Guest: Daniel Fredell

Podcast Release Date: 4/29/2021

Welcome to Trulyfit the online fitness marketplace connecting pros and clients through unique fitness business software. 

Steve Washuta: Welcome to the Trulyfit Podcast. I am your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s podcast, I’m speaking with Daniel Fidel. Daniel is a personal trainer in North Carolina. He’s also a BJJ. A jujitsu coach at Phoenix Jiu-Jitsu. Daniel and I speak about unconventional equipment.

We start talking kettlebell at first, and then we expand and talk about bands and some other unconventional equipment that he uses and why that may be best also, for some of his athletes and for some of his clients. Really, overall, this conversation is Daniel Nye, sort of waxing poetic about how you not only use the unconventional equipment but how you use the body of your client to represent an overall solid workout and tips and tricks for trainers. I think it was a very important conversation. I enjoyed it. With no further ado, here’s Daniel. Daniel, thanks for being here with the Trulyfit podcasts to let the audience know a little bit about you and your fitness background how you got into fitness what exactly you do now.

Daniel Fredell: So basically, I’m a full-time personal trainer, I have been for going on eight years now full time. I originally started working out in high school and absolutely fell in love with it. Shortly after a more strict some of the Brazilian jujitsu instructors here at Phoenix jujitsu. I just needed something, you know, whenever I was growing up, I had very bad asthma.

Daniel Fredell: So I would literally be eight years old, go up a flight of steps and I couldn’t breathe at the top, I would have to hit my inhaler, I had to have a rescue inhaler with me everywhere I go. I grew out of that in my early teens, you know, early teens, it’s kind of late to start wrestling or football or basketball. So I just started looking for other pursuits signed up for weight training, fell in love with the movement of it. So I continue to do that. I’m 33 and I’ve been working out ever since.

Steve Washuta: Awesome. You know, like a lot of personal trainers, we have so much in common so much that we could potentially talk about here. But we’re going to focus on and center on one topic. That’s going to be sort of unconventional equipment. We’re going to talk about equipment that you use, and that I use or that I’ve never heard of or that you’ve never heard of and different things we do to get our clients to their goal. So first, let’s start out with one that’s considered unconventional by the standards of the average person who goes to the gym but certainly not by personal trainers. That’s the kettlebell. Can you speak to maybe how you use the kettlebell and what you think about the kettlebell?

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, so the great thing about the kettlebell, and one of the reasons why it’s one of my main training tools, is the unbalanced nature makes you fight throughout the entire technique. A lot of trainers use the kettlebell much like they do dumbbells. But kettlebell wasn’t designed for that. It was designed as a tool in the market. But whenever people start moving them, the weight is all in the ball at the bottom. If you’ve never seen a kettlebell before, think of a bowling ball with a fat handle attached to it. Okay, it’s got a flat bottom on it big handle on the top. So every movement from the swing to the snatch to the windmill, everything is going to make the weight off balance.

Daniel Fredell: So not only do you have to fight to move the weight, you have to fight to maintain balance with the weight as well. When you start talking about true functional fitness, that’s a big thing in dealing with a weight that isn’t always perfectly balanced. How often in your life do you do a barbell squat? Now, I mean, you may pick something up and throw it over your shoulder, but you’re not going to have it perfectly balanced across your traps and then go into a squat position, come up with a kettlebell, you can mimic a lot of daily activities with the kettlebell itself because of the design and because of its off-center resistance.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, now that makes perfect sense. And for those who, you know, most of the people who listen to this podcast are personal trainers. But for those who don’t understand what we mean by that, that balance being all set, imagine holding something in the air, right with your arm up this way. That weight, right the dumbbell, there’s weight on either side, and you’re holding the weight like this, right? It’s not difficult for your forearm and your elbow to hold weight.

Now, if that weight was top-heavy, right, so I’m holding the handle at the bottom and the kettlebell is actually facing in the air. But that kettlebell wants to fall in either direction. So I have to use my core and different shoulder muscles in my forearm and my grip strength and all these different things to hold that kettlebell up. That’s just one example of one exercise. But that’s why the weight distribution is more challenging and it recruits more muscles.

