EP31 Part 1 The depths of Johnny Gillespie and The Balanced Athlete

EPISODE 31

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:15] KC: Welcome to the Business of Life Podcast. My name is Keith Callahan. I am the host of the show and honored and grateful to have you here listening and tuning in every single week. If this is your first time on the show, welcome. This is the place where really it’s a curiosity project of mine.

It’s me interviewing people who I am curious about and it’s usually life experts. People that are achieving the type of life that they want to live. They’re really living a life filled with happiness and fulfillment and gratitude. They’re those people that you see, they’re just glowing and you want to be closer to them.

So, that’s what this show is about. I always say that I have the coolest job ever. I literary do. I get to interview these amazing happy just awesome glowing people and learn from them and pick their brains and just fulfill my curiosity about what it is that they’re doing to achieve that level of happiness in their life.

Today, we have on Johnny Gillespie. Johnny was introduced to me through a mutual friend, Jackie Bonwell and I didn’t really know too much about him. So whenever somebody suggests a podcast guest, I do a little bit of research and the first thing that I saw when I was poking around on Johnny’s Facebook page and this was right before Thanksgiving when we were lining up this interview.

I see a video of him and a couple of his buddies doing “Murph” which is an insane CrossFit workout. Google it if you want to know what it is or if you don’t know what it is, they’re doing it in their basement before Thanksgiving or on Thanksgiving morning and right away, I was like, “Alright, I like this dude.”

So many of the people that I interview come from so many different walks of life but there’s something about people that have that, I shouldn’t say intense, I guess intense is the word. They like to go all in with something and just watching that cross fit video, it’s amazing what you can learn from somebody in a little 20 second video clip.

But I was watching that and right away, I knew I was like, “Alright, this is somebody that I know that I’m going to have a lot in common with.” He’s a Buddhist, he is a meditation teacher, he’s actually a yoga teacher. I think he does incorporate meditation into a lot of his work too. He’s also the yoga teacher to the yoga teachers.

A lot of the very well-known yoga teachers in New England specifically but also around the country, they’ll bring Johnny in to their teacher trainings and they use him as the opening act. So he opens up the teacher trainings with the work that he does with one of his companies called Balanced Athlete.

It’s really around proper alignment starting with your spine but starting with a proper alignment, the foundation of proper alignment before we move into anything else. We talk a lot about this in the interview and about the work that Johnny does and yeah, it’s an amazing, amazing conversation. I enjoyed every minute of it and he’s a guy, guy with a beautiful bright shiny soul just out there. Working as husband and a father and a business owner and a yoga instructor and he’s got so much going on and he’s walking through it with a heart centred place and a heart centred mind every step of the way.

One other quick thing before we bring Johnny on, I just want to say that I just moved into a new home. I just got my computer all set up, was amped up for this recording and I forgot to switch the microphone from my computer microphone over to the microphone I am talking to you in right now. My nice podcasting microphone so the sound is going to sound a little bit off on my end but besides that, awesome kick butt interview with so many nuggets and so many take aways.

Alright, let’s go ahead and get Johnny on.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:04:52] KC: Alright, so I am excited to introduce today’s guest, Johnny Gillespie. Johnny, welcome to the show man.

[0:04:59] JG: Thanks for having me brother.

[0:05:00] KC: I’m excited to have you on and one of the reasons that I am really excited for this conversation is a mutual friend of yours or a mutual friend of ours, Jackie Bonwell connected us and seeing over the years that she’s been raving about you and then one of the things that — you and I got to chat a little bit last week and connect.

One of the things that really intrigued me and really has me interested to talk more about you or talk more with you about is you have a very good balance with fitness, yoga, meditation, sort of the whole life, all-encompassing — married, children. And I guess leading into that, the first question I really have just jumping right into it is how did you get involved in all of this? What is the path that brought you to where you are now?

[0:06:05] JG: Thank you. One of things is that I am 43 years old so everything is a long story at this point and let me just give kudos to Jackie Bonwell because Jacks, as I call her, I bow to her deeply so maybe I’ll just say that but I just got into weight lifting when I was between 7^th and 8^th grade. My track coach told me this was going to help me run faster.

