Ep. 6: Chris Davidson

James Clasper: Hello, and welcome to Dad Mode Activated, the podcast celebrating fatherhood after 40. I'm your host, James Clasper, and here I talk to fellow late bloomers about the unique joys and challenges of becoming a dad later in life.

My guest this week is Chris Davidson, a 48-year-old dad of three and a lifestyle and fitness coach to tired, busy, over forties. As Chris puts it, he helps people over 40 fix their messed-up body, shapes, hormones, and lifestyle habits so they can look and feel great again.

And as this is the final episode of the season, we're gonna do something a little different. Instead of talking about the joys and challenges of fatherhood after 40, we're gonna discuss how dads over 40 can get “match fit” through realistic and sustainable lifestyle changes, including the importance of sleep, nutrition, and consistency in exercise. Chris, welcome to Dad Mode Activated.

Chris Davidson: Hi. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

James: Chris, let's suppose you're on a flight somewhere and you've got a nosy neighbor in the seat next to you. They ask you who you are and what you do, and you're in a good mood, so you play along. What do you say?

Chris: I suppose I lead a double life in the sense that I have an in-person training business here in Northern Ireland where I train people in person, just like a personal trainer, but then recently I've kind of branched out into online content stuff. So I do my own podcast sometimes and some videos and write some articles too. But it's very much focused on helping guys my age and over, so I'm 48, so it's very much focused on guys 40 and over to help them get in shape in quite realistic and doable ways because once kind of kids come into play, I have three teenagers, once they come into play, then a lot of stuff that we read about online or just in books, that will work in theory for people that have as hectic a life as guys in their forties with kids do. So everything I try and do is to try and simplify things and boil it down to here's the minimal amount of stuff for you to do for your health and fitness.

James: Your accent's a bit of a clue, but I don't wanna assume anything. Where are you, where are you based?

Chris: I am in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. I grew up here. I lived in London for five years too, when I had to soften my accent a little bit, obviously, because then no one could understand a word I said. Then, since I've moved back, it's become a lot stronger. Having said that, my wife is Canadian, and so sometimes I need to soften my accent too, so she can understand me as well.

James: Brilliant. Now listen, you've got a business with a terrific name. Tell me what it is. It's a very cute acronym.

Chris: It's OFFA coach, OFFA coach, and OFFA stands for Over Forty Freaking Awesome. It didn't used to be Freaking, when I first was coming up with ideas, it was the swearword version, starting with F. I kind of calmed that down so it wasn't getting into people's spam. But I suppose the whole reason is that I want people to see their forties and over as a time when you can thrive and look, and feel awesome as opposed to a time when you've kind of peaked, and it's all downhill from here,

James: So why, why the focus on the over forties, besides you being one yourself?

Chris: Well, I suppose that it felt like we were like an underserved audience because a lot of the things that we were kind of bombarded with, like I said, will work for people in their twenties and thirties guys with lots more time and energy, and sky-high testosterone. It felt that when I hit my forties and I was reading online advice about how to get fitter and stronger or lose weight, I knew for a fact that, yes, that may well work for someone who doesn't have kids, who isn't in their forties, but at our age, life is getting a little bit harder in terms of just purely being busier, having more things to juggle, but also maybe our bodies start to argue with us a little bit and we need to be more mindful than that to avoid trying to do things that make our bodies angry as opposed to helping us kind of get in shape.

James: I like that way of putting it. Many days my body wakes up angry and it's, what have I done to put it in a bad mood? But in all seriousness, what is it that happens once we hit 40. I mean, it's obviously not a kind of an overnight thing, but there or thereabouts different things start happening to our bodies. What are they?

