Mike Fitch is an innovative fitness educator and movement coach with 20 years of experience in the fitness industry. He is the Founder/Creator of Animal Flow, a unique ground-based movement program that has certified more than 10,000 fitness professionals in 42 countries. Mike has also developed multiple other skills-based bodyweight training programs including the Bodyweight Athlete and is a highly sought-after presenter and content contributor.
Mike spent years exploring and coaching a range of techniques including Kettlebells, Olympic Lifts, Corrective Exercise, and pre/post rehabilitation. However, it wasn’t until he turned 30 years told that he decided to put down the weights and explore only bodyweight disciplines. He describes his change in training as a major turning point in his personal and professional development: “I had reached a point where I decided that I was way too young to feel so beat up all the time. There was something that I had been missing.”
Beginning with basic gymnastics, Mike found himself both incredibly challenged and inspired. Gymnastics soon lead to parkour, which lead to breakdancing and then hand balancing. A common thread that ran throughout these disciplines is the use of animal movements (locomotion) along with the emphasis of “flow.”
Mike is always the first to admit that he didn’t create animal movements. He sees his contribution to the discipline as having created a systematized program that makes the movements easy to learn and easy to coach for people of all ages and skill levels. Building upon his previous understanding of body mechanics, anatomy, and common postural issues, he developed specific ways to integrate animal patterns and other bodyweight-focused movements to elicit specific responses and results. His goal was to use these animal movements to improve the function and communication of the Human Animal.
When it came to incorporating the Flow component, Mike found the feeling of free and potentially endless movement to be incredibly empowering. He knew that others would feel the same immediate connection he did. In putting it all together, he created the Animal Flow program and its global community of inspired movers.
Today Mike remains dedicated to the various bodyweight-based disciplines, but still draws upon his accumulated knowledge to develop new training programs. You’ll see him integrating kettlebells, VIPRs and other heavy weights into his multi-disciplinary training regimes.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Mike Fitch about how Animal Flow can lead to improved movement.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How Animal Flow helps people reconnect with their bodies and addresses deficits in physical attributes.
– Why you should push yourself out of your comfort zone to stimulate growth and train the body to adapt to new challenges.
– How focusing on discomfort in the learning process creates new neural pathways and improves performance over time.
– How engaging in Animal Flow movements results in significant improvements in cognitive markers and joint repositioning sense.
– How incorporating variety and variability in traditional movement patterns enhances overall motional.
Connect with Mike:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@animalflowoffical
Facebook
facebook.com/AnimalFlow1
Links Mentioned:
animalflow.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Whatever activity you’re doing, whether it’s yoga or running or climbing or hiking or lifting, you want to be better at it, right? Maybe not. Maybe it’ll be better if you got bad at a lot of things. But we’re going to be looking at that and much, much more on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, typically starting with the feet first, because those things are your foundation. We’re going to be debunking the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that people have told you about what it takes to run, to walk, to hike, to dance, to lift, to do all those things you like to do, and do that enjoyably, efficiently, and effectively by using your body naturally. We call this the MOVEMENT Movement because it’s a movement about movement, more specifically about natural movement, again, about letting your body do what it’s supposed to do, and it’s a movement because it involves you.
It’s something that doesn’t happen because I’m saying it or because I’m trying to push it. It’s all the people who discover the value and benefits of natural movement who are making this happen, creating this groundswell, this grassroots movement of trying to get people to move. I think I’ve said that more than enough times. If you want to be part of this, it’s really easy. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. That’s where you’ll find previous episodes, you’ll find all the different ways you can engage with us. You can find us, of course, where you always find podcasts. And of course, do me a favor and spread the word. Like, and share, and review, and give a thumbs up where that’s appropriate, and subscribe where that’s appropriate, and hit the bell on YouTube. Basically, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe in all the ways that you can do that. All right, so that’s the intro. And now, I want to introduce Mike Fitch, who is here. And Mike, I don’t like to do intros for people, so you get to tell people who the hell you are and why the hell you’re here.
Mike Fitch:
Okay. Hey, I’m Mike Fitch.
Steven Sashen:
All right, we’re done.
Mike Fitch:
You may remember me from certain movies as… Hey, Steven, good to see you, man.
Steven Sashen:
Thanks. And by the way, before you even start about who you are, just to let people know about the timing of things, right before we started, I got on and I said to Mike, “Hey, how was your weekend?”, thinking that it was Monday. By the way, it is not Monday, today is Thursday. Which is even weird that I said, “How’s your weekend?” Because every day to me feels like a Saturday or that I have to work. I don’t know about you.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. And this is not the first time that we’ve tried this.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there is that. We tried this last week and then suddenly, we realized that Zoom had crashed in some way and nothing was getting recorded. So this is our second time doing this, but our fourth time trying to do this.
Mike Fitch:
I think even more. I mean, we’ve had so many hiccups along the way just with either scheduling or the first time that we were supposed to actually do this, you had the Wi-Fi issue, so the lines were down, they’re trying to fix something, and so we had to reschedule. And then our reschedule, Zoom crashed. And then, funny story, this morning, my Wi-Fi wasn’t working.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, man.
Mike Fitch:
It wasn’t working until about an hour ago. And so I thought I was going to have to call you and say, “We’ve got to do it again. We’ve got to reschedule again.”
Steven Sashen:
I had a situation like this with somebody else where it was like fifth time’s the charm, and they said, “Well, I’m taking this as a sign that we shouldn’t do it.” I said, “That’s cool, but just remember you’re the one who painted the sign.”
Mike Fitch:
You know what’s funny? This morning, I was thinking if I said that to you, you’re going to have some comeback, I would not be able to think of something past it. So I’m glad that I wasn’t the one that said that and that someone else had previously said that to you, so you could work that out.
Steven Sashen:
Or if I was going to do it more. You are the sign maker. I mean, look, everything’s a sign if you want to really go that way.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah, for sure. But anyways, I’m Mike Fitch. I created some program called Animal Flow, another program called the Bodyweight Athlete. And yeah, I get to teach people how to get on the floor and move around. The best job ever.
Steven Sashen:
Before we jump into Animal Flow specific things, because this is The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, whenever I have someone on who is hip to movement and does movement things, I ask them this question, what movement that something can you share with our humans who are our audience, I’m assuming they’re humans, there may be others listening, but at least with the humans, that would give them a taste of something to do and also maybe a little flavor of what you do with Animal Flow?
Mike Fitch:
Yeah, for sure. Everyone’s got time at home right now, and so while they’re at home, I would like them to do two things and it’s only going to take two minutes, although-
Steven Sashen:
Watch Tiger King. Oh, sorry, different.
Mike Fitch:
Watch it as many times as possible.
Steven Sashen:
But other than that.
Mike Fitch:
Then watch the reunion show or whatever they’ve been doing since the original release.
