Health Over Performance and 'Prepping the Prep'

The first 20 years of my career was based on basically how to train pro athletes and how to train collegiate athletes and things like that And I didn train a lot of them because the area I was in, I basically only trained general population, maybe a couple of pro golfers, some pitchers and things like that. And when I got actually traveling over the world for the other company, I found that everyone's learning how to train pro athletes, but nobody knows how to train Mary Muffintop. They're clueless. They try to fit them into training like really intensely and sprints and all this, and they're not taking care of their health. So when I started Muscle Nerds, I said, we want to do health over performance because everyone else is doing performance, but they're not doing the health aspect. So you end up getting, even the coaches that we specialize in, they come to us after they've been training for a long time and they look fantastic on the outside, but they have stage one, stage two hypertension. They've got a waking and resting heart rate of, you know, in the nineties, their heart rate variability has crashed. They're stressed out, their hair's falling out, their low testosterone, low thyroid, but they look amazing, but they come to us because they don't feel amazing. And then when we look at things like their organic gases testing, we look at their bloods, they're, they're fantastic on the outside. And they look like a 700 year old person on the inside. They literally 24 year old looks like He's got one foot in the grave. And I said, man, this stuff's got to stop. And you expect that when people are competing. But a lot of these guys aren't competing. There's nothing healthy about competition. If you do a bodybuilding show, especially at a high level, there's going to be a bit of unhealthiness that you have to do to win. But the entire year doesn't have to be like that. And then they start training general population people, and they start using those techniques. And, you know, chronically under eating and leading to binging and purging and really poor relationships with foods. And we end up getting the people after they've really messed themselves up, and now they have to unfuck themselves. And the majority of the industry, especially in general population, they come from a background of Flex Magazine, muscle and fitness, training the pros. This is how the pros train. So Joe Average needs to train like that, and they don't. And the majority of your clients that come to you in the general population, they don't want to squat 200 kilos. They couldn't care less. It's not going to help them walk up and downstairs, play with their kids. They want to be more mobile. They want to live without pain. They want to sleep better, poop better, think better. They want better moods, better relationships. And most of them don't even want to be shredded. The majority of our industry, especially the physique athletes, seem to think that when a guy comes to you, he wants to be dick-skin shredded. But at the end of the day, he probably just wants to be unfat. And those are two different things. Most guys want to look down and see their feet. And it's all the same process physiologically, but there's different extremes that you go to. And our industry is a big industry of extremes. You go to these guys, they go, it's all weightlifting, fuck cardio. Then you've got the guys that say, oh, low carb is the way to go, no, high carb is the way to go. And at the end of the day, you have to find out what works for each individual client. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I used keto a few years ago, and it worked really well for me. Whereas Tony, when she used keto, metabolic crash, energy just absolutely dives, and she ends up not being able to try it. So, you know, and this is the thing we talk a lot about the microbiome. And in fact, we're doing a podcast with, we're invited onto another podcast with some trainers, really, really good blokes. And we were talking about the importance of looking at people as an individual. And you've got your genetic polymorphisms, which everyone's different with that. The makeup is different. Your gut's different. There's so many things. We are individuals. And if you just try and use one size fits all, you're not going to get the results. One of the questions I did have, and I'm going to throw it over to Matt and then you guys are going to talk on a whole new high science level. But one of the questions I want to ask, Luke, is without naming names of companies, what are the things that frustrate you most about the industry, the perception or the practices that a lot of personal trainers or master coaches are doing out there that is really upsetting you in terms of its wrong information being perpetuated?