Okay, welcome to the AdaptX podcast where we have conversations with individuals who are building accessible businesses, advocating for inclusion or excelling in adaptive sports.
Our intentions never speak on behalf of those with disabilities, but give them a platform to amplify their voice so we can create a more accessible world.
Today, we are joined by Tommy Trout, an award-winning leader in the inclusive fitness space, notably for his for-purpose enterprise, WeFlex.
WeFlex is an Australian disability service provider connecting people with a disability to mainstream fitness professionals, to whom it also educates on inclusive practices.
Tommy is a qualified personal trainer and educator utilizing 18 years of experience in the sector from corrections, AOD, suicide prevention, disability care, as well as experience of having family with disability.
He's now running an agency, Inclusive AF, which works to increase accessibility and inclusivity of health and fitness services.
Tommy, thanks for joining me today.
Couldn't have said it better myself, love you, bit.
Alright, let's maybe start with what first got you into the space that we'll just coin as inclusive fitness.
What were your first influences and motivations to do so?
Obviously, just the loss for money and fame was the main thing.
Exactly, I'm with you.
So I think, probably using an advantage for my accent.
So I guess the way I keep coming back to where it started for me was I was working in disability support and I was given a client file.
The client file just had three labels.
It was just autistic, psychotic, antisocial.
When I go, go work with them.
And that's all I knew about them.
And so in my early 20s at the time, I'd get out there kind of terrified because those are big words, especially for someone with limited exposure to it.
And I was just preparing for the worst.
And then I met the nicest guy ever.
But I also realized that this guy was completely isolated in his home.
He only ever left his apartment twice a week.
That was once to go to groceries, once to go to the center that I worked out of.
And nobody in his life asked him how he was.
That wasn't paid to ask him that.
You know, no family, no friends.
And little known fact is that a lot of antipsychotic medication leads to massive weight gain really quickly as well.
It's pretty amazing.
And he was putting on a lot of weight that was making him pretty miserable.
And so on whim, I sort of said, look, let's go, how about we just go to the gym?
There's one down the road.
You know where it is.
It's easy to get to.
He agreed. Took a little prompting, but we got there.
And I just watched this guy just love it, just get involved in it and just became part of the family child with everybody else at the gym.
They actually were at a point where they refused to accept his money and I forced him to give it because you have to take ownership over it.
And before I knew it, I had eight people with disabilities, pretty severe disabilities in that gym training together.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I was in my early 20s.
If it wasn't like bench press and bicep curls, I don't think I understood it.
But all the other equipment was.
But, you know, I sort of was just there and just in that moment, I was just looking around at all these guys just working out, enjoying it, part of just a regular gym.
And I was like, OK, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
What was the what was the response that maybe the gym owners had or maybe even the rest of their client base had to this influx of people with disabilities in their space?
You can put this a little bit before social media wasn't then what it is today.
So the owner was a little bit nervous about it, but trust that I'd be there the whole time.
But within one session, he realized that he couldn't almost tell.
Like he was like, oh, no one cares.
And then what happened was over time is that, you know, a lot of the clientele at the gym just love the guys.
And it actually became a struggle because they had to keep breaking up conversations for them to get their workouts done.
You know, and it was just funny.
Like, I remember I was watching this this very little petite female that I was working with talking to this massive bodybuilder.
And I was like, oh, God, what's going to happen?
And I walked over and he's just congratulating her on how good she's doing at the moment.
And he's been keeping an eye on them all and thinks it's great.
And I was like, how good is this?
It's just included.
It's not, you know what I mean?
It's not a special gym.
This is just in the mainstream.
And for them, you know, for a lot of people, you know, people with autism, especially, you know, you can have a very small world where you only have a few places where you feel safe, where you know how to get to it.
You can regulate yourself in it by increasing that that range and adding a new place where they can be at home and feel good.
You're making their world just so much bigger, which is awesome.
And if you can do that and also give them the benefits of regular exercise, it's just a win win for me.
So, yeah, yeah, part of that, like normalizing disability, you mentioned the bodybuilder and the petite female.
It's like shared interest in recreation.
Like that bodybuilder had probably no experience with disability.
He was just like, oh, this is a person that's crushing it.
We have similar interests.
I'm going to have a conversation with them.
So sometimes it's like unless you create the environment, those interactions are never going to happen.
But they always happen around like shared interest.
Yeah, it's just it's just yeah, absolutely.
And what was great is that, you know, I'm in firm believe that there's obviously we know that social health is a real thing.
Being in community is good for your health.
And I believe that you can still get the benefits of that, even if you're not talking directly with people.
But you're just in the same room as them, doing the same activities as them.
You can still get that social benefit.
I mean, you know, I mean, so being able to provide that, I think, is really important, too.
So it's funny, a lot of them come for the exercise, but they stay for the community is what I've learned.
Absolutely. You mentioned even that, like the gym owner offered for that individual to train for free, but you were adamant that they continued to pay.
This is actually something I was writing about this morning.
So it's kind of top of mind. Should programs for people with disabilities be free?
And if not, what is the unintended harm of everything?
Disability and inclusion oriented being free?
It's tough because the title of the media wants to say everything should be free.
But I think, though, for me, it's about ownership and also it's about creating a business case for inclusion in gyms as well.
What my experience has been is that if you're doing something for me for free, but then as a business owner, other competing priorities that do pay money come up.