Steven Sashen:
We haven’t watched that one yet. Last night, we watched Three Identical Strangers, which is a whole other completely unrelated thing, and it’s only an hour and a half. But anyway, those are my two biggest-
Mike Fitch:
So while you’re watching Tiger King or Three Identical Strangers, while you’re watching those high quality TV programs, set a timer for one minute. This is your goal. For one minute, start standing. Try to get up and down from the floor as many different ways as possible for one minute. Once the ringer goes off or the buzzer goes off, get on the floor and just crawl around. So it doesn’t matter how you do it, we’re not talking about form, technique, just crawl around in as many directions as you can. Try to do it for one minute. You can take rest if you can’t do it for one minute because it can add up pretty quickly. And then you can just repeat that as many times as possible, especially if you’ve been sitting down, watching Tiger King for hours or however long that show is, get on the floor. So get up and down for one minute, then crawl around for one minute and then do that as many times as you can.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a old song from the mid ’70s and it just popped into my head, and the refrain is something like…
MUSIC:
Open the door, get on the floor.
Everybody do the dinosaur.
Steven Sashen:
So open the door, get on the floor, get off the floor. So let’s talk about what you said. I just want to break it down a little bit. I mean, as simple as that sounds, it’s get up and down in as many different ways as possible. I love this. I have a fondness for doing things different ways. I cross my arms in both ways. Can you do that?
Mike Fitch:
I could try.
Steven Sashen:
Hey, there you go.
Mike Fitch:
There we go. There it is.
Steven Sashen:
Now repeat. Good.
Mike Fitch:
I think I hurt myself.
Steven Sashen:
I go through phases where I put on my pants with the other leg first. Easier to do with pants than underpants, by the way. I have gotten in the habit of putting on jackets the opposite way that I started doing it. So talk to me about this whole idea of as many ways as possible, and you may want to get someone a pointer or two, because I know with the whole idea of barefoot running or natural running, there’s some cues that you can give people that just accelerate the process of their creativity opening up. It’s like if you tell them, “Try and do X, Y, and Z.”, they would’ve discovered that on their own eventually. But by shortcutting the process, it opens up more ideas.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. So the whole concept behind that little drill is variety and variability. And so essentially, what we’re trying to get people to do is break their traditional patterns. And so as human beings, we have a tendency to do, going back to your examples you were giving, we take the path of least resistance because it’s more efficient for our system. So if we learn to do something a particular way, we tend to lean into doing that same thing the same way every single time. And especially when we’re kind of walking around, we’re sitting down, we’re going throughout our day, our variability in our overall motion. So if we look at our spectrum of available motion and then we look at the amount of motion that we’re actually getting in, it’s usually just a slice. And so the whole concept is by us getting up and down in as many different ways as possible, we’re adding variety into that pattern of how we would typically get up and down. And variety, our body thrives on.
And so we want to make these really resilient bodies, and that means not only in how we experience them, but also how the tissue adapts. And we could go down that road, but we’re not going to yet. So we’ll just say the more that we can experience different loads. And when I say loads, that just basically means how gravity is affecting our system and as many different angles as possible, then now, we’re starting to encourage an adaptation process, which is again, being forced on by all these different angles versus us just always moving in the same planes.
So that’s the concept of getting up and down. And then a tip that you could add on top of that is exactly what you said, which is if you have a tendency to always go down to a right kneeling position when you try to make your way into the floor and try doing it from the opposite side. So start trying to identify maybe some of those patterns that you would typically lean on because they feel stronger or more coordinated. And the other thing is just allowing yourself to feel kind of goofy and to not feel coordinated and to be exposed a little bit.
Steven Sashen:
Be bad. Be bad at just getting up and down.
Mike Fitch:
That’s it, man. Be bad at it because again, that’s where the learning process takes place. And our bodies are adaptation machines. They love new challenges. They want to figure out how to be more efficient at new challenges, IE, lazy at new challenges. So the more that we can go out and experience new stimulus, the better our body will hopefully adapt to these new challenges.
Steven Sashen:
I think there’s probably a line between the interest in variety in something novel and the existing neural pathways that have us wanting to do the exact same thing over and over, because I know that when you’re trying to learn something like a really new movement pattern, something significantly different, especially I’m using barefoot running as an example, many people say, “Oh, I tried it. It was really frustrating.” It’s like, oh, no, no, let’s reframe what that means. Frustrating, with air quotes around it, is your experience of trying to lay down new neural pathways, getting out of a groove and laying down new neural pathways. And like you said about being bad, I don’t remember how you said about learning, but what people forget is that the learning happens after a bout of discomfort and feeling awkward and all the rest. And then while you’re resting, you’re getting these new neural pathways that make it a little easier the next time and a little easier and a little easier and a little easier. If people would reframe that frustration as learning, it would be a whole different thing.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. And that’s the way our body adapts. So if the stressor… Our body adapts to stress and load all the time. And so it does it in a way by either becoming stronger, having a better cardiovascular system, becoming more resilient, becoming more efficient, but we have to give that stressor first. And the thing is, if it’s not enough, then our body is not stimulated to adapt. If it’s too much, then we may break down or we may not be able to adapt to such a high stimulus. So it has to be in that kind of sweet spot, and it’s not going to be comfortable. You’re not going to feel good when you’re doing it because it’s way outside of your comfort zone. And I think most people have a tendency to, again, go towards the things that make them feel successful, feel comfortable, feel good.
Steven Sashen:
Successful.
Mike Fitch:
Or they expect the discomfort. And so if I go in to work out, I know that hopefully, if I do my workout to the best of my ability, it’s not going to feel awesome the entire time. I’m going to be in points or phases of discomfort. And that’s part of the growth process.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s also, again, that balance between the discomfort part and the enjoyable, fun, opening up thing that makes you want to do it again, because obviously, if it’s just painful, you’re not going to want to do it, but there’s definitely moments of… I mean, the intermittent reinforcement part of, hey, it’s good, and hey, there’s something that’s a little tricky. That’s kind of the holy grail because we respond to intermittent reinforcement. I mean, that’s how Vegas works. Like every now and then, it works… Actually, that’s how child-rearing works. It’s 23 hours a day pulling your hair out and 60 minutes of heart opening. Hey, that’s wonderful, and that’s why we don’t eat them. So you reminded me of something that I remember seeing in high school on TV. It was during one of the PBS fundraising things where they had someone who’s teaching something and then selling a course.
I don’t remember who it was, what he was teaching, or what he was selling, but his line was he asked the audience, “What’s the fundamental purpose of thinking?” And everyone came up with all these answers. I don’t know what they were. He goes, “The fundamental purpose of thinking is to learn to stop think, sorry, learn how to stop thinking.” Can’t even say it in English. And people are like, “What?” He goes, “Thinking is the process of taking incoming information and developing a pattern, a heuristic, so that when you see something similar to that, again, you don’t need to figure it out, it just kind of goes right in and you it immediately.”