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, that’s one thing about too, I love hopping on Instagram and seeing people talking about you know, the kettlebell jugglers. You know how they say it looks more like a circus act than an exercise. The truth is actually somewhere in between. So the kettlebell and you’ll hear a bunch of different dates thrown They’re from different stories. But basically in the early 1600s, it was made as a counterweight. So the at a flat bottom weight on the bottom and then the handle on top, they would tie a rope around the handle, throw it over a pole and then hang meet up in markets. So that was literally the original design as a kettlebell.

Daniel Fredell: Once jesters and entertainers start coming into the market, like beggars looking for handouts, they would just grab these and start juggling them and playing with them to entertain people coming in and out of the markets to try to get you to know, $1 thrown in a hat or whatever. So once they start doing that, it actually became a fitness routine. And then, of course, the circuit strongmen found them, and then they started making these ridiculously heavy kettlebells, and they would show their strength through swings and snatches, and, you know, double juggle tosses and stuff like that. That was one of the big things back then was more entertainment and fitness. But obviously, because of these guys, were swinging this weight around, it started building a lot of money around that.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, that’s interesting, you don’t typically think about fitness equipment having been dated back to, you know, 400 years ago and used not for fitness. But then again, we’re talking about unconventional equipment. Let’s go right to another piece of unconventional equipment. You know, on it is a big brand now in the in fitness, right? So they have a lot of unconventional equipment. I know they’re tied to a lot of MMA-related things which you are as well, so they have the mace right, which is also in that same category as the kettlebell as far as the weight distribution is off, have you? Have you used the mace before? If so, what do you think about it?

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, I’m a big fan of the mace on there, again, you’ll see a lot more like flow style movements with the mace. I’m not a big fan of those Personally, I love the mace because A, it’s great for shoulder mobility and shoulder stability. You will, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an exercise or a piece of exercise equipment, that works your grip harder because the mace handles are just, they’re hollow, but they’re really fat, you know, most of them have like a two-inch diameter gives me a two-inch diameter. So whenever you get that thing swinging, whether you’re doing 360s, tendon twos, barbarian squats, whatever you’re fighting the entire time, over the mace and if you go heavy enough on your grips go burn out before your shoulders.

Steve Washuta: I think a lot of this like unconventional equipment, people in the fitness industry, for whatever reason, tend to center themselves on to one area, whatever that is, it’s like, oh, you have to do yoga, only, you have to do Pilates only, or you have to do just, you know, weight training sets of six, moving in one direction. It’s, whatever you enjoy is good, right? So as long as you’re moving and getting stronger, and doing whatever you have to, and if this brings more people into the industry, because they think it’s interesting, and more people who want to work out and exercise, then that’s great, right? The more unique that we can create things as fitness professionals and fitness industry creators, the better it is for everybody.

Daniel Fredell: You know, that’s one thing too is, I know, it’s very easy to kind of find your niche and hang out within that. But the big thing is, is it doesn’t matter what piece of equipment you have, the basics are always the basics. Whether you have a barbell or a dumbbell or a kettlebell, your line of pull is the same. your elbow angle for presses is always going to be the same. It just depends on what tool you use, you know, the original bodybuilder, Eugene Sandel, had no other stuff, he lifted rocks, rock is still a form of resistance, you know, and that’s where we get the Atlas stone competitions and all that stuff.

Daniel Fredell: So the actual weight you have is only going change and how you use it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing, you know, like we talked about the steel mace or the kettlebell, you know, the steel maze, you’re gonna have a much longer lever. So whenever you’re doing presses, you can play with the length of it, the ball is the heavy bar on the mace, the tubing is usually hollow. The closer Your hand is to the ball, the better balance you’re going to have.

Daniel Fredell: Once you stretch out, you know two feet away from the way your grip is going to be fired up because you’re trying to balance that weight left to right, as you press it, kettlebell, you’re not going to have the leverage part of it are not that long of a lever, but you still like you were trying to do a bottoms-up press to where the bail is overtopped, and you’re just squeezing, the same thing, trying to make micro-adjustments to where your wrist isn’t going to collapse from the weight. 

