When to End Your CYCLE - How to COACH YOURSELF to Success (OptiCast 19)

🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO
This video delves into the crucial differences between self-coaching and professional coaching, particularly in the context of fitness goals like fat loss and muscle gain. The hosts emphasize that while self-coaching offers autonomy, it often leads to stalled progress and health setbacks due to emotional bias, a lack of clear frameworks, and a tendency to prioritize tactics over systemic understanding.

Key discussions include identifying when a fat loss or push phase should end by focusing on biofeedback trends rather than just scale weight or timelines. Indicators like sleep quality, energy levels, libido, mood stability, training performance, and recovery are highlighted as vital metrics. The hosts explain that a good coach provides external pattern recognition, unbiased decision-making, clear sequencing of interventions, contextual interpretation of biofeedback and lab results, and proper phase timing. They also stress that people often confuse information accumulation with effective decision-making, leading to overcorrection and ignoring crucial physiological signals. The goal of effective coaching, they argue, is not just to change immediate outcomes but to transfer skills and build robust systems that can withstand life's chaos, ultimately fostering client autonomy and repeatable success.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan. I'm me Aubrey. Today we are talking about coaching yourself versus coaching other people and uh being coached, as a matter of fact. So we're being here covering why people stall, what coaching actually solves for you, and how to think like a coach without actually pretending that you're one. This is going to be a very, very special episode, very close to my heart, because I have very strong opinions on this, uh, but also because I want you guys to leave with enough that you can actually do this shit on your own. That's always the goal, right? The goal is independence and uh you know autonomy, always, even if you are being coached by someone. So um, we have some questions that we got from our clients, which is fucking awesome. Well, my clients, uh, including questions that you send. So that's really good. Um, but yeah, really appreciate you guys sending these questions. Really appreciate the guys uh uh just uh sending questions on Instagram as well. We're gonna get to those at the end. Uh so stay tuned. And if you guys have any other questions throughout the entirety of the episode, please leave a comment down below, and I'll get to those as soon as possible. So let's start with our first question of the day, which is when coaching yourself, how do you determine when a fat loss phase or a push phase is over? Okay, so very good question here. I actually don't really use the timeline or scale weight as the the only decision maker here, um, because those things they really, really change and fluctuate based on stress, based on water, based on glycogen, based on your hormone levels and everything. So um we need to make sure that we are making um decisions based on biofeedback trends. What does this mean? We need to be making decisions based on your energy levels, your sleep quality, your libido, how stable is your mood, right? Like how is performance tracking for your training? What is your hunger signal? Like, are is hunger still there for a push phase? Are you like dying of hunger when you're doing a fat loss phase? As well as your recovery, are you able to recover from your workouts and you have a lot of joint pain and things like that? So, in terms of like separating and thinking for a fat loss phase and a push phase, like on their own, right? So if on a fat loss phase, if this starts costing me sleep, if it's fucking up my libido, if it's costing me my strength at the gym, if my body temperatures are declining, or my mantle bandwidth just can't deal with this shit at all anymore, the phase is over, right? Like we were gonna try to deload first, but you know, if that doesn't work, we we will likely need to do a deload. And uh um uh like by ending the phase, like we might also actually start something else. Like we might need to work on your mitochondria, we might need to work on your GI, we might need to get you, you know, some fats back in to uh restore your libido, uh, we might need to add some orals to hold your strength to the gym uh and stuff like that. We might need T3 to regulate your body temperatures. Um, so it just it just really depends a little bit. Like you gotta play it by ear, and experience is gonna help you a lot, like when deciding like what decision to make. Now, for a growth phase, well, if if the fat gain is too much, um, if I'm having digestion issues, if my blood pressure is creeping up like nothing else, or if I'm seeing inflammation markers going up, or just like my insulin levels and my glucose, like if I look at my HOMA IR and the trend is not good, is going above one. I don't like it. I know 1.5 is the norm, I don't like it above one. Like that phase is gonna be over, even if my lifts are still going up, right? Because I need to make a decision of like prioritizing my health here. And this is not to say, like, oh, prioritize your health in exchange of the gains. No, no, no. It's because you will make better gains if you actually prioritize your health. So that's the thing that I that I am uh looking for. I'm also gonna be looking for things that I call pattern breaks. So these are gonna be like not single days, um, but they're gonna be like the things that are are are like sticking their head out and just showing up that they didn't use to show up before. First, it feels random, it feels like maybe it was work, maybe it was something at home, like, but then you start realizing like, no, it actually has something to do with your fatigue levels and everything. And when when when coach people when self-coach people are doing this, they generally speaking, they panic react instead of just zooming out and making a correct assessment of what's going on. Um, with regards to labs, for me, they're gonna be the the confirmation here. They're not gonna be the the steering wheel at all. Um, but I'm gonna be looking at things like my cortisol patterns, um, my like whether my thyroid is still converting T4, T3 very well in my liver. Uh, I want to look at my lipids to make sure that we don't have any issues with uh, you know, the filtration and our retox uh and detox in my body as well, and some stability in in glucose levels as well. I want to measure that throughout the day to make sure that like things are looking good. But if these things are not looking good, like in general, we're not going to be continued to phase just because it just doesn't make any sense to push things to get worse because the the deeper you dig the hole, the worse things get. I used to be the person who used to like on the last week of a push phase, I used to bury myself into the ground with you know, like um like drop sets and and and cluster sets and and widow makers and all of these things, and it would just dig a hole so big that it would take me several weeks to recover. Now, what I do on the last week of the push phase, I actually deload when I have more drugs in the system that will help me recover. The the hardest part of self-coaching in this aspect is going to be the emotional bias that you have because you want the phase to keep working even when the data is actually telling you to stop. So, like you're experiencing this right now, where it's like, well, this congrats, it's the last week of your push phase, like tomorrow is the last day. It's like day end, but I want to like I want to keep going and stuff, but it's like, nope, we have biofeedback for that, and it's just not the right time for that. Uh uh, what what is a coach going to offer you here? Well, a coach is going to remove the bias that you have and is going to end the phases earlier than your ego actually would, which is why clients will progress faster with uh fewer setbacks, so to speak. Now, if you are self-coaching and you're doing that correctly, there's a rule that's very, very simple. The phases ought to end whenever it's costing the cost of the like the physiology cost, the physiological cost is outweighing the return that you're getting. You don't end a phase when motivation runs out. You end when the physiological cost outweighs the return on investment. How is that for an answer?

