All right, I guess we can get started. Thanks so much for coming. Welcome to WordCamp. Happy to have you guys here, especially excited to be talking about contact forms, because I am never allowed to talk about contact forms in public, because I do mostly marketing stuff. And I am crazy about contact forms. I feel very passionately about them. And you may also, and you maybe just don't know it. So let's get started talking about contact forms and how to optimize them. Essentially, what we're going to talk about today is how to make your forms serve your business. So if you have a website, you should have a contact form. And if you have a contact form, you should make sure that contact form is working well for you. Come on. All right, so to get started, my name is Kimberly Daggarhart. And I am a freelance professional marketing person. So that's the business stuff. Fun stuff, though. I collaborate with NASA on projects from time to time. And I do social media work for them. I'm also a member of the 2016 South by Southwest Programming Committee. And the last little icon there on the left stands for the Hunger Games, which I was an extra in. So there's a bunch of weird stuff about me. Hopefully that will make you remember who I am. You can find me at my website, Kimberly.co, or on Twitter, at KMDaggarhart. I primarily tweet about space. So if you really love space, feel free to follow me. I'll be tweeting about WordCamp as well. So what we're going to cover today, we'll start with why contact forms matter. And hopefully I'll make the case really well for that. And everybody here will walk away thinking contact forms are very, very important. Then we'll look at five ways to optimize your contact form. Simple things you could do today to make your contact form better. Then I'll talk briefly about contact form plugins. And then we'll have a Q&A session. All right, why contact forms matter. And this will be illustrated by real tweets from frustrated people. Tweet number one. And by the way, I remove the company names from these tweets because I don't want to publicly shame anybody. But here's somebody tweeting at a specific company. Tried to contact you through the site, but contact us for I'm not working. Waited 15 minutes on the phone with no help. Don't want my money on the new site? Yikes. So contact forms impact user experience. This is really important to keep in mind because people are coming to your website for a variety of reasons. They may be trying to get in contact with you for a sales thing, for something they've already purchased, for all kinds of opportunities and your contact form needs to work correctly. Tweet number two. Hey, email provided? Why even have a website if you're not going to have any contact information at all, especially if you're a business? You should have contact information. And this shows us that contact forms also impact sales, which is the sad pig. Tweet number three. Hello, trying to reach you for a magazine feature but contact form not working. Wow, that's a huge missed opportunity, right? Especially because journalists work on deadlines and if they don't have a chance to get in contact with you in that time, that window of time, that they have to work on their piece, you're not going to be featured. And by the way, this happens more than you think. Just two weeks ago, somebody contacted me through my website contact form for a magazine feature. And it was because they saw me tweeting about Pluto. So that was cool. It was confusing to me at first because I thought, why doesn't that journalist just contact me through Twitter if they obviously saw me tweeting about it? But she had a really long pitch and she wanted to explain her articles so she needed more characters than 140. So contact forms impact user experience and sales and media opportunities. Get back one more. And more. There are lots of other opportunities that are out there that your contact form, if it's not working correctly, means you are missing out on lots of opportunities. So that brings me to this. A contact form is an important aspect of any successful online presence. Done and done, final word, bottom line, you need a contact form and it needs to work well. So now we'll talk about five ways to optimize your contact form. And again, these are things you can do today. Some of them are a little more technical than others, but at the very least, if you know what words to say to the programmer or developer you're working with, then they should be able to help you out. Test your contact form. Test it. You must always test it. And testing it one time is not good enough. You need to test it more than one time. You perhaps need to test it kind of often. So here's another frustrated person's tweet. Our site's contact form has been down since December 26th. Just noticed, ah, if you've messaged us, please try again. What? Who do they expect is gonna send another message? Like the one, probably the two people who are following them on Twitter who have sent a contact form, submission to them are even gonna see this tweet. That is a really bad thing to have to do. And we are now in July. This is a tweet from July. Yeah, exactly. So there you go. That can also happen. If you don't test your contact form, you don't know what's going on with it. You can miss six or seven months of leads, sales leads, media opportunities, customer service inquiries, all kinds of things. So here's how to test your contact form. First thing you do, you fill it out and you submit your own form. I know that seems incredibly elementary and basic. But these are the questions you have to ask. Is my contact form working? And not just the functionality of it. So if, when somebody has submitted their contact form when you're testing your own, if you get that confirmation message and you know it's been sent through, it doesn't end there. What you also need to do from there is see where that submission went. I've worked with clients before and they had previous employees' email addresses and email accounts and that's where the contact form submission went and nobody checks that email account anymore. So you should check it and make sure that you know exactly where your contact form submissions are going. Along those same lines, is it going into the spam folder? Because that happens too, even with completely legitimate contact form submissions. For whatever reason, sometimes they still end up in spam. So check your spam folder. Another thing is having a backup. So this previous company, if they had had a backup, either a backup email address for the contact form submissions or if they were using a plugin that had a database backup, like for example Jetpack, their contact form allows you to keep a database of all the contact form submissions, then they would be able to retrieve these. However, it sounds like they didn't and so they lost six months of leads and you don't want to be that person. And lastly, you want to check to see if it works on mobile devices. And if you have multiple devices that you can use to check, I recommend that. So if you're in an office where people have an iPhone and they have an Android and maybe there's a Windows phone, who knows what it does, but checking them on multiple devices is a really, really good idea. Make sure it works for all of the devices that you can. So here's the bottom line piece of information about this. Test your contact form, test it often and then test it again. If you haven't tested your contact form in the last couple of months, you should do it because it's amazing how many things can break your contact form. I know because I've broken lots of contact forms. I used to work for a website company and we would do redesigns and launches and part of my job was to check the contact forms before we launched. And then usually two weeks after launch, I would also go back and check and sometimes the client would add a plugin that interfered with our contact form plugin without telling us or they would hit the update for the latest WordPress version and that would break a contact form or their employee who was getting sent the contact forms would leave the company. There's so many ways your contact form can go very, very wrong, which is how I think about when I submit a contact form to a company and I don't hear back from them, I'm just thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong and I try not to hold it against them, but not everybody's gonna be so gracious. Second thing, use helpful form design. Now this isn't a design talk, I'm not a designer, but we can all understand and realize what is helpful form design and what is not. So for example, clearly indicating required fields. You can do that in a number of ways, you can do it through text, like seen here, required and asterisk is a very popular way to indicate that a field is required. You can also do it with color and other design elements. It's important to tell people what fields are required and which ones are not. There's nothing more frustrating than thinking I have filled out all the fields in a contact form, only to have an error message and not understand that I was required to fill out every field. So along the same lines, clearly indicate errors. If you have a contact form or any form on your site and there's, for example, 20 fields that somebody's gotta fill out and then at the end of that, they click submit, but it says error and you don't identify which field is the error, you're gonna lose that person unless they're very dedicated and very committed to submitting information to you. Make it easy. Say exactly where the error is occurring so they can fix it quickly and get on with their day. And finally, mobile-friendly design. It's important for contact forms to not only work on mobile, but to also be accessible on mobile via thumbs. What you want is proper spacing between your fields and a large button. You want your colors to indicate what the user is supposed to do next. So again, test on mobile, see how easy it is. Do they have to scroll left and right to see all of the fields or are all of the fields stacked on top of each other so they just have to do one scrolling motion? Does that make sense? So improving the experience improves communication and conversion. And in this scenario, what I'm talking about when I say conversion is contact form submission.  Mobile-friendly design, indicating the errors, and telling us which fields are required. All right, this is my favorite part. Simple, relevant form fields. I'm sure that we've all encountered contact forms that ask us for things like our home country, our pet's first name, our mother's maiden name, et cetera. There is this idea, I think, in the sales world that the more information you can gather, the better. Just hands down, flat, like that is it. However, this is true in the world of contact forms. So three to five fields are gonna be what produce the best conversion rate. And according to a HubSpot study, using just three form fields guaranteed a 25% conversion rate. And that's awesome. That is a great conversion rate. And so here's an example of a contact form with three fields. What else do you actually need to know? Person's name, email, message. On my personal contact form, I only require an email address. So you can either tell me your name or not, or you can send a message or not. I don't know why anybody would just send me their email address, but that's fine. If that's what they wanna do. So, to show you the power of using fewer contact form fields, we're gonna take a look at a case study from Expedia.com. So Expedia was testing how their different form fields affected conversion and ultimately sales. And here's how they started. This says company name. And that's the field that they removed for this test. As you can see, it's not even required. So why did they even ask that? Who knows? But so company name, they decided to remove it and they did a test and the results were incredibly startling. $12 million could be directly attributed to removing a non-required form field titled company. That's kind of incredible, right? So, because I often have to talk to clients who want to get into this discussion of, well, we need their address, we need their phone number, we need at least two email addresses, we need for them to make an account, et cetera. Here is a really great study to show anybody who wants to argue with you about how many form fields you should have. Reducing form fields and focusing only on what is relevant to that customer, to that potential client in that