It’s one of those days that I will always remember. We were in his garage and he was just teaching me and he didn’t know what the hell he was doing and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I was like a lot of kids in the 80’s, my dad got me a weight lifting set and I was in the basement just lifting weights.

As I got into high school, I continued lifting weights and was into body building and sports and then I got into college and continued it and it wasn’t until between my sophomore and junior year that I went to my guidance counsellor and said that I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown because I was in accounting and finance double major.

I said, “This is not what I want to do with my life,” and I was chasing the two and half kids, the white picket fence, the Beamer, all that stuff and I’m like, “It’s not just who I am.” And so I did a series of test. The next thing you know it, she said, “Well, you shouldn’t be — you’re not in a major that you like. You should be in physical therapy or exercise science or sports management.”

I was like, “What’s sports management?” And back then, that was the beginning of the era of basically sports management. At the time, I went to West Virginia University and back then, sports management was either heavily focused on business or it was heavily focused on the exercise science portion of it.

When I was at West Virginia University, it was focused a lot on, it was then in the school of physical education. Now, it was in the business school so I got into that and then started. It wasn’t until a year later that I was doing an internship at a Gold’s Gym where I saw some guy personal training people.

A light bulb went off in my head and I said, “You know that’s what I’m going to do” that was the summer of ’94. That was before the big boom in the personal training industry and that’s how I got started in the fitness.

[0:08:21] KC: Yeah, so you’ve been doing this your whole professional…?

[0:08:24] JG: Yeah, I really don’t know what it’s like to put on a suit.

[0:08:27] KC: That’s awesome.

[0:08:27] JG: I did cut my hair but that’s a long story too. I actually cut my hair when I started our company 16 years ago and then when I turned 40, I grew my hair back and as long as I have it, I’m going to keep it long.

[0:08:39] KC: I’ll have to make sure that when we put your picture up on for the show notes, we’ve got to let nice long hair, no ponytail, hair out.

[0:08:48] JG: Yeah, I got a little bit of a samurai bun in the back but the rest of it is long but yeah, you know? And I could keep going on that because I commonly get asked. It’s like, “How did it?” Because when I graduated from college and I started personal training people, then I got a handful of certifications.

USAW Olympic lifting coach which CrossFit has made very popular but Olympic lifting and a certified strength conditioning specialist which is a five hour test that you have to, which is very kind of through that national strength and conditioning association which basically certifies you to make the human body bigger, faster and stronger.

And then maybe three personal training certifications and then by the end of 2000, after five years of doing it, I was burned out and my body hurt me and I went and took a hot yoga class. I took a Bikram class and it kicked my ass and I hated it but I woke up the next day and my back didn’t hurt.

I knew it wasn’t stretching. I knew yoga wasn’t stretching but I didn’t really know exactly what it was and it really forever changed my outlook on human movement.

[0:09:58] KC: I had to say that one of the things that really stuck was, so Jackie asked me to reach out to you. I reached out and I thought I was reaching out to another yoga instructor and then I saw a picture of you and a couple of your buddies doing Merf in your basement and I was like, “Alright, this guy is cool. I like him.”

[0:10:17] JG: Yeah.

[0:10:18] KC: Yeah and I think the piece that really interested me is you’ve blended it now, right? So you are a practicing Buddhist, you have a few yoga studios from what I gather.

[0:10:31] JG: Yeah, three, three yoga studios.

[0:10:34] KC: And then you also have, I guess we’ll ask that question before we go forward so there’s Empowered Yoga, there is the Balanced Athlete and there’s Plexus Fitness right?

[0:10:44] JG: Yeah, so Plexus Fitness is the parent company. That’s the company that I started in the fall of ’99. Then it was called Johnny Fitness and as Johnny Fitness grew, people were referring to me as Johnny Fitness and it was a little bit of a joke in the beginning but then as the company grew, we needed a better name and we chose Plexus Fitness.

Because the Plexus is the easiest way for anybody who practices yoga, it’s like the Plexus are the chakras. You have plexuses all over your body and what it symbolizes for me is it symbolizes a team and an interdependent effort because nerve plexuses are where all these nerves come together and the whole is greater than some of its parts.

And so when you work in a company, it’s really important to understand that it’s a team effort and so Plexus was a perfect name. Empowered Yoga came along. When I opened my first yoga studio, it was called Wilmington Yoga but then as we decided to open a second one and it wasn’t in Wilmington, it just seems so we’d have that name and a very talented business coach Allan Sargui, helps take me to an exercise to figure out what the new name of our studio was going to be.

And the exercise was cool. It was do a brain dump and just write down, “Why did God put you here on this earth?” And after he read my brain dump, he said, “You know what? I got the name for you” and he said, “You ready?” and I was like, “Yeah?” and he said, “Empowered Yoga” and I was like, “That is silly”. I’m like, “I don’t like it” and he said, “No, I want you to think about it”.

He said, “Think about what you went through as a personal trainer” so taking a step back to my comment of feeling burned out after five years of personal training, it’s because people come in to personal training and they come in and they have all these goals and things that they want to accomplish but anybody who’s been in this industry for a long time would say the vast majority of people never accomplish those goals.

They never change their eating habits all that much, they never really lose weight, so why did they stick around? They stick around because they’re exercising a couple of days a week and they feel better with that but the reality is, is that change is very difficult and most people are not really willing to change. So what really burned me out as a personal trainer was that and as well as the other thing that really burned me out. ..

[0:13:09] KC: Let me just jump i real quick so that being like your clients, you weren’t seeing else but clients.

[0:13:17] JG: Yeah, that was part of it and then the other part is the one on one can be very laborious because it’s almost like you become a therapist more than anything and talking and listening for eight hours a day which I was training that much. Five and a half days a week, Saturday mornings until noon and it was just a lot.

It was very cumbersome and a lot of what we were doing with Balanced Athlete is a result of not only all of my studies and meditation and yoga but also that experience as a personal trainer and being able to teach people how to be in the driver’s seat as a client not to be so dependent on the trainer and a lot of that just comes into the system that we’ve set out with Balanced Athletes.

So whether it’s one on one or groups, it really, really helps with that problem that trainers can come up against.

[0:14:13] KC: Yeah, so when you’re with Balanced Athlete and I was looking around and I would say there are a bunch of recipes as well. Are you incorporating the diet as much?

[0:14:25] JG: Well, yeah. My wife could make a living as a chef. She does do cooking classes so she’s really into cooking and that’s her hobby so that’s the food part of it but one thing is we’re working on redeveloping the Balanced Athlete site because it really needs to be redeveloped and there needs to be more information on there.

So people can really understand what it is, but the three things that define Balanced Athlete is barefoot, that’s the first one. The second one is a mirror, you’ve got to be able to see what’s going on so you can be able to correct your movement and focus and also come into a better relationship with your mind and body as your body is moving. That can also pivot into a very deep sacred or spiritual conversation and then the third thing would be movement principles and mindfulness based principles. The thing is, most people don’t really recognize the fact that there is a very specific design that the human body has on how it moves its body.

Most people when they go into gyms, they have no idea. They just get on machines or maybe the run on the treadmill or they take a class but the things is, there’s this whole operating system almost like your computer and what we do on Balanced Athlete is we actually teach people how to teach this operating, system.

Most of us are running programs so whether we are doing yoga or a cross fit or running or bar or anything but it’s like, “But what is your operating system while you’re running those programs?” and what I find is most people don’t have an operating system. They don’t have an understanding of the four corners of their feet.

They don’t have an understanding of the importance of dorsiflexion in your ankles or knee hedging or hip hedging or spinal stabilization and so what happens is, as you go in and no matter what the program is that you’re running, you’re running it without an operating system. That results in the level of injuries that we see in any form of training. It’s got a lot to do with it because people don’t have an operating system.

[0:16:35] KC: This is bringing up a few things that aren’t going on in my world right now. I know you said you read the book and you recommend the book, Born to Run. I’ve actually never read that. I’m reading this other book right now, Natural Born Heroes.

[0:16:54] JG: Yeah, Christopher lives locally. He lives around me. He’s a wonderful human being.

[0:17:00] KC: Really?

[0:17:00] JG: He’s a good guy. He’s a great guy.

[0:17:02] KC: The amazing part of that, so I am half way through it and the whole entire — what the book is really based off of is fascia and how your fascia works and a bunch of different athletes with that. So that popped into my head but then also, one of my favorite things to do is, because I’m in New England and in Massachusetts, is I’m ready to give up professional football except for one thing. I really love watching Tom Brady play.

[0:17:35] JG: Yeah, who doesn’t?

[0:17:36] KC: Because of what you’re talking about, right? It sounds like everything you’re explaining, he has that.

[0:17:42] JG: Yeah, what Tom Brady has and you know what? I think Tom Brady is one of those guys that you just love to hate like I like him and I did enjoy watching my Eagles pull off, the victory last night. If they played that game a 100 times that would never happen again but it happened last night and I do love to see Brady pissed off.

[0:18:02] KC: Yeah.

[0:18:03] JG: And I say that jokingly because I do like Tom Brady and I’ve grown, like my second teams are the New England teams now because of my relationships with everybody up in Boston. It’s become like a second home to me. I do so much teaching and I have so many people I love so dearly up there but really what makes Tom Brady “Tom Brady” is he’s reaction time and his processing capabilities.

He’s able to process quicker than anybody else and his decision making skills are very quick which is the other flip side of practicing yoga because when we’re practicing yoga, we’re so focused on not being so reactive, being more mindful, almost like letting things slow down, through all that stuff and I did that for a decade.

Because three months after I took that Bikram class, I sat on a Sunday night with my mom and dad which I have dinner with them still almost every Sunday and I said, “I’m not going to play ice hockey anymore and I’m not going to run anymore and I’m not going to lift weights anymore. I’m just going to do yoga.”

And my mom looked at me and she said, “Are you gay?” And again, for anybody who’s listening, I love gay people. I have tons of gay friends. It’s just my mother and the humor of my mother and I just said, “No”. I said, “My body just hurts and I need a change,” and I look back on that Keith and that’s a mistake that I needed to make.

It was a mistake, but I needed to and that mistake took me into a 10 year journey of studying Bikram, Baptist power yoga, Ashtanga yoga, a 400 hour certification and Anya Saryo yoga, when that train was just started getting going and then it took me about three or four years and I went back to that Bikram studio.

Because after six months of Bikram, I started becoming a yoga snot and I started becoming materialistic in some ways in my yoga view just like most people do. They fall into that pitfall in the beginning of their practice and when I went back to that Bikram studio, I didn’t really think much about it.

I put my mat down and I stood up and I looked in the mirror and I started to cry and I started to cry because I started to realize that this four year journey, that T.S Elliot quote, the whole idea of starting where you are and you come back and you do a full journey but you see with whole new eyes and I don’t know the quote. I should memorize it, I use it often.

But that was the point. I was looking at the mirror at myself and I’m like, “Isn’t this really the epitome of practicing yoga? Can I come to grips with this man in the mirror? Can I make friends with him? Can I be okay with my aging? Can I be okay with my body? Can I be okay with what I see in the mirror?”

And then as I practice that, I started to realize that many of the misalignments that I had, I was still making those same mistakes because I was practicing styles of yoga that didn’t practice in front of the mirror. So I as unable to really be aware of the mistakes I was making. That practice for me that day really forever changed me.

For anybody out there that like, “Well, you know I’m not really into the mirror and I feel like it’s this and this and this,” it’s a tool and the tool is there to help you better understand how your moving because I don’t live my life in front of the mirror. The other hours of the day, I have to walk around and I have to move my body.

If I can spend an hour in front of a mirror, practice and become more familiar with how my body is moving, it becomes an invaluable tool and you think of like you see dancers on Broadway. They’ve spent 20 years in front of a mirror to be able to dance with the grace and eloquence that they do.

So I think a lot of people can make big mistakes not using a mirror to learn how to move their body and learn how to position it properly so they’re not making mistakes when they’re not in front of the mirror.

[0:22:01] KC: So anytime you’re doing a physical activity like you’re isolating time for a physical activity, your work though you’re in a mirror?

[0:22:13] JG: No, so I practice in front of the mirror. My practice is pretty diverse and it changes from week to week. I do a sequence of postures similar to Bikram but different. In front of a mirror and we call that the stationary sequence and I do that typically a couple of days a week I’d say and then sometimes, I do a Vinyasa practice and I do not do that in front of a mirror.

But I use the awareness that I’ve created through the stationary sequence practice to move my body as I’m moving it to be able to feel it. I do all the balanced athlete stuff we do in front of the mirror and then I also do Olympic lifting and then I do straight bar work which is familiar in CrossFit and strength and conditioning practices and that stuff is not done in front of the mirror.

But what I’m teaching somebody, it’s almost a required tool for me. I almost don’t need anything but that. I just need that and I need them to take their shoes off. But I’ve found as a teacher, as a coach, as an educator that I need people — and there I say it again “I need people” — people need to see how they’re aligning or if they don’t see it, they’re going to keep making the same mistakes.

As a personal trainer, this is one of the many things that contributed me to feeling like I was burned out. People are often times not in the driver’s seat. It’s like when you drive somewhere and you’re in the passenger seat and then you couldn’t tell your wife how you got there because you weren’t really paying attention.

Those first five years when I was training people, I felt like I was almost developing a dependency issue and they would go away on a week’s vacation or two weeks’ vacation and I’m like, “Well, did you do any exercise?” “No, I don’t know what I’m doing without you.” And then you wake up to, “Well, what kind of teacher am I?”

It would be like your child being 18 and be like, “Well, I can’t go out on my own.” Well so we didn’t do a very good job as a parent and there’s an old expression in Zen that the master teacher at the end of their life has no students because they all have become teachers themselves. They all have grown so much.

So it’s just kind of like, it makes you think and a lot of times, personal trainers and coaches and teachers will say, “But then, they won’t need me,” and I’ll say, “No, they will need you even more because they will love you because of what you’ve done for them.” Getting back to the whole empowered yoga thing, that was really where it came from.

What yoga did for me, the shift it did for me as a teacher, as a professional was it allowed me to put people in a room, not let them talk and teach them how to be self-reflective, how to focus, how to feel and how to take control of their own life versus in personal training, it was just kind of, it was very intensive and the fact of constantly talking to people. And talking to people is more of a therapist type role.

Whereas from my background in Buddhism, the last words of the Buddha was, “Be a light onto yourself. Be a light onto yourself.” My teacher, David Nichtern, he says, “Johnny, nobody is going to save you. Nobody is going to save you. You have to do the work.”

[0:25:30] KC: That’s a powerful realization when you get to that point too.

[0:25:32] JG: Well, it is but as a teacher, you have to realize that so you start asking yourself, “Am I actually empowering people or am I developing a dependency issue?” Or “Am I putting people in the driver’s seat or am I keeping them in the passenger seat?”

[0:25:49] KC: I think that’s such a — so what you’re talking about is I sort of refer it to a ton of people that I work with and we’re creating leaders. So if I was to identify what my number one role is, it’s really creating leaders and I think, and it’s along the same lines we’re talking about, that the number one obstacle to a leader like once you start getting people that you’re leading, is that we start to become leaders of followers.

That’s totally not what we want to do. We want to become leaders of leaders because then it’s repetitive thing and that’s a lot harder. It’s a lot harder to become a leader of leaders than a leader of followers.

[0:26:38] JG: Yeah because it requires everybody to be a light onto themselves. It requires everybody to take responsibility for their life and it requires them to think and it just requires more of people. But again, I’ve been teaching — I’m on my 21^st year being a teacher and it’s the only way that I can keep going.

It’s the only way that I can keep doing this for a living is to work more from a perspective of empowering people and putting people in the driver seats and making sure that they realize their ass is on the line and they are responsible. They are ultimately responsible.

[0:27:21] KC: I want to jump back to two points and we have a ton of yoga instructors and a ton of yogis who listen to this podcast and I think that you hit on two points that I’ve sort of always felt but I think that you hit on them and you’ll be able to vocalize them better than I would. The first point is, when I first got involved with a yoga community I had the same thing.

It was like, “I’m done with corporate America. I’m done with this, I’m done with that. I’m just going to Zen out now.” And then reality hits really fast and you have bills to pay and you have everything that is involved with daily life. We’re not at a monastery. I would say probably not a single person listening to this podcast is at a monastery.