SPEAKER_01 6:23

That is a very good answer, but I want you to expand on it. How do you know when it outweighs?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

So, like looking at biofeedback, so it's like if I if my sleep is taking a massive toll, I know that I'm not going to be growing as much because I need all those processes to like stabilize my hormones. Um, if my like at the gym, like I'm still making progress, but every week it just feels like I need to work even harder to just hold the same weight as before. Might be the time that we actually need to stop. Now we're not talking about competition prep here. We're just talking about a fat loss phase, which if you remember, a fat loss phase is part of your growth phase. It's just a subset of your growth phase. It's like a subtitle of it, a subsection of it. So we need to remember that the goal still is to grow as much as possible, to stay as lean as possible. So that's why the the fat loss phase stays within that. Does that answer the question?

SPEAKER_01 7:14

I think so. Okay. The biomarkers that you were mentioning. Yep, yep. What's the decision-making process when you're deciding to move someone to a different phase? What specifically might you take into account?

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Okay, again, very, very good question. I actually start with a hierarchy that I work with, which is mitochondria is gonna come first, then is gonna come your metabolism, and then is gonna come your nervous system, and then is gonna be your hormones, and then is gonna be your organs, and then is gonna be your symptoms. The symptoms actually come last. The majority of people who are self-coaching, they treat the symptoms first. But symptoms only happen when these things are already in the surface. I tackle all of these things before so that we don't have to deal with that. You're tracking them exactly. Like, why? Because the phases don't actually fail at the surface level, they fail upstream. So that's why we have to end it based on these things first. We need to consider these things first when switching a phase. I also am gonna look at biofeedback trends over time, so not like single check-ins or anything like that. So I'm gonna be looking at your sleep depth, like how much energy you have waking up, like how is your appetite and the regulation of your appetite right now. I'm gonna be looking at your body temperatures fucking always. I want to know how stable your mood is, your libido, your training output, and your recovery in between sessions, just like in the previous question. After this, I'm gonna assess your nervous system load. Why? Because most stalled phases are actually sympathetic overload. There's just too much going on, and that gets disguised as discipline for the people who are self-coaching. So they start having rising anxiety, they start having poor sleep, they start being irritable, and they start having these like wired but tired patterns that should force a phase change, and it generally doesn't. But with me, it does. I'm gonna also be watching for metabolic signs like hunger suppression and rebound hunger, two different things, uh, but two sides of the same coin here. I want to make sure that the you have like your your your weight, it's like if it's stalled, well, do we also have rising fatigue with that? Do we also have cold intolerance with that? Our hands and our feet cold, right? Is our is our tongue getting coated? Um, like how is our training performance? Is it is it is it has it flattened? Like, are you not making progress anymore? All this stuff is gonna tell me about fuel availability. Whenever fuel ability availability doesn't match the demand anymore, we're gonna have a problem in our metabolism. I also want to factor in whenever making these decisions, your life stress and your environment. Why? Because your work chaos, illness, sleep disruptions, like all these things, they can end a phase, even if nutrition and training look absolutely perfect on paper. You need to pay attention to these things as well. I'm also gonna be paying attention at your hormonal cost, like indirectly speaking, right through patterns. So not I'm not just looking at labs because it takes a long time for labs, so we can't really just be basing ourselves off of that. But I want to be looking at like libido, right? Like how is it? Is are you losing libido when you're talking to women? Like, are we having some cycle disruption here? Guys also go through a cycle, it's just not 28 to 32 days, about 24 hours long, right? I for guys, I want to know, like, hey, are you are like are you still getting morning wood? Like, is erection quality still good? How is your morning readiness when you're when you wake up? And and and how emotionally volatile you are. All of these things are basically indicating the cost that this phase has on you. And if the cost outweighs the reward, again, we need to switch things up. Now, with regards to labs, like I talked before, they're not the driver, they're they're sort of like the ref the referee, so to speak. So again, cortisol, thyroid conversion, glucose stability, lipid movement, inflammation, like all of these things are going to confirm what the biofeedback is already showing. So it serves as a confirmation, not as the main driver of the decision making. A lot of people, they just look at the labs and if they look perfect, I mean they just look good within the reference range, which don't get me started on that, that's really fucking stupid. Um, they would just assume that like we're good to go. That's not entirely true. There's certain things that you cannot uh evaluate on the lab marker, and you need to know like where do you feel optimal? Uh, where is the up where are the optimal markers for you, not just what is normal if you compare a bunch of sick and fucking fat people that you find on the street. Now, I'm always gonna ask one question before changing anything, and my question is gonna be like, is the body adapting or is it compensating? Why? Because compensation means the phase is already over. We are already past the point of no return. It just needs to end right then and there. So, like for you, it was something similar where it's like, okay, the dose is going to be the same if we had to use a lower dose over eight weeks or a higher dose over six weeks. So let's just make the decision of like before it turns into an actual problem, permanent problem. Let's stop it right here, right now. Uh, when you have a coach, they should be making this decision earlier and cleaner than someone who's coaching themselves. Again, why? Because there's no fucking emotional attachment here to to just stay in the phase, just like feel that you're productive or something like that. So removing that emotionality and that bias is what that coach is going to be offering you, right? Questions on that?

