Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / You Know Enough About Nutrition and Fitness (Here's Why You're Still Stuck) | Ep 444

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You Know Enough About Nutrition and Fitness (Here's Why You're Still Stuck) | Ep 444 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:02
  Philip Pape: 49% of the people who come to me for coaching are struggling with getting enough protein.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: And it's not because they don't understand it.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: They know it matters.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: They know how much they need oftentimes.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: And they could explain it to a friend.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: They maybe listen to this podcast.
• 0:17
  Philip Pape: They struggle because knowing and consistently doing are two different skills.
• 0:22
  Philip Pape: And only one of them responds to more information.
• 0:25
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you what's actually missing when you know what to do, but you can't make it work, and why the answer's not just gutting it out harder, it's not motivation, and it's not another program.
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, where I put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape.
• 1:01
  Philip Pape: And if you've been doing all the things, you're lifting weights, you're tracking your nutrition, you're doing what you believe is all the right stuff.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're not doing all of it, but you're doing some of it, and your body still doesn't reflect any of that effort.
• 1:13
  Philip Pape: This episode is going to explain why.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: And it's probably not the reason you think.
• 1:18
  Philip Pape: After 500 episodes of this show, you would think I would have explained this by now, but it's important.
• 1:24
  Philip Pape: It is really important because I'm working with a lot of people in their 40s and 50s.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: They come to me after years of trying to figure this out on their own.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: I did that for decades.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: And even now I'm still trying to figure it out, and I have coaches helping me.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: They are smart, they are educated, they've listened to a hundred podcast episodes, they've read the books, they've tried the programs.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: Does that sound like you?
• 1:46
  Philip Pape: And they're still stuck in one way or the other.
• 1:48
  Philip Pape: Something might be moving forward and something else is not.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: Or they go in this pattern where they make some progress, or then the progress unwinds itself.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: And it is absolutely not because they lack knowledge.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: The fitness industry has convinced them that more information is the answer.
• 2:05
  Philip Pape: Podcasts like this one thrive on giving you information because I do think information is or should be free.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: However, information is usually not the answer after a certain point.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: What I mean by that is when you go from a zero level of knowledge, you need information to get started.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: But after you get to about a two out of 10, the information becomes less and less the actual factor that gives you success.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: So today we're gonna cover why learning more about nutrition, about fitness, training can actually make things worse after a certain threshold.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: We're gonna talk about three specific things that are missing when you know what to do, but you can't make that knowledge work for you.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: And we're gonna talk about what effective coaching looks like versus what most people think it means.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: In case you're looking for a coach or a program or an app or a tool or whatever, how can you evaluate what's out there?
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: How do I evaluate the people I hire as coaches?
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: And stick around to the very end because I'm gonna give you a three-question audit that you can do in 30 seconds to figure out whether you're stuck because of a knowledge gap or an implementation gap.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: It's quick, it's honest, right?
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: You can be honest with yourself when you take it, and it might help you reframe the thinking about the next step.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: And I'm a big fan of reframing.
• 3:20
  Philip Pape: All right, let's talk about the information trap first.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: The conventional wisdom in the fitness industry is if you're not getting results, you have to learn more.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: You gotta watch my video, you gotta read my article, you have to listen to my podcast, you have to try a different program, you have to buy this, buy that.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: And I totally get it.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: I'm an engineer, I'm also someone who has to market my own products and offers.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: And my instinct when something is not working is find more data, get more something, something.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: There's something out there that I don't know.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: And that's how I'm wired, and how many of you are probably wired as well.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: And for a long while, learning more actually does help.
• 3:55
  Philip Pape: And by a long while, I mean when you're a kid, when you're a teenager, and maybe partway into your 20s.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: And then there's this thing called wisdom that starts to creep in.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: Um, and and by the way, I the more wise I supposedly get, the more I know what I don't know, and the more ignorant I realize I am.
• 4:11
  Philip Pape: And I think that's true wisdom.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: Um, and yet ignorance implies a lack of knowledge.
• 4:16
  Philip Pape: So I don't want to go there just yet.
• 4:17
  Philip Pape: Now, if you've never done certain things, if you've never tracked a macro or your food, and if you've never learned about energy balance, right, if you've never learned about progressive overload, then learning that is a huge step change and can blow your mind and change the trajectory of your life.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: I actually do agree with that.
• 4:37
  Philip Pape: I think there is a step change where information has real tangible value at a certain stage.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: For me, that was around the year 2020, the couple years leading into before I launched this podcast when I discovered starting strength and I discovered, you know, macro tracking, and I discovered recovery, and I discovered periodization of your nutrition for fat loss and all these different things.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: I discovered barbells, you know, how to use them effectively, all of that.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: And it just like blew my mind and changed the trajectory immediately for the better, but up to a point.
