S1E82 · Raise the Bar Radio: Lachlan Wallace + Stu & Nick

Hey legends, welcome back to the Virtus Performance Podcast. It's been a couple of weeks since we've pumped out an episode to give you guys a little insight into why I've been a little lazy, I've been tactically lazy, let's put it that way. So when we started the podcast, the intention was to do one a week and we did so for 81 weeks but kind of got to the point where I was flat chat with a lot of different things and I wasn't able to kind of dive in and put the time and energy needed into the podcast for a few weeks.

So I decided to take four weeks off to kind of refresh a little bit and give myself a bit of time to kind of remember why I was doing this in the first place and I guess the intention is to have cool conversations with cool people doing cool things in a way to open up this long-form communication to more people. So yeah, I'm back, I'm feeling refreshed, we're going to keep rolling with one a week for the next 18 or so weeks until we hit episode 100 and then we've got a shift in the intention of this podcast which I'm really excited for.

So it's been a bit weird kind of spending four weeks not recording an episode, I've managed to record three episodes last week so we've got some pretty epic ones coming up for you guys which I'm very, very excited about. But I've also been spending a lot of my time writing and kind of diving a little bit deeper into how I'm feeling and how everything's going so if you guys want to check out any of that, you can jump on the Virtus Performance website. We started a daily blog about a week and a half ago and you can also jump on my website lachiewolus@virtusperformance.com, that's my email address, that's not even my website, my website is just lachiewolus.com.

If you would like to shoot me some feedback or shoot me some suggestions of what you'd like to hear then lachlanwolus@virtusperformance.com is the email address, apart from that thank you very much for listening, thanks for getting around it. If you could share and subscribe and do all that kind of stuff, that would be awesome. Time for today's episode so let's kind of get us back rolling again, today's episode is one I recorded with a couple of legends, Stu and Nick from Raise the Bar Radio, I jumped on their podcast a couple of months ago. Now

we kind of had a bit of a chat about what I'm doing and what they're doing and how it all fits in, both of those boys own CrossFit gym so a little bit different to what I do but it was really cool to have a chat to like minded people just doing their best to create a community and to create a thing out of nothing which I think is something that shouldn't be underestimated, it's pretty cool to see people creating something out of nothing and doing really good things with it so hopefully you guys like this chat, next week we'll dive back into the regular episodes with a couple of epic guests coming up, cheers to you all!

My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day, I believe everyone especially normal people have a story to tell, the Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey and experiences of each of our guests. Alrighty, welcome to the show guys, here we are, we're on the road today, we're down in Mornington, a very nice part of the world as we were just discussing off camera or off audio or whatever you say there, how are you Stu? I'm really good, I'm in

my hometown so I'm always happy, just had a common folk coffee for anyone that doesn't know what good coffee tastes like or anyone that's from my part of the, you know, crayman part of the world and is drinking piss every day, head down to common folk coffee and yeah, get yourself one because it's the best coffee gun around. Apparently it's a bit of a business hub down that way as well and people get things done as well as drink coffee while you just talk shit. Most, I think they both happen at the same time. Welcome to the show Lachie.

Mate, thanks for having us. Absolute pleasure, thanks for being on, tell us a little bit about yourself mate. Oh, it's a good question, my name's Lachie, I guess what I do is run Virtus performance, which I am, is probably an extension of that or that's an extension of me. Fuck, we're the son of Deets. Someone that I guess grew up loving sport, like a lot of kids down this end of the world, kind of chased that for a little while, realised that I was never good enough to make a career out of it so decided to do the next best thing which is coach and it's kind of just, you know, rolled on from there.

Sounds like my life. You still do, are involved in sport though, you still play footy? Still play footy, back to local level now, so get to run around with the boys there which is a whole lot of fun. So you say coaching's the next best thing, what do you enjoy more, being an athlete or being a coach? I'm getting deep straight away mate. I'm incredibly competitive, so an athlete, but I definitely miss, so started out doing athletics and playing footy and kind of trying to mix the two. And love the, I guess, individual challenge of

athletics and it's all on you kind of deal, but love the team aspect of football as well, so football ended up winning out, but I think I still love competing on the football field, like I'll never not love competing in every area of my life, apologies to everyone that spends a bit of time with me, I will try and make everything a competition. But I think coaching and being able to see other people achieve the things they want to achieve and to be able to merely watch and slightly guide them on that journey, that's an epic feeling.

So I don't think I prefer one, I think they're different feelings. I think I can't, I would really struggle to just have one. Of course. So we definitely want to get into what is Virtus during the show, but I know doing a bit of research before we came on down today, that it's taking you a while to get there and tell us a bit about the lead up to, I guess, where you are now and what is Locky Wallace before, you know, getting to where you are now. Yeah, where do you want me to start? What's your favourite, to start where you enjoy starting the most?

Yeah, I've always found it really interesting to kind of go chronological, because it's, it kind of takes you back to like a different place and a different mindset. So I guess I grew up in Carrom Downs, played footy at Seaford Tigers, did athletics at Seaford Little Ass, spent the most part of my childhood playing football and running and I guess trying to figure out what life was, you know, in a way, like trying to figure out what I enjoyed doing, what I didn't enjoy doing. School was something that I probably didn't try hard enough at. I was, I guess you'd probably say I was a good student, but I never really, really committed, committed to it.

School, looking back now, maybe wasn't the best, I guess, environment for me to grow and learn and stuff. I did that a lot more on the football field or on the training, training park and kind of did that up until I got to the end of high school and kind of went, 'Holy shit, I need to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life', because that question you get asked in year 11 or year 12, whatever it is, about what are you going to do next, I was one of the kids that had no idea.

And I was, I probably grew up in a family, I was so lucky to have the family I had growing up being so incredibly supportive and all these kind of things, but I probably was always going to go to uni. It was just, it probably wasn't something we spoke about all that often, but it was just probably a foregone conclusion that, okay, the next step after high school is uni. So it was almost, well, I like sport and like a lot of kids that like sport, they jump into exercise science. So I dove into that, spent the year after high school deciding that I wanted to do a, some sort of gap year.

I didn't want to, didn't really want to travel. I had no interest in travel back then, which was strange because now I'm kind of the opposite. I jumped into a Cert 3/4 and Diploma of Fitness, it was back in the day when they were giving those out with a can of Coke and chips and they weren't exactly the most sought after thing in the world, but I guess I was lucky that it was the time where the government was kind of pumping a lot of money into it, that I was able to jump into it

for and spend the best part of 10 months there doing those three little courses and getting to the end of it and kind of being like, all right, cool, now I can go to uni and actually have a job that I can kind of love doing. And PT only really came about after that because one of the boys that I played footy with used to run jets in Langley. So that was kind of my first PT gig. So yeah, uni was very much the same as high school. I did it as little as I kind of had to.

I rocked up, passed my classes, spent most of my time playing footy and working at Revelsport. If anyone bought a pair of shoes from 2010 to 2015, you probably bought them from me at Revelsport. That was, I loved that job. I'm some of my best friends in the world. Now from that era, so that was a pretty important part of my life, I guess, but kind of found myself three years later at the end of a uni degree at the same spot I was at high school. I was like, okay, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?

