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EP 11 : Consistency is the Key with Eric Chessen Highlight
Eric Chessen is the founder of Autism Fitness. He's an exercise physiologist with an extensive background in applied behavior analysis. And Eric has been working with the ASTM population of all ages for nearly 20 years. Eric is on a mission to help kids with Autism he has extensive work with individuals with developmental disabilities with a specific focus on young individuals (4-21) with an autism spectrum disorder. Particular emphasis on program and curriculum instruction and implementation of adaptive fitness programs as well as staff training. Innovative problem-solving techniques. Strong abilities in group settings.
Listen, create awareness, and be motivated with Eric Chessen.
Episode Highlights
Ari [00:07:10] Well, very, very cool. I mean, you know, it's it's an unusual thing to choose to work with a population that a lot of people are kind of scared of. They think you are. Oh, yeah. The autism population is too delicate, maybe or fragile to work with. So I want to just for for everybody, like give me a story of an experience that you've been able to produce in one of your clients and just kind of like the love that they've been able to give back. Based on what you've been able to do for them. So any kind of kind of story about an experience, you know, that you've had.
Eric [00:10:17] And it didn't mean he was performing the exercises perfectly and that and that everything was great. It just meant, you know, he was on task enough that he could learn and that he could he could progress so that for for myself and me as a coach and a practitioner, that that was a major victory. And, you know, for his family as well to to earn that trust and to understand that this is something really important in his life, to have me work with him for four, 12 years as well until I relocated and then to, you know, to have him work with another coach after that, who I trained. But on on a larger scale and looking from the perspective of what we're doing with autism, fitness, what I wasn't doing, I wasn't going in there and waving my magic wand and saying, well, now you're having fun and now you like exercise. What I was doing was taking that the concepts and principles and strategies that at the time I was I was learning and just starting to develop into a system and be able to integrate that and have a successful outcome, which is the same thing now in teaching the certification course and in educating other people and consulting. Having other people have those results is the real merit test for for validating that the curriculum itself. Because if it's just me doing it and it's just the Eric Chessen super autism fitness magic show, that's fine for the athletes that I work with. But what do we do on a larger scale? But if it's if we can replicate it and there are other coaches and practitioners who can use the work for their athletes, then then we are doing something that that really is world changing.
Eric [00:14:38] What I mean by that is I think it's shifted and shifted for the better in terms of a lot more programming's being a lot more programing, being focused on quality of life now, which is good, especially for a program like mine, because we're dealing with quality of life in terms of physical health as well. So the conversation has shifted and I think the focus now is is a little better. What I think that one of the biggest issues is the difference between knowing something and doing something about it. You know, if if we asked a room of 200 people, how many of you think is physical activity is important for the best quality of life. Now, one hundred and ninety nine hands go up and no one not because they just want to argue. Right. Which is fine. But it's actually enacting those processes and those strategies, and that's the thing about what we do with autism fitness also is that I didn't have to invent anything in terms of the exercises. You know, we're using presses and squats and crawling patterns and hurdle steps and medicine ball throws. I don't have to invent anything. And I don't necessary hurdle or obstacle was not. We don't know what exercises are good. It's how do you implement these for this population?
Ari [00:16:05] You know, it sounds like like there's a lot of cognitive benefit that may be a side benefit to the physical movement, especially if you're doing things like cross crawling, activating both sides of the brain with the movement, activating balance, that there's going to be a cognitive shift as well in in those that population. It sounds to me like you're having quite an effect on cognition as well as just knowing motor response. Or can you know Kinney's.
Eric [00:19:28] Number one is prioritize. Someone can give as much lip service as they want to fitness or anything else. But if it's not made a priority, then, you know, when is it going to happen? So, again, it's you know, I can have 100 hands raised in a room. How many people think it's important? Right. But how many people are actually doing it? And you're going to see dwindling numbers of hands there. Number two is consistency. We in our program, we win with consistency, and that's across the board with consistency with the exercises can just consistency with the teaching methodology, consistency with the coaching and cueing and the language that we use. And three is you can only work with what you're observing. So we have a saying in our program. We have many things in our optimum fitness program. It's no what you're looking at, which which means from all three areas, physical, adaptive and cognitive. So know what you're looking at with respect to the movement pattern. Know what you're looking at in terms of level of motivation and what we need to do to support behavior and know what you're looking at in terms of the individual's ability to understand and act on the directions that we're giving them.
