I want to connect you to information you can trust, and I don’t want to be limited by social media. From now on, it’ll be called “Connection of the Week”. I’ll connect you to people, books, products, documentaries, social media post…the list can on and on ?
I have a good one for today!
I want to tell you about my friend, Diana Rodgers.
Corrupt corporations, big pharma, and factory farming have left my clients confused and misguided. They’re scared to eat fat and meat, they don’t know the impact of where their food comes from, and they’re left with little to no results.
Diana’s work has been a lifesaver because she is not afraid to speak up to these misleading ideas.
“A Vegan diet will save all the animals”
Lie. There’s blood on all of our plates. Diana wrote an article on that:
I could keep going but I think that gives you an idea of what her work entails.
Here’s the best part ->
She is making her own documentary!
Kale vs. Cow
This is where we all must help spread the word. Start educating your clients because THIS IS IMPORTANT.
This documentary is going up against factory farming and promoting sustainably raised cattle. It’s busting all the myth and misconceptions that the population is fed about consuming and raising animals. This is where meat eaters and non-meat eaters need to stop fighting each other and help promote sustainability and end factory farming, the true enemy.
To learn more about Diana’s work and her documentary check out her website Sustainable Dish, and follow her on social media.
“If your client’s training session looks like a rehab session, it’s no longer training” – the internet
Let’s give that quote a little bit of context.
The goal of training is to overstress the client to drive an adaptive change. With rehab, you are trying to apply the minimal effective dose that creates an adaptive change yet protects the client from digging a deeper hole.
If all your sessions are too rehabby, then your clients will have a tough time reaching their fitness goals. However, there are certain types of situations where a rehab-looking training session is warranted.
To learn when it’s okay to breathe for an hour, keep reading ?
Calling a Training Audible
Have you ever scratched a client’s program and let them get after it on a stress-relieving 30/30 track?
To hell with a fancy warm-up that requires a lot of thinking, frontal plane shifting, and rotating. Just lift heavy shit and not think. Blow off some steam.
But is this strategy really stress reliving for someone who has a Hashimoto’s or colitis flare up? Or someone who just tweaked his or her knee? Or a person who works night shift and has slept only 6 hours the last three nights?
When these clients need to relieve stress, getting after it might dig the whole deeper for them.
You try cluster setting back squats when you’re bleeding out of your ass throughout the night. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, google what a colitis flare up entails.
While loading the system is important, it can have negative consequences on these types of clients. For overstressed clients, we must move away from system loading, and move toward restoring people. Provide an environment that promotes healing. An environment that adapts to the stressors at play.
In a perfect world, I would love for weightlifting to be my client’s largest stressor. But in the real world, I’m up against failed rehab, mismanaged autoimmune diseases, and a society that doesn’t respect sleep.
These are the clients who cancel their sessions when shit hits the fan, unless you’re a trainer who can give them a restorative session. Something that will make them feel better and eliminate cancelling as an option.
The gratitude that these people show after an hour of low level activities never gets old. It’s something they’ve never received before. Their previous trainers didn’t know how to bring the intensity down when life forced that as the only option.
So what kind of clients am I talking about?
Clients with an Autoimmune Disease
Autoimmunity is on the rise, and most trainers don’t even know what it is or what a “flare up” means. Healthy people rarely develop Autoimmunity. Though we don’t know exactly why autoimmune diseases occur, they are often associated with a stressed-out body, compromised immune system, and will likely worsen with too intense exercise.
A lot of people with an autoimmune disease deal with chronic fatigue. I never knew what that felt like until last year. I dealt with intense fatigue, talking for longer than a minute wore me out. Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do was train hard.
Clients with Acute Pain
In acute pain, everything becomes sensitive, even the lightest touch. In these situations, a client might put their membership on hold while they wait to heal. You think intense exercise or heavy lifting is on docket?
When in pain, the brain perceives an actual or potential threat to a body tissue. It’s up to you to find activities that are not perceived as a threat.
If you’re a trainer, chances are that exercise is probably a big part of your life and you love it. Unfortunately, many of your clients will not share your passion. Not everyone has a type A personality.