So went the easy option and jumped into a master's, which I guess was the easy option because it delayed things a little bit longer. So jumped into a clinical exercise physiology master's. I'd done a fair few placements at different gyms, different exercise physiology clinics. Did one at PACE in Mornington, spent some time with Mark Simpson there, who's been an awesome mentor over the last few years. And kind of went, oh yeah, this is pretty cool, this is a good next step, and jumped into that and kind of got halfway through the year, or actually it

was almost towards the end of semester two and we're sitting there one night, we're talking about cardiovascular disease or something like that, and I'm just like, this is not for me, this is not what I want to be doing. So made the decision, you know, after that year I kind of was just floating and playing footy anyway, like footy was kind of my focus. Had done a bit of an internship at footy, kind of learning, I was at Collingwood in the VFA, so I learnt a little bit more about how the AFL system worked and

how, I guess, the strength coaches and the strength staff, exoscientists were treated and how they were able to do what they loved doing and what it actually looked like. And I think when you, a uni student, you go, I want to work in AFL, or I want to work in elite sport, and you kind of go, you know, this would be the best job in the world. And I think some people would be, but it feels like for me there was, you know, you got 100% of stuff that you want to do with the plays, you've got about 10% of the time and the actual ability to do all those things.

So that kind of showed me that I didn't want to work in that environment, but I loved the standards and the expectations and the competitiveness of that elite environment. So yeah, fast forward through that, got to see what that was like, spent some time, or spent four years at uni and got to the end and kind of had one and a half degrees and I was like, holy shit, what do I do now? So spent a bit of time, during that time I was coaching, coaching out of Jets for a year and then coaching out

of home, spending a bit of time kind of trying to figure out what my kind of place was in the industry, in the world to a deeper extent and probably struggled for, I didn't struggle because I was playing for uni and that was my focus, but struggled from a career point of view for six, 12 months of like, hey, what the hell am I actually going to do? And it's fine for a while of just going, well, I've got another year of uni or whatever. And you kind of get to that point where at the end and like, holy shit, what actually is next?

And I guess we have an internship program now and I see the kids and the interns going through that same process. And it's not a great place to be, but you guys have been down a similar path of not necessarily knowing what you want to do all the time. Do you find a lot of your interns are in that same boat where they've kind of fallen into it and not sure where their place is in the world just yet? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I think it's a lot of passage as well, I think, going through

that process because one of the things that I kind of learnt afterwards, after the fact was we go into a degree like Excel Science and I guess anyone that does a degree that's, you know, the arts degree of sport, more or less, and people look at it as, oh, you don't have anything at the end. You do a teaching degree, you're a teacher, you do an accounting degree, you're an accountant. You do an Excel Science degree and you're not necessarily an Excel scientist, you're not necessarily this or that. I used to look at that as

a big negative in terms of, like, oh, you don't have any direction, but now I kind of look back at it as it was the best thing in the world because I was able to try heaps of stuff I didn't like, find bits and pieces that I liked, and that ultimately was kind of the catalyst to put together, I guess, what I do now, was to, you know, realise that I didn't have to conform into a job, I was able to, I guess, put a job together in some way. So yeah, that kind of took

me to starting to think about what was next and then it was a few conversations with a few of the guys I look up to, I probably wasn't aware enough back then to call the mentors, but they were definitely people that mentored me and showed me kind of what, or allowed me to open up to what was next. Do you still lean on those mentors now? Not those guys so much, probably different people, just being the environments I'm in now aren't those same environments, but they definitely were really important, I guess, guides through those stepping stones.

Can you give us some insight into what... Yeah, definitely. My coaches at footy were massive for me, a few of the strength coaches there were just, because you kind of see what they're going through, right, and a few of them were lecturing at unis and teaching and doing things like that, and I did an internship with Christian Woodford at Woodford Spill Science Consulting and that was kind of the first, apart from coaching myself, that was kind of the first real like, okay, well there is actually a chance to do something that no one else is really doing, like I loved what he was doing from an exercise science and a, I guess, evidence based practice, athletic development point of view.

Can you give us, for the listeners, the context on what he was doing? Yeah, definitely. I guess there's, the way our industry runs is there's a shit ton of gen pop coaching, which varies, like anything, like I'll preface this conversation by saying that no matter what people do, or what area people are in, whether it's a cannon or a chyro or a physio or whatever, there's a lot of people who are good in the middle, a lot of people that are, a couple of people that are excellent at one end and a couple of people

that are really shit at the other end, so I think people say this, this job or this professional isn't very good, like I don't believe in chyros or I don't believe in whatever, like I think that's a really small, a really short-sighted, small-minded way of looking at it. So I guess, the way our industry is, is there's a lot of that gen pop side of things, a lot of really good coaches out there, like I definitely don't think that good coaches are rare, I think that coaches that give a shit and that care about their clients and that care about, I guess, evidence based practice isn't rare, and I think that's important to understand that.

But I guess I wanted to find something that was kind of more towards that kind of elite end and Christian was someone that was really chasing that athletic development, bringing sports science to the forefront of, I guess, Australian sport and, you know, he's still working at it, so we've got a long way to go and it's something that, as an exercise science student back then, really interested me. I guess any exercise science student would probably be able to tell you the stats on how many people were actually still in the industry five, ten years after. After doing it, it's not many.

So being able to see that, oh shit, this guy's actually creating jobs and he's doing things like that. Do you believe he's made a big dent in the landscape of the exercise profession? I think he has from a, yeah, definitely locally from a sports performance point of view. I think he's definitely making an impact and I think there's, and that's the thing, people forget the difference between, you know, health, function, performance and tend to try and put everyone in the same category, like what, you know, what clients are going to jets to do is different

to what he does, is different to what you guys do, is different to what we do, so I think it's important to remember that but I definitely think he's making a difference and he's made a difference and he's someone that probably more than anyone shaped that six, twelve months of my life, so. I want to definitely hear some of those positives about, you know, how he shaped, I guess your vision in that six, twelve months, but before we get into that, I mean I don't want to spend too much time on this because I've never

met him, but he's very polarising on social media and I would say that, you know, I'm probably one of those people that has been a little bit polarised and it's probably because I haven't been behind the scenes and so I can't comment on his character or culture or what's going on at WSSC, but the generalisations and just the general disdain towards, I guess, some other, you know, people not living up to his expectations. Yeah. What are your thoughts there? I think it's a really interesting one, like it's something that I think there's, where there's smoke there's fire, but at the same time there's two sides to every story, right?

Like I think one of the reasons he's so polarising is because he's so passionate about what he does and I think when anyone is that passionate about something, they can have tunnel vision through different areas of their life, of their coaching, whatever, I think he's a spectacular coach, I think, and to be honest I haven't spoken to him for a couple of years. We planned on opening a gym with those guys and kind of ended up it not working out from both ends and we kind of moved on and he moved on and it's all,

you know, I think everyone's ended up in a better place because of, but I think from a communication point of view and getting his message across, when you've got that much passion and that much drive, it's really easy to tread on people's toes and make people unhappy and things like that and I think, to be honest, most people who have made a difference and want to make the kind of difference he's making are going to piss a lot of people off on the way. And I think it's really hard to be friends with everyone, there's

like, I definitely have shared some of his opinions on certain things but also being completely against some of his opinions on certain things, so I can't necessarily speak for where he's at now, but he was someone from a passion point of view and from a drive and from a work ethic point of view that I learned a heap of over a really short period of time and that was the period of time where I probably needed that person to kind of learn from. I'm actually blocked on the Facebook page, it's just a generalisation about CrossFit

coaches that was too much for me and I jumped in and kept it very, kept my wording very political but at the same time wasn't too happy with the generalisation. Yeah and that's the thing, you're going to be passionate about that side and he's going to be passionate about the other side and most of us know that there's a middle ground somewhere and that's a frustrating thing, I've got a life rule, never argue on the internet, which I have broken a couple of times but for the last six, seven years I've been pretty staunch on

