Rachel:

Please introduce yourself! Who are you? What is your name? And where do you currently work?

Brandon:

What's my name? Sorry, back up. 

Rachel:

Yeah, Brandon. “Who are you?”, is the question.

Brandon:

My name is Brandon Chien, and I'm located in Oakland, California. And what was the other question?

Rachel:

Are you currently a coach? What do you do?

Brandon:

Yes, I'm both a personal trainer and a strength coach. I now call myself a trauma informed personal trainer and strength coach.

Rachel:

How did you first hear about trauma informed weightlifting? 

Brandon:

I first heard about trauma informed weightlifting from a client, I think back in 2022. She sent me an article about trauma-informed wellness and strength training. And then I went down the rabbit hole. I was like, boom, this is important stuff, especially blending mental health and the body in terms of health outcomes. It just started to really make a lot of sense.

I was like, oh my gosh, there's a language for this. And there's science, and there's people talking about it. I was like, I need to be part of that. I took the certificate training as early as 2023. 

I jumped right into the certificate. I was pretty sure that this was the direction I needed to go. And also in my own mental health journey, I was like, this makes so much sense.

Rachel:

Would you talk a little bit about that first cohort that you were with? What was that experience of being in your cohort like?

Brandon:

I like to call it going back to school again, but with all the drama musical theater kids mixed in with the jocks.

I think it's the best blend ever because it just felt like everybody could be themselves. And also we were here to work together on a big project, which was the big question mark. How do you blend mental health with the body?

If I'm being true to myself, those are my favorite kind of people to be around. And it sort of renewed my spark for being a personal trainer and strength coach.

Rachel:

And now you're part of our new Train the Trainer program. You’ve fully come all the way through literally all the things we currently offer. Which I love.

Would you speak for a moment about what Train the Trainer is and what you hope to get out of it? 

Brandon:

Honestly, being part of a team and being around other people who also have other ways of looking at a similar subject. I love being exposed to other people's perspectives. 

I think it's also important because we're conducting research in real time, and applying it in our own communities. Sometimes when people think about research and science, they think it's about finding the perfect method for something. But I think it's really just about documenting things at work and the situations that come up that create that change. Because there's a lot of things that can happen when we talk about mental health and the body in the same context that mainstream fitness isn’t even going near. 

So, the value of Train the Trainer is that people are discussing ideas, and it gives us trailheads to explore and decide where to go forward and iterate.

Rachel:

So you touch on something really interesting there. There’s a situation that we anticipate, and I’m curious as to your comments.

Let’s say there’s a strength coach that has graduated from a TIWL program. They get in front of a client, and they notice they're exhibiting symptoms. And it's like, okay, where does my job end? When do I start referring them to an actual therapist? How much am I supposed to be doing here?

Does that resonate with you at all? 

Brandon:

Oh, 100%. Something that's instilled in most trainers is “know your scope of practice”, know when to refer out. 

However, there's the anecdotal evidence and storytelling that trainers are like therapists to people, they'll just be that person. So I think there's a couple of ways we can approach this question. 

I think number one is this Western way of thinking that there's a practitioner for every problem. I'll just give you an example. 

Early in my training career, I had a client burst into tears during a training session. I thought it was something that I did. 

But really it was the gateway opening for them to understand something that was happening in their mental health, or their emotional experience. It took me years to realize that that's just the opening. 

We're helpful in getting people embodied enough to also face the intensity of that feeling. 

Because part of strength training is literally challenging the nervous system. 

And if we're prepared, and we know, okay, this is something I can handle, or this is out of my scope, having somebody that we trust, especially like in my cohorts, now I know who is local or also virtually available. And I think that is a huge boon that I never had before.

Rachel:

I love that you addressed, “Yup, you feel that way. I felt that way. A lot of people feel that way, it's real.” 

This leads me to a question about the word “embodiment” within the context of TIWL. In your own words, what does embodiment mean in trauma care? 

Brandon:

Embodiment, yeah, embodiment is a new word. I think it means trusting your body to tell you what it needs, what's next and what isn't good for it.

I think it also means to be able to trust the full spectrum of sensations and feelings that come up in our body, and to not really label them immediately. Which is sort of also related to the separation of the mind and body problem that they call Cartesian dualism. I'm a former philosopher. 

I think the idea is that the body is the mind. 

Rachel:

I'm going to have to think about that one for a minute. That's cool. The body is the mind. 

