 Fitness influencers. They can either help you or hurt you. Here are five signs that your favorite fitness influencer is full of crap. This is going to be a fun one. How? Just thinking back, we've been doing this for a long time. So I've been now, uh, gosh, is it possible not to offend people? I know. I know. Oh, no, I've been in the space professionally for over two and a half decades, right? And all of us have been into the space, at least on our own, for longer than that. And it has changed radically when I look at it now versus, uh, when we first became trainers, like, like when we were first trainers, fitness information, it wasn't easily accessible. It was magazines, there used to be barriers to entry. Yes. Yes. Yes. That was a thing. Yeah. It was all, I got all my information for magazines and certifications and then experience. There wasn't this ability to just, to just hear all kinds of different people presenting and opinions and stuff like that. It was, it was much more, much more challenging. Sign number one, your trainer wears track suits and soccer shoes. He never played soccer. Whatever dude. I said to add on. Can't think of a, I just had to add to your list a little bit. He don't know us first. I'm next. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Second sign. He wears a flannel. He wears a flannel. It's not even cold. All right. Yeah. Today's giveaway on YouTube is Maps Aesthetic. To enter to win, leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it, subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. We'll let you know in the comment section if you win. Also this month's workout program sale is Maps Anabolic 50% off and Maps Anabolic Advanced also 50% off. If you're interested, click on the link at the top of the description below. All right. Back to the show. Do you guys think it's better or worse these days for a consumer who's looking for good for, who's looking for fitness and health information? So I wrestle with this. I go back and forth on my opinion on this. I think that there's way more options, which generally that means better for the consumer. Right. Yeah. Like in any other market. Like the best idea will rise. Right. Right. So and I think that's still somewhat rains true that over time, even with all these options, the cream will rise to the top and that tip and then it'll be competitive because there's so many. So for the end consumer, that normally means better coaches, better trainers, better prices. But because it's so competitive and with social media, it has expanded the reach of crappy trainers. Yeah. I don't know if the immediate right now is so much better. I think it's worse right now. So I've been thinking about this and I think that there's a certain type of consumer that has benefited from new media and it's the consumer that likes to go out, likes to educate themselves, compare information and kind of study and figure things out. I think that consumer is much better off because there's so much information that you can learn from and you can parse things out. If you kind of pay attention and read and listen, then you're able to parse out like what works and what doesn't work. Now the consumer that doesn't do that, the young consumer or the consumer that just wants to act right now, I think is worse off. Like especially young consumers, teenagers, I think. Okay. So that's funny how you say that because I would argue that younger consumers are more privy to how the social media game works than older consumers. The game, yes, but the information, like if you look at fitness. Don't you feel like I like to hear both of you guys' opinions. You both have teenage kids. Aren't they more like, they shop around and they check reviews and they go to Reddit and they go cross-reference things? Maybe you bring up a good point, but at the same time, I feel like we're in a little bit of a bias with that because I'm constantly kind of educating my kids about those signs, those red flags, asking them and prodding who are they following, what kind of information you guys consuming. And then they're kind of teaching their peers, but their peers are like, they're on TikTok listening to these wacky ideas. Because, you know, I just recently was talking to a friend of a friend. I recommended a program. He's about 10 years younger than us, 15 years younger than you guys, 10 years younger than me. And just want to point that out. I don't think I'm five years older than you. It makes you feel better, dude. Yeah, pretty much. No, I think it's two or three. I'm 29, how old are you? Yeah, right, bro. Anyways, what happened with that? So I recommended Map Symmetry to him. And it wasn't long before I got a text back. He said, oh man, you have great reviews. And I'm like, oh, who'd you talk to? And he went to Reddit to go find that out. There's a lot of reviews on there. Yeah, and I just, and so I thought that was really interesting. And I'm like, that's not something I would default to, but it's very smart to do that, right? Where it's like this kind of, it's not, he didn't go to our page. You know what I'm saying? He didn't go to my Instagram or he didn't go to our marketing material that probably was probably one of the most unbiased place they could probably get. It is. Real like feedback from just regular people. It's just that the challenge though is with like kids. My trolls, but. I know me when I was a kid, right? Like you're more likely to listen to the super ripped, exciting, you know, body centric, whatever person. I'm more, if somebody tells me like, this is the secret they don't want you to know. And here's what's, you know, this is the cutting edge, whatever. I would be more like, oh, that person knows what they're talking about. I'm going to go with that. Or they're entertaining or whatever. So that's why I think that they may be more harmed than help. And in the data shows with young kids, especially the body image issues going up, because of the fitness influences of people that present themselves. Yeah, I feel like there's two conversations we're having in this conversation that both are interesting to me, right? And we're obviously just speculating on if it's true or not. Like I don't know who would be more duped. Would a boomer economy, right? Like certain people got like a lot better off. And it's almost like it created a bigger divide between the two. Well, what's interesting is this, because when we were consuming this information as young trainers or even just as teenagers working out, there were arbitrators of information and gatekeepers. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that what you're getting is accurate, because oftentimes the gatekeepers were products, companies that were selling things that were. So the gatekeepers prevented good information or skewed information so that it overvalued. Well, a classic example of that. I mean, at one time, bodybuilding.com was the most, one of the most searched websites in the world. And their model was give out free information and sell that everybody supplements. And so of course, over time, their content is going to steer in the favor of getting you to buy supplements. And so, and that's exactly what kind of happened. I remember reading magazines and the article, they would always put. Same with that. Yeah, there was one magazine, I don't remember the name of it, but I think it was Muscular Development. And they would post, Flex did this too, where they would post studies. But all the studies that they would post. Supported the supplement. It would kind of point to a supplement or something like that. So, okay, so because of that, and we've evolved now to this internet, social media time, it's disrupted all of that. And there's better information that can be found. But then there's more of it. So there's a couple of different ways you can argue this. I think that more customers are hurt today from the bad information, bad trainers that are out there, but in the same breath, more are helped. So you just think there's more consumers overall? Yes, and that would make sense. And it's just, it's pulling. I will say this, what's interesting, over the last 10 years that we've had this podcast, I have seen the information getting presented on social media seem to move more towards what's true and what's not true. Like the average person now will argue basic things that in the past they had no idea over, like calories or macronutrients or strength training even. So it seems like more is better and low barrier is better. But in the middle of that, you as a consumer have to sift through and like, okay, well... I feel like in real time, we've been able to see a lot of these trends and ideas evolve in real time. So we're finally to the point where a lot of them died or rebranded or found something else to glom onto. And so I think that, we didn't even add that on the list of flags, but if you ever see somebody who's constantly had this thing that they're all about keto or they're all about IFIM and they've been jumping on these different ideas and that have, it's just a matter of time before it gets exposed. That's a really good point. That's a red flag. That is a red flag. That's a good point, Justin. That's a good ad. Like their entire persona is based off of fasting or keto. I mean, even carnivore diet is going to come up in that. Or are they on their fifth supplement company that they've worked with now, right? Protein powder or what do I think? I mean, this is something that... So this is six signs. That's a good one. We haven't had that one yet. No, I agree. I do like that. In fact, this is a conversation that, Katrina and I have this a lot because she manages all of our partners and there's times where she's just like, oh, this other partner, they're great. They're this and that. I'm like, I don't care. Like we stood by this brand as a good brand. We wouldn't have partnered with them if we didn't think so, just because someone else is offering more money or better deals or maybe they're a faster growing company. That's great. But it's like, I don't ever want to represent our brand as somebody who like, oh, It just jumps from one thing to the next. It's just jumping from one thing to the next just based off of where they can make more money. And so I think it's a great telltale. It says a lot about integrity. It does. You guys remember when we started the podcast? There were a lot of podcasts with the name Keto in the title because at the time Keto was like this super popular thing. So there were like entire podcasts dedicated to it or Instagram pages or whatever dedicated to it. I think that tends to be a red flag because all these extreme endeavors or ways of eating or whatever, they don't apply. There's so much nuance. They don't apply to everybody. So and they tend to communicate in extremes. You listen to a carnivore quote unquote expert and it's all about how evil fruits and broccoli are. Yeah. Well, that's your, I mean, you have that listed as your third red flag, zero nuance. And I agree with that. That would be considered that. Like I think it's always a red flag if somebody has labeled themself one specific diet. Yeah. What we know about diet is that it's so diverse and not only to the individual but where that individual is currently in their journey even. So it's like you could be, you could, you could argue all day long that this diet is what's best for you. Well, that's best for you at this time in your life. And I bet that even changes over time. Bull