Karl Bratland is an online fitness and nutrition coach for busy dads. He helps dads fit fitness into their lives with the intent of moving better, feeling better, and looking better, so they can be active participants in their own lives. As a 41-year-old dad of 4, he understands the demands of balancing life, family, and health, both physical and mental, which is what drives him help other dads.
Karl has been coaching in some format for over 20 years, has a master’s degree in Exercise Science, and several coaching certifications. His focus is functional fitness that carries over into everyday life, allowing us to be better dads, husbands, and men.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Karl Bratland about fitness for busy dads (and others too).
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How transitioning back to an active lifestyle can be humbling when you can no longer achieve what you used to.
– Why comparing yourself to others on leaderboards or social media can lead to frustration and self-doubt.
– How people should focus on what is best for themselves and their circumstances.
– Why adjusting clients’ mindset and approach to their fitness routines can be as challenging as adjusting their physical workouts.
– How men often struggle with ego and overestimating their athletic ability leading them to believe they can return to their previous levels of fitness when most cannot.
Connect with Karl:
Guest Contact Info
Facebook
facebook.com/livbetterfitnesstraining
Links Mentioned:
livfitkarl.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
If your brain thinks you’re 20 but your body is disagreeing, you’re going to love this 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 feet first because you know those things are your foundation and here we break down the propaganda, the mythology and frankly sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or workout or do yoga or CrossFit. Whatever you like to do and to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. Wait, did I say enjoyably? Trick question, I know I did. Because if you’re not having fun you’re not going to keep it up anyway. So do something that’s fun for you, find one of those. I’m Steven Sashen co-founder, co-CEO of Xero Shoes. Your host of the MOVEMENT Movement podcast and we call it that because we, that includes you you’ll hear why and how in a second. We’re creating a movement around natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do and the way you can help, it’s really easy.
A, if you like go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. It doesn’t take anything to join, there’s no secret handshake, there’s no money involved, there’s no song we just sing every morning when we get up. Just that’s the domain that I got but you’ll find the previous episodes, all the places you can find us on social media. When you go there give us a review, give us a thumbs up, like us, hit the bell icon on YouTube. You know the drill, if you want to be part of the tribe just subscribe. So let’s get started and have some fun. Karl, do me a favor, tell people who you are and what the hell you’re doing here.
Karl Bratland:
All right, my name is Karl Bratland. My Instagram handle is livfitkarl and basically what I do or what I’ve started to do is help busy dads become fit, stay fit, healthy and being a dad of four and I guess sort of doing that myself people started asking me what I was doing. So I started creating programs and helping dads do the same and that’s kind where I’ve navigated to. Because they relate to me and can ask me questions about what’s working for me and now what’s working for my clients. Yeah. But the focus is more on being functional, longevity and not… Obviously we all want to look better, right? But that’s just kind of a secondary result a lot of times. So helping dads figure out how to fit it in their lives and do what works for them and make it lifelong habits.
Steven Sashen:
So for anyone who’s not a dad, I am not a dad but this is of course interesting to me because it’s the same busy thing let’s say.
Karl Bratland:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
My wife and I our businesses is our child and given how much time it takes I would put myself in the busy dad category even without having actual biological children and if you’re not even a man for lack of a better term these days. You’re going to want to listen to this because there might be something you can pass along to the man in your life or the person who identifies as a man or a busy dad in your life.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, for sure. I mean I have women clients, moms and busy men who aren’t dads. But the niche is busy dads ’cause that’s just who relates to me and that’s what I really focus on. But like I said the human body is the human body, so it reacts to exercise in pretty similar ways regardless.
Steven Sashen:
So I started by saying if your brain thinks you’re 20 but your body disagrees, how old are you? Because you don’t look like… I mean I’m 61, it’s a whole different game. How old are you?
Karl Bratland:
Wow. I’ll be 42 on September 20th, so about a week.
Steven Sashen:
Happy very early birthday.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. So I broke my 40s and now… Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
What I can tell you for people who are not into something like Masters Athletics, I’m a competitive sprinter and in the master’s track world what’s really fun is you enter a new age group every five years.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So when I turned 40… Well, actually I didn’t start sprinting again until I was 45. But I went around 50 total blast, 55 total hoot, 60 couldn’t be more awesome. So those birthdays ending in fives and zeros get very entertaining when you’ve got something to work with.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But I looked into some of the CrossFit stuff and I was really into that for a while and so I know the age groups and so it’s like maybe when you get in next age group. Are you more elite then like when you turn 45? Are you like suddenly I’m the best in this group and then you become 49 and you’re the worst or is it the opposite?
Steven Sashen:
You know it’s an interesting question. So as a sprinter in track and field, they have all American times that change every five years and they get slower every five years and for sprinting they get way slower way faster once you get over 60. So I only care about making all American times and happily rather than winning because there’s a handful of guys who are former Olympians and they’re going to crush me. I mean, we’re all genetic freaks but they’re the freakiest of the freaks. So I’ve been happy that I’ve said all American times at the top of the age range like at 49 and at 59, etc. So that’s been really nice but when you do hit the new one like at 60 it’s like all right, here’s my best chance to crush it and so that’s fun. If there is a major competition you do think you have a bit of an edge if you’re 60 instead of 64 and sometimes that’s true, sometimes not so much. There’s a good friend of mine who… I mean he beats guys 20 years younger than him, he’s just a complete monster, so he doesn’t care.
But those of us at the let’s call it the far end of the top of the funnel or whatever the hell, the far end at the top of the whatever.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So we’re just trying to end up in a semifinal or in the finals that’s all.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, that’s cool. I like it.
Steven Sashen:
So talk to me about this, so the journey that got here about both your fitness journey and how that related to becoming a father of four and what you had to do to wake up to the fact that you were no longer 20?
