The FITSPRO Podcast

Mobility came on the fitness scene in large thanks to CrossFit. Perhaps you disagree or perhaps that is even untrue. But in 2011-2013 CrossFit was booming and thus came a large demand and need for mobility in the fitness industry. People like Kelly Starrett with Supple Leopard, and resources like ROMWOD mobility became more advisable than ever (from my experience and perspective). To my knowledge, mobility has been an important part of sports like weightlifting for decades. But was not as aggressively integrated into general strength training.

Here’s the deal, mobility is, in short, your active range of motion.

This is in contrast to flexibility which is your passive range of motion. Sitting in the middle splits is your passive range of motion, while sliding down into and back out of the middle splits is your active range motions. Can your muscles get you into and out of your end ranges? As you can imagine from these definitions, flexibility is the potential for mobility. For instance if you can’t get there passively, then you more than likely won’t be able to get to or past that point actively.

Why does all of this matter for putting on muscle and/or gaining strength?

I am guessing you’ll have more questions after listening to this podcast than when you came into it. But I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing. I will do my best to keep it clear and concise, providing disclaimers where needed. I say that because this is not black and white. So, stay curious, and keep context in mind as we move forward.

For starters, it comes down to muscle fiber recruitment.

One could think of range of motion as the practical use of mobility within weight lifting. Range of motion is simply the distance traveled from start to finish of an exercise. Are you lowering all the way down in pull ups, are you squatting ass to grass? These would be considered FULL range of motion (or ROM).

I hope you can see that if you lack mobility in a given area, you may be limiting your potential range of motion in a given lift. This is not the end of the world, most people have mobility restrictions and can still put on plenty of muscle. I don’t wish to scare you or over complicate this.

Why does range of motion matter for strength or hypertrophy? We answer these questions because they CAN BE connected. Muscle mass is the potential for strength. Muscle is the how the body will eventually demonstrate strength (force production).

So now we ask how we build muscle. As discussed on many episodes, there are three main factors - being mechanical tension (this is most important), metabolic stress, and muscle damage. We will be thinking about mechanical tension and maybe muscle damage.

For a muscle to contract, muscle fibers are recruited. Number of muscle fibers recruited and strength of a contraction are positively correlated. Meaning more fibers = higher contraction. This is what we are after both for strength and hypertrophy.

That is also where range of motion comes in. Within range of motion, the muscle is lengthening - this is known as the eccentric phase. That means the shortening phase only has to contract within the range the muscle was lengthened. That also limits the fibers which are recruited. More range of motion has the potential to mean MORE FIBERS recruited. And that means more potential mechanical tension and muscle damage. Ideally, with proper load, recovery, and diet, muscle cell growth or strength gains.

Think about body building and the idea that they want to stress a given muscle from as many angles as possible. The literal point of this is to maximize motor unit recruitment and fatigue.

It’s no secret that since November 2020, Instagram added another type of content for all of us to create and consume. Many people did not get access to this feature for nearly a year to my knowledge. But I believe most users have access to both consuming and creating reels at the time of this recording.

For the past month and a half, I did a little experiment with creating only original content on reels. And that was because although it’s really fun to use trending audios and voiceovers, it’s very short-lived content. And I think I’ve talked about this before. But that means that I’m depending on somebody else’s audio more likely than not. So if that audio is removed then I lose that Reel. And it doesn’t make sense on other platforms like original content does. For me that looks like blog posts and Pinterest. Obviously if you are using TikTok and then taking that content and using it in a Reel, then that makes sense for dual use content. But that simply doesn’t apply to me. So for an extended period of time I created only original content, to see how it stood up against unoriginal content, and how it was received by my audience.

Today we are going to talk about trends, whether you should follow trends, creating original content and the benefits of that, as well as the benefits of creating with trends. But by the end of this episode I just hope that you have some efficacy behind the choices that you make in regards to creating real‘s content if that something that you feel you need to do for your business or something that you want to do.

What are Reels?