Resources and Links
- https://autismfitness.com/
- https://www.facebook.com/eric.chessen
- https://CreateANewTomorrow.com
- https://www.facebook.com/arigronich
Full Transcription
Ari&EricChessen1.mp3
Ari [00:00:00] Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results. We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians, Paralympians, A-list actors and Fortune 1000 companies. If I did not get results, they did not get results. I realized that while powerful people who controlled the system want to keep the status quo. If I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as a chat with industry experts. Elite athletes thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down.
Ari [00:00:50] I'm Ari Gronich and this is. Create a new tomorrow podcast.
Ari [00:01:01] Hey, everybody, this is Ari Gronich with the Create a New Tomorrow podcast. We're here with a good friend, Eric, who is an autism fitness expert.
Ari [00:01:13] That is a really unusual thing for somebody to be an autism fitness expert. So I'm going to kind of give you a little bit about Eric Chessen. He is the founder of Autism Fitness. He's an exercise physiologist with an extensive background in applied behavior analysis. And Eric has been working with the ASTM population of all ages for nearly 20 years. So, Eric, what are you kind of give us a little bit of background as to who you are and why you chose this particular niche, which is your niche to choose.
Eric [00:01:50] Thanks. All right. Sure. So I started out as many in the industry who went on to work with niche populations as a personal, young, very green personal trainer working with general population. And at the same time, I was doing graduate studies in behavior analysis. And in one of those, I believe it was a principles of human behavior class. I had a classmate who was the director of a program for teens on the autism spectrum in New York City. And she said, hey, I know your personal trainer. You're in this behavioral science class. Would you be interested in developing some fitness programs for our curriculum? We've never had a dedicated fitness program. We've tried some sports activities. It hasn't really gelled, hasn't really worked out. So over the course of our discussion, I decided to apply to become part of part of this small research program. And they liked what I had to say. I started working with the individuals in the program. And one thing that was really important about my early experience was that I was not working with individuals who would be considered high functioning or highly motivated or very on task. And it set the foundation for everything that I would develop later, which was you have to have a system that accounts for nearly any any possibility. So as I continued developing my my craft or my skill set in this program, an opportunity came along. I had a behavior analyst who contacted me. I forget how it must have been based on something that I wrote. And she said, I usually do early intervention, you know, three and four year olds. I just took on two new cases, these two twelve year old boys. I have no idea what to do with them. Do you think you could help out? So I said, yeah. I think I can. So those became my my first two athletes outside of the program that I was working at. And at the time, I found when I started performing any type of research and I put that in quotes of best practices for integrating fitness programs for the autism population. I found very little. What I found was vague and general. At best it was fitness programs are important for all populations, special needs, populations included, which not much to take action on there. So what I realized was there was this large gap in in practices or disciplines. So you have the the world of fitness and physical activity, strength and conditioning and and movement. And it's not. It's not visible to the autism world, meaning families and other practitioners, behavior therapists, speech pathologist, etc..
Eric [00:05:00] So I thought, well, I don't I don't I can't profess to say that I ever actually had this specific thought. But it occurred to me over time that there was something to having an interdisciplinary background where I can speak. When I talk about autism, fitness now, we can speak many different languages so we can talk about fitness with respect to how we can improve movement quality and strengthen stability. But we can also talk about behavioral challenges and how we can integrate positive behavior support, how how we can increase fluency of speech, how we can integrate speech targets. So we speak to all of these different professionals and caretakers, including parents, family members who are involved with or caring for or or serving the autism population. And we look at fitness as a gateway and a foundation for both short and long term optimal development. So from so I've been running programs for, I guess I guess around 15 years at that time. And then I met David Blumen, who is my business manager, and we launched our autism fitness certification level one in May 2017. And now worldwide, we have over how many is over 400? Thirty, I believe, autism, fitness certified pros. And we're just looking to create our mission is called the Movement for Movement. So the idea and the goal is to have fitness programs and adapted P.E. programs accessible to the whole of the autism population, regardless, again, of age or or ability level. So that's where we're at now. And then back in in early March, in fact, March 1st. My my wife and I relocated from New York, which was my home for over thirty nine years, to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I'm speaking to you from now.
Ari [00:07:10] Well, very, very cool. I mean, you know, it's it's an unusual thing to choose to work with a population that a lot of people are kind of scared of. They think you are. Oh, yeah. The autism population is too delicate, maybe or fragile to work with. So I want to just for for everybody, like give me a story of an experience that you've been able to produce in one of your clients and just kind of like the love that they've been able to give back. Based on what you've been able to do for them. So any kind of kind of story about an experience, you know, that you've had.