unknown 12:20

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Or anything you'd like to know about it on my process on on how I change phases and stuff like that, and it varies person to person, right? Because again, you have to learn what these people's bodies are doing and how they function psychologically. So I didn't talk so much about the psychology here, but like the biofeedback includes the psychological aspect as well, like when I talk about your emotional volatility and uh just how stable your mood is and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

But yeah, why do people who do their own research? Why do people who do their own research still get stuck?

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Um, the primary reason that happens is because people confuse information accumulation with decision making. So, like they think that because they know a lot, and they don't, but they just have second-order ignorance, which is they don't know how much they don't know because of how little they know on a subject. So there's a sort of a Dunning-Kruger effect happening here as well. They know a lot, but they can't tell what really matters right now. They don't know which decisions to make and stuff. So that's the the primary problem that we see. They're also going to be researching like tactics instead of systems. Like, what do I mean? They're gonna be looking at supplements and macros at training splits and drugs. They're not going to be looking at energy availability, they don't pay attention to the stress load and the recovery capacity because they're not tracking these things, they're just tracking these like tactics that are like easy to tell, like these quick ways of like adjusting things and stuff like that. They they what whenever people like just do their own research, they can't see the compensation that I just talked about in real time because you're inside your own fucking body, so like everything feels justified, nothing feels urgent, right? It's like with myself, I never have the desire to get 12, 15,000 steps a day, and it's not it doesn't feel that urgent because I still have several weeks to go. I just need to fucking make it happen, right? Because that's what my coach told me to do. Now, like, what else are these people doing? Because it's not just these things, even though these things alone, if you're able to fix these things alone, you're already gonna put yourself on stage here. These people are going to be optimizing like isolated variables, but because they don't know how much they don't know, they miss the interactions here. So it's like they push fat loss while they're sleep, while their thyroid and their nervous system here, like their the tone of their nervous system, the conversion of thyroid hormones, like all of these things are collapsing underneath them. So they don't they don't know what normal looks like. So like the dysfunctional feedback that they keep getting, that becomes their baseline, and then they stop questioning it, right? So in they like to make decisions on this, because we're operating at like such a like overdrive already, these people are gonna tend to overcorrect instead of sequencing things. So they change like five things at a time, and like they have no idea what actually worked or what actually broke. So they get also get no data for the future, which means that the next phase cannot be better than the previous phase. So to make sure that the phase is gonna be better, they just take more drugs or eat more food, which just ends up with them getting unhealthy and meaning getting worse results and eating more food and getting fatter, or they raise their training volume or the training intensity, and that goes to shit as well because of the recovery ceiling that you have. These people are also going to mistake the tolerance that they have for adaptation, so they stay on they they they're gonna stay on phases for like way too long. Why? Because they can fucking survive it, but they're not thinking whether that is actually productive. The only thing that they think is like, can I do it? Not should I do it. On the should I, you're biased, you can't actually make an accurate assessment of this, right? So, like everybody is talking about Sam Sullick right now, who decided to coach himself again. Phil Viz made a fantastic video on this, and it's like it's his choice, right? He's a smart kid, he's gonna make good progress and stuff, but it won't be his best. And Phil Viz coached himself his whole life, but he's the first to admit, I made several emotional decisions and it didn't fucking work, and it bit me in the ass so many fucking times. A lot of these people, they just have an issue and just they're not coachable, they're just not humble. So that's the primary issue, and it's it's an ego thing. Like the the these people here who are like just doing their own research, they they lack the stop signal, so to speak. So their ego, their impatience, their fear, all of these things are gonna drive their decisions instead of the physiology. Why? Because again, they don't understand the physiology. Self-coach people, they're usually going to be ending the phases way too fucking late when coached people are actually gonna be changing the phases early. And that timing is where the majority of the results are going to be lost, especially when we're talking in between phases where things don't feel as serious, or you don't get enough instruction, enough feedback, and you don't know exactly what needs fixing right now. You just assume lower the drugs, train a little bit less or a little bit lighter, and everything is gonna be back and it's gonna be fine. It might be fine, you might make good progress, but it won't be excellent progress.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

