-: Welcome to the Trainability Assessment
and Application Course.
As the obvious from the name, this course is going to be
about things that we can assess,
and then how we can apply that information
to make our programming better and help our clients better.
So you've probably heard the statement,
if you're not assessing, you're guessing.
And what I'm gonna encourage you to do
is take that a little bit further and say,
now that we're assessing, we're doing educated guessing.
Because when we're talking about human beings
that definitely is more the case.
Because it's not an input-output for most things.
Meaning that there's not like, okay I can assess
and ask this one question and then I know for sure
that this other thing over here is going to be the answer.
In reality, a lot of times there's just so much going on.
We have complex lives, physiology is complex,
and our day to day stuff varies quite a bit.
And of course you add in exercise, nutrition,
supplementation, whatever it may be on top of that.
There's a lot of information
and it all kinda blends together.
Hopefully coming from the Program Design course
and you've kinda seen how the body
really functions in gradients and there's a lot of overlap.
And it's really about different shades of gray
more so than black and white.
You can take that mindset and bring it into
the assessment realm.
Because when we look at assessing,
it's going to be about seeing patterns
and being able to discern, like what is
the most important piece of information
out of all of this information that I'm getting?
And how do I act on that?
Like how do I make sure, out of all the data
that I collect, that I'm making decisions
based off of the most relevant data?
The thing that's gonna give me the most bang for my buck?
And there's a lot of factors that are gonna go into that.
Sometimes it's the magnitude of change that it can make.
And sometimes it's logistically
just how easy these changes may be for the client.
So sometimes what's relevant is what you have
most control over.
And it's not necessarily the most physiologically relevant,
but it is actually what you have the most control over,
and you have the best chance at having an impact
and making a change.
So there's this, you know sometimes we can focus on,
you know doing one change that has a huge impact.
And sometimes we can do a lot of changes
that are not gonna have as much of an impact,
but they're very easy for the client
and when you build those up,
we then have a huge impact.
So this is where navigating this landscape
of learning how to collect information
and sorting through what is gonna be useful,
and then what can I actually act on?
That's gonna be one of the main goals of this course.
Some other goals with this course,
are essentially going to be understanding
how to communicate with a client.
And when we look at the way that we interact with the client
just simply the fact that we ask them about sleep,
or ask them about digestion, or these things,
all of a sudden that makes that information relevant.
So it's very important that we don't translate
our interest in some of the nuances to the client
in a way that makes them forget the big picture things.
So if we focus, if we get excited about
this minute little detail cause it's cool to us,
we just learned about it and we love science, whatever,
and all of a sudden that energy, that enthusiasm
makes a client think that that information
or that aspect of what they're supposed to be doing
is more important than some of the most basic
foundational stuff that maybe just isn't as sexy
or science-y or interesting, all of a sudden
they can work backwards.
Or we can essentially be spending too much energy
on things that are yielding small incremental changes
and results, versus getting the things that are big.
So we're gonna start this journey
with a section that's focused on big rocks.
Basically, what are the things that are going to be
most important when we look at assessing and tracking.
And we're gonna kinda break the assessment process up
into two pieces.
One being that onboarding of someone,
or if it's you when you're just starting out.
It's like okay, how do I assess somebody
that I haven't been working with?
And so obviously what I could collect from data
from them is going to be limited to
what they've been doing, what knowledge they have of it.
So that's a very different point.
And the approach that we should take
with utilizing that information is gonna be
very different than once we are kind of in the driver's seat
of what they're doing.
We've established a program,
a nutritional and training paradigm,
and we're working that through and now what we're doing
is we're tracking how they're progressing
throughout that program or protocol.
That's a very different level of assessment
than somebody coming in completely unknown,
because all of a sudden we have now
created a much more controlled environment.
And so one of the things that we're gonna focus on
with this is just getting in that mindset of you know,
if we are assessing we're educated guessing.
And that initial assessment is going to be
the worst guess that you're going to make
compared to all of a sudden when we have
a more controlled environment.