that rule and I think there's a reason for it, like we can have a conversation like this and I think CrossFit has come such a long way since early days, just like sports performance coaching and 24 hour gyms and whatever so I think we can sit here and have a conversation and see it from each other's perspective and see it from the other side of the coin and being a coach and a business owner you kind of start to realise that 'oh yeah, everyone's here for the same reason' and I think it's really important to

remember that and really important to be able to take a step back, hold two opposing views in your mind at the same time and go well, like from that point of view, from me, if you asked me six years ago what I thought of CrossFit, yeah CrossFit's shit, next question, like if you asked me now I'd be like okay CrossFit's shit, next question, that was a joke but there's obviously good and bad for everything right, there's stuff, there's ways that we programme that is different to the ways you guys programme, there's ways where you deal

with our clients, athletes, that's different to the way you guys do, one isn't necessarily better or worse, my kind of question is, my question to those questions is are you making a difference in these people's lives, are they walking out better than they walk in, are they progressing and are they having a fuck tonne of fun while they're doing it and if those answers are yes then carry on, keep doing what you're doing, yeah I'd probably, like compared to say the Christians of the world I'm a lot more on the fence, I still am feeling

opinionated on certain things and certainly driven towards certain things but my desire for the industry is that can't we all just get along, it's not that fucking hard, yeah I totally agree, I'm an opinionated person but I think if university taught me anything it was to seek your own information and be very objective and find everything out for yourself and definitely don't bash anything, there's always more than two sides to every story of things so yeah in terms of Woody I don't know much about him but anything I've ever heard negatively is usually via another

sort of you'd probably say industry leader in the area and in my opinion it's possibly more of a feeling threatened thing than anything else because he's outspoken and because he is who he is but like you said before everyone's got their own thing, a lot of the people that go the furthest probably have more haters than anybody, take Kim Kardashian for example, she has more haters than anybody, I'm so off her by the way, you and I both got involved in Sonya who's been on the podcast and she reposted a whole bunch of comments about

the AFLW and all the sexist comments that were coming up on there and I know I can't exactly remember what you said but yeah she was you know she's standing up for her industry because she works for the TC cup girls and works in girls rugby league and I just said look my opinion was you know just you girls got to ignore that shit and just get on with it and just be you and do what you're doing because what you're doing is so good for the sport and her response was no I think we

should be standing up and saying that this shit's wrong and I was like my comment was well if you don't have moronic idiots commenting are you really a sport yeah that's right you gotta have some haters like you know there's a lot of people bashing women's sport but there's a lot of people bashing men's sport so yeah you know you just gotta get away with it if you love it you just gotta ignore the noise it was my opinion for that and that goes for the same for you know people like Woody I feel like

he would just ignore the noise as well I don't think it would affect him too badly yeah I think he's part of his and like again I'm speaking for him which is probably not a good thing to do but I think part of his persona is that polarizing figure and that's what he's taken on and that's the responsibility he's now taken upon himself and that's his cross to bear now and yeah to be honest like as long as he's happy and he's and his athletes are getting better and everyone's moving forward then you know it

can only be good for the industry down the track yeah I think it's important to notice or to remember that everyone that's trying to change an industry or a part of the industry it's not for them in two years it's going to be for you know the changes that are made in 20 years from now and if he changes the way that we look at you know online Instagram models and you know Kim Kardashian's of the world and he changes the way that universities do their degrees and it pushes everyone else to do better then

it's a win yeah definitely great you know in my opinion on every type of you know fitness programming out there like I personally don't really care much for you know the fitness modeling bodybuilding world yeah but if you're out there and you do that and you enjoy that and you get a lot out of it and it's helping you progress your life in a positive way then who cares yeah if it's not doing a good thing for your life and it's fucking your life up then get the fuck out yeah I want to kind of

move on from that one um but I think the difference is is like we're all I think all three of us in this room are really agreeing that you know if someone's out there doing the right thing and has the right intentions and care you know that's we're all there for the same reason it's important to understand like people can have the right intentions yeah and be fucking people up and I think that's that's where it's like where I shift back to that like you know I don't think anyone has you have to have a

unity degree I think you're right it helps you think critically in a lot of little ways but when you've got people that assert three and four have been doing the same shit for 10 years just like you know fucking a dead horse I think it's really important to kind of be aware of that and it's really hard for us as coaches to who are doing the right things to be able to you know move that part of the industry forward and that's where it's frustrating right because yeah good intentions are part of the it's just

the generalizations I guess hurt a little bit like there are coaches out there that have degrees yeah sure myself and they're also our guys that have done a weekend course yeah so you know like you said right at the start you've got a lot of people banging the middle you got a lot of excellent people and they're not so excellent people would you ever hire a cert three and four yeah one of our senior coaches cam senior coaches yeah so one of the senior coaches can search for and he's waist one of the me he's

one of those people that he's I met him I met him through woody and he's one of those people that he's just self-taught and he's one of those people that he's tried uni and it just didn't it wasn't for him and I respect him a lot for that he's actually diving more into some deeper study at the moment with some massage stuff trying to bridge that gap between I guess your therapist and your coaches dove into a lot of like the weekend courses like your FMS and SFMA and things like that which to be honest

nothing has changed the way I coach more than that functional movement screen course so I think it's really important to look at a degree as part of a person and yeah I would hire what makes him just different to the others just his thirst for knowledge he has incredibly high standards from a coaching point of view that he he's able to I guess not only teach his clients but also pass down to our interns and other coaches and things like that I think it's a look if someone has a science degree or a bachelor degree

or whatever for me it's shown that they can sit in a classroom for three years which you know you can be sitting in a classroom three years not learning anything or not you know not really moving forward and progressing but it's three years of something you've got to commit to and I think that's a big part of especially when we're growing up when we're 18 to 21 22 when most people are at uni it shows that you can actually commit something to something for a period of time but yeah the things that it's that growth

mindset that ability to consistently show up and take the ego out of it and go well I don't know this how do I learn that and you know he's part of our team and I think a lot of the other people in our team have been able to help him in certain areas that he maybe have a gap he's helped me in heaps of areas I've had a gap and he's been able to help a lot of the other guys where they've had gaps and I think it's a balance between actually going to uni and

being educated from other people and learning things from experiences yeah is he a personable that a personable that is his personality it depends it depends how well you know him okay he's a big teddy bear I love him lots but he's also a pain in the ass okay I can probably say that about most of my god no I think he's yeah he's when you get to know him he you realize how much he gives a shit he's got that and I'm sure he won't mind me saying this because I probably said it to him

a few times he's got that kind of like facade of kind of tough guy don't mess with me a little bit but once you break through the barrier and like our interns week one week two they're a little bit scared of him usually and then by week four or five that he's given him cuddles and and all that kind of stuff so I think it's one of those things that when you break break down those those barriers yeah he'll teach he'll teach anyone anything that's why I love about him yeah so does that bring us

to oh yeah well we are yeah we've got sideline quite a lot but that's all right we're not always that chronological but let's dive into getting started with Virtus and how that came to be yeah awesome so it's kind of during the master's year I think I've struggled a little bit with like timelines I'd have to like sit there and work it out but it was kind of during the master's year I was one of the boys I did my undergraduate with Jesse we kind of sat down one day over coffee and kind of like

what do you want to do what do you want to do I don't know how cool would it be to open a performance gym went play golf and I spent the whole day talking about like the best performance gyms in the world what we'd actually want what we'd actually want it to be like and it was that I guess for me it was taking the standards and elite environment from that I'd been able to see and learn about at Collingwood and through the different football and I guess athletics things I'd done what were some of