moment will help with conversion. And as Expedia shows, also can help you make money. Lots and lots of money. So here's the thing about phone numbers. People don't like to give them out. Nobody wants to be hassled on the phone with a marketing call. And because of that, if you require a phone number for your contact form, you will reduce the number of conversions. One study by Quicksprout said that conversion rates doubled when a phone number was listed as an optional field rather than a required one. So if you're currently requiring phone numbers on your contact form, make it not required, if at all possible. And sometimes it's a difficult battle to wage, and I understand that. People really like getting all the information right there, right up front. But here's the thing. What I often try to do is to challenge the sales team, because usually it's a sales team, I try to challenge them to come up with ways that they can collect that data further on in the sales process. So rather than getting somebody's life history right up front, let them talk to us for a while before we get their whole life history, and make that part of the sales process rather than part of the marketing and lead capture process. The thing for as little information as possible is a really solid strategy. Anything you can do to get your contact form builds down to that three to five Goldilocks down, good thing, good stuff. Now for my second favorite part of the presentation, let go of the capture. What's a capture, you say? Oh, we've seen them. You've seen them. You've seen them everywhere. This one says former nerd, so it's one of the funnier ones that I've seen, which I really like. So a capture is an anti-spam measure that looks something like this, but it also looks like this. This is a huge screen, and I know I'm wearing glasses and I don't have great eyesight. But what is this? My God, that I have no idea what even language that's in. That is crazy. To ask me to, you know, this is an insurmountable obstacle for any human just to contact you. Like I know nobody wants Viagra emails, but my God, come on. That is crazy. So essentially, what I would like to ask you to do is to let go of the capture. Now, this may be concerning in some ways, but we'll get to how you can let go of the capture and still not get spam. Here's another tweet. Your contact form's not working. And the spam detector is in another language, which I cannot decipher just in my question of tweets about capture-related frustration in the last month. So it's not just me. Your capture, if you use a capture, it will actually reduce conversions. A Moz study found that it makes conversion rates decline by 3.2%. And maybe that's not a huge deal. However, I had clients before where one contact form submission could equal $100,000 contracts. So telling them that they could improve their conversion rate by 3.2% made an amazing business case. And they went with it because it makes sense. So what do you do? What about all the spam? Well, technology moves very quickly and we are now in a place where we can have spam-protected capture-free forms. Raise your hand if you knew that. This was a really exciting development for me. Somebody who loves contact forms, so it really hates captures. So what you do instead of using a capture at the end of the presentation, I will show you which plugins have the feature of capture-free that are still spam-protected. So you can make your decision. Captchas reduce conversion. And something you'll have to balance as a website owner and a business owner is security and usability. So it's a decision that you'll have to make. But I would err on the side of no capture. I would so much rather deal with a little bit of spam than make it impossible for people to ever contact me. That's me. And finally, provide confirmation. Now this one's important because I think that there's definitely a perception of, when I submit a contact form to a company, it kind of goes into a black hole. Nobody ever responds. I don't know what's happened. I have no idea if anybody's ever seen the thing that I've submitted. And it would be really easy to take care of this if the company just provided me with some confirmation, which is really easy to do. Here's another frustrated tweet. Ugh, attempted to make contact with at company via online form, but it didn't seem to send. So they either got six duplicate emails or none at all. Who's ever done that? Who's ever submitted a contact form and you just had no idea? Right, right. So it's really easy to make this a better experience by providing confirmation. And there are lots of ways to do it. One way is just to say with a message that pops up after form submission, your message has been sent. That's one way to do it. Another way is to confirm with a thank you page. Thank you pages are really fantastic because they give you an opportunity also to have some marketing stuff going on that page, which of course I love as a marketing person. But something I really like about this page specifically is that it says we'll respond to your request shortly. I would prefer something a little more specific saying in the next 48 hours and one business day, et cetera. But that's way more than most people give you to even say that they'll respond to you. And then in the world of analytics, if you have a thank you page that is shown upon contact form submission, then you can also track your goals that way too, which is really fantastic. Here's another one that I really, really like. This really became apparent to me that this was a great way to do business and to have your contact form set up when I was planning for my wedding because I was contacting lots and lots of vendors and submitting lots of things to their contact form. And the people who sent me a copy of my own contact form submission with the link to their website, those were the people I went with because I contacted like 15 people a day. And the only people that I could really keep top of mind were of course the people who responded, but also I had this record of the people I had contacted, so that was really fantastic. So this is the three ways to confirm. You can do it with a message and lots of contact form plugins allow you to have a message that you can customize. You can do it with thank you page and confirm with an email. At this point, I don't care which one you use, but it would be really great if everybody would agree to confirm that when a contact form has been submitted on their site, they display some kind of confirmation message and let the user know. So confirming successful contact form submissions helps to avoid confusion and frustrated tweets. If you don't want frustrated tweets, let's go with having a confirmation. All right, so now we're gonna review the five ways to optimize your contact form. The first thing, test your form. By the way, if at any time you want to look down at your computer and test out your form right now, I'm totally fine with that. Whenever you can find a moment. Have a helpful design. So let users know what's required, what's not required, and make sure that it works well on a mobile device. Simple, relevant form fields. If you can whittle those form fields down to three to five form fields, that would be great and would help increase your own conversion rate. Let go of the capture and provide confirmation. Anybody have questions about those before we move on to contact form plugins and their features? Yes, yeah, it says confirmation of successful contact form submission helps to avoid confusion and provides additional marketing opportunities. Yes, so I always find it comforting myself. One of the links that I have at the end of the presentation is to this incredibly exhaustive study that was co-produced with Google. And they have about 41 things to do to make a great contact form. And that may be one of the things that's mentioned there. But I like it when companies will say, we don't like spam either, we're not gonna send you spam. Other questions? No, I don't. Yeah. The more confirmation I can get, the better. And plus, go ahead. Well, again, I think a lot of the time people don't wanna have an email address because they don't wanna get spam. There are ways around that as well. And I think it is better user and customer experience if you give people a way to contact you for the email address. Yeah. I can talk about it briefly. What I've seen people do, and maybe some other people in the audience have different ideas, is they'll write something like, so for example, for me, I would put hello, the word, and then a space, and then I would put the word at, and then I'd put domain.com. So it couldn't be read by a spam bot, but people could still understand that that's how to contact me. Yes. Well, that's kind of the thing. There's almost no way to know if you haven't been tracking your contact form submissions and you don't have a backup, unless that person is very kind and helpful and reaches out to you in another way. Like, hopefully you have another way to be contacted somewhere. But yeah, I've encountered that more than one time with people who are like, okay, well what can I do to recover those? If you don't have a database set up with your plugin and you don't have a backup email address, then nothing. You can't do anything.  That's terrible. So yeah, I don't know of any other ways to recover, which is why having this stuff in place before something goes wrong is really the best way, it's just to avoid it to begin with. Other questions? Yes. Yes. Oftentimes all you have to do is actually add just a comma to between the email addresses and having a backup is a very, very good idea. Other questions? All right, let's keep going. Contact form plugins. Now I have to give you lots of caveats on this because right now there are more than 1,000 contact form related plugins that are available for WordPress. And I do not have enough time to review all of those with you today. Hopefully what I've done instead is show you kind of the criteria or what you should be looking for in a plugin. And there are lots of plugins that fit the bill. There are lots of really great plugins out there. And so I'm gonna take you through four different contact form plugins that I like and I think are pretty rad. And I have all the information that you'll need to find out more things about them. So contact form seven is the plugin that I've used the longest. It is very malleable. You can do lots of fun stuff with it. It's not exactly the prettiest contact form but it's very flexible. So this does feature a database of submissions so you can keep track of that. You have to have an add-on called Flamingo to make that work correctly. You can do an auto-responder email and you can either do Captcha or you can use a Kismet to not have to use Captcha but still be spam protected. It provides a confirmation message that you can customize. It provides error messages that show the user where their fields needs to be updated and it's free, which I love. And once I post this slideshow online, you'll be able to click on these links to get more information. Does anybody here use contact form seven? All right. What do you guys like about it? And or why do you use it? Basically they provide a specific contact seven form and then hit submission, we would get the email, the total answer to the question and they would get sent for no payment. Right. Exactly, yeah. The Thank You page provides so many marketing opportunities like being able to download a PDF or an e-book, et cetera. Do you have a reason why you use contact form seven? It's really powerful for what it is. Steven, do you have a reason why you use contact form seven? Absolutely. Yeah, and that's very general criteria. Every company and every business and every project is probably gonna need something a little bit different. But this is kind of like the lowest bar that a contact form plugin has to pass before I will use it. So, yes, that is included in the confirmation message. Contact form seven does allow you to redirect to another page. All right, moving along to Jetpack. I just recently started testing out Jetpack's contact form feature. And as I was testing my own contact form in preparation for this class, I realized I had mistyped my own email address into the recipient box. So there's another mistake to look out for. But so far, so good. I like Jetpack. It has some nice features. It's very, very simple. It's not as customizable, but I think for a lot of people, this will be just fine. And it has the database of submissions