What does coaching actually provide that self-coaching doesn't?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Holy shit, that is a massive question. I need to take a gulp of some water with electrolytes here. Um, so like that there's this thing called external pattern recognition. These people they're gonna see compensation early instead of like letting you bleed progress for weeks and weeks until you convince yourself that this is just fucking normal. So a coach is able to recognize these patterns because the coach is externally located from your own brain, from your own psyche. The decision making of a coach is going to be done without emotional bias. Why? Well, because I just don't care how hard you're trying, I don't give a shit how motivated you feel. I only care about what your physiology is actually tolerating. I don't care how much you think you can do it or not. I don't, I literally don't give a shit about that. Coaches are also going to provide a clear sequencing. So this is going to be done in an alternative to just guessing things, right? So meaning like I know which lever I'm gonna pull first, I know what lever to leave alone, and I know what I'm not gonna touch yet, right? So those are the those are the things you need to know to structure the sequence of what's going to be done.

unknown 18:46

Can you have examples of like those three things you just mentioned?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Yeah, so for example, for me, like right now I'm finishing uh a growth phase um and uh on a fat loss phase, right? Like within that growth phase is still under anabolic load and everything, and then I'm gonna enter a health phase. Now, on this health phase, the goal is not just to lower everything and just make sure that everything is like okay, fine for and I'm not as tired for the next phase because it's gonna be another half year of just putting on fucking muscle, which is a long ass fucking time, right? So, like, what am I gonna do? Well, I need to make sure that a couple of things that I've noticed picking their head out, these pattern disruptors, are going to be fixed. So I need to correct my sleep, I need to correct a couple of things with my GI tract, and I need to make sure that my mitochondria is operating at full capacity. So I'm going to be adding this in a proper sequence. A couple of these things can overlap, but a couple of these things cannot. They should not overlap. Okay, so it's not just tossing the fucking kitchen sink here. Like we're we're I'm going to be making sure that I'm getting absolutely every every problem that I've seen before in the past 26 weeks corrected to have a proper sequence so that the next phase starts from a blink slate, so to speak. That's what I mean. Like we're we're like a coach is also going to provide time compression. Because I've watched literally hundreds of people make the exact same mistake you're about to make. I can stop that shit before it costs you months. So a lot of people they think about the cost of coaching. It's like, oh, it's too expensive and all this type of shit. I'm like, think about the cost of staying in the exact same place that you are right now, how much that's costing you, not just in terms of progress, but also physiologically and mentally speaking, right? A coach here, like it's also going to provide a contextual interpretation of your biofeedback and of your labs. So they're not just reading the numbers, they're actually understanding what systems are failing upstream. So when people who are self-coached, they just look at their labs and was like, looks good, they have no fucking clue how their DHAS interacts with their cortisol, they have no fucking clue about the interaction of their MCV and their ferritin. Why? Because it's just not clear on the labs at all. They just don't know that the reference ranges for insulin are just retarded. It goes up to 24. Are you fucking out of your mind? If I see someone with 24, we're pulling everything out, we're doing a full reset. You can have a level of 10 and it will still healthy, it's pretty far away from that, right? So this contextual interpretation is important because we need to correct these problems upstream. We can't just correct the problems just patching these things. And I see coaches doing this every fucking time. Every coach that has a client that still has PCOS, that still has PMMD, that still has Hashimoto's, is a coach that is not correcting the problems upstream. They're correcting the problems downstream just to the surface level. And any fucking idiot can patch a problem with just some fucking tape and band aid, right? Like that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to correct the systems that are already failing. A coach is also going to provide you with some like phase timing decision here. So, meaning like we're going to exit phases early while they're still productive, instead of ending them late when the damage control is like needed already. Like when you when you really need to correct something. We're going to provide that for you way before. And we're also going to provide um like a buffering, so to speak, for your stress. So like when life hits, I don't want you to need a new plan. So what do we need to do? We need to make intelligent adjustments inside of the same system. We can't change the system. And if you are self-coached, you don't know what your system is. You need to figure out what your system is because you have one. You're just not aware of it. Okay. A coach is also going to provide accountability to physiology, not to your discipline only. It does provide accountability to your discipline, but also to your physiology. Why? Because just showing up harder and just trying to wide knuckle shit will never fix a phase that is currently mismatched. That's the issue. And self-coaching, it's gonna require a mastery across biology, across psychology, physiology, and execution. And when you work with someone, it just lets you borrow that mastery while you're building yourself. So you're literally time traveling in the past and learning all the shit that you didn't learn in the present and making so many more gains than you would otherwise if you're just doing this thing completely on your own. So that's like primarily what a coach is going to offer. Anyone that that whenever you ask a coach, like, hey, what do you like, uh, what do I get with you? Stupid question from the beginning because you're just looking for features, and people that look for features they don't stick for the long term. So if you're a coach, you should be able to identify that when people are talking to you already. But like also, you need to like make sure that you're not just like that you're not just getting a meal plan and like some WhatsApp messages and a training design. Like Chat GPT can build you that it's gonna be shit, it's gonna be utter shit, it's gonna be wrong. We have studies on this actually, but it can, especially if you know how to prompt, which if the majority of people don't know how to prompt, why because they don't know how to talk, why because they don't know how to think. So, like when people are like, Oh, AI is gonna take your job. I'm I'm fucking waiting for it because people need to learn how to communicate their thoughts clearly, and people don't even know what their thoughts are. So I don't think so. But yeah, that's uh that's what a coach is gonna offer, and don't settle for anything else.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

What are the biggest mistakes people make when they try to coach themselves?