As of now reels are short form video content. They can be literally anything. I’ve even seen people lately posting a single photo as a graphic on reels. like a one second photo that then repeats over and over and over again because that counts as views or time spent viewing that particular reel. Now, I don’t think that is a good tactic from a business standpoint or a creator standpoint. Because as a consumer I don’t enjoy consuming that. So it’s not going to get liked and it’s not going to get shared. That’s my current perspective on this but maybe I just haven’t seen someone use the tactic in a way that makes sense in my opinion.

Timing

Again, at this point these videos can go up to 60 seconds. But I honestly don’t suggest that. And I want to bring your attention to a point that I repeat a lot when speaking on any aspect of business and marketing. And that is the fact that I encourage you to observe yourself as a consumer. How long are the reels that you typically watch in their entirety? Why do you watch those ones? Are there a lot of transitions? Is it entertaining? How did they grab your attention? These are all questions that you can ask yourself while you consume content in order to then use that data and apply it to your own creation process.

I still want you creating more often than you are consuming. But I do think that it benefits us to organically take and content on the app and see what trends are happening, as well as what is appealing to us as a consumer.

So strictly speaking from my own experience I tend to only watch Reels that are definitely under 30 seconds. More often than not under 15 seconds.

No matter how long the Reel is that you were creating be sure to keep transitions very quick. There should be no space before or after you starting or ending a sentence. So if it is an organic piece of content - An original piece of content, then be sure to cut your clips very very clearly and concisely so that they butt up to each other with no gaps.

So that kind of wraps up this idea of timing. And duration of content. Attempt to keep it short,

Training plateaus are going to happen the longer you have been training for. That’s the joy of newbie gains - in that season, which can last years, you are able to make noticeable adaptations on a monthly if not weekly basis.

And when that time ends, you have likely hit a training plateau. Meaning that you are unable to increase load lifted for a given amount of reps. Or you’re unable to increase volume at a given load. Basically nothing new is happening, and it feels like you aren’t making progress. Thus, a plateau.

Luckily training plateaus are part of the process, and not the end of the world.

If you haven’t taken a deload week, that is my first suggestion before getting fancy with anything, or adding more training stimulus to yourself. If you are not making gains with your current programming and you are pushing yourself, I assume deload would be the way to go.

Doing a deload allows the body and mind time to recover from training that has happened over the past weeks and months. Not only your muscular system, but also your central nervous system. During a deload week it’s not that you do nothing, but lower the volume and intensity of the work that you’ve been doing. These workouts should not be taxing. The point is to keep yourself moving, but not going away the taxes the body or requires adaptation. Which is what we want from our normal training, right? We are applying different stimuli to the body in order to require an adaptation that builds muscle or results in better movement patterns, better mobility, higher work capacity etc. etc.

So rather than adding anything, my first suggestion is always a deload week. Do less to hopefully be able to do more.

If you have done a deload week and or have been implementing deload weeks and you are still hitting a training plateau, then you have a few other options.

Play with tempo, variation, and range of motion. These are in contrast to playing with things like volume. Which we will discuss later.

When playing with tempo, you will likely have to lower the load whether you are making the tempo faster and working on power and velocity, or slowing it down and increasing overall time under tension. Both of these scenarios require a lighter load for maximum power output and development, or obviously increasing that time under tension.

I also want to go back to the idea that less is more.

So while I might play with a variable like tempo, I am not necessarily increasing or decreasing tempo on every single lift within a work out and therefore a training phase. I may just play with tempo on one or two exercises per day to give the body a new stimulus.

Variation in range of motion kind of go hand-in-hand. So sometimes if a client is plateauing on say a dead lift or a sumo deadlifts, I might implement sumo deadlifts from a deficit on their sumo deadlifts today, and maybe rack pulls or pin pulls from a limited range of motion on conventional deadlift day. The deficit on sumo day pushes the range of motion, and it also gets after that posterior hip capsule. The pin pulls on conventional dead lift day allow the client to pull a higher load, but for a lower range of motion. Therefore giving a new stimulus to the muscles.