Steve Washuta: Yeah, so that’s a great point that you made so that the tool itself is used in a similar fashion as the other tools, right? So a kettlebell is not that much different in how you look when you’re using it as a band or as a dumbbell or a barbell.

But what’s not talked about is really the body is the secondary tool, right? So you have the item, set item that we just named, and then you have the body and the body is being challenged in different ways by using the tool different So whether you’re pushing or pulling or lunging, or squatting or hinges or planking, you know, these small adjustments by shifting weight by changing the tempo by changing the weight distribution and the item and how far your arms are out or in is really, you know, your body. That’s, that’s changing the creation of the movement.

Daniel Fredell: The good part about that is it’s very easy to swap out equipment, you know, if you’ve been doing bent-over barbell rows, and then you swap that out for dumbbells. In the next week, the clients always feel like they’re doing something new, you know, it’s the exact same motion, you can put them on a cable pulley and have them doing seated rows. Then you can have them doing plank rows, they’re still getting the same line of pull, but you’re mixing it up enough to where it still feels fresh too, you know, they don’t feel like they’re still going in doing a push, pull and legs. Do you know what I mean?

Steve Washuta: That’s great advice, I always shamelessly plug my book behind me Fitness Business 101. In that book, I have an acronym called dots, duration, object, tempo, stability. By changing any of those changing the duration, whether it’s 45 seconds or 12, repetitions object, whether it’s a kettlebell or its mace, or it’s a dumbbell by changing the tempo, which could be three seconds, concentric, two seconds, II centric, vice versa, whatever, and changing the stability, which is maybe I’m on one leg, maybe I’m standing on a Box. Maybe I’m on two legs, maybe I’m seated. By changing any of those, you’ll have endless exercises to work with. like that now. Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty nice. Yeah, yeah, you know,

Daniel Fredell: I could definitely see how that would apply to, I mean, every training session, that’s great.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, so using that, I think, I want to talk now about I don’t know if you’ve ever used the rep trainer before. So the rip trainer is one of like tr x’s, I think, branded tools, but they have other versions of it, where it’s essentially a straight bar. And at the end of that bar, it has a like a scholastic band that connects to things. So you can move in different directions with it. And I find that great to use with my clients, because like we just talked about, you can move in all different directions, and you can create the push and the pull and all those other motions, but it has that unbalanced where the energy is coming from one side.

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, I like those. I think this one thing that doesn’t get programmed often enough, especially in rehabilitation clients with bad hips, bad knees, weak trunks, weak is resistance. You know, the rib trainer is very good. Like you said to me, it’s on a bar too. So the further you get away from the bungee attachment, the heavier it gets, but if you have some I just starting out, they can grab right beside the bungee attachment to where there’s gonna get a little bit of that resistance.

Daniel Fredell: Obviously, you can walk, you know, closer to the pole or further away from the pole to add resistance on the band. But just really building that rotational strength and rotational stability in the hips is extremely important, especially for anybody with a desk job or my travels often to where they’re constantly in a seated position. That’s one of the big things that gets atrophied is the glute Meade, your spinal erectors are so as the deep muscles of the core, and rotational poles are one of the best ways to rebuild them.

Steve Washuta: So what about cardio equipment outside of maybe Jacob’s Ladder? I don’t know any ones that are like that unconventional? Do you use anything that’s unconventional in the cardio world?

Daniel Fredell: So I’m not a big fan of cardio, but I am a huge fan of conditioning. You know, and a lot of people use them interchangeably. But basically, to me, cardiovascular fitness is being able to run a 5k without getting tired, you know, being able to go long distance, low heart rate, for conditioning, much like hit training, you want to get your heart rate to spike, hold it for a little bit and then recover and then spike it again. So for me, you know, the kettlebell is an excellent conditioning tool. You know, I’ve got one workout that I run my class through maybe once every couple of months just to test them and see how their conditioning is going. I call that the VA hero.

Daniel Fredell: So basically, you get a heavy kettlebell that you can swing for 20 reps. As soon as you knock out 20 reps, you’re going right into the Hero Pose. So think about shins flat on the floor, seated down on your ankles. Okay, so you’re in a seated position. shins down, basically bowed down, you take five deep breaths, your everything just based off your breath, stand up 20 more swings. And we just keep that going for as long as they can. I mean, that’s a 10-minute workout that will just destroy your lungs and destroy your heart rate.

