Podcast 1

The Origin Story of the Exercise Coach and Why Strength Changes Everything

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SHOW NOTES

Brian Cygan and Amy Hudson reveal the origin story of the Exercise Coach and the one book that completely changed the trajectory of Brian’s life by transforming his understanding of what strength training can do in your life and how quickly you can see results. Find out how the Exercise Coach is changing lives 20 minutes at a time.

• The goal of the Strength Changes Everything podcast is to inspire and empower people to live life at their full physical potential. Simply put: strength changes everything.
• Effective personal strength training fundamentally changes everything about your body for the better. It also changes the requirements to get all of the health and fitness results that matter most to you.
• If you want to look better and feel better then this podcast is for you, especially if you’re over 40 and started experiencing the effects of the aging process, even if you’re not excited or interested in going to the gym.
• Brian is also going to discuss the Exercise Coach which is the application of the principles that flow out of the Strength Changes Everything philosophy.
• Brian has been in the fitness industry for the past 20 years and in the process has become pretty passionate about a few things, mainly the science and business of fitness and getting the value of fitness knowledge into the world.
• As a former athlete, Brian became very interested in the science of strength training which led to him going to school for kinesiology.
• The classical science aspects of his degree made sense to Brian, but his education left him with a lot of questions on the application of strength training.
• On the last day of his schooling, a classmate gave Brian a book to read called A Rational Approach to Strength Training, and just by reading the first few chapters, it transformed Brian’s understanding of exercise.
• Brain learned an approach to exercise that was very different from the approach that he had been exposed to in school or as an athlete. The new approach can be summed up in three things: the science says that exercise should be brief, intense, and infrequent.
• Brian tells the story of how he worked with a basketball player and helped him put on over 20 pounds of muscle over the course of 12 weeks while only exercising once a week for 20 minutes to get those results.
• Brian’s newfound approach caused a bit of conflict with the department he was working in and eventually, Brian decided to leave to find somewhere else he could apply those principles. He found a fitness studio that specialized in the application of those principles and after working there for a year found that he was extremely passionate about helping people of all ages and fitness levels.
• That was also around the time that Brian discovered his entrepreneurial spirit and when he and his wife co-founded a business called the Exercise Coach.
• Brian partnered up with another company called Exerbotics to launch the franchise. The technology they provided allowed them to standardize the approach and customize the plan more deeply for anyone that wanted to participate.
• Brian now has hundreds of locations of the Exercise Coach all over the country with plans to open more over the coming years.
• Amy’s story started off by being introduced to Brian many years ago in the Chicago area. She had recently given birth to her second child and was trying to get back to her pre-baby weight and found herself spending hours each week exercising in the only way that she knew which were long runs.
• Brian invited Amy and her husband to try out the Exercise Coach program and within six months, she noticed an incredible shift in her body composition. For the first time in her life, she felt athletic and capable.
• At the same time, they learned about the nutrition aspects of fitness and started making healthier choices. She got so excited about healthy eating that Amy started a blog on the topic.
• Once Amy started learning about the profound health and longevity benefits of strength training she realized that it’s truly a transformative thing and can change the trajectory of someone’s health for their lifetime.
• Right before the birth of her third daughter Amy and her husband moved to Minneapolis and decided to open their own Exercise Coach.
• The first five episodes of the podcast are meant to be the foundational overview of the Strength Changes Everything philosophy.
• We’re going to cover why not all exercise is the same, why people aren’t exercising and the obstacles people face in their fitness journey, the scientific paradigm that underlies the philosophy, the problem of people’s loss of health and fitness and they age, and what can be accomplished by a 20-minute workout once a week.

So when we say strength changes everything, we mean that effective personal strength training as a form of exercise fundamentally changes everything in two ways.

You’re listening to the Strength Changes Everything podcast with the exercise coach, co -founder, Brian Sagan, and me, exercise coach franchisee, Amy Hudson, where you will get up -to -date information on living a healthy lifestyle. The exercise coach methodology promotes whole effort exercise, whole food nutrition, and personalized coaching, utilizing state -of -the -art fitness technology that keeps you safe while building strength. Welcome to our very first episode. Today, we are going to talk about who this podcast is for, what type of content we are going to be bringing your way, and the story behind the exercise coach. Brian, what is the goal of the Strength Changes Everything podcast? And what can our listeners expect to learn as they tune in?

Hello, Amy, and welcome, everyone. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. The goal of the Strength Changes Everything podcast is really to inspire and empower people to live life at their full physical potential. We want to help people live life at their full potential, and their physical potential is such a huge part of that. And we will hopefully do this largely through sharing about the unique point of view that we have developed and that we’ll be explaining and discussing and teaching people about, which is that strength changes everything. Let me just share a little bit about what I mean by strength changes everything.

