In this episode of Get Up And Code, the panel talks about fitness fads and scams. This episode's panelists are Donn Felker, Jesse Taber and John Sonmez.
 
Patreon (Donate to Get Up And Code)
I’d really appreciate it if you could Rate Get Up and CODE on iTunes. Thanks!
Full Transcript:
Speaker 1:      Welcome to the Get Up and CODE Podcast with your host John Sonmez. The only podcast that combines fitness and programming and does it in less time than it takes to finish your workout.
John:               Hey everyone, welcome back to Get Up and CODE. We have our panel today and if you’ve been listening to Get Up and CODE and you haven’t heard we are now moving to a panel show so it’s not just me boring you. Now you’ll have more people hopefully not boring you because hopefully we’ll have some more interesting conversations.
Today we’ve got Jesse Taber who you all should know and the new panelist Donn Felker. Donn, welcome and thanks for coming on to the panel.
Donn:              Yeah, no problem. Thanks for inviting me on. I appreciate it.
John:               Yeah, I guess—we still have to figure out the exact format of this like how we’re going to do this, but we’re all kind of—panel seems like such a formal word like we’re going to interview like, I don’t know.
Donn:              Like we’re on stage?
John:               Mm-hmm. I thought probably it would be good to—we’re going to talk about today about fitness scams and fads kind of all that stuff but before we do that we should give Donn a chance to—why don’t you introduce yourself to everyone and kind of—we did this a couple of episodes ago. Jesse and Christopher did but Donn you haven’t had a chance to tell your origin story.
Donn:              Sounds good, yeah. My name is Donn Felker and I guess I’ll start with the programming background here. I’ve been developing since the late 90s and then the 2000s. I kind of did a lot of dot net development. Right on 2008when the first android device came out I kind of embraced that quite heavily and just kind of got sucked into it by accident. Actually not many people were doing it. Since then I’ve been doing android development exclusively for clients all over the country. I’ve written 4 books on android, I speak all over the country on it and so forth.
I do that and I also consult for various different people that have web apps and training materials, so I do a whole bunch of different things in technology. Not just Android. I do a lot of Node.js stuff, some Rails, sometimes a Python so that’s kind of the technology background part of it.
The fitness side of stuff is a little bit different. I kind of have been just into fitness overall since I was probably a teenager. I started just working out myself. I decided I didn’t want to just be on the couch and not be healthy the rest of my life. I saw a lot of people in my hometown which is a small town in Northern California getting sick, overweight and so forth so I just had the drive to not be that way and eventually got into racing motocross and after that kind of short career ended I moved around the country a little bit and just started going to the traditional gym for about, I don’t know, I’d probably say 10 years. After that I got into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I did some Jiu Jitsu for a couple of years and then moved across the country again to Minneapolis. Actually in Arizona I started the Jiu Jitsu and moved up to Minneapolis and continued up there.
Eventually one day I was working out and heard a bunch of noise in the other side of the wall and there was this weird gym in Minneapolis. It had Jiu Jitsu on one side and on the other side it was—actually it was Crossfit and I ended up trying Crossfit up in Minnesota and ended up liking it quite a bit. I’m not a big Crossfit zealot so I’m not going to preach to the choir there but it’s just something I do and I’ve just continued d...