 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. I finally managed a podcast on CrossFit, which is awesome today. I had my coach Spuddin from CrossFit Toughenall Park and a really interesting life story. He started out in the army and started in CrossFit in Afghanistan and we talked about his life and transition from army life to civilian life and into CrossFit and the world of personal training and health and fitness and really tried to demystify a little bit about what CrossFit is and how we can all lead healthier and better lives. So really interesting and I hope you enjoy it. Hey it's Lewis, welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Boom and we're live. Hello. Spuddin we made it man. We did. We threatened and we finally did it. This is the dream I'm sorry about last time but no worries. Thank you very much for coming in. Thanks for having me. I like this place and I've finally got to see the artwork and the flesh as well. Yeah it's this guy called Italian guy called Hinto who was like a graffiti artist in Italy and then became legal and became a street artist and does some cool stuff. Yeah well I've seen it. I've seen it every time you pop the picture up on Instagram I want to get in front of it. You're in. I've got a claims fame now. You're trying to be consistent with it. Yeah. I do love that one. Cool so what is your background? My background I'm a fitness professional I guess you could call me. I'm a head coach at CrossFit Tofinal Park and I sort of found fitness a long time ago just before I joined the army I had to get fit to join the army. So this was when you were 16 or? 18 so I joined when I was 19. Okay. So I made the decision at 18 and then I wanted to sort of change my lifestyle and I didn't have very much going on at home. I was working in a bar and it was a little bit dead end so I didn't I wanted a bit of progression. Yeah the town that I came from wasn't it wouldn't push me as far as I needed to go so my brother went to join the army and failed so it was kind of a bit of a well he's failed so I'm going to try and do it just to say that I passed it and then I passed it and through being in the parachute regiment I had to maintain a good level of fitness. I found CrossFit on my first tour of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan? Yeah in Afghanistan yeah so we were working with the Canadians and they had like a CrossFit affiliate already this was 2007. Cool in Afghanistan? Yeah CrossFit Kandahar. Wow cool. They were working out there and we went and did a workout and then from then I was like I need to do this every day. Start coaching some of the blokes when we were in Afghanistan when we came back to the UK left the army eventually and went into fitness got my PT qualifications yeah but it was postnatal PT so all my clients were like young mums all prenatal so getting ready to sort of give birth and then recover and keep working out. So how long were you in the army for? Five years almost. Thanks. Yeah I mean you can go one or two ways out of the parachute regiments it's either the fitness or some sort of close protection work. Oh okay yeah. And I did fancy that. Fair enough. I didn't want to sit on a boat in the Indian Ocean for months on end looking to somebody. I fancied interaction I liked walking and I enjoyed coaching and I went into fitness and it was a big hill to get up so try and establish yourself in the fitness industry. Oh okay. You can't just walk in and have 100 clients you have to show that you're good at stuff you have to show that you kind of got to prove yourself to your local client base. On Instagram? Well this was like pre-Instagram so like I started really coaching people in like 2000 like professionally coaching people like 2010. Okay. And getting paid for it I was coaching before that in the army but 2010 was really the first time that I was getting paid to do it and starting PT in people and it's just word of mouth you do a good job they tell the friends the friends come in for a session. Yeah yeah. It just sort of spreads that way until eventually I opened my own gym. Nice. Not affiliated to CrossFit did all my CrossFit level one and whatever I needed to do to get affiliated to open up my business partner. We did that which was more. Where was this in Stoke on Trent? Yeah. Yeah up in the north the Bleak North. So we did that went really well and then we wanted to go a separate ways. He had different ideas to me and we just sort of split it off and shut the gym down which was a shame but it kind of needed to happen. Yeah yeah. How long have you done it for? The gym was open for about three years. Amazing. So it did really well. We did really well. How did you find it from coming out of the army to setting up your own business? Strange I guess but the army sort of gives you that resilience. It doesn't