Ep. 9 - My Toxic Bodybuilding Coach's Email

Trigger warning: This episode discusses disordered eating, body image, and anxiety.

My old bodybuilding coach called me a pig.

I emailed him after the 4th or 5th binge. First year of PT school. The most anxiety I'd ever had in my life up to that point. I was stuck in a cycle I couldn't break and I reached out for help.

That email is what came back.

It's also one of the two or three reasons I became the coach I am today.

Nobody asked me why I wanted to bodybuild in the first place. They probably should have. Instead, what I got was blame and shame piled onto someone who was already flagellating himself daily.

This episode is about that email, what it cost me, and what I've come to believe any good coaching relationship is built on.

In this solo episode, I get into:

• Why shame fails every single time to create lasting change, and why that's especially true for high-achieving perfectionists
• What my coach should have asked when we started working together, and what it cost when he never did
• What a year's worth of client responses says about what changes people most, and why constant communication ranked above everything else
• What trust, relationship, and communication look like when they're done right
• What I need you to know if you've had a toxic or damaging coaching relationship and you're still carrying it

You didn't fail your coach. Your coach failed you.

And that's not a reason to stop yourself from having hope and reaching out for help again, my friend.

Links:

Book a free consult call with me: https://calendly.com/unbreakablestrengthonline/firestarter-call-1

Trying to get consistent with your own training? Get a free copy of the Consistency Catalyst guide: https://unbreakablestrength.kit.com/cac1abf5af

Wanna be more confident working with athletes in your practice? Get a free copy of the Confident Sports Clinician's Checklist: https://unbreakablestrength.kit.com/35c376acac

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jared.unbreakable/

Follow me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jared.unbreakable

Follow me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@unbreakablestrength1

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

My name is Jared Maynard. I'm a physical therapist, strength coach, and in 2023 I was lying in an ICU bed on a ventilator with a 50-50 chance of making it out alive. I made it out. And what I learned on the other side of that changed everything about how I live, how I coach, and what I believe is possible for the people who keep showing. This show is for the coaches and clinicians, the people who give their all to everybody else and don't have much left over for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

