Tyler Bramlett, co-founder of WeShape, joins us to redefine fitness as a tool for longevity rather than a punishment for how we look. After five knee surgeries, Tyler realized that sustainable wellness is about listening to your body instead of forcing it into shame-based intensity. He introduces the concept of joyful movement and explains how taking small, consistent steps creates lasting physical change. You’ll learn how to replace self-criticism with self-worth as your primary fuel for health. We also look at how functional movement patterns, like simple hip hinges and core stability, provide the foundation you need to feel at home in your body again. Tyler reveals how his COACH algorithm creates personalized routines that meet you exactly where you are, whether you’re recovering from injury or simply looking to move better at any age.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Move With Freedom: How To Build A Body That Feels Great With Tyler Bramlett
Welcome to the show, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. Our conversation is one that I think will resonate deeply with so many people because we’re talking about something bigger than fitness. We’re talking about our relationship with our bodies, our identity, and what it really means to pursue health in a sustainable and life-giving way. My guest is Tyler Bramlett. He’s a movement coach and entrepreneur and co-founder of an amazing company called WeShape.
He is a powerful voice that’s challenging the toxic, shame-based culture that has dominated fitness for decades. After a devastating cycling accident, shattering his femur and permanently damaging his knee, Tyler was forced to completely rethink everything he believed about exercise, performance, and self-worth. What followed was a fifteen-year journey through pain, rehabilitation, five knee surgeries, and a deep personal transformation that ultimately led him to create a radically different approach to movement and wellness.
Tyler and the WeShape community are helping thousands of people move beyond guilt, body shame, and appearance-driven fitness to rediscover joyful movement, confidence, and what he calls movement freedom. This is a conversation about healing, resilience, self-compassion, longevity, and learning how to truly feel at home in your body again. Let us welcome Tyler to the show.
Tyler, thank you so much for being with us. Your story is quite remarkable, and your journey has been really one that is helping a lot of other people on their journeys as well. I am excited to learn from you and share your story and the things that you’ve learned with our audience. I am excited just to dive into this conversation. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Thanks for having me on the show, Zach. I’m really excited too. I always love to talk about this stuff because I think there are a lot of people who need to hear this message. Hopefully we’ll dive into body, mind, and need to get a little spirit in there and help people just feel their best.
Maybe we could start with, I’d love to just understand your story and your journey. It really seems like there was a turning point where a lot of things changed for you. You had an accident. Would you mind unpacking that and sharing a little bit of how you ended up there?
Breaking The Cycle Of Toxic Fitness.
I’ve really had this journey where I’ve come to believe that the fitness industry is leading most of us down the wrong path. It started by doing what most of us do. We do not like the way our body looks. Maybe we’re overweight. I would look in the mirror, and I would be like, “You gross fatty, it’s time to go to the gym and do something about this.” A lot of people do that. They start with shame as motivation, and then they use that as fuel to go to the gym. I did that like everyone else, following the programs that you see online that are all about intensity and burning calories and all this stuff.
I started to make a little bit of progress. I’m going to air-quote that, and you’ll get why in a sec. As luck would have it, I got hit by a car when I was riding a bike. I always like to say “As luck would have it” because everybody’s story has a lead domino. That was my lead domino right there. That was the thing that tipped over everything. I was in a wheelchair for three months. I had to relearn how to walk. I was pretty young at the time too. That was really challenging because here I am looking around at all the people around me. They have got no issues with their body.
Shift Your Focus: From Appearance To Feeling.
I’ve got arthritis in my knee. I do not feel good. I’m trying to figure out what the heck’s going on here. When I went back to the gym, I’ll never forget this. I tried to do the same things I was doing before. Try to hit the treadmill. Nope, that hurt. Try to hit the bike. Nope, that hurt. Try to hit the leg press, the leg extension, all these different things, this normal stuff that people do, and everything felt horrible. When your body feels really bad, you do not care about how your body looks anymore. You care about how your body feels. Anybody who’s listening right now knows this.
When you’re in pain, it sucks a lot of your mental energy. I really realigned the way that I was approaching fitness away from, “I’m here to change how I look,” to “I’m here to change how I feel.” I spent the next few years traveling around the country, learning from the best athletic trainers, physical therapists, and coaches that I could possibly find. I’m very grateful I found some really amazing coaches early on. They taught me a lot about how the human body worked. The biggest thing I really took away from that was that we need to learn how to move our bodies functionally.
I know it’s a buzzword, so we’ll get into what that really means here in a second. We also need to learn how to move our bodies functionally using a roadmap that starts us out with things that our body can feel safe doing and gradually promotes us towards things that are more challenging. That’s where I think a lot of people go wrong in fitness is, we start a program, and we’re using that shame as motivation. We push ourselves hard, two weeks, three weeks later, we burn out, we get injured, our body feels like crap, we get sick, and then we stop, and then we start over again. We just get stuck in that game. I call it the one step forward, one step backward game.
When that happens, where do we go? We go nowhere. A lot of people have been in that game for decades, and they never can figure out why. To me, I’m always like, in order to fix my injury, I had to learn that I had to take 10 steps backwards in order to take 20 steps forward. Most people just are not told that. They’re not told you have got to work on mind-muscle connection. They’re not told you have got to work on basic mobility, basic stability in all the big joints of the body. They’re not told that you need to learn how to move better if you want to feel better.
That’s the big message that I try to teach people now. If you feel lousy in your body, learning how to move better is going to help every single one of you feel better. You might not fix everything perfectly. You might have actual issues inside your body that need surgeries or something in the future, but it almost always reduces the discomfort and increases your freedom of movement. When you take those steps backwards, you learn how to move better from a strong foundation. I made my life about that. I made my life about learning how to feel better.
I became a personal trainer and started working with people. I remember a long time ago, I quickly noticed that most of the personal trainers out there, you might have seen this too at the gym, are going to give people a routine, and they probably only have a few different routines. They give people different moves for different body parts that they want to do stuff with. They have them do cardio, but most trainers are not coaching movement. They’re not teaching form to the degree that I think most people need to. They also do not understand what it’s like to be in a body that’s riddled with pain and needing to get out of it. Most trainers are ex-athletes.
Ex-college athletes and things like that. They do not know what it’s like to not be able to walk up a flight of stairs without experiencing pain. That really stifles their ability to educate and coach people in a way that’s actually going to serve them. I became obsessed with that. I started working with people, and I remember way back then thinking to myself, “One day I want to figure out how to give everyone the right moves and stretches for their body at scale.” It just drove me nuts. Come on, Zach, people pay like $1,000 to $1,500 a month to have a personal trainer like 2 or 3 days a week.
