Mat Lock:
Welcome back Will. Welcome back to The Unleashing Potential Podcast and this is our opportunity yet to pick your brains at programming for the real world because as you know, The Bay Games and everything we do is all about the everyday athlete. So firstly, welcome.
Will Henke:
Yeah, thanks for having me back again.
Mat Lock:
And for those who haven’t yet seen or listened to, your first vlog where we talked about programming for the Grand Slam 2020, could you just give us just a on one minute lowdown on who Will is and then we’ll dive in.
Will Henke:
Yeah, if you wanted to go back and watch that video (Episode 002), it’s a little bit more in depth, but yeah. I have a pretty extensive background in the military, in the U.S. Army. So in that time I myself and also trained others soldiers for combat and combat preparedness. So that moving forward allowed me to kind of mesh those principles that I learned in the military with the principles that I’ve learned when coaching weightlifting, gymnastics, CrossFit, and a few other things as well in sport specific training process.
Mat Lock:
Excellent. Thank you. So obviously Head of Programming for The Bay Games, I think, I imagine most people listening to or watching this will be aware of that. But outside of doing that programming for this team, what else do you have in terms of businesses?
Will Henke:
So two things. My wife and I, Carrie, run a business, called WanderFit Retreats. The business itself is run under the umbrella of WanderFit Ventures and under that umbrella we have two main businesses that we do. The first one is WanderFit Retreats. So we do active adventure and fitness retreats around the world.
So right now we have fitness retreats in Bali, Portugal, Costa Rica. And next year we have a really exciting, I don’t know when this is going to launch so I’m going to keep it hidden, because we haven’t announced it yet, but we have a really cool fourth location for 2021 that we’re looking at, that we’re going to launch. So, that’ll be coming up here. That will launch in March, end of March, 2020 so look out for that. So we do that. That couples fitness and active adventure going to some of the most beautiful destinations around the world, while keeping your fitness up and travelling with like-minded people, kind of building a very strong community of travellers who like fitness.
And that, to me and Carrie, is the core of what we love. Carrie is probably the most functional gypsy you’ll ever meet in your life. And I love fitness, one of my passions. And for us to be able to combine those two things together as a married couple in a business is our dream and it’s great. Additionally to that, underneath the WanderFit Ventures umbrella, we have a training programme called ‘The Program’ by WanderFit. And that is created for the general population of people, not competitors. And that’s one thing that as the training programme we have at our core. There’s plenty of great competition prep programmes out there but I don’t feel there are many general health and wellness programmes that deal with functional movement, training proper positions for longevity of life and health. And that’s what myself and my coach Cassie, are developing together.
She’s a Canadian who lives in Australia. Amazing, amazing coach, amazing woman. So she’s been instrumental in building this with us. So with that we have also our individual programmes where we do specialised individual programming. Presently I have 11 athletes that I train individually.
Cassie has a few athletes that she’s training as well. So with the mentoring that I’ve been giving her to teach her to coach online and also move into the performance both for athletes and for people that just want that one on one relationship with a coach, I’m teaching her how to go about doing that together. So I have my own philosophy just like every coach has their own and it’s, I think it’s a great thing for me to be able to show her, not my secrets, but what I think makes a great coach and she’s able to take what she likes, bring it with what she’s done very well and learned from her background from track and competing in the sport of body building and develop into her own as a coach, which has been amazing to see over the last year.
Mat Lock:
Awesome. Mate, just before we dive into the details of ‘what’ it is, when you’re doing individual coaching in particular, you mentioned the WanderFit Retreats and of course you have a whole string of Bay Games winners and Grand Slam winners scheduled to go on all sorts of retreats this year with you. I think it’s what, three or four, or is it more now.
Will Henke:
Yeah, some in Costa Rica, some in Bali. I think we had one of the teams book, one of the Bali retreats with all four of them are coming together. That’s going to be such a cool thing to have them come out and show them a good time and reward them for their hard work for the Games last year.
Mat Lock:
Yeah, exactly right. And we certainly appreciate your support from, WanderFit Retreats and at the end of the day provide those as prizes for the winners of the various events. So thank you very much for that.
Will Henke:
Oh, it’s our pleasure.
Mat Lock:
Okay, I think it’s important, but so, when we talk about the individual coaching, is it as simple as say, if I could come to you and say, yeah, look, I want to drop a bit of weight. Can you write me up a programme? That might make your skin crawl. What would your reaction to be to that? How would you handle such a request?
Will Henke:
I think that understanding why. Why do they want to lose weight? Are they unhealthy? They’re looking just to get a better body composition. Is there a specific goal in mind? Losing weight or gaining strength or any of those things, there has to be an underlying reason. And for me as a coach, I don’t, I’m not just, when I do one on one coaching, I’m not just providing a programme and if that’s what someone’s looking for is just to receive a programme from me, more of a transactional relationship, that’s not the type of relationship I have with my athletes because I don’t feel that whatever you do in your training session, whether it’s an hour or 90 minutes in the gym, that is such a small fraction of your life and that’s not the biggest impact that’s going to be concerned with your results.
