Strength Coach Collective

Marcus Filly on Functional Bodybuilding Without Burnout

• twobrainbusiness@gmail.com • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Tired of burning out your clients—or even yourself? Marcus Filly, six-time CrossFit Games competitor and founder of Functional Bodybuilding, is here to offer solutions.

In this episode, Marcus unpacks his transition from elite competition to coaching everyday athletes with sustainable strength-and-conditioning methods.

He shares how Functional Bodybuilding emerged from the burnout he and many other athletes experienced with traditional high-intensity training.

Marcus explains how hypertrophy training paired with lower-skill aerobic work can drive better long-term results and adherence for clients.

He also discusses common programming mistakes and offers insights into growing an online coaching brand without compromising quality.

Hear how Marcus rebuilt his coaching approach—and how you can apply the same principles to help your clients make sustainable progress.

Links

Strength Coach Collective

1:54 - Marcus’ training philosophy 

7:22 - Incorporating Functional Bodybuilding

11:06 - Avoiding burnout in training

17:06 - Most common coaching mistakes

30:46 - How to build an online presence

36:11 - Trends shaping the future of coaching

UNKNOWN:

music

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome back to the Strength Coach Collective podcast. I'm Chris Guerrero, and this show is all about helping strength coaches grow, whether that's improving programming, refining coaching techniques, or navigating the business side of the industry. If you're a strength coach looking to level up, check us out at strengthcoachcollective.com and join our free Strength Coach Collective Facebook group, where we connect with coaches at all levels to share knowledge and get better. Now let's get into today's guest, someone who's made a huge impact on the strength and conditioning world. Marcus Philly is a six-time CrossFit Games competitor, former Division I athlete, and the founder of Functional Bodybuilding, a training system that blends aesthetics, strength, and longevity. After competing at the highest level in CrossFit, Marcus shifted focus to creating sustainable, intelligent training programs that help athletes and everyday people stay strong, injury-free, and performing at their best for the long haul. Beyond his coaching methodology, Marcus has built a thriving online business, reaching thousands of athletes and coaches Thank you, Chris. What a

SPEAKER_00:

very glowing introduction. I appreciate that. I actually took a moment. I paused when you said I've had a impact on the strength and conditioning world in a profound way, or some version of that, you said. It is certainly a humbling label to take on. And it's something that I'm, if it's true, I'm proud of. I hope it's been for the better. I

SPEAKER_01:

think it very much is true. And I think that our audience is going to very much enjoy listening to you and some of the knowledge you have. So I'm just going to jump right in. Let's go. You've You've competed at the highest level in CrossFit and then you transitioned into functional bodybuilding. Yes. What do you think led to that shift and how has your training philosophy evolved over the years?

SPEAKER_00:

