00:11 Mike Vacanti: Hello, Jordan.
00:12 Jordan Syatt: What’s going on Mike?
00:13 Mike Vacanti: Not much. Feeling pretty good, how are you?
00:18 Jordan Syatt: I’m feeling good, I appreciate your help with my financial advising, it’s been great.
00:23 Jordan Syatt: Wow, did you plan on kicking the episode off of that, did you just pull a me?
00:27 Mike Vacanti: No, I was gonna start by talking about the chapstick, but then I was like, No, let’s go the other way. [laughter] And that was the first thing that came to my head. [laughter]
00:37 Mike Vacanti: That’s very Jay of you, I like that. You’re welcome. You’re welcome.
00:42 Jordan Syatt: Now, it’s been really good. It’s been helpful a lot. So I feel like, I don’t know about today, ’cause around time crunch today, but we could talk about that. Remember that one time for the mentorship… For one of the courses, you just you interviewed me the entire time, I feel like maybe I could do that with you just ask you all of these questions about financial planning and advising, ’cause every time you help me with it, I’m like, “Oh, I really wish I learned about this in school, I really wish someone told me about this.” So…
01:09 Mike Vacanti: Let’s do it like a personal finance/investing, Q&A.
01:15 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.
01:16 Mike Vacanti: That’d be really fun. I’m into it.
01:18 Jordan Syatt: That’d be super cool because I could ask the questions from the perspective of someone who literally knows nothing, and then you could address all the mistakes that I made in asking the question and then actually explain how it works, just like on a base level for people who have… Don’t know where to begin with financial planning or whether it’s making a budget, or how to invest for the long term, what that looks like, what to expect when you’re investing, all the things that you’ve given me some insight on. I think would be great.
01:48 Mike Vacanti: That would be really fun. And even the… For people out there with student loans, like the paying down loans process and which loans to pay down first, and whether it makes sense to pay down versus invest and… Yeah, that’d be a lot of fun. Let’s do it.
02:02 Jordan Syatt: Alright, yeah, and if anyone listening would like that, let us know. And also, by the way, if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, five-star review would be amazing, they actually help a lot, so we would love that, but if that’s something you want, let us know. If you have any other questions you want us to answer, please tell us, DM us on Instagram or anything. We’d love to hear it.
02:23 Mike Vacanti: Absolutely. Cool.
02:25 Jordan Syatt: Everything good otherwise?
02:28 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. I have so much serotonin pumping through my brain and entire body, I am a fundamentally different human being in this state, and I’ll say in the South in general, but in warm weather, Minnesota had just started to get cool. Spent a little time in New York and now being down in Florida and getting some sun on my skin and not having… You know, we actually spoke about this a little bit this morning, but for as many things about New York City that are amazing and incredible and make it one of a kind and make it so special, there are several downsides too, and I don’t wanna sound like I’m complaining, but just comparing the two situations for me personally, like having the ability to go to a place where, one, you’re in nature. Two there aren’t… It’s not a heavily populated area, so there’s no forced human interaction, and having nice weather, which is seasonal obviously. But yeah, I feel great. I feel very dialed.
03:42 Jordan Syatt: Do you have a specific times every day where you get UV?
03:47 Mike Vacanti: No.
03:48 Jordan Syatt: No, just ’cause Florida, there’s always UV.
03:49 Mike Vacanti: No. I guess if I were some expert, it’s not even really the UV, I mean it is, but it’s not like I’m going out there at peak UV during the day, but we just had daylight saving, so I think right now between 11 and three or 12 and four in that range. Yeah, I’ll go spend… Some days it’s 20 or 30 minutes, some days it’s an hour, but whenever I feel like I need a break from whatever I’m doing, go outside and either go do cardio or just go hang by the pool, go swim in the pool. That’s something else I’ve been thinking about, and I’m rattled from our last episode, like with our screen time…
04:31 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah…
04:33 Mike Vacanti: Whoever asked that screen time question, they might have changed my life fundamentally forever, because it’s really got me thinking about… If you didn’t listen to the episode, Jordan and I were both averaging around…
04:47 Jordan Syatt: Eight hours. Yeah.
04:47 Mike Vacanti: Eight hours a day on our cell phones. Of which…
04:49 Jordan Syatt: Pretty crazy how close it was, it was like within six minutes, I think.
