0:00:11.7 Mike Vacanti: Hello, Jordan.
0:00:12.7 Jordan Syatt: What’s going on, Michael?
0:00:14.3 Mike Vacanti: Not much, man, just trying to battle through this mood that my tweaked neck has me in, but…
0:00:20.5 Jordan Syatt: Man, I’m sorry.
0:00:22.3 Mike Vacanti: All will be better in two to three days.
0:00:24.6 Jordan Syatt: If it makes you feel better, my armpits are stinging really badly right now.
0:00:29.6 Mike Vacanti: Your armpits are stinging. That’s a new one to me.
0:00:32.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I deliberately waited to tell you this until we started recording ’cause I wanted to get your natural reaction to it. [chuckle]
0:00:40.0 Mike Vacanti: I assume it’s jujitsu-related, but the initial sound of it is like some kind of infection or something.
0:00:47.0 Jordan Syatt: I just started a new deodorant, and I think I’m having an allergic reaction to it.
[laughter]
0:00:54.1 Mike Vacanti: Is there any visual changes?
0:00:56.4 Jordan Syatt: You want me to show you my armpits, so you could see it?
0:00:58.1 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Yeah.
0:00:58.9 Jordan Syatt: Alright, well, no one else is gonna see this one. One second.
0:01:01.9 Mike Vacanti: I’ll describe…
0:01:03.5 Mike Vacanti: Are they red? Is it red?
0:01:04.4 Mike Vacanti: No, they look good. They look healthy.
0:01:06.7 Jordan Syatt: Okay, well that’s good.
0:01:07.9 Mike Vacanti: I think you’re alright.
0:01:08.1 Jordan Syatt: I’ll be honest…
0:01:10.5 Mike Vacanti: It could be more protective antiperspirant. Did you switch to a gel or something?
0:01:15.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I switched from a softer creamier one to more of a gel one.
0:01:20.9 Mike Vacanti: You went with the sport endurance, kind of like high protection.
0:01:24.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that more difficult on the skin?
0:01:28.7 Mike Vacanti: I think you can definitely expect more sting with that compared to normal deodorant although I’m by no means an expert in this.
0:01:36.1 Jordan Syatt: In the deodorant world.
0:01:39.3 Mike Vacanti: Like around puberty. I remember switching from whatever… I don’t even remember, I think I was just using my dad’s deodorant secretly. And then… Not the brand, but I would just go do it, and then when I actually got deodorant, it was Speed Stick Sport and I remember the same sensation. So you’re good.
0:02:00.6 Jordan Syatt: Speaking of puberty, going completely off topic of what we planned for, did you ever get that ball in your nipple as a kid?
0:02:08.6 Mike Vacanti: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, probably 13.
0:02:10.2 Jordan Syatt: Dude, how I’m painful was that?
0:02:12.5 Mike Vacanti: It was very painful. Still don’t know what that was.
0:02:15.2 Jordan Syatt: I remember I thought I had cancer in my chest. I thought I had breast cancer ’cause there was like this hard ball in my nipple, and I remember being… Like it was the worst ’cause that was the age that nipple twisters were really a big thing. And like…
0:02:30.5 Mike Vacanti: We called them titty twisters.
0:02:32.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I was trying to keep it… [chuckle] But yeah, they were called titty twisters in middle school. [laughter] And man…
0:02:39.6 Mike Vacanti: Is that not PC? Is nipple twister the appropriate way of saying titty twister?
0:02:44.0 Jordan Syatt: I think a lot of people don’t like the word titty, but we’re talking about middle school things, so it’s okay.
[laughter]
0:02:50.6 Mike Vacanti: It was 1999 for me.
[laughter]
0:02:53.8 Jordan Syatt: I just remember. I didn’t even realize I had it until someone just ripped a titty twister on me and I wanted to cry. It was so painful. And then I was like, “Wait, what is this?” And there’s just this hard ball. I still don’t know what it is, but I remember I went to the doctor and they were just like, “Yeah, this is normal. This happens to a lot of guys growing up.” But why in the hell do you just get this marble in your nipple?
0:03:18.1 Mike Vacanti: I don’t know, I just remember I had it and then Chapin Knault, my friend at the time had it too, so I figured I was good, figured it was a normal thing.
0:03:25.9 Jordan Syatt: Did you tell your parents?
0:03:27.7 Mike Vacanti: I don’t think I told my parents.
0:03:29.7 Jordan Syatt: Really? You didn’t tell your parents you had this hard ball in your nip?
0:03:34.7 Mike Vacanti: I think when Chapin had it too, I was like, “Must be normal.” I think that was my thought process.
0:03:38.2 Jordan Syatt: Man, I’m a real catastrophizer.
0:03:42.1 Mike Vacanti: As Jessie would say.
0:03:43.3 Jordan Syatt: This is just something that I’ve had in me forever ’cause I remember telling my mom, I was like, “I’ve got cancer.”
[laughter]
0:03:52.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Well, it’s better safe than sorry, right? Get checked out and realize that you’re okay.
0:03:58.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah. I remember… Man, we’re really going off topic, but I was expecting it. I remember in high school one time, I told my mom, I was like, “I think I have AIDS.” I told my mom, “I think I have… ” ‘Cause I had unprotected sex one time and we had learned about it in school, and I was like, “Mom, I’m so sorry. I think I’ve got it.” She was like, “You’re an idiot.” [laughter] I like sat her down on the couch, just like, “Mom, we need to have a talk.” And she was like, “What’s wrong?” I was like, “I think I have AIDS,” and she was like, “Why in the hell do you think that?” I was like, “Because I had unprotected sex.” She was like, “That’s not how it works.”
[laughter]
0:04:38.3 Mike Vacanti: What was the follow-up from there? Did she then… Was there a pregnancy scare?
0:04:43.3 Jordan Syatt: No. No, I mean, she was like, “Well, now we’re gonna get a check, like an STD check, and all that stuff, just because this is what you do after you do something stupid like that, but like you’re fine.” And that was that. And yeah.
0:04:58.9 Mike Vacanti: Interesting. [chuckle] I just would have been way more afraid of the pregnancy than the STD, but in health class, they did just… In middle school and high school, they just drove that into us.
0:05:16.6 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah, and I remember, same thing with drugs too. I remember watching a video in middle school. I wish I could watch this video now just to see… I remember vividly, they had this video of what happens if you smoke weed. And literally this kid smoked weed, and then he was like, “I can fly,” and he jumped out the window and died. And I remember going like, “Oh my God, I’m never smoking weed. This is a terrible idea.” [chuckle]
0:05:43.1 Mike Vacanti: They really scared us into not trying anything.
0:05:46.9 Jordan Syatt: A lot of scare tactics. Though, I will say the one that worked really well was the cigarette one where they brought in a cigarette-looking lung versus a non-smoking… I was like, “Wow, okay. Well, definitely don’t want that to happen.” But all the other stuff, I was like looking back, I’m like, “Man, you guys really just… Alright, we’re just going fear. We’re instilling fear in all of these young children starting in fifth grade.”
0:06:09.8 Mike Vacanti: I’m sure, it’s like the intent was in a decent place, at least for a lot of it.
0:06:15.1 Jordan Syatt: Oh, absolutely, yeah.
0:06:16.8 Mike Vacanti: I saw a funny meme recently related to this about the amount of people that as a kid, you expected were gonna be offering you free drugs. But it’s like now that I’m an adult, it’s like, “No one’s ever offered me free drugs.”
[laughter]
0:06:34.9 Jordan Syatt: People everywhere, you’re gonna turn a corner, free drugs already available. [laughter] There is a fair amount though, in New York City of people who are just like as you walk by whispering like, “Weed, ecstasy, cocaine? Need it?” Especially later at night, they’ll just like whisper as you walk by. It also happened when I was in… Where I was? Louisiana, I think it was. And what’s this city?