• 5:13
  Philip Pape: And there is that point.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: Most of you are listening, maybe getting there or maybe you're past it, where more information just makes it worse.
• 5:21
  Philip Pape: Okay, makes it worse.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: And the reason is simple in that the more you learn, the more conflicting advice you encounter and is swimming in your head.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: You have all of these quote unquote experts, and I put quotes around that because who the heck knows what an expert is today?
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: It's even very hard to figure that out.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: Credentials doesn't mean you're an expert.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: Others calling you an expert doesn't mean you're an expert.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: Being a good marketer doesn't mean you're an expert.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: So what is it?
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: That's a very hard thing to answer.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: But there are a lot of people purporting to be experts who will say one thing or another that's a complete opposite.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Cut carbs for fat loss.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Nope, carbs are essential.
• 5:56
  Philip Pape: Train, you know, X number day a week days a week with these kinds of reps or high volume program for body recomp.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: No, you need to do, you know, two days a week with three full body movements and go for intensity.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: You know, all of these counter-arguments that you can't make sense of.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: And there's so many more.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: Like that's just barely scratching the surface.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: And the thing is, every one of those claims is polished really well, has a bunch of studies that can they can probably point to to back them up, and they sound very authoritative.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: So what do you do, right?
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: What do you do?
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: Well, what you have actually done, tell me if you're wrong.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: I'm wrong here.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: You try a little of everything.
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: You taste a little bit of this, a little bit of that, the buffet, the buffet of the fitness industry.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: You try this, and then two weeks later, you second guess it because it's not quite quite working.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: Or you hear a really compelling argument for a different method, which we call shiny object syndrome.
• 6:52
  Philip Pape: Then you pivot to that.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: You hear about a new tool, a new piece of equipment.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: Oh, I can do BFR or I can do vibration plates without having to lift as many weights, and I could build all this muscle.
• 7:01
  Philip Pape: Great, that sounds great.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: Oh, there's a new pill or a new supplement or whatever.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: I'm not even getting into GLP wines, it's a whole different thing.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: Great, I'm gonna do that.
• 7:09
  Philip Pape: And again, it's not, it's not that you lack discipline.
• 7:12
  Philip Pape: I see a lot of people write in or comment in, like, oh, I just lack discipline.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: To me, a lack of discipline is just a lack of a system or lack of a structure or lack of a plan, right?
• 7:20
  Philip Pape: It's not really the discipline piece.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: It's because you are actually making what your brain thinks of as a rational response to all of this conflicting information, but without a filter, without a filter.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: Because if if five credible sources on YouTube and this podcast and that podcast and people you respect that you listen to in your feed tell you five different things, how do you even commit to one of those, right?
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: Like, how do you commit to one and know what the heck is the right path?
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: And I see this in the intake data.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, so here's the cool thing.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: I've got about a thousand pieces of client intake data that I just looked at over the last few weeks.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: Literal forms that I was able to put through AI and do an analysis on them.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: And the average person who comes to me for coaching has tried three to four different nutrition programs.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: Nearly half of them, so 49.2%, still struggle with protein when they come to me.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: And it's not because they don't know protein matters for building muscle.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: Of course, they know this.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: Everybody knows that.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: I mean, think about protein today, is in all the foods too.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: Sometimes they can even explain complex things like leucine and muscle protein synthesis, you know, they and they impress me with their knowledge.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: I'm like, that's pretty cool, right?
• 8:34
  Philip Pape: But then they struggle to get enough protein.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: And they they struggle because knowing why something matters and that you need a certain amount of food, and even that you could split it up by each meal, say 30 grams a meal, right?
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: Even though you know all that, you are a human being with a real schedule who has to go to the grocery store.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: You have a family, you have to cook, you have to plan your days, you have a stressful job, you have, you have, you have.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: And these are skills that you haven't built.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: And they're it's not, they're not gonna get built automatically, and they're not gonna get built just because you have more information.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 9:10
  Philip Pape: The fitness industry really loves this cycle, by the way.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: Every month there's a new program, a new method, a new secret that promises to be the one that finally works.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: And every one of those products is selling you more information.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: In fact, a lot of the like course and curriculum stuff, education stuff, you're seeing through it now, right?
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: We're all like seeing through that.
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: The webinars and everything are get they're getting more and more savvy, or they're just not working in the in the industry because people don't just want more information.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: And yet more information is often the product, and and a lot of it's just bad marketing too.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: But right, it's it's not a conspiracy or anything, it's just business models.
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: And the person who who figures that out will stop buying, and more of you have figured that out.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: But the people who stay confused are the ones that keep subscribing.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: So they're kind of like the the the patsies, if you will, or I don't know what the word I'm thinking of, right?
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: I don't want to say suckers because even I'm a sucker if that's the case.