SPEAKER_00 24:46

So we're gonna touch on that a little bit, but like they're gonna anchor their decisions to aesthetics or to the scale change instead of physiological costs. Like keep going back to this. So they're gonna keep pushing their phases for longer while the adaptation has already stopped. They're going to be making the mistake of like conflating discipline and readiness. So like they assume that their effort is gonna be able to just override their sleep debt, how much load like they're getting from their stress and how poor their recovery is, and you really, really can't. These people, like I touched on before, they're also going to be changing variables emotionally, they're not gonna be doing systematically. Why? Because they don't know their own system, so they're gonna react to bad base instead of tracking trends and then making adjustments based on these overarching um like markers that we have. These uh the people who are gonna be self-coaching, they're also going to be ignoring the nervous system. So they're gonna treat their fatigue, their anxiety, their poor sleep, or or or even irritability as a character flaw. It has absolutely nothing to do with their program, right? It's actually a biological sign that is part of your program. You can't just separate these things. We're like, we we haven't been able to distinguish and separate these things since Plato pointed out that you can't do that. So, but but people are so fucking ignorant, they don't even know that Plato came up with this idea so far before that they don't they're unable to make these decisions and start thinking at a level that actually takes into account these things in an integrated fashion because they don't have a fucking system. They're also going to be changing the interventions or their like shortcuts or hacks that we talked about before, they're their strategies before they fix like the fundamentals, right? So before they change their stack supplements, their drugs or protocols, like they're they're they're these things should be done first. When you change these interventions before you fix the fundamentals, you're literally just stacking all of these decisions on top of a broken energy system already. People are also going to be reading their labs in isolation. So people who self-coach, they're gonna be missing these interactions between the systems and these compensations that are happening upstream because they don't understand how these things work. I mean, dude, the amount of money that I spend just learning endocrinology, I literally just purchased a$300 book for endocrine advanced endocrinology alone. Most of these people haven't spent$300 on education on this their whole entire fucking lives, you know? Um, people who self-coach, they're also going to be confusing surviving a phase with benefiting from a phase. They're going to be like tolerating dysfunction. Why? Because it hasn't completely collapsed yet. So they can still fucking keep going. They assume that you just gotta train harder. And social media doesn't help because it literally just calls you a pussy and tells you that you need to try harder and just do it for longer. That actually doesn't really work long term. The reason for all of these things going back to the systems is because they lack a framework to decide what not to do, which is why these self-coach plans are gonna slowly turn into a chaotic mess. And then when you finally get over to a coach, they're gonna have so much more shit to fix. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's it's so much correction that needs to be done, so many thought patterns that you already like created that you need to just keep doing. These things that are like these people are gonna start like hiding things from the new coach and all this stuff, it just creates so many problems. It's just not something that I recommend for the majority of people here.

unknown 28:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

So, how do you build the skill of self-awareness without turning it into obsession?

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Okay, you like we talked about this on the previous podcast with regards to identity here, but you need to anchor awareness to a fixed framework. If you like you can't apply it to your feelings, so like you need to check the same signals every single fucking time instead of like scanning your body all day, like just thinking about how I'm doing. Oh, how am I doing today? Just deciding what I'm gonna do today based on how I'm doing today. That's not really how this goes. You need to have a fixed framework that you need to develop and have this laid out very, very clearly. You also need to decide what's going to matter ahead of time. So, like sleep quality, your morning energy, your hunger regulation, your training output, your mood stability, your like all of these like random sensations, they cannot get any fucking air time. If they do, it's gonna turn into an obsession. If you do start thinking too much about your body and how you're doing on a day-to-day basis, it's gonna turn into an obsession and overcorrection. To prevent this issue, you need to track trends, not moments in time. Obsession is gonna thrive in this daily noise of just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on every single day. And like awareness, it's gonna live like precisely on patterns that are going to be at least weekly, at least weekly, preferably over the string of several weeks within a block that already has a very, very clear outcome in place. To prevent like the self-awareness to turn into an obsession, you also need to start separating observation from intervention, meaning like you need to notice a sign. That doesn't mean you need to fix it immediately. You need to figure out what is the cause upstream first. Okay, you also need to schedule check-ins with yourself instead of monitoring yourself constantly. That just creates that problem of just constant monitoration. This is gonna keep your system outside of that threat mode. But if you try to just like monitor things closely too much for too long, you're gonna end up burnout. So, one question that you can ask yourself repeatedly is like, is the signal consistent or is it? Because like consistency is actually actionable, reactivity is just stress, it's just an emotional response, right? You need to use structure to use the thinking. The structure exists to free mantle bandwidth and allow you to make more objective decisions, not to increase thinking. The framework is in place to basically calm your mind instead of allowing your mind to be hijacked by too much thinking. The people who think that they can self-coach, they are either really fucking stupid, dumb as a door, and I physically cannot endure a conversation with these people, or they think they're too fucking smart. And I've fallen into this problem before when I didn't have any guidance whatsoever of basically just like, I'm smart, I know the concepts, I know what to do. Bullshit. You're self-sabotaging yourself multiple times a day, multiple times a week, and it's costing you so much progress that you're putting in effort every single day, but you're not getting as much return on investment. Obsession should come from responsibility. If it comes from responsibility without guidance, your awareness is gonna come from responsibility with a system. So, like, obsession is going to be like you have the the responsibility of doing all this stuff, you know what to do, you you have to do it, but you lack the guidance, you lack the structure, you lack the system, you lack the framework. Awareness, on the other hand, comes from responsibility within a system. You're aware of it because you're also aware of all of the other things that are happening as well, and that gives you clarity. Coaching is actually very helpful for most people, like this in this aspect right here, because like someone else holding this is is holding this pattern for you, so you don't have to live inside of it all the fucking time. It is exhausting, and I'm telling you this as someone who self-coach for the longest fucking time. It is fucking exhausting if you're going to be doing right, because you need to try to avoid that emotional attachment and lack of a framework. So applying the same framework with yourself is very hard. Why? Because there's always an excuse, there's always a reason, and you are super understanding with yourself. I'm not that understanding with my clients. They don't hire me to be understanding, they hire me to give fucking results.