give you much as far as like tangible skills. You don't come out as like a top business person but what you do come out with is the ability to just go okay I want to do this. I'm going to do what I need to. I need to research it and study it and make sure that I can do it well. Yeah. I don't want to do a poor job of it so that definitely helped. Just having a really solid mindset if you were setting yourself up for it you had to follow it through. Definitely. And we did that. He was ex-military as well so that helped. Amazing. We were on the same lines. Did they give you any kind of training for life after the army while you're in the army? What was it like? They funded my PT course as a resettlement. So you can sort of go, they say you've got ex-amount of money, you can go and do a resettlement course. Some people go and use it for maybe like a business course or whatever you want to do. So I chose fitness. The PT courses aren't cheap so it was good for me to get that and just sort of put me on the pathway then I needed to be on. And then it's just continued personal development. Nice. Always just trying to learn more. If you think you know enough you probably don't. True. Why CrossFit? Just because I enjoyed doing it and I saw the difference that it made for me not physically but mentally as well. So if there was times where I wasn't feeling great and I was just in a bit of a rut, I would grab my kit and I would go to do some CrossFit. Whether that was on my own or with a couple of pals or eventually in an affiliate or even in my own gym, it was always the same. You'd always got these guys that you could high five for the end of a workout and you write something stupid on the board that you know is going to hurt and you just get through it anyway. It doesn't matter. You set the timer, you turn the music up, it's the best hour of your day and that sort of sets you up for the rest of the day and you can do that every day. True. To some extent. And what is CrossFit? Constantly varied high intensity functional movement across broad time and modal domains. So it's essentially trying to move the way that you did when you were two years old up until you were 110. Cool. You biomechanics should function the same forever but you have to look after them. We get screwed by sitting and by bad shoes. Looking down at our phones and poor footwear and just bad life choices. Nutrition, we're probably chronically dehydrated and we're living in a zombie-like state because we don't get enough sleep. Yeah. But that's just all the world is now. So even if you can just spend that one hour trying to alter something for the better, that for me was what CrossFit was about. And do you know what? It's different for everybody. True. Some people are like, it's a place where I can go and get sweaty for an hour. It's a place where I can go and get shouted at by the coach. It's a place where I can chat with my mates and we can go and get a drink. True. But it's got a bit of a bad rep, hasn't it? Yes. Why is that? Because there's so many affiliates. There's so many affiliates globally. There must be 20,000 plus CrossFit gyms worldwide. Everybody gets taught the same methodology but you take that and you use that how you want to. Right. Okay. And realistically CrossFit is, I always say that CrossFit is for anybody but it's not for everybody. So if you come into the CrossFit gym and you enjoy the fact that I'm just like, shut up, listen to me, do the thing, move better, get to the end of the workout, you've applied really high intensity, you're on your back and you're just like, I'm completely exhausted. You love that. You give me a high five, you take a sip of your water, you feel great, you're going to tell your friends about it. Yeah. People will come in and that is their worst nightmare. That's just absolute nightmare material. Me, six foot three and 15 stone saying shut up and do as you're told, straight away they're like, oh my God, this is not for me. This is not, it's not fluffy, it's not nice. It's very effective and very efficient. Yeah. But it's, some people just don't like the fact that it's a bit rough. For me, I do, obviously I do, you're my coach and I do your CrossFit. It's great. Yeah. But for me, the great thing is I can just turn up, you tell me what to do. Yeah. I work as hard as I can. I swear. I speak, I have a nice like relationship with people there. Got no idea what they do outside of CrossFit gym, just that this guy can do it quicker than me and I'm going to try and beat him next time. And I go home. But my wife, who's, who you know, who's a women's health physio. Yes. All of her physio mates were like, don't do CrossFit. It's going to, it causes loads of injuries. It's really bad and all this kind of stuff. And then eventually she started and she's like, actually it's nothing like what people