that you can access from inside your WordPress dashboard. And it's under a tab called Feedback, if you haven't seen that before. And it uses a kismet, so you don't have to use Captcha, which is great. There is a confirmation message, and it's free. Again, totally free. Not nearly as flexible as contact form seven. But if you're looking for something simple that does look good and still looks good on mobile, Jetpack is the thing. So the Jetpack contact form feature is very good. Does anybody here use the Jetpack contact form? Yeah, that one too. Yeah, I've used lots of them as well. This one's good. I think for the average person, that is a totally fine contact form to be using. Ninja Forms. Does anybody here use Ninja Forms? Yes. So Ninja Forms is again, incredibly customizable. They're very beautiful. You can put together just really, really lovely looking forms if you're into that kind of thing, which I am. And you've got the autoresponder, you've got a database of submissions, you can do Captcha or not, confirmation message, you've got your error messages, and the core plugin is free, but add-ons will cost extra. What do you like about Ninja Forms, Steven? Well, as a developer, it's very extensible, so you can, you know, extend upon it. Really do any kind of manipulation with the submissions. And the add-ons are really great, like the multi-part form. Yeah, yeah, they're really beautiful, well-functioning forms. I like their forms very much. I don't like that I might have to pay for the stuff that I want, but it's worth it in the right situation. Formidable, again, it meets all my criteria. It has a database of submissions. It lets you have an autoresponder. You can do a Captcha or not. There's a confirmation message. They have great error messages, and it's free for a basic version, but if you want advanced versions, that will cost money. You can visit Formidable if you wanna take a look at those. There are lots and lots of other forms. One of the ones I hear about often, heard about it a lot yesterday, Gravity Forms, does anybody here use that one? Ah, and what do you guys like about that? It's based on the person's submissions, skip logic, multiple database entries, but also for non-suffocating users on mobile, it's easy to visit the Captcha code. Wow. Yeah, and that's actually something that's not available for all contact form plugins. It's difficult to find a plugin for WordPress that will allow people to upload images and make that simple. So that's awesome that Gravity Forms does that. Yeah, that's awesome. Gravity Forms, yes. This is pretty fantastic. Does anybody else have something fun to say about Gravity Forms? If you're trying to do some really complex things, Gravity Forms is really great. If you're trying to integrate it with some of the service, and you're just doing something really black, they can probably do it. It's a really cool credit card. Pretty easy credit card integration. You're using a third-party credit card processing service built-in security kind of thing. It can be kind of nice to set up. Yeah. Yeah, I can't remember either. What's that? Let's see, last one. I think the single site, the single site's like, you can see it is $39 or $69 a year. Yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, a year. But another thing is, if anybody in here has a product that they sell, Gravity Forms makes it super simple, kind of how old-fashioned it is. Basically, super simple to be able to just have a product and then when people go to some different services to check out, they can send them over to PayPal, and they'll be able to check out the product for if you can do a lot of credit cards or really simplify the product sales. Yeah, lots of great ways to use these different forms. I mean, so even though we're focusing on contact forms specifically today, this applies to all forms. This applies to your checkout process. This applies to surveys that you're doing. You can use all of these same tips to make all of those elements of your website more effective. And now I will open the floor for any other questions. And if we have a little bit of time, I think it would be worthwhile if you have a contact form to test it. And if you want to talk about it, I'm happy to talk about it with you. If you want your neighbor to test your contact form, I think that would be a fun exercise as well. If you guys want to go test my contact form, it should be working, but I make no promises. Like how embarrassing, right? My contact form was not working two days ago because I mistyped my own email address, which is my name. Come on. So it can happen to anybody. It happens all the time. It's fine. And if you would like to reach out to me, definitely feel free to do that. And here on the last slide are sources. I put the Twitter search for contact form not working. So if you guys want to see just a live stream of all the people frustrated with all the contact forms out there, I think it's really funny. And then there's the quick sprout study that I mentioned earlier, the Moz study. This one right here, usable web form study. This is a huge study that was done in conjunction with Google. And like I was mentioning before, it's incredible the amount of information that has been collected. And their tips are really fantastic. I didn't want to do more than five because that's kind of overwhelming. But they have lots just page after page after page. If you want to go really, really deep, real deep dive into contact forms, usable web form study is the place for you. And then I also use some information from the website UXMuffin. All right, any other questions? Anybody want to talk about contact forms? Thanks by the way. Thanks for coming. So to qualify people, we deliberately made a contact form where you're only serious people would fill it out. So a family field model for this thing was two dozen. And we got pretty qualified ladies who worked out. So go in the other direction sometimes. Yeah, that's the thing. There is a certain amount of information that you have to have most of the time for these sales leads to qualify people. And that's totally understandable. I think if that's the thing that works for your business, that's completely fine. As long as all these fields are thought through and you're not asking for something crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that tactic work. Well, yeah. Other questions or comments? Yes. There's a specific email service. Jack emailed from a contact form. Yes. So if there are any good ways to fix that, we usually just switch to sending emails by SSTP to consider how to manage the situation. Yeah, this is one of those things I almost included in the presentation because it comes up a lot, but it also is kind of technical and it's gonna depend so much on what that person is using and then where they're hosting their website and they're just all these additional things. If you wanna come to the happiness bar, I'll be there for 115 to 245, I think, and we'll be happy to talk about that one-on-one because it does get a little more technical. Anything else? Yes. So I have three days, three hours rest, and I actually get submitted, and then if they don't go through the follow-up and fill out sort of a long and extended two-page or one after that, you still have the information. So that's something that we implemented on our site recently. We asked a very simple question in the front that actually submits that in the words of the user, in the graphic form, and we have this whole marketing thing that if they don't actually go out of the second form, if they don't talk, they don't market anything. So it keeps that conversion rate higher than you're gonna ask in the whole live, but eventually you've got to do that in the patient. Right, and they're even, oh man, I was talking to a friend of mine and he was telling me about a plug-in that he came across recently that will, so if somebody's filling out your contact form but they don't make it to the submit button, it will still send all the information that was put into the field. Which I have ethical concerns about, but maybe over time it'll be fine and it'll just be what we do, but there are ways to get information that people aren't even giving you, which is interesting. Good question as to whether or not that's okay. I guess if your privacy policy very clearly details that you may just be taking information from people, whether or not they decide to send it to you, then maybe that's fine. But I thought that was really fascinating that we are out of place where technology can just grab whatever they're writing into your form fields and keep it. Interesting stuff. Has anybody seen that? Yeah? I haven't had experience with it yet. That's kind of crazy. Yeah. Yeah, and it's kind of similar to if you've ever put something into your shopping cart when you were shopping online and then you get an email later that says, hey, did you forget something? An abandoned cart email? So it's kind of the same concept, which I'm totally fine with an abandoned cart email, but just thinking about contact forms that I maybe decide not to submit still get sent to that person anyway, just kind of freaks me out a little bit. You know, it's kind of difficult to deal with thinking about that. Other questions or comments? Yeah. It's okay. So this may be a happiness. So I have a client that's used on that phone server and he doesn't want to thank you for that. He just likes to go, you know, and I don't dare have to submit it. I'm having trouble tracking that in Google Analytics. The form says to put this little code in addition to sevens, but it's not working, because I'm ready to believe you have any experience. Yes, I do. And that is definitely a happiness bar question. But essentially, contact form seven is incredibly flexible and super awesome, and I love it. But you have to do everything exactly correct. You know, it's an unforgiving syntax and every piece has to be set up perfectly or it won't work. And then sometimes it has nothing to do with contact form seven, as to why other stuff doesn't work. It could be another plugin that's interfering with it. Yeah, it could be any number of things. So yeah, let's talk about that. I'll be at the happiness bar starting at 115. Other, yes. Wordpress, and I go to test my form again after I think now it's not working. Another really good question. Okay. That is the first thing I do, usually. Yeah, it can be very confusing. How I approach Googling for tech support is I will sort in the Google results by time and I'll look for answers from, so if an update happened that week on WordPress, I will look for answers from the last week, because I'm not the only person that has this problem if it's related to the update. And then if I can't find the answer that way, I will uninstall the plugin or reinstall the plugin. I'll start there and go through the process again. But of course, before doing that, you will want to back up the database of contact form submissions if that's something that's important. Other questions or comments? So if you're not a technical person, what are the rest of the things that are developed for this one there? A lot of them are from India, so you've got to deal with that. But there are some on there and obviously you can check the ratings and stuff like that. So if you want to sell any of the WordPress on the product, we're going to need more fibers or fibers, we're going to need five bucks. So generally, we can find some other ones that sell more of that, but it's about the less. Yeah, and also, if you have contact form questions beyond WordCamp, feel free to contact me. I really like helping out with contact forms. I'm trying, I think of myself as trying to improve the world. One functional, beautiful contact form is at a time. So I would love to help you with that. That would be fun for me. And they're just so important. They should be working properly. And if you're working with a developer and a designer and maybe you're doing a website refresh, et cetera, make sure they understand how important your contact form is to you. They should have it set up and working well. And they should be able to tell you where those contact form submissions are going, if there's a database, if there's spam, anti-spam measures in place, et cetera. Other questions or comments? All right, guys, well, thanks so much. Come join me at the Happiness Bar. If you'd like to talk one-on-one, I'll be there starting at 1.15. And I hope you have a great rest of WordCamp, but I'm sure I'll see you guys around.