On this show we talk about training and rehab, as well as mental health, identity, and what it costs to be the kind of person who keeps showing up when the gun gets tough. This show is meant to be your companion on the Soul. This is unbreakable.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Welcome back to another episode, and I'm gonna let you know up front that this might get spicy, and this actually comes with a trigger warning. What I'm gonna read for you first, and what this conversation is gonna be around, is disordered eating. It's gonna be about body image, anxiety, and a really toxic and abusive coaching relationship that I was in. There's a reason I'm talking about it, because it is the reason that I am a coach now. It really is one of probably two or three reasons that I do what I do and that I am who I am. So, with that in mind, I'm gonna start diving right into this email. I want you to imagine that your coach is the one who sent this email to you while you are in one of your darkest periods of time with the most anxiety that you've dealt with to this point in your life. You can fill in the pieces of the picture. I'm gonna tell you more of how this actually happened, but I want to leave it open for your imagination. So imagine that you get the notification and you open up your email app, and this is what you see. As I told you so many times, you keep pursuing excuses to just binge eat. It's what you did again. Anything you can find, it will give you a reason to binge. I told you, and I wasn't mistaken, that you love binging. That's why you keep doing it. And that's why any and every excuse you find helps you to keep doing it. There's no me, no need for me to go in depth about things again until you change your mindset. You will just keep doing this. Reverse dieting will only give you even more excuses to binge, and you will take every single chance to do so because you keep looking for excuses in your head to justify your binges. You keep looking for reasons to binge. I really don't know what to tell you because I know it won't stop. You're refusing to man up and reach your goals. You prefer to eat and eat like a pig. Yeah, that's the right expression. I don't think you're gonna stop until your thyroid completely shuts down from the constant binging. In the other email, you say you want to start. Sorry, you say you start to worry that if you're gonna be hungry at night, another reason and little excuse that you like to put in your head to justify further binges. I'm lost at this point. Because even as a psychologist, there's a truth in which you can't help people that don't want to be helped, and you don't want to be helped. The year was 2014. I was in my first year of PT school. I was experiencing the most anxiety I ever had in my life up to that point when I got that email. That was from my old bodybuilding coach. I was trying to get lean enough to compete in natural bodybuilding. And I was the leanest I had been ever in my life. But the binges that he was talking about was the cycle of binge eating that I found myself in. After the fourth or fifth binge, was when I reached out to my coach again, told him about it, distressed, looking for help. And that was the response that I got. I hope, not I hope, I know many of you who listen to this, and even if you're a newer listener, I don't think I need to point out to you how toxic that response is and how it layers on the blame and shame so heavy. I told you that this email was one of the two or three catalysts that made me who I am today. That coach, whose name I am very tempted to share, he dropped off the face of the internet, so not sure it would do much good, but uh I don't think that's actually as it would serve you and everybody else as much as it would make me feel vindicted and achieve a little bit more of the vendetta that a part of me wants to wage. So I'm not gonna do that. But I need to talk about it because every time I do, I'm reminded by other people in the coaching space, clients as well as coaches and PTs and kairos, that that personality, that sort of interaction is still too common and still exists in the coaching space. I go back to how I felt and what I was struggling with at that point in time. The thing that my coach never asked me about was why I wanted to bodybuild in the first place. If he had asked me that on the front end, it probably would have surfaced the fact that I am a perfectionist. I am a high achiever. I am somebody who loves control. As humans, who doesn't love control? We want control over our bodies, over our lives, over our circumstances. That's ingrained in us. I don't think anybody loves to not have control and not be in control. But for some of us, maybe for you listening, you know that it hits different when you are that type A person. And had he asked me about that, had that been part of the conversation on the front end, and had he been the kind of coach that knew that bodybuilding and physique sports inherently draw people who self-select towards things that are self-punishing, towards things that are exacting, that allow them to indulge their perfectionistic tendencies and then be rewarded by external validation, how they look, their physique, how other people tell them that they look. That would have surfaced some yellow and red flags. And at least given an opportunity for a conversation, an honest one, about why I wanted the goals that I did, and if that was actually the best thing for me. I later heard from other bodybuilding coaches who I very much respected then and still do. In fact, I've grown respect for them. I will name these people by name. It's people like Dr. Eric Helms, Brad Loomis, uh, Jeff Alberts, Alberto Nunez, basically the entire 3DMJ uh coaching team. And I'm I'm blessed enough to call both Dr. Eric Helms and Dr. Nick Licamelli friends who are on that team. It was Eric who I've heard talk about the, I've heard, I've heard many people on the team actually talk about the prevalence of perfectionism and self-selection. People who are running from or indulging their or coping with their anxieties, their um their discomforts by channeling it into being perfect with their macros, hitting all of their workouts, making sure they do things to the T. And then seeing that change in their body by gaining mass or especially by getting lean. And I remember the how it felt to see the first ab vein, uh, and then see more veins in my arms. And I was checking myself in the mirror, doing a little flex check in the bathroom between classes or issue, even during class, go to the washroom, do a quick flex because nobody else was in the bathroom. And that was a little hit to my brain of like, yep, I look pretty good. And that was during the times when I wasn't binging. When I was binging, I would do the same things. But naturally, after eating everything in sight, or making a trip to the grocery store, which was down the street from my apartment, and buying all the sugary junk that I didn't usually buy because I fell off. I didn't hit my macros. I was hungry. I was stressed. So I thought, fuck it. I'm gonna go to town. I'm gonna eat all of these things right here, right now. I know I'm gonna feel shitty afterwards, but I'll get back to it. So naturally, after slamming all of those donuts and baked goods and ice cream bars