Strength Coach Collective

Inside CNU Stretch: Helping Clients Move Better and Reduce Pain

• twobrainbusiness@gmail.com • Season 1 • Episode 16

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Most coaches treat tightness, tension and pain as mechanical problems. But what if those issues are rooted in something deeper?

In this episode of the “Strength Coach Collective” podcast, Chris Cooper sits down with Evans Armantrading, founder of CNU Stretch, who breaks down his framework for blending movement, nervous system input and client self-awareness to create long-lasting change.

Evans explains how CNU Stretch has evolved into a fully scalable system that helps clients reduce pain, restore range of motion and reconnect with their bodies.

He also shares how he now licenses gyms to deliver the Stretch experience at a high level—without needing a rehab or clinical background.

You’ll hear about the most common mistakes coaches make when delivering stretch-based services, as well as how trainers can unlock progress by shifting their mindset around flexibility, fascia and recovery.

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Strength Coach Collective

1:10 - Background on CNU Stretch

13:02 - CNU Stretch vs. therapy

15:28 - CNU Stretch licensed gyms

32:55 - Common mistakes trainers make

41:05 - How hard is this to add on?

SPEAKER_04:

How do you coach stretching better? And do your clients actually value it? I'm Chris Cooper. This is Strength Coach Collective. And joining me today is Evans Arm& Training. Evans is the founder of CNU Stretched, which has a licensing and certification model for coaches. And it turns stretch therapy into a high-value, scalable service that not only improves retention for you... but it also creates predictable recurring revenue for your gym. So it's great for coaches. It's great for gyms too. And already, CNU Stretch has partnered with 20 gyms and certified over 100 coaches. They've helped turn gyms... space into usable space, functional space in between classes and sessions. And they built a model that adds a lot of value without disrupting the core business. More important than anything else, it keeps people in your gym for longer. It's a very unique business model that you can bolt onto any practice that you have as a personal trainer or a coach. And that's what makes it super attractive to me. Evans, welcome to the Strength Coach Collective Podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you. I'm grateful that

SPEAKER_04:

you have me here, Chris. Well, this is going to be awesome. I mean, I already love hearing this stuff from you. I think a lot of us are familiar with the rise in stretch therapy and we've heard of brands like Stretch Lab before, but what led you to doing this with your clients?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, a big part of the story is the fact that it came out of need. So just a little bit of a quick background. I've owned my gym now for 16 years. So I've been doing personal training for that amount of time. And I don't know, can you see my screen now? Yep, yep. Beautiful. And this lady, Tammy, she's actually still my accountant and she was, you know, a client back in 2010. She's still a client today, but around 2014, she came in and she, you know, you ever had this experience and I know you have a different, several different modalities where a client comes in and you're like, you probably shouldn't be going really hard today.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So that's exactly what happened. Well, I've done a little bit of bodybuilding, so I'm familiar with like deload weeks. So I'm like, hey, let's just do a light week and reassess next week. The next week she came in, she looked just the same. It was tax season, a lot of external stressors. I said, let's do another light week. She said, Evans, I'm not paying for light weeks. Can we just do the stretches we do at the end of the workout for the workout? I was like, I guess we can. I had a kind of thought. I know a little about anatomy. And then another client was coming in and she was ending. That was back when we were just doing one-on-one primarily. And then she was like, what's that? And I was like, facilitated neuromuscular. I just had a lot of scientific names, so to speak, for it. And it just became something that we just did as a back cell or cross-cell offer. It was definitely not something that a lot of our, a backend offer, a lot of people knew that we even offered unless he was existing client, but because we saw it, taking off a little bit, I started to deep dive and try to figure out, okay, how can I learn about, you know, movement in the body? And really it was rock tape back in 2015 when we got our rock tape certs, where it really started breaking down fascia and understanding how all that works. And I realized, hey, this is a component that we weren't really talking about much in the gym. I mean, my only understanding of it was Kelly Starrett's, you know, supple leopard book back in the day. and we're just smashing and digging in. But we start to realize over the years that that aggressive modality didn't work for all demographics. And we were running into people who had fibromyalgia or had chronic inflammation, and we did an aggressive recommendation and it only heightened their pain. So we started to do all those sorts to learn how to do a softer touch and how to really work in corrective exercise. Our gym over the years kind of really dialed into the people who are 40 and above. Now we do stretch athletes and things like that. We stretch even gymnasts. We have this youth group, a bunch of like middle school to high school girls and they do gymnastics and we stretch them as well. We found a technique that kind of worked for us big time. And, you know, I love this because I live in Delaware and it's like redneck country and I got duct tape. But we I mean, this is electric tape. We held our services together. We didn't know what we were doing. We just knew we were helping people and they were paying us, you know, and we were getting testimonials from it. And I love this story. This is Letha. Leif is probably her mid-70s now, and she's been a stretch client for six years. She just signed up for personal training twice a week a couple months ago, and she still does stretching twice a week. So we have a lot of stickiness with the program, which is cool. We figured out how to put together systems over the pandemic timeframe, and we kind of cracked the code on how to help people.

