Auto news on Youtube Aug 30 2017

walked into the library one day and everyone was watching one of my videos

giving me some shit about it and having a bit of a laugh but look who's laughing

now so

Today we're with a good mate of mine from the old days in primary school actually

So this is Daniel Vadnal. Primarily known for his

massive YouTube channel called FitnessFAQs and how many views we have at

the moment man.

We're about to get 34 or 35 million

34 or 45 million. Just a casual amount.

Looking back now I remember him when he was lot younger in Primary school

A year below me... we also went to the same high school, same uni. I'm just realizing

all of this now. We went to ACU, so shout out to you guys as well. Now we're just catching up and

just see how he's going with his whole journey because I personally am really

inspired by my Daniels work and he's impacting like he said you know 34 45

million people viewing this content online you're just really excited to

deep dive into your story and the man behind the brand at FitnessFAQs and how

exactly got there. So appreciate the catch up today man, looking forward to it

sounds good yeah so you want to tell a bit about

yourself and the journey you come through having this amazing YouTube

channel impacting millions of people's lives and yeah what are you doing next

I first started my online presence if you will started filming back in 2008 this

was around the time when I started exploring hand balancing so doing

handstands at this time I was also doing parkour and I was mainly just you know

filming myself doing things and trying to see what my form looked like and

refine things based on my own objective view during the videos back again it

wasn't until maybe 2010 that I decided that I'd like to start posting more

educational type of videos on the internet because I looked on the

Internet at the time and I saw a lot of people posting videos but really poorly

edited people couldn't actually do the skills themselves and they were talking

a lot of BS to be honest with you so I looked at that and I thought I could do

that a lot better a lot more succinctly and

help people out by doing so so at that stage I started fitnessFAQ's and my

main goal at the time was to start obviously educational videos and how

to's with different exercises different workouts people could do and it was all

based off not requiring any equipment so there was absolutely no excuses or

any barriers to people doing different things and that was my vision from the

start. At the start for the first year or two I don't think I posted that

consistently but every time that I did post when I got around to making the

content the feedback across the board was really positive so people were

giving me good affirmation as to what I was doing and it wasn't that difficult

for me to keep going in that sense because I didn't many people saying oh

what you're doing is bad or what not obviously on the internet, you're gonna get

those comments where people are just being silly but I had a pretty good

experience from the start and then it took me a few years to just to decide you

know what I should do this a little bit more consistently and then when I

started to put in work more religiously I was starting to reap the rewards with

more subscribers more viewers and essentially took it from there to

expand my YouTube platform to what it is today

Awesome man, so it definitely sounds

like a massive highlight if you will in terms of where you've come from and what you've done till this day

Obviously it hasn't always been that whole steady uphill kind of journey (Of course not)

what was that first milestone for you where you were like I really

want to keep going, this is it, I'm doing it. One of the initial stages that really stood

out to me was probably back I think it was 2012 if I remember

correctly at the stage YouTube was putting something out there called

YouTube next trainer where basically they were offering mentoring they were

offering equipment to youtubers at the time who are doing quite well in the

fitness field and I applied for it I thought you know what I might not get it

you know how we always tend to doubt what we can actually achieve applied for it

got successfully through Hey everyone my name is Daniel I'm 19

years old and I'm from Melbourne Australia and I just got

approved to be YouTube's next trainer So it was only 12 people I think that got accepted

for YouTube max trainer so basically kick-started everything I

got a DSLR camera and microphone tripod advice regarding editing and stuff and

how to reach your audience on YouTube so going through that process really made

me think you know what maybe I can do this

pursue this further even as a financial means and that really kick-started

things for me with the progression of my channel reaching more people doing

higher quality content and making it more watchable if you will more

interactive the audience retention went up when I started working more

exclusively with that YouTube next trainer program Right, just taking on their advice

their guidance I realized that you're actually pioneering

the health and fitness, it's booming, you know got gyms everywhere, PT's

everywhere you have a lot of fitness influencers out and about especially like

yourself with your YouTube. The other thing is also video(yes) so combining health and

fitness and video you've got like this amazing opportunity which you're really

really pioneering. When you first started did you know you entering into

like this gold mine or was there a certain point where you're like wow this is

crazy opportunity right now I'm gonna go all out on this. From the start I mean I was

talking to mark about this before but when I when I started it wasn't really

to build a business or to build a brand it was essentially filling a gap that I

felt existed on that medium on YouTube which was high quality content for that

specific purpose I think in my case because I just started putting the

content out there very innocently just to help people and just seeing over time

each video doing a little bit better than the previous I essentially just

kept the momentum going and just built off my previous success if you will and

then just taking the the negatives from my previous one and really trying to

turn them into positives so if someone was giving me feedback on a style video

that I was doing or how I was coming across I'd try and refine that in future

videos And just essentially growth continually

overtime and just trying to put out the best content I could and just help as

many people as I could Nice, and what was the first kind of feedback you got from