Karl Bratland:
So I started out college wise, I was always interested in fitness and strength specifically just from a young age from sports. My dad was into lifting and bodybuilding, things like that and once I got into sports you quickly realized that strength, fitness, nutrition, all that stuff changes your performance. So getting stronger helped me in sports, so I kind of got hooked in the lifting and the fitness stuff from high school really and then my initial education was in exercise science. I got a master’s in that and for whatever reason I was into coaching, I coached wrestling. So I always liked helping people and coaching people and coaching different ages and kids, adults, whatever, college kids, and then for whatever reason the fitness field didn’t quite click with me once I got out of college. I didn’t want to be a personal trainer, I thought maybe I’d be a strength coach somewhere. But to get at those universities it’s few and far between to be like a D1 strength coach, you got to kind of know somebody and be in the right avenue. There’s only a select few but…
So eventually I got certified to teach, then I’ve been a teacher for the last 10 years, high school and coaching a little bit there and then I’ve just been doing all my fitness stuff. I got some certifications, I’ve been working out and I started posting it all on social media. I don’t even know why actually just something different, just whatever it was the thing to do. In high school people talk about TikTok and Instagram and all that. So I started posting workouts, things I was doing and eventually kind of grew a following. People started asking me stuff like what I did and they were interested and then they started asking me if I made programs. So I started kind of doing some of that stuff on the side, like a side gig. Just really robust making programs for a couple of people like Excel documents and just not a really streamlined process and it just kind of started to grow.
The more people asked the more I had to like all right, I got to figure out a real smooth process here and I got into online coaching and got connected with a company. I got my own app and so yeah, eventually it just kind of kept growing and then now I’ve narrowed down my niche and here we are with busy dads and essentially being an online coach for busy dads and I still teach and I still have that job. But the online side might become the job, we’ll see what happens because I like helping others and I like that I can reach anybody in the world and it gives me a flexible schedule obviously. So I can work and check my clients and communicate at any time anywhere just because the whole world’s connected now and I don’t have to go 09:00 to 5:00 or 08:00 to whatever job and be restrained by that. Because a year ago, so my identical twin girls just turned one year old on the 26th August.
So now we have four kids which has changed things a lot, so I’ve been staying at home. So I’m like the stay-at-home dad, daddy daycare for the last almost a year now and I’ll be staying at home this whole school year taking care of the twins, doing all stuff at home, but then obviously I’m able to do my kind of coaching stuff as well. So that’s sort of where I’m at right now in the process. Stay-at-home dad, online coach and I guess that’s why dads want to reach out and let me help them because trying to figure out how I’m doing it.
Steven Sashen:
So talk to me about the how you’re doing it part. About whether you had either of those realizations that A, hey your body and your brain are not in the same age range and B, just what you had to do to adapt to being a busy dad and how sort of… I don’t know if there was a kind of come to Jesus moment of like oh crap, things have fallen off the rails now I got to do something. Or if it was just this evolution of how am I going to be able to maintain the activity level and fitness that I’m looking for when holy crap I’m barely getting any sleep, etc.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. So the transition from the kind of the 20-year-old thinking to now I’m 40, I mean I turned 40. So that was a milestone just I think in any person, man’s life. But I was doing like I said a lot of CrossFit, I was super into it and I was trying in my mind I thought when I got in my 40s like you were saying I would go and try to get the CrossFit masters games type thing and I normally probably weigh 170 ish and most of those guys are probably almost 200. Right? They’re big dudes, so some of those guys that are smaller I don’t know if you know any of them like Josh Bridges and some of them are smaller athletes. They do well in some events but the huge lifting events they’re just not big enough, so I was trying to get big and strong.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, dude look. I’m 5.5, 145 and the first time I walked into a CrossFit box I went, “Hey, this is a blast. But how come I’m having to deadlift 300 the same as those guys who are twice my weight? That just doesn’t add up.” I mean I can do it but it’s not the same, it’s a whole different game.
Karl Bratland:
So I was trying to get as big and as strong as I could, I was like 195 so I put on a lot of weight, I was strong, I was in the best shape. Those CrossFit dudes they’re in a phenomenal shape, men and women of my life really as far as… But I started to realize as I got closer to 40 my body hurt, like I just hurt. I was just like, how am I in the best shape of my life but I literally can’t move. It hurts me to move and get out of bed and so I was like something’s not right here, I was always just aching. So that was sort of the realization of maybe this isn’t the path for… Then us having kids, and maybe this isn’t the path for somebody who just wants to be fit and look better and move better and be able to play with their kids forever. You do whatever they want to do in life forever, not go to the nursing home, not be limited by…
Because I was kind of like I’m going to be this beast, strong, huge guy and I’m going to be in the nursing home because my fricking joints hurt so much or whatever. So that was the realization for me then that it probably wasn’t sustainable forever and I maybe was doing more harm than good. Because some of those movements it’s like, do I really need to be doing overhead snatches? Do I really need to be doing muscle ups? Do I really need to be doing handstand walks? I was kind of like hurting myself forcing these mobilities. I wasn’t really mobile enough to do some of the movements and then you get tired and you’re just forcing yourself through that and you know how it is. It’s like all of a sudden you’re trying to keep up with the 23-year-old next to you and you’re hurting yourself, the competition’s good but also it can be negative.
So that was when I changed and started focusing more on myself and just trying to move better, do everything correctly, finding the smaller minor muscles and joints and such that you don’t really focus on in CrossFit and major lifting. You’re just doing the major lifts and I realized that I started to feel like a lot better. I mean I lost weight, I weigh 170 pounds now so I lost all that weight, that muscle. I mean I’m not fat or anything but I just don’t lift like that anymore.
Steven Sashen:
So if we can get more specific into that, what were the things that specifically changed? So what are the exercises you stopped doing? What are the ones you started doing and on the dropping all that weight? I mean, clearly you’ve got to eat to get there. I imagine that part of dropping, it was really just not eating that much.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. It was not lifting so heavy all the time, just that heavy lifting of squats, and I still do squats, dead lifts, things like that in different variations. But I was just doing it so heavy and so much volume like you said and obviously eating a lot too and it was just too much for my body. I think I was over training probably, but things like I said like a lot of the Olympic movements like with the power cleans and the snatches, the thrusters and things like that I stopped doing really with a barbell. I don’t do them that much with a barbell anymore, I’ll use a dumbbell, a kettlebell. It’s just that stuff was so much wear and tear on my shoulders, doing an overhead squat. You might be able to do them, but how many people can actually do an overhead squat with the barbell over their head? That’s such a mobile movement and it was just destroying my shoulders and my spine and my knees just trying to force that position that I probably wasn’t mobile enough to really do.
