Go ahead and get rolling.
Okay, so what is a transformation?
Well, most of you guys probably the simple answer,
or the first answer that you would give would be it's
body composition, right?
That's, that's the, we'll say the analytical analysis of
what transformation is.
Okay? But if we're being honest, for the majority
of your clientele, like losing body fat, like
what are the two main reasons they're gonna do that?
Or three, maybe like one is, okay,
I simply wanna look better naked,
or maybe even just with clothes on, depending on
how much body fat we're talking about here, right?
Okay. Um, but then the others are, well, how many times,
how, how many of you guys had people that come to you
and the reason they wanna lose weight is
because of a health reason, right?
Either their doctor told 'em this
or they had a health scare,
or, you know, whatever it is,
they're just overall concern, right?
About the health.
And then the third one that a lot
of people forget is simply just quality of life, right?
Like, and if we only focus purely on
the measurable body composition change
and not the other ones, we miss the ability to
reinforce some habits and stuff like that.
So, under quality of life, we have things like the amount
of energy people have, right?
You guys obviously have all probably trained people
or been through this process yourself, right?
When you have people and they first start, like,
what are the typical things that they say in terms of like,
you know, what's changing?
Okay? It might be like, oh, okay, cool.
You know, maybe it's like, oh, I'm sleeping better,
I have more energy during the day.
This feels better. This doesn't hurt, you know,
my clothes fit differently, et cetera, right?
How many times do you guys hear more of that
than you actually hear people talking about the scale?
Raise your hand, right?
I mean, that's what most people talk about, right?
Because I mean, even if you're,
even if you are weighing yourself every day,
that's something that you look at for just
that moment, right?
Once you get off that scale
and you go about your day, that number doesn't necessarily
follow you round, or at least, hopefully it shouldn't.
If he does, then maybe we gotta talk about, you know,
some things going on upstairs.
But for the most part, people are gonna experience the
benefits of a transformation program
the majority of the time.
Like, it's not gonna be just the scale weight, right?
It's gonna be all of these other factors, right?
So we wanna look at those, okay?
So that's everything from energy, sleep, and recovery, okay?
Mobility and function, strength of performance,
lifestyle habits, cognitive function, and stress management.
Okay? Those are all gonna be important things.
And the thing is, is that
because we know, like basically if we improve somebody's
conditioning, we improve their nutrition,
we improve their lifestyle habits,
and they're also getting more metabolically healthy
by gaining a little bit of muscle, losing a little bit
of body fat, and having that tissue be overall healthy,
that we're gonna experience benefits on all of these things.
These are all things that we should be monitoring so
that we can reinforce them by saying, Hey, cool,
look at the progress we're making in X, Y, Z area, okay?
But also so that you can understand
how your program is affecting them across the board.
Not just on the scale or the body fat,
but actually how it's affecting them overall.
Because all of this stuff impacts their life
more often than just the body composition.
So when we look at transformations, one of the things I like
to teach coaches is that you should set goals
in multiple categories.
And some of those goals should be rewards based,
and some of them should be action based.
So with the stuff that's on the board here, okay?
If you know, energy is not something we can really
take an action, I can't just tell you
to have more energy, right?
Unless that means like, you know,
double your caffeine intake or, or whatever.
It's, I can't tell you to have more energy,
but we can set goals for things like sleep.
Just like we can steps
or just like we can hours in the gym, we can also,
we can also program hours in bed, right?
And we can have a positive reinforcement for
accomplishing that, right?
Can we focus on quality of sleep? Yes.
But I can't tell people to simply have better quality sleep,
but I'm gonna have to do, well, I'm gonna have
to work on some lifestyle habits, right?
So maybe that's winding down at the evening,
getting rid of light, right?
And you know, stressful
or, you know, stimulating activities in the evening.
So having some sort of a nighttime routine, maybe part
of it's, you know, how they time their last meal, what
that last meal consists of.
Are we gonna use any supplementation?
Are we gonna bring their magnesium levels up?
Are we gonna get them sunlight or red light during the day?
All of those things can help with the quality, right?
So those are things, so I can measure sleep quality
as just am I accomplishing that?
But I can also give them the goal of, hey,
if you do X things, simply accomplishing those things
is an accomplishment, accomplishment itself.
So we reinforce those things, okay?
Mobility and function, okay?
You have somebody come in,
maybe they can't touch their toes, right?
Maybe they can't get into a full depth squat, okay?
So even their goal, even though their goal is
I wanna lose X amount of weight, okay?
If I set some of these, do you think
that's maybe gonna help their motivation to train, you know,
or motivations to stick to the diet When all
of a sudden it's like, okay, cool, I'm accomplishing these
little things that I wanted to do,
I can now get into this position.
Right? So what we need to have for the average person
is a variety of ways to measure progress, a variety of goals
to focus on, both from an assessment perspective for you
as a coach of what's going on,
but also for a client to have multiple checkpoints
other than just body composition to strive for.
Okay? Because does fat loss happen like linearly?
Like you start the diet and you just, you know,
you lose half a pound, you know,
every three days, like forever.
No, that's not how it works, right?
Weight will fluctuate up and down.
Body water will fluctuate up and down,
and that actually may be intentional with your programming.
So it's nice to be able to pivot
and focus on other things, right?
So if somebody comes in, how many of you guys, a lot
of you guys work with moms, right?
Okay. Most of them may not come in with a strength goal,
but sometimes you
get somebody that's like, yeah, you know what?
I would like to be able to do a pull up.
I've never done a pull up in my life, right? Or they don't.
But maybe we should reinforce that once we see
where there are, maybe we should actually set up like, Hey,
by the end of this transformation, I don't want you just
to be a size whatever,
but I also want you to be able
to squat your own body weight.
Or I also want you to be able to do X, Y, and Z.
Because if we can accomplish those things, not only does
that help the process, but also
what we can tell them in terms of making it important is, is
that, okay, cool, if we establish the strength,
we know there's a direct correlation between
how you're gonna feel, how healthy you're gonna be,
and also what are the odds that you're going
to keep the weight off, right?
So the majority of people that fail at maintaining
fat loss are people that don't build strength
or muscle mass during the process.
They simply do only diet, right?
There's a massive increase in your odds of retaining
most of your body composition goals.
If there's a strong relationship with gaining muscle
and focusing on strength,
because that builds not only another reward system,
but it builds habits and also puts you in a better place,
physiologically to be able to get back to a more maintenance
and balanced diet is if we've built some muscle
and we're overall stronger and better performing.
If all I do is diet somebody down
and they are just a smaller version of their low performing,
tired, weak self, well then as soon
as they start eating again, what's gonna happen?
They're just gonna get fat really fast.
But if somebody in the process of losing that body fat
builds muscle, becomes stronger, more energetic,
more active, and finds a reward system in being active,
then they're gonna be much more likely to keep
those body composition changes.
Okay? Alright.
And then the la the last two on here, lifestyle habits,
cognitive function, and stress management.
Those are like, those are inherently good in terms
of what you can do from somebody's health perspective,
but they're also gonna be very important
for the sustainability because working on habits
and lifestyle is going to decrease the challenges
that people have over this, over this process, right?
Because the more chaotic
and more negative things
that they have in their environment, et cetera,
that's gonna make it harder to stick to the plan
that's gonna increase the likelihood they fall
off, et cetera, right?
And it's also gonna just make the process seem
more challenging, right?
It's like increasing the RPE for the process
if we don't have good lifestyle, uh, practices
and habits in there, okay?
Cognitive function and stress management. Okay?
How many of you guys reach for a plate
of broccoli when you've had a hard day?
Never. Right? Okay. No.
How many of you guys, you know,
and this is where sometimes this can be the opposite.
How many of you guys, when you're having a really stressful
period in your life, you know, really focus on getting
to the gym more, maybe a couple, right?
Because some of us are a little bit like masochistic
or whatever, where it's like, okay,
if I'm gonna come in here
and, you know, work out my feelings,
but the average person, that's not the case, right?
They're gonna work out their feelings, you know,
pounding down some cake or, you know, something like that,
or alcohol or whatever their current, um,
you know, crutches.
Okay? So getting people
to not only appreciate the cognitive benefits from this,
but to help them understand how, how managing stress
is gonna be very helpful through this process, right?
Can be huge. Because essentially between these two,
what we want to do is minimize the challenge
of actually doing the transformation,
but also make it so that this process is rewarding
and that people have the right amount of structure
and flexibility for them to be able
to manage whatever stresses are in their lives, right?
So we'll get into
that in detail when we get into that section.
Okay? So when it comes to achieving a transformation,
okay, what are the challenges?
Okay, we usually like to think of this, which is like,
I'll just start here at the bottom, what are the,
the less likely ones?
Well, you know, if they would've just tracked their calories
or their macros a little bit more accurate, you know,
or if they would've fall, like if I had the secret
macro ratio for that,
it would've just unlocked their metabolism.
They would've lost all the body fat, right? Okay.
Um, is finding a good macronutrient ratio
and calories gonna be good?
Yes. But if we're actually talking about
what is the likelihood that that was the thing
that kept somebody from getting the results,
it's gonna be less than the, the above.
Okay. Perfect. Programming, no. Okay.
Most people that fail fat loss isn't
because their program isn't good enough.
It's because they didn't follow through with it, okay?
Right? Even a, like, when, when it comes to fat loss,
a bad program, right?
Done well is better than a great program done poorly. Okay?
Perfect technique. Yeah.
The perfect bicep curl doesn't really
burn many more calories than a s****y bicep curl.
Okay? And then acute training effort, right?
So a lot of times people are like, oh,
you're just not working hard enough in the gym.
Okay? We don't need to actually train
to all out failure all the time for this process to happen.
Okay? How many of you guys know people
that have lost like a ton of weight
and all they did was, you know,
they made a few lifestyle changes,
like maybe they started walking and whatever,
and all of a sudden, like, you know, they lost, you know,
40 pounds over, you know, six months or something like that
because they made a nutritional change
and they started walking.
But what they made was some big lifestyle habit changes.
And that made a huge impact going from, oh,
when I'm stressed out, I eat a bag of chips to, Hey,
if I'm stressed out, I drink a cup of water
and I walk for 10 minutes,
it's gonna have a bigger impact on somebody then
teaching them like a perfect heel elevated squat.
Okay? That's just the, that's just the reality. Okay?
So we wanna make sure we understand where these things rank.
That's not to say that technique is important,
programming is important, these are still important.
But if all you do is focus on these
and we skip these things, then
what you're gonna do is you're gonna have a lot
of people simply failing to do your program.
Well, okay, so what's most likely gonna be the issue?
Consistent compliance, right?
Are we actually getting the sessions in?
Are we actually getting our meals in?
Are they actually what they're supposed to be, right?
Are we getting our steps in, et cetera? Okay, time.
Okay, who here trains three hours a week?
At least raise your hand. Okay?
Like yourself, okay, everybody, right?
Most of you guys probably train somewhere around
like five hours a week if you're
being, if you're being honest, right?
Most of you guys probably, okay?
How many of you guys have clients
that train on average five hours a week?
Okay, so, right. Okay.
How many of you guys, it's somewhere between two
and three, like hours a week of training
that you're getting out of people, right?
That's, that's it, right?
So a like, so think of yourselves, okay?
All of, none of you guys have a ton
of body fat to lose or whatnot, right?
Except for me. So if you guys took,
and you cut your training by 40%,
do you think it would be just as effective?
Probably not, right? What would you have
to start changing in your life
if you cut your training by 40%?
Would that mean that like, oh, maybe I had
to eat a little bit less, or maybe I had to find some ways
to get some extra activity in.
Or maybe my training sessions needed to be a little bit more
like dense so that I could get more done in the two
or three hours that I have because I don't have four
or five hours to get that same volume in.
Okay? So time management
is gonna be a big factor for most people,
and that's time in the gym and time out of the gym.
So that means, okay, if I'm limited on
how much time I have in the gym,
I have to make every minute count.
Okay? If I'm limited on how much time I have for activity,
well then that activity is likely gonna have to be
a little bit more intense.
Versus if I have time for tons
and tons, like when we, when we get into talking about,
well, which cardio would I use
and, you know, how intensely would I train
or whatever, a lot of it's gonna come down to.
It's like we need a certain dosage of stimulus.
If the window of time we have to get it in is smaller,
well then the intensity has to go up.
If I have more time to do it,
then I have more options in terms of using lower intensity.
So some people will be like, oh yeah,
you know, it's the best.
And other people will be like, no,
you know, you can just do lists.
And like some people are like, oh,
you don't have to train to failure.
And other people are like, yeah, you have
to like do all of this other stuff.
And in reality, what you're gonna need
to do is figure out which
of those strategies is gonna be best given the time
and limitations that you have, okay?
Right. Cost and access. Okay?
Anybody here have clients
that have all their meals prepped for them?
You know, that makes life pretty easy, right?
Like if you don't have to do any of the cooking, okay?
The challenge for that is you have to,
you have to pay for it, right?
Okay. How many of you guys have clients that would train
with you more if it was in their budget?
Okay. Right? So they might only see you x times a week.
So cost and access, okay?
You guys train at Equinox,
that's a pretty bougie place, right?
But some of you guys probably have clients that, you know,
maybe they train at home with very little equipment,
or maybe they train at a really crappy gym.
Like the gym at Prospect, I'm just kidding.
It's a great gym, right? Okay. Or the, what is it?
Gym five down the road. It's a power lifting gym.
You guys got one cable machine? We got two now. Whoa. Wow.
Wow. Trying to expand.
I, I feel like, I feel like I'm
succeeding as an influencer now.
Yeah, right? Because when I came, when I moved here,
you guys had zero cables.
We had a like right home
Version of a cable.
Okay? Yeah. So yeah,
Now we have one that, you know, moves
around and has different
Angles. Awesome.
Okay? So cost and access.
Some people are gonna have access to better equipment.
Also, some people are simply gonna
have better access to the gym.
Meaning some people are gonna be like, yeah,
the gym is right there.
I can get to it back and forth really easy.
Other people are like, yeah, if I'm gonna get
to the gym, it's a 40 minute drive.
Like if you guys, if any of you guys train people
that like commute, like they live in the burbs
and they go into the city, the gym will either be close
to work or close to home.
So depending on their schedule, they may
or may not have access to jump in and get a session, right?
So, or they're like, oh, my gym membership is here. Right?
Luckily, there's also situations where people have, like,
the nice thing about franchise gyms is maybe some people
have one close to work
and one close to home in those situations,
but access can be a limitation.
Okay? And then the last one on here is just gonna be
motivation, discipline, managing expectations,
and the ROI, which ROI is return on investment.
For anybody that doesn't know
he had somebody asked that last time.
Um, so when it comes to staying
consistent and staying on task with your transformation,
a like every day you're making tons of decisions, right?
We make the decision to go to the gym to do all the stuff,
how much effort we make the decision on everything
that we eat, whether we put the effort
into prepping that, right?
Whether we take the time to, you know, walk versus,
you know, take an elevator, et cetera.
Um, all of these things come down
to is it worth it?
So a lot of people will look at things of like, oh,
you know, you're just not motivated.
And really it is, is
that we're always making a mental calculus of
is the acute reward of the laziness
or the piece of chocolate to me, more worth it than
what I perceive the benefit of skipping that.
And most of the time people make the decision
that the acute reward is worth it.
Okay? How many of you guys are familiar
with the marshmallow test?
Gee, okay. Not very many. Just a couple of you guys.
Okay, cool. So the marshmallow test, you wanna,
you wanna explain it, Anthony,
if you want? Sure. Yeah. Okay.
Um, they gave the kids, uh, they put a plate out
of marshmallows in front of 'em,
and they wanted to see if the kids were going
to eat the marshmallows or not.
They didn't really give 'em,
if I remember correctly, much of a directive.
And some of the kids ate 'em, some of them didn't.
They followed him through life.
And the kids that were able
to abstain from eating the marshmallows were more
successful later in life.
Yep. So the, the thing that's missing from
that is the kids were given the choice that,
so they were given one marshmallow
and they could eat it now,
but if they waited, they would get two marshmallows.
And pretty much all, like the majority of the kids
just chose to eat the one marshmallow rather than wait
and have two marshmallows.
Okay? So delayed gratification
is the principle that they're looking at, right?
Are you willing to wait suffer
or be inconvenienced now?
Or would you much rather have the reward now versus
a possible bigger or better reward later?
Now, evolutionarily, we are wired
to take the reward now
because the future is never promised, right?
And there's a bunch of instances
where you can look at taking the marshal,
like eating the marshmallow now is a good idea, right?
I mean, we want, like, if we're thinking, like,
if we're being really cynical, it's like,
how do I know he's not just full of s**t?
I'm gonna wait. And he is like, just kidding, we're out.
This marshmallow is no second for you, right? Okay.
Anybody ever, anybody ever like save some macros
and then you get something
and it totally wasn't worth the macros?
And then you feel cheated by life, right? Okay.
So they like, there's always the chance they're like, oh,
you skipped out on like, you know,
you didn't eat a little bit, you know, you,
maybe you left the condiment off your mo
food or whatever it is.
Or you skipped something or you did a little bit more work
'cause you were really looking forward to this thing you
were gonna have, and then you had it and it was totally
f*****g not worth it, right?
That's an example where delayed gratification fails.
So there's tons of evolutionary pressure against
delayed gratification.
So it requires conscious cognitive effort
and reminders to us how much
we want those other goals.
And also how little we get from the instant gratification.
Okay? So when those kids ate the one marshmallow,
how long did the pleasure of eating
that one marshmallow last?
Like, pretty, pretty fricking short, right?
And that's the same thing, right?
You know, okay, cool, you know, you eat a pizza
or whatever, it's great while you're eating it, right?
But what do you get? Like, you know, a few minutes of, hmm.
Comfort, maybe a couple hours.
And then how long does it take you
to work off a whole f*****g pizza?
Right? Or how many days do you have
to be a little bit more hungry to offset that pizza?
Right? So we have to basically have this constant,
we'll say calibration of
how we're gonna make decisions throughout this process
in order to keep us from falling back into
instant gratification.
'cause instant gratification will always lead us away from a
body composition goal, right?
Okay. If we walked by a bush
or berries, we weren't like,
we're not wired to be like, you know what?
I should only eat like five of these
and then tomorrow when I come by, there'll be more left.
No, evolution says, eat as many of these f*****g berries
until you're gonna puke, right?
Because who knows who's gonna come by?
A bear's gonna come by here
or something, it's gonna eat all those berries
and they're just gonna be gone, right?
Or they're gonna go moldy or whatever, right?
So we have all these evolutionary pressures
and we're essentially wired for instant gratification.
That is why everything that we're addicted to
gives us instant gratification, whether it be
likes and engagement on stuff like this, or funny videos
or whatever be or hyper palatable food, right?
How many of you guys really enjoy when something
takes a long time?
Never. Right? We pretty much want s**t now, right? Okay.
How many of you guys are p****d off
when your package from Amazon takes three days?
Right? It's f*****g b******t, right? It's two days.
Like that's, you know, that's what you paid for, right?
And so now you feel like the world has slighted you.
If you have to wait three days from your like thing from
like, you know, across the country, okay?
You know, or you send a text message to somebody
and you have to wait for the response.
Like, and you're just like, Hmm. Right?
I know they're not busy, right? Why are they not looking?
You know? Right? We are so wired for instant gratification.
You have to understand how big of a hurdle that is, okay?
Likely since you guys have chose this pursuit of fitness,
which requires years and hours of work,
because you have this ideal health that you want
to achieve physique, that you want to achieve this lifestyle
that you want to have, that requires not only a long,
like a lot of work to get to,
but it also requires consistent work to maintain.
So the fact that you guys found that somewhat appealing
or worth it already puts you in the minority in terms
of mindset on delayed gratification.
Your clients likely are on the opposite
because people in the middle are likely the people
that may have some success on their own,
and people that are really gonna struggle
to have success are gonna be on the far end of that,
and more likely to be the people that end up paying you
for help because they aren't successful
with it on their own.
Most people aren't gonna hire a trainer
if they tried it on their own
and it worked out just fine, right?
Most people are gonna hire a coach
because they feel that either they need the help,
like they don't know what they're doing,
or they understand that if they go on it on their own,
they're more likely to fail, okay?
Because they've tried it before
or they understand their willingness to go
through this process, okay?
So we're gonna need to constantly maintain a recalibration
of looking at why did we start this process?
Okay? Why am I going to skip the pizza?
Why am I going to go to the gym when I'm tired?
Why am I going to take the inconvenient way to, you know,
you know, park further away
or do whatever lifestyle habits, et cetera, right?
So that I can get there to get, to get to my goals, right?
So that comes down to managing expectations.
A lot of understanding what do I need to do to get there?
And then I will be able to understand
what my return on that is.
So if I build habits of actions
rather than just like, Hey, I need to be in a deficit.
Like, oh, okay, cool.
But if I build a logic around the actions that it takes
to do that, and then understand that if I do set actions,
I will get said results.
That helps me maintain a calibration of is this worth it?
And this is where we'll get deeper into talking about, well,
how structured should a program be, right?
How much flexibility do we give people? Okay?
Because just
because you wrote out a plan of how to do it
doesn't mean they're gonna think it's worth it.
Everybody's gonna have their own amount of effort
and discomfort that they're gonna be willing to go through
for a given result.
Okay? I use myself as an example here.
I f*****g hate dieting. I hate it.
Like being hungry is the most annoying thing, right?
I would rather somebody like cut off my f*****g arm
than deal with the slow nagging hunger all day long, right?
Because it, it distracts like, I love being able to focus
and being hungry f***s up my focus.
And that means I don't, you know,
if I'm reading research papers, it's like, blah, blah,
muscles, muscles, muscles, I'm hungry, right?
Like, that's what it is, right?
Like I'm, I'm Dory about being hungry, okay?
And it, the fact that I recognize it makes it worse
because then I'm irritated about that,
the distraction, right?
So it's worse than the hunger itself is my irritation
with how distracting it is.
So for me to do it,
I need a huge payoff.
So that means I prefer if I'm going to do a fat loss thing,
I'm gonna do an extreme for a short period of time
because one, the results to me then
will be worth the annoyance of the diet.
Okay? And two, I can say, Hey,
I'm only doing this for X amount of weeks.
I then I'm gonna be back in a position
where I can just focus and do all my things.
It's a temporary condition that I'm putting myself in.
So I'm like, okay, cool. I can plan how I'm going
to go about my work, et cetera for a period of time knowing
that I'm gonna have this obstacle to overcome
that affects my productivity, and then that's gonna end.
So for me, what makes it worth it to me
and helps me stay motivated is if there is a deadline coming
that's very short where I'm like, okay,
I would rather suffer a lot for a short period of time.
And also while I'm doing that, while I'm in that state
of not really enjoying the deficit, it's worth it
because I'm losing fat and weight at a higher rate.
Right? But being really annoyed to like, you know,
lose a quarter pound here and there.
Yeah. Not, not gonna work for me, right?
I prefer that there are other people
that have the exact opposite approach.
Okay? So just
because that's the way I prefer to do it does not mean
that is the way to do it, right?
That's just an example of me saying, Hey, here's my hurdles,
here's how I'm looking at
what the return on investment is, right?
And this is how I find a way to manipulate that.
So if I do do it, it is worth it for me. Okay? All right.