The reality is most of them are not worth that. I just really wanted people to have an experience of getting something that their body actually needed, especially the people out there who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. They’ve tried everything. Everything’s failed. Their body’s not feeling good. They’re moving dysfunctionally. There are just not a lot of people out there who are teaching them how to start at the right place and how to make progress from there so they can start feeling good again.
Thank you for sharing a little bit of my story and sharing that. You got hit by a car while riding a bike. It’s funny how you said, “As luck would have it.” I love that you started with that, but as you said, a lead domino, and everybody’s story has a lead domino. Based on the things that you’re teaching, I’m assuming you healed yourself through that process as well. How is your leg now? I know that was years ago.
I’ve got more parts of my story that educated me more that we’ll probably get to throughout this conversation. That first injury, as I said, was really good at teaching me the basic principles of movement. When it comes to the knee, you have to have strong hips. You have to have strong feet. You have got to make sure you have good alignment during all the movements that you do. Almost everybody with knee pain is missing one of those three things. Their feet are not active, their hips are not active, and their knees do not have good alignment.
When I say good alignment with everything that you do, you might even just watch somebody walk, and they have bone-on-bone knee pain. You watch them walk, and their whole body, maybe they waddle from side to side like this. Every time we transfer our weight across the midline like this, instead of contralaterally, we’re putting a rotational and lateral torque on our knee joint. I see somebody like that. No wonder you wore your knees down.
The fitness industry uses shame to sell programs. You don’t have to hate yourself to get healthy. Start from self-worth instead.
If we practice a new gait pattern, a new walking pattern, if we practice foot activation, if we practice hip stability, all of a sudden they’re like, “Wait, every step I take feels good again.” That’s the process that I learned for myself because every step I took hurt. I tell people when they have pain, you have got a guru living inside of you. It’s going to teach you how to move better, or it’s going to make you feel crappy for the rest of the time. You have a choice here. Let’s figure it out. Usually people just need like one a-ha moment where they do a movement differently.
The Ego Trap Of Performance.
They’re like, “That was way easier. That felt way better,” to see the value in what it really means to focus on learning how to move their bodies better. That knee feels a whole lot better. If you want me to continue this story, it’s interesting for about ten or so years, I got really obsessed with what I could do with my body. It’s like, I healed it, now it’s like, how strong can I get? How flexible can I get? What can I do with it? Interestingly, now I look back, and I go, “Man, that was just rooted in the same egoic pattern as wanting to lose weight was.”
Still, the whole time there was this insecure little boy underneath it, just trying to get the world to say, “You’re doing great.” You know what I mean? How I learned that was I got injured again. I was doing gymnastics. It was ten years later. I came down from this twisting move on one of their spring floors, and my knee completely collapsed sideways. I tore my ACL, MCL, LCL, quad, and meniscus, all in one shot. I had surgery on that knee. It was a surgery that was not done well and ended up tearing that ACL and having tons of arthritis in that knee, and I ended up having three subsequent surgeries since then on that knee as well.
A huge part of my journey is five knee surgeries. I’ve spent a year in bed recovering from knee injuries and knee surgeries. At that point, I realized that fitness is not about how you look. It’s not about performance. It’s about longevity. That’s when I really learned that lesson big time. You have got to learn how to listen to your body. My body was telling me during that gymnastics class that my knee did not feel good when I was doing the twisting move. I told my knee, “Shut up. I’m going to do it anyway.” My coach was saying, “Punch harder.” I was like, “Shut up, knee.”
I did it and boom, everything went sideways. That was such a valuable lesson. I want people to let my injury be the way they learn that. If your body’s saying no, pause and listen to it. It’s really important. In the long run, if you go slow and if you practice movement, and you do functional movement patterns consistently, and you have a good progression that gradually gives you more strength and mobility over time, that’s what we want to do for longevity. Not burning ourselves out, not lifting as much as we can, not doing more cardio, not running another marathon.
It’s about learning how to move well and consistently try to make progress, but not from a place of ego, just from a place of a deep sense of care for your body. That second injury was an even bigger life lesson to me than the first one. That’s what really changed my path away from even some of the other stuff I used to teach people. Some people would come to me for a performance, and I would go to a performance. Again, this is an egoic pursuit that oftentimes leads to injury because you’re trying to push the limits instead of working within your limits, if that makes sense.
Absolutely. It does. You’re throwing out a lot of things that a lot of times I do not hear often, and I love your message here and how your perspective about things is that movement and fitness is about longevity and listening to your body. We can all probably share stories about times when our body was saying one thing, and we pushed it a little too far. I know I have my own story of that. I tore a plantaris muscle playing pickleball of all things. Right before that, I was like, “I should probably be done. I ran like six miles this morning. One more game.” I was tired and dehydrated.
It’s always that last little bit that ends up getting you in the wrong spot. Listening is so important.
Listening to your body. It tells you, as you said, there’s a guru in there. Let us talk about this functional movement and how do you actually, what does that process of unlearning the toxic fitness and diet culture look like? How do we build a different foundation?
It is important to acknowledge that the fitness industry has led most of us wrong because I think a lot of people blame themselves for not being where they think they should be. I want to just be real with people. The fitness industry has a message, and it’s a pretty toxic message on your mindset. It can really damage your sense of self-worth. The message is this. It’s like, “This is the way that you should look. This is the ideal body type, and you do not have that. You should feel lousy about yourself.
You should use that shame and self-criticism to motivate yourself to buy my program so that you can lose weight and finally feel good.” I just want to be real that this is what’s happening in the fitness industry. I’m going to be extra real with you. I’ve been doing programs online for fourteen years now. The reason why I know that is because early on, that’s what I did too. It was about trying to get somebody to feel really bad about themselves so that they would want to buy your program so that they might have hope to feel good about themselves. This is marketing. This is fitness marketing.
It’s not the reality of the situation. It also leads people to this place of always thinking there’s hope with some new, exciting thing. After I realized that I was doing more psychological damage to people than good, I realized that, by the way, we helped over a thousand people lose a hundred pounds. You might think that those people were really happy at the end of it, but I found something different. They just picked the next area of their body that they wanted to criticize and focus on.
I really think about that for a second, because I think there’s this panacea of “If I could only get there, then I’ll finally be happy.” If you use criticism and self-judgment to get you there, the entire way you’ve just rehearsed hating yourself. If you rehearse hating yourself for a year or two and you lose the weight that you think you’re supposed to lose, do you think you’re going to like yourself after that? No, you’ve just strengthened the neural pathways that are saying “I’m worthless” over and over again. I’ve met people who are fitness models, who are fitness influencers.
