Episode 101: Cardio or Weights for Weight Loss, The Worst Types of Clients, Can You Bank Your Steps, How to Get Out of Debt, and More

0:00:12.0 Mike Vacanti: Hello, Jordan.

0:00:12.8 Jordan Syatt: What’s up, Michael?

0:00:14.3 Mike Vacanti: Jordan…

0:00:16.2 Jordan Syatt: Oh, God. [chuckle] Oh, God. [laughter]

0:00:17.0 Mike Vacanti: Do you have an inner monologue?

0:00:22.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, of course. Do you?

0:00:25.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:00:26.7 Jordan Syatt: Okay. What do you think about it?

0:00:28.5 Mike Vacanti: Well, first of all, I’m very distracted by what’s going on with your microphone setup. Are you gonna hold that the whole time?

0:00:34.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:00:34.7 Mike Vacanti: Okay.

0:00:37.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, it’s good.

0:00:37.0 Mike Vacanti: Okay. All right.

0:00:38.9 Jordan Syatt: It’ll work.

0:00:39.5 Mike Vacanti: All right.

0:00:39.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh, man, I forgot that we’re on video pod.

[laughter]

0:00:44.8 Mike Vacanti: 30% to 50% of people… This is just something I read on Twitter, so take this with a grain of salt.

0:00:50.9 Jordan Syatt: So it’s a fact. So it’s a fact.

0:00:52.9 Mike Vacanti: Don’t have an inner monologue.

0:00:55.8 Jordan Syatt: Really?

0:00:55.9 Mike Vacanti: Mm-hmm.

0:00:55.8 Jordan Syatt: I’ve heard of that. I’ve heard that a certain percentage of people… I didn’t know it was that high though, but yeah, I’ve heard that there are people don’t have it. I was talking to Paul Carter about this like a year ago, and he was like, “Did you know that some people don’t have an inner monologue?” And I was like, “What does that mean?” He was like, “When you are thinking, do you ever like talk to yourself in your head?” I was like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “There’s a lot of people who don’t have that.” So my question… Like what do they have instead?

0:01:25.6 Mike Vacanti: Nothing.

0:01:28.1 Jordan Syatt: Right, like…

0:01:28.8 Mike Vacanti: Nothing.

0:01:29.0 Jordan Syatt: Their brain is silent?

0:01:30.9 Mike Vacanti: I think.

0:01:31.7 Jordan Syatt: What’s going on in their head?

0:01:31.8 Mike Vacanti: My theory is that all of their like thinking comes from external stimulation. Nothing comes from inside. And so actually the reason I asked you this was because the time when I asked you if you’re ever like sitting on an airplane… And by the way, that’s making a lot of noise, David’s not gonna be happy, but we’re just like…

0:01:50.1 Jordan Syatt: Really?

0:01:51.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. When we started podcasting three years ago, one of the core rules that he told me was the microphone goes on the table. Don’t touch the microphone. Leave this all in by the way. And don’t bang the table or do anything because it makes a lot of noise. And literally while I’m like… Even… I mean, I guess…

0:02:09.3 Jordan Syatt: You can hear it in your ears?

0:02:11.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, it’s like du du du du du du every time you move it.

0:02:13.3 Jordan Syatt: God damn it. Okay. I’m trying to use the bike, the desk bike.

0:02:16.2 Mike Vacanti: Get the bike out of here. Use the bike on the next call. Let’s set this up nicely.

0:02:21.0 Jordan Syatt: I just feel so sedentary already though. You know what I mean?

[laughter]

0:02:26.4 Mike Vacanti: Dude, this is actually something I wanted to podcast about. I’ve been thinking about making a setup where the camera is like in the corner of a room, so you’ll be able to see the entire room. It’s like in the top corner of a room. And then the microphone is like a headset with a mic.

0:02:43.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want one of those.

0:02:44.3 Mike Vacanti: And then we podcast… I don’t know, we get like a TV on the wall or something. But then instead of sitting there talking to you, I’m walking laps around the room talking.