say. It's not scary. Do you know what the, so realistically, in the world of the physio, I can see why they would look at CrossFit the way that they do. Their client base are probably injured, injured people. You go to a physio because you have an issue. And if people go and say, I did this at CrossFit, I did this at CrossFit, then their, their scope is CrossFit is bad. But then do they look at rugby the same? You get rugby players going in, you'll get football players, you'll get tennis players, you'll get skiers, you'll get swimmers, everybody, the human body is not as resilient as we think it is. And you're going to get an injury, whatever you do. Realistically for me, on the, on the scale of CrossFit, you have gyms where you can go in and get sweaty. The coaching isn't at the top of the agenda for the business. It's just get as many people in the room as you can, do a big workout, go away, get the next slot in, which for some people that's perfect. They don't have to talk to anybody. There's no real programming. It's just do a workout. There's no focus or there's nothing conscious about it, which some people love. Some, which realistically is how I would like to run the gym, is coaching focused. You're here to be better at stuff. If you're moving poorly, if you have something that's stopping you from sleeping at night, if you're in pain, then we'll help you change that so that you can do this forever. And that's why CrossFit gets a bad rep. Because even within CrossFit, some people will go to our gym and go, oh, they just talked too much and there's too much coaching. They wouldn't just let me crack on. They didn't let me go heavy with the workout. And I'm going, you can't go heavy because you can't move it well enough. Where you get other people going, I went to this place and no one coached me. There was no one talking. So it's like art, I guess. Some people love a piece of art, but some people look at it and go, that's not for me. Yeah, that's true. I think when I first came, when I first started CrossFit, which is a different CrossFit gym, it was like dead lifts, rock up and put the weights on. I think within two minutes, I was just doing a plastic bar. It's taken me like years to get the technique because it's kind of like, for people that don't do it, it's like gymnastics, weightlifting, and then our high intensity body movements, right? Kind of a mixture of all those things. It takes a while to learn the technical weightlifting movements. Yeah. But even the simple weightlifting movements, just a deadlift, is we run an elements class three times a week, where new people who've never experienced CrossFit before can come in and we show them how to squat and how to deadlift, how to press weight overhead. When people struggle with it, if you've never been shown this thing before, picking something safely up off the ground is an issue. So we can guide them and like you say, if you have a PVC pipe and you're moving properly with it, then we can sort of slowly upgrade you. And that's the best way to do it. Yeah, no true. For me also, because it's mental health week this week, I find when I'm doing exercise, I try and do like, I say, I do about three to four days. Three in CrossFit, I do a yoga session, try and play one day a week of football. I'm a much better version of myself. Like my endorphins are going. And when I'm in CrossFit or doing something physical, like running or something, I just, I never think about anything else. It's just, I've got to pick up this weight again. I don't want to, or I've got to pick up this ball and throw it against the wall. And nothing else in my life comes into my mind at that moment. And then. So you're completely focused. Completely. It's like meditative. Immersed. Yeah. It's weird. And that's, do you know what, I've never met anybody that doesn't feel that way about it. And that's why I love it. It's because even, you know, I've been doing it 12th, 13 years this year. And I still feel the same when I'm doing, I don't work out the same as I did when I was 19. I just can't. I'm 32 this year. I'm not as 32. I thought you're my age. Thanks for that, mate. I, yeah, I'm not as resilient as I was, you know, you're more injury prone, the older that you get. And I think it's just being aware of how your body functions and what's good for you and what's bad for you. No, it's true. I still train hard. I'm still getting stronger. I'm still getting fitter, but I just have to do it at a slower pace. Yeah. And for the people that don't do anything but want to, is it right for them? Or do they need? Yeah. Yeah. People have this conception that the, I mean, it's a misconception that you have to be fit to do CrossFit. We have like 68 year old members who can't step up on a box. So you have to step them up onto a plate. And we can scale everything down ultimately