Inspire a culture that inspires itself: result mapping with Andy Petranek of the Whole Life Challenge.

Life is a journey and I want to find and share the maps. I look for outliers who find and prove new ways of doing things that drastically outperform the status quo. Our domains of focus are products, teams and personal development (my obsessions).

Andy Petranek's experience touches all of those domains. He's co-founder and Chief Evangelist of the Whole Life Challenge ("WLC" for short). He's also got a podcast called "Breaking Ordinary." If you are part of our community of people with a passion for performance and innovation, The Whole Life Challenge is worth attention. If you are looking to make healthy life changes, it's really worth the attention.

WLC is could be described as "culture-as-a-service." It's part app, part community and part curated content. The focus is on building and maintaining habits - and making the process fun.

It's tempting to look at Andy's background and think he's some kind of machine. Before the WLC, he started the largest CrossFit gym in L.A. He's a former Red Bull sponsored athlete who's done extreme events. Before that he was a Marine and studied trumpet at the Eastman School of Music. He's been featured in Outside Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Muscle & Fitness and other places in the media. 

But it's Andy's human-ness and enthusiasm that stand out when you speak to him. His approach and personality are down-to-earth and practical. These same traits come through in WLC itself.

SL: Thanks for connecting. Team Levy are big fans of the Whole Life Challenge.

Andy: How many Whole Life Challenges have you done?

SL: I've done four. My wife has done at least 5. It’s become part our lifestyle. I bailed on the first. My targets were too high and I became frustrated. The second time, I set goals that kept things easy. That was key. It was more about the momentum factor - that is really powerful. I’ve made changes in patterns that had been in place my entire life up to now.

Andy: That's really the idea. It’s a problem in our world - we go about trying to solve today's problems using the same mindset that created them. 

“What can I do in the next six weeks to lose all the weight that I need to lose”. It should be simple, right? It should be easy to improve your sleep over six weeks?

We set these big hairy audacious goals and have always heard those work. More often than not they work right up to that point where we just can't sustain it anymore. Then we give up completely and go right back to the way we were before - or worse.

SL: It can be counterintuitive for those of us who are challenge-oriented; that even when we hit a BHAG ("Big Hairy Audacious Goal") related to health, we often revert to old habits afterward. WLC uses small steps and incentives to create momentum. Then suddenly you've got these believers telling their friends to join. How did this approach evolve?

Like you I come from an athletic background. I was a Red Bull athlete. I was doing ridiculously long adventure races all over the world. I was climbing mountains and crossing channels and the ocean and doing 400 mile crazy stuff. In 2009 I qualified for - and went to - the CrossFit Games as a competing athlete.

So I know what it means train hard and achieve results. I know what it means to create objectives and hit themes. I understand how to work, work, work until you get there. But I found some of those strategies don’t work in every area of life.

Aiming your compass at the right point absolutely works. But when you want to make a lifestyle change, the speed at which you get there is not fast. You have to reorient your thinking around what you can do in three months, in six months or a year.

On paper it's possible to completely change your diet for six weeks or eight weeks. But the question becomes, "What will you do once it's over?"

One of my biggest frustrations as a trainer was seeing this in my clients. They’d leave the gym and go right back to the same stupid shit that resulted in them wanting to see me in the first place. Just checking the box: “I'm doing my fitness. I'm doing my wellness through my time at the gym.” That only works up to a point.

Yes you can get ripped and look great. That doesn't mean you're well.

In fact, the fitter you get and the more you train toward an athletic goal, like a professional football player for example, a professional CrossFit games competitor, the further away you can get from wellness. Not the context of your body. But there are sacrifices made in the other areas of your life in order to play at that level that are not healthy. Knowing that is powerful.

SL: I think There are also parallels in the idea of “organizational health”. Speaking of that area, we see processes advertised as “innovation” and “performance” that are guru-driven or dogma-driven. WLC seems to avoid this "we have all the answers" approach. Is that intentional?

Andy: That was really our goal with the challenge: to create an environment where we didn't have to be the gurus.

