Here’s everything you need to know about the man on the other side of the bike screen.
He started his career as a dancer for some of music’s biggest stars.
“I moved here as a professional dancer and I was also side-gigging in the fashion industry, working for startups, working for streetwear brands, actually,” he recounts. “So that’s kind of my genesis into New York City.”
He’s not just an instructor — he’s also Peloton’s cycling director.
“I’m kind of a liaison between our producers, our instructors, and really advocating for what our instructors need,” he explains. “And then a really big part of what I do is talent recruitment and development.”
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“I really love that part of my job because I love being someone that helps other people and like, this is the most incredible, amazing job in the world — especially for someone who’s in fitness — and to be able to kind of guide someone through that process is really rewarding.”
He puts a lot of thought into those class playlists.
“I want someone to take my class, and think, ‘Oh my God, this entire playlist makes sense,’ " he shares with PEOPLE. “And the connections between each song completely makes sense.”
He wants to ensure one song is “adjacent to the next is adjacent to the next,” sparking curiosity and familiarity. “Like maybe there’s something you’re super familiar with, but then I throw in something that you might not know, but you’re like, ‘Ooh, I like this.’ You know? I want people to feel familiar within the playlist and the programming.”
He loves to be vulnerable with his riders.
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That honesty, he tells PEOPLE, is so important to him: “I think a lot of what we consume is so filtered and so staged. You know, we’ve grown up with like the eight to 10 years on Instagram, where everything needs to be perfect and everything needs to look exactly right. And you kind of get these distorted ideas of who people are and how you should be.”
“It really creates this internal battle of staying true to yourself and finding your joy and then trying to live up to these expectations that others are setting on you,” he explains. “So for me, it’s important to show vulnerability.”
He also dispels the notion that being vulnerable comes from a “sad place” — unguarded revelations can be “fun and flirty and silly.”
He’s focused on gratitude after battling COVID-19.
“It was a really scary two weeks of it,” he reflects now, after recovering and returning to the studio. “One week, it would be like this, and then the next week the symptoms would completely change.”
The experience, and all of 2020, he says, has shifted his priorities to"be more centered around gratitude, just being grateful for what I can do, grateful for what my body is capable of. "
“Instead of letting that fear kind of drive me, I landed in a space of gratitude and just taking every day as it is, and to celebrate what I can do in that day. "
source: people.com