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: So if you're someone who knows a lot about what we talk about on the show, and look, if you just listen to like 10 episodes of this show, your level of education is gonna go way up for free.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: That's cool, that's awesome.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: So if you know about these things, if you know about training and nutrition and you could explain like body fat versus muscle, you know, even the basic concepts, and you're still not seeing the results that reflect that knowledge, then by definition, the problem is not that you need to learn another thing or you need to learn it better.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: I've had clients who would ask me a billion questions to learn, but it didn't change their skills until we took that information and applied it to them.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: So let's let's talk about that next section now.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: What's actually missing?
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: If it's not information, what is missing?
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: Well, there's three things.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: Information is not a bottleneck.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: There's plenty of it.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: There's plenty of it.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: It's not willpower, it's not motivation, it's not discipline, not all these buzzwords.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Those are all I'll call downstream effects.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: Those are, I'll say, symptoms.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: They're outcomes of the constraints.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: Here they are.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: What are those three constraints?
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: The first one is sequencing.
• 11:12
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: This is the big one.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: You know 50 things that you can improve about your nutrition and training right now.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: I bet you could bet if you took out a piece of paper and I said, write 50 things down that could help you become fitter, you could write them down.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: You know your protein could be higher, you know your sleep could be better, you know you're not periodizing your training the right way, you know you're not managing your stress, you know you're not eating enough on your training day, you know your fiber is too low, shall I go on?
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: And all of those might be true.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: And knowing all of them right now is paralyzing, is it not?
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: It's paralyzing you because you can't fix 50 things at the same time.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: But what you can do is you can fix one thing this week.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: Maybe two, at the most three.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: This is the human's capacity, human's capacity to change.
• 11:57
  Philip Pape: And the question of which one to fix first and in what order, that is not a knowledge question.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: That is a sequencing question.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Because it depends entirely on your specific situation.
• 12:08
  Philip Pape: Okay, now we're gonna, now we're getting to some truths, aren't we?
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: Because a lot of this is gonna be context dependent.
• 12:14
  Philip Pape: And this is when we talk about personalization, this is what we mean.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Now, a lot of programs, strength programs, nutrition programs, even yes, my physique university, which is about learning and learning to apply with some accountability and support, dump everything on you in week one.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: Here's your meal plan, here's your training split, here's your supplement list.
• 12:35
  Philip Pape: He track these 15 metrics, track this, use this tool, join the community, watch the onboarding videos.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: And I'm mentioning this because my current program kind of takes this approach, right?
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: And and it's a slightly flawed approach.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: And you're like, why is Philip saying this?
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: Is he trying to not have me join?
• 12:52
  Philip Pape: You, you'll you'll understand in a bit because my my thinking is evolving on this.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: And I also had a listener that challenged me to talk about the honest truth about what I thought about coaching and the industry and my own products and offerings.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: So I'm doing that.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: So you see this big mass of stuff, of features, of things that you get, but nobody tells you which piece to focus on first, which one matters the most for your situation right now, which ones you can safely ignore for the next eight weeks.
• 13:15
  Philip Pape: You know, in a in a better version of this program, like what I try to do in when when you join our group program is give you an onboarding ramp and a set of a sequence to go through that at least makes it a lot more manageable, and you know that you can ask for help to answer these questions as you go, right?
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: Which is kind of the best you can do in that kind of situation without working with a one-on-one coach.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: And so when I do start working with someone one-on-one, and by the way, I take very few of those clients now because I'm trying to scale up what we do to more people, we spend the first several weeks doing almost nothing except building a measurement and a tracking system so that you can stop guessing and you start to think in terms of, okay, I need to collect information about myself to so that I can stop guessing.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: And that's where you have a baseline and you focus on just one or two things a week.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: And it's not because all this stuff doesn't matter, but look, you've been trying to fix all these things simultaneously or in the wrong order, and they've often made the other problems worse.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: You know, you might be eating low calories and exercising too much, and now you're trying to do 15 more things to optimize them.
• 14:20
  Philip Pape: And if you're a go-getter who listens to wits and weights, if I give you 15 things, you're literally going to try to do them.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: And that could be the problem, right?
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: So if you take someone who's, say, under-eating, what's the first thing she needs to do?
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Probably eat more, right?
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: And and and someone needs to look at that data to make sure she's doing that, whether she's doing it for herself or a coach is doing it or an app or something like that.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: If she jumps into an aggressive training program and a fat loss phase, but hasn't done the the you know restoration of her metabolic rate first, she's just gonna burn out and she's gonna be in the same cycle again.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: So the sequence matters as much as the content in that case.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: So that's number one.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: Number two, the second constraint people have is of course context.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: Context.
• 15:05
  Philip Pape: Because generic advice doesn't account for your life.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: It never has and never does.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: And even all the new tools and whizbang, AI, and everything else today has a hard time understanding you unless you can feed the information about yourself to it.
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: That's where humans are helpful, right?
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: Because a human can ask you a question and then get you give them an answer.
• 15:24
  Philip Pape: And if the answer is not good enough, they can ask you a follow-up question, right?
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: And and when we talk about personalization, by the way, I don't mean in the vague like everyone's different way, like the demographics-based differences.
• 15:36
  Philip Pape: So, for example, you can go to a calculator online to calculate your metabolism and it's gonna ask things like your age or your weight, your training activity, like a few things like that.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: I don't mean that level of personalization, although that that's a start, right?
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: Because you're telling it something about yourself.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: But I mean like the very complex web of things that makes you you, right?
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: I mean, look, I have some that I mentioned data from my intake.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: 54.5% of people I coach report hormonal hormonal concerns affecting their nutrition and training.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: Now, whether it actually is that is different from the fact that they feel it's that.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: And I'm not gaslighting people.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: What I mean is a lot of what we feel or experience could be hormonal or we think it's hormonal because of age and because of how things don't work like they used to.
• 16:23
  Philip Pape: You know, for women, that's perimenopause, menopause, thyroid changes.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: For men, it's the declining testosterone, slower recovery, disrupted sleep.
• 16:29
  Philip Pape: And so that's over half my clients who deal with this variable that is very hard for a template or a generic approach to kind of address without digging an extra layer or two or three deeper.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: Another statistic from my intakes nearly 39% of people struggle with consistency around social situations and weekends.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's again almost half.
• 16:52
  Philip Pape: And it's not because they're not committed to, trust me, they're committed.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: They they are to the verge of tears sometimes that they're not able to get this right with the weekends.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: And again, I'm talking about when they come to us, not once we start working with them, because that's when we can help them do this.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: But it's simply because their weekday strategy falls apart when something else happens, like a work dinner, or their teenager ate all the protein in the fridge, or they're traveling every third week for their job, or the weekend, hashtag weekend, right?
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: Which which tends to be very chaotic for a lot of people.
• 17:26
  Philip Pape: You know, I have clients who track perfectly Monday through Thursday, and everything's cool and it's just a super routine.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: Day, day Monday through Thursday, hit their protein, they stay in the calorie range, all that great stuff.
• 17:36
  Philip Pape: And then the structure just falls off a cliff Friday night.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And by Sunday, you've consumed some unmeasured, because you're not tracking, amount of wine and takeout.
• 17:47
  Philip Pape: And then you try to make it up on Monday, right?
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: And you cut a whole bunch of calories, and then the cycle repeats over and over, and then your weekly average pushes you at maintenance or maybe even a surplus, and that's why nothing changes, or you gain weight, even though you think you're eating less.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: And you get what I'm saying.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: So you don't need more information.
• 18:04
  Philip Pape: You need a system, okay?
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: And the system has to have this middle gear of life between perfect and screw it.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: It has to, it has to work with life, guys, right?
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: Right in the middle.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: So context means someone or something or whatever, knowing your schedule, your stressors, your triggers, your hormonal patterns, your training history, your actual food environment.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: Like what does your personal life look like, your relationships, all that stuff.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: And then sees your plan and says, you know what, this is not going to work for you on Wednesdays.
• 18:37
  Philip Pape: Let's adjust it, right?
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: Now, that that's what we mean by context.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: But again, it gets, it gets context gets complex, doesn't it?
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that's sequencing and context.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Now, the third thing, and this is the one that probably holds everything together, is feedback loops.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Feedback loops.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: I've talked about this before as a control systems engineer, the idea of inputs and outputs, feeding and outputs feeding back into the inputs.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: You need someone or something watching that data.
• 19:05
  Philip Pape: You need the data to be observed in some way or tracked in some way, you know, and it's not just your scale weight, but it's a whole bunch of things like your sleep quality, your energy, your stress, your training performance, maybe your hormone patterns in your cycle.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: And basically being able to predict, okay, not just see what happens after the fact, but able to predict what's working now, what might not work in the near term before you spiral into the oh, nothing works for me.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: Just put up, you know, hands up, shrug emoji, nothing works for me.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: Because without that, without that feedback loop, here's what happens: you start a new plan, you start a new program, new nutrition approach, you're all excited, it's Monday.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: You follow it for three weeks, your scale doesn't move, maybe it goes up, and you're like, ah, it doesn't work.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: Doesn't work.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: So what do you do?
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: You change something, right?
• 19:51
  Philip Pape: You cut calories, maybe you add cardio, maybe you scrap the whole thing, you try something else.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: But what if you had the data that said, you know what?
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: Your metabolism was exact adapting exactly as expected.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: And by the way, your waist held steady, but your neck and your biceps went up by an inch, right?
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: Or your waist went down.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: I actually had a client recently, we looked at her data.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: Her weight is the same because we're keeping her at maintenance, but she actually lost like three inches on her waist.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: And like, look, you gained a bunch of muscle.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: Her body fat's down 4% without losing a weight weight, a pound on the scale, right?
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: You wouldn't know that without the data, and then you would give up and you'd want to switch up.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: What if your training log showed, hey, my lifts are going up?
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: I'm probably gaining strength and muscle.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: And three weeks just wasn't enough time for that to show results on the scale because the scale's a terrible indicator of what happened in those three weeks.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: Every other indicator, though, said it was working without having the data to be observed, read, understood, analyzed, and telling you, hey, let's stay the course.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: It's actually working.
• 20:49
  Philip Pape: It's actually working.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: And let's let's get it away from the edge of the cliff, okay?
• 20:53
  Philip Pape: Put bring your feet back here.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: Let's not fall off the cliff right now and make reactive decisions based on incomplete information.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: Let's not drive with our eyes closed and turn the wheel every time we feel a bump.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: That is the gap.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: It is not the knowledge gap.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: It is the sequencing, the context, and the feedback loops.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: Those three things are the difference between information and implementation, between knowing what to do and getting it done in a way that produces results for your body.
• 21:22
  Philip Pape: Now, that's actually why I wanted to share something with you.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: Because if what I've described so far sounds like your situation, and it is for so many people, and it was for me.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: If you're someone who has the knowledge, you listen to the podcast, but you haven't had the structure.
• 21:37
  Philip Pape: I am working on something pretty cool.
• 21:40
  Philip Pape: It is designed to close this gap.
• 21:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, it's not one on one coaching, and it is not the physique university.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: It is also not the app that I have out fitness lab.
• 21:51
  Philip Pape: That that can do a lot of these things in a different way for a certain type of people, and it's awesome for that.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: But I'm not ready to share all the details.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: I will be soon.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: Sorry for the tease.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: However, however, if you're on my wait list, you're going to hear about it first.
• 22:05
  Philip Pape: And if you want to be on that wait list and hear about it first, and by the way, when it comes out, you're going to get rock bottom founders pricing that will never be that low in the future.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: Yes, you heard right.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: Eat more.
• 22:20
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: That's all I'm going to say.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to tell you what it is.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: You know me.
• 22:25
  Philip Pape: You know I create some pretty cool things that I believe in and I'm passionate about.
• 22:30
  Philip Pape: This is years of coaching, knowing what works and what doesn't work.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: Coming soon.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: Eat more.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: Put your name on the list.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: Totally free.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: There's no charge to get your name on it.
• 22:41
  Philip Pape: And then I'm going to tell you everything when it's ready very, very soon.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more.
• 22:47
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: Now, what does good coaching actually look like?
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: I want to talk about it.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: We're going to talk about coaching because I think there's a massive misunderstanding about what the word means, like what that word means in fitness.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: Because if your mental model of coaching is wrong, then you're going to just avoid it altogether, like, no, I would never get a coach.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: Or you're going to buy the wrong thing and I want you to waste your money.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: I hate wasting money.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: I hate blowing money on things that don't work.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: So most people think coaching is one of two things.
• 23:18
  Philip Pape: Either it's a personal trainer standing next to you in the gym counting your reps, which is fine, right?
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: But that's that's like a tiny piece of what a coach would do.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: It's not even coaching in many cases, it's supervising your training.
• 23:30
  Philip Pape: I mean, you're lucky if that person even gives you a good program.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: That that's one thought.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: The other thought of coaching is a premium service where you pay $500 a month, $600 a month for a one-on-one coach, and someone gives you a plan, a meal plan, texts you every day, maybe creates a dependent relationship instead of helping you build skills.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: And a lot of you are like, well, I want that.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: I want somebody to tell me what to do.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: But it's not going to work long term because you don't know what to do after that point, unless you want to keep working with somebody for $500 a month for the rest of your life.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: I would say that effective coaching that actually produces change looks very different.
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: The first thing it has is a timeline.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: It actually has a start point and an end point.
• 24:11
  Philip Pape: And a lot of the coaches listening are like, why are you doing that?
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: What about the long-term value of customers?
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: What about, you know, you get customers a result, clients a result, and then they keep, they stay with you for the long term.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: Well, I love it when clients, we get them a result in three or six months.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: And then they're like, I want to keep working with you because I'm learning and there's another goal that I have.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: That doesn't preclude the fact that there's a start and an end point to the first goal.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: So you should be able to get a goal that you're trying to achieve.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: And it has to be a realistic goal, of course.
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: But then, and then you could do another goal after.
• 24:42
  Philip Pape: There's nothing that stops you.
• 24:43
  Philip Pape: But it shouldn't be this like content feed that you're subscribing to forever, right?
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: And and when I think of physique university as it is today, that's more like the it's more like the ladder in that it gives you a lot of great information and education, the ability to engage constantly and the beginning, ability to get coaching support constantly.
• 25:02
  Philip Pape: And we do help you with your goals, but I feel like we could do a better job of having a start and end point, right?
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: Which alludes to the thing I mentioned earlier, witswaits.com slash eat more.
• 25:12
  Philip Pape: Stay tuned.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: So the goal of coaching is that at the end, you can manage your nutrition and training without a coach.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: You can fire the coach.
• 25:19
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry, other coaches, if that's not the model you want me to tell people about, but it's the one that I think is super, super effective because if you get a result with me, you're gonna tell everybody about me anyway.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: You're gonna say, hey, Philip was a good guy.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: He helped me out, he didn't lie, he was honest, he had integrity, he helped me get a result that I'm happy with.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: It was realistic too.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: He didn't sugarcoat it, he didn't promise what he couldn't deliver.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: And hey, go check him out.
• 25:43
  Philip Pape: Or hey, I'm gonna work with them again on my next goal, you know?
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: So if a program doesn't have a plan for doing that, for making you independent by building skills and getting a result, ask yourself who that program is really designed to serve.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 25:57
  Philip Pape: Second, is it sequential?
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: Does it build on itself and actually help you build those skills?
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: Does each week build on the last?
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: You're not just browsing or floating around or doing, I'll say, 20 habits from day one, and now you just do those habits for the next six months.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: You've or you're following some sort of progression where the, you know, day one builds into week one, builds into week two, builds into month two.
• 26:23
  Philip Pape: And it it makes logical sense and is super achievable.
• 26:27
  Philip Pape: Like the bar is very low.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: So what that might look like is well, in the first phase, you're gonna build your measurement system.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: Then the middle phase, you're gonna execute that system, but have real-time adjustments with the feedback loops.
• 26:38
  Philip Pape: And then maybe the final phase is I'm gonna build autonomy and maintain those results.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: So then I also have the skills to do this again in the future.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: So that's really important.
• 26:47
  Philip Pape: Is it sequential?
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: Does it have a process?
• 26:48
  Philip Pape: Does it have phases, et cetera, periodization?
• 26:51
  Philip Pape: The third thing is that there is some human or entity, I'm gonna put it that way, watching your data and helping you make decisions or make calls.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 27:03
  Philip Pape: And I say human or entity because today we do have AI, we do have software, we do have, you know, I'll say automated systems that can do an effective job at some of this kind of thing, but not all of it.
• 27:17
  Philip Pape: And, you know, I like the approach where if there's if you need a human involved because your situation has a little bit of complexity, having it be a combination of automated things that make it convenient for you, where like the data is easy to track, it's easy to get a quick answer on things that like are somewhat automated, and then a human can jump in for the more complex stuff so that it's convenient for you and it's fast.
• 27:40
  Philip Pape: Like I want you to get an answer quickly.
• 27:41
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to have to wait till the next call or like wait to get a response from your coach.
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: I I'm seeing it from both sides here.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 27:48
  Philip Pape: And yeah, it helps when you have a video library or education or guides or something like that.
• 27:53
  Philip Pape: Like we all do, like all good coaches have those things.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: But if if someone can access your training history, your hormone context, your schedule, you know, maybe, maybe your photos, maybe your measurements, like whatever makes sense, or at least be able to get them quickly and then say, hey, based on what I'm seeing, here's what you need to change.
• 28:09
  Philip Pape: So there's got to be some level of that.
• 28:10
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: Like in my app, for example, it it's doing that almost fully automated and it's really impressive.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: And it uses AI to do that.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: And yet some people want the human connection as well.
• 28:21
  Philip Pape: And that's why I think there's a place for both in the world.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: The fourth thing it does is it integrates nutrition and training.
• 28:27
  Philip Pape: Now, there's a lot of other pieces of lifestyle we talk about, sleep, stress, et cetera.
• 28:31
  Philip Pape: But to me, the nutrition and training are the two big ones that come together.
• 28:34
  Philip Pape: And they're not separate problems.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: That's the thing, they're not separate.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: I can't tell you how many people join my list or find the podcast and they reach out and they're like, I really want to lose weight.
• 28:42
  Philip Pape: I really want to improve my health.
• 28:43
  Philip Pape: I really, first question I ask is, Are you lifting weights?
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: Oh no, I'm not doing that.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: Like, oh, I am so glad you met me because that is so important.
• 28:51
  Philip Pape: It's not just the nutrition, it's the training.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: And some people have the opposite problem.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: They're like all into training and PRs and lifting weights and everything, but they eat like crap.
• 28:59
  Philip Pape: You know, they they they just don't know how to make it work together.
• 29:02
  Philip Pape: So they both go together.
• 29:03
  Philip Pape: They affect each other tremendously as a system.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: And so I think any coaching program that addresses just one side of that is only solving half the equation.
• 29:14
  Philip Pape: Now, that doesn't mean you can't have a program for one side if you're addressing the other side a different way.
• 29:19
  Philip Pape: I'm not trying to criticize all the great programs out there that do like just training.
• 29:25
  Philip Pape: I'm just saying that you have to have them both addressed in some way.
• 29:29
  Philip Pape: Okay, now I know some of you are thinking, wow, that actually does sound like that sounds like more expensive than one-on-one coaching, what you just talked about.
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: Like, how am I gonna find somebody or something that does all of that?
• 29:39
  Philip Pape: I definitely can't afford, let's say, 500 a month for personalized one-on-one.
• 29:43
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of people, honestly, that is overkill.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: Most experienced people, they don't, they don't need like a human texting them every day or they or constantly following up on them.
• 29:54
  Philip Pape: But what they do need is structure, they need a sequence, and they need periodic check-ins.
• 29:59
  Philip Pape: Like to me, that's a good balance because this isn't your life.
• 30:02
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: It's it's kind of my life because I'm a podcaster and I'm a coach, but it's not your life.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: And I get it.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: I don't want to be imposing on you some system where you feel overwhelmed by your coach.
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: That's not the point.
• 30:15
  Philip Pape: I think there's a middle ground between, you know, here's information, here's some, here's a group, here's some content, you know, like think about physique university, which is $27 a month.
• 30:25
  Philip Pape: I mean, that's dirt cheap, right?
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: For it, it's practically like a Netflix subscription.
• 30:29
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of the model, right?
• 30:31
  Philip Pape: But then the other side is, oh, full-time personal nutritionist, you know, you're like Mr.
• 30:35
  Philip Pape: Hollywood, Will Smith, or whoever who needs the nutrition guy following you around.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: But there's like gotta be this middle ground, and it barely exists in the industry because I think people are going full on what they call high ticket, or they're going low tuck to low ticket where they want to upsell you to high ticket.
• 30:52
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 30:53
  Philip Pape: Now, let me tell you what I'm not saying here because this message always gets misread.
• 30:58
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying the information is useless.
• 31:00
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying podcasts and books and YouTube don't help.
• 31:03
  Philip Pape: I have a podcast to help people.
• 31:05
  Philip Pape: I learn an enormous amount that way myself.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying that everyone needs a coach.
• 31:11
  Philip Pape: Some people do figure this out on their own, and that is awesome.
• 31:14
  Philip Pape: What I am saying is that past a certain point for a certain type of person, and you know if this is you listening, more information has diminishing returns, whereas structure has exponentially increasing returns.
• 31:29
  Philip Pape: And the gap between knowing and doing is a real gap.
• 31:32
  Philip Pape: It is not a flaw in your character or your discipline or something like that.
• 31:36
  Philip Pape: Stop beating yourself up.
• 31:37
  Philip Pape: Stop being guilty.
• 31:38
  Philip Pape: It's not you.
• 31:39
  Philip Pape: I mean, you can feel guilty, but I'm just telling you, it's not you.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: It's a problem with the design.
• 31:43
  Philip Pape: And design problems have design solutions.
• 31:45
  Philip Pape: Hey, hey, physique engineer here.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: Okay, I can help you with that.
• 31:49
  Philip Pape: Now, I want you to stay to the end because I still have that three-question audit to tell you if your bottleneck is knowledge or implementation, so you don't go down the right path.
• 31:57
  Philip Pape: But I do want to zoom in on why this is relevant if you're older.
• 32:03
  Philip Pape: If you're among us older dudes and gals who are over 40, we lift, the stakes get a little bit higher now.
• 32:09
  Philip Pape: And whether you're a man or a woman, okay, the specifics look different, but the principles are universal.
• 32:15
  Philip Pape: Go back in time to your 20s or your early 30s.
• 32:18
  Philip Pape: What could you do back then?
• 32:19
  Philip Pape: Just about anything with a suboptimal approach, right?
• 32:23
  Philip Pape: Your hormones were very forgiving and fiery, and your recovery was super fast, your joints felt great.
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: You could out-train a bad nutrition plan, you could do gross fit terribly like I did for eight years, and you had this huge margin for error, and it was great.
• 32:36
  Philip Pape: Life was great, okay?
• 32:37
  Philip Pape: You do whatever.
• 32:38
  Philip Pape: And that margin starts to shrink.
• 32:40
  Philip Pape: It starts to shrink in your 40s and your 50s.
• 32:43
  Philip Pape: Those are the key decades where this happens.
• 32:46
  Philip Pape: For women, you've got perimenopause, menopause, which change hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone.
• 32:51
  Philip Pape: That affects your muscle protein synthesis, it affects your sleep, it gives you all these symptoms that affect everything.
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: It affects your body fat distribution.
• 32:59
  Philip Pape: For men, testosterone is declining starting at the age of 30.
• 33:03
  Philip Pape: And by 50, you could be at like 70% of your peak, especially if you're not lifting weights.
• 33:08
  Philip Pape: And that means slower recovery, less energy, stubborn body fat.
• 33:11
  Philip Pape: And then the information landscape for us over 40 is a complete mess right now.
• 33:17
  Philip Pape: It's a mess.
• 33:18
  Philip Pape: Half of the advice says you just accept the declining strength and do all these other longevity hacks, biohacking.
• 33:26
  Philip Pape: It's a huge thing.
• 33:27
  Philip Pape: Or they're going to sell you a hormone-specific supplement stack, or they go right to HRT but forget all the lifestyle, or GLPs and forget the lifestyle, right?
• 33:36
  Philip Pape: What you need is someone or something or a method or system to understand how your body is operating under all of these new constraints that didn't exist before, and then work within those constraints intelligently, not as a fear-monger, not to say you can't.
• 33:53
  Philip Pape: No, you can absolutely thrive in the best ways this time of life.
• 33:57
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 33:58
  Philip Pape: And that's just not something that a guide can do or podcast can do, including this one, including this one.
• 34:03
  Philip Pape: I give you the principles every week.
• 34:04
  Philip Pape: I give you lots of tips too.
• 34:06
  Philip Pape: I bring in a lot of cool guests, but the application of those to your body and your hormones and your schedule and your data requires more than information, requires a structured process.
• 34:16
  Philip Pape: All right, that tip is coming up in a second, but if this episode made you think, hey, that is me, that is my situation, I want to hear from you.
• 34:24
  Philip Pape: I want to hear from you.
• 34:25
  Philip Pape: I am building something for people who lift weights, who don't mean more need more information, who are not beginners, but you need a structured, week-by-week coaching process with a real sequence, with actual context, with someone watching your data, a human in the a human in the loop.
• 34:42
  Philip Pape: I'm going to be sharing the details with my weight list.
• 34:44
  Philip Pape: So to get on that list, go to with witsandweights.com slash eatmore.
• 34:48
  Philip Pape: The link will be in the show notes.
• 34:49
  Philip Pape: That's witsandweights.com slash eatmore.
• 34:51
  Philip Pape: And I'm going to be sharing more soon.
• 34:53
  Philip Pape: I, you know, everybody loves to be teased, right?
• 34:56
  Philip Pape: Like, what is Philip doing here?
• 34:57
  Philip Pape: This is not an April Fool's joke, by the way.
• 34:59
  Philip Pape: Because I know we're getting close to that time.
• 35:01
  Philip Pape: Witsandwaits.com slash eat more.
• 35:03
  Philip Pape: Also, text this episode to a friend if you think they need to hear it, because a lot of people need to hear this message.
• 35:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, here's a quick way to figure out whether you're stuck because of knowledge or implementation.
• 35:14
  Philip Pape: It's three questions.
• 35:15
  Philip Pape: They're yes or no questions.
• 35:16
  Philip Pape: Question one can you explain right now what you would need to do with your nutrition and training to move toward your goal?
• 35:24
  Philip Pape: Okay, not perfectly, but just a general approach.
• 35:27
  Philip Pape: Okay, can you explain what you need to do with your nutrition and training generally right now to move toward your goal?
• 35:33
  Philip Pape: If the answer is yes, knowledge is not your problem.
• 35:37
  Philip Pape: Question two, have you followed that approach consistently for at least six weeks?
• 35:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's about 45 days, six weeks without changing it.
• 35:46
  Philip Pape: Okay, have so if question one was yes, you know what to do.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: Question two is have you followed that consistently for six weeks without changing it?
• 35:53
  Philip Pape: Now, if the answer is no, well then you have a commitment or structure problem, don't you?
• 36:00
  Philip Pape: It's not an information problem.
• 36:02
  Philip Pape: Something is preventing you from sticking with what you already know works.
• 36:06
  Philip Pape: And now question three Do you have a way to measure whether your approach is actually working beyond just the scale?
• 36:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, so things like training logs, biofeedback, stuff like that.
• 36:19
  Philip Pape: All right, if the answer is no, you are flying blind.
• 36:23
  Philip Pape: You might be making progress or you might not be.
• 36:26
  Philip Pape: And you just don't know.
• 36:28
  Philip Pape: You might be stuck in a cycle and no way to catch what to do next.
• 36:31
  Philip Pape: You just don't know.
• 36:32
  Philip Pape: So if you answered yes, no, no, then you do not need more information.
• 36:39
  Philip Pape: You don't need another podcast episode.
• 36:41
  Philip Pape: I have a lot of them, I can send you, but you don't need it.
• 36:44
  Philip Pape: You need a system that takes what you already know and turns it into a structured, measurable process.
• 36:49
  Philip Pape: That is the gap.
• 36:50
  Philip Pape: And remember that closing that gap is what's gonna change everything for you.
• 36:54
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 36:56
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 36:58
  Philip Pape: And remember the gap between knowing and doing is not discipline, it is structure.
• 37:02
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Hate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.