the gyms that you really respected at that time what did we write down we wrote XS, Cressie's, Boyle's, Woodford's was one because it was local, DeFranco's was one, Altus. Do you still look at the US and think and yes and no not in the same way as we probably did we've been lucky enough to acquire one of the best physios in the world and I don't have a any problem with saying that yeah he's a freak but he's someone that teaches has taught FMS and SFMA all over the world his last job before us was

a Chinese Olympic team and that was something that he came in and told us that when we first met him and I was kind of like wow what sports with deal with he did some work with the handball guys and then valuable so he prayed the volleyball girls for the world champs and the Beijing Olympics well I think and they won which is cool so he seems to think it was all because of him but I didn't say that at all I'm really interested in that yeah but what's his thought how is his thought process

different that makes him the best physio in the world I think he's just so I think the the functional movement systems process and they're just in terms of being can you give more or less it's a it's a whole system developed by a bunch of insane guys from the US mostly physios Greg cooks kind of the possibility for it it's been it's one of those systems that it encompasses everything from the health function performance in terms of the SFMA which is it's more around parts and surrounds if we break movement down it's lots and lots

of parts playing their role to provide patterns which is the the FMS which is the middle part this is works a lot better in a diagram but so your your parts at the bottom you get your patterns in the middle and then you get your power at the top so when we're looking at movement deficiencies I guess capacity deficiencies we're able to look at that graph and kind of go okay where's the problem lying so if someone's got a busted ankle it's a parts problem when they fix apart if when they're coming back from that

busted ankle they're unable to do a certain movement then it's a pattern and there's no pain and the parts okay then it's a patterns problem we've got to reteach that pattern and then from there it's okay let's teach it how to be stronger and faster and things like that so one of the analogies we use is these screens are kind of like taking a car in for a systems check before we take it out on the racetrack and put the foot down we want to make sure that we're not driving with leaky oil and wobbly

tire and handbrake on and things like that so that we can actually make sure that the training we're doing is going to make a difference and he's going to make this person better and I think he's exceptional he does because of all the experiences he's had that's obviously a big part of it like I think he's worked in probably more countries than I've been to which is frustrating I need to change that over but and he just follows the system and I think it's really easy to divert from whatever system you've learned and this is

a system that gets updated consistently with you know if there's 20, 30 years of research behind it and yeah and his ability to not only execute it with clients but also teach them you know someone that's never set foot in a gym to be able to teach them what what he's doing and why he's doing it and why their body isn't working a certain way and then to teach us as coaches to have someone like him on staff it's just it's insane is he inside your facility yeah he'll be up there at the moment I

played FIFA with him before he beat me in penalties it's upsetting but yeah so he was he'll bounce around the world throughout the year but his home base is here which is crazy to think yeah he's he's chosen us which I used to think is was really lucky he's chosen us but I think we've created an environment where where that's happened we went way off track again didn't we that's fine that's right I like this track it's a good track yeah so we've been able to create an environment where someone like him wants to hang

out and you must really feel like that the people that are coming to see you are getting as comprehensive attention as they possibly can with so many experts coming in from different angles yeah I think so and I think that's one of the things you know when so started with Jesse back in the day and we were talking about what we wanted to be and that was an environment that was holistic in the fact that it hit you know I said before the health function performance in one space and we're still not there yet there's

still a fair few cogs in the machine that we're still yet to add but finding somewhere that has because you know I have my skill set I have my abilities and yes I'm going to keep pushing that to the edge and then further and further and further but if I try and do it on myself I'm gonna have you know I'm gonna have a long hard road ahead of me so I'd rather follow that long hard road with a heap of cool people who are really good at what they do so I guess our intention

from the start was to build a team who could all complement each other who could all fill each other's gaps but also who wanted to you know learn and grow together and yeah that team's ebbed and flowed over the last couple of years but I guess we want I want to be able to you know go upstairs have a conversation with the physio with one of my athletes who's struggling with something or you know to to be able to send them to our yoga instructor for some for some TLC time because they're stressed stressing balls

because of work or you know I want to be able to get them that massage they need or or have them chat to the dietitian about about their food and nutrition so that one I don't have to do it but two that I know they're going to get better service from them and I think it's really important for us as coaches to know what our lane is and to stay in it and yes our lane can get bigger as we learn and grow and things like that but I guess that's the whole vision behind what

we're doing it's really a great sign of excellent leadership really to know that you know you can only do so much and there's a lot of people out there that are better at what they do it takes a lot of humble professionals and it's really hard your ego is like the fitness industry would have to be one of the most ego filled industries going around so for to get a group together that you've got to all like I said stay in their lanes and be humble enough to say I don't know is huge yeah that

doesn't exist in many places yeah and I guess we set out like what are the gym rules like Jesse and I wrote them early on and Jesse was with us for the first 12 months of the business and it wouldn't be anywhere near what it is now without him I owe him a heap of gratitude for that but one of the rules we wrote on the wall early on was just leave your ego on the hook and it was something that we realised that early on that we were never going to be able to do

all these things and I guess like interning and playing in elite sub elite environments we got to spend a lot of time with the guys at the piers and to see you've got your doctors your medical staff your nutritionist your physio all talking together with the strength coaches with the actual skills coaches you know there's there's a team of 30 40 people looking after sometimes one athlete and I think it's really easy for us to go oh no I know best but if we're able to kind of take a step back and assess okay what

is actually best for this athlete and be able to get everyone's kind of you know your brain's trust kind of conversation happening then all you're going to end up with either it's going to take a lot of time or you're going to end up with a program or advice or that next step stepping stone for the athlete that's going to help them get to wherever they need to go and I guess our intention is to get people from where they are now to where they want to be sometimes that path will be 80% physio 10%

dietetics 10% my coaching sometimes will be flipped but I guess being able to have those resources to to lean on and to you know to have that conversation with that's where I guess our value lies and that's what we want to keep building you seem like you're an extremely passionate coach and I can imagine that part of the one of the best parts of your day is you know being like that one-on-one coaching and being with you athletes or just helping someone you know with their personal goals but I walk into your office and I

mean it's a bit of a war room on your wall and I mean you've just described how much of a leader you are and it's pretty damn neat dude yeah mine would be great if I have a lot of mostly but I mean everything you've described like I can relate to it just I mean everything that you're doing is not easy I mean obviously you've had to step away from being on the coalface and coaching more and more I mean are you very are you accepting that that's what you need to do or is that

something you struggle with a little bit it's a battle it's a journey I find some days I wish I was coaching like things were really easy when it was kind of just me in my gym coaching 12 hour days you know going to footy training and then repeat things are definitely easier but I kind of look at why I'm actually doing it in the first place and like what my intention is kind of what the you know the buzzword vision or mission is and for me it's just to make the world a better place like

as wanky as that sounds like that's what I want to do and for me I want to do that but with people that I love people that I want to hang out with people that I want to spend time with so it was it was easy decision to start putting together that team it's a really hard thing to as that team grows to delegate to a handful of coaching to not spend as much time on the floor with clients and with our athletes and with the with we call the very family with with all those

guys but I know that if I'm doing less of that I can spend more time you know building the the structure and the foundation of the of the whole whole you know the ship basically we've used that analogy a little bit over the last couple of years I can help I can you know build out that ship make it as stronger faster more efficient ship so that people you know we look back at why we're doing it so that people can get from where they are now to where they want to be we can help