Like I said the muscle ups, I don’t need to do a muscle up. Pull-ups are good. Why do I need to do a muscle up? Why do I need to walk on my hands? That stuff was just wearing on my body so much and then some of the workouts where it’s like all right, you’re going to do 200 burpees for time or whatever. It’s just a lot of the same movement over and over and over and it just creates so much wear and tear on your body because you’re not mixing it up. I guess CrossFit is really anything that’s across different modalities of fitness. If you’re running and then you’re doing pushups, you’re essentially doing CrossFit so they just coined the name. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
Its fitness across strength endurance, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, so they just made it a thing that’s competition and so I still do versions of it it’s just not at that scale. I took out some of those movements that were just too much, I was a little smarter with it. I started dropping the weight and just really focusing on form, technique, movement and not worrying so much about the leaderboard. That was the thing too, is I would go on there during the… And then you’d do the Open, right? So I’m turning 40 and I’m like I’m going to do the Open, there’s like five or six events when you do it and it’s like I’m a freaking beast and then I go check the leaderboard and I’m like 1500th place in the US and I’m like, what? How is that even possible? I’m literally in the best shape of my life. How many people could be in that much better shape than me? I felt like I was kind of a beast and that’s sort of depressing. Well, not making the CrossFit games with being 1500th place and that really hit home too.
It’s like some of these people like you said are like Olympians, it’s like Matt Frazier’s now or whatever. He’s not really competing but let’s say he moved into the 40-year-old division, I’m not going to beat him.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
Rich Froning.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. That thing went-
Karl Bratland:
That was eyeopening.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I think this is a really common thing for anybody who was athletic when they were younger or even getting back into it. I mean I remember when I first started sprinting again, my first goal was thinking I’m going to win races and then I met the guys who were winning races and it’s like now my goal is to show up at the starting line and have people wonder what the hell I’m doing there. Then I’d beat at least… Well in a national meet there’ll be a handful of guys but in a regional meet tops there’s going to be one guy who beats me and usually not that. So then I want people when I finish the race to go, “What the hell just happened?”
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
But yeah, that wake up call that… I don’t know if women have this as much as men do. But you get back into something and you start imagining, I’m going to be the oldest guy in the Olympics in this event. Just you have this idea that you’re going to somehow transcend time and transcend physical limitations and then something happens where you go, okay, that was a little misleading which kind of makes me wonder. So I mean talk to me just about that transition in your mind from realizing, hey, you couldn’t do all this stuff and getting used to or getting… I don’t even know what the word is. Just switching from this idea that you’re going to crush it and be the biggest, strongest whatever to what you’re doing now. What was that transition like in terms of time and what was going on in your brain?
Karl Bratland:
I mean I tried just a lot of just random different workouts for a little bit, I was just doing a lot of body weight stuff, I was doing some… You know the Wex? So I was mainly the guy who does the ropes and I was doing some of his stuff and just mixing up and just I was like I got to change something and then I really just kind of decided… What I actually decided was the leaderboard was kind of was the problem basically. I was comparing myself to everyone else and I was like how come I can’t do it that fast? You know what I mean? So I try harder and I would push harder, I’m like I must not be pushing hard enough, there’s no way I can’t do that and I finally just decided, you know what? I don’t care. My brother was doing workouts too and he would beat me in a lot of stuff and he’s a few years older than me and I’m just like I just don’t care what anyone else is doing and I was on social media then.
So you look on social media and you’re like, look at these people. There’s somebody always more fit and better than you somewhere, whether it’s real or not it’s on social media. So I was just like I don’t care what these other people are doing, I need to just worry about myself and how I feel and what’s best for my life and my current circumstance. So that was the mindset shift is I just decided… I would look up a workout maybe on CrossFit and I’d be like I’m going to do the women’s weights. I don’t care, what does it matter? Or I’d look at the women’s weights and I would do less than that and I would really just focus on getting a good workout in, doing it right, not forcing the movement when I’m tired and hurrying myself and I just decided that that was okay. Was the workout hard? Was it effective? Did I do my best? Was it intense enough? Yes, and that’s all that matters. I don’t need to do 325 pound whatever.
Steven Sashen:
I was talking to someone on the podcast recently and this came up about weights and I was realizing the annoying thing about weights is they’re weights. They have numbers, you can see what the number is and it’s just almost natural to think I need a big number or I need a bigger number than last time. I said, there’s nothing that is more… It’s not even humbling. That you have to get used to when you start thinking about paying attention to form, paying attention to really using the muscles the way they are instead of just pushing the weight. Walking up to some woman who’s finishing with a barbell workout and you grab the barbell from her and remove some of those weights. Once you get used to that, it’s okay but it takes a little while. I mean I imagine, I’m curious when you’re working with clients which is the more difficult thing? To get them to make adjustments to what they’re doing or adjustments to how they’re thinking about what they’re doing?
Karl Bratland:
That’s a good question. I think both really, I mean I think the mind probably comes first because I think specifically guys we just have this ego like you said from wherever like, “Oh, I can do that.” What I do actually with my clients is I’ll start them on a fitness assessment and a mobility assessment, is the first thing they do. So I think for a lot of people that’s eyeopening whether that’s mentally, maybe both or physically. Because it’s just like how many can you do? How many pushups can you do? Just basic stuff. It’s like run or walk a mile and you have a lot… Even my neighbors or just people I talk to, guys specifically because that’s kind who I work with. But they think back to when they last ran a mile and they’re like, “Oh, I could run a seven-minute mile right now.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
And I’m just like, “You’d be lucky if you run a 15-minute mile I’m just telling you, no offense.” And then they go and they try to run the mile and they’re just like… You know what I mean? The last time you ran it you were 27 and maybe working out, now you’re 38 and you probably haven’t really worked out or maybe you’ve jogged. But then to go really try to push a mile time it’s just like… So that ego I think is in people’s minds and they think like I used to bench press 300 pounds. Well, I think guys just think they can just do it, “I’ll get it back in no time, it’ll be easy I’ll do it.” And then they go try and they’re like, “Holy cow, I have lost a lot in the last 20 years.”
Steven Sashen:
I remember seeing a video or it was in the news when Jack LaLanne turned 90 or 95, I don’t remember something way, way old and they’re showing him working out and most people didn’t know Jack LaLanne. I think it helped invent the universal gym which used to be in every high school in America, just a multi station gym.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, I remember.