Robert Sapolsky in his book, Why Zebras don’t Get Ulcers, mentions how exercise can be great to relieve stress and boost mood, unless, you don’t enjoy it and see it at a chore/pain.
I work with a lot of people that have never been a huge fan of exercise. So when life gets super stressful, I take them through low level activities and hop them on a bike for some cardiac output.
Clients with outside stressors they can’t control
This one is important!
The last three clients are people you may not choose to work with, and that’s OK. Everyone has their target market. However, we all have clients where life gets in the way.
The client who made me think of writing this article texted me last week, letting me know he had a couple nights of horrible sleep. He was up because of his son waking him up multiple times per night.
Can you imagine? Caring for a son who can’t sleep while you are running on empty, struggling with recurring illness (another issue this client has, then getting up and going through your own stressful life? Do you think maxing out on the bench would be high priority?
I can kick my cat out of my room when he interrupts my sleep. Good luck doing that with a family, busy schedule, and work.
A trainer must be able to step back and look at client’s entire life situation, and make the decision of what session this person needs.
Do they need to go all out? Or do they need to chill the fuck out?
Training should be sustainable. You’re not going to prevent someone from reaching their fitness goals by backing things up on the training floor once a month or so.
In fact, you’ll be providing a better service that takes a multifactorial approach. Training from this lens will allow you to determine when a client can be stressed to maximize results, and when they need a break before going to the next level.
Why do you think people go to things like restorative yoga or meditation? If you could offer restorative sessions along with training, you’ll diversify your skillset in a manner that can only help your training business grow.
So what kind of exercises can you do with these clients? Because breathing exercises doesn’t mean you have to stay on the ground. It just means that you’re not loading the movement as much, you’re really concentrating, and you’re increasing movement variability.
Here are a few examples:
Give these a try with the clients that don’t need added stress in their life. Which will allow them to get back to training at a faster pace.
What if the answer to your client’s problems is good quality sleep?
You’ll never know until they make it priority and stop downplaying it’s role it has on their health, performance and well-being.
Sleep is one of the most overlooked aspects in people’s lives that could be preventing them from reaching their goals, freeing themselves from disease, or living a life worth living.
I think one of the reasons people dismiss sleep is because the lack of education. Not understanding the detrimental health consequences of getting a poor night of sleep every single night.
For this week’s social I picked this extremely well written post on sleep by Justin Moore.
If your clients were aware of this information, they might start thinking about making it a priority, and their life could potentially change.
Justin’s post was too long to take a picture of so here it is:
“It’s really interesting to have a young puppy and watch his day to day behavior, especially when it comes to sleep.
He sleeps when he wants, where he wants, and for however long he wants.
He’ll sleep for 6-8 hours a night and then nap multiple times a day, sometimes for short spurts, sometimes for hours on end.
He tends to nap the most after walks or after social experiences playing with other dogs or meeting new people. This is certainly not by accident as sleep is the time when we process, consolidate, and store new memories and experiences, something that a young organism has to do quite frequently.
The fact that he naps so much also doesn’t have anything to do with him having nothing better to do. Sometimes he’ll fall asleep sitting up or pass out even when someone is home and offering to take him outside, which is probably his favorite thing ever.
To put it simply: it is clear that left to their own devices, animals will sleep quite often and very regularly, throwing a serious wrench into the notion that we’re only meant to sleep at night, or even more ridiculous, that we don’t need much sleep to function.
Watching his behavior, it becomes even more clear to me what an incredible mismatch humans have created between our physiology and our behavior.
Drago never fights sleep. He doesn’t seem bothered by the idea that he might be missing out on something while he sleeps. I’ve never seen him take stimulants to stay up later, pull all nighters for no apparent reason, or tell any of his friends that they’re lazy for going to sleep earlier or taking naps in the middle of the afternoon.
Nature has never faced the problem that humans have created: we have a large and highly-influential cortex that has allowed us to override our evolutionarily-selected need for sleep, and even convince society as a whole that sleep is a waste of our lives and a behavior demonstrated by those that are too lazy to work.