Eric [00:07:54] Sure. Well, one of my one of those two boys who I mentioned, who I was working with originally back in the first or second year that I started my business, our first few sessions wound up on the floor with me protecting him from banging his head into a hard tile kitchen floor. And so that was that was definitely the most shocking, one of the more challenging situations that you can be in, particularly with this population, because we're looking right there. We're looking at a one hundred percent. This is a safety intervention right now. And I had I had worked with him, you know, from from that point for 12 years after that also. And to have him eventually develop to the point where he began mastering some of the most challenging exercises that we have in our autism fitness curriculum is doing Schoop throws with a medicine ball. So learning hinge mechanics, his squat pattern is getting better also. And it's not just about the the exercises or the physical benefit or the development of the physical skills. It's definitely about that, because that's what we're that's where it worked to achieve. But going from a place where were we have to be very considerate of severe self injurious behavior to a point where an athlete is largely motivated to participate. Definitely shows that something good is happening and that something has changed. And the biggest success for me now out of that, the biggest success was the fact that Fidelity, after several sessions and some and a few interventions, and it's not to say that it was always 100 percent unicorns and rainbows in our session. But to go to that point, which was a real concern to a point where I would go over and you would understand the expectation and we would go through all the exercises that we needed to go through and everything was cool.
Eric [00:10:17] And it didn't mean he was performing the exercises perfectly and that and that everything was great. It just meant, you know, he was on task enough that he could learn and that he could he could progress so that for for myself and me as a coach and a practitioner, that that was a major victory. And, you know, for his family as well to to earn that trust and to understand that this is something really important in his life, to have me work with him for four, 12 years as well until I relocated and then to, you know, to have him work with another coach after that, who I trained. But on on a larger scale and looking from the perspective of what we're doing with autism, fitness, what I wasn't doing, I wasn't going in there and waving my magic wand and saying, well, now you're having fun and now you like exercise. What I was doing was taking that the concepts and principles and strategies that at the time I was I was learning and just starting to develop into a system and be able to integrate that and have a successful outcome, which is the same thing now in teaching the certification course and in educating other people and consulting. Having other people have those results is the real merit test for for validating that the curriculum itself. Because if it's just me doing it and it's just the Eric Chessen super autism fitness magic show, that's fine for the athletes that I work with. But what do we do on a larger scale? But if it's if we can replicate it and there are other coaches and practitioners who can use the work for their athletes, then then we are doing something that that really is world changing.
Ari [00:12:04] Absolutely. So it sounds like you're creating a movement which is part of. What create a new tomorrow is about, meets with people and their passions. You have over 400 people that you've trained in this system who are now getting the opportunity to have an effect on thousands and thousands and thousands of a population that were previously unserved, as you know. I'd like to pick fights, so I'm going to pick a fight with the system itself. What have you seen as one of the largest obstacles inside of the system as it is and the training of the system, both in fitness and in all the other forms of medical care that you're you're looking for other practitioners? Like if you had a behavior in a speech therapist and, you could refer to regular basis that are as qualified as you are in what you do for that population. What would what would you consider to be the biggest obstacle in that system?
Eric [00:13:14] I think having a largely reactive model and we can talk about this in terms of certainly the Western medical system, and I think it's gotten it's gotten a lot better with preventative care. In my experience and of course, this is only my experience when I first started out the buy in for or the interest in fitness for this population. Was not there. Not very high. I don't think people had an understanding of what fitness really is and what physical act, the benefit, the benefits of physical activity. And there's is a conversation I've had numerous times with colleagues, the fact that programing for the autism population at two decades ago, definitely even even a decade ago, was largely focused in the the academic and also in the very. I suppose we could say almost vocational. So it was all you know, it was all skill development. It was all this kind of rote, if not rote, rote memory, but just read a lot of repetition with no real, I think, overarching goal as far as a fully developed human being.
Eric [00:14:38] What I mean by that is I think it's shifted and shifted for the better in terms of a lot more programming's being a lot more programing, being focused on quality of life now, which is good, especially for a program like mine, because we're dealing with quality of life in terms of physical health as well. So the conversation has shifted and I think the focus now is is a little better. What I think that one of the biggest issues is the difference between knowing something and doing something about it. You know, if if we asked a room of 200 people, how many of you think is physical activity is important for the best quality of life. Now, one hundred and ninety nine hands go up and no one not because they just want to argue. Right. Which is fine. But it's actually enacting those processes and those strategies, and that's the thing about what we do with autism fitness also is that I didn't have to invent anything in terms of the exercises. You know, we're using presses and squats and crawling patterns and hurdle steps and medicine ball throws. I don't have to invent anything. And I don't necessary hurdle or obstacle was not. We don't know what exercises are good. It's how do you implement these for this population?