0:02:51.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:02:52.2 Mike Vacanti: And then I can come to the camera to make a point or I can just keep walking and talking almost, like a phone call. But then the video aspect would just be me walking around like a prison cell essentially.

0:03:03.5 Jordan Syatt: It would sort of be like the real world type video. Remember how they had like cameras in the corners of the rooms and you could just see… Yeah, that’d be cool.

0:03:10.9 Mike Vacanti: And then we could just get steps in while we pod.

0:03:13.2 Jordan Syatt: Dude, that’s… Yeah. I don’t like this microphone ’cause I just have to sit down like this. I want to have that headset that I can just walk around with for sure.

0:03:21.6 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Well, especially like I do, four hours a month of this and 90 minutes, two hours, whatever, mentorship Q&A twice a month. But otherwise, I’m not doing podcasts or calls or sitting and I still feel like it’s too much sitting video. And so for you, you’re doing multiple podcasts a day, I can’t even imagine.

0:03:47.2 Jordan Syatt: Now I feel bad ’cause I was on a podcast yesterday with a woman and I was doing the whole bike thing and I was holding the mic and she didn’t say anything about the sound, but hopefully it wasn’t that bad.

[laughter]

0:03:57.9 Jordan Syatt: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. [laughter]

0:04:02.5 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, I think most people have more social IQ and capability to just let something like that slide, whereas I don’t.

0:04:10.3 Jordan Syatt: You’re just gonna J it hard.

0:04:12.5 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, I am. Well, David J’d it hard on me. So that’s… I’m really just paying it forward.

0:04:18.2 Jordan Syatt: Man. Yeah, David J’d you hard. Okay, respect.

0:04:23.0 Mike Vacanti: David’s a man of his craft, really like completely dialed in. And so he knows the audio engineer podcast world better than anyone. And so I’m listening to what he says.

0:04:35.2 Jordan Syatt: Smart. Yeah, that’s smart.

0:04:36.9 Mike Vacanti: I have a question for you.

0:04:37.0 Jordan Syatt: Clips Nation question?

0:04:37.7 Mike Vacanti: No, we’re not there yet.

0:04:39.5 Jordan Syatt: Okay.

0:04:40.1 Mike Vacanti: But just a random like human interaction, human psychology behavior/does this annoy you question.

0:04:45.8 Jordan Syatt: Okay, cool.

0:04:46.5 Mike Vacanti: Or not even does it annoy you, it annoys me, but how do you handle, and I’ll just read it and bless this person’s heart, I don’t mean any ill will towards the person who sent this submission.

0:04:55.8 Jordan Syatt: Someone sent us a question?

0:04:57.0 Mike Vacanti: Not a question. You’ll see, an expectation, kind of, I don’t know, it probably comes from a good place. Let me know.

0:05:03.0 Jordan Syatt: Someone sent us a comment about our podcast.

0:05:08.1 Mike Vacanti: No.

0:05:08.9 Jordan Syatt: Okay.

0:05:09.9 Mike Vacanti: I’ll just read it.

0:05:11.7 Jordan Syatt: Okay, read it.

0:05:12.6 Mike Vacanti: Hi, Jordan and Mike. My name is… I’m a personal trainer based in… Would love to set up a time to chat about the mentorship. I’ve been training one-on-one in person for almost a decade looking to transition online. Let me know what time works for you.

0:05:25.8 Jordan Syatt: You don’t like the presumption that we’re just gonna hop on the call.

0:05:29.4 Mike Vacanti: Anytime that there’s an expectation thrust upon me, rather than an ask, feels so ENTJ and just makes my stomach… Sometimes it makes my stomach drop, sometimes it just gets me. But, one, I never know how to reply. Like, “Hey, man. I actually don’t do phone calls, like in life. So…

[laughter]

0:05:54.2 Mike Vacanti: Here’s a link to the website. If you have any specific questions, let me know.” Maybe that’s the right answer. But I’m curious how you handle situations like that.