I'm probably going to be the first thing that you have to drop. Right?
Not because you want to, but because you just have an economic imperative to.
I don't want that for people with disabilities. And I don't want that for the gym.
I want the gym to be able to make money with clients by providing great service to them.
I want people with disabilities to be customers with disabilities.
So that's my new term now is quads. I want them to be treated as customers.
That way they're always right. And that way gyms have an incentive to tailor and adapt to them.
But the point that I gave to the guy at the time when it first happened, I said, mate, you're not a charity case.
You've got it's three. It's two dollars. It's a gold coin in Australia.
You can afford it. Take some ownership. Invest in yourself.
You're not a charity case. And that was sort of the rule.
So that's my view. I think that what I want and but it's also different here in Australia.
So we've got a different system at the moment called the NDS, where there's a bit more consumer power for people with disabilities to access a government scheme that gives them funding to fund other services.
So rather. Yeah, I like that you said that it gives gyms an incentive to adapt as well.
It's like like you mentioned it. It's hard sometimes for maybe businesses to see the perceived value if they're investing a lot in modifications, accessibility without much ROI just from a straight business standpoint.
But we're not expecting gyms to make sacrifices.
So show economically, we're asking for them to see this large consumer base that is relatively untapped, probably not competing with a bunch of other gyms to train people with disabilities.
Like, it's a way to stand out in the marketplace.
So my experience is so we flex itself.
We've got hundreds of clients with disability across Australia operating out of mainstream gyms, as well as parks and homes.
We've never received a complaint from a gym about the effect that having a person with a disability in the gym is having on them.
We've had quite a few people actually say, how do I go more full time in this because I really enjoy it?
But the big issue or the big benefit, and I'm sure you can speak to it as well with AdaptX, is that a lot of the clientele want to train during the day when there's off peak hours for a personal trainer.
You're busy before work, you're busy after work, nine to five, you're a bit more flat, maybe except lunch.
Our experience has been that most clients with disability want to go Tuesday 10am, Wednesday 2pm when it's downtime.
The gyms are a bit more empty.
PTs are typically less booked out.
So all you're doing is supplementing your existing income with more clients.
And the other thing is that you don't have to invest tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to become accessible.
Two percent of people with disability are like, we're in a wheelchair here.
Accessibility is actually not even a scale, you know what I mean?
It's a bit of a galaxy, but a lot of people don't need you to be accessible, they just need you to be inclusive and work it out with them.
I think so.
Yeah, there's a huge opportunity for gym owners to get in it.
Yeah, we say you're not expected to have all the answers regarding accessibility, but you are expected to care enough to kind of find them.
But that often comes through the conversations that you have with prospective clients.
Yeah, and so our experience has been that one of the common misconceptions we had here was,
oh, people with disabilities don't go to the gym because they can't afford it, right?
And there is absolutely socioeconomic realities of having a disability, ability to work, living on government schemes and the rest of it.
But we, WeFlex, did tons of co-design sessions, which is where basically all I did for three years is sit down with people with disabilities in groups,
and one-on-one, and ask them dumb questions about everything.
And the idea of it being too expensive almost never came up.
In fact, what happened is that they don't go to the gym because the gym is not going to be able to meet their needs.
The gym isn't tailored to meet their needs because the person with a disability isn't a customer, right?
So it's a bit of that stalemate.
And so it's about just bringing the people we knew can train straight away in.
The gym gets a taste of it, then they sort of can create a little bit more accessibility,
a little bit more inclusiveness and just build it up over time as they begin to tailor and adapt to new clients.
But the idea that you have to be ready to handle every single possible client that can come through the door day one is a misconception, I think.
And not there either.
Yeah, my friend Eric Kondo calls that like incremental universal design.
Like if you're running a business, you start with lowest hanging, lowest support needs, and then kind of work up.
Okay, you can start to accommodate an above-knee amputee.
What's next?
And you just kind of stack.
So from that lens, when you were making the WeFlex Academy and the resources, what did you start with?
So we started with a co-design session, which was I made every mistake you can make starting a business.
But in this one, I did a co-design session and I was like, this is for just the general principles.
Like just what's the 101 teaching you how to suck X sort of stuff.
And what happened was is we got a bunch of people with disabilities, but we got very different disabilities in the room.
And the issue was that we had some people with a little chance of being neurotypical, some people with learning disabilities, some people with intellectual disabilities.
And it was almost impossible to keep them on the same page the entire time.
So it was a bit of chaos.
But what we wanted to do, though, is just get a sense from them, like what do you actually care about in your personal trainer, especially in the first session?
Like what is the fastest way you're going to sign off on someone as being good?
What are the kind of behaviors or traits or things that you experience that make you go, I'm never talking to this person ever again?
And the big part of it, they just want someone who's just willing to adapt, someone who's good at communication, someone who's patient and just is happy to work with them.
The standards were pretty low, which is, I guess, a good thing.
So we started with disability inclusion principles.
And then I wanted to go into just disabilities.
I wanted to start in autism because I've got family, my brother and my dad, both on the spectrum.
And I was talking to a clinician who goes, you're going about it wrong.
You shouldn't look at it as disabilities because that doesn't tell you an awful lot.
Instead, look at support needs.
So we actually then pivoted completely and all our academy was based on support needs instead.