to almost minimal movement. Yeah. But it doesn't matter who you are or what your level of fitness is. You can come into a community where people don't care if you're fat or thin or anything else. It's just you're there. You're part of that class. You're still going to get the same high five at the end. Yeah. And you may not speak to any of these people outside of the gym, but in that place, you're like a little crew. It's like a gang. And you all do the same thing. You all hate the coach because he's making you do this stupid stuff. And at the end of it, you all feel great because that chemical release in the brain is just going, Oh, we need to do this all the time. Yeah. And high intensity is relative. It's what you apply to it. True. Everybody feels the same at the end of the workout. Me and you could do a workout. You'll finish it in nine minutes. I might finish it in eight. We'll still feel the same. The 68 year old member will feel the same as the CrossFit Games champion doing the same workout. They'll just do a very different workout. Yeah. They'll finish in three minutes. They'll finish in 12, but that's high intensity. Yeah. He goes quickly as you can. Yeah. And if you want to try and compete with other members, that's up to you. Yeah. But it's really just about, like you say, finding the best version of yourself. Yeah. What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into exercise or movement? Most of my mates, and I'm 37 still. Yes, you are. Yeah. I mean, a lot kind of let themselves go, let's say, or they find any excuse they can. Yes. You know, I've got kids now. I'm married. I've got kids are working too hard, but there's 24 hours in a day. Yeah. And you can always find, I mean, actually, these were a lot of these workouts are only at 15 minutes or 12 minutes. Yeah. It's not, it's not a vast amount of time. Yeah. But for me, I don't think it's the time I've known a lot of people who are in the same position. And it's people going, I can't find time. You just won't find it. It doesn't exist. You have to make it. You have to make that hour. That hour is my hour. And realistically, mentally, it's a massive hurdle to sort of take yourself out of whatever you're doing. You get in from work. What you want to do is kick your shoes off, sit on the sofa, get a beer out of the fridge and watch TV. Yeah. That's so easy. And believe me, there's days where I just do that. But the big mental hurdle of getting of going into a space that it's not the most comfortable, most CrossFit gyms are big open spaces with rubber flooring, big steel rigs up against the wall. So you can do pull-ups and then just barbells everywhere. And a load of people dressed in brightly color. No nice showers with nice smelling towels. Yeah, none of that stuff. Yeah, none of that stuff. It smells like rubber. It's loud. The music's up. Everybody's vibrant and happy. That is a daunting experience. So my advice would be just take a deep breath, walk into your closest CrossFit gym and just say, I want to give it a try. You won't get hurt on your first one. I mean, ideally, you can spend your whole life doing this sport and never get hurt. I've been injured once, and that was when I was Olympic lifting and my elbow gave up. Ouch. Yeah. And there's nothing you can do for that. No. It was a cartilage issue in my elbow and it just couldn't handle the way that was overhead. Yeah. But as far as like, you hear people going, I hurt my back doing CrossFit or I've hurt my legs or like I hurt my knee doing CrossFit. If you're conscious of the way that you move, you should never get injured. So if you can just take a deep breath, walk into the gym and say, I want to give it a try. And then at least you know then if it is for you or not. Yeah, that's because before it's for anybody, but it's not for everybody. So at least try it. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of fitness places that sprung up. Yeah. Like the cycle places, barris and all these kinds of different things. It feels like people are starting to get a bit more into it. But obesity and diabetes is still the biggest drain on. Still massive. Yeah. Yeah. Still massive. No, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even say like, as far as the NHS is concerned, it's just an epidemic, generally. Yeah. Food, poor food is cheaper to buy than good food. True. Yeah. So people with less money are more inclined to spend the money that they have on poor quality food, which doesn't help the health. No, no. The people are willing to go down the pub and spend 100 quid on a round. Yeah. And I mean, people, you always hear it as well, like another excuse is it's expensive to join a gym. It's expensive to do CrossFit, it's expensive. Yeah. But you know, hundreds to 120 or whatever it might be, right? Yeah. 100 to 150, let's say. Yeah. A month. In London. That's in London. In London. In London. In London is, are you going to have to spend on your health at some point? Yes. You might have to do it upfront. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it depends on how you, how you, where you put your health on the scale of things. Yeah. Yeah. Some people will put their sort of short-term happiness above the health, like drinking. Yeah. Going for a smoke. It makes them feel good for 10 minutes when they go on the lunch break. Or at the end of the day, they can just get a beer out of the fridge or get the bottle of wine out. They feel good momentarily. Yeah. And that's pushing them further away from long-term physical health. And you don't have to be, it's not like a cult. You don't have to be like super involved in it. You don't have to go to every event, but do something. And I'll never knock other gyms. I'll never knock other fitness modalities. If you can go and work out and start to get healthier because of that, just go and do it. Yeah. Keep doing it and just keep doing it. Because you're going to get to a point where you're probably 50 or 60 or 70 years old and you'll start to panic because you've, you've set these bad mechanics in place, your whole life and it's going to, it's going to have an effect. Yeah. What do you think is a good kind of healthy balance and exercise, good program, nutrition? It's quite daunting. I think it's like Google it. Yeah. And it's just so many different things. Yeah. How do you just kick off and just... I mean, you kind of know as an, as a functioning adult what you should and shouldn't be eating. If you think I should go and eat a pizza for dinner every night, I mean, that's, we need to have a conversation. But most adults know not to smash a pizza every day, not to drink 10 pints every night. They know that smoking is probably bad for them. I'm not just going to go and buy hog and doors and just sort of start smashing ice cream every day. But what I'm saying is you don't have to eat broccoli soup on a daily basis to be in good shape. Yeah. If you want to be a really high level athlete, then we can soup dial in a nutrition plan. But realistically, eat less sugar, drink less alcohol, make more conscious choices about the food that you put in your body and do something active. Even if you do a few air squats at home or a little bit of yoga to a YouTube video on your own TV, start the ball rolling with doing something physically that you don't normally do. And that that could sort of pave the way for healthier choices for the downline. Is the start, do you think like diet over activity? Diet should be the base of anything. Good diet should be the base of anything. So if you think of things in like a pyramid, the base of that pyramid should always be what you eat. Okay. Absolutely nutrition. If you're, if you think no one needs to train six days a week, and I can still eat what I want, the pyramid turns upside down. And then it's probably going to topple over at some point. Either that or the pals that you train with who are eating properly are going to surpass you very quickly. And you're going to stay in that same place. You're not going to get any stronger. You're not really going to get any fitter. Your t-shirts aren't, you know, you're not going to get any slimmer. You're not your aesthetics aren't going to improve because you're still putting that same rubbish in your body. So yeah, diet is probably the first thing I would change. But as you mentioned, it's quite expensive to eat healthy for some reason. It's also quite hard to eat healthy because you go down to Tesco and then you, I mean, you have no idea what's in half of these things. Someone told me the other day that if it's got a food label on it, it's probably not healthy. Yeah. So vegetables, meat, fish, great. I mean, this is another great part about London. You don't have to go to Tesco's and Sainsbury is to get your food. There's so many like independent fresh fruit and veg places. Most street corners, you'll find like a market that you can go to to pick up all the fresh fruit and veg that you need. You can go to a fish mongers, you can go to a meat place. And it's not going in and just buying all of the food. Make a little plan for yourself. One day we're going to have chicken and veg. Tuesday we can have steak and chips. But you know that you've made the chips yourself. And steak is high quality. So that's it. Can't be bothered or I can't find time to cook for myself. Make it. Yeah. No, you're right. And that it all goes back to where am I putting my health on the scale of things? Am I putting it below easy food at the end of the day and grabbing a quick beer and just having one cigarette on my lunch break. And then your health is in fourth place. Where do you put it? And you have to make that choice. It's a really, really