Anybody that's done CrossFit long enough probably knows exactly my transitional story. I mean, year one is like you just got... They found the best drug in the world. Year two, you kind of started to dose that drug up a bit more. And then year three, you started to OD on the drug. And that's kind of what most people experience in CrossFit worldwide. It's just, there's very, I mean, if you look at the total number of people that participated in that fitness modality or the sport, you know, the vast majority follow that curve of like, I'm in, I love it. It's taught me something I never knew about strength conditioning. I learned a new level. I knew I learned how to basically be intense in my training. I didn't need to have an athletic background to even come in here and learn what it means to push myself. The workouts pushed it. And that is what was a profound change for everybody. And then that led to how do I get better at the thing? I start to develop strength. I can now express more power. The workouts that were once hard are now brutal. And I'm starting to love that because I'm seeing changes and And then, then you spill over the other side where, wow, like this has now become my sole focus, my identity. And I'm training like a, like an athlete, but I'm not recovering like an athlete. I'm not dedicating myself like an athlete. And I'm feeling, I'm feeling like garbage, uh, in many respects. And so that was like what happens in a very, um, discrete amount of time for most people who do CrossFit. For those of us in the competitive landscape, it was like that went a little bit longer because we were driven by sport and performance and the select few of us that were fortunate enough to be resilient enough and have the time and space to compete and train as hard as we did. We got to do it for a bunch more years and we got kind of caught up in the, hey, there's There's celebrity to be had here. There's a thing to have status with. And I did it a bit for that. I did it a lot for the personal journey, but it wasn't, it was clear to me that after year four, I was like, man, this is brutally hard, both physically and mentally. And I kind of started to want to get out because it just didn't feel like the trade-off for how much I was pouring into it was what I was getting out. And then this inflection point happened where I was like, okay, well, I'm six years competing into this seven years in the sport. And my body is, you know, it can tolerate it, but only with 30 to 40 hours of investment of time per week. It certainly doesn't pay in a way that makes it really viable. Now that I'm starting a family and, um, I just sort of made the decision to say, you know what, I'm going to take the energy and the focus and the drive that I have now. And I have to point it towards something that makes more sense, not just for me, like in my life, but I saw the churn of so many people over the years. And I was like, well, I know there's a more sustainable way to do all this stuff. And it means dialing back intensity a little bit in some respects. It means adopting or at least embracing other strength conditioning models that develop strength and help people with their body composition because that's what most people are here for. And we don't have to like say goodbye to, you know, mixed modal training, but we just need to do it in a more refined way. And so I started doing that myself when I retired and was focused on building my, you know, next business, which was not a CrossFit gym. It was a more of a personal coaching business. And as I started to do that, people just were like, oh, I want to do that. And I was like, yeah, it makes sense. Cause it's, if I'm one, you know, somebody who's been heavily invested in this community for a long time, there's gotta be hundreds, if not thousands of other people. And I come to find out it's tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people that feel the same way. And they're like, I don't wanna not do CrossFit, but I also don't wanna feel this way. And so that was kind of, the origins and how that evolution started. And then that was in 2016. So coming up on nine years of doing what I call functional bodybuilding, which was the same time duration that I was in CrossFit, if not longer. And so I've dedicated more of my career now to this approach to fitness and coaching people. And it's like intensity is still the name of the game, but doing it, under aerobic fatigue is oftentimes not the best thing for people. And we want to just get people strong, help them build muscle, and then teach them good nutrition and lifestyle habits that are actually sustainable for their goals and not just geared towards how do I train and then recover to train harder and harder and harder for the rest of time.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's great. I mean, like, so in terms of functional bodybuilding, it has become it's become such like a major influence in our industry, specifically, like when we're talking about like the CrossFit functional fitness space. How exactly would you define it? And how should strength coaches define? Think about integrating some of the principles into their own program design. Like if you're at a CrossFit gym, right? Like how would you incorporate some of these principles into the program design there?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think it's relatively simple now. I mean, words like hybrid have become, hybrid training have become very, you know, common vocabulary in the fitness world. But that's basically what, I think CrossFit brought to center stage. Yeah. People will argue with me on that. They've done a lot more than just that, but it was essentially, you can get strong, build muscle and build aerobic capacity all concurrently, and you can do it in world-class levels, which we didn't ever think was possible. So being a functional bodybuilder is basically. Rather than train lifting to optimize for one rep max strength, which is more or less what a lot of the lifting and CrossFit was geared towards on a competitive level. And then trying to push anaerobic thresholds with high skill exercises. We say, we're going to build strength and muscle. We're going to actually focus more in the hypertrophy realm of strength training, where anybody that's in the strength conditioning world might be listening to this, you know, building peak maximal strength for one rep maxes, versus focusing on how do I build muscle tissue for people? You know, there's so much overlap, but there is definitely a divergence in how you might approach that. One puts people under heavy load that goes beyond, you know, 90 to 95% of their physiological maxes, which introduces risk. The other keeps them at loads where they work in reps of like six to 20. And there's, probably a bit more control and safety for them. So we're gonna get people strong and build muscle through this method. And then we're gonna do concurrent aerobic training with