So the example is that I'd say, hey, Brandon, I've got a client, he's autistic, go work with him.
That gives you no information.
And you have other clients on the spectrum, maybe, but that only tells you about them, not about this new client.
Instead, I'd say, hey, Brandon, I've got a client, they've got sensory needs and they've got behavioural needs.
These are what they are.
He's training on those two things.
Now go work with the client.
That puts you in a better position to succeed.
But on top of that, you're now looking at the client not as someone with a disability.
You're not looking at them as a label, as autistic.
You're looking at them as a client with needs, like you would every and any client you would ever have.
Like you would someone who's pregnant, someone with a bad knee, bad back, older, younger, first time.
You're looking at them through needs.
So we broke it up in the needs and that absolutely transformed the way that our PT's were able to engage.
But it also just led to better service because a lot of the times courses on disability are like the stats,
their criteria for diagnostics or whatever.
It doesn't help you when the client's having a massive behaviour of concern throwing weights around the gym.
Or is completely frozen up in a section of the gym.
It doesn't tell you what to do.
And so we wanted our work to be really targeted to what they're actually going to encounter in a workout.
And everything we did was both clinically signed off but also co-designed by people with that experience.
So we have autistic people telling us what to teach in autism in their autistic support needs courses.
We have people who are blind and low vision teaching us about that, deaf, hard of hearing, about that.
That's how we built it out.
That's what I've always appreciated when we first had our initial conversation a couple of years ago.
You kind of turned me on to that perspective in a way that like my course starts by saying understand the diagnosis but train the individual.
And I'm saying what you're saying.
Like the diagnosis doesn't really tell you much.
Down syndrome doesn't tell you much.
It may be universal hypermobility, universal language differences.
But at the end of the day, it exists on a spectrum.
Not only autism exists on a spectrum.
Pretty much any condition does in the same way that any 45 year old male does.
It's like the diagnosis or the criteria doesn't really tell you as much as that initial session does.
So it's like because people will ask for assessments like, oh, what do you do for an assessment with someone with a disability?
I'm like, it's relatively informal.
You got to figure out what they like, what they want, what environment they're comfortable in.
And then you can design it based on that.
You're not measuring range of motion, measuring things in that first session.
You're making sure they come back for the second.
It's all about this.
You can't do anything in one session, right?
So the attitude we had and what we've always taught is that look, assessments can take place.
But for some clients on the spectrum, it could take four workouts to get them in the room.
It could take them five workouts to touch a weight, let alone lift it.
You're working on their schedule.
And the priority should be around building rapport and building trust and building an understanding of your client.
The assessments will come.
Chances are you're not going to get a client with significant disability that's also an elite athlete and really needs to achieve to shave off 0.5 seconds in their 40 time.
They're probably there and they don't know how to do a squat or a push up.
They've never been to a gym before.
You're working with the basics.
So technical skills are really important to a degree, but they need to be coupled with really strong soft skills where you can make sure that the client enjoys it, wants to come back, has great fundamentals and is also being coached on how to behave in a gym or in a fitness setting.
That's not going to make them stand out or be a pariah either.
So a lot of it is around rules like you have to wait your turn.
You have to do this.
That's where a lot of the stuff comes in where you sort of put setting them up to succeed.
You're an ambassador for the fitness industry and make them fall in love with it.
As a PT, I'm pretty poor technically.
I'm a great fun foundations guy, but no athlete's going to ever come to me for help.
But I'm really good at getting people who have zero idea and are maybe scared of the concept to fall in love with it, have really good fundamentals, know how to behave in the gym and then sort of graduate on to maybe more capable PTs.
But that's where most of the clients are coming from.
They're scared.
They're anxious.
They've never been there before.
You don't see many gyms advertising disability.
You don't see people in wheelchairs and marketing campaigns for any fitness brands.
Or if they do, it's either inspiration porn or Paralympics.
That's who's coming through the door.
And so those soft skills are just vital to just get them to fall in love with it and come back.
How would you define inclusion?
I think it's treating everyone the exact same way unless there's a reason not to.
And that's where the debate is, is that is there a reason why you're treating these people this way?
And is it a good reason?
So an example would be is that a lot of the times you see people talk about their clients and then say they've got a disability.
Why do you have to say that?
Like we all have conditions.
You don't say, oh, this is my mate there.
He's got a bad knee.
So why is it that because they've got a disability, you do need to say that is an it's a inconsistently applied rule.
So for me, inclusion is about treating everyone the same unless you have a good reason not to.
And my job is to challenge people and why they think it's a good reason to do certain things.
The only, I guess, maybe counterpoint to that, the example of specifying that it's someone with a disability.
And obviously, when I'm introducing someone at my gym, it's not like here's Owen, he has spastic paraplegia.
But it's like when you're specifying or when you're marketing to the population, you need to be able to demonstrate that you work with disability.
So it's like that line between not overemphasizing disability, but also demonstrating that you are inclusive and welcoming.
And I'd say that's a good reason to do that.
Right.
Yeah.
But it's also not because it's all you're doing is you're advertising to a market, which you should be doing.
Right.
And so that's totally fine.
I actually just wrote an article and it's called I think passion is overrated in this industry.
So a lot of the times people are just like the most important thing is passion.
And I've always said, no, the most important thing is actually just professionalism, quality service, quality care.
