A conversation with Dan Daly and John Sinclair on unlocking Athletic Potential?

Question

John Sinclair · Answer

Welcome to Creator Conversations. I'm Sam, and I'll be hosting today's conversation between John Sinclair and Dan Daly. John is a health and human performance engineer with over 20 years of coaching experience. Dan is a swimming strength and conditioning coach with 15 years of coaching experience. This discussion touched on how to make best use of wearable fitness tech, cross-training, active recovery techniques, motivating athletes, and more. Enjoy. Why don't we just start with introductions, and then we'll get right into it. John, do you want to start us off with a little bit of intro about yourself? Sure. I'm John Sinclair. I've been a certified strength and conditioning specialist for over 20 years. I've been coaching athletes in just about every domain at every level for over 25 years now. I started out in hockey because I'm from Canada, so that's where we spent most of our time, is with Canadians playing hockey in the wintertime and baseball in the summer. I was a 17-sport athlete in high school. I played just about every sport because I grew up in a town of 300 people, and you needed everybody to play a sport if you're going to have a sports team, so I had to play everything. Then I went to university and got my degree in physical education and sport performance and then started practicing as a physical therapist, assistant, kind of athletic therapist guy, and then eventually became a personal trainer and started working as a personal trainer at a company called World Health in Edmonton, Alberta, and then that transitioned me over 13 years to become their director of education. I went across the world learning from some really beautiful mentors and became one of the faculty for PTA Global, which is a certification that's now being run by the National Academy of Sports Medicine, and then we started the Institute of Motion, which is a company that delivers education for personal trainers and coaches across the world. We've developed a number of mentorships and apprenticeships and certifications. One in particular is called the Applied Health and Human Performance Specialist, and now I do most of my coaching out of... I've worked for many different gyms and facilities and helped develop some of their programs and offerings, and now I work as a consultant and strength coach out of my home in South Florida. Awesome. Dan, how about yourself? Mine was going to be a couple sentences, but I feel like I add a little to John's now. Oh, sorry. I feel like we have so much in common, John. So where do I start? I was a multisport athlete as well all through high school. I got an athletic scholarship for swimming. I swam at both Division I and Division II levels. I was an All-American sprinter, studied personal training, having a bachelor's degree in physical education, kinesiology, and got into the personal training world and worked in corporate fitness for over a decade. Doing a variety of things there. Education, staff education, training, and also really starting to develop a niche in the endurance world, so working with a lot of endurance athletes. Started out marathoners, triathletes, and then kind of came back to my roots of swimming. And over the last three years, developed a remote coaching consulting business, working for myself. I work with athletes all over the world, and what I really specialize in is the dryland piece, which is what we call in swimming the strength training piece, and helping swimmers and endurance athletes be smarter about their strength training and perform better as a result. I work with swimmers all over the world. I consult with some brands in the swimming space, and that's kind of my more succinct background on me. I love it. Dan, why don't we stay with you for the first question, which is about swimming and dryland training in particular. What are the primary benefits of utilizing mass-based tools for dryland training for swimmers, and can you define what a mass-based tool is? Cool. Well, I'll start off with the first question and try to remember the second. In swimming, there's two ways to get faster. You can take more strokes or you can pull harder with the strokes that you have. And a lot of swimmers, the most specific way to get better at swimming is to swim, so a lot of swimmers, they start in the water. What's unique about swimming is water has an element of resistance, so it's full body. There is a resistance component to it. A lot of swimmers are quite strong, but you're going to get to a point where you can't produce any more force in the pool without adding some type of external resistance, some type of external load. And there's some tools that you can use in the water, which we'll probably talk about today, where you could load the body a little more. You can allow the swimmer to grab more water or apply some type of resistance to them. But at some point, you need to get out of the water and you need to get strong, and there's better ways to get stronger out of the water that you can then translate to the pool. At some point, we need to load, and I think every swimmer has come to that realization at some point, and there's other benefits, too, from a muscular balance and an injury prevention standpoint, but if you want to get stronger and produce more force in the water, you need to apply some force outside, and we can talk about some of those ways. And then in terms of what a mass-based training tool is, is mass is just something that has a certain