And I might not change much with the accessory work. Because that single change in the main lift might be enough to push them through the plateau. Range of motion is a very very powerful variable of training that I don’t think people play with often enough. Different muscle fibers are recruited within different ranges of motion. Therefore we can possibly push past a plateau by recruiting more muscle fibers in a given area...

Everyone wants passive income but no one talks about what that actually looks like - how you get there, and how you maintain it, what you have to have in place FIRST, so on and so forth.

Today we aggressively pull back the veil on those very topics and considerations. Because passive income is the shit. I love it. I think most coaches in the online health and fitness industry should seek to have some level of it. But I also think people have some unrealistic expectations, largely due to coaches selling “how to build a course and make a million dollars with ease” type of vibes. Perhaps this episode can bring the heads down from the clouds a bit and share just one perspective.

You can take what sits with you, and ignore the rest.

Let us define passive income and the gloriousness of it’s sales pitch - You sit back, and make money while you sleep. That’s the idea. And trust me, this is a huge reason I started my online business. There is time and money freedom is the idea of online entrepreneurship in general. That idea gets magnified when we talk about passive income.

Reality #1: You need a funnel

Don’t run away at the use of that word. Stick with me - You must answer the question of how people are going to find and purchase this thing: the course, the one off product, the tutorial - whatever “it” is. How much does it cost? A funnel is exactly what it sounds like: you have your largest pool of your coldest leads at the top. Maybe that’s a free opt in, download of some kind, could even be a free or low ticket 3 day challenge. You need a low level buy in but there also needs to be a time limit on that. The funnel begins once they put their name and email in the box to receive the low ticket buy in.

Depending on the price of your passive offer, you may be able to ask for the upsell to your offer immediately, or it might require a longer buying cycle - maybe a mid tier offer is made, or sever more pieces of free, valuable content. Regardless, the funnel primes the potential buyer to eventually make the purchase of your passive offer.

If you don’t have a funnel, I want you to consider a few things: Mainly the fact that you’ll need to live launch the thing several times before eventually needing to build out the funnel (which ideally takes over the “selling” process for you - through the automated email drip I described above). Now live launching doesn’t mean it’s not passive income. I will eventually build out a funnel with a free or low ticket buy in workshop series for Pure PROgramming. At this time I will live launch 3-4 times per year, but the payments roll in and then my work is done until students submit their final programs for review and certification. So, that’s an example of a funnel free passive income.

That brings me to the next point that I personally looked right passed back in 2015 when I put the cart wayyyyyyy before the horse. Please learn from my mistake.

Reality #2: A funnel without an audience will make no money

Before you even THINK about passive income, you need an engaged, aligned audience who wants what you are going to be passively selling. I cannot stress this enough. You don’t need 10k or even 5k followers. But an email waitlist of 100+ is highly suggested. That of course is relative to the price point and how many of units you need to sell or want to sell. We can’t just wish, we need to evaluate numbers and be realistic with expectations.

I’d add to this that especially in health and fitness, passive income likely comes second to having worked with several 1:1 clients or in a group setting to where you now see a common gap that needs filling,

Platforms To Explore Other Than Instagram For Business...

Instagram is fantastic from a business standpoint BUT it is forever changing - as is to be expected with a platform we don’t personally control. We must be adaptable while staying aligned to and authentic to our own brand and what people may expect from that brand. Part of building a trustworthy and dependable comes from the fact that you show up *mostly* how you’ve conditioned your audience to expect you to. It’s basic psychology when you really break it down. But that’s a topic for another day.

Why is Annie, a woman who built her business solely on IG, discussing other platforms for entrepreneurs to consider? Because of the first point I made in this episode. Things are changing. It is not nearly as easy as it used to be to grow an audience on Instagram. It’s not as easy to be seen. It’s not as easy to go viral and it can feel a lot more like a waste of time - or rather, like your time put in to content creation maybe doesn’t give you the return it once did. I know this because I experience it first hand AND my job is literally to help health and fitness professionals build online business, largely with the help of instagram. So, I live and breath this, and witness my FitsPROs and 1:1 biz clients TRYING to live and breathe this stuff.