The problem is we’re really good at coming up with these patterns. We’re the sign painters. We paint signs where they don’t necessarily exist and we come up with these patterns that aren’t necessarily effective or efficient because that’s the fastest, the most efficient thing, is to come up with a pattern. Having the right pattern is not necessarily the most efficient thing. And I have a sneaking suspicion that leads into what you do with Animal Flow. Am I correct?
Mike Fitch:
Of course.
Steven Sashen:
Success. So talk about what Animal Flow is and how you got to it/developed it.
Mike Fitch:
Okay. Yeah. And just to be clear, for anyone that’s listening, when I said discomfort earlier, I didn’t mean pain. So I just want to make that clear distinction between the two. So discomfort, I just meant the sensation of this is not always going to feel awesome.
Steven Sashen:
It’s awkward.
Mike Fitch:
And so it’s awkward. It might be a little bit awkward. So anyways-
Steven Sashen:
Pardon me, just the thing of cross your arms and then switch arms on top and then switch the other side, that’s going to feel awkward. It’s not unpleasant, it’s not painful, but it’s definitely going to make your brain fritz a little bit or putting on… If you put your jacket on right arm first, then left arm behind you, then switching around, it’s going to feel weird as crap for a while.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. And I think fritz is a really nice word. We’ll just go with that one. So let’s say make your brain fritz as much as possible all the time, because that’s where the magic is. It’s in the fritz itself.
Steven Sashen:
Some people would argue that my fondness for brain fritzing is why my hair looks like this. It’s just an expression of my brain. Yeah.
Mike Fitch:
I think you’re right.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I think we might be onto it.
Mike Fitch:
I need more fritzing then. Clearly, I have no fritzing.
Steven Sashen:
There’s fritzing and frizzing. Those are two, they’re very related. One was a cat and one is what soda does. That’s an obscure set of references. Well, fizzy soda is easy. Fritz the Cat, a lot of people don’t know Fritz the Cat. Are you too young to not know Fritz the Cat?
Mike Fitch:
No, I do know Fritz the Cat. I was just trying to remember where Fritz the Cat is from, it used to be… Was that a comic strip?
Steven Sashen:
Yes.
Mike Fitch:
Yes. Then yes.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, back to Animal Flow.
Mike Fitch:
So Animal Flow, okay, so let me tell you how I got into Animal Flow or what my journey was to get to Animal Flow, I should say. So I began as a personal trainer in New York City when I was 19 years old, and I did everything. So I really would get into something and really go all the way into it. So over the years that I was training, this is from the time I was 19 until I turned 30, I ran the gamut. And at that point, it was getting into Olympic lifting, getting into kettlebell training, getting into sports specific training, became a medical exercise specialist. So I worked with physios and physical therapists for pre and post rehabilitation. And then I eventually found myself where I think most guys do, who are kind of in that world of personal training, I just wanted to get jacked and I wanted to lift really heavy things. And I was about, I don’t know, maybe 30 pounds heavier than I am now, maybe 40 pounds and-
Steven Sashen:
Holy smokes.
Mike Fitch:
… I felt awful all the time. And I want to say, I want to make this very clear, I’m not saying that being big and strong is bad at all. I’m just saying that there was some message intuitively in my system that kept speaking louder and louder, which was you are only honoring one of your abilities, and that’s to be strong and to grow muscle. And so I had just turned 30 years old and I said, “You know what? I’m going to listen to that message and I’m just going to see where this takes me.” So I decided to do the exact opposite of what I was doing and decided to go be really bad at a lot of things. So I decided to put down the weights 100% and just explore bodyweight movement disciplines and so-
Steven Sashen:
Once you decided to do that, give me an example of something that you were really bad at.
Mike Fitch:
Well, all of them. All of them. But I started with gymnastics, which was… I was not only the oldest person in the class, but I was by far the worst person in the class. I thought, “Well, man, if I’m this bad at this, maybe I can be bad at other things.” So I went and I started breakdancing, super bad at that. Started parkour, I was bad at that. I got much better quickly. But anyways, I was experiencing all these different things and I was being very consistent with it and realizing, “Wow, there’s so much here that my clients could certainly benefit from, but they’re never going to go join an adult gymnastics class or join a breakdancing class. So what can I do to help bring some of these inspirations in?” And so like with parkour, that was the first time I was introduced to animal locomotion as a way of warming up the system and preparing the body to move.
And then with breakdancing, I figured out what we call, or I experienced what we call a movement window. So if my arm is here, my leg is here, that’s an opportunity for me to move through that window that I’ve created. And so there’s just a lot of inspiration that I thought, “Okay, well, how do I put this together in a way that my clients could enjoy it or could benefit from it?” And so I just started spending hours and hours and hours a day on the ground, figuring out the puzzle of how can I take these inspirations and these things that have been so pivotal in my growth at that time? And so I just started creating a program and started creating a program around it that had a language that we used that had all these rules and different technique cues, and it was just such an interesting thing.
It took me about three months to put the outline of the program together, and then I just started using it with my clients. And so I started integrating it into their one-on-one sessions, and then I also started offering classes for the other clients in the gym, and people really enjoyed it. And I was like, “Wow, there’s something here.” And so then, eventually created a certification around it, put a DVD out first. The response was really good. And so then I was like, wow, I’ll see how far I can go with this. And so created a certification around it and then spent years training other people to teach it. And we now have about 10,000 instructors globally.
Steven Sashen:
Holy smokes. That’s awesome. I want to come back to that because the whole idea of creating, I mean, look, we’re talking about creating a movement that what you just described is creating a movement, and I want to hear more about the management of that or sort of the evolution of that, because that’s the kind of thing that most people will never do and some people want to do and don’t know how to do. But either for both of those, it’s going to be kind of interesting, but I want to come back to just what Animal Flow is and what people experience from it, why they come to it, what they get from that. So let’s jump in. I mean, it’s not just trying to move like a donkey, whatever that would mean. Although if you just say to someone, “I do this thing called Animal Flow.”, what do they think that you do? Wait, hold on. You tell me and then I’ll tell you my guess.
Mike Fitch:
Sometimes we get, “So is that goat yoga?”
Steven Sashen:
I was going way past that. I was going for, “Are you an animal urologist?”
Mike Fitch:
Oh. No, I haven’t gotten that yet. So well done. That’s the first time.
Steven Sashen:
Do you help ferrets with kidney problems?
Mike Fitch:
Mm-hmm. Next life.
Steven Sashen:
But goat yoga, that’s good. And what do you say? If someone asked me that, I would have to riff on that and just pretend that the answer is yes.
Mike Fitch:
Well, here’s something funny, so I taught a workshop, the first certification I taught here in Boulder, I taught at Colorado Athletic Club, and it happened to be the same weekend they were doing a special event that had a goat yoga session in it. So imagine how confused the front desk must have been that day.
Steven Sashen:
That’s brilliant. The fact that there is a thing called goat yoga, it says more than the fact of goat yoga.
