“Are You Presenting This Weekend?” Why I was Willing to Pay To Attend an Event in Kansas City

I just got home from the Kansas City Fitness Summit, which I’m sure if you follow any number of health and fitness professionals through social media, your feed was most likely blowing up all weekend with status updates, pics, and tales of drunken woe.

One of the weird things I’m still trying to get used to is having people who know who I am when I introduce myself. It’s kind of strange to say to someone “Hi my name’s Dean,” and they respond with “I know.” For the first 5 or 10 times that happened I got creeped out and wanted to go home and hug my knees in a corner rocking slowly, thinking I had a stalker who was going to try to wear my skin like a coat, but then I realized, well, they probably read something I’ve put out onto a site like T-Nation or Bodybuilding.com or something like that. Am I becoming famous? Should I get an agent? Should I get many leather bound books and have my house smell of rich mahogany?

Yeah, that’s not going to happen. I’ve never understood when people try to feed into their own self-perceived celebrity and try to pull a power move on anything in life. If you have 50 million Twitter followers and have people handing over their first born to get their hands on anything you do, that’s nice. I’ve always believed that whomever you are currently investing yourself with, they deserve to be your equal and get your full attention, regardless of whether they’re 500 pounds and never worked out a day in their life, an A-list celebrity, a doctor of complicated surgery, or some jackbag trainer who markets “one weird way” to do anything.

As a result of this, when I see there’s a cool event I want to attend, I’m happy to pay the registration fee, fly halfway across the continent, get a hotel room, and be part of the audience even though half the people I talked to this weekend were asking if I was there to present.  If I’m asked to provide something to an event, it’s an honour and a privilege, but it’s not a requirement for me to attend. If the content is good and the speakers are ones whom I want to hear, not merely because I resonate with their message but because they have a unique approach or a specific body of knowledge that I don’t have.

For instance, Dave Dellanave did a great talk this weekend on Biofeedback training, something he’s used a lot within his personal facility to the tune of over 10,000 contact hours and something I’ve only stumbled upon with grip testing in some different moves. I wrote about it HERE if you’re interested. Mike T. Nelson (pictured above, complete with middle initial) did a fantastic job of simplifying and overviewing heart rate variability, something I’ve played with in the past personally, but didn’t understand the longterm applications, but now I’ll be doing it more regularly.

It also gives me a chance to meet some people I’ve only corresponded with through email or social media. Bret Contreras and I got into great discussions a number of times through the weekend, the culmination of which was anatomic triggers that could cause coregasms in women doing ab related exercises (post coming in the future on this, I promise).

“The Owl of Fitness” and I have always had a great working relationship and friendship where we have no problem respectively calling each other out if something isn’t lining up with what’s known or follows reasonable thought processes, which is one of the main reasons I consistently listen to him and take his word as honest. He was willing to give his time for a class I was teaching a couple weeks ago and do a Skype Q & A session, which everyone felt was awesome and hated the fact that he was sitting in sunny warmth while it was below freezing for us in Edmonton. Plus he tells awesome stories about some of the emails he receives from some whackjobs who think doing heavy squats and deadlifts will make women’s’ ladyparts explode.

There’s also a chance to reconnect with people I’ve met previously and had the opportunity to converse with on a regular basis, such as Lou Schuler, Brad Schoenfeld, Tony Gentilcore, Jen Sinkler, and too many others to keep this post under 3000 words. There’s a chance to meet my previous editor at T-Nation, Bryan Krahn, and ask him why he changed some elements in my articles but also ask about his monk strap loafers at a fitness conference when everyone else was rocking Nike’s and minimalist shoes. Plus meeting Cassandra Forsythe and realizing we went to University of Alberta at the same time, both grew up in British Columbia, commiserating about some of the people we both knew, and realizing that for a well respected academic complete with PhD and RD designations and multiple best selling publications, she can swear hard enough to make a sailor blush.

Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, who has guest written for me HERE, had an awesome presentation about how the medical and fitness worlds could overlap in a more productive manner plus some things trainers should be asking our clients, but after his presentation he was having some issues with his hip, so I got to take him through a quick musculoskeletal thing and helped get him back in order. For most relatively young guys in good shape, stuff like this is just a byproduct of training and postural work, so it’s a pretty quick fix. Guys in their 50s and 60s who aren’t in as good shape tend to need more intensive stuff, so I figured it wasn’t a big deal and he wasn’t going to die of cancer or anything like that.

In the lobby before dinner on the first night, heading to the gym to get some biceps curls in (short sleeve, you know), I bumped into Jon-Erik Kawamoto (my Newfoundland brutha) and Hunter Cook, the instabattle Don Mecca. We started chatting about hip mobility (it’s a fitness conference after all) and Hunter mentioned he had stupid lax joints (he does) but that he couldn’t do the splits. This is always something of a personal challenge I take on as I’m a firm believer that everyone theoretically SHOULD be able to do the splits, and if you’re hyper mobile, it’s most likely an approach thing versus a tissue thing holding you back. So within about 15 seconds I showed him a different hip alignment to use, told him to reposition his tongue, and breathe in a different pattern than what he was used to using, and voila, Splitsville.

The pic was after only one set of curls. I got way more gunny as the night went on.

Now, I’ve been to a lot of these conferences and group events, and one of the predominant concepts they most often involve is that they tend to be like multiple infomercials for whatever the presenters are trying to sell you or get you enrolled into. That’s all well and good, but in terms of getting knowledge that you can use and information you can take back with your clients, it’s not the best option. There’s also an end game profitability which means there has to be huge numbers of attendees to offset facility and speaker fees, which makes the events less than personable and hard to connect with people on a realistic level.

The Fitness Summit is great because it’s the antithesis of this. Each presenter stays (relatively) on topic, has a short window of time to work with, and everyone is in the same room at the same time. The social component of the weekend is a major selling point for many people to attend, as it’s a great time to get to see friends and people you’ve only known through online connections let loose and have some fun. Most events have special VIP dinners where the presenters are and where the lucky few willing to pay a few hundred bucks for a cash bar and appetizers can attend, but this was different.

The entrance to dinner the first night was $10, and BYOB, which meant seeing Alan Aragon crush a bottle of vodka and spend the next day in sunglasses. The second day was $25 at a restaurant where the portions were too small and meant everyone congregating in an office tower lobby with multiple tubs of ice cream and dozens of cookies for the “dessert.” There’s something contradictory to attending a fitness conference and getting blackout drunk while smashing your macros with cookies and ice cream, but if you’re good 28 days of the month, you can afford 2 days of not good eating. It’s not just science, it’s #science.

Will I be back next year? Most likely, depending on what stage of building our house is at and what our timeline looks like, but I’ll make it a personal mission to get there. If I’m presenting, that would be a nice touch and hopefully I get the chance, but if not, I’ll still be in the audience taking notes, and as Lou said in his opening monologue, probably writing 10 programs, 3 blog posts, and coming up with a new theory of relativity with my sweet time management skillz.

These events are more about the people attending than those who put it on, but Nick and Dave Bromberg did a great job getting people to connect in the middle of nowhere, Missouri, and the behind the scenes work they did was top notch. If you get a chance, I’d love to see you there, and I promise I won’t think you’re a stalker looking to wear my skin as a coat if you know who I am already. I’m getting better at that.