After working in the fitness industry for thirteen years, I have picked up a thing or two in regards to helping people reach their goals.
A vast majority of this knowledge was built on me making a lot of mistakes and figuring it out for myself.
One of the things that I often think about is how I would have started my fitness journey differently.
The way we coach our clients is a direct reflection on all the things that we have messed up in our early careers. Our main goal is to have our clients avoid certain pitfalls along their path (no duh!)
Because that is what a good coach is, correct?
Things that are easy to us coaches and other professionals are not easy and very well known to our clientele.
So you have to coach them, and that in return will create autonomy in your clients. Which makes your job a heck of a lot easier.
One thing is for certain, however, when I first started I did a lot of things wrong and I spent years and years doing the wrong things and wasting money on supplements that don’t work and gadgets that offer minimal return on investment.
So if I could go back to my younger self, what would I tell him?
Keep it simple.
Most of the time, the solutions to our problems are far more simple than we can rationalize.
Small, simple things – such as parking further away from the grocery store, taking the flight of stairs instead of the elevator, or going for walks on your off days – all have a direct impact on your weight loss journey.
Can an extra couple thousand steps positively impact your health?
Yes, it can!
The biggest thing that you have to remember is that the hours you spend per week in the gym are a small portion of the total calories that you will burn throughout said week.
The vast majority of calories throughout the day are spent keeping the lights on in your brain, your blood pumping, and other metabolic functions working smoothly.
Proportionally, if you spend 5 hours a week in the gym, that is only 5 out of 168 total hours throughout the week. With rough math, that is less than 10% of the total hours you have during the week..
Which means we have a huge opportunity to move more between our exercise bouts to make our efforts not only more logical but to see results even quicker.
So… taking the stairs instead of the elevator or parking further away from the store yields a far greater benefit than you realize. I would simply tell my younger self to move as often as I can and not worry so much about spending hours upon hours in the gym.
Having a plan is optimal, but only if you execute the plan.
Self-admittedly, I’m a pretty black-and-white person.
In the past, I have “optimized” myself into a corner.
Back squats are optimal for leg growth as opposed to leg presses?
Perfect, we are only doing back squats now.
The best training program includes 4 days per week of undulated periodization with a healthy mix of pushing and pulling mechanics and just enough frequency that you’re abiding by the recovery gods?
Perfect, that’s what we’re doing for everyone.
I did this so much and whittled down my toolbox so far that my programs barely fit a majority of the clients that came into my gym.
Now, we have to continue to learn, optimize, and tweak here and there to provide a better product, but such is life. But, there is sometimes too much of a good thing.
If you’re working with a professional athlete, that extra 5% or less is going to matter, and then your modalities or programming capabilities are going to have to be nuanced.
But, we live in the real world, and the vast majority of our adults do not need nor do they want that level of programming to feel good about themselves or live a healthy life.
The biggest thing I had to learn was that people have lives outside of the gym. They have work, families, and other responsibilities, so what is optimal may not be what is best for them.
There is a fine line between what is optimal and what is enjoyable.
Bringing people into the gym who already have a hard time getting themselves there do not need to know every nuance or trend that is happening because that is going to limit their overall view of what exercise can be or what it should be used for.
Most people want to simply enjoy their exercise routine and reap the benefits from it, and this goes for nutrition as well. A vast majority of people do not want to have every single meal they ingest look like it should be fed to a rabbit.
When we start assuming that there is only one optimal way to do something. Everything that doesn’t fit into that box becomes inherently bad.
If you have a client that enjoys Zumba and going for long walks, that should be praised because they are exercising and taking care of themselves. Is it as optimal as lifting weights? That doesn’t matter in the context of what is best for that individual.
Or if you have another client who enjoys leg presses over back squats, are you going to force them to do back squats? No, you’re going to allow them to do the exercise that’s going to bring them the most joy and in the end will probably bring them the most benefit because they’re going to do it more often. You’re not going to go into a long tirade about the efficacy of back squats vs. a leg press.
Don’t force yourself to fit everything that you do into a small little box. Life has plenty of gray areas. And the fitness industry, is no exception.
Consistency wins the race.
Back in the day when I started training, the only thing I cared about was whether I looked good or not. I sort of enjoyed the process of getting myself there, but I became upset that results did not happen immediately.
I would train my legs for hours every other day. Go home, look in the mirror, and nothing changed.
My logic back then was simple but very flawed: To get bigger legs, I needed to do legs as often as I could for as long as I could.
Aside from the shoddy programming and lack of basic scientific understanding, my logic was not silly it just lacked real world merit.
The way I was doing things would not work for one very simple reason: unsustainability. There is no way that I could put that much effort towards training one particular body part for as long as I did and do it for as long as I wanted to.
I was not thinking far enough ahead. I wanted the results now and didn’t realize that consistency over time is what’s going to get me there.
Most people, myself included, do not have 2-3 hours to spend in the gym every single evening.
That’s how a lot of people view exercise and nutrition now. They want results immediately and minimal effort upfront. Unfortunately, it took a long time for me to understand that longevity is thinking decades in advance. At some point, we’re all going to reach our 60s, 70s, and 80s, so we should start thinking about longevity and the consistency that gets us there.
Want to learn from my mistakes?
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