and whatever else I grabbed, I retained a crap ton of water and I felt terrible. And so every movement in my clothes reinforced this story of you're fat. Can't believe you did this again. You knew this would happen. And every time I caught sight of myself in the mirror, it was the same reinforcement. But instead of being a dopamine hit because I could see those ab veins, and ab veins and leanness equals self-worth. Now I didn't. It was covered by water. Um, it was the opposite. It was taking away from my son's sense of self-worth. And this was a torturous battle in my head. It was fueled by unchecked anxiety. At this point in my life, I had never had any sort of mental health help, nor had I really had any conversations about mental health and how it can show up because I was the oldest of five kids. I was the high achiever. I was the one who had it together. I was the one that my parents didn't need to worry about. I didn't struggle with stuff. So why would I be allowed to struggle with something now? The unchecked anxiety of being in a competitive, demanding graduate degree program in the first year as I'm getting my feet under me, going on my first clinical rotation, with these unchecked and unhealthy thought processes and tendencies, coupled with the physiological demands of starving myself, which is what bodybuilding requires. I'm being hyperbolic a little bit on purpose. But to get lean, you obviously have to eat less fuel, consume fewer calories than your body wants and that you're used to so that it burns fat. You also have to train, not just with weights and train hard to maintain your muscle mass, but you also have to do a good amount of cardio so that your energy expenditure exceeds your caloric intake. So you keep getting lean. If you're working with a coach, you are doing physique checks every week. You are also stepping on the scale every day. And I don't have a problem with either one of those things. I would argue actually that both of those elements, physique checks regularly, and consistent weighing are both. I'm going to say necessary, but even I'd be willing to concede the ground that they're not strictly necessary, but they're very, very useful. The physique checks allow your coach, if you're working with one, to be able to see changes over time. And things are always different when it's you. So having a more objective set of eyes to be able to judge something as subjective as physical appearance is helpful. Consistent weighing, even though this can be a trigger for many people whose stories don't exactly match with all the details of mine, but they match on the biggest details and common beats. Um, consistent data points help because body water, or excuse me, body weight, pardon me, fluctuates based on a lot, based on sodium intake, based on food, food bulk, uh, hormonal cycles, especially with the menstrual cycle, if you're a female, all these things. They vary a lot. So if you only have one or two or three weight points through the week, is that giving you the full picture? No. Can it be enough? Possibly. You can make it work. You can make your physique goals, your body composition goals, you can make your nutrition goals work on far less than weekly physique checks and daily weigh-ins. You don't even necessarily need to track macros. Even though I will maintain that so long as it can be done in a healthy environment, tracking your macros and being really honest for even a short-ish period of time, a number of weeks, a couple of months, is one of the most instructive things that you can do as a person and to understand what that actually looks like. But my point is, you don't need those things necessarily to make progress. If you're trying to be competitive in a physique sport, you do. It's the nature of the game. So I was doing all this. Are you surprised that at certain points, when my energy and willpower were whittled down from all of these things, from being in a caloric deficit, from staying lean for a long time, I'm talking years. This is at least two years of mostly being in a caloric deficit or trying to be. Maybe that's a little bit on the high side. At this point in time, this would have been somewhere between eight to twelve months. I think I did a bulking phase before that. But being in a caloric deficit for a long enough period of time, training hard, being in a demanding program, being out away from home for the first time in my life, my undergrad, I commuted to and from school from home. Um, and again, had these unchecked, unchecked-on mental tendencies and stresses. So who's surprised that the thing that I was limiting the most seemed the most comforting, and that I was the most fixated on being food. And that I reached that fuck it reflex. It seems so obvious looking back on it, doesn't it? Just to illustrate how bad it got. Around this point in time, I started looking into like a 12-step program. Overeaters Anonymous. Because I thought I have an addiction. I'm food addicted. I went to a meeting or two. I'm I'm grateful to say that I'm not I'm not there anymore. I haven't been there for a long time. But in it, in the middle of that storm, oh my gosh. It was hard to have hope and keep going. In addition to the overall toxicity of that email, the next biggest miss that my coach had at the time was piling on that blame and that shame, not seeing that I was already flagellating myself on a daily basis. And the rich irony of it all is that this guy was supposedly a clinical psychologist overseas. As such, you would expect that he, of all people, would understand the misguided intent of trying to shame somebody into changing their health behavior. Why do you think that fails every single time? At least to create lasting healthy changes. There is no trust and no safety. A reason that I am who I am as a coaching clinician, man, husband, father, today is that I believe, professionally and personally, the foundation of what I do to help people when I'm on the clock and off the clock is first and foremost trust and relationship, those being one and the same in my eyes, and communication. All of them being intertwined. Why? If you are in a situation that feels unsafe, how can you be expected to be honest? If you are not honest, how then can you expect to reach clarity? If you cannot reach clarity, how then can you expect to find the next action steps to take and to make that sustainable to get you where you want to go? Turn that on its head though. If you instead got an email from your coach or a message, first and foremost, thanking you for the honesty and for sharing where you're at. And then said, I understand what you're saying, and I can imagine how difficult this all must be with what you're talking about, with the binge eating cycles, as well as stress from school and from the other things that are going on in your life. And the message ended with a question. Are you open to more of a conversation about what's going on right now? So I can help you? How does that then land for you? I can tell you that that was what I was hungry for. And I wished somebody would have asked me. I didn't know how to struggle and tell someone about it. I had never practiced in my life. And I'm willing to bet that you that at some point hadn't had much practice either.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

