The Show Up Fitness Podcast

Real Coaches Summit w/ Coach Aram

• Chris Hitchko, CEO Show Up Fitness • Season 3 • Episode 305

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Aram ig: 4weeks2thebeach

Tickets to April Seminar: https://realcoachessummit.com/tickets/p/presale-ticket?fbclid=PAVERFWAPYjK1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xMjQwMjQ1NzQyODc0MTQAAafjv2BNCBPnJJ3D9ceS2w-zGHPXsepZjXlelCytEsxnN-vw3piPbXSvFFCQdA_aem_S7fs_0X71OSfA7u01Joigg

If you’ve ever felt torn between doing real coaching and chasing the next shiny promise, this conversation will feel like a deep breath. We unpack the journey from a high-paying finance gig to the gym floor and into building a no-fluff education event designed for the most neglected crowd in fitness: coaches with a few years of experience who want practical solutions, not sales scripts. Along the way, we get brutally honest about risk, debt, burnout, and the grind it takes to stick around long enough to get good at this work. 
 
We break down the myths that keep clients stuck and trainers spinning. Fat loss isn’t driven by lifting alone; nutrition and intentional cardio move the needle while strength training protects muscle and confidence. Compliance is the science, so the plan has to fit the person’s bandwidth, not the other way around. You’ll hear simple, effective ways to teach intensity, set expectations, and offer clear choices that give clients autonomy—drop calories, add cardio, or both—while cutting out the jargon that loses people. We also get into sensitive, high-interest topics the right way: how to talk about GLP-1s and peptides within scope, coach women through menopause and PCOS, and program around pain without pretending to diagnose. 
 
We also spotlight the Real Coaches Summit in Las Vegas, a two-and-a-half-day, CEU-eligible event built around applied talks you can use the next morning: hypertrophy programming, client compliance, deadlift mechanics, lab literacy, emotional eating strategies, and more. It’s education you can trust, plus the networking that only happens face to face—new peers, new podcasts, and the validation that you’re not doing this alone. 
 
If you’re ready to trade optimization noise for outcomes, tap play, share this with a coach who needs it, and join us in Vegas. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us the one skill you’re committed to simplifying for your clients this month.

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Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showupfitness.com. Also make sure to check out my book, How to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy all. Welcome back to the Show Up Fitness podcast. Today we are lucky to have Coach of Rom. How are we doing today, sir?

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, and he gets bonus points for pronouncing my name perfectly well. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

You are quite the character in an awesome way. I love everything that you're doing. And people need to have more opportunities to go to great programs and hands-on learning like you're offering here in April. So I want to talk about the Coach's summit, but before, let's hear a little bit more about yourself and how you're just doing such great things for the industry.

SPEAKER_01:

You spend enough time making mistakes, you finally get better at stuff along the way. And that's basically been my story and my journey. I started out in finance because as a Russian immigrant, that was kind of what my parents wanted for me. It was like go, you know, have your briefcase and wear your suit to work every day. And that's what I did for seven years. I was in uh Stanford, Connecticut, working for an energy trading company. And it was lucrative. I mean, I was 20 shit, 23 years old.$40,000 bonuses,$90,$95k a year, which was, I mean, for me, it was astronomical money. And I was just like, holy shit, this is gonna be it for me. And then I put most of that up my nose and left a lot of it in Miami and G strings and real didn't have much to show for it after seven years. And then when I got laid off due to restructuring and everything else in 2012, I just realized it wasn't for me and it was sucking my soul away from me and it was destroying my mental health. I was always passionate about fitness and training in general because I it it gave me the confidence that I never had as a kid. I was always like the shitty athlete, kind of doughboy-shaped high school kid who started playing football with the football team just so we could lift with the football team. And then I realized I was stronger than most of them because I worked harder than most of them. And I'm like, wow, this lifting thing is kind of cool. And then I carried that into my professional career. I was always the guy that like people wanted to work out with at work, before work, after work. Always asked me like what they should be eating for lunch, even though I had no nutritional experience at that point formally. Um, but then I got laid off in 2012. I sat at a coffee shop in Jersey. I bought an old hand-me-down NASM book from somebody else, got my CPT, got a job at Equinox uh in Greenwich, Connecticut, started training people there. Realized very quickly that it was just really all about personality versus know-how. Um, you know, they were kind of telling us to like sell, sell, sell. And I was the dude in the blue shirt walking around fixing people's form and saying, hey, that's a great exercise, but try this, or hey, what's the goal of this? And just I was always innately the person to challenge people's belief systems. And I just I think people, especially with nutrition and fitness, like we don't have any knowledge of this stuff. And the gym is such a crazy place to me, dude. Like, in what other setting do you have an open facility with relatively sophisticated equipment and just give people an open pass to it? Like, you would never walk into an auto-body shop and just throw your car on a lift and start going at it. But the gym is like, here's a lat pull-down machine, here's a hack squat machine, here's and you're like, what the fuck is this stuff and how do I use it? And there's no education on it. And unless you hire a trainer, which is not a cheap date, you understand that, you have no idea what you're doing in there, but people are somehow expected to just navigate it and figure it out. And most people don't have the time or the mental bandwidth to do it. Like, they're not 15-year-old kids who are geeked out about increasing improving their bench press, they're 45-year-old burnt out, tired parents who are just trying to lose 40 pounds, and now they're entering into this facility. So that was like my exposure to fitness, and I realized it was being done poorly all the way from the beginning. And that's kind of what made me start thinking outside the box a little bit and wanting to further my knowledge base of everything.

