Oh, you guys. Hey, thank you. Hi to the bad kids up the back row.  I love the way that people spread out in these things. All right. I don't remember what the podcast bit of my title was about. I wrote this before I went away. So my talk today comes out of a recent research trip that I took to the states. I went around seven different cities looking at how museums are reaching visitors using digital technology. The trip was generously funded by a Winston Churchill Fellowship and with assistance from the Hutt City Council, who are the core founders of the Dallas Art Museum. So my talk today is going to take the form of three experiences and three observations. And if I can just get a bit of help from you first, who has heard of the Dallas Museum of Arts Friends program with free entry level membership? Who has heard of the Koopa Hewitt's pen? All right. And who has heard of the Ask app at Brooklyn Museum? Okay, good. Thank you. So that, every year there is a new hotness in our sector. And we sit here at the bottom of the world and we watch the hotness heat up.  And you're doing amazing things. Right now it is kind of the Koopa Hewitt with the pen battling it out with the Brooklyn Museum and the Ask app. Before that it was the O-Mona, before that it was Cleveland's Wall, it was the Walker's website, it was the AMAs Art Babel and their dashboard. The main point of my trip was to try out for myself as a visitor some of these kind of superstar projects. And I felt like after flirting online with them all for years, I was finally going to go on a real date but I wasn't just going on a date, I was going straight into their front lounge. So, few of the people who visit the places that we run and particularly I'm talking about art museums because that's my wheelhouse at the moment. Few of the people who visit our places are museum visiting experts and even fewer of them are visiting for the explicit purpose of critique and so I am not a normal visitor. In this case I was not from around there. I purposefully visited cities Dallas, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and I'll count Brooklyn in here because it's basically a different city. They're not on the international tourist museum map and I picked museums that like my own have an emphasis on repeat attendance by local residents. And I'm a professional and I was doing what I call a view source visit and on many of my visits to art galleries I'm so focused on looking at the front of house staff and how clean your bathrooms are and how you've lit the artwork and what kind of hanging devices that you use. Occasionally I walk out of a gallery and not actually have a visual memory of any of the art that I looked at. So I tried really hard on my trip to use these products with some kind of optimism and a bit of joy in my heart rather than being a mendacious mystery shopper just looking for issues. So I hope you're going to take my experience and observations with the kind of honesty and some of the self-acknowledged limitations that go with them. So after moving to the Dallas Museum of Art three years ago the director who has just announced his resignation, Max Anderson and his head of technology, Rob Stein, who came with him from the Indianapolis Museum of Art introduced a free entry policy to the museum and a new free entry level of membership called the DMA Friends. And the program has three aims. It's to promote the gallery to non-visitors, it's to increase engagement and repeat visitation and it's to use the data gathered from tracking those members to inform the museum's operations. So on the first day that I visited the DMA I watched the front of house staff greeting visitors to the museum and selling them on the Friends program. And people were remarkably happy to stand and listen to the sales pitch and I think that's partly because people in Texas are very polite and they will hear you out. A friend in Brooklyn observed to me that no New Yorker would stand there and listen to you in the front door of your museum trying to sell them on something. And I think it's also because people still aren't used to the idea of free entry and they think that there's got to be some sort of I have to give you something. So after looking for a wee while I took the plunge and I signed myself up and it was quickly clear that this was not a program that was for people like me, international visitors like me. So one of the first things that they're asking for is your postcode which is a key part of their tracking information. They're using that to understand where visitors come from and particularly with the idea of trying to make their visitation more equitable and to target their marketing and outreach into particular neighbourhoods that are underrepresented in their visitor stats. But there's no option for an international visitor and instead the staff are used to the work around that he's developed which was to sign me up under the postcode for where the museum is itself. So I assume that people like me have caused something of a glut in their statistics right there. We also went through a screen where I was encouraged to choose an avatar and at this point the very nice man said to me everyone who has ever developed a piece of kind of web technology for a frontline person to use will recognise us. He said to me, I just don't understand why they put this in here. They don't know what they're going to use it for. You can just skip it if you want to. But I did it, I did it. So the way that the program works is that for a visitor you gather points in order to access rewards and in a city where everyone drives the first objective is to gather enough points to get your parking at the museum redeemed. And so this nice man entered some cheat codes for me and I had enough money, enough money, enough points, upfront to get a free ruler from the shop. So I started on that basis. And after that I started exploring the galleries and you gain points in several ways.  Like it's got three entrances, it's so big. It boggled my mind how big this museum was. So every gallery has an entrance at its sign with a code. You text the code to the thing, the program and that racks up the points. And you don't actually have to walk into that gallery or interact with the art in any way in order to get those points. Correspondingly it's a really low point activity and this was where it was reinforced again for me that it was not like people for me because I'd stayed on my New Zealand data plan and I wasn't going to be texting from my New Zealand number to an American system to get points because it would cost me too much. So instead I had to note these all down. I flicked open my notes app and I noted down all the codes and then I would go down four or five floors to the front of House Lobby and I would manually enter them at a kiosk after I'd signed myself in. And it's just as well that this was a low value activity because I was there to actually look at the art. I kept on missing. I don't even have a picture of one of these codes because I forgot to take them. They're actually incredibly discreet. They're quite easy to overlook. And so I wonder if that's equally disruptive for the data gathering effort. If they're trying to understand who's visiting what galleries if the signs are actually remarkably easy to miss then you're only getting a small picture of what that actually looks like. The other main activity that the DMA was offering on the day was the DMA Faves scavenger hunt.  I think they are one of the lowest forms of engagement but that is my personal perspective and I know some people love them. But it's good to be honest. So this is a photo of a Monet with the normal DMA label style and then the DMA Faves sign underneath of it. Here's the prompt up close. Like I said this place is enormous and the art is astounding and the interpretation is all very discreet. And so these things just sing out at you. You see them from galleries away and you're drawn into them. And they gave these artworks a really, really strong level of visual attraction that I think was probably not totally intentional. Again, a code for a fave object, earns you more points but you didn't have to engage any harder. You just had to find it. You didn't have to understand the work in any way. So my experience of this programme was that it requires only the most modest effort from the visitor and it evokes correspondingly low engagement and the incentives, I do think, are very conducive towards people who live locally, visiting frequently. And of course now I am receiving at least a weekly email from the DMA telling me about events, exhibitions, things I might like to buy and things I might like to donate towards. But the power of the project really does light in the data and when Rob Stein showed me the analysis of membership data against census data neighbourhood by neighbourhood for their region I could kind of palpably feel the vision that he was putting across and with a goal that's not just about increasing visitation but trying to more equibly serve communities across the city and to not over-serve communities that are already well-served and to understand that as well as underserved communities. I do see that data being invaluable for their outreach, their marketing and their programming initiatives at a mass scale, which is really, it's not easy to do and it sounds like probably I'm being heavily critical. These are my observations. I think in some ways it was one of the most ambitious projects that I saw. All right, it's time to get moving. All right, the pen at Cooper-Hertz. The good thing is you all know what this is already most of you and if you don't it is all over the internet so you can look it up. Unlike the DMA friends where the program is promoted for a free entry, the pen gets given to you when you buy your ticket to go into the Cooper-Hertz at the front of house staff have got like a 40-second pattern that they run through with you and they explain what it does and how you use it. It has two ends. One end you use to collect icons from labels as you move around the galleries. The other end you can use to, and then you download them into the interactive tables. This will make sense with time and then the other end you use to manipulate them. Well, I loved about the pen and I loved it as a design object. I loved the weight of it. I loved that kind of firm rubbery feel as a physical person. I loved being able to use my body in an art gallery, even in just the smallest way. It was really nice to feel like I was moving when I was in that building and it was unique and it was special and it wasn't like reusing a device that I use all the time in the rest of my life where it got pesky and again not your normal visitor.  