them get there quicker and you know one of the big things we've been big on early since early on is that education side of things so if we can have a team that educate our clients to not need us anymore then we're doing our job as professionals I think we the last thing I want to do is babysit anyone yeah when you lead your clients to that point are you still facilitating their training so is Virtus in terms of like them not needing us anymore so like do they still do their training at Virtus yeah

so that so we don't have we don't have an option for people to come in and do their own thing okay my way but we know that we're always you know unless someone goes and studies how to like physiology or whatever we're probably going to be a couple of steps ahead of most of them anyway even if they do know where they're at then there's we've still got a whole heap of steps that they can still take I guess part of the intention about teaching them and allowing them to be self-sustainable is that we want

to have on the flip side of that we want to have the environment where they don't want to leave and they want to keep contributing and putting back into it like some of our clients could be coaches anywhere else and they're you know Sparky's and teachers and all this kind of stuff but you know I can sit back some classes and kind of watch them coaching each other it's a really cool feeling so we know that you do a very comprehensive job with your clients and the people that are coming in seem to like from

all accounts seem to be getting you know an excellent service compared to you know what is out there but um I mean what how if I walk in the door for the first time and I saw your post the other day where I've been following the socials for a while but it was F45 with an empty box next to it crossed it with an empty box to it and then Virtus will tick in it um so cut deep mate cut deep no but I assume that you're some like you've created your own hybrid yeah if

I want to come to Virtus as a as a train like and be trained like what am I how do you what's your elevator pitch and what am I doing that's a really good question what do you want uh well come back question yeah I like it so right now I just don't want to be fat you could stop eating done next um yeah and I actually that was a just a little cheeky post that I I really I really enjoyed putting up it was something that I think it's really important to not have that

like we spoke before have that like like don't want to piss on what everyone else is doing um but for us that was just a little bit of fun was that on Virtus or on Excellence Coach no that was on Virtus yeah I don't think it did well I thought it was just someone who's unique I've got a really good idea to elaborate on that I've already so we actually got stole out of someone I crossed out their business name and wrote Virtus so yeah I'm gonna probably steal it again and take it next level

by all means um so so what you do so I guess my conversation you know usually that's on the final it's come in my conversations all about what you want okay um first step for every client no matter whether you're a you know world champion or a a mum of two just you know wants to get off the couch our first process with all new clients is what we call our induction process so it's three one-on-one sessions um our goal for those three sessions is twofold it's one to get to know you as well as

possible and for you to get to know us as well as possible we use that for we do our movement screens we do our if if confident we do our capacity screens we do our goal setting we do our lifestyle management stuff and we kind of paint a really good picture for us as to what you need what you want because for a lot of people they're not really the same thing people might want to lose weight but really they need that self-confidence people might want to bench press more but really they want to be

faster or stronger for footy and we know they're not necessarily the same things so it's to paint a picture of what people need um but also to educate so it would be educate you guys on what it is that you need and what you think you need compared to what you actually need um so we want to make sure that it's an understanding from both ends after at the end of those three sessions okay what is the best um next step and that might be seeing a few that might be jumping into our group training

it might be one-on-one it might be going somewhere else i'd imagine that that would be hard to remove your bias yeah so i'd imagine trying to go in and seeing this person as a blank canvas and not having any you know notion of which direction you want to take them in yeah that would be very difficult and that's what yeah and that's why we follow like follow the system to okay because we follow that functional movement screen we go okay well if people if people don't have a certain score um then we use user correctives

to fix those things um if they get to the end and they still don't have that screw because obviously some people come starting from a longer way back um then they will only have one or two options with us it might be see the fears it might be um to jump in a one-on-one you don't qualify for our group training yet and i've found it it's getting easier but it's a hard thing to do to say to someone i don't think you're a good fit for us or you know if we have a lot of

people who will say oh i don't want to do that induction process and i say well you know best of luck if you need any help let me know but we're not a good fit because that's that's the barrier to entry um and as hard as that is it means that when we do when people do join they one want to commit to being a part of what we're doing but also we know that they're they're ready to commit to themselves and that's a that's kind of why we started that and it gets a little

easier over time once you've established a strong culture definitely i would imagine yeah definitely well yeah from experience actually yeah and when you when you know that what they're coming into is going to be um you know one of the best that they're going to find and it's it's an easy much easier sale now than it was when we didn't necessarily know what we were doing um but you must know what your most popular programs are they're a group one-on-one yeah where where but uh if i tick a lot of the boxes and my score

is okay where am i often heading what do you want i told you i just don't want to look fat in front of the class well then i don't know if it's not in front of a class then come look fat and just one-on-one no no no it's not like i don't want to be the fat coach i know what you mean um so so for us it's it's a conversation around what you want and what you need so okay um and my budget and your budget obviously so if it's okay one of the questions

the really simple ones how many times you want to train a week okay and if you want to train six times one-on-one with me a week then great for me not great for your wallet um if you want to train six times six times in our group training it'll be less than one one-on-one with me then then that's kind of your answer yeah um and because we have that screening process initially um there's not that oh but you've got to do these six one-on-ones first it's okay well you pass or you haven't and i'll have

that conversation with them like at the start um here's why we do this here's what i need to see from it if i don't see this then this is what we've got to do so i don't know the word we use when we're talking to the coaches about about it is probably just pre-framing and say you guys done some sales stuff it's just pre-framing what it's actually going to look like and then leading them through it and allowing them to lead us in certain certain points of time yeah so i mean i'm not silly enough

to ask you what the best program is for someone because i mean yeah we all know the answer is depends um but what are your principles that make it for an excellent program that's a really good question i think my principles um so for me it's it's kind of there's a couple of i guess emotional mental principles that come with it and then there's a couple of that those physiologic physiological principles so i need to make sure someone actually wants to be there um actually like principles almost the most important thing is understanding what they

actually want and why they actually want it so you know it's it's been bastardized a little bit because it's so common but that starts with why um simon cinek book or podcasts or ted talk whatever um if anyone any coaches haven't listened to that 15 times and get on it and i think that's that's principle number one we need to know why someone wants to be there because those days where you don't want to rock up those weeks where you don't want to rock up when all the other shits falling in around you life's happening

we need to know what we can come back to um and what and they need to know what they can come back to too so so it's about building resilience from a coaching point of view it's and from a physiological point of view it's very much about okay we need to make sure you can move well and move often we need to make sure that you have the strength and capacity to be able to lift heavy weights do it consistently and deal with all the stuff that life throws at you and we need to make

sure that we can develop your energy systems to be able to have a strong cardiovascular respiratory system to be able to do shit that whatever is expected of you in life so so i guess you know there's going to be different principles between say your general population guys your rehab guys and your performance guys but if you want to simplify it it's move on move off and be strong as fuck be able to do it consistently um and it's simple yeah do are you so do you get many of the amateur local athletes coming through

your facility yeah so we do we started off um and i guess this is how our business models change over the last couple years we started off you know 98 percent one-on-one like everything we did was one-on-one maybe we'd have a group of one-on-two all basically local amateur athletes um athletic development one of and that was that was my one of my passions and jesse's passions early on was that athletic development side of things um one of the things i kind of realized was that we are just people for a lot longer than we're athletes

and that's something that i kind of started rolling into you know six 12 months in it was just you know i want to be training athletes as a part of it um being an athlete and kind of probably struggling with that um transition from an athlete to a coach that was what i wanted to be doing and i guess that transition changed changed what the kind of people that i wanted to be coaching that i thought the business wanted to be coaching so so we kind of made that shift from the mostly elite, sub-elite athletes

