My prediction for fitness trainers and coaches plus the Flex Diet Cert is now open until Jan 9 at midnight, 2023
For the Flex Diet Cert, go to
http://www.flexdiet.com for all the details
[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey, what's going on? This is Dr. Mike T. Nelson here back with the Flex Diet Podcast for the first episode of 2023, and today I'm talking about my prediction. Since it's the beginning of the year, it's always fun to predict. My prediction for a better fitness model for trainers and coaches. So if you're not a trainer or a coach, this may not necessarily be useful to you, but might be something to look for If you are a trainer or coach, my biased opinion is this will be super useful for you.
And before we get into that, wanted to let you know that the Flex Diet certification is currently open right now as of this recording and release date. It'll be open through Monday night, January 9th, at midnight Pacific Time, 2023. So if you're interested in a systems approach for nutrition and recovery, Go to www.flexdiet.com,
right now it is only open through Monday and I will give you a heads up that the price, the next time it opens. Which right now is slated for around the June timeframe. It'll be much more expensive. I'm not sure exactly what I'll have the final price at next time it opens, but it'll be around double the price that it is now.
The reason for that is I've been adding a lot. Material to it over the course of about the past four years, also been making sure everything in there is updated and still valid according to the new research. And I haven't increased the price to match that at all. Plus we have CEUs from ACE, NASM, and the NSCA
so you are able to, CEUs for it. So go to www.flexdiet.com if you have any questions about it, you can contact me. It'll be open from today when you're listening to this, until January 9th at midnight Pacific Standard Time 2020. If you are listening outside of that time period, you can still go to flexdiet.com and get put on the wait list for the next time that it opens.
Today we're talking about 2023 prediction regarding fitness training industry, and I will just jump into my bias prediction is that everyone needs some type of offline model, and I'll explain what that is. As you have seen in the past due to potential pandemics or just changes that can happen overnight.
The reality is everyone should be operating some type of hybrid model. So even if you're only doing in-person training, I think you need some type of offline component to go with that. And I'll lay out what I think is an easy transition in my recommendations for what to do. Now, hopefully this shouldn't really be much of a surprise, but unfortunately when I talk to a fair amount of trainers the people who are doing in person, which is still alive and well, contrary to what many other people may say.
They don't really have an offline component at all, and the two main reasons I think this is gonna be super useful is one who knows what's gonna happen in the future and things may get shut down again or. It's just really hard to predict. So if you have things already in place, it's gonna be an easy transition.
You are gonna be able to keep more compliance and if they can stay working with you, obviously they're gonna get much closer to their goals cuz we assume you're doing good work. Otherwise, you probably won't even bother listening to this podcast. So number one, you should have a hybrid approach already in place related to that.
Number two is I think gone are the days of just talking to clients and. Counting reps and walking them through exercise. Yes, if you're an in-person trainer, that is still gonna be the bulk of what you are doing, and of course, you need to do it very well. Be personable, giving them the correct exercise, making sure they're doing the correct form.
All of that is still very important. But I believe that is at best, the absolute baseline and that the future is going to be incorporating nutrition and recovery and other lifestyle components. Because as you already know, most people are training for performance and especially better body composition.
They want to get leaner. And yes, exercise training is a big portion of. But another huge portion of that is nutrition. And if clients don't have any skin in the game, yes, you may talk with them about nutrition when you're training, but the action on the other side just doesn't really happen all that much.
So for me, step one to transition into a hybrid model that you can do very easily is to do nutrition recovery, lifestyle work, offline. So you would set people up by offline here? Away from the gym. And actually this would paradoxically be online. So maybe I should say do training and nutrition lifestyle online, not necessarily in the gym.
So you would set this up with a check-in maybe once a week or twice a week. However you want to line that up with their boundaries. You would provide them nutrition, recovery, and lifestyle items. This could be related to sleep. You could get as fancy as measuring their stress with heart rate variability.
But all of this would occur when you are not necessarily training with them in. And yes, you would charge them for this service. Not only is it a way for you to make more income, which is great. Clients need to have some skin in the game in order to be compliant. So a simple transition would be, let's say you're training Karen three days a week in person.
You would continue to do that, and then you would add on, or at least give her the option to add nutrition, recovery and lifestyle work for an additional fee. You would set up what that looks like. When she would check in you could have it be check in maybe on a Wednesday at the first part of your training session.