SPEAKER_00:

And then you started going to seminars and hands-on learning and continue education and saw some flaws with that, and you're like, you know what? I think I should, you know, start my own thing. And so, what was that journey like? Because you have been to a lot of continued education and you have this thirst to continue to grow mentally. So, where did that stem from to start your own thing?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I was lucky because living on the East Coast, like I was exposed to like Cressy Speed School, I was exposed to perform better in Rhode Island. So I had started going to stuff like that, but then like every year I'd gone, and I'm like, it's just the same shit every year. And like this is stuff that like they should at least have different tracks or at least ways to level up the education. Like, I don't need to learn about the kettlebell swing again, and I don't want to hear from the same 15 speakers that you guys put on rotation every year, literally saying sometimes verbatim what they said the year before. And I just realized very quickly that that like I guess I get that they were advertising this to like the new crop of people coming in, but it was that middle crop that never got served. It was like that trainer who's been on the block for two to three years, who's got NASM one, who's got precision one, who may have done a couple of seminars, but that was the underserved population. Or it was like, you know, fast forward to like 2021 and beyond, it was never about the technical skills savvy of coaching anymore. It was always about how to get more clients, sell more clients, make more money, 10k months, blah, blah, blah. And then there was always a sales pitch for some bullshit mastermind afterwards. And that's all it was. There was just nothing in the middle. So I'm like, I'm just gonna create my own thing and I'm just gonna put people that I think are good educators that I've learned a lot from over the years on stage. I'm gonna hope that they do right by me. And hopefully enough people want to come to where I don't lose my shirt. And the first couple of years I did. Sucked. Um, I got a bill for$128,000 two weeks before the second year event. And I'm looking at my I called my father up. I'm like crying on the phone. I call a buddy of mine up who I used to work with in finance. I'm like, dude, can you float me like$15 or$20,000? He's like, I don't have it. And I was using Stripe as my payment system, I still am. And literally just that day, I got an email from them saying, hey, you're qualified for a$70,000 loan. Like, perfect, great timing. So I called the hotel up and I'm like, hey, can we do something about getting this$125 down to like 70, 75? So they chopped up a bunch of like my food options away for me, which whatever it wasn't the biggest deal in the world, but we got it down to like 75. I paid it, took out the loan, and that was that was it. Like, I just realized I just made a mistake that year, but I took a shot, man. And like I just keep taking a shot because I see this industry has put food on my table for so many years. And I I truly do believe, man, that we're not like trainers, we're not just coaches. We are, I mean, I say this every year, we're the front line of healthcare. Like, we are the people that have more touch points with our clients than any one of their medical professionals ever will. And we know that a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, whether it's growing muscle, losing fat, like this is stuff that's going to improve your quality of life, not just your aesthetic. And I know that most of the time it starts off as an aesthetic desire. But when it truly becomes a lifestyle, like I know it is for me, and you like, I don't give a shit what I look like anymore. I'm sure you kind of don't either. It's on the it's so far down on the priority list, and now it's just about like I lift because I want to maintain strength. I do cardio because I don't want to fucking die early. I eat well because I don't want my stomach to feel like shit. That's why I do these things, not because I'm trying to lose 30 pounds or because I want to be in a swimsuit by January or June, whatever. But I want to do this stuff because it's in it's improving my my overall quality of life. It's allowing me to be a better business owner, it's allowing me to be a better partner. Be it just be a better, more positive human. And I think if more trainers can adopt that mindset and then install that or help install that in their clientele base, we no longer will be seen as the fringe of healthcare. And people will finally start to take us seriously. But if we keep talking about the bullshit, right? Like the perfect sets and reps or seed oils are bad for you, or you know, you should fast or you should do this. Like instead of making these dumb recommendations that a lot of coaches find themselves having to make to stick out, that's where I think we lose credibility.

SPEAKER_00:

So much to unpack right there. And I love it because uh there's a lot of similarities. I started out with in the banking industry as well, got let off and and you know, I was living the life trying different diets and stuff. But I was fortunate enough just serendipity that I had a background in kinesiology and went to the University of Connecticut. So I can kind of decipher the bullshit. And so when I started teaching and I got the NASAM textbook, and I would go through this, I'm like, okay, well, this is this is horse shit. I'm not gonna teach just because this is actually not evidence-based and it's just a bunch of BS. But my question would be from your end, what allowed for you that that critical thinking aspect that you can navigate through the BS, but also have that thirst to, you know what? I at least want to go to a Cressy to learn something, and I want to go to a perform better because the biggest victimhood that I see with newer trainers is I'm not making enough. I'm just gonna skip that middle part and I'm gonna go right to that ten thousand dollar coach and say, Hey, I want to make this one guy said the other day, and I like my mind was like blown. Like, there's actually someone out there saying you can make 68,000 a month online, and that's like they're a push. I'm just like, what the fuck are they selling as an online coach? And so this was a trainer within a couple of years, and it's there's no knock to him at all. It's just like, but that's what people are seeing, and so it's like this is the norm where it's okay, I'm gonna get certified. I got my textbook cert, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing. Let me go to a business coach to learn how to, it's like crazy. So, where was your thought process behind that to continue to learn in the trenches and to grow, grow, grow?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I was I was always kind of a natural nonconformist. Like, if you told me to go, if everybody was going left, I always went right. It started out just, you know, kind of rebelling against my father. I was never had a really good relationship with him, and then just not really enjoying being part of the herd. And then I started to realize that like practical knowledge is what most people were missing. Like, I saw a lot of coaches and trainers inside of even even Equinox, just they weren't able to communicate the basics well, they weren't able to take what was relatively complex science and biomechanical principles and dumb them down to a Mrs. Jones, right? Because Mrs. Jones doesn't give a shit about origins and insertions. They don't, she doesn't care about joint angles or joint function. She just wants to know how to get rid of this while she points at it, or this, or this, and just name your body part. And it's all relatively simple shit, but I think again, like to sound smart, trainers would overcomplicate and over-speak. And I'm like, this is completely wrong. You're losing your audience. Like, you're not sitting in a room full of academics or other trainers where you sound cool saying this shit. You're talking to an end user who makes$300,000 a year who doesn't give a shit about the science, period. So then I started just realizing like the more I expose myself to various avenues of education and various schools of thought, then I get to pick what I like and what makes sense for me. And that I just spent the first like three to four years just accumulating as much as I possibly could. I went to every local seminar I could find. I went to national conferences, I maxed out two to three credit cards over the course of three years. I was putting, you know, five, six grand worth of travel and and and tickets on there and whatever. Like I know that I'm not stupid, so I'm gonna make money eventually. Most people, most successful entrepreneurs put themselves in debt for some period of time to then come out on top later on. That's called self-investment and taking risk. Without it, you're fucked. So I just didn't play small. Like I was done playing small, I was done conforming, I was done waiting for shit to happen for me, and I just started taking those shots. And I realized very quickly that it all boils down to very simple shit. It comes down to more psychology than it does physiology, more often than not. We don't need the complexity for most of our paying clients. Like, let's be honest, power lifters don't make that much fucking money. Bodybuilders don't make that much fucking money. Athletes, unless they're at a professional level, and even then, good luck trying to get them to actually pay you their invoice, which I found out from people that I know who coach high professional athletes. So the people that have the money that want to spend it, that are trying to solve very simple problems, are our target audience. So, how do we serve that target audience? Well, we get them to comply for longer than they have before. That's it. Like there is no best plan when they can't even follow a plan, period. So I don't give a shit that you have the optimal training program written in your phone. Mrs. Jones doesn't follow it, period. So if you have a four-day plan and she can only do two days, cool, let's figure out how to get her to do two days and squeeze the most out of juice out of that lemon. How do we incorporate nutrition to that equation? Because we know that we can train people five times a week and their goal is fat loss. It's not going to make any meaningful difference in their lives. And it's just like we're just doing this over and over, trial and error, fucking up, watching people suffer, watching people not get served. That led me to finding answers. And I'm still finding answers. I haven't figured it all out yet.

SPEAKER_00:

That growth mindset's how you win. And for those that are listening, the biggest thing you can take from that is constantly moving the needle forward. And you know, there's so much survivorship bias in the industry where people will say, Oh, I went to PRI, you got to go to PRI and do all this crazy stuff. Where it's like, you know, try it out, see what you like, take something, trial and error, implement it with your clients. As you the name on my shoulder says, show up. You got to keep on doing that. But the issue that I come across a lot with these newer trainers is they get caught with the process by analysis and they're chasing CEUs, and they'll say, Well, what's the next best cert to get? And I want to get this specialization. And I ask them and I say, Are you talking to people? Where's the engagement? Do you get to have someone say, Hey, actually, what about trying this and trying that? As a new trainer, I remember vividly 2009 or 10, it was uh Dean Somerset seminar. And the first time meeting him, Dean's a great guy. He's like the hip guru, as you know. And I was doing a squat, and I was like, Yeah, I get some hip tightness in here. He's just like, Why are you squatting like that? And I was like, Well, because NSEA says you're supposed to have 10 to 15 degrees of index rotation of the foot, and that's what you're supposed to do. And he's just like, try this. And I just moved my foot, they weren't parallel, they weren't 10 to 15 degrees, they were different. And I was like, Holy shit, that feels so much better. He's like, That's how you squat. And I was like, What? Well, and I was like freaked out, like, but the book said that. And I would never have learned that if I just kept on trying to get the next book to read with all this esoteric information that you can't have someone break it down. So I think that's just so such a great nugget that you're talking about investing into yourself. And yeah, you you may get into a little debt, but that's just part of your story. Your story right now, where you're at with uh the real coaches summit, it hasn't even reached its its pinnacle yet. It's gonna be gigantic in the future, but that's part of your story, having that cool, you know,$128,000 bill right there. Like that that's what defines you, and you were able to show up and figure that out.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, it's scary, dude. It's scary because my whole life, like, I mean, moving moving from Russia to America at five years old and watching my parents work three jobs apiece and never really being financially comfortable or safe, nothing feels uncomfortable for me. Like, I don't like none of the shit that my clients complain about to me, the shit that other coaches complain about to me. I'm like, yeah, that's life. That's growth. That's it's it's uncomfortable. Like most of this life will not be margaritas on the beach. It's gonna be fucking snowy, shitty, cold days. It's gonna be wondering what's gonna happen next. And if that consumes you and you're not ready for that, then go get a nine to five and get out of this industry. Because this industry is going to be that way. It's gonna be cutthroat, feast or famine all the time. And the only way that you can build sustainable income in this industry is by being honest and by producing results. And if they can't produce results, then you have to be able to communicate appropriate expectations to people. And I think the one thing that defines me from other coaches is that I tell my clients if you don't follow through, then expect to be exactly where you're at right now. And if you're okay with that, which I'm okay with it, then let's just hang here because it's better than you going backwards, which is what would happen if you were on your own. So even if you're not making progress, and I think this is a very scary conversation for coaches to have because they feel like they're gonna lose business. I always tell my clients, I'm like, you're better off with me than without me. I know what happens when you leave. You're gonna unravel, you're gonna stop tracking your food, you're gonna stop incorporating cardio into your training sessions, you're gonna stop lifting as heavy and as as close to failure as you do, and then you're gonna have to be okay with the consequences of that. And if you are, then leave. That's fine. If you want the potential to do better, then stay. I'm charging you seven bucks a day. Why the fuck wouldn't you? I also think some of the rates that people charge are astronomically high for what they deliver. Like, what let's be honest, what are we really delivering? We're giving them a relatively templated program because most people that are gen pop don't need fucking periodization or anything else. They're just not following through enough. Like, if you're an athlete where you have a strength goal, a performance goal, fine, let's periodize some stuff and let's make sure that it's appropriate. But if you're just like looking to lose fat, we know that lifting does jack shit for losing fat. Nothing. If you're still believing that lifting is going to burn fat off your body, you're fucking maniacal and you need to read more. Like uh my size at 210 pounds, if I lift for 60 minutes, which really means I'm only lifting for about 34 minutes, if that maybe I burn 300 calories, maybe, which I ate this morning in my coffee before I left the house. So we like lifting is awesome. Don't I'm never gonna say don't lift weights. I mean, must people are losing muscle at an astronomical rate. So let's at least keep muscle on. But we have to understand what is your client's actual goal? If they come to you with a fat loss goal and you get them lifting five times a week and doing no cardio and no extra steps and not paying attention to their nutrition, you've done that person a disservice. They're not going to get results. That's what I used to do. I had a guy paying me for five sessions a week. The dude had more money than God, was the nicest guy ever, and would listen to anything I said. And I think he got fatter over the time he got stronger and he was psyched about that, but his gut didn't go anywhere, his body never really looked any different, but he trained his ass off five days a week. Why? Well, because we never paid attention to the stuff that drove fat loss, which is not fucking training. So it's just little stuff like that. Like I've had I've, you know, I used to reverse diet everybody, that was a mistake. I used to give everybody very specific exercises and programs and this and that. Now I'm just like, Jesus, whatever you can fucking do, I'm fine with. And if your goal is fat loss and you have 200 minutes a week to allocate towards exercise, 180 minutes of that should be cardio. At least for now. Let's get the body fat down, let's get you feeling comfortable in your own skin. And then when you can develop a little bit more bandwidth, then let's add more training activity to it. Let's get you fired up about being inside the gym. That's fine. But let's fix the overarching problem first. And again, I don't think there's a lot of conviction because there's not a lot of confidence in the delivery of what people say. And they're just they're kind of saying things, especially on social media, to make sure that other coaches think it's okay. Like if I say this and then somebody else comes after me in my comment section, I can't handle that. I don't give a fuck. I you if you want to come at me and throw fucking PubMed articles in my face about what I said online, take that time and serve your clientele base with it, as opposed to coming at me. Like all this infighting, like ripping apart Mike Isratel's dissertation. Who gives a shit about Mike's mistake 20 years ago? Has he not provided you with enough reasonable content synthesis? Then have you not learned something from him along the way? And do you have any level of discernment to say, hey, maybe that doesn't apply to me in what I'm trying to achieve? Because that's what I think is really missing. It's the discernment part. There's plenty of good content out there, and there's plenty of shitty content. I got to learn with discernment what made sense for me. That's who I ended up putting on stage at my conference. And that's what I'm going to continue to do. There's going to be plenty of people that will disappoint me along the way. I've been disappointed plenty of different times. And then there's other shit that I just don't care about. Like I don't care about Jeff Nippard's optimization content. I don't need to have Mrs. Jones turning her body while she's focusing on her iliac fucking fibers of her lats that she'll never see anyway. Because she doesn't even understand what her lats are, what they look like, what they feel like. She just knows that if she pulls her elbow back, something happens. Cool. Let's get her to do that three or four times with relatively high intensity. And maybe she'll have a chance of growing a lat muscle at some point.