amount of matter, and it depends on weight. It's something that we want to differentiate a little bit because things can weigh differently depending on whether or not we're loading in gravity, we're loading in the pool, or how much that weight is moving with things like momentum. So mass is just something that just kind of takes up space and has a certain amount of matter, and weight is something that has some type of load depending on where we are, and that's interesting about the pool because we're unloaded and we have buoyancy and gravity is affected in a way. There's some interesting things or ways that we could look at how we train swimmers in those positions and how we get them to kind of be land creatures as well as aquatic creatures. And now, John, is there anything related either to the mass-based training in general or just specific factors that you consider that are unique to different sports as well? For sure. One of the considerations we always have when training athletes is that, or any person for that matter, is exercise by definition is a movement plus a force. And so mass, if we look at forces, force is mass times acceleration. Mass itself is this measurement of inertia of that object, right? So it's resistance to change. So with gravity or dry land exercise that we do, gravity is a downward force, whereas in the pool, buoyancy is an upward force. So your mass in the pool is different than your mass on the ground, just your own body mass, right? And so there are different effects to the tissues, different effects to the bones, different effects to the nervous system when we have you on the ground versus if we have you in the water. Because we can use mass-based tools in the water, but as soon as you take, say, a Viper Pro, for example, which is a cylindrical, looks like a really long tube that's hollow, that mass weighs less when you put it in the water, right? But the resistance and the drag and the force when we push into it, just like when we're swimming, increases resistance, which means the muscular system has to be recruited in a different way. And so the cool part about doing dry land training and swimming or training any athlete in the water is that we have opposing forces that the body has to deal with, and they're just different environments. So the cool part about us doing exercise is that exercise equals the movement plus the forces. We can apply different types of forces in different ways to get different outcomes for somebody's body, whether it's trying to make them stronger, more powerful, more resilient, and then offset the repetitive stress that comes from swimming. I think that Dan could speak to that much better than me, but the repetitive stress of swimming on tissues is pretty egregious. So getting you out of the pool and into a completely different environment just opens up opportunities that I like to call cross-training. I didn't coin that term. That's been around forever. But where I find value of working with swimmers is that we're giving you a completely different environment with a different set of forces, with different tools that allow your body to get more resilient so that when you get back in the water, you can go do what you do best. And Dan, kind of just following on from that line that John had just mentioned where maybe you could expand a little bit more on that repetitive stress of swimming, what does that look like, the repeated, the toll that that takes on a swimmer's body? Well, you know, the majority, well, not the majority, but one of the most popular strokes is freestyle, and you're in a prone face-down position and you're doing repetitive flexion and internal rotation over and over again. And, you know, the average swimmer could take 100 strokes per 100 and they might be doing 6,000 yards per practice. I don't know what the math is, but it's thousands of strokes per practice. And we want to offset that a little bit. You know, we know that the body performs better when it has muscular balance. And so offsetting some of those joint actions can be really helpful from an injury prevention standpoint. One of the most common injuries in swimming is shoulder issues of all kinds, and sometimes they're kind of lumped into a term called swimmer's shoulder, but it can be multifaceted. And we want to take a look at that and get people out of the water and talk about, you know, what should your shoulder be able to do because you're a human being? And it only does so many things. And then what are you doing over and over again and how can we be complimentary to that? Because we don't want to be adding stress to stress. We don't need to be doing like more specificity. The best way to get better at swimming is to swim. We want to get you out of the water and take a look at the things that you don't do well and how we can fill some of those gaps and make you more resilient. And a big thing of this is being athletic. And we can do a lot of athletic things on land and we want to make swimmers more athletic. They actually tend to not be so athletic, particularly if they weren't multi-sport athletes. They don't move as well on land. They didn't play ball sports in a lot of cases. So if we can add some of that athleticism to them, we're going to make them more well-rounded athletes and we're going to make them more injury resilient. And is that one of the main benefits of improving a swimmer's athleticism is injury prevention as opposed to the direct benefits they may get from just generally being more athletic in the water? I think initially we want to reduce