That's what I needed.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

That is what fuels me to. Stand up against coaches like the one that I had. That coach is the antithesis of who I am and who I strive to be. It shouldn't have to be said, but I'll say it anyway. I am not perfect. I'm far from it. I miss things occasionally. I look back and I think about responses that I've given or how I've handled situations in the past, both the distant, the medium, and the not so distant past. And there are things that I would do differently. But I I review those things so I can get better. And I do that because the second most important reason that I want to get better is so I can be the best that I can be. The first most important reason is because the people who trust me are worth that. They are worth creating an environment that is safe for them. They are worth hearing them. Not just hearing the words, but hearing what's underneath. And looking for the right questions to ask, especially when they are needed the most. I do not expect myself to have the right answer all of the time. And still, I look to get better. That is the standard that I hold for my assistant coach or coaches. It's this yes and we are fallible, imperfect human beings. And still we show up and we do our best for our people because they are worth it. And when we miss, when we make mistakes, we catch it as quickly as we can and we fix it as quickly and as well as we can. That means that when a client sends us a message saying, hey, look, excuse me, it was a tough mental health week last week. I'm stressed. Uh I'm planning to get back in the gym tomorrow. Our response isn't just, yeah, it's great. All right, looking forward to the workout. It's thank you for sharing that. I'm sorry to hear it was a tough mental health week. I know what that's like. Are you open to sharing what made it tough? Most of the time, people are willing to share that because they're they want someone to care enough to ask. Sometimes they're not ready. And that is okay. I take the fact that most people, most of our clients, share those pieces of themselves as a really good sign that we've created a safe environment. And a safe environment is not one where we just say all the nice things and say, oh, they're there, it's fine, and insert platitude that makes you feel good, but doesn't actually change anything. What I and my team do is we have the hard conversations. But this is I'm I'm no secrets here. This is something I do because I want this done for me. And I wish it had been done more frequently through all of my life. Before we get to the fixing part, we have to make damn sure that the other person feels seen and heard first. There is no skipping that first step. There can't be. Otherwise, well-intentioned as it might be, if we jump right to, well, you've been inconsistent. What do we got to do? What's the next goal? What does your schedule look like? Give us your time blocking. Cool. When are you going to go hit that workout? All right, you should be ready to rock. Let's go hit the step goal. Whatever the case is, we've dismissed the person. We have not taken the half second it takes to say, hey, thank you. I hear you. This sounds hard. I have been there too. Even if you haven't been there, it doesn't take much to say this is hard. And I'm grateful for your trust. Can we talk more about this? Because I care about you and I want to help. That small step carries so much weight and does so much heavy lifting for people. This is applicable also in the clinic or in the hospital if you work there. It does not take much to be a human first. And I know full well that the load that you carry, being on for everybody, and you've been on probably for several hours before you leave for work if you're if you've got a family at home, if you've got a power partner, if you've got kids, if you've got other things going on in your life for family and for friends. And then you go to the clinic and you are the go-to person. You are the one who has to hear and carry and create space for all of the bitching and moaning and the pains and the aches and the worries and the fears and the fear-mongering that comes from other healthcare professionals. You have to be the go-to person all day long. And you've got to somehow fit in documentation between patients. You've got to somehow eat and nourish yourself. And by the end of the day, after you dissociate for another five or 10 minutes in your car before you start driving back home, you don't get the break because you're back home and you're right back into the fray. And where is the time for you? If any of that sounds familiar, I get it. And I know how depleting that is on your gas tank. If there is one thing, one single thing that I want you to take from this episode, it is that, yes, it is difficult. And we must still preserve the humanity and the half beat that it takes to make somebody feel seen and heard. I'm not promising that every single time the person will respond well and say, oh my gosh, thank you so much. I feel seen and heard. There will be people who don't give a shit. There will be people who