SPEAKER_00:

There's again just so much of this is exciting because as a teacher of trainers, I'll go to seminars and I'll come across trainers that are just so dogmatic and principles in a book. Like there was one that really stuck out to me where we're talking about posture, and we were like, yeah, it's not that big of a deal, just get the rep done. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, do we, what do you mean? Like, if you don't have perfect posture, you're gonna get hurt. And it's just like, what the fuck? Like, where are you learning that? And the scary thing to me is that there's people that will kind of slip through the cracks and then they get into management positions. And I was just talking to a kid the other day, and he didn't his interview process at this gym, the manager was quizzing him on overactive, underactive muscles based off a NASA's curriculum for need algus. And she was like, hmm, you know, you didn't get the adductor magnus being overactive and the glutes being underactive. And I'm just like, that's gonna be your potential fucking boss. Like, do you want to be in that environment where you need to be around people that are, you know, thinking bigger in it and you're having conversations where it's like you may have a different viewpoint, but it's great to have a conversation to hear the why. Like, I love to hear the why on, oh, then you have a conversation, you go, you know what? Fuck, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna implement that and see how it works. Holy shit, that worked. That's pretty cool. I'm gonna start doing this more. That's the hands-on learning and the critical thought that is just loss today with people, it's unfortunate.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, and just even just the the granular level of thinking. Like, why are you gonna rush to optimal when basics can't even be observed or exhibited for months at a time? Like, I, you know, and especially now, I mean, God, when I was lifting weights at 15 years old, I mean, I'm 41, I'm not too much younger than you are. Like, we had to learn like the weird hard way, which was you watch dudes that were bigger than you inside the gym, you hope that you can get some of their form down. You would maybe you were brave enough to walk up to them and ask them questions, which in my gym was impossible because these dudes were like fucking construction workers with Timberland boots on, who would walk in with like cutoff shirts and just like guts, but massive traps, and they would just balls to the floor, bury 500 pounds with five plates on each side and squats, and then called us pussies. And like that's the way I learned. It wasn't like you could just open up Instagram and go to somebody's page and literally or their YouTube channel. I mean, and to the point where like some of the YouTube content that's out there is so good you wouldn't even need to buy a book ever again. Because, like, I like to learn from people that are actually in the trenches doing work, getting people results. So, like and I'll I'll name drop and I don't care. The Lane Nortons of the world. Smart guy, overall, relatively decent content, but he's not really a professional in this industry anymore. He's a talking head, and yes, he has professional experience, but is he in the trenches today, every day with Mr. and Mrs. Jones? And my suspicion is that he's not. Maybe he's got a couple of clients left over, but most of the people that he has have been passed off to his assistants and he's not doing the work anymore. I want to know what that seven-year in their career coach is doing with their client to fix their problems. How are you creating programs for the individual that I know I'm gonna end up serving? Like that's who I want to learn from. I don't give a shit what the researcher who's never left the lab has to say about hypertrophy. I want to know what actually happens if you increase or lower volume practically with an individual who's right in front of you. Like that's the stuff that matters to me. And through trial and error, through 26 years of lifting myself, through fucking it all up, getting hurt, trying different methodologies. The basics, I've come back around to understanding that I was way too granular, I was way too in the weeds, I overexplained simple shit that didn't need to be talked about. I over, I mean, I would get like pissed off at people for sending me videos of like their bicep curl. And if it wasn't perfect, I'd be like, well, that's that's not gonna work. It's like, as long as they're flexing their elbow, it doesn't fucking matter. Whether it's at their side, in front of them slightly, supported by something else, behind them, as long as there's elbow flexion, the bicep is doing something, do it long enough with enough load, it'll grow. That's it. It's just it's it's that stuff that I keep coming back to. And I think the longer you probably spend in your career, the more simple everything just starts to look to you, which is what makes you a good professional, which is why we need more of you educating the younger class as opposed to these optimization, perfect angle, perfect posture, treating the body as if it was this fragile thing that's gonna break, God forbid, if we put the spine under load.

SPEAKER_00:

That's beautiful. It's I almost feel like we grew up in parallel universes because in Chico, you had a bunch of hillbillies that go to the gym, and that's when I got the strongest, is working out with my brother. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. But you know, you have two plates on the bench, and him being my older brother being a dick, he wouldn't take off the other plate. He's like, just fucking do it. And I'm like, I can't do 225, I can barely do 135, just fucking do it. And then he would just lift it up, and I got so much stronger just from the overload. And you reflect back, you're like, Oh shit, maybe I shouldn't try to get perfect stabilization for my clients because they have Nevalgus. And it's like, focus on getting them stronger, focus on getting consistent. And it's just, ah, there's so much that you can talk about. But again, I cannot stress the importance of being around people like you because what it does is it skips so many years where we fucked up, where it may have taken us three, four years of figuring out these granular things that oh, this actually doesn't work. But then you hear from someone with 20 plus years, you're like, oh shit, that person who wrote that textbook, yeah, they may know a lot, but they're not even working out. Can they even bench 135? I mean, and so then you you talk to people and it kind of skips you ahead so much further. And I age myself and I'll talk about like back in the day playing you know, Mario Brothers, like you get um a feather and you can skip worlds. And so instead of going, you know, all constantly losing to that one, you know, master, whoever the fuck it is, and the bad guy, but then you're able to skip worlds by talking to people like you or the presenters that you're gonna be having at your conference and the people in in the in the seats because they're the one percenters, they're the ones that want to move the needle and they have that excitement to better themselves. And so if you want to really advance your career as a trainer, you got to get to events where you're learning from great professionals. With this lineup that you have in April, are there some people that you haven't seen before that you're excited to hear speak?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I think actually, out of out of all the years so far, this is probably the most practical the topic list is. Um, let me just actually pull it up so that way we can have a little bit more of a specific conversation about it. But like, for example, uh one kid from Canada who I met last year actually, and typically this is how it works. Like, uh people don't apply to be speakers at my event. I either have a personal relationship with them and I respect what they do in the industry, or they're somebody, or both have been somebody who's been in the seats already who's been supporting the event and being there. Um, that's generally how, like, so most of the speakers that are actually speaking this year were at the event either last year or the years before. So this guy named Ryan Taylor, who's uh who runs a hypertrophy-based class out of Canada, is gonna be talking about how to create an effective hypertrophy program. Um, there's gonna be a nurse practitioner who's gonna be talking about GLP1s and all the different emerging agents and how to talk to your clients about those things. There's gonna be somebody who talks about strategies to stop emotional eating because that's his expertise. There's gonna be somebody who's gonna be talking about how to use lab work to help your clients, but not diagnose their issues because it's still out of your scope of practice. There's gonna be somebody talking, uh, you probably know her, Tasha Whelan. Um, she's gonna be talking about the deadlift because a lot of people still fucking can't disseminate the difference between an RDL and a and a regular deadlift for some reason. Um, programming around pain, Justin Farnsworth, who's uh who's got a class that he teaches, um, how to work with people who have PCOS and how to work around those hormonal issues, coaching women in menopause, because we hear a lot of bullshit about that. Uh Brad Dieter from Macros Inc. is going to be talking about set point theory. And then we're gonna have PDs versus peptides and what you need to know and what you should shut the fuck up about. And then client compliance from a woman who's got a psychology background and teaches trainers how to get better compliance out of their clients. So it's like all very practical. Like you learn in that room after an hour, you can immediately apply it to your coaching practice and start fixing client problems immediately. Now, here's what I'll tell anybody who's listening. I don't care how much education you have, what you know, how good you are, how good you think you are, how good other people think you are. At the end of the day, you're only as good as your client compliance and your client follow-through. Your clients don't show up and don't do anything, then either you have to communicate to them that their expectations of results have to be lower, or you have to rethink the way that you communicate and attract clientele. Because what I found out is that like I can have such amazing plans, amazing strategies. I've tested them on myself, they work. I've tested them on people who were compliant, they worked. But if they don't follow through, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you know, it doesn't matter how much you know. It all in and Stan Efforting is great at this. This is the science or compliance is the science. It's 100% true, it'll always be true. I don't care what perfect world means. I want what's practical, I want what's doable, and I want to see somebody be able to follow through. And then along the way, it's also just understanding just professionalism 101, getting back to people, or at least proactively communicating with them to keep them engaged and keep them participating, answering a fucking text message on time and not letting it go two or three days unanswered, getting back to people through email, keeping your clients engaged with either book reviews or research reviews or giving them grocery lists or ideas about you know what intensity means in the gym and showing them examples of it, like filming yourself train. Do a chest press to failure and show Mrs. Jones what a chest press to failure looks like if you don't have her in front of you one-on-one. So there's a small community gym here in La Mesa called Stallion Fitness, and I, you know, I go there probably two, three times a week. I have enough equipment in my garage to where I can get decent workouts in there, but I but I'm generally like talking to the management in there and the guy that bought it's a really nice guy. And the other day, he knows I'm a trainer and a coach, and he's like, hey, do you want to maybe pick up some of the overflow? Because we have some clients that are we just don't have enough trainers for. And it's like, it's like, dude, it's 25 bucks an hour. Obviously, not going to be doing it for the money. And I said, Hey, like, I'll do it as long as I'm able to then also sell them my nutrition on a monthly basis. And if you're cool with me pitching them that, then I'll I'm happy to help for two reasons. A, obviously, can help me amplify my nutrition coaching business, but B, like, I miss being on the floor with what I I know now. Like, I want to be back on the gym floor and spend that hour being really impactful in that person's life as opposed to being their fucking girlfriend for 60 minutes, which is what I ended up doing. Like, I that's what I was for 10 years as an in-person trainer. I just listened to people's bullshit. I never taught them anything, I didn't explain anything with any level of depth. They never really understood the why behind they were what they were doing. I never shook their limiting belief systems. I did none of that. I just showed up, I put them through a workout, which any fucking monkey can do, and they got no better because of it. So I want to be able to have this second opportunity to sharpen my skill set because it's been turned off for so many years. Like coaching people online is completely different than coaching people in person. Like in person, it it may take five or six video submissions to fix somebody's hinge when they're submitting videos online coaching. You can fix a person's hinge in 30 seconds in person, right? There's five different ways you can do it. You can have them hold a dowel behind their back, you could push their ass against the wall, you could push their shins against the bench. There's a there's nine different ways to do it, and uh that's what I miss. And I also miss that personal connection that I have with people, being able to actually be in front of them for an hour. So he brought it up to me, and I talked to my financial advisor. I'm like, is it worth taking a$25 an hour job when I'm already doing$20,000 months just to go back into personal training? He's like, why not, man? He's like, if you have the time and it doesn't smoke your bandwidth and you enjoy doing it, go back to your roots, go and do it. So I'm fucking, I texted the kid today. I'm like, I'll take it. So if it gives me an extra eight or 10 hours a week of work, and now I get to be in front of eight or 10 people, that'll be it'll be fun for me again because I miss it.