So you've got stuff, you've got lots of stuff and I can't quite imagine what that's like when you've got a kid but I guess then the kid's got a pen so they're happy. Sorry, that was on the fly. I didn't actually see many children when I was on my visit which was on a weekday. So it was when I was looking at a collection show about different elements of design that I was really struck by the underlying power of what Seb Chan who has recently left could pure and move to ACME what he and his team have made. So this is a really bad photo taken through a perspex case of an early 20th century bracelet and an early 21st century piece of medical technology that's used in shoulder reconstruction and on the face of it they're both very attractive objects but they have no link between them but when I read the label another layer gets revealed to me so every object that's on display possibly every object in their collection database they have got the curators adding at least 10 tags to and in the case of the implant the first two words are aesthetic descriptors lace-like and snowflake and everyone who's worked in an art gallery has seen dumb database curating which is like we need a show very quickly someone search for flowers search for dogs search for whatever this to me took database curating to a whole new level and it kind of changed my whole perspective on this particular exhibition so a group of things that were blue were suddenly a much smarter display when I thought about it in the terms of what they'd done to understand and think about kind of deep diving their collection and during my visit I came to perceive the pen as the most recent point on the design continuum that stretches all the way from this beautiful historic mention that you're in the Fancy Pants House of the Fancy Pants people that is now a public museum all the way out through its collections and then right up to the contemporary visitor experience and this kind of shitty photo summarises that so I'm standing in this exquisite original carved teak library and in the distance there's an isimayaki dress and between me and the dress are two people using the pen on one of these interactive tables and this to me this was designed across the centuries. These were objects made to be used and enjoyed by humans which is the story that the Koopa Hewitt is trying to tell and of course nothing is perfect they have some problems that I'm not going to go into quite so deeply right now around touring exhibitions, they haven't figured out how to integrate this kind of collect thing when the objects on display are not in their collection and this was a weakness again a very very discreet panel so you didn't really notice the weakness and an otherwise exquisite show about the Heatherwick Design Studios and those of you who heard Melissa's talk Melissa Feth's talk yesterday would have seen this, I really did feel using the interactive table and using this particular one which is around picking something that you want to design and the materials that you look at all the designers I have worked with I felt this completely undersold their work for these kind of two janky lines and make something that looks like that that to me didn't communicate what design is and what it does I also have not gone back to my unique URL that would allow me to access the riches that I collected on my visit and I thought about doing it, I thought about doing it really hard and then I realised my heart wasn't in it and so as a visitor I wasn't going to do it but my relationship with the Koopa Hewitt isn't through that URL, it's through all the micro touches, their blog posts and their tweets and publications and things like that, that's how I stay in touch with them the URL is not my link to that museum alright, the Ask App at Brooklyn Museum, at first point if you're a Kiwi you talk about this a lot, it sounds like this which is awesome when you're travelling around America and telling people what you're doing what I found as I went around and tried these different products what was required of me to interact with them grew and the engagement grew as well, so again unlike the DMA where you sign up on site and the Koopa Hewitt where everyone's given a pen the Ask App is not integrated into the entry process, you either download it and it is going to sound like that every time I say it you download it in advance or you notice a sign inside the building that prompts you to do so, we had a quite vibrant conversation about this at museums in the web Asia or about whether someone who's standing inside your museum is going to download your app and my gut feeling is no, why would you? you know, you don't stand inside the warehouse and download their app, why would I download to Papa's App just because I'm in the building anyway, so uptake is very low it's at about 1% or 2% of their visitors so the app effectively lets you live message a group of specially trained staff with questions as you travel around the museum and they can pinpoint you using beacons or you can communicate where you are through the text and the photos that you send to them. I had to push myself really hard to use this because it turns out I don't actually generate a lot of questions when I'm looking at exhibitions either I already know the answer or I'm just kind of usually just moving on especially when I'm visiting by myself so the DMA friends is all about kind of picking up breadcrumbs and then depositing them into a bread box and then the pen is this kind of oh that's interesting, click click, click interaction to get started with the Ask App I felt like I had to come up with a question that was worth asking someone who was waiting for me to do that and I found it strikingly difficult and my first experience was a little bit frustrating it was a excuse my pronunciation it was a Redfield chair from like the 1913 or 1930 one of those beautiful monodist thing and my question was was this generally available could any punter buy one of these is it just available to people who were in the know who knew the guy who had access to it and the answer that I got back came in four chunks because they deliver it in bite-sized information and it kind of started with you know, well avant-garde design wasn't to everyone's taste and it was very uncomfortable for people and I was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah get me to the bit that I actually asked you and I think that was me and the person calibrating ourselves coming to a shared understanding that I was looking for from them and from their perspective understanding what I already knew and could be taken for granted so I was really intrigued by how the app grew on me and I found myself generating way more questions than I usually do and instead of shelving them, I started asking them and I felt like I struck up a rapport with this person and I started sending through observations and like like smiley faces and I felt like I was visiting with a friend and having discussions in the galleries rather than having a solitary experience and this is like after two weeks of just mega museum marathons I hadn't had a day off at that point I'd visited at least one if not up to four museums a day and it was getting to the point where you really had to work hard to arrest my attention not everything is perfect the Brooklyn Museum has these funny elevator lobby spaces where they put sculptural works and they feel like liminal spaces, they don't feel like art displays and a bad director I kind of thought maybe you should be able to touch the things that were in these spaces and so I sent that question through can I touch the sculpture but by the time I got my response which was somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes later I was hundreds of metres further on in the museum and I'll leave it up to you whether I did or didn't Shelly Bernstein at the Museum she acknowledges that one of the areas they need to work on are the question prompts which are scattered through the gallery to encourage uptake and use of the app I found myself asking quite detailed questions a recent blog post from the museum talks about a three hour long exchange with one particular visitor the questions that they've put out at the moment are dumbed down compared to the object labels that they sit next to the MA faves there is a disproportionate amount of visual grab with these bits of signage but the tone is the opposite of the experience in that they feel kind of patronising or try hard and they undersell the really deep engagement that the app can deliver we'll get to that in a second and another distinctive factor that I didn't notice until I heard Shelly at a conference about a week after I'd been there it disappears when you leave the museum you cannot track back over the conversations that you've had they are keeping all this information they're using it to answer future questions to inform the way that they lay out the museum, what they put on display, how they write labels, all that kind of stuff you cannot revisit your conversation and I was fine with that because it felt true to the real life experience of having a conversation in an art gallery which goes away when it's finished other people I've talked to have differing opinions on that from either it's my data and I should always be able to control it through to I really wanted to see what my kids were talking about so I think that's an interesting decision what I love about Shelly what I love about all of these people is that they have strong opinions and they're making strongly opinionated experiences and I think that's really admirable so who's is the best it's not actually a question at a fundamental level there's no point comparing what they're doing because they're all being designed in response to a really different question how can we widen others at a profile how can we communicate design in its fullest sense, how can we help people think curiously about art they're not setting out to do the same thing and so comparing contrast is not actually that useful but I do have some broad observations the first of which is global to local and this pertains especially to art museums I don't think applicable in other parts of the sector five or ten years ago we were talking about reaching the whole world through the web and this idea that our collections going online could change the world today I see art museums moving their focus firmly away from there and strongly into the physical visitor this is a quote from Shelly from her announcement last year where they talked about where they were shutting down a whole bunch of their social media social media platforms that they were appearing on they shut down the posse and they shut down two tagging games in order to focus their endeavours firmly upon the ask app and this decision for them was informed by the fact that they observed that people who live within five miles of the gallery are both that's their visitor base and they are the people who are actually by and large most involved in their digital outreach as well so the people who visit the museum are the ones who are the most heavily using their digital tools and last week at museums in the web Asia there was quite a lot of discomfort in the room at the idea of making a distinction between the online and the in gallery visitor in terms of the value of that person or their behaviour or their needs I actually have a lot of sympathy for this position 80% of my funding comes from the council which means from the 45,000 rate-paying households in Lower Heart effectively each of those households is paying an annual membership to visit my museum and my first duty has to be towards creating value for them, for that and for donation but I do often talk about first degree and second degree effects for rate-payers so there's the experience and benefits that they can access from using the museum themselves but there are also the benefits that accrue to rate-payers when their city is the home of a respected and well-known cultural institution which takes me to my second observation, digital as unique selling point. Traditionally a museum's brand is being built on buildings, collections and kind of the cumulative effect of your exhibition program and something that really struck me while I was away perhaps because I was looking for it rather than because it's new is that digital is definitely the newest way of branding an institution and unlike buildings and exhibitions and collections, a new digital brand can be formed pretty rapidly so DMA's digital brand is about a commitment to inclusion and that's what DMA is saying, that design is an integral part of being human and that each of us has a designer inside of us and the Brooklyn Museum is saying that people are intelligent and curious about art and they warrant personal responses to their curiosity and these projects are being extremely heavily communicated out through to members, to funders, to stakeholders to residents and the general public and there is a lot of newspaper attention in the states on these projects at the moment and I think there is a very distinct danger in your digital brand being or becoming disassociated from your physical experience and my clearest experience of that on this trip was at the Walker Art Centre many of you would have seen Nate Solis at NDF a few years ago talking about the Walker's new at the time kind of website which was built on this kind of philosophy of incredible generosity and outwardness, they were using their social capital as a museum site outwards and direct people's attention to other things I am going to wrap up real quick, I promise I'm so close and I found what they were doing really inspirational and I have tried to use that in the way that the DALS behaves online and at the same time that they were doing this web redevelopment they were running a program called Openfield and some of you may have heard of the infamous internet cat video festival that they ran in this space 10,000 people who turn up to watch YouTube clips of cats so I rock up to the Walker and I have all of these expectations and what I'm met with is a building site so the field is being torn up and it's being replaced with a sculpture garden and a new entrance to the museum and there's none of that generosity and freshness that I felt when I was interacting with them online and it's a beautiful gallery, it is a beautiful building, they have astounding collections, they had the most beautiful light that I saw in America but they weren't who I had flirted with for all these years online they did not look like their avatar at all and it made me really sad but so I think what we love about the web is that it changes so fast and there's all this emphasis on experimentation and we on the website I count myself in here when I'm here I'm a web person, we joke all the time about museum time and how one year in a museum is like seven years of normal life I think we need to think about how we make enduring digital change where the values of our work are sustained even if the products that we're putting out into the market change over time and last one digital is merging with visitor services sometimes this is happening in a really concrete way Suze Kins who was the digital content coordinator at the Baltimore Museum of Art has just been put in charge of their front of house team so their web editor effectively is now running their visitors services stuff I met six people from the DMA who are in Rob Stein's team and four or five of them told me the same story that when Max got there three years ago gallery attendants were there only to protect the art, they weren't allowed to make eye contact, they weren't allowed to talk to visitors and if a visitor had the question that they would be conducted down to the front desk where someone who was qualified could answer that question for them Nick Paul, alumni 2010 I think, he tweeted this while I was travelling and it really resonated with what I was seeing the DMA and so many other US museums are starting on a massive back foot when they're trying to create a more inclusive and welcoming visitor experience and there's no way that an app can fix that by itself and by the time I got to the end of my trip my conclusion was that most you know frankly most museums should be ditching these visitor focused apps and they should be investing in more training, more empowerment higher pay and more autonomy for their visitor services staff but sadly it is a damn sight easier to get funding to create a new digital product than it is to pay your staff more. I should stop now I've got one more point I'm going to do it while you're coming out, there was a pause the other thing that I observed was please, please let me look honestly two paragraphs, do you mind? Okay I so much apologies to the other speakers but the other thing that I observe was the energy that's going into study and visitor behaviour and particularly that of members that when you sign up for these membership programs you are being tracked and your data is being used it is being used to sell things to you. In the states the word leveraging is uttered in conjunction with the word engagement so much more frequently than it is down here but in an environment of decreasing public funding and not increasing business support this move is coming to us too we will be digitally tracking our visitors and the front of us is going to be whether our use of this data tilts in favour of creating value for our visitors or creating value for ourselves thank you


It's actually one of the most effective forms of strength training to boost your metabolism, help you burn body fat, and yes, sculpt the body. Powerlifting should not be avoided. It's a phenomenal way to train. I love this. Yeah. Yeah, I really do like this advice, and it's something that I didn't start giving to my female clients until later on in my career and shifting them in that direction. I think partially because I never really identified as a powerlifter, and so it wasn't like a sport that I was really into, but the part, and we talk about this on the show all the time, that I think is so valuable. And I don't think this is just to women. I think men and women get a lot of value for this, is just to focus on getting stronger. Yeah. We're marketed to so much, both men and women, women especially, that this look, you know, it's all about this look. It's all about this look. And when that drives your behaviors around nutrition and exercise, for most people, it drives them in the wrong direction. That's right. Yeah. And so I love sitting any of my clients in this direction of like, listen, we are just going to focus on getting strong because that in itself is difficult. It's difficult enough to program correctly, get adequate rest, feed the body nutritionally so it has the tools and the building blocks to go build muscle and build strength. And yet you're not focusing on the scale and getting all worried about what the mirror shows. It's like, my goal is to get strong. I love that. I love that it's more popular now. I know back when I was training clients, it was less of a thing. And it was always my favorite time to introduce the lower rep count and do like three to five reps and really show them. Like if you're focused on just getting strong and being able to like add a bit more load, it's a completely different mindset. But also too, it's just like, it was so empowering. And I got the same response from basically every like female client I had was just like what it did for them. This was my go-to for female clients towards the back of my career. And it was so effective. And a lot of it has to do with just how women are marketed to in the health and fitness space. It's all about losing weight, getting lean, maybe sculpting. Nobody talks about the benefits of strength or what that translates into. So women typically, if you ask them, why do you work out those, you know, they'll say, you know, I want to look better on be more fit. You know, maybe I want to get stronger, but they're not really chasing strength. When you chase strength, then they start to get all those other things that they had wanted. And the reason why strength is such a great pursuit is because it's hard to do a lot of things wrong and get stronger. So in other words, if you're not eating properly, you're probably not going to get stronger. If your sleep isn't that great, you're probably not going to get stronger.  If your training program is off, you're not going to get stronger. It's a wonderful pursuit to chase because if you're consistently getting stronger, you're doing a lot of things right. Now you don't have to necessarily be perfect, but you can lose weight and do a lot of things wrong. And of course the weight that you lose on the scale is, you know, half muscle, half body fat, or sometimes mostly muscle. You can look in the mirror, which is a subjective thing. See yourself getting smaller and be happy because the scale is going down. You can ignore energy. You can ignore health because clothes are fitting looser. But if you're getting, if you're not getting stronger, then that's it. Bottom line, you have to fix something. And if you are getting stronger, you're probably doing everything right. And the other side of it was it took my female clients away from the subjective aspect of looking at themselves in the mirror, judging how they look. Like we're just going to get stronger for three months. We're not going to focus on anything else. And that was very freeing for them because they stopped. And then what was cool about it was within the three month period, they got what they wanted. They're like, oh my God, I look amazing. And part for me that I think really changed the way I started, then became like a thing that I like, oh, I didn't care what your goal was. I was recommending we go this direction. And that was also when I started to adopt this idea of like, hey, even though you want to lose 30 or 40 pounds, I'm not going to restrict. I'm going to add to your diet first. All that was all part of like the same transition for me. And so helping, you know, helping my female clients focus on that, even though they came to me and said, oh Adam, I want a smaller waist and I want to bud. I want all these things, even though that was what they came to me originally for getting them convinced to follow this. Let's get stronger protocol and do these big lifts and focus on kind of a powerlifting type of routine. They ended up getting the results that they ultimately wanted and they got it by eating more foods than they thought they ever were going. It was like such a game changer to get people to connect these dots and very empowering too.  Yeah, you know, a good kind of way to understand this is even if I had a female client that said she wanted to build some muscle and usually it was in the butt, right?  If you followed that up with, well, how strong do you want to get?  The right answer is I want to get strong as possible because the strength is what translates to the muscle. As you get stronger, you will build more muscle. It's just a fact. There's no better predictor of muscle growth than strength, nothing. Now, of course, eventually that starts to slow down, but we're talking five years down the line. And that's by that point, you're pretty advanced. You've been very consistent for a long time. Otherwise, like if you want to build muscle, just chase strength. If you chase gaining muscle, then you're going to be playing this weird game of trying to figure out if I'm gaining muscle or is it, you know, water weight or what's going on. It was just, and again, it was just, it was objective. You either added five pounds to the bar or you didn't. This is why when I, back in the day, when I first started writing kind of the blueprints of the first maps program, I borrowed a lot from the strength training, competitive strength training side of resistance training because they had the best workouts. Bodybuilding workouts, fat loss workouts, they were all, there wasn't really any science involved in their programming. Powerlifting, Olympic lifting, anything where you had to actually objective, objectively perform. The coaches designed the best workouts because you hit the stage, you either lift the weight or you don't. It either worked or it didn't work. And so they have the best programming as well. Well, you're highlighting one of the things that got me so excited about talking to you before we ever really met in person about Maps Anabolic when you sent it over to me. At that time in my career, I had figured this out for my female clients and it was something that I was already implementing in their programming. And when I looked at Maps Anabolic, the thing that Maps Anabolic has in common with powerlifting in general, and I think this is the number one factor of why this is so beneficial for women to follow a powerlifting routine is it focuses on the three big lifts. And we had just came out of a decade or two of most people, both men and women, neglecting those lifts and definitely women. I did not have women squatting and deadlifting, overhead pressing, bench pressing, heavy weight. That was not common. It still isn't common in the gym today. And so I remember when I saw you sent over and that's the cornerstone of Maps Anabolic is centered around those incredible lifts because we know it builds the most muscle. It does. Yeah, that's one of the, that's the number one reason why powerlifting is a great way to train is the three exercises or the three movements that are done in powerlifting competitions are three of the best strength training exercises you could possibly do. Today's program giveaway is Maps Powerlift. If you want to win it, here's what you got to do. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Now everybody else in today's episode, we talk about why women should powerlift. So we've put Maps Powerlift on sale. It's half off. If you're interested, click on the link at the top of the description below. Or you can go to mapspowerlift.com and use the code womenpower for the 50% off discount. All right, here comes the show. The bench press, the deadlift and the squat. All three of them hit major muscle mass in the entire body. All three of them, if you get stronger, you don't just develop one muscle or two muscles. You develop entire swaths of the body. And in order to get stronger at those three exercises, because you might think if you're not experienced or you're not from a powerlifting thing, well, that's all I do is those three exercises. No, no. Competition is trying to lift in those three exercises the most weight. But to train for those three, there are other exercises that support those lifts. So you do end up doing things like pull-ups or pull-downs, overhead presses. You do end up doing exercises like, you know, stiff-legged deadlifts and leg curls and stuff like that because they support those three lifts. But the goal is they pick those three, what are called gross motor movements in competition. And so if you're, for example, if somebody added 15% more weight to, let's say, their laterals or their barbell curls, okay, or their tricep pushdown, they'll see some muscle development. Not a ton. You add 15% more weight to a barbell squat, a deadlift or a bench press. You're going to see a lot more results because it's such a big movement. So just the three best exercises, we like to talk about the top five. The top five would also include, let's say, an overhead press and maybe something that includes some kind of rotation or row. But these are the top three right here. They're all multi-joint lifts. And the greatest gain is like how much you can tap into muscle recruitment and to increase the amount of force output. And so you're actually able to recruit more muscle fibers throughout your entire body. With these lifts in comparison to a lot of single joint exercises. So it's literally the difference between just one musical instrument versus the entire symphony. And I just look at it that way because we keep talking about it as the loudest signal. And it's literally the loudest output you can produce in terms of the exercise spectrum. And so this is why we always tend to program these specific lifts and different variations in all of our programming. Yeah. So along those lines, if a muscle is made up of muscle fibers and one of the things that will dictate, I guess, how well the muscle gets developed is, are you able to recruit all of the muscle fibers in that muscle? And the heavier the weight is, the more intense it is, the more likely you are to recruit more muscle fibers. Now those muscle fibers are controlled and communicated to you by the central nervous system. The central nervous system ultimately decides how many muscle fibers are going to be activated. Okay. So here's the kicker. An individual muscle will activate more muscle fibers when other muscles are also activated. This is how the body works. So if you were to squeeze something as hard as you could with your right hand, but keep the rest of your body relaxed, you would generate less force than if you squeezed with your whole body while squeezing your hand. Even though your hand is being measured, you would see a noticeable increase in the amount of power output because the central nervous system fires harder when the whole body is turned on. So what does this have to do with those exercises? Those exercises activate the entire body. So yes, a barbell squat is a leg exercise, but unlike a leg press where the rest of my body is kind of chilling and I'm just moving my legs or especially like a leg extension, I have to hold and support the bar on my back.  My feet and ankle have to be activated. And when I'm pushing heavy weight, all my muscles have to turn on even though the prime movers are my lower body. So what does that mean? It's going to develop my legs more than if I didn't turn on all those other muscles. This is even more important for beginners and intermediate lifters. Now when you're super advanced, you start to develop the ability to activate lots of muscle fibers without having to turn everything else on. This is why advanced lifters can do isolation exercises and get pretty good results. But if you've been working out for less than a couple years, you're not going to activate all those muscle fibers unless you turn on the other muscles. And this is why gross motor movements are so effective. That's why these three exercises in powerlifting are so effective. Well, it's crazy. The benefit is it increases that capacity now for your other exercises, your single joint exercises. So it's like you squeeze more out of those once you learn, you teach the body how to do that with the overall multi-joint exercises. You go back to your regular kind of lifting and realize how much stronger you can get at that. Totally. I also like training for powerlifting. We said this earlier because the goal is objective. One of the biggest challenges with fitness, and this is what I communicate to personal trainers all the time, is that the client is typically focused on subjective goals. Now, why are subjective goals or let's say landmarks in their training? Why is that so frustrating? It's subjective.  If you've ever looked at a picture of yourself from 10 years ago and you're like, oh my God, it looked amazing. And then you realize, oh my God, I thought it looked terrible back then. It looked so good, right? It's because your subjective view of yourself is highly influenced by your confidence, your state of mind, whether or not you're on social media all the time, who you're comparing yourself to, the partner you're with, whatever. It's so subjective that your subjective opinion can change even though your objective body doesn't change at all. That makes fitness something that is super ineffective. This is why people will over-train, over-diet, hurt themselves, train in ineffective ways, ignore the fact that they feel like garbage. We talk to people all the time on the show, and they're ignoring all these signs that they're doing too much and needing too little. It's because they're just focused on subjective goals, which again are in your mind, right? Strength is objective. Did you get stronger than you're doing the right thing? Oh, you didn't get stronger? We're doing something wrong. It's black or white. It doesn't matter what you think you see in the mirror, whatever. You can't imagine the way to be heavier. It's either heavier or not. And so it tends to point you in the right direction. And I love that about powerlifting because when I would get clients, I could put them on the subjective path and not have to have all these conversations around their subjective opinion of themselves, which was very challenging to do. Dude, subjective goals are extremely difficult for a super advanced knowledgeable person to gauge. I share this all the time about my journey of competing and how difficult it was to be able to make sure like, wait a second, I swear I look like I'm putting weight on or I'm not losing, it's not moving. And I'm like measuring, tracking, weighing, everything. So just to map, because I'm looking at the mirror. I'm looking at the mirror or I'm looking at the scale, which both those things are subjective. The scale can stay the same, go up, go down, and it could mean the opposite of what you think it is. And that's somebody who I would consider myself an advanced lifter who's very knowledgeable around the subject. You had to go back to your numbers. I mean, I remember you talking to me about this where you look in the mirror, you're like, I don't, I look different, but then you go back to what I ate, what I drank, and you were so meticulous that you could override your subjective opinions. You're like, no, no, no, these are numbers. I must be holding water or less water or whatever. Yeah, and even though I saw that, I'd go like, what the conversation would go like this would be like, okay, I need to adjust though. I'm looking, this is not looking right, but everything I'm doing, I know I've written it down and I've tracked it, this is right. Okay, let me give it three to four days and let's see what happens. Yeah. And so I would be patient, stay the course, and then in three to four days, I'd see my, the mirror change or the scale would change and there would be enough to be like, okay, I'm all right, stay on the course.  So having a client that you have focused on something that is as clear as it can get, just telling them, okay, did we get stronger or not as your North Star is the simplest way to keep them and you brought it up as we opened up and started this.  Like if you consistently miss those marks, you're not going to get stronger. You're going to feel it see in the gym. So constantly trying to tweak all those things in order to get stronger really puts you in the right path of getting to whatever your goal is. Even if you have a subjective goal, like I want to look cute in this bikini, like still focusing on getting strong is the better path to get you there long-term because ultimately we know if you get stronger, you build muscle. If you build muscle, you speed up the metabolism. If you speed up the metabolism, it makes it that much easier to slim down and lose your body fat. You mentioned nutrition. One of the biggest challenges with women, for me, when I used to train women, was getting them to eat enough to support and fuel the type of things that we were working for in the gym.  But what would happen is they would go too low. It would make it very hard for us to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish. And we didn't get the metabolism boosting. We didn't get the muscle building. We didn't get the sculpting. And so it's kind of this kind of battle. Well, training for strength encourages eating in a surplus. It encourages eating enough protein. In fact, it's so effective at doing this. I learned this from a therapist. I used to train this couple, and I trained them for a while. Then they brought me their daughter who was recovering anorexic. And before I trained her, I remember I called the parents and I said, okay, I'll train her, but I'd like to talk to the therapist first because I want to know what I can and can't talk about. And I want to make sure I help your daughter and put her in the wrong direction. The therapist told me, don't talk about body weight.  Don't talk about any of that stuff. Just focus on performance.  Of course. If we just focus on getting stronger, not only is it not triggering for her in terms of restricting or eating, it's going to encourage her to eat more because if she's not getting stronger and if she wants to get stronger, which eventually I convinced her to want to get stronger, she knew she had to eat more. And it got her to eat the right amount of protein and appropriately. This is one of my favorite reasons. It's kind of liberating. Very liberating. It's one of my favorite reasons why this type of training is so effective because especially when I'm trying to get someone to build muscle so we could get the metabolism boost and all that stuff, if somebody's afraid of gaining weight and they're constantly watching the scale, it's such a battle back and forth. This was such a hard one. I mean, because that mentality of coming in and always having to be a certain amount of calories per day, a lot of my clients knew, if I eat a little bit more than this, my body's going to change and I'm going to have this and that happen to me and to be able to go through and really trust the process that I'm lifting different, my mentality's different, my body's requiring more nutrients and to see them go through that process and see it actually change them for the better and how liberating that was for them, it was fantastic because now we're not worried about the scale on a day-to-day basis. We're just focused on one objective and that's just to get strong and then all the benefits you receive and it reveals itself through that process. This is why I don't like the law thermodynamics type of conversation that so many fitness professionals have about, oh, you just got to eat less and move more because one of the things that I experienced in my career was starting to break down these diets and look at, because the first thing I'd have to do is show me where you're at and these people were struggling, not only these people were struggling with weight loss but they were malnutrition. They weren't getting enough of these nutrients. We were not getting enough fiber. We weren't getting enough protein. We weren't getting enough healthy fats. We're missing on all these things that your body wants and needs. For me, that was the first kind of light bulb that went off. Here I'm switching my clients over to getting stronger. Oh, look, they're missing all these macro and micronutrients. Let's start thinking of ways to add to the diet. Let's add to the diet and then the way we measure if we're on the right track is performance in the gym. Let's not worry about the scales, ups and downs about that. Let's speak to health and being stronger and sleeping better and more energy and so the conversation started to shift in that direction and then as I would add things in the diet, that would be the feedback I wanted from my clients to see are we heading down the right path and ultimately what was so great about this was if you did this correctly, they're slowly building muscle and it's getting more and more difficult for them to eat more food and naturally they would start to lean out. So it's amazing how effective this is for coaches and trainers to focus on this aspect versus what you think you're supposed to do, which is cut calories, cut, cut, cut. It just naturally makes you want to limit it. Yeah, this person's 40, 50 pounds away. I understand if you're a new coach right now listening to this, it has to be like, what? You need to tell me you get someone who wants to lose 40, 50 pounds and you're telling me I should put them on a powerlifting routine and add things to their diet. That sounds so counterintuitive but it's so the right strategy for long term success for this client. It is, you're building the engine so they could, look by the way, there's obviously more to this than just eating in a surplus.  We're aiming for protein. I'm aiming for whole natural foods and I'm telling them to eat more. I'm adding to the diet. Now what happens when this person who normally eats fast food at this time of day, I tell them to eat.  I want you to cup of rice, whatever. They're not going to eat both. They tend to eat what I tell them to eat. It's very satiating. It's complicated than just that encourages eating in a surplus but it definitely discourages eating too little or not getting enough nutrients. If you're not eating enough you're not going to get stronger and if this is you and you're scared and if you're constantly saying I know they say to build muscle but I'm really scared don't weigh yourself, just try and get stronger. It'll push you in that direction. It's also really important for coaches and trainers psychological hurdle you help your client get over. Totally. They have Yoyo dieted and Extreme dieted their whole life and you kind of flipping it on its head saying we're going to add things into this diet. I'm not going to focus on cutting from you and restricting from you. I'm going to focus on putting you in a diet. It really helps them with that mental hurdle because I don't know about you guys but many of my clients that were suffering and they had this super slow metabolism is because they were scared to death to ever eat because every time they did it felt to them like they just piled it all on so over time they'd go on these benches and then they'd see it go on and then they'd go with these hardcore restricts for long periods of time and so then you have to and if they're going to have long term success you've got to help them break through that mentally and one of the best ways is right out the gates teaching them we're going to get strong we're going to add things to the diet and that's a huge, huge part of their long term success. Right, now the next point this is just one of the side effects of getting stronger is it speeds up your metabolism. You know burning calories manually is hard it's first off it's obvious work like if I want to burn more calories by moving well I got to move a lot well that could be hard to do it could be inconvenient I got to schedule time to do that and moving more my body eventually learns how to adapt and burn less calories in other ways either by paring muscle down reducing activity in other ways so that my calorie burn this has been proven in study after study trying to burn calories manually for fat loss there's nothing wrong with moving more moving more is good for you but doing it to try to lose weight it's a losing strategy every study Donna has been shows this I've experienced this with clients myself a much more effective strategy is to get your metabolism to burn more calories on its own how do you do that? Well you build muscle that's it what you're doing is you're literally losing a lot of calories the beauty of this by the way for somebody who's listening right now who's like oh god I got to put size on my body I'm trying to get smaller muscle is very dense if you lost 10 pounds of fat but gained 10 pounds of muscle you'd be smaller about a quarter of the size you would lose almost a quarter so it's so dense that gaining 5 pounds of muscle you're not going to look bigger you'll feel tighter with your metabolism 5 pounds of muscle on your body done the right way and I mean real muscle not just water glycogen like actual contractile tissue right gaining 5 pounds of actual real lean body mass the right way I mean you're going to boost in my experience I would have someone's metabolism boost by 500, 600, 800 calories depending on the person that's like an hour of cardio every day just sitting there thinking about what flexibility a meal you could eat or you just get leaner eating what you're currently eating it's like investing money I can put my money somewhere where it makes money for me and I just sit at home while I make money or I can go try and work more hours you can go ahead and try and work more hours by the way your body learns how to tax you more when you do that just like you would with taxes but with this it's tax free think of it that way and it builds for you speeding up the metabolism is the most effective strategy for fat loss this is why when you hear me say fat loss this is why it's the number one reason I'm so glad you said that because somebody's going to clip that and they're going to do a counter argument to what you just said so I want to arm the trainers and clients out there with this discussion because it's one of my pet peeves is the research around how many calories more your body burns for every pound of muscle you have is there's massive debate around that I've seen it as low as like 5 or 10 calories a day to as high as like 60 calories a day and arguing over the science of what we have on what exactly is that is not the whole story the metabolism is far more complex than you be able to measure just the metabolic rate of one pound of tissue so don't allow some dork who just got out of school who wants to take that clip and argue it and say like that's not true even if you had a 5 pounds of muscle it would only equate to about 75 calories and 75 calories is insignificant because one we still don't know everything about the metabolism we're still trying to figure it out two there's also huge behavioral changes that happens to somebody who adds 5 or 10 pounds of muscle to their body yeah they don't measure any of that they're right I guarantee anybody listening right now nothing else changes in your life but you add 5 to 10 more pounds watch how much more you move you know and watch how much more effective you are when you move inside the gym and how much stronger you are and there's this effect better decisions you make nutrition there's a rippling effect of positive benefits that happen to you metabolically physically physiologically from adding 5 to 10 pounds of muscle on you that is cannot be measured in a lab and compared to fat burns this muscle burns this and unfortunately our community in space will take a clip that I guarantee someone's gonna clip that cell you know what and they'll try and make this argument that you're full shit you don't know what you're talking about trainers and coaches that do reverse dieting with competitors or work with people they know we know this by the way there's a range of calories you could burn within the same with the same lean body mass so your body can become more thrifty or less thrifty whether you gain or lose a single pound or not doesn't matter your body can decide to burn more calories less calories and there's it's a very complex system but if you're training to build muscle you're in the process of building muscle you're feeding your body to do so all those things point towards becoming less thrifty with calories means you have a fashion metabolism I've had people's metabolism boost even more the story I share about Melissa will find her on Instagram and ask her if this is a true story or not it's the last person that I train if you based it off of what the research says on pounds of muscle it would be impossible for me to have increased her calories to what it did but not only did we do so we did so and then want to show by doing that and when I got her she was at like 1900 calories or less we worked her all the way up to like 27 2800 calories little tiny little thing and we did that in a relatively short period of time she most certainly did not put on 50 pounds of muscle in that period of time so what did all that extra calorie burning go from and it wasn't me increasing your activity like crazy because before prep I had her doing zero cardio so go explain that to me it's like we don't we haven't quite fully wrapped our brains around exactly all the different mechanisms that it's affecting and how it works I can tell you from firsthand though I've done this hundreds of times with clients it's extremely effective and I have seen metabolisms roaring and even myself because I've heard me share the journey on here that there's been times on this podcast in the last eight years when at 5500 calories I would lose weight yeah 5500 calories right now pile on like crazy I can't even eat over 3000 right now because I'm a total different person right now so that's how much you can radically shift the metabolism so don't let some dork tell you that's not okay calm dorks it also look powerlifting training or training for strength also discourages over training one of the the the biggest hurdles for anybody starting a fitness program especially women because they tend to want weight loss more so than men even is that they over train they think if some exercise is good more is better that's not true at all the right dose will give you the best results more than that will give you worse results less than that will give you rest less results so how does powerlifting discourage over training if you over train you're not going to get stronger you'll get weaker if you're training hard and you're not getting stronger and then you add more training and then you start to get weaker oh I must be over training I got it back off if you're training for strength this is one of the times look if you're training for the mirror if you're just doing subjective right it'll be very hard for me to get you to back off when you're training and even realize you'll look at the mirror like I think I look better I'm not sure but I am training less but if I have you back off your training and you go up 15 pounds on your deadlift it's right there oh you were over training look you got stronger from training less because you were over training before and just to put it more clearly training for strength encourages proper workout programming you can't train improperly you can't have a crappy workout program and consistently get stronger you can't fool the body when it comes to strength for too long maybe initially when you first get started for the first few months you'll get stronger doing almost anything but then you'll stop and you'll not get stronger unless you have a well written well planned workout and powerlifting encourages it because again it's objective the reason why this is such a strong point is because one I think this is extremely common across the board I think a lot of people especially fitness enthusiasts think a lot of women over train in relation to the calories they consume because the most common move is to cut calories and increase activity and when they don't see the body moving or changing they just keep increasing yeah they just keep increasing the activity and reducing the calories and have no idea they're getting further and further in that direction of over training and to your point about getting stronger it's it's so objective that even if you got a little bit of newbie gains training and under eating eventually that kid catches up really quick and you have to solve that in order to see yourself get strong well and one of the other things I love about the style of training is it just highlights the importance of rest and how a lot of these other programs that most women that I would train would basically they were doing cardio with weights in every single session every single workout they've ever done and that's just because of what's going on there in the marketplace it's this busy do more more more in order to keep leaning out and get to your desired outcome where this just shows you how you can increase strength and you take longer rest periods in between completely different mindset shift and then hopefully that then translates going back in the importance of rest in between sets right now you guys mentioned this earlier but I love talking about the empowering feeling that getting stronger produces for women this was one of my favorite comments that I would get from female clients is they would come in and they would say something like you know I had one woman that I trained she was this really petite executive and she would travel a lot and I remember she came in this was after maybe four or five months of training she's like oh my god the craziest thing happened I'm like what she's like I didn't need to ask she was real small she's like five foot I didn't need to ask anyone help for the whole time and I kind of chuckle that was a young trainer she said you have no idea Sal she goes I travel all the time for work I always have to ask some guy or flight attendant to help me she's like it's almost like I'm dependent she's like I did it myself and it's because I'm so much stronger and I thought about that like what would that feel like right I've had other female clients say things like oh my god I was holding both my kids all day long and I didn't get tired or I was I picked them and I didn't have to wait for my husband I picked it up and did it myself to feel stronger is to feel more able bodied it's empowering it feels incredible when you get when a woman can squat her body weight or more than her body weight for the first time and she looks at that bar and you say you know that was 135 pounds and they're like oh my god I just lifted 130 I remember I had a female client lift her husband's body weight I asked her and her eyes she's like oh my god I squatted my husband like that's insane it's an incredibly empowering feeling to get stronger and a lot of women don't experience this because workouts that especially designed for women don't talk about strength like it's this it's almost like the side effect like oh burn body fat sweat get sore you'll get a little stronger too it's not the primary effect training for powerlifting it's the primary effect and let me tell you it feels amazing yeah I think it's important that the women trainers learn to highlight this and point this out more I know you're going to get a lot of clients that come in and tell you that they need to lose weight they want to do that but shifting helping them shift their mindset in this because it's nice you have a client who's got to lose 30 40 50 pounds and you got a journey ahead of you and one of the things that you can hang on to or celebrate with them are these strength gain wins along the way and if you teach them and help them understand how impactful and important that is and how much that's a signal that you're doing the things right right you got to let them know that like listen if we are eating with we're supposed to we're taking care of your body stress management wise you're getting good rest we're feeding the body the nutrients it needs to grow and build you're getting stronger and if you're not getting stronger it's because we're missing on those things so even though I know we have this 40 pound journey we got to get to we're hitting some really important ways to do you celebrate those wins and communicate that to them because it's incredibly empowering to let your client know even if they have this big journey ahead of them that they're already starting to compile wins getting stronger just translates to so many things I mean it's this confidence builder it's it bleeds in everything it's it's overcoming any kind of other adversity that you're going to face you know at work or relationships or anything else it's just one of those types of training I don't think people put enough emphasis on it it's all weight loss agreed all right this this this last point I love because one of my favorite things to do with female clients who struggled with eating issues dysfunctional eating body image issues female clients that just had challenges with you know the way I was trying to train people who always had worked out a particular way they need to get sore and sweat a lot otherwise it wasn't effective is that would encourage them to sign up for a local powerlifting me now why would I do that because they had a date that was set they were training for it and help them become objective and single-minded with hitting their goal and then when they got there the powerlifting community is so supportive and fun strength training community that exists now bodybuilding physique bikini very subjective it can definitely be fun and supportive but boy do people really sacrifice themselves and their health going into it because the metrics tend to be very subjective right how you look powerlifting very different they're very very supportive it's very fun and you don't sacrifice I mean of course at the extreme levels health is sacrifice I'm talking about like you know local level type of deal but training into a powerlifting me you're your healthiest the day of the meat you're your strongest the day of the meat and again it's a wonderful community and I've had a few clients do this and get the support and they couldn't believe it like my god people were cheering for me I'm not even competitive I just did it for myself but all these people were like so excited you know for me to lift the weight off the floor it was so awesome I mean community is always important and I think in training right I think just think that whether you find that community within your family and your close friends or you go outside of that and you look for it and your comparison of bodybuilding well what's so accurate about that is that you're right like I don't care what anyone says bodybuilding is not healthy there's a very healthy aspect to strength training or powerlifting right there's a very healthy is there extremes and becomes unhealthy of course there's extremes but generally speaking the sport of powerlifting getting ready for that prepping for that all the way to the day of your competition if you're more healthy you're strong you're well fed you're not depleting your software like that bodybuilding a little bit different in that case but I mean this is also what I think what CrossFit why CrossFit was so big like they nailed this they figured this piece out of this you know building community around the big lifts I mean it's literally that it's literally these boxes all over the country are these little you know hole in the wall garage type gyms that focus on all the major barbell lifts and it's a very vulnerable community and it's why it's so successful I really I really I wish the trend was not a group of female friends getting together and saying let's do a bikini contest together so we could all get in shape for summer I wish it was like hey let's sign up for a powerlifting competition that'd be awesome you know what's funny about that they would look generally speaking they'd get better results more women would get better results working out together for a powerlifting competition a lot of people have developed more body image issues eating disorders or gotten worse through the get on stage and look and have the judges judge you type of sport versus I could go lift a heavy weight I would love to see that trend of women getting together and saying we're all training for this competition coming up in August or whatever just a bunch of muscle it would be it would be super amazing now if we've convinced you look here's a deal I'm glad also we have a program specifically designed for powerlifting training and it literally will take you to the day of competition if you decide to do so it's called maps powerlift and because of this episode it's half off 50% off you can find it at mapspowerlift.com use the coupon code womenpower to get that 50% off


Hey everybody, this is Debbie Daschinger coming to you from Southern California and The question is do you think you're ready to be interviewed on a podcast? That is a fair question, right? We all learned during COVID Hey everybody, this is Debbie Daschinger.  I have to turn this sound down Sorry Okay, tada, there we go. So first of all, I know that God or the angels is shining a light on me It's it's like I'll take it So this is clearly a very important message for you to listen to because the angels are here with us right now I've been doing this 15 years 15 years 15 and a half years actually on radio and also on podcast I am an expert. I've written for international bestselling books and everything I do I coach So not only am I interviewed and do I do interviews on Radio and podcast, but I'm interviewed all the time too. It's totally built my business and it's what I recommend everybody does We all learned during COVID that if you're not online It's very hard if you can't meet people in person and that this is a must-have skill So for those of us who knew how to do this we did pretty well Being online is everything and guess what when you are interviewed in a podcast or radio show You do it from your own home or your office. You only have to get in the car and drive anywhere Maybe some local radio stations that would be different. You'd go in person But in general you do it from your own environment There are so many people out there who have the very wrong approach about how to get booked I see it all the time. They try to contact you. They don't even know you and they DM you on social media Hey, I've got a book or I've got a this or I got a that or I know you should interview me And it is so wrong to do it. Now caveat Of course, there are some shows maybe more new shows who don't mind that or may be Super young hosts who are very cool with the social media DM But there are ways to do this when you've got a bucket list of which shows you want to get on and You really dream of some hosts that you listen to and some shows or you know, it's a right fit Do it properly so you get a yes the first time easy peasy. I Teach the entire system. I am Starting the five-day podcast interview challenge It is so exciting because I did it earlier this year with great success Everybody who signed up has been having great success and being interviewed and I love this because I am here to mentor spiritual messengers folks like yourself coaches authors speakers healers spiritual folks entrepreneurs You came here at this really auspicious time with a message and you came here not to put your light under a bushel But to let it shine right now, right? You came here as part of the puzzle of heaven here on earth So let it shine shine shine or what better way than through interviews think of it this way when you're interviewed on a podcast You can reach let's say as a smallest show and they have 5,000 active engaged listeners or viewers You are going into somebody's well-nurtured show and meeting those people for the first time and because you're having conversation for 20 30 60 minutes or more. They're getting to know you intimately This is where people start getting new clients because they've been interviewed filling up workshops online or in person Getting new folks in their database. It is such an exciting process and you're engaging with influencers You're creating very enriching relationships, which is super important When I taught this earlier this year one of the gals in my class from another country because people joined from all countries and She came aboard never had done anything like this, but I teach the whole system What do you need to have in order to get a yes? Use your time and your energy wisely so you get those yeses then what you once you have a yes What do you do? I teach you exactly what to turn over to the host the producer or the platform So you are so pro then once you get on the show. What do you do? You don't want to get on a show Get nervous, right because people do unless you know exactly how to show up and be phenomenal During the interview so part of it is about knowing exactly what to do during the interview with all your brilliance and your message How do you funnel that properly and how do you use it so you get great results? so we had a gal and She was in my challenge earlier this year She reached out to a show and she started getting booked and she came and reported to our class that she did a YouTube interview with 700 people which is very small but it was 700 people in the audience and she walked away two new clients and Then five people contacted her and said I want to set up a call To talk about what you do what's going on with me and see if we're a fit. That's awesome That's ten percent, right? That's or maybe my math isn't great It was 700 people, but still that's that's that's not ten percent. We get it It's really more like one percent, but still that's phenomenal. So I just want you to picture this if it's you What if you got on a show with five thousand, which is a small number by the way five thousand watchers listeners Well-nurtured audience you never would have met them before five thousand people Who get to hear you get to know you like you love you really appreciate what you're doing out there and That's five thousand people you would have never met otherwise What if you did that twice a month still only five thousand people and you just met ten thousand people You would have never met otherwise Even if you speak on stage Most of us are lucky if we have one to two hundred people max in the audience You can't even come close to these numbers and you don't have to travel You don't have to go anywhere. You just show up. I even teach you the right equipment to have The entire system and then what do you do afterwards, right? How do you repurpose? How do you build a relationship? What do you do with that show? There's so much to this that is a game changer a life changer We had another gal who has an online program That she actually teaches live and she was finding it really really difficult to sell to people And she was part of our five-day podcast interview challenge and She walked away and started using this to teach people what to do Giving away so much content and value during her interview and what happened is people started signing up and she was selling out her workshops These are the things that can happen. We're often surprised and Sometimes we know exactly what we'll get what I've just named But there are surprises people listen to us and say I'd really love you to be on this panel I'd really love you to speak on my stage. I'd really like to collaborate with you I really there are so many treasures out there when we do this work. I Learned this system 15 years ago 15 years ago I was on radio and Being interviewed then I started writing books and suddenly people are coming to me with big shows and Saying we'd like to interview you and I realized I sucked I had no idea what to do because I assumed when you're on radio this mic Interviewing people and having conversation with your audience. I assumed a piece of cake. It's gonna be the same That's all I need do the same.  I promise you it's a completely different system. This whole God angel thing is pretty intense, isn't it? so My dears. Mm-hmm. I would be very happy to help you get this tool in your arsenal So you start out the new year the right way five freaking days. I do this with you I am holding your hand through the process. You can join anywhere in the world We are live 45 minutes every day together and then you go out and You start doing this and you have media stuff together. It's it is exciting I love working with spiritual messengers I have to say you guys are here for so much good and isn't it time you let your brilliant shine You let your message go out there and that it was easy for you Easy for you to attract people to what you do and you don't have to work so hard I am so excited to work with you. Go to Debbie D.net. It's de bbi D.net slash challenge Debbie D.net slash challenge. That's where we're going to be Me and everybody signing up people already signing up and so I'm excited that I'm going to get to know all new people and work with all new folks That's pretty delightful for me. I am still doing radio podcast being interviewed and coaching this Because it is my joy spot. I love turning people like you into rock stars in whatever realm it is that you do We even had somebody worked with bees who came last time and now She's in all sorts of media right now. She's doing great. It's so exciting and that's a great message, right? You don't we all know there's a problem on the planet with bees and we all know that if we keep Extinguishing the bees there's going to be a terrible imbalance on the planet that we may not recover from so here she is. What a great message at an important time Excuse me. I'm also a book writing coach And I can tell you that every single author in my book writing group has taken this Challenge has done this ultimate visibility So if you're ready to learn how to be interviewed on podcasts So you do it all correctly the first time Like right up at bat you do it right you get a yes You know what to hand over when you show up You're amazing when you're on air and then you know what to do with the show afterwards and how to keep going You can do this for a book launch if you've written a book you can do this for a workshop launch You can do this if you're new in business You can do this if you're old in business It doesn't matter if you're switching gears in business or if you just want visibility or you just want to increase your database Whatever it is. This is an amazing tool that's there for you and once you learn how to do it You got this forever more. Amen So debbie d.net Slash challenge make sure no e at the end of my name. It's d e b b i d Dot net slash challenge. I'm so excited to work with you. Truly. I am I know you're going to do great. I love showing up and working with you guys And I love finding out who's coming to the class. It's amazing It's amazing who shows up and how tight everybody gets so Join me. What do you have to lose? You have a lot to gain. I promise you and I deliver I'm excited debbie d.net slash challenge. It is the five day podcast challenge rolling out globally. We meet on zoom five days 45 minutes and then watch you grow wings and


We're Plays Fives! Oh, look! A secret message. I wonder what it is? It's coming together. I see something appearing. We're going to show you how to make a secret message so you can place five too. Watch this! Here's how to send a secret message on blank paper. Here it goes, Amanda. So first, you get a white crayon and we write a secret message on paper. You can't really see it, but you have to know what you're writing. You can also just draw pictures. Tricky to see what you're drawing sometimes. There you go. Once you're done with your message, you use the watercolor on top. The watercolor paint doesn't stick to the crayon, so you can see the crayon message. Look what happened to mine! You can use a dark color because it'll be easier to see. I'm using the color orange. Maybe I should send a map to important clues. Maybe I could send a secret meeting place. And that's how you make a secret spy message. Touch here for more cool videos! Come play with us! And touch here to subscribe! Come on, you can do it!


In order to diversify the region's economy, shaping our Appalachian region approved finances for the Kentucky Appalachian Regional Development Fund. The city of Prestonsburg was awarded $78,000 through the card grant to use as a broadband strategic plan and feasibility study. It's for Eastern Kentucky and some of the Appalachian areas that's been heard the most by the declining coal. It's a technology grant. It's an opportunity for us to do some feasibility studies and some design planning for broadband in the city. Mayor Les Stapleton says having broadband in the city will attract other businesses to move into the area. Becoming a gigabyte city is going to increase our opportunity for businesses to come in. It's going to put us on the front edge of technology. It'll allow more data services, quicker downloads, quicker uploads, quicker processing information. Not only will it attract more businesses, it will also help the businesses already located in the city. If we're able to get broadband in here to the point where we have gigabyte service and we have the bandwidth to be able to handle all these services, it's going to help small businesses. If they can advertise not only locally but also nationwide. And that's where our goal is, try to connect us to the rest of the world and get things moving forward at an affordable rate. The Prestonsburg City Council also proclaimed May 1st through 7th Small Business Week in Prestonsburg. Reporting in Prestonsburg for EKB News, I'm Shelby Steele.