04:55 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. That was nuts, especially because yours involved so much working on Instagram and mine involved so much Hulu. But to put a caveat on some of that time, I’ll listen to music on YouTube, while I’m doing client emails and my phone’s open, so there’s part of me that wants to be like… That’s not a true eight hours, but really it’s a lot of time on your phone, and when you are on your cell phone, you can’t… Think about your body when you’re on your cellphone, think about your posture, think about your breathing, think about the fact that you’re almost always not moving. Like if you’re actually holding and doing something on your phone, you’re sedentary, and then I just think about… I combine that with watching… Have we talked about The Social Dilemma, that Netflix documentary?
05:50 Jordan Syatt: No.
05:52 Mike Vacanti: They interview a bunch of people who are early in social media early in Silicon Valley, like big Google people, engineers like Twitter, someone from Facebook in there, YouTube, just talking about… The too long, don’t read of the documentary is that these founders and early people in these companies knew that they were making these apps as “Addictive” as possible, which is just the business model, right? Maximize user time on the app, which maximizes ad revenue, which is like win-win all around.
06:33 Mike Vacanti: The guy who… One of the main guys in the documentary, I don’t know if he actually created it or what, but he was in a significant amount of it. His name’s Tristan Harris, and he was just recently on ROGAN, and I watched maybe 20 or 30 minutes of that. YouTube served it up for me, and I clicked it, and it got me thinking about how much of my unintentional consumption on a phone, I am doing and that whether or not I’m in control of it and to what extent I’m in control of it, and how much of it is like… You and I both know we don’t have a boss, we don’t have someone watching us saying You need to be working between this time and this time.
07:21 Mike Vacanti: The only negative repercussions to not doing what we wanna be doing is obviously there’s a certain bare minimum of client work and programming and responding to people, but beyond that, you really need to… As a coach and a small business owner, you need to self-motivate, and with this device, that is very alluring in many ways, like if there’s a hot headlines served up on YouTube, I might have not even planned on spending the next 16 minutes in that app, but now I am because the algorithm knows me because of all my behavior on the app and knows people like me and has big enough sample size to give me something that I really want when…
08:16 Mike Vacanti: That got me thinking about how I feel when I spend more time on my phone versus how I feel if I aim for instead of eight hours a day, like four hours a day, and then what I’m doing in those other four hours, swimming, twisting like maybe I’ll throw in some random ab work, moving around more, go for a walk, call a friend, like that trade-off in a very short window, like 48 hours, because it’s only been the last two days that I’ve really paid attention to screen time has me feeling much better.
08:51 Jordan Syatt: How has your screen time been in the past couple of days?
08:55 Mike Vacanti: So I made a goal of four hours rather than eight, which seemed reasonable, and as of last night, around 8:00 PM, it was close to five hours, and that was kind of end of… Yeah the day.
09:12 Jordan Syatt: Good.
09:14 Mike Vacanti: And today, I feel like it’s probably been higher today I’m at three hours, I’m at three hours, say, but like right now for this whole podcast, I have my notes app sitting open for our whole hour of podcast… So it isn’t… But I’m just actively trying to not be…
09:28 Jordan Syatt: Looking at it…
09:30 Mike Vacanti: Head forward, internally rotated shoulders, not moving, scrolling, watching something that I… If I actually want to be watching it, or if I want to be engaging with that… And by the way, creation is a whole another game. If you’re making content on your phone, if you’re using your phone offensively, like doing something that is intentional and moving you towards your goals, amazing, incredible. That’s best use of the technology, in my opinion. But if your… Did the bare minimum work and then you’re in a position where you are chasing a feeling or chasing distraction or chasing stimulation that’s easier, you can stimulate yourself by going outside and going for a run, or you can be stimulated by some… There was another shooting, or there was another this in this state, and here’s this hot take on the subject that pulls you into another place.
10:29 Jordan Syatt: Especially what’s interesting about the stimulation aspect and the consuming aspect is so much of the consuming we do, like you can look at the news, the media, which is almost guaranteed to put you in a bad place or… I feel like a lot of the people who might listen to this podcast, coaches trying to build their business, a lot of the consuming they do is oftentimes comparing themselves to people who they think are more successful than them, which is something they do unconsciously, where it’s like they’ll look at other people, what they’re posting, and then just compare themselves, they’ll be like, “Oh, they’re making more money than me, they have more followers than me, why aren’t I as successful as them yet?”