A lot of these people are deeply miserable if their journey was rooted in self-criticism and self-judgment. I just want to bring that up as a mental framework, because part of what I like to do with people is I like to get them to get away from using criticism, shame, and self-judgment as fuel to get started and start teaching them that this is about self-care. It’s about looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, “I’m worthy of spending some time on taking care of myself.”
The ABCs Of Sustainable Progress.
There’s a reason why this is important, Zach. It’s not just because I want people to have this mental shift that makes them happier with themselves. It’s because the other thing I teach people now is the ABCs of fitness. This is really simple. Take action on the basics consistently. If you take action on the basics consistently, that’s what creates long-term progress and change in how your body functions.
If you jump from program to program and you’re doing advanced stuff this time and you’re doing this thing the other time or even that thing the other time, and then you burn out and you take two months off and you go, people will perceive that they’re putting a lot of effort in, but they’re not getting a lot out of it because they’re not doing it consistently. They’re not focusing on the basics. Even if you are taking action, if you’re bouncing around a lot, it’s really not going to serve you in the long run. What are the basics?
If you want to feel better, you have to learn how to move better. It’s not about burning calories; it’s about building foundation.
Once we can reframe our mind, “I’m going to show up to take care of my body because I want to live longer and feel better for as long as possible, have as much freedom of movement as possible.” What’s next? Let us learn the basic movements of the human body. We have got to squat. We have got to lunge. We have got to learn how to stabilize our core. We have got to learn how to push with our upper body. We have got to learn how to pull with our upper body. We have got to make sure we maintain mobility in all of the joints.
We have got to make sure that we maintain stability in all of the primary movers and the bigger joints, like the feet, the hips, the core, the shoulders, the scapulae. If we learn how to do that, we can get really far. The reality is there are thousands of exercises that you could do out there, but you do not need a thousand. If you picked like 30 to 50 moves that you practice consistently, and if you had a map of progress from, “This is the variation of this move I’m doing now. Now it feels a little bit easier. I’m going to scale up the difficulty a little bit. Now it feels a little bit easier. I’m going to scale up the difficulty a little bit.”
That is how I found people have the best results when it comes to feeling significantly different in their body. Take action on the basics consistently, reframe your mind away from shame as motivation to self-worth as the reason you’re showing up for this. That makes a huge difference in how people can show up for themselves in the long haul.
That makes a ton of sense. I do know people who have lost a hundred pounds and made this amazing transformative progress and, as you said, still feel critical about themselves. It is a little bit sad, like, “Look at what you’ve accomplished and how much work you put in,” but really, like you said, coming from that place of sometimes self-criticism or self-judgment.
I became aware of that because if you met me ten years ago, I was living the Instagram life that everybody wanted. I went from being an overweight kid to having abs and driving the cool car and having everything that I ever thought I wanted. I’ll never forget at one point, I bought this new car, and it was my goal car, and I rolled up to my house, and this was almost ten years ago. I just pulled up to my driveway, and I was like, “I’m still empty inside.” It was a huge moment for me that really started a different journey of recognizing that happiness comes from within, not from outside of ourselves.
I can make a choice of either scrambling to just find a way to find meaning outside of myself, or I could do the real work where my car does not define me. My body does not define me. My house does not define me. I define me. I get to choose how I want to define myself. It’s hard work, but it’s a worthwhile journey to take that work and say, “How do I find happiness in who I am right now?” If you do that, then you can live a more authentic life. You can show up and take care of yourself without guilt. That’s a huge thing, especially for women out there. They feel a ton of guilt.
They’re so wired to care for everyone else around them that they always say, “My self-care will come when I do all this stuff.” At the end of the day, they’re burned out, and they never get the time for it. A huge part of ours, I have a lot of coaching conversations with people, is like, “What about time for you?” We teach people how to set boundaries. These are the things that you wouldn’t think you’d learn in a fitness program. Again, the goal is to get you to take action on the basics consistently. We try to remove all the blockers that are preventing you from doing it consistently, and a lot of it has to do with just how you think about yourself.
It all starts there. You talk a little bit about joyful movement. Can you share a little bit about that? What does that look like in everyday life?
Defining Joyful Movement.
The easiest way to think about joyful movement is like, imagine the last time you saw a bunch of kids playing with their bodies. Running around a playground or just having fun. They do not do that because they should exercise. They do not do that because they’re overweight. They just play. They just have fun with their bodies. When I talk to people about movement, that’s one of the things I love to do to people. I say quit exercising and start practicing movement because if we can get rid of that word that has like all this negativity associated with it.
The shame and judgment and gym class running a mile in high school, all this different stuff that we did not like about exercise, we start practicing movement. We give ourselves permission to go a little slower. We give ourselves permission to really feel what it is that we’re doing. We’re more mindful about the approach. Joyful movement is a couple of things. One, it’s learning to appreciate what our body can do for us, regardless of where we’re at right now. Everybody listening, you might be disappointed even with where you’re at, but your body still carries you. It’s carried you through this whole life.
If we can find gratitude and appreciation for that, then we start to find more joy in what it can do for us. The more we have joy and appreciation for our bodies, the more we want to care for our bodies. That gives us that real motivation, that intrinsic motivation. I’m showing up for me, not for something outside of myself. We want people to find joy in that. Now I want to be real about something here, though, because people confuse this.
Does that mean that doing structured movement practice is always joyful and fun? No. It’s something that we show up for because we know that it’s going to make us feel better. We know that it’s going to support the joy that we want to do with our bodies. Here’s the difference. People think that “I’m doing a little bit, so I should do more.” I have to tell people, “If you’re doing like two routines a week consistently, that is enough to really feel some significant difference. If you’re doing 3 or 4, you’re absolutely crushing it. If you’re doing 5 or 6, you better absolutely love it.
Otherwise, I’m going to tell you, “Why are you doing that? Go do something else. Go for a walk, go for a hike.” People think that you’re supposed to work out so that you can work out more. I’m like, “No, we’re supposed to like practice movements so that we can apply that and enjoy our lives.” Everybody here remembers things that they’ve loved to do that maybe they do not do anymore. We should be doing more of that. We should be dancing. We should be going for walks and hikes. We should be playing on the beach. We should be just having fun with our bodies again.
Again, that fortifies that appreciation, which is really this. If you can pay attention to the mental model we’re framing here, it’s this feedback loop of feeling good. Much of the fitness industry teaches you to feel bad about yourself, to create that motivation, then go to the gym and push yourself until you feel bad. You come home, and you’re feeling bad because you’re sore. You criticize yourself again, and you just repeat this loop of feeling bad. We wonder why we cannot be consistent.