testicles are going to get old after a while. Calm down. Gross. But that, but that's a, that's a thing to watch out for, right? Is this person promoting said diet and that's all their hand, their hand, they're all carnivore, they're all keto, they're all vegan. It's just like, and if you are trying to help all people, that's a major red flag. Or if you communicate it as the answer to everybody, or if they answer a question and they don't, they don't say it depends. It depends. Like somebody, a good coach or a good trainer when asked nutrition questions or exercise questions, then of course there's, there's definitely questions where I could say yes or no. But oftentimes the answer is, well, it depends. It depends on your goals. It depends on your fitness history. It depends on your current stress levels. Depends on whether or not you enjoy this or not. It depends on, you know, are you just getting started? Are you being consistent? Did you fall off? Have you worked out before? All of those things will help me give you the best answer. And I've only learned that through experience. I can't tell you how many times. Well, many times. Isn't that, isn't that, isn't that always true? Except for people in mathematics. I know I'm serious. What other subject, let's say you're an expert in anything else in the world where you not, should you not say depends to somebody when you ask a question other than math? I think science and technology can be like that. I mean, we're in science. Even science depends. It depends on a lot of variables. There's a lot of variables that come into play when you're talking about. Oh, I see. Because you need more information. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like math is simple. Yeah, what's one plus one? Right. I don't even ask you a question. I don't even ask you a question about it. It's going to be the same all the time, no matter what. There's no, there is no, but every other field, I feel like is always going to be nuanced. And that's a, that's, that's, I know we're talking about. I would say English really keep changing definitions in terms. When you're working with people, it has to be. I can't, I mean, I was going to say, I can't tell you how many times, I know you guys experienced this too, where you think you know as a trainer, then you run into that client, that's not it. And then you got to go back and be like, I guess that's not everything. And here's what it is. I remember when I had a client who went vegan and got healthier, whereas most of my experience was, veganism didn't do so well for some people. I remember when that slapped me right in the face. I remember when, you know, working with a client, I had them do one exercise I thought was the best thing, it just didn't work for their body. So I switched to another exercise. And I don't remember exactly, I think it was a deadlift in fact, which was one of my favorite exercises. But my point is, is there's always nuance. And if you're trying to communicate to people, and you don't hear that nuance, or you're trying to, you're following an influencer, and you don't hear any nuance. It's all very this or that. And that's it. Then there's probably a red flag. I think too, what makes it more difficult, and what we do, there's times where you actually throw out the nutritional science and biological science out the window, because the behavioral science comes in. It's another factor. Yeah. And so that's what makes this really difficult for the consumer is that somebody can be, you know, touting the right, you know, nutritional science, right? Or the right exercise. Yeah, exercise science, or biological science, or physiological science. Like they could be touting the right information in regards to that, but if they're not factoring in the behavioral psychology that's connected to that person, it's not, it's still not complete. Application isn't there. Because there's times where I'm gonna actually, I mean, I might take it into account, the nutritional science, right? Or the physiological science. But there's many times where the behavioral psychology is going to trump that. If somebody asks you what's the best form of cardio for me to, let's say, I want to get in better cardiovascular shape, what's the best piece of cardio I can use? My question to them, the first one is maybe, which one do you like the most? Yep, yep. That's the first question. Then the second question is why are you doing it? Yeah, why are you doing it? What are your goals? What's your fitness history? What is this endurance leading you towards? But the first question, because as an experienced trainer, I know consistency over long periods of time is that's the biggest challenge. Let's first start with what you like the most. That's probably the one that we're gonna pick, because it's the one that you're gonna do. Yeah, yeah. The other one is, this one I think is kind of obvious, but a lot of younger consumers might fall for this, which is that their content, the fitness influencer's content, is mostly about the fitness influencer's body. It's about how ripped they are, or how jacked they look, or how great their butt is, or whatever. And then they promote that they coach people or they help people. But the way that they're portraying themselves or their information, it's no value. It's basically like, look at me, this is the evidence. This is why you need to hire me. Not a great way to find somebody who's gonna give you good information. This is tough because we know sex sells. That's right, it gets attention. Yeah, and it does serve them, right? So this is a really, and I don't even know if this is necessarily an example of a red flag or what makes a bad trainer, as much as it is a flag that they're not quite to the