Will Henke:
And if someone’s only looking to receive a programme, I’d be looking to refer them to someone that does do body comp training. But if someone was looking to have someone, a coach on their side, someone that always has their best interests at heart, who’s looking to make changes in their lifestyle that’s more conducive to that are sustainable, incremental changes such as, what does your sleep look like? You know how many hours of quality sleep are you getting? Nutrition, how dialled in is that? What’s the quality and quantity of foods you’re getting? Vitamin D exposure, water consumption. There’s so many things that go into someone’s fitness self that controlling just what you do inside the gym isn’t enough. And to be honest, that’s not going to get the athlete where they want to be. And I think being able to actually coach that person to show them how to make these incremental sustainable changes to their lifestyle, we’ll give them a better quality of life.
Will Henke:
I’ve been working with an athlete for a while. A friend of yours, actually, Josh Sharp. It’s one of the, just by far, is one of the coolest experiences I’ve had as a coach. And it has nothing to do with fitness.
So Josh came to me, he’s a very, fierce competitor and very, very hard on himself. So when I started working with him over a year ago, I asked him, how’s your sleep? What’s your sleep look like? And he would tell me, and it was by most people’s standards, probably average, normal. But when I was saying, hey, let’s try to increase your time in bed by an hour or 90 minutes. Let’s make some sleep hygiene changes where you start with stop looking at a screen at a specific time leading up to your bedtime, working with your partner. So his partner, Georgia, when they were here visiting, they actually said, now they do these things together.
They both say, okay, now it’s a time when we stop looking at screens and dim the lights. They start training the brain to be in a rhythm of, all right, like sit down. We’re getting ready for bed. You know when they wake up in the morning to finding that time where they can have the most restful time to allow your body to recover. Now Josh is saying if he’s not getting at least nine hours in bed, that he feels not fully rested, and the fact that he’s able to actually understand his body and how it feels when certain actions are taken or not taken, gives him the mindfulness of, and the tools to be able to say, all right, like I know what I have to do. So it’s not me telling him you need to do this. It’s him receiving the coaching that I’m providing, implementing in to his life and how it’s implemented because I don’t know, I’m not with him every single day.
I can’t tell him exactly when to do things but when he has the tools and can do it himself and he sees the results and he’s performing better, his body weight’s a little bit lighter, he’s lifting heavier. I think a little while ago he matched his all-time PR deadlift when he was 15 kilos heavier. Now that he’s 15 kilos lighter, right? So those are the things that we’re looking at, is these incremental changes that don’t necessarily come up in one specific change, but being consistent with your changes and making the changes that are sustainable where you’re not just going to do it for a week and stop. That’s when you start to see coaching. And for me that’s what coaching is about, is giving you a programme that’s going to get you toward your fitness goals, giving you the requisite tools that you need to do and implement in your life, whether it’s sleep, vitamin D intake, all these things, how your diet looks. And then using all these tools collectively together to push toward your goal. So that’s what I enjoy.
Mat Lock:
Yeah, that’s awesome. And I know Josh, or Sharpie as we know him at this end. I think it’s been transformational for him and he continues to learn so much and he, in particular as an athlete appreciates that. And you say you’re providing the tools for him to then go and discover those aspects for himself.
I guess as well, it sounds like it’s a very intimate affair when you’re coaching and you’ve got 11 and I know you’re not looking to take, to grow that to a hundred, 200, 300, certainly not on your own, maybe with an army of coaches, but it sounds like it’s a very intimate affair and therefore do you have the chance and is it important with all of the other life things going on? For most people who are at work, maybe have children have stresses in their life, surely that’s all part of it.
Will Henke:
Yeah. You have to look at what they’re doing outside the gym. You could have two people that want the same programme or that wants the same results, right? Let’s say just a general health and wellness. Someone who’s looking to be healthy, look good naked. So when someone says they want to look at naked, that generally means they want their body composition to change, right? They want to look better. So if someone has a job where they’re a construction worker and they’re on their feet and moving for nine, 10 hours a day of strenuous work, then the other person who wants the same goals has the same body type is sedentary and sits in an office on the computer all day typing, right? You can’t give them the same programme because one person having a much more active lifestyle where you have to take into that time to account.
The other person doesn’t. So that person may lack in the flexibility needs they need versus the person who’s on their feet all day. They may need some things that aren’t going to be super active but are strengthening specific conditions or certain conditions they need to. So it’s on the coach and this is an evolving relationship and you’re right, it is very intimate and that when you do individual coaching, there needs to be a cap. So for me, my cap is 11 people and now when new customers come in that are looking for one on one coaching, I get Cassie on the phone and Cassie is starting to take on those clients because the moment that your quality is lost that’s the end of it. And you can’t, no one can give individual programmes, you know, a hundred to 200 per week because there’s no way you can follow up with that many people.