But I think having everything offline is going to be better. And if she has questions, she could maybe email or text you, however you wanna set that up. So step one to a hybrid approach would be to add. A nutrition lifestyle recovery component to your clients that are training in person right now. And the reality is this is a relatively easy cell, cuz most of them are probably gonna be training for body composition.
And most of them are probably not nailing their nutrition. So this is an easy way to get them closer to their goals. And some may take you up on it, some may not. But that way you know which ones you're gonna spend more time with and which ones have greater capacity or bandwidth to do a. More work instead of beating your head against the wall, trying to assume that all clients who say they want to get leaner and then they don't follow up, and that just gets really annoying after a while.
So this way, you know which people are going to do that. You'll have a system set up with how to help them with it. So number two would be step two if you're training people in the person would be to move everything else offline. This would be the program design. When I say offline, I should say not during their training session.
So paradoxically, again, online, their program design would be online nutrition, recovery, lifestyle. You can get as fancy as looking at breath work, cold water immersion, sauna recovery, heart rate variability whatever you feel. You have the capacity, time, and understanding to. Again, I think this going forward in the near future is just going to be the baseline of what trainers would need to offer to be competitive.
Most people don't have time, want to go to a physician, which they definitely should to get blood work, get some of their blood glucose, blood pressure, all that stuff done. But their physician, unfortunately, due to the. Doesn't have much time to spend with them otherwise. Talking about lifestyle factors, So this is going to fall towards the trainer.
And this again, is not talking about prescription or diagnosis. This is just talking about simple lifestyle design sleep, how much sleep do they get? When do they go to bed, when do they get up? What is their nutrition? What are other things you can help them with in the range of health parameters?
And getting them closer to their goals, which most of the time is body composition and performance. This way when they come in to train at your facility or where you're working, you just refer them to the program that has already been done online for them. You'd walk them through what they're doing that day.
Again, it's in person, so you may make some changes based on how they feel, how they appear, how the first couple sets go. But the program design would also be. so that way if something happens or they go on vacation or the gym has to close, who knows what may happen. It's very easy to transition them to an online status, and of course you would have a separate fee, usually a per month fee to do this.
So your in-person fee would be separate. From the program, design, nutrition, lifestyle work, and everything else. So for example, maybe you're charging a hundred dollars per person per session, and we'll use Karen again as doing two training sessions with you Tuesday and Thursday. Her goal is to get leaner.
Doesn't really care too much about lifting weights, but is very compliant, and we'll do whatever you tell her to do. So you would continue to charge her per person for that session, right? So it'd be $200 a week, but then in addition, you would charge her a monthly fee. Again, I'm just making up numbers here, say $400.
For training when she is not with you. So if she's only training Tuesday, Thursday, she's yeah, I can do another 30 minutes. Other times of the week, maybe you'll have her do some simple cardiovascular stuff. Maybe she'll do one of those sessions. It's a body weight on her own. Maybe she has a rower or a bike or something she can do at home.
There are definitely ways you can get the data online for that. And then you would include her nutrition, work recovery, lifestyle, heart rate variability if you want to get that advanced. But the point is that you would have a separate fee for all of the online features you are doing when you are not with her in person.
So that way if she goes on vacation or again, gyms gets shut down, who knows what'll happen. She already has her plan in place. And while it may not be ideal, she may need have some questions about some of the weight training exercise. It's gonna be far superior. Than having nothing in place. Now again, if you want to get crazy and do you know, Skype sessions with her maybe on a Tuesday or Thursday as a virtual in person that is entirely up to you.
For me personally, I would rather take a red hot Poker and gouge out my left eyeball then. But again, that's me and that's why I only work with clients online anymore. Although I do some in-person sessions here, but that's like not that many in by invite only. So you're already set up for what you would need to do and your transition is pretty easy.
Because for Tuesday and Thursday sessions would already be programmed into whatever software you are using for your online. The nice part then is that you have very little transition, and it is infinitely better for clients because they're gonna know what is the plan, how do all the components fit together, and if something happens, they're already.
Still invested in the model and they know what direction they should be going. So my prediction for 2023, and again, this is already happening. Everybody should have some type of, I'll use the word online model that would occur when they are not with the client in person. Now again, you can take all of this and flip it on its head and just very easily do this as a hundred percent.
Again, the training component there can be a little bit tricky to transition, but all the same principles would apply. So step one would just be to transition and do their nutrition recovery lifestyle work online. Again, you would charge them an additional fee to do this. Your next question then is what do I do for nutrition?