the risk of injury. We're never going to like completely eliminate it. But like if you get hurt, you can't perform. So first and foremost, let's make you resilient enough that you're going to be less prone to that. And then second to that, we want to make you more athletic. And then we want to make you the most specific swimmer possible. So that might be my hierarchy and my approach. And it depends on the level of the athlete and their age and what the goal is. And John, going back to you here, this is not necessarily specific to swimmers, but for any athlete who maybe they're just being introduced to strength training or maybe they've done some strength training in the past but not necessarily at an advanced level, what are some precautions that you take just to make sure that that transition goes as smoothly as possible? Yeah, just further to what Dan said, he said it perfectly. Like really variability is the key to health. When we're looking at trying to develop a very proficient skill for your sport, whether it's baseball or whether it's swimming, the skill that we're trying to learn would be to replicate that skill as perfectly as you can so you become efficient, economical, and you can get the job done. Ultimately, when we're racing, it's to be the fastest person in the pool. The challenge with that is that the body wants to protect itself. So if you look at a swimmer that's trying to get their strokes absolutely perfect as they're pulling in the water, they don't want to have too much variability in that because that's going to slow them down. They want to be as perfect as possible. The challenge to that, though, is that that becomes a fairly repetitive stress and that becomes really damaging to particular areas of the body. So our goal is to offset that stress by doing opposite patterning, right? So if we are flexion and internal rotation, I want to take my arm into extension and external rotation with different movement patterns. That would be a direct or a counter strain to the strain that I'm providing in the pool. We see this with athletes all the time. Whether you're baseball pitchers, we see it all the time. They're trying to throw all the time. When I was growing up in Canada, I played baseball in the summer but played hockey in the winter. You couldn't throw every single day. The challenge with swimmers is they got the opportunity to swim indoors year-round. So the variability of stress that we want to try to provide somebody is to offload or counter strain some of that repetitive stress. With athletes of any ilk, you could basically take their movement, look at them, and see what they do repetitively and then build strength training programs that offset that strain. That's where we call that. That's the essence behind cross-training which is, A, what are the techniques or the movements that make up the tasks required in the sport? Then how do I offset those stresses and or forces so that they can get better at their sport? How we make you more athletic is simple. Let's do the things that you don't normally do. Dan and I, if we were multi-sport athletes, we'd be far more athletic because learning the sport demands different tasks and demands different skills. When we have different skills, we become more athletic. That will inherently make you a better swimmer. I would be guessing, but I'm pretty sure that what Dan would do is to introduce some ball-type activities with his swimmers to get them to have to use their nervous system in a variety of different ways that they wouldn't normally get in the pool. That's what would make somebody, A, counter strain the stresses, B, make it enjoyable in the training environment and make sure that we make them more resilient just by getting them out of the water for a period of time is going to be very beneficial to their long-term health and longevity in their sport. Dan, what would you do? Particularly with young people, I work with a lot of age group swimmers, we're seeing more early specialization and we're seeing seasons get much longer. It's actually counter to the science. We know that athletes perform better, they have longer careers, they're healthier, they're more athletic when they have a variety of activities early on. For the parents listening to this call, the young kids, you should be playing as many sports as possible, getting as much exposure to a variety of things. Particularly in something like baseball, where we're seeing throwing athletes pitchers, I don't know the data, but they're throwing nine, 10 months out of the year, whereas before, when I played baseball, it was two or three months. Then I would go on to play basketball and tennis and soccer and all these other things. So they're doing too much of it, they're doing too soon, they're not getting enough variety and they're wearing themselves out both physically and mentally. So 100%, swimmers are not throwing the ball so much. In some ways, they are overhead athletes. In some ways, there's some throwing components to that, but I would get the medicine balls out in particular, hand-eye coordination. There's some great ways to work power. They're super accessible from a swimming standpoint, like on the pool deck. They're fun, they're soft. It could be an entry point for adding some mass and some load to their training in a way that they're not getting or for people who might have aversion to immediately going from the pool to like, I don't know, barbell squatting with a lot of weight. So that could be an entry point. But to kind of sum up what John said, yes, we want to add