So when we say strength changes everything. We mean that effective personal strength. training as a form of exercise fundamentally changes everything in two ways. I mean that two ways. It changes, first of all, everything about your body for the better. It changes everything for the better in your body, every system of your body.

We’ll be talking much about that on this podcast. It also fundamentally changes the requirements to get all of the health and fitness results that matter most to you. So this is what we mean when we say strength changes everything. And people can expect really to hear thoughtful explanations and defenses of the points that we make through appeals to reason and research and science and what now after 20 years is our pretty vast experience. And this podcast really is for people who want to look better and feel better and function better, but that maybe aren’t your average or your avid exerciser. Not people who are just crazy about exercising every day, but people who have started to experience the effects of the aging process.

Probably primarily people over the age of 40 who want to look, feel, and function better and really aren’t exercise enthusiasts, don’t love going to the gym, maybe have some kind of injury that they’re concerned about. These are the people who this podcast is really for. And in addition, I think eventually we’ll get to having guests on the show that can share insights and innovation that support our mission of inspiring and empowering people to live life at their full physical potential. People who can share with us also things that support our mission and act synergistically with effective personal strength training. I love connecting dots.

I love shattering myths and shifting paradigms. And I’m excited about eventually talking with fellow paradigm shifters and innovators on our show down the road. And we will also, I should say on this podcast, be talking often about the exercise coach. And the exercise coach is a very cutting edge fitness business. We started and have been operating now for a number of years. And the exercise coach really is the application of the principles that flow out of this philosophy that strength changes everything.

Absolutely.

I am so excited to learn along with our listeners, really, in this podcast journey and from these experts. But Brian, talking about the Exercise Coach, I’d love for you to just share your story and the story behind the Exercise Coach brand. We’d love for you to take us back to the beginning of your journey as a business leader and in the exercise science space, the beginnings of this brand.

I’d be happy to. Been in the fitness industry now for 20 years. I like to share with people that in the past 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to become pretty passionate about three different things. First of all, science -based fitness, and then really the business of fitness. How do we take these cutting -edge methods and the unique value we create and get that value out to as many people as we can? And then also franchising, which is just a way that we help get the value that we create distributed out to the world.

But really my story starts prior to getting into business 20 years ago. And it really begins with me being a baseball player, a division one athlete, who also was pretty into strength training, competed in powerlifting and got really interested in the science of strength training. And so that’s what I studied in school. I got a degree in exercise science or kinesiology and played baseball in college. However, after earning a degree in exercise science, or almost getting to the point where I’d earned a degree in exercise science, to be honest, there were a lot of things that still didn’t make sense to me.

The classical science aspect of my degree made sense, but things seem to be lost in the application. I just had lots of questions. Back then, it was just simple questions like, why do we do three sets of 10 reps? Has anybody ever tried 11 reps? What’s the difference? Why do we do three sets of 10 and not three sets 11?

And so I just had lots of questions. How exactly does exercise work? Frankly, it didn’t really make that much sense. But then on my last day of school, literally last day, a classmate comes up to me and says, Brian, I really don’t know why, but I think for some reason you would really enjoy reading this book. And this classmate gives me a book. And I thought, that’s cool.

I like gifts as much as anybody else. And I took that book home and I started reading it that very night. And that night, the light bulb just went off for me. This book, which was called a practical approach, or I’m sorry, a rational approach. to strength training was written by Matt Briskey, who’s a collegiate strength coach and professor. And this book in just a few chapters completely made sense of exercise for me.

And eventually we’ll talk about some of the scientific principles that were really elucidated for me. But this book helped me learn about an approach to exercise that was very different than the approach that I had been exposed to in school or even in my athletic training as well. And this approach, which was based on scientific principles, can be summed up with three things, three principles, and that is brief, intense, and infrequent. This book explained that based on science, we could understand that exercise to be ideal should be brief, intense, and infrequent. And I started to apply and more specifically some of the principles that I learned about in this book.

