Dr. Mike T. Nelson explains why sleep—despite being a massive physiological lever—ranks last among the eight interventions in the Flex Diet Certification. The key concept: coaching leverage (physiology × psychology). Sleep scores high on physiology but rock-bottom on a client's ability to change, while protein scores high on both, making it the #1 starting point.
In this solo episode, Dr. Mike T. Nelson introduces the concept of coaching leverage—the idea that effective coaching means multiplying physiological impact by a client's realistic ability to change.
The Flex Diet Certification closes tonight (Monday, June 22, 2026) at midnight Pacific. Get details here.
FD podcast - Flex Diet Cert Closes at Midnight Mon 6/22/2026 and Coaching Leverage
[00:00:00] Speaker: 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 performance, improve body composition, add more muscle, do all of it in a flexible framework without destroying your health. Today on the podcast is just me talking about why, if you are coaching sleep, which I think you should if you are a coach or prioritizing it yourself, that this is probably the last thing I think you should work on.
And we'll discuss this through the lens of coaching leverage. Wanted to let you know that the Flex Diet cert, if you're listening to this today, Monday, June 22nd, 2026, it does close tonight at midnight Pacific Standard Time. We will put a [00:01:00] link down below, so you have-- still have a little bit of time to hop into it.
If you have any questions, you can send me a direct message. If you're listening to this after that time, uh, there'll still be a way to get information, uh, when it opens next time. So right now it's not slated to open until probably January or February of next year but you can still get in and get all the information this year.
Go to the link down below. And today I wanted to do just a short solo cast to discuss why a lot of coaches are coaching sleep, which I think is for good reasons, but in practice I find it to be an absolute nightmare. So many years ago, God, it was probably eight-plus years ago now, probably longer than that, uh, I read a book, I think it was called Lights Out, and it talked about how sleep [00:02:00]deprivation is really bad for metabolism.
God, it might even be much longer than that. I think I-- the older I get, the more I'm losing track of time. And I started looking into sleep. I remember talking to my good buddy, Dr. Dan Pardi, at a conference many years ago about all of his research on sleep, and I started coaching it with clients 'cause I realized, oh my gosh, I have clients who their sleep is pretty horrible.
They're only sleeping maybe six hours a night. And this is before even Oura. And then once Oura came out, I was one of the first people to use the second generation one and started doing more stuff with sleep. And unfortunately, what I realized was over time that there is a lot of reason physiologically to talk about sleep, and most people are probably walking around chronically sleep-deprived to some degree or another But man, coaching it, I would rather put my head through a wall because if you go through their entire schedule, no matter [00:03:00] how much they air quote optimize their sleep environment, and yes, you should do those things, make it nice and, and cold, have a downregulation routine at night.
You can even go so far and get crazy like I have with regulating your sleep temperature at night. There's a bunch of temperature regulation systems on the market. I've had one to-- kind of on my third one now, probably over the last seven years. Makes a huge difference. Really like it. And all those things you can do to make your sleep environment better, and it does make a difference.
But at some point, if you're only sleeping six hours a night or five and a half hours a night, doesn't matter how good a high quality sleep you get, you're just gonna need more sleep to function. And yes, there are a couple genetic weird things. There's DEK2 mutants wandering around, but they are exceedingly rare.
So again, I've had clients who swear they can get by on six hours a night, [00:04:00] but as soon as we bump their training up a little bit and remove any form of stimulants, they don't do very good. So they're basically just Living on high stress and caffeine, which I've done that for, yeah, pretty much through my, my whole PhD.
Uh, and it does have a cost at the end. I was a mess for about a year and a half after that. It was a complete disaster. So good sleep does make a huge difference, but coaching it, at the end of the day, it's basically, "Oh, yeah, you know those two hours I chill and watch Netflix at night? So you're telling me not to do that, and I should just go to bed for those two hours?"
In, in short, yes. Um, and that never really went over well. And again, most of the time, they don't have the ability to change a bunch of stuff during the day, not putting their kids up for adoption. They still have a commute to work. They're not changing jobs. So it is kind of, uh, unfair to expect them to make these radical life changes from where they're currently at to get [00:05:00] more sleep.
But the good part about most people, especially with nutrition and exercise, is there are tons of good starting points. And what I realized over time was I made the mistake of just prioritizing things only based on physiology. I wasn't really accounting for the client's ability to change. So the concept I came up with is called coaching leverage, and it's just simply the physiology times the psychology.
So we wanna do physiology. We wanna do things that move the needle. Don't wanna be majoring in the minors. But we also need to take into account either yourself or your client, their ability to actually change that thing. So for sleep, for example, huge physiologic lever, but trying to get people to sleep more I found was incredibly difficult, and it was actually a much longer-term process.
