that cardio machine and get that heart rate up for a little while or to the point where you feel like, Oh, I just can't do this anymore. It's time to get off the machine. Correct. Honestly, cardio. I have people warm up on my cardio equipment. I have a new step, I have a treadmill, I have an elliptical, and I only have to do 5 to 10 minutes. They a warm up. We do their routine. If people want to do more extensive cardio, especially if they're working out on their own and they are trying to lose weight, the best time to do it is at the end of your workout. Now, at the beginning of your workout. I've learned this through experience, through a lot of research myself, because once your body is done, expending your energy from your muscles, it's going to go after your fat cells. When you do your cardio post-workout, it's going to attack that more people that get on cardio, like I said, and do an hour before their workout. Yeah, you're still going to get something out of it, but not to the extent that you would if you do it after. A lot of people don't like to do it after because it's hard. If you really do a real hard workout, it's hard to jump on cardio after, but you don't need to do an hour either. If you get on cardio and you do a strong 20 minute, 30 minute, you're good and you don't need to do it every day. You can do cardio three times a week and do a good extent cardio 20, 30 minutes. And like you said, keep the heart rate up for a certain period of time. You're good to go as long as you're getting your good workout routines. Then also it works hand in hand. It really does. That's an important statement right there. We need to have a rounded lifestyle between diet, between cardio, between strength training and stretching and flexibility. So it all comes together. Absolutely. 100%. Yep. It takes all three in order for people to maintain their lifestyle or get to a certain point in life, you got to have goals with things so you don't ever set a huge goal. That's what I tell people. Also, don't set a giant goal. You're looking to lose weight. Don't look at, Oh my God, I need to lose £30. No, no, no. You said set a goal for a week. Okay. I want to lose£2 this week and then next week I want to lose another £2 because that's the healthiest way to do it is losing 1 to £2 a week. Not going on once again, going on these crazy fad things where all my are using. I forget the new drug that people are using, that doctors like diabetes drug people are actually going to doctors and doctors are giving them injections of this stuff. And and that. Are they losing weight all to. Absolutely. Is that healthy? Oh, my God, no. And this is one of those things that I hate to say it, but it's going to have ramifications down the road. You're taking a drug that is meant for a specific reason and you're using it for something totally opposite of that effect. It's not a healthy way to do things, but people in this day and age, it's just like the eating habits. People want instant gratification and with losing weight, if you're getting it instantly, it doesn't stay. Like I just said about the eating habits people are so that everything needs to be done right away. So look around Palm Coast. Every corner, every street corner, you have fast food, you have a subway, you have a Chick fil A, you're having McDonald's or a Wendy's, whatever. And it's really bad because you look around this day and age and especially our younger generations, to see them in the condition that I see them in, it breaks my heart to see a teen or a young 20 something year old. And there you look at them and you can tell they're 60, 70,£80 overweight and they have nothing but health issues in their future. You don't want to be pre-diabetic when you're 25 years old. And there's a lot of them out there that are and they don't even realize it because right now they feel fine. So they keep going about their same lifestyle, eating garbage three, four or five times a week. And then all of a sudden they wonder why things start to hurt and things start. They're putting so much pressure on their joints and on their back and everything else. And then, like I said about the diabetic part of things, I mean, you're pre-diabetic when you're that overweight, and the next thing you know you're doing injections and you're taking pills or even both just to keep yourself alive. And it's sad. The building that I'm in, I actually have a pizza place in the same facility and there's an ice cream place in the same facility. The amount of people that I see go in that shouldn't be going it. Let's just say that they just they shouldn't be. I'm not telling people to not eat. Of course, you know, enjoy your life. But everything should be in moderation if you're£90 overweight and you can barely walk. And the walk that you do do goes from the parking lot into an ice cream place and you're not doing anything physical to take care of yourself. I mean, what's going to happen to you another five years down the road or even less than that? It bothers me to see people like that. It really does, because is short and life is precious and people don't appreciate it. They really don't. And I do. And that's why I try to do what I do with my clients. You know? I know that they appreciate life, otherwise they wouldn't be here with me. You eat those kinds of foods, they make you lethargic. And then on top of that, you're not doing any kind of activity. It's a domino effect. The longer you sit there, the less you move around, the more weight you're going to put on, the sicker you're going to get. At least move. If you're going to eat that crappy food, then at least move, get that body moving. Maybe after a while you'll see something happening and then you want to improve your diet also. Well, it's funny because I've learned over the years that a lot of old ladies, as they start to progress in life, they really want to do what it takes to take care of themselves. Their other half do not. A lot of the gentleman, they give me the story. I worked my backside off my whole life to be able to do okay. But you worked your backside off your whole life to just sit on the couch the rest of your life. And then they wonder why they're going to four different doctors a week and their knees hurt and their back hurt and they got the shoulder roll and they can't breathe when they sleep. And they got to take this medication, that medication and everything else. And it just amazes me because I'm like, my God, I want to be in my seventies and be like some of my clients are being able to still do what