So let a be a square matrix. Let's say it's in my end We say that a is a nil potent matrix if a race to the nth power is equal to the zero Matrix here. So some power of the matrix is equal to zero. That's actually where this word nil potent comes from It basically means zero power Some power of this matrix will give you zero. It's gonna be the nth power right here Now it turns out that with a nil potent matrix It's actually very possible that some smaller power than n will do it to you For example, we can construct a three by three matrix, which is nil potent, which would mean a cubed is equal to zero But it could also be possible that some smaller power that in fact a squared might actually be equal to zero For example the zero matrix. Let's take the three by three zero matrix It's actually nil potent because it's already equal to zero if you take the cube you're gonna get zero still So the matrix zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero the zero matrix is nil potent Because when you cube it you get back the zero matrix although you get away with the first power So oftentimes when we have nil potent matrices We are curious like what's the smallest power that we can get away with that causes it to be zero Now in the previous video We actually use the outer product to construct ident potent matrices matrices such that a squared equals a Using nil potent excuse me also using the outer product We can construct nil potent matrices with the property that a squared equals zero now I don't want you to think that every nil potent matrix squares to be zero But the outer product to be used to construct nil potent matrices which square to be zero and you're actually going to use Orthogonal vectors to do that.  This is going to equal if you look at the middle perspective This is going to be the same thing as v dot u Times v transpose. So that's just the that's just the inner product there and because the matrix the two vectors are orthogonal The inner product is zero. So we're going to get u times zero times v transpose And so at any point, you know, you get zero in there the whole thing is going to become zero, right? I and so this is going to turn out to be the zero matrix The zero matrix when we're done. So in fact a squared was equal to zero. This is an example of a nil potent matrix Let's show you how this thing works in practice. So let's take two vectors u equals one two and v equals two negative one It's very easy to see that this in fact is these are orthogonal here You're going to get two minus two which equals zero and So if we take the outer product of these two matrices of these two vectors, excuse me So if we take one two times two negative one You're going to get one times two which is two you're going to get one times negative one Which is negative one you're going to get two times two which is four And then you're going to get two times negative one which is equal to negative two so this is the outer product of the two vectors and I claim that this is in fact a nil potent matrix if we square this thing you take the first row times the first column You're going to get two times two which is four minus four, which is zero take the second column You're going to get negative two plus and I will minus a negative two. It's a double negative there You had negative two plus two which is zero Keep on going here.  But a square does turn out to be zero so we can construct nil potent matrices using the outer product This is not the only way one can construct a nil potent matrix I do want to make mention that nil potent matrices They're actually very easy to construct using strictly upper triangular matrices So for example, if you take the matrix zero one zero zero I want you to convince yourself that this is a nil potent matrix. You end up with zero zero zero zero Okay, and you could construct this you could construct this using a Outer product right here another example of you do three by three matrices. So we want this to be strictly upper triangular You could do something like zero one zero This would be an example of the matrix of squares to be zero That's perfectly fine. And again, you could construct this using it in an outer product But let me give you the example right here if I take one one zero This matrix is nil potent, but if you were to multiply together That is if you square the matrix You're not gonna get zero right here. Notice what happens when you take the first row first column You're gonna get zero great first row second column you end up with zero First row third column this one you actually do have a one that matches up You're gonna get a one right here next if you take the second row first column You're gonna get a zero second row second column You also get zero second row third column you end up a zero and then everything else is gonna be zero right here So notice what happened here is that you know analyzing this thing if you started off with like zeros One away from the diagonal entry when we squared it actually kind of pushed this these ones up by one to the corner You're kind of squishing it into the corner there and so this time if we take the matrix Zero one zero zero zero one zero zero zero zero if you times this by then it's square which is zero zero one zero zero zero zero zero zero like so in this situation You're gonna see that the product is in fact now all zeros. I'll let you double check that on your own So this matrix right here. Let's say that a is equal to this matrix zero one zero zero one zero zero zero This is an example of a nil potent matrix where a squared is not zero, but a cubed is zero So it is possible to construct nil potent matrices that The square is non-zero, but some higher power is and the easiest way to construct these nil potent matrices is strictly is Honestly speaking using these strictly upper triangular matrices every every strictly upper triangular matrix or strictly lower triangular matrix will be Nil potent and based upon how many numbers you have above the diagonal that are non-zero will determine how many powers it takes But if you want to construct some non triangular nil potent matrices, the outer product is a cool trick that you can do


Hey everybody, I'm Lance Squiggy, and this is Tea Time with Lance and Allison. Allison, what's tea time? I just got some routine blood work done with my doctor and found out I have elevated cholesterol, triglycerides, and my glucose is borderline. And for the past couple years, I've had kind of elevated blood pressure as well every time I go to the doctor and we kind of just assumed it was like white coat syndrome. I don't really have any issues with it. I'm still pretty young, but now I'm beginning to think maybe it's not white coat syndrome. Maybe my blood pressure is kind of elevated. So we thought it would be cool if as previous and current health professionals, current physician assistant students to kind of take you on my journey because my goal is to not go on to medication. My goal is now that I know that this is a problem and I have evidence that shows what I've kind of known all along, which is that I haven't been treating my body very well in PA school. This is a little bit of a wake-up call for me, so I'm gonna get my blood work done in about three months. So end of March, probably. I'll be right in the middle of my last quarter of my didactic year of PA school. And my goal is to have all this stuff be normal. So what do you plan to change? Where was your life two months ago and where is your life going to be in one month? Honestly, pretty similar. I don't have any changes. I'm still gonna be in school. Monday through Friday, I'm still gonna have exams every week. But I think my mindset has changed. Like it's that thing where you're young, so I'm 26 and I have a family history of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, types of diabetes, you know, obesity runs both sides of the family. Like it's not shocking to hear that I would get this at some point, but I've always been like the healthy one in my family. I tried to exercise pretty consistently. I eat pretty well. We don't drink alcohol. We do all this stuff that should help mitigate those genetic factors that make me a high-risk person. So that's not gonna change. School is not gonna change. But how I think about what I'm doing in my free time and even in my not-free time is going to change. And that's kind of what we're gonna document is in this lifestyle of mine that I have right now where I really do spend. So ideally, I'm getting eight hours of sleep that leaves 16 hours of my day. At least 14 of those 16 hours. I'm studying or learning. I don't think that's that much of an exaggeration. Or sleeping as well. Yeah, no, I mean that that seems like an accurate number. My kind of follow-up to your life is so previously and upcoming things aren't gonna change very much, but if your triglycerides are gonna go down some sort of habits are going to change. Do you have a plan of attack already or are we gonna talk about that? We're gonna talk about that because part of the reason we're documenting this is one to show you this is possible. So when you go into your doctor and they say, hey, you need to make these or when you come to see me in a year and a half and your blood work comes back and I say, hey, your cholesterol is kind of high and your triglycerides are elevated and your glucose is borderline like we got to make some changes. I'm not bad enough yet where I need medication to help regulate it. Like it's not off the charts. Like, well, you know, we can't even properly test your blood because it's it's the centrifuge. It's too thick with all the cholesterol and triglycerides, which happens. But it's elevated. But this is just a general lab course scale where the reference range for triglycerides is 0 to 149. I'm at 162 and this is fasted. So I got this done in the morning. My LDL cholesterol, so that stands, it's like the bad cholesterol, if you think about it, that range is 0 to 99 for fasted. Mine's 127, which is high. And then you have your HDL, which is the good cholesterol, the happy cholesterol. Mine's 41 and they want it above 39. So it's like in that range where oh, it's above 39, you're okay. But that's kind of low. There's not a lot of buffer there. Especially if my LDL's are high. Sometimes if your LDL's are like kind of high, but your HDL's also really high, it can kind of like help mitigate that a little bit. So it's less concerning if your LDL's high, but your HDL's, you know, on the higher end of the scale, too. My concern is more the triglycerides, which the more optimal ranges that I've heard are ideally, you want it under 50. Like less is generally better. For triglycerides, whoo! Yeah, and when we're at 162, so I don't have a clinical medical background, but I did do a master's degree in cell biology and anatomy and the metabolism stuff that we've talked about is what I think of when I see something like triglycerides. So I think triglycerides, what we're measuring here is a blood panel. So we're measuring triglycerides in the blood. This is not really an indication of fat as stored throughout the body, right? That would be, you know, you could do a dexascan or whatever. We should probably establish that first. So I'm not overweight. My BMI is normal. My body fat percentage is normal. But that doesn't mean that I can't have health problems. Yeah, or metabolism problems. That's how I see it, yeah. Yeah, because like Lance, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, you can please continue. But that's what he's saying is like triglycerides are the way that your body stores fat. My blood triglycerides are still elevated even if I don't have a lot of fat storage. Clarification that I think we should look up just for our own whatever, but I don't see when I hear triglycerides. I think less about stored fat, especially this blood panel. I think triglycerides is a somewhat mobilized form. It is, it's a partly stored form, but it's not, it's not stuck in adipose tissue, which would be more stored, more on the spectrum of stored to me. Whereas more on the spectrum of not stored is something like a free fatty acid or you know, eventually a ketone body. That kinds of stuff, that'll float around. You can use that a little more readily for energy. Whereas these triglycerides, they're a little bigger and they, like you were saying in the centrifuge example, they thicken the blood. Like the blood is literally thicker. So you'll often see with something like this, blood pressure increase and that's just resistance in the the tubes. Yeah. I think establishing that sort of baseline is actually really important even for, you know, a normal listener who is not a medical professional or a fitness professional, like it helps you advocate for yourself. You want to, you want to kind of know what's going on so you know how to attack it. This is, this is most, the most intimate portion of you and if you're going to change it, like there's no way you can totally farm this out. You can't just say, give me better blood. I mean, that helps actually, but it's not really a great solution. And that's why I come back to metabolism because when I think of metabolism, I think of two things. I think of diet and I think of exercise. And when I think of how the body responds to those things, I also think of stress and sleep. And so generally, if I have a client who's in your situation, I'm giving them some form of a new cocktail of diet, exercise and stress management.  