some variety. We want to counter what they're doing and add some balance to all that training to make them more well-rounded. Totally, and it's funny, we're talking about cross training. So in college, I did track and field. I was a triple jumper and a long jumper. And honestly, the days where we were in the pool were some of my favorite days just in general. An opportunity to mix it up a little bit, still a great workout, no load on your knees or as much impact necessarily. And you kind of walk away from it, even if you're sweating or super tired, feeling a little bit refreshed in a way that's just different. So totally echo those sentiments about switching it up. I feel like I saw the benefits firsthand for sure. And this may not necessarily be in the same breadth of cross training to an extent, but actually a follow-up question for you, Dan, relating to swimmers is, can open water swimming be beneficial to people who are used to swimming in the pool? Good question. I didn't do a ton of open water swimming when I was younger, and now I love it. And I was actually a little tired of swimming post-college and got into open water swimming and do a ton of it now. Can it be beneficial? Can it be beneficial? I think yes, because it's a different environment. I would almost equate it to swimming in a pool is kind of like running on a treadmill. And like, if you want to get good at pool swimming, you need to do a lot of pool swimming. It probably more of the psychology out of getting outside is really powerful and swimming in beautiful places. There's pros and cons and there's challenges to open water swimming and pool swimming. But yeah, I think it could be beneficial to get out there, get some volume in, connect with nature, get a different stimulus. The buoyancy, particularly in saltwater, is different and that can provide a different feel. And you can kind of see maybe where your passions lie. I think a lot of people get tired of staring at that black line and being indoors in a dark, chlorinated, kind of confined space. And the open water can really open your swimming life to like a whole new world. So I'm a big fan of it as a post-collegiate competitor. I think that was brilliant. One of the things that really connects with me is like, if you were to go back, I don't know, the technology of swimming has changed so much too. The technology, how they build pools is so much different, right? Like I would venture to guess that, you know, 30, 40 years ago, swimming in a pool would feel maybe more like open water, right? Like they didn't have the ability for the water to go down into the drains and to limit some of that drag. You'd probably have to swim with more waves, you know? And that's the one thing is that you're not really in control of the environment when you're open water swimming too, right? So temperature's not always the same. The amount of drag or how much, where a current is taking you is gonna be different. So that's gonna have a different effect on the accumulative forces that are going through your body when you're swimming. So again, while you're swimming, that's a change in environment that is creating variability for you. And I think that's a great answer. And sort of moving on a little bit past swimming to just a little bit more general workout principles and to get your thoughts on other things. So, you know, I'm used to a lot of tough workouts, tough competitions, not as much anymore in, you know, post-competitive life for the most part. But a big part for any sport or any athlete or just anyone in general is also the mental aspect. So a question that I have for you, John, let's stay with you, is what are your mental strategies, either for yourself or that you share with your clients for coping with pain and discomfort during those tough workouts and competitions? It's tough for me to relate back to some of the high school kids that I work with because I've got, you know, 30 years of training experience, whereas they might have one or two. So the challenge really becomes is when things start to get strenuous, I try to gamify it for them. So we try to make it as game-like as possible, even though it might be lifting a weight. So it might be a challenge or creating some sort of how many can we do in a particular amount of time? How many times can we get through this while going through that lactic acid burn that you're getting and how quickly we can clear that out? Does that feel like your shift in hockey? Do you experience that when you're playing hockey? So they can rely on a different context mentally that is meaningful to them. Because at this point, they don't really know what it's like to have to grind in a gym. That might be new and novel for them, right? So it's like with that different environment and a bar on their back and they're squatting for 50 repetitions, that's unheard of for a 15-year-old. They want to do something 10 times. But in order for me to get the same feeling in their tissues, we might need to do something that's over 50 repetitions, right? And so in regards to trying to get it like what a hockey player might experience, what works for me is trying to get them to recall some situations or feelings that they might have in their sport and let them kind of reminisce of what that feels like and how they're going to be able to train in a way that might mimic that feeling but help them get through it also, right? And so we say pucks out of our own zone and high off the glass is what we say when we're tired, right? So you get an opportunity to change. So we throw those