That's the foundations of what clients come to expect.
They don't need you necessarily to be super passionate about everything that they're doing.
You just need to provide good service because just because you're passionate doesn't mean you're good at it.
Right.
Or that you have healthy attitudes and beliefs towards it either.
And it's not about you or your passions.
It's about them and their outcomes.
And that requires quality service and professionalism.
Is the passion not necessarily applicable to the consumer, but is passion for inclusion essential to the professional?
I don't know.
Like I think passion is a type of fuel, but not everybody has the same kind of fuel.
Like if there's a business owner who owns a gym and they're trying to make more money and they decide they're going to open up to people with disabilities, they're not passionate about it, but they treat the customer with respect.
They do great work to make sure everything is on the level and done properly.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
And I don't think that.
And I don't think many.
Like again, with all the co-design sessions, passion never came up.
None of them said they have to really be in this for the right reasons and they better be passionate about my squats.
Like, no, they're like, just make sure they do the right thing with me and they treat me well.
Yeah.
Don't know.
And it could come down to semantics on the word passion.
But for me, it's like, I don't know that you have to be quite passionate to provide a professional level of care.
But a lot of people do feel like being passionate is a substitute.
And I don't think so.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Cause I feel like sometimes I see people that are well-intentioned working with disabilities because they care about disability, but it's not the best training.
No.
And I don't always love that.
So that's where like your comment at professionalism and good service is obviously addressing that portion.
But I feel like a curmudgeon all the time.
Cause I'm like, oh, that's not good.
Everyone's applauding it, but that's not really a good squat.
That's not a good push up.
Like that person could do better.
So it's like, I guess, how do you find the balance between holding to a high standard while also appreciating effort?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think that's just your inner coach speaking there Brandon.
Maybe.
Is a gym that only trains people with disabilities inclusive?
No, I think it's about, I think so.
Would you turn someone away if they didn't have a disability?
Not me, but I'm saying my program isn't only for people with disabilities.
But if there's a gym that says we train people with autism and that's all they do, is that technically inclusive?
If they say no to other people, then no, it's not right.
As in it's okay to be specialized for sure.
But the idea of inclusive, so I guess the argument I'd make is that I don't know if creating separate spaces is necessarily the best path towards where we want to get to, which is in that mainstream.
And the more we make it a really, really specific skill set and then also say you need specific places for it, all we're doing is segregating.
And I just don't believe that that's where, I don't believe that's the ideal outcome.
I think we need to make it where it's more normal for these people to be in mainstream fitness centers.
That being said though, like, you know, we both have, there are some people whose disability is so significant that they just require a very, very specific environment, set of equipment and the rest of it.
So, you know, there's a part of me that also feels like maybe that is inclusive because that's the only place they can train.
Yeah, I think the opportunity maybe to exist in whichever environment you feel a sense of belonging in is what makes something inclusive.
So the opportunity to choose maybe.
And I won't pretend that my gym at peak hours is the best environment for someone who has sensory needs because there's music going.
There's a lot of people moving.
So that's not an inclusive environment for someone who has high sensory needs.
But we're going to give them the opportunity to train earlier in the day when it's quiet, if they desire.
Yeah. And again, for me, it's always just treating everyone the same unless you have a good reason not to.
And so if people have very specific needs and that's a good reason not to treat them the same.
Can you explain what the role of NDIS is in Australia?
Whatever. This is the part everyone's listening for, the Australian politics.
I think it's interesting to see how other countries are structured.
The way Australia works policy wise is that we're either operating in 1950 or 2050.
We oscillate wildly between the two.
So this is one of our better moments is the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
So you're not sure what happened is that in 2011, no, about 15 years ago, we ran a review into disability services to be like,
we're spending a lot of money, how's it going?
Are people satisfied with the services?
And it was pretty much just a completely anonymous like, no, this is just horrible.
Like no one's happy.
The way that it worked is I made it pretty similar to the way it works in the States, in most Western countries,
is that government provides funding to not-for-profits to provide this service to these people in these areas and these conditions.
I mean, then that provider then provides those services.
What they found in our review, though, was that the people who lived a block out weren't eligible.
If your kid was a year too old, year too young or diagnostically just separate enough, they didn't qualify.
You didn't get to choose what service you got.
It was take it or leave it, which also put providers in this position or the not-for-profits in a position where if they did a bad job, it's too bad.
Like where else are you going to go?
There's no consumer rights.
Like we can do terrible work and that's just how it is.
So we decided basically to flip it on its head.
We use now an insurance model, very pioneering, both in the world and very much for Australia.
And instead what we do is the government will assess everybody who wants to enter the scheme, so to speak.
We'll decide, OK, so Brendan has this disability that will require this amount of support.
We also work out what your goals are.
So you could say, I want to get a job.
I want to go to school.
I want to be more involved in my community because I'm isolated.
We'll then assign amounts of money to you achieving those goals with the level of support that you have.
And then you could go and you basically use that funding to choose your own supports to engage those peoples.
And what that does is that from a charity model goes to a free market model.
So it's like instead not-for-profits all of a sudden have to compete.
They've got to advertise. They've got to provide good service.
They can get fired. People can take their money where they want to go.
They can pay for what they want.
Big part of it is choice and control, which means that people with disability,
but the funds get to choose what they engage with and the supports have to be reasonable and necessary.