Mike Fitch:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, just one day, someone thought it happened and then it became an actual thing. That’s the part that’s crazy.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. So anyways, so typically, if someone asks me what is the Animal Flow? I’ll say, “All right, well, if you were to see someone practicing it, it would look like yoga meets breakdancing meets modern dance or gymnastics.” Because again, people can associate very easily. And so at least if you give them something visual, they can start to put together a concept of what this may look like. And then that way, whenever they see someone on the ground doing it, they’re like, “Oh, okay, yeah, I can conceptualize that.”
But I also then go on usually to tell them there is some animal components to it. So there are some animal locomotive patterns that we use, but it’s not about finding your spirit animal. It’s not about acting like a donkey for an hour or roaring like a lion. It’s really about the human animal. So it’s really about improving the communication connection and function of the human animal. And one of the best ways that we found to do that, at least in Animal Flow, is by putting both hands and feet in contact with the ground and then having the participant figure out this movement puzzle of these Animal Flow moves.
And so that’s one of the main underlying concepts is get people back inside of their bodies, because with all the stimulus that we have externally now, especially with tablets, phones, stress at work, the COVID, everything that’s going on, it’s very easy for people to be thinking of everything else except for managing their own system. And so most often, people will go into the gym and then they think about moving objects from point A to point B, or I’m going to run from here to here. And so they’re still putting their focus outside of their system. But when you put someone on the floor, hands and feet in contact with the ground, and you ask them to move all of their limbs in different directions and in different ways, then now, it’s very tough for them to be thinking about the stress at work or what they’re going to do when they get home because they have to be… We’re gently forcing them inside of their body and making them accountable for how they move their vessel and navigate it it across the floor. And so that’s…
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Mike Fitch:
Do you want to say something?
Steven Sashen:
No, I like it. It reminds me, actually, when we were talking about the movement suggestion you gave people at the beginning, thinking about, excuse me, after getting up and down a bunch of times, crawling, the first thought I have, whenever I’m in some sort of group and there’s some instruction for doing something, where my brain goes is, okay, how are most people going to do this? And what’s the opposite of that? And so what’s immediately occurred to me is if I were crawling, which I can’t do right now, the first thing I would do for an unusual way of crawling is try to crawl along a wall. So I try and get vertical instead of just being… I’d start thinking about the vertical component and not just the horizontal component.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of that in parkour training, and there’s a lot of, again, crawling up and then crawling across railing or a thinner wall or what it might be, whatever it might be. So yeah, so again, the inspiration certainly came from parkour definitely. But to go back to those underlying concepts, the first one is reconnecting the system, the second one is filling in the deficits. And so if we look at this kind of spectrum or line of physical attributes or abilities, if you have, let’s say a CrossFit athlete, and he or she is usually expressing their abilities to be strong, powerful, to have a good endurance in the way that they train. If you look at a yoga practitioner, they’re on this other side of the spectrum where they’re more working on their mobility, flexibility, stability.
And so we like to use Animal Flow as a bridge between those two sides of the spectrum because we believe that you can elicit all those responses for our physical attributes by using this modality. And so if you have someone who’s a CrossFit athlete, this will really allow them to use a dynamic approach to mobility, flexibility, stability. If you have someone who’s already expressing those, this is a nice bridge into more strength, power, endurance, speed. And so it kind of fills in the void. It fills in the deficits. And if you have someone who’s not doing any workouts or hobbies, it’s a nice introduction to exercising those attributes or those abilities.
Steven Sashen:
I’m reminded of a friend of mine who is one of the smartest people that I know, and he was dating someone who kept complaining that he was just in his head. And on the one hand, I said to him, “Yeah, that’s what you do. Shut up and leave her.” On the other hand, if she’s telling you that you’re wrong for being exactly what you’re amazing at, that’s a problem. But at the same time, he was really curious about finding movement things that were different than what he had done. He was a really accomplished long distance runner, but he felt like that was very linear, literally, and not really getting his whole body doing what he wanted to do. So it’s an interesting point. He was trying to find that bridge between his sort of intellectual strength, if you will, and his body flexibility, mobility, et cetera. And I don’t know what he’s doing now. I got to double check. But that’s another version of things, I imagine, for people who just aren’t familiar with what that thing is below their neck, that this might give them a way in.
Mike Fitch:
Is he still with the girl?
Steven Sashen:
No. No, no, no. Happily, that ended and he found someone who loved him for being super, super brainy.
Mike Fitch:
Perfect.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it was great.
Mike Fitch:
So yes, so to go with that, it invites people, again, back into their body and then lets them experience their body in all these different ways. And so it really encourages them to be strong, to be stable, to have mobility, to express their ability to be powerful and have good endurance, et cetera. And of course, coordination.
Steven Sashen:
So one thing I’m just going to prompt you for it, because I’ve remembered it from the first time that we tried this, which was really the fourth time that we tried this conversation. Talk to me about… So wait, was it ABCs or… What was the…
Mike Fitch:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on.
Mike Fitch:
So the ABCs of animal locomotion.
Steven Sashen:
The ABCs of animal locomotion. That just sounds like a good kid’s book, other than… Except that it would involve a train that somehow transformed into a gorilla.
Mike Fitch:
I think we’re onto something here.
Steven Sashen:
That’s ABCs of animal locomotives. I was confused.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. So with the ABCs, and again, these are the traveling forms, we call them traveling forms, they’re just one component of the overall program, but we do call them the ABCs of traveling forms. And so A stands for ape. And if you were to think about what that looks like, it’s just begins in a deep squat. So if you were to see someone deepest squat they can go, that’s our beginning position for our ape travels.
Our beast is kind of almost like a baby crawl. So it would look similar to a baby crawl except for the knees would be about an inch off the ground and the toes would be tucked under versus tops of the feet on the ground. And then also we have our C, which is our crab position. So crab would essentially, and most people would’ve done crab maybe in gym class when they were younger, but essentially, if we were to look at the side of a crab, it would be look kind of like a capital letter M except for the outside lines are slightly angled. And butt would be off the ground, fingers pointing behind us. And so those three movements are the what we call base positions in Animal Flow.
Steven Sashen:
Do you do anything upside down?
Mike Fitch:
As far as inversions go or hanging?
Steven Sashen:
Inversions. I’m thinking as a former All-American gymnast, one of the things that pops into my head on a not infrequent basis is, “Man, I got to be upside down.” And I don’t hear people doing that very often. And unless you’re familiar with that experience, it wouldn’t cross your mind for most people. Is that something that comes into Animal Flow in some way?