Do you want to do something that constantly feels bad? If you hang out with a friend and they’re constantly criticizing you and making you do crap that makes you feel bad, you do not want to do it. If you wake up and you’re like, “I’m so grateful that my body has carried me through my life.” It has to be real for you. It shouldn’t be fake. Some people just need to wake up and say, “My heart beat all night long while I was sleeping, and I breathed all night. That’s incredible. Thank you so much. Let me do something to take care of you today.”
You do something to take care of yourself, and you go, “I did it today. I focused on myself. I took care of myself. Great job, me.” You feel really good. When you focus on that cycle, eventually you get to a place where it becomes your identity. Like “I do this because I feel good,” not “I do this because I hate myself.” That’s what makes consistency easy. If you like yourself, if you appreciate your body, you will take care of it. Period. No one’s going to stop you from that.
I always try to make that mental shift at some point throughout the journey with people working with us is like, you see this moment where I was going for a walk, and I had this moment where I was like, “I actually get it. This body is my one body that carries me through my whole life. I have spent my entire life judging, shaming, criticizing, trying to change it. For the first time in my life, I’m appreciative of it.”
I love that. Thank you for sharing. On those days where maybe we do not feel our best, you use this acronym COACH. Can you explain what that means and how that helps support people on days where maybe they do not feel like doing the routine that day?
WeShape’s coach is something I designed with our technology team. I’m really proud of this because I feel like we were ahead of the curve. We started building WeShape a little over four years ago. Actually, it’s more than five years ago when we really built the prototype of it. My goal was to use machine learning and AI to be able to deliver a customized routine to every single person that came to use WeShape. Again, like so many of the programs out there, even group classes that you go to, online programs, they’re one size fits most for the most part.
It’s like, “You want to come in here for this and then here’s the things you should be doing.” When you work with people who have complex situations, where they have injuries in certain areas, movement restrictions in certain areas. Maybe even like the way their body was formed at birth and they have issues with not being able to do certain things a certain way, you really quickly find out that basically the best routine for someone is the routine that was built for someone. Before we started WeShape, I had a moment where I was like, “What do I really want to build here?”
We were already pretty successful and doing all this other fitness stuff, as I had admitted in the past, but it started to feel empty. We were selling abs programs and supplements and cookbooks and everything. It felt empty inside. I’ll never forget the moment when I realized I was not showing up in the way I wanted to was when my older daughter started showing some early signs of an eating disorder. I realized that the strictness that my wife and I were putting on her was fueling her to rebound the other way.
I was like, “Who else is this happening to? Who else am I trying to apply my model of fitness, which at the time was criticism, shame, self-judgment, and perfectionism? Who else is getting damaged by this?” My wife really brought the toxicity of the fitness and diet industry into my mind. My daughter really showed me very clearly that this wasn’t healthy. One of the proudest moments of my life is when we decided to shut all that down, even though there were successful businesses and successful products that we had, and asked ourselves the question, like, “What do we really want to do to support people?”
When I started thinking about WeShape and this coach algorithm you’re talking about, I thought to myself, “If I were to work with a client, what would be the best experience this person would have?” You’re not going to walk into a gym to work with a world-class personal trainer, and they’re going to give you some cookie-cutter program and not ask you questions and not get to know you and not customize things for you. I always thought back to when I would work with people. First thing I would do, big intake. I try to figure out, where are you tight? Where are you weak?
Where do you have aches, pains, injuries? What are your goals? Figure out from there, “Now I’ve got a good sense of who you are, and I’ve got a good sense of the movements and the level of these movements that you should be doing in order to start you out. The progressions that you’ll need to make over the course of our time together to get you from where you are to where you want to go.” On top of that, when someone comes in to work out with me, I’m going to ask them, “How did you sleep last night?”
I’m going to ask them, “How does your body feel right now?” I’m not just going to write a program out and expect everyone to be able to show up and do that program that day. We’re normal people. We’re not professional athletes whose bodies depend on us being super strict about our routines. We got kids, we got stressors at work, we got everything. If somebody comes in burned out and I burn them out more, am I really doing a good job? No. I want to be able to offer them something that’s contextual for them that day.
Using AI To Create Personalization.
When we designed the technology behind WeShape, we called it COACH. It’s the Custom Optimized Algorithm Creating Health. I’m a little bit of an acronym nerd. Nobody has to worry about that at all, but the goal was to create the same experience as someone working with a really high-level personal trainer, but to be able to do it at scale, so that you can literally download the app. We take you through our assessment. We ask you like 30 or 40 questions that basically diagnose where this person is tight, where this person is weak, what their movement restrictions are that we need to work on.
From there, it’s going to create a movement profile. It’s going to basically select the best movements for you at the best levels. It’s going to start to give you a percentage breakdown of all those movements. You do not see any of this. This is all behind the scenes, by the way. Basically, I’ll give you a great example. Let us pretend you have back pain, and we figure out you have tight hamstrings and we figure out you have a weak core. Clearly, my workout should be focusing on restoring hamstring mobility, maybe getting your glutes active and involved, restoring your core stability, and teaching you how to properly hold your pelvis and your posture. Great.
That works fantastic for a lot of people. Now all of a sudden that person’s back starts to feel better. Where the system gets really special is as they interact with the workouts, just like they would if they were working with me. If they start to scale movements up to a certain degree, we go, “We fixed the hamstring mobility issue because you’ve actually scaled up to a level where I know your hamstrings are pretty flexible now. Now what’s your weak point?” The system we’ve built is always looking for the areas of your body that are the weakest, the tightest, and the least coordinated, and prioritizing that in their program.
That’s one of the aspects of it. Of course, as I said earlier, I think what people really like about the program now is we constantly make iterations of this. Our goal is always to make the best product possible when it comes to people using this workout. We ask you those same questions that I asked people when I was a personal trainer. We say, “How did you sleep last night?” We say, “How does your body feel right now?” We say, “How much time do you have?” because time is a huge obstacle for a lot of people. We give people 10, 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes to choose from.
Based on those answers, we generate a personalized routine for that individual for that day with their movement profile and with those answers from that daily check-in. Again, the goal is like meeting people where they’re at, giving their bodies what they actually need, adjusting it based on how they feel, how they recovered. It’s worked fantastically, especially for people over 40, 50, 60, 70, especially for people with aches, pains, and injuries, and especially for people who feel like most of the routines out there just do not feel good on their bodies. That’s what COACH does. It just acts like a personal trainer and tries to give you exactly what you need.
There’s so much there. I want to dive into this a little bit deeper, but first of all, I think it’s very notable and honorable that you took a successful business and shut it down because you didn’t like what it was causing for people. That’s very honorable. You totally reimagined something that came from a very altruistic place. I am glad that you’re having success with that. Thank you.