level of experience that you would want, right? Because this is part of the journey I think some trainers are on, right? And they could actually be a pretty good trainer, but they think that this is the best way to market themselves, because so many other people before them have shown this path. And they've shown that they've been successful by marketing sex, by marketing themselves, or marketing their bodies, or transformations. Well, there's no follow-up. Like if the rest of their content is void of a lot of like educational content where they're actually trying to teach people something or bring up other points of nutrition to reflect on, and it's just literally about like how their body's changing on a day-to-day basis and it's always about like how they look, then you have to ask yourself, like what kind of value is that? Now what do you guys think is the most dangerous part about that? The first thing that comes to mind for me is that the trainer that promotes that or uses that as a tactic is also the type of trainer who trains their people the way they train themselves. Yes, yes. Like that, it worked for them. Now I'm an expert. And yeah, and so then they lean into the like whatever it was, whether it was a self-talk of discipline and motivation that got them to be with that, or it was following the specific diet or the specific type of program. It's like, and so then they're promoting that same philosophy to every client instead of understanding how unique every individual is. Well, that's like as dangerous because they can get a lot of business through that. And they're not going to be as motivated to expand on their education either because like, you know, it's almost like this it's self-perpetuated. It's like, I'm getting the reinforcement by people buying into what I'm doing. I think I'm providing a service and so it's like they don't really think it's wrong necessarily, but they don't have the experience to tell them otherwise. I want to speak to trainers and coaches now who think that this is the way to grow their business. There's also like it's a bit, it's a myth that this is how a lot of people in the fitness space actually make a lot of money. Very few people can use their body and their looks to gain followers and then through that, provide enough value to get money from the followers. In fact, it's a terrible business trend. We teach trainers not to do that. And it's even if it is successful, it's a dying model. Totally. You can only, you live up to that for so long. And you know, you kind of pulling the curtains back for the listener because we have so many friends in this space. These are the trainers that are miserable. These are the trainers that have now walked themselves into this is how I look. And so either one, they're obsessed year round of maintaining this look or they stoop to lying about it, right? Photoshoot one time a year when they're in the best shape of their life, drip content. So they pretend that they look a certain way hiding though in the shadows because they don't want people to really see that like, oh, I don't really look like that year round. And so either way, it's a torturous way to live. It's also, in my opinion, if this is all they do, it's a strong sign. I don't think it's 100%, but it's a strong sign that this person values fitness in the wrong way and they're going to teach it the wrong way. And the value that they're, what they're showing is that their value is all about how they look. It's all about looks. That's such a good point. Yeah. And so if you're a trainer or you're trying to be a trainer, right, you want to get clients and that's what you think the value of fitness is. That's all you think the value is. You're not going to be a successful coach or trainer because that is not how you get everyday people. One dimensional. Yeah, that's not how you get everyday people to become consistent. That's such a better point to be made, Sal, because this is something that we always are trying to communicate to our coaches and trainers that we help is like, one of the strategies to making sure that a client has long-term success is detaching them from the scale in the mirror. Yes. Once you learn to detach them from the scale, and that's okay, that that is what motivated them to get them started. That's normally where most people are motivated to get started is the scale or the mirror. But if you're going to have them have lifelong success, you as a coach and trainer at one point need to learn to be able to move them away from that and attach to all the other benefits that a healthy body provides for them. And that is how you're going to be really successful to coach it. Now, if you're promoting your body all the time and the way you look all the time just shows you where you're currently at still in your journey and you haven't even evolved to that. So that's probably the best point made in regards to somebody who uses that content along is that you're basically showing your audience that I'm still trapped in that place that I attach being healthy with the way I look. You're going to hire a coach that at best will give you some results and then have you get back out of shape or whatever because you never learned how to develop this relationship, the right relationship with fitness and nutrition. The next one is, and this was just plain and simple, is they lack experience. If their experience coaching people is I built a business online, a social media following online and then built a coaching business, they don't have experience. I firmly believe that someone needs to have experience working with people, training people, coaching people, preferably in person before this becomes their business. By the way, this also, and I'm not going to