I just wanted to hear your thoughts on A, when that happens and B, how do you get yourself out of it or do you give yourself a little bit of time to be in that space? Like when you first start practicing, when people first come in, some people stay there for a while I think.

[0:28:38] JG: Yeah, just keep going a little bit more into the question because I’m just trying to…

[0:28:43] KC: Yes, so I guess the question is do you think it’s healthy to — so a lot of people come into a yoga practice really out of desperation. Like were forced into a yoga studio out of desperation.

[0:28:58] JG: I remind our teachers that all the time, people don’t walk into a yoga place because their life is great.

[0:29:04] KC: Yeah.

[0:29:06] JG: People are walking into a yoga studio because things aren’t good and they’re looking for something and when a student disappears and then they come back again, when they come back in, they’re not coming back in because everything is great. So you always have to remember that as a teacher to meet people with a lot of compassion, with a lot of understanding, with some joy, with some enthusiasm and with open arms because they’re hurt. They’re hurt, you know? And that’s why people will come back.

[0:29:40] KC: So getting to that and it’s going to be cool because you’re drawing out the question that is really been within me. So from both the teachers’ and the students’ standpoint — so what happened with me is I threw a lot of other responsibilities aside and dove all into a yoga practice and then there is that elastic effect.

Like I went one way and then it pulled me back and there was a lot of things that were neglected because of that, because of a philosophy that like nothing else matters right now. Does that makes sense?

[0:30:25] JG: Yeah, I mean I’ve got a bunch of different thoughts on that. I think that when people come in, we could talk about just everybody’s tendency to be excessive in one direction. So people come into yoga and then they take that excessiveness. Like the Buddha when asked, “How do you tune a loot?” And he said, “Not too soft or not too tight not too lose.”

So in medication practice and geez, we could spend some time on this because yoga is meditation and meditation can be yoga. I mean they’re the same thing but we tease them out as two separate things and so I think people come in and they want to go for it and so they put a lot of energy into their practice.

I think it’s admirable that people are jumping in and trying to do that but there’s obviously some balance that you can find once you keep going if your life is going out of balance because of it. But I think the person needs to be able to feel that and note that for them to pull back a little bit on that. I was like that. I mean, geez, I stopped being Johnny Fitness.

[0:31:40] KC: Do you think that you had to do that though? Because for me, I honestly think that I have to go through it and to experience it.

[0:31:48] JG: Yeah, I think I did because what I thought was running and ice hockey and weight lifting was the problem and yoga was going to heal me and really what the problem was, it wasn’t really the programs that I was doing, it was the way that I was doing the programs. Running, I do encourage you to read the book, Born to Run, because my dad read it. He’s not a runner and he just said, “That’s a fantastic story.”

And it is a great story but we’ve been running for millions of years but if you don’t run right, running is horrible. If you don’t lift weights right, lifting weights is horrible. If you don’t do yoga right — I see people entering themselves all the time in yoga and because they’re not moving their body through the practice the right way, I think there’s been a huge fall out from people practicing lots of styles of yoga and they’re not aligning their body right.

And any teacher knows that you can’t teach somebody how to align their body in one class. It’s going to take a lot of practices. It’s going to take a lot for them to learn how to understand their body and to learn how to align it which I think that process is incredibly difficult and I could go further into that. That’s really what the impetus for Balanced Athlete.

[0:33:15] KC: I got you.

[FINAL MESSAGE]

[0:33:15] KC: Alright, so we’re going to cut out there for today and again, next Wednesday, we will bring you the second part of this interview with Johnny. Before we end today, I just want to remind you that the biggest compliment that I could receive, the biggest thing that you could do to help this show and to get our message out there is sharing it on social media, telling a friend, telling a family member. Just ask them to check out one episode or share something that has really helped you with creating that big beautiful dream of a life that you’re in the process of creating.

And one other piece while I’m on that, this information is great for you if you’re listening and learning and taking it in. But none of it means anything until you put it into action. So action is that piece that’s going to mix this all together and start to bring the fruits of those dreams into your life, into reality. Have a beautiful, beautiful day and see you on the next one.

[0:34:30] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Business of Life Podcast. Apply what you learned today and you’ll be one step closer to creating the life you love to live.

[END]