Mike Fitch:
So hand balancing is a big part in Animal Flow. It does play a big part in Animal Flow. So we do a lot of inversions and we typically will… So in gymnastics you would typically do hollow body handstands. So vertical handstands. In Animal Flow, we typically use what would be considered tuck balances. So basically, the knees are pulled towards the chest, and that allows us to transition through the balance a lot easier versus going all the way up into a vertical handstand then coming down. So even the beginning levels, or even as someone’s beginning their Animal Flow journey, we use variations of tuck balances to just get them comfortable with being inverted. So it doesn’t mean they’re trying to hit the tuck balance right away, but we’re just getting them comfortable with being upside down, which again, is great for so many systems in their body.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It always strikes me as a really interesting one, that so few people have any experience being comfortable being upside down. Or when you look at people learning gymnastics, I don’t know if this was your experience, when someone’s learning to do a standing back flip, the thing that they typically try to do is jump backwards instead of really basically jumping up. And similarly, they do the exact opposite. If they’re doing a front flip, they try to throw their body down instead of actually what you try to do, which is, again, jump up. And the only thing that’s different between a front flip and a back flip is just which direction your hips are going, because it’s the hips that drive the flip, everything else is basically vertical. But it’s such an unusual thing. It’s so counterintuitive. In people’s head, if you want to do a back flip, you got to jump backwards. Front flip, you got to initiate the movement by dropping down. And really, you want to do the exact opposite.
So same thing with getting comfortable being upside down. It’s such a weird thing. Or the other thing I’m thinking about with early gymnastics training is doing the same motion in both directions, like a cartwheel where you put your right hand down. I just said, put your right hand down first, and I have my left hand going down. A cartwheel where you put your left hand down first, then a cartwheel doing your right hand first. And one will feel normal, awkward at first, but the other will feel impossible at first. And getting used to just doing things bidirectionally is another total brain fritzer.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. And our human balance system is pretty much made up of three subsystems. And so we have our vestibular system, which you can think about as inner ear. You have your ocular system, and so vision. And then we have our proprioceptive system, so our body’s sense and awareness of where we are in space in relation to other objects. And it’s the combination of those three subsystems which give us overall global, and when I say global, I mean, full body balance. And so by doing just what you’re saying, again, trying to go do a cartwheel with the opposite arm, or even just trying to do a cartwheel in the first place, you’ve never done one before, it really does challenge those systems. And again, it’s just if it’s a variation that you’re not going to hurt yourself at, it’s just enough stimulus to get a positive effect from. And hopefully you’re starting to get some positive adaptation by doing things just outside of how you would typically do them and challenging, again, just challenging those systems.
Steven Sashen:
I’m also thinking about how part of what you’re saying, especially using the thing about crawling and babies, it’s fascinating that we’ve lost so many of those movement patterns that we do as babies and infants and toddlers, and in a way, it seems like we think that we’ve evolved and gotten past those, and we don’t use those. I mean, I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor. Just mostly, I’ll come home from work, I’ll make some dinner, or Lena will have made some dinner, although I do it more often, and we will have dinner often in front of a television, because we have little time to chill out, and so we want to get maximum chill.
And so sometimes that involves eating in front of the TV. And I’ll do that while sitting on the floor because I don’t want to spill stuff on the couch even though it’s microfiber and would be totally fine. And if I spill on the carpet, way worse. But regardless, that’s what I do. And I think about how growing up, never saw anyone sitting on the floor for any extended period of time. I never saw anyone crawling to get somewhere just for the fun of it. And it’s all these developmental moves that we’ve just, we think it’s below us or beneath us, and they’re really fun.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. Yeah. And you hit the nail on the head by saying, these patterns were so important to us in our developmental stages. And so whenever baby begins to learn how to roll over, press up, reptilian crawl, which is kind of like stomach crawling, and then mammalian crawling, which is usually quadrupedal, so knees and hands on the ground, and then learning how to stand holding something, get up and down. All of the squatting, all of those things, they’re huge parts of baby’s developmental processes, but not only physically. So not only creating these muscular synergies that will be so beneficial when they actually begin to be bipedal or upright human beings, but also, there’s a lot of stimulation that’s happening in the brain as well.
So just by doing these cross lateral patterns, we’re stimulating and organizing neurons in the brain that will be important for cognitive processes like comprehension, memory, all of these things, binocular vision, looking off to the distance and the back of the hands, strength and communication between left and right hemisphere of the brain. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. And like you said, as adults, we rarely return to some of these patterns that were so important to us in our developmental stages. And a couple of years back, we had a couple of guys who were Animal Flow fans, and they did a study where they took these participants through four weeks of Animal Flow. And for the study, they called it just quadrupedal movement. And they found that within four weeks, there were noticeable increases in markers of cognition-
Steven Sashen:
I was just going there.
Mike Fitch:
… and joint repositioning sense. So yeah, so stimulating the brain, again, increasing cognitive markers, and then also the repositioning sense, basically just means their awareness of where they were in space.
Steven Sashen:
That’s so interesting. There are a couple of things that pop into my mind. Kirk Erickson, the University of Pittsburgh, years ago, in fact, it was about 10 years ago when the study came out, he had done a long-term study of elderly people and walking, and just found that the ones who walked the most retained the most grey matter in their brain. And I asked him why he thought that was, and he said, “I think a lot of it is just the stimulation from walking, both the movement and what you’re seeing, and how you have to navigate.” I said, “Boy, imagine what it would’ve been like if they had been walking barefoot and got all that extra stimulation and had to really respond.” And he went, “Oh, yeah, that’s good.” But it was a nine-year study that cost a lot of money and we didn’t have time for that.
But the thing that I keep thinking of, especially when I think about people in shoes where they’re making it so their feet can’t feel the ground, they’re not stimulating all those nerve endings in the soles of their feet. I think most people think of their brain as just this kind of passive thing that I don’t know what they think it actually does. But back backing up to Kirk’s study, and the reason that aerobic exercise is so good, it’s mostly about having things circulating in your brain. Using your brain in some way creates increased blood flow, creates increased activity. And as soon as you started talking about that, I was thinking, there’s got to be… How do I want to put this? When you don’t stimulate your feet, your brain basically shuts down the part of it that is supposed to be getting that information because it’s not getting the information. So it just kind of does something else barely, if anything.
When you’re getting that stimulation, it’s not just affecting that one part of your brain, it’s affecting that part of your brain which has a global impact. So feeling good is not just a thing that happens in a couple of neurons in your brain, it’s an overarching neurotransmitter process. It’s a neurochemical phenomenon that is instigated by doing things that your body and brain like that feel good. You said it. I was just imagining that just getting an overall stimulus must have some cognitive impact. It must help in some way. I love that there was an actual study that looked into that. That’s super cool.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah, same here. And to go back to what you were saying about, because we always practice Animal Flow barefoot. And one of the reasons for that is because of that sensory information, so that sensory feedback, and we have so many sensory receptors in our feet, in our hands and our feet. Unfortunately, we talked earlier about the adaptation machine that is the body. If we turn those receptors off by putting on these super padded shoes and walking around, we’re essentially putting our feet in sensory deprivation chambers. And so that message is significantly turned down.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the difference though is when you do get in an isolation tank or a sensory deprivation chamber, it’s relaxing and you hallucinate, but when you do that with your feet, not the same.