the audience we're like I'm addicted to this now I really want to keep adding

value keep helping change people's lives? Oh definitely, I mean when you when you

see your stats and see that you're getting you know X number of views from

different parts of the world and you know tens of thousands of views on each

video it just really puts into perspective that you've got a reach that's wider

than your local demographic so just for example if I'm doing personal training I

can only you know train say like 40 50 people a week whereas if I'm putting

online content out there I can reach thousands even while sleeping as well

which is just an extremely gratifying you know feeling.

Both of us have got quite a few friends, you've probably got a ton more you know in terms of friends being in the fitness industry

yeah I met quite a few were there like you know I'm happy to doing what I'm

doing right now and there's that kind of barrier from them taking themselves in

say a 'brick and mortar' styled business where it's just local

demographic and your clients are situated just in an arm's reach basically

What is the best advice to give these people who have that kind of

obstacle from getting themselves from this physical presence to the online

presence we have unlimited reach to clients and the ability to increase your

credibility and increase sales and your training and impact more people.

I think in today's day and age with online marketing social media and things like that you'd almost be a bit

of a fool not to put yourself out there just because of if you can reach more

people even in your local area it will help your brick and mortar business as

well but if you can reach people outside of that you can add an additional

service or product that you can sell which will help expand your brand or

your business too and I think even more important especially in the fitness

field if you are forced to put content out there it really keeps you

forced to be up to speed with the latest in research what works most effectively

you can't just BS your way through a conversation with a client your your

voice is out there people are going to critique you so you've got to be putting

out the right content so it'll help you professionally in your own brick and

mortar business as well so it'll help you expand professionally it forces you

to keep learning awesome Let's get into details because I know that there'd be

people out there who are on that kind of edge where they're like you know I'm

thinking about taking my business online maybe I want to create a website I want

to get into social media that kind of stuff you know. In terms of someone who's already

making it happen, I can only imagine how many people are reaching out to you and

saying Daniel I wasnt to work with you and because of your level credibility

and your exclusiveness you having to say "no" It definitely does get like that

especially I didn't mention this earlier but I'm currently working as a

physiotherapist as well so I'm trying to juggle full-time physio with my fitness

FAQ stuff as well so as you said during that interesting position where you've

you've got this service to provide which is a specialty service and you can

charge what you want you can take on as many people as you want and at this

stage I've actually got a decent waiting list for my online coaching stuff just

based on the time commitment I don't want to spread myself too thin so

definitely there is the need to do that if you want to push your business to the

next level and I think just not hesitating to take the first step you've

got to learn somehow you can't read about this stuff indefinitely you've

just got to put yourself out there see what the reaction is learn from your

mistakes and just try and put out the best quality content you can there's no

secret to any of this it's going to take hard work to do that but unless you take

that first step you're never going to know if you can do it or if it's going

to be a viable option for you so you go try it just try it. So looking forward to a

lot of you guys taking the first couple steps and people reaching out to you man because of

this interview so looking back and when you did take that first step for you

I can only imagine the people who were supporting you

and the people who were not so supportive

and in terms of belief in yourself especially with what we're doing yeah it's so important

because if you don't have that belief in yourself and you're not surrounded with the right people, you can only go so far

so how did you handle that like mentally yeah how did you combat people saying to you

because we're talking about this previously when you're at uni and can you share with us

what other people were saying in terms of like negative remarks? Sure, I'll start with just the

positive stuff that I got first I mean from the channel it always helped that I

had you know say 90 95 percent positive feedback so that always made it fairly easy

for me to keep pushing in that environment family and for the most part

friends really supportive I know my family in particular I know that if I

wanted to pursue this full-time they'd be all in they know that it's my passion

I love I love teaching this stuff and I love doing it when it comes to some of

the negative stuff that's with everything in life you're gonna get

people who are either jealous or just trying to you know drag you down like

that crab mentality so you know you've got crabs in a bucket one crabs trying

to get out and do more than everyone else the rest try and pull it down I

found when I was in uni when someone found out about my channel because I

like to keep things on the low just go about my business a group of friends

found out about my channel they told people in my cohort and I walked into

the library one day and everyone was watching one of my videos on loudspeaker

and it was a bit bit funny everyone was you know giving me some shit about it

and having a bit of a laugh but look who's laughing now

Hit 'LIKE' right there! That's awesome so, like what you were saying surrounding yourself with the right people