So what that means for us is that a lot of people want to use their money not just to get fit,
but they also want to use it to engage with the community because they're isolated.
And they found that a gym was a really great environment for that because a lot of gyms can have their own unique culture and community, which is great.
They're in the same location. They're open quite a lot.
They're protected from weather, typically on easy public transport lines and people go there.
So that's the Australian model.
Plenty of floors, plenty of stuff, a lot of teething stuff as well.
But that's the model in a nutshell.
Yeah, I think it's comparable and this isn't an area that I'm well versed in,
but I think there's something called agency with choice here in the States where once someone turns 22 and they age out of the school system,
they get to determine how they want to allocate their funding.
So many people just choose to go to a dayhab program,
but others choose to apply their resources or their funding elsewhere.
Maybe they pay for a job coach to get employed somewhere or some people pay for their gym membership with that funding.
So, yeah, I wonder if that becomes more so the standard at some point,
or even whether it's better to single out one or allow choice.
Yeah, it's interesting.
So one of the arguments the government had for it at the time is that it's sort of it's Keynesian in its approach in that it's something that
it all the money goes back into the economy and grows industry.
You know what I mean? It grows innovation, it grows high technology and the rest of it.
So, you know, they reckon that in the NDIS, like every dollar spent, it's like $7 coming out of it, essentially,
because it's providing employment, opportunity, you know, services, IP and the rest of it.
So it's very cool.
But it's also a multi-billion dollar national government scheme addressing a insanely complicated topic.
So it's about as good as a government can ever do that.
How much of Weflex Academy did you develop?
Most of it, pretty much all of it.
Most of it.
And more recently, you've stepped away from Weflex into a different position.
What led you to do so and maybe how have your goals evolved over the last few years that led to that point?
So sort of Weflex. Weflex is very much a passion project for me, which I was really, really excited about.
But as a founder, you know, I built Weflex on the back of a very of my personal story with my brother and my dad.
And, you know, one of my biggest fears was you don't want to be the founder that is being rolled out to every event,
telling the same story year after year after year.
Because after a while, you kind of get in the way a little bit.
You also can sort of it can become at risk as well as becoming a cult of that person and the brand sort of suffering or becoming second.
So for me, you know, we were sort of redoing our leadership, redoing the board.
And I was like, you know what, like, you know, I've given as much of my DNA into this business as possible.
Now's a good time where I can sort of slink out the back and it can manage itself and go on to better things.
And the reason the big, big reason why is because it's a storytelling organization and it has to tell other stories and it needs more stories to tell.
And it just doesn't need me to do that.
So walked away, of course, that is, you know, pretty intense experience, which, you know,
I sort of took about two months off just sort of staring into the abyss, just like, wonder what I'm going to do next.
And I really think of my next thing.
But I realized, though, that supporting the fitness industry and health and wellness industries in particular to become more inclusive and accessible is pretty mammoth undertaking.
And I was like, there's so much work here to do.
I want to keep doing that. And, you know, I spent a few years specializing in it. I may as well continue on that journey.
So at the moment, I'm working with a lot of big bodies and big brands over here,
supporting them just to, again, incrementally increase and improve their accessibility and their inclusion.
Working on accessibility tools, which I'm really passionate about and I've spoken about in the past,
the notion that accessibility is in a binary and it's not even a gradient.
You can be super accessible for one type of disability type and very inaccessible to another.
So instead, I think it's about migrating to a badge system.
You can be sensory, very sensory accessible, very wheelchair inaccessible.
But that's OK as long as you communicate it.
And then people can sort of opt in and opt out of where they can fit in.
As well as continuing on the education as well, I just don't think you can have too much education in this space.
Yeah, absolutely. I think education is one of the biggest barriers, not only for fitness professionals,
but for the general public in terms of understanding, appreciating and including disability further.
Yeah, I guess if you're tackling these bigger projects,
did you think you could stay under the guise of Weflex and address these things or did it have to be separate?
No, to some extent, Weflex is a business and it needed to focus its attention on its main mission,
which is just bringing on as many clients as possible, matching them with as many fitness professionals across Australia as possible
and supporting that dynamic relationship to thrive moving forward.
All these other things for these other passion projects, I guess the shiny things I got distracted by and I really wanted to pursue.
So it's sort of now a bit more of a advocacy, bigger picture space while Weflex really starts to just refine doing what it does best.
And that is meet onboarding clients with disability, matching them with personal trainers that are suited to them,
training that personal trainer to meet their needs, matching them and then coordinating the red-based payments from there.
Yeah, I wonder how many different projects and interests of mine can fit underneath the Adaptex umbrella
and whether some of them need to be separate and my gym's separate.
My gym is a for-profit entity, Unified, and then Adaptex was our educational branch.
But now there's the podcast, then there's the research projects, there's accessibility renovations for fitness facilities.
It's like, I guess, how do you know which one stays with one organization, which one goes elsewhere?
And maybe how do you take off the blinders and realize I'm the one holding the organization back
from accomplishing what it needs to accomplish?
It's hard to let go. It's really difficult, especially when, you know, I'm sure like me,
you were also started on your own screaming into the void, you know, at night.
Yeah, still screaming into the void often.
It's just like, oh, you know, especially when you're in a pioneering space.
And I'd argue that inclusive fitness is, I think it's that nice, the beginning phase.