unknown 33:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

How do you know if you need a coach or if you just need a better system?

SPEAKER_00 33:18

Well, if you can change the tactics like all the time, but your outcome is not changing, you don't need more information. You need an external pattern recognizer, you need a coach. If you can execute the plan, but you can't really decide when to stop, when to shift, or when to hold steady, like that's a coaching gap. That's not a motivation problem, that's a planning issue. It's a framework that's lacking. If your system works, but it only works when your life is calm, and then when stress happens, when life happens, it just collapses, like under illness, under your workload, under travel. Well, it isn't a system yet. You need to have a system installed. I talk in terms of system because that's what the O5 system actually is, and it's basically installed into every person that is within Opti. If you're constantly asking, How am I doing? Like, am I doing too much or am I doing not enough? You're literally missing that like decision framework that we talked about, which is what a coach supplies immediately, right? If your progress is only happening when you're super, super hyper focused, but then when your attention drops, you start experiencing stalls. You're relying on effort instead of relying on structure, and that means you need a coach. If you know what to do, but you still hesitate, or you're used to overthinking, or like you second guess every adjustment. Second guessing was my biggest issue here, that's emotional bias. And when it comes to emotional bias, you you literally cannot correct it. Like you can't self-correct that. Any person that is from a philosophy or a psychology department or or or a psychiatry department is going to be able to tell you that. You just cannot step out of your own emotional bias. A better system is gonna tell you what to do, a coach is actually gonna tell you when to do it, when not to do it, and when to do absolutely fucking nothing. A system is just gonna tell you what to do. You need to decide all of these other things here as well. There is a there is a test, the the litmus test here. It's it's it's very simple, right? Like if your results are dependent on your mood, on your energy levels, you need a coach. If they depend on repeatable rules that you have clearly laid out, literally written down that you execute on, then you might be ready for self-coach. It happens, it it really happens. Some people have that. I talked to a person today, I just asked like all these questions about their program and everything. Fucking send me absolutely everything. We corrected his problem like this. Why? Because that person doesn't need a coach, that person is ready to self-coach. Most people they don't hire a coach because they can't work hard. Some people do, but most people don't. The people who do their outsourcing effort, and you cannot do that. People hire a coach because they're tired of being inside of their own blind spots and not being able to step out of them. That's the primary issue that we see here.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

How do you avoid becoming dependent on a coach?

SPEAKER_00 36:22

Okay, this is very, very important because I talked about autonomy. Autonomy is one of the fundamental human needs in Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. So it's very, very, very important. The goal of coaching is not control, it's actually the skill transfer. So I explain why the decisions are made. I don't just explain what I do. Now, some people don't want to know, and they literally will tell me, like, hey, I don't care. Just tell me what to do. Fuck yeah, let's do it. But so many people work with pieces of shit of coaches. I talked to someone this week, a guy who was working with a coach who literally lost all of his clients. He would ask, like, hey, why are we like doing this thing? It's like, you just need to fucking do it. Just like, just fucking do it. If you keep questioning this thing, you have a problem. It's like, I'm not questioning it, I'm asking a question. Those are two very different things. And everyone who's autistic has a pet peeve with that. Because people confuse being confrontational and questioning your authority and your decisions with just asking a simple fucking question. I talked to a girl from a gym uh the this week, and uh she said that when she asked the coaches, like, why am I taking all these supplements? She literally said, Google it. Piece of shit of a coach. So if you have a coach like that, you're gonna be dependent on it. These people, they generally speaking, don't end up depending on a coach, they just end up not getting any coach whatsoever and just doing their own thing. And nine out of ten times when I talk to these people, they have absolutely no fucking clue what they're doing. So, like, how how do I do this for my clients? Well, I build rules and I build like thresholds instead of just making constant adjustments to them. So I want the client to learn how to actually think, not how to just wait for a decision. I want you to make decisions on your own. I want us to this to be a collaboration. We're gonna anchor absolutely everything on these repeatable signs and the frameworks. We're not gonna base it on daily feedback that's coming from you or my personal opinion. My personal opinion literally doesn't fucking matter. I'm also going to increase this very gradually, like this this decision ownership, meaning like I want my clients to start making calls that I'm later gonna start validating instead of overriding. In the beginning, you need the training wheels, but as it continues, and that's why a long-term relationship with a coach is important, and that's why I don't sell short-term programs or do month to month and shit like that. You need to actually start like allowing your clients to have decision ownership. I teach my clients, like every single one of them who wants to learn, it's it's it's more like a coaching mentorship almost. Like, I teach them how to audit their phases, how to like spot whenever they have like compensation patterns, and uh I teach them like when we need to hold, when we need to push, when we need to exit a phase, and like why, right? The dependence actually is gonna come when like the coach becomes your fucking brain. But mastery, on the other hand, is gonna happen when the coach becomes just the reference that you're using. That is when things start thriving. You can't really have this from the very beginning for the majority of people, but it should be walking towards that. The end goal here is autonomy, like I said, with guardrails, not freedom without structure. A lot of coaches they don't provide this shit because they think that the clients will just leave. Let me tell you, clients will not leave if you are providing freedom with structure. Okay, a good coach should be making themselves less necessary over time, not more necessary over time, unless we are changing things, unless we're going from like natural to enhanced, because then we're starting a new phase entirely. If we've never done a prep, we're gonna start basically from scratch again, and we're gonna need those guardrails, and you're gonna be less of a brain. But you can learn these things as you go. Like, I the irony in all of this that I'm saying is that the fastest way to stop needing a coach is to actually work with one at first from very early on. That's the fastest way to never need a coach ever again in your life, is to actually work with the real one first.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