You got your family which are really supporting you

So in terms of having the right people around you with your friends and having people who

have achieved what you want, who are the people in your scene

the fitness scene doing bodyweight training that kind of stuff that you

look up to in short who is your 'Dream Team' of people that you have around

and would love to have around you more? I'd say one of the people that I look up

to most in terms of just their global impact and what they've achieved is

someone called Ido Portal he basically specialises in bodyweight

strength training essentially movement culture whereby we're manipulating our

body through space advanced mobility training anywhere anytime using your own

body to get more athletic feats and just better use of your body in your day to

day life with him he's had such a global impact in changing people's paradigm of

what Fitness really is and just seeing the reach that he's been able to achieve

he's travelling the world teaching workshops he recently was working with

Conor McGregor leading up to one of his UFC fights just seeing someone go

from sticking to their values sticking to what they're trying to teach

I think that's very motivating to see something like that if I can stay true

to myself continue to push my vision with what I see bodyweight training

becoming in Australia I'll be content that will be my definition of success

reaching people teaching people getting bodyweight training more popular in

Australia would be my vision and I guess coming back to your question mark about

who would be my team I would be looking for people who I only practice what they

preach so are capable of doing elements that you know I hold true to the style

of training so living the lifestyle but also being committed to the brand and

the movement of creating a good culture surrounding this style of training

I'd say that's my vision so if people have those qualities I'd be looking to

take those people on Nice, I love that. It's so important to have the right people

around you pushing you and actually I've heard this

from somewhere you've always gotta have people who are better than you so that

you can learn from them You gotta have people that are

that are on the same level as you so you can be challenged with each other yeah

you know yeah and then you may have people who are who are learning who are

willing to get to that stage yeah where you used to be so you can help bring

them up too - so having that nice balance of people around you, is

always nice and healthy. I think if you're not working with people who are

better than you or if you don't think that you've got things to learn you've

lost the battle yeah is you're gonna stagnate and you're

not gonna get to that next step I think you would have got this from speaking to

people that are more successful that probably is a trend that you'd see a

quality that would be consistent amongst everyone they'd probably hold a lot less

worth in themselves than other people think of them and that's probably what

keeps the fire going in the sense of pushing the envelope constantly.

Let's talk details because I mean one of the most recent videos you actually published was how

to work smarter, something about that right? You and I are very alike in

terms of we're very goal-driven, taking action every single day

to the point where it can be sort of detrimental to us you know

In the big picture of things yeah that's really important because yes it's good to

achieve his kind of level of success and get that fulfilment helping other people

but more importantly we need to take care of ourselves

you know I've seen myself new people around me they're "all in" in sort of one area of

their life they kind of neglect other areas like health It's hard it's very hard so

what was your mindset and your main advice to people who you want

to maintain a kind of healthy lifestyle and optimize your strength

and your progress? I think with that video, I'll just give you a brief summary so

I've been trying to achieve an advanced body weight skill so for me it's a

really difficult skill it's taken me a lot of time to progress so my goal for

this exercise is 5 reps and I've consistently been stuck at say 3 to 4

reps and I notice upon reflecting on my training and my approach that I've been

doing a pretty similar approach for a couple of months now

and you know how we are we get a bit dogmatic in our ways we tend to do

things that we're comfortable with that we like doing essentially was me just

reflecting on that realizing that things have got to change you know insanity is

doing the same thing over and over expecting different results Albert

Einstein said that and it's it's really hard to look at yourself and make a

change it's easy for me to look at someone else and see what they're doing

wrong but I think the most difficulty is just reflecting on yourself and seeing

what needs to be done and more importantly executing on the change that

need to be made so for me I found that I was training too consistently so too

frequently at too high of an intensity so with me I love strength training I

like it a lot and it's probably a detriment that I'm doing too much so

it's not that I'm not doing enough we often get the perception that we should

be doing more but I think in my case less is more especially when it comes to

this to allow myself to recover so I find that focusing on my areas of

weakness and actually working on them is going to be a successful approach moving

forward and like you were saying before it's it's hard to achieve the balance

but I think you can always skew the balance more by focusing on areas that

must be addressed yes so you're gonna get a bigger return on your investment

working on things that you suck out or that you don't want to necessarily do

compared to continuing to add more to what you're already good at so

that's my focus moving forward for the rest of the year working on the

weaknesses doing a little bit less of what I'm good at

it's not easy to do it it's not necessarily comfortable but I think

that's what's required. Yeah for sure, it's kind of funny as well because we're both

on our rest days today yeah I mean you're resting today. I only recently

found that I need to have these rest days from researching or doing too much work