Steven Sashen:
He’s still lifting and they show him bench pressing and he is struggling, really pushing hard and if you look closely though you could see he had 20 pounds that he was pushing.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So at a certain point… Again, back to sprinting. The first time I went to the senior games when I turned 50 there was a bunch of 60 year olds standing behind me and they were saying, “Just wait until you turn 60. It all falls off a cliff.” And there’s a bunch of 80 year olds standing behind them going, “Yeah, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” So the all-American time for the 100 meters goes from… At my age now it’s I think 13.2 seconds and then it very quickly ends up in the seventeens and by the time you’re old, old like 90 plus it’s like 40 seconds. I mean it’s something outrageous and you think well, that can happen. I mean that won’t be me and it’s like oh no, you’ll be lucky if that happens to you.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. I mean, they’re probably almost walking it.
Steven Sashen:
You could easily walk and beat them if you’re a younger person but they’re working as hard as they can. The first time I went to the World Master track and field championships I hung out a lot with the people who were 85 plus, because they were the most interesting. Because it is just not easy physically and emotionally because you remember what it was like five years ago, 10 years ago. So it was fascinating talking to those guys and my favorite thing I asked them, so nature and nurture and every one of them said the same thing. “Oh, totally genetics that I’m here, totally training that I beat that guy.” And even that I think they’re being a little glib, I think any given Sunday either one of those guys could have won. There’s always one or two guys in any age group who are just again, such genetic freaks that you don’t stand a chance no matter what and I just realized this. One of the weirdest things that happens is you have to not dwell on the thought…. That’s not even how to put it, I don’t know how to say it.
But when you start a race you’re thinking, I just hope everybody ends up healthy at the end of the race. At the same time you’re thinking crap the only way I’m going to beat you is if you pull a hamstringing and it’s this really bizarre, competitive/wanting to be helpful and friendly thing that shows up. People turn to me, it’s happened a couple of times at the beginning of a race and they’re like, “Good luck man, have a good race.” I go, “Hey, hey just relax. There’s no bonus points, there’s no money involved, no one’s going to know if you won or lost. Have a good time, stay healthy and by the way I totally want to kick your ass.” That’s where it gets fun actually, once you get… I think for you maybe it’ll happen earlier. But once you realize that it’s kind of dumb to be this competitive but you are anyway then it becomes kind of silly and if you can fess up to it with everybody else it’s like having a secret handshake. It’s like oh, you’re a competitive moron like me.
Let’s go have some fun and let’s hope that we end up happy at the end of this no matter what the outcome is.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. No, I definitely can relate to that. Because even my kid, my oldest son is seven and he’s so competitive I’m just like oh God, he’s going to be like me, we got to tone him down. But again, at the same time it’s like that’s something you can’t teach it’s innate. So I don’t want to make him not feel that way, but it’s hard when he’s seven and he’s doing soccer or gymnastics and there’s some kids that are in those sports that they’re just there for the social. They don’t care, they’re chasing butterflies and he’s trying to win and he gets mad at them and he’s like, “Well, why aren’t they paying attention? Why are they just looking around not stopping…” “Okay, buddy. It’s okay, just try to get better, have fun, you can’t be that way they’re not going to like you.” So it’s hard to navigate that when he’s maybe at a different level than a lot of kids and there are kids like him as well. So we’re navigating that right now with athletics.
But again, like you said, you don’t want to tone it down too much but you got to have some tact when you’re in those rec sports.
Steven Sashen:
Well, now you have a goal that I didn’t have as a goal but happened for me. When my nephew turned 17, 18, he was suggesting that maybe we should race and I said, “It’s not a good idea.” And he said, “Why?” I said, “Well, there’s no way you’ll win.” He goes, “Well, I could beat you.” I said, “No, no, you’re missing my point. Either you lose to a guy who’s 57 or you beat a guy who’s 57. Where’s the upside?”
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
You lose no matter what.
Karl Bratland:
No one is going to think it’s that cool.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. We never had that race, it worked out okay. Well it’s funny though, I imagine… Even though you’re talking about your seven-year-old. But I imagine a handful of your clients are going through that same thing and you’re having to work with them through that. Again, the mental part of not only figuring out what your body can and can’t do or the physical part of figuring out what your body can’t do with the mental part again and I’m just again, so curious about that. Because the example I give, and I’ve said this on the podcast a bunch. When I got back into sprinting, it took me two years to learn that when I think let me just do one more that’s the time to leave the track.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, for sure. I think like I said the assessment definitely helps, because they realize I’m not what I once was. It’s like the whatever that song is, Toby Keith, something maybe, “I’m not as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.” Or something like that.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
That’s essentially what it is, like okay but you’re probably still not as good once as you ever were at that moment because you can’t lift what you did lift. But at least you got to realize, okay, I can get close to that or back to that maybe eventually. But it’s going to take some time and I’m not going to go in the gym tomorrow and max out and there’s different ways to get intensity, I guess. So you can slow down the weight, do time under tension and pre-fatigue the muscles or do different accessory lifts or change the lift a little bit so it’s not so demanding on whatever’s bothering you or your back or your shoulders or your hips. So just being smarter about some of that and again, like you said some of these guys they think back to the last time they lifted might’ve been high school football. It’s like, all right, well you probably shouldn’t be doing your high school football program at 37 years old or 42 years old.
You probably should be doing something else and then they think they need to do that or they don’t know, or the amount of volume they think they need to do. You don’t need to be a bodybuilder, you don’t need to go in and do 16 sets of chest in one day. It’s like I’m going to do four sets of bench, I’m going to four sets of incline, I’m doing four sets of dumbbell flies and then I’m going to do four sets of pushups. It’s probably too much, that’s how much I do in a month maybe.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
So that mindset’s got to shift as far as less can be more, I guess to not be cliche.
Steven Sashen:
I think it’s even more than that. I think it’s not only less can be more, but actually less… Well, no, that really is it. Let me say it this way. I remember working on this one exercise because it’s really good for sprinting, the Nordic hamstring curl. For people who don’t know you’re kneeling on the ground, something’s holding your feet down and then you try to keep your body as straight as possible and lean forward as far as you can and then come back up. So I was working that three sets of whatever, three or four times a week and it just was never getting better and then I just because… This is going to lead into what I want to talk about next, I didn’t have time. I started doing four or five sets of five and to be clear the first set of five was pretty good, the second set was a little worse, the third set was worse, the fourth and fifth I’m basically practically falling on the ground but I just did them anyway.
But just doing it once a week and within a month I could do a Nordic hamstringing curl all the way down, all the way back.