Do I just give them some macros out of a random number generator and yell at 'em if they don't comply? I've done that in the past, doesn't really work so well. That is one of the reasons why I developed the Flex Diet Cert , which is a more habit based approach. Yes you can do some macros within it but most of it is a habit based approach.
There's eight different interventions and they are done in numerical order by the order that I think is gonna be the most beneficial for everyone to start, or what I call progressive disclosure. So number one is gonna be the intervention of protein. And so we've got an hour video that goes over all the technical aspects of dietary protein.
Which amino acids do you need? How do you take amino acids and shove them into muscle tissue? Everything from muscle protein synthesis to mTOR to all the technical words, which we explain what they actually mean in English. And then we've got an overarching video that uses the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting to give you the background and the information about the system.
So you've got a video that continues each week over the eight interventions, so you'll understand all about metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting and then for each one of the interventions, there's a technical video, which for all of them except for the carbohydrate model, it's less than an hour.
And then we've got five specific action items that you would implement with yourself or your clients, so that way you know exactly what they are supposed to do. And it is a complete system. So we explained to you how to pick which one of the five action items is going to be best for that particular.
The good part is that this gives you an entire system of how to do nutrition and recovery, and you can implement this online. So you do not necessarily need to be with the person as they are right in front of you. So this allows you to stay focused on the training sessions when they're there and help them with nutrition and.
the eight interventions that are covered are everything from protein to micronutrients, intermittent fasting, carbohydrates, fats, keto exercise and neat non-exercise activity. Thermogenesis i e walking around. So all those are covered. So that would cover all your bases for nutrition and recovery, and even includes, like I said, sleep and some other lifestyle components in there.
Now, of course I'm super biased because I created the Flex Diet Cert but the reason I created it is in 2018. , I saw that there was a huge gap with a lot of clients doing really good in-person training work, but they weren't really doing much with nutrition and recovery and clients were not getting as good a results as they could.
And when I asked them why that was, they were just generally confused about what nutrition thing to follow. Do I just have 'em do some 30 day challenge? So it's this month is paleo, whatever, and next month. keto and next month is fasting and month four, the poor clients are so confused. They don't know what the hell's going on.
Maybe they'll have 'em do carnivores, we're not really sure. Most of 'em just didn't have a specific system that they followed at all. And so I designed the system so that they can actually implement it and use it based on my experience with metabolic flexibility. This goes back out almost 13 years now, and I work with working with clients in person and online.
And as I mentioned, it's a very guided but yet flexible approach. The downside I think of doing a. Systematic macro based approach is that you're expecting clients to figure out how to do that right away, and most of the time if they're new to doing a nutrition system, they can be a little bit much, and they probably don't need that level of detail quite yet.
So again, we set it up in more of a progressive disclosure so that clients are doing. The main items that they need to be working on first. So there you go. I think everyone should have some type of hybrid model, and you can take that as far and advanced as you want to go. So some of the things you could add on to it if you wanted, like I mentioned, heart rate variability.
So H R V was part of my research for my PhD as was metabolic flexibility. So I've been using heart rate variability on clients, oh god, coming up on almost 10 years now. I think it's super, super useful, especially if you're doing a hundred percent online and do think there is some use for it in person also.
Again, I'm biased cuz I have a course on that. The H R V education course and then, excuse me, if you wanna get really. The items I cover in the physiologic flexibility certification which will open in a couple months from now. That covers everything from cold water immersion, sauna L S D or long slow distance training, or zone two aerobic work, high intensity interval work, breath work, advanced supplements, and so on.
So the reason I designed those three main courses, Is that, that will cover everything that you can use in an online model, and you can add all of those to your existing in-person training also, is that way if anything happens to the economy or the gym or. Clients go on vacation or take time off, they are all ready to go.
So if you have any questions on any of that, let me know. As I mentioned, the Flex Diet Cert is now open until midnight January 9th 2023. Just go to www.flexdiet.com for all the info and as I mentioned, the price will be going up substantially. Next time it opens, which will probably be around June.
I don't know what the final price will be, but it'll probably be close to around doubling of where it is now. So go to www.flexdiet.com. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. As always, really appreciate it. We've got some great episodes already lined up for this year. We've got an episode with Dr.
Escalante about the fate of professional bodybuilders. My friend Lori is gonna talk all about fascia. Dr. Scott Forbes will be talking all about creatine and much more. Stay tuned for all those episodes and more. Thank you so much. Greatly appreciate it.