0:06:01.0 Jordan Syatt: Well, there’s two questions. There’s, one, how I handle it, and then another, how I feel about it, right? Two different questions, right? It’s like… How I initially feel about it is like, “What the fuck? Why do you think we’re gonna have a conversation about this?” But then I have to think, “Okay, maybe in their mind, they just assumed that that’s how it worked.” So like, cool, I get it. Like you might… People do that to me about the Inner Circle. “Hey, I want to ask you some questions, here’s my phone number. Give me a call whenever you have a chance.” I’m like, “You’re out of your fucking mind.”I think it’s just like they don’t know that it’s sort of a crazy thing to do. So it’s still in my head, I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right. No, that’s not happening.” But how I actually respond is usually I’ll send a voice memo and I’ll just be like, “Hey, what’s going on? Thanks for reaching out. Really glad you’re interested. We don’t do that. We don’t do phone calls. We have a lot of people who have questions about it, so we have an entire page explaining how it works. If you have any further questions, feel free to shoot me an email. I’m more than happy to discuss there. But I’m not doing phone calls right now.”

0:07:10.6 Jordan Syatt: Which, to be fair, that might be enough for them to be like, “Hey, this isn’t worth it for me. If you don’t have the time to get on the phone with me, then I don’t want to invest,” which is respect. It’s great ’cause if I then do take on that phone call, then they’re going to expect so much more. They’re gonna expect that level of one-on-one discussion once they join, and that’s just not what we offer. So yeah, I go hard and say, “Hey, thank you so much… But yeah, that’s not what we offer.”

0:07:36.7 Mike Vacanti: Even if it was like… So when you were in the weeds of building the Inner Circle and I think this was pre-admin or you were doing all of the basic stuff yourself, letting people into the Facebook group, onboarding, I don’t know, 2016, 2017, if someone sent you that email, that’s how you would reply with a voice memo?

0:07:55.3 Jordan Syatt: No, back then I would have gotten on a call with them.

0:07:58.6 Mike Vacanti: Oh, okay.

0:08:00.4 Jordan Syatt: Back then I would have. Dude, I did so many calls at that point in my career. I was just on calls all the time messaging people. I literally… I had people message me their phone number so I could give them… I would call random people all the time. Like it was a… Yeah, I would do phone calls all the time ’cause I knew once I got on the phone with them and we had a conversation, they were going to join, there’s no question, once they could get to know me a little, once they could get to know me and see my intentions were good and I’m really here to help no matter what. So yeah, now, no, I don’t do that. But you know who does is Susan, Susan actually does. Susan, she tells me like… We all hate doing email, it’s not fun. So she said if people want to talk with the Inner Circle, she just hops on the phone with them. She still does that all the time.

0:08:48.2 Mike Vacanti: I do prefer email to call and I just realized something mid-conversation here, is that because you’re an obliger, you’re probably a bad person to ask this question to.

[laughter]

0:09:00.6 Mike Vacanti: Because you in general are like, “Oh, someone expects something of me. I want to appease them.”

0:09:06.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, it’s so true. It’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s exactly right. I don’t like the idea of letting someone down in that sense. Like oh, they felt that way. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. You need to ask another rebel.

0:09:21.2 Mike Vacanti: I need to ask another rebel. I don’t know any other rebels.

0:09:25.0 Jordan Syatt: Did you reply to that email?

0:09:26.4 Mike Vacanti: It just rolled in like an hour before we jumped on here.

0:09:27.9 Jordan Syatt: Got it. Okay, so no.

[laughter]

0:09:33.1 Mike Vacanti: All right. I have it sitting in an open tab so that I remembered to talk about it here.

0:09:38.8 Jordan Syatt: Do you want me to send them a voice memo?

0:09:41.5 Mike Vacanti: We’ll see. I’m gonna think about it.

0:09:42.2 Jordan Syatt: Or maybe they’ll listen to the podcast. [chuckle]

0:09:44.1 Mike Vacanti: Maybe, and I might actually use this as an opportunity to type up a canned response for times when people reach out expecting a phone call.