I like to do, which is an active lifestyle. And these people can't do it. I mean, they just absolutely can't, you know, even if they want it to, they can't do it. And it's because they wait way too long to be able to do something. And I have clients that they'll come to me and I'll tell them, you know, hey, yeah, I can get you stronger. We work on as much as you want to work on it, but you wait until you're in your mid seventies to start taking care of your body. I hate to say it, it's not too late, but you've definitely on the wrong side of the corner. You can hopefully do things to offset certain things. Why are you going to be in shape like you were in your forties? Absolutely not. You can still work at it. You can still hopefully better your lifestyle. But like I said, a lot of the guys, they just they don't want to do it. And I don't understand that because you did work your whole backside off your entire life to be able to retire and to be able to enjoy fruits of their labor. But you can't do that if every day you're going to another doctor and you got to worry about taking certain pills that certain times of the day and you can't even get off the couch anymore because you can't even stand. I mean, I just that's no way to go about the last half of your life by not being able to enjoy yourself. I don't care how much money you have. The one thing that you're not doing is you ain't taking none of it with you. I mean, not one thing is going with you. I don't care how much you have, It's not going to save your life either. It's not going to extend your life. If you don't take care of your body, your body will not take care of you. And it will kick back on you. And you could be a multibillionaire with more money than Jesus. And guess what? It's not giving you any more time on this planet. And you tell us your biggest success story. Probably my oldest client, but not my oldest as far as in age, but my oldest as far as being with me. This man, he came to us as a patient. This is back before I was in working full time in the gym and I was doing therapy with people. And he came to us and basically the he had already been told he was going to need cervical fusion in his neck. He's the veteran. He's a he was a former semi-pro baseball player. He just had all kinds of issues. And his neck and shoulder region were just horrible. I mean, to the point to where if he held this arm straight out, which is one of the tests that you do to test the strength with people's neck shoulder region, you hold your arm straight out and have somebody push down on your hand and you could use one finger and push his hand all the way to his side. He just didn't have the strength to even hold it up. So they basically told him he was going to need major surgery to repair this area, which no surgery like that makes you 100% my back surgery didn't make me 100%. It's something I have to deal with every day of my life. But it got me better than where I what for sure. Now, with him, we started working with a resistance band that is probably as big around as a charging cable for a cell phone, and he could barely do it. It was just doing regular straight shoulder poles, basically just doing shoulder exercises with him, and it was excruciating for him. And the same doctors, after working with him for probably at least a year, he went back to the same doctor. They ran the same tests on him and basically said, I don't know what you've been doing, but keep it up because you don't need to have surgery anymore. We had built up that region and that muscle structure enough to where when they did the push test on his arm, they couldn't use his they couldn't move his arms anymore. He was able to hold his arm up because he had the strength back in his cervical region to where he was able to start living a normal lifestyle. And that's one of the reasons why the gentleman is still with me today. We're friends now. I'm friends with his wife. I mean, they're as far as I'm concerned, they're like part of my family. He trains with me twice a week now. He goes to regular massage therapy. He still has issues here and there. But to see where he started to where he's at now, like I said, we were he is in the resistance bands the size of a charging cable. And now he can I have them sit here and he's in the seventies and he'll do shoulder presses with £20 dumbbells and we didn't even have him using dumbbells are doing shoulder presses back then because it would have made things worse on him. So there's not a whole lot I won't make him do. There's still certain things I got to watch with him. He's got a little bit of a back issue. So we work on some core and he's a golfer, so I work on balance with him. But he's one of those guys. He likes to maintain his lifestyle. He loves to play golf. He's retired. Him and his wife are fantastic people. They did great for themselves and they really like to be able to be active. They have a dog. They like to walk their dog every day together. And what we do in here helps them do that. And to see once again to see where he's come from. And he transitioned with me from being a patient to being a regular client working out. That's one of those people where I tell people about him all the time. I'm like I said this. He's been with me 12 years. I was like, He's one of those people. I'm never going to get rid of him, even if I wanted to. Have you saved his life? He's appreciative of that and he's going to keep coming back. He knows that if he doesn't continue what he's doing and he's not held accountable for it, things will go the wrong way again. And he realizes that he did have a he had a cancer scare. So where he had just a little thing on one of his ears that he thought was like a pimple and it happened to be cancer. So they actually removed 60% of his one ear. So he was out of commission with me for almost a year. And when he came back for him to realize how much weaker he was because he didn't do it for so long. And I told him I was like, look, man, I said, Well, we'll get you back to where you were. I was like, But I tell people, you don't lose things. Just like gaining weight, getting out of shape. You don't get out of shape overnight. It's a process and you don't get back into shape overnight. It's a process if you're not willing to take that job on and to go through the entire process, then don't do it. And I told him it's going to be a process to get him back into tune and get him back to where he was. And we have a matter of fact, he was here yesterday and telling me how great his golf game is