Ari [00:16:05] You know, it sounds like like there's a lot of cognitive benefit that may be a side benefit to the physical movement, especially if you're doing things like cross crawling, activating both sides of the brain with the movement, activating balance, that there's going to be a cognitive shift as well in in those that population. It sounds to me like you're having quite an effect on cognition as well as just knowing motor response. Or can you know Kinney's.
Eric [00:16:40] I'm I'm certain that we do in some respects. The tricky part is not overestimating or over qualifying something that that's happening. So I only speak to what the observable universe that we have in front of us because I don't know what that's going to look like for each athlete. And I talk about this in our Level one certification with respect to when we break everything down. The system that I created is called the PAC profile. So it's physical, adaptive and cognitive. And from a cognitive perspective, we can see an increase in cognitive functioning during the fitness session. We have to be really careful in discussing what we're talking about because it's not as though we're saying, OK, well, we're doing 10 medicine ball throws and then three cone touches and then they're going to raise their IQ, you know, four points. But what we're looking at is the individual's ability to start making some some associations and contingencies between a direction. So I say, OK, go do a 20 rope swings and they go over and they pick up the ropes because they know they they are able to match my language, in the words unamusing with the recall of what they're supposed to be doing. So the cognitive effect, though, I'm sure it there's some there's a beneficial outcome there. What I can't start going into is whether it's specific or whether it's general. Because, again, when you're dealing with individual, I don't know what that's gonna look like for every individual, especially when we're talking about our our non-verbal population. But there is there's I think there's enough good research in the neurotypical population demonstrating that exercise does have a positive effect on certain areas of neurological functioning, that we could take that information and say, you know what? It's probably true for the autism and other developmental disabilities as well.
Ari [00:18:47] Absolutely. So we're we're going to wrap this up a little bit. I ask everybody on the show to give some actionable steps that people can take today. And, you know, in this case, we'll talk to the parents, the trainers, the therapists, the people who deal specifically in this population or to what is what are three actionable steps that they can do if they're passionate about working with or supporting this population. What can they do to be of of more support workers?
Eric [00:19:28] Number one is prioritize. Someone can give as much lip service as they want to fitness or anything else. But if it's not made a priority, then, you know, when is it going to happen? So, again, it's you know, I can have 100 hands raised in a room. How many people think it's important? Right. But how many people are actually doing it? And you're going to see dwindling numbers of hands there. Number two is consistency. We in our program, we win with consistency, and that's across the board with consistency with the exercises can just consistency with the teaching methodology, consistency with the coaching and cueing and the language that we use. And three is you can only work with what you're observing. So we have a saying in our program. We have many things in our optimum fitness program. It's no what you're looking at, which which means from all three areas, physical, adaptive and cognitive. So know what you're looking at with respect to the movement pattern. Know what you're looking at in terms of level of motivation and what we need to do to support behavior and know what you're looking at in terms of the individual's ability to understand and act on the directions that we're giving them.
Ari [00:20:37] Awesome. Thank you so much. What? Where can people get a hold of you? What are some of the ways that somebody who's listening to this can connect with you?
Eric [00:20:46] Our main Web site is autismfitness.com. And across the board, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. It's the autism fitness. And I do a lot of I have started on them again. I do a lot of live chats where I answer people's questions. We put a lot I have we have a lot of videos on our YouTube channel that not only demonstrate the exercises, but some of the insight as to why we're doing something or what we're looking for. And for those who want to dove in and become autism fitness certified level one, pros on autism, fitness dot com. You can look at the certification page. You can download our course syllabus. Our next course begins. I believe so. Timber 20th.
Ari [00:21:38] Cool. Sounds good.
Ari [00:21:41] I really hope that people will come and check you out just as an added benefit to those that if you specialize in any fitness or medical training. Your average income goes up by approximately 60 percent. So for anybody who's on the fence, who's thinking, I'd like to do a general fit as I like to just do the general work. You can actually earn approximately 60 percent more for doing the same work and you'll have the reward of working with a population of people that you can really, truly have a massive effect on. And so that to me is a great benefit. Thank you so much, Eric, for coming on the show. Thank you. I am going to sign off now. This is Ari Gronich. And this was another episode of Create a New Tomorrow. I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you next time. Thank you.
Ari [00:22:46] Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you.
Ari [00:22:53] If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world, go to the Web site, createanewtomorrow.com and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you. Just for checking it out.
