Stan Efferding: What Actually Gets Clients Results (and What Doesn’t)

In this episode, Stan Efferding—renowned coach, world-record-holding powerlifter and creator of the Vertical Diet—breaks down the biggest mistakes coaches and athletes make when trying to build strength and improve performance.

He also unpacks the foundations of the Vertical Diet, debunking common nutrition misconceptions and sharing practical advice for setting macro targets and improving digestion and energy.

Stan has worked with some of the strongest athletes in the world, including Hafþór Björnsson, Brian Shaw and Jon Jones. He explains what sets elite performers apart from average clients—and how coaches can apply those lessons to create more sustainable results for anyone they work with.

Whether you coach competitive athletes or general-population clients, you’ll walk away with tools to improve performance, adherence and progress.

Links

Strength Coach Collective

2:34 - Mistakes when building strength

8:07 - High-level athletes vs. average clients

18:28 - Biggest nutrition misconceptions 

25:31 - Takeaways from the Vertical Diet

36:05 - Calculating macro targets

52:39 - Common habits of successful athletes

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

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SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Welcome back to the Strength Coach Collective podcast. My name is Chris Guerrero, and this podcast is all about helping strength coaches level up, whether it's improving programming, coaching, or business. If you're a coach looking to grow, connect with us at strengthcoachcollective.com and join our free Facebook group at Strength Coach Collective, where we bring together coaches from all levels to share ideas and get better. Now let's get into today's guest because it's a big one. Stan Efferding is a legend in the strength world, an IFBB pro bodybuilder, a world record-setting powerlifter and the creator of the vertical diet which is a personal favorite of mine a performance nutrition system used by elite athletes around the world beyond his dominance in strength sports stan is also a successful entrepreneur who has built multiple multi-million dollar businesses he appeared on shark tank and coached some of the biggest names in the game including ufc champ Thank you so much. Welcome to the show. to the show. It's an honor to have you.

SPEAKER_02: 1:27

Thanks for having me on, brother. Talofa, which is hello here in American Samoa, which is my current place of residence. My wife was born and raised here on the island, and we spent 24 years together in the United States between Seattle and Las Vegas before we finally decided to move back to where she originally was born and raised. So I'm here on this tiny little speck of a little volcanic rock in the South Pacific Ocean, about five hours off the coast of New Zealand and Australia. If it were a rectangle, it'd be four miles by 20 miles. It's about 77 square miles, about 40,000 occupants, and it's just an absolutely beautiful place. We have a 10- and 12-year-old, so it's a wonderful place to raise kids amongst three or four generations of families. So hello from American Samoa.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

Thank you so much, Stan. I want to jump right in because I know you're a busy guy and I kind of want to pick your brain. So I know you have trained some of the strongest and most elite athletes in the world, but you also emphasize longevity and sustainability. What are the biggest mistakes that you see strength coaches and or athletes making when it comes to building strength long term?

SPEAKER_02: 2:48

Well, I always say if I knew then what I know now, I started competing in 88, started training seriously in 1986, and I competed until I was 45 years old for 27 years until my last competition. That was 12 years ago. I'm 57 now. And so I have the opportunity to reflect on a lot of mistakes that I made. Some of the biggest mistakes I made early in my career, which I still see that are persistent today, probably the biggest one amongst large athletes is Football, linemen, powerlifters, strongmen, and even bodybuilders offseason is probably the dirty bulk. That's folks who just eat in too big of a calorie surplus and pack on too much weight. It's one of the first things that Mitchell Hooper, and congratulations to him, the world's strongest man who just won his third Arnold Classic last weekend. First thing he asked me was to say, I want to get bigger, but I don't want to get fat. And essentially not compromise his health. Obviously, powerlifting and any sport for that matter. I've always said if you want to be healthy, don't compete. There's a difference between health and fitness. Health being the ability to perform or health being free from illness or injury. Show me somebody who's never been injured. I'll show you somebody who's never won anything. And fitness being the ability to perform a particular duty or task. And the fitness level required to compete in sports is often not healthy. And so I do a lot to try and mitigate damage. And one of the things that I try and do is prevent these athletes, these big athletes, from accumulating too much body fat and specifically too much visceral fat, the fat around the organs, the fat central adiposity underneath the abdominal layer in the liver, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and then that spills over into the pancreas and ends up resulting in insulin resistance and high blood pressure and a host of other what we call metabolic syndrome problems. One of the biggest things I try and do is encourage them to maintain a smaller calorie surplus, or if they're already at a huge weight, you don't need a calorie surplus at all to gain muscle. You can just utilize maintenance calories. It won't impair your ability to grow. And probably second to this, and I didn't used to believe this, to be honest with you, is the type of calories you eat matter. So I prefer a lower fat diet overall. I've been talking about that for more than 10 years. but specifically the types of fat. We see in the literature that saturated fats drive fatty liver and AFL-D at twice the rate of other calories, including carbohydrates and sugar. So I do try and keep saturated fats under 10% with these big athletes and try and pay careful attention to their health markers. I guess the big thing is I get a blood test as a foundation, check their blood pressure, and make sure we're addressing any of these metabolic syndrome problems, which would be high LDL and insulin resistance from high blood sugar. So those are the two big ones. And that enables me to throw a lot more at an athlete and not compromise their health so they can have a longer career and better performance. And I guess beyond nutrition and blood testing and metabolic health, we just talk about physical health. capability to handle the workload. I would say you have limited physical capital to invest. And so we've talked for many, many years and I've done videos on YouTube, my Rhinos Rants, where I talk about the best way to recover from workouts. And we focused a lot on recovery from workouts. And to be honest, now we're seeing more and more that that's actually a little late to the game. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And nowadays we focus mostly on or I'd say mostly, but we prioritize load management so as to minimize the amount of damage that you have to recover from to begin with. I didn't know this in the 90s. We took every step to failure. We maxed out every week. You know, we wear it as a badge of honor how hard we train and, you know, how much pain we can endure. And we think that that's actually going to be the gateway to success. And as it turns out, That's probably not the wisest thing to do. And so I try and create less fatigue for my athletes overall. And there's a whole host of ways that we do that, which we could discuss. But that's probably the two biggest things to mention is just not to not to get too fat and unhealthy and not to push, you know, be cautious about the amount of fatigue that you accumulate in your training.

SPEAKER_00: 7:29

So, yeah, I mean, I think you mentioned a good point. And in terms of even, you know, I haven't been training as long as you, but I've been training for probably 25 years, different modalities. And even 10 to 15 years ago, the kind of training that I would do is the same thing, trying to max out my clean and jerk and snatch every week. And it takes a toll. So how should coaches approach training? like a high-level athlete, such as some of the people that you've trained, like a half-Thor, a Brian Shaw, a John Jones, versus just the average client? Because obviously the principles would be the same. It's just a different varying in how you're going to vary the approach there.