little bits in at them as they're doing it as well. And actually a question I have too is you've been doing this for a long time. Do you find that it's always like that's always been the main motivator maybe for younger athletes or age group athletes just to gamify it a little bit? Or is that something that is a little bit more recent and it's this new crop of athletes coming up that maybe need that type of motivator? Yeah, I think it depends on the coach, right? Every coach has their different way of applying different coaching techniques. I guess I grew up in sports and I love sports and I study sport. And for me relating it back or using imagery that makes me think, well, the reason I'm doing this is I'm going to run faster. The way I train today is still reminiscent of trying to train as athletically and be as resilient as I can so that these high school kids can't move faster than me. That's my main thing. So it's like I can't let them beat me at anything. I think if we can start to connect back with what the athlete is thinking about, then that's how it helps us have a maybe create a little bit more of a relationship that is more on par with what they might be experiencing as well. Because if you leave it to sets and reps and loads, that's not something that's meaningful to younger athletes. It might become more meaningful to them as they've grown into their 20s and early 30s because they've got more of a well-rounded experience to draw upon when trying to go through those harder workouts. And, Dan, I want to go back to you. Feel free to expand on anything John just said, keeping in mind, I guess, that the overarching theme, the original piece, is how to help athletes deal and cope with the mental aspects of these tougher workouts or competitions. You know, I think mental toughness is a skill. And with repeated exposure, you can become more resilient to stress. It's just the same way we kind of apply physical stresses to more sets and reps or more load. And with repetition and frequency, you're going to become better at coping with that. And I really like John's point about the gamification and making it fun, also making it social, particularly in swimming, because oftentimes your face is in the water and it's not as social. The more we can make it fun, gamify it, relays, toys, different tricks, to I think sometimes to maybe get out of focusing on the discomfort and the pain. Sometimes we want to get away from it. And there's ways to do that with, I don't know, like a song in your head or a different focus or a mantra that you can kind of zero your intentions in while you're doing that. But then sometimes we might want to be more focused on it. So it really depends. And teaching, particularly young athletes, different coping strategies for overcoming that. One way is to, like, what's the long-term goal here? What's your extrinsic why to why we're trying to do this? Can you see yourself on the podium or envision yourself accomplishing some type of big goal, like hitting a personal best or getting a scholarship to a school or helping your team win the relay, for example? Those things can maybe get you out of, like, what you're doing in the moment and think more long-term. Maybe see yourself, like, beyond just yourself and think more of the team. And I'm doing this for the team because I'm a team player. Even in a sport like swimming, which has individual components, but there's also relays, there's also team points. So I think there's a couple of different ways to do that. And then, like, the physical preparation of it all is I was always big on all the other things that were happening outside of the session so I could come back to training and not hurt so much or not hurt maybe as much as my teammates by focusing on my sleep and my nutrition and my recovery. It's like, how can I maximize my gains and my adaptations before the next session so that I can become more tolerant to this and kind of win the sets and win the goal and just keep moving forward? And I actually want to stay on that piece about recovery, Dan. Could you elaborate a little bit more on the efficacy of techniques like cold baths or foam rolling for active recovery? Well, your training is only as good as your recovery, we say. Swimmers might be training 20 hours per week, but you have 148 hours of the week after that. So what are you doing? I think a lot of the recovery strategies are like a game of one percenters and adding up the aggregate of those to something bigger. Your big rocks are the simplest, most boring things of getting enough sleep, hydrating, proper nutrition. So checking those boxes before you start thinking about the foam rollers and the ice baths and the massage guns and all these other things. But I do think those things can be powerful. But a lot of the low-tech, affordable, and accessible things are the easy ones. So start there. I would challenge everyone to look at the science. There's some things that are really popular. And in the fitness and wellness space, people are really trying to, like, there's all these biohacking and hacking our fitness or our wellness. I would just challenge people to take a look at the science and, yeah, maybe there's a benefit. Maybe there's a one percent benefit from doing ice baths, for example. But maybe you could also just get an extra hour of sleep, and that's going to have an exponential increase in your performance and recovery as a result. So check those big boxes first. And then if you are doing those things, I do think there's a lot of one percenters that you can start