Practical Biometrics for Coaches and Clients

just to touch on some of those metrics that you've mentioned, maybe for people listening from a starting point, what ones do you think are easy, kind of non-invasive that pretty much anyone can be collecting that is going to give them useful information? And then maybe beyond that, what are some extra things that they should consider if they want to go a bit beyond and track some of the things that you might track with clients? Okay. Probably the easiest and most accessible for most people. If you're, if you're, if you have the money to train with somebody, you probably have a smartphone, right? I know people who are homeless with smartphones, right? So you can use there's, you can use the Argus app to take your heart rate. You can use a iFleet. You can use HRV for training. There's a ton of different ones you can use where you just put your finger against the camera and it'll give you an HRV and it'll give you your heart rate. So that's the easiest. If, if the client's coming to me from a doctor and they've got high blood pressure, I'm probably going to tell them to buy a blood pressure cuff, you know, but not everybody's going to spend seven or 80 bucks for that. So if not, I'd send them to the grocery store to one of those machines. And I haven't taken thing there for free or whatever, just so we have a baseline. If they don't get it fine. Um, but if I can get heart rate and HRV, that's going to give me a lot of data, right? Um, some of the extra stuff, a glucometer, I try to get everybody to get a glucometer just so they start understanding fasting blood sugar and postprandial. So we'll have them take their blood sugar right when they wake up for a few mornings, like four or five mornings. So what's the trend? Okay, let's modify your diet. Let's do the diet for three weeks and let's take it again for three or four days and let's see how that diet's affected you. Um, if they're doing a ketogenic diet, which I, I start a lot of people off with very low carb diets for three weeks and then I start ramping the carbs up to their tolerance. So we can do that with a ketometer, freestyle Libra, freestyle Optium. We'll do that. If the client really wants to be analytical, we get them a continuous blood glucose device. So the Freestyle Libre, they put an implant in the back of their arm. I've had very few people that are willing to do that. I think it should be mandatory for all trainers to do that for three or four months. So they understand that'll give them a deeper understanding of how food affects them. And then that they can use that knowledge to then look at their clients and say, how do I feel like this is going to affect them based on the data I used with myself, right? What else do we use? Yeah, other than that, like standard strength stuff, we use modified Cooper's test a lot to see where they are on the aerobic and aerobic spectrum. And then we can modify that through their training. So if they're gen pop, gen poppers is never going to be too aerobic, right? I mean, the aerobic, as my wife would say, is the pathway for life. It's what keeps you alive. If somebody wants to get super aerobically fit, I don't have a problem with that. Now, if it's a power lifter, I got a problem with it. It's an Olympic weight lifter. I got a problem with it, right? If it's a bodybuilder or a fighter, I've got a problem with it because there's certain places we want them. If it's a fighter, we want them to have power endurance. It doesn't, doesn't make any sense if you're, you can last five rounds, but you hit like a five-year-old, right? Um, unless your jujitsu is really good. And that's a whole nother story, but you know, you you get you without getting this data you cannot make a proper program without this You can make a program that probably work for most people but what about when it doesn work And is it working the best for your client Personal trainers get paid a lot of money And so professional personal training you should take it professionally, which means that I should be doing everything I can to get my client the best possible results and drive them to the best possible health they can be. Yeah. I liked that you mentioned a few moments ago that you look to see if they're a downward trend in some of these markers after like say five or six continuous days because i think the big issue a lot of time when people try and start to include more data to make decisions is they jump too early at the first sign of something flickering like one day something their hrv is lower or their resting heart rate goes up after one day or they had a poor workout and that one workout means oh i need a deload and then they deload for a week based off the back of that and make snap decisions too early. So is that that decision to wait that certain number of days? Is that a function of the fluctuations you see in some of these numbers? Yeah, I mean, they can fluctuate a lot. But also, it's how do I know when I'm overreaching? Like the whole purpose of getting stronger and getting bigger is you have to go into an overreaching phase, right? So you expect to get weaker, you expect for your heart rate to go up, you expect for blood pressure, you expect these numbers to change, that's a good sign that your body is reaching a state of under recovery. But you don't want to pull the trigger too early because you could be having the best workouts of your life during that phase. But if it's trending and trending, and it keeps going down, keeps going down, yeah, man, my numbers have been pretty shady for a week, I probably need to recover my sleep. Now I'm looking at subjective measures like, Oh, man, I'm not sleeping. Well, I'm waking up to pee a lot at night, my hunger is going away. I don't really feel like training. okay this is your body telling you something this is that oil lights come on in your car it's now time to repair the oil light and then go right back into training again and i like the biometrics because you can't really fake them the number's the number right and if you take you know you can take three measurements kind of do the average of everything to try to make sure it's consistent but it gives you it allows you a biological quantifiable measurement of where your body's going. Right. And you're right. A lot of the trainers, when I teach them this stuff, they get stuck on these numbers and they're like, Oh, if I'm not hitting my numbers, Oh, that's not good. Look, you, you put them to the numbers where they feel the best. You make sure the numbers go the wrong direction for a period of time. And then you bring the numbers back up using recovery methods. Right.