SPEAKER_02: 8:14

They really are. The principles are the same. I think with general population, I mean, with both groups, consistency trumps intensity. And having said that, frequency over volume, and what I mean by that is doing eight sets of chest once a week is not as effective as doing two to three sets of chest three times a week, or four sets twice a week, because we see that muscle protein synthesis has a window, 48, 72 hours, beyond which those muscles wouldn't say atrophy, but they're not continuing to grow. So you want to have a more frequent stimulus. With the general population, probably the biggest thing is the time. Lifting weights and exercise in general is not the priority. It's faith, family, and work, kids. They have a lot of things that take priority. So you have to create a schedule and a diet plan that fits their lifestyle. And what you find is that people set themselves up for failure by thinking they have to do or commit so many hours or so many sets a week into an effective program. And the fact is, is that it's far less than what anyone ever understood. We're seeing now that, you know, Dorian Yates, seven, eight time Mr. Olympia, whatever he was, trained three days a week for an hour. So why would a dad bought a soccer mom need to go in four days a week for an hour? I would suggest they could go in three days a week, even two. for 40 minutes, 30 minutes, you know, if they wanted to superset antagonistic body parts and just increase their effort, not the volume. Two very challenging top sets of a particular body part twice a week is more than sufficient, not just to maintain, but actually to grow. And if you could handle more, great. It's probably not necessary. If you enjoy it, super. But be cautious with junk volume. Be cautious with excessive warm-ups. Just go in and get yourself prepared. And like Dorian did in his Blood and Guts book, it's still just as relevant today as it was when he was training. I think he was way ahead of his time. This isn't the Mike Minster philosophy. This isn't once a week or once every two weeks do a single set. There's kind of a middle ground here. But two to four sets maybe? two, twice a week. Now we're talking about a program that's sustainable. I've always said compliance is the science. So for the general population, that's what we design. Now for the athletes, of course, we're going to constantly temper frequency and intensity with progress. And if we're not seeing progress, then we might have to scale back just a little bit on how much fatigue they're accumulating, particularly with athletes like a a UFC fighter like John Jones, he has all these other demands on, it's not just lifting weights. He has to go to jujitsu and wrestling and Muay Thai and boxing and has some cardio training to do. So we have to be very cautious. So when I work with UFC fighters, they might do two sets twice a week until they get into the last month of camp. And I might do two sets once a week to maintain that adaptation. So I hope that covers kind of generally speaking, what I think in terms of volume and frequency and fatigue management.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

Yeah, you know, it's so ironic because we know and the science says that your muscles don't grow while you're in the gym, right? It's all the stuff you do outside the gym, yet it's very difficult to convince the average person that like, hey, you don't need to be doing all of this in order to grow, get stronger or progress. And I guess just like a side tangent question, what has changed culturally within weight training to make people think that more is better and not better is better i

SPEAKER_02: 12:22

don't think anything's changed i think we've always thought that i remember that was the thought in the 90s and that was i remember when uh was it even in pumping iron when arnold was talking about how he would just do more than other people you start training am pm In the late 80s, I used to drive down to Gold's Gym Venice from my perch in Oregon, University of Oregon, Eugene. I would take the trek and drive all the way down there just so I could watch and talk and ask questions to whoever would answer. Most of those athletes were training two times a day, six days a week. They were doing a push-pull legs, and they would do, say, a quads in the morning, hamstrings at night, and then chest in the morning, shoulders and tris at night, and then back in the morning, biceps at night. But that was their full-time job. That's all they did was eat, sleep, and train. Flex Leder would go over to, what's the name of that, Firehouse Restaurant just down the street from Gold's Venice, and he would eat there six or seven times a day. They knew what he wanted and when he was coming in, and he would just train in the morning, train at night. But interestingly enough, Flex is an example of somebody who didn't accumulate too much fatigue. He did a lot of volume. But he didn't necessarily go to failure or overload himself that often. So that's one way to do it. I think that it's too much time and too many sets. And I did that routine with Flex. Flex trained me for my IFBB Pro Card back in 2009. And we did 16 sets per body part. And we trained twice a day, again, the same split, push-pull legs, push-pull legs, Sunday off, training twice a day. But we would do 16 sets per body part, four sets of four different exercises. And I I don't suggest that any natural athlete in particular or general population person should ever do that. I think it was too much. I've thrived on much, much less. And we see now that it's unnecessary to subject yourself to that much fatigue. So I don't think anything's changed. I think actually what's happening now is even though there's a bit of a tug of war going on on social media between the high volume people and the low volume people, I tend to be more, particularly at my age, and I tend to be more on the lower volume side of this argument. I think the high volume literature is conflated or confounded by edema. I think they're measuring the muscle adaptations too close to the completion of the studies, and they're getting readings of inflammation. So I think that within those studies, another confounding variable is that anybody who grew also got stronger. You cannot get bigger without getting stronger. You can get stronger without getting bigger. That's a whole other conversation as to athletes who are in weight classes and you need a good strength to weight ratio. But the fact of the matter is, is the real metric isn't measuring the total number of sets and reps that you do. The real metric is, are you getting stronger? Are you able to progressively overload? over time with the same exercise under the same conditions. If you can continue to do that, then you want to train as frequently and with as little volume as necessary so you don't accumulate the unnecessary fatigue to continue to progress. And so I think that would be the measurement. Same way you'd get a diet client and have them get on a scale. I know that's not the be-all, end-all. You want to look at body composition and lean mass and all that with, say, waist measurements or progress pictures. But it's a good metric at least initially. And I think that the strength, beating the book, as I don't know if Mensa originated that or Dante Trudell was always a big one for beating the book. That's the way that most of the great trainers I know keep clients motivated and can measure progress is, did you get five more pounds or one more rep with the same exercise week over week? And it's not linear, but generally speaking, you know, kind of a starting strength sort of method, which is a great thing for beginners. But even as you get advanced, the gains happen slower, but they still should be measured in terms of load or reps with the same load. And I think that's a good way to keep people focused on, keep their eye on the prize, because you can get distracted. I think we know now, and we didn't know 10 years ago even, even the scientists didn't know, the researchers, Brett Schoenfeld et al., used to think there were three drivers of hypertrophy. They thought it was muscular damage, metabolic stress, which is the pump, and mechanical tension. And now we see that muscular damage and metabolic stress are passengers. And it's all mechanical tension. And any fatigue or damage that you do or pump that you get is really just kind of a side effect of training harm. But it's not a driver.