to the more gen pop we probably have a split of maybe like 20 80 now more towards gen pop we still have that big chunk of athletic development stuff but for most i guess local athletes they're spending most of their week on tactical technical stuff we want to be able to guide them through their through their i guess strength training and through their athletic development but it's from a i guess a time and funds point of view it's it's really difficult to have everything or to be able to give them everything that we want to

give them so it's more about starting to teach them that those first little steps and then taking them from there and maybe checking in once a week once a fortnight whatever but we still do train athletes in you know 20 30 different sports in from guys that see us three or four times a week to guys that see us once a fortnight or once a month you know we've got a couple of younger coaches that that do predominantly coach more athletic populations i still have a chunk of kind of the elite guys and then guys

kind of verging on or guys that just want to be better local athletes we still run our like pre-season programs and stuff like that but one of my big values as a as a coach as a person is community and is belonging and tribe and all of those all of those fancy buzzwords but part of my coaching is just building that as well and part of my i guess role as as head coach or whatever whatever title i want to give myself on a particular day because i like having fun with titles because i think

it's so wanky we give us when we give us our own titles so lord commander of vertice el chiefo ceo um yeah i think that's pretty funny but whatever title i want to give myself growing that community is a big part of it as well so i find the balance is hard right like i'll pump out like we'll pump our marketing for a period of time and i'll realize we haven't touched athletic development so i think that's why like i talked about the health function performance before the performance side of things is both on an

athletic um athletic grant ground or environment but it's also life environment it's finding the balance between that and it's hard when you've got we don't have a heap of resources as a small business it's hard to be able to diversify and do both really really well so um i guess yeah i guess you could say we've shifted a lot more towards the gem pop um just legends that want to be happier and healthier stronger fitter versions of themselves um but there is still that element of athletic development yep um i love it i love your

vision it sounds yeah um excellent but another question for you just before we move on from that amateur athletic development or sub elite athletic development i haven't been involved in team sport or um like club land for five years now and um has it changed at all because i feel like um the education was always the thing that was missing yeah you know uh you know monday uh tuesday thursday's you've got your training and play on sunday and in between your bench on monday you do bicep curls and tricep dips on the wednesday and that's

pretty much the extent of your athletic development is that is that getting better or are you guys making an impact there i think it's getting getting better that you know first 12 months that was a big focus for us to be able to get into clubs and do that but from it's you know we've i guess been running the business on smelly rag for a couple years and it's really hard to continually tip in the resources from our point of view what the clubs need compared to what they're able to give us um give us

back so yes it is it is changing it's changing a lot slower than we would like and i think that's just a little bit of the reality like we kind of came into it going yeah we're going to change all these clubs um i still try and get in clubs that we play like ycw footballer so i'm still trying to get in clubs we can we play and train them wrong as a joke so we can still beat them um but i think it's you know we i look at my club frankston ycw and it's

getting there but there's still a long long way to go um and all of that comes down to resources comes down to funds it comes down to what the club can actually put in like i think if you're a local athlete if you're a like an amateur athlete then the onus is on you um to find those ways to do it so you have elements of each club will be trained properly we're doing the right thing um we'll move away from your back and buys and your chest and tries and and all that kind of

stuff and they'll start moving into you know learning about different ways to to program around like push and pull or around like power strength speed all those kind of things so i think it's moving um it's not moving as fast i think being at a club that's been really successful for a long period of time it's kind of that like you don't need to change what's not broken so a lot of the clubs that have caught up to us over the last couple of years i know they're doing a lot more strength work than we

are um but it's really hard to to change that on a border spectrum so our focus kind of comes on okay which athletes actually need or want help and how do we best best help them my next question is yeah we're going in a totally different direction but you just said something that um kind of really sparked my interest in that you've been running vertice on a on the smell of an oil rag and i can relate to that a lot yeah because you know as yeah as the business grows i mean more equipment comes

in is that um i mean how much of that is true and how long you've been has vertice been open for now and i mean does that keep you like the like the fire in your belly really going that you have to you know you you're all in it's a really good question and you've got to you've got to get into work and just get it done every single day yeah it's um it's it's a really really tough one i think the fire the fire is definitely still there um i definitely feel some days that

i'm like so worn out that i just need a lot find a hole to sleep in um you'd be a robot if you want yeah that's it how many hours a week do you reckon you work on average um i don't know it depends what you consider work like i don't consider this work we're just hanging out and shit what about fifa fifa that so that's something that like finding little things like that they're usually the first things to go that's there was a big period probably like six 12 months where i didn't do any

like i didn't do any i definitely kept playing stuff like that but we didn't do enough of that fun stuff and i remember that first year when we didn't really have any worries we'd play soccer we'd kick we'd piss far around we'd play basketball we'd do all the fun stuff throughout the day coach wake up next morning rearm to go again and you know now we've you know got all the the back end stuff that i know you two have to deal with and all of the things that aren't while you got into business in

the first place um so to answer your question we're three years yeah we just hit three years thank you um it's it's been a it's been a cool ride like it's it's crazy to kind of reflect um and it's something that i'm definitely getting better at doing i wasn't great at the first couple years of that reflection and looking back i'm i guess fairly driven and fairly like that competitiveness comes out in business i always want to be getting better and i think it's really important to stop and take a breath and look back and

realize how far you've come and this year's been a lot of a lot of doing that kind of stuff but there's definitely been times so jesse was your first 12 months and it was kind of like i kind of look at it as like chapters like first year was just us having fun figuring out oh shit we're running a gym now what do we do um the for the next 12 months was me kind of like oh shit i've got to do this by myself and it's not by myself in the fact i've got a

team around me but like you guys know it's still some days feels like it's by yourself it's very lonely yeah it's definitely a lonely place to be and that middle year was like how hard can i work um how many hours can i be here all that kind of stuff and that probably got us out of the hole a couple of times where i you know i never really thought it wasn't wasn't going to work there's always those doubts holy shit what if i fuck up what if i fail what if it doesn't work and

then you know towards the end of last year and the start of this year i was very much about okay how can i build a team to one give me a little bit of my time back but also to create that culture and to be able to run the place without me one of the things that i wanted to do that i did was travel a little bit this year so i ended up going away early this year for seven weeks um left the gym did the gym explode it didn't funnily enough and it's you

know it didn't burn down and and everyone still kept getting better and i guess that's that was a really cool feeling to be able to like be on the other side of the world be able to look at it and you know there's some spot fires and there were some staffing issues that happened and different things but at the end of the day it was all going to be okay if i got back and you know were five grand down on what i expected and we're five grand down on what i expected so it's i

think it's for me that growth has come from being able to appreciate things a little bit more being able to slow down um i like to think one of my biggest lessons from this year is being able to learn how to walk slower um and you know a couple of people around me have helped me do things like that um but yeah it's i can't remember all your questions around that but it was just one of those it's been a crazy it's been a crazy ride and it made me realize how because you you think

early on that all you want is growth i want to get bigger i want to get bigger i want to get bigger but what you forget is that when you get bigger your expenses increase your equipment costs increase your wages increase and all these different things and you're kind of like i realized probably mid middle this year that i was kind of chasing stuff i didn't really want anymore well i didn't really think i thought that i wanted i didn't actually want and it's been a really interesting kind of six months where it was always

what's next and now it's it's a bit of that and it's always going to be good at that but it's more like okay what can i do to make to get better at being small rather than what can i do to try and take over the world can you identify the catalyst to making that decision i think perspective is a big big part of it is like it's really easy to think this is really difficult you know there's i'm the only one in this position and all that kind of stuff and when you kind of