0:07:02.0 Mike Vacanti: New Orleans?
0:07:03.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, New Orleans. Yeah, New Orleans, just walking around, just like people just whispering, “You need this? You need that? Need this?” But it’s not for free, obviously. You gotta pay for it.
0:07:10.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Yeah, that’s obviously quite different. [chuckle]
0:07:13.8 Jordan Syatt: Didn’t that happen to us? Recently, we were walking in New York? I could have swore, that was you and I. We were walking in New York and a guy started saying something to us. We were like, “No, no, no, we’re good.” But if it happens pretty frequently in terms of people offering drugs, at least like, “Hey, I’ve got it. If you wanna pay for it.”
0:07:29.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah. Well, this was a good start to this podcast.
0:07:34.4 Jordan Syatt: Definitely not the anticipated route, went from deodorant to nipple balls.
[laughter]
0:07:41.1 Mike Vacanti: That’s what I love about the beginning. It’s a warm-up. It’s getting the juices flowing. It’s just letting us kinda perceive our way through.
0:07:50.6 Jordan Syatt: And I knew you weren’t in a good mood, so I really had to try and make the warm-up fun.
0:07:55.1 Mike Vacanti: I really appreciate that. [laughter] I was grinding out the last rep on incline bench and yeah, just purely my fault, improper warm-up, rushed through it, and then basically tried to progress from last week and felt it immediately. Workout stopped right there.
0:08:14.4 Jordan Syatt: Sucks.
0:08:15.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, sucks.
0:08:18.3 Jordan Syatt: How much longer do you think until your neck is ready to go?
0:08:21.2 Mike Vacanti: I’m gonna try and train legs today just because I’m pissed, just to spite my neck.
[laughter]
0:08:28.0 Jordan Syatt: Just do everything upright, really wide stance, goblet squats to stay upright, like really like reverse lunges, chest tall.
[laughter]
0:08:38.1 Mike Vacanti: I almost wanna go the opposite, test it because for the last two days, all I’ve done was I sit like lay around pretty much taking Advil every four hours and it’s not that much better. And so now I kinda wanna go the opposite route of, “Alright, if my life was on the line, would it really hurt that bad?” I don’t know. Let’s go train.
0:09:00.1 Jordan Syatt: You know that leather strap that you can tie around your head and just do neck work with? You should just go all in on that.
[laughter]
0:09:07.6 Mike Vacanti: I’m might go do that.
[laughter]
0:09:11.0 Jordan Syatt: Just strap a quarter, like a 25-pound plate on to the end of the chains and just up and down, left and right.
[laughter]
0:09:19.7 Mike Vacanti: We’ll see if they have that down here, I’m not sure, but I am gonna train. So I’ll keep you updated.
0:09:26.5 Jordan Syatt: Sick. [chuckle]
0:09:28.5 Mike Vacanti: What else is happening?
0:09:31.8 Jordan Syatt: What else is going on with me? Nothing, nothing. I mean, should we jump into the regular stuff or you still wanna do the warm-up?
0:09:41.3 Mike Vacanti: Let’s jump in, we got a great episode here.
0:09:44.0 Jordan Syatt: We’ll start by saying that we have a $200 off sale right now for the mentorship. So by the time you hear this, we’ll put a link in the show notes. If you want to join the online fitness business mentorship, there’s a $200 off sale for about a week. We don’t know the exact date it’s gonna end, but about one week from today it’s gonna go back up to normal price. We do this about once a year. Last year, we only did it once the entire year. In our minds, we always say like, “Yeah, we’ll do this again later in the year,” but it takes a lot of effort to do a launch, so maybe not. So if you want to join the mentorship $200 off for this week, link is in the show notes. And in this episode, we really are gonna give you a whole conceptual framework for how to get more online coaching clients. We’re gonna do a whole big pyramid, starting with the bottom, the foundation of the pyramid, all the way to the very top, explaining the steps you need to take in order to build a successful online coaching business that will continuously bring in more online coaching clients.
0:10:46.6 Mike Vacanti: Awesome, and this will probably be a two-parter, so we’re going in depth.
0:10:53.1 Jordan Syatt: I love it. I love it. Do you wanna start off?
0:10:55.6 Mike Vacanti: Let’s start it off and you’re so right, by the way. I completely forgot that both in 2019 and 2020, at the beginning of the year, we were like, “Yeah, we’ll do two to three launches throughout the year, continually.” And yes, we only did one.
[chuckle]
0:11:10.6 Jordan Syatt: It’s just, it’s a lot of work to do a launch. It’s a lot that goes into it. And actually, everyone in the mentorship knows because they literally just in the January challenge was setting up a whole launch and we had them do the entire one sheet for their product or for their coaching services. It’s a lot of work for a launch, and it’s… I think it’s in an ideal world, if you would probably do a sale on the mentorship once every trimester, every four months or so, three months, whatever it is, like do a nice $200 off sale. But the early bird gets the worm, right? So the people who join right now for this week are gonna get $200 off and then… And you’re in for as long as you want, so that’s that.
0:11:58.9 Mike Vacanti: Well said. Let’s dive in. At the very bottom of the pyramid, it’s not TikTok, it’s not long-form sales copy, it’s not running Facebook ads. At the very bottom of the pyramid…
0:12:16.6 Jordan Syatt: What else is it not? Let’s keep building this up. The bottom, the foundation of how to get more online coaching clients pyramid. It’s not TikTok, not Instagram, not sales copy, not advertisements, not email list, not having a six pack.
0:12:32.3 Mike Vacanti: It’s not fear-mongering people into thinking they can’t make progress without your super specific ketogenic system.
0:12:39.1 Jordan Syatt: That’s exactly right. Definitely not that [laughter] Well, what’s the bottom? What is the foundation?
0:12:48.8 Mike Vacanti: The bottom, the foundation, the most important thing that is going to help you get more online coaching clients and help those coaching clients and continue to get more coaching clients in the future and to build a long-term sustainable business is knowledge.
0:13:05.6 Jordan Syatt: Which we know is… A lot of people are like, “Oh, thanks guys, knew that,” but candidly, I think a lot of you know that there’s still a lot of room to grow in terms of knowledge. There’s always room to… Literally, it’s funny. I was texting Joe Therapy yesterday because I had some questions about stretching. It’s like I have a pretty decent background in mobility and stability and working with that, but he’s more of an expert on that than I am. And I wanted to ask him some thoughts and processes on stretching and what’s actually going on neurologically, neuromuscularly, and knowledge is the foundation. And it sounds obvious and so like, “Yeah, we know.” But a lot of people, they say they know that, but then they end up signing for a guru’s course, a mastermind course on how to optimize your sales copy and how to make six figures. It’s like, “Yeah, but you suck as a coach. You’re not good.” And it has nothing to say anything about you as a person, it’s like as a coach, you suck.
0:14:04.3 Jordan Syatt: So how do you get that. You first have to learn. You have to study, and it doesn’t mean studying… You said yesterday, it’s like, don’t just look at your buddy’s Instagram posts and don’t just… Even my… Don’t just look at my Instagram posts. Go into my long-form articles. Go into… Buy books. No one buys books anymore. Buy like books. Buy strengthening and conditioning books. Buy nutrition books. Buy… Go into Alan Aragon’s Research Review. Like study those things like. These are where you’re gonna get the real, real high-level knowledge.