0:09:53.9 Jordan Syatt: Smart, smart.

0:09:55.0 Mike Vacanti: Because that’s probably something that’ll happen, I don’t know, one to five times a quarter and might even go up going forward.

0:10:01.4 Jordan Syatt: Especially now that we’re Clips Nation and things are just exploding.

0:10:05.6 Mike Vacanti: Clips Nation, we’re posting basically daily, not every day, basically daily, cross-platform.

0:10:10.5 Jordan Syatt: I’ve slipped a little bit. I was sick traveling. But with your reminders at night, I’m gonna be posting every day.

0:10:17.7 Mike Vacanti: Are you putting it on me?

0:10:17.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. If you text me, it will happen. If you don’t text me, there’s a strong chance it won’t happen.

0:10:23.9 Mike Vacanti: Good. I’m fine with that.

0:10:25.9 Jordan Syatt: But as long as you say, “Hey, post.”

0:10:28.9 Mike Vacanti: It’s funny because in my mind, I had felt like I didn’t want to be… In my mind, I’m like, “Oh, well, he knows, we’re doing daily posts, and he does… “

[laughter]

0:10:37.5 Mike Vacanti: It felt like an annoying thing. If someone was constantly like, “Hey, remember to do this,” it’s like, “I know. We said we were gonna do this, so I’ll just do it.” But it’s beneficial for you because you actually do forget things and then the reminder is like, “Oh, nice, I will do that.”

0:10:52.5 Jordan Syatt: No, it’s sort of like, you know how Gary knows what he should eat at dinner, but he still wants you there with him just to make sure? It’s like, I know that I should post, but if you text me, it’s like, okay, now I really gotta do it ’cause I know you’re watching. It’s funny, when Susan and I first started working together, she would do the same thing. She’d be like, “I feel like I’m annoying you.” I’d be like, “No, no, no. I need you to do this.” And I say the same thing to my podcast producer, Tony, I’m like, after we have a call and I’m supposed to do a podcast, I’m like, “I need you to text me and remind me over and over again until it gets done.” So it just keeps me accountable.

0:11:32.3 Mike Vacanti: It’s good. That’s great self-awareness and good to set up systems and dynamics with people you work with to benefit from that aspect of someone…

0:11:42.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, and you’re J, so I know it’s easy for you to just be like, “Hey, fucking do it.”

0:11:46.2 Mike Vacanti: Well, here’s where it’s not easy. You’re like… I like when you come up with a new creative way to do it. I’ll be like, “People love it when we post. Keep going with the post.”

[laughter]

0:11:57.3 Mike Vacanti: You’re like, “I want it to be different and exciting every time, not just like… ” Hey, you gotta post still.

[laughter]

0:12:04.5 Jordan Syatt: But if you come at me with a little bit of anger or resentment, that’ll make me really do it immediately.

0:12:10.7 Mike Vacanti: I’m not one to fake anger just to get a response.

0:12:13.7 Jordan Syatt: Well, you could though, Michael Jordan style. You could create a fake scenario.

0:12:18.4 Mike Vacanti: I don’t know if I have any of that left in me.

[laughter]

0:12:21.9 Mike Vacanti: I think my next big run in life is gonna have to be built on habits and systems and good and gratefulness and basically good motivation. I don’t know… Like we were going to talk about in episode 100, we won’t go deep into this, but I think I’m just…

0:12:41.7 Jordan Syatt: Don’t get me started.

[laughter]

0:12:44.2 Mike Vacanti: I think I’m too content in a solid place in life to dig down into that deep, dark anger as a form of motivation to do things I don’t want to do. I think it’s gonna be way better to just mostly try to do things I want to do, do them consistently, shoot shots every day. You don’t necessarily need to put in 16-hour days, but be consistent and compound results over time rather than think about some things someone said 17 years ago that irked my teenage self and now I’m gonna rely on that to do my next three hours of work. That