to think about adding. Yeah, I agree with Dan. You can't get enough sleep, and you can't get enough healthy foods to eat, right? So as an athlete, you know, if we look at nutrition as only a recovery tool and just, like, what I need to satisfy my hunger, we're already behind the game, you know? So sleep and nutrition are number one. The strategies that we employ for preparing the tissue to be able to perform and how I can help aid in that recovery, for example, like a foam roller has been misunderstood for a really long time. Essentially, a foam roller is a – and the way we use a foam roller can be twofold. One, it's to drive circulation into a tissue, right? So if I lay on a foam roller and I compress that tissue, when I get off, fluids move back to that tissue. So it's a really cool circulation tool. So is it going to help me recover from the stress that I did? Well, perhaps, but it's going to do it indirectly because I'm going to drive circulation to a particular tissue. Same thing with percussion. Percussion guns are the massage guns. It's essentially like someone judo chopping your tissues to help with blood flow, right? So a lot of the recovery tools that we see here today are driven around changing fluid dynamics in the body. Ice is another one, right? So cryotherapy is the overarching description of using ice for therapy and recovery. Going in an ice bath will change some circulation in the body, right? So we got fluids that are going to move away from the extremities and towards the central part of the body. And then when we get out and we contrast it with heat, we're getting a massive change in that fluid dynamic and the shifting of fluids through the body, which can be really important for lymphatic drainage and can help with moving substrates through the tissues itself. So in addition to not only knowing the science, is knowing how to program these recovery strategies. So when you know what works with what and when to use it and for why, that becomes one of the things that our industry is still way behind on. We developed a programming system for recovery at the Institute of Motion. We call it our 4Q Recovery, and it's looking at all the different modalities, when to put them in place, and why you might be putting them in place and building that into your programming. I actually want to keep talking a little bit about recovery, but in a different lens. So let's stay with you for a second, John. Do you think wearables like fitness trackers or smartwatches add value to a strength training regimen? Yeah, so I got mine right there. So I've got the Polar Vantage M2 watch. I'm a big advocate of Polar. I've been using them since 1994. What I love about it for myself is that it gives me instant feedback as to what is happening in my body as I'm exercising. So our only true biofeedback that we can get information on is our heart rate. So if I am training at the appropriate zone that is indicative of the outcome that I'm looking for in my training and what I'm trying to accomplish from that particular training, this gives me feedback as to whether or not I am in the right zone or I'm training at the right intensity for the outcomes that I'm looking for. Some people, especially younger athletes, I've worked with a ton of anaerobic athletes, so I was mostly an anaerobic athlete, and we would redline, like, all the time, right? And so we would realize that, all right, so the entrainment that happens from training in a particular sport over and over and over again, your body becomes efficient and economical and pretty effective at doing that particular strategy. For someone like yourself, Sam, who was a triple jumper, that's an explosive sport, right? So you have to go from very relaxed to very explosive, and then your heart rate doesn't get up until you get out of that pit, right? And then you have to recover from it. It's a good thing you've got, like, 15 other guys jumping before you because if you had to do four in a row, you would see that your jumps are getting shorter and shorter, right? And so what we have to use is this becomes a really good feedback tool for our clients, and that's what I use it for is feedback for my clients so that they know that, all right, it's either we want to get you to a certain level of intensity and or we want to make sure that you have completely recovered before we go in and do a repeat bout of stress. Yeah, that makes a whole bunch of sense. Dan, what do you think about the whole wearable smartwatches? I think they're nice to have. I don't know if they're necessarily need to have. I mean, John and I grew up not really having them at all. He's been using it since 1994. I don't know when I added mine a little bit later. It's interesting, you know, swimming in particular is such a low tech sport for a while, so it's cool to see things that are waterproof and things that we can track. And I think the biggest value is looking at trends. So even with some of these devices, they're not as accurate and specific as we'd like them to be. I think the heart rate monitors are pretty reliable at this point, even at the wrist worn type of product. But some of the other metrics that we're looking at, like heart rate variability and some of the emerging tech that's coming out, sleep science, sleep tracking, we really want to look at trends. And if you see like a recurring trend of something that's off, it can help drive programming and training choices. More maybe in the nuts, well, sometimes in the immediate and the longterm as well. We want to look more at trends because there