I still think IG hands down the best platform for building an audience who is eventually ready to buy from you. NO question about that. It has other platforms beat in the combo of daily static posts but also IG stories, where I believe a lot of magic can happen in the world of entrepreneurship. This is all still true. It’s a free platform that, even with being a slower road than it used to be, is still a faster way to get skin in the game than on other platforms. You can argue TikTok is the new Instagram as you can grow a massive following very quickly there. I don’t have personal experience because I just refuse to use the app for multiple reasons. And I don’t have the bandwidth or desire to be there. However, it is a place you may be able to get that 2014 Instagram level of growth if you think it’s a place your ideal clients are hanging out. Probably worth a period of experimentation.

TikTok, to my knowledge is still lacking the main reason for this episode, search-ability and the long game.

Instagram’s hashtags used to be a potential big player in world of getting eyes on your content. And not only eyes but potential clients based on what they were searching in hashtags. I believe this has mostly died out. People who know a lot more about IG and have connections high up in Instagram, have hinted at this. Which I am fine with as hashtags were never a big pull for me and my audience as I never used hashtags to search as a consumer and it appeared, neither did my ideal client. In my advanced settings when I go to post on IG (at this time anyway), there is a new key word option which is a form of SEO - search engine optimization.

We see SEO used on search based platforms or content types - blogs, Google, Youtube, Pinterest, even podcast platforms to some extent. WE LOVE SEO. Why? If we can learn how to speak the language of key words, then we have more control in how our content ranks and shows up when someone SEARCHES for the topic we’ve posted about. This means two big things:

Before I say them - please remember you’re on social media as a BUSINESS AND BRAND. That is the point.

Thus we need to look at these platforms through the lens of a savvy CEO even if you don’t feel like one.

* YOUR CONTENT LIVES FOR LONGER. Which means your time is better used and ideally there is higher return on time and effort put into that piece of content.

My Sports Massage Therapist Experience & Action Plan

There is, and has been, tension in the world of strength and conditioning and physical therapy and chiropractic fields as to the benefits, application and need for manual therapy and things like foam rollers. I have personally been all over the spectrum and look to people all over the spectrum as well. Frankly, my goal is always to just call something what it is. To make sure that we’re not selling something or using verbiage that is misleading to consumers.

We must begin this episode with a slue of disclaimers - I am not a massage therapist, I am strength coach, and I am not prescribing you do something. You need to consult with your doctor or health professional on your own to determine treatment or if that is even needed.

Today I am merely sharing my own sports massage experience.

That is IT. Period. Nothing else.

You’re probably, to my knowledge, not rolling out an adhesion or changing the actual tone of your muscles via a massage or foam roller. Okay. Fascia is like super fucking strong fibers that would take an astronomical amount of pressure to actually alter in any way. That’s why I have seen physical therapists on the “no need to massage or foam roll” spectrum make statements like “if I could change your muscle, I’d leave a dent in your leg.” Which I fully understand. BUT also, it’s grey. So is there NO benefit to massage? Or any manual therapy?

Studies that I have seen do not support increased recovery, lack of muscle damage post workout, or long term increased range of motion. Some of the claims we often hear with massage and foam rolling or other types of manual therapy. Don’t quote me on this, but I do believe there is support in increased circulation and causing a parasympathetic response. Especially with massage, these things would be beneficial.

So, I don’t know that the debate will ever end. We need far more research applied to strength, performance and muscle growth to make any bold claims I believe. You’re not lengthening your muscles with a foam roller. We know that. Okay? So use it for it is, turning up the volume of pain, causing temporary relief when said pain and pressure subsides. It’s quite possibly more in the mind than anything. If you’re going to follow that up with some mobility work, good on you.

