 The first question is from NAD7719. Can you please share your success stories of helping really overweight clients and how you help them? It is such a different journey than training athletes and people who just wanna lose a few pounds. It is a very difficult task when you're dealing with somebody who has that kind of a relationship with food because when you're talking about really overweight people, I consider I would say 60, 70 pounds plus overweight, right? Average person wants to lose weight with me was anywhere between 20 to 30 pounds. Once it got 60 to 100, typically you're dealing with someone that's been overweight for most of their life. Their relationship with food is a very difficult one to change because food to them, kind of like a drug, it's used to numb feelings or they found comfort in it. And so it's a difficult thing to change, a very, very difficult thing to change. The way I used to train people who were really overweight was very different than the way I ended up training them later on in my career. The way I first started training them was here's your meal plan, you gotta get strict, you gotta show up to the gym this many days a week. That's it, we're gonna do it. We're gonna low calorie, burn a lot of calories. All discipline-based. All discipline-based, all dropping the hammer and I was the motivating, hardcore, take no bullshit type of a trainer. And this was successful in the short term. I would get people to lose weight in the short term. I got none of them to keep it off. None of them to keep it off. And it took me a while to really figure this out and I remember the first time I actually figured this out. I had a client who came and saw me who was 100 pounds overweight. And as I was, and I remember this because I was showing them around the facility, I sat them down and they were visibly uncomfortable and shy. Okay? Now this is kind of common with this type of client where you can feel that they're, I mean, think about it. They probably haven't worked out in a gym like ever and they feel uncomfortable. They feel like they're being watched, like they don't fit in. But this was really the first time when I really felt it. Like I was really paying attention. I remember they were super uncomfortable. So then we sat down and I thought, I need to communicate to this person a little bit differently because I can tell that they're intimidated by the weights and by other people working out. So we started talking about their goals and what got them to where they were. And, you know, I remember sitting there talking to her and I thought, I'm gonna change my approach. I'm gonna change my approach. I'm gonna, this time I'm gonna be successful long term. And so I said, look, I said, here's the deal. I said, I've trained a lot of people in your situation and I've had a lot of failures. And here's why. The reason why I'm telling you this is not to motivate you to not be the failure. The reason why I'm telling you this is because we're not gonna use that strategy. Here's what I wanna do with you. I want you to come in, train with me, we'll figure out how many days a week is realistic for you to show up and we're not even gonna try to lose weight. I don't even, let's not even talk about weight loss. I know you said that's your number one goal, but let's start with you coming in one day a week meeting with me and let's do that until this is something that you're not afraid of and you don't hate because she had told me that, you know, she was intimidated. And she thought that was a great idea. She hired me and we took this very slow approach. We didn't talk about weight. In fact, I told her to not weigh herself. I said, you know, I know maybe you thought you should weigh yourself to track her. Let's not do that at all. I didn't tell her to take anything out of her diet. What I did is I started adding things to her diet. You know, Adam talks about this a lot himself. And it was this kind of slow process. Here's what happened. The first year she got stronger, improved her mobility, started to enjoy the way she felt, started to enjoy showing up at the gym. She got comfortable there because she would have conversations with me, conversations with the other clients that happened to work out at the same time. She became a staple in the facility. She came to the Christmas party that I had every year, talked to people, everybody treated her amazingly. She lost no weight the first year. She just got stronger and felt better. This ended towards the end of the second year, she on her own started to make changes to her diet. And she would come to me and say, okay, Sal, I'm ready. I think I wanna make some changes. I've already eliminated soda. And remember she said that to me. I was like, oh my God, you already did it on your own. That's beautiful. Let's just stick with that for now. So by the end of the second year, she started to see some results. It was the third year that she started to lose the weight. She lost all of it and it never came back. In fact, I still am friends with her on Facebook. Until this day, she's kept the weight off. So now we're talking, I don't know, 10 years later. She's kept it off. She's not one of those statistics, which is a majority of people, especially in that category that fail. She did not fail. She has a very good relationship with exercise. I see her posting pictures of hiking. She likes to bake. She still bakes foods that she enjoys, but she's got this great relationship with exercise. That was the first time I was able to really piece together what gives people long-term results. I like you, same thing. For many years, I think I did a really bad job. And so the back half, I would say, or at least the last five years of training clients, this was actually what I focused on. So I actually stopped training a lot of athletes. It would be a rare occasion. And I actually really enjoyed this type of client. And I think it was because I was very motivated to figure this out, because I didn't do such a good job in the early years. And I think what made me realize where I went wrong, and this person did a great job asking this question, because they compare it to training athletes, why it's so different, and you're right. The journey is completely different, and they're at a different place. So the irony of that as a young or immature trainer, you sometimes approach almost every client of the same way. Here's your meal plan, how many days a week can you commit to, and you write a good workout, right? And then you train them hard, and you try and motivate them to be consistent. And the truth is that everybody is at a different place and their journey, and a good trainer will learn how to meet that person where they're currently at. And that light bulb didn't go off for me till way later on in my career. And it's so funny when you think about it though, it's so obvious. It's like you wouldn't treat somebody learning a language that way. You wouldn't treat an athlete even that way. And you're just gonna throw them in the game without the training. Exactly. And if you're somebody who's really, really overweight, it's more than just a calories-in-calories-out thing. There's a relationship that you've established with food. There's a lack or a relationship that you've dealt with with exercise and movement. There's a lot of things that have came into play that have got us in the place that we are. And so I wanna slowly start to unravel all of that versus like here, throwing it all at them, just like I was using the example of learning a language. If you've got somebody who has no clue about anything and you all of a sudden start speaking to them in that other language, it's gonna be really tough for that person. Maybe some people start to pick things up and they might learn or see some results that way, but it's gonna be really hard to get it to stick like what Saul was saying. And so it really was about learning where they're at and then setting very small, realistic, obtainable goals that then can become part of their lifestyle. And one of those things is, if they came in and said, I could commit to three or four days a week of training, absolutely, I didn't want them to do that. Like Saul said, let's just start with one day a week or two days a week, something that you know that you can stick to. This is also where I started to add things to the diet. Many times when I would get clients like this, it would be somebody who you would think was eating McDonald's four or five times a day and a ton of calories and just sitting on a couch watching TV. That wasn't the case. Many times these clients had already yo-yo dieted so many times, their metabolism was extremely slow and they were eating only 1,300 or 1,500 calories of like nothing. And so it was like, I would look at them and I'd be like, wow, they're this much overweight. They're only consuming this much. They've really slowed their metabolism down. I definitely can't take this person and tell them to eat less than what they're already eating so I needed to add food. So, and like what Saul said, I would not focus on weight loss. That's not, right? It's all about making good habits in your life right now and let's start with one or two at a time and slowly build on that. And after I would build on it, I would want them to stay consistent with it for a couple months before I even thought about adding something else or taking anything else away because I, and I really wanted them to be the one to like be begging for it. Like, Adam, I'm like, this is, I haven't missed a day on this, it's going great, I feel good, what else can I do? Okay, now we're ready for the next thing to focus on. And that's just it. I think that when you get in that situation, there's normally something that triggers them to come in that day and hire the trainer or start on their fitness journey. And they're highly motivated because of emotions. Either something set them off to trigger them to come in and finally do that and make a change or our biggest loser show they just watched or something or went to the doctor and found out they have a health issue. And so all of a sudden they're making a decision based off of emotions. They're emotionally fired up and they want to make a change. And a lot of times, just like in any other aspect of our life, when we respond emotionally all the time, it's not the most logical approach to doing things. And so as a coach and as a trainer, I had to really watch that and then help them understand that. Listen, I feel you and I understand what you want, but this will be a better strategy. And then explaining to them to set small goals, let's hit that out the park before we add any more to it. Yeah, and this may sound a bit redundant because I definitely went through the same experience and came to the same conclusion as you both did with training these people. To add to that, as far as when somebody comes in with this type of urgency and emotion and they're driven and they really, you could tell, they really care about themselves now more than ever. This is really what drives a lot of personal trainers and health professionals into their field. They want to match that emotion. They want to match that urgency and they want that same result as their client. Like I felt passionate about trying to get them to that place and I wanted to be a part of that, like so bad that it was misplaced energy that I was putting in my initial clients where I was so focused on, let's get to it, let's get to it, let's get to it. And it really took a lot of time and people that I've trained to realize this sort of conundrum where much like when you're given to a charitable organization where you go in somewhere else where you realize that just giving people things isn't the solution. Like this isn't what's really gonna help them long term. They really have to own it themselves and build themselves from within. But how do I be a part of that and be around that and provide them with the necessary things to make that happen? And for me, that was the lesson, that I am just here as like a vessel. I'm here to be able to provide what's necessary in whatever stage you're at. So I had to listen a lot more. I had to ask more questions and that was like what I had to learn as a trainer was what are the needs right now? More so than what you need to do. What you need to do is this, like I'm not driving the ship. You're driving it. What do you need from me? And to ask those kind of questions more was I got a totally different result. Oh, totally. It became for me about creating a new relationship first with exercise, a good one. And then later on one with food, which is why when they show up to the gym, it turned into something they really enjoyed coming to. They enjoyed coming to it not because of the hard, crazy workouts. Sometimes we'd have those, but really because it was a place where everybody was cool with them. Hey, how do you feel today? Oh, you're really tired. All right, today we're gonna do things that are gonna help relieve stress. Sometimes I would take this woman on a walk. She would show up and she'd be like, oh man, I had, you know, got terrible sleep. I've been really whatever. Like, you know what? Instead of working out in here, let's just go for a 45 minute walk. Or you know what I'm gonna do today? I'm just gonna stretch you out. You look like you're a little tight. We're not gonna do anything with resistance. I'm just gonna stretch you out. So I stretch out. So this person showed up when they felt bad. That's what you want. What you want is you want a client. Okay, a client who calls, who shows up when they feel great and weren't ready to work out. Okay, congratulations. You did nothing. That's easy. You want your clients to show up when they don't feel like showing up, when they feel bad. If your client calls you and says, hey man, I feel really terrible. Can I come in and see you today? Then you know you're doing a good job.