5 Truths from 45 Hours of Coaching in 4 Days

Multiply this by 50 weeks and 20 years. There were years where I worked all 52 weeks. And there were many weeks in there where I had 55-65 appointments PLUS another 20-50 hours of management time. But I’ve also had a few reserved years where I refuse to take more than 35 appointments in a week, and where we had multiple trips or went to Greece for 3 weeks. All the same, when you add in my studies, my daily medical and scientific journal reading, my own workouts, it is A LOT of deep deep knowledge, wisdom, and experience. I conservatively place it over 70,000 hours. It could be closer to 85.

In that time I’ve discovered really wild and unexpected troubleshooting, difficult outlier challenges, rare conditions, and many insights which just cannot exist within any lesser amount of experience. There are conditions and client challenges I did not encounter in my first 8 years which I’ve many times now encountered in the past 12. And I managed gyms with thousands of members in my first 8 years in this profession.

So it gives me some worry. It gives me some worry because there are now a lot of really influential people online with far less experience than I had in my first 10 years, far less even than I had in my first 5 years, or even 2, less perhaps than I had logged as a kid when I was obsessed with reading nutrition science and exercise science textbooks.

And these are the voices setting the tone out in the public, out in the ether, out in parlance.

It’s not all bad necessarily. It’s even sometimes flattering to see a fitness trend nowadays which I had pioneered a decade or 2 prior. Whole franchises, companies and cultural movements today are built atop metabolic experiments I ran 10, 20, 30 years ago. But it’s also disappointing to see such simpleton explanations trending, such bad science trending, such bold and wrong advice trending, such entrenched insistence that one single cult is the only way.

I don’t have the will to combat it. I am busy being a real business owner with a real business and a real storefront in the real world. So I’m not wasting effort on the optics of marketing and “looking” like a trendy online personality. But I will take the time from time to time to post and share something which I hope impacts even one person or corrects one of the many pieces of popular and terrible advice floating around. Today, it’s simply this:

1.) be honest
2.) track
3.) go slow
4.) persist
5.) progress

And if I had to add a 6th, it would be to remind yourself that the distance between where you are and where you want to be is FINITE and involves ACTION which is broken down into measurable objective steps. Health and fitness or careers and business aren’t magic. They are not supernatural. Are there some tricks? Sure. Are there intense techniques? Sure. I have many. I share quite a few. But categorically NO ONE is going to shake those 5 truths.

I saw it in this week. I saw it in the past few decades. To get anywhere worth going, we need to be honest with ourselves. Chances are high that when we are unsure why we aren’t more successful or further along or closer to goals, the first area we must examine is our personal honesty. Then, we need to be tracking what we actually do and measuring how it will or won’t produce the desired outcome (honesty, too, will be paramount here). Implementing productive steps need to be slow. We can always accelerate if we have good footing. But we sometimes can’t even reclaim where we were if we go too fast, get hurt, or burn out. If an effort works, it does not magically keep working. Not to be too circular, but we have to keep working at what works for it to keep working. I suspect honesty and persistence together may do more than the other three combined.

As we grow, we earn more growth. With each step, we can tolerate more. And with each step, the distance to the goal is closed. With each step, the distant is closer. And soon, the unknown is the known, the unbelievable is reached, the seemingly-unattainable is attained.