I think in 10 years time, the conversation is going to be a lot more evolved, a lot more common,
which is great. I think both of us want that, you know, in a nutshell.
But when you're kind of at the front of doing it, you know, it sounds really cool, but it's not,
because there's no one to steal from, no one to copy from.
You're working everything out for yourself and everyone's looking to you to work it out too.
And it's just so you just spend all these nights just like, how the hell am I going to make this work?
Like, no one's done what Weflex did, right?
So I've got to work out everything, just scribbling on whiteboards all night until I work it out.
You make all the mistakes, you know, to get there.
It's really tough because you're so committed, you're so attached to it,
to then the idea that other people can now pick up where you left off.
It doesn't have to be Brendan solving it.
You can hire someone else who's just as capable of solving it as you are.
It's hard to let go and then to step back and to give yourself permission to do other things.
You know, it's like getting out of a marriage to some extent.
That was one of the biggest challenges with my brick and mortar facility was it was becoming my gym.
And that kind of took all of my trainers and automatically put them on a lower tier.
People would come in, work with one of the trainers and be like, oh, could I ask Brendan a question?
It's like, no, they're perfectly capable.
And so we're at a great point now where all of our coaches are well respected and knowledgeable amongst our membership base.
But it's like the hardest thing was I basically just had to stop and it felt it felt like abrupt to a degree.
And I still feel guilty when I'm not out there, when I haven't seen a member for a couple of weeks
because I'm not here at a time that they typically train.
But it was like it was a necessary step towards becoming unified health and performance, not becoming Brendan's gym.
Yeah, absolutely, dude. Like I said, it was funny.
I remember when I was especially when I first started out, I was talking to a mate of mine who had just given birth
and we were both complaining basically about me and the startup staff her with the baby.
And I'm not saying it's the same as having a baby.
But what I'm saying though is that the complaints are very similar because we were both saying the same thing.
I'm always tired. I always feel guilty. I can't take breaks.
And when I do take a break, I feel bad for taking a break.
And then I don't actually get the benefit of the break.
Then I come back just as tired. You know what I mean?
Like I want this to be independent of me, but I can't handle the abandonment of it.
When it does leave me and does its own thing, I want to be there for every second of it.
My mate came out laughing going, you two sound exactly the same at the moment.
I was like my I guess my goals to with the gym have evolved a little bit towards.
Yeah, like I get two boys under two years old and I want to make sure that I don't miss things over the next four or five years.
But at the same time, I love working and I love the diversity of the projects that I'm working on to the point where
I think if you gave me the option to hang out for a few hours or work on something, I would choose the latter.
And I don't know if that's a bad thing or not.
It is what it is.
Because people are I mean, you always hear, oh, you got to relax, you got to do this, you got to do that.
But I always feel better if I'm getting if I'm getting something done.
I'm the same. I don't deal well with relaxation or nothing.
Yeah, but but it's like it's been conditioned to and I'm not promoting like a hustle culture.
I'll never really boast about that stuff.
But I don't think necessarily the desire to work a lot and take on projects like this is inherently a bad thing.
Maybe sometimes people want to feel better about themselves.
So they're like, you shouldn't work so much.
So it's I know it's been it's been an interesting thing to juggle.
It's a deeply personal journey going through it.
You love so much about yourself.
For me, it was always about I wanted the brand to mean more than me.
I wanted the brand to be something that people actually cared about that people bought into.
I was so passionate about the brand being so the reason why I was we flex was because I wanted the way to be
about we're all founders, we're all the people involved.
Like it's all of us. It's a movement, not so much a company.
I wanted to make it cool enough that our clients would want to buy the gear and wear it and wear merch and represent it and actually be proud of it.
For it to be a cool fitness brand, not you know, because sometimes I'm sure you've seen it yourself,
like there's all these super depressing names for businesses with disabilities in a way.
You know, they use it where a special way too much.
I think super, I feel I feel the Special Olympics because there's so much history attached to it.
So I feel like they get they get a bigger pass.
But the new new companies coming out, it's just like, oh, special fit buddies or stuff like that.
It's like I've got a younger brother on the spectrum.
But, you know, he's a one. He's he's he knows where he is.
He knows what's happening around him and being involved in his program just makes him cringe so hard.
And I just never wanted that for our clients.
And so you want to create a brand, but then it has to be the brand, not you.
And so it's about I'm going to do everything I can with my force of personality or whatever to get it to a point where others can start holding it up.
And then I've just got to accept I've got to step away and just hope it continues to do the right thing.
But at the same time, the idea that it has to be me or it's going to fail without me is not the point.
You've got to build it to sustain. So you've got to build it with leaving it in mind.
And so that's why I believe.
How did you brand the new consulting project?
Just want to sound more professional. So I started to call it Inclusive AF.
Again, like, you know, I think it's about I think there's there's almost a weird taboo about having like cool branding in the disability space.
It has to be super G rated Mickey Mouse sort of shit, which I don't like.
So for me, it was just about making it a bit more fun, a bit more trendy.
And, you know, everyone thinks that AF stands for AF, but it's actually accessible and fun.
That's what it stands for. Perfect. Interpret it as you wish.
If you're on the data, that's on you, not me, Brandon.
So it's like, you know, what I want to do, though, is get to a point where I can, you know, Jim, if Jim's want to standard to set themselves to an accessibility inclusion, then I can give them a better say in their inclusive AF.