11:05 Jordan Syatt: And they’ll spend hours doing that a day, when it’s like… The better you can get at recognizing that and then doing what you were saying, which is if you wanna use it to create and to help people, then that’s literally the best-case scenario, but if you’re stuck in the real of just comparing yourself to other people and looking at what they’re doing and using it as a justification to shit on yourself, that’s… It’s not a good use of screen time.
11:31 Mike Vacanti: Absolutely, and it’s an important differentiation, right? Like two hours on your phone… Two hours on Instagram, scrolling your feed and just not even engaging with anything and just looking at comparing yourself to “Peers” and that making you feel a certain way versus two hours in your DMs leaving voice memos, like going back and forth with people who are asking you questions, those are… One is work, one is like… They’re on complete opposite ends of the spectrum…
12:02 Jordan Syatt: Correct. Yeah.
12:03 Mike Vacanti: So it’s important to differentiate those things. For many years, I did a lot of the former. I think it’s probably easier to be on offense on those apps when you have a goal to grow your business too…
12:19 Jordan Syatt: Yes, absolutely.
12:21 Mike Vacanti: Like when there’s something that you’re striving toward, it definitely helps, but… Yeah, it’s… Eight hours a day was a wake up call. Physically too, because I can tell in my lifts, I can tell my joints feel different when I’m living a certain way and moving my body a certain way in a certain number of times throughout the course of the day versus when I’m not. And you can compare like eras, if you compare how your body felt during the Gary era when you’re on 12-hour flights and hunched over and crank neck sleeping on a plane and doing whatever, versus the last six to 12 months, just different.
13:08 Jordan Syatt: Completely. Yeah. It’s funny, I was thinking the other day, this is a slight deviation, but still in the same realm, I was at Jiu-Jitsu the other day, and one thing I’ve noticed about the guys at Jiu-Jitsu is they’re always in a better mood than most people in other circumstances. Like all the guys always… They’re always happy and smiling even though they’re fighting, they’re always laughing and joking around, and I was watching two of the best guys there the other day, I was just watching them roll, and one of them… They were joking around, and he’s just out of nowhere, he just jumped and started rolling on the ground by himself, just out of nowhere, he just started, jumped, roll, grab his feet while he was on his back like a baby, grabs their feet from their back and just rolls around, and I was like, man, no one does that in every day life nowadays, it’s like, how often in your day-to-day life do you find yourself just rolling around on the ground, just like laughing, rolling around. We’re always either sitting down hunched over or walking, and it’s like we lose that almost like childlike play and fun and behavior, and very rarely just roll around. And I have no science to support this.
14:16 Jordan Syatt: I have no like… This is just me wondering, I was like, Man, I wonder if just on a day-to-day basis, if we spent more time just getting on the ground and rolling around and just playing more, if it would lead to better mood and habits and for example, instead of picking up your phone and going like to scroll down the feed, get on your rug and just roll around, just like I’m gonna do almost like… One of my favorite exercises is called Baby rolls, it’s rocking side to side on your back, holding on to your feet, do 10 of those side to side, I guarantee, you’ll feel better. It’s something that I thought was interesting to pay attention to, to look at the happiest people in the world, sort of like the blue zones, looking at the healthiest populations know all the people who live the longest, looking at their habits, I would love to look at the habits of the happiest people in the world, and… At least for the people in my life, it’s the people who consistently roll around and play and they do these things that don’t require technology.
15:12 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. I think you’re hitting the nail on the head there, I think that’s probably the number one reason that those guys are… I think too, of… The mindset shifts and perspective shifts that come from the journey to becoming elite in a martial art. Also just… They change who you are fundamentally and make you… There’s some cheesy Fight Club quote, I’m sure that would hit that nail on the head, that’s a little cliche, but also true. I don’t even know what it is, but I know there is one.
[laughter]
15:56 Jordan Syatt: I don’t know what the quote is, but I know it’s true.
15:56 Mike Vacanti: Yes. I think something about when you’re doing something so hard while you’re there, it makes the rest of life easy.
16:02 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
16:06 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, play more. And I think so. Why do you think more people don’t?