be super strict on this because I was a young trainer at one point as well, but this somewhat applies to young individuals. Like if they're 22 years old, social media, and they're like, I'm a great trainer and coach or whatever. There's only so many years of experience that they could have working with people. And this is just, Frank, and again, I started as a young trainer. I didn't know anything for, say, 10 years as a trainer in terms of how I was able to really, truly become effective. And now that's not true for everybody, but that does show some lack of experience. Oh, I think this is really important. I mean, and one might be able to argue, like, oh, well, it's the science. They can read the studies, they can share it because there's examples of these YouTube stars or Instagram stars that have all this attention and have a huge business online, but really have coached minimal or no people in person. And those conversations are so important. It's so important to what happens when I pair these two exercises with a majority of my clients. Like what happens to their movement? What happens, when does it break down? Like what is it, what's the feedback they give me when that starts to happen? What are some of the common things that they say? What are the most common struggles that people have when I ask them about their nutrition and their diet? There's a lot of things that... How do I get this person to want to continue when they're going to fail? Because everybody fails, you know, along the way. How do I guide this person along this journey? You can't go to your studies and your science for that. That'll help in terms of maybe where to start or what works and what doesn't work, but it's not the full story and it's only experience that you learn that. Like I said, I've worked with many clients to know that, you know, what they like, what they're going to be consistent with and their personalities and their psychology is probably more important than whether or not a study showed that this was 15% more effective than this other. Yeah, how do you garner that retention? That's everything. That's what we should gauge our success off of as coaches is like, are they wanting to come back? Are they looking forward to the journey of the experience and they're not like super fixated on the outcome as much as they're just enjoying the process? So much communication is actually visual and not audio. So you could talk somebody all day long on a Skype or Zoom or what that, but like to not watch their body language when you do different things. I mean, that's what you're doing as a trainer. You learn how to read that. Yeah, you're testing all these variables, you know, whether that be your programming or what you tell them to do nutritionally or the way you communicate advice. And part of their response is the way you visually see their facial expression, the way where they receive that information, the way their body moves when you show the exercise. How long did it take you guys to be able to do this? It took me like 10 years where a client, if a client's words didn't match what I was reading, I could tell like, okay, they don't necessarily know how they feel. Like they'd walk in and be like, how are you feeling? Oh, I feel good. But then I'd notice signs of stress, fatigue. Okay, now I know you say you're fine, but I think I'm gonna take you through this workout over here. Or you watch them move or perform certain reps and the way the fatigue kicks in and you go, okay, so we need to scale back. Even if the person says everything feels great and I'm awesome, you can kind of tell. Yeah. It took me 10 years to be able to start to figure that stuff out. Yeah, no. I just think that that's such an important piece to it. So if all of it, if all your experiences is through, and by the way, that doesn't mean that you can't become a good trainer through that. It's just a much harder path. And I would imagine that if you lack all the in-person experience, then the amount of, you know, of not to figure that out would be as long as the database to refer to you. It'd be longer because you're trying to figure that out without ever having that. Part of what made me a good online coach was I had experienced, I had over a decade of training people in person. So I already knew, like I could forecast common behaviors. Like I would tell clients, this would be me on a Zoom call, right? I'm gonna, I want you to do this and this. Now I know you're gonna want to do more. Because you're gonna feel like it's too easy for you. Easy for you to say and add a few more reps. Yeah. And you're gonna feel like you should do more and you're gonna get more results. But I'm telling you, that's not what you want to do for these reasons. Like, how the fuck do you do that if you've never trained somebody in person and seen that firsthand? Like you've never seen somebody do a workout session with you and then you go over to your desk to input your information and you see them out there doing more exercises. Like you just, you don't get to see that if you're at home or you only meet with this person once a week or once a month. He's gonna eat a little bit less than he said because I'm pretty sure I want to speed this up. Yes. Or I want to add a cardio session. Even they told me not to. Or it's gonna feel like you're eating too much food but actually you're not. Or you, how's your squat form? Oh, it's great. And then you look at it and you're like, holy fuck, that's not great. You know what I'm saying? You don't know that until you've seen people move or how about somebody tells you like, I've got this pain in my hip. Like what do you tell somebody if you've never trained somebody and you don't know what happens when they do specific exercises