SPEAKER_04:

I got a quick question here, Evan. So, you know, you've already mentioned fascia and a lot of us who've been in the industry for a long time, we still don't know, like, why is this so important? And when I was down at Parisi Speed School Summit last two weeks ago, that's all they talked about. Like the whole two days was just about fascia, fascia, fascia. And I felt so far behind. I mean, I've been coaching people for 30 years. I really didn't know what I was, you know, talking about when it came to fascia, honestly.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Why is this so important? Like, do the average people understand what this is? And like, why are we so focused on it now?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I would say the average person doesn't even know they have it.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, so I like the way we like to teach it in our assert is you pull back a piece of chicken skin and you see that little like. clear goo that's there, there's something to scrape off, that's fascia, it's connective tissue. Or if you break a banana, all the strands you see that goes into all those different directions, all the way to the middle of the banana, is fascia. And if you push down on the banana and then you break it, you'll notice that the tissue looks a little bit different in the area that was pressed versus the rest of the banana. And so that's our body. And so this connective tissue is communicating. Think about it as like a network of tissues that talk to every cell throughout your entire body. How are you going to learn? Now, when I first learned about fascia, it was old school cadavers and you ripped over and you said your IT band is this piece of fashion, it doesn't move. And we needed to, it can hold 2000 PSI of pressure. Well, we've advanced technology and we've learned that it's so supple, it moves and it's this communication network. For clients and the impact and why it's important to them is historically, we've looked at our body in parts. I have a shoulder issue. So let me just look at my shoulder and focus on fixing my shoulder. But if you could see my shirt a little bit and you could see my shoulder here, if I pull down on my shirt in the opposite corner, you see the shoulders impacted by it.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, there's a series of tissues that are connecting all the way down, just like on my shirt.

SPEAKER_02:

inside of my body and sometimes the area of discomfort or pain is not the cause of where pain is. So when it comes to creating force production, when it comes to movement without pain, when it comes to just general everyday performance, we're learning that if we can influence this tissue better, All the cells, the muscle cells, all the cells that it's connecting have a better influence. I guess the last piece is understanding that the nervous system is communicating through the fascial system. So when it sends a message to the tissues, you know, your nervous system is receiving these impulses and responding back. And you can't maintain movement without your nervous system giving you the okay.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. And it's not just rehab. I mean, one of the big speakers at the Parisi summit was Patrick Mahomes trainer. And he said that is his focus is, is training fascia to get my homes to top peak playing shape.

SPEAKER_02:

Really interesting.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. And like whatever, like if you think about, and I use this a lot with like with total movement, right. Wherever you create stress and, Like we know all muscle hypertrophy, right, is a, you know, is a parasympathetic response to overloading tissues. Right. So if we give a lot of pressure, like for me, my chest, right. You know, if I want to grow my chest, I have to load the chest. And then my nervous system goes, that's not cool. We're going to build more tissue to manage, to match out that load and create homeostasis. So I'm Patrick, my home, right. And I need to be able to throw football. I need to be able to move agile. I need to stress those systems, but it's not stretching the stressing the quad. It's stressing the movement pattern, and what's helping control that movement pattern is the fascia. That's a really

SPEAKER_04:

good, succinct way to

SPEAKER_02:

put it, Evans. Thank you

SPEAKER_04:

for that.

SPEAKER_02:

No

SPEAKER_04:

problem at all. And by the way, if you're listening at home, and when Evans says something like, I've done a little bodybuilding, or I want to stretch my chest, I mean, Evans is massive. So Evans doing a little bodybuilding is like me doing a little reading, okay? So yeah, okay, carry on, man.

SPEAKER_02:

I appreciate that. So what we realized is that what we were doing wrong was a client would come in and they would say they have this movement dysfunction or they're feeling tight. Now, of course, due to scope of practice, we can't say like, hey, we're going to fix your pain and all those things, but we know if you move better, if you hydrate better, if you get stronger, sometimes you don't have the pain. But anyway, they were having this challenge and we were like, okay, cool, let's stretch you one off until treated it very much like a massage therapy would. But the challenge was that one, it takes about three months for your nervous system to accept, accept new changes. Like you'll see a result, you know, quickly, but then you just bounce back. So, so your nervous system is designed to like your moment. Hypothalamus has one goal, homeostasis. And the weather changes one day, your brain doesn't just go, okay, cool. We're accepting that as new temperatures. And so similarly, we would help somebody once and then they'll do maybe two or three sessions and they'll come back in a month or two. And we just couldn't build business. So we said, no, no, no, we got to treat it the same way we do personal training. We have a lead that comes in. specifically for stretch. We do a consultation, we do an assessment, they get launched into a program, and then we stretch them. So delivering the service of stretch was the last step, not the first or the second step. We need to say, okay, to help you long-term, you need to do that. When we put this in place, it was 2021, In 2020, though it was a pandemic, it was still our highest year to date at that time with stretch therapy. And you can see here, we did like$13,000. We put system in its place. We literally tripled the business and did 44,000. And then we leaned into the systems and we grew by over 100,000 to 154 in 22, another 90,000 growth to, you know, 245,000. And then we grew another, you know, thousand. So Last year, we did$246,000 just with stretch therapy. This is not anything to do with our licensing, our coaching. This is us helping people in the community. And so we're able to really get clients a lot of results, the team. And for the trainers, they loved it because a couple of things. One, it helps fill the time gap. You know, so you run a gym like I do, you know, a lot of gyms have like morning hours and this crazy midday gap and then evening hours. And but the people come at any time to solve a problem, you know, so it was kind of cool. So like right now in our gym, people are getting stretched, you know, because they're like, OK, I can leave work for half an hour. I can leave work for, you know, I'll come to get stressed. You don't get sweaty or anything like that. So it was something that they enjoyed. from that standpoint you know so it helped grow so my trainers can make more money and then we can help more people also from a training standpoint we've had trainers report that hey you know i feel i can actually help someone get a result when a client comes with 40 pounds you know that person or 50 pounds they have to commit to a year of work they have to commit to a whole lifestyle change but in a couple quick stretches or even in one stretch someone can report like oh wow i feel so much better just after one stretch and it gives the trainers a little mini high And it's all within their scope, which is really exciting. I'd