16:13 Jordan Syatt: Speaking from personal experience, it was just… I was so focused on other stuff, so when I was coaching Gary and traveling, it was like I was so singularly focused that it was just work, work, work, work, work, and it sounds cliche, but time passes without really realizing it, and new habits are set into place and that just becomes your new norm, I think it’s just, it’s very easy to let almost the seriousness of life take over, and I think that’s part of almost like the… And this is sort of a theme that I remember we would talk about in school when we’re reading books like losing your innocence type of thing, it’s almost like very innocent to just be playful and enjoy and like to do… But as you get older and you have more responsibilities and more stressors, you tend to focus and be more serious and it’s harder to find the playtime, but I think, what’s interesting about the guys at Jiu-Jitsu is, these guys like, oh, they don’t have much money, it’s like they’re not super-wealthy and dishing out, it’s not money that’s making them happy, it’s their life, it’s the enjoyment that they find in their life and doing what they love, being playful and absolutely working really hard, but not forgetting to play along with that.
17:36 Mike Vacanti: When you describe yourself shifting from… I guess just comparing those two eras, it makes sense because in the 2016 to 2019 time frame, you were working very hard and accomplishing a lot of things. But there are people who don’t play who aren’t using their… And this isn’t a judgment, like this is me trying to raise the sea level for all the ships and just throw out ideas, but there are people who aren’t playing, who aren’t happy and who also aren’t spending all their time working.
18:19 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.
18:21 Mike Vacanti: We’ll call it an extreme version of what I saw on my screen time, I know for a fact there are people who spend eight to 10 hours a day just arguing with people on the internet. I’ve spent enough time on Twitter, or like, I’ve seen enough Instagram comments, threads in my day to know there are people… That that’s all they do and… Yeah, I don’t know. I would very much like my life not to…
18:49 Jordan Syatt: Thank God it’s not us…
18:51 Mike Vacanti: Well yeah. Yet.
[laughter]
18:55 Mike Vacanti: Keep an eye on things on that screen time. Yeah, this was fun. Do you have anything else before we dive into the questions?
19:04 Jordan Syatt: No, let’s do it.
19:06 Mike Vacanti: Number one, do you ever re-negotiate your rates with current clients?
19:12 Jordan Syatt: That’s a good question. I like that one.
19:15 Mike Vacanti: Me too.
19:19 Jordan Syatt: Yes. Yes, it’s happened for sure. For whatever it’s worth, I would say 99.99999 times out of a 100 it’s because I tell them, “Hey, I’m gonna reduce your rate,” it’s not because they’re asking. The majority of the time that it’s happened is because they’ve been with me for a very long time, and I really enjoy working with them, and maybe I know that they’re going through a hard time, and I’m like, “Hey listen, I’m like I’m gonna give you the next three months free,” or, “Hey, how about we take $100 off your monthly payment just because I enjoy working with you.” And that’s something that I appreciate you and I would rather work with you than not work with you.”
20:01 Jordan Syatt: So working with you brings me more joy than the extra $100 a month might. So that’s the majority of the time. I have had some occasions where people would be like, “Hey, going through a tough time right now, I’m gonna have to cancel,” and then I say, “No, you’re not,” like, we’re just gonna… I’m gonna give you the next two, three, four months free just because I love you, and when you can start paying me again, you start doing that.
20:19 Jordan Syatt: I’m like, “You know what? How about we take 50% off? How would that work?” So yeah, that has absolutely happened, but you have to ask yourself, I think the important question here is, is this a client that you want to do that for? Right, I think that’s really the big question to ask is if it’s a client who stresses you out, every time they email you, your stomach drops because you know it’s just gonna be a lot of anxiety and giving you anxiety about that interaction, maybe it’s not worth doing that. But if it’s someone that you’ve worked with for a long time and you really love them and have a great relationship with them, then yeah, I think that’d probably be worth it.
20:55 Mike Vacanti: Thank God that the stomach-dropping client, at least in my experience is like one in… It’s probably one in 250. I’ve been very fortunate that I can count on one hand, and I’ve had those experiences, we’ve had those experiences, but I can count on one hand the number of them that I’ve had, which makes me extremely grateful.
21:22 Mike Vacanti: I love that I asked that question, ’cause I didn’t even think of… I’ve experienced similar things, I didn’t even think of that interpretation of the question, my mind went to the grandfathered in client who has been with you since during your first year of coaching, and is in at a rate that is maybe one-third or one quarter, or one half of what your current rate is… Do you… Is there a time when you re-negotiate with that client and increase them, to bring them up to what your “new rate is”? Was how I interpreted it, and it definitely could be either or both.
22:07 Jordan Syatt: And how would you answer that interpretation?