conscious effort to do that. But you have to do it. Have you have you experimented with any of the like pre made meal plans? Yeah, it's quite a lot of companies that have popped up there. Yeah, I used one for a little while actually. And it works very well. But that's a very expensive way of doing things. Okay. Yeah. Because you got the most people can't be asked. But that's the problem. They want it. It's not that they don't have time. It's just that they can't be bothered to make the time. Yeah, they want to get in from working and chill out. Yeah. But me personally, I love cooking. I really enjoy cooking. So my working day, I normally start worker on 6am to coach the class, the first class at 6 30. Do a couple of hours coaching and then have pts for maybe three or four hours in the morning. I'll get a little bit of time in the afternoon. I'm about about about to embark on a master's or some degree in strength and conditioning currently reading and writing for that to get ready for that. I then go back to work and do an evening shift finish at 9pm and then go home and cook. Nice. We cook dinner. And we'll stand and we'll cook dinner together every night. Yeah. It's an experience. It's not just like sit down and slob out. What are we eating today? And we enjoy like getting the ingredients together and seasoning things and testing things out. Yeah. Yeah. Cooking food from different parts of the world. And we're quite experimental with what we like to eat. And you do because you're not vegetarian. No, I'm not vegetarian. It's just meat, fish, vegetables. Yeah. That's it. And you know that it's good food because you've been to the local place to buy fruit and veg. It's not coming out of the packet. Yeah. Because we're also conscious about the amount of plastic that we get through. Yeah. We like to try and avoid plastics. So if it comes out of a packet, not only is I have no idea what is in the food, but I've also added to the plastic issue that is currently happening. And do you experiment with like supplements, protein and this kind of stuff or? I have done in the past to see what works better. I've taken like creatine and blah, blah, blah, blah, like pre-workout. BCAAs. Yeah. I mean, I take a bit of protein, pre-workout and post-workout just to give me that extra kick of just just to help recovery. Okay. I take a little bit of casting protein at the end of the day because it's slow release and it sort of goes back into your system as you sleep. Yeah. But realistically, that's it. So you should be able to get enough from just eating normally. If you eat good food, if you put in protein in your system, chicken and fish, and there's vegan alternatives as well, you know, if you know what you're putting into your body, you don't need to take a billion supplements. But again, it's about what you want to get from it. Yeah. True. If you want to be a little bit looking a little bit better naked, which is everybody's goal, everybody wants to look better naked. If you want to look better naked, just stop eating crap and do a bit of physical activity three times a week. So to lose weight, eat better, get on the exercise. Yeah. Just stop, eat the same. Just stop eating the bad stuff. Don't put sugar in your body. Don't put alcohol in your body. Do something physically active three times a week and you're probably going to see a difference quite quickly. Yeah. Give yourself a month of doing that and you will see a difference. Yeah. We think all the diet stuff because it's like, you see people go on a diet and then they get off it and then they put the weight back on. And then they're like yo-yo-ing. Yeah. I mean, for me, that is people are always going to experiment with what diet works best. And I'm not on a diet. I just don't eat crap. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. Some Fridays, we will go out and we'll drink beers and we'll order pizza, but that's not every day. You know, it's consciously every day I'm eating something that I know isn't going to bloat me out and make me feel crap the next day. Yeah. It's that momentary thing. If you're trying to find something that makes you feel good in that five minutes, it's probably not going to feel good for the next 24 hours. True. If you know you're eating a good dinner, you're going to wake up thinking, yeah, I made a good choice last night. I'm going to have a glass of water and go for a run. But that mouth pleasure of a nice pizza and a chocolate. Don't get me wrong. So tempting. I love that stuff. I've got a sweet tooth and I like eating burgers and I will always drink a beer if you give me the opportunity. So it's more of a mental hurdle. Yeah. It's not it's not physical. It's mental. You've got to know that. Yeah, it's good balance, but you need to know that through the week, you don't need to go and have a pizza. You