It’s one of those things where I wish I could take credit, but sometimes life throws you a choiceless choice. When you see something in front of you that is clear, like my daughter and my wife, and you start reaching out to other people and asking them, you start realizing, “This whole industry is built on shame and criticism.” It’s like, “What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to ignore that?” When you know better, you do better. One of the hardest parts about that was forgiving myself for going so hard in the opposite direction.
Stop exercising and start practicing movement. Your body isn’t a machine to be punished, it’s a home you live in.
Here’s the thing, Zach, about the shame-based cycle that fitness puts you on, and this is something I’ve contemplated a lot. There are a lot of people out there who are really successful in social media because of insecurity. They use self-criticism, judgment, push harder, and go and like hustle. Underneath it, you almost always find somebody who had a lousy childhood, and they’re like, “Somebody see me, somebody loves me.” I was that person. For one percent of the population, maybe you can have enough insecurity to become successful.
Everyone else goes, “That’s what I should be doing because that person is where I want to be.” For the 99%, you know what actually ends up happening? They do not hate themselves enough to push themselves to become successful. They just hate themselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and they get stuck in this low self-esteem, low self-worth, and then they keep trying that same pattern that’s not going to work for them. Flipping it on its head has been a game changer for people, getting people to like themselves now.
Throughout their journey, when we work together, continuously work on that. Now, even if they do not lose the weight, maybe they just feel a little better from practicing movement. They still like themselves. They like their life. They’re happier. That’s what we all want underneath this. We want to feel happy. We want to feel fulfilled. You’re never going to get that if you constantly focus on lack and what you do not have and all the things that you do not like about yourself.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Here are some things I can improve.” That’s fine too. I want people to grow and be honest with themselves, but I do not want them to attack themselves and shame themselves. Again, I think it’s a choiceless choice at some point in your life. You see things that you cannot unsee. I had to make that move, but I appreciate that it was really big because it was hard for sure.
Let us dive into the WeShape programs a little bit more. What is an average day? You said you can choose from anywhere from 10 minutes up to 60 minutes. You mentioned maybe there are 30 to 50 different movements, but what does a typical routine look like?
That’s one of the hardest questions I can answer. I’ve got about 6,000 people right now using the WeShape routines, and every single one of them is doing a different routine because of the software we’ve built basically on the backend. It varies from person to person, but the philosophy is the same, which is we touched on this a little bit, but in a nutshell, let us start with the time commitment because I feel like that’s a huge obstacle for people. I tell people to start with two 10-minute routines a week. When it comes to building new habits, especially with fitness, 99% of people go way too hard, way too fast, and it just is not sustainable.
It makes it so that we get stuck in that one step forward, one step backward game. If I tell you, as a starting point, let us do two 10-minute routines a week, and you tell me, “I do not have the time for that,” then I’m like, “Bye.” I cannot do anything for you if you cannot find two 10-minute spaces a week. You have got to be able to have enough consideration and be able to create that spaciousness for yourself. We always tell people to start there. Actually do that for a month. We want it to feel easy. Changing your habits, changing your body, changing in your life requires that the nervous system does not get red flags.
We have to feel safe as we do it. We have to feel regulated as we do it. If we do two 10-minute routines a week for the first month, all of a sudden we’re like, “This is not so bad. This feels good.” Especially if you start them out with movements that are a little bit easier, we reframe their mind toward “This shouldn’t be like a burnout workout. This should just be like, just do it. You feel good afterwards. You feel like you got more energy afterwards. Your body feels better afterwards.” Maybe go to 20 minutes, maybe go to 30 minutes, whatever feels comfortable over time. Maybe go to three routines, maybe go to four routines, but keep the baseline of those two routines there as a minimum.
The reason why I say that is because if you do two routines a week for a year, that’s a hundred routines. That’s you taking action on the basics consistently. If you can do a hundred routines that have a good progression that are customized to you, there’s literally a zero percent chance, barring something outside of yourself like an injury that happened outside, that you’re not going to feel significantly better in your body. You’re going to learn how to move better. It’s going to carry into your daily life. You’re going to literally get stronger.
Not just your muscles, but your tendons, ligaments, and bones are going to have more strength and density. You’re going to have more mobility at the end of it as well. That’s going to result in just a higher quality of life. I always tell people, like, do less as a starting point and slowly work up from there. Now, when it comes to the actual routines, I’ve hinted about this progression thing over and over again. I’ve talked about this progress piece. The way that most fitness programs make progress is they increase the duration, or they increase the repetitions, or they increase the weight.
If you’re weightlifting, you’re doing 10 reps, the next time you’re doing 12, the next time you’re doing 15, you add some weight, you repeat the process. That’s just fine. It’s a good way to train if it’s something that you enjoy doing. I focus on movement, not on the body, like how I want my body to look. I’m never thinking about isolation. I’m thinking about integration when it comes to teaching people how to do fitness in the way that I think is the best way for longevity. When it comes to a progression, the way we do it is not adding repetitions. It’s not adding weight, and it’s not increasing the duration. It’s sophisticated.
If we want to get a little nerdy for a second here, I personally believe that this is how the human body was designed to make progress with its ability to move itself. I take this from, there’s a camp called DNS, Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization, founded by a man named Pavel Kolar in Prague. Highly regarded as one of the most sophisticated physical therapy schools in the world. What they’ve discovered is that as a baby’s born, this baby cannot really do much with its body. If you start to watch the baby make a progression of movement, what it does is first it starts to lift its neck and stabilize its core.
That’s because everything starts at the core and moves to the extremities. If you do not have good coordination in our core, not just strength, not crunches and sit-ups, but coordination, everything from the pelvis all the way up to the chest, if we do not learn how to stabilize our core, then we cannot do movement safely. A lot of people would be surprised if all we do is work on stabilizing the core. Again, this is not crunches and sit-ups. This is a proper way to integrate everything in stabilization. Everything starts to feel better. Back pain goes away. Everything feels a little bit easier.
Picking stuff up off the ground feels a lot easier. A baby will start with core stabilization. It’ll start with contralateral movement. It’ll start trying to roll. That means taking your left shoulder over to your right hip. This is a prerequisite to a proper walking pattern. Earlier we talked about if everybody walks in this fashion where their whole body moves ipsilaterally, which basically means our whole body moves to the right, our whole body moves to the left instead of contralaterally, meaning our left shoulder and our right hip move towards each other, that creates a huge dysfunctional pattern in the human body. When you’re a baby, you learn how to do that by rolling.