We never provided a workout plan. We never provided a meal plan. It didn't mean we didn't share recipes, or we didn't tell people the right ways to do pushups and sit ups and squats, and you can do workouts at the gym when you came in to train. We wanted everyone to understand they needed to be responsible for their choices.

Leading someone around like a dog on a leash is one way of training. people. I find it the least satisfying method. You can do it, and you can get results. But my objective has always been to get people to wake up to the need for to be accountable and responsible for themselves. Wake up to the need to learn.

SL: What are you learning about getting people engaged in order to change?

Andy: One of the challenges we have is that our audience is predominantly women. They are 80 to 85% of our players. A lot of the men that do it are like you. They're brought in by their wife/girlfriend/sister or someone else that's done it.

I think men and women approach things differently. Over the years, I've trained a lot of women. Generally speaking women like to be taught things before they do them. They want to understand the mechanics of “how.”

When I taught kayaking and rock climbing, the men would need to be beaten over the head with a two by four. They’d need to fall into the ocean five times before they'd listen. At the gym I could see this correlation between to how fast they puked in the workout and whether they continued. If they puked in less than five minutes, six minutes, (and most did) their chances of signing up would rise exponentially.

The women had no interest in puking. They listened and they learned and they were understanding. The challenge we have is the Whole Life Challenge is not that next big mountain you're going to climb. Or, it is, but it's very long term not fast.

We're working on things that take years, and they're sequential, and they're very small. They're bite sized chunks if you do it well. It’s not exciting. It's not sexy. You're not going to get on the top, finish the Whole Life Challenge, put your hands up over your head like you just climbed Mount Everest, and be like yeah, I got it. I did it! Getting people into that long term road is our challenge.

SL: What got the WLC started and how did evolve?

I had been running a fitness challenge for many years. It started off being called the Toronto Fitness Challenge. It was for my private clients. This was before I was in the gym, before I was in CrossFit and before the Whole Life Challenge. It was a way to clients context for the training.

The first one was a decathlon - five events in the gym and five at the track. It was. 500 bucks to join so I only had 10 or 12 clients do it. I put 300 of the fee back into the prize money.With 10 people, there was a $3000 dollar pool.

I tested them in the gym to get a baseline. And then one day, I was like “all training sessions in the next week are going to be done at the track”. We went to the track and did different drills. Then we trained for 8 or 10 weeks.

At the end we came back to the track for “finals” as an event. It created a competitive aspect. It ended with a mile and a half run and it was incredible. So I repeated that multiple times. I'd been doing it for around five years when I opened CrossFit LA in 2004 and I transitioned the challenge into the gym.

Instead of $500 we charged $30. Instead of 10 we got around 150 athletes. Everyone was aiming going for their best improvement. That became part of the fabric and culture of the gym. It was this ongoing thing.

We had gone to a nutrition seminar, and wanted to bring elements of that to our members. But we didn't want to do it in the form of a seminar; that's just boring. It doesn't necessarily result in anyone taking action. Michael, my business partner was my head trainer at the time. He sat down to create 12-week course called Food University. It was great, but it was long and required a lot of work. It was expensive - $500.

We call that our greatest failure.

It didn't engage people at a level that made a difference. Out of 300 people in the gym, 12 started, and only 3 finished. The material was good, the information was good, it just didn't result in many people changing their life or taking action.

So we were like, “what if we took the elements we teach - nutrition, mobility, exercise - and then add to that reflecting on what you're doing each day? What if we built those into a simple check-in?"

We were thinking it would be Google Spreadsheet. Some of our members were software developers and they talked us down off that ledge. Can you imagine 150 people using huge Google Spreadsheet? What if you're three weeks in and somebody accidentally deletes you from the list? There so were many ways that could have gone wrong.

These guys developed our first rudimentary site. It was a trade for membership - and we had our first challenge. It was very similar to what it is today. We’ve improved the points system as we’ve learned.