Brandon:

Yeah, yeah, I like that. 

Rachel:

Did you start coaching with a trauma informed approach or were you doing it before you found any of this?

Brandon:

Maybe a fraction. I think I tried things that were trauma-informed but not officially under the umbrella. I think I just wanted to do things outside of mainstream fitness and I know this is crazy, but it's. . . I don't assess people formally.

Like I don't take their body fat measurements. I don't take their physical measurements. And that's one of the principles in trauma-informed.Fitness is letting people enter in whatever space they want to enter into. 

I thought it was very shame and guilt based and I have always been sort of railing against that but silently because I needed to make a paycheck and I always felt there's an ethical kind of conflict of interest there. Making people feel bad about their body so they continue to see me.

In my own practice, I adopt the idea that I'm on this journey with somebody and there might be a side quest for them to go see somebody else. That could be a massage therapist, a psychedelic assisted therapist, someone trauma trained. I really believe that trauma informed weight lifting endorses a continuity of care, and that I'm not the final answer.

Rachel:

So my follow up to that is, have you noticed differences between then and now - the coach you began as and the coach you are now?

Brandon:

Now, I understand I'm dealing with their nervous system and I can explain all the steps along the way and that can be a very good way to create buy in, and when I have buy in I can do amazing things with people. But I can't do it if I don't have any buy in. 

I used to think it was about giving them information, but now I know that it's about giving them a safe space to explore and begin to trust themselves again.

That's the difference in my practice now. I'm much more confident and relaxed, I'm not in charge, I'm just holding the space and creating guidelines and constraints. Most of the time people are pretty set on where they want to go and they go faster when somebody is just assisting them and they're not being told what to do.

Rachel:

It’s story time! Can you tell us a story that you personally have experienced as a coach or a student? 

Brandon:

If I could tell a story about a client, that would be Quinn. She's a Vietnamese woman. I teach strength training at Olympic weightlifting at a community gym and she's in my adult class. 

When a lot of people try something that is very impactful to the nervous system, people can exhibit little forms of how they deal with trauma or coping mechanisms. Basically, after everything she did she would say sorry. And I was like, that's interesting, she didn't do anything wrong, she's just exploring her body. But I pulled her aside one day and I asked her about her history with exercise. 

Also just being Asian-American myself, I think I can clock that there's a set of circumstances that come with being an immigrant and a part of a large clan family. Soon enough I got some real information about how, oh my gosh like she's trying to create a new way of being for herself through fitness, but there's also things that are large blockages. 

I was like okay, maybe you need to talk to a professional and I have somebody in my network. I did some one-to-one training with her and then sent her off for a couple months. And lo and behold, when she came back maybe almost a year later to the gym, she's a completely different person. 

That's usually my case study when I do the guest presentations with TIWL. 

Rachel:

Thank you for sharing that.

We have another Foundations Cohort coming up - do you think the TIWL Foundations training is useful for other coaches like yourself? What would you say to somebody who is considering taking Foundations but is maybe a little bit apprehensive.

Brandon:

I would encourage other trainers who are considering the foundations course to give yourself a chance to do some continuing education.

It's always impressed upon us in the training industry to continue our education and almost none of it is around mental health. 

I think this is the best way to introduce yourself lightly to understanding something very valuable that will impact your training career positively for the rest of your career. There is no loss here, there's only win and gain, especially language of science. If you know science about neurology and emotions and the human nervous system, that's gonna help your career.

Rachel:

My favorite and final question is, what's the hill you’d die on? It could be just weightlifting related, working out related, mental health related - if you could telepathically put this message in every human's head - what would it be? 

Brandon:

If I could die on a hill, I would keep it in the realm of the body and train the nervous system first. Everything else comes after the nervous system. Sometimes that can sound vague and like, what's a nervous system, but everything we do is creating a stimulation or an effect on our nervous system whether we know it or not, whether it's conscious or unconscious it's being impacted and registered.

Every nervous system responds to the environment differently. We call that personality. It’s the way that people respond to the many infinite factors in the environment. 

And the way training has been taught traditionally is that the person is the static thing and the environment is the thing we control, like reps and sets and exercise. I'm like, sure, but how do we know what's happening with the person? We need to understand the individual person and their intersectional experience of gender socioeconomic class. All of these things matter, and how they impact their nervous system. So that's the hill I'll die on.