are assholes to you. And I'm not suggesting that you just shut up and take mistreatment, especially not misconduct. Absolutely not. Hold those boundaries, get help. Unacceptable. You are worthy of safety as much as anybody else's. What I am saying is that for us as coaches and clinicians and people, trust and relationship are the foundation, the necessary starting point for any lasting change. Especially when we're talking about something deep-seated and difficult, whether it's anxiety, whether it's anything related to disordered eating, whether it's body image, whether it's chronic pain, whether it's stress and worry and fear about the future, when we can feel seen and heard and understood, even if it's not perfect, we are so much more willing to hear what's next out of that person's mouth. And we are so much more willing to trust that the person understands us better and thus will give us the next step or piece of advice that we need. And in the absence of it, we just dismiss what comes next. It might be the exact right thing. On paper, in reality, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we can dismiss it out of hand because we don't feel seen. We don't have the trust. I still wish that I felt that way more often in many interactions in my life. I cannot control other people. I can only control how I show up and what I give and bring to people and how I communicate. I can ask for this for myself. I can also share these thoughts and why I believe so strongly that they matter. I have two more things before we wrap this episode up. Hitting my mic. Because for the people who work with me and my team at Unbreakable, I gather data. And I recently took a year's worth of client data. Not all the data I have, mind you, but the really important things. Excuse me, what people share at the very beginning of their journey with us, what they're struggling with, what their goals are, what success looks and feels like to them, and why that matters. And then what they tell us at various points in the journey, five weeks in, 10 weeks in, 22 weeks in. Not only about how we're doing in making progress towards their goals, but also what the biggest win is, what the biggest challenges are, what the next problems are we need to solve, and most importantly for the point of this conversation, uh how they are changing as a person. And what is most valuable for them in the relationship, the working coaching relationship. Out of all of the responses, I'm forgetting actually right now how many there were. I think there were over a hundred. I gotta go back and check. They got stronger. They had less pain. Lots of people come to us because they're dealing with pain or injury, uh, because they are not consistent, but also because they are so just slammed by decision fatigue, because they are holding it down for everybody else all day long and have nobody to pour back into them. So it's not a surprise that with the coaching and the programming that we do, which is tailored for them to meet their bodies and their lives where they are at, and then build them up over time, that they get stronger, that they have less pain. We're really good at that. Which makes the bigger surprise when people notice I have shown up for myself for 16 weeks consistently now, and I haven't done that for anything in my life. Or I am a completely different person. The confidence that you've helped me find in the gym has spilled over into literally every other aspect of my life. And you helped make the gym fun again, which I had lost. Or my confidence is back, and I believe that I can do it again, which I had lost. All three of those are direct quotes. Which elements are most valuable? Which do you think out of the programming, the feedback videos our clients get every week, the goal setting process, we take them through the Everfit app itself, we use that app right now, or the communication. Which do you think they rank as most valuable? Number one is the constant communication by a far sight. I forget the raw number, but it I have it somewhere. It's not even close. Along with that, people talk about how they feel safe. They feel seen, they feel challenged. Because if something doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you. Yes, that's a platitude. Yes, we all hear it, but damn it if it's not true. But to have something that is challenging and changes you for the better and that lasts, it must be built on a foundation of trust and safety in relationship and a common, shared goal of why you're doing it in the first place. Because the going will get tough. Of that you can be sure. And when it gets tough, you have to know what your why is, and you have to have people in your corner who you know are going to show the fuck up for you. Because they care. And that they will see you, they will take the beat to recalibrate to where you are, they will tell you the hard things, but you know the hard things come from a place of love, which is why you're open to them. The other two most valuable things that are effectively tied for second place are the feedback videos and the programming. I sat down uh about a month