22:13 Mike Vacanti: I wouldn’t judge someone for increasing their rate with a client, I never did, probably because any time a client was grandfathered in, like I remember a few… I think they were men, two or three from my first six months of coaching who were with me five plus years later that were in it like… And I am actually not working with any of these individuals any longer, but were grandfathered in at ike 129 or 139 a month. And when I was charging 350, I never raised their rates. But there’s a built-in, if someone’s with you for that long, like clearly, they’re not a terrible client…
23:04 Jordan Syatt: Correct.
23:06 Mike Vacanti: So that you have a good… It’s hard to work with someone for half a decade and have a bad relationship.
23:09 Jordan Syatt: Correct. Yeah.
23:13 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, so no, I never have done that.
23:19 Jordan Syatt: I would say there are two examples here that I’d like to bring up, the first one being, let’s say you’re working with a client and they… We’re using your example where they’re grandfathered in grandfathered in and you’re working with them, and then they stop working with you, and then a year later, they come back, right? So if they come back a year later, then I wouldn’t have them grandfathered in at the price they were paying, unless it was someone that again, I really loved working with… And they were like, “I’m sorry, I can’t afford the new prices,” and I really enjoy working with them, “Cool. No problem, let’s go back to what it was before.”
23:50 Jordan Syatt: If it was someone that it was like, I’m not like, they’re a little bit more difficult, time-intensive, then you can absolutely use your current prices that are more expensive and have no issue at all with that. It’s totally fine. The other example that I would say is, when I first started coaching people online, and I sometimes would do $20 a month. Like and this was in 2011, 2012, when I was still in college and I was like, “Yeah, we’ll do 20… I don’t care like 20 bucks, 30 bucks.” Then I would have, I had re-negotiation times where once I got to about $200 a month, and then I still had a couple of people at $20 to $50, what I did was this, I think this is actually really important. I didn’t just say, “Hey, just so you know, your prices are raised going forward,” is I gave them three months notice.
24:36 Jordan Syatt: And I said, “Hey, first and foremost, I wanna say thank you so much. It’s been amazing working with you. And I want to continue working with you. I also wanna let you know that because things have changed and demand is increasing, in three months from now, I will be increasing all of my prices to $200 a month. If that’s too much for you, I totally understand, and I will not be upset at all if you decide to leave, I’d be happy to refer you to another coach if you’d like. Obviously, I would love for you to stay on, but I wanted to give you three months advance notice so you can plan ahead,” and not a single one of those people ever dropped off as a result of that.
25:13 Mike Vacanti: That’s a great piece of advice for that reason, and also if for whatever reason, three months down the road, someone couldn’t afford the new rate, it’s really nice to give the client that notice so that they can mentally game plan for…
25:29 Jordan Syatt: Correct.
25:30 Mike Vacanti: Their fitness needs in the future, whatever those might be.
25:35 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, exactly. That was a great question. I like that one.
25:37 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Me too.
25:37 Jordan Syatt: I like the different interpretations of it.
25:39 Jordan Syatt: Me too, question two, we’re going slightly rogue here, this isn’t actually a question, it’s something that I wanted to talk to you about.
25:48 Jordan Syatt: Question number two, this isn’t a real question.
25:52 Mike Vacanti: I was gonna frame it like a question, but that wouldn’t be very transparent. So there’s a very common… It’s almost become a… You know what, I’m gonna say, you started it too. I’m gonna say you’re the founder of this, but something that I think that has become a little bit of a cliche that I’ve noticed that seems more nuanced is the subject of as a coach or as anyone, how should you handle nutrition when you’re on vacation?
26:30 Mike Vacanti: And the answer seems very obvious, which is enjoy do what you want, enjoy your vacation, don’t stress about it, get back on track after, like when you’re on vacation, you should be enjoying time with your family, you should be enjoying the experience, like nutrition shouldn’t dominate your life. It should add to it. And so that’s like the very seemingly obvious answer…
26:55 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.
26:55 Mike Vacanti: However, that’s under the… In my opinion, that’s under the assumption that someone is taking maybe a couple or a few vacations a year, or vacations are more kind of special thing, and just fundamentally like by the numbers it needs to be somewhat infrequent for that advice to work. And I think for the majority of people, that’s true.
