David Dellanave is a lifter, coach, and owner of The Movement Minneapolis in the Twin Cities. He implements biofeedback techniques, teaching his clients, ranging from athletes to general population, to truly understand what their bodies are telling them. He writes articles to make you stronger, look better naked, and definitely deadlift more at his website. He holds several world records, including one in the Jefferson deadlift, and his alter ego, Dellanavich from Dellanavia, has a penchant for coaching classes wearing a weightlifting singlet and speaking with a (terrible) Eastern European accent.

Note from Matt: This interview was done via email over the span of several weeks. David said that it was the longest interview he’s ever done, so I am very proud to share this new PR with him.

Matt: The favicon for your website is a mustache, but according to pictures uploaded to the internet you seem to be seriously lacking in hair in the general head region. Is this favicon a tribute to a mustache of the past or something else?

David: The mustache is really the truest expression of male facial hair. To always wear a mustache wouldn’t do justice to it, so I use it sparingly only in the most important of circumstances.

Matt: So you would instantly grow a mustache if someone was trapped underneath a car and required your DL services?

David: See, now you understand when a mustache should be called upon.

Matt – I’ll be sure to remember this.

You have a very diverse past for a strength coach. You’ve been an entrepreneur inside and outside of the fitness industry. You’ve also built technology of your own with an early fitness tracking site called Adaptifier. Now you own a gym and travel to do educational seminars and speak at conferences around the U.S. Could you tell me a bit about how you first got into fitness and what led you to eventually making a career in the industry?

David: I quit college when my first foray into online business started making $300/day. I did the math and found out that this was 6 figures per year. The fuck do I need college for was basically my thought process. I went on to start several online businesses mostly in the online marketing space – we were huge in ringtones in the mid-2000s. I co-founded and sold a company in 2007 which led to a few years of sort of trying to find the next thing to pursue. I started to become less enchanted with doing things that were making good money but weren’t necessarily helping anyone. At the same time I was getting more and more passionate about fitness. When I parted ways with my business partner the only thing that made sense to me was to open a gym and start teaching people what I had learned and the unique approach I took to training.

Matt: Do you think that switching to the fitness industry later on in your professional career benefited you in anyway?

David: Absolutely. I have the benefit of a totally different perspective coming from the startup side. For example, when I first started really training I built tracking software because nothing existed – and still doesn’t to this day – to do what I wanted to do with the data. When I opened the gym, I built all the gym management software because everything else sucked. I also didn’t have the burden of the ideology of “we’ve always done it this way.”

Matt: After moving into the fitness industry full-time as a gym owner and coach was there anything in particular that surprised you?

David: I’m not going to lie, I was pretty naive about how irrational people were going to be. I really thought that if you just showed people how easy it could be to make amazing progress and transform your body they would flock to me. Joke’s on me. Coaching is like 10% the what of training and 90% psychology of behavior change. That’s not to say that it’s all that complicated – the levers and action points aren’t that difficult to figure out, but it definitely caught me off guard.

Matt: This awareness of the psychology aspect of coaching seems to be the biggest gap that new fitness professionals have when getting into the space. I think that most trainers/coaches will figure it out eventually if they care about getting long-term results with their clientele, but it could definitely be emphasized more during the initial learning process. That being said, if a young fitness professional asked you for advice on where to start when digging into behavioral change what would you tell them?

David: That’s a great question. I would tell them to read Switch, Motivational Interviewing, Thinking Fast and Slow, and the Power of Habit. That should be enough to get the gears turning and to get someone to realize that “do what your trainer told you to do the first time” isn’t good coaching. I’d also encourage them to find something about themselves that they actually want to change and start working on it. More than likely fitness already came easily to them, so that doesn’t count.

Matt: More books to read!

So in addition to having a strong presence online you also founded and train clients at Movement Minneapolis, a gym that I very much hope to visit one day. Can you tell me about the community you and your team have built? What’s a day like at Movement Minneapolis for one of your clients?

David: The community at the gym is really critical and is one of our main areas of focus. I have to give a lot of the credit to Cardigan Mark (Mark Schneider) for sort of being the community cultivator. We know that community support is one of the biggest factors in behavior change. It’s the thing that Crossfit accidentally does exceptionally well. If you hang out with the same shitty friends all the time doing the same shitty things you’re not going to change any of your habits or behaviors. So we try to make it this incredibly open, inviting, and supportive community. Some people will talk about being accepting of gay and lesbian people for example. We are not so much accepting as that we just don’t even care what you “are”. Gay, lesbian, transgender, non-gender-identifying, black, white, male, female it doesn’t matter. Come as you are, leave a little bit better is what we say. We encourage people to come a little early or stay after class to chat or take a nap on one of our couches. For many of our members it has become their “third place” which is really the goal.