and what common dysfunctions or movement patterns do people have and then how to, I mean that test takes. Be more specific. Do they lack experience working with people like you? This might even help with your journey because you might look at them and go, oh, they've been training bodybuilders for five years but you're not a bodybuilder. You have no intentions of wanting to be a bodybuilder. Well, then they might not know what it's like training a middle-aged woman who just wants to get in better shape or a dude that only works out twice a week cause a lot of stress. Got two kids at home or whatever, right? So you want to find somebody who's got a lot of experience working with people like you and preferably in person. Next up, their content is mostly entertainment. Now there's nothing wrong with entertainment. We do that on our show quite a bit. It's actually a very good strategy to keep people engaged. As a trainer and a coach, part of your job is entertainment. Person's gonna show up twice a week to see you. Can't all be serious workouts. They gotta also wanna enjoy seeing you. But if the content is all entertainment, then they're probably not the best in terms of knowing how to train you or coach you or move you in the right direction. And what would fall in this category? Gimmicks, ass photos, and like... Yeah, just a bunch of entertainment stuff. The gimmicks are the big one, right? Like look at this, look at me squat while standing on a hoverboard. Yeah, yeah, like benching a bench. Jeans hung, you know. I mean, will we include like the hype motivation videos with this too? So I envision a lot of the female online coaches use the sexy camera from behind, watch me do all my exercises. Not a lot of guys do that. Guys tend to do the more like watch me pull up with my cool car and then throw the chains around my neck and then go do like some intense workout where my gun hits me in the stomach. Right? I mean, is this what we're talking about? Like it's glasses in the game. That's what goes through my head when I think of like... It's a character, you're looking at a character. Yeah, yeah, the traits here are like, okay, this is big red flag for me. Like if, you know, if my female coach here, like all her workouts are angles from her ass. I have an entourage behind me. Yeah, and my dude rolls up, my dude drives up in his Audi R8 and with no shirt on, you know what I'm saying? To the gym and does all his crazy workouts and the hype videos around what he's driving and stuff more than it is about what he's knowledge of. Absolutely, this guy. Yeah, so I think that what we're pulling at. And then lastly, it's just that they promote intensity, all about intensity, all about beast mode. Never quit, get sore, hammer yourself, destroy yourself. Don't just this David Goggins mentality of training. He's his own character. He does his own thing. I think he'd be a terrible fitness coach as well. My point with this is that promotion of ultra intense workouts is a huge red flag for me. When I look at that, right away I go, this person hasn't worked with a lot of people and they're hitting a button that worked maybe for them, but it's not going to work for long term. Any theories to why this has been perpetuated in our space for so long? Like why has that been a go-to model that so many trainers default to? Do you guys have any? I have an idea on what you think. No, I want to hear. Do you guys have any ideas on why you think people do that? I think it's because the inevitable is going to happen. Like this is just like training clients. They can't count for the fall off. Yeah, training clients is like baseball. If you are getting 30% to 40% results, you're Hall of Fame. Okay. You know what I'm saying? Like you're just, you're bad. So 60, 70% are going to fail. So one of the things that you can always lean on that it's because you didn't try hard enough. You didn't work hard enough. Oh, yeah. Like most people are going to not be successful and then the way that makes- And people are going to be like, yeah, you're right. Yes, exactly. They're feeding their defeated mentality. Yes, and if I promote myself as the Joe Donnelly type of person who works out, and he's like, fuck, I cannot do 52 sets every day like this. This is great. He's just so badass. Like if I wanted to look like that, I just got to get to that level. Yeah, you can't get on my level. And I feel like that's the reason why that strategy has stayed around for so long is because it's the easy hype you up so it gets that emotional response to people. They're like, oh, I want to do this too. Then when the inevitable happens, since more than half of them will fall off, even the good ones, right, will fall off. When they do, what they'll blame is not that I had a bad coach. It's just like, oh, I couldn't work as hard as that. Yeah, well, I think it feeds two myths. One is that in order to be fit and healthy, you have to suffer so bad, and it's so hard that... So then when they see it, they go, that's the evidence. Oh yeah, it's because I have to suffer terribly to feel, to look fit and healthy. But that's why I've never been so fit. And then the second thing is it captures people in a state of motivation. When people, when the average consumer is ready to start a fitness program, it's probably because very recently they felt really bad about themselves. So now they're hyper motivated. I want to do this, and I want to do this right now. And then they scroll through, and there's the guy telling me I'm a piece of crap, that I'm not working hard enough, that if I worked out six days a week or seven days a week, and I just ate all these specific foods that I would get there, and you know what, he's right, I'm going to do that. And so it feeds into those