SL: You reporting/check-in process is so simple. I see a lot of people over-engineer and add all these layers of data to things like this. WLC has this simple model with responsibility on the players to score themselves. How did that evolve?

Andy: We had to put the responsibility on them. That meant not giving them the answers. That was one of the hardest things. We had this rigorous commitment to not answering peoples questions when they asked. Not to be jerks - to help them take responsibility.

People would say “Can I eat this or that?” and we’d have to say “I don't know can you? Do you have the ingredient list? Here's the list of all the foods that are allowed.” “Here's the list of everything you need to answer that question, so answer the question.”

“What should you do for a workout today?” I don't know. What should you do for a workout today? What would be valuable for you today for 10 minutes? Should you do a CrossFit workout? Should you do Tabata squats? Should you skip around the block and walk your dog? Or should you play Frisbee with your kids?

It’s a great question but it’s your responsibility to decide. we're not giving you a workout plan. [Editors note:WLC does provide suggestions for people to use - many of them with Andy in fun "Living Room Workouts".]

It’s the same with scoring nutrition.

It’s not about being “good” or “bad.” It’s about noticing how much wiggling you are doing to try to get out of something you know is not serving you.

As it went along we noticed people were leaning on one another to answer their questions. Then they started to put together these food groups. Those were gatherings where they would bring compliant meals. They would trade meals, they would trade recipes. They just started to take responsibility for themselves and what they were doing. They would do a meetup, meet for a run down at the pier or one of the other local places.

What are some other ways that community factors in?

We created our business model on this idea where, if you're a coach or you're a gym owner or you're a chiropractic place, your clients can do the challenge, and we’ll split the revenue. If you bring 50 people in it's a 30% revenue share point. If you're over 120, you get 50% revenue share. That was really a big piece for me as a small business owner to begin with, I wanted to create a product where I wasn’t the only one that profited from someone bringing their clients to me.

The focus stays on awareness, not the tech. Is that by design?

I was just asked whether we ever going to develop the app to keep track of your food like MyFitnessPal does. It’s a good idea, but no. We have no problem with you doing it. We have no problem with MyFitnessPal. If it serves you, you should definitely use it. Our commitment and our strength is in doing what we do really well: simplicity. It’s a commitment to non-analytics analytics.

Everything's manual. We want you to be your own coach. The emphasis has to be on you to figure things out. Because you're the only one that's living in your skin. You are the only one that's living in your life.

Do you draw from your background in music?

That's a good question. Music brought me discipline and a willingness to practice. I wasn't the greatest practicer. I could have been exponentially better. But I understood the power of time -time spent with a hard piece of music. If you do it enough times slowly, and you get the fingerings correct, your lips to do the right thing ( I was a trumpet player)... eventually you'll get it. That was a big thing for me and still plays a big role in how I think. 

I think in terms of small steps. I don't think in terms of big.

One of the areas that I do not do well in is with big, hairy audacious goals. It's much to my chagrin actually. I really could use being willing to set those. Knowing where I am, knowing where I want to go. Then setting a target and going to hit it.

I am more process driven. I am less concerned whether or not I hit those targets in three months. My experience has been, I will hit them. I just don't quite know when.

That works to a point, but I'm 51 years old. I'm starting to see that there's a limit. There's an endpoint where I don't want to necessarily keep working the way I'm working. I want to be able to make enough money that I can retire by the time I'm 65 or 70. I don't even know what retire is for me, but there's an endpoint that if I really believe that I'm going to get there, the time's now.

In order to do that, I need to step up into these greater levels of accountability of hitting goals rather than being process driven. So I think that's an old habit of mine.

Somewhere in there is listen before you start to play. I didn't really appreciate the value of listening until after I stopped playing.

SL: Did your experience in the Marines inform how you think about teams and personal responsibility?

Andy: I didn't think of direct correlations from the Marine Corps when I was building the Whole Life Challenge. But when I think back around my military and Marine experience, it boils down to having a certain level of pride, and a desire to have my life work.