That very smoothly leads us into why I sought out a sports massage therapist about a month ago now.

Whether anecdotal or not, I am fan of massage. Always have been. Largely because two distinct periods in my life when I physically felt my best were when I was regularly getting massages.

Those two seasons were after an extreme car accident that ended in 9 months of PT and 2-3 times per week with massage therapy. And the other, a very different situation - we were living in Chiang Mai, Thailand and we would both get massages every 3 days or so. They are like 10-15 per session there. They’re also the same every time. So no specificity but just a fantastic mid day full body massage 2-3 times per week. SIGN ME UP.

It should be noted that Nate and I don’t have health insurance. Coming off 2021 health was something that kept recurring in my personal journaling, as well as business weekly, monthly and quarterly reflections. Health for myself and my family. Obviously not having health insurance makes things more stressful. Where you’d normally have an ache or pain and just make an appointment, without insurance you lack that reassurance that so often comes from the doc, right? Normally it’s nothing, you’re fine. When I looked at the issues I was having with my body from a physical sense, I landed on massage as the first step.

What it takes to get strong.

Often times I think hypertrophy and strength are thrown into the same boat or conversation. And I am not mad at that. There are certainly programs that involve both, and the two topics or training goals are related. Which brings us to the first point...

Let’s first start this episode with off with a precursor. “Consistency” is not one of my main points today because that is a given. You’re not maximizing strength in the absence of consistent training. So, there’s that.

The difference between muscle growth and strength

Muscle mass holds the potential for strength

* muscle is the engine that allows strength to be demonstrated 

Strength IS a skill

* There is a massive neurological, mental and physical piece to building, gaining and maintaining strength

Newby gains

In a very oversimplified sense, to gain strength, we need to stimulate the muscle beyond what it has experienced before.

When a person starts lifting for the first time, anything beyond body weight, or maybe even their body weight alone can elicit that stimulus. There are also massive neurological gains to be made. They are learning a movement pattern and building neuromuscular pathways. Thus in the first 4-6 weeks they likely haven’t built actual strength, rather improved neuromuscular pathways. Which I suppose you could argue is in fact gaining strength. Point is, these much larger jumps in weight lifted and force produced are going to happen early on in someone’s lifting experience. Even as an amateur. These gains can continue for YEARS before a lifter truly plateaus with their strength gains. But that largely depends on the lift.

Say with lateral raises, a lifter may hit 5lbs and realize that is going to be difficult for a very long time. AND the point of this more isolated movement with a long lever is maybe not the lift to drive strength with. Not every exercises is best used for maximal or near maximal strength. Maybe better to push control + capacity with these exercises.

What it takes to get strong

As mentioned earlier you need a greater stimulus than a muscle has experienced to have an adaptation that results in more force produced.

This is in fact the definition of strength. Time is not a factor when looking at strength. It strictly refers to and measures force produced, period. If it takes you 20 seconds or 5 seconds, that is not of value - only the weight lifted.

In theory more muscle could be correlated to more strength if strength is being trained. Remember strength is a skill. A body builder with massive amounts of muscle - even more muscle than someone else may not be as strong as the person with less muscle mass but they’ve trained strength in a given skill. Training the skill is so freaking important when it comes to building strength. That is #2 for what it takes to get strong.

#1 is actually building muscle - because, I am a broken record, we need muscle to build strength. #1 and #2 can of course be trained in tandem. A perfect example of strength and hypertrophy working hand in hand. It can and often does happen. Built By Annie is a prime example. I call it strength and hypertrophy programming because that’s what it is. This is also the type or approach of programming I teach inside Pure PROgramming. Simply because most people want to have more muscle and also be stronger. Even outside of sports like body building or power and weightlifting.

I am so grateful we live in a time where building a personal brand is a doable thing in the online space. That literally by leveraging your views, personality, and interests, you can create a business. I mean it’s not THAT simple, but generally speaking, it’s perhaps more doable than any time before.

