Evidence-Based vs. Evidence-Informed Coaching

Oh, man. It's so hard for me to talk about myself. I've always been the kind of guy that just pushes it off. so I don't know how to I don't know how to answer the awesome thing um yeah look uh I've just I've been I'm an educator I still train people I'm probably one of the few educators in the business who still actively train people most of them don't and I think that's a I think it's a big mistake I think you still have to maintain a roster of at least a handful of clients because that's where you test your theories out that's where you see things that's where you sharpen your sword so I guess business owner with my wife. I'm a science nerd. I just love fitness and health and training, physiology. And I love the biochemistry and the physiology, not just the training aspect. I got into it as a kid for the training. And over the years, I got into it at a weird time. This is going way back in the 80s, where we didn't have the internet. So we had to figure everything out through books or like somebody's brother's uncle's trainer would tell you some stuff you know and you would just pick up stuff as you went and and studying physical culture history it's a completely different world to now where you can just get all the information at the at the touch of a finger but the problem is now you don't know like there's so much information what information is good and what information is is not good what you know so it's hard to discern with that. So that's where I come in with the educational side of the business is I read research, I look at that, and I compare it to what I found with my experience with the experience of my colleagues with the experience of my coaches and my clients. And I funnel down the things that people really need to know. And I try to disseminate what is the actual truth of what's going to get things done. Because for a long time, we've had this evidence based crowd who only look at, they only look at peer reviewed research and peer reviewed research is really important, but we also have to understand that it's limited. They, when you do a research paper, they're looking at one or two different things. They're using a low subject pool. They're using not very long time span. Like it's not uncommon. A long study for what we do is, is 12 of 16 weeks, and that's not really long enough to see anything. And usually like 13 subjects, seven in the experimental, six in the control. So while research is important, there's a lot of limitations on that. And so it's hard for me to call that like evidence, where a lot of the evidence comes from being in the gym, under the bar, training people who are under the bar, and then making sure you take meticulous notes and data. So I like to, I try to compare both of them. And probably my favorite quote is by Dr. Lauren Bannock. Don be evidence be evidence informed And I think that to kind of whittle that down a little bit more evidence comes from a lot of different places You don have to be a scientist in a lab coat in a million lab to get evidence You get evidence every day with the clients that you train. And so I try to teach coaches, this is what I found over the last 30 years. This is what the science says or the formal science. where can that stuff meet in the middle because both sides are equally as important so yeah i guess that's i guess that's what makes me awesome is i kind of stay in between and i make my own decisions not just based on what research says but on what i see in the research and then weighing that against what i see in actual practice and being able to take really sciencey mumbo jumbo stuff and water it down enough to where people can understand it that don't have a solid science background, but don't water it down so much that it loses its value. I agree. That's definitely what makes you awesome. For one, you are awesome. Otherwise, you wouldn't be. Thank you. That's my podcast. Number two, I thought that that was exactly what made you stand out to me because, dear listeners, I got to meet Luke somewhat recently at the end of August. I went to a seminar that he hosted with his company, and I was absolutely so impressed with not just the amount of knowledge that you have, Luke, which is clearly the fruit of decades in the fitness industry, but the way that you can deliver that in a way that even people who are not at your level, because I don't think there are many people at your level, can understand. So that's why I wanted to have you here today, because my listeners, there may be some coaches among them but a lot of them are my clients so members of the general population and i want them to have access to somebody who can do that who can educate and help them make sense of what evidence we do have with the amount of experience in practice that you have in a way that they can easily understand and apply to their lives so to get into the first question then during the the seminar that I just mentioned, you used this quote, you brought up this quote that I mentioned earlier, it's just a calorie deficit. And as far as I can remember, you mentioned that it is technically correct, but it's also overtly simplistic. And I think that's a great place to start with my questions. And my first one would be, why do you think that?