Now, again, people have done it. We have gotten people to get a lot better sleep, but that is [00:06:00]a many months to sometimes years project. It's not something that's most likely gonna change in a few days or a few weeks. So what I did then is to create a coaching leverage score for each of the interventions.
The physiology and psychology would just be ranked on an arbitrary one to ten scale. Again, I did try to pull for at least for the physiology portion as much research as I could. On the psychology part, there really just isn't a ton of research there. So the scale is just arbitrarily based on my twenty-plus years of working with clients, and I still work with clients all the time online now.
And we found that protein was number one. Protein has a lot of physiologic advantage. It's helpful for recovery. It's helpful for satiety. Uh, it's almost impossible to eat enough protein to have it turn into fat. I've had long discussions on this with, uh, Dr. Stu, Stu Phillips, uh, Dr. Jose Antonio, he did a [00:07:00] huge protein overfeeding study.
Both those, I have expert interviews from both of them in the Flex Diet Cert, uh, including Dr. Mike Ormsby, who's done protein feeding before night. Dr. Jorn Trombelin has done a protein feeding study of 100 grams of protein all at once. So there's tons of leverage on the physiology side with protein.
And I found with, you know, just a bit of education, most clients could actually dramatically increase the amount of protein they were eating, and they got better results for, especially for body composition. So protein in and of itself, I ranked on a one to 10 scale on physiology, a nine. Client's ability to execute it also a nine.
So the aggregate score for coaching leverage score then is 81. Sleep, probably a 10 on physiology, probably one of the highest ones. But client's ability to change, I gave it a frigging two. So the overall score was 20. [00:08:00] What this means is if both of those are moving the physiologic levers, granted sleep might even be a little bit more, but the aggregate score of where you should start, protein wins by a landslide.
And when I ended up ranking the eight interventions in the Flex Diet Cert, protein was number one and sleep was number eight, was dead last Why is this useful is because it allows you to prioritize the thing that is gonna be easier for clients or yourself to do. I made the huge mistake of trying to prioritize things that I could make a really good argument based on physiology, but in practice, if I looked at the end result of what was actually happening, eh, it wasn't really that good because they weren't able to do it.
And again, that was my mistake, not necessarily their mistake. So in coaching, we wanna kinda rig the system in [00:09:00] their favor. If we've got a bunch of different interventions we can do, we definitely want to do things that physiologically move the needle and get them closer to their goals, and we can also leverage the things that are gonna be easier for them to do.
That's probably one of the biggest mistakes I see with coaching. I know it was one of my biggest mistakes also, is I kept thinking that the physiology was the only thing, and then I would get super frustrated about the psychology. And as you know, if you've worked with clients, a huge portion of it is the psychology of change.
So this was the spine of the Flex Diet Cert and how everything is then arranged. And then we've got the big picture, which is metabolic flexibility combined with flexible dieting. And then we have the eight interventions where we give you an hour lecture on everything you need to know about, say, protein, fats, carbs, uh, even NEAT, micronutrition, [00:10:00] fasting, sleep, and much more.
So I limited myself to only one hour to tell you everything you need to know about the research on protein, for example. Um, that was probably the hardest part when I was designing the cert, was to try to get that into one hour. I think the carbohydrate one I ended up redoing, God, multiple times. I think it's an hour and 20 minutes right now.
So that's the only one that, that went over. Uh, what's cool about the Flex Diet Cert is it's kinda the system that I wish I had when I started coaching clients The other biggest mistake I made was just not following a system and thinking that I had to reinvent the wheel. I could have saved myself, man, hours, time, money of just purchasing a system that I trusted, executing the system, and then troubleshooting the system to see what went wrong.
Get really good at that, and then if you wanna add things or, you know, expand it a little bit from there, I think that's fine. Um, but I was just-- felt [00:11:00] like I had to invent everything myself. I think that was a huge mistake and cost me a lot of time, and ended up costing me a lot of money of not being able to get clients as good of result either.
Uh, that is the Flex Diet cert, and what I think is the biggest principle of coaching leverage. Again, you can apply coaching leverage to your own system or everything that you've got going on. Uh, but it is kinda one of the things that I came up with that I am pretty proud with. A lot of the stuff that is there is based on research and is based on work from many other people.
Um, but a couple things that I feel like are a little bit innovative that have been beneficial are coaching leverage and then the concepts in the physiologic flexibility, uh, which is a different certification, and that one doesn't open again until fall. So if you have any questions on it, uh, that is the idea of coaching leverage, which you can take away and apply right now, and that is the backbone of the Flex Diet certification, a complete [00:12:00] system to teach you how to get better body composition and performance with yourself or with your clients.
Uh, it does close tonight, if you're listening to this, as this podcast came out on Monday, June 22nd, 2026. It closes at midnight Pacific Standard Time tonight. We'll put a link down below there. So as always, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really appreciate it. A ton of great stuff, ton more interviews, everything else coming up.
So thank you once again, and we'll talk to you next week