don't need to have a beer. If you're going to go out for dinner, then fine, but you probably wouldn't go out for dinner every night. No, no. The one thing really I've got I've got two kids. Yeah. And when I had my first kid, then it really got me thinking about what I eat because I want to try and teach my kids to be healthy. Yes. So they see me going to CrossFit. They see me going for a run. We kind of bang on. I've seen them in the gym chewing you on when you work out. So it's great. Yeah. And I'm not doing very well. They don't care though at that moment in time, you're the hero. Yeah, exactly. You are the hero. I know that you're dead last in the workout, but that doesn't matter. No one cares. No one else cares. You don't probably don't care. You just want to get to the end without dying. But you could see you in this place moving. Yeah. And it's not it's that's normal. And it's not about giving kids this is what healthy is. It's giving kids this is what normal is. Exactly. Yeah. Your normal, your normality is you're going to move often. You're going to eat good. And that's normal. So they know if they're eating a pizza, it's like, whoa, we're having a treat. This is a big deal. Yeah. It's treat day because we're having a pizza. 100%. So I completely agree with that. Yeah. But I see so many don't. Yeah. And the child obesity thing's really bad. And it's so easy just to, you know, give it be a good be a good example for your kids and others. And yeah, it's also very easy to not be a good example. Like we said before, it's it's it's it's easy to sort of slip off. And it's easy to buy the cheap food, because it's just easy. And that's it. I think for me, if you want to achieve anything, it's not just fitness, physically, if you want to achieve anything that's worth achieving, it's probably not probably not going to be easy. True. Do you do any kids CrossFit stuff? So I used to run, we did CrossFit kids when I ran my own gym. And I used to run a football team for under six year olds. So we would train like twice a week. And then we'd play a football match every Sunday. And it was really good to see these young kids develop into like mini football players. But really, it was they were, they became a little family and you're all getting stronger and fitter. And eventually you went off to play football for steak. Well, one lad actually got signed up for ball veil. So he did well went into the academy system and stuff. So but yeah, realistically, I would love to do I'd love to do CrossFit kids where we are at the minute. Yeah, definitely. It's just like it's just insurance. We have to do that. Yeah, we just have to sort that out. And then hopefully we can start we can start bringing that into play a little bit. Great, great. It's about finding time for it as well. Yeah, putting putting something in the schedule. So how can people find you on the website CrossFit Tough North Park, you can go on CrossFit.com. You can certainly doesn't even have to be us. You can find CrossFit on CrossFit.com. There's an affiliate map. You can put your address, you can put your postcode into the affiliate map, and it will bring up the CrossFit gyms that are closest to you. Whenever I go on holiday, I'll look on the affiliate maps, see what my closest gym is. And I've got this t-shirt collection at home of all the CrossFit gyms that I've been to around the world, New York and Arizona and many different places. Yeah, I've done a few. I've always been a bit tight and haven't bought the t-shirts. You should always buy the t-shirt. I know I messed up. You always get the t-shirt. I mean, most places, if you say you're a CrossFitter, they'll let you train for free if you buy a t-shirt. Yeah, do you know? If you say I'll pay the $20 for the t-shirt, and I'll get the drop in, I'm not going to come back some on holiday, but I want to get the t-shirt collection going. Yeah, you're right. Because then you can go back into your home CrossFit gym and you've got this little t-shirt and you're like, yeah, I'm more experienced than you because I've been to other CrossFit gyms. You're right. You're right. Yeah, I need to get on that. So yeah, get on CrossFit.com. If you're interested in doing CrossFit, I would say start with CrossFit.com and just have a look at the kind of stuff that they're doing on there. And it's not just like, this is the workout. Do the workout. It's not like this big cult. At the minute, CrossFit.com are at war with Big Soda. I saw that. They're in court with Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew because they paid scientists to say that exercise could offset sugar, which it can't. If you take in massive quantities of sugar, you can't offset that with exercise. No way. But the scientists were paid by Big Soda to say you can do that. Keep buying Coca-Cola. Keep drinking Coca-Cola because