I started to apply it right away as I was working as a graduate assistant or about to start working as a graduate assistant strength conditioning coach at the university that I graduated from. And I was working with the baseball team and the basketball team primarily. It’s summer in between the next school year. And one story that was very transformative for me involves some work that I did with a basketball player. And that basketball player was a young student athlete that was 6 ‘9″, 209 pounds, trying to build muscle and put on weight to perform better, but after going through a lot of conventional strength training was unable to do. And that summer, him and I applied these principles and we saw him go from 209 pounds and a little bit out muscled on the court to being in the mid 230s.

just put on an incredible amount of muscle in 12 weeks. But the real punchline is he only worked out once a week for about 20 minutes, that’s it to get those results. So it was really amazing to see right in front of my eyes, this science work in application in such a profound way. So from there, I continued to apply these principles with other teams. And it led to a little bit of conflict, just in that I’m applying principles that are not what the rest of the strength and conditioning department is applying. And so ends up that I was given an option eventually to apply the approach.

that was being used at that school or go someplace else. And so rather than pursuing my graduate assistantship and master’s in exercise science, I was so committed to this newfound approach that I went out and left and I had to find a place where I could apply these principles. They just made so much sense. And went and started to work in a fitness studio that actually, fortunately, specialized in the application of these principles. One of very few in the country at that time, 20 years ago or so. And after working there for about a year, figured out that I was super passionate about creating this kind of value for people of all ages and fitness levels, not just athletes.

That got me even more excited to see that I could help someone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or even beyond, who just wanted to perform better in the game of life, look, feel, and function better. And I also discovered that I had an entrepreneurial spirit. And to make a long story short, my wife Jerrianne and I co -founded a business called The Exercise Coach. And we operated a couple locations here in Illinois for a number of years. And then really felt for quite some time, just a burden to scale the unique value we were creating. Again, creating such powerful value for people that were not avid exercisers that wanted to get healthy and feel better and live better.

And we wanted to scale that across the country, maybe even eventually across the globe. It was pretty revolutionary for people to get all those results that are so important to them. And their doctor says are so important. of them with a 20 -minute workout that they could do just once or twice a week. So we really felt we needed to expand and scale across the country. But also we really wanted a technology at the heart of our method and really our brand offering if we were going to do what it takes to scale a business across the country.

And so we ended up finding that technology and partnering with a company called Exerbotics, which at the time was a partner of ours in launching our franchise. And our goal really in putting a technology at the heart of our offering was to better quantify this value that we were delivering and people were realizing and to standardize the approach so that we could do a really quality job across the country. And we were looking for a technology that would allow us to even more deeply and more personally customize what we were doing with individuals of all fitness levels, with all kinds of conditions and all kinds of even really comfort levels with exertion. And so we found that in Excerbotics and we designed and launched a franchise with our first locations opening in 2011. Eventually, a group of our partners and us were able to acquire exerbotics.

And so we’ve really developed that technology into something that’s exactly what we had always envisioned. And today we have hundreds of locations of the exercise coach around the country and even in Japan and have plans to open hundreds more in the coming years.

That is so cool. And I love the way, Brian, that your passion for delivering this revolutionary training in a safe and effective way to many people came together. And in your vision, starting at the exercise coach and scaling it, I think it’s so cool. And I think it’s helpful for our listeners to really connect with you and get that background and just appreciate the origins of this brand and understand on a deeper level, why strength changes everything, really. Thank you for sharing that.

My pleasure. And in this initial episode, Amy, I thought it’d be a good idea if we also shared with our listeners, how you got involved with the exercise coach and how that led to you being my co -host. the Strength Changes Everything podcast. So would you mind sharing?

Absolutely, sure. Yep, Brian, you mentioned The Exercise Coach now being a national franchise and even having locations in Japan and I am a franchisee of this brand. So here is my story with The Exercise Coach. So I first got introduced to The Exercise Coach by Brian himself, actually, down in the Chicago area where I had grown up and used to live with my husband and kids. And I had just had my second child. I was trying to get back to my…

You still, by the way, live with your husband and kids.

I still live with them.

Yeah. Yep.

Still.

You guys used to live down here. But we used to live down there. I had grown up in that area. I had two kids at the time. Now we have three. But I had just had my second child and I was trying to get back to my pre -baby weight.

And I was using the only form of exercise that I knew at the time, which were long runs. So the long runs, though, were taking up about five hours of my time each week on top of me working full time. And I was just getting to the point where I was feeling like it was unsustainable. And I was being I was taking too much time away from these babies that I had at home that I wanted to be spending time with. And so I was frustrated. And Brian, actually had invited us into one of his studios to try the exercise program.

So my husband, I met Brian and he invited us to try his exercise program. And I heard it was a 20 minute workout. And I looked at my husband, Jesse, and I said, if the exercise coach can accomplish the job in 40 minutes a week that I am trying to accomplish in five hours a week, sign me up. I will be the first one in line for that. It sounds too good to be true, but let me try. And at that time, my husband That might downplay your initial skepticism just a little bit, Amy.

I was like, I hope this works. Let’s see. And it would be great if it worked. And my husband, Jesse started working for the exercise coach brand actually as the director of franchise development. And I got to start strength training twice a week in one of Brian’s studios.