27:19 Mike Vacanti: I’ve come across people, clients, and just people in general, who every single weekend, is a… Like is some kind of… Someone’s brother-in-law’s wedding event that’s out of town, there’s a birthday for a greyed aunt and there’s cake, and we’re actually going out the night before, and I’m gonna go travel to a new city, and I’ve never been there and I’ve heard they have this and this and this and this. Yeah, I just… It’s something that I was thinking about and I wanted to throw out.
27:57 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I think this is sort of the question of what is flexible dieting? Right? And I think I see a lot of people struggling with this nowadays, and I’ve even made a lot of content around this topic where some people will use the “flexible dieting” as a justification to eat like shit all the time, and it’s like then they get really upset that they aren’t making the physical progress that they want to see, when the reality is, they’re not doing what they need to do in order to see that progress, but they’re calling themselves a flexible dieter.
28:37 Jordan Syatt: And I think it’s really important to differentiate between flexible dieting and just eating like shit. Flexible dieting doesn’t mean eat as much as you want of whatever you want, and be okay with it, that’s not… But I think that’s what a lot of people have. I think that’s sort of where the pendulum has swung, and I think where… The way you put it, vacation… Vacation is a once or twice a year thing, vacation is not a, “Oh, well, you know, it was Becky’s birthday on Tuesday at work, and then it was Brian’s birthday on Friday, and then it was my aunt Bessy’s birthday on Sunday,” and it’s like, “So I’m flexible dieting and I’m just eating like shit at every birthday party.” That’s not how it works. Or it can be how it works, but you can’t be upset that your body fat isn’t going down…
29:26 Mike Vacanti: Yes.
29:27 Jordan Syatt: Right, it’s like we have to have realistic expectations. So I think it’s a really important discussion, and I think a lot of coaches, myself included earlier in my career, had trouble articulating to a client how this works, ’cause on one hand, we want them to have a good relationship with food, and we don’t want anything to necessarily be off-limits. But we do have to make sure they understand just because nothing is off-limits doesn’t mean that there are no limits.
29:55 Mike Vacanti: Don’t beat it. Sometimes. Some might say. That’s a great explanation, and obviously, there’s variants from person to person, based on their habits, or lifestyle, what they want to accomplish, the response from a coach to a client is gonna be individual, but if you have a brand new client and you’re of the philosophy that when you’re on vacation, enjoy yourself, but that client took four vacations first month of coaching, there needs to be… Yeah people understand.
30:36 Jordan Syatt: I also think this is a good topic to discuss, I also think, for example, let’s say we’re only talking two vacations a year, right, you take two week-long vacations a year… I think that some people struggle to do this appropriately, just because you’re going on vacation for a week doesn’t mean you should binge eat the entire vacation. Like I’m very much of the belief that you shouldn’t be trying to be in a calorie deficit during vacation.
31:07 Jordan Syatt: And I am generally of the belief that you probably shouldn’t be meticulously tracking your calories and macros when you’re on vacation. That being said, I don’t think that you should be eating significantly past the point of fullness and eating things just ad nauseam every meal simply because you’re on vacation.
31:29 Mike Vacanti: Correct.
31:31 Jordan Syatt: So there’s a difference between not dieting and actively uncontrollably eating to the point of feeling sick, just because… And there are a lot of people who struggle with this.
31:41 Mike Vacanti: And that it’s important to highlight that doing that is… The reason that you don’t want to be meticulously tracking and staying in a deficit on your one week-long vacation of the year when you’re going down to the Caribbean or Mexico or… There’s all-you-can-eat buffet. The reason you don’t wanna be dieting is because you want to increase your enjoyment of that experience.
32:12 Mike Vacanti: However, if you eat 5000 calories every single day of or more of fried food and ice cream and your proteins are under 30 grams, you’re actually gonna enjoy the vacation less because of how your body is gonna feel physically as a result of eating all that for seven straight days, and how you’re gonna feel psychologically when you wake up each morning, being someone who made a bunch of progress over six months and then went off the rails here.
32:41 Mike Vacanti: For me personally, on vacation, I like to do pump-type workouts, like workouts that I consider the most fun, maybe every other day that I go hit some arms and push-ups and pull-ups in the hotel gym, and I’ll keep my nutrition pretty normal during the day, and then at night, kinda eat whatever until I’m full.
33:06 Jordan Syatt: I think a lot of our goals with our clients in terms of nutrition is to develop a healthy relationship with food, that’s our goal. If that’s your goal, well, if someone feels the need to binge to the point of nausea over vacation, that’s not a healthy relationship with food. Like building a healthy relationship with food is getting them to the point where they can enjoy their favorite foods without guilt, without going past the point of… And going into a binge.