lower skilled exercises. So, you know, we do tons of conditioning workouts in all of my programs, but rather than saying let's deadlift 300 pounds, do burpees over the bar, And also go do a bunch of spinal flexion with toaster bars at the same time or GC setups, which is like that combination is high skill, high demand, high stress. We can perform a similar aerobic capacity workout with Russian kettlebell swings, you know, uh, hanging knee tucks and a cardio element. And you get, you get a similar dose response with a lot less risk and a lot less like. potential wear and tear on the client's body. And so if somebody wants to do functional bodybuilding, it's like, okay, we'll just focus on building muscle and strength through hypertrophy strength training methods and do aerobic capacity training with lower skill movements. And it can be mixed modal or it can be monostructural. It doesn't matter, but it's like people want to build those two things. And that is what's very important. in the media in vogue right now in fitness, people want both. And so give them both, but do it in a sensible way where you can just build those things over long periods of time.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's, it sounds like a lot of the, the evolution of functional bodybuilding was a direct result of almost, and I'm But forgive me if I'm putting words in your mouth, like a burnout from all the high intensity training that you were experiencing at such a high level. And you were like, hey, something has to change for me. You realize it wasn't just you. It wasn't 10 people. It wasn't 100 people. It was tens of thousands of people. Now, in the beginning, was there a specific avatar that you were after in the early days of creating this program versus now?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you just said it, the burnt out CrossFitter. That is right. That's absolutely right. It was in our marketing message. It was built, not burnt. That was our tagline. I mean, it, the difference between like where I sit now versus where I sat then was at the time I was coming out of competitive CrossFit and I have a lot more clarity. Athletes in the sport chose to compete, which always leads to burnout if you try and push the limits of human potential. And that's true for any sport. You ask somebody who's just finished the Super Bowl, how do you feel? It's like, I'm pretty burnt out and playing football and getting hit by a truck every weekend. What do they do? They go chill, right? However, you know, they chill for a number of months. We didn't do that. We just kind of did it year round, but we made that choice. And so some people didn't recognize that there's a lifespan to that. They tried to just think, oh, I can do it forever because I'm there's these two guys out there that are just have been doing it for a decade and they still seem to be getting better. Yeah. Let's not look at like the genetic, you know, outliers or the outliers of the population. Let's look at how most people respond to that kind of thing. The problem was that you had this next tier of athlete, which people who did CrossFit considered themselves athletes, but they were really not athletes. professional athletes in how they treated their body. They were recreational athletes that they came to the gym and they pushed themselves with them. They left the gym. They didn't treat themselves like they needed to. And so they were caught up in this, Hey, this fitness method that I love is really crushing my soul. And I'm not running points for this. I didn't sign up to compete at the games. Like, yeah, they did the open and maybe they had aspirations of a local comp, but they were the same people that had aspirations of going to the local gym. turkey trot, 5K, 10K, and they never felt the weight of doing this type of training before. The avatar was burnt out CrossFitters. That was my whole audience was CrossFitters. Some people were at that burnout stage. Some people were still trying to climb the ranks and make regionals and do the thing, but that person came in. They were like, this is great. I get to still do some CrossFit, but we have new strength models, strength training models inside these workouts. We're doing supersets. We're doing compound and isolation lifts we're doing, we're looking at how to make more things stable, less, and, you know, we don't have to have everything be unstable and high speed. We can slow things down. And they're like, oh, I just feel better. And like the number of testimonials I got from the first year of running my kind of flagship functional bodybuilding program that were like, oh, I feel better than ever. I've like recovered all my injuries. I feel, you know, pep in my step again. It was just, it was astounding how many people were feeling that. And I felt like, oh, I just stumbled across something. But now it's like, oh, these are principles of training that have been around for a long time. We're just now applying them in the context of hybrid training where we're doing both in a sensible way.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I remember the early days. I started CrossFit back in 2008. You know, I competed a lot. I competed at the regional level for seven years. And it was very, very... I guess just the training back then. And I feel like now has evolved so much where, like you said, like we trained three, four hours a day, but there was, you know, we knew we had to eat a lot and calories and stuff with the sleep and recovery and all of the things that we know now about it. It's just interesting to me. How many people have come and gone that I've known over the last 15 to 20 years from CrossFit and how in the beginning it was, I remember even myself, oh, you bodybuild? I CrossFit way better than that. There was no like, hey, there could be like a mix and matching of both worlds to give us, you know, they could use some of our stuff, we could use some of their stuff. So it's just interesting to see how the fitness industry has evolved over the last 15 years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's also remarkable to me too. I mean, two things you said, number one, yeah. Pushing bodybuilding aside, like it is, you know, taboo and it's like, you're, you are less of a human being than somebody who, you know, just does CrossFit. Right. Well, there was about an eight year span of my life where I felt shame. If I wanted to do bicep curls. So I didn't do bicep curls for a year. It's like, man, I just made a content piece the other day. I was like, man, I missed eight years of developing better biceps over. So that aside, but then also it's like now there's another thing out there that is talking about concurrent training models and that's hot. high rocks and people like that is getting a large influx of people. Yes. People from the CrossFit community, but people from all other walks of life that are like, Oh, I want to be strong and still do cardio. And that's