Chris: Well, some of them are natural and are unavoidable and other things are avoidable, but we kinda shoot ourselves in the foot because of how life is after 40. So the unavoidable stuff is that from about our late thirties onwards, our natural testosterone production starts to decrease slightly, and as much as people think about testosterone as libido and sex drive and stuff, it’s more kind of just a man's force. It helps your metabolism run smoothly so that you can burn off body fat or avoid gaining weight anyway. And it helps you build muscle whenever you start working out in the gym. And it helps to kind of keep your mood and motivation stable. So we get a little bit older, as I say from our late thirties, that starts to decrease slightly, and we can’t avoid that, which is why you don't see guys in their eighties with massive muscles because eventually circle of life and all that, we get lower testosterone. That decrease happens only by about 1% per year from our late thirties. The issue is that from a lot of our lifestyle habits because we're so tired and busy after 40, that decrease in testosterone production decreases at a much faster rate, and therefore we're much more likely to start suffering from low testosterone symptoms, as you might see it referred to online, which is just gaining weight faster than before, despite not necessarily changing how and what you've been eating, feeling like your muscles, certainly through your limbs, your arms and legs are getting wasting away a little bit. You feel skinnier, and just a bit more a grumpy demeanor as well, and all those three things tend to be caused by low testosterone.

James: So the grumpy old man persona is real.

Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And as I say, some of it is self-inflicted. We can kind of, we can increase our testosterone back to where it should be at our age.

James: Okay. So well then the million-dollar question is, what can we do about it? And what are you doing, through your work, to help guys once they hit 40 to kind of address those issues?

Chris: I suppose I try and encourage guys to get away from seeing getting in shape as a kind of project, as something that is kind of, okay, I'm gonna do this for six weeks, or I'm gonna do this for 12 weeks. Like something that they've maybe seen online. If it feels like a project that tends to be you're doing something that's quite unrealistic in terms of volume, like in terms of workouts or eating in a weird way. And then by the end of that project, you're desperate to stop kind of doing those things. You don't wanna go back to the gym again because you're sick looking at the place or you don't want to eat healthier foods because you've been craving the things that you want for weeks and weeks and weeks. And so I always encourage guys to take a sort of “slow and steady wins the race” approach to things. You may not necessarily get the wonderful transformations overnight like you see online, but if you can start just inserting some doable, healthier lifestyle habits into your life, then things will start moving in the right direction. And I suppose the main one, and we mentioned testosterone there a minute ago, that's just one of a few hormones that we need to try and balance so that our bodies and minds smoothly. So I normally try and encourage guys to prioritize their sleep because sleep very much is the mental and physical recovery time that we need to things ticking along. Now, that can be a challenge, obviously, if you have young kids. You may want to sleep eight hours a night, your kids probably have other ideas, as I'm sure you find with, I know you have young kids. But certainly by prioritizing sleep, that helps our metabolisms to kind of keep ticking along so we burn through whatever food we eat and it also helps us with that kind of natural testosterone production, and then when it comes to healthier eating, again, trying to get away from eating in a special way on a short-term basis, but instead looking at how you eat and noticing where are you possibly shooting yourself in the foot. Are you snacking on too much rubbish between meals? Are you drinking maybe a bit of alcohol in the evenings? Those two things tend to add a lot of calories and just, as I say, shoot ourselves in the foot. Then when it comes to exercise, again, go down this road of some hardcore workout program. Think: looking at my kind of week, my weekly schedule, how can I foreseeably exercise in some way, whether that's a walk or a workout, or even some mobility and stretching. How can I do that more days than not? Even if it's only 10 or 15 minutes a day, how can I insert that? And obviously none of those three things, the healthier eating, the sleep, and the being more active are necessarily big news. Everyone knows these things, but it's taking a bit of time, I suppose, to figure out where can I personally insert those things into my life, regardless of the plan or the program that I've found online, that's not my life. My life as potentially a dad in his forties is a lot different. So you need to kind of come up with your own customized approach to ticking those things off.