Yeah, what's the difference between a coach who changes your body and a coach who changes your life?

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Fuck man, a coach, like I a body coach, let's call it that, and I I I don't like that. I I just generally call it bodybuilding coaches or like accountability coaches. Um, they're gonna chase outcomes. A coach that's gonna change your life, it's gonna build systems that are to survive chaos, stress, and every single one of your bad weeks. Uh a body coach is also going to be optimizing phases, which is very good. But a coach that changes your life is going to optimize the decision-making progress process so that your progress can actually continue when we don't have perfect conditions to help us out. A body coach is going to react to platose, which again is not bad on its own, but it's still reactive and not part of a framework. Whereas a coach that actually changes your life is going to prevent these things, how? By managing your stress, by managing your energy levels, and your recovery, all upstream, never downstream. We're never patching. Okay. Now, talking about patching, that's what a body coach is going to do. They're just going to fix your symptoms. A life coach is actually going to teach you how to read these signals before they become symptoms. In the way that I actually explain symptoms, they actually appear at the fourth level. We should correct these things on the first level here. Okay. If you want to know exactly how I do that, should be at the end. A body coach is also going to be giving you a lot of plans, which is good because it provides a little bit of structure. But a coach that changes your life is going to give you a framework. So you can reuse this in your training, in your nutrition, in your work, in your relationships. Like you can apply this to many areas of your life because it's not just a plan, it's not just a diet plan. It taught you how to think. A body coach just gets you leaner and it gets you stronger. And generally speaking, it does that once. A coach that changes your life, it's going to make the process repeatable without you having to burn yourself down to the ground every single fucking time. A coach that just changes your body is also going to be very useful when motivation is high. That's when people sign up. But a coach that changes your life is going to be invaluable when your motivation actually fades out entirely. The real difference is that one is going to change how you look, and the other one is going to change how you operate under real life constraints. That's the primary difference between someone who just changes your body and a coach that's actually going to change your life. And you should be able to like write these things down so that you can like basically um make sure that you like ask these things beforehand and you know exactly what you're getting yourself into before uh signing up with someone. So these these are very, very good questions. And we got to them very, very fast because it's a topic that's very, very close to heart. But we also got questions from Instagram. The questions before was from my clients. Now we have questions from Instagram. I'm gonna answer them a little bit faster. So rapid fire.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

Rapid fire.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Do I really need a coach? I mean, you don't need a coach to work hard. You actually just need a coach to know when your effort is no longer producing adaptation and when it's quietly creating damage. That's when you need a coach.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

What if I can't afford coaching?

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Well, like I said, you're you're literally already paying for your mistakes in lost time, in stalled progress, in health issues, and rewinds, and all of the stuff, but Coach just makes that cost visible and finite. It shouldn't scare you. It should just show you how much this shit is actually costing you.

SPEAKER_01 44:07

How do I know if my coach is good?

SPEAKER_00 44:10

A good coach can explain why you're doing something. It should explain when it will stop working. And a good coach should also tell you what signals are there and like what they're telling you, like when it's time to change things before it breaks. That's what a good coach should be able to do. If your coach doesn't do that, your coach is a bad coach.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

How long should I stay with one coach?

SPEAKER_00 44:35

Well, very difficult question because, like I said, like things change and you have different phases, you have the introduction of different things and stuff like that. But in general, like when you internalize their framework and you can make their own decisions without needing constant correction, that might be a time that you can start thinking about self-coaching with the caveat that you will still not be able to get away from your emotional bias.

SPEAKER_01 44:58

Why did my coach ghost me?

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Because your coach is a piece of shit. And many coaches they sell access, they sell motivation, they don't sell systems, they don't sell accountability, and then they're gonna disappear when things stop being easy. Literally talk to a natural uh athlete, uh competitor who did very well on a show, just fucking clean house. Post show is the most important time after a client because that's when shit is gonna hit the fan, not during the prep. Coach goes to him, hasn't talked to him in three weeks. Still paying him, still not working with someone else. So this person is really fucking stupid, but you know, it happens.

unknown 45:34

Whoa.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

Yeah. Should I coach myself after my show?