SPEAKER_01:

cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm signed up for a high rocks. I'm still an affiliate owner and it's for me, the elimination of the high volume gymnastics and, and heavy loading of Olympic lifts. So it's interesting. The evolution is just always interesting to see how things change over the years. You work with a wide range of athletes and coaches. So what are some of the most common mistakes you see in how people either train or or program for their clients?

SPEAKER_00:

If I stick within this kind of micro gym community that is kind of trying to transition away from maybe the way they did CrossFit a decade ago to today, I think there's this slow adoption of strength training, resistance training as being the center point how you get people to to their goals it's like a decade ago we all know that like people came and they did the lift at the beginning of class but they were chomping at the bit for the metcon and they're like oh the metcon's where it's at i want that i want that buzz i want that feeling and so because that was like the the target market and that's what the market was saying they wanted Everyone tried to cater to that and they've been trying to cater to that for a long time. Like how do we give them what they want, but get them what they need. And I've kind of gone very far to the other end of the spectrum where I'm like resistance training, strength training. That is the fundamental thing that people should be doing when they go to the gym. They should just be spending their two to five hours in the gym per week, just trying to get really strong. And then you can tackle. aerobic fitness or VO2 max, or just general activity through a lot of different ways. So if I'm going to call out a mistake I see being made, it's continuing to try and put that conditioning piece as the center point of your programming for customers, rather than making resistance training and then accessory resistance training as the center point with aerobic conditioning as more of like an afterthought. I think that, does that answer the question?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that does answer the question. And, you know, what I was thinking is how over the course of the years and how the evolution of just programs have changed to like what you said, do you think it has anything to do with culture now? Because I remember, you know, as little as six or seven years ago, I would still be getting mainly female clients that would come in. They were like, hey, I don't wanna get bulky. I don't wanna lift weights. I don't wanna get stronger. And now it's almost like people seek us out over the Orange Theories, the Barry's Boot Camps, that kind of stuff, because they know. I had a 73-year-old woman join my gym last year. She was going to, I'm not gonna mention the name of the gym, but she was going to one of these commercial gyms where they're all about the experience, and hey, it's a good workout. If somebody's working out, I'm happy. I have other choice of what I would choose. But she said, hey, the weights are not heavy enough for me. I want to get stronger. And I'm lifting like a 15 pound kettlebell and I know I need more. So do you think the cultural shift or, you know, people like Andrew Humerin, Dr. Atiyah and faces like that talking about muscle being like a longevity organ have played a role in this shift that people are accepting of that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, there's two ways that the culture has shifted and they've kind of hit two different target audiences. Now, for let's say the early 2000s, the athletes and the bodies that were on social media and in fitness that people aspired to were CrossFit athletes. They saw a bunch of CrossFit athletes. They're like, oh my God, that's amazing. Whatever they're doing, I want to do. Now, the younger generation is seeing C-bombs and figure competitors. And just there's a lot more media of women and men doing aesthetics training and they're making it sexy and they're making it attractive. And they're like, I want to do more of that. You're seeing less of like the top athletes in the world being labeled as like these CrossFit functional fitness athletes. So that's one thing, but then you're right. The older generation or kind of like the generation we came up with that demographic that was in CrossFit in the early days is now in their 40s. and all they're thinking about. And this is what I've noticed is that once people get into their late thirties and forties, they could care less about their VO2 max. And they're like, I need muscle, I need to be strong. And they know that strength and muscle is actually what's gonna give them longevity, whatever that means to somebody, but it's gonna, they're like, I need to stay strong. And they're actually understanding that that's how you build a good physique is by having muscle, not by doing endless cardio, which I don't want to just push people's buttons. But it's like the way most people did CrossFit for years was just cardio. It wasn't really getting people strong for what they were capable of getting strong doing because they just didn't, they spent a fraction of their time lifting weights. You know, it's like if you, if you were a three time a week person, which is generally the average person, you know, group class participation. That was always mine at my gym. You know, maybe it was 3.5 times per week. You come in and you have an hour long class and the first 20 minutes or first 10 minutes are warming up. The next 15 minutes are strength training. That person was maybe putting in like total of 40 minutes, 45 minutes per week of doing strength training, which was more focused on one arm strength and less focused on and they just didn't do a lot of volume at all. So they were not really maximizing their potential. Then they would spend 20, 30 minutes doing prep and warmup for Metcons, which were always weights that were far below people's 1RMs. And that just doesn't get people the absolute strength and the muscle tissue that they could potentially get through other means. So now it's like somebody comes in and like, Hey, I'm, I'm 40. I feel like my metabolism slowing down. I'm like, it's not, you're just slowing down. So come into the gym, let's get you super strong. Let's get you lifting more weights. And we need to just track your steps. You need to start walking more. You need to start moving more. And that is like what that generation. And then all the older, like it's just, and thanks to Huberman's, Atiyah's, Gabrielle Lyon, like those names that are out there that are pumping that message, it's wonderful to see that it's like, oh, this is kind of changing the tide of what people are asking for.