Daniel Fredell: But I absolutely love that and you know, with anything much like the mace bill, you know, you can do the canoe paddle to launch to where you’re hitting a full-body exercise but light resistance so you can spike it, drop it down. Basically anything even the barbell you know if you’ve ever done a set of 20 back squats, your heart rates through the roof and you can’t breathe, you know, it just depends on how How you live. So like you were talking about changing the tempo, changing the lift, speed, all of those things can be worked into conditioning.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, that’s a great point, there’s a lot of different ways in which you can get your heart rate up and, and work conditioning, it doesn’t need to be in one plane of motion, stepping up and down on a stepper or elliptical. You know, obviously, there are clients who don’t feel comfortable otherwise, I shouldn’t call them clients, just general people in the public, who might not have the, you know, the finances or the time to work with a trainer, like yourself for myself. That’s what they tend to do.

But I think us as trainers, it’s important that we teach our clients or people in our classes, there are other ways to do this. It’s probably best for your body to move in, in all directions. I know that that’s probably how you train too. I want to speak a little bit to you mentioned, you know, mixed martial arts training, are there tools that you believe unconventional tools that are good, that people can use in the weight room as mixed martial artists to help them in their practice?

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, so I tried to get my guys to mix it up as much as possible. You know, obviously, we’re pretty heavy on the kettlebell training, a lot of just dynamic stretches are great for that a lot of you know, like, using your body weight as the tool.

So you’ve got like the frog hops, and your bear crawls, shrimp wall or shrimp crawls, and just a lot of things to get your body to learn how to move together, you know, everybody sees bear crawl, and they think it’s just, you know, a lot of people cast it, like they cause burpees, you know, but the big thing about the bear crawl much like a burpee is all four limbs learn to work in unison, you know, you’re keeping yourself balanced, you’re keeping your hips low, all of your joints are bent, all of your joints are under tension, and you’re just crawling. Your right hand has to know what your left foot is doing, your trunk has to stabilize, your lungs have to keep everything fired up and moving. So it’s a great full-body exercise.

Daniel Fredell: But you also want to learn proprioception, you learn how to balance say, your bear crawl, and you automatically want to go to the right, you know, your body has to know not only how to change gears or change sides, but all four limbs have to do that same change at the same time. So that’s one of the big things that you’ll see with a lot of new, you know, like you said, general population, if you ask them to come in and show you a Turkish getup, you can explain it down to the finest detail you possibly can, you can demonstrate it for him 20 times, soon as they do it, they’re not going to do anything correctly.

Their body doesn’t know how to work as five individual units moving in unison, you know, between your trunk and your four limbs. Their body just doesn’t understand how this works. So that’s one of the big things, Jeff to get them to learn is the proprioception and the balance from limb to limb.

Steve Washuta: I think that info expands into all sports, not just mixed martial arts. So you know, whether you’re playing football, or baseball or basketball, golf, even, you’re not just moving in a sagittal and frontal plane, you’re moving in all planes, and your weight distribution is off. Because you’re never doing the same exact swing, even in baseball, depending upon the speed of the pitch, your swing is going to be different.

So I think it’s important to work with your clients in all ranges of motion and have these unconventional pieces of equipment to challenge them to get them used to your athletes specifically, but really everyone to get them used to what they’re going to be encountering, and not just say, okay, we’re going to work in your deadlifts and squats, great, you know, I understand you want to train for muscles, but you also have to train for movement.

Daniel Fredell: You know, obviously, in your athletes, you want them to be very mobile, and you want them to be able to have excellent reaction speed, have excellent power and endurance throughout the entire sport of it. But think about your daily living activities for the average client. You knowmemergency situations could you get into to where that could mean the difference between having a good day and having a bad day. I don’t want to go on the terms of life and death. But that’s why I tell my clients as far as like, I’m not a big runner, I have done some mountain runs in the past.