two. I almost blame Hollywood. Yeah, that too. Because of all the hero origin stories, and like you said, you got to go through this like incredible suffering to be able to be emerge, re-emerge, and transform, become this amazing Phoenix or whatever. It's like, stop being so dramatic, be more pragmatic. I mean, the bodybuilding space is just as guilty of this too. Totally. I mean, let's be honest, how many Ronnie Coleman videos did you watch before you worked out? Of course. You know? It works, man. I get sucked into those. And it's not, and we don't follow, the camera doesn't follow him around on rest days or when he's walking on the treadmill, you know what I'm saying? It's like, this is like, you watch his PR days, just train his Branch Warren type of workouts is what we're drawn to, but the reality is like it's such a terrible way for 99% of the population to train like. It's the belief that you, and I've even said this myself wrongly, like you have to force your body to change. Force it, right? Think of the word force. It's like it doesn't want to, I must force it by all means necessary, brute force, it's going to happen. The truth is if you, when you do this right, it's you encourage. It's much more like a dance. 100%, you encourage your body to improve its health. Your body doesn't not, your body does not want to be unhealthy. Yeah. It's not like your body's fighting it, like, oh, damn you. I don't want to get fit and healthy. That's not what your body's saying. Your body's saying, hey, the signals you're sending me are overwhelming, can't recover from this. I can't adapt. You're not feeding me enough. I think I'm just going to survive. I'm just going to survive right now, which means I'm going to try and store body fat. I'm going to ramp up your cravings. I'm going to make it so that you don't have a lot of muscle because that costs a lot of calories and we're really stressed out. And we, you know, usually stress means there's not enough food. People don't understand this. They think the reason why I'm not fit or look the way I want or feel the way I want is because my body's resisting. I just have to, I have to force the shift. You're fighting hard enough. No, the truth, the truth is when you do this right, it feels like you encourage your body. It took me so long to figure this out for myself. I figured it out for my clients way before I figured it out for myself. When I finally figured it out for myself, I remember when I finally figured it out, I remember going, oh, I'm not supposed to be super sore after every workout and I'm improving. That was the problem. That's why I became one of the biggest evangelists because it's like that completely was my mentality. I have to crush, I have to bury myself. I have to punish myself to emerge this super human version of myself. Like that was my only go-to. Yeah. It's just pain, that pain. I think that's a common like athlete perspective, I think for sure. Even pro athletes, I'm trained that way. They have an in-season and off-season for a reason. If they train like that all the time. But there's a part of training for a professional sport that is- In-season, hell yeah. Well, I mean, even there's just mental toughness, right? Oh, I see what you're saying. And so you're trying to obtain, most people that are training like an athlete aren't technically trying to be an athlete. They're trying to train like an athlete because they think they want to look like an athlete. But what they're really doing is they're, what they're training like is the mental grit and part of the training for an athlete, not the balance, nutrition and exercise portion. The other thing that I would add in this, even though it's not necessarily like a ultra-intense workout, is the creative workout, right? So if your trainer is doing all these weird exercises all the time with you, balancing on the stability ball, making up things you've never seen before, like, and I'm very much so guilty of this in my early years as a trainer, like trying to wow my client. That's an easy way to know they don't know how to train. Yeah, with the unique stuff. The truth is, the best stuff is the most basic shit that everybody listened to has seen before. Like the best movement is the best- I'm following the entertainment brought up, right? Yeah, so I don't know where you want to put this category because it's not necessarily super intense as much as it is just creative. It's like, if you are not seeing squat, deadlift, bench, overhead press in your programming, major red flag. And if it's full of all these neat exercises and your trainer's trying to convince you that they're this for this reason because it's cutting edge or it's new or it's so much better because it works all these other things at one time, like that's when you know that that's a red flag because you know they're not a lot of experience. And to be clear, all, I mean, us in this room, at one point, did all, did most of this or a lot of this at least, right? We made these mistakes as trainers and coaches ourselves early on. But what got us out of it was we were concerned with our client's progress. How do I get them to prayer? How do I get them to continue to get better? And why is this not working? Why do I keep failing? And eventually you figure the stuff out and you figure out that these were all terrible red flags. Look, if you love the show, you got to check out some of our free guides. In fact, we have a free guide for hard gainers. If you're trying to build muscle and you find it difficult, download our hard gainer guide at mindpumpfree.com. You can also find us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin. I'm on Instagram at Mind Pump Stefano and Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam.