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Podcast: Building a Fitness Brand with Sean Pastuch

Written by David Tao
Last updated on August 6th, 2023

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Dr. Sean Pastuch has worn many hats in the fitness industry, including trainer, coach, chiropractor, podcast host, business mentor, and business owner. But he’s perhaps best known as the founder and face behind Active Life, a company built to “help the world helping thousands of people to get out of pain WITHOUT going to the doctor or missing the gym.” Active Life also provides an immensely deep offering of educational tools to fitness professionals on how to build their knowledge, businesses, and clientele.

And it’s not just what Sean’s business does that makes a big impact in the public eye. It’s who he works with: Some of the fitness world’s biggest and most influential names, particularly when it comes to elite CrossFit athletes.

I sat down with Sean to talk about his history in the industry, with a particular focus on the ups and downs of working with some of fitness’ MEGA influencers.

One things that stood out to me is Sean’s unwavering dedication to his principles, including instances when he’s actually FIRED big-name clients who weren’t adhering to his programming in a real and dedicated way.

That’s right: This is a business owner who told some of the biggest names in fitness he didn’t want to work with them anymore because they weren’t using Active Life to its utmost potential.

Find out why that’s turned out to be a great business decision — and other lessons important for anyone interested in the business aspect of the fitness industry — on this episode of The BarBend Podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02mM7EpwmkA

In this episode of The BarBend Podcast, guest Sean Pastuch and host David Thomas Tao discuss:

  • How Sean began his fitness journey (including life as a 103-pound wrestler) (1:05)
  • Sean’s informal beginnings as a personal trainer (3:20)
  • Why Sean purposefully built his knowledge base in the least glamorous environment possible — and took those lessons to higher-end facilities (4:30)
  • Active Life’s beginnings and finding a path in a changing era of fitness (7:30)
  • Leveraging the growing influence of CrossFit to build connections and raise the brand’s profile (10:10)
  • How Sean found and partnered with athletes to provide real value and raise Active Life’s profile (12:45)
  • Why value is a two-way street, and why Sean had to (shockingly) fire some high-profile clients — and why he stands by those decisions today (16:50)
  • The good AND the bad of working with super-high-profile athletes and influencers (20:49)
  • Why working with elite athletes upped Sean’s game with clients of ALL levels (24:39)
  • Sean doesn’t his company to be known as the brand with great programming. Here’s what he REALLY wants long term (29:09)

Relevant links and further reading:

Transcription

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Welcome to the BarBend podcast where we talk to top athletes, coaches, influencers and thinkers from around the world of spring sports presented by barbend.com.

Today on the BarBend podcast, I’m really excited to welcome Sean Pastuch to the show. He is someone with a long history in the fitness industry. I’m excited to talk to Sean about the fitness industry’s growth, branding, personal branding, what it really takes to build the company in this space. Sean, thanks so much for joining today.

Today, if you wouldn’t mind giving the listeners a little background on where you’re coming from and how you got involved in fitness.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

 David, I appreciate you having me on the podcast, obviously. I’ve talked to you now for years, since back when you were at Reebok, Fifth Avenue, were working with the Rhinos, all the stuff that you were doing in the past. I’ve always had immense respect for you and the way that you run your business and your show, so I appreciate you having me on.

A little bit of background about how I got myself into fitness is easy. I was 103 pounds, freshman year of high school. 103. I was…and I know it’s 103 because I wrestled in the 130-pound weight class. The guy ahead of me in the weight class was eighth place in the nationals, and I was not.

There was no weight class to cut down to, so I would go to practice every day and get my ass kicked. I’m like, “This sucks.” [laughs] “I got to get stronger. I got to get bigger.”

I started getting into weightlifting and into exercise because I knew if I wanted to get out of wrestling where it was a walk-on, that I was going to get beat up every day and not make much improvement, I wanted to do something.

Play basketball was that thing, and I wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, athletic enough to make that team. I started getting my ass in gear, and that’s how fitness started for me back in sophomore year of high school.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

When did you realize that you could make a career of that? The fitness world, the strength world, it’s really expanded in a huge way over the last decade or so.

Back when you were in high school, back when I was in high school, the trajectory of making that a legitimate career and a profession wasn’t so clear to a lot of people, I don’t think.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

No, I remember watching one of those trashy TV shows like “Temptation Island” or something first time through and one of the guys on it was a personal trainer. They talked about how he made $50 an hour.

I started doing the quick math, I’m like, “Wow, he should work 20 hours a week and make $1,000.” I was in high school. That’s freaking awesome. I want to do that, but I didn’t. I went to college.

Senior year of college when I realized that I knew what I was doing in a weight room, at least at the relatively simple level. I figured there’s got to be room for me to teach people how to do this, because I’m looking around and they have no idea what’s going on.

I came back between my sophomore and junior year of college, having really dedicated the summer to getting in great shape. Everybody felt like I’d taken steroids. I’m still 160 pounds. It’s not like I was huge when I came back. It was just…I understood principles of exercise.

Senior year, I started informally doing some personal training in the weight room at University of Maryland. Then I got my license to actually be a personal trainer, the summer that I graduated. The evolution of how I was going to do that evolved quickly.

I’ll give you a little bit more of the background. I was working at a terrible gym on purpose. I looked for the worst thing I could possibly find knowing that I didn’t want anyone to ever know I existed from the things I did in that gym.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Hiding in the shadows?

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Yeah, I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to make all of the mistakes that I could possibly make without being on the stage and I was going to do them on. By the way, there’s never that stage, you’re always chasing a false peak. When I was young, I didn’t know any different. I learned how to put together a selector eyes machine, how to clean the mirrors in a gym with newspaper.

I learned everything about the personal training business in a world gym. Then I went to Equinox, which is the top of the mark personal training gym business, business, business, business. Let me use that as the emphasis for they are. I learned so much. The biggest thing that I learned was the best way to help people is to be looking for the people others have discarded.

Everybody wants to train the hot chick and the jack dude. I was upstairs in the pool looking for the overweight man, the overweight woman who didn’t want to come downstairs and “embarrass” themselves on the gym floor. While it would take the average trainer in the gym six months to become full time if they ever got there, it took me five weeks. I had clients who really valued what I was doing with them.

I had a major pivot, a job point because I was taking my clients up to the physical therapy suite that was at the gym and asking, “Hey, what do I do with these people? She has frozen shoulder. He has a hip problem. This guy’s got a back problem. What do I do?”

They never told me what to do. They just told me what not to do. “Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t do this,” as a death socks. I can teach them something. I just need to learn something first.

I’m back to school to be a chiropractor, and then I graduated the smartest person in the world, if you would have asked me. Over the course of the last nine years, I’ve learned that wasn’t true either.

I continue to try to surround myself with people like you and people on my staff who are smarter than me in something about what it is that they do, so I can learn from them.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

That’s fantastic segue because I first became aware of Active Life and what you’re doing in Active Life RX through the CrossFit’s base, through your work with a lot of very…the Jack Dude, the Jack Chick, these people performing at this elite level.

My first conception of this was years ago of what you were doing in your brand was working with the one percent of the one percent of top performers. Since then, I’ve learned that your brand is…it’s really built for the rest of us.

There’s an athlete you’re working with at the top have a lot of the same problems, a lot of the same imbalances that the average gym goer might have, like you or me, sometimes exacerbated because of their high level of volume of training and their very high level of fitness.

Tell us a little bit about the early stages of Active Life, and then how you began to identify communities and groups of athletes that you wanted to work with, that you wanted to target.

 

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

To make that long story concise, I was treating patients out of my father’s chiropractic clinic. I was enjoying it. I was learning from my father’s, learning from my uncle. We come from a family of chiropractors. It was great.

The problem is, I was way less efficient than they were helping a patient. I was clogging the machine because it took me too long to treat a patient. To be frank, they weren’t seeing the kind of patients who I was enjoying my conversation with.

I wanted more active population, so I started doing CrossFit at CrossFit Garden City on advice my friend Chris Teppy and who had gone there previously. I loved it. I was like, “This is cool. This is hard. I thought I was in good shape. Apparently, I’m not.”

I remember wearing basketball sneakers to do push presses one day, and this guy was like, “You don’t want to wear those shoes because the bubble in the heel will throw you off balance when you sink your weight down.” I was like, “I don’t know what these guys talking about, but I love these shoes.” [laughs] I wore them one more time, and that was the end of that.

I started treating patients out of CrossFit Garden City and quickly recognized the town I lived in didn’t have a CrossFit gym and didn’t have a clinic that I thought was doing the right kind of care.

I reached out to a friend of mine and said, “You should open the CrossFit gym. I’ll help. I’ll run the clinic. We’ll be attached. I can serve the population that goes there. It’ll be great.” That’s what we decided to do. The way that we did that was the first of 10,000 massive mistakes I made along the way.

One of the things that I did that was not a mistake was, I recognized that even I was working at Equinox, I didn’t always have so much respect for the way that the busiest trainer in the gym would train his clients, but I always respected the way that he built his business.

The way he built his business was he would have the hot chick, the Jack Dude working out with him in the middle of the floor, doing what looked like a choreographed fight scene from a movie.

Everybody’s just watching this guy. He’s not getting anybody fit, but he’s busy. What I took from that was, “OK, maybe that doesn’t have to be all of my clients, but if I can get attention using that kind of a clientele, maybe I can get more.”

I looked around and said, “Who is the best most influential CrossFit athlete in the area where I am?” I looked within two hours, and it was Daniel Tyminski at CrossFit Lindy.

I reached out to Dan and I said, “Hey, I know you don’t know me. I’d love to come by and do an evaluation on you, and see if there’s anything that I can do to give you an edge over the people you compete against in CrossFit.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

What year was this roughly?

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

2012.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

All right. This was during Dan’s streak of just back to back to back to back to CrossFit games finishes. He was like, “You could bet on him year after year at that point.” He was pretty much at the top of the game.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Yes. We had some back and forth, and he said, “Yes,” eventually. I would drive out to Dan to help him with all the little elements that he was dealing with. We grew a friendship. I went to his house for 4th of July party. He was not a great resource of referrals, but he referred me to his girlfriend, who is now his wife, I believe, Riki Long.

She was very active on her social media account and was pumping me out all over the place, led to things like Krissy Mae Cagney, who she was friendly with, who came to an event that I ran, Flex in the City.

Then came to my clinic, became a patient. When she had 165,000 Instagram followers, she started telling everybody about it. It was just continuing to ask people if there’s anybody who they knew, who they thought I should be helping to refer them to me.

It just led to the right people. I never said like, “Hey, do you know anybody with a lot of Instagram followers who wants free treatment in exchange for a post?” It was just, “Do you have any friends who really need the kind of help that I provided you?” Yes.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Working with these athletes at the beginning seemed very organic. They were pushing you out because they had a fantastic experience. You were helping them.

A little further on as active life, the brand started to coalesce. You started working on notice of athletes who you would bring in, you would show promotional content around them. It was a little more formalized.

How did you get to that next step of…not only helping them obviously, but being a little more direct on leveraging their reach and utilizing that.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Great question. My parents tell us right now. It started off in my parents’ house, it’s funny you ask. One of Krissy Mae Cagney’s boyfriend at the time was Drew Canavero, who was on the San Francisco fire.

Drew was like, “You should work with these guys from Brute Strength. They’re brand new. They need somebody like you.” We started connecting with them. They started hooking me up with their athletes.

Their athletes were a variety of different elites. We didn’t have a way to connect with them because they were wherever they were, we were we were. Drew had a friend named Will Dermody.

He’s like, “Will wants to see you. I told him he needs to see you in person. He’s willing to come out.” I’m like, “He lives in Nevada. It’s not worth it. Why would he ever come out for an appointment?”

He was like, “Dude, he thinks it’s worth it? Make it worth it.” “All right.” I talked to Drew, and I talked to…I forget his name right now. Jesus. I talked to him on the phone. [laughs]

I’m like, “Here’s how it works. I guess we would need three days, and we would assess this, and then we would assess this, and then we would assess this, over the course of those three days. It would be about two hours a day.”

He’s like, “OK. What would that cost?” I’m like, “How about $1,000?” He’s like, “Yeah. Cool.” “When you’re free?” He’s like, “Shit, I have no idea.”

Will Dermody, I don’t know why I forget Will’s name. Will ends up coming out from Nevada. He’s the first person ever to do it and like, “Wow. People came out for this stuff. That’s cool.”

Then Jared Stevens was in a CrossFit Solace for noble. I was working with him through Brute. I’m like, “You’re in New York. I’m coming to meet you.” I drove into the city to meet with Jared just to check him out in person because we’re working together online and I knew I need to build some trust.

I started evaluating him in the downstairs of CrossFit Solace, and we only have like 20 minutes, and I’m like, “Damn, I wish I had all three days with you. You should come back.” The next day he came out with his wife to my gym and we did more evaluation. Then he came back out again a few months later. We did the full eval and like, “This is a real thing.”

We built a…what we call the intensive assessment, intensive visit. It was where athletes from all over the world, not just the ones that we worked with who were elite in promoting us would come out and they would get the assessment. They would pay the $1,000 for three days of assessment, and then we would write them programs when they left.

That became like the, “Hey, if you need help, because now, at this point, to be honest with you, we’re reaching out to some elite athletes, but mostly, they were reaching out to us. It was, “Yeah. Look, we will work with you if you fly out here on your own dime, and we can create content around evaluating and managing care with you.”

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

So you’re setting these value expectations upfront. You’re saying, “This is what you’re getting out of this. We know the value of this. We’ve established that people are flying in and paying for that. We have some promotional expectations or asks that we would ask for in return there.”

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Yeah. I was like, “Look, I would happily pay you $1,000 to promote me, but I wouldn’t pay you $1,000 to promote me if you don’t know what I do and don’t think I’m valuable.”

If you would fly out here on your own dime, we’ll do the evaluation for three days for free in exchange for being able to document it. As you promote this service that you are receiving, we’ll continue to offer it for you at no cost. Once you stop promoting it, we have to stop providing it.

We even went the other way, where we had athletes who were promoting us because they felt like it was their duty to do it, who were not doing all of the things that we asked them to do, who are household names in the CrossFit world, who read fire as clients because the last thing we wanted to do was have somebody not get the results that they should and be promoting us at the same time.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

That mean they could have negative repercussions for your brand.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

And for them all around. It was a hard thing to do because the first time we did it, we did it with the top 10 athlete in the world, repeat top 10 athlete with the CrossFit games.

I was like, “Look, if you feel like this is what you need to do when you’re training, even though I’m telling you, I think it’s a bad idea. I understand why you want to pursue that. I have to let you go as a client. I can’t keep you on knowing what the risk that you’re taking.”

Truth be told, he ended up being right. Nothing went wrong, and his career has been just fine. He also sends a thank you card. There’s no hard feelings. When I see him, we’re still friendly. It’s just that we weren’t willing to take that risk with our brand.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Those are difficult conversations. It’s very difficult to end partnerships, relationships that have worked out well, but then there arise situations where maybe no one’s necessarily wrong. There’s just a difference in opinion, direction, maybe people are weighing impacts differently.

You do have to have those conversations, but you always want to leave it open down the road in case interests and ideas align again.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

True. What I can say to your listeners and to you is I’ve sought coaching, specifically sought coaching, for how to end relationships so that the door can stay open.

I’ve paid somebody money to teach me how to tell somebody I no longer want to work with them, so that they might come back one day when their mindset and my mindset better line up. It’s been some of the most valuable money I’ve ever spent.

Now, instead of having all these people out there who are like, “Sean’s a fucking asshole. He fired me as a client, said one day, ‘We’re done,'” they’re all like, “He did a really nice thing. He told me that if I want to train like this, then what he would ask me to do would be extremely stressful for me. Right now, it’s probably best that I train like this and come back if it ever makes sense to train like that. “

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

You’ve turned firing a client, or ending that relationship, into an opportunity for even better word-of-mouth referral, because people hear that and they think, “Wow, this guy Sean, he’s really got his athletes and his clients’ best interest at heart.”

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

The client who I’m…Yeah. The client I’m talking about specifically right now, who is a top 10 CrossFit Games athlete who, if you are a CrossFitter, you know who it is, by name I should say. You don’t know who it is, but you would know who it was…has referred me clients who are also elite CrossFitters, and who are not elite CrossFitters.

They come to me and they say, “Look, the reason I’m drawn to you is because person X said that if you can’t help me, you’ll tell me.” That was the truth.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

That’s a really interesting tidbit and something that’s undervalued, not only in the fitness industry, in business in general. The fitness industry is oftentimes a weird, accelerated microcosm of some things you see in business in general, because you have so many people starting their own businesses, building their own brands. Those things get accelerated on a faster timeline.

What are some other things about working with influencers in the fitness space that surprise you for the good or the bad as you build your own brand?

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

I’ll give you the bad first and then I’ll give you the good so we can have people feeling on a high note.

What I mean by that is when you’re responsible to make sure that they feel good, it doesn’t matter what else in their life is going on, what their training looks like, what kind of flight they took before they did the photo shoot, where they were lifting the heavyweight that they didn’t warm up to. None of that matters. If their hip hurts afterwards, it comes back to me.

I can’t turn around like, “Well, you did hop on an airplane, fly across the country, sit for six hours, go straight from the airport to a photo shoot, claiming you’re 300 pounds, you shouldn’t be surprised that your hip hurts.

Of course, I say that in a tactful way but then there’s the…here, let me tell you why this is not going to be a big deal. Here’s the lesson you learned. Here’s the way you’re going to approach it in the future. Here’s the conversation you’re going to have with the sponsor next time you go about what needs to happen in order to have you come out. Everyone’s going to win. That’s valuable.

Another downside to it is when you work with the elite athletes — what you were saying in the beginning, especially when they’re your marketing — everybody thinks you need to be one to work with us.

We get people, not so much anymore, but we got people all the time who were like: “I would love to work with you guys, I hope I can be competitive enough to do it one day.” I’m like: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean?” “Well, I know that you guys work with Rich Froning and you work with Brooke Ence, and Brooke Wellss, and Jared Stevens, and James Newbury, and Giga Pattner.”

I’m like, “Yeah, but there’s only a hundred of them in the world.” We can’t build a business on that. They are in our pictures because people don’t stop and click on a photo that has my sister in it, who I love. They just don’t know who she is. She is not doing something insane, so they’re like, “Yeah, OK, pedestrian, move on.” We build our business off of people who are just like you and me.

That was another downside. The third downside that I found was, it’s difficult not to take things personally. You can’t take things personally. At the same time, it’s difficult. I’ve made some mistakes in the way that I’ve communicated with clients, which is why I hired a coach.

Where I believed that the client was making a bad decision for their competitive career to work with this specific coach, or to do a specific competition, or whatever the case might be.

Instead of allowing the client to learn this for themselves over time and find out if I was right or wrong, or not really care, if I was right or wrong, just support the client because they’re the client, I would impress myself upon them. It’s because when I look back on it, I was taking personally that they weren’t taking my advice.

I didn’t end up in a better place because I pushed back. I did but not because of those relationships. I learned how to not do things through those relationships and those communications. Those are the big things about working with elite.

The positives are because there’s so much pressure, I learned how to be great. I really did. There was a level of care that I grew to be able to provide to a client just through the conversation of clarity, certainty, and assurance that made me and our company more valuable than anything they had done before.

Jared Stevens, I talk to him all the time, “Hey dude, I don’t pay you. I feel bad that you’re constantly pushing us out. How can I pay you in some way? I could just create a way to pay. I could just give you money, but what’s a greater way that I can pay you? You’re constantly promoting.” He said, “Dude, you gave me my shoulders back, that’s priceless.”

I talk to him about interpersonal stuff. I talk to him about his life, and we’re friends. Getting that skill set has been incredibly valuable. The exposure that those people can provide, extremely valuable if you know how to leverage it after you have it. The experiences, I mean let’s be realist.

When you’re at the CrossFit Games, and there’s 30,000, 40,000, wherever there are people there, and they’re all walking around, and they see their favorite athlete. They go nuts, they wave and they scream. They take a selfie over the crowd because Rich Froning is a hundred feet behind them.

Then I walk back through the same gate over to the couch, high five, sit down, “That was good workout, man.” It’s cool. That is cool. Those are the higher points of working with elite.

The interesting thing, which is not a higher alone, is finding out that those are people just like we are. They have stresses in their marriage. They have stresses in their training. They have stresses in their business. Their pipes burst, too. It’s very cool and interesting to get to learn these things about people who you put on this pedestal because you only see them at their peak.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

In a controlled environment where they are elite. Just because you’re an elite athlete, doesn’t mean you’re better than the next person at managing family relationships, at not keeping your life in order. Yeah, it’s interesting. We see people in the context that where we want to make heroes, I think.

In the fitness industry, the longer I’ve been around it, the more and more respect I do have for somebody’s superlative accomplishments. These world record-holders, these multi-talented winners, I respect them more and more because I see that that is the product of just consistent effort over time, relentless effort over time.

You also see that relentless effort often comes at the sacrifice of other parts of their lives because you just can’t be at that level for that long without giving something up. Everything has an opportunity cost. It’s a fantastic point.

mentioned earlier the impact and learnings from working with elites. You had this huge social presences and the impact that had on your brand.

At this point, your brand has a pretty big social presence. I follow you on Instagram. I have it for a while. You’ve got over 50,000 followers. You’re posting a lot of content. I like how you get creative with the types of content.

You’re always willing to explore new things graphically, video, working with clients, bits of your personal life. What have you learned from your own presence online about building a personal brand and connecting with potential clients?

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

 I think the most important thing that I learned about that is that there’s a faster way to grow, and it’s not worth it.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Say more about that.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

When I need posts on an Active Life X, for example, if I talk about the strength ratio of left leg to right leg, squat to hand, single leg to bilateral, they always get a lot of buzz, and they always get a lot of likes, and comments.

I had a lot of followers after I do that, but…I need to but. I don’t want us to be the company who gets known for having great programming. I want us to be known as the company who helps people, solve people problems using programming.

That’s a big difference. When we work with clients, their expectation is always like, “This is it. This is the magic bullet. You’re going to give me exercises that are going to get me where I need to go, and that’s what I want.”

One of the things that we ask all of our clients on Mondays is we give them what we call a lifestyle check in. How was your eating this week? How was your sleeping this week? How are your relationships? How is your stress? How is your energy?

Our staff is taught to answer those problems first because if those problems aren’t taken care of, then it doesn’t matter how much weight you can squat and deadlift. You’re going to go back to having the stress. I have a client, for example, who I just gave the book, “The 5 Love Languages” to because he was going through some stuff with his wife.

I go in and I amend his program every week because at the end of the day, people need a program, but if I’m attracting clients who are unwilling to have those difficult conversations with their coaches, then we’re never going to be able to truly help our clients.

I want to grow the account in a way that the people who resonate with the message, the whole message are following, and not only the people who are like, “Can you give me a whole set of single leg exercises so I can grow my glutes?” No.

 

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

It’s a good point. Sean, we’re wrapping up and coming to the end of this episode. It’s been fantastic learning about your growth evolution and continued development in the fitness industry. I’m really excited to see where you personally and your brand go over the next few years.

Where can people find out a little bit more about you, about active life? Anything exciting coming up we should know about?

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

There’s definitely something exciting coming up that you guys should know about depending on when you start to release this podcast. You said July, August.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Assume this podcast goes live late July 2019. If you’re listening to the archives of the BarBend podcast right now, we’re recording in June 2019.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Yeah. Assuming it’s not already full by then, what we’ve just released is called the Active Life Professional Path. Essentially what that is, is we’ve been very successful helping our clients. There are over 10,000 people across the world now. It’s been awesome. Coaches and gym owners are becoming inspired by the way that we view exercise and humanity.

They want to learn how to do what we do. We started our immersion course. The big thing about the immersion course we guarantee money back before it’s over.

You’ll make your money back from the course before the course is even over with clients in your own gym. Some people do really well on it, some people do transcendentally well on it. Some people do OK on it.

We decided that we don’t want that to be the case anymore. We want everyone to crush. We came out with the Active Life Professional program which is everything.

It’s assessment, correction, marketing, sales, coaching in person, developing staff, business development, all of that rolled into one in a year-long program. We’re only taking 40 gyms on that ride with us the first time around. I’m super stoked about it.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

It sounds like an interesting trip around the sun for a year-long program. Really excited to see how that pans out well. Sean, thank you so much for joining us.

Just so folks know where can they follow you, what’s the best social media platform to reach you at, or to at least follow what you’re doing.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

If I can, I’ll segment it. If you are somebody who is looking to get out of pain, or just wants a more thoughtful exercise program that relates to your life, follow us @activeliferx and activeliferx.com. If you’re a coach, a gym owner, a fitness professional, activelifeprofessional.com and activelifeprofessional on Instagram.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

That’s easy enough.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Yeah. If you think I’m awesome, I appreciate that. You can follow me @drseanpastuch.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

My goal is that you see the biggest follower bump from that last one after this podcast.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

I hope so.

David Thomas TaoDavid Thomas Tao

Sean, again, thanks so much for joining us. Really, really appreciate the conversation. As always, I love that you’re not afraid to talk about the bad with the good because any professional evolution is going to include both. Really do appreciate that.

Sean PastuchSean Pastuch

Happy to do another full podcast in the future.

About David Tao

BarBend's Co-Founder and CEO, David is a veteran of the health & fitness industry, with nearly a decade of experience building and running editorial teams in the space. He also serves as a color commentator for both National and International weightlifting competitions, many through USA Weightlifting.

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