are going to be some fluctuations and some anomalies to how to that data. And the big thing is, do you have someone who's helping you interpret that and actually use the data or are we just wearing these things and tracking them? And I think a lot of us are just wearing them and we don't really know what to do with the data yet. I don't think the industry does, but increasingly, when my athletes have them, I like to use it, particularly from a remote coaching standpoint. There's ways for me now to collect some information and have that pushed into their calendar and some of the technology and applications that I'm using to take a look, but I don't want to, I want to use it. I want to look at the trends. I'm not going to put too much credence into like any one metric, but I'm going to look at like the big picture and it, it helps guide my decision-making a little bit more, but I also still rely on some of the tried and true stuff of, you know, how we've been doing it for a while. Totally. Yeah. That, that all makes a bunch of sense. And Dan staying with you here, I'm sure for some people, the fitness trackers help with motivation or at least getting a little bit of some metric or numeric to help them get an idea of how hard they're working or whatever, either with fitness trackers, smartwatches, or just anything else. How do you keep your clients motivated? I know it's super easy to give up or not even want to start, or maybe kind of get the ball rolling and then decide it's not for you anymore. Like how do you keep people coming back every day or every week to improve on their own goals and want to get better? Well, the first is having a goal. So, you know, I work with people just like they want to get fit or they want something kind of looser. So we try to get more specific about that. And, and it's not, oftentimes it's not like just about losing weight. I work with a lot of personal training clients as well. It's like they come to you and they want to lose weight, but there's something deeper there. Maybe they were overweight as a kid or they want to do their first marathon, or there's something about their life that they want to be better. And they're kind of attaching it to that weight loss. So there's some coaching strategies and this gets into like behavioral change psychology, but kind of peeling back some of those layers and digging deeper and knowing what the why is. And you get to the root of somebody's weight loss or someone signing up for a marathon is more about like looking good. So they feel confident at work or they can play with their kids. And now they have this deep intrinsic why of, of why they want to accomplish something. And they can go back to that. And it's a deep motivator for continuing on. And those goals can change sometimes, but just kind of bringing them back to like, why are you doing this? Why do you get up at 5.00 AM and show up at the pool in the dark and get in the water during the winter when it's cold? What are you really trying to accomplish? It kind of goes back to some of the mental toughness strategies, because that all plays into it of being disciplined. Consistency is really the biggest thing for people wanting to see results. A lot of these adaptations is a game of time. So if you can be consistent with it, because you have a goal and you have some behaviors that you're focusing on to get to that outcome, those can be really powerful drivers. And then having a coach keeping you accountable a little bit, but I'm not here to do it for other people. And I can't, you know, I can't call them at five in the morning. I can't call John in Canada from New York to Canada at five in the morning and be like, Hey, are you up? Are you going to the pool? He's got to want to do that thing. You want to do that. But as a coach, if we can map it out a little bit, set goals, map it out, hold them accountable, check-ins, those things can be powerful to helping people create change and long-lasting habits. And I imagine too, to your point, really getting to the root of why it is that they're there in the first place probably makes your job a little bit easier as well, right? It takes away the guessing work for sure. John, was there anything that you wanted to add as far as keeping your clients motivated? Yeah, I think motivation is very short in its, in its outcome, right? So somebody can be motivated for a day and lose motivation the next day, right? The trick is to find what is your aspiration? An aspiration is a goal that's got a value system attached to it, right? So it kind of incorporates the entire self with that goal. Social media is one of those things that I think can be very powerful, but it can also be really damaging is that we tend to identify with clicks and social groups. And then if you decide, well, that sounds like me, I think maybe I need to lose weight to get to this, you know, cause I'm going to a wedding, you know, and so everyone's losing weight so they can go to the summer weddings. And it's like, well, when did we ever kick people out? Is there a weight, is there a weight restriction going to a wedding? Right? It doesn't happen. But you dig a little deeper, like Dan said, and you might find out, well, I'm alone. I don't have a partner. I wish I had a partner or someone that I could go and be in a social environment for maybe that connects a little bit more with them because they're lonely. And so when we ask the relevant questions such as a question I like to ask is if you don't change or you stay the way you are with your health and fitness, how would