In fairness, Drago is not going to be writing symphonies, sending other dogs into space, running billion dollar enterprises, or solving the mystery of life itself.
But, we can probably take a lesson from him, and recognize that across the animal kingdom sleep has survived millions of years of evolutionary selection and is a critical pillar of health, wellness, and performance. We need to stop treating it as an afterthought, a nuisance, and a sign of laziness.
We need to appreciate that sleep impacts:
1. Hormones like testosterone and growth hormone — people have looked for performance enhancing supplements to boost levels of these hormones forever. Instead of trying to boost these hormones with supplementation, go to sleep, it’s a critical period for both of them.
In fact, men who sleep 5-6 hours per night have testosterone levels of someone 10 years older than them (Matthew Walker).
2. Muscle growth & tissue repair — sleep is the most potent recovery tool there is for athletes and weekend warriors who want to get bigger and stronger alike.
3. Appetite & the types of foods you decide to eat — deprivation leads to greater consumption of sugary, carb-rich foods. Trying to lose weight and adopt good eating habits? Without sleep you’re screwed.
4. Blood-glucose regulation — healthy people show pre-diabetic blood-glucose regulation after 5 nights of restricted sleep.
5. Immune function — 70% reduction in immune cells that specialize in killing cancer cells after ONE NIGHT of sleep loss.
6. Stress & inflammation – want to up-regulate your stress response and live in a chronically sympathetic and inflamed state? Deprive yourself of sleep. Bad, bad news.
7. Learning, memory, skill retention, & cognition — research shows if you don’t sleep after learning new information or a new skill, you will show no improvement in the skill or retention of the information over baseline when retested. Without sleep, your brain cannot put new memories away for long-term storage.
8. Creativity & Problem Solving — research has also shown that a night of sleep allows people to gain insight into the most efficient way to solve a problem that they were never told was there. It seems that during sleep the brain is actively going through information, searching for patterns, and analyzing it from new perspectives. Those who are sleep deprived are unable to detect the trick to solving the problem that those who were allowed to sleep figured out.
9. Time to exhaustion — your conditioning may get up to 30% worse after one night of restricted sleep.
10. Attention & responsiveness — reflexes and reaction times very quickly become that of someone who is intoxicated in the face of sleep deprivation or sleep restriction.
11. Brain health — sleep is when your brain clears out toxins that are implicated in devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s. In fact, long-term sleep restriction is beginning to be seen as a major risk factor for developing this increasingly common disease.
The list goes on and on. Lets change the paradigm and look at sleep as the vital part of life that it is. Your athletic performance, fitness and body composition goals, ability to produce quality work, capacity to learn and make new memories, and long-term health are all dependent on the quantity AND quality of your sleep.”
For more awesome info, follow Justin on social media!
Ryan Patrick owns a successful gym, coaches clients throughout the day, is a competitive powerlifter, and has FIVE kids!
In a year he went from sitting a wheelchair with a broken tibia to setting PR’s in his Squat and Deadlift.
You could say the man knows what to do to stay in the game.
Because that’s what it’s all about, right? What will it take for you to be able to do this for a really long time?
Even if you don’t want to compete. If you or your clients want to be strong AF and want to get serious about lifting, how are you going to make that happen? How are you going to make sure that the balance between Health and Performance doesn’t shoot so far into the performance side that it actually takes you or your client out the game.
Putting an emphasis on Aerobic Fitness can sometimes be a low priority in a powerlifters programming.
But if you’re serious about powerlifting, you might want to let it wiggle itself into your or your client’s programming.
In the following video, Ryan explains why it’s important and he also shows you how you can start building an aerobic base 🙂
And not only did Ryan film this video, he also has shared multiple FREE programs on his facebook and instagram!
He is really hooking you all up with all that content, go follow him to get all the explanations and videos that come along with the free templates 🙂
If you want more, check out his website, I think you’ll really like it -> coachryanpatrick.com
Now go work on your heart health and build a conditioning base.