SPEAKER_01:

So how do you think coaches can better educate their clients on this kind of balance, especially those that just want to, you know, they're chomping at the bit to just push hard all the time? Like, I mean, we get, you know, we get feedback times like, oh, we're, you know, the workouts aren't long enough, they're not hard enough, and they don't understand that, like what you're describing, more is not better, better is better, right? So like, we don't want to just always be pushing for one rep maxes. Maybe the, you know, three sets of eight to 10 back squats is going to be a lot more more beneficial for someone building volume and building that strength over time? How do coaches do a better job of educating people if we are now seeing that this could lead to better long-term success for clients in the long run as opposed to burning out? I

SPEAKER_00:

mean, it's hard because I've tried to just like talk people into it. And until they experience it and they feel it, they're not going to really adopt it. And so my approach was like, let me put you through an hour strength training session and let me show you what it can feel like to really lift weights hard and add in supersets and manage rest periods so that you finish an hour of hard strength training and you feel like you just did the Metcon, meaning that you have the sweat, you have the personal gratification of like, damn, I just worked really hard. People are, they're looking for that feeling. They're not, they don't care how they get it. They've gotten it through a 20 minute AMRAP before. So they know that that works and they want more of that because they want that feeling. But a good coach shows you, doesn't tell you, it shows you how you can achieve that through resistance training. The other part is if I were going to start over in a group fitness model, I would not, I don't know that I would feel good about trying to run a program that within 60 minutes that tried to tackle both strength and conditioning. It's just truly not enough time to get the maximum stimulus for each of those respective kind of energy systems. Strength train somebody for an hour, they get strong, they feel a certain way. Have a full hour-long session dedicated to aerobic capacity, that is meaningful. And I like these micro gyms that are, or these boutique gyms that are kind of offering like, Hey, we got strength and we've got aerobic or conditioning or sweat classes. And it's like, come to do both, but then really make sure your customers are not just biasing the sweat and they'll go to the sweat class. If they had a bad experience in the lift class to say, Hey, come to the lift class, teach them how to lift, get a good session in anybody that's done an hour of let's say. old school Pollock in German body composition methods, where it's like, you've got three or four super sets back to back that are. Thoughtfully programmed with two compound lifts that are antagonistic. You're going back and forth. You're doing four sets of each with 60 to 90 seconds rested between like you're smoked at the end of that thing, especially if loading is correctly done. And so that just takes that, that you educate people to do it right. And then they're like, oh, well, this is it. This feels right. You know, if you're just like, hey, strength is important. You gotta do more of the strength stuff. You gotta do, you know, less of the, you know, they're just gonna be like, but I felt that's not what I feel. That's not what I've felt in the past.