James: Obviously any exercise is great, whether that's walking or running or whatnot. But is there something distinct about, you know, the aging body and the importance of muscle mass, which means that, you know, for someone that maybe does a kind of a 5K at the weekends or, you know, they kind of get a few lengths in at the pool, while those are great forms of exercise, actually kind of holding onto muscle mass is what's gonna become more critical and therefore kind of strength training is maybe more important. Is that a kind of a fair assessment?

Chris: Yeah, it's fair enough. You're right. A kind of easy way to feel like you're exercising is to do some cardio, whether that's walking or running or swimming or something like that. And that is great. It's great for heart health. It's good just for stamina, for getting through life. And it helps you to burn off some calories. But that’s aerobic fitness. There's also anaerobic fitness, which is doing something for a shorter period of time until the point that either your lungs, because you can do it for sprints, or some muscle group gives up and tells you I've had enough. And that's the type of exercise that isn't particularly comfortable and therefore guys tend to shy away from it if it's a choice between going for a run or going to lift some weights, going for a run is easier and that's what tends to win. But you're right, if we ignore that kind of strength training and anaerobic resistance training muscle as we get older becomes a “use it or lose it” thing, which is why my grandfather, he was in his eighties, he just had a simple, fairly innocuous fall, but he broke a hip and he broke a hip because his muscle mass had wasted away for decades. So he wasn't particularly well held together. He was just like a bag of bones. And we can fight against that by making sure that we give our muscles a reason to hang around. So not just going to the gym thinking I'm going to build big muscles. I'm not gonna look like prime Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's just thinking I need to do this, so for longevity and mobility and to kind of keep thriving in my forties and fifties and sixties because I'm well held together, I'm a kind of fit, strong specimen trying to fight against that muscle wastage as best you can. And even just to retain that muscle, it's only really about 45 minutes a week you need to find, to keep those muscles under tension , challenging them, trying to push beyond what your body really wants to do for a wee while.

James: You know, for me, you know, this is the kind of the crux of it because I think it, it, it feels like in the culture there's, it's almost like a meme, you know, when you become a kind of a middle-aged dad, you're meant to accept the dad board and the, the middle-age spread. And you can let yourself go at this point. By the same token, you know, the idea of lifting weights has this, as you say, this kind of, you know, body builder image. And it feels like those are both, almost cultural ideas that are really hard, you know, to kind of overcome. And what I love about, you know, your work is you're trying to kind of push back against those ideas in a way and saying, actually no, like this is really serious. This is why you kind of need to be thinking about this aspect of your health.

Chris: You're right. It tends to be, people have this kind of all or nothing approach. Either I'm doing nothing and I'm kind of embracing the dad board and leaning into kind of making fun of your belly and stuff like that and letting yourself go, or this feeling that, well, if I'm gonna work out, I need to become a man who becomes obsessed with the whole thing, I need to live some fitness lifestyle, I need to be chugging protein shakes every half an hour because that's what we see online. And yes, finding a middle way to say there's anything wrong with wanting to look good. We all have egos. There's nothing wrong with wanting to look good on the beach or in shorts and t-shirts or something on holiday, but that first you're doing this so that you are a useful human being.

You can run around and lift your kids and grandkids even as you get older. That's like a life thing. This is why you should be doing it. Any kind of aesthetic benefit is another huge payoff. But that shouldn't be your main focus.