Matt: I love that concept. It’s interesting you mention it because many of the successful online coaches I see are creating that “third place” online through their own websites/blogs, FB pages, Instagrams, etc. It’s possible to create an online community where they can interact and work with people from all over the world. How do you see this new type of fitness training/coaching evolving over the next few years?

David: Look, I think this ties into the 10k hours question and how much experience does a coach need to have before talking about it or creating an online presence. There are some old guard coaches who wouldn’t like these young guys to grow their online presence. I look at it like this: the 80% of training knowledge is so simple a monkey could figure it out – the other 20% takes a lifetime to master. But for that 80% there can be hundreds, nay tens of thousands, of different messengers for it. Look at guys like Anthony Mychal, JC Deen, Roger Lawson, Greg Nuckols. They all are fundamentally talking about the same things with different angles, viewpoints, and perspectives. It’s all fucking ice cream, they’re just different flavors and it’s cool if you don’t like soy blueberry because there’s dark chocolate over there. Yes that’s a Rog Law joke.

Bottom line is that having lots of different messengers is a good thing because the more a messenger resonates with someone the quicker they’re going to get moving in the right direction.

My mentor Frankie once said the best of us can separate the message from the messenger, but that’s some ultra-high-level cognitive gymnastics.

Matt: Let’s switch over to you as a trainer and strength coach. You’re well known for incorporating biodfeedback into your programming. What is this and why should coaches seriously consider implementing it into their programming?

David: Biofeedback in a few words a the process by which you gain insight into the state of your body or a body’s system and make a decision based on that information. That last distinction is important because if you don’t change your action based on the data then it’s not biofeedback. The example I always give is if you’re looking at a heart rate monitor when you’re running and you slow down or speed up based on your heart rate that is biofeedback. We do the same thing with any movement using ROM or sometimes grip strength as the metric.

It’s a simple and very effective way to determine the body’s response to a stimulus. We’ve noticed this association that when you do positive things you get greater ROM and when you do things that are negative or outside the body’s current limitations you get a decrease in ROM. Over the long term it seems that if you do all the things that test well and avoid the ones that don’t you see greater progress and fewer injuries. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

Personally I think that if you learn how to implement biofeedback and then you choose not to you’re foolish and borderline unethical. If I hand you a way to tell if your client or athlete is getting better or worse in realtime and you actively choose not to use it, relying on YOUR body and mind to run their body then you’re making a big mistake at best. It doesn’t take anything away from you as a coach, on the contrary I think it enhances the relationship and outcomes. Plus I pride myself on being able to accurately predict what is going to be good for a trainee. Verifying it via biofeedback just enhances my predictive ability and intuition over the long term.

Matt: Final questions for you. What are working on improving with your business or your training right now? What gets you excited when thinking about the fitness industry as a whole over the next few years?

David: Biggest thing we’re working on right now is just improving the education flow and experience so that someone can come in at any level of health & fitness expertise and get up to speed not only on the general philosophy of self-experimentation and letting your body lead but also knowing what we sort of consider the current best practices or state of the art. For example I am not a Paleo aficionado by any means and I think there is plenty of room for non-Paleo food in your diet, but at the same time if you’re currently munching on Doritos and Lean Cuisine then we need to get people to a level of understanding that the majority of their food needs to come from the earth and that beyond that they can do whatever they want provided it works well for them. All of that education and letting someone sort of step into the process at any time and starting at any point is a tremendous challenge. If I knew I had 32 weeks with someone it would be trivial to program it all out, but the gym environment is so much more ad-hoc.

I’m going to take a pass on the second question, in a sense anyway. It’s not that I am not excited about things in the industry, but I guess fundamentally I don’t care about the industry at large. I’m more concerned with my immediate sphere of influence and how I can do things there exceptionally well. I could say some things or make some proclamations about the fitness industry at large, but even defining what and who exactly that is is no small task. Consider that the smart and open-minded trainers that make up the social circle you and I share have an audience that combined is maybe 1% of the reach of a product like P90X. What gets me excited is pursuing better for myself and my members and clients.

Matt: Big thank you to David for giving me his time to do this interview. If you’d like to read more from David I highly suggest checking out the links below:

• David’s FB Page
• Website
• Twitter Handle @DDN