Ari [00:23:11] And look forward to seeing you take the leap. And joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.
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By Ari Gronich
4.9
4242 ratings
Eric Chessen is the founder of Autism Fitness. He's an exercise physiologist with an extensive background in applied behavior analysis. And Eric has been working with the ASTM population of all ages for nearly 20 years. Eric is on a mission to help kids with Autism he has extensive work with individuals with developmental disabilities with a specific focus on young individuals (4-21) with an autism spectrum disorder. Particular emphasis on program and curriculum instruction and implementation of adaptive fitness programs as well as staff training. Innovative problem-solving techniques. Strong abilities in group settings.
Listen, create awareness, and be motivated with Eric Chessen.
Episode Highlights
Ari [00:07:10] Well, very, very cool. I mean, you know, it's it's an unusual thing to choose to work with a population that a lot of people are kind of scared of. They think you are. Oh, yeah. The autism population is too delicate, maybe or fragile to work with. So I want to just for for everybody, like give me a story of an experience that you've been able to produce in one of your clients and just kind of like the love that they've been able to give back. Based on what you've been able to do for them. So any kind of kind of story about an experience, you know, that you've had.
Eric [00:10:17] And it didn't mean he was performing the exercises perfectly and that and that everything was great. It just meant, you know, he was on task enough that he could learn and that he could he could progress so that for for myself and me as a coach and a practitioner, that that was a major victory. And, you know, for his family as well to to earn that trust and to understand that this is something really important in his life, to have me work with him for four, 12 years as well until I relocated and then to, you know, to have him work with another coach after that, who I trained. But on on a larger scale and looking from the perspective of what we're doing with autism, fitness, what I wasn't doing, I wasn't going in there and waving my magic wand and saying, well, now you're having fun and now you like exercise. What I was doing was taking that the concepts and principles and strategies that at the time I was I was learning and just starting to develop into a system and be able to integrate that and have a successful outcome, which is the same thing now in teaching the certification course and in educating other people and consulting. Having other people have those results is the real merit test for for validating that the curriculum itself. Because if it's just me doing it and it's just the Eric Chessen super autism fitness magic show, that's fine for the athletes that I work with. But what do we do on a larger scale? But if it's if we can replicate it and there are other coaches and practitioners who can use the work for their athletes, then then we are doing something that that really is world changing.
Eric [00:14:38] What I mean by that is I think it's shifted and shifted for the better in terms of a lot more programming's being a lot more programing, being focused on quality of life now, which is good, especially for a program like mine, because we're dealing with quality of life in terms of physical health as well. So the conversation has shifted and I think the focus now is is a little better. What I think that one of the biggest issues is the difference between knowing something and doing something about it. You know, if if we asked a room of 200 people, how many of you think is physical activity is important for the best quality of life. Now, one hundred and ninety nine hands go up and no one not because they just want to argue. Right. Which is fine. But it's actually enacting those processes and those strategies, and that's the thing about what we do with autism fitness also is that I didn't have to invent anything in terms of the exercises. You know, we're using presses and squats and crawling patterns and hurdle steps and medicine ball throws. I don't have to invent anything. And I don't necessary hurdle or obstacle was not. We don't know what exercises are good. It's how do you implement these for this population?
Ari [00:16:05] You know, it sounds like like there's a lot of cognitive benefit that may be a side benefit to the physical movement, especially if you're doing things like cross crawling, activating both sides of the brain with the movement, activating balance, that there's going to be a cognitive shift as well in in those that population. It sounds to me like you're having quite an effect on cognition as well as just knowing motor response. Or can you know Kinney's.
Eric [00:19:28] Number one is prioritize. Someone can give as much lip service as they want to fitness or anything else. But if it's not made a priority, then, you know, when is it going to happen? So, again, it's you know, I can have 100 hands raised in a room. How many people think it's important? Right. But how many people are actually doing it? And you're going to see dwindling numbers of hands there. Number two is consistency. We in our program, we win with consistency, and that's across the board with consistency with the exercises can just consistency with the teaching methodology, consistency with the coaching and cueing and the language that we use. And three is you can only work with what you're observing. So we have a saying in our program. We have many things in our optimum fitness program. It's no what you're looking at, which which means from all three areas, physical, adaptive and cognitive. So know what you're looking at with respect to the movement pattern. Know what you're looking at in terms of level of motivation and what we need to do to support behavior and know what you're looking at in terms of the individual's ability to understand and act on the directions that we're giving them.