James: Yeah. Now speaking of protein shakes, I'm somewhat guilty now of using these because I learned that, you know, as part of this attempt to combat the loss of muscle mass, you know, as I get older, as we get older, we need to be increasing our protein intake and it's tricky enough to kind of get enough protein, you know, through regular sources, especially if you're cooking for young kids, I'm not gonna be slapping down, you know, filet mignon, in front of them every evening. So it’s kind of introduced me more broadly to the world of supplements and it's critical that even if we have a pretty good diet, there comes a point when you start to need to supplement it in different ways. So, tell me, what are the most important supplements that you think guys in their forties and older should be thinking about and some that are promoted heavily through social media that are actually, you know, snake oil or, or not far off it.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of them around, but as you know, there's a new one every week I think on social media. You're right, the main one that I normally recommend to people, for guys who are starting to work out and do some strength training, is just maybe just a scoop of protein powder. Just whey protein powder every day, because that gives you 30 grams of protein. If you can be aiming for around a hundred grams a day, then you'll be fine. You'll, see coincidentally supplement companies telling you you need 200 grams a day, preferably by buying their massive five kilo sacks of protein powder. But if you can get a hundred grams a day of protein, you'll do great. And so that means a high protein breakfast, lunch and dinner plus a scoop of protein, you'll get there quite easily. Then all of the others, really certainly for guys over 40, I recommend a supplement called ZMA. Sounds fancy. It's literally just zinc, magnesium, and vitamin B6. So you don't even have to buy it as ZMA. You can just buy those three things separately. But the reason the three of them go so well together for guys over 40 is that zinc helps our natural testosterone production. So as well as kind of getting enough sleep and looking after yourself, low zinc kind of holds you back a little bit. So the ZMA gives you the zinc. The magnesium is a good one for sleep and mental and physical recovery. So, if again, if you're working out, it helps with physical recovery, but also mental recovery, it helps you kind of people, they give it the kids now for anxiety and stuff like that, but it's excellent to take some magnesium about half an hour before bedtime because it helps to switch on your melatonin melatonin’s like your sleepy hormone, it helps you nod off to sleep and it helps you get into a deeper sleep. So it's very much a natural sleeping aid that doesn't necessarily, I mean, some sleeping pills, you're groggy the next day for hours. Magnesium just helps you nod off to sleep, you stay in a deeper sleep, but you wake up quite refreshed. And then there's vitamin B6 in ZMA too, which just helps with all round. So ZMA is probably the main one. Everything else that you see out there is really a kind of case by case basis. You don't wanna go down the road of taking a supplement for something that just fixing your lifestyle could help you do for free. So taking a supplement that lowers stress, well, you could just get more sleep or take some steps to lower the stress in your life. Same with taking B vitamins for energy. Again, just get some sleep and eat plenty of vegetables. There are some things that I've taken myself. I take fish oil every day because I find that again after 40 my joints would feel a little bit achy in the morning, like fish oil, I found just taking a couple of capsules a day helps you feel a little more, a bit more limber in the morning. But other than that, really it's worth kind of being very mindful of whenever you see a supplement pushed online as being this wonder supplement, the only thing you need. If you look into the ingredients, more often than not the studies or the proof behind it's, it's fairly sketchy. They'll bill something that helps you sleep as a testosterone booster because theoretically if you get more sleep, that will increase your testosterone. So it's, yeah, it's just being very wary of things. There's very few supplements that you need. They should be supplementing a healthy lifestyle.

James: The thing about having a healthy lifestyle, right, is that all of these things have to work in lockstep. So it's about the exercise and it's about nutrition, and it's about the supplements and, and one thing alone may be good, but the three working together and we should include sleep. So all of it working together, ideally.

Chris: Yes, rather rather than looking for a kind of magic bullet approach, there's not one supplement's gonna fix your life and your body shape. There's no one diet, there's no one workout. But it's much easier to believe that you just need one thing because it feels like this huge, steep slope to build whatever a healthy lifestyle is. When if you look at your current life and it's a bit of a shit show. If you've got like your house is a mess, you keep forgetting to do grocery shopping, you've never got time to work out, your sleep's terrible, then having to fix all of that is fairly daunting. So if someone says, well, just take this supplement or just jump on this keto diet or something like that, that'll fix everything. And that's why we continually get sucked into things that we're probably deep down know it's not gonna work, but we give it a crack anyway, just in case because it feels, as I say, it feels like such a daunting, huge task to fix your whole life. And I suppose that's what I try to do. I try to convince guys, it's not as big a task as you think. By all means it would be wonderful if some weeks you were sitting down to a super healthy breakfast, lunch and dinner, you were working out four times a week, you were getting eight hours of sleep and things like that. But that's not to say that working out twice a week, cutting out crap in the evenings and doing your best with sleep isn't gonna get you halfway there quite quickly.