So if you're watching this, you probably know who we are and what we do slash what we did. Lance and I both have backgrounds in exercise science and working with people in my position. I've worked with countless people in my previous jobs with blood panels, just like mine or worse, and help them get it down. So for me, it's a little embarrassing, I guess, to be in this position because I know what I have to do and I know it's not that difficult. But what I was doing previously, you know, my first couple quarters, I always get started and in the first couple weeks of the court. And I mean, so for me, it goes back a little bit further, I guess. Let's go back before even school, because I think my problems start long ago. Cue montage and will be abbreviated because it's not that interesting to other people. I played Division One field hockey all four years. I did it all four years. But my freshman year, I got really sick. There is an article on Quotipiac's athletic website about my journey, if you want to read up on it. But basically, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease and got really, really sick, took an entire semester off of school for medical leave to receive antibiotic infusions and thought I was doing a lot better. But I think just the stress, I had Lyme disease. I was also diagnosed with a couple other tick-borne infections. And at the time, I was also exposed to Epstein-Barr virus, which is the mono virus. So I was just really, really sick. And I think the toll that it took on my immune system and most importantly, my nervous system was just crazy. I think the stress that my body experienced was something that I'm still struggling to recover from. And this, I was diagnosed back in 2014. So, I mean, we're coming on eight years of this. And I still have not residual Lyme disease, but, you know, recovery from such a serious infection. After I had the Lyme disease, it was really hard for me to exercise. I still, I've seen a lot of doctors and I've worked with a lot of really awesome professionals and I've gotten to a much better place. I really worked on my sleep hygiene. I changed my diet. I changed and worked on my mental health to work on anxiety and all this other stuff that can contribute to your recovery from a serious infection like Lyme disease. And I got myself to a really good place where I can actually exercise again. For a while, I couldn't do anything without having what I called major flare-ups, which were just like major bouts of fatigue, muscle numbness, muscle pain, tremors. I mean, Lance saw a couple of them. It's kind of like, it's almost like paralysis in the morning too, sometimes. Just when it's really bad. It's crazy. I've never seen anything like it.  Need assistance around the house. It's important to describe these types of things because I think this is one of the many, like you have the schedule challenges of being a student in a very demanding program, but you also have, like you don't respond to exercise the way other people respond to exercise. You can't just do a little bit more or try a little bit harder and kind of get by, like doing that could set you back for weeks. Yeah, so that's part of what I have to work with is what Lance is saying. I don't respond to exercise the way that most people will. So if I try to go and do like a hit workout, for example, like a high intensity interval training exercise, 15 minutes go really hard, push yourself. Those actually tend to make me pretty sick. I don't feel well. I get this muscle pain. I get really fatigued and I just don't respond well. And so something for me is I need like 40 or 60 minutes of my day carved out where I can go for a really long walk or do a strength workout in the gym or something. But trying to make time for that is the biggest issue at school. And I can start out, this goes back to, you know, I started out the quarter. My schedule is pretty light the first couple of weeks because we haven't had any exams yet. And I'm in the gym and I'm on top of my notes and I'm doing everything right. And then I hit that first bout of exams. And this quarter is a really good example because we came right back after Thanksgiving. I was great. I worked out every day and I took all my notes and then it came to exam week and I had three exams like Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. I didn't sleep for about 48 hours for one of those, I mean two of those days and it is horrible. And I never ever wanted to do this. This was like, if you would ask me, I would have told you like, nope, I will never do that. I will never get to that point. I had to. Prove it. And it was not awesome and I don't recommend it. And if you're in school, I really hope you're never in that position. But I just was not ahead of the game as much as I thought I was. And I ended up doing okay on my exams, but I slept for 14 hours after that. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. And so I mean like those weeks, I don't have 60 minutes to go and work out and even if I do, that might be bad for my body. Like that might be too much. Yeah. That might not be a good plan. And so it's refreshing to get this side of the experience where I could sit in the chair as a coach and be like, you really need to do the different. You can't be doing that. But as the student now, I'm like, no, I really had to do that. There's no way around it. So coming back into this quarter, we're halfway through the quarter. I'm kind of at midterms. And I wanna say that's not gonna happen anymore. It probably will, especially finals week. It will definitely happen. But there's a lot of stuff that I can be doing that I'm gonna be doing over the next couple of months to work on the other stuff that's more within my control. So I think this is the most important part of this process is for me to experience for Lance to visualize and live with and to kind of have him and my coach, Jay Chung, to help guide me through. And that's gonna be, you can't control your schedule. You can't control your exams, but there's a lot of stuff you can control. And that's what we gotta work with. And so for that, it's gonna be all the stuff that you hire Lance for help on.  What's your diet look like? And what are you doing to mitigate the day-to-day stress that you feel? Because like Lance is saying, stress can elevate all the stuff that we're seeing on my blood panel. So when I get really stressed out about an exam, I'm potentially making those blood markers worse. I'm potentially putting my body into a fight or flight state, getting really stressed out, elevating my cortisol, doing all this stuff that's going to increase my triglycerides, increase my cholesterol, and increase my chances of developing heart disease and dying from a heart attack early on. And that's what we're trying to not be at. Like I don't wanna be on medicine. I wanna be healthy. I wanna have a long, healthy life. So we gotta work on stuff and we're gonna take you through exactly what your coaches would have you do in a crazy schedule environment. Yeah, yeah. And normally I wouldn't throw a bunch of stuff at this person if I'm training them, but I've seen Allison live for a few years now and I know her cortisol is always high and if she skips meals, it's just gonna get higher and persistently high cortisol is gonna raise her triglycerides. So like eating healthy for her might mean less about having fresh, nutritious stuff, though I think that's still important, but maybe more about just having regularly scheduled meals so that her body doesn't have to freak out so much, her hormones don't fluctuate so much.  Yeah, maybe we should hear Lance's perspective, but I don't. The biggest thing that I think I took away from that comment from Lance is I am one of those people where I have a lot going on and I just forget to eat. So I think there's like two or three maybe types of stress response with food.  I can afford to miss a meal. How many times have we heard that? I can afford to miss a meal. There's a cricket outside and it's very loud. It might be inside, it's pretty loud. Go ahead. Arizona man. The second type that you'll see are the stress eaters. So the people who snack constantly when they're stressed, so they're studying for their exams and they're eating chips and they're eating, I thought of waffles, I don't know why I thought of waffles, you're probably not eating waffles, but you're eating food, you're ordering food, whatever. And that third type of eater are maybe like the second eater, I wasn't sure, emotional eaters. And I do this sometimes too where to reward myself after I've done really well on an exam, I'm like, I did really well, I'm gonna get a pizza. And it's like, you were so stressed out you didn't sleep for 48 hours and now you're gonna help your body by giving yourself some unhealthy foods to make you feel better because emotionally that's what you do to reward yourself after a stressful week when I'm really just hurting my body further. So that is actually one of my goals for 2022. Even if I can't maintain, that's my goal is to maintain but understand life happens and it's not always gonna be perfect but I want my mindset to change from that. Like if I had a really stressful week and I made it through, I want to help my body by doing what's good for it, not by what my irrational trained brain has learned is gonna make me feel better inside by eating that pizza, you know, going to sleep early and getting a nice big plate of vegetables is what's gonna make me feel better physically after a stressful week and probably emotionally, yeah. I've seen the, one scenario of stress eating that you did not mention that I've seen most common from you and from other people, but from you is I'm so stressed, I have so much to do right now I just wanna order a pizza and it's not like, it's not like you don't have, like if I offered to cook, you'd be like but I really just want pizza because I need the comfort. So I think that's like number two, I think it's the stress eater where like you want that comfort food. It's just an uncontrollable craving. Yeah, yeah, because I mean, that's a thing, when you're stressed, you want sugary foods, you want fatty foods, that's, I don't know the science behind it but I know that's what people want. Yeah, yeah, brain craves it, especially as you're used to it. Yeah. Like you were saying, it's a learned behavior, you've become familiar with that. So we talked about that, it sounds like you sleep pretty well as long as you sleep. She is a pretty deep sleeper, doesn't always feel rested, not really sure what to do with that but hopefully metabolism stuff can maybe help with some of that. Yeah, I think the, so the thing that I would always tell my clients and I tell my family members this a lot too and I mean, I've never been sedentary. I played sports all through my entire life into college so I had cardio every day and then I worked in strength and conditioning where I was up and walking around and I had a very active life profession.  