Resources and Links
- https://autismfitness.com/
- https://www.facebook.com/eric.chessen
- https://CreateANewTomorrow.com
- https://www.facebook.com/arigronich
Full Transcription
Ari&EricChessen1.mp3
Ari [00:00:00] Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results. We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians, Paralympians, A-list actors and Fortune 1000 companies. If I did not get results, they did not get results. I realized that while powerful people who controlled the system want to keep the status quo. If I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as a chat with industry experts. Elite athletes thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down.
Ari [00:00:50] I'm Ari Gronich and this is. Create a new tomorrow podcast.
Ari [00:01:01] Hey, everybody, this is Ari Gronich with the Create a New Tomorrow podcast. We're here with a good friend, Eric, who is an autism fitness expert.
Ari [00:01:13] That is a really unusual thing for somebody to be an autism fitness expert. So I'm going to kind of give you a little bit about Eric Chessen. He is the founder of Autism Fitness. He's an exercise physiologist with an extensive background in applied behavior analysis. And Eric has been working with the ASTM population of all ages for nearly 20 years. So, Eric, what are you kind of give us a little bit of background as to who you are and why you chose this particular niche, which is your niche to choose.
Eric [00:01:50] Thanks. All right. Sure. So I started out as many in the industry who went on to work with niche populations as a personal, young, very green personal trainer working with general population. And at the same time, I was doing graduate studies in behavior analysis. And in one of those, I believe it was a principles of human behavior class. I had a classmate who was the director of a program for teens on the autism spectrum in New York City. And she said, hey, I know your personal trainer. You're in this behavioral science class. Would you be interested in developing some fitness programs for our curriculum? We've never had a dedicated fitness program. We've tried some sports activities. It hasn't really gelled, hasn't really worked out. So over the course of our discussion, I decided to apply to become part of part of this small research program. And they liked what I had to say. I started working with the individuals in the program. And one thing that was really important about my early experience was that I was not working with individuals who would be considered high functioning or highly motivated or very on task. And it set the foundation for everything that I would develop later, which was you have to have a system that accounts for nearly any any possibility. So as I continued developing my my craft or my skill set in this program, an opportunity came along. I had a behavior analyst who contacted me. I forget how it must have been based on something that I wrote. And she said, I usually do early intervention, you know, three and four year olds. I just took on two new cases, these two twelve year old boys. I have no idea what to do with them. Do you think you could help out? So I said, yeah. I think I can. So those became my my first two athletes outside of the program that I was working at. And at the time, I found when I started performing any type of research and I put that in quotes of best practices for integrating fitness programs for the autism population. I found very little. What I found was vague and general. At best it was fitness programs are important for all populations, special needs, populations included, which not much to take action on there. So what I realized was there was this large gap in in practices or disciplines. So you have the the world of fitness and physical activity, strength and conditioning and and movement. And it's not. It's not visible to the autism world, meaning families and other practitioners, behavior therapists, speech pathologist, etc..
Eric [00:05:00] So I thought, well, I don't I don't I can't profess to say that I ever actually had this specific thought. But it occurred to me over time that there was something to having an interdisciplinary background where I can speak. When I talk about autism, fitness now, we can speak many different languages so we can talk about fitness with respect to how we can improve movement quality and strengthen stability. But we can also talk about behavioral challenges and how we can integrate positive behavior support, how how we can increase fluency of speech, how we can integrate speech targets. So we speak to all of these different professionals and caretakers, including parents, family members who are involved with or caring for or or serving the autism population. And we look at fitness as a gateway and a foundation for both short and long term optimal development. So from so I've been running programs for, I guess I guess around 15 years at that time. And then I met David Blumen, who is my business manager, and we launched our autism fitness certification level one in May 2017. And now worldwide, we have over how many is over 400? Thirty, I believe, autism, fitness certified pros. And we're just looking to create our mission is called the Movement for Movement. So the idea and the goal is to have fitness programs and adapted P.E. programs accessible to the whole of the autism population, regardless, again, of age or or ability level. So that's where we're at now. And then back in in early March, in fact, March 1st. My my wife and I relocated from New York, which was my home for over thirty nine years, to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I'm speaking to you from now.
Ari [00:07:10] Well, very, very cool. I mean, you know, it's it's an unusual thing to choose to work with a population that a lot of people are kind of scared of. They think you are. Oh, yeah. The autism population is too delicate, maybe or fragile to work with. So I want to just for for everybody, like give me a story of an experience that you've been able to produce in one of your clients and just kind of like the love that they've been able to give back. Based on what you've been able to do for them. So any kind of kind of story about an experience, you know, that you've had.