0:14:35.1 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, absolutely. And if you hate reading, if you don’t have a single spare three minutes in your day to be reading because it’s so jam-packed, audio books are a great alternative. You can retain a lot from audio books, but simply relying on the content that shows up in your feed via the explorer page, via your peers, view your friends, whatever it is, isn’t enough to build and continue to build the knowledge base that is going to make you a great coach, that is gonna help you not only serve your clients, but get more and more clients in the future. And those resources that you named are all awesome. In addition to our websites, the websites that we learned so much from are still incredibly valuable, Martin Berkhan’s leangains.com, Lyle McDonald’s Bodyrecomposition, Lyle McDonald’s books, Alan Aragon Research Review. There’s a lot of good, high-quality information out there that isn’t necessarily the flashiest or the sexiest or the easiest to consume or the most fun to consume, right? But it is what is going to pay massive benefits in dividends in your future for both you as a coach and for your clients.
0:15:54.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I completely agree. I’d say for nutrition, Lyle McDonald’s bodyrecomposition.com is probably the best free resource on nutrition. I’d say Alan Aragon’s Research Review is the best overall source for information on instruction. It’s $10 a month. I can’t recommend it enough. The reason I think I like Alan’s so much… Alan texted me, by the way, the other day. He’s like, “Man, I’m sorry. I have been super late with… ” Alan is like the best… Alan is a legitimate researcher and nutritionist, all that stuff. He’s going to make a course for the mentorship on how to read fitness research, how to actually go into PubMed, how to go to Google Scholar, how to open up a study and critique it from a non-biased perspective, go in and read the study, read the process of the study, you read the methods of the study, make sure you know any biases that they might have had, make sure, you say, “Okay, well, does this make sense, based on X, Y and Z?” He’s doing a whole course on that. He texted us just… He texted me being like, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry. I’ve just been swamped.” Because he’s writing 15 million books, but it’s gonna happen this year, which is another reason to get in on the mentorship ’cause it’s really gonna be an amazing course.
0:17:03.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, that’s exciting.
0:17:04.9 Jordan Syatt: But I think one of the reasons Alan’s Research Review is probably my top recommendation is because it’s not just presenting you with facts. He’s presenting you with how to critique both sides. It’s like… He’s teaching you how to be a critical thinker. It’s not just like, “Okay, well, here’s why this is good.” It’s not, “Here’s why this is bad.” It’s like, “Hey, here’s all of the research. Let’s read the research, see how you can analyze the research on your own, so you can make your own well-informed decisions.” I think Alan’s is the best fit from a nutrition perspective overall. Again, his is only 10 bucks a month. We make zero money from saying this at all. It’s just, he’s literally the best for that. For strength training, Eric Cressey has, I think some of the best information on that. More recently, he’s a baseball guy, been a baseball guy for years, but his more recent content is very baseball development. But if you look back in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, ’13, ’14, ’15, his content there, super informative, really great strength training stuff.
0:18:03.7 Mike Vacanti: For free, going deep on his website because so much of it still stands the test of time, is applicable, you’ll benefit massively from digging back in those archives.
0:18:13.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, exactly. Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson and Joel Jamieson. Joel Jamieson has a really interesting perspective, more of a mixed martial arts, athletic perspective in his content. I would say… Oh, you know what’s a great book? I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, is called “Triphasic Training.” Really wonderful book, “Triphasic Training” for again, more athletic performance. “Starting Strength” for beginner coaching, “Practical Programming,” great program. “The Texas Method,” great program. If you just wanna see a really… Probably one of I think the most underrated programs now, I’d say it used to be like everybody got this program, but now I don’t hear about it as much anymore is Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1. Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 is I think one of the best programs anyone can get. It’s not… He doesn’t really explain the science behind it. It’s just in its simplicity, it’s… It’s so perfect. It’s so simple. It’s so perfect. It’s like progressive overload 101, very simple how to get stronger and how to use good programming in the gym. I’d say Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 is another really good option as well.
0:19:19.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, all great resources. Something that we pride ourselves on too is… And we talk a lot about not being guru-y and that being a great coach is more important than being a great businessman or woman. And in that vein, we have courses, specific long courses in the mentorship for both programming and for nutrition coaching, which are also… We’ve put a lot of effort into the free content on the podcast, and the fact that you’re listening right now means you’ve benefited, I would imagine, but that’s a snack in comparison to the whole full course that exists in the mentorship.
0:20:00.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, the mentorship courses are very extensive, and we appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten on the podcast immensely. A lot of people have said, “We listen to it over and over and over again. You’ve been super helpful.” And some of the most popular podcasts have been the ones where we do something like this, where we have the pyramid. And it’s similar to what we do in the courses where we sort of have, “In the order of events, here’s the process that you follow.” I think a lot of what we do in the podcast is give you concepts to understand. We go deeper than that in the mentorship. It’s not just the concept, it’s the practical application like, “Here’s what you do. Here’s the set interrupt schemes. Here’s the rest periods. Here’s the way that you program for this type of person. Here’s the psychology and understanding of how to communicate with your clients.” Not just the concept of it, but, “Here are the literal phrases you can use. Here are ways to speak to them in this situation.” Recently, in one of the Q&As, we do two Q&As a month, I think someone asked a wonderful question, “What do you do if a client is not giving as much effort as they could?” Right?
0:21:07.7 Jordan Syatt: And we broke it down into two different types of clients. It could be this type of client, or it could be this type of client. And so I think what… Man, I love doing the podcast and think it’s great, but the difference in the mentorship is, it’s not just the concepts, it’s the practical application. It’s like, “Here’s what you do. Here’s how you identify which type of client it is, and here’s the steps that you take to really help them achieve their absolute best potential results.” Yeah.
0:21:33.1 Mike Vacanti: Yep, that was fun, answering that question too. I’m trying to think of what else falls under this knowledge umbrella, and the last one that’s coming to mind for me is… And this is a combination of, it’s going to help your knowledge and it’s also gonna add to other layers of the pyramid, but internship. Like you can and do need to learn from books and from similar resources, but getting in-person coaching experience is also going to feed a different part of your knowledge. It is going to help you, not only by watching others and having in-person mentors, watching other great coaches and interacting with them and learning from them, but also what you’re going to learn from actually coaching clients is gonna help you build that knowledge base, and like you mentioned before, help you learn how to apply what you’ve read to an actual client.
0:22:32.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, and obviously, right now, getting an in-person internship might be impossible because of everything going on in the world right now, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can do or you can’t do to also improve, whether it’s reaching out to a coach who has a facility, and number one, asking if there’s anything you can do remotely or if you can come in and help, but also in your community, your neighbors, your friends, family, whatever, get something going in your garage. Literally, you could do something on a Tuesday and a Thursday, get people to go in your garage. I used to do this in Boston. I had a group of three to five women that I would train every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:00 AM, and it started off… It was just for free. For the first couple of weeks, I was like, I just like, “I’ll coach you for free for a couple of weeks.” I know we’re gonna talk about this later in the pyramid, but, “Every Tuesday and Thursday, for the first couple of weeks, let’s just do it free. If you like it and you enjoy it, then I’ll charge you 20 bucks per person for that hour.” So if you get three to five people in there for 20 bucks each, that’s a significant amount of money for that hour, number one.
0:23:36.3 Jordan Syatt: Number two is, one of the things I like about that small-group training is you see a bunch of different types of clients in that one hour. Instead of only being with one client, you get one client who might really struggle with their mobility. You get another client who might really struggle with our stability. You get another client who might be very introverted and struggles to interact with the group, so it’s your job to sort of be a good coach and figure out, “How do I get them to interact?” You get another client who might be like, they love to talk and they hate taking rest, they hate sticking to the rest periods, so you gotta try and figure out ways to make sure that client doesn’t rest for 12 minutes and start talking to the other people and distracting them. These are all things that I guarantee you in the Mastermind guru courses they don’t talk about. They don’t talk about actually, coaching. It’s just sales, sales, sales, sales, sales. And there’s a place for that. But if you wanna be a good coach, let’s talk about coaching. Let’s talk about the person who has a knee injury. Well, how do you modify? Let’s talk about the client who’s gonna literally try and distract you from coaching them because they don’t wanna actually work. How do you get them to get a good training session in.