What is the delineation between doing good for a business and making money?
I think it's about for me. Yeah, it's hard.
You know, my background is not for profit sector.
So I was sort of almost indoctrinated with the notion that to make money is greedy or is in some our contradiction to your values, which has taken a long time to shake.
I think that, you know, it's if it falls to say, you know, and Dan Pallotta has amazing talks on this, too.
I'm sure you know who he is. So, you know, the notion that if I was if I was here as a banker and I'm telling you I made a quarter mill last year, you wouldn't think anything of it.
But if I'm here saying I work in disability and I made half a mill last year, all of a sudden it's just that little suspicion on my ethics, my values.
Why am I doing this? And I just think it's crappy.
Like, if we want the best minds and great talent to make the industry more stronger, then there needs to be money in it, essentially.
And I think treating people with disabilities like they could not or should not ever spend any of their own money, limited though it may be on good services,
I think is also super condescending and charitable as well. Right.
So I believe you can make money as long as you're providing the right the subsequent or the appropriate amount of value along with it.
When I work with businesses, I charge what I think is a pretty fair amount, but I'm giving them a lot of value that's going to help them make that back and way more over the long term by having clients.
You know, so that's how I sort of justify it.
I'm giving myself a bit more permission to just look after myself because otherwise I'll just be paycheck to paycheck my entire life, creating value for everybody but myself.
Yeah, that's very fair. I know in Pilata's TED Talk, he talks about how like how is a nonprofit going to attract the brightest minds if they can just go work somewhere else,
make two hundred and fifty thousand, donate a quarter of their salary and be praised as a philanthropist.
Like, why would they go work for a nonprofit for half the amount when they can make more and still be considered a giving person?
Yeah, exactly. The rules are weird where it's like you can come here and work here, but you can't make money, but come and work really hard.
Like, we're the only industry that asks that of people sort of thing.
But it's the people who work in the industry, not so much the participants. Right.
It's not so much the clients like again, all the co-design that none of them have a problem with it. Right.
As long as you're providing good value, I will be a customer and I'll buy your services.
Just do a good job. Be professional. Give me what I need.
Like, just run a really good business and I want you to be successful.
But so it's more it's not actually driven by the people that actually matter, like the customers and the end users.
It's driven by just a weird I think it's a relic of old attitudes from the charitable back in the day.
I think there's a lot of gatekeeping involved in it as well.
Where it's like, well, Brandon, unless you have family with disability, you don't get it.
You know what I mean? And you can't sit with us, which I don't think is fair.
It's like, no, you can just be really good at it. And again, that's one of the things that's been tough about like the lived experience.
I am my LinkedIn. My LinkedIn feeds a lot of people with disabilities, nothing about us without us.
And I fully understand the premise behind that. And there should be representation in all the conversations.
But sometimes it feels like a little bit of an echo chamber.
They're just like shouting to each other and they're all confirming their own biases.
But they're like, but you need to reach you to reach the key stakeholders if you want to make change.
You need to reach the businesses that aren't inclusive, that aren't accessible.
And the way of doing so, I don't think is to chastise them for currently not being accessible.
No. Sometimes it seems like there's a lot of critiques and that's not really going to incentivise anyone from diving into this quote unquote world of inclusion.
I just I'm not convinced that you can sort of shame and bully your way to a better place or a better world.
I think what happens is that you sort of just people just try to is like people just become the kids back in the class.
He just doesn't want to get noticed kind of thing.
They just want to float through and avoid anything.
And they don't want to even try. And instead, what we should be doing is just, you know,
and that's the hard part of being an advocate, right, is that you have to have the same dumb conversation with people all the time,
but not make them feel stupid for it.
Thank them for asking the question, give them useful advice that can make them a little bit better or help them decide if they want to be a little bit better.
But also have the conversation, you know, so I do I've done workshops for some of the bigger brands here.
One of the things I say straight up is like you're allowed to have an opinion.
You're allowed to use words if you're not sure if they're good or not, I'll tell you.
But I'm not going to physically assault you if you say a word that's maybe not proper nomenclature anymore.
Like just and you know, and one thing that's really interesting is, is that all the time I've spent working with co-design and I had employees,
most like half the input my workforce was people with disability or psychosocial disability.
And all of them always reiterated it's like the words aren't anywhere near as important as the meaning behind it.
Like I've had conversation with people where I've said what I've now realized was what we don't say anymore.
I used to say hearing impaired quite a lot, although you should say hard of hearing now.
But I never got jumped on or attacked for that is always say that now.
But I know that you mean well, like I can tell you just using the words, you know,
and I think we should not shy away from using the word disability.
Like I want to tell us all my favorite. I love this.
So I watched I watched a woman try and talk to this other lady who was in a wheelchair and she was so painfully trying to not say the word wheelchair
and disability to this person when explaining it, describing her condition.
And I just watched it for three real time minutes, which took like a year.
Dancer round, trying to find the words to say it without saying wheelchair and disability.
And the woman in the wheelchair just got the shit and was just like, I'm in a wheelchair.
Why are you making me awkward?
Yeah, that that person that I connected you with a few weeks ago,
the former intern of mine who's now in Australia studying for school,
she she texted me and a friend of ours and she was like, is this conversation happening in the US?
And she's like, we just had a lecture on person with disability versus person with a disability, one being temporary, one being permanent.
And I was like, oh, like, I don't think that's really happening.
And the more conversations I have with people with disabilities, a lot of them don't mind being called disabled.
Again, it's like the connotation of the word, are you putting them down?
Do you even need to specify that they're a disabled person or I don't know.
Sometimes I put that like language and the inconsistencies and the potential fear of being critiqued for a lack of accessibility,
I think is that that concoction of fears is what prevents people from even making the effort to interact with someone with a disability.
Yeah, instead of just talking to them directly.
So yeah, little echo chamber where they just they're just talking to themselves.
I think and again, it's just never come up to me is actually important.
But there's a few that there's words that grow out.
You should learn them definitely and stay in touch.
But people within the community will tell you that.
And they're just happy to be spoken to, like just talk to them directly.
So cut out. It's just people with that disability in the industry just taking up all the oxygen.
You know, so again, one thing I loved about your intro is like, you don't talk on behalf of I think that's really important.
And that's something I teach all the brands is like have an opinion on fitness,
have an opinion on inclusion and accessibility and philosophy.
Just don't talk for them.
But if you if you if you have a customer with a disability, they tell you something, you can share that.
But you can you can report back conversations you've actually had even better as if you highlight or let them say it in their own words.
But that's what you should do. Just go straight to the source.
That's all you have to do. Yeah. That's what I've loved about this podcast.
I mean, this is going to be episode thirty three by the time it publishes.
And I find myself when I'm making content, writing pieces, referencing things that guests told me.
Brad McAnnell from the Rick Hansen Foundation talking about accessibility and he's redesigned airports.
And well, he talks about he talks about how accessibility can benefit some people and hurt others.
They put carpet down the middle of the runway, which reduced some of the hearing and the echoes for people who are hard of hearing.
But at the same time, it made it hard for wheelchair users to navigate the airport.
He's like accessibility isn't like a checkbox. It's not a state of being.
It's a commitment to addressing people's needs.
So just stuff like that. But hearing that from the individual with disability weighs a whole lot more than me saying it.
Yeah, that being a platform. Yeah, I love that. Accessibility is a state of mind.
It's like this is amazing. She's not only with us, got to rest her soul.
But we had an amazing disability advocate in Australia called Stella Young.
And she has this great point, though, where she was like, you see all these memes and posts about the only disability in life is a bad attitude.
And she was like, no amount of good attitude is going to turn stairs into a ramp.
Exactly. Absolutely.
We've wrapped up most of these episodes with kind of the overarching prompt or theme of what do you think needs to be done to make fitness or the fitness industry more accessible for people with disabilities?
I think what I've learned is just to not overthink it and not be scared of it either.
So if you if you want to get into the space, if you just started getting into the space, it's OK to like make mistakes.
As long as you are trying your best, you are constantly communicating, getting feedback from the client with disability.
But just get stuck in like and just get going and you'll just get better.
I know both I've no doubt me and Brandon have made all kinds of mistakes with our earlier clients in earlier days.
And you just get better at it. But a lot of them are still our clients because they don't expect you to be perfect either.
They just want you to try and get.
Yeah, I've learned a lot from you over the last couple of years, too.
And that's why it's it's like tough to be stuff to have a growth mindset, but also be an authority figure or perceived authority figure.
Like, I'm supposed to have all the answers, but I I completely understand that I don't have any of the answers.
No. So it's like it's like, I guess, how can I how can I teach if I'm if I'm learning every conversation I have?
Yeah, I've completely rejected the term expert.
I don't even know if that's possible in this space.
But, you know, one thing you learn is that the education journey.
So going from knowing nothing to knowing something, it isn't it isn't up is that it's just a plummet.
Because the second you start with the client, you realize all the things you didn't know you didn't know.
And you're just like, oh, man, I am out of my depth.
And then you just start at that very bottom, the real bottom.
And then you just slowly just build your way out of it.
You know what I mean? So it's tough.
It's like what's it what's it called?
The Dunning-Kruger effect where you learn a little bit and then you think you're an expert.
And then the more you learn, the less you realize, you know, and that's kind of how this experience has been for me.
And now I've made this commitment to, I guess, quote unquote, like learn in public through these conversations.
And through our course revisions.
And yeah, it's been I think that's, I guess, maybe what makes the best educational experience.
You can't just take my course. You can't just take your course and be ready to go.
That's like the that's the ground level.
And then the hands on experience is the is the expertise or maybe not expertise, but at least the knowledge.
Well, if there's an expert, it's the customers themselves.
Exactly. Yeah, that's why including their their voice has always been something that I've valued.
And in your educational materials as well as is that co-designing piece.
So Tommy, glad to have you in our network.
Glad to have you as a friend.
If the audience wants to learn more about what you do or benefit from your services, where should they find you?
Just inclusive AF dot com.
It's a I've had to just start that website.
So it's pretty cringy at the moment.
But there's a contact form.
I'm also just opened up my socials.
So LinkedIn, Instagram, Inclusive AF.
You'll find me it's pretty it's a standout brand.
You know, inclusive, inclusive, accessibility and fun.
Tommy Trout. Thank you, Tommy.
I look forward to sharing this with our listeners.
And I have always appreciated what you've shared with me.
I appreciate you. Thank you, Brandon.
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