SPEAKER_00: 17:04

I think that's really interesting. And I wanted to kind of transition to something relative to... nutrition, right? Because obviously a big driver in the results and outcomes that coaches are going to get their clients is what these clients are doing outside of the gym. I mean, I'd argue that that's probably more important results-wise than what they're doing inside of the gym. Not that they're mutually exclusive, but I mean, just from a personal standpoint, I had such phenomenal results when I was following the vertical diet. What what are some of the biggest nutrition misconceptions that you think are holding athletes or when i say athletes we could just say the general population back but general population in the sense of people that work out on a regular consistent basis

SPEAKER_02: 17:55

yeah i mean we talked about dirty bulking just eating too many calories that's that's a bad thing on the flip side of that i've worked with professional figure physique bikini competitors. Nadia Wyatt was third place Miss Olympia, second place Arnold Classic. And I've been working with female competitors since the early 90s. I was a personal trainer in and after college and I've been competing all those time. They tend to be over-restrictive. I've talked about this in my Iceland seminar some eight years ago. It's got over 7 million views now. And the guru diet was always the one where people would start eliminating too many things. That was a huge mistake. You'd end up on white fish and tilapia and protein powder, egg whites, big giant plate of broccoli, and maybe a teaspoon or a tablespoon of almond butter, which turned into a shovel full as you started starving. These kinds of diets started resulting for women in particular in what we call the female triad, which is a cessation of the menstrual period, chronic calorie restriction. And they would end up getting hypothyroidism, suffering from bone mineral density loss. I used to have runners back in University of Oregon back in the early 90s getting shin splints because they were over-dieting. And just as recently as a couple of years ago, I was working with a female softball team in Arizona, and a couple of the girls were underperforming. We measured everything. That which gets measured gets improved. So we did laser-timed 40s. And a couple of them had had a significant decline in performance, talked to the parents, found out they'd been really tired lately, suggested a blood test. And sure enough, they both had low iron. They both had anemia. Asked them about their diet and they had started demonizing because of social media. They started eliminating red meat, started eliminating the egg yolk, started eliminating dairy, started eliminating fruits, started avoiding salt. All those things that the chronic dieting group, the guru dieters in the bikini world, had been doing for so long and of course it had a huge adverse effect on their health and so the big thing about the vertical diet that i tried to do i mean obviously the calories are king you got to get sufficient energy you have sufficient fuel to fuel your workouts and then protein probably the most important macronutrient but then diversity becomes pretty important that's why i kind of liked red meat for women because the high iron and b vitamins and the like lean red meats keep the egg yolk in choline for you know biotin for skin hair nails and Dairy in particular, Stu Phillips, McMaster University PhD, has some great research out recently and has stated that dairy has an independent effect on BMI and performance. And that's independent of protein, independent of calcium, independent of calories. And so for those people who can tolerate dairy, I usually go with a Greek yogurt because it's most easily tolerated and it has great benefits for digestion. And they got microbiome fermented foods in general do that for the Stanford's studies. So the big thing is, is that it was diverse. And then another thing that I introduced into there because of my experience as a coach and the kind of athletes that I was working with, I was working with chronic dieters, I was working with chronic bulkers, you know. And in my Iceland seminar, I had both there in the audience. I try and tailor my presentations to the audience. And the audience was competitive bodybuilders, female physique, bikini wellness. It was strongmen, powerlifters. It was a group at Hopthor's gym up in Iceland. And they tend to have digestive distress. They tend to suffer from a lot of the chronic dieters. Of course, IBS is more prevalent in people who are on chronic calorie restriction. And then the bulkers end up having all sorts of problems with diarrhea and GERD. And so the diet intended to help alleviate some of those problems by first the diversity, but then I leaned into the low FODMAP diet to help. And that's fermentable oligodi monosaccharides and polyols. And it's not a good food, bad food conversation. I'm not suggesting everybody should be on the diet, but it's one of the few that has very good evidence from Monash University of Australia showing that certain foods can cause more gas than others. And so if you're going to eat a lot of a particular kind of food, then it should probably be a lower gas food, just basically based on quantity. And then how you prepare them matters as well. And there's some individualistic responses. So I kind of went step by step through that. And I do so in my book and in my e-book, The Vertical Diet, so people can start to choose foods that might provide them with a better digestive experience, a better stool quality. And that's, I think, what a lot of people experience when they utilize the diet. I made it easier for dieters to feel satiated, which is huge in terms of long-term dietary compliance. And I made it easier for bulkers to consume more calories without being overwhelmed by the foods. I started to shy away from the pizza, pasta, pancakes, and got into, as you mentioned, the monster mashes of foods that had more moisture, that were just easier to consume more of, digest faster so you could have another meal and be able to acquire enough calories to fuel your current mass and workload.

SPEAKER_00: 23:22

Yeah, you know, one of my favorite quotes that you have is the best diet is the one that you'll stick to, right? And I think that that's... So true with consistency because it's a question that's constantly asked. What do you think I should do? And now you see social media, carnivore diet, animal based diet, vegan diet, vegetarian diet, keto diet, paleo diet, Mediterranean diet. There are so many diets and it's like it's so difficult for people to kind of sift through everything. So that just always stands like true. What I tell people, hey, this diet might sound great, but if two weeks from now you're going to feel so restricted that you're not going to be able to sustain it then it's probably not the best thing for you right now speaking on the vertical diet if if coaches because i i actually had your i believe the 2.0 3.0 ebook that i read uh for myself but if coaches wanted to start applying some of these principles with their own clients Where should they start, and what would you say two to three key takeaways they should be after?

SPEAKER_02: 24:31

Yeah, I mean, you start by reading the diet, and I'm now on version 4.0 because I originally launched this eight years ago, and It's expanded to the point now where, as you know, it's both weight loss and weight gain. It's sleep optimization and digestion, hydration. I do blood testing. And we talk about hormones. And I have a blood pressure quick fix kit and a blood sugar quick fix kit. And the training is in there. Injury prevention and myth busting. It's just expanded based on the number of questions I've gotten over the years. I've tried to memorialize my responses. In this document, which is the Vertical Diet at StandUpForNew.com, which is now version 4.0, the subsequent versions are available for free to anybody who bought a previous version. If you go in there and click on your document, the most recent version will pop up. But I think the big things, what we covered, you know, calories are king. That's always going to be, you know, kind of the top of the list. Protein is next. Well, compliance. You got to find out if you're athlete, you know, where they like to eat, when they like to eat. I have a business partner who travels a lot. And so I can't exactly give him a diet where he has to cook all his food. He has to be able to make those selections when he's on the road. And are they going to eat three times a day or four times a day? Unless they're dieting and feel as though intermittent fasting is the be all end all and it feels the least restrictive and easiest to comply to. Great. It's not magic. It's like you said, it's no better than the other diet. One of the slides in my Iceland seminar and one of the pages in my book, says there's many paths to the same destination. And whichever diet you choose, you want to pick the one, as you said, and as Lane Norton has often said, that feels the least restrictive to you. Because at the end of the day, you cannot white knuckle hunger. You're just not going to be able to win that battle long term. And so the goal is satiety. And as a brief aside, that's why these new medications work so well, because they manage hunger. That's bottom line. That's why we also know that eating a lot of ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, calorie-dense foods cause you to eat more, from Kevin Hall's studies. It's because they don't trigger the same satiety signals, and you're just more hungry at a particular meal, and you're hungry again sooner. All the strategies I utilize for large athletes to gain weight are kind of the standard American diet, but I've I tweak it to manage health as we started off speaking about with lower saturated fats, low sugar control. So, I mean, if you're going to get an athlete in, compliance is the big thing. I'm going to tell a story here and rat out one of my clients. Kennedy Blades won the silver medal in last year's Olympics. She's a wrestler. And I was down in Arizona working with Henry Cejudo. couple years ago and i met kennedy and we put a diet together kennedy had a hard time gaining weight she's a lighter in her weight class and so i went down and i i got everything that she needed and i mapped out a diet program for her and it looked like the vertical diet you know i got the uh the uh the little easy cook oven that that uh what's the name of that one the The little air fryer that I use.