0:24:33.4 Jordan Syatt: Let’s talk about the client who’s really introverted and nervous, and they’re not willing to tell you that, but you have to be able to spot it in their body language so that you can maybe take them to a corner privately, so you can do the work with them without them worrying about other people looking at them. Let’s talk about the things about coaching that the only way you learn this is from coaching, rather than just saying you coached people and then starting your Mastermind.
0:24:53.8 Mike Vacanti: Clip it.
[laughter]
0:24:56.1 Jordan Syatt: That would make a good Instagram clip.
[laughter]
0:25:00.6 Mike Vacanti: And we’re recording this. What you said reminded me of something funny. Who am I? Hey Jordan, how’s your business doing?
0:25:11.0 Jordan Syatt: Do I have to say someone’s name?
[laughter]
0:25:13.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. He won’t mind.
0:25:16.4 Jordan Syatt: Wait. Who is it? I don’t know.
0:25:17.8 Mike Vacanti: Who would, when they wanted to maybe take longer rest periods or maybe just…
0:25:23.9 Jordan Syatt: Oh, oh. Gary. Gary.
[laughter]
0:25:28.8 Mike Vacanti: How’s business Jordan?
[laughter]
0:25:32.4 Jordan Syatt: It was funny because that was one of the things that when I first started coaching him, he told me that he liked about you. He was like, “Mike didn’t let me… ” He would say like, “If I asked Mike about his business, he wouldn’t let that affect the workout.” It was like a lot of time.
0:25:50.2 Mike Vacanti: Mostly, that was… Yeah. I tried.
0:25:53.4 Jordan Syatt: So there were times where like, Gary would be like, “Hey man, what’s going on with business.” Well, like, “We’ll talk about it after the workout. Just do this set first.” And these are things that I don’t think people realize or coaches realize, especially early in their career. And it’s funny ’cause a lot of people will ask like, “Oh man, you must have learned so much from Gary,” which I did, but that came from a product of being in his ecosystem and watching at a close distance as opposed to like, “Hey, let’s spend this whole work out talking about how you can help my business.” It’s like, if you got a client who’s a lawyer, if you got a client who’s a finance, whatever it is, you’re not spending the whole session learning how they can help you. It’s, the sessions for them, and then who knows maybe just as a by-product of knowing them, you can learn stuff from them. But the whole purpose of the workout is to make sure that your client gets the workout, not to extract from them.
0:26:42.9 Mike Vacanti: Right, right. And that’s just an example of noticing when your client is trying to angle for extra rest for… They not the greatest.
0:26:52.6 Jordan Syatt: Exactly.
0:26:53.3 Mike Vacanti: And that’s something that without the knowledge of it and the experience, you’re gonna get sucked into their frame, for lack of a better term.
0:27:03.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
0:27:07.5 Mike Vacanti: Sweet. So the base of the pyramid, knowledge.
0:27:09.9 Jordan Syatt: Knowledge, and before I think we go up to the second level, I think we should talk about what spans the entire pyramid ’cause this is gonna go with every level, including the first level, which is consistency. Consistency spans the entire pyramid, so like the bottom…
0:27:24.5 Mike Vacanti: Consistency and patience.
0:27:27.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, exactly. And it’s so funny. Everyone listening, probably the first thing, the things they really appreciate in clients are patience and consistency. That’s it. It’s like, you’re not gonna get a six pack in a week. You’re not gonna build your business in a week. Relax, just be consistent. If your client’s eating perfectly for a week and then falling off does nothing, it’s like you’d rather them be around 80% consistent for years that 100% consistent for a week or a month. Same thing with this, if you feel like it’s overwhelming to post on Instagram every single day, then you don’t need to post on Instagram every single day. Post on Instagram a few times a week and make it really good for three, four, five years straight. That’s how you’re gonna build a business. And we’ll talk more about social media and website either later on in this podcast or in part two. But as long as you understand knowledge is the foundation and patience and consistency spans the entire pyramid, you’re gonna do really well.
0:28:24.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Yep, those factors alone. And as we move on, as we move up the pyramid, you’ll see how patience and consistency relates to each and every rung within the pyramid. So the second layer is actually pretty similar to the first, and that is experience.
0:28:48.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah.
0:28:49.1 Mike Vacanti: And that is experience in the form of coaching. That is experience in the form of an internship, if you can get one. That is experience in the form of actual experience, making content and actual experience, coaching clients online, whether paid or for free.
0:29:09.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, it’s experience in literally every realm. And I remember when I first started writing articles in 2011-2012. I remember I made a Facebook post basically saying like, “Man, if someone told me when I was in high school that in order to be a really well-known established coach, I’d have to be a great writer, I would have told them to screw off.” ‘Cause when I was in high school, I knew I wanted to be a coach. I was already coaching, but I was like, “Okay, all I have to do is be a great coach.” I didn’t realize… And it was funny ’cause at that time I was reading books, I was reading articles, I was reading Eric Cressey’s work, I was on Teen Nation, I was reading Martin Burke, and I was reading all these people, but I wasn’t conceptualizing, “Oh, they’re writing. This takes a long time to write.” I literally just… I wasn’t aware of that even though I was actually reading. It was right in front of my face. And then once I started to write, I was like, “Oh man, I need to develop writing skills.” Same thing with making content on YouTube, “Oh, I need to develop my video skills, and then I need to develop my… ” As you build a business, you are literally… You’re not changing careers. You have to become more knowledgeable, and that takes time and experience and patience and consistency and knowledge that you develop over time in order to make it happen.
0:30:23.5 Jordan Syatt: So I think this is one of the most overlooked things and a lot of things that coaches get frustrated with, that you could be the best coach in the world, but… You could have all the knowledge in the world, but if you don’t devote enough time in order to get enough experience in other aspects that are gonna allow you to build your online business, then it doesn’t matter. You could have an amazing in-person business, but if you want an online business, that’s different. And this is where the differentiation comes from an in-person business to an online business. If you want an amazing in-person business, yes, your attitude matters, and whether or not people like you matters. But if you’re a great coach in-person, you’re gonna get enough referrals and build a great in-person business that will probably last you forever just based on being in-person in your local area. But if you wanna go online, it means you have to reach people who are outside your local area. It means you’re gonna have to reach a broader audience who might not have the opportunity to work with you, which means you’re gonna have to build up a lot of experience in other areas outside of just simply coaching. Definitely with coaching as well, but outside of that as well.
0:31:26.6 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, and even the best in-person coaches, when they transition online or start to transition online, they often feel overwhelmed and frustrated and sometimes confused and struggle early on, even with a small number of online coaching clients because they haven’t done it. And because the base, what is most important about coaching translates from good in-person to online, but the systems, the new method of communication, the having technique videos rather than being with a client in-person, the style of communication, all of that is different online. And from… We’ve said it so many times, a coach, a new online coach in their first several months or year, even two years online, can struggle with a smaller workload, a smaller number of clients that after two, three, four, five, six, seven years of online coaching is a breeze. They can go from handling five clients to 40 clients, and 40 can easier because of the experience because day after day after day for years of communicating with clients, designing programs, working, actually building that online business through that experience, you’re gonna become a better online coach.
0:32:45.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s funny, [chuckle] one of the things I see a lot of the best coaches who are in-person coaches, super knowledgeable. They know everything about everything. They’ve read “Supertraining,” They have all this amazing knowledge, but they struggle to build stuff online. They struggle with social media. They struggle with creating content. They struggle with getting more engagement. Oftentimes, I see these people, what they do most is they spend their time arguing with people on social media. I see this all the time, and it happens to me. I get people on my DM saying, “Well, this wrong, and this is wrong. Well, you said that wrong. Technically, that’s incorrect.” And I look at their page, and they’re not doing well. And then eventually through a conversation, I’ll be like, “Man, how’s everything going?” They’re like, “Man, nothing’s working for me.” I’m like, “Well, bro, you just spent 30 minutes arguing semantics with me over deadlifting, which by the way, you’re still fucking wrong, number one. Number two is you just spent 30 minutes arguing on me when you could have spent that time helping people and making great content.”