You roll over to your stomach, and you learn to press up to a kneeling position. This is more core stability and involves the limbs now, not just involving the core in a lying position. We start to learn to crawl, which again, contralateral movement. We learn to stand. Now we’re creating stability in the hips and the feet, and then we learn how to walk, and then we learn how to run. This is the way a human being, if you leave them alone and do not tell them anything, learns how to move. It’s encoded in our DNA. I’m happy that we’re going here.
I do not get to talk about this depth on a lot of podcasts, so it’s a really interesting topic. When I learned about this, I had a baby at the time, and it was really interesting because I literally watched her go through every single step that was described to me in that system. I was like, “This is really powerful.” Simultaneously, I’d been doing gymnastics for a long time. People probably heard of calisthenics and progressive movement through calisthenics or gymnastics. This is how those people train. You want to find the strongest, most coordinated people in the world, the most flexible people in the world.
Consistency beats intensity every time. Two 10-minute routines a week for a year is 100 wins for your body.
Look no further than gymnastics. It is absolutely incredible. Guess what? Gymnasts do the same exact thing. Everything works in a movement progression. They start you out with a movement that your body can do. When that starts to feel like something you can easily do, we make the movement a little harder. We do not add weight, we do not add reps, we do not worry about duration. We just make the movement a little bit more challenging. We repeat that process over and over again, as you start from basic stuff to more complex stuff. Let me give you a more concrete example of this, just to make sure that people really understand what I’m talking about. I’ll give you an example of, like, recovering from a knee surgery, because I’ve done that far too many times.
You’ve had your fair share.
I’ve had my fair share of that. A simple version of this. When you first start recovering from a knee surgery, you start to go back to wanting to learn how to move again. Most people will try to learn how to walk. They’ll have some dysfunction. They’ll try to learn how to squat. They’ll have some dysfunction. They’ll just go back to their daily life, never fixing those patterns. I would take somebody back to square one. I want everyone to be able to do movement practice. Every single movement that we have in our library starts with a level one that you can do lying in a bed if you cannot even sit up.
If this were me, my first movement would be working on activating the quads, the glutes, and the lower legs. I would be lying in bed. I would bring my heels up underneath my butt. I would lift my toes towards my nose, and I would press my heels down into the ground, and I would work on the mind-muscle connection between my quads and my glutes. Again, my lower legs all at the same time. Literally all I’m doing is squeezing the muscles in an isometric contraction for a few seconds and then relaxing.
All we’re doing is rebuilding that neural pathway from the brain to the muscles, because when you get injured, what often happens is the muscles around the injury turn off, and the muscles above and below turn on in a much more heated fashion. That’s why if you get a knee injury, you often get calf and ankle tightness, and you often get hip tightness on top of it. To get the hips and ankles to calm down, we’ve got to get the muscles that stabilize the knee to turn back on. Those muscles start to calm down. Can stretch those muscles all you want.
We do not get the muscles around the knee to turn on. They will stay tight forever. We’ve got to learn how to activate the proper muscles. I would do that just to see there’s a lying heel push. All I’m doing is pushing my heels into the bed and learning how to activate those muscles. Once I was able to get to a seated position, I will do the same thing from a seated position. I’m working on my seated heel push and I’ve gotten, I’m always teaching alignment. I’m teaching how to do things with proper form throughout that so that people do not have dysfunction in their movement.
If it’s a knee injury, probably the most important thing you can consider is, is my knee pointing the same direction as my toes? That’s probably the most important piece of alignment that people need to be thinking about. From there, we would transition them to learning how to go down into a chair with good form and using support. We would teach them how to go down and up into a chair using support. We would remove the support. You’re doing what’s called a sit-to-stand, which is a prerequisite for a squat.
Once you got good at the sit-to-stand, we would increase the speed a little bit. We would have you rise up on your toes. Now we’re starting to condition the feet and the ankles to come through it. We would have you add a little hop at the top. Now we’re learning how to absorb impact and create elasticity in the fascia, the tendons, the ligaments. Also, impact is the absolute best way to reduce osteoporosis, to increase bone density. It’s better than weightlifting. This is the thing. If people tell you weightlifting all day long helps for sure, it does, but absorbing impact is way better.
One of the most important things you can do as you grow older is maintain your ability to hop or jump and land in a pain-free way. We would remove the chair. We would have you increase the range of motion. We would have you increase the height of the jump. By the end of that progression, you’re doing jump squats. Now, if you’re somebody who wants longevity and you can maintain jump squats into your 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you do not have to squat 300 pounds. You do not have to do this stuff.
If you can do jump squats, that is like a super incredible foundational human movement that is going to carry you super far. Again, most people, they step too far forward. They take too many steps forward in the beginning, so they lose the ability to have that strong foundation. That’s what often prevents that progress. That’s why I keep saying take 10 steps backwards, take 20 steps forward. That’s a concrete example of a movement progression. How we apply that at WeShape is we have this movement library. We have more than 900 different variations of movements and stretches.
What our system does is look for about 50 that are the right fit for you. That was an arbitrary number because honestly, I could probably give you 20 or even 15 and you’d still get great results, but you’d probably be pretty bored because you’d be doing the same thing every day. I want enough variety that people do not get bored, but not so much that we never make progress because we’re never practicing something consistently enough. We find the right level for you wherever that’s at in the spectrum of that movement. We start you out there. Your job is to follow along with your routine.
When you feel like the movement feels good, scale it up. It scales it up to a slightly different difficulty of that movement. We’re always trying to make leaps that are small enough that it does not feel super challenging. Again, if we make these big leaps, it can tend to be a place where the nervous system does not feel safe. Maybe, if we go from a slow sit-to-stand to a squat jump, the risk of that is pretty high. You know, we haven’t done any ankle conditioning. We haven’t learned how to absorb impact in a more controlled fashion.
We want to make sure that people make that slow progress. That slow progress oftentimes really gets people a lot further than when they’re trying to make fast progress. I’m a huge fan of “By the inch it’s a cinch, and by the yard it’s hard.” Little steps make huge progress. I do not know if I answered your question. I’ve been ranting for a while now, but there’s a lot about how we look at movement and how we properly give people what we think they need and help them grow.
No, that makes a ton of sense. It’s really applicable for anyone tuning in or a loved one. I’m thinking of my own father who’s undergone some surgeries and things like that, and he would be starting off at some of the basics at this point in his life. Some people are maybe in their 70s or 80s, like you mentioned, that can start with some really simple movements and then work all the way up, or other people are maybe really fit but want to increase or have some areas that aren’t being worked very well. I know for me personally, like there’s probably a lot of places where I feel pretty fit most of the time, but there are some areas that I’m not working on some of those little things that could probably make a big difference.