SPEAKER_04:

actually like to ask you about that. So you've mentioned scope a couple of times. Where is the line between CNU Stretch and therapy?

SPEAKER_02:

Correct. Great question. So we do not manipulate.

UNKNOWN:

Okay.

SPEAKER_02:

So if you go to your physical therapist or your massage therapist or your chiropractor, they can manipulate tissue, meaning they can set joints and all those kind of things in there. Every personal training cert, and I've actually sat on like I've audited the certifications and stuff like that, every single one talk about stretching. It's just that industry-wise, we've never monetized it. We just knew, oh, there's ballistic, there's static, there's dynamic, but we never said, okay, pay me and I'll do a methodology to you. And then we don't do massages. So I can stretch. So if you can see my hand here, and I always have people do it to themselves in the cert, you put your hand on your forearm for those who are listening and you just gently press in and just push or glide and you see the tissue stops. And that's your fascia stopping in there. If you continue past where your tissues stop, that's called a massage. That is out of scope. So I can stretch the fascial tissue in multiple different directions. I just can't massage the tissue. Wow. That is

SPEAKER_04:

so

SPEAKER_02:

good. So now I'm staying within my scope of practice as a trainer where I can stretch. Everybody accepts it. I can stretch. And we even went to the point because we were working a lot with the gym owners. They were like, oh, well, I don't know if I'm comfortable, if that's legal, whatever. And we've gone to professional regulations and they're like, dude, aren't you a trainer? Like it's within your scope of practice. It was funny that the regulatory agencies were like, why are you asking me this question? But yes, we cannot manipulate tissues. We cannot fix problems, any of those kinds of things. No different than if a client They have diabetes. You can't treat diabetes as a trainer.

SPEAKER_04:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

You can train them. And we know that exercise will burn glucose. Right. At a faster level. So by default, if they exercise, their blood glucose levels will go down. And if they maintain a lower blood glucose and start making some healthy lifestyle changes, then their A1C goes down. And it's a like unto a treatment. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. We can get there. Sure.

UNKNOWN:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

So we're sitting with a group of business owners in the beginning of 24, and they're looking at the numbers and thinking about needle movers. And they said, hey, Evans, literally you're generating what some gyms don't generate as another revenue stream within your gym. Can you teach us how to do it? And many of them have done things like nutrition coaching and other things, but the challenge was they couldn't keep the clients in that program for a long enough time to make it worth it. So bring somebody on and you gotta hire a specialist specifically to do that work. In our gym, every single trainer also does stress therapy. And the clients are used to, because we built a culture of there's no unicorns, we built this culture where every trainer can go to get trained, or every client can get trained by everyone. Oh, that's super smart. Yeah, so we mix it up and they just get it. They know they're coming here to solve their problem, not for Johnny. And so everybody can stretch you. So they said, hey, can you teach us how to do this? And my analytical brain said, let's start writing a book. So I started writing a book on stretching. And one of the gym owners was like, dude, I don't want to read a book. I need you to come here and teach our team how to do it. And so we launched LaTosha. She was our first one out in California. And she had four locations. And her first nine months, she generated an extra$40,000 in stretch revenue. Peace. which is really cool. She was like, her clients love it. Her trainers love it. Her biggest challenge right now is that her director likes stretching more than anything else. And she's like, I need you to do other things. So we create a system for gyms where, you know, they're averaging about$3,500 in monthly reoccurring revenue within their first 45 days of launch. And, but for, for gym owners, I mean, for individuals, they're able to add additional revenue in gaps and able to help a lot of people. So, you know, specifically as we think about like, what is stretch? I talked a little bit about it, you know, actually I'll play this quick video. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of explains what is stretch therapy.

SPEAKER_05:

Really great about stress therapy is that our clients function better in their everyday life. Most people, People do not understand how much flexibility impacts their life. Tightness contributes to pain and restrictive movement. So our goal is to increase mobility and relieve pain.

SPEAKER_00:

So what makes our stretch therapy program different from others is the fact that we have such a holistic approach in how we address fitness. Here, you know, we always say that fitness is a lifestyle. So all of our stretch therapists are also trainers. So we have that knowledge and background of how the body works, the anatomy of it, and how we can help people out of pain. We're not just limited in one way we can help people out of pain. We have, you know, many clients that do training and stretch therapy and that's how we're able to give them their life back ultimately. A lot of people have pain in their day to day and sometimes it's just things like they want to be able to run around with their grandkids. They want to get in and out of a beach chair so we're able to help them get their life back through our holistic approach and how we're able to bring fitness back to them.