0:33:48.2 Jordan Syatt: And even then a lot of those coaches, their content is built around making fun of other coaches. It’s like their content is literally built around saying, “Well, this coach is stupid or that idea stupid or this is stupid.” It’s like knowledge is amazing, and like we said, it’s the foundation of this, but it’s not enough. And it’s not just enough that you have the knowledge, you have to focus on spreading that knowledge. Spreading that knowledge doesn’t equate to hating on other people who don’t believe the same stuff you do. Spreading that knowledge is teaching people what you’ve learned in an easier-to-understand way, and I think this comes with the experience of not just being a good coach. I think there’s a different than being a good coach and being a good teacher. And when you’re creating content or even when you’re coaching people, and maybe it’s online as well, you’re a teacher. It’s a huge part of it, and I think there’s a distinction to be made between those two. I know many, many coaches who are incredibly smart, great, great coaches who have a ton of knowledge, but they suck at teaching.
0:34:50.9 Jordan Syatt: And so this is something that you really have to do. It comes with time. If you go look at my old content, I sucked at teaching? I really. I sucked at making content. I was really bad at it, but with experience, you’ll get better and better better at learning, “Okay, how can I really teach these people, not just talk at them, but speak with them and teach them how to make better decisions for themselves?” And that’s really where you have to focus on your content and your overall approach.
0:35:20.6 Mike Vacanti: Yep. That experience also translates into each specific platform, right? If we just take website, for example, to start, think about the first article or even look back. And if you’re listening and have a website, compare your very first article you ever published on your website compared to your most recent article that you’ve published. Like the difference between those two is primarily driven by experience. I’ve seen what works. I’ve seeing what resonates well with people. I’ve seeing what people learn the most from by getting better at writing, like you mentioned, but also getting better at writing articles, getting better at picking good titles and good headers, being better at knowing what kind of images to include, being better at all of these things that you can’t learn in a book that you can’t learn from Stephen King’s “On Writing,” that you can only learn through actually writing and becoming better. Experience in all realms of content creation, coaching, online coaching, like it matters so much for getting more clients and helping those clients over time.
0:36:38.0 Jordan Syatt: Same thing actually with… That’s a great example ’cause same thing goes for looking at the first program you ever wrote for somebody versus the programs you’re writing now. Like, “Man.” And this isn’t just like in-the-first-year thing. This is something that I do now. Like every six months, I’m looking back at my old programs being like, “Oh, what the hell was I thinking?” It’s important. The cool part about that is six months ago, those programs were still great, people were still getting great results to them, but it’s number, one, always sticking to that bottom foundation of knowledge, trying to get better so that then every six months I can look back at the previous programs and say, “Oh, that could have been better. I could have programmed that better. That could have been more efficient.” And I think a lot of people, this comes with experience as well. The best program isn’t the best because it’s the best on paper. The best program is the best because it makes sense for that individual at that point in time, and maybe it has to do with efficiency. Maybe it has to do with…
0:37:37.0 Jordan Syatt: Sometimes I’ll do things in programs that make no sense on paper from a physiological perspective, but I know it’s gonna be good for that person mentally and emotionally. Some things… I’ll do things in a program because it might not make sense in terms of the progressive overload aspect of it, but maybe that’s just the physiological progressive overload, the mental progressive overload, the emotional progressive overload, pushing someone, just because it’s time for them to be pushed in that way. These are things that you only get from experience, and like you said, you can’t learn it from a book. You can’t learn that from a book. This only comes from working with more and more and more people, knowing different types of people that you work with, knowing like, “Okay, this type of person… ” I remember the first person who I ever heard talk about clients in terms of introvert, extrovert was Louie Simmons.
0:38:23.7 Jordan Syatt: He was the first, and he’s still to this day, he’s the only other coach I’ve ever heard talk about training introverts versus extroverts differently, and I don’t think it’s as black and white as that. It is much more individual. But when you know, when you can identify if someone’s an I or an E, there are many different approaches that will dictate your coaching methodology or at least give you insight into what might be more appropriate for this person, but whether it’s in-person coaching or online coaching. Again, these are only things that you learn from experience.
0:38:58.1 Mike Vacanti: What would you say is… And maybe you just gave the answer, but what would you say is the biggest difference or we can even call it the biggest mistake from your programming, if we look at it eight to 10 years ago compared to today?
0:39:12.4 Jordan Syatt: I think, let’s say near the beginning of my career, I know exactly what it was ’cause I remember getting rimmed out for it at the gym that I was interning at. Kevin, the coach there was like, “Write a program. Write a program.” And he made up a random person, and he was like, “Write a program.” And I wrote it down on a piece of paper. It took me like two hours, which is another aspect of the experience thing, right. When you first start writing programs, it’ll take you hours, or actually you should be able to get to write a program in 7-12 minutes, depending on the person. But anyway, I remember I wrote it on a piece of paper in this red Journal. It was like a journal with a red cover on top, and he was like, “What is this?” He was like, “You have 27 different exercises here.” I was like, “Yeah, I wanna hit all this stuff.” He’s like, “You don’t need this many exercises.” He’s like, “What are you doing? You see me coach clients. You see me do the classes. There are like six exercises in a workout. What are you doing?” And I think that was my biggest mistake when I was younger was thinking I needed to have every possible type of exercise and more exercises the better. So early in my career, I think that was probably the biggest mistake that I had. What about you?
0:40:17.7 Mike Vacanti: Very similar, but… And maybe too many exercises, but even more importantly, just way too much volume. [chuckle] In my mind, I was like, “Alright, this person’s paying me. I’m gonna give them progress in 90-minute workouts minimum usually, probably closer to two hours and, I don’t even know, maybe 30 sets per workout like [chuckle] four to six days a week, just pouring on the volume.” Yeah, and it was a by-product of programs that I had done myself, which weren’t effective for who I was where I was and the things I was or was not putting in my body. But I remember doing super sets of like… There was a German volume training. There was a… I remember one brutal… It wasn’t even a finisher. It was just like there were maybe eight exercises on a leg day and the B1 B2 pairing was 8 sets each of 8 x 10 leg press and 8 x 12 per leg walking lunge with no rest after the leg press. And then I…
0:41:33.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh, my God.
0:41:34.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. So programming way too much volume.
0:41:38.3 Jordan Syatt: How much workout do you program now?
0:41:42.0 Mike Vacanti: As little as… It depends on number of days per week. I would say the minimum number of sets per workout that I’m programming is nine. I’m trying to think if there are instances with any current clients where they’re doing less than nine sets in a workout, I don’t think they are, and…
0:42:04.7 Jordan Syatt: I have an instance with that, but yeah, keep going.
0:42:10.5 Mike Vacanti: And as many as… On average, definitely not more than… I’m trying to think because there’s like a leg plus ab day, if someone’s only training ab. If they’re not hitting any direct core work, any other workouts they might have six, seven, eight, nine sets of core. So maybe in the 24 to 27 set range, but not on average.
0:42:40.3 Jordan Syatt: That’s high.
0:42:41.2 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. That’s like the upper end.
0:42:43.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, that’s like a very well-trained person who can handle it and also wants that type of volume and time in the gym.
0:42:50.1 Mike Vacanti: Correct.
0:42:50.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, they’ll ask for it. They’re like, “Can I do more? Can I do more?”
0:42:53.1 Mike Vacanti: They’ll ask for it, or they just need it. I have been training for a couple of years in a surplus. I have been bulking most of this time, adding more and more volume over time and without the on-average increase in volume over time, just would plateau with muscle gain.