look at it like i'll as you've probably noticed i love diving into books and i think starting to realize how much of an insignificant role we play in the world um has helped um immensely um there's a few may as well i have argue arguments with to a red in the face about um meaning and and desire and things like that and i think we are so meaningless as individuals that what we do doesn't matter in the slightest and for me that gives me a whole a whole heap of uh i guess meaning within itself

in a weird fucked up way um it makes sense in my head but that insignificance gives us meaning to be able to find things we're passionate about and and do what we want and to be able to realize that things are always going to work out eventually like one of my favorite sayings is this too shall pass and i think the good shit or the bad shit like when things are going really really well it's going to pass things are going to be shit pretty soon may as well just enjoy it right and when things

are shit okay let's just endure it because things are gonna get better um so the catalyst is probably a lot of conversations running the podcast definitely helps being able to have a couple of you know conversation every week or two about other people's journeys and other people's struggles and i think everyone suffers and everyone struggles and it's really important to know that and be reminded of that because as business owners you guys would have been through the same stuff it feels like you're all alone you know you're the only one going through it but you

know it just takes a little bit of perspective to kind of look out at everyone else and go well they're all dealing with the same shit just in different ways whether the worst thing that's happened to me is better or worse or different to the worst thing that's happened to someone else relatively it's still the worst thing so it's still yeah it's they're still dealing with something so yeah the catalyst is conversations podcast books being part of the alchemy crew and being able to see like not just one or two different people are going through

it but everyone's going through the same stuff and and you know being able to offer some of my lessons and experiences to help other people and vice versa has been a massively beneficial experience this year now you do have a fuckload of books on the shelf in front of us here um what scar tissue great book that's a great book um what are some of the most influential for your business for your career um and your coaching are up on here and what are some influential people that have kind of um changed your perspective a

little bit yeah it's a really good question i don't really know where to start um i think in terms of books there's probably a couple that and they probably coincided with i guess a time when i was ready to start diving into learning and understanding and um i think when you're like growing up an athlete that ego is always a big part of it and and that trying to disassociate from from the ego side of things has probably happened over the last six twelve six twelve months for me i'm still a way to go a

long way to go but there's certain books that came along kind of at the right time and i tend to find that keeps happening funnily enough you'll read something in a book and you're just like holy shit i was just talking about this or whatever um probably the big one is principles by ray d'alio i read that book twice listen to it once and just how someone who you look at is so successful and has some had so much self-doubt and had so much failure um you know he's had to rebuild his company again and

all these kind of things and he's looked at as like he's the go-to guy now when it comes to like economic um stuff in the u.s and but it it's so much deeper than that in terms of like culture and personal beliefs and principles um and you know it's kind of like a guidebook to like anyone that hasn't read principles and it's loosely based around joseph campbell's um hero's journey that's such a good book to see the because the first third talks about his story so you get a really good insight and context behind it

the middle third talks about his life principles and what he tries to live his life by and then the last third's his work principles and i remember getting to the end of the life principles and going this can't get any better this is amazing his work principles will just be like yeah do this do this and his work principles blew my mind um so much so i've bought five of their books and i actually don't know where any of them are um so i think i've uh ditched them out to people just to read and

and um yeah so that's probably been the one book um and probably you know i could i could list 20 but probably two of the others that have really shaped that view of i guess this insignificance and and meaning and things like that is probably sapiens um by uvano noah harari uh outlines by malcolm gladwell um two that make me realize how little choice we actually have into the white like we have a bandwidth to operate on and i think we think it's a lot bigger than it is um in terms of how much how

many things are determined for us prior to us actually being able to make decisions and even those decisions are influenced by you know who we are and who our ancestors were and the way the world's set up and all those kind of things so yeah that's that's there too that have yeah just blown my mind from a person people point of view um or from like understanding me a little bit better and then two stories that are just amazing parables one's the alchemist um and the other ones uh the old man and the sea so

the alchemist is paulo coelho i think it is and the old man of the seas um ernest hemmingway um two pretty short books that i think they're two of the books that everyone should read once a year because they're the story about i guess hardship and and journey and process that you every time you read them you get something else out of them um yeah i think that's that's the um any good storybook you should be able to learn something different from each one and the celestine prophecy by james redfield is pretty pretty similar on

that it's just everything's a journey in this process and you've sometimes when you don't know where you're headed you've got to trust that process i think it's um great that you do so much reading i think so many of us including myself put reading and learning aside and it definitely stunts our growth whether it's personal growth or business growth um like nick and i could totally agree that the past that we've taken in terms of running our businesses will be similar in wage what you talk about you know i feel like you know it's definitely

we've come across those things at certain periods and my gyms are my six years down bravo but from yeah like one thing i think about it's like fuck man if i just read more books i feel like i could have been so much better at the three-year point than i am like the things i'm learning now by the six-year point if i read books i could have half that and double what i was doing but not be ready to hear some of the advice no exactly right like it's i liked what you said about let

some things come to you at the right time and i think this year everybody read this book this year but the sublapse not giving a fuck come to me at the right time i hate that book it came to me at the right time and um it was really helpful yeah no i don't hate it i think it's a really good book i think so mark manston i dove into all these articles and stuff because i didn't like the book but i think it was because everyone else was fucking reading it so i read it

maybe i got it just after it came out so so fuck on the cover so orange this is pretty cool like so i read it and i really enjoyed it at the time but thought he repeated himself a little bit yeah i thought he was just fuckity fucketing yeah after the first couple of chapters for no reason i thought he was pandering to that crowd that wanted to see fuck in a book yeah and this probably says more about me than he was but it really frustrated me every time someone would like take a photo

of it or put it on instagram like i could tell you everyone that read that book this year because they all put it on instagram and it that almost frustrated me like i kind of set off the carpet it's the book that people read if they don't really want to read books but they want to read books yeah i totally agree like i i started reading it because i was like i haven't read books for ages i need to get back into reading books i'm gonna start with this one one that says fuck and it's

and it's i think i think the way he's purposely written it is to appeal to people that probably should read more books yeah so he's i would say he's probably he's not dumbed it down i don't mean to insult the people that are reading it but i i think it's a good lead into reading more like reading that book maybe go i'm gonna read more yeah his website is exceptional some of his articles uh you know those ones that you read at exactly the right time um yeah it's it's bloody ace i think if anyone's

struggling to get into reading um the alchemist is probably a really good place to start or just dive into an audiobook um audible is probably the best 13 bucks you'll ever spend a month well here what is uh your perfect day look like um perfect day i'll probably get up come and go i'll probably get up at like 4 30 4 45 come in and train that's not a perfect day all right i'm getting into it um get up and train um i've been trying to get into back into the habit of doing it beforehand

because it's one of those things as coaches we always lose our ability to train ourselves because we run out of time and give it to everyone else so come in and train my six a.m crew one of my favorite favorite hours of the day every day um probably go to common folk have coffee have breakfast talk shit um probably at eight eight in the morning i'll probably head down the beach um maybe ready to go for a walk um hang out by myself probably catch up with kp my partner um she's been a big part

of my growth and progression as a person for the last we've been together almost 10 years what does she do she's a teacher so that perfect day probably wouldn't happen because she's goes to school um but spending some time with her probably probably lunch chilling out enjoying the delicious food the mornington potential has to offer um then i'll probably slide in for a nap somewhere somewhere in there probably wake up have some more food do a podcast coach for an hour or two go drink some beers with some mates how often does this day happen

probably all of those boxes in the same day probably never um however i am very fortunate that i kind of get to do whatever i want to do most days and i and you know obviously there's certain times you don't want to rock up and coach at 6 a.m there's certain times that i set five alarms to sleep through them all um to get up at 4 35 and um you know there's times where i'll have to coach till nine or ten but you're an albrey marcus fan i am um in certain certain ways what