Functional Longevity Exercises.
Again, I’ve spent a lot of time doing things rooted in ego and insecurity, as I shared with you. One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned is that we will often make decisions that serve that ego when it really does not serve us in the long run. I’ll give you a great example, probably one of the most incredible movements that I think people should try to learn and gradually build up to and maintain. I call it a one-leg drinking bird, but essentially you’re just doing a single-leg hip hinge deadlift on one leg with perfect technique. If you can do that, the likelihood of having back pain is really low.
The likelihood of being able to go on long hikes up and down stairs, and stuff is really high. The likelihood of knee stability, hip stability, and ankle stability is really high. It’s definitely something you want to work up to. It’s not something you want to just try on day one because then you’ll develop all these bad movement patterns. We have ways to work you up to that as well. In the past, I would do a deadlift with two legs, and I would lift heavy. I’ve had the one injury on the left and the other injury on the right with the four surgeries, and then I’m deadlifting.
I’m like, “I know that I’m not doing this symmetrically.” If I’m not doing this symmetrically, there’s pretty much a hundred percent chance that I’m going to develop a pattern here that’s going to end up hurting me in the long run. Sometimes we have to take the thing that we’re like, “I’m deadlifting a lot,” or “I’m squatting a lot,” or whatever these things we use to serve our ego and say, “What’s really more functional in the long run? Is it having a 400-pound deadlift or is it literally just being able to do a single-leg drinking bird with your body weight or maybe pick up a lightweight and do that?”
You’ve got to check your ego at the door and say, “What is my actual goal here? Do I want to serve my ego and be the guy who can lift a bunch of weight? Do I want to live as long as possible, as functional as possible in a body that feels as good as possible?” I always think about this. If I could fast-forward to anybody listening right now, like 10 or 20 years, and you chose to go down the path of intensity and pushing yourself, you’re probably going to regret it. Almost all the people who push themselves really hard end up pretty banged up and injured.
It’s the people who focus on longevity by using yoga moves, physical therapy moves, and functional movements. That’s what carries you into old age gracefully. You’ve got to check your ego out the door. You’ve got to do movements that require a lot more focus and balance and coordination, and really focus on them a lot more. You have to care a lot less about what other people think about you when you’re doing them as well.
Thanks for sharing all that. One question too, do you work with anybody who is like high-performing athletes or a pro athlete or others that are really optimized in a lot of areas and then you’re coming along and maybe optimizing a little bit more in certain places, or do you?
Early on, that was my angle I wanted to work towards. As I said, I worked with some really incredible coaches and athletic trainers that were training some really high-level athletes at the time. I’m like, “This is what I want to do.” I want to be like this guy and go train Maria Sharapova and all this stuff. I ended up getting a handful of clients in Santa Cruz. I live in Santa Cruz. There are some professional surfers and things like that here. I got a couple of people from that circle. I had a Navy SEAL I was working with as well.
It was fun to work with these people to a certain degree, because when your body is your work, you do the work. Throughout my experience, getting injured and things falling apart and having to build them back up over and over again, and watching like my parents struggle and seeing them. That was another motivator for me, like, my mom’s getting both of her knees replaced, and then the physical therapist is discharging her, and she does not even have what I would consider like great range of motion back at that point.
I’m starting to watch the world, just the medical industry, function like that. They’re just like, “Let me get you back to like functioning. If you want to do more, you have to pay out of pocket.” Nobody does it. I just started realizing that I think my skills are better served for people who are struggling and do not have that roadmap to go from “I feel like crap” to “I feel good again.” Quite a few years ago, I made the conscious choice to really focus on those people, focus on my mom, focus on the people who have had a bunch of injuries like me, and get them back to a baseline because there’s plenty of athletic trainers out there, there’s plenty of people out there that will do that thing.
I liked it. It was fun in some ways, but I realized my ultimate calling was more with real people, like normal people, real-life people who really want to make a change in how they move. I look at it more like how do I take all the information I learned that normally is only applied to this elite group of people and bring it at scale to people who really need it?
I love that. As you said, now you have over 6,000 people in your WeShape. Programs, 900 different movements. Can you tell us just a little bit as we wind down here, how does someone get started? Obviously it’s probably pretty easy, but can you just share, how do we get started?
The process is really simple. We lead with a movement assessment. The goal is to figure out where you’re tight, where you’re weak, what your goals are, where you have experience and injuries. We build out that customized routine. One thing I want to call out here is if you’re online and on social media a lot, you probably see a lot of quizzes and things in the fitness space still. I want you to know that most of these quizzes are collecting data to market to you more efficiently. They’re almost never using any, if not just a tiny bit of that data to contextualize your program at all.
Why I say that is because we use literally almost every single data point from our intake to actually create a customized program for each individual. That’s how it functions. We literally do come in and try to use WeShape without our assessment. We cannot create a customized workout for you. I just want people to know that from the start. That’s why we do that. I also want them to be cautious about some of these companies that are mostly asking questions to try and play on your emotions instead of actually asking questions that are relevant to building something unique for you.
You take our movement assessment. We build you a routine. We always let people try out their routine for two weeks. It’s a two-week free trial of things. I want people to give it a shot. At the end of the day, if you do three routines in those two weeks or four routines in those two weeks, I’m pretty certain you’re going to notice a difference. If you do not, if it does not feel like a great fit for you, if you do not find value in it, no harm, no foul. You can easily get out of there and cancel. We are not trying to hide anything from anybody and try to lock people into a membership they do not want to be in. I always tell people it’s really easy.
We actually made a link for your audience too, where they can go straight through this and get that two weeks free. It’s WeShape.com/FullyAlive. If they go there, they’ll land right on our assessment. They’ll be able to go through it, find the movements and stretches that are the right fit for their body. We’ll build the routine. They can get set up, and then they’ll get into the program and try it for that two-week free trial. There are a couple other things we do inside there too that I think are worth mentioning. Community is something that we really focus on at WeShape.
Especially, I do not know about you guys, but as AI gets more and more pervasive and everything, to me, like human-to-human connection is really important. Not only do we have, like, but it’s basically like a Facebook feed wall. It is not actually Facebook. It’s our own wall inside the software, but you can post and get support from actual members and stuff like that. We have a really active community of people. I always encourage people like this, not just for like, “I did it. I did my routine.” This is for like, “I’m really struggling today. I feel like I cannot even get started. Can someone help me out?”
