2960: How Three Personal Trainers Built the Most Downloaded Fitness Podcast in History — The Origin Story

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer and Justin Andrews.

Sal Di Stefano (0:13)

You just found the most downloaded Health, Fitness and Entertainment podcast in history approaching over half a billion downloads. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, Adam, Justin and myself talk about how we got into the fitness industry and what it looked like back in the 90s, early 2000s and what it looks like now. Look, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Legion Supplements. Legion makes high quality supplements for athletic performance, muscle building and fat loss. One of the reasons why we work with Legion is their integrity. Every product is tested by a third party. Every bottle has the ingredients list and they don't use proprietary blends so they can hide things. They show you exactly how much of each ingredient is in the bottle. Legion also only uses compounds that have data supporting their use. They don't waste time with things that sound fancy or that are trendy, unless there's data that shows that it works.

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Justin Andrews (2:06)

All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it, enjoy the rest of the show.

Sal Di Stefano (2:21)

Look, we've been doing this for decades. Now, I don't just mean professionally, definitely not the podcast, this has only been on air for a little over 10 years. But I mean personally, we've been in fitness since we were kids, and so we thought we'd do an episode where we talked about how it started for us, the mistakes that we made, when we learned how to do things the right way and what that did for us, and maybe even get into how we got into the fitness industry. So we're gonna talk all about that right now.

Adam Schafer (2:46)

Let's go. You know, it makes me feel really old when we think about this.

When we have trainers and staff that work for us now that are younger than the amount of years that we've been doing this. Like, oh man, that's crazy. That's wild. Isn't that wild to think that? Some of our top trainers are younger than the amount of years that we've actually been doing this.

Sal Di Stefano (3:09)

Well, dude, I've been personally into the fitness.

Doug Egge (3:13)

Yeah, you're the longest.

Sal Di Stefano (3:14)

For 33 years. So for 33, that sounds like crazy.

Adam Schafer (3:19)

That's counting like when you started.

Sal Di Stefano (3:21)

Started.

Adam Schafer (3:21)

Yeah, even as like a 15-year-old.

Sal Di Stefano (3:23)

Yeah, in fact, I was telling this story to my son the other day, because he's like, how did you start? And so I remembered exactly actually how I started. The first thing I did, I asked for dumbbells, and I don't remember what it was for, Christmas or my birthday or something, and I got these two plastic green dumbbells, the sand-filled ones, and it came with this sheet that had like six or seven exercises on it. So I'm maybe 13 and a half years old, and I just practiced the exercise. I just copied the pictures in my bedroom every single night.

And then when I was 14, my dad had a weight set in the backyard, which that's a great story in and of itself. He had this guy that worked with him who lifted weights, who bragged about how much you could bench press. My dad, he's a Sicilian immigrant, never heard of bench press, but this guy talked about it so much that my dad wanted to try it. So I actually went out, bought a weight set, practiced bench pressing for a few months, was able to bench press 300 pounds. I'm the one that spotted him, so picture a 13-year-old kid spotting his dad at 300 pounds on the bar.