Eric [00:07:54] Sure. Well, one of my one of those two boys who I mentioned, who I was working with originally back in the first or second year that I started my business, our first few sessions wound up on the floor with me protecting him from banging his head into a hard tile kitchen floor. And so that was that was definitely the most shocking, one of the more challenging situations that you can be in, particularly with this population, because we're looking right there. We're looking at a one hundred percent. This is a safety intervention right now. And I had I had worked with him, you know, from from that point for 12 years after that also. And to have him eventually develop to the point where he began mastering some of the most challenging exercises that we have in our autism fitness curriculum is doing Schoop throws with a medicine ball. So learning hinge mechanics, his squat pattern is getting better also. And it's not just about the the exercises or the physical benefit or the development of the physical skills. It's definitely about that, because that's what we're that's where it worked to achieve. But going from a place where were we have to be very considerate of severe self injurious behavior to a point where an athlete is largely motivated to participate. Definitely shows that something good is happening and that something has changed. And the biggest success for me now out of that, the biggest success was the fact that Fidelity, after several sessions and some and a few interventions, and it's not to say that it was always 100 percent unicorns and rainbows in our session. But to go to that point, which was a real concern to a point where I would go over and you would understand the expectation and we would go through all the exercises that we needed to go through and everything was cool.
Eric [00:10:17] And it didn't mean he was performing the exercises perfectly and that and that everything was great. It just meant, you know, he was on task enough that he could learn and that he could he could progress so that for for myself and me as a coach and a practitioner, that that was a major victory. And, you know, for his family as well to to earn that trust and to understand that this is something really important in his life, to have me work with him for four, 12 years as well until I relocated and then to, you know, to have him work with another coach after that, who I trained. But on on a larger scale and looking from the perspective of what we're doing with autism, fitness, what I wasn't doing, I wasn't going in there and waving my magic wand and saying, well, now you're having fun and now you like exercise. What I was doing was taking that the concepts and principles and strategies that at the time I was I was learning and just starting to develop into a system and be able to integrate that and have a successful outcome, which is the same thing now in teaching the certification course and in educating other people and consulting. Having other people have those results is the real merit test for for validating that the curriculum itself. Because if it's just me doing it and it's just the Eric Chessen super autism fitness magic show, that's fine for the athletes that I work with. But what do we do on a larger scale? But if it's if we can replicate it and there are other coaches and practitioners who can use the work for their athletes, then then we are doing something that that really is world changing.
Ari [00:12:04] Absolutely. So it sounds like you're creating a movement which is part of. What create a new tomorrow is about, meets with people and their passions. You have over 400 people that you've trained in this system who are now getting the opportunity to have an effect on thousands and thousands and thousands of a population that were previously unserved, as you know. I'd like to pick fights, so I'm going to pick a fight with the system itself. What have you seen as one of the largest obstacles inside of the system as it is and the training of the system, both in fitness and in all the other forms of medical care that you're you're looking for other practitioners? Like if you had a behavior in a speech therapist and, you could refer to regular basis that are as qualified as you are in what you do for that population. What would what would you consider to be the biggest obstacle in that system?
Eric [00:13:14] I think having a largely reactive model and we can talk about this in terms of certainly the Western medical system, and I think it's gotten it's gotten a lot better with preventative care. In my experience and of course, this is only my experience when I first started out the buy in for or the interest in fitness for this population. Was not there. Not very high. I don't think people had an understanding of what fitness really is and what physical act, the benefit, the benefits of physical activity. And there's is a conversation I've had numerous times with colleagues, the fact that programing for the autism population at two decades ago, definitely even even a decade ago, was largely focused in the the academic and also in the very. I suppose we could say almost vocational. So it was all you know, it was all skill development. It was all this kind of rote, if not rote, rote memory, but just read a lot of repetition with no real, I think, overarching goal as far as a fully developed human being.
Eric [00:14:38] What I mean by that is I think it's shifted and shifted for the better in terms of a lot more programming's being a lot more programing, being focused on quality of life now, which is good, especially for a program like mine, because we're dealing with quality of life in terms of physical health as well. So the conversation has shifted and I think the focus now is is a little better. What I think that one of the biggest issues is the difference between knowing something and doing something about it. You know, if if we asked a room of 200 people, how many of you think is physical activity is important for the best quality of life. Now, one hundred and ninety nine hands go up and no one not because they just want to argue. Right. Which is fine. But it's actually enacting those processes and those strategies, and that's the thing about what we do with autism fitness also is that I didn't have to invent anything in terms of the exercises. You know, we're using presses and squats and crawling patterns and hurdle steps and medicine ball throws. I don't have to invent anything. And I don't necessary hurdle or obstacle was not. We don't know what exercises are good. It's how do you implement these for this population?