SPEAKER_00:

That's great. That's that's why we do this. We to help people, right? And that's exactly what you're doing. And and what you're gonna find is you're gonna get some innovative little things that maybe those 10 years delayed, and you can you know piggyback off of that, and it's just gonna open up new windows, and and the future now is gonna be significantly greater than even your wildest expectations thought.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm hoping, man. I'm I'm hoping, and I just I want to see like how simple I can really make it and how easy it is for those people to follow. Because there's just so many mistakes I made as a trainer when I first did it on the floor. Because you know how it is, man. And like I'm sure a lot of the people listening to this will relate to this. Like, you get up at 4:30, your first client's at five, you're trying to squeeze a meal in between four sessions in a row. Then you have that that that late morning break where you run home, you let your dog out, then you have to run back to the gym to get your own workout in. By the time that's done, you got to shower, clean yourself off, do another three or four sessions, and that's your life, and that's the grind. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like, I feel like there's too many people bypassing that and heading right into the online coaching space, trying to make these five figure months. And it takes away that level of grit that I think guys like you and I built up and and gals like us have done that have that there's a reason why we're still here. And like what I think you said in your video the other day was perfect. Like, most trainers will not make it two or three years. Most, and I think now it's probably gonna be less than that because there's just less stress resilience, there's less emotional regulation, there's more freaking out. Because, like, I mean, there's times where even I still have when I lose a client or I lose two or three in a row, I'm like, oh my God, my business is crumbling. I should go back into finance. What am I doing? Why did I do this? I'm still such a loser, nobody likes me. Like, like literally, like those thoughts still creep up. And I've been doing this for 15 years, and I have a very healthy, robust business to where I can afford to lose probably 10 grand a month and I'd still be fine. But you still like that imposter syndrome, if you have enough humility, never really actually leaves. And I think that's what we're lacking, is we're lacking the desire to go through the hard shit and bypass it. And then that level of humility, once you have gotten there, like I'm not that important. Like, I don't like, yes, people ask me for my ideas and I get invited on podcasts, but let's put it this way I don't even speak at my own event. Like, I show up, I say hi to everybody, I get on stage for five minutes, I thank them for coming, and then I give the mic over to the people that were invited to speak. I've been asked to do virtual events, I've been asked to do other little things, but like I what I have to say is not revolutionary. Like, I'm gonna tell people that hypertrophy training works for Gen Pop. I'm gonna tell them that the way that you can get somebody to lose fat is probably by either eating less or moving more. Both of those still work. Like, science is still gonna be science. I don't care how much fucking functional medicine shit comes out and how many peptides they invent tomorrow. Those things are just going to be band-aids. And if the lifestyle problems don't get fixed, I don't care what people engage in. And it's really just it's it's it's these basics, it's that level of just being okay with learning it slowly and being bad at it for long enough until you get good at it. And that's that's across the board. That's not just us as coaches that we're seeing problems with. That's that's the general population trying to lose weight. They're being deceived by all these grand messages of like it'll happen fast. Yeah, it will. Like, take the GLP one. I'm I'm fine with you doing it. Just also eat some fucking protein and eat some and and lift some weights so you don't become a melted candle. And you know, if you're gonna go the peptide route, get it from a reputable source, understand what it does for you biochemically, and make sure that you have resources that are credible resources advising you on this stuff. Don't just grab something off of line because you saw some jerk off on the internet say something about it. Because now nobody's actually speaking with context anymore. It's like, well, I did this and this happened. Okay, well, what what what show me the underneath the water, the whole iceberg? Like, what was your 15-year history of eating like? What did you do as a as for training all along the way? Like, how many people have you had that have come to you and been like, I only eat 1200 calories and I can't lose weight? Then you're not eating 1200 calories. What the fuck do you want me to tell you? Like the amount of and I coach mostly women and I get this kickback all the time. The amount of conversation, and this is by the way, like if if coaches are doing the like the hybrid in-person online thing and they're looking for content ideas, the easiest place, guys, to get content from is the conversation you're already having with your clients. Because I'm sure they're asking you questions about stuff they've seen online, about stuff they've been exposed to in the media or stuff that they've heard from their friends. That is your time to flex your intellectual muscle and shine with them. And it's also a great way for you to get ideas for what to post about online because if they're asking you those questions, it's safe to assume that other people are thinking those same things. So that's a chance for you to really start. And like the content doesn't have to be pretty, the message doesn't have to be super complex. I mean, if you go back a year, I was saying the same shit a year ago that I'm saying today, just maybe rewording it a little bit differently, putting a different bit of a spin on it, maybe trying to make it slightly a little bit more exciting, or maybe I'll break balls of my videos. But the scientific principles haven't changed and they're not going to change. We're not going to find out anything monumentally new or better anytime soon. Outside of GLP1 drugs and performance-enhancing drugs, progressive overload still works. Cardiovascular activity is still necessary for cardiovascular adaptation, and nutrition still drives fat loss. I don't care how you slice it, how you package it, how you communicate it. It's like, yes, gut health issues are at an all-time high because we're talking about them more. So are hormone issues because we're talking about them more. But they're not any more rampant than they ever were. There's just more awareness about them. And it's very easy to start to offload your personal responsibility about your lack of adherence to a plan of any kind, to these really easy, convenient scapegoats. And our clients truly believe very often that they're doing everything right. And here's the thing: if you're walking around at 35% body fat as a woman or 25% body fat as a man, there's no evidence that you're doing anything right. Because if there were, you would be physically a manifestation of that. And that's not a mean-spirited thing to say. That's just the proof is in the pudding. I work really hard. Cool. What's the result of that? You driving 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction is still you driving in the wrong direction. I don't care how hard you're putting down on the gas pedal, you're still driving in the wrong direction. Like even today, a woman was telling me, she's like, Well, I do carting. I'm like, what do you do? She's like, well, I walk. If I walk my dog, I'm like, does your heart rate exceed 120 ever? She's like, no. Like, okay, so you're not getting any cardiovascular adaptation from that. So that's not cardiovascularly significant enough for you. It's not, I'm not saying it's bad that you're walking your dog. It's just if you're trying to get a cardiovascular adaptation from the activity you're doing, that's not it. She's like, well, what about in CrossFit? Lifting weights at a high rate of speed is not cardio either. So it's like this lit, these little things, but knowing how to explain to those things to people in a very lay way, that's the sauce. If you can exhibit an ability to master these topics in a way that you can also disseminate them to the general population as succinctly and as easily for them to understand as possible, you will win a hundred percent of the time as a trainer, as a coach, because the other people who are gonna try to overexplain it will be lost after 30 seconds. But if you can tell them in five seconds, like, hey, orange theory is cool, but it you're gonna max out after three or four months and then you're done. You're either gonna have to learn how to progressively overload and also incorporate your own cardiovascular work into it, or you're gonna have to drastically drop your nutrition to see more results. Which one do you want to do? And then you start to give people a level of autonomy and then they start to trust you because you're not lying to them anymore. Or it's not that you were lying, but maybe you just misunderstood some of these principles yourself, like I did for very long. And eventually you do learn that the basics actually work, and it's just people are not following through with them.