that affect your life? Right? And so generally people want to move motivational theory is that you move from a place of pain towards pleasure, right? There's always going to be this shift here. So the trick is asking the relevant questions that makes them move from where they are to where they want to be, but make sure that the goal that they attach to it is driven around their own value system and why that will change their life in a positive way and what benefits could happen as a result of getting it, but also what consequences could happen as a result of not getting it. And then they'll go through that motivational stage on their own and start to apply different lifestyle strategies to work towards becoming a better version of themselves or just accomplishing something they never thought that they could do. Keeping on that same line of motivation, I mean just to bring it back to you both as coaches for people, you know, what does it make you feel like when somebody reaches their goals or you're seeing them progress? How does that make you feel? John, do you want to keep going there? So because I work with both health clients and performance clients, one of the things that I love seeing is just seeing how efficient they become in movement because I always look at the world through the eyes of movement because that's my, my perspective and the way I always see things is that seeing somebody who, when they first came to you and they might be a little uncoordinated or are a little awkward and they're not moving very efficiently or they need longer rest breaks because they're not quite as fit and then seeing them progress over time and now seeing some of their metrics change. Like I have a client that we started in last September, actually a full year. He started training five days a week with me and in that time because he's been so consistent and doing so well that he's now in remission from his diabetes. So it's like when that happens, you've actually helped somebody change their, not only change their life but probably add years to their life, right? So 100% so like that becomes really exciting for you. And then when you're working with younger athletes and Dan's probably experienced this as well is that there isn't a direct relationship in athleticism to something such as speed, right? Like you might get some kids that are, you know, they're good athletes, but they're not super fast. And then one day overnight, they're just like, where did that come from? Right. And it's like the totality of everything that you've done and their nervous system just finally coming and blossoming and blooming. And it's like, pow, they're like lightning quick. And I've had parents say to me, have you been doing a ton of speed work with the kid? And I was like, no, not more than usual. And he goes on the court, he's flying around on the tennis court. What did you do? I was like, that's just their nervous system. It just clicked. Right. And so that those are the things that excite me the most is just when other people notice it and they're like, what happened? Right. And that's the beauty, beauty part about biology is it'll adapt and it's never like the same timeframes for every single person. And it just one day it happens. And that's what excites me. Dan, do you feel the same way? I think happiness is rooted in like the service of others and coaching is a service based profession. And we get into it for altruistic reasons of wanting to help people and see them be successful and do something beyond ourselves. We're passionate about these topics. We live this lifestyle. The profession allows us to live the lifestyle and also we're able to share with others and see them be successful and grow. And it's super rewarding to see people hit their goals. However, incremental, I always say progress is progress. So if someone can do one extra pushup today, huge win. If someone in swimming, we're looking at hundreds of a second sometimes can be the difference between gold and silver at the Olympics. So these these like incremental changes are really great. And I love John's point. I'm talking to young kids all the time. It's like, Hey, you may wake up tomorrow. And because you got eight hours of sleep, you hit your PR that we've been training like years for. It's fun to see people have these huge leaps, but it's also sometimes helpful or fun to see people work really long and they finally get to something. So we do it because we're goal oriented. We want to help other people be goal oriented. We want people to, to have fulfillment from this and, and happiness. And, you know, we're kind of the guide to some of that. I just want to thank you both again for taking the time to be here today. One way that we'd like to close these is just to give you the opportunity to let the audience know where else that they can reach you. Dan, do you want to start us off? Listeners can find me at my website, train daily.com. It's T-R-A-I-N, my last name daily, D-A-L-Y. And you can find my social media handles on there as well, but I'm most active on Instagram at Dan Daly. Sweet. And John? Yeah, you could also reach me at train Dan daily. No, I'm kidding. You could reach me at Instagram on at authentic health coach or at my website, www.authentichealthcoaching.com. Perfect. Well, I want to thank you guys again and have a good rest of your day and enjoy your weekends. Awesome. Thanks guys. That was awesome. Thank you.

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"A conversation with Dan Daly and John Sinclair on unlocking Athletic Potential"