Karl Bratland:
Oh, yeah?
Steven Sashen:
Because the thing that as I’ve gotten older is something that’s really hard for my brain to get wrapped around is just how much recovery I need. I mean way more than when it feels like I’m not sore and I feel okay, that’s just a sign that I still need three more days and that was a tricky one. Which brings me to the thing that I want to talk about next is the second part of what you’re doing is the busy part. Talk about just what you’re doing both for yourself and with clients who are dealing with the fact that they are busy working professionals and have a limited amount of time.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. Again, we keep coming to the mindset. A little bit comes to that where you don’t need to work out for two hours, an hour and a half. You don’t have the time anyways like when you’re in high school, college, whatever, beyond that you’re single and you don’t have a real career or whatever, you got time to go waste for two hours in the gym and do whatever. But when you got a business or you got kids or multiple jobs or whatever, you probably have an hour maybe. So changing that mindset that you can get a lot done in half hour, an hour and that it’s okay. It’s better than nothing to be like, “Oh, I can’t go lift for two hours, so I’m not going to do anything.” Is the first step and then just like I said being smarter. Some of them just don’t know, but you can just be efficient in the gym where your warmup includes some accessory movements that are maybe good for mobility or good for strengthening the muscles on your scapula or your hips or your ankles or whatever.
You can do that stuff in the warmup and it still warms you up, but it helps you improve your mobility, improve maybe some strength in some areas. Maybe you’re doing some modified Nordic curls or something as part of the warmup and sort of rotate and a lot of things we’ll do rotate through either supersets or you’ll do exercise and you’ll rest like 30, 60 seconds, do the next exercise and kind of go through those things. So if you can be smarter with how you program your time in the gym you can get a lot more done in a short amount of time, and it’s just as effective as going in and doing four sets of bench press and resting two minutes between each one and you’re doing six reps and then it’s like, well that takes forever for one and all you got done was bench press. It’s like you just wasted a half hour and you only did bench press. So a lot of that’s again, just realizing you can get a lot done in an hour and it’s fine and then strategizing a little bit with how you’re going through your workouts.
Staying on maybe more of a time cadence, rotating through whether you’re doing supersets of the same muscle or if you do supersets of different muscles. If I do chest and then I do a back, they’re sort of opposing, so I’m not really fatiguing either one.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So I was going to say, do me a favor for people who don’t know. Give us a specific example or in this case too of what a superset could look like, like name the specific exercise as an example and then also if you can go back in time a little bit and talk about some of those exercises that will be sort of a warm-up/mobility/a little strength as well just so people get a sense of what they might be able to do.
Karl Bratland:
So I mean supersets or compound sets can be… It just depends on your goals, but there could be a variety of them. So it might be a lot of people might think of as just doing the same muscle group, like two different exercises. So maybe you do a bench press and then you rest a little bit and then you do dumbbell flies or something. So you’re still hitting chest, but it’s two different exercises and you’re kind of resting in between just shortly. Or even doing it back to back to really fatigue the muscle and hit the muscle hard in a short amount of time rather than having to rest two minutes and do another set, two minutes do another set. Or it could be if you want to get more strength muscle type things, specifically strength you can do opposing group. So where like I said, maybe you’re doing pushups or bench and then you rotate it with bent row or pull-ups, so you have the chest back or opposite muscle groups. So when you do one, you’re not really fatiguing the other one.
So you can still hit both of them pretty hard, even though you’re only resting 30 seconds to a minute in between each of those and then rotating through whether it’s two or three exercises. So that’s kind of a superset compound, giant set type idea. It really depends on your goal in some ways, but it saves a lot of time, obviously because you’re resting forever and you’re not just doing one set rest. As far as the warmup, so usually it’ll be some sort of cardio thing to just get the heart going, your breathing going and get your heart rate up. But it depends on the day too, so if you’re doing a leg day or an upper body day or a full body day. The warmup I like to do just activation things where maybe it’s like an isometric, maybe it’s just a wall squat and you’re just holding the position for a little bit.
Or a glute bridge where you land your back and you bridge up with your feet on the ground and your butt off the ground in an L position for people that don’t really understand and just activating the butt or the glutes or the quads or the hamstrings. Then you could do things that maybe focus on range of motion and it might even be just a longer body weight lunge or something. You’re going to lunge out a little bit further to get a little better range of motion or maybe put your front foot up on a weight or a height so you can get a little bit better range of motion. You’re just doing body weight, warming up the muscles, getting through a further range of motion, it helps with mobility, it helps you warm up and so movements like that. So that might be like the three, you do a little one-minute bike, you do a 30-second wall squat or 30 second glute bridge and maybe a set of 10 to 15 walking long extended lunges or something for two or three sets and that’s a warmup.
So you’ve got some mobility, you’ve got a little muscle endurance, you’ve got a little range of motion, a little activation to get everything just ready to go.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s a great one. For people who haven’t done it, or if you haven’t done it in a while. Doing a wall sit or wall squat where back against the wall and you squat down until your thighs are parallel at to the ground and your shins are perpendicular to the ground and just stay there as long as you can you will be humbled very quickly.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, like in 20 seconds.
Steven Sashen:
It’s one of my favorite exercises that I hate because it does kick in fast and you’re going, whoa, I don’t know if I can make it and it becomes as much of a mental game as a physical game and at a certain point you just fall down there’s nothing you can do. But it is one of those things that really puts into perspective what you can and can’t do and you can get much better at it for sure.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
But when you start, if you haven’t done that for a while that one’s going to put you in your place.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. You can use them for strength building and for part of your actual workout too. So that’s the thing is you can take the movements you normally do and do them better form, better techniques, lower more range of motion and that’s going to help you with one, get warmed up but also improve your functional movement really. So if you’re doing bench press, I don’t know maybe take the bar, do a wider grip and just go really far down, slow three seconds down focus on the movement and the contraction and even the isometric portion. It’s a lot of different ways that people don’t think about as far as how you can activate the muscle, get it warmed up or even strengthen it, build muscle, improve range of motion. I think people just have these set concepts in their mind of this is how I build strength and this is how I stretch and this is how I do flexibility and this is how I do cardio.