because the more you work ,you're clouded your

mind gets, and if you try to push yourself that last hour to work mentally

it may not be as productive Yeah you're not going to be as effective

that's really interesting I really think it's really really important for people

to understand like ourselves you're still going through it too what are your

thoughts on people who are out there trying to teach people what to do but

don't have the level of credibility that you do need yeah and giving the wrong

type of advice? I think on the internet now in particular especially in the fitness

field because that's what I know that's what I do there's a difference between a

fitness celebrity or a fitness personality and a fitness professional

so if I was to classify myself I'd edge more towards the fitness professional

side of things just because I've been doing it for so long I've got a you know

proven track record of success with clients online coaching in person I've

got a Bachelor of Exercise Science master of physio so we've got those

titles behind what I do some would say that they look up to me in the sense

that I could be deemed as more of a celebrity in this field yeah but I like

to stick to more of the educational content sometimes people blur the lines

with what they shouldn't shouldn't be saying ie people giving nutritional

advice or say strength training advice to populations that you should be seeing

a professional for so you shouldn't have like a 60 year old person who's never

done exercise in their life and they go on the internet how to squat and

someone's teaching them that you know is just giving a blanket statement for

everyone so I think there's a very fine line but it's very difficult with the

internet because obviously there's no overbearing liability if you will so

people can just chuck content out there and without any consequence of what's

happening whereas if someone came into the clinic to see me and I gave them

some wrong advice or a wrong protocol and they got injured as a result of that

I could be liable yeah so I think when you're looking to get advice from people

look are they a professional or a celebrity don't get me wrong it's good

to get motivated by people who you know posting vlogs who are in really good

shape but just because someone's in good shape doesn't mean they're good teacher

I think trying to have the best of every world is really difficult and that's

what my major focus is I try and practice what I preach I want to have

the credibility to do so as well and I want to be a source of motivation so I'm

trying to blend both of those into one but I think when it comes to people

giving the advice on on YouTube in particular you've got educational

content you've got comedic content and then you've got more of like your

lifestyle content so I try and specialize in the educational stuff and

then some comedic stuff as well

We sprinkle them with yeah

I think you've got a find your niche and

really try and work in that if you spread yourself too thin

I reckon that might not be the best thing either. Do you find that's as

well like what differentiates you from everybody else is because people know you

for that for the education I go for your stuff because I'm like okay

now I know exactly how I do that muscle up, now i know how to do this

planche push up, now i know how to do this chin up I find

that you combining that with your entertainment kind of stuff to

compliment it as opposed to someone who's trying to do too many different

things you lose them in that Whereas yours is like you know who your

audience is they know exactly what they like that's why they follow you yeah so

it's a really it's a really difficult balance because you're trying to get the

educational content out there in a succinct fashion whilst you can get

people's you know retention time in a video but you're trying to sprinkle in a little

bit of personality which is not the easiest thing to do I find but doing the

best I can, getting better at it over time

I'm loving the vision that you've got for in terms of Australia, getting your

name out there and helping people 'live' what's the vision for that and what's next?

Moving forward, I really want to start doing more in person educational stuff and workshops

and seminars are a really good way to do this because you get that tactile

feedback people get to practice it and apply it and we get to tweak things on

the fly and it's a really good balance of you know actual practical application

in addition to the theory that goes behind what we do and I find in

Australia at the moment calisthenics bodyweight training is very unknown it's

in its infancy it's not really that popular in Australia you go to Europe

you go to America they're practicing this everywhere I think that's partly

because of the culture there's a lot of outdoor fitness parks people are really

into it but I think in Australia we're really working to get that out there and

I believe that doing workshops is going to be a really good way to kickstart

that and my eventual goal beyond doing it across Australia is obviously to go

international travel Europe America because that's predominantly where my

audience is but really at this stage we just want to test out

the waters with the type of stuff that we're teaching the structure of things

making sure that it's really refined in Australia and then take it further from there

Awesome man. Daniel's come a long way, he's shared a lot of his time with his audience, giving a lot of value

and impacting a lot of people like myself. Really really grateful the time you've spent with us today

and the amount of value you've shared with us, all the tips and everything

so excited for 2017, really excited to be a part of it man. Appreciate it

it's always good connecting with like-minded people especially in today's

society everyone's so negative so it's nice to get people who trying to be positive, push things forward

That's why i really wanted to connect with Mark today and it's been a good experience man.

Really appreciate it man. So shout out to FitnessFAQS, all the audience, you guys

Looking forward to hearing feedback Really excited for the year to come

Sweet, see you guys. Thanks for watching!

you