SPEAKER_02:

Stretch therapy is a form of body work that includes assisted stretching to help increase mobility, decrease pain, help with flexibility, And one thing I like about our program is our ability to have quantitative as well as qualitative measurements. We use a form of technology that can assess your range of motion, flexion, extension, rotation, and give you exact measurements of how well you can move. And then we can use that information to design your stretch therapy program from there. The technology is really cool. It's like a self-driving car, but then clients can see their results

SPEAKER_01:

over time with it. For me, CNU is so much better than a a normal big box gym that you get. You know, it's personal, it's family. Everybody here, I know all the trainers, I know all of the people who do the stretch, and like I say, they're family. We joke, we kid around a little bit, but we're also serious. They push me. It's something that I need. I need somebody to push me when I'm training, and I enjoy that one-on-one personal relationship that I have with my coaches.

SPEAKER_06:

I am recovering from a lifetime illness. I have multiple sclerosis. I was also in my 50s, and I wanted to get stronger, so those two things converged, and it encouraged me to come out, build muscle, build strength, build flexibility, build cardio strength, and that motivated me to come to a gym like CMU. I like stretch therapy because it allows me to push my muscles as far as they're going to go. I have somebody who can help me keep them safe at that range. For me, flexibility is a component of fitness, and on my own, I'm not a particularly intuitive or patient stretcher, so stretch therapy gives me an opportunity to work with somebody who knows my body, who knows what my limits are, and actually can teach me new limits and better ways to take care of myself.

SPEAKER_02:

We talked about like, we spent a lot of time already talking about fascia and how it's this connective tissue that communicates throughout the body. You know, if you've ever read anything anatomy trains, you know, you're familiar with this image here. In addition to that, we're also working with the musculoskeletal system. And that's where most people are used to, right? They're just used to like, hey, what's a good chest stretch? Or what's that component? And that's really important. But I always like to say, like, the one that a lot of people talk about is the nervous system. And what the nervous system has to do is allow movement. So, you know, little techie, but, you know, a sciencey, right? You know, all muscle action happens through nerve innervation. And we see this all happen, especially if you have a stroke patient or a stroke client. And we do have two cool clients. We have a couple of people that have had strokes that we work with, which is really awesome. And then we have this young guy who he had a brain injury from a boating accident. It has the same situation, right? His brain was injured, so his elbows locked at 90 degrees. That's not a fascial issue. That's not a muscular issue. That's a nervous system issue. And so we have to tell the nervous system that it's okay to move there again. And a lot of our movement dysfunction, if you think about it, what happened was I hit my toe on something, I limped around for a while, and then my body kind of like contorted and said, hey, don't move this certain way anymore. And now we're moving in this piece of dysfunction that causes residual pain. You know, my daughter was experiencing that as a high school athlete. She had this Achilles tendon calf, you know, tear during a soccer game. She's like, man, I gotta recover because now my knee's hurting, right? Because it's going up the chain,

SPEAKER_03:

you

SPEAKER_02:

know? You know, we see this with ankle instability or hip instability. Now you have knee pain. Well, the knee only does flexion extension. So unless you like have blunt force trauma or arthritis, the only reason why you have a knee pain is because something else is out of alignment that's causing your knee to take a load that it's not supposed to take. Anyhow, as we started thinking about the nervous system, what we have to do is even though we can get this range of motion, you know, passively, what we need to do is tell the brain that it's okay now to move here again. You know, and so by stretching the tissues gently, we start teaching or rewiring the new pathways. In our certification, one of the things we have people do is fold their arms. And if you fold your arms, it's kind of funny how your brain will think about it. Gotta fold your arms real quick. All right, now I want you to flip the, put the opposite arm on top. And you feel how weird that felt? Yeah, yeah, I had to think about it. There

SPEAKER_04:

was a little pause there where it's like, wait a minute, which one is, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

yeah yeah you know because your brain has said this is the way we fold our arms and there's no right or wrong answer just what it is so we start looking at these neural pathways these directions that our brain naturally takes just because it's been doing that consistently doesn't mean it's the right direction to keep you healthy yeah you know and if you watch people and you because i mentioned it you're going to notice it when you watch people walk around the supermarket on the streets you'll notice that most people do not stand up They have this forward lean because their psoas is super tight. And so they don't stand up, but that tight psoas can lead to low back pain. Again, unless you had something hit your lower back, it's probably not your back. But there's other things that contribute. So one-time stretch is like footsteps in the sand, right? You're going to feel, you'll notice it happen, but the water is just going to brush it away because you have more consistent movement. And over time, our goal is to build balance. a pathway that says, yes, this is the right way to move consistently. I no longer have this compromised space. Okay. Because we have some scares really quick to kind of talk about the industry-wise. We know that our industry is in a massive growth curve right now. Honestly, if you study, and I know you do, and you go back, we haven't seen this kind of growth since, like, 2006 at eight nine ten that that right going into the teens is the same kind of growth curve that we're having so we're expected to grow about you know 7.3 percent which is double the gdp with the country's economy and things are going and right now we're pushing about almost a seven trillion dollar market is looking to be in two to three years at a nine trillion dollar market And this is all wellness. Now we know that the drug companies have had influence on these numbers, but still is a huge part. You know, the wellness is growing five to 10% annually and recovery is growing by 20%. And, you know, I came back from Ursa and at Ursa you had all these, you know, massage tables that were$10,000 and red light therapy rooms and all these different things. And I don't know what the lifespan on those are, but I know that the more we go into technology, the more that the human to human touch is valuable.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And so for us who are trainers, it gives us an opportunity to really help people because we can provide that.

SPEAKER_04:

It really seems like the big trends are people trying to solve a problem with their body now. So I'm going to do cold plunges. I'm going to do red light sauna or whatever. I'm going to be doing this and this to fix this thing.

SPEAKER_03:

Yes.

SPEAKER_04:

When in reality, you can fix this thing better. It won't be... a trend thing so gyms can count on consistent revenue as your own revenue graph showed and this is something that's worth learning because it's going to stick around it's not going to be obsolete in three years

SPEAKER_02:

yeah absolutely i mean every major athlete i know of if you follow if you just like start googling or youtubing all the athletes the athletic trainers are stretching them in the games you know this is not a new thing it's just been around it's just that in the gym industry and you know i love i read your report every time you put it out annually and you see the cap of revenue is stuck at a certain amount and year a year you know it's just like i you know moving that dial is challenging you know so to your point you know and people like something you can do and sometimes people like well what about yoga the challenges with yoga is that you cannot control the load that you put on your your tissues You know, so when I go into downward dog, I can't say, well, I'm going to have 20% load. You know, I'm 220, I'm 230 pounds. So when I'm going downward dog, that's a good amount of weight on my wrist. Yeah. So I don't have that same kind of control. And massage therapy doesn't actively move my limbs. They just push my tissues down. You know, so again, if I want to teach the brain that, hey, you can move, I have to move the tissues in a safe place. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

I was doing a podcast this morning for my gym. A lot of people in my town are really getting into the weighted vests right now. And honestly, it worries me. As much as I love to see people doing anything and finding any excuse to go outdoors, a lot of these people are just adding load to dysfunction. Yeah. They barely stand up all day at work. Their posture is horrendous. You're going to throw. And of course, it's not like a 10 pound vest, right? It's like, well, the 50 pound is the cheapest pound for pound. So that's the one I'm getting. And the next thing you know, they're like jogging their first 3K with 50 pounds of weight on a body that doesn't move properly. Yeah. I like this because, you know, you really do fix a lot of the underlying issues first before you add intensity or load.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And what's cool is that once you get motor control, right, you know, and movement, then we can add load, right? So we can start using corrective exercise. Like Amanda said in the video, the difference is that we're trainers, right? So different than like a stretch lab or stretch zone. And I'm grateful for them because they've helped grown our industry. The difference is they'll just put somebody off the street. Maybe you have a kinesiology degree or not. And then it's like, hey, you know, like here's our stretch protocol. You do the same thing with everyone. But as a personal trainer, our team is able to say, OK, hey, here's some correctives you can do. And whether they're a personal training client, they can add it to a session or they can do it at home. They can now do some of these correctives to help create the like now we can move, but we need to strengthen and reinforce the activity that we did. So he was like, Hey, let's do some glute bridges to help you activate your glutes so that your piriformis is not firing and causing some of those, you know, issues that you have. So cool, man. You know, so that's kind of like the thought process, but the need is there for it. And the reason why I stretch it is growing or recovery and specifically stretches because 80% of people annually report low back pain. So everybody's talking about their backs hurting. 70% report shoulder pain. One in four people report stiffness on a daily basis. One in two people say neck pain. And for adults over 18 years old, we're seeing 50% have some sort of musculoskeletal condition. And that's what you're talking about, right? You have all this dysfunction. And now let's load more. 79% of people feel stressed and we know the stress you can, you can hold it in your body. So there's no more of this, like, oh, it's just a mind thing. No, no, no. Like I remember my mom had ulcers in the nineties because of stress is something you can feel and experience in your body now, you know? And so they struggle with coping mechanisms. Well, just as you can influence something from internal to external, you can also influence from external to internal. Meaning if someone's feeling anxiety internally, they shake externally, I hug them externally, they feel less anxiety internally. So you similarly create that reverse engineering effect. People lose flexibility as they age and our sedentary society and work environment is not helping that. And then we're also seeing that 80% of people, this is a study done in 1981, that people had bypassed her. I'm like, I don't even want to know the numbers now.

SPEAKER_04:

No. With cell phones, we're all like this all the time.

SPEAKER_02:

Legit. Legit. You know? And so... It's sort of embracing it. The fitness culture at the big level have 70% of the health clubs offer some sort of recovery service and or stretch. There's two big franchises in our realm and they're not a negative to gyms. What they're doing is telling the marketplace, hey, this is available and their growth curve is showing that the marketplace is responding with need. You're saying this solves a need. So it's not like we're against them. It's just, you know, they've said they got the money thrown at it. Stretch Lab opened up 500 plus locations and sold over a thousand locations. They're the fastest growing franchise in the exponential brand, as well as in the stretch space. Which is cool. And the benefits are amazing. You know, you know, you're seeing anything from flexibility, range of motion, muscle tension, better circulation, stress, posture, injury recovery, you know, speeds up, you know, performance and sleep quality, which is a huge, huge challenge, you know, that people have and everybody can do it. You know, and so we literally have anywhere from athletes to seniors, you know, that come to get stretched. We've even seen this a lot where people say, you know what, I want to lose 30 pounds, but my body aches. So I'm afraid to exercise. Yeah. So they're like, oh, well, I'll stretch first. And then they convert and upsell it to personal training, you know, which is really cool. So it kind of happened with Drake.

SPEAKER_04:

I see Drake on the screen here.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah. This lady, she points herself as the stretch therapist, but she stretches Drake, which I thought was kind of cool. So it just shows all kinds of celebrities. I mean, anywhere from someone who sings to someone who plays basketball, LeBron here, they're all doing stretching. It's just a need when it comes to movement. You know, so if we can wrap up here with and then I should open up anything else is, you know, kind of mistakes that people do as they start to launch. And I'm going to do these mistakes from a trainer perspective, but I'm going to throw one extra one in there from a gym owner in case gym owners are listening to this podcast perspective. One is just not screening clients. So in the video, I showed this like a. This piece of technology we use, but even before we were using that, we did the overhead squat assessment and we can look and see where their movement dysfunction and based on how they move, that gave us a guide along with the symptoms and things they told us. So how do we go and stretch this person? So if you watch me stretch the same person five times, it may be five different things or five different people may look different just based on how are they moving. So we have to screen people instead of just laying on the table, let me just stretch you through a routine. The other one's not treating stretching like training. And I talked about that earlier. We were like, oh, we'll just do these one-off sessions. Like, oh, like I love getting a massage, but I don't get it as much as I probably could or should because the therapist never treats it like a business. Exactly. They just come, they get stretched, they get a massage, you get their tip, and then I just book whenever I'm in the mood. And so you got to treat it like training. If someone said to you, hey, can you design for me a program? You don't just write a program if you're worth your salt. You're thinking about what are their needs, what do they want to accomplish, what do they have time for, and you build a program. And so similarly with stretching, we say we're going to give you like a recipe or recommendations based on what's going on versus like, Just a one-off thing. The other one is not consistently showing value. Remember, I relate this to being married. I've been married 23 years and I still got to tell my wife every day I love her. When it comes to value, unless you're showing the clients what's happening, whenever you stop being in pain, you don't remember you were in pain. It's just this weirdest thing in our brain, right? You don't remember, when did your finger stop hurting after you slammed it in the door? It just doesn't hurt anymore. So you have to bring that to the client's attention. Like, hey, did you realize that your leg can go up here? This is normal. And I'll say, I don't use terms clients wouldn't get. I don't go, this is normal hip flexion. It's supposed to be between 90 and 120 degrees. I don't say that. Clients don't care. But when I'm doing a straight leg hamstring stretch and their leg doesn't get to 90 degrees, I go, should at least be here, you know, and it's there. And then I'm showing them as they progress, like, wow, look, what far you got, you know, they can see that. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_04:

It's a good lesson for any trainer listening to this, by the way, you have to consistently show value. Like every session is your sales pitch for the next session.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. And it's so in, you know, on the training side, because remember, I have three gyms. So, you know, on the training side, that's where you experience churn and, you know, higher than you expect because you're like, man, I thought everything was going great, but you didn't show them like, you know, hey, pick your chest up. Hey, do this. You know, you got to consistently do that. So I love that idea. The fourth one is pushing too hard, too fast. We see very often that people are so committed to getting, let's say, in this hip flexion example, get in my leg to 90 degrees, but they take me to 90. Remember, I'm not just trying to move the muscles. So we went to an event, and I was a speaker, and there was a couple other people that was in the stretch space speaking, and this one lady who stretched for the Jets. This kid didn't have, you know, and she got him crying on the floor. She's like, it's going to feel better. And we're going to unlock this and break this up and everything else. Well, whenever you put trauma on the body, the brain doesn't say, do that again. So yes, she got the range and he could move, but 24 to 72 hours later, that thing's going to lock up worse than it, than it was before the stretch. Yeah. You know, so, you know, we have to gently get to where we need to go versus just like, oh, we can get it there because we're just going to break up the tissue, you know, like this whole old school, like I want to break up the fascia. Well, we don't want to create that trauma to a system that's communicating through other systems because all it's going to do is build resistance against the thing that created the trauma. Yeah. So, so that's a common mistake that's done. And then the last one is getting stuck in a rut and doing the same thing over and over. Sometimes it's like, oh, okay, this is my routine. So I'm just going to do this same thing in there. So we have to stay flexible. No pun intended there. Go

SPEAKER_04:

ahead. Well done with your pun. That's all. I

SPEAKER_02:

appreciate a good pun. And continue to look at this person like they're new and move around. And then a mistake I see gym owners make all the time is they look at this and they go, wow, this would be great to add into my business. This would be a good way to help my clients, make my trainers more money. And bottom line is because there's not this heavy lift, it literally costs less than$1,000 to get everything you need to to launch a stretch program, there's more profit that ends up in their pocket. But what they do is instead of thinking about like a business, business owners look at what are the systems, i.e. what are the seats on the bus I need to have to get the bus to my destination, and then they figure out who can get on the bus. And what I've seen very often that gym owners make as a mistake is they go, who do I want to do something And then that person becomes a person that controls whether or not they have a program in their gym or not. So they're like, oh, I'm going to talk to my trainers and see if this is something. In 16 years of business, I've never done that. It's my responsibility to cast a vision and my team's responsibility to follow suit. And we have room for dialogue, but then you understand like, hey, this is where we're going and why we're going there. But too often they allow the trainers to kind of lead them. And six months to 12 months later, those trainers are not even in their business.

SPEAKER_04:

That's

SPEAKER_02:

right.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, man, that's such a great point, Evans. And I think why this program is so successful and so valuable to gyms is that you also own gyms and you see it from that gym owner's perspective of like, what does this have to be to be a good solution for a gym owner?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, yeah. Like, you know, I'll show you this in here real quick and just kind of like fast forward through. But like Ayan is, you know, she was I think I have her testimonial here. So when she launched with us, she's the third one down. She said we're at over two thousand dollars in monthly recurrent revenue in less than a week of internal stretch intros. We have a game plan that we help people go through where they're literally you don't do any external marketing until, you know, maybe 12 plus weeks after your program. programs launched. Because remember, you have existing clients, you have former clients, and you have leads. So what's helping them generate revenue is now they're going back within their list and saying, hey, here's something I created that can help you move forward. So a lot of them get a lot of cool results out the gates. Well, Ayan owns a CrossFit, and then she has also a private training studio that's near each other. And she had told me she's doing more stretching through her CrossFit than she does through her personal training studio. That's wild. Love it. Yeah, it's really cool. She's going to be coming to the summit because, you know, because it's kind of like her, it just matches everything. So cool. Yeah, so you really meet her. But then this is her in November. So that first one was in June because she launched in June. Five months later, she says it's been a rough month for training memberships, but Stretch just went over 9,000 in the monthly recurring revenue, you know, which is really cool.

SPEAKER_04:

That's so important. I mean, because a lot of, a lot of GMOers just believe like the more heads in the door, the more money you make. The reality is it's like the product that people want determines how much money you make. And sometimes that attracts people. And sometimes it adds onto the people that's there. So very cool, man.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of great success stories, but I'll stop the slide here, open up for, you know, any questions that you have. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Well, what I want to talk about is like, like how hard is this? to bolt on because, you know, let's face it. We've worked with a lot of gyms, like thousands of gyms and gyms will see something like nutrition coaching, for example, or online coaching. And they'll think, Oh, this is just going to be additive. I'll add it to what I'm currently offering. And then they realize that it's a lot of work. I got to get somebody credentialed. I got to maintain this certification. Maybe I've got to pay a dietitian to oversee what I'm doing. And I'm only working with three, four clients. So like, You know, the certifying body's making money. I'm not. Maybe the coach is, but I'm not. Like, how do you make it the juice worth the squeeze? Absolutely. So

SPEAKER_02:

for us, when we license a gym, it includes certifying up to 20 people in a year from that gym. For the same cost. For the same cost. That's wild. So we do the independent certification. So any trainer can come and get an independent certification. But literally, if they're within your gym, you can license up to 20 people. Now, most people don't ever need up to 20 people. And you go, Evans, why do you do so many people? Don't you? Well, my goal in the license is that you don't have to worry about trainer turnover. You worry about like, oh, what if Johnny leaves? Well, when Joe comes, Joe can get certified and you can pick it up from there. So that's one portion that we help that makes it. And then we break up the license over the course of a year. So you're not, you know, just having this huge uptick in there. And then on top of that is we're working, you know, so everything's designed to be very low cost to grow, right? So we don't take a percentage of your revenue or anything like that. We have a fixed cost for the license. And then we train your team. We literally fly out to you. So you do an online portion for two weeks. And in that long portion, they're going to get familiar with all the language. By the time we show up, we shouldn't be like fascia. I'm like, what is fascia? We literally stretch you or your team in the weekend. That's 15 hours of stretching. Wow. Yeah. You know, so you're just getting those reps in because what's most important is touch. You know, we talk about going too far, too fast, hand placement, you know, all kinds of things. We even think about like we've stretched anywhere from children, you know, and I'm, you know, 5'11", you know, big black guy, so to speak. And then you have this little girl who's eight years old, you know, you know, it's kind of like, how do you do that? And mom doesn't freak out, you know, kind of thing, you know, just like I have a little girl, you know, so we teach like proper hand play How to do this, how to do this. And they just get their reps in with it. And then we have continued education available online. As long as they're in your ecosystem, they have access to all those kind of things. So our whole thing is that the team that you have, you can use those same people to deliver the service. So you don't have to. You pay out. We teach. Everybody does it a little bit different, but we teach. You pay the same training rate than you do for anything else. So you don't go like, oh, well, now you're stretch certified. Let me give you a specialty certification. Right. You know, so different, you know, licensees have had turnover with their staff and they're able to just put a new person in and get them going. And then let's say. Let's say I'm going out to your gym and someone else is a licensee. They can bring one of their people into that certification, no extra cost. They just pay to get their person there because, you know, I'm paying for that. And then as far as proficiency, what's important is at the end of the certification, the last hour, you have to do a 50-minute stretch with a real client. Wow.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So whatever gyms you're in, let's say you have 10 people that's getting certified, we ask you to invite 10 clients from your existing client list to come and get stretched. And we run a really cool marketing play with that too, where they're inviting, they're telling their existing client, hey, we're looking for 10 people to volunteer. Let's say you're 10, right? The goal is to get about 40 people who are interested. And the 10 are typically your 10 early adopters.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, because they're going to get a 50-minute stretch, which is worth probably about$120, minimum$100 to$120 is the value of that 50-minute stretch. So they're going to get that. And we get testimonials, marketing. We do a lot of stuff with that 50-minute stretch. So you have content to reuse and repurpose. Well, the other, let's say there's 40 people, the other 30 people, we call them and we book consultations. So what you do is reach out to all those people and say, hey, we only had a room for 10. You weren't one, but what we're going to do for you is give you a free stretch consultation. And so we teach in the certification how to do the sales as well, because some people, the challenge for the gym owner, right? We think, oh, if we get this program, we're going to make money. Well, here's the deal. I've done a lot of different certifications. You know what they didn't do? Was tell me how to sell it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That was always the missing mark, right? You know, like it was like, Oh, I got this new nutrition, sir. Just, you know, now you have it, go out there and help people. Well, the missing mark is like, you have to teach them how to sell it. So, so we teach the sales end, you know, to everybody on staff, like 100% of my staff does sales for stretching, you know? Yeah. I can

SPEAKER_04:

remember. I got my, I think I got my CSCS. I'm going to say 98, maybe 99. And, you know, day one, you're like so excited. I am a highly credentialed trainer now. What do I do? How do I get a client? How do I make money at this, right? It's wild. And quite often, you know, my professors at college would come back with, well, I guess you go get a master's. Oh, okay. Got it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Then it just rains money as soon as you got your

SPEAKER_02:

master's. Yeah. And the big challenge is that none of your clients even know what a CSC is. No. You work for college. No, exactly. They're like, okay, so can you help me? Yeah, exactly. All those things to help them put it in place. But then you have 30 consultations. And that's the reason why you see these really big revenue numbers, like two grand of money in a short period of time, is because by the time we finish the certification, that next week had already pre-booked a bunch of consults from the people. who signed up, meaning they raised their hand for interest, but they didn't get the spot. So now we have a bunch of consults that we book right into. And because they learned sales, they just close them. So funny story with Ayan is that she's never stretched one person in her gym and she's never done a consultation. Wow. Yeah, it's kind of cool. You know, so she built a system now that drives revenue and that's the business ownership. You know, that's perfect.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

And it's a great example of making an investment into your business because you pay for this thing once and then it just keeps paying for you. And honestly, the way you've got this set up, Evans, it sounds like the ROI on it is just way better than you'd get from anything else for a few reasons. Number one, you can certify 20 trainers. So it's not a case of like Johnny got the nutrition cert and then Johnny left. Number two is like you have a waiting batch of clients who are already interested. And number three, your staff knows how to sell it. That's a huge missing piece in most gyms. Even if the staff knows how to deliver the product to a 10 out of 10 level, the owner is usually required to come in and sell it. So if the staff know how to sell it, that's amazing, man.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Two things with that real quick is that we decided to do the, you stretch real people because obviously, All the certifications I've ever done, you've only practiced it on fitness people. So we noticed, even for myself, my team would leave a certification, come home, and their confidence would nosedive because those weren't real people. Everybody else was in the cert all weekend long, and they almost cued them through it. But the person that comes in, you have to do 50 minutes with, builds the trainer's confidence dramatically because they're like, okay, I did this with someone who has no clue what this is. which was really important. So that was something that we kind of dialed into it, which is good.

SPEAKER_04:

Well, Evans, I'm a huge fan of this. I also love, I love this, that you're not going out there and buying a Stretch Lab franchise, that you can add this onto your gym with your model, your community, your coaches, without making that massive franchise-y investment. You're going to be at Summit? Yes. Shaking hands, meeting people. That's so awesome.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

And we're going to get you into the two brain marketplace too. But for those listening who are not part of two brain or who are going to miss summit, how can they get ahold of

SPEAKER_02:

you? Oh, just www.cnustretch.com. Okay. Beautiful. If you put your stuff in there, literally pings right into my cell phone.

SPEAKER_04:

Wow. You are seconds away from talking with Evans Armstrong right now. Um, Okay, man. Well, thank you. We're going to do this again for sure. There are so many questions that are going to pop up from the Strength Coach Collective community about this. And I think that you're a great resource. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. All right, man. So we're going to wrap there. CNUStretch.com. I will have that in the show notes if you're interested in chatting with Evans. In the meantime, if you join strengthcoachcollective.com, you'll get into our free group for coaches so that we can help you build careers and talk to experts like Evans. Thanks, man.