We’ve briefly talked about the challenges of boundaries - what to share and what not to share when building an aligned personal brand. But today I want to give you permission to EDIT that, and many other things as you grow your brand.

Editing your personal brand

I was in the DM’s with two different FitsPRO’s from my FitsPRO Foundation course and both were talking about how they feel like they’re “done” talking about a certain subject. Maybe even a subject they widely built their current business on. We know that messaging matters - it’s something that I teach pretty aggressively. But we have to come back to the nuances, transitions and flow of building businesses ran by evolving humans.

Now, I want to make something very clear. This does not mean that its a wise move to re-evaluate your messaging, what you talk about and what you don’t talk about every week. That, in fact, will NOT allow you to build a successful, recognizable or profitable brand. I do think there is a balance between have a brand that is consistent and trustworthy, but allowing ROOM - a percentage that is allowed to change and evolve if needed.

These FitsPRO’s aren’t changing their businesses or the business model - they’re simply refining and honing in on the next season of their business.

I am sure you follow entrepreneurs that have changed their focus, or approach over the last five years. I know I have. And in that process I have fallen more in respect for some and decided to unfollow others. Even if I unfollow, I have to respect and give kudos to the fact that they had the courage to say, “I don’t want to teach ‘x’ anymore, or offer ‘y’ - “I want to pivot, or just remove one aspect of my overall messaging.” I deeply respect and fully understand that from a human and entrepreneurial standpoint.

In a very literal sense, I did a lot of things when starting out because I though I had to. I didn’t know it was acceptable to ONLY offer training without nutrition. But I never enjoyed offering nutrition services. 2.5 years in I finally edited that out of my messaging, freebies and paid offers. THIS IS NORMAL. I can’t stress enough how normal it is to start very wide and broad when you’re building a business. You try a bit everything in order to confirm what sticks, what you do want to do, and what is a no go for you. That is 100% to be expected! That’s how we refine right? It’s taking the tree trunk and carving off chunks to find the art or masterpiece beneath. I know that can sound woo woo but it’s a fantastic and very applicable parallel to the process of building and maintaining personal brand.

Obviously the nutrition piece is literal, like I said. But there are much more emotionally loaded topics on the table as well. Maybe you’ve talked about bodies - sizes, neutrality, positivity, the process vs the result. that’s fantastic, it’s not a BAD thing, but you find that you maybe resent talking about that now - you’re “sick” of talking about that topic. You don’t feel it’s needed, or you’re happy to refer your audience to other professionals for that given topic. People who align with your past messaging - who you can now just tag when someone asks about said topic.

I have also experienced this over the years. As a woman I very much so appreciated accounts that normalize cellulite, aging skin and truly “normal” bodies.

So this episode comes about because for most of my years of training, I wrote my program for myself, or pulled from templated programs as a base for my own programming. I’ve never had a 1:1 coach, outside of interning with other performance coaches in person. That mainly comes from the fact that I enjoy being my own guinea pig and have always loved the process of training. Even in seasons where I probably wasn’t as consistent as I would’ve been if I did have a 1:1 coach.

So we moved into our rental in June 2021. And we had pretty much our full home gym set up at that point. But since essentially January 2020 I was wildly inconsistent with training. And that was coming off only training for six months from June 2019 through December 2019 after we were done with our first year of full-time travel. Basically, since April 2018, I have not been consistent with training. And that brought up a lot of past injuries, and just general weaknesses and loss of range of motion that I got as a result of inconsistent training largely while traveling.

Back to June 2021 when we moved into the rental and had our garage him, I trained myself not at the intensity that I was training in 2018, but with the same style of training. And after prepping for shooting over 400 videos for YouTube with Paige Major, my friend and videographer, I just saw that I had some nagging issues that quite frankly I didn’t want to coach myself through. But I did feel that I had the answers or the knowledge needed in order to pick an appropriate program.

That, it’s what brings us to today’s episode. I’m currently following a very well-known coaches templated program, that has everything I need in addition to what my sports masseuse has kind of told me to work on in my own time.