0:43:10.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah, I have… I would say for me is, yeah, it’s usually, at least nine. The one instance right now is I’m coaching Kim Schlag, her and Susan Niebergall are both moderators in the mentorship, just incredible, incredible coaches and people and friends and family, but Kim… We don’t know for sure if it was COVID, but we basically know it’s COVID. And she was out for like, legit, four months. She got hit bad. She was really, really, really sick. So her first week back, I think it was a total of five or six sets. It was just one set per exercise, and there were five or six exercises per day. And so for now, hopefully this is helpful, so maybe you’re working with some people who are getting over COVID and they’re super tired and they’re out of breath. It’s like one set for exercises is sometimes plenty, especially if someone’s just coming back from something like that. And very quickly she went from one set to two sets and then two sets of three sets per exercise, but there’s instances where you’ll drop volume to what they can handle, and sometimes that literally might be five or six sets the whole workout and then that’s it.
0:44:19.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah. It’s a great example, anomaly. And sometimes even zero, right. There are people who it doesn’t make sense to be training for various reasons, who are literally just walking… And then you start introducing training, and when you do introduce training for clients who absolutely hate soreness, let’s not take them from zero to 60 in two seconds. Let’s start with a much lower volume and work our way up.
0:44:47.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, sometimes what I’ve done is with the clients who are morbidly obese and really can’t go to the gym, not just don’t want to, they can’t go to the gym yet. It’s just like, it’s not happening. Sometimes I’ll just put a total number of times they should walk up up and down their stairs that day, and so even… I can’t leave we’ve never spoken about this. Sometimes I’ll have them, “Alright, so for the whole day, I want you to go up and down your stairs 10 times. Going down the stairs, I want you to really support yourself on the handle,” because going down is when they get sore, the eccentric part of the movement. I don’t want them to be too sore. “So really support yourself, so you have a support on the way down. On the way up, try to support yourself as little as… Only as much as you need.” That way, going up, it’s all concentric. There’s no eccentric on the way down, so they don’t get sore from that. And if they’re really support themselves on the way down, they can mitigate how much soreness they’re gonna have.
0:45:42.5 Jordan Syatt: And I don’t care how long it takes them. Do one an hour, over 10 hours. Just get up and down the stairs 10 times, boom, then you can increase it to 12 times and 15 times. Then before you know it, they’ve lost 30 pounds and maybe that you start doing goblet squats or whatever it is, just at home, just simple things like that. Again, experience, this is just all experience. Sometimes instead of having a legit planned workout, it might be like, “Hey, that’s sort of like the grease the groove method, right? Pavel Tsatsouline. Just do it all throughout the day, just find something. Don’t go to failure, just make sure you’re doing it throughout the day. You could do that for the chin ups. You could do that for push-ups. You could do that for people who can’t go to the gym or aren’t ready to go to the gym, but just need activity, and they’re stuck at home right now. They can’t really go outside. Walk up and down the stairs. Support yourself on the way down. Mitigate the eccentric components, so you’re not too sore. These are only things you get from experience. You don’t get this from a book.
0:46:37.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. It’s absolutely right. Should we move to our third component of the pyramid?
0:46:42.3 Jordan Syatt: Were you gonna say something or no.
0:46:43.9 Mike Vacanti: I was gonna say something, but [chuckle] it slightly contradicts what you just said, but it’s kind of a funny story. Actually, no, it supports what you just said because I couldn’t wrap my head around it from the book. When I was 20 years old, I was on my way to be a business major, but we had a certain amount of electives we could take. And I took a… I think it was like a Phy Ed class, but really, it was like in the…
0:47:12.9 Jordan Syatt: What is Phy Ed?
0:47:14.3 Mike Vacanti: Physical education.
0:47:15.3 Jordan Syatt: Oh, got it. Got it. Yeah, yeah.
0:47:16.4 Mike Vacanti: But in high school, that’s like playing dodge ball. In college, this was like in the intro to Kines Exercise Science, it was most of those kids that were in the class. And it was a pretty tough course that wasn’t Phy Ed at all. It was all book stuff, and I remember a test question, “Which of the following eccentrically loads, or is like an eccentrically loaded movement?” And it was like… There was lifting. So one of the answers was like pressing a weight or doing a push-up or something that was clearly concentric, and then one of the answers was something random, and one of the answers was walking downstairs, and the last answer was like an isometric hold at the top of a chin up. And for some reason, despite actually caring about the class and putting in an effort, I could not wrap my head around how any of those were eccentric. Like walking down the stairs just didn’t make sense to me as eccentric for whatever reason, probably because I needed the experience, not from learning it from a book.
0:48:19.0 Mike Vacanti: But I was like, I rationalized and I was like, “Okay, so if you’re in an isometric chin-up, eventually you have to lower yourself. You can’t just be there forever. Eventually you gotta let yourself down, and I put that answer and it was wrong, ’cause it was walking down the stairs, but I literally… This was the only time in my five-year college history that I remember going to office hours, and I was like please…
0:48:46.8 Jordan Syatt: You asked the teacher.
0:48:47.8 Mike Vacanti: Went straight to… I can picture his face. I don’t remember his name, older gentleman, and I was like, “Tell me how you get out of that position.” I was raging.
0:49:00.4 Jordan Syatt: You were on tilt. You’re like, “How…
0:49:01.1 Mike Vacanti: Well, it was more like, “These other three are non-answers. It can’t be any of these three, so it has to be this because you have to get down from that bar and you gotta lower yourself down.” And he was like, “No.” He’s like, “Going downstairs is a eccentric.” I was like, “Nope, lowering yourself from the bar is eccentric.” [laughter] But after that, I was like, “Okay.” From then on I knew. Yeah, yeah.
0:49:22.9 Jordan Syatt: That makes sense. Or someone could have the box underneath them on the chin-up bar and they’re just doing the isometric holds. [chuckle]
0:49:30.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, and they’re just standing there. None of that crossed my radar. I was like, “Well, they gotta get down somehow.”
0:49:37.6 Jordan Syatt: It’s fair. It’s fair. They’re getting down somehow. Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. You only get this from experience. I wish I could hang out with 20-year-old Mike for a day.
0:49:45.4 Mike Vacanti: I think you would enjoy that.
[laughter]
0:49:50.8 Jordan Syatt: Just storming into office hours. “Alright, here. Explain to me how this person gets down. Yeah. [laughter] Go use a different example next year buddy.” [laughter]
0:50:03.6 Mike Vacanti: I literally was thinking that, I was like, “Why couldn’t you use lowering the bar on a bench press. Use something that’s applicable, please.”
[laughter]
0:50:15.3 Jordan Syatt: Looking back, you’re like, “Alright, that was a fair example.”
0:50:17.6 Mike Vacanti: I was like, “That was very applicable, not for someone who’s obsessed with doing men’s fitness workouts or men’s health workouts, but… “
0:50:25.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah.
0:50:26.5 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.
0:50:28.1 Jordan Syatt: Oh, that’s funny.
0:50:31.6 Mike Vacanti: Alright, we got knowledge at the base. We have experience as our next level up. We have patience and consistency running up and down the side of the pyramid. This third one ties in pretty close with knowledge and experience. So we’ll talk about this and leave off here because then there’s a little bit of a transition into different types of things. But the third rung of the pyramid is actually being a good coach.