Mike Fitch:
Well, not everyone relaxes in a deprivation chamber.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, really?
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. I mean, I certainly know a couple of friends who tried float tanks and they freaked out.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, man.
Mike Fitch:
They were not into it at all. It increased their anxiety tenfold.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, man, it’s one of my fantasies of having-
Mike Fitch:
I love them.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, my fantasy is to have a tank in the house or actually to have a tank just outside the house, because otherwise, the entire house smells like Epsom salts, but oh, that’s interesting. Anyway, but yes, the point you were making before I interrupted with my sensory deprivation tank.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. So anyways, I mean, the same way that we can train our feet, the same way that we can train them to be more sensitive and to send more information, it’s very easy for us to train them out of sending information.
Steven Sashen:
I think it’s actually probably easier to do that. It’s easier to make yourself stupid, excuse me, than it is to make yourself smart. Well, the simple thing, it’s use it or lose it. I mean, that’s the bottom line.
Mike Fitch:
That’s the bottom line. And that’s how the body works. If we don’t use it… I mean, and I mentioned, I kind of jokingly said that earlier, which is our body is lazy. And what I meant by that is not that we are lazy or that you are lazy or anyone else is lazy, but our body is always striving to be more efficient at any given task. And so if you’re not using a system, it can very easily start to turn down that system and/or become more efficient at it. Same way you lose the ability to squat, right?
Steven Sashen:
Right. I’m going to suggest that your body’s actually not trying to get more efficient or find the most efficient way of doing something. I think it’s probably trying to figure out what to do to get to the goal, and if it finds something, it will latch onto that even if it’s not the most efficient because it accomplished the goal. So this is the dopaminergic process or the dopamine system, where it’s about learning and accomplishing goals. People think that it’s all about reward, but it’s the reward for accomplishing something that you’ve learned to do. Because I’m just thinking of all these people who develop movement patterns. Actually, here’s the exact thought that I had. It’s someone who I know who thinks of himself as an accomplished barefoot runner because he’s able to run half-marathons and marathons barefoot. But you look at his running form and it’s like Groucho Marx moving faster.
It’s not really running, but it’s allowed him to accomplish the goal of being barefoot and covering this amount of distance. And he learned it. He figured it out on his own. No one ever taught him how to move this way. It was just like, “I’m trying to figure out a way to be able to move barefoot and cover distance.” And found this crazy way of basically walking fast like Groucho. And to get him to learn to run was a Herculean task because he had laid in not only the neural pathways of moving that way, but the idea that that was really good, that I had accomplished this, I’ve succeeded. And I imagine that when you’re dealing with people in Animal Flow, part of what’s happening is finding these patterns that they think may be effective or efficient. But when you look at them more carefully, turned out to have sort of detours in the road.
Mike Fitch:
Sure. When we’re teaching the workshops or we’re doing the certifications, we call those strategies. And so we’ll say, well, when we’re observing someone and… So let’s say we set someone up and we’re taking them through what we call our activation process, and we set up an activation in beast or crab, so the B or the C of our ABCs. And while in that position, we start to look at them region by region. So maybe I’m just going to look at someone’s shoulder blades and how they articulate with their upper spine or their thoracic spine. And so we’re looking at one, can they even find their shoulder blades? Two, do they know when they’re apart and do they know when they’re together? And then start looking at what else is the body recruiting to try to make just that motion happen? And so you may see where someone does something really funny, they start twitching their big toe when they try to do that, or they start shifting towards one arm when they try to do that.
And so again, I can’t say, “Oh, well, that’s your body’s strategy of recruiting the right psoas and your left external oblique.” All we’re saying is, “Oh, that’s interesting. Look at that.” Look at the strategy that the body just came up with to complete that motor task or that goal that I’ve given them. And so we’re watching those strategies and seeing, okay, does that look like good fluid motion or does that look chunky? Does that look like it’s really hard for them to either access it or it looks very muscularly driven? So it looks like they’re putting a lot of effort into making that happen, or does it just look effortless and fluid? And so looking for those strategies is really fun, man, because the body is so infinitely complex and cool. And just observing those, it’s like, man, everybody really does have a different body, and each body is a storybook of the experiences they’ve had through a lifetime.
Steven Sashen:
Can you think of one where you saw someone doing something and the thought that popped through your head was, “Wow, I would’ve never thought of that in a million years.”?
Mike Fitch:
Sometimes people do weird things with their tongue or their jaw or their eyes.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, really?
Mike Fitch:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Like what?
Mike Fitch:
Yeah, so if you ask them, you put them in a position, you ask them to lift, let’s say, their left foot and their right hand. And then you see them start to think really hard about it and then they’re trying to think, first of all, what’s my left and my right? And then during that process, you may see them start to anchor in somewhere. So maybe they start to move their jaw around or maybe they put their tongue out of the side of their mouth or they close one eye and they keep one open. And then you ask them to do something else, and then that changes. So their strategies change, their anchors change. It’s just a cool thing to watch.
Steven Sashen:
That’s really interesting. One of the things that’s fascinating to me is watching as people in any sport in particular, as they get better at it, how the motions do become more efficient, and how there aren’t those extra things like what you do with your tongue or whatever. Basically, if you were playing poker, it’s a tell. And one of the things that first clued me onto this was when I was doing gymnastics, our gymnastics coach’s ex-wife married a guy who was a professional boxer, and he used to come in and he was a really cool guy, and he would do the thing, he’d say, “I’m going to put a nickel on your head and I want you to try and keep me from grabbing the nickel. You can start your hands right up by your face, just I’m going to try and grab the nickel. You just try to stop me.” And you couldn’t. And what’s interesting is he wasn’t moving quickly. He was doing two things. He was moving super efficiently. There was nothing extraneous, and he wasn’t telegraphing the movement in advance.
So there wasn’t some subtle movement that you would pick up unconsciously that told you the big movement was about to happen. So because it only takes a quarter of a second for him to reach out and come back, and it takes longer to process the visual information of the cue that he’s about to do this move, those things didn’t work together and there was no way you could block him. It was both frustrating as hell and fascinating. And I just love seeing as people get really… I don’t play golf, but you can spot a good golf swing from a bad golf swing, not perfectly, but you can see when something looks just elegant, even if you don’t… There may be something where it could be a little better or whatever, but I just love seeing that kind of like you said before where it just doesn’t have any glitches. It’s just like, man, just smooth. It’s so wonderful to watch.
Mike Fitch:
So that reminds me of two people that I’ve worked with over the years. One of them is the strength coach for an NFL team, and I went in to work with some of his players. And the first thing he told me, he was like, “Look, these guys are elite athletes. They’re the top in their field. They’re in the NFL.” And he goes, “It basically means they’re really, really good at three patterns. And the three things that they need to be in that position at their level. And everything else, they fall apart.” And again, that’s a big generalization, but it was just funny to hear someone say these guys are considered the best of the best, and it’s because they’re really good at three things each. And of course, those things are going to be different. And then the other thing-
Steven Sashen:
Go ahead. Sorry.