even if you go to the gym, you're going to burn it off. But that's not true scientifically. The impact that it has on your insulin production and all the rest of it, the science of it is super detrimental to your body. That's crazy. Sugar and bad carbs are like cornstain of a bad diet. Yeah. And they were saying, drink Coca-Cola, go to the gym, you'll be fine. And now CrossFit are going, that's a lie. And you know it's a lie because they're currently losing. The company that they paid, the lawyers, the Coca-Cola have paid have just refused to carry on representing them. Really? Yeah. Didn't like American Heart Foundation also, like, I think they supported some of this as well from there? Yeah. Yeah. CrossFit are making waves now. It started off as something like we need to work out, but now because they've got such a massive influence globally. Yeah. Most countries have got a CrossFit gym. And it's about how do we, it's literally how do we move well for as long as possible. Yeah. Yeah. It's not about just getting a workout anymore. It's about making people just better and healthier across a really broad range of time. They've got great info on CrossFit.com as well. Yeah. They publish a lot of the articles and the site papers. Yeah, the CrossFit journal is available to anybody. That's it. Yeah. I get the email every day, I think it is. Yeah. You can sign up to the emails. You're probably not going to read them, but if you can go into the journal and just, you can literally type a keyword in. If your knees are hurting, you can literally go into the CrossFit journal and type, knees hurting. And there's probably a paper in there about how to improve function of your knees. Yeah. If you're interested in looking at how you should eat, go into CrossFit.com. There's probably papers on how to eat. I'm just getting ready to do my CrossFit level three. Nice. What does that look like? So it's a five hour exam. So your CrossFit level one is a weekend course. They go and teach you like the basic methodology, the compound movements, how to coach things safely and efficiently and how to get people thinking about CrossFit as a health choice. CrossFit level two, you have to have like X amount of coaching hours as a level one and a little bit more experience, probably do it a couple of years after your level one. There's another weekend course that's just about coaching and programming. How do I coach a group environment? How do I make sure that I see everybody's faults? How do I program efficiently across a broad range of time to make sure it's a rounded program so everybody gets something from it? Yeah. CrossFit level three is just an exam. Right. Okay. They give you reading material. There's like 300 articles this on you. Wow. Yeah. It's wild. They just send you a link like read all these. And it's a written exam in the classroom? Mostly, no, no. It's like mostly multiple choice. Okay. Right. Yeah. But you'll go, you'll sit in front. It's like a designated test centre. You sit in front of a screen. They ask you questions. There's some written works. They'll be typing in answers. Yeah. Some that like, is it this, this or this? There's some where they'll show you a video of somebody moving. Is this a good movement? Is it a bad movement? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think currently there's four CrossFit level threes in London. Oh, is that it? Yeah. There's not many. Because it's a really difficult exam to pass. Because they don't tell you what you fail on either. Oh, so you can just keep reading until... Yeah. You fail it, they just say fail, come back and do it again. They don't tell you what you need to go and study. And the next time you do it, it'll be different questions. Have you done it before? No. No. I've just, I just had to do a CPR and defibrillator course. I got that refreshed. That's part of the prerequisites for the level three. There you go. Yeah. You've got to have a defib and CPR. So at least there's one CPR qualified person within the gym. And then once you've passed the level three, you have to either do it every two years or have so many CPD points. So going on and constantly trying to develop yourself. Yeah. Just live the life and keep pushing the message out that actually this is really good for people. So fingers crossed. Also, good luck, Matt. Later in the year. Awesome. Well, great to chat. Yes. Thank you very much for coming in. And if people want to find you, you're our Metconsbud. Metconsbud. Yeah, I got an Instagram at Metconsbud. There's some usually videos of you finishing a workout in a sweat state. Yeah. It's a little bit more fun, the Instagram people, people working out and doing some cool stuff. But yeah, Metconsbud. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. See ya. Hey, folks. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.