Daniel Fredell: One of the big things I tell them is I continuously run because I think if you have a good solid 5k time, you find yourself out of a lot of problems. You know, if you run out of gas on the side of the road, you can cover three miles to get to the gas station, get a gas can run back, you’re good to go. If you have trouble running a mile, then it’s going to take a large chunk out of your day. You know, if you get into any type of bad situation whatsoever, if you can put three miles between you and that bad situation, you’re probably going to be fairly safe. It’s kind of looking at not only the martial art side of it, not only the athlete side but just the normal daily life side.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, that’s that’s a good point. I had that problem, fairly recently. Actually, I locked my keys in my car and locked my phone in my car and no one was around. Basically, I showed up to hit golf balls early in the morning, and no one was there yet. I got there an hour early and I was the only car in the parking lot. I had no idea what to do because in 2021 without a phone, you go well, “what that what the heck do I do?” and I live two and a half miles from the golf course.

But I just I booked at home, you know, I probably ran eight, eight and a half minute mile and got there and a decent amount of time. I didn’t waste my day. Right? Not that we need to be training for things just like that. But like you said, it is a great, you know, secondary thing to be able to know that if you’re in a bad situation. If you can strike or wrestle or run, these things could potentially help you out.

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, definitely, let’s put you back in a situation. But this time, your favorite drink is Mountain Dew, you usually eat pizza for lunch and you smoke a pack a day, your entire days go. Like you said you got home and under 20 minutes. So that’s like an hour out of your day. But if you had to walk that entire distance, because you got out of breath every half mile or every quarter of a mile, then that’s literally half of your day, if not more than that, just to get that one simple task, though.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, that’s a great way to look at that to like that scenario. Llike we said, Yeah, is this going to happen to you on an everyday basis? No, but this that’s that is just a secondary benefit of all the other benefits that come with being in good shape. So I want to stay on this a little bit more. So let’s stick with the martial arts. I’m a big TRS user. I love the T rex because you get to use your full body and there’s not an exercise you can’t do with it like I just named before pull shins, lunge, squat plank, whatever you want to do. You could ever hit every muscle group.

I feel like for martial artists, the suspension training would be great because the grips are fairly big. And everything except the pushing movements revolves around you gripping. I know grip strength is important. Do you use that? And do you use anything else for grip strength?

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, the TRS is great. I love how, if you get tactical, when you get that like rubber handle, that’s an excellent document, it doesn’t break down. But what I really like are the auto like the cheaper ones with that foam handle. Because your fingers really sink into it, it feels like it attacks your grip a lot harder. So I definitely use those, especially for the single hand exercises to where you can just grip down and you’re focusing everything on one hand.

But I mean, if you do a set of, you know, if you take a tr x row, and you walk in deep enough, and you do a set of 25 of them and your grip is smoked your forearms, gonna fill the pump with your back. But now I really like that I use that a lot in not only the athletic performance side but the rehabilitation side too.

Daniel Fredell: Because if I’ve got somebody you know, older client or anything like that that comes in, that’s a great way to balance them as well. So we can work on fixing squat depth, we can work on, you know, single foot squats. With some of my athletes, that way, you just get a little bit of an adjustment. Whenever you’re using your hands, you’re not worried about holding on to a static pole, the TRS straps kind of move up and down with you as you go. But I mean, I probably get 20 of those.

Steve Washuta: To add to that, for anyone who doesn’t quite get what you were saying, but that was perfect is that, you know, using your upper body to help assist your lower body allows you to get to a point in which you don’t need your upper body anymore. That’s potentially the end goal, right? So at first you do a squat, and you’re holding on nice and tight and you’re using maybe let’s just throw random percentages out there 6040 upper body to lower body before you know what it’s 5050 and then it’s 4060 the other way, and then before you know it, you have a decent squat form where you’re not holding the handles at all.

I think you know having that ability to use that. Not just for athletes, but like you said in a rebuild Terry sense is very important because that’s another part of the conversation. But that’s where the money is scarce. If you want to if you if you’re a trainer out there and you’re struggling, guess what the people who have money are older, they’ve had more time to acquire that money. They have retirement accounts, they’re probably not paying for kids anymore. The 50s and 60s and 70-year-old adults have the money so you have to know how to train them.