I will likely do another episode on my experience with a local sports masseuse so far and why I sought her out in the first place. So look forward to that.

To program for yourself or hire a coach?

When it comes to being a trainer, I really do believe that you should always to some extent be your own guinea pig. I think there is a power and different level of coaching that comes from you having experienced some of the things that you are going to program for your clients. No that doesn’t mean that you need to move as much weight as them or be in as good of shape as them or even have the same goals or background as them, but having done German volume training or some kind of super high volume training gives you an idea of what that feels like and you can better prepare your clients for that if you happen to program some kind of high volume program or even super set.

I guess really that is just the experiential piece of being a coach. Because you can have those experiences even if you’re not programming for yourself.

There are pros and cons to programming for yourself, and hiring a coach, or following someone’s templated program. I personally find that templated programs are a bit of a sweet spot, because again, it gives you that base but also allows for you to modify as needed, or according to your own preference.

I find a lot of times that coaches have this guilty complex because they know how to program in a way that would get them a good work out, and they know they could be consistent, but they aren’t because they simply don’t have the time or brain space to program for themselves. And even the time and energy it would take to just whip up a single work out four days a week, can be too much. And then that coach is left not working out at all. Not feeling good about themselves from maybe an integrity standpoint,

Lessons I have learned through world travel

I have had several conversations as of late where someone has brought up something and I’ve said that “I learned that via world travels.” Or that world travels made something clear to me that this person had mentioned in a conversation. So it made me think why not hop on a podcast and discuss some of the lessons that I have learned through world travel.

I will start this off by saying there are going to be many many generalizations in this episode. And that I am not some guru, I am not an expert on culture, I am just a chick who has gone to a lot of places and had some experiences, and so I’m sharing those, and what I have learned from them. You are free to take from that what you wish. Or, take none of it at all. That is up to you.

Oh number one, strangely enough has to do with money, perception and options. 

When Nate and I took off for world travels back in 2018 everyone assumed we were rich. Some people abroad, and many people here in the states. I get that there are questions when you see someone traveling full-time. Do they own a house? Did they sell everything? Do they still have cars? All of these are very valid questions. And we ask those questions as well. The answer is that if someone wants to travel the world they just do what needs to be done in order to make that happen. Some people own a home and rent it out as an Airbnb, some people sell literally everything and buy a plane ticket. Or some people own a home and save up for several months or years and then take a year sabbatical to travel. Some people keep their jobs, some people quit their jobs and some people get jobs overseas. The moral of the story here is, you have options. And it just comes down to entertaining what it might take for you to do the thing, and if that is worth doing the thing or not. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but I was making $2500-$4000 a month when we left for world travels. Now my goal was of course to increase that monthly revenue as we traveled and I did. But we also booked some of our accommodations and flights and things of that sort for seven months leading up to our travels. Again that was what we had to do in order to feel secure in our decision to travel. We sold some stuff, a friend moved into our condo and took over rent for us. We sold one of our cars and kept a car that we don’t have payments on.

So there is no one size fits all answer to "how do you travel the world?"

When it comes to money, perception, and options, it’s cheaper to live in a lot of other countries than the United States. You can get jobs there and still be a resident of the US, and have no monthly payments or debt besides maybe your phone. The amount of ways that exist are the ones that you’ve exposed yourself to. That is lesson number one. There are almost always more options to consider.

With that, like I said, sometimes those options are not worth it and you know we are free to make the decision to not pursue the thing because the sacrifices too big. But we made $2,500-$4,000/mo and met people traveling on $5/day. That’s extreme and would not be possible in counties in Europe for example.

Moving on.

Humans want to be understood and want to understand

The question I get often about our world travels is in regards to the language barriers and if we were nervous about those. The answer is yes, we were somewhat nervous about them, but we had traveled to Spain previously, and Puerto Rico. That’s all the traveling we had done before taking off for a year. And between Google translate and playing a bit of charades, it is clear that most humans want to understand you,