do you think of his book um three three out of five stars yeah that's the book you're talking about own your day own your life yeah so it talks about the perfect day and yeah yeah i mean i like the concept but some of the methods yeah i actually i really liked it for the fact that it was like one it was for us as coaches like if we're reading it right it's a really good kick up the ass for some simple shit you know you're not doing um i think for anyone that hasn't dove

into all that kind of side of things you might he might lose him a little bit i listen to it so we're talking like just for context again yeah we're talking about somewhat left alternative kind of methods to yeah i don't know i like them because i think anything my perfect day now is going to be different in a in a couple of months and i think that's the thing that like i get stuck in routine i think routine is great to get stuff done but it's also really easy to burn a month or burning

a year by doing the same shit every day um so my perfect day another answer would be i know something different to yesterday um but yeah i like the doing things differently but i also like the consistency so it's like that that balance right yeah do you when you try and do you immerse yourself in the culture or like do you do a class or do you yeah i try to um one of the things so we we run internship program where we get younger coaches students practitioners in for 12 weeks to for us to

basically teach them as much as we can and for them to learn and have some real practical experience so when they're competent enough and i might sleep in that morning then i'll kind of set them up to run one of those classes and then you know i'll be able to experience it as a client but also to be able to help out for coaching as well so one of one of my goals for next year is to not necessarily coach um after 12 o'clock yeah okay um is to spend the afternoons working on the business

doing podcasts um you know reading napping doing all the fun stuff but then being able to be a part of and being around but not necessarily having to coach yeah um so i definitely don't do it enough the last you know i probably after footy for me like at a subway level finished up i probably had a year and a half where i kind of didn't do much yeah um do you need to do i mean you you wouldn't do as much in the gym i mean i definitely don't do as much being seeing as

you're the club yeah i kind of lost that desire to do anything in the gym you know in a way for a big big period of time and i've kind of i feel as i'm finding it again okay um because i just in terms of i guess sporting achievements or sporting um goals i don't have any okay um at the moment like i ran a marathon a couple of months ago off a day's notice um this guy did the same thing yeah what do you think they're not that hard cardiovascularly wise it wasn't that hard

like i was like pins my pins went though yeah yeah that was the thing they seized that i was probably running too fast like not too fast for what i could handle aerobically yeah 100 but off doing a like a 2.4 in preparation uh yeah at the 20k mark there was a lot of seizing in the pants yeah he rocked up for a podcast a day or two later and couldn't move i'm on the second level looks out straight into it i watched him get out of the car and just waddle up i couldn't get

my phone out fast enough to get it on video but yeah i still got a purple tie now yeah i've still got a tie down um but yeah this is a question for you as well stewie but do you do you ever because i have a cert like a slight level of like resentment sometimes of the commitment that i have to the gym because i mean like we talked about my goals earlier i don't want to get fat yeah so i still want to train yeah i still want to be in the gym i still

enjoy it that's why i got into it yeah um but it's impossible to immerse myself in the culture and do a class and not be not have a hundred people coming at me at the same time so it's impossible to just whilst i'm in the gym i can go somewhere else and do it of course and i sometimes i've been a student a couple of times to get this experience but i can't just do a class i can't just do a workout because it's probably on me to a very high degree but i can't switch

off at the same time so um do you guys find that at all it's taken me time i used to be like that people would ask me questions or i'd be thinking about something else but now i've probably got the stuff around me but i can do that i can just train and just train with the boys in the class or whoever really or sometimes i just immerse myself but do my shit by myself um yeah but that's not always been that way and sometimes it goes back to that way here and there depending on

if i've put too much shit on my plate i've stressed myself out but it's something definitely to work towards and that comes to probably putting your other staff in that position of leadership definitely yeah i think i don't know for me there's certain times that i can train and then if it's outside of that i'll really struggle to just get moving and get motivated like um so i think one of the things for me is i you know some people will say that they don't want to mix business and pleasure and stuff like that one

of the things that i'm completely okay with is to be really good friends with the people that are in in my facility i guess i want it to be a community and if i'm not buying into that then no one else will um so i find it easier now to dive into coach to dive into training with them and you know i'll just end up being one of the like one of the guys in there who will cue and do little things like that so um it's definitely hard it's the curse of being a coach

is that your training is going to be the first thing to go um and that you're not never going to see the environment the same way again um you know when you say to people that i kind of need another gym to go to sometimes they don't get it but i'm sure you boys would get it and i think the way the way that i program a little bit and the way that our gym operates is it's a place that i want to be most of the time anyway so i'm definitely sometimes i resent it

but i'm definitely still not at the stage where i like i need to be somewhere else right now like if i've got three hours off i'll be in here or sitting at the gym um i need to get better at going home and having a nap or going home and chilling out doing some me time or getting down the peninsula and doing something else but yeah it's it's a hard one but i think you get like stu said you get better at it the more you do it yeah it's a never-ending evolving process yeah i'm

really fine yeah what's your advice for someone that's stepping foot in the gym for the first time um i think i think it goes a couple of different ways figure out what what you want is a big one and why you want it and my first bit of advice would be find a really good coach um and yes there's some bias towards that but if you find a good coach then they're going to facilitate you figuring out what you want to do figuring out why you want to do it figuring out how you're going to

get there they're going to set the plan in place they're going to be the support network that you need so you know all of the things like the five bits of advice i give if you find the right coach and the right environment because like like one coach isn't going to be able to change your well they're going to be able to change your life but they're not going to be able to do it forever um so being able to find an environment that's constantly evolving and that can keep teaching you as you evolve would

be number one cool yeah um i'm going to fire our biggest question at you um last final question yeah yeah um but your one message to the world and you can put it on the billboard what's that going to be be excellent is uh that ties in with the vertice name as well yeah so vertice is latin for excellence yeah um excellence character and courage but excellence is that one word that it's really it's kind of the it's been you know in the background the whole time um when we're trying to think of a name

like it's one of the things really hard like i say another hardest thing you're almost doing business trying to find a name that you actually enjoy and you like and you want to keep going back to um excellence is one of those things that we've i guess probably got our own definition for now what's the definition for us it's being able to show up consistently and do your best even when you're even when you're knowing you're going to fuck up and fail and being able to show up again the next day and have a crack

and i think excellence is like you know if you draw a line where excellence is we're probably never going to reach it but knowing that every time we get closer to it we get better and everyone around us gets better and every time we get close to it it gets a little bit further away um so it's just that it's never-ending pursuit of like you know perfection is probably another word but for me excellence is perfection excellence is knowing that you're going to fuck up and be imperfect but you're going to keep doing it and

keep moving forward um yeah and that's and it's multifaceted it's not just in the gym it's life as well yeah everyone kind of bangs on about gym being a metaphor for life um but it is absolutely yeah well that's a great way to finish the show i reckon um you're very wise man i've really enjoyed that i just wanted to say that well thanks for coming down lads i appreciate it quickly where can we find you uh you can find me at 1/2 talk of terrace in mornington um verda's performance most most of the time

um if i'm not there then i'll put you down in my office um you can find me online uh those performance social media uh facebook instagram um i am lachlan willis on facebook the excellence coach on instagram i have a website lachiewelles.com all that's on there is a couple of photos a couple of quotes i love quotes and my journal i kind of write try and write an article i write an article once a week try and write a couple more if i'm not being a piece of shit um far from that just search search

verdas on google you'll find us okay yeah beautiful thanks a lot lads thanks mate pleasure