Daniel Fredell: You know, it leads into a whole different conversation as the division between health and fitness in this industry. But the big thing about it is a lot of my clients come to me from probably 40 and older like you said, You know, I mean they’re definitely gonna be the population that has the money to pay for a trainer but at the same time those are the ones who are finally like, Look, I’ve been given terrible health information my entire life.

Daniel Fredell: The younger people, it’s there. It’s much easier access to get to health information because we have Google you know, back then they relied on the food pyramid and the US regulation of what is healthy or what is not healthy and with the older population they’ve been brought up on fried foods and soft drinks and Everything that the money marketers can throw, or the food marketers can throw at him, though with them.

Daniel Fredell: It’s about giving them their life back, you know, most of them have gone from working a very active job in their teens and early 20s to working into an office, you know, back then, I say back then, which was probably a 70s to 90s era was when a lot of jobs started moving from being static, or excuse me from being on the feet and moving around a lot to being static and being seated.

Those are the ones you’re going to see that need the low back strengthening that needs to loosen up the hip flexors to need to loosen up the hamstrings.

Daniel Fredell: So, I mean, I feel like that is kind of the generation to where you can give the most back in your community as well. You know, with me, one of the things that I did early on in my career is would schedule a session with a massage therapist. While we were there, I would get into anatomical discussions with them, kind of showing them what I know. That built referral programs for me. Then I go to a chiropractor, same thing, can I talk to him about how the muscles lined up, how to keep everything in good alignment, how to push for a good movement pattern, that I could help out their clients as well.

That built a referral program. So like a lot of my work, even though I’m kind of known for the kettlebells and jujitsu training, a lot of my paycheck comes from my rehabilitation clients.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, you’ve made a lot of great points there. I want to talk about the last point and then go backward. But having these people to refer out, I tell young trainers all the time is very important. We are not specialists in everything. If you pretend you are, they’re gonna sniff you out, right? People are intuitive, they’re gonna sniff out your Bs, and you’re not helping your clients. So when a client comes to you and has a major issue that you don’t know, you can say, “Hey, listen, I have a, an orthopedic doctor, I think that you can see I know him personally, here’s his card information” or “I have a massage therapist that can help work out your lower trap issue better than I can, why don’t you go see this person”.

So it’s important to build relationships in the industry. Then leading to the first point you said, you know, these older clients who come in, you know, it is important that we help them. It’s also important that we make it fun and creative, all of the things that you talked about earlier, right, using the mace moving around using the kettlebell, all you have to do is lighten those versions and make them a little bit easier, right they that you can use all of those pieces of equipment we mentioned and all of those exercises with those older populations.

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, and that’s one thing, that’s a lot of new trainers that come in here, the potential trainers coming here, it’s awesome to know how to use an exercise and modify up. But you also need to know how to modify it down as well. You know, a lot of new trainers come in, I remember to back when I was a young buck, I was like, oh man, I’m gonna tear these people up, nobody’s gonna is walking out of hereafter leg day, working with an average client, they have a job to get to tomorrow, you know, they can’t let their entire lives revolve around training.

So there’s sometimes in here with a normal client, even my athletes, you know, we’ll get into a heavy training session, and I’m like “Okay, we need to back this off a little bit”. You know, a lot of my athletes, I’m lucky to say a lot of my athletes, I have to pull back rather than push forward. You know, mentally they’re ready to run through a brick wall.

Daniel Fredell: But is that going to help them progress? Or is that just going to make them hurt for the next couple of days, and then drop our progress back by a week or so? You know, so you kind of have to learn the balancing act between that. Okay, well, they don’t have a job to go to tomorrow, but how’s the recovery? Are they really eating what they’re supposed to be eating? Or do you know that they have trouble with, you know, they’re in inflammatory foods, and they like to drink a six-pack on the weekend? You know, how’s the recovery gonna match up to the training load that you’re putting them?

Steve Washuta: Yeah, and you know, just speak to what you started that with. It’s much easier to train a professional athlete than it is, let’s say a 77-year-old woman with COPD, and a bilateral hip replacement, and tendinitis, and all these other issues, right. So you can’t do anything wrong for professional athletes because they’re freaks of nature. But you can do a lot wrong for a lady who has you know, fake hips.