James: Yeah, it all kind of reminds me of the philosophy of marginal gains, right?

Chris: Yeah. And a lot of people, even if they look at their own careers, instead of looking at health and fitness in isolation, they know deep down that anything good in their life has happened because they stuck with something and did a little bit. Often enough it's the same, even with parenting. My kids are in their teens now, but with parenting, there's no one big lecture or big life talk that I've given one of my teenage sons that's caused him to see life in this new way. Thanks, dad, what a wonderful speech. That never happens. It tends to be reinforcing just things like kind of drive-by bits of advice reinforced over and over and over again. And it's the same with people's careers. They've probably got to where they are now by staying in the game, doing the right things over and over again.

James: Okay. So then let's talk about some of your work. So tell me about some of your clients and start by telling me who they typically are.

Chris: Locally, people actually in here are all shapes and sizes. Men and women, mostly between 30 and 60, but certainly the OFFA coach, online coaching, tends to be guys in their forties and fifties who are drawn to me because they've read something I've written or they've watched a video. If they listened to a podcast and they always say the same thing. It's, I like your approach. This is the approach that I didn't think would work for me because I keep on spinning my wheels, trying some morning bootcamp classes, or cutting out bread and sugar for my whole life or something like that. So they get in contact because they like my approach and they tend to be professionals, busy jobs, still have kids, ranging between quite young kids and all the way up to teenagers or sometimes they've even left for college now. And they've started to feel a few warning signs, I suppose. In some cases their doctors said, you need to look after yourself better, in most cases it's just they're starting to feel less able. They went out last weekend and they tried to do some yard work and clearing up the back garden and their back went “Ping” or they realized they couldn't lift things as easy as they could, or they went away for a weekend with their wife and they realized they had no stamina to just walk around and do some sightseeing. So life more often than not has given them a kick up the arse to say: you need some help with this. And so I help them kind of from the ground up, kind of build, “Well, let's look at your life and your needs. Well, here's what we could do with workouts.” So there's no, I don't tend to have a cookie-cutter program that everyone does. I do focus on the same things in terms of being more active, eating more healthly, taking the right supplements, having a plan and having an evening routine around your sleep. How we customize that for the individual's life changes. But we definitely need to tick off all of those things for the individual. And once we get on multiple fronts in a sustainable way, like a doable way, that they look at it and it doesn't feel that daunting, they can literally think, I can do that every single week, even if my life is completely hectic. Even if work is hectic, I can do that and I can do that week in, week out and then the payoffs happen. But it's just consciously knowing that they're in this for the long term. No one's coming to me for a six-week transformation program because I don't do those things. So it tends to be guys that are ready to admit, okay, the six-week magical solution isn't gonna work. I need long term help with this.

James: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And can you give me a success story or two? Perhaps someone who you've worked with who has young kids, a father in their forties. Someone who kind of looked at their situation and thought, okay, I, I know I need to do something, and they came to you looking for help. 

Chris: Well, there's a guy, I just trained this morning here locally, Tim, he has two kids. They are six and nine, and he said something funny, he realized his kids were like sticking their fingers in his belly, like making fun of it. And he was laughing it off, but then he said after a few months he realized it's not that funny. I don't want my kids potentially drawing pictures of me in class. And I'm the one with the belly. So there was a bit of embarrassment almost that, his kids saw them as almost like a Homer Simpson-type character. And it coincided too with him noticing pictures of himself on holiday, again, skinny legs, skinny arms, but a guy kind of pot belly. And he said that like looking at his dad, like that's how he remembered his dad's body shape. So it's things like that brought him to me and again, the same as the goals for online coaching clients. He just wanted a way of not having to become some fitness nut, but how do I fit in enough of this kind of weight training and resistance training to change my body shape? How do I adapt my own family's diet a little bit so that I can start losing weight, but we're not having to go down the road of either me having to find lots and lots of healthy meals that my kids will eat or me having to prepare my own diet meal. And then just another few lifestyle habits and supplements And so bit by bit he's lost, yeah, he's lost 12 pounds now. Didn't have a huge belly, but it was definitely pokeable by his kids, like I said. So he's lost that now and he kind of has visible arm muscles and stuff, something he thought that was in his past. He's 46. He's a little bit, younger than me. But the point he makes is that he didn't really see it happening. It's been so incremental there were times when he thought, I don't think this is working because every morning he looks at himself and he still looks the same. And that's because with fat loss, you need to be okay with understanding you’re maybe losing like a millimeter every couple of days off your belly. And the same with strength. You're only getting a little bit of strength and a little bit of muscle but you need to stay in the game for long enough and obviously. Because I'm seeing him I can help him track that with body part measurements, measuring around his arms to see if he's getting muscle and measuring around right around the belly button to see if he's losing weight while also jumping on the scales every now and again without necessarily trusting the scales, 'cause scales tend to be temperamental sometimes, but certainly he's seen huge changes in his body shape. He's obviously very happy about this, but as I said, he was just very surprised how incremental it was because he'd fallen down that rabbit hole before of trying to fix everything in four weeks so he didn't have to do it again, where now he's leaning into he'll stop training with me one to one, and I'll get him on a program he can do in his own time, but with choosing exercises that I've taught him. So we're gearing up to that kind of “go and fly by yourself now” because I've helped you get on the straight and narrow.

James: Yeah, you mentioned that he had thought about his own father and maybe something has changed in the culture that, you know, even though we've got the persistence of, you know, the dad bod and the Homer Simpson meme and, our generation is different, right? I mean, it feels different. Do you agree?

Chris: Absolutely. I mean, I'm 48. Whenever I look back to when my dad was my age, he just looked like a dad. I have the vision of him sitting on the corner of the sofa with TV, with a snack and probably a tin of beer or something, and he was very much leaning again to the kind of dad bod territory. I certainly think our generation wants to be more active and involved with our kids, even probably wants to continue looking quite good to even fashion choice. My dad from about his early thirties was dressing like a dad and kind of sensible jumpers and things like that. I think even our generation wants to continue looking decent into their forties and fifties too. And obviously being a healthy weight and having a good body shape that we're proud of feeds into that too. So, no, certainly I think we want to look and feel good for as long as we can and we kind of see the dangers probably 'cause if you have aging parents who have leaned into that letting themselves go in middle age, they tend to start, at my age anyway, having health issues and stuff too. And then you think, oh, if I follow that same path that my father took, I may well have those same health issues too. So, no, I think you're right, but that's a generational shift, certainly.

James: Yeah. So I want to, get some advice from you for someone who's listening and thinking, okay, so where do I start? But, what's a mistake that you think you see quite often? What's something that someone over 40 kind of might do that you think, ah, you know, that's, no, no, that's a bad idea.

Chris: It tends to be, and it's a uniquely male thing, obviously being too gung-ho, straight away, going, trying to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour, overnight. And so if someone isn't currently working out, thinking okay, I'm gonna start working out five times a week, 'cause I found this super muscle-building strength workout online. And at the same time, I'm also gonna try and lose my belly by following this very restrictive diet, too. Those things may well work, but they're just not gonna work in your life. Because if you look at how much spare time and how much spare energy you have, that’s too much, too many new things, too many new plates to start spinning in your life. So it's trying to harness, harness the motivation that's got them to the point of thinking, right, I'm gonna do this. I'm really gonna go for it, but helping them to dial it down and think, Well, let's start off kind of building slowly and just ticking things off the list. So by all means, one day you may well be able to do five workouts and follow some magical diet, but let's take these tiny steps and make sure that we can nail these tiny steps over and over again first and then build from there. And so that's why sometimes I don't even with clients tell them a specific number of times a week to work out. I’ll tend to say five times a week either go for a walk or do a short workout. It's up to you. It's entirely up to you. At this point in these kind of first few weeks where you're trying to build the habits, it's just used to interrupting your life each day to do something for your fitnes or strength. Once you nail that turning up multiple times a week thing, then we can start looking at, well, if you're gonna go to the gym, here's what workout you should do. Or if you wanna push yourself harder on the stamina front, what we should do. And the exact same thing with the diet of things too. You may well look down and think, right, I wanna lose 20 pounds and I want to lose it in a couple of weeks, you can't lose four or five pounds of body fat every week without starving yourself. And so it's being happy with, can I find a way of still eating the same meals I currently do? Maybe dialing up the protein a little bit, but maybe just cut out anything that's not a meal. If it's not breakfast, lunch and dinner, don't eat. Even if you're hungry, you'll be fine. We wouldn't have survived as a species for very long you can't survive for two hours without eating something. And then certainly in the evening time, don't have any kind of extra wee meal planned called supper where you have a cup of tea and some biscuits or a glass of wine and some toast and stuff. You're just doing that out of entertainment rather than hunger, and it's curtailing your fat-loss efforts or it's forcing you to gain weight. So more often than not, I tell people just eat three meals a day as high protein as you can. Nail that and then see what happens. You may well just lose body weight like that, in which case, happy days, w don't need to change anything, but if we do need to do something else, then, then we can tweak it there, once you've built those habits of grazing on food all day and turning off the calories after dinner.

James: What other tips would you have for someone that's thinking, where do I start, what should I do?

Chris: I would say certainly prioritize sleep, try and have a hard stop by what time you go to bed, even if you don't feel tired, because that sleep gives you extra energy and motivation the following day to make those better decisions. There's certainly a correlation between having a crap night's sleep and the next day feeling super snacky and wanting lots of sugary things and wanting to indulge because you think you deserve it because you're tired. So number one, sleep. Sleep fixes an awful lot of things. Then when it comes to exercise, the hardest thing is just started and so a lot of people will procrastinate on getting started by building it up into a big project, like I said, and so they'll think, well, I don't wanna start exercising until I've researched all the different weights, workout programs or cardio programs. And then I'll need to research all the local gyms. Maybe I need to visit all the local gyms too, and have a taster session. It's all just procrastination. And so I say to people, just get your shoes on and get out the door and start walking. Just get used to being more active than you currently are. That also walking helps you kind of untie a few knots in your brain too and figure some things out. So walking and sleep, as obvious as those sound, are two of the best things you can do to get started in terms of mindset and just getting your body primed to more than that eventually. But just don't try and do too much too soon.

James: And last question then. So, someone who's heard this thinks, all right, let me hear more from Chris. Where should they go? Where can they find you?

Chris: Well, I have a website, OFFA coach. That's www.offacoach.com. There's various free programs on there too, whether it's a kind of beginners weights work program or a kind of fairly simple approach to fat loss and there's programs that are about how to reset and get your life set up to kind of stick with all this. Or people just reach out by email to chris@offacoach.com, just with any questions. I get emails all the time from people just with random questions and always happy to help, certainly.

James: That's been brilliant, Chris. Thank you so much for this wonderful interview today.

Chris: Cool. It's been good to talk to you.    

James: This episode was produced and hosted by me, James Clasper, for Archipelago Audio. The music’s by Pete Morrison. For more stories and inspiration, head to dadmodeactivated.co. And if today's show resonated with you, please consider leaving a nice rating or review, or better yet, share the episode with someone who might enjoy it. Until next time, keep your dad mode activated.