It’s like you can intermix them with CrossFit. CrossFit, that’s not the coined CrossFit just being fit across anything. So you got to be a little creative and open-minded to what maybe you’re not used to and like we said, you don’t have to go in and just squat as heavy as you can for five sets of whatever. You can get stronger and better and more functional and build muscle in different ways besides those traditional and they have a place, obviously they’ve been around forever. But you can do it different ways and mix it up rather than just grinding yourself into the ground and then like a lot of my clients, they say, “I’ll go back to the gym. I’m good for a month and then I get hurt and then I’m out for two months and it’s like then I gained 30 pounds and then it’s a cycle.” I’m like, “Well stop fricking going in the gym and warming up at the bar for…”
They go in, they put the bar on, they do 10 sets of bench press and they think they’re warmed up and then they throw in two plates and they try to do 225 for how many reps and then their shoulder pops off and it’s like, “Well no wonder, stop doing that. Why would you go back every time you do the same thing?”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, I’ve been trying to think of how I want to say this lately it’s been coming up. It’s like if you’re having some problem doing something or if you’re having some problem, the best thing to do is just figure out what the thing is that you were doing that led to it and then just don’t do that and that one’s a tricky one. Because people are like, “Well, I can’t do this motion anymore.” Or whatever it is. It’s like, cool, then don’t do it, you don’t need to work to fix that one necessarily, there’s a way around that and for me I got a messed up spine. I love dead lifting heavy and squatting heavy, I just can’t do it anymore, I mean it’s really stupid if I do. So now I just do a lot of single leg stuff where I’m putting myself in these more compromised positions that aren’t putting any strain on my spine and again, psychologically challenging to do that.
But way, way better and after a while it becomes the new normal and you don’t miss doing the crazy heavy shit and you like the benefits you’re getting without getting wrecked.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, yeah. Squats I like but for some reason I’ve just never been that mobile in my hips and ankles and even my dad, I must have his… That just hurts me sometimes to do a back squat. I’m like, it’s just not even worth it, why do I need to put on all this weight? And it just feels like it hurts. So doing like I said, Bulgarian split squats or single leg squats or lunges. You can still get just as strong and get the same results without… People just have this mental thing of I want to lift and it’s fine if you like that. I want to lift so much weight and I want to tell all my buddies how much weight I can lift. I did a post one time about people asked me when I was a teacher and even now, “How much can you bench? How much can you squat? How many pull-ups can you do?” And I did a post one time that got a decent amount of engagement and I honestly don’t know. I literally don’t know, I don’t even care.
When I would do dead lift’s I don’t even know, I’d just start putting weights on and it gets hard and I do if it’s easy, maybe sometimes I’m supposed to do six reps I’ll just do 10. I haven’t maxed out on my pull-ups or bench press like, “Oh yeah, you know how many times you benched 225?” I’m like, “I honestly don’t even know the last time I put 225 on the bar for bench press.” Just like, who cares? I was on the post, I’m like, “Who cares what your max is? Who caress how much you can lift? I literally don’t know.” They’re like, “Well, how don’t you know? You need to record and know if you’re progressing or know if you’re getting better or stronger in your weights.” And I don’t know, why do I? If I look good and I feel good and I feel like I’m building muscle, maybe I’m gaining weight in muscle or I’m losing weight, whatever my goal is. I guess I don’t care anymore, I don’t care if I bench 225 or 240.
So that’s a mindset too is I just don’t care, I just put weights on, I lift, it’s a good workout and I’m done.
Steven Sashen:
No, this is brilliant though. Because it goes back to the thing I said in my intros, if you’re not having fun do something different than you are and what you’re doing is you’re gauging it based on how you feel and what feels appropriate/enjoyable, and enjoyable doesn’t mean that you’re whistling all day. It can be that you’re pushing yourself, which is enjoyable but you’re not doing it with some arbitrary number in mind whether it’s sets, reps, or weight and to make that more of an intrinsic motivator of just paying attention to what feels right. It’s like, “Hey, today’s a good day. I’m going to throw on some extra weight. Hey, today I’m a little tired I’m going to do a little less, one set less or less weight.” Whatever it is, that is so critical and that one is so overlooked. Because I mean humans to have things that are paint by numbers, it just makes life easy.
We think that that’s going to get us to our goal and this idea that you need to actually pay attention to yourself in a way that will lead you to what you’re going to do that doesn’t have those same metrics. I’ve seen that, that’s a tricky one for people.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, it definitely is. Even for me, and I’ve changed this too. So normally I’ve been working out five days a week and maybe on my off days maybe one day I do nothing, but the other off day maybe I’ll do light cardio, maybe some stretching, mobility motion’s, going through some just range of motion, yoga. There’s been a couple of times in the last year specifically where I’ve dropped to four days per week. I just felt like over trained, when we had the twins I just didn’t have time when they were firstborn because I was so tired and again my body was starting to hurt. I could tell I wasn’t recovering like you said, I could tell it just wasn’t helping me to work out that much and for a while I was like I feel like I’m losing my gains. I’m not pushing hard enough in my workouts, I can tell I’m just going through the motions and eventually I was just like, I think I’m going through the motions because my body’s not ready to go through the motion intensely.
So I’m like, it’s okay if I can only do four days a week. So I dropped to four and then all of a sudden I started to feel like I could work out more intensely and I’m like I feel pretty good today, that extra day off was apparently what I needed. So then my workouts were better because I wasn’t so just beaten to the ground so to speak, so I’ve done that twice. Actually, I just dropped down to four days a week for the last month again. Just like I said I didn’t want to overtrain and maybe that will be my new norm now that I’m 42, the four days is maybe my spot. The off days I do I’ll do some cardio, I’ll do maybe some body weight stuff, I don’t always do nothing on my off days. But it’s definitely not going in hitting some weights, hitting a metabolic conditioning circuit and getting after it and that’s again a mindset that a lot of guys specifically need to be able to accept.
Because once you start getting the gains or you start losing weight, it’s like, “I just lost 10 pounds and then now I can’t drop to four days worth per week or three days per week because I’m going to lose all my gains and going to gain all that weight back or whatever.” They start thinking that they want to do more like, “I lost 10 pounds, so if I do more I’m going to lose 30 pounds or I gained five pounds of muscle if I do more I’m going to gain 10 pounds of muscle.” And that’s not really how it is. There’s at some point of no return you know you’re not going to get returns on your investment at some point.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well I’ve got a story that’s the opposite of that in a weird way, it makes the same point from a different direction. When I was in college there were two women on the gymnastics team who had been trained by their parents up until they went to college and had never worked out more than three days in a week, and they were national champions. Then they got to college and they were working out five days a week, never had more than three weeks until they were injured. Never had an injury up until then, and they couldn’t convince the coach that they needed to go back to three days a week. He’s like, “No, you got to work through it.” It’s like, we can’t tolerate that and for me and this is just because of the combination of time and energy. I’m a two day a week guy right now. I mean two and a half, two days of lifting and one day on the track. Because that’s all I’ve got, and sometimes to be totally candid.
