Focus on one thing at a time.
So we do something called habits and behavior change.
“Where you focus on one task and you focus on it for a week.”
You just do it every day. Drinking half your body weight now is as a water. That is your only mission for this week. Don't worry about protein, don't worry about any of that stuff. Don't worry about if you come to the gym three times a week you're golden.
But focus on your water and take for the week. You're not allowed to move on to the next habit until that one's accomplished. And then we start stacking habits. David Christensen is a resilient, driven and empowering fitness entrepreneur and the award-winning owner of Burlington Fit Body Boot Camp.
Through 30-minute weight loss boot camps, he helps people achieve their fitness goals with expert coaching, accountability, and a positive supportive community. Discipline comes in all forms, whether it's waking up at a certain time of the day or meal prepping.
“What would you say to somebody that's struggling really hard with discipline?”
I would say... Today Apple is going to reinvent for fall. It's not over, I'll tell how we're... The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast.
Today I have a very special guest in the studio.
First of all, I have David Christensen of Fit Body Boot Camp, but we also have...
Obi, so that's our... Obi, I don't know if you know this, but you're our first canine guest on the podcast. You are making living your legacy history right now, right? Shout out to Obi, we love that. Super comfy. I know he looks so cozy, he looks like he could fall asleep. You probably will. So David, for the audience, that's just me just now being introduced.
You tell me a little bit about your story, just your service in the military, and how do we get to Fit Body Boot Camps? Yeah, so I served four years, Air Force six years Army. I get old, I get old, I get old, I get old, I get old, I get old, I get old, I get old. I need to do more as well, I switch to the Army.
I like to say I raise the IQ of the Army a little bit when I transfer over, but don't tell anybody there, right? It's not on here. Yeah, so I served ten years and then I had a back injury and kind of moved me out of the military. It was time for me to go anyways. I was done. And then after I got out, I struggled a lot. I just trying to find my place, kind of loss of purpose, you know,
under ten years of doing something that kind of becomes your identity. And then kind of lost it. Then I had odd jobs here and there. And then I started DJing and then that led to more alcohol and more food and my weight gain just did not stop and it was pushing almost 400 pounds. I don't actually know how heavy I got because I was afraid of the scale. Yeah. And then one day I took a picture of myself without my shirt on,
I was like, that's almost got a change. And just before that I admit my wife now, Brandy, and things kind of evolved from there. Like we started working out together, doing high intensity
interval training, I'd lost the first 40 pounds of my garage and I was like, this is, this is real.
Like, I feel my life changing. And then I wanted to bring it to the masses. So I kind of stalled out in my journey. So I was like, okay, let me go back to college, learn real fitness, learn nutrition, learn everything I needed to, to complete everything. I had to do an internship. So then I got an internship at this gym and that was when I things really changed for me. We grew out of that and then went to owning a business. And so as far as, you know, we talked about
this a little bit off camera, but like, you would say that fitness saved kind of saved your life, correct that point. Yeah. And in terms of like building out this business, what was sort of the aha moment of like, oh, not only is this, not only is this saving my life, but like I can, I can tangibly give this to somebody else as well, like as a service. Yeah. So while I was working at the first gym I worked at, I was really into group training and
everything. And I was letting me help more people, more people, more people, but I kind of capped out. I could only help so many people at a time just because of the space. And then I was following all these different content creators and things like that in entrepreneurs. And I was like, I got to do more. I got to reach more people. I'm ignoring you. You've heard this story before.
“Yeah. So the only way I could help more people was doing my own thing.”