So it’s important to have a wide range of clientele, especially when you’re starting out in the industry. So like, just like you said, you can modify down and you can have the easiest of exercises, and then understand that, you know, modifying up is you know, that that’ll come you can YouTube that the modifying down you need actual experience with clients on-site. Yes, definitely. So, tell me about maybe a piece of equipment we have not discussed yet. That is unconventional.

Daniel Fredell: So two of them that I use on a weekly basis would be sandbags. on the loose ends, usually haggard tan handles on various sides of it, and the steel clubs, which are basically just smaller versions of the mace so still club kind of looks like a metal bowling ball pin. But you know, obviously, with the weight, it’s gonna have to four dimensions.

Daniel Fredell: So with those, the sandbag is great because it does kind of lead into the everyday life, you know, you’re picking up something odd-shaped, it’s not going to be balanced, the handles are going to be wonky on it, but you can still use it for a lot of stuff. With the steel clubs, again, just like the mace, it was, you know, it’s hundreds of years old, you know, they used to use it for the old wrestlers for shoulder mobility and shoulder strengthening, to build up the grip to learn to swing something through an unnatural space.

Daniel Fredell: So those are two that I really like, there’s a lot of, I mean, every now and then one of the new fad tools will come out and I think it’s kind of gimmicky, but it does serve a purpose. And then you get other ones, you know, like the shake weight and AB roller and all those things that are kind of just gimmicky, you know, it’s 30 bucks on Amazon, play with it for a month and then never touch it again. You know?

Steve Washuta: Total and those were two great ones. I’ll try to match your two great ones here. There’s something I use called step 360, which I would describe as a Bosu light. So it is unstable. It is good for like your senior clients but it’s not Bosu unstable on and it doesn’t flip over like a Bosu does, it’s almost like if I don’t know like a trampoline, ask unstable. It gives your clients who maybe are not ready for the Bosu yet, or don’t have to hold on to something using the Bosu.

Then the other one is not purchasable by normal trainers, unfortunately, it’s called a kinesis wall. Basically what a kinesis wall is, the best way I can describe it is when you go to a cable machine, and you can move the system all the way up to the top, so you can pull down and you can move it to the middle, you can move a cable machine to the bottom. So you can do upward things right like a bilateral cable system.

This kinesis wall already has all of that in place. So nothing has to be moved. The wires sort of speaker together. So you have wires that run up top. So I can grab the handles and do lap exercises and pulling. You have wires that run longways. And they move in a 360 fashion. So I can cross out. But I could also stand sideways and rotate.

And then you have wires that run on the bottom where I can pick it up and do squats. Or I can do biceps and do different things with them. Obviously, like we talked about before, it’s not about the machine. It’s about the creativeness of the trainer and using the body. But I love that you can stay on that kinesis wall and do every exercise imaginable. Wow. That’s pretty interesting. I’ve never heard of that. The problem is, I believe it cost nine grand and that’s why most people haven’t heard of it. I would never buy it. But I’ve worked on one at a gym.

Daniel Fredell: Yes, definitely not for the small personal training studios.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, if you’re between the kinesis wall and a steel mace, I suggest you as a trainer, go with the steel mace and work your way up to the kinesis.

Daniel Fredell: I would say definitely dollar spent a squat rack that has the peg holes in it, you know, you’ve got to have the pegs and you get a pack of bands. You know, I mean, you could probably replicate that for much, much cheaper. I don’t know the definite ins and outs of it, I’m sure it’s a very useful device as well. But man, whenever I’m traveling, like me and my wife go on vacation, I take two kettlebells and a bag full of bands with me. It’s the perfect traveling kit, as long as they have a balcony or a steel rail anywhere, you can get a very good workout in with just bands themselves.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, exactly I’m the same way and I sit with my clients. I will give them a band sometimes if they don’t have it, and I’ll write them out a small workout. You know, everything you can do with the band, pull the press, you can rotate, you can squat, you can launch, you could do all these different things. You can combine those movements, right, you can obviously change resistance using different bands, and they’re very easy to hook up. I prefer they’re a little bit more expensive.

I believe the proper terminology is a scholastic band where it’s not rubber, it’s almost it’s hard-pressed to explain this, but it’s almost like a can it’s like a malleable Canvas that’s on top of the band so they don’t break. You don’t have to worry about them snapping back again, they’re a little bit more expensive than your rubber bands, but they’re safer and they give you poundage resistance, just like your other bands. I’ve gotten them off Amazon like a 25 or 35 and a 45 pound and a pack for like 25-30 bucks.

Well, thank you for your time man. I think the audience getting to understand that using different equipment, but still using your body as the basis for why you’re doing this and the different ways in which you can use it is really going to, you know be helped by this situation. Let everybody know where they can potentially find more information about you. Any information you have that you want to give them.

Daniel Fredell: You got it. So my name is Daniel Fredell. I’m on Instagram, Facebook. If you hop on Amazon, I’ve got two books up there. Currently, I’m working on my third, which is gonna be a little bit different. But the first book is on the kettlebell training system, I kind of created my own system around that.

Daniel Fredell: The second is resistance training for grapplers. It’s called Fenix Fit. Yeah, just check that out. Danielfreedell.com that’ll give you links to everything I have, and all that. One thing about the podcast that we forgot to cover was as far as the mace Bell certifications, and kettlebell certifications, you know, there’s a ton of great ones out there. I’m not saying anything bad about them. But my big thing is a piece of paper doesn’t tell you what you know, it doesn’t show your clients what you know.

Daniel Fredell: So if you want to do a certification, it’s perfectly fine. One thing that I would do is invest in the tools, whether its a kettlebell steel, sandbag, whatever, and just play with it, do some skill-building sessions block off an hour of time, a couple of days a week, and just spend that time going over YouTube videos playing with it, try to get a feel for the movements, not only a field to where you can do it yourself, but a field where you can easily explain it to anybody, you know, so like we were talking about before, as well as like getting people to understand how to move within their daily activities.

Daniel Fredell: The hip hinge is the hardest thing I have found to teach anybody teaches on my a proper hip hinge without them rounding their back or without them bending their knees to a full extension in a squat or a full flexion into a squat is very difficult. So you may have to learn some new nomenclatures, or a couple little real-life examples to teach those. So kind of get that stuff down. But if you want to go through the certification program, there are a lot of them out there on as one, especially for steel mace I think it’s one of the only ones that has that certification.

Steve Washuta: One more piece to that information. If you can find a personal trainer who you trust, like Daniel, like me, and they have experience with the said tool, reach out to them. Ask them questions. See if you if they’re local, right, if you’re in Daniel’s local North Carolina area, go to him, I promise you, he dedicated his life as a personal trainer to help people he’s not going to care if you shadow him. He doesn’t want to hold information from you. He wants to give you information, go shadow, good personal trainers who understand what they’re doing, and it’s only going to benefit you.

Daniel Fredell: Yeah, definitely. Even if you’re a current personal trainer, you know, we’ve got a small stable of personal trainers here in this area, some of them are better with, you know, nutrition than others. So we’re just kind of shooting each other messages, hey, you know, I mean, don’t think of it as a feast or famine mentality. You know, if you’ve got other personal trainers in your area, I guarantee you, the two of you or the four of you cannot take on everybody in your community if you decide to get them healthy.

Daniel Fredell: So if you get your community excited about health and fitness, everybody will be on the easy side of that. If you’re constantly butting heads, nobody wants to get into that. If you are friendly, like “hey, you know, I would probably be a good fit for you, but who would be really great is so and so right over here, I think they will be a fantastic fit for you”.

I can share the wealth pushing around a little bit, make good connections with people. So like you were talking about we’ve got one personal trainer around here, that’s very good for Olympic lifts. I’ve gone to him before so I could tighten up, you know, my barbell snatch or my barbell clean and press, I’ll probably never really have any of my clients to do it. But it was for my own personal knowledge.

Steve Washuta: I couldn’t echo your statements more- whether it’s for yourself personally, or whether it’s to help your clients reach out to other people in the industry. Make sure you start to learn that we can’t possibly know it all. We are generalists. We try to have a niche. But it’s always good to send people out because I promise you it’ll come back to haunt you. All of those connections and networking. So Daniel, thanks again for your time, and hopefully we’ll speak again soon.

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