Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast! In this solo episode, I dive into the concept of coaching leverage, a key aspect of the Flex Diet Certification. Learn how to maximize muscle growth, improve performance, and enhance body composition through eight essential interventions, including protein intake, sleep, and more. I discuss the practical application of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting principles to help you and your clients achieve sustainable results. Don't miss this opportunity to gain insights and tips that you can apply right away. Flex Diet Certification is open from February 9th to 16th, 2026. Sign up now and start your transformation!
Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast! In this solo episode, I dive into the concept of coaching leverage, a key aspect of the Flex Diet Certification. Learn how to maximize muscle growth, improve performance, and enhance body composition through eight essential interventions, including protein intake, sleep, and more.
I discuss the practical application of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting principles to help you and your clients achieve sustainable results. Don't miss this opportunity to gain insights and tips that you can apply right away. Flex Diet Certification is open from February 9th to 16th, 2026. Sign up now and start your transformation!
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase muscle, improve performance, and better body composition, all without destroying your health in the process. Today is just a solo cast for me, talking about the concept of coaching leverage.
And how you can use it, and this is one of the key pieces of technology in the Flex Diet Certification, which if you're listening to this podcast when it came out, the Flex Diet Cert is now open as of February 9th, 2026. It'll be open for one week through February 16th, 2026. If you want all the info, we'll have a link down below.
Where you can get all of the information. We'll also include a way to get on the [00:01:00] newsletter because we've got a ton of information this week going on about the Flex Diet Cert, and it's primarily designed as more on the nutrition and recovery side, so it's eight different interventions from protein, fats, carbohydrates, micronutrition.
Fasting, the basic exercise sleep and a whole lot more. And within each one of the eight interventions, we've got the 30,000 foot view, the kind of the big picture. So the concepts that it's based on are the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting. And then for each intervention, we've got a one hour primer on everything you need to know on that topic.
Based on research and I condensed it down to about one hour. So they're all only one hour except for carbohydrate one. I did go a little bit over on that. It was hard to condense everything about [00:02:00] carbohydrates into one hour. Um, but for protein, everything you need to know about how does protein work, what are the two main leverage points for protein?
Why is protein important? And it's in a language you can understand. We've got all the full references and everything there. And then for each of the eight interventions, we've got five explicit action items. So you'll know the big picture, you'll know the concepts, you'll know the details of each intervention, and then you'll know within the system of how to explicitly apply each action item for yourself or for your clients.
Uh, what I wanted was a complete system that includes both a physiology. The psychology, which is baked in, which we'll talk about in the coaching leverage section here, coming up and to understand the concepts, the details. But I wanted to make it extremely practical so that you know exactly what you need to do in a flexible [00:03:00] framework.
So it is gonna be a little bit different for each client that's in front of you or yourself, because everyone is a little bit different. Shocker. I know. So if you want more information on that, uh, check it out down below. We do have some fast action bonus items for the first, uh, few, couple days, few hours that it's open.
If you have any questions, you can contact me directly through the newsletter. Just sign up to the newsletter, hit reply. I'll get back to you within 24 to 48 hours. And ide cert, right now it's only open twice a year, so this is the first time it's opening. Open today, February 9th, 2026 through February 16th at midnight Pacific.
Standard Time 2026. So I think you will enjoy it. All the feedback on it has been really, really good. And last point for right now, I'll, I don't know how long I'll be able to keep doing this, but for right now, for this [00:04:00] launch for sure, uh, I'm committed to answering any questions you have. So once you enroll.
If you have any explicit questions about the information or case studies or you're stuck with a client, I will personally answer you and help you. I know a lot of people who sell certs don't like doing that, and I get at some point with scale. Uh, it's probably not practical, but I'm gonna try to keep doing that as long as I possibly can because I do want you to understand the material.
I want you to go through the course. I want to personally help you if you get stuck. One of the little dirty secrets with people selling some courses is they don't really want you to go through all the material and they don't want you to ask a lot of questions because that's more time intrusive on their part.
But I do want you to understand all the material, and if you do get stuck, I'll do whatever I can to personally help you out. So check out all the information down below. We do have [00:05:00] payment links and everything down at the checkout place. If you want more information, you can hop onto the newsletter for completely free.
If you're not on there, if you have any questions, you can send me a question directly through there. Once you're on the newsletter, uh, just hit reply and up next I'm gonna do a little solo cast here talking about the concept of coaching leverage and hope to see you in the Flex Diet Cert.
Dr Mike T Nelson: What I did when I designed the FlexThigh Insert is I wanted it to be a little bit more on the physiology side. Since most of the questions I got were related to different aspects of physiology. And how do you use that for more muscle, body comp, and performance.
When I designed the system, I baked in sort of the psychology of it, because there is no question that when you're coaching clients and people, the psychology portion is a massive portion. In fact, I've often joked that I, [00:06:00] I shouldn't have been an exercise physiologist and looked at metabolism. I should have been a psychology major and probably would have made my earlier career a lot easier.
So coaching leverage is simply the physiology or the physiologic response times the client's ability to change. So what this does is it gives you a good marker for both of them, because at the end of the day, you could have something that rates very high on moving the needle closer to their goals, but if it's impossible or extremely difficult for the client to actually do said item shocker, they're not really going to do it.
And this is true across the board with any interventions. So the problem I was trying to solve was, I ran into the issue of only equating the physiologic response to the things that I was doing with clients. So an example I've given before, which I'll repeat here, [00:07:00] is talking about sleep with clients.
Sleep is very important. We can run down the list of all the things that it helps with. Pretty much almost everything that we've studied so far from Glucose regulation fat use, body comp, blunting appetite, recovery, down the list. They're extremely beneficial for a whole host of things that are helping clients be better and helping performance and body comp.
However, when you've actually worked with clients, what you realize is yes, there are things you can do to increase the quality of their sleep, and yes, you should do those things. It is well worth the time and effort. But if Mary Muffintop is only sleeping five hours a night, at some point, she's probably going to need more sleep.
Unless she's a rare Dektu mutant, which there's almost very, very few of those people running around, who can legitimately get very little sleep [00:08:00] and do well. Every client thinks they are one of them, but I have yet to find one that actually is. So yes, you should increase the quality of her sleep, but at some point, five hours just isn't going to cut it.
Shocker, most people need seven to eight hours a night of sleep. I know my friends Juliette and Kelly Sturette were telling me that they had posted an Instagram on this, based on their great book, which I would highly recommend, Built to Move. And we're recommending that people get 8 hours of sleep a night.
And they got lots of really horrible comments about how people were really mad at them about that. But, that's what the data currently says. And, for myself and some athletes I've worked with, that might be 9 or 10 hours a night, which I know seems like complete, utter heresy. The point being that there's a huge physiologic benefit to sleeping more.
The downside is, again, going back to [00:09:00] the client's ability to change, or kind of more the psychology side, at some point you can only increase quality so much, and you just physically need more time in bed. And most of the time this came down to a discussion of, well, you're not putting your kids up for adoption, you're not changing your job, you have other responsibilities, you're training on top of this, plus errands.
And the one to two hours you get to chill and watch Netflix in the evening. Oh, don't do that because my trainer said I'm not supposed to. I should just go to bed. Like, good luck trying to get someone to do that. Some people might, but most people probably won't. And so then you have this kind of battle going back and forth, and that usually doesn't end well.
So in terms of coaching leverage, sleep ended up being, out of the eight interventions, ended up being number eight. And it wasn't because of the physiologic response. If we do a one to 10 scale on the [00:10:00] physiology, heck, I'd probably give sleep maybe a nine or a 10 on a one to 10 scale of a co client's ability to change, probably a one or a two, right?
So if you have a, let's say, we'll be gracious, we'll give it a two, and we'll say that physiology is a nine, so nine times two is 18. Pretty darn low. Compare this to protein. And most people, especially who are trying to improve body composition or only eating maybe 40 grams of protein a day, not per meal.
When you explain to them that they can eat almost like four times that amount of protein, they can eat more of a specific macronutrient or foods that are high in protein, and lose weight, and most of the time improve their performance and add muscle, they're kind of shocked because they expect that they're just supposed to slash all the calories out of their diet.
And you're telling them they can eat more of something that will also help keep them [00:11:00] full, so they are more compliant and doesn't feel as miserable. A lot of times, that is kind of shocking to them. Again, to people in the industry who've been around, probably nothing new there but getting people to eat more protein does take some work, does take a little bit of education, which we go over in the Flux Diet Certification, but most people are pretty much on board with doing it.
And I've noticed that the intervention of doing more protein is way light years ahead of trying to get someone to sleep more. So even if we say protein has a little bit less. physiologic benefit. Let's give it an eight. I would argue it's still very high, but the client's ability to do it is extremely high.
I would give it probably an eight or a nine out of all the things we're going to rate. So eight times nine, seventy two, way higher than the sleep of, we'll give it graciously an eighteen. So what I did in the course is I laid out the eight [00:12:00] different interventions and then they're all ranked on coaching leverage.
And shocker, as you figured out, number one is dietary protein. So the first intervention you will go through in the Flex Diet Cert once you enroll is learning about protein and the benefits of it, how it's related to flexible dieting, metabolic flexibility, and you will have five explicit action items of how to get clients or yourself to eat more protein.
So you will know exactly what you need to do with it. And it's sort of like rigging the system in your favor, like if the client is more willing to do that and it's moving the physiologic needle, i. e. they're doing the thing and it is getting them closer to their goals by a significant margin, of course, you would want to start with the things that are easier.
And what I found is then by the time you get to something like sleep, which is literally number eight of the eight interventions. You [00:13:00] have a fair amount of capital, so to speak, or social capital, or trust, or whatever word you want to use with it, and they're actually more willing to listen. They've done a lot of the other bigger items, which has gotten them closer to their goals, and they are willing to dig into the weeds and possibly change a few more things.
However, starting there, I find, is just a big battle, and not really worth it, in my opinion, at the end of the day. So the concept of coaching leverage is baked into the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. The 8 interventions are ranked then from 1 to 8. With the most coaching leverage items are number 1.
So number 1 is protein, and number 8 on that list is actually sleep. And the other ones are ranked in between. Everything from exercise to meat fats, carbohydrates, fasting, etc. So, just wanted to cover that today for you. The idea of coaching leverage, which you [00:14:00] can actually go out and apply right now.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this solo cast about the concept of coaching leverage. As a reminder, flex Diet Cert is now open as of today, well, depending on when you're listening to this Monday, February 9th, 2026 through Monday, February 16th at midnight Pacific Standard Time 2026. Right now, the Flex Diet Cert is only open twice a year, so this is your time to get in.
Right now, it's not slated to be open again until probably September, so it'll be quite some time. We've got all the information down below. If you want more information and you're not sure, sign up to the newsletter. You got a ton of information going out to the free newsletter, and if you have a specific question, that's probably the best place you can, uh, ask me your question.
As I mentioned in the intro, it's eight different interventions designed to help you [00:15:00] improve. Your body composition, improve performance, add more muscle, everything from macronutrients such as protein, fats, carbs, fasting, micronutrition, exercise, neat sleep, and a whole lot more. It is highly research based, but it's done in a language you can understand.
We've had people go through it with undergrad and master's degrees and we've had people go through it who don't really have a whole lot of formal training. Um, in nutrition and they were all able to, uh, get through it and use the system right away. The other cool part is that you don't necessarily have to complete all of it before you can start applying it.
Some people want to know everything. You want to get through all of the eight interventions, which is great, but in reality, you only need to get through the first intervention and then that intervention stands on its own and you can literally start applying it with people immediately. So within probably about.
Not even two and a [00:16:00] half hours of material. Uh, you can actually start working with clients on that particular intervention and then as long as you're just ahead of where they need to be going through the rest of the cert, you are fine. So I wanted something that was also actionable and correct based on the current level of research and in practice.
So I've been coaching. People for nutrition, exercise, movement, all that wonderful stuff for literally over two decades now. We started officially in 2005. It was kind of working with a few people before that, but that what I can't get to consider the start date since I did my, uh, N-S-C-A-C-S-C-S and was training people, uh, in person and at gyms at that point.
So, any questions on that, hop on the newsletter, hit me up with an email. More than happy to help you out. I hope to see you in the Flex Dieter. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Really, really appreciate it. I'll have another [00:17:00] episode later this week, and in the meantime, check out the Flex Diet Cert.
Hit me up with any questions. Hope to see you there. Talk to you later. Thanks.
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