SPEAKER_00: 27:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 27:46

So she could easily cook her food. I picked up all of her food and I showed her exactly how to prep it. Well, Kennedy has to train twice a day and has a full class schedule and commuting and everything. She doesn't have time to do all this and she doesn't really have the habit form to where this is easy for her. You and I, we've been doing it so long. It's just... We're just pushing buttons, and next thing you know, we've knocked out a full day's worth of meals or three days' worth of meals. So all of my clients, I ask them to send me a picture of each meal, their morning weight, and their hours of sleep every day. That's information that I, as a coach, want to get from my clients. The information helps me somewhat, but it helps them more than anything just to have some accountability and some regular tracking. Again, that which gets measured gets improved. And if I have them weigh every day and check their hours of sleep, then it's something they'll pay more attention to. And they snap a picture of the food. Well, Kennedy, after I went down to Arizona and set her all up with a diet plan, the next day I asked her for pictures of her food. Breakfast was a Chobani and half a bagel. I'm like, where's the other 30 grams of protein? And lunch was two PB&J sandwiches and two small ones at that. And I was just like, okay, this isn't going to work. There's no way. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And there's just no way she was going to be able to adhere to the program I had mapped out for her. So we went to meal prep. And I'm not shilling for my meal prep company. You can use whatever meal prep company you want, whether it's online or local. But we know from research, we know from dozens of decades, from decades of history, that the most successful dieters are meal preppers. They have their little six-pack bag and their little Tupperwares, and their fridge is full of three to seven days' worth of pre-done meals that are perfectly measured out, and they have their calories and macros. Macro is much less important than calories at that point. But those people are successful. They lose weight as a result. And when they don't have a plan and they don't have everything measured out and they're just eating when they're hungry and they're going wherever is most convenient or even in their own refrigerator, they're choosing things to satisfy them. you know a hunger and they generally pick things that are tastier and they generally overeat and or they go to a restaurant that they enjoy and and they order and eat too many calories so meal prepping was the big thing for kennedy so we just started sending her meal prep and she was able to eat you know a hearty meals we had mapped out a bunch that she preferred and i you know i can be some people can be really picky about uh hitting your macros right on the spot or having only organic this or grass-finished that. And even with meal timing, it just pales in comparison to just being consistent, getting sufficient or accurate calories for your goals and adequate protein. And then where carbs and fats fall in is really personal preference. All the research shows that when we control for calories and protein, carb and fat percentages don't matter. The caveat being you have to get sufficient fats for hormones, for sleep, for fat-soluble vitamin absorption. But those are pretty minimal, somewhere around 50, 60 grams a day would more than satisfy the health benefits of fats. And fats beyond that, while they may be your personal preference, probably don't lend much to performance, which is why I always kind of leaned into carbohydrates for athletes in particular. because they do help fuel performance so i don't know how far off track i got there uh and i know it's not one two or three things uh that coaches should focus on with athletes but i just kind of reiterated the fact that appliances and science design a diet program and not just when you eat and where you eat but the types of foods you eat when i send out a questionnaire to a client I have a list of dozens and dozens of foods, and I want them to go through and rank them from zero to 10. Because if they say there's a food that they don't like, I'm not including that in their diet. It's not sustainable. And I feel the same way about felons on any diet program. I've had clients come to me literally crying, saying that their doctor refused to help them unless they went on a keto diet. And that's painful to me. There's no evidence that a keto diet is superior to any other diet for weight loss. There is evidence that they can work for some people. And as mentioned, they're equivalent in the research as far as long-term dietary adherence and 95% of health benefits. This isn't me making this up. This is the conclusion from the researchers in the bulk of the literature. They actually say 95% to 99% of the health benefits on any diet are from the weight loss itself, irrespective of the diet. And that included the McDonald's diet, the Twinkie diet, the 7-Eleven diet. All of these people improved all of their biomarkers, their blood sugars improved, their blood pressure improved, their cholesterol improved. All of those things, their inflammation markers improved, homocysteine, HA1C reactive protein. All of those things improved from weight loss, irrespective of diet. And the same thing would be true for reversal of type 2 diabetes. When you reach and achieve about a 15% total weight loss, irrespective, high carb, low carb, does not matter. Liquid diet didn't matter. When you achieved about a 15% weight loss, those people who still had pancreatic beta cell function, the ones who weren't completely shut down, reversed their type 2 diabetes and no longer needed supplemental insulin or had insulin resistance to carbohydrate consumption. So The weight loss was the primary driver. Now, the types of foods you eat affect whether or not you're going to be able to lose weight because the types of foods you eat affect appetite and energy and a whole host of other things. So, yeah, and saturated fats, as mentioned, even in a weight loss diet, it may take longer to reverse non-hypothalic fatty liver disease. So people in the keto community who complain about sugar should pay very careful attention to saturated fats as well if you're going to be honest about what the literature suggests.