0:50:58.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, and again, I think that the base of this pyramid, the knowledge experience and being a good coach, it’s not exciting things. It’s like, “Yeah, we know that,” but… And I think we’ll do part two. There will be the more exciting stuff. The more exciting stuff is what the gurus masterminds, it’s what they talk about. It’s like the more like, “Oh, sales copy advertisements, Facebook ads, duh, duh, duh, duh.” But it’s like the people in the fitness industry who are talking about fasted cardio and training and doing HIIT, and I don’t know, doing advanced forms of different macronutrients splits before you get your client drinking water and eating vegetables. It’s like, if you look at it that way, this is really where most people need to focus. And when you get this stuff down… The cool part about this is like if you get your knowledge down, you get your experience down and you get your good coach down, you don’t need to worry about advertisements, you don’t need to worry… Everything else will come as a result of it, just from the reputation that you build, just from the results that you get with your client. That will be more than enough.
0:52:12.1 Jordan Syatt: The reason so many coaches fail is because they try and go for the flashy stuff. They try and go for the things that look cool. It’s like… The clients are like, they’d rather stand on two BOSU balls trying to do one arm kettlebell swings with the shake weight in their left hand. It’s like… That’s flashy stuff. Or the person who does… They stand. They put the kettlebell on the ground and they stand on the handle of the kettlebell and do a pistol squat. It’s like, “That’s a cool circus move. I like respect it’s hard, but hard doesn’t mean it’s effective.” And so same thing with this stuff. It’s like if you get your knowledge down, you get your experience down, you get being a good coach down, you’re gonna build a very successful business. It’s literally just a matter of patience and consistency, which is why that spans the entire portion of this pyramid. That’s literally all it is. So being a good coach. What’s up?
0:53:05.2 Mike Vacanti: The example that I always loved, and I just thought of it because I just recently went bowling when I was back in Minnesota with my family, Mark Rippetoe, talking about how soreness doesn’t equal progress. If you haven’t bowled in three years and you go grab a 15-pound ball and you bowl five games in a row, you’re gonna feel it the next day. Like your forearm, your wrist, you’re gonna feel it, time. Does that you’re making optimal muscle building progress? No, it doesn’t.
0:53:35.9 Jordan Syatt: You bowled.
0:53:37.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.
[laughter]
0:53:39.9 Mike Vacanti: It means you bowled, and you don’t bowl very often.
0:53:42.9 Jordan Syatt: And now we’re gonna practically apply the knowledge of eccentric and concentric. So much of bowling is an eccentric movement. It’s like you’re basically doing the eccentric single-leg RDL, going right into it. And then not to mention, and people don’t think about this, you’re not only doing an eccentric movement, and not only is it loaded, but you’re sort of resisting it too. You’re resisting the motion all the way down, which puts more strain, more time under tension onto your muscles. So yeah, I could imagine being super sore from that as well, but again, you probably don’t see that many like jacked and ripped bowlers just because they’re bowling all day. [chuckle] Such a great example. Mark Rippetoe does really good with his analogies and how he talks. He’s great in that sense.
0:54:26.5 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.
0:54:27.3 Jordan Syatt: Terrible nutrition advice. Terrible nutrition advice.
0:54:30.4 Mike Vacanti: GOMAD.
0:54:31.4 Jordan Syatt: A gallon of milk a day.
0:54:33.2 Mike Vacanti: To his defense and to play devil’s advocate, I think a lot of the people he was giving that advice to were…
0:54:43.9 Jordan Syatt: Young football players.
0:54:45.5 Mike Vacanti: Exactly. Young male football players who also were really struggled to get enough calories and really struggled to gain weight, and he probably got fed up with hearing, “No matter what I do, I can’t gain weight.”
0:55:00.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
0:55:00.9 Mike Vacanti: Drink a gallon of milk a day and do barbell lifts.
0:55:05.1 Jordan Syatt: Guarantee, that’s exactly where he was like, “Alright, drink a gallon of milk a day. Shut up.” I guarantee that’s what he was thinking about that. I think it would have been better if he was like… Instead of a gallon of milk, he was like a loaf of bread a day. It’s much more realistic. I think a lot of people ended up being lactose intolerant because of that.
[laughter]
0:55:23.4 Mike Vacanti: But in my mind, I’m like a loaf of bread a day.
0:55:26.0 Jordan Syatt: No protein.
0:55:28.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, like think of how much protein, how much leucine is in a gallon of milk.
0:55:31.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah.
0:55:32.7 Mike Vacanti: Maybe a half gallon a milk.
0:55:34.3 Jordan Syatt: There’s just no way. Yeah. Yeah, or maybe a quart of chocolate milk, a quart of chocolate milk a day would probably be better advice. You get some good protein synthesis in there. You get the taste. You get the calories in there, it’s like… But having a gallon of milk sit in your stomach, it’s hard to get a good workout in.
[laughter]
0:55:53.7 Mike Vacanti: Do you know where I came across his work?
0:55:58.1 Jordan Syatt: I would imagine T-Nation.
0:56:00.7 Mike Vacanti: The twoplustwo.com poker forums.
0:56:04.3 Jordan Syatt: Shut up.
0:56:05.0 Mike Vacanti: Dead serious. There is a health and fitness subsection on the Two Plus Two Poker Forums, and they were all obsessed with Starting Strength and Rippetoe.
0:56:13.9 Jordan Syatt: That’s so funny. That’s crazy. How old were you?
0:56:18.7 Mike Vacanti: It was around the same time that I was reading Lyle and Martin, maybe slightly after. Maybe it was 2008.
0:56:26.8 Jordan Syatt: That’s so funny.
0:56:28.2 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, but yeah, one other thing I want to say on the subject of being a good coach because some people might think, “Okay, you have experience. You have knowledge. You’re a good coach. How does that lead to actually getting more clients?” Referrals.
0:56:47.6 Jordan Syatt: Yep, yep.
0:56:49.1 Mike Vacanti: Referrals are the best, the most consistent, the…
0:56:56.4 Jordan Syatt: Most underrated.
0:56:57.8 Mike Vacanti: Most underrated, least amount of micro-effort. Maybe it takes five to eight years to become a great coach, so it’s not that it doesn’t take effort, but those dividends pay forever because referrals and SEO are two massive leverage points. There are things that you… That past effort is benefiting you now.
0:57:22.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.
0:57:23.3 Mike Vacanti: Right. Like other forms of social media where consistent posting is required to continue generating…
0:57:30.7 Jordan Syatt: Stay top of mind.
0:57:32.0 Mike Vacanti: Exactly. Like referrals, if you’re giving someone a great service, people are going to see them. People are gonna ask them what they’re doing. People are gonna ask them how their experience was with this coach that they’re working with. And as a result of that, you might end up working with their friend, their kid, their wife, their anyone like who knows them.
0:57:51.2 Jordan Syatt: And to that effect, in terms of past effort, you might not work with this person anymore. It might have been 15 years ago, you worked with this person, and then someone they’re talking to is like, “Man, I really need to get in shape.” It’s like, “The best coach I ever had, Mike Vacanti, and he does online coaching, gotta contact him.” I think the key component here is past effort still paying off in dividends, which is SEO, whether it’s YouTube, website, whatever, which we’ll talk about in part two and how to do search engine optimization and all of that. But in terms of being a good coach, referrals, whether it’s right now, people, you getting clients right now because of it, people you coached in the past, saying, “Hey, you should go coach… You should work with this person,” or people you coached in the past coming back to work with you years later. These are all… I think, I love the overrated-underrated stuff. Referrals are the most underrated form of building your business.
0:58:51.8 Mike Vacanti: By a lot.
0:58:52.5 Jordan Syatt: By a lot. I’d say referrals are better than SEO because if someone says, “Hey, you should work with this person,” if your best friend, your mother or your father, your co-work or whatever, says, “Hey, you gotta work with this person,” you are immediately… The trust barrier is already crossed. You trust them or you trust them way more than you would if you just randomly found them on a website. You’d trust them way more if you randomly found them on the Explorer page in TikTok or Instagram. The trust barrier is crossed because you were just referred by a friend or by a family member or a colleague that you already trust. Referrals are without question the single best way to build your business, and this is why we say you don’t need a ton of followers. This is why you don’t need a huge audience in order to have a massively successful business is because of referrals. And yeah, I still get referrals on a weekly basis, and because of people I worked with when I was in Boston, and people I worked with when I was in Israel, people I worked with when I was in Delaware. It’s referrals.