I don't need to do anything else. And my question is always, okay, you did 30 minutes of cardio and you'll hear this from coaches a lot but what did you do the other 23 and a half hours of that day? You probably just sat on the couch or sat at your desk, especially with the work from home stuff because you're getting up to go to the bathroom or the kitchen and that's about it. 30 minutes of cardio is probably not even meeting your daily prerequisite of how much you should be moving. It's still sedentary. Yeah. Yeah. It's something, and I think, I said this on another podcast today, not Tea Time with Lance and Allison, but another one, that cardio and going for a walk are not the same thing. You need the cardio, but you also need to move around. It's just good for managing your stress. It moves, fluid around in your cells and your tissues and you get to start recycling the waste out of there so it can be excreted or what's the hippie word for that? When I detox, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I think of the medical stuff that we learned with this, which the American Heart Association recommends that you have 10,000 daily steps every day and that's not really done with a lot of good research, but that's saying this is what you should be doing in addition to your exercise. So your 10,000 steps should not equal your cardio workout. You know, that's in addition to whatever else you're doing. The two should almost be separate. So that American Heart Association recommendation for if you're trying to lower your triglycerides, if you're trying to lower your cholesterol, you need to do four to six days, I think it is of, you know. It depends on how vigorous the activity is. Yeah, I forget. Six days of relatively low intensity stuff for like at least 30 minutes a day. Yeah, that is not the 10,000 steps that you should be getting. And that's kind of a lot of cardio. When most people think about how am I gonna fit that into my day? That's one of the reasons that the high intensity stuff has taken off so well is because I can get a 90 minute cardio workout in 20 minutes of high intensity work. The issue with that stuff is you just can't recover from it. And if you're Allison, because this is Tea Time with Lance and Allison, and we're talking about Allison, she won't be able to recover from it probably at all. Probably not for a week or more. Yeah, don't put me out. I won't be able to study the rest of the night. I won't be able to work out the next couple of days because I'll have too many muscle pains. It just doesn't make sense for me to try to do. So we talked about diet strategies. We talked about bad ways to do it. We didn't talk about how we're gonna- Well, what are you gonna do? Yeah. And so I'm hopefully gonna document some of this for y'all as we go through it. My personal goal is because of how I compensate with stress, which is skip meals and order out a bunch. My goals are to one, not skip meals. And for me, that meal is primarily breakfast and lunch. Sometimes I skip both breakfast because I slept in because I'm tired because I'm stressed. And so I wake up and I have to leave so I didn't have time to cook breakfast. So I just don't eat that day. And then if I didn't pack my lunch the night before or I don't have food that I want for lunch, I don't bring lunch with me and then I'm at school. And what I was doing last year was going to Del Taco across the street because, well, I don't have lunch and I need to eat something. So I'm gonna go to Del Taco, which is not a great option. And then I'd come home and be so stressed out I would have us order out food and get a pizza because I'm stressed out and I wanted a pizza. So this, what we're gonna do this year, 2022, new year. I've been pretty good about breakfast so far. We're about a weekend. I have granola bars that I can eat, that's an option. I wanna eat more vegetables with all my meals because they're good for me and they will help lower my cholesterol. And so a good way to do that is smoothies and they can be done pretty quick and Lovely Lance does the dishes while I'm gone. So if I use the blender, I come home and it's all clean after. I try to rinse it out. But I have to get up early enough to do that. And so I get up, make my smoothie, put some vegetables in it. That's been good so far. If I don't have time to do that, I can probably make a peanut butter and jelly on a piece of gluten-free or like whole grain bread really quickly. And to preface that, we use just like fresh ground peanuts, it's not processed peanut butter.  I would consider that processing, but it's not that bad, you know. It's not layers of processing and preserving. Okay, that's fair. It's just raw peanuts though. I do use like Smucker's Jelly, which is not awesome. But again, my goal is not to have a perfect meal. It's, I need to make sure I'm eating. So I'll do that and then I'll pack some fruit and carrots in a little container the night before and bring that with me. And that's like my snack or the other part of my breakfast. And then for lunch, we are buying like rotisserie chicken or something at school that I can shred up, put on salads for lunch. That's super easy.   I'm kind of a freak and I don't really eat salad dressings on my salads anyways. So for me, it's just like a couple handfuls of spring mix, maybe some arugula, spinach, whatever we have in the house, handful of shredded chicken and then toppings that I might want. So if I want some carrots or walnuts or pecans or I feel like I can never say that word. I thought that was so weird. I needed to say it because I felt weird saying it.  Blueberries. Blueberries. You can get fancy and like pre-make some quinoa to put on your salad, have some extra protein, carbohydrates, blah, blah, blah, but it's really not hard to do and you just do it the night before. I've also been trying to plan out our weeks better. So Lance is great. He helps me a lot around the house while I'm in school. He doesn't plan ahead when he goes to the grocery store as much as I need to for, well, listen. Because we have to cook a lot at night to have stuff to bring for lunch. And if we don't have enough of that protein that we had the night before or something, I just have like a plate of cauliflower to bring with me to school and then whatever Lance is gonna eat because there may not be enough for both of us to split or I come home and I need to go to the store more frequently to get stuff basically is what I'm saying. Like today I had to stop at the grocery store on my way home to make sure that we had something to have for dinner so that we would not order out. Whereas last quarter, I would not have thought about, okay, we don't have anything to make for tonight. I would have just gotten home and been like, oh, we don't have anything. We better order. Yeah, we have to order. That's what the pain of a high measurement on your blood test will do to you. You're finally feeling it. So I'm just basically, long story short is I'm trying to plan ahead. I'm trying to think a couple days in advance is like, okay, we're having this for dinner tonight. I'll bring this in for lunch tomorrow. What are we gonna have for dinner tomorrow? This, okay, two days planned, the whole week planned, however you wanna do it. I like planning the whole week because I'm kind of a freak like that, but you do figure it out. I would say that is the best diet tip. I wrote a whole book on diet tips. Actually, you should check it out. It's currently called Dieting Without a Diet and it's available on mastering.fitness sponsored by Mastering Fitness. I might change the- Click the link here. Oh yeah, I should put it. I think it's, wait, I think it's, I don't remember, it's one of those. I was wanting to do that. That though, planning ahead is the most helpful tip because it eliminates the need for willpower. If you have a plan, you just execute the plan. You need a little bit of energy, but you don't need to control yourself and say, oh, I'm not supposed to have this. I need to look at those fries but not eat them. Like it's not that kind of thing. It's just, this is what I do today so I'm going to execute it and it becomes less emotional and more logical. Yeah, and the emotion is still there. Lance and I have very different relationships with food. He will just eat something because it's good for him. I don't do that. I'll like throw up, so. She's like, I love you. You're like a child when it comes like being picky about stuff but I don't wanna. She doesn't actually say that but she thinks it. I do. I just don't want to eat that. It doesn't sound good to me, so I don't want to. So finding food that tastes really good is really important to me. So my goal for this kind of like whole series with y'all is to show you like, cause we also have a bunch of crazy diet restrictions, right? So like I'm not really supposed to eat eggs that much. They kind of upset my stomach. We try to be gluten-free. We try to be dairy-free. We're pretty paleo, honestly, but also Lance has a bunch of sensitivities to like nightshades and. Fod baps. Yeah, so we have like a crazy long list of foods that like onion, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, stuff that we're not really supposed to be eating. We do sometimes, but we try to avoid it for the most part. So I think it's nice for us to show how we kind of navigate these crazy diet restrictions because a lot of people are like us that we know and it's hard to navigate that. And the reason, we should probably just make another video on it on why we decided to make all these dietary changes and how we went about it and figuring out what didn't work well with our bodies. But I wanna keep y'all updated with some of that. And then the other part of this stuff is gonna be taking you through my workouts. And so we talked kind of about workout, but we never really talked about what the plan is. Yeah, I've been waiting to get there, let's do it. Okay, so workouts, I would say anecdotally, it seems like she used to not work out at all. I didn't ever. When we lived in California, every time I got into a good groove and you were with me for at least one of these, maybe two of these, I could work out pretty consistently for like six weeks. And for me that was like some type of cardio and what I was doing for a while was like walking on the treadmill on an incline. I'd wake up early, I'd go to the gym, I'd walk on the treadmill for a Netflix episode. That was my TV time for the day. Then I would head to work and then I would have a break in the day and I would do not an intense lift, but I would do some type of lifting exercise. And then I get to like six weeks of that and I'm just progressing because I'm getting stronger, I can lift heavier weights and I'd have a flare up. And that would put me out for months. Meaning she would be very, very tired. It would be very hard to get up in the morning. She'd get a lot of those muscle pains, pins and needles, feelings in her extremities and just like responses where you would say this doesn't feel like, before she got sick, she worked out and she knows what it feels like to work out and this doesn't feel like that. Like it's not just I'm being a wimp, you know? It's interesting because as a strong conditioning coach I know how strong I am. And so like I know I can deadlift 135 pounds. That I know I can do. But when I'd have these flare ups, nope. The, I don't know if it was nervous system, endocrine, whatever could not do it. Too tired. I just couldn't pick that weight up off the ground. And some people might be, we had a friend who would be like, it sounds like a mindset. It's a fixed mindset. And that would honestly really make me mad because I would be so frustrated partially because I was afraid, like what if he's right? What if it really is all in my head, you know? Like if you have a chronic illness, there's always some voice in the back of your head. Like you're making this worse than it is.  