Tracking Progress Beyond Body Fat Percentage

Is there anything else that you look at for anybody here that's important before you start to ramp things up? It just depends on how crazy they want to get. Obviously, you can run labs every quarter, every half a year. But then you have to have somebody who can interpret the labs because your doctor is not going to be able to interpret them correctly with an athlete, right? And then most trainers have no idea what they're doing when they're interpreting labs, or they've taken a course from another trainer and they're looking at single markers instead of looking at them all together. So that's not a practical thing to do, even though if you know how to read lives correctly, it's a good thing to do. Blood glucose can be a good one, but then it depends on if your client, clients are scared of needles, so they're not going to finger prick themselves and there's a pain involved. then that's another hassle. We look at our objective scores would be resting heart rate and blood pressure, HRV, if you can get it. And if we can keep like in context of what it does and doesn't mean, those are all really good. Obviously weight is definitely a marker, right? Are you gaining too quickly? And then circumference measures are a good one. Body fat measurements can be a good one, but then they can be variable too. It depends on what you use. What I'll use with clients when I'm back home in Brisbane, we have a, we have access to a deck. So that's not too far away, but we almost never put them on that. We have an in-body, but in-body is not that accurate either. But what I like to do is try to take a few different ones. So I'll look at their pictures. I'll look at their height and weight. I'll do a, I have an ultrasound machine that I'll use. I've got my calipers. I have my in-body and I'll do circumference measures, do a Navy body fat test. And then what I'll do is I'll track that over time and see what they all say and based on how their pictures look. And so I'll use that, but I won't really talk to them that much about body fat percentage because it doesn't matter. You either look good or you don't. You either like the way you look, you don't. Your body fat percentage doesn't really matter all that much because you can have people like for me, you can have people with different size fat cells. So depending on what's inside of those fat cells, you can have people that need to be leaner to look as lean as somebody with smaller fat cells. So generally like younger guys have very small fat cells most of the time, so they don't have to be that lean to look lean. Usually the older you get, things start to change and you have to be

a little bit leaner to look the same lean as you did 10, 20 years ago, right? So pictures can be good, but you also have to keep that in context. And then you also have water retention. If people are, I, when I got here, the first thing I did was I went all to, I woke up the next day. I went from looking like I was 12% to looking like I was 20% and it was just water. So two days of sweating, working out and all that. And now I look like I did when I first got here. So you have to keep all this stuff in context because data is good, but data can also drive you absolutely insane if you don't keep a control on it. And then subjective markers are good too. So you'd never want subjective metrics to override objective metrics. You want to pair them together and just look at trends. So how do you feel like you slept? Did you wake up well rested? Are you falling asleep in the middle of the day? Are you falling asleep easily at night? That's a good one. Are you recovering? How's your DOMS? Are you progressing in the weight room? Are you adding another rep? Are you adding a little bit more weight? Looking at where you started a phase versus six weeks later, were you into the phase? Did you gain strength? Did you lose strength? These are all stuff that we look at. So you have to look at them in like a matrix format. Right. Yeah. Any one metric by itself was probably not giving you the full picture, but taking multiple ones. But even within that, each one's going to have potential errors, right? The body fat one's the one that I see a lot of times too, where, okay, I want to get to this percent body fat. And it's, ah, I'm just not a fan of having somebody try to get to a certain body fat percentage. Like you said, the pictures are going to be the way to go there. Do you feel like you look good? Do you look lean? That's the most important part there. And then even with the labs too, like you said, those are good metrics, but we need somebody that understands how to interpret those. If you really want to get a good picture on those. That's right. And the thing with the body fat percentage too, is people are only obsessed about body fat percentage because people talk about body fat percentage. If you never bring that up, they don't give a shit. It's okay. Let's take a picture. Do you like what not yet? Okay. Let's lean out a little bit more. Let's add a little bit more muscle because that's, you're not looking, you're not really looking for a number. You're looking for a look, right? So it's in people don't understand. And even coaches don't understand true body fat percentage. If you haven't, if you haven't been lean enough to have your ass look like a Walnut, you probably have a really bad misunderstanding of what true body fat levels look like at each position. Cause you'll get every trainer says he's 12% and they're like 20% because they're using, because they're using like a Jackson Pollock seven site and they're using crappy calipers and they don't have good technical skill with how they're doing that. So you got to understand, even in a skilled person, body calipers can be off by plus minus four to 6%. So again, it's not a bad thing to have, but you got to keep in mind, there's a lot of variability in it. I, if I'm going to do calipers, what I'm looking at is a sum of a certain number of sites. So I'll look at like 10 sites, 12 sites. I'll do it. I'll add up the numbers. Let's say it's two millimeters. I'm like, okay, if you want to be, you want to be Dick skin lean, that's going to have to be somewhere around like 65 millimeters or less. Right. So our goal is to go from two 50 to, and if we're losing five to 10 millimeters a week, we're pretty happy with that. That's good, consistent. That's good, consistent progress. And to what I like about that too, you mentioned like the, the body fat number, like you said, nobody cares about it, but it's just because people talk about it. It also goes back to, you talk about these subjective measures too. Like, how are you feeling? Like some people,