You can’t have the intricate knowledge of what is your athlete doing right? I can tell you pretty much what my athletes are doing right, now, because I know generally how their work schedules are, when they train, how they train, how they feel, what their partners are like and things like that. So it’s very intimate as far as understanding, hey, how was your day today? Anything crazy happened this week? You know, how are you feeling? That’s a common message that a lot of my athletes get from me every day. How are you feeling? Not just like, Oh I’m good. Like genuinely like tell me like how are you feeling mentally? How’s your mental state? How’s your physical body? Like how’s your relationship with your partner? All these things that add stress to the body, that’s going to limit your ability to recover optimally when you don’t manage your stress properly.
If someone’s not getting enough vitamin D, their energy levels and their mood is going to be a lot lower. So their motivation to go to the gym might change. So there’s a lot of these variables that are going to constantly be in flux and as a coach you need to kind of try your best to get a handle on that. One thing for me that’s really important is everyone, when they want to work with a coach, they think I’m going to work with this coach. He or she has it, like they know what they’re doing. They have the perfect programme. There is no perfect programme. It doesn’t exist. The programme that’s perfect gets you to where you want to go and to get where you want to go, you can do that so many different ways and there are so many intelligent coaches out there that can get you to the same goal, the 17 different ways, but it’s understanding what way is most conducive to that specific person.
If you’re doing a one-on-one track, now, if you have like a group programme, you’re trying to take a general programme that you feel is your specific person. The working mom and dad that have kids, the single girl who wants to look good naked, you know, whatever they’re doing in their life. The guy who’s tried, the single guy who’s trying to impress the girls, by looking in a certain way. The ones that just want to perform well, they don’t really care how it look, but they want to perform well. And in that mass programme that you create, you have to make it somewhat, not individualised, but scalable for all. And one thing that I massively disagree with is when you write a programme in a functional fitness gym and you’re in what I hear all the time from people who say, programme for the best and scale for the rest, that’s a lot of gym philosophies on programming. You programme for your best athletes and you scale for everyone else. And there’s two things that are ridiculously wrong with that.
One, when you say you scale for the rest, that means you’re saying everyone at your gym that’s not the top athlete at the gym isn’t good enough to have your thoughts and the thought and mindfulness that goes into those scaling options for people is usually a last minute thing. It’s like, oh, you can’t do handstand push ups in this workout for 40 reps? Okay, just go over there and put your feet on a box and do some modified push ups. How’s that prepping them in the right way and allowing them the adaptation to build to that? Right? And the other option is, people are thinking scaling option is always down. So in my opinion, when you programme a work out, it should be for the general population of your pool, right?
Whether it be a gym, an online client, finding who your finding one person that you’re programming for, you programme to work out for them. And say yes, I know that there are people who if they do this work out this stimulus won’t be the same for them. So we’re going to get a scaling option that’s up that’s going to allow that stimulus to still being met as if they were this person. Now there’s also a scaling option for people down and adjusting movements, taking into account injuries, mobility issues, equipment limitations, things like that. So finding that common ground of understanding like who your specific person is that your programming’s for and what their goals are that you’re trying to get them to in your programme. That’s important. And a lot of coaches, gyms, whomever, that are doing programming or designing programming for whoever their clients are, don’t typically do that because they think, oh, I’m going to make everyone go to the CrossFit games where there are barely any gyms where that’s your target pool.
And usually those people are doing their own programmes because the class programmes aren’t enough of a training stimulus to prep them for sport. The sport of CrossFit versus you know, just staying fit and using CrossFit as a tool or F45 or these other, you know, there’s a great gym in Melbourne called Pick It Up Fitness. They are a functional training gym. You won’t see barbell snatches because every person in the world doesn’t need to be doing barbell snatches, nor do they have the overhead mobility and their lats or their thoracic spine to move that way. So you don’t need that for general health and wellness in my opinion. But I think for sport you do, if the sport calls for that.
Mat Lock:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I appreciate that great answer. We’re getting short on time, but what I would say is how can people reach out if they’re interested to find out more about what it is you offer and how you offer it or to reach out and make contact with you. What’s the best way for them to do that?
Will Henke:
A few ways they can do a lot of people just reach out to me via my Instagram as a direct message. To be a little more formal, you can send me an email to will@wanderfitretreats.com, you can reach out to our Instagram account for The Program by WanderFit, or our ‘retreats’ Instagram too. Myself and Carrie run all of those, so if you really wanted to find out more information, it wouldn’t be that hard to find somewhere.
Mat Lock:
I think they could even come on a retreat with you and chat about it there.
Will Henke:
They could, yeah. I’ve had a lot of people that have been retreat clients, left, then became individual clients or clients of the programme just because they liked the coaching they received on the retreat and they went home and wanted to have that as well.
Mat Lock:
Yeah, for sure. And certainly all of the links and connection points will be in the show notes when we publish this. So if anyone’s interested to reach out to Will, if you look below, you’ll find all of those details there. Will, thank you once again for your time. Appreciate it. Always good to chat. And somewhat envious of you right now, even though we need the rain where we are, almost post-fire season in Australia, kind of envious with the shirt-off tropical look going on.
Will Henke:
I mean, you know you’re always welcome here, man. You know that.
Mat Lock:
Well, we’re only a plane ride away, right? All right, mate, thank you very much indeed for your time, Will.
Will Henke:
All right, man, have a good one.