You're being dramatic. But I knew that wasn't the case. I knew it wasn't just being dramatic or I wasn't just in my head where I was telling myself I can't do this. Like it's something I wanted to do and I tried really hard and I would just get sick. So Lance is correct there. We've been together for over four years and two and a half of those, I did not work out consistently if at all. Like there'd be months where I did not work out at all. Going to work was my workout and that would kick my butt. So I started working 2020 with a coach. One of our I-Fast crew, J-Chung, J helped me a lot and I think COVID kind of gave me the space and time to go for more walks and do more stuff and kind of focus on my body and health a little bit more just because I didn't have a commute and it gave me some extra free time in the day to really focus on myself. So I started working out pretty consistently then and then I felt really good and I was making the body comp goals that I had wanted and I was running again and I ran a 5K and then I started school and just all that got pushed to the back burner. So I know what needs to be done. I know I need to have more daily movement. I know I need some type of cardio routine and I know I need some type of strength training routine because another thing that's important that I talk about with my doctor is for women, your, I don't know if I've told you this directly, for women, your bone density peaks at the age of 30 and every year after that, your bone density starts to go down and then it dips really low when you hit menopause and that's why you see osteoporosis in women so much and so lifting weights is really good and I'm not 30 yet. I probably haven't reached my maximum bone density yet but I want that bone density to be as maximum as it can at age 30 and lifting weights is gonna help me do that because again, I'm looking at long-term, I'm looking at longevity, I'm looking at how can I live to be 100 with Lance because I never wanna leave you. So how do I do all that? And for me, that's gonna include some type of strength training. So we got a bike, a stationary bike so that I can do my work. If I'm studying at home, I don't have to worry about trying to go to the gym and get my computer set up and my iPad set up and getting all my notes out and listening to my lectures and blah, blah, blah. So we got a stationary bike or I can use it as the 30 minute break that I get myself when I get home from school. So we got a bike. My goal is to do some type of cardio work at least, I think I said like a, I should have wrote this down. 100 and something or two, 300 and something days. So 365 minus 52, whatever that is. I gave myself one day a week that I'm allowed to take off and not do cardio. So six days a week for this year is my goal of cardio. This is in addition to some movement. So going for walks, doing stuff during my lunch hour instead of sitting on my phone, scrolling through social media or watching YouTube videos or whatever. And doing strength workouts on days where I have the time. And for me, those strength workouts, what I found worked really well when I was working with Jay is I respond really well to like, like a half of a workout basically. So instead of like a 60 minute lift, I'll do a 30 minute lift. And it just, it works better for my schedule. I feel better when I do it. So I'll pick three or four exercises. I'll do three to four sets of like eight to 12 reps and strength is kind of a goal for me because I like to feel strong, but for now my goal is just to have a routine and stay consistent because this is what you'll learn if you have a routine and you stay consistent, you'll make progress. Whether or not that's the progress you see, like if your goal is weight loss and you're starting out slowly because that's the best way to build a routine, you may not lose a bunch of weight right off the bat. You may not make a lot of strength gains right off the back. But the blood marker stuff, if you start a routine and you're consistent with it, you'll see those changes pretty quick, which is why I'm excited to get all this stuff redone in about three months. I may not see body comp changes. I may not see a weight loss. I may not even feel like I could like, oh, now I can like run five miles and I can do all this stuff. Like I'm not gonna feel bad in three months. It'd be awesome if I could, but it's not gonna happen. But I should see changes in my blood work. So that's what we're gonna find out. Yeah, that's exciting. We've kinda got a plan, kinda got a plan. We've got systems that are gonna go into a concrete plan. She's a planner, I'm sure we won't be short of plans. Is there anything else we didn't talk about? I don't think so. I think, yeah. Pretty much hammered it. What's the recap is, as a coach, you've gotta address how is somebody eating, how is somebody exercising, and how is somebody managing their stress, which includes sleep, right? So we generally wanna sleep about eight hours a night, hopefully uninterrupted.  And hopefully that doesn't take too much time for you, but if you need to spend more time to make it delicious, then you tailor the program to the person. And then for exercise, my recommendation is generally try to do something pretty much every day. So six days a week I think is a super good challenge there, super good process goal. And that's six days a week of my cardio workout. It's not talking about that daily prerequisite of movement. Because again, that's just something you should be doing every day as a human.  And that cardio stuff, that doesn't count your strength work either, eh? Correct. That's a lot? Yeah, it kind of is, but I still see it as manageable because my strength stuff, if I need to, I just do that Saturday, Sunday, and I pick one day in the week where I don't have an exam. That's three days a week of lifting. And it's 30 minutes, I can carve out 30 minutes. Yeah, your sessions being 30 minutes helps a lot because I don't know about you or your psychopath, but when I was in my master's program, I could not just study all day. Like I needed a little bit of a break, I would start fall asleep, I would just give up. So having that 30 minute break might be enough for you to kind of process what you were just studying, but also get away from it, not look at the paper so much, rest your eyes, whatever it may be, and then you can come back in. And if you take another 30 minute break to work out later on in that day, as long as you have the time, like I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so keep in tune with all this stuff. We're gonna take you through diet stuff, we're gonna take you through workout stuff. Maybe we'll do a video on stress management too because I have lots of it. And it's been a process, I have a lot of resources, I've worked with therapists, I've worked with doctors, I've worked on myself and run up on how to do it and had done work with friends and stuff just to kind of help manage all that stuff and really explore the root of my stress and how to manage that. I have some ways that I'm gonna be tackling that this year to see if I can help with some of the really high stress moments that I'm sure everyone experiences. So we'll do some more videos on that, but keep watching. We have based Tea Time with Lance and Allison off of our favorite YouTube channel like Becky and Chris and Tuxedo Time. So if you like travel or things that look beautiful, you should watch Becky and Chris, definitely. You just like good people. You should watch Becky and Chris. Oh man, good people. We're gonna be, I'm trying to get her to move to Buffalo so we can be friends. Yeah, check out their link here. Yeah, one of these. I think it's this way, because I remember doing this, I don't know. Yeah, I think it's this way. Check out the link. It's a card, it's called a card. Yeah, thanks for watching. If you learned something or you found yourself inspired, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when we release the next one. I'm gonna put all this in a playlist, the Allison story stuff. So she's gonna kind of like, she's kind of leading the ship. She's got Jay, she's got me if she wants. I try not to dip into her life too much with stuff like this, but obviously I can offer any. Partner, not coach. Yeah, right? It's not my role. But he has a unique lens because he is a coach and he can see. I see all the data. When I'm doing stuff and sometimes it's not so great when he points it out because I'm also a coach so I also recognize the bad stuff. Sometimes I don't want to talk about it. Sometimes I just want to do it. That will be our next series. Managing your relationship. When to say nothing. Yeah. That's what it's called. Thank you for watching. I'm gonna do it again. If you learned something or you found this inspiring, is that what I said? Hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when we release the next one. If you need something else to watch, I'm gonna leave some videos here in the end screen. So click one and I said subscribe, right? Stay tuned to see if I can actually change my blood panel in three months. It's what we're teaching you to do, three months. Yep, and if you're joining- Totally new person. If you're joining, let us know. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye. An hour. Taken by Allison Lance and the Cricket.


It's the opportunity to be able to make a difference every day. It's a team of professionals that are only focused on selfless service. Our service members are willing to put their life on the line for our freedoms because they believe at the point of injury the best medical care is going to be there in the time of need. When we look at what our young medics are doing and our service members are doing in deployed lands and realizing that they're able to do what they do because they know the best health care is going to be there and that our army medics and our clinicians are there to put themselves in harm's way so that they can protect our service members and our values. Army medicine is all about people. We have such wonderful staff members and we have to be able to rely on each other. We really want our beneficiaries and everyone who comes across the army medicine department to have trust and faith in us. We want to make sure there is no doubt that you weren't taken care of by the most world-class best facilities and the world-class best people. I'm motivated because I know the dedicated professionals that are part of army medicine that come to work every day only wanting to do what's best for our service members and their families. Serving to heal means that through every phase of a healing journey army medicine is there shoulder to shoulder helping them and their family members. We don't ever get to pick when our health breaks down. We never get to pick when the next disease hits us or we get to pick when that injury occurs. It just happens. You know medicine doesn't heal everything but if we can give that caring touch to the patient that definitely would make the process better. To mentally, physically and medically take care of people and their families it's what we do and we serve to heal those inside and out. And service comes in many many ways.  You just don't know how many ways that you're able to heal somebody. For me healing means overcoming. It's my job. It's my personal goal in life to serve others. Since both wars kicked off we've had a lot of significant injuries. Patients coming back 18, 20 years old with significant wounds, burns, missing limbs and to provide those patients' cares. Probably the most rewarding for me. I think when we're working with people who serve our country we have to be especially grateful that we have the opportunity to help them be more successful. You don't realize it until you're in a situation as we're in but there's people here who really care. My son's a triple amputee. I mean it was probably the most devastating day of my life. The day I walked into his hospital room but there's many people here to support you. The doctors here really do care about what you have to say, how you feel. They really do a lot to make you feel comfortable and they take the time out to make you feel good about yourself again and I think that's important because serving to heal it's not just healing the physical but healing the spirit and the emotions as well. Trust really is the bedrock in the framework of everything that we do. Our service members and their families need to trust us that we have the best intention to help them get to the best level of health possible. We have to be accountable to our patients and accountable to our team members so that we ensure that what we're doing is focused on improving the health of those that we're honored to serve. I think all you have to do is look at the flag and realize that there have been so many sacrifices that are made since the birth of our nation. Army medicine is really the face behind the scenes. It's the glue that binds the army together. Army medicine will often work unaccredited and unaccounted for but without us the force wouldn't be sustained. To have the honor to serve is really a humbling position, a humbling job to have. I think you have to give back what this country has given you and so it's an honor to serve with people, it's an honor to serve for people. It's taking pride in knowing that you are putting someone above yourself. And it's valuing the opportunity to give back to those people who provide us the opportunity to be free. I know that these young men and women have given more than I could ever imagine and in some small way I can give back and say thank you and that's an honor to me. Serving to heal and honor to serve, I really think speaks to the heart of our legacy of army medicine. We've been honored to serve shoulder to shoulder with our war fighters. There's never been a conflict when we haven't been there with them on point to ensure that they have the best healthcare process and that's allowed us to be able to have a strong America and a strong army medicine team serving with our army.