And within six months, it was amazing. I noticed just a dramatic shift in my body composition. I noticed that I was leaner. I was stronger than I had ever been before in my life. And for the first time, I really felt almost athletic. I was never an athletic person and I felt athletic and I felt capable physically.

And on top of that, my husband and I really started learning about the whole food nutrition approach as well through the exercise coach. And we started making healthier choices, cooking meals on a daily basis from the amazing collection of recipes on the exercise coach Pinterest boards. And my husband, actually dropped about 40 pounds. He completely transformed his body composition too. And we adopted this healthier way of eating. I learned the best choices to offer my children.

I even got so excited about healthy eating that I created a blog about healthy and creative meals to serve young kids. But on top of all that, once I really started learning about the profound health and longevity benefits of strength training, I realized that it’s truly a transformative thing that somebody can do. It can actually change the trajectory of somebody’s health for their lifetime. And I became so passionate about it. I started working with corporate to put out articles and social media content to help educate people on this and inspire clients and potential clients experience this transformative thing called strength training. So right before our third daughter was born, we actually made the decision to move out of the Chicago area and up to Minneapolis.

And I told my husband that I couldn’t live without the exercise coach and that we had to open one. opened our first studio in April of 2017 and our second in October of 2019. And I just find it a great joy to own this brand. I see the way it transforms our clients’ health. I see the way it empowers them to live the lifestyle they want.

And I hear amazing stories every day. And it’s just hard to put into words, Brian, how deeply satisfying that is. But we like to say around here that the exercise coach changes lives 20 minutes at a time. I feel like I’m living proof of that. And I just see proof of that on a daily basis with my very own clients.

So that’s my story. That’s so great, Amy, thanks for sharing that. And it really, I guess we’ve known each other now for more than 10 years. And Jesse and I have been working together for close to that as well. And he has maintained that weight loss now for years. And you guys are one, one healthy family for sure.

And you do a great job in those exercise coach locations in Minnesota, those two locations, you guys serve your staff and serve your clients so well. And we’re so proud of the work that you do up there. And I’m excited to be able to bring that experience into the podcast. As we go forward, you can share your firsthand experience, not only personally applying the Strength Changes Everything principles, but also you can share stories about how you apply those principles and help people of all kinds of people with different goals and different fitness levels get the results that matter most to them. So thanks, Amy, for your willingness to co -host The Strength Changes Everything podcast. I think a big task of yours is going to be to maybe filter and ground some of the things I talk about in a manner that make good sense to people and bring me back down to down to earth and making sense when needed.

Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, I will do my best. I am just excited about this podcast and all of the content we’re going to be bringing. I hope as clients or potential clients or as owners or as coaches that it brings just a lot of knowledge and inspiration to you. And we in fact have designed the first five episodes together. a great foundational overview of this philosophy behind Strength Changes Everything.

Brian, can you tell us what we have planned for the next four episodes? Yeah, so as Amy said, we wanted these first five really to give people a good people that have never heard of the exercise coach or people have no idea what we’re talking about down the road when we’re 100 episodes into this. We want people to really go first to these first five episodes for this this foundational understanding of the strength changes everything philosophy. So in the next four episodes in this order, we’re going to be talking about first how not all exercise is the same. And we’re going to be talking about these commitments we have to safe, effective, and efficient exercise and exercise that is based on evidence. Not all exercise is the same.

We’re going to be talking about that in the next episode. And then we’re going to talk about why people aren’t exercising or what gets in the way, the obstacles that people face. It’s a passion of ours to help people who conventional workouts just are not working for. And then we are going to start to focus in a little bit and we’re going to start to talk about the scientific paradigm that really undergirds what we’re talking about and informs our approach. And we’re going to share why we believe that muscle quality matters more than movement quantity. And in that episode, we’re also going to talk about what is at the root of people’s loss of health and fitness as they age.

So you’ll want to tune into that one. We’re going to talk about what really is the problem that we’re trying to solve with exercise, and more specifically, with very optimized exercise that is safe, effective, and efficient. And in our view, that means we’re going to use strength training, evidence -based strength training. And then in the fifth episode, we will talk about what can be accomplished in a 20 -minute workout done twice a week and how that works, how people can possibly get maximum results, the results that matter most to their personal health and fitness from a 20 -minute workout.

And we’ll talk a lot about the unique process that we’re using at The Exercise Coach in hundreds of locations around the world. I can’t wait. You won’t want to miss these upcoming episodes. Be sure to download them, save them, make sure you listen to all four of them. They’re going to be packed with lots of awesome info and inspiration for you.

You can learn more about the exercise coach by visiting exercisecoach .

com. While you’re there, make sure you take advantage of the two free sessions to try our revolutionary training method in your local area. We will see you next time. Don’t forget, strength changes everything.