Sometimes if it’s a crazy busy week where I’m rolling out bed at 5:00 and getting back home at 8:00, then that week’s off and I don’t beat myself up about it. I wish I had time to do more is the best way I can say it. But even those two a week it’s valuable, it’s working, it’s doing things. I’m improving in certain ways or at least I’m staying consistent on others and so again, just this whole thing of helping people figure out what works for them is something that I really appreciate your mindset about that. Because one, it’s not as easy to sell in some ways and it’s certainly harder for people to adapt to at first.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. It’s definitely tough for a lot of my dads to kind of understand that each person’s a little bit different. So what your buddy’s doing might not be what you need to do, every person’s body’s different. Three days might be good for you, four days might be good for someone else, this many sets might be good for you. So it’s not like there’s one size or one template that works for every single person and it’s okay to take days off and it’s okay to do three days versus five days. One, if that’s all you can do then that’s all you can do and two, it might be all that you need to do and that’s what I’ve realized too. Is that I don’t need to do as much as I once did and it becomes like… So sometimes with my clients I become a little bit of a… And I by no means like a perfect dad fitness person that can I have it together all the time. Because who does? On social media people think that like this guy he’s got it sewed together, he’s got the best life ever.
It’s controlled chaos or sometimes just chaos, especially in the last couple of weeks with school starting it’s been like… Our kids are in so many sports, school’s starting, my wife’s starting to go back to school, she’s a teacher, it’s been just a mess. But anyways sometimes I’m a mentor to some of my clients beyond just fitness and nutrition and such and just talking them off a ledge so to speak. They’ll miss a couple of workouts and they’ll be like, “Oh, basically it’s all shit now. This week’s terrible, I missed these two workouts, I ate pizza and drank beer last night and it’s over.” I’m like, “Okay. Well maybe you enjoyed yourself, maybe you needed that.” But then they beat themselves up so much that they almost lose motivation and then maybe they were doing well, and then they kind of want to quit or they go off the rails more for the next five days then they binge-eat and drink and don’t work out. It’s like well, now you just took what was one or two days and made it a week just because you were upset with yourself.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
So I got to talk and be like, “Hey, it’s all right. You had a weekend, friends came over, you can enjoy it. Sure, whatever, you had a few beers. All right, let’s get back on the horse today, go back to work, workout. It’s fine, it’s not the end of the world. We’re in this for the long haul. So you’re not in this for a six-week shred and now you mess it up and your six-week shreds over. Well okay, but that’s not what we’re doing. We’re doing a 40 years shred or whatever it is, a lifelong shred, so a day in the whole scheme of it is irrelevant.”
Steven Sashen:
That’s another point that I love is on our end we get it when someone says, “Well, I want to run a marathon in six weeks can I switch to your shoes?” And it’s like, “Well A, I have no idea and B, don’t be a moron.” And it’s simply people get these ideas about what they want to be able to do that are often completely unmoored from reality and to get people in line with this is not… Like you said it’s not a six-week shred. This is not a cookie cutter program where we’re going to start here, end here and everything’s going to be fine along the way to get people into that mindset. It’s not even a longer term mindset, again it’s just a not… How do I want to put it? It’s a more in line with reality mindset and reality will include one day your friends are going to come over and you’re going order two pizzas and have a great time and you’re forget that you had a great time. It’s kind of like I had a friend who was going through cancer treatment and her roommate was a…
I don’t remember what she called herself. Basically a vegan, natural foods whatever thing was just making her drink green drinks all day every day and I would call her every two weeks and go, “Is it time?” And she’d say, “Yes.” And I would take her out for donuts and I would buy one of every donut at this place and say, “Have as much or as little of any of these as you want and we’ll give the rest away.” Afterwards I say, “Which do you think is helping you more all the green drinks or just how much fun this is?” She went, “The fun.”
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So that doesn’t mean you eat donuts every day, it means if you’re going to enjoy it, enjoy it and then you go back and start again.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. No, it’s consistently obviously matters and if you do that every day obviously you’re not going to be healthy and get where you want and reach your goals. But I’m a big proponent like you said of enjoying life and fitting these things into your lifestyle and if you have birthdays or weddings or… I feel like that’s not the way to live I guess to just never be able to really enjoy some of these moments because you’re… Some people like it. If you like that and you’re like all right, I don’t want do any of that ever and I just feel better. Sometimes I’ll have a birthday and I’m like all right, today I’m just going to eat the cake, I’m going to eat the pizza, whatever, and have some drinks. I don’t care, I’m going to enjoy this and do I feel like crap in the next couple of days? I mean yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I can tell because I eat fairly decent for the most part.
But again like I said, I’m not perfect, I’m not eating salads and chicken for every single meal. I just like vices and I like desserts and cakes and cookies and I like Bourbon from time to time. So that’s the thing is once I started going on social media is people would… A lot of the naysayers or whatever. I guess maybe I’m fairly fit or fit for my age, I don’t feel like I’m as fit as I was when I first started because I feel like the twins have aged me like five years I swear. I think I just got five years older in the last 12 months. But they would be like, “Oh, yeah. It’s easy when you got a garage gym and you just can work out for three hours a day and you’re just home all day or whatever and you’re just a fitness guru.” And I’m just like, “Okay. Well, I work full time and this is a side thing and I got four kids and I literally work out an hour at most a day. So five days a week.” I’m like, “Sorry.”
Steven Sashen:
I think you’re making a better point than you think, which is this in a different way. It goes back to expectations. There are a couple of fitness guys who I’m friendly with who have started posting things saying, “Look, if you’re a guy and you’re at 15% body fat you’re doing fine, you really don’t need to be… This idea that you should be at 10 and especially if you’re getting older, you’ve got your head up your butt. That’s just not real, you’re not going to live that way.” So that’s just another thing. I love that you’re not positioning yourself as some unrealistic model, you’re positioning yourself as a real person and you’re helping real people do real things. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation because there’s so many people who are not that and either it’s because… I mean, my God. The number of fitness guys that I bump into online who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s and they’re so clearly taking just a boatload of steroids to do what they’re doing.