Mike Fitch:
Sorry. No, and the second person was Dr. Spina who has a system called Functional Range System. He’s a buddy of mine. And he always says in his lectures, “The better you get at sport, the worse you get at being human.”
Steven Sashen:
I totally get it. It’s like the first time I walked into a CrossFit box they were trying to sell me on, it’s like, “We’re going to make you a better athlete.” I said, “Yeah, I don’t want to be a better athlete.” They’re like, “What?” I said, “I’m a competitive sprinter. I want to get that much faster in 100 meters. I want to take one step off of my 100 meters. That’s all I want to do.” “But we’re going to make you a better athlete.” I went, “Don’t care. All I’m trying to do is beat that guy who’s next to me by that much.” And I know that it’s a weird, goofy thing, but it’s like even when I’m working out for sprinting, there’s a bunch of things that I probably could or should be doing to be a more well-rounded, whatever. But at this time in my life, I don’t care. I’m just trying to get that little bit faster before I get old enough where it’s just never coming back.
Because that’s what happens for sprinters, once you get past about 60, plus or minus, and I’m going to be 58 soon, it just starts falling off a cliff. And I was at the senior games talking to a bunch of 60-year-olds, this is when I just turned 50, and they said, “Yeah, it gets really bad once you get over 60.” And at that point, a couple 80-year-olds walk up and went, “Yeah, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Just wait.” So that story with the NFL guys, that raises the question that popped into my head. If people are runners or they are engaged in some particular thing, what benefits have you seen Animal Flow delivering for them for the activities that they’re trying to do other than just becoming a better human being? What are you seeing as the, what’s the word I’m looking for, the translation or the transference of what they get from Animal Flow into other things?
Mike Fitch:
Yeah, so that kind of goes back to some of those concepts I was talking about earlier, those two main concepts, which is one, making people more aware of how their body moves through space. And so just bringing more awareness into their system makes them more accountable, or we’ve seen anecdotally, make them more accountable for how they move through the rest of their life. And so how they move through their other sports, how they move through their other hobbies, how they move through their house as they’re cleaning or taking care of their kids or whatever it might be. So it’s, again, bringing the awareness back into their system. There’s a huge translation there. And then also filling in those gaps. So if you have someone who is a long distance runner, they’re, again, mostly linear in the way in which they run. And then also, they’re experiencing one plane of motion. And then also, they’re expressing their ability to have great endurance.
And so that’s, again, this little sliver of the spectrum that they’re expressing. And so if we get them to express motion or experience motion in different planes of motion, so let’s say not in just one direction, but all directions and not at just the joints that they work during running in that direction, but also working those same joints in every direction. So now we’re making not only their joints, but also their soft tissues, more pliable, more resilient, have better communication with all of the other joints, have better communication with the nervous system.
And so that was kind of the concept behind cross-training, which is a lot of kids, sorry, if you’re in the athletic training world, so let’s say you’re working for a high school team, or you’re working with a high school team, or you’re working with the college team. That’s the big thing as of recently, which is stay away from specialization. And so make the kids do everything. So it’s not just when they’re in season for football, they do football and then nothing else. It’s make them do all the things so that they can build these resilient bodies that don’t break down so quickly from over repetition.
Steven Sashen:
I remember seeing an infographic somewhere where it was showing Olympic athletes from the ’30s through the ’60s and then beyond that, and in the early time in the Olympics, most of the athletes, they all looked about the same. They were 5’10-ish, 180-ish. They were well-rounded athletes of all sorts who just picked a thing that they specialized in for some reason, but they all looked kind of similar. And then specialization kicked in, and now you have 4’2″ female gymnasts and 7’10” basketball players where if there was a media where that hit the Olympic stadium, and then many thousands of years later, someone did an archeological dig, they would assume it was a collection of different species, that was some sort of weird meat market, but it definitely was not a collection of human beings that all came out of the same universe.
So I like that. That’s a really interesting thing. I want to move on, because we don’t have a whole lot of time left. About something that I’m just curious about. I’m always fascinated with businesses that I’ve never done that I can’t even conceive what it would be like to do them. And the idea of creating a program where you then train trainers to propagate the program is one that I’ve thought about that’s fascinating. That and probably something I will never do. So talk to me about what that was like. I mean, I’m just curious when you realized you wanted to do that, and I’m assuming you hadn’t done it before, what happened in your brain? What were you thinking? And then the technical part of doing it.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. So once we had put out instructional DVD and we got such a great response from it, I realized that if I want to reach more people, one of the best ways to reach more people is to reach the people who affect those people. And so I kept thinking, all right, well, yes, we can continue to go kind of… And I hate to use this term, but direct to consumer, we can think about the people who are at home that might want to use this or the, what are they called? Not fit pros. Anyways, people who want to educate themselves on different training strategies, but they’re not necessarily professionals.
So that was one idea from the beginning. But then I realized, well, you know what? I’m having so much fun teaching this. The classes are going really well. I’m integrating into my personal training sessions, and people are loving it. Why not go after the people that affect more people? And so we started really gearing towards personal trainers, physical therapists, chiropractors, body workers, anyone who was in the field of health and wellness. And so when we first put up the workshop, I think I had one person at the first workshop.
Steven Sashen:
Nice.
Mike Fitch:
And then after that, it just continued to build and build. And then we’d have people that would actually fly in to take the workshop, which was super weird for me at the time. And then I think we did a year-
Steven Sashen:
Well, wait, I want to pause there. I mean, when you have the idea, okay, I want to build this out, and then one person shows up, I’m imagining, it’s kind of like, okay, all right. That’s not what I was hoping for. And then at the flip side, when people start flying in, it’s like, okay, now I feel a certain sense of responsibility that I didn’t know I was going to feel. I mean, that’s what I’m imagining. Was it anything like that?
Mike Fitch:
Well, I can tell you I was stoked to have one person.
I was like, “Yes, one person came.” And at the time, we weren’t spending anything. This was 10 years ago. So 10 years ago. As far as the digital age goes, that’s a long time ago. And so at the time, there was basically YouTube and Facebook was kind of being used, but wasn’t really super popular yet, at least in my experience. So there wasn’t Instagram, I don’t even think Twitter had come out at that point. And so we were mostly working with YouTube, and so we were putting out these different videos and then put out the Animal Flow video. And so I was still trying to figure out what is this digital space that we’re starting to play in? And then looking at, wow, there are so many possibilities of reaching different people.