SPEAKER_00: 34:06

So a couple of followups to that. So in terms of calories and protein, because calories are King and protein is probably the most important macronutrient. Obviously you could read, read the ebook. I'm sure there's more information on that in there, but is there like a general framework or any formulas you use? I've heard so many different things in terms of calculating how many calories the average person should get. And it's so difficult to say based on activity level and also how minimum effective dose of how much protein someone should be consuming. Can you speak to me a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02: 34:39

Let's hit on calories first. And you're right. It is basically an estimate. We use the Mifflin-St. Gior equation. That's just our preference. My co-author is a PhD RDN who was director of dietetics at UNLV. And we met and trained together and wrote this book together. Spent hundreds of hours in Las Vegas. Dr. Damon McKeown. And that He's done thousands of DEXAs as he was an instructor in the exercise phys department. Calculating somebody's calories is really kind of an estimate. There's two ways to do it. You can use one of those equations, and there's many others, a BMR equation on the internet. Type in your weight and your activity level, of course, and your age, and it'll spit out a number, and that can be a number that you start with, okay? That could just be a starting point, and you have to eat that many calories and weigh in consistently, and we like to use the average of the week. And so maybe you do two weeks. Weigh in every day, but we divide that number by, you know, we take the seven-day total and divide it in order to get the average for the week and then see what the trends are week over week. And the reason we do that is because weight fluctuates, especially in women with the menopause, or not with menopause, but with the monthly cycle. especially even with like the day after leg day, you're going to retain more water, a high fiber meal. You're just going to have more food bulk and more water in your, in your intestines. So you can move two pounds in any given day or three pounds, but that's not indicative of whether or not you gained or lost fat or gained or lost muscle. That's a water fluctuation. So we manage that by averaging. We do daily weigh-ins and average for the week. Now, once you've Eat in a consistent number of calories and weight inconsistently and see whether or not you're gaining or losing weight. It can help you fine tune. Another way is the food log. And I know these aren't, people just want to be told. Tell me exactly. And you're right. It is frustrating because that's the number one question they have. How many calories should I be eating? And you can only give them an estimate and ask them to track it. And here's the challenge with the tracking. And I know that a lot of these diet tribes, the intermittent fasters and the keto folks in particular, and again, those are perfectly valid. pathways to the destination. They like the fact that they say you don't have to track calories, you're just likely to eat less food. Calories count, but don't count calories is kind of where they're at on that. But at some point, just like balancing your checkbook and learning about banking enough such that you can manage your household, you need to know what's in the foods that you're eating. And so I do encourage as an education process, Using some sort of calorie counter, whether it's a MyFitnessPal, I kind of like a chronometer because it gives you the micronutrients as well. So you can see if you have any potential RDA deficiencies. But it just helps you become familiar. One of my employees many years ago was coming in every morning with a vanilla latte from Starbucks and was trying to lose weight. And I said, you know, that has 700 calories in it. She had no idea. Absolutely no idea. But if you had a calorie tracker, you'd punch it in there, then that would be your, you don't have to count it all the time, but you'd learn which choices you were making were contributing to that, your total caloric take for the day. Even things such as cooking certain meals in oils or butter, I don't care. This isn't a discussion about those foods in particular, but they're very calorie dense. So just adding a tablespoon or two of oil to a meal or two a day I

SPEAKER_00: 38:07

don't want to interrupt you really quickly because I think there's a really important point there of what you mentioned. consistently similar the same 10 to 15 things over and over it becomes very easy for you to know how much you're eating and i just i just think that's such an important superpower that people don't realize that once you track and you know you can then i probably had about 180 grams of protein today but it's through the consistency like you said sorry

SPEAKER_02: 38:36

you're absolutely right and i think you should weigh and measure initially at least so you know you're getting your 100 and 80 grams of protein that day or 130 if you're a woman. You know what 30 grams of protein looks like for breakfast because most folks aren't hitting that. They'll have two eggs and a piece of toast and a cup of coffee and that's 12 grams of protein. Where's the other 20 plus grams that the average female should have for that breakfast meal? Yes, the calories is a tough one. You've got to either use the calorie calculator or measure your food for a week and kind of see whether or not you're gaining or losing weight. And so there is some upfront work that you have to invest in that. And then, as you mentioned, eventually it starts to become a habit for you. It's just easy to manage because people do tend to eat the same one or two things for each meal throughout the day. Where we go off the rails is generally they'll eat really good Monday through Friday afternoon, and then comes Friday night and Saturday, and they just... Just blow the whole thing out and start going anywhere and everywhere with their buddies. Learning how to order in restaurants. I was going to say that the challenge with calorie counting is we're not very good at it. We tend to underestimate the number of calories we consume by at least 50%. Labels can be off by 20%. Registered dieticians can be off by 20%. Restaurants can be off by 30% to 50%. just from the size or the extra tablespoon of oil that you can't necessarily control when you're ordering from somebody else. Generally speaking, if people hit a plateau and they believe they're eating a certain number of calories, it's Occam's razor. 99% of the time, if they really weighed and measured and paid attention to finishing that last couple of bites of their kid's pancake in the morning and snacks and sips and bites and sauces and drinks, you know, just peppered throughout the day, you'd find that you're probably 500 plus calories over what you think that you're eating. That's generally speaking what mostly happens. And then secondary to that is you're just hungry and you just eat because you're hungry and you have to properly manage both of those things.

SPEAKER_00: 40:56

Now, one quick question, and it's still about the vertical diet. So There's a lot of variety. You mentioned eggs, Greek yogurt, lean bison, lean ground beef, salmon. Have you or how do you manage within that diet? Because there are people that say, hey, red meat, saturated fat is linked to higher cholesterol. That's what the data shows. How do you manage cholesterol on the diet? And again, because what I've seen has been sensationalized watching Thor or Brian Shaw put down 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day of Monster Mash. But how do you manage variables such as that? I mean, I've heard you talk. about the 10 minute walks for blood sugar and things like that. But from a dietary perspective, with a marker like cholesterol, how does the diet help or what do you do within the diet to make sure that the LDL cholesterol is not increasing?

SPEAKER_02: 41:59

I know there's a lot of influencers out there claiming that LDL cholesterol or ApoB does not matter. They're dead wrong. The overwhelming consensus amongst academically credentialed domain-specific professionals. I'm not talking about chiropractors. I'm talking about lipidologists who've been researching for 30-plus years. Thomas Dayspring is a perfect example of that. There's many others. Based on multiple converging lines of evidence, from epidemiology to randomized controlled trials to Mendelian trials, Randomization research, which is your genetic trials for people with, say, PCSK9 gene differences, all conclude that ApoB is an independent cholesterol, to use the word cholesterol because there's a difference between cholesterol in the diet and cholesterol in the bloodstream, is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Now, there's other risk factors as well. Both can be true, that diabetes, high blood pressure, high iron, inflammation, all of those things can compromise the endothelial layer of your blood vessels, making it easier for those ApoB particles to penetrate the walls of your blood vessels. And so you want to look at your overall risk, but you can't disregard the fact that there is no atherosclerosis. sclerosis without atheroma, which is caused by those ApoB particles penetrating the blood vessel. So that's just brief. I've got an hour and a half long seminar with Mark Bell where I really took a deep dive into that. And there's better people to listen to, as mentioned with Thomas Dayspring and others. But most importantly is that you want to manage the total saturated fat that you consume because it increases the amount of circulating LDL in the system. It decreases the number of sites on the liver that can help with cholesterol, with getting cholesterol out of your system. We call clearance. So you want to keep

SPEAKER_00: 44:26

that below 10%. Of total daily calories or? Saturated fat.