and a half ago with the help of a resource that I got from my mentors in the Honey Badger Project. And I sat down with Claude, the AI, and went through four and a half hours of Claude asking me about a hundred questions about my philosophy, my decision-making process as a coach and clinician, who my influences are, who I stand against in the health and fitness and rehab spaces, what I actually do with people, how do I actually structure the program? What do I do when the client flares? How do you actually change that? All sorts of things. Four and a half hours. And I got this synthesis of what makes me me as a coach and clinician. That's going to keep evolving. It's not a one-and-done thing. But that is something that is unique about me and my team at Unbreakable is that we are not robots. We have distilled down what the essence of who we are and what we stand for. One of those elements is that for our clients, the program that we write, the program that they see pop up every day and every week in their app is our way, or one of our ways to make them feel seen and heard. It's a way to show, to make them feel loved. I know love can be a weird word for people, but at the heart of the philosophy, that is what it is, it's for. Because when you tell us something, hey, look, my life is insane right now. I am drowning, I'm not completing the workouts, uh, this exercise hurts. And then you see that the workout hasn't changed. Or you're told, eh, okay, yeah, figure it out, modify it on your own. How does that make you feel? But if instead you see messages from your coach or coaches saying, hey, thank you so much for letting us know we understand. Here's what we're gonna do. And then the next workout you see is a little bit shorter. You see the exercise has been modified to something that you think you can try. And it's these little details that make you know that your people give a shit about you. Like I told you before, I and my team are not perfect. If you've worked with us or work with us now, you know that sometimes there are little mistakes. But another part of our philosophy is that when we find out about them, we thank you for letting us know and we fix it as quickly and as well as we can. There is an expectation of a two-way street. Because we're good. We can't do all of it for you. However, when you or somebody meets us in the middle, we are 100% responsible for our 50% of the street. Oh boy. That's where the magic happens. That's where people start to unlock things about their body and their minds that they didn't know was there or that they had lost. And that's really what we're doing this for. I said there were two things to close things out. That was one of them. The very last piece is that if you have had a toxic or a damaging or hurtful relationship with a coach and you're still carrying that scar or that wound, I would need you to know that you are not alone. That it is okay that you feel the way you feel. I don't like that you've experienced that. I hate it actually. And even without knowing all the details, I want you to know that you did not fail your coach. Your coach failed you. That is not to say or suggest that there weren't things that you needed to own and probably could have owned better. I absolutely needed to own different things at the time that I got that email from my old bodybuilding coach. This is a yes and situation. Yes, there are things that are yours to own and yours alone. And if your coach tried to force you into a box that didn't work, if your coach tried to shovel blame and shame on you for the real struggles that you were trying to navigate while you just needed a hand reached out to you, that is on them. And my one final ask is that you do not let that stop you forever from reaching out again for help. Because I promise you, while there are assholes out there, I believe there are more good and capable people out there who want to and can help. If you're ready now, reach out to someone. It could be me and my team. It doesn't have to be. If you're not ready, that's okay too. Just give yourself the grace and the permission to walk through that door and reach out your hand one more time. Not even one more time. Reach it out, reach out again, walk through again. When somebody shows you that they're worthy of that trust. Keep going, my friends. You are not done yet. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of Unbreakable with me, your host, Jared Maynard. If you found what we talked about today to be useful, if it served you, please consider leaving a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts. Hit that follow or subscribe button to keep up with the show. And if you are a coach or clinician, if you're running on MT, you're giving everything to everybody else, you are exactly who I built Unbreakable Strength to serve. The link to Book a Call with Me is in the show notes. I'd love to hear where you are and see how we can help you get where you want to go. Go check that link out in the show notes, as well as the links to a few other goodies. You can follow me on socials. And until next time, my friend, you're not done yet.