SPEAKER_00:

Coach, you are a humble, authentic, badass. I call them hunks in our world. I love it. Two things, listeners, what you got to do. You got to check out his nutrition coaching because if you're a trainer and you've never had a coach, you can benefit from it as well. But most importantly, get to the real coach's summit. It's gonna be in April, uh, April 26th to the 28th. Get to that, and we're going to choose one lucky winner. I'm gonna buy your ticket, throw it into your story. We're looking forward to coming out there meeting in person and measuring those biceps because I think you're about five inches bigger than mine. This is amazing, coach. Where can people find you?

SPEAKER_01:

Most of my stuff is on Instagram at four weeks to the beach. The uh the events page is real.coaches.summit. Um, and just to give a little more background on that, it's two and a half days. It's all meals included. It is CU eligible if you apply for them after the fact, which you can do. You just I just give you a piece of paper, you submit it to whatever crediting body you're working with, and they usually approve it. I think you get like 1.2 to 1.4 credits, so it's not a bad gig. It's fully tax deductible, obviously, if you're a if you're a coach or a professional trainer of any kind. The networking there, I think, is really the highlight that it's very difficult to come across in words. Like the people that you meet, like the Andrew Coates' of the world and other people that will be in that room that will connect you with other people. You'll get on a podcast that you never thought you can get on. You might start a podcast with somebody that you met there. And if nothing else, it just validates that you're on the right track. And it's in Vegas, which makes it kind of fun. I do take people out on the last night, and um, you know, if you're brave enough and can stay out past one. And it's just it's one of those things where I want it to become, if not just an education event, I want it to become a yearly meetup for us to get away from our day-to-day, to get away from the little world that we live in and expose ourselves to this bigger picture scale that we're involved in and really see the right side of the industry. Like, I like if you'll notice that the people in the you'll be sitting at a 10-foot-round table with people from all different walks of life of all different experience levels, and you'll realize that you're not alone in this anymore. And that's the beautiful part about it. Like, I'm so tired of just sitting in front of my fucking computer all day or sitting in front of my phone, I miss that connection, and that's what this hopefully can bring about.

SPEAKER_00:

It will. And I'm excited because I'm gonna get there. I'm gonna see if I can pull some strings and do a seminar in Vegas a couple days before, because then I'll have excuses to stay out there longer. So I'm looking forward to meeting you. And because we have good connections at the there's three good lifetimes there. So I'll see if I pull some spring strings. We do it Friday, Saturday, so I can just make it one long weekend because it's um Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it'll be Sunday night. Welcome dinner, learn Monday, Tuesday, and then done Tuesday night.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, I love it. Well, again, this has been an honor, my man. I appreciate it. Everyone go check out, check them out, follow him and get to Vegas in April. Thank you very much, sir.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Chris.