Someone I was following, Bay Drows. Bay Drows. Bay Drows. I did a podcast with him last year. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So he's super, super cool. Yeah. So he created Fibody Bootcamp
amongst other different companies, you know, first generation immigrant. He was the, you know,
He was overweight at a time and then overcame certain struggles in his life a...
with me. And I was like, I understand his values and I believe in his values. They're part of my
“values. So it just seemed like the logical next step to open up my own Fibody Bootcamp. They laid”
the framework. It allows me to help hundreds and hundreds of people at a time. And the outreach that Fibody has compared to where I was is so much more. Like I just said Bay Drows and you do exactly who he was, right? This doesn't happen where I was before. So we have people coming in from all over. We have people that come in 530 session in the morning and they live 45 minutes to an hour away. And that's the kind of impact we're having on people. We built a, we built something
there that's more like a family. You know, we run events all the time, different challenges, people participate with each other. And it's unlike any feeling that I've ever had working at another gym. I know it. Bay Drows is a super cool guy. I had, I had built out a podcast studio with a buddy of mine last year and he was one of the guests that came in. He actually flew into
“Miami to come into a podcast and he actually made us do a 100 push-ups before we started.”
I had to get that blood flowing. Yeah. That waves like, he's like, hey, I need everybody in the studio to wake up. Come on, we're all doing 100, 100 push-ups in like the span of like five minutes. I'm not going to make you do that. Yeah, he does do to savage. But you mentioned our fate, one of our favorite words in this studio is impact, right? Can you tell me it's story of maybe a client, maybe somebody that has been through your program that, you know, really tells the story
of like, hey, we're out here changing lives. Yeah, he's not the average person you'd think. So actually, we'll talk about Liz actually. I feel Liz is someone that has really overcome a lot. She's one of my older clients. She's actually my oldest client. She's 80 years old. Just, and I've knew her at my old gym. She followed it me over when I opened to my new one. So I've been training her for about six years maybe seven years. And she's reversed all her blood
work. She's off a bunch of medications. She's living her best life right now at 80 years old. Some people can't get up from the ground. She's very spray pops right up now. Every day she comes in to high five at the front door. Super excited to be there. I feel like we are her social hour, her family. She messages us all the time. Even when we're not in studio, something like reversing your blood work, creating that longevity and quality of life that you might
have not had, had you not done something. That's something that tells me that we're doing something right. She's changing her life on a day and a day out basis. She says she feels it when she misses the gym when she can't make it in. She's like, oh, I need to do something. So we provide resources for her to do stuff at home. But I'd say that's one of the main, one person that really speaks volumes to what we're doing is now we could have maybe we've extended her life another 10 years.
I wanted to mention that because my, so my granddad, he was, he passed in, I want to say 2022, but towards the end of his life, he had dementia. And so he, you know, he would struggle with
memory and stuff. But the one thing that he would never, he was always super lucid about, he
loved to play tennis. Yeah. And cleared into his late 80s, he would just get up every day in Jamaica and just go play tennis. And that, that was like, if you asked him a question, or if you asked him about something in his life while he was playing tennis, instant recall, like he can recall anything
“while being active. And so like the extension, I think if he hadn't played tennis into his 80s,”
I think we would have lost him probably a lot sooner. But because he was still active and because he was still going out there, he was able to, you know, I got a few extra years of my granddad, just because he liked to play tennis. You mentioned something else there as well, which was that for this client, she feels it when she's not in the gym, right? I'm the same way.
Any day that I don't go, like, I always like to set a baseline of like, all right, if I can't physically
go to the gym at the bare minimum, I'm blasting out 150 push-ups today. Like, or something, the Major's got to you. He really did. I would never let him know it, and I'm just kidding. What are some, what are some, like, of the key pieces of advice that you have for somebody out there, who's really struggling with creating, because discipline is the answer, right? discipline is the thing that's going to get you there. But what, what would you say to somebody that's
like struggling really hard with discipline? Discipline comes in, in all forms, whether it's waking up at a certain time of the day or meal prepping. I would say focus on one thing at a time. So we do something called habits and behavior change, right, where you focus on one task, and you focus on it for a week. You just do it every day. So for us, we, when we're working with
The client, all right, drinking half your body weight, now it's as a water.
mission for this week. Don't worry about protein. Don't worry about any of that stuff. Don't worry about, you know, if you come to the gym three times a week, you're golden, but focus on your water intake for the week. You're not allowed to move on to the next habit until that one's accomplished. And then we start stacking habits. And there's small winds. They don't have to be exorbitant, like
“we're not saying, or you have to mean all your macros, you know, your protein's fats and carbs right away.”