1:00:08.4 Jordan Syatt: And again, this is from experience. This goes back to the experience which is below this one, which is, you can’t get that level of referral until you’ve built up that level of experience, until you’ve worked in different states or worked with a certain number of people, whatever it is. And the more you do that, the more it will come.
1:00:25.5 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.
1:00:28.6 Jordan Syatt: What’s maybe at least one thing you would say is a characteristic of a good coach? What does that mean to be a good coach?
1:00:38.5 Mike Vacanti: Man, we should do that as the episode after this two-part episode. That would be incredible.
1:00:46.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, there’s a lot to talk about.
1:00:48.3 Mike Vacanti: There’s an infinite number of things to talk about. The two that are top of mind for me, and maybe because they’re somewhat natural, they come easier to me than other things that might are, one, actually caring about the progress of your clients and, two, being on top of communication, specifically with online compared to in-person, but being on top of email, on top of communication, and really what that means is on top of meeting the expectations that you laid out at the beginning of coaching. If you say you’re gonna get back to your clients the next day, get back to them next day, every single time, no exceptions. Don’t give an expectation and then not meet that. And then in your communication, if the fact that you actually care… If you actually care about their progress, that is going to show through in how you communicate with that person.
1:01:43.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. I love that. It’s funny, the first thing for me, in terms of being a good coach, was making sure showing that you care about them outside of their fitness, which is like… It has to be both. You have to care about their progress, obviously. You have to be on top of communication, but for me it’s like, “Do you know what their kids names are? Do you know they have kids? Do you know what role their daughter played in the musical at middle school? How did it go? Did you get pictures of it?” These are things that I think… It’s funny ’cause you, and I have different brains. We’re very different brains. Mike is ISTJ. I’m ESTP. I’m very focused on a lot of different components, but for me, I’ve always found that the more I know about them and their family and their personal life, which for whatever it’s worth, that presents a whole separate set of issues as a coach.
1:02:51.3 Mike Vacanti: Which we talked about in a recent Q&A.
1:02:53.9 Jordan Syatt: In the mentorship, exactly. It can present a whole… If they start to then say… Well, I have had clients be like, “Listen, I’m really struggling with my partner. We’re having a really tough time in my marriage.” Then, this is… We talk about this in the mentorship a lot, especially the Q&As and people are struggling with it, there’s a line that…
1:03:10.6 Mike Vacanti: Barriers.
1:03:11.3 Jordan Syatt: There’s barriers here, and that you have to be… This is another part of being a good coach, knowing where to call it, knowing where that line is, and that only comes with the experience. It’s like there were times early in my career where I was like… I have, I think what I would call the savior complex, where it’s like, I wanna save everyone and like, I wanna make sure you’re okay. So it’s like someone’s husband or a wife or whatever it is, is telling me they’re struggling with their partner. It’s like I wanna save them. I wanna make sure you’re okay, and that’s completely inappropriate for a coach. Like you don’t fuck with their marriage, and by fuck with it, you don’t give advice on that. That’s not your job. And so one of the things I learned from experience is saying, “Listen, I’m here for you. You know I’m here, no matter what. It would be inappropriate of me to give you advice on this, and I don’t want to step outside of my scope. I strongly encourage you two to get to see a therapist, maybe relationship counseling. Unfortunately, it would be outside of my scope to keep talking about this just because that’s not what my expertise is in.”
1:04:17.0 Jordan Syatt: And I remember for a long time I didn’t wanna say stuff like that ’cause I thought they would get really mad, but as soon as I started saying it, they were like, “I really appreciate you saying that. Makes total sense.” Sometimes they would apologize. “I didn’t mean a burden you with that.” “Listen, you’re not burdening me at all. It’s just like, we’re friends, and I’m your friend, I’m your coach, but also as your coach, you’re paying me. It’s like, I can’t do that. It’s outside of my scope to do that.” So that’s another part of being a good coach is understand… Yes, learning more about them and what they care about and what they love, but also knowing when to draw the line and say, “Hey, this isn’t my area of expertise. You need to seek help elsewhere for this.” Yeah, yeah. But they would make a great podcast. Maybe so next week we’ll do a part two on this one, going into more like the… I think yesterday when we were planning this podcast called it the sprinkles on top like the fun stuff, like the social media, the SEO, the things like how to get more followers, well, sales copy, but all that stuff, we’ll dive in that next week on that, and then maybe after that, we’ll do a whole episode on what it means to be a good coach.
1:05:21.1 Mike Vacanti: I love that. And maybe before what it means to be a great coach, we do our fun episode of the 13 different types of clients that you will run into, which has a pretty…
1:05:33.2 Jordan Syatt: Oh, yeah.
1:05:34.6 Mike Vacanti: We’ll get to all of this.
1:05:36.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah. We made a whole big list on like… We were trying to come up with every different type of client you’ll encounter within your coaching experience. We came up with 13 so far. Is that how many?
1:05:47.8 Mike Vacanti: I think that’s how many, yeah.
1:05:49.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, and who knows? There are probably more, but with that said, if you want to join the mentorship, now is literally the best time all year. It’s $200 off when you join. You get access to all of our courses, in-depth courses. You get access to our Instagram Growth Guide. You get access to our nutrition manual. What’s the title of that manual, Mike?
1:06:12.8 Mike Vacanti: The Calories and Macros Guidelines for Clients.
1:06:16.5 Jordan Syatt: So how to structure your nutrition for your clients, how to… An Instagram Growth Guide that I made. Our courses are incredible. I think my personal favorite course… I’m interested in what yours is, Mike. My personal favorite course is the Client Psychology Course. I think that goes really deep into understanding client psychology and behavior change, how to speak with your clients, things to actually say to your clients to motivate them or to get them back on track, or if you have a client who ghosted you how to handle that type of a situation? That’s my personal favorite course.
1:06:45.2 Mike Vacanti: I also love that course, probably because it’s one where you just don’t get that anywhere else that I’ve ever seen. I really liked… I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but I really liked the Scaling Your Business Course, partly because we talk about all of the ways, like the eight to 10 ways that makes sense to go from one-on-one coaching to a more scalable style of business, but we also talk about when to make that jump, the factors that go into whether or not you should make that jump and what to do before making that jump.
1:07:15.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah, and there are many, many more courses and more to come. We have live Q&As two times a month. We have challenges every single month. If you struggle with, you don’t know what to focus on, you don’t know what to do. It’s like, cool. We tell you. In the same way you give your clients a new program every month, we give you a new program every month. It’s a new challenge. This is what you’re focusing on. We tell you, you tell them what exercises to do, how many sets and reps. We tell you what platforms to focus on. Exactly what numbers we want you to hit, how often we want you to do it. We give you your program every month, and at the end of every month, we pick one winner that we’ll get on the phone with and have a consult call with them to help individualize with their business. So if you wanna join the mentorship, if you wanna build your business, if you want to reach and help more people, $200 off for one week right now. The link is in the show notes. There’s literally no better time to do this, and we could say all day that we’re gonna be launching again and giving $200 off in three months, six months a year, but don’t trust us on that because [laughter] historically, it hasn’t held true. So that’s it. Anything else you wanna add to that, Mike?
1:08:17.5 Mike Vacanti: No that’s perfect.
1:08:18.7 Jordan Syatt: Amazing.
1:08:19.4 Mike Vacanti: Everyone have a great day. Thank you for listening and we will see you very soon.
1:08:22.5 Jordan Syatt: Bye-bye.