SPEAKER_01:

I think what's interesting is if you look at the early days of CrossFit, because I agree with you, but now convincing people, hey, come to a class that's a five-by-five back squat. That's the workout.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a horrible program, in my opinion. That's like if you come to a workout that's just that, then you're leaving so much on the table. In one hour, that person should be doing a crap ton of volume of weight training. The average person doesn't have enough strength, power lifting experience to get a stimulus out of five by five. It's just a joke to them. They're like, when are we doing the hard stuff? And you're like, Oh, but I'm over here. Cause I've trained for 20 years. And when I do a five by five, I feel like puking. And they're like, I don't even know what you're talking about. I've never even experienced that. So that's not a good prescription for somebody or for the gen pop and the gen pop to come in and do the way I prescribe, you know, my pump lift program, which is you come in, you do a 10 minute warmup that does your prehab and gets you ready to train. You do strength intensity, two big compound movements for some hard sets. Then you do a superset or two supersets back to back of like accessory lifts that are going to target similar muscle groups. And then you do a finisher at the end, all within an hour and you're cooked. And so that's where, like, I saw a lot of people trying to, and that was a mistake. If we go back to mistakes that I see people making, it's like, okay, yeah, we got to do more strengths and we're just going to like get people five by five of something. And we're going to really focus on it. It's like, well, this is not enough. It's not enough training volume for, for somebody to see something meaningful out of it. They got to, you got to pack a lot more into that time.

SPEAKER_01:

It's going to miss the mark for probably 90 plus percent of the people that are walking into our gym that they're not going to even have the experience wherewithal or knowledge to understand like, Hey, these sets should be an eight or nine RPE. You might have someone who can, Back squat, 150 pounds, just doing 55 pounds, five sets of five resting 30 seconds in between sets and being

SPEAKER_00:

like, and that's why for years it was the same. It was true back when people were doing the traditional CrossFit, you know, group fitness program, which was come in, do one strength lift for 20 minutes and then move on to a Metcon. They did. It was like, all right, today we're doing five by five back squat. And then we're going to go do this Metcon. And in the Metcon, they did 350 reps. I don't care what the movements are, but that's, 350 reps versus 25 reps. They were under aerobic fatigue. So all 350 of those reps, or at least 80, 90% of them felt like a high effort. And they're like, oh, well, that's what makes sense. It's like, yes, that is what makes sense. So give somebody 150 reps or 120 reps of hard resistance training in a session that will elicit the same Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, this is a good segue into what I wanted to ask next, which is about your online coaching brand. So you built a successful online coaching business while still keeping quality at the forefront of what you do. What advice would you give to coaches who want to expand beyond in-person training and grow an online presence? Because that's such a big thing that... It seems like people who are coaching a lot in person five, 10 years ago now have a really big online presence, but you happen to do it really well. So what advice would you give?

SPEAKER_00:

The advice that I give people, I would give people now is different. And that is because having an online presence, the only way you have an online presence or you can build an online business rather is by having an online presence and an online presence comes from winning the contact game. You, you know it's it's harder now to break through but at the same time the the playing field is has been leveled completely so creators out there that have large instagram followings you know they don't really have much of an advantage over somebody who's just new to the platform if you get on the platform instagram tick tock youtube whatever and you put out content that is good and people resonate with and like they connect with, you'll start to get viewership and you'll start to grow an online audience. Then it's really like the business mechanics of delivering something virtually versus in person. Yeah, there's a lot to learn there, but you're basically selling fitness to somebody, which you do when you sell fitness to somebody in person. It's all the same messaging. It's all the same things that you just like, hey, we need to get you doing these things. We need to get you doing it consistently. We need to focus on. And maybe the thing that you want to leverage if you're trying to coach online is that, hey, I'm going to provide you a service that you have access to all the time, as opposed to just coming to see me once a week in person or coming to see me three times a week in person for an hour. Now that we have this way of communicating virtually, you know, there's, there's a huge benefit to be being your coach online versus me just being your coach in person. And yes, there are trade-offs like I'm not going to be with you when you're training and seeing you do the exercises and making technical adjustments, but those are things that you can overcome as an online coach by just learning how to asynchronously communicate with clients and give them the skills and teach them, you know, as time goes on. But in terms of building a business, it absolutely just comes from like, you have to provide value to people through social media, because that's where everyone is consuming their fitness content now. And that is not like a, you know, that's a, that's a multi-hour conversation topic of like, how do you break through on social media? And Fortunately, unfortunately, that's the game. If you want to get into it, you have to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01:

So you did say in the beginning of that, that you would give different advice now. Were there mistakes that you feel you made in the past that you learned from early on? I