33:35 Jordan Syatt: So if you really want to help develop a healthy relationship with food, then you should look at situations in which maybe they’re not tracking, but they have the ability to enjoy themselves without going overboard. It’s sort of like when someone goes on vacation for work, I would say you probably shouldn’t answer your work email, like you should take time off, you should put that away, but that doesn’t mean go in and call all the people on your client list at work and just start cussing them out and saying how fucking stupid they are.
34:03 Jordan Syatt: That’s the example, that’s the sort of work analogy that’s similar to just going and eating as much as you possibly can, simply because you’re not tracking your calories, just because you’re not answering your work email doesn’t mean you go in and actively destroy all of your work relationships, it’s like you just you leave it be let be and you wait for once vacation’s over. When you go on vacation, enjoy yourself, but that doesn’t mean like, yeah, you should absolutely go and binge on everything available because that’s not a healthy relationship with food.
34:32 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, good analogy. You heard that had that in the arsenal pre-podcast, or did that just come to you?
34:37 Jordan Syatt: No, it just came to my head right now. I didn’t know you’re gonna ask that question.
34:39 Mike Vacanti: Wow. I wasn’t sure if you’d had a similar conversation before where you used the curse out every one of your clients.
34:49 Jordan Syatt: No, I just made up, I like that one…
34:51 Mike Vacanti: That was good, that was good, I bet that I’ll…
34:53 Jordan Syatt: Thanks, man.
34:55 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, coaches feel free to steal and use it with your clients. I think that’ll help.
35:00 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah.
35:00 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Number three, how to come up with a creative logo?
35:06 Jordan Syatt: Oh man. Do you have a good story around this, I feel like you’ve gotta good one.
35:12 Mike Vacanti: No, I just really wanted to see your reaction.
35:15 Jordan Syatt: On, I mean, number one is, It doesn’t matter…
35:17 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah.
35:19 Jordan Syatt: It just doesn’t matter. My logo was made when I was in my sophomore year of college, I started my website, and this kid, a wonderful kid, Dan Schneider, on the powerlifting team, who’s now a doctor, I haven’t spoken to him in years, he was a really great kid, he was just like, “Hey, could I make you a logo?” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And that’s been the same logo my site has had since 2011-2012, so it really doesn’t matter, just to be frank.
35:48 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, this wasn’t one I’d planned on spending much time talking about, just that the worst thing you can do here is drag your feet on getting started, and for the reason that you spent two, three, four months trying to figure out the perfect logo for your business, it really… For certain types of businesses maybe, but for starting as a personal trainer or building an online brand in the fitness industry, it does not matter.
36:20 Jordan Syatt: How did you come up with On The Regimen? What’s the story behind that?
36:27 Mike Vacanti: It was about 3 o’clock in the morning in September of 2006.
36:39 Jordan Syatt: Wow.
36:40 Mike Vacanti: No, no, no, 2007 as I was a sophomore, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and very drunk, eating pizza, laying on the couch with Jordan Wild, Joe Wooley,Bye-bye and Mike Stone, and we were watching Seinfeld just winding down a nice solid night and a P90X infomercial came on, and I think Jordan was probably just laying there in his boxers, eating pizza, and looked down at his body, and looked up and was like… He was like, “Boys, we gotta get on a regimen.” And then through college, that was what we all like… If you had a few bad weeks, you were off the reg, if you’d been going to the Surf, which was the rec center, if you’d been lifting, if your nutrition had been solid, you were on the reg, you were dialed, you were on the reg.
37:37 Jordan Syatt: Wow. I’ve never heard this. I like this.
37:40 Mike Vacanti: Have you never heard that story?
37:40 Jordan Syatt: I’ve never heard that story.
37:43 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, that’s where it came from. And yeah.
37:47 Jordan Syatt: Boys, we gotta get on a regimen.
37:55 Mike Vacanti: We gotta get on a regimen.
37:55 Jordan Syatt: Sounds like something Gary would say, I love that.
37:56 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah. Okay, question four, coaching one session a week with gym clients. How to get the most out of it.