Ari [00:16:05] You know, it sounds like like there's a lot of cognitive benefit that may be a side benefit to the physical movement, especially if you're doing things like cross crawling, activating both sides of the brain with the movement, activating balance, that there's going to be a cognitive shift as well in in those that population. It sounds to me like you're having quite an effect on cognition as well as just knowing motor response. Or can you know Kinney's.
Eric [00:16:40] I'm I'm certain that we do in some respects. The tricky part is not overestimating or over qualifying something that that's happening. So I only speak to what the observable universe that we have in front of us because I don't know what that's going to look like for each athlete. And I talk about this in our Level one certification with respect to when we break everything down. The system that I created is called the PAC profile. So it's physical, adaptive and cognitive. And from a cognitive perspective, we can see an increase in cognitive functioning during the fitness session. We have to be really careful in discussing what we're talking about because it's not as though we're saying, OK, well, we're doing 10 medicine ball throws and then three cone touches and then they're going to raise their IQ, you know, four points. But what we're looking at is the individual's ability to start making some some associations and contingencies between a direction. So I say, OK, go do a 20 rope swings and they go over and they pick up the ropes because they know they they are able to match my language, in the words unamusing with the recall of what they're supposed to be doing. So the cognitive effect, though, I'm sure it there's some there's a beneficial outcome there. What I can't start going into is whether it's specific or whether it's general. Because, again, when you're dealing with individual, I don't know what that's gonna look like for every individual, especially when we're talking about our our non-verbal population. But there is there's I think there's enough good research in the neurotypical population demonstrating that exercise does have a positive effect on certain areas of neurological functioning, that we could take that information and say, you know what? It's probably true for the autism and other developmental disabilities as well.
Ari [00:18:47] Absolutely. So we're we're going to wrap this up a little bit. I ask everybody on the show to give some actionable steps that people can take today. And, you know, in this case, we'll talk to the parents, the trainers, the therapists, the people who deal specifically in this population or to what is what are three actionable steps that they can do if they're passionate about working with or supporting this population. What can they do to be of of more support workers?
Eric [00:19:28] Number one is prioritize. Someone can give as much lip service as they want to fitness or anything else. But if it's not made a priority, then, you know, when is it going to happen? So, again, it's you know, I can have 100 hands raised in a room. How many people think it's important? Right. But how many people are actually doing it? And you're going to see dwindling numbers of hands there. Number two is consistency. We in our program, we win with consistency, and that's across the board with consistency with the exercises can just consistency with the teaching methodology, consistency with the coaching and cueing and the language that we use. And three is you can only work with what you're observing. So we have a saying in our program. We have many things in our optimum fitness program. It's no what you're looking at, which which means from all three areas, physical, adaptive and cognitive. So know what you're looking at with respect to the movement pattern. Know what you're looking at in terms of level of motivation and what we need to do to support behavior and know what you're looking at in terms of the individual's ability to understand and act on the directions that we're giving them.
Ari [00:20:37] Awesome. Thank you so much. What? Where can people get a hold of you? What are some of the ways that somebody who's listening to this can connect with you?
Eric [00:20:46] Our main Web site is autismfitness.com. And across the board, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. It's the autism fitness. And I do a lot of I have started on them again. I do a lot of live chats where I answer people's questions. We put a lot I have we have a lot of videos on our YouTube channel that not only demonstrate the exercises, but some of the insight as to why we're doing something or what we're looking for. And for those who want to dove in and become autism fitness certified level one, pros on autism, fitness dot com. You can look at the certification page. You can download our course syllabus. Our next course begins. I believe so. Timber 20th.
Ari [00:21:38] Cool. Sounds good.
Ari [00:21:41] I really hope that people will come and check you out just as an added benefit to those that if you specialize in any fitness or medical training. Your average income goes up by approximately 60 percent. So for anybody who's on the fence, who's thinking, I'd like to do a general fit as I like to just do the general work. You can actually earn approximately 60 percent more for doing the same work and you'll have the reward of working with a population of people that you can really, truly have a massive effect on. And so that to me is a great benefit. Thank you so much, Eric, for coming on the show. Thank you. I am going to sign off now. This is Ari Gronich. And this was another episode of Create a New Tomorrow. I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you next time. Thank you.
Ari [00:22:46] Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you.
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Ari [00:23:11] And look forward to seeing you take the leap. And joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.