Psychological Triggers in Exercise Selection

and the thing is and i know her very well and she's she's had her own her own journey the last few years uh basically hitting the bottom and having to having to say okay i have to address this stuff because it's not going to go away if i don't um and i I think more people need to be honest having come to the food stock with themselves that they probably need to get some type of help. And, you know, it can be crazy. I was talking to another trainer about this this morning. Even down to things like, you know, we've been talking a lot about food, but what about exercise selection? Like if I get a client who has hurt themselves squatting a number of times, I may think that squatting is a great exercise, but the minute they see squats in the program, their brain switches from being safe to feeling threatened. They mount a massive sympathetic response. Their thinking brain goes out the window. The minute they put that bar on their back, their odds of getting hurt were probably close to 100% because now the motor pattern's screwed up. They're scared shitless of the weight. They're scared shitless of the bar. And I've gone through that myself with squatting where I did some stupid shit, hurt my back really bad, and I've had to learn how to re-squat again without being scared shitless of squatting. And so, you know, my solution with that was slower tempo training, changing what was on my back so I don't squat with a straight bar anymore. I only squat with a safety squat bar. Small changes like that can trick your brain into not being scared of it anymore while you work on now re-solidifying how you move and how the weight feels to you. So it can become exercise. can be really good or it can drive somebody's brain to a negative state if you look at food same thing if if you were raised and your mom constantly told you that you're eating so much you know in a lot of cases your perception is your reality and so a lot of a lot of women become bulimic or anorexic because their mom said some dumb shit to them or their dad thought it'd be funny to call them a little fatty um and they didn't realize like the dad thought that that was funny um and he was joking but to the kid they they didn't find that very funny and it destroys their self-confidence and then they carry that through their adulthood yeah parents and fucking PE teachers well they always they're ruining people's lives i swear if you're not if you're not athletically gifted they give you a hard time yeah man like i said i'm 42 now so i grew up in the state where you know in texas where high school football is everything like we start training weight training for football when we were like seven or eight years old and everything about Friday night lights and your coaches are very very hard on you And I grew up where we still had corporal punishment, so if you got in trouble, you got paddled. Like, I think we were the last class of 1996 that they outlawed that, but fuck, I can remember, I probably got smacked 200 or 300 times just in one year. Like, and we now know that that's probably not a great idea. but you know then the coaches were like super hard they came from a whole different generation and they were like you either toughen up or get the fuck out of here type of thing so they would you know they would belittle you and undermine you and do all sorts of shit thinking that that was going to make you tougher but and it did make some of us tougher but some of them it caused all kinds of issues later for other people yeah it makes for good netflix shows but it's going to cause a lot of fucking problems later in life. That's like even some people, some people respond good to, you know, fucking played short last week, you need to pick it up. But other people, that's going to ruin their confidence, whether that's in sports or it's in the classroom, it doesn't even matter. It's going to cause a lot of problems later on in life. And we're programmed for it, right? We're programmed. Like people are programmed to not feel good about themselves, to sell them more shit they don't need. Like, especially women. We're looking at Hollywood, man. I remember I was, I did stunts in the movie Varsity Blues, and I had become fairly good friends with some of the actors there. And one of them was Ron Lester. He was the guy that really big, really, really morbidly overweight guy. And a few years ago before he passed away, he had lost all the weight, tremendous amount of weight. No one would hire him for movies anymore because his whole identity surrounded about being the 425 pound fat guy. and it ended up screwing with his head man and i can't remember if he told himself what happened but the uh it's it's the culture were brought up and and really telling people to you know shoot for a shoot for a body and a physique and a mentality that's just not attainable for a lot of people and you know telling people that you know you need to be stronger you need to be fitter you need to be this and a lot of times the personal training industry they people tend to glorify things like being really strong like how fucking strong does joe dingleberry from next door need to be like um you know he you get clients to come in and joe might just want to look down and see his dick for the first time in 20 years like he doesn't care about squatting 300 kilos and then you make him do all this shit that's not conducive to what he wants to do and flipping tires and all with the dumb shit that people flipping tires and hitting tires with sledgehammers like what fuck are you training people for yeah they just say i think they're just seeing that on the youtube motivation all that kind of stuff anyway but one of the things one of the reasons why i love listening to luke and all his lectures and courses is okay i think one of the good and bad things like we talked about is today people are gaining more knowledge about calories in calories out but then again like we talked about although it's simple in theory in practice there's so much that feeds into that your mechanisms physiology psychology all this kind of stuff so then when people aren't um maybe that that outlier where you're not losing weight we are doing everything they think well i'm just fucked like what am i going to do now i think that's what luke is is educating coaches and hopefully they can um educate their clients as well but that's that's kind of a big issue now as well isn't it with the calories in calories out model yeah and you know the thing is it's trainers need to understand most trainers don't know shit about nutrition because they just don't they don't prioritize their continuing education and they also don't understand a lot of the physiology behind what happens when you train with weights and if you don't, I really like Stephen Covey's quote, seek first to understand and be understood. Your client cannot understand shit that you don't understand yourself. So this is one of the, one of the battles I have with a lot of my clients here at, at our gym is that they're used to losing tremendous amount of weight, you know, starving themselves doing boot camps and then the weight coming back on. So I'm like, okay, you know, if you want to keep doing it that way, you're just, you're going to keep getting the same result that you have been. Let's play the long game. Let's build strength and muscle. Let's put the focus on performance metrics. So we're going to focus on how strong you're getting. We're not going to focus on your scale weight because when I, when I take a brand new client and I tell them that even if we don't pump their calories, if I take a girl who's eating a thousand calories, like, okay, we're going to work on 1200 calories. We're going to try to nail that. Most of them are severely under reading protein. so it pretty much on average about 60 grams of protein a day if they lucky well i pump them up to 120 to 180 grams of protein So if I give them some weight training which is going to stimulate an anabolic response and then I give them sufficient amounts of protein, they might not lose any weight for the first three or four months unless they're doing excessive amounts of cardio, which we don't recommend. For a lot of them, we have to constantly pump them up. Now that you're actually training with weights correctly and you're eating a protein, your scale weight's not going to go down, but you're going to get smaller. So we're using a lot. I don't put people on the scale here because it demotivates them. It demoralizes them. But we might do circumference measures and things like that. So that way they can see the circumference measures going down to their waist or their head. Because, I mean, the thing is, like, people self-identify with the scale. And so if I ask a lady, you know, how much do you think you weigh? I don't, I don't, it doesn't have to be perfect. I just need to know so I can calculate your calories and things like that. A lot of them will say they haven't been on the scale in like a year and they remember being 70 kilos and I'm looking at them going, oh, there's no way you're less than 80. So if I put them on the scale, that's immediately going to screw their head. So we don't even put anybody on the scale until they're ready for it. Because if they get on the scale, they're going to want to slash the calories. And most of them aren't eating enough, you know, daily, you know, they're, they're binging and purging but what they're doing is they're they're under eating and over exercising until they binge and they're going they're not sticking their fingers down and throwing up but it's still a bulimic style of thing it's just a long-term like a global bulimia type of thing so yeah we have to we talked to them about the realistics of the physiology that when you train and you provide an anabolic response it is most more like more than likely you're going to put on muscle so fast you're not going to see a lot of skill change and as you put that muscle on and as you do hypertrophy training you're going to be storing more glycogen and that glycogen is going to store water and that's going to bring sodium in with it too so you're going to look bigger and fuller and your weight's probably not going to move that much right so we try to take a lot of their ideas and we take it away from food we take it away from the focus being on the calories and we focus more on the macros. If they're tracking their macros, the calories will naturally fall into place and we prioritize protein and then we look at fat and carbs as if you want the simplest solution, you can have fat or carbs, it doesn't really matter as long as you tell me what you like to eat. I prefer to put people on a lower carbohydrate diet initially than ramping carbs up over time as difficult as possible because now they can store glycogen more effectively. right um