So what I want you guys to get your mind around
is that it's really important that
you focus on the foundations, focus on the principles,
and don't get lost in the nuances.
Because we will definitely talk about some nuances
and some fine details throughout this course.
And it's very easy to get distracted by those
and kind of leave the stuff that wasn't as sexy
in the background, or it just doesn't seem as cool,
but oftentimes that basic stuff
is the most important things to do.
Back to the Program Design course,
matching training and nutrition,
putting somebody on a program that's trainable for them.
If we're not getting, if our program design is not good,
and we're trying to assess how that particular stimulus
should be affecting somebody,
well I mean we're not getting accurate information.
We're not assessing what we think we're assessing
in those cases.
So it's very important to understand
that when we look at how we can impact somebody,
that the foundational stuff is going to cover
a big percentage of ultimately what's gonna get them
towards a goal or get them towards their result.
And then on top of that, what's left in terms of
percentage of improvement becomes much smaller.
So the fine details have a lower payoff, right?
They're just not as much of a bang for your buck.
And so what I want to do in terms of
the way this course is organized,
is to help you focus on the big rocks,
the things that are gonna be the most important,
give you the biggest bang for your buck first.
And really give you a lot of application
and help you master those skills,
before you start worrying about
the tiny little details that are only gonna yield
a percent difference or a percent of a percent difference.
You should be focusing on the things
that are gonna get you like 80-90% of the way
to optimal progress before you focus on that thing
that's give you an extra half of a percent.
You don't want to, you know,
lose the forest for the trees, so to speak.
So as we go through this keep that in the back of your head.
I'll probably repeat it over and over and over again
in a million different ways.
But we are, through assessment, trying to make
the best educated guess.
And then in our, both in our assessment and application
of that, the delivery and the way that we do that,
we have to make sure that regardless
of what information we got and the decisions
we try to make, we have to make sure that
the net effect is we make that change in the client.
And that's even gonna come down to how I asses,
how much I assess.
Because simply, when we look at just collecting data,
for different individuals that whole process
for one person it may be very stressful or irritating,
or they may be insecure about certain things
like stepping on a scale regularly, whatever,
so all of this stuff is going to come down to
the N of one principle.
So we're gonna teach that principle basis.
And then your goal is, for that individual person,
to come up with the best way of assessing
and applying this.
There's not gonna be like here's the outline
of what you should do, all the questions you should ask etc.
We can get into templates of things,
but in reality what you should be doing
is you should be kind of structuring and adapting
your assessment base, especially the check-ins portion of it
to that clientele.
The initial assessment, that's one where we can
kind of have like, all right this kinda what we do
for the onboarding process.
And you know there's some things that we can
take away from how people react to just that in general,
versus if you hand them a single page,
versus if you hand them like,
here's a book for you to fill out.
There's a lot that we can take away
from that beginning assessment,
but because we don't know that much about them,
we might have more of kind of like,
here's a blueprint on how to start that first one,
and then we have to be adaptive based off that.
Is there some additional information that we require?
Or how does that change my approach going forward?
So that I know that my follow up assessments,
my check-ins, whatever you want to call them,
are going to be very individualized to that person.
And you'll have people that come in with blood work,
and you'll have people that come up with labs,
you'll have people that come in with data
from a device that they wear.
You'll have all sorts of different information.
And so hopefully through this course
we can navigate through what's useful,
what's not, how useful is something versus another thing?
How does that change from individual to individual?
How does that change from phase to phase?
Because the most high priority or the big rocks
for one month, may change as you switch into
a different training phase.
Like there may be different markers
that you really need to focus on.
All of a sudden, those become the more priority markers
to track and really make adjustments for.
And so as we go through this,
we're gonna take that N of one approach
to all the data collection that we can do.
And then how we can apply that to any given individual
at any moment in time just like our Program Design approach.
And that's gonna be how we can take
a generalized principle-based set of information
and help people on a one on one basis.