I always encourage vulnerability and whatnot throughout there. We also have live calls. For all of our members, we do live calls. I do live calls every week around movement questions and answers just to help people find even more things that can help them get the goals faster. We have a physical therapist, Dr. Lisa, who works with us and also does movement calls every day of the week. We have support group calls because let’s get real, when you’re struggling, you need support. People come to these support group calls with all kinds of stuff.
“I got diagnosed with cancer today. I cannot believe it.” They just need someone to hold space for them and listen to them. The community is huge. This isn’t just our opinion. Part of the reason why we lean so heavily into it is that we did the research. When you have a community around you to support you, you feel safe. Remember what I said earlier. The only way to actually make permanent change is when the nervous system feels safe.
If you’re doing a workout routine that’s too intense, and you do not have a community, and you’re criticizing yourself, like, of course we’re not going to make a permanent change. There’s nothing around us to make us feel safe that can allow that change to happen. Community makes you feel safe. Safety is what allows us to make permanent habit shifts in our life. Beyond that, I think the research is very clear that the quality of your connections and your life ultimately determines your happiness at the end of your life.
You know, we’re not going to sit on our deathbeds and go, “Man, I wish I would have scrolled more on social media.” You know what I mean? We’re going to be like, “I wish I had more meaningful connections with human beings.” That’s a huge part of our system as well. It’s just real people in community together. We’re trying to give people all the support they need to be able to make the shifts that we talked about on this call.
You can’t hate your way to a body you love. The secret to long-term health is liking yourself right now.
We do a lot of mindset work through our challenges for our members as well, which again focus on shifting that mindset away from using external motivation and self-judgment as fuel to get started and towards self-appreciation as fuel to get started and keep going. We’re just doing the best we can at the end of the day, like flipping the fitness industry on its head and doing fitness differently.
I love it. Thanks for that software as well, WeShape.com/FullyAlive, to try it out for a couple of weeks. My last question. You’re the functional movement coach and guru here. What does a day in your life look like? How do you practice this yourself, and how do you stay even after five knee surgeries and multiple injuries and things? What are you doing for your own longevity?
First of all, I want to say one thing. What I always teach people is I do not want to be your damn guru. I want to teach you how to be your own guru. I strongly consider our job is to give you the tools, both physical and mental, so that you can grow and heal yourself and make yourself feel good. That’s the win there, not me having to be there to support you through that. As far as how I apply it for myself, I’m a real human being. I’m a real human being too. That’s the other thing that social media really does.
It creates this idealized perception of people. My right knee, after four knee surgeries, I still do not have an ACL in there. It still hurts some days. It feels better some days. I try to stay as strong as possible. I try to practice what I preach. I’m doing WeShape routines or the movements inside the WeShape routines as a part of my own program. I try to maintain my ability to elastically absorb shock in my lower body. Even despite the fact that I do not have a lot of tissue inside that knee, it still makes me feel a lot better when I’m able to do that.
There are some weeks where I’m like, “I went for a hike or something, and things feel off there, and I cannot do that.” Practicing movement consistently is a huge part of my life. It doesn’t have to be every day, but a few days a week tends to be really good. Prioritizing the things that make me feel good. That’s what I always try to focus on. What makes me feel good? When I meditate, I feel good. When I do deep breathing, I feel good. When I try to prioritize sleep, I feel good. When I prioritize practicing movement and not pushing myself too hard, but deeply listening to my body, what does it need today?
Do I just need to stretch and do some yoga? Do I have a bunch of energy I need to get out of me? Do I feel angry and rageful, and I need to go do some hard stuff to get that out of my body? I just try to listen to it and offer it what it really needs for each day. We didn’t talk about this much at all, but on the nutrition side, this could be a whole other podcast, but I believe that everybody already knows what to do with nutrition. Most of the stuff out there, the supplements and the diets and stuff, is just a distraction from connecting with themselves.
I just like, listen to your body, man. This is the key. If you eat something and it gives you good energy and it digests well, and you feel good, like great, that’s probably a great food for you. If you eat something and it does not digest well and it makes you sluggish, then you know the consequence of eating that food. That does not mean you shouldn’t eat the cookie. Have the cookie sometimes, but do not have the cookie and feel guilt. Have the cookie of choice. Say, “I’m going to eat this cookie. I’m going to enjoy the crap out of it. It’s going to taste good.
I’ll probably feel a little bit off afterwards, but that’s okay today because that’s the choice I’m going to make.” I found in my own life that I used to be so strict with all this stuff and tried all the routines and diets and everything. When I just gave myself permission to listen, I’m probably in the same exact shape I was back when I was crazy strict, and I have absolutely no restrictions whatsoever. I really think that people need to do that in all areas of their life. Just what does my body need right now? What’s going to make me feel good? When you do something that makes you feel good, give yourself a high five, celebrate it, create that feel-good loop. That’ll give you that motivation to take action on those basics consistently. That positive feedback loop, as you mentioned, that’s perfect.
Tyler, this has been a lot of fun. You’re, like you said, flipping the fitness industry on its head here and uprooting some of the toxic culture within the fitness and diet culture itself. I know it’s a great uphill battle to climb and to fight against. You’re doing an amazing thing and helping a lot of people along the way. Hopefully, hopefully we’ll help a lot more through this conversation as well. Thank you so much for the great work that you’re doing, the work that you’ve done to get to this point. I just really appreciate the altruism behind it as well, and that you’re here to help people feel good, live longer and healthier for longer and better lives along the way. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
WeShape.com/FullyAlive, people can check it out there. Thank you so much for being with us, Tyler.
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I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Tyler Bramlett from WeShape. There are so many nuggets in there that it really jumped out at me. Just a few to recap. I love what he talked about we need to practice movement so that we can enjoy our lives and move away from this shame-based culture that has really dominated the fitness world, moving out of our egoic patterns so that we can just learn how to move well and feel good about ourselves. Moving away from self-criticism and self-judgment to self-care. That’s really the foundational mental shift that he mentioned there that’s really crucial to this whole idea and this whole philosophy.
Functional movement, he said, quit exercising, start practicing movement so that we can then enjoy our lives and appreciate what our bodies can do for us. The premise of this conversation was really about making a big shift in the way we think about exercise. It’s not exercise. It’s practicing movement. WeShape is really another company that can help us that makes it really simple, like he said, at scale to do that. You can do a movement assessment.
You can try it out for two weeks, learn some of the routines and things that are in there, but bigger than that. It’s really, let’s be a community of people that practice self-care and self-love so that we can also become more loving people and really live healthier for longer and find meaning and purpose and joy along the way, both in our movement, in our bodies, and with each other. Thanks so much for tuning in to the show. Check out Tyler at WeShape.com/FullyAlive for a two-week trial if you want to try that out. We’ll see you back here next time. Have a great day.
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