38:08 Jordan Syatt: Okay, so coaching one session a week with gym clients. Number one is I really like this question because I think it’s something that a lot of coaches struggle with, a lot of coaches are in this position, and they don’t know what to do with that one hour, right? So I think number one is… I think you have to take a very realistic… You have to have a very realistic expectation of what you can get out of that one hour, and odds are if you’re just with someone for one hour a week, I’m not gonna say you can’t change your life because you can, but it’s not gonna come from that one hour.
38:45 Jordan Syatt: So I think the best thing you can do is develop a great relationship with that person, that that has to be the foundation of the relationship because ideally, from that one hour, then who knows, maybe it’ll go into two hours, and then maybe you’ll have more of a connection, then you can start talking about their nutrition when you’re not coaching them, ’cause the reality is that one hour, it’s not that much time, especially like maybe they’re gonna come in 10, 15 minutes late, and they have to leave a couple of minutes early, oftentimes, what’s on paper as a calendar comes down to being…
39:19 Jordan Syatt: What’s on paper as an hour comes down to being like 45 to 40 minutes. So I think the best thing you can do is develop a really good relationship with them, and from there, ideally work towards getting them to improve their habits when they’re home and on their own. I think, obviously, your job during that hour is to coach them, to coach them with their technique, with their exercise technique, make sure they’re using the right muscles, they’re not gonna injure themselves, but by developing a great relationship with them in that hour, you’ll then ideally impact them going forward.
39:55 Jordan Syatt: And this is for whatever it’s worth, this is where I think social media can play a huge role in your client success, where if they’re only with you that one hour during the week, but you have a great relationship with them and they follow you on social media and you’re posting very helpful information about nutrition and lifestyle, well, now you’re with them for more than an hour, which is one of the reasons why I think that a lot of coaches who say I don’t need to do online stuff in-person is the only thing that works, well, what happens if you post one time a day and the person who was only with you for an hour, now sees your consistent helpful posts and updates on social media.
40:27 Jordan Syatt: It’s like what that one hour becomes is something where, “Hey, you know what, I saw you posted about meal frequency and I really wasn’t sure what you meant about that, ’cause I was always told that I need to eat six small meals a day, can you tell me more about that?” Well, now you have a great relationship and they’re able to ask you a more educated question based on the things you’re posting on social media.
40:46 Mike Vacanti: I love it, I love that answer. I think you hit the nail on the head. From a technical standpoint, the only thing I’d add is, one, I would program all of their workouts, so I would give them a full training program, and then two, I would vary which workout I’m doing with the client, so over the course of a four-week phase, if they’re training four times a week. I would try to get one of each session in with the client, especially if they’re on the new… Even intermediate, but beginner to intermediate, and really enforcing proper technique.
41:30 Mike Vacanti: Beyond the relationship, that’s one area where you can make a fundamental difference is, and even picking one or two movements in a workout and hammering those. But just from the perspective of not getting hurt, from the perspective of maximizing progress, going from having terrible technique on a squat deadlift bench row chin up to having 9.99 out of 10 plus technique on those movements is gonna be extremely beneficial for that person.
42:09 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I like that a lot. I think to just to take on from there, ’cause I think it’s a super important point is and I think the goal in that hour that you have week after week after week should make it so when they go on their own… Whether they stop working with you or they go on vacation, or if they aren’t able to meet with you, is that you know that they can train on their own safely. You know they know how much weight to use, you know they know when to stop if something doesn’t feel right, you know they know how to set up certain pieces of equipment for certain exercises.
42:42 Jordan Syatt: It’s like that hour isn’t going to… I think a lot of coaches, the mistake they make is they’re like, “Alright, I’m gonna try and destroy you for this hour, I wanna make you sweat, I wanna go crazy, I wanna make you do this crazy finisher, I’m gonna make sure when you leave here, you can barely walk, which is… That’s a whole separate discussion for stupid coaching, but if that’s the only hour that you have with them, then your job should really be to make sure they’re an intelligent, well-informed lifter, not just trying to make it so that they… It’s the different between giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish. You wanna teach them how to fish, you don’t just wanna give them that sweaty session, you wanna make sure that they’re an intelligent lifter and know what to do on their own.
43:21 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, great reply. And with that said, thank you very, very much for listening, we’ll be back next week, we are banging weekly episodes, we’re not missing a single episode for the rest of 2020, we appreciate you listening, if you enjoyed this, please, please leave a five-star review. It helps us reach more people with the podcast, and we wish you a great week, weekend day, night. See you soon…
43:42 Jordan Syatt: Bye bye.