SPEAKER_00:

just think it was like the, it's more like I used to give advice about how to deliver fitness online as a coach. Like what are the mechanics of like, building trust and providing good programs and then making sure that you provide some accountability so that they feel like they're getting some, you know, I used to focus on like the mechanics of delivering. Now the advice I give is don't even think about being an online coach until you actually have an audience and go out and get an audience by providing a lot of free value to people and doing it in a captivating way. People are like, how do I grow an online business? It's like, well, when I think back, like how did I grow an online business? I just provided a lot of free content that was resonating with a big market out there. And people were banging on my door to sell them something. I didn't create a product or say, hey, I'm launching as an online coach. I just was like, here's all the things that I'm doing that I know. People are like, hey, how do I do what you're doing? I was like, I don't know. Hire me as your coach. And they're like, well, I can't afford that. I'm like, okay, well... Here's a PDF. I just was trying to solve for a demand. And if you're a coach that does in-person stuff, you're like, I want to transition online. You got to go create demand. Before you think about what's the business model, how am I going to write the program and sell the thing? It has to be, go create the demand. And the way you do that these days is through creating an online social media presence where people are like, dude, you are cool. I really like what you're doing. And what more can I get from you? Because you just provided me so much free education, material content that impacted me positively that whatever you're charging for must be better. And so I want to get some of that.

SPEAKER_01:

The fitness industry is always evolving, right? So what, What kind of like do you see any trends now or anything coming down the pipeline that you see shaping the future of strength and conditioning over the next five to 10 years? Like we talked about how much things have shifted in the CrossFit landscape over the last five to 10 years. Do you see anything if we were to talk again in 2030 or 2035 that's coming down the pipeline that people should be paying attention to right now?

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, definitely two things we've already discussed, like high rocks is changing a lot of people's, what people are expecting or wanting out of fitness. That's certainly something to pay attention to. And then the, you know, longevity, ATIA, like that community. And then the others, weight loss drugs, Ozempic for sure. Because I think that there's a, there's a huge potential there to, um, Like people I've heard, and I believe that there's probably a lot of fitness professionals who are like scared of this. It's like, oh, if somebody can just lose weight without doing the work, then they're gonna opt for that. And maybe there's gonna be even more solutions in the next five to 10 years, medical advances, which allow people to curb hunger or to accelerate their fat loss. But it's clear already that the mechanisms that are working for people here are really about controlling caloric consumption and that people who want to arrive at a body that they love and that, that feels great. And it has longevity. We're still require strength. They require muscle tissue. And so jumping on the back, like jumping on the heels of that and being like, you know, Hey, I'm a, I'm a fitness coach for people who are on those epic and people are gonna be like, Right now, maybe like, well, I took Ozempic, so I don't have to do all the fitness stuff. It's like very soon, it's going to be more and more clear that those two things go together. You must lift weights and you must control your diet. And for those people who really struggle to control diet through conventional habit change and utilize a drug to minimize their hunger, like Ozempic, then that's a perfect marriage. And I've already worked with half a dozen clients who have done this before. And this is a small little sample size of what's starting to grow and grow and grow out there. And it's like, yeah, you hear these horror stories of people going on Ozempic, losing all this muscle tissue, wasting away, having that Ozempic body or Ozempic look, whatever. Well, the ones that I've worked with, they've controlled their appetite through a drug, the support of a drug. They kept resistance training three days a week or more, and they haven't lost any muscle tissue. They've just lost 95% plus fat. That's a win. That's what we try and do with all of our clients. That is the goal of, you know, habit change, good nutrition, macro tracking calorie, you know, counting calories, et cetera. They've just taken a route that has helped them overcome all of their cultural conditioning around food and what they've grown up with. And yeah, it's super supportive. So I think that that is a big trend and a big thing that people need to really be thinking about in the strength and conditioning world.

SPEAKER_01:

I couldn't agree more. And I've seen so many strength coaches poo-poo it as like, oh, they're cheating. But the truth of the matter is if we got into this industry to help people and we know that this person who's 50, 70, 100 pounds overweight, yeah, maybe they can do it naturally, but they're not going to. And they have the access naturally. of such a powerful drug that has an appetite suppressant that we know is going to help them. Why is it that a lot of strength coaches are against it instead of saying, like you just said, hey, this is a new niche. so many people are taking it. Why not be a partner with it and say, Hey, let me help you from some of the negative side effects by educating you on what kind of foods you should be eating, making sure you're consuming enough protein, making sure that your strength training three times a week. So that at least I would say 80 to 85% of the weight you lose is fat and not muscle.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, you said it perfectly. And I'll give one, you know, personal anecdote here. I have a client who joined my CrossFit gym, was one of my first 20 members. This was in 2011, we opened our doors. And he's been working with me for 15 years, or close to 15 years, 14 years. And for the first 10 years, no, 12 years, I guess it just happened last year. So however many years that is, he was very overweight, borderline obese, Had central adiposity. It was just like pot belly started in his fifties. Now he's in his sixties, had a heart attack in that time. Like all the things that you would say, like, this guy should be motivated now to make change and was never able to overcome like his big obstacle around caloric intake, you know, energy balance and And it wasn't until just last year that he went on Ozempic. And since then, like he's one of the clients, like he's lost 40 pounds, you know, his, his DEXA scans show that he has not lost any muscle tissue today. He walked into the gym and he said, you know, he's been skiing a lot. Cause this winter is like ski season. He's like, my skiing is amazing. I've like done all these, like, it's like, it's the best I've recovered at the end of the day. I don't even feel worn out. I'm skiing. Like I was, Like I'm 30 years old. Like he's just so happy in every possible way. And he says to me, he's like, I owe it all to you. And I'm like, oh, it's me. Like, here's somebody who went on a drug. He was with me for 13 years, went on a drug that got him over the hump. And he still attributes a lot of his, the majority of his success to the work and the lessons that I've taught him over the years. And it just goes to show like, there is still a place for the fitness, the health and fitness coach, the strength and conditioning coach in that model to, like you said, he's not, he doesn't have much of an appetite, but he knows when he does eat something, it better be protein so that he doesn't lose muscle tissue. He knows that if he doesn't come into the gym and he's not like a, he's not, he's never been a great strength training, you know, client like he, and now he's like, he knows how important it is today. I saw him doing a chin up isometric over the bar. And I like stopped. I was like, Jim, like, I've never seen you do that before. He was like, I don't think I've ever done that before. And he's adopted those lessons and he's ingrained them. And it's just like, he's heard it enough times. And now he has something that helps him not eat 3000 calories a day, but stick to something underneath 2000 calories a day, which he needed through this phase to lose a bunch of weight.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I think the lesson here is to just, if you really did get into the industry for what you say you did, which is to help people, then we should help people with the tools at our disposal. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to transition into a rapid fire round. I'm going to ask you a question. So what is your favorite exercise? One movement. Dear God. Probably pull-ups. That's, that's my, that's also my favorite movement. Okay. What is, what is your favorite meal?

SPEAKER_00:

Like just going off the resume.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And it could be healthy meal that you eat all the time. Favorite sheet meal. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I'm for a long time. I've said, you know, like Southern barbecue is like, you know, that'd be my death row meal type of thing. But I might be shifting to like, a very elaborate, like authentic, you know, Chinese dim sum type thing. That's also way up there.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. And now what is your current training split? How many days a week are you working out yourself? Four days a week of lifting.

SPEAKER_00:

One day a week of aerobic capacity training. And that's it. And I walk 12 to 15,000 steps a day.

SPEAKER_01:

If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self as a strength coach looking to have a long, successful career in the industry, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00:

Keep people coming back every day, whatever that takes. It's like you only have a chance to change someone's life if they're there. If you push somebody so hard that they burn out and they don't want to come back, you, you, you blew your shot because this is whatever you're going to try and teach somebody. It's going to take a long time to make that happen. So, you know, keep people coming back. What's going to get them coming back tomorrow or next, next session with you and just stay focused on

SPEAKER_01:

that. Awesome, man. I think that's an awesome way to wrap it up. Where can our viewers, if they don't know who you are, I'm sure most of them are going to know who you are, but where can we find you on social media? Where can we find out more information about your programs?

SPEAKER_00:

At Marcus Philly on all the social media platforms, YouTube, Instagram, X, all the places. And then functional-bodybuilding.com. That's the hub of all of our services and programs that we offer. So head over there and join our newsletter. And so you'll get weekly content. That's kind of like our primary content delivery where we go into anything that's longer than 60 seconds. Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Well. Marcus, thank you so much. Again, guys, my name is Chris Guerrero. This was the Strength Coach Collective podcast. You can find us at strengthcoachcollective.com or on Facebook at our free group, strengthcoachcollective.com. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.