The Marines give you that. They tell you, this is what it looks like to have your life work. You don't have a choice. You're a Marine, and you're living by the Marine guidebook. But once you get out of the Marines, there is no guidebook. And so, what does it mean for your life to work? And what does it mean for your body? What does it mean for you to have the body and the fitness and the health and the mobility and the rest and the recovery and the resilience that serve your life?

When I started to ask those questions, it was on the backside of being injured multiple times. In 2011, our team from the gym qualified to go to the CrossFit Games. I was on the qualifying group. And I started training prior to the Games coming up. And I started riding my bike for everywhere I went. One day I noticed my butt was hurting in a weird way.

I had ridden thousands of miles. I had ridden across the country. But this was something different. I got an internal hemorrhoid that got infected, and then it ruptured. Suddenly I went from being one of the fittest, healthiest men around, one of the fittest men in the world, to being bed-ridden and unable to do anything other than survive.

I was out for five weeks or six weeks confined to bed rest. That was in 2011, the same year as the first challenge.

I ended up going through this exploration of how going hard doesn't necessarily get you the results you want.

The Marines is all about going hard, driving forward. There's certainly value in having the ability to do that for weeks on end. But will that get you the results that you want? Does that lead to this "uber-health?" This "uber-ability" to live a long time and a prosperous life? I started realizing that maybe it doesn't. Maybe there's more to it than what I originally thought.

While those elements from the Marines elements are useful, at other times they have to play second fiddle to what will really get you what you want. And you have to actually know what you want before you realize that.

Do have any favorite books?

Andy: As far as books, such a you can see behind me I'm looking at a little parable called the Go Giver. It's about giving. It’s a great book.

Another is by a client of mine named Peter Himmelman. It's called Let Me Out. Peter was a rock star who created a company called Big Muse to help corporations. He has a character named MARV who get’s worried and scared and holds us back. It’s a great book

SL: Are there mentors or authors who helped you shape your self concept or the WLC concept?

Andy: I've had some version of a coach since 1996, 1995. I am a huge fan. You can't see what you can't see. I don't think I'd have what I have today without having gone through these programs. I got a degree in spiritual psychology from the University of Santa Monica. That was a two year master's degree program. I had a private coach while I was going through that program. I had a private coach back in the late '90s back before anybody really knew what a life coach was.

Each conversation with each of those coaches has been slightly different. Some have been more emotional. Some work with work, work with relationships, work with my wife, work on being a better father and husband. Some of them were spiritual based, and some have been more “get results done” or “get things done in business.” I'm a huge fan of working with a coach, just like Kobe Bryant would work with a coach. There's always somewhere he can learn, someone who can help him better understand and grow.

SL: What are your current goals for the WLC?

Andy: We are trying to grow. WLC became my full time business in 2016. We've been growing it about somewhere between 15 to 20% every year. Last year we had about 62,000 people go through a challenge. We’ve grown from 3 to 4 challenges per year.

Our big goal now is to move into the corporate space. Not the“corporate wellness” space. That’s pretty full, and we don't connect to insurance companies.

The real objective and the real value of doing the challenge is culture, responsibility, and communication. Wellness just happens to be bonus.

In a company, there are people you are around all the time. You may not be able to relate to the tech guys if you're a marketing person or the artists if you're not a creative person. But everyone can relate to wellness. Because we're all stuck in the body that we have. What better way to engage everyone around a shared purpose and a shared goal to the level that they're capable of going?

We don’t claim to have THE formula for everyone. But we’ve got one that is universally scalable and applicable to wherever you are in your life. My mom is 83, and she does the Whole Life Challenge. And we’ve got 20- somethings too and everyone between.

I did a corporate speaking engagement a couple of weeks ago. The topic was how wellness and culture and communication and shared purpose are the answers to this broken state of wellness today. 

...Wellness and culture and communication and shared purpose are the answers to this broken state of wellness today. 

You can achieve that with the Whole Life Challenge.

Interested in more? Check out the Whole Life Challenge or Andy's web site to access his podcast, Breaking Ordinary or book him to speak to your company event.