It’s like come on, I mean that’s just ridiculous. Or this one guy that I’ve known for years who he said, “Well, I’m taking testosterone replacement therapy but I’m just at the high end of normal.” And I went, “Yeah. But before you didn’t have any problems, you weren’t symptomatic, so you just had a low free testosterone rate and right now you’re jacked, you’re at 10 times what you were before. That’s not normal for your body.” He’s like, “Well…” A few lately who have gotten the hint, especially as they’ve gotten into their late 60s, early 70s. There are a couple of these guys who’ve gone, “Yeah, this isn’t working for me.” And they’ve started getting off of some of those drugs and watching how their bodies have changed is dramatic. But they’ve become more normal and we have no idea what the long-term effects of certain kind of hormone replacement stuff is, so there’s that component as well. But it is interesting watching and I’ll be curious to see what happens over the next few years as some of these fitness guys continue to age.
What’s going to change and what they’re recommending because of what they’re doing or the effects of what they’ve been doing.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. No, I mean there’s just a lot of naysayers and haters on social media and I’ve had to get a little bit of a thick skin with that.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
It’s like whatever, but that’s it too. They be like, “Oh, you’re on TRT or steroids or…” What’s the other? Is it Tren or something? What’s the other-
Steven Sashen:
Tren’s one of-
Karl Bratland:
A form of it?
Steven Sashen:
But, yeah.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. So I’m just like, “All right. Well, first of all if I was on steroids I hope I would be a lot bigger and more jacked and more fit than I am.” Because otherwise it’s not worth taking them and second of all nothing against people that need TRT and all that stuff like you said.
Steven Sashen:
Need?
Karl Bratland:
Because some people are asking about too like my brothers and we’ve been just talking about-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, hold up you cut up for a second.
Karl Bratland:
Because we know some people that do it and they’re upset they’re like-
Steven Sashen:
You cut out for a slit second. You said some people are asking about and then you cut out for a bit, say again.
Karl Bratland:
They’re asking about TRT and if I do it and if they should and I talked to my brother who’s into fitness too and coaching and I talked to a doctor who was like a endocrinologist, a specialist once, and his analogy was pretty good. So basically like you said if you don’t need that, if your body’s not deficient in producing testosterone he’s really against prescribing it because you get on a path that you might not be able to get off. So if you start prescribing someone testosterone and they don’t need it yeah, you’re going to get all these benefits or whatever. There are some negative things that can happen as well like it can impact your hematocrit and your blood cells and your bone density and some other things they’re finding. But you might not ever be able to get off because your body’s going to essentially like I don’t need testosterone anymore because I have all this testosterone, and it might shut down producing it.
So then it’s like, okay, well do you want to take it forever? Cost-wise one or two, we don’t know some of the negative effects that might happen from that. So it’s like, okay, maybe someone’s a little low in testosterone but the range of testosterone is so big that my normal might be lower than your normal but it doesn’t mean I’m less of a man or I’m not healthy. So people need to be careful with that and just going and doing it because… And you could find all these… There’s not doctors but there’s those institutes that that’s what they do, “We give you TRT, come in.” They’re not going to say no, they give it to whoever pays for it and you’re going to get results obviously. Man or woman, you’re going to get physical results but again it’s a slippery slope because-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. At what cost? Yeah.
Karl Bratland:
What if you never get off?
Steven Sashen:
This is a very…but I got to say it for the fun of it. There’s some guy in town who’s got some new device for helping with back pain and since I’ve got a messed up back I was curious and they want to charge like 60 bucks for the evaluation before they decide what to do. I said, “What percentage of people after they have the eval do you not recommend that they come in for treatment?” And he said, “Oh, we’ve never not recommended that.” I’m like, “Then I’m not coming to see you guys.”
Karl Bratland:
Yeah, everybody needs it. Yeah, every single person has back problems.
Steven Sashen:
It seems a little unlikely that you got 100% hit rate from a trial into clients. Well, Karl-
Karl Bratland:
I’m surprised you said that.
Steven Sashen:
I was shocked. Well, I found that if you ask people enough questions long enough they eventually tell you something they’re not supposed to. So that was one, there’s stuff in marketing where people call me about things and I’ll ask them a bunch of questions and they’ll finally reveal that their stuff doesn’t really work and it’s very entertaining. But anyway, so Karl this has been a total pleasure. If people want to get in touch with you and find out what a realistic path to being a healthy, happy person might be. Again, whether you are an actual dad or not and regardless of really how busy you may be. Even though busy dads is what you like to say your niche is, how can they find you and get in touch with you and take the next step?
Karl Bratland:
Yeah. So you can go to my website, which is just livfitkarl.com and all my social media handles are livfitkarl. L-I-V, K-A-R-L, so livfitkarl and then yeah, that’s really it. So if you go to Instagram, TikTok, just find livfitkarl and you’ll find me or go to livfitkarl.com and you can fill out the form there and essentially it’ll go to my team and we’ll reach out to you and set a time to talk to you and see what we can do for you. But yeah, that’s the easiest way. If you go online and you search livfitkarl you’ll find me and we’ll reach out.
Steven Sashen:
Karl with the K?
Karl Bratland:
Yep, Karl with a K.
Steven Sashen:
Perfect. Dude, again a total, total pleasure. I do hope people take advantage of that and I just love it when I get to introduce people to someone who is not crazy and happily I’ve never had anyone-
Karl Bratland:
Well, thanks.
Steven Sashen:
Well, pleasure and I’ve never had anyone on here who is because then why would I want to talk to them? Other than to say, “Hey, you’re crazy.” Which usually no one has had the balls to say that to them, so it’s kind of fun to do but haven’t had the chance lately. So that’s a good thing.
Karl Bratland:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Anyway, for everyone else. First of all thank you for being here and don’t forget to go check out the website at www.jointhemovementmovement.com and find the previous episodes and ways to find us on social media. If you have any questions or comments or requests or if there’s someone you think that I should have a conversation with, especially if you can find someone who’s willing to talk to me who might think I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome. Just send them my way, drop an email to me at move. M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com and until then most importantly just go out, have fun and live life feet first.