SPEAKER_02: 44:32

Saturated fat. Saturated fat. Not fat in general. See, here's the problem. This has been an evolution. This is the reason some people are skeptical, because we've learned a lot over the years. We know more now than we knew in the 50s and 60s, and we knew more now than we knew in the 70s and 80s. And at one point, fat was bad. But unfortunately, there's different kinds of fat. It exists on a spectrum. The fats from dairy and cheese did not seem to have the same LDL-elevating problem that the fats from, say, butter was. There's a we call a milk-fat-globulin membrane that would seem to be somewhat protective, whereas butter, when it's churned, you compromise that membrane. We saw in the Finnish study in Finland that they had an 86% decline in cardiovascular events as a result of a nationwide campaign to reduce saturated fats, primarily butter. They were huge consumers of butter. They didn't have too much change in smoking, a little bit, but it wasn't nearly as big as the reduction in saturated fat, but the decline in cardiovascular events was huge. So we do have lots of great studies on that. But, you know, we made the claim that certain things, eggs is another example, depending on the individual, only about 20% of the population is a hyper absorber of the cholesterol from eggs. And so initially, everybody was saying that the cholesterol in eggs is causing cardiovascular disease and increasing LDL. And as it turns out now, it only pertains to a small number of population. And dietary cholesterol does not seem to be, for the vast majority of the population, a driver of elevated LDL and cardiovascular disease risk. And so, yeah, they were, you could say, wrong. I don't think it was intentional. I think they used the best information they had at the time. And now they've been able to parse through and separate some of these things. So generally speaking, the saturated fats that you'll consume from, say, butter, and then some processed meats like pepperoni, bacon, and those, and even like a palm oil. Those can hit you pretty hard. Those can raise your LDL. The only way to know is to get a blood test, look at your current LDL, and then implement a plan to try and get those numbers down, which maybe for some people do have to reduce eggs. It's very individualistic. Reduce saturated fats, increase soluble fibers. It's about all you can do. And then some people have a genetic predisposition for elevated LDL. cholesterol that might not be manageable with diet and exercise. Unfortunately, oftentimes there's not much more you can do. So how do I manage that with a vertical diet? Well, I use a variety of foods. I use leaner meats. I use a 96-4 beef, which gets my saturated fats way down. I use a fat-free Greek yogurt. I use egg-egg white blends. And again, I'm still sensitive to the fact that we do subsequent blood tests to see if those egg yolks have an effect. I use an olive oil. We use salmon. because it's high in monounsaturated fats and even beef for that matter. Some of the recent research demonstrated that in the absence of a lot of these other terrible foods that you get from the standard American diet, fast foods and the high sugar consumption, that red meat is over 50% monounsaturated fat. I said that eight years ago in my ice consumer, the healthy fat. And so it kind of depends on how you respond to it. Some people don't have elevated If they have an otherwise healthy diet that includes some red meat, the amount matters and the saturated fat content matters, yes, but it matters on an individual basis. And you should seek to get ongoing testing to see if your LDL is elevated such that you have a higher exposure to cardiovascular disease. And there's all those other risk factors, as mentioned, that also matter. You know, just because you've got your seatbelt on and you're driving the speed limit doesn't mean you should be texting willy-nilly. You know, it all matters. And it's frustrating that people get so focused on just one thing and try and completely dismiss another. I'm just not in that camp. And I also believe that a carnivore diet may help. And we do see a lot of people that it has helped. That's a survivorship bias, of course, because we have to see a lot of people that were hurt by it. But It would be primarily due to the weight loss. And as mentioned earlier, some people have a very hard time with vegetables. And this was even borne out in the Sonnenberg trials at Stanford, where they found that when they increased fiber, that a third of the respondents had poor outcomes. A third had no change and a third had beneficial outcomes. A hundred percent of those participants in that trial, though, all had improved gut microbiome diversity and density from fermented foods. That's where your yogurt comes in, kefir, kombucha, et cetera. So I include as much of that as I can in everyone's diet or as much as they can tolerate and enjoy. Probably the biggest change I made with Hofthor and Mitchell Hooper was to throw a lot of calories at them with dairy because of Stu Phillips' work and Sonnenberg trials and just the manner in which I think it has a lot of benefits with very few drawbacks.

SPEAKER_00: 49:45

So a perfect segue, because I was actually going to ask you next, and it's kind of going off of what we were just talking about, but like working with someone like Hooper or Brian Shaw or Hafthor or John Jones, like you've worked with some of like the, the most elite athletes in the world. Are there common habits or mindsets that make these athletes more successful than, than others? Like, have you noticed a specific trend with these people?

SPEAKER_02: 50:14

Well, first and foremost, genetics reign supreme. These guys are freaks. I mean, yeah, six, nine, you know, John Jones, both of his brothers were NFL Super Bowl champions. Yeah. I mean, come on. They're freaks. There's no question. Doesn't mean they don't work hard, but genetics reign supreme. And then beyond that, as I said, it's always, you know, we weren't as bad to honor when we train a great athlete, but they're the easiest people to train because age to the genetic predisposition. But B, they're so hardworking. And they're so focused and disciplined and consistent. All those things are what's most difficult about gen pop weight loss. And those guys, they've got it in spades and they're entirely focused on one goal. Whereas in gen pop, you're distracted by a million other things, family, faith, friends, kids, you know, work, iPhones, social media. But these guys are, I mean, they live, breathe, eat, think they're, they're sports. That's, Fantastic. Probably the biggest challenge with them is overtraining, is just thinking that they just believe that it's quantity. And that's not to say that they don't hone in on quality, but even when they get dialed in on quality, they just want to do more and more and more and more and more. And then they want, as we discussed earlier, something they can do outside the gym to help them repair for more and more and more and more. And that's downstream. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So the biggest thing I have to do with these folks is manage fatigue and try and design a program that doesn't put them in a position to where they are overtrained and under-recovered. I'm big on measuring. I have to have metrics. I need to put something in there that shows me that what they're doing is actually giving them progress. It's hard with skilled athletes, very hard with skilled athletes, because you can't just measure– broad jump or bench press or, you know, those things are very easy to measure. But performance in a skill sport like football or fighting, it's really difficult to put your finger on it. But you do have to have those metrics to make sure that they aren't getting weaker and more tired. And so we do continue to incorporate, say, a broad jump or a high jump or speed. We like to track speed. We use an overspeed treadmill where we can. because that's a metric that we can measure. Those are probably the biggest challenges. And I'll design a program, plus the fact that they have so many other demands, as mentioned, outside of what I do as a strength and conditioning nutritionist. They've got their coaches taking them through, whether it's football or fighting, all of those other challenges, all those other disciplines that are going to affect their ability to recover. So I'm I'm trying to get everyone together. They all think their discipline is the most important. We all believe that as a coach, that what we do for the athletes is the most important thing. And so you've got to be respectful of that and just make sure and account for how much load or stress that they're accumulating. One of the biggest problems I find with, I think, athletes such as fighters or even soccer players, football players, et cetera, is that they do a lot of stuff in zones that probably don't replicate their actual sport. Football players for the longest time, basketball players, soccer players, they used to run and run and run and run and run. That's not reflective of their sport. Football is six seconds all out, 30 seconds rest. Six seconds all out, 30 seconds rest. They're not jogging one, two, three miles. Soccer players, same way. And so you want... I think I can build... a base of cardiovascular fitness with a lot of explosive work, but it has to be, so I keep it as a priority, not as a majority. I keep a lot of their explosive sprinting work in there at a very high level, both as benefit for the central nervous system, but also for the kind of demands that are going to be imposed upon them in their sport. And then, you know, throw in the zone two, the stuff that doesn't accumulate a lot of fatigue. And generally that's on a bike, or maybe a rower or maybe in a swimming pool where I can get their heart rate going, but I don't further break down their muscles. So that's probably the biggest thing I do with those guys is fatigue management.

SPEAKER_00: 54:44

Awesome. Well, I want to do a quick rapid fire round. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and we'll wrap it up. So first random, what is your favorite meal? Still the Monster Mash. For those that have never had the Monster Mash, can you

SPEAKER_02: 55:00

explain what it is? I just mix up a little lean ground beef with some white rice, a little bit of bone broth, and that's the foundation of it. And then if I can add maybe some scrambled eggs into that and a little bit of peppers or whatever your vegetable of choice is, I like to kind of steam them or saute them in bone broth so they're soft. And I eat that. To me, it just tastes great. I've actually made chicken mash. I know it's blasphemy. I've always said, have you ever seen a big chicken, is my quote. But I don't always have available. Like here on the island, the meats are pretty fatty. They're an 80-20 or 75-25 beef. And so it's harder for me to get lean meat. So I do some boneless chicken breast. I dice it up real small. White rice, bone broth. A couple of scrambled eggs. And you add the bone broth to your preferred consistency. Sometimes I like it just moist. Sometimes I like it more soupy. But that's such an easy, comfortable meal to eat on my stomach. So that's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_00: 55:59

Awesome. What is your current workout split?

SPEAKER_02: 56:04

I'm doing a little more frequency with less volume. So I was doing upper, lower, upper, lower. I would do Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, let's say. On upper day, I would do two sets for chest, two sets for shoulders, two sets for biceps, two sets for back. They'd be top sets. Generally, the weights are pretty heavy. I try and stay in the five to seven, maybe eight range at the top end before I'm adding load. I know I'm the guy that said 20s will change your life and did the 20 rep squats for years and the 20 rep leg presses and But I was a younger guy. And the higher rep sets, you accumulate more fatigue, not just physically, but mentally more fatigue. And I know we probably don't have time to get down into it, but fatigue has a lot to do, your ability to recruit muscle fibers in a given exercise has a lot to do with your central nervous system and your brain's ability to send the signal and recruit the muscle. That's what turns off first when you start to get fatigued or distracted or hungry or stressed or anything else. It's a psychological component. I'll go in and warm up and my warmup will be like seated bench press. I won't do a ton of repetitions. I'll put it on 30 and I'll do a couple and I'll put it on 80 and I'll do a couple and I'll put it on 120 and I'll do one and I'll put it on 180 and I'll do one. And then I'm up to the stack and I'm doing my first set, but I'll do those warmups in a circuit to where I'll do. you know, a couple of easy reps on the bench press and I'll go do a couple of easy reps on the pull down. I'm just trying to get my body, see what I feel, you know, because sometimes I go in there and I've got a little, you know, the Bulgarians say it's the same pain. It just moves around the body. And so at any given moment, any given day, I might have something that's like talking back to me. And so I'll pick a different exercise if that's the case. I don't force myself to do anything in particular. But generally speaking, now I'm on to one set three times a week. I'm trying the frequency here for full body. So I'll do one set of leg extension, one set of leg press, one set of seated hamstring curl, one set of hip hinge, which could either be a stiff-legged deadlift on the Smith machine or on a back extension machine. I'll load the weight on my arms. Smith machine, I can load heavier. It's hard to hold on to that weight from the back hyperextension, but I can feel my glute hamstring area better on that hyperextension. On the Smith machine, stiff legged, I feel the back of my knees. I don't like that feeling because I'm not terribly flexible. I'll do one set of reverse grip Smith machine chest what are you hearing me say over and over and over again here when i'm talking about smith machines leg extensions leg presses you're not hearing a lot of free weight exercises and if i'm going to load something heavy in the five to six rep range something like a squat or a bench press or an incline dumbbell or something like that i just find that if i really want to measure progress i have to be careful that i'm not incorporating balance or you know just a more difficult exercise into that routine. I want it to be a fixed movement where all I can do is what needs to be done for that muscle, and then I can easily measure over time if I'm progressing. Maybe two sets of calf press. I mentioned just a preacher curl, bicep curl, and a bicep machine, one tricep push down. I maybe do nine different movements. Generally, it doesn't take me more than 35, 40 minutes, and I'll get the full body workout in and now i'm trying to do that three days a week

SPEAKER_00: 59:43

and how does walking play a factor in what you do consistently

SPEAKER_02: 59:47

always do that yeah i mean just we talked a little bit earlier about passive versus active therapy or and i have a whole video on the best way to recover from workouts and my quote was things that are done to you or for you are never as effective as things you do for yourself And a lot of people look outside to try and find some sort of intervention, whether it be physical therapy or chiropractics or ice baths or dry needling or gua sha, or the list goes on and on and on. Home rolling, et cetera. We just don't have much evidence that that helps much with the arms or recovery. And it could just, if anything, just take time away from that, which could be spent doing something that provided more benefit or just getting out of the gym. So yeah, I still walk, and we see now that multiple walks a day is better than one long bout of exercise at the end of the day in terms of breaking up the duration of sitting. We talked about the blood sugar control post-workout, how it helps with digestion, the enzymatic action, the muscular contraction of the stomach. So I use it for a lot of things just to keep moving. At my age, motion is lotion.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:58

If you could give one piece of advice to coaches who want to be their best coach, in their field, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:06

Well, I learned this from my good buddy, Matt Whitmer, at a beat training in Cincinnati. He studied under the great Buddy Morris. He was an NFL strength and conditioning coach at Pittsburgh and there in Ohio. He's in Cincinnati. He said, this is with respect to your clients. They just don't care what you know until they know that you care. And so I would be listening more than talking. It's hard to hear me say that on this podcast where I haven't shut up for an hour straight. But when it comes to clients, I mean, ask them what they want and then try and design the program that gives them what they want. And that would include, as mentioned earlier, the kinds of foods they want to eat, the kinds of exercises that they want to do, when they want to train. It needs to be simple, sensible, and sustainable. It's got to be enjoyable or they're just not coming back. And the hook that we use is always strength, but I always talk about bringing somebody new into the gym that hasn't traditionally lifted, and I get them a trap bar deadlift. That's one of my favorites because it's real easy to learn. You just grab the handle. They're usually elevated handles. The range of motion is not all that extraordinary. And the first day they come in, you put the 10-pound rubber weights on there, and they lift it. And then the next time they come in three days later, this may be your soccer mom or even your postmenopausal woman who comes into you for training. Next time they come in, you put the 20s on, and then the 30s, and then the 40s, and then, yeah. And they feel a sense of accomplishment. That's so important that the individual that you're training, I hate the whistleblowing and what I call battle ropes and burpees, and, oh, if they got to sweat and breathe hard that you did your job as a coach. I think that's absolutely ass backwards. I don't think you'll find a client that looks forward to that and goes home and tells their husband or their friends that, oh, my God, this is great. But they will tell their friends how strong they got, and they'll have an exact number. And Matt on his wall in Cincinnati at his gym beat training– he's got three gyms now in Cincinnati, and it's almost exclusively personal training– And as business professionals and gym owners, I think this is important to hear. His strategy has always been to do one thing. He doesn't bounce around trying to do it, be all things for all people. He does personal training. In order to be successful and for his coaches that train for him, his trainers that he hires to train people, they have to train more than one client per hour for a number of reasons because that– gives them more money per hour, but it also has their client pay less per hour. And the long-term, in order to keep a client long-term, it's really hard to, I don't know what New York's prices are, but it can be expensive. And you want to open that up in terms of affordability by sharing the load. That doesn't mean it's group training. He has this specific program. He'll train an 18-year-old wrestler at the same time he's training a 65-year-old woman at the same time, but they're not training together. And he's able to manage that. everything and make sure that everybody's getting full attention. They're not sitting there with unused time and he tracks everything that they do. That's very important. And then he does monthly recurring billing on a credit card. They pay 400 a month for 12 sessions. Now he's there or his trainer's there from say 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. Come in anytime. This gets rid of the whole, well, I had an appointment and the whole back and forth with the scheduling and I'm not going to be able to make it. Come in anytime because the trainer is capable and experienced enough to be able to train from two to seven people at once, whenever they come in at their convenience. And then if they don't come in, they still pay. And if they come in an extra day, that's fine. You find that that bridges Thanksgiving and Christmas, which people's trainings generally tends to drop off by about 50% if they're charging only per session. So those are some very important aspects of being successful in personal training. Matt and I actually wrote a book called, geez, what's the title now? It's an e-book in my... Building a career in the fitness industry, not the greatest title in the world, but we didn't want it to be. How to make money. And we talk about these very foundational aspects of personal training. But on the wall, Matt has a chalkboard on the wall at his gym. And you go into a powerlifting gym, and there's the names of the guys who have the biggest bench squat and deadlift. Well, in Matt's gym, the chalkboard's huge, and it has the name of every one of his clients up there. And he also has a board up there with clients that have been with him for one year, for two years, for three years, for five years, for 10 years. for 15 years. He has a list of clients that has been with him for 15 years. He knows their family. The kids have grown up. He's attended their high school graduations. You become part of the family. He says it's always important when he's training his trainers to be able to do a book report on a new client. You need to get to know them personally so you can make sure and develop a relationship with them for long term. But on that board, he lists every single client and then he has a whole host of things, not just bench squat and deadlift, but he has like a five rep squat or, you know, you name it, there's a whole bunch of different exercises, your lat pulldown. And everything's measured based on, you know, whatever it is, five reps, an AMRAP with a certain weight. Sometimes it'll even be like a two rep. But when the client comes in and say it's chest day, he's like, let's beat the book. And he'll take them over and show them, you know, exactly what that number is up on the board. And the clients continue. And then he breaks them up by male and female and age group so they can see what other people in their age group and sex, how they're performing. And everybody has that kind of competitive nature about them. And so they're like, oh, I want to, you know. And it's a fantastic retention tool. It's a fantastic, I think, motivational tool that keeps them training hard every time they come in. Because we know at the end of the day, That if you continue to do what you've always done, you're not going to make progress. You can't just be in there, you know, doing sets and reps. The effort matters most along with the frequency and consistency. So those, I think, are the big things. I know it wasn't one thing. It's a lot of things, but I think they all matter. And I think it's all pertinent to coaches who want to be successful in the industry.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:28

It's important to summarize. A lot of it has to do with listening more than speaking so that you understand exactly what your clients want to deliver or what you want to deliver so that your clients get those results. But also, a big thing is highlighting them, highlighting their successes, which is something that we always talk about. Stan, we did almost an hour and a half, and I feel like I could speak to you for another four hours. Some of the things we talked about, some of the biggest issues you see were dirty bulking and the type of calories that you're actually consuming. We talked about consistency being greater than intensity, that calories are king. Protein is probably the most important macronutrient. Something you use with your clients is having them send you pictures of their meals, their morning weight. What was it you said? If you don't track it, you...

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:28

All right, there you go. And

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:34

then lastly, something to touch on because I think it's important that you mentioned it is... The saturated fat debate and all the literature on saturated fat and red meat, that it should not be ignored even if your favorite influencer is telling you that it does not matter and the cholesterol doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:51

I used to believe that. So did Lane Norton. So did, what am I thinking of, examine.com. You've got 15 PhDs over there just as recently as three years ago. We're putting out research showing that there was no difference with cholesterol. And I don't want to jive into it anymore because I've done a ton of it, but I'm saying this is coming from someone who used to believe that, and a lot of people used to believe that. But there's more nuance to that. Don't wear your seatbelt and drive the speed limit, but still text while you're driving.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:27

Right. Where can we find you on social media? Where can people learn more about you and the Vertical Diet? Everything's at Stan Efferding.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:36

At Stan Efferding, I have a nationwide meal prep company you can order from, The Vertical Diet. And I have my e-book, The Vertical Diet e-book, as well as others. My Instagram is Stan Efferding. My YouTube is Stan Efferding. My rants are somewhat old, but I'll tell you what, they're going back five, seven, eight years now. But somebody commented on one of my interviews one time, Stan just keeps repeating himself. And initially, I was like, rough about it. But the fact of the matter is, I talk about things that work. And now when I watch current social media posts, They're repeating stuff that I've said eight years ago, and it's not like I invented it. I got it from people before me. But the fact of the matter is, is the more things change, the more they stay the same. You and I talked about some of the biggest things that we've evolved to know that are somewhat different, but the basics or the foundations still the same.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:25

Yeah. Well, Stan, thank you so much. Guys, this is Chris Guerrero. This was the Strength Coach Collective podcast. You can find us at strengthcoachcollective.com or join our free Facebook group at the Strength Coach Collective. We'll see you next time.