And so just to have one person was great. And then after that, we started getting a little bit smarter with how we were marketing the workshops and the DVDs. And Karen was a big part of that who… So Karen’s my business partner, and Karen is crazy smart in all the things that I’m super stupid at. So it makes a good team, and I think everyone needs that person. Everyone needs a Karen.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, if I weren’t married to Lena, Xero Shoes wouldn’t have happened because she is the operations, finance, trying to figure out everything that could possibly go wrong, and let’s make sure that doesn’t happen person. And I’m the vision, product, creative marketing guy who’s always trying to think of the million things that we could do next. And so my job is to build a car. Hers is to make sure there’s gas and tires.
Mike Fitch:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Same thing. Same exact thing. So if it weren’t for her, I mean, I certainly would not be where I am now with Animal Flow, that’s for sure. So yeah. And luckily, she has her doctorate in sociology. So she worked for a nonprofit in Miami for many, many years. But also, she had a degree in film, which that was crucial for us at the time, we could shoot all of our own content, we could shoot our own videos, we could put out videos that we produced, we’d edited, et cetera. So the cost was very low, the cost was very low. And we always had a grassroots approach, trying to figure out ways that we could reach more people without putting a lot of money into advertising because we just didn’t have a lot of money to drop into advertising at the time. We both had regular jobs. So she had the job at the nonprofit, and then I was still working as a session trainer.
So as we began to build the company Animal Flow, and at the time we were working, we also had a company called Global Bodyweight Training, it was just figure it out, play business. We always say that we were playing business. We were just kind of stumbling along this path of let’s just figure it out as we go and work with people that we like. That was our number one rule. Don’t work with shitty people. And we just started to see it snowball. And then at one point, so I used to work for a company called Equinox gyms. So Equinox, I give them a lot of credit for my education as a trainer. And they really push, they really put a lot of resources into educating their trainers and making sure that they go through different certifications.
And so this is many years later, after I’ve left Equinox and I went back to them with Animal Flow, and we ended up working with them exclusively for a year. So they gave me the opportunity to go around to all the Equinox gyms and teach the program. And so essentially, what they gave me the opportunity to do was to learn my own program and learn how to become a better teacher.
Steven Sashen:
Love it.
Mike Fitch:
Yeah. So I spent a year doing a couple workshops a week for almost an entire year, and just working with trainers and figuring out how to become more effective with the way that I coached. And I communicated to them and then figured out how to help them take these tools and apply them right away with their clientele.
Steven Sashen:
At what point did you find yourself walking around the house or when no one had shown up yet for the workshop? I don’t mean because no one’s there. Because it was either before or after an actual workshop session that you… Did you find yourself going, “Huh, check this out. This is an actual thing.”?
Mike Fitch:
Man, I still do that.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. But I’m just saying, when was the… I mean, same thing. When was the first time where you just really took a moment and went, “Holy crap.”?
Mike Fitch:
You know when it was? I had seen someone post a video of themselves performing Animal Flow in Australia, and they were on a beach in Australia, in Sydney, in Bondi, where I was at in my young ’20s. But anyways, it was just to see someone do this thing that you put together and see them do it on the other side of the world, and just think about all those connections or what had to happen for that person to get the video. And then once they got it, they actually took time to learn this methodology and then apply it and then video it. And then I was like, “Wow, yeah, this is a real thing. We can affect people.”
Steven Sashen:
I mean, I’ve had a number of these, but I had one just recently, and it was a COVID related thing. I went into Whole Foods very quickly just to pick up some bread and go. And I was wearing a Xero Shoes t-shirt and there’s a couple standing at the same counter. I was six feet away. And the woman turns to me and says, “Oh, do you work for Xero Shoes?” And I didn’t give the most accurate answer I could have. I just said, “In fact, I do.” She goes, “Oh, my God. They’re my favorite shoes.” And she goes on and on and on about how much she loves her Xero Shoes. And she had no idea who I was. And I love it.
Mike Fitch:
That’s awesome.
Steven Sashen:
Because I mean, my face has become so identified with the brand. I mean, Lena and I put ourselves out there. And like you, when we started this, I was just making videos and putting them on YouTube about how to make barefoot sandals and how to run, et cetera. So when it’s someone who’s come to it who has no relationship at all to me, it makes me extremely happy.
Mike Fitch:
Man, same here. And sometimes same thing, if I’m wearing a shirt and someone’s like, “Oh, I like Animal Flow.” or “I’ve done Animal Flow.” or “I’ve heard of it.”, I will quite often not tell them that I created it or whatever. I’ll just like, “That’s great. Have you tried a class yet?”
Steven Sashen:
My fantasy is to be at a dinner party sometime in the future and have someone come up to me and tell me how he helped start Xero Shoes and it was someone who had nothing to do with it. That’s my fantasy.
Mike Fitch:
And then just let them play with it. Just go with, “Oh, cool. Tell me more about that.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. “How’d you do that? Where’d you get the original idea? God, that’s so neat. Weren’t there some other people involved in the early days? I don’t remember their names.” That would be really cool.
Mike Fitch:
Nope, just you. Huh? Amazing.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ve met so many people who claim to be the first investors in Crocs, and I know who the first investors in Crocs were, and it was not these people. And so it’s basically, I want to have that happen at some point. I think that’d be a lot of fun.
Mike Fitch:
That would be great.
Steven Sashen:
It would. All right. Well, wrapping things up, if people want to experience this, and I imagine they will and recommend that they do, how would you recommend that they take that first animal-ish step into Animal Flow?
Mike Fitch:
I think the best way would be to go to www.animalflow.com, and from there, they can figure out what the experiences that they want. So from there, they can find out about our on-demand channel. So we do have an on-demand channel and corresponding app where you can do the classes, do tutorials, do flows. We have all of our live workshops that are mostly for fitness professionals. However, we do allow people who want to come in and just learn more about Animal Flow. We’re doing those now, streaming of course, because live workshops are not a thing at the moment. So we’ll have our first one this weekend, which I’m looking forward to. And then we have there, they can find our Instagram or they can find more ways or options that they can maybe work with one of our instructors remotely. So yeah, I think animalflow.com would be the best way.
Steven Sashen:
Not surprising in this dotcom world we live in. Cool. Well, Mike, this has been not surprisingly a total pleasure, because it is every time we chat. And so I do hope people find out more. And let me know what happens. And of course, I still have some Xero Shoes sitting for you in boxes right back there, that when we can get within six feet of each other, you’re going to be getting your hands on and your feet.
Mike Fitch:
I can’t wait to get them, man.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, we’ll make that happen. And in the interim, once again, thank you and let me just do a quick sign-off. For everyone else, thank you for being here. Again, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. For previous episodes to find out all the different ways that you can engage with this content, find our Facebook page and our Instagram and et cetera, et cetera. And like I said, we’re creating a movement movement. You are the people who make the movement move. So if you want to be part of the tribe, please do subscribe. If you have any questions, drop me an email, [email protected] or any recommendations, anyone you think should be on the show, whatever it is that you want to do, just drop me a line. I’m happy to respond. And I’m usually pretty fast at doing that as well. That’s all I can think of. So until next time, have fun, be well. Live life feet first.