going. And of course me being me, I always just look and I'm a go. You're welcome. You know, and of course, I reached beyond myself and patted myself on the back because I'm just you know, I'm a smart guy and but yes, you are. So but with with people like that when they thank me for things, I'm like, look, I said, you're the one doing the work of I'm the I'm the guide service. You come in the door and I put you through the routine. But you have to walk in the door and you have to be willing to do what I ask you to do. I mean, because it is their money and it is their time. And, you know, they can basically tell me no. And I had a couple of clients at times that I'm not doing that. No, I don't want to do that, which is a shock to me when when you get that response from people. I don't have clients like that anymore. Those people don't work out anymore, I don't think. But it's funny when you hear that, and I just kind of I look kind of cross and like it really. What do you mean you're not going to do that? That's, you know, that's what I'm asking you to did. No, I'm not doing that. So that's okay. Some people get it and some don't. That's the one thing with me is as a trainer, you need to learn what people can do, what they can't do. You can't just write up a workout for somebody and go, Oh, this is what they're going to do. Because if you have people do things that they can't do, one, it's going to make them feel horrible about themselves too. It's going to make you look stupid. So you really need to make sure that before you write it down on a piece of paper, you think things through. I write everything down. I have copies of every workout that I've done with every client for the entire time I've had my business. A matter of fact, some of the people that have been with me for all those years, I still have their folders from four or five or six years ago with their workout. It. I track everything we do. You could walk in the door and if you wanted to look at one of my clients, I can show you every single workout they've done because I know what they're capable of. I know what they can handle do, and I know what they can't do. I'm not going to ask them to try and do something that I know they can't do because I don't want people to feel like they're failing on themselves and I damn sure don't want them. I don't want them looking at me. Cross Like, why would you ask me to do it? You know, I'm not going to have my 93 year old client do burpees. It's just not going to happen. And s he’d look at me like I lost my mind anyway. And she and she's a tough lady, Don't get me wrong. She's absolutely top. So she would try anything I asked her to do, but I obviously wouldn't ask her to do burpees. It's a matter of learning your to the point to where you can do that with anybody that walks in the door. A lot of people think that just because they get a little piece of paper that calls them a trainer and says they're certified, that they're a trainer and I'm sorry. No, you're not what you learn in that course. Yeah, that's great. But you're only get to use a very small percentage of what you learned from that course. With clients, you'll learn basic things, but it's your job to learn the client and to learn their strengths and learn their weaknesses and work with that. And if you can't do that, then you're not going to be a very good trainer and you're not going to have a lot of clients. Yes. Excellent advice to all those trainers out there. So let me ask you this. If you could go back and give your 18 year old self some advice, what would you say? Probably think before you act. I've had a lot of situations in my life where I just acted before. You think about things and gotten myself in trouble doing so. So yeah, I think that would probably be the one thing that I would probably tell myself is think before you act. Yeah. For everybody out there, not only the 18 year olds, everybody. I heard a thing from an old football coach and basically when you're mad and you write a text to somebody, don't push send, sleep on it. Because when you're upset, you tend to see things that you probably wouldn't say. So leave it in your phone go to sleep, wake up the next morning, read that same text because I guarantee you 99% of the time you're going to change your response to somebody. You're going to change how you say it because you can say whatever you want to say to somebody. It's how you say it and you'll get a better response wording things a little differently than just coming out and being angry about something because people will turn it off. They'll turn you off. If you're talking down to somebody, you're not going to get a good response from that. They're not going to be receptive to what you have to say. If you say things a different way and a different tone using different words, they'll stay tuned in and they might be a little more responsive to what you have to say. Absolutely. Very good advice. All right. So one more question, though. Let's leave our listeners with a goal in life so that they can live a better life. You know what? Just be thankful for every day you wake up, enjoy every day of your life. Like I said earlier, don't set a goal for a year down the road. Set a goal for that day, set a goal for that week. But just really try to enjoy life, turn off the tube, stop listening to the outside noise, enjoy the outside world. Get outside to keep yourself active and just stop the negativity. There's so much of it in this world, this day and age, and it just feeds. And when you feed into it, it's like a plant. When you put grow food on it, it just continues to grow and it gets worse and worse and worse. And before you know it, it's taken you over. So enjoy your life, enjoy every day of your life and be thankful for for every day you have. All right, C.J thank you so much for coming on today. I'm sure that our listeners are going to get some value out of all that great information you provided for them. And who knows, maybe somebody will come visit you at your gym and let you use your professionalism to help them get to where they want to be. Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. And I wasn't as nervous as I thought I was going to be. Wonderful. You're a natural. Who knows? We will ask you next to be on their podcast. That's right. I mean, you know, I could be a star in the making. A star, a celebrity. Take Care. Thanks you too. This is Angela Grayson from the Loving Life Fitness Podcast to help others in their fitness journey. It’s All Possible! It’s time to wake up. Here we go.