SPEAKER_00 45:38

If you have a very clear, laid out, written down, and evaluated by other people who know more than you, if you have a post-show framework, if you have objective stop rules, and if you have emotional distance from your physique, which most people don't, then you can self-coach after a show.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

How do I stop overthinking my plan?

SPEAKER_00 46:04

You need to replace this constant decision making that you have with a small set of repeatable rules that should tell you when to act and when to wait. That's how you stop overthinking.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

What should I track weekly to stay objective?

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Sleep quality, uh, morning energy, um, your uh cycle if you're a woman, uh, morning wood if you're a guy, your uh body temperatures, your hunger regulation, your training performance, how stable your mood is, and one body metric. Just one body metric, not more. Don't start pushing 15 different body metrics, waist size, circumference, caliper sites, body fat, DEXA scans, don't do that shit. It's gonna be way too complicated.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

What's a good one to start with?

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Wait, average for a week.

unknown 46:52

Sweet.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

How do I know if I'm plateaued or just impatient?

SPEAKER_00 46:57

You're just impatient and your program is shit. But if the data is actually stable and your effort is rising, so you have good data to be able to evaluate this stuff, but you're getting no return, no return, not a little return because it depends on your level. Well, you're plateaued. Now, if the data is still trending, but it's trending at slower pace, it might be slower than you want. And if it's just slower than you want, you're just fucking impatient.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

What's the number one thing you wish coaches understood about female athletes?

SPEAKER_00 47:31

I have about a hundred things that I wish coaches understood about female athletes. I've read so many books just about female physiology to be able to like understand this shit. Females are just a completely different fucking animal. Their physiology will always protect survival and reproduction before aesthetics. So you need to be able to preserve these things beforehand. When you ignore that reality, that's when like you're gonna have women just burning out and making shitty progress, which the majority of women that I see they do make shitty progress.

SPEAKER_01 48:03

What makes you trust a coach?

SPEAKER_00 48:07

If they can say like stop for me, like with the same confidence that they can say push, and if their decisions are not like changing just based on on my emotions, I I I'll probably trust that coach.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

Like a little pushback compared to just matching whatever you're feeling.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Just no emotional reactivity and no no no uh like linguistic or body language mirroring or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 48:39

What's a coaching red flag you'd never ignore again?

SPEAKER_00 48:43

Well, I had a coach that almost killed me. So uh if I get three grams for of steroids for my first cycle ever again, um, I am definitely going to be uh ignoring, uh I'm not ignoring that's a red flag, but any coach who just keeps like pushing a phase while your like sleep, your mood, and your hormones and your recovery are clearly deteriorating is a massive red flag. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

If you could go back and coach your past self, what would you change first? Training, nutrition, mindset, or environment?

SPEAKER_00 49:16

I actually wouldn't change my training, I wouldn't change my nutrition, I wouldn't even touch on my mindset or my environment. The real mistake that I made was actually thinking that I could manage objectively all of that shit alone, just because I had a deep understanding of these concepts and because people told me that I was smart. I literally left years of gains on the table by being an arrogant piece of shit who just like arrogant enough to believe that knowledge can replace your systems, can replace external judgment, when in reality, like the biggest blind spot that you're gonna have is always going to be your own perspective. The the highest return on investment move for absolutely anyone, regardless of your background, regardless of your discipline levels, is going to be getting a coach early on. Why? Because leverage is going to beat intelligence every single fucking time. If I could change one thing, I would have gotten a good qualified coach from the very first day and I would stay with that person pretty much until today.

unknown 50:17

Yeah. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 50:19

Guys, thank you so much for sending these questions. I absolutely love talking about this subject. If you're someone who wants to learn how to self-coach and how to coach and stuff like that, I also have a mentorship pipeline within uh OptLab that allows you to understand how we do these things. So we basically look at the way that you are doing things, the way that your body reacts, and we teach this framework and how to implement this thing and create a system for you, not just implement my system onto you, but just do all of these things so that you can start understanding these things. We go over research papers, we go over uh you know, books, lectures, and things like that. We meet regularly, we talk about all of these things because I believe this is an important skill to have, even if you are going to be working with a coach, because every now and then coaches are going to make mistakes, and the best you're gonna get is I'm sorry. You have to deal with that. But if you are someone that are in a collaborative environment with someone, you were able to say, like, hey, just I know you told me to take like 500 micrograms of SLU, but like when we look at the data, like I was under the impression that the dose needs to be significantly higher. Can you explain to me how you got to this 500 micrograms here? Like, that's something that I would like to do from the very beginning, right? It's just like figuring these things out. That's that's going to like help you out to be able to like have a more productive relationship with your coach because a coach should also be learning from you. Like I mentioned, this is a two-way street here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sending all of these questions, guys. We will talk to you uh to you again next week. Stay tuned for our next episodes of the podcast. And if you guys have any person that you would like us to interview, no matter how big or massive they are in the industry, let us know. We're gonna do everything we can to make that shit happen for you. Optolab, Nathan, signing out. Aubrey, peace out. Love you guys. Talk to you soon.