we're going to start section 10.4 inscribed angles with some vocabulary and we've already learned what a central angle is, but we're going to review that and find the similarities and the differences between an inscribed angle, a new term, and what we know about a central angle. So one thing about a central angle is that we know that the vertex is going to be at the center of a circle. So I'm just going to make a central angle here and call it ABC and I'm going to say that it's 80 degrees. So I would say that the measure of angle ABC equals 80 degrees. We will remember we want to put that M there and that make sure we know that it's a degree measure of an angle or an arc with the M. We know that on this central angle the intercepted arc is as you can extend these sides even and see that the intercepted arc is going to be arc AC and we learn that the measure of that intercepted arc is going to be equal to the central angle. So the central angle, 80 degrees, the intercepted arc AC is also 80 degrees. Now an inscribed angle is different because the vertex isn't the center, but the vertex will have be right on the circle and the sides will be cords of the circle. So if we create an inscribed angle ABC, it will look like this. The key thing being that vertex is going to be on the circle instead of the midpoint of the circle. So I can also label this angle ABC and let's just give that a measure of 30 degrees. I'm just putting that out there of 30 degrees. We still have an intercepted arc here AC because if we extend the cords here, that's where it's going to intercept the arc AC and we have a theorem that states that if an angle is inscribed in a circle, then the measure of the angle equals half the measure of its intercepted arc. So what that means to us is we know arc AC, the measure of that is going to be double the inscribed angle or you could think of it as the inscribed angle is half of the intercepted arc. So be aware of the relationships as we go forward in this section. If you're looking at central angles, the intercepted arcs will be equal and if you're looking at inscribed angles, we have that doubling relationship where the inscribed angle is going to be half of the intercepted arc.


What's going on everybody got Kyle and Shawn here relating sports cards, and we are ripping 2023 bowman sapphire and jumbo three box mixer number three random team style we did a randomized for the break guys. I had Daniel G with the Reds down to David B with the Royals. Good luck. Good luck here guys. Let's see what we got Appreciate everybody grabbing up spots today We are close to full on the second bowman sapphire as well one spot to go on number 10 see this one spot to go Yeah, they're not stealing Norvel watch Norvel is not going to watch no way you watch no way I'd rather him take stark sark take sark. Not a don't take my Norvel. They're taking good luck here guys This is mixer number three. I've seen his name a couple too many times today. I'm not happy about it I've seen dabo a few times too and obviously laying kiffin because He's got many ties to He's got a few of them went there twice. I think righty. Good luck here. We'll start with the jumbo orange to start orange to start It is gonna be a first Joe Redfield nice when they're angels to 25 on the orange chrome very nice 11 out of 25 outfield prospect for the angels First Santana and Gutierrez. It better not take Norvel man I saw that You've got to be kidding they better not take one of the other guys first cold Carrick and cam Collier. I'm sure if they ask it need be down No There's an orange paper now. It's gonna be a Zach Levenson at 25 first Cardinals Two oranges so far in the jumbo Cardinals No, there's a Aqua shimmer Christian Campbell to 125 McDaniel, yeah, I mean I I could see it but Hunter Haas I feel like me Daniel still wants to stay in the NFL more than I Don't know I'm sorry about the mental you have in the first one Well all card ships, so we'll definitely get some cards at least all the paper and everything ships in that one Adrian Santana on the first blue Gonzalez and Quinn McDaniel were fracter first Oh Nor valley's we get coach prime probably not until uh Shadoor is gone though, so it'd be a few years. I think I could potentially see that happening at some point But for a little bit, I don't think there's any music rain Taylor 250 rates Yeah, I got you Mitchell. Sorry about that sir Jaworsky and Detmer Don't blame us man playing the cards No one wants every matter. That's true. There is a lot of coaching vacancies right now, man One quarter of the NFL doesn't have a coach at the moment And then some big college openings too. There's a blue Gutierrez and Lunar Blow nice one there Max Clark Tigers on the globe first bowmeister and Carlos Jorge. There's an auto It's gonna be Adrian Santana class of 2023 base auto for the race And what's up Jacob? That's right. That's right Lucas Gordon and Clemmie Stash and trash All of them. That's you wanted urban Meyer. Oh man. Oh Man, there's a now. It's gonna be a mood ring of Jacob Wilson Nice one there Jacob Wilson for the ace mood ring short print and to 125 Eric baton see the brew crew Baez and J. Bashir's first refractor. Thank you Matt V taking that last spot in a sapphire Sapphire sold out guys got Star Wars and Bowman's best you that is it for tonight on spots We'll have Sam rip it in the morning again guys. I'm gonna check out spots with him as well some more bowman There's a first Garrett Forrester pirates Yeah, the UCF got a big win yesterday. Sean had to rep Sean had to rep Kansas man my daughter's on the modern Kansas My brother's too I got Jack Mahoney. Don't mess with us. Yeah, I was telling jaker. I was my sister also paid some money there Here's a first Fisher and Gutierrez your nights. Yeah, that was a big win man That was a big win. Yeah. I don't see that happening. I'll see Sean wearing a Michigan There's a blue nice one there raise. It'll be Braden Taylor to 150. There we go on the First blue very nice Brayden Taylor there First young and Mercedes and last pack of the Jumbo. We'll get a two sapphires go 30 30 minutes Yeah, from downtown just about there. Yeah, 35 40. Yeah, and on how I force feeling on a certain day. Absolutely There's a Django Gonzalez bowman glass white socks first skeins refractor and cold Miller Yeah, like yesterday it was a I got here five so it was right around a Right around rush hour, so it takes about an hour But if you go any other time of day, it's about 35 minutes. Oh Right here. Let's start with some sapphire. It's got two of them for three color and one auto Lot there's a lot Get a couple half casers sapphire going up after this next mixer and filled up on bowman draft today If you guys want to check out Sam tomorrow morning, he should have some more going also got on bowman jumbo cases as well There's a cool shown wire Behind it is calling. How can other nice one met the 75? Very nice on the yellow the first round pick for the Mets First Rios and Caraco. I got you Jacob. Appreciate that man. They have to come see us Jake Gonzalez a Huna Mitchell and Emmett Olson. Yeah, if anyone's ever in the Orlando area, please feel free to come by We're open up every day 11 to 6 Winninger Marion Boyd Eldridge and Darniche Valdez Yeah, yeah, not too bad from Disney either. It's like about 45 or so just a bit longer than downtown Jayden Ham and this will be a Adrian Santana raise or killing it in this one on the yellow Um the bowman um sapphire selections. That is Daniel G with the raise nice one there to 50 That is gold actually not yellow Santana to 50 very nice Walters and torn go race Hard of cannons. I hire the cannons. There's Jackson Meryl, Hunter Holland, Delio, and Christian Opper They're still sending my fanatics over there. So they were they had me saying fire the cannons all day. I wasn't even there Unbelievable there's a wide Langford base first Got Emanuel Bonilla, Drew Jones, and Roman Anthony They read socks Another selections Alfredo donno and it's going to be Adrian Santana on the sapphire selections auto for the race Raise based sapphire selections to go with the uh gold wall drop and guanipa One last pack here I'm gonna see a poppy today. There's a gold Got Luke K. Scholl and the gold is going to be cooper angle for the gaudians The audience of 50 Charlie Soto and Montero Yeah, they're fun, man. They're fun.  It's not not the greatest time. I pulled too many crowds out there, but It is a good time. I'll write guys box to a sapphire Jerry Watts Brown And gold is AJ Ewing nice one there Mets go with the um to go with the uh Calling Hauke as well It's gold the 50 AJ Ewing Gonzalez and JC young Hey, what's up Lisa? How are we doing today? Lisa Yeah, the razor razor eat in this one. There's drew hackenburg grace and hit hugs are haas and Quinn McDaniel Oh, let's see a poppy Let's see a poppy got Xavier Isaac. That'll be Tanner Hall JB Shears and Cole young Are you into magic kingdom last year? Very nice Is it Sunday yet? No It is not Kevin Perrata got a yellow. That'll be Kevin sim d-backs On the yellow sapphire This one there. I like the colors man. Clemmie and Jesus bites sapphire always looks so good, man always Tomer bush Spencer Nivens sliger and Lucas Gordon Oh, you mean the Cardinals players on Sunday. Nice That's sick. I'll be a good time Got host way to Paula and Otto is going to be Brayden Taylor to 199 for the race. Damn race. Geez Daniel Geez Brayden Taylor to 199 on the sapphire auto Got Camilo Diaz and Diane Jorge. I'm not sure. Toka heard a forest talk about I think they're in the planning stage Still, I think they're still in the planning stage on that one Brock rodent on the base and gold is going to be Jason Savakul Savakul for the cards On the gold first Dillon head and Kevin sim Alrighty there guys, that'll do it another bowman giraffe mixer We'll do a quick recap and then we're on to number four here and then we'll get straight bowman sapphire coming to half casers Yeah, right. That was a crazy one. That was a crazy one. You don't expect to see that very often for sure Yeah, sorry everybody else. That was uh, that was definitely a raise Raise a couple boxes there. Thank you. Uh, Jonathan taking a few and masterwork Masterworks almost down to single digits now appreciate that guys We had adrian santana sapphire selections auto for the race face auto 499 Garrett Forrester had adrian santana class of 2023 had brayden taylor to 199 on the um sapphire auto and the blue wave auto to 150 Uh, brayden taylor, sorry true blue true blue to 150 to 125 batonsi christian cambell gold to 50 adrian santana Kevin sim on the yellow to 75 and calling how for the Mets Gold to 50 ajouing cooper engels savakul and to 25 was joe redfield first for the angels Alrighty there guys, that will do it for mixer number three. Give me just a moment. We'll get number four going about eight minutes or so