That's like the worst part for a lot of people. It is nutrition is 80% of the work. I know, I despise it. There's a lot of people struggle with it, right? But that's why we stack the small things. So all right, so now we're going to stack water. If you did it for a week, all right, now we're going to stack, all right, let's hit your protein for a week. We're not worried about carbs or fats. They fluctuate anyways. So let's hit your protein and water now for the full of our whole next week.
If that's good for that two weeks now, perfect. We're going to add a third stack. So let's all right,
focus on carbs now. Fats can fluctuate. Let's make sure we're hitting water protein and carbs. And then the next week's fats. Now before you know it by week four, you're tracking your water, your proteins, your fats, your carbs, all four things, and you're getting there three workouts in a week. It's just small progressions lead to long-term success. Yeah, you got to set that like baseline, like you set that foundation of like your core habits that you're going to keep doing over and over again.
I study a little bit of psychology and I know that it takes exactly 24 days to build a habit in the brain on a subconscious level. Right. So you build the one habit when you're able to do that habit without having to think or schedule it or you know actively think about doing it, that's when you're able to move on to the next one. And now I don't even think about drinking the water anymore. That's a foregone conclusion. All right, let's hit protein. I don't even
think about that anymore. I know I'm going to get my 150, 200 grams in a day. So difficult. By the way, getting the protein in is the most difficult part for all you guys out there, let that be the last habit that you stack. Like figure out how everything works. It makes it easy. Oh, man. I now gone through, dude, I must have gone through six or seven different brands of had two shakes over time because I I'd find one. I like the taste of it. Get my 30 grams in. And then
I would finally like weeks later. I'd look at the actual macros on like the side of the
bottom and like, oh my god, this has like 40 grams of carbs in it. Or like this has a million grams
“of sugar in it. Let me switch to another one. And then finally I landed on like, I think I'm on Isopira now.”
Yeah. That one's pretty good. Now, there's one thing in the room that, you know, we've got a little bit of a different pod for you guys today. We've got Obi in here. There's also another thing in the room that you guys might not have noticed, you know, if you're just watching, but on this table here, there's a there's an award on the table. Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, so this was completely unexpected. So every year we meet up with four to six hundred other owners throughout
the country and we all meet up once a year for world conference. Every year they do awards for
different things for owners and stuff like that. So we had been open two years and there's always
a rookie of the year, right? Someone who I entity or a franchisee that has the most success or the most growth quickly, essentially within that two years. And this was unexpected. So me and Brande were sitting there and we're just watching the conference and all of a sudden they say, all right, rookie of the year goes to, and then I see, they say David, but they stretch out the first name. I'm like, man, there's probably like a hundred other David's in this room. I'm like, let's say
us. I say David. Yeah. And then they said Christensen, and for some reason, it's still an register that it was me, right? And then I see my name on this big screen out there. Holy crap. Is that me? And then Brande hits me on the side, but like, that's you. What? Yeah. So rookie of the year, it just shows the dedication that myself and Brande have into helping people. We had an exorbit amount of growth, all of a sudden we were creating these programs that people just believed
in. They were bringing their friends, bringing their family. And that's where that family aspect comes in. Because we actually have families that work out together in our gym, whole family. Yeah. We just had this great amount of growth early on. Why wouldn't say early on? There was a while where we were really nervous that we were going to stay open. It's a business is a role. Yeah, the first year, the first year was actually really rough. And then all of a sudden, like things just started clicking,
people started believing in us and what we were doing in our name, where it was getting out there. And then all of a sudden it was just an upward trajectory. And then it showed in the numbers. And we were awarded with rookie of the year. For us was shocking. We had no idea. They didn't tell us
“ahead of time. That's the only thing about who we just did our Red Carpet Award show for”
inside success. And we didn't let, you know, we had different awards for, you know, we had like, legacy maker of the year, most empowering woman, just different awards for different shows.
We didn't let any other clients know, like, who was going to win an award.
there was a lady that got up on stage. And she was like, I had no idea. I had nothing prepared. I was going to sit in the bathroom. I'm so nervous to be on stage right now. But it was just like,
just getting to see that reaction that having now produced an award show, because I've always like
watched them, but not having now produced one. Now I kind of see how the back end of it works. And I'm like, you know, because someone asked in a meeting, they were like, oh, should we let them know that they won? So they can prepare, I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, make it to make it to see good. I need that real surprise. We got on stage in front of hundreds and hundreds of people. And I know I do what to do. They hand me that award in it's heavy. And I got Obi and one hand,
the award in the other. And I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. Everyone's looking at me like I'm supposed to say something. So I handed to Brandy. And she's just standard. She don't know what to do with it. And we're just like, thank you. You got like a beer and head like that. Yeah, I'll show you the pictures later. It's literally me standing there next to Brandy. Like, what? This is real. Yeah. It was surprising. It was a great honor. We felt congratulations on that. Thank you.
Yeah. I always like to celebrate growth because it's like scaling a business is no small
feet. And guys, for anybody that's out there watching this episode, if you're still here at this point, first of all, I want to make sure you guys tune into David's episode. It'll be coming out shortly after this podcast episode drops. As we sort of wind down the pod here, David, if there's one piece of one key piece of advice, you know, our viewers are super entrepreneurial minded, their business owners. They might be in that that first year where things kind of suck.
What advice would you give to a business owner out there on scaling and getting to that level of success that they're chasing? Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest things would be like, it's not easy
“and just be aware of that. And you have to put one foot in front of the other. Nothing in this”
being an entrepreneur comes easy. And there's just no one else to blame other than yourself if it doesn't get done. So you just have to wake up at the morning, be like, all right, I got to do it. You just tell yourself that you just keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, because eventually like this happened, things just click all of a sudden. And all that hard work that you put in before pays off, right? Now we're able to breathe. Our head is above water. We are not struggling.
So I think that's the biggest thing is just realizing, yeah, it might suck right now. You might have to eat crow for a little bit. But eventually, if you put in the work, things will happen for you. It materializes over time. And you don't get to pick the time frame. You don't get to pick any. You don't get to pick. Yeah. You can, there's, I'm all about systems and planning, go at something with a plan. If you have, if you're out there and you're working on a business,
“create a plan for it, obviously. But understand that life is going to”
have a way of getting in the way of your plan, sometimes. But that's a part of it as well, because the way that you react to things not going according to plan, that builds the, the character in you to go out and make better decisions going forward with your business. So David, this has been an immense pleasure getting a podcast with you, brother. Absolutely. How, you, you do these podcasts often? I've done one before, not too often. Just one, just one. You, you're, you're on your
like a season vet. You got, old be there. We've had, oh, you're talking about me. He was like,
oh, there you are. You always mentioned to me. Again, guys, make sure you check out David's
episode coming out shortly after this episode. Where can people find you on social media? Yeah, Instagram is Burlington or Burl FBBC. Facebook is Burlington. The body boot camp. It's pretty easy. Personal Instagram is D.V. Dave C. dysfunctional veteran, Dave. That's pretty bad.
“That's what it's for. Yeah, that'll do it. And we'll make sure we put all of those in a little”
title corner somewhere here for you. Again, guys, this has been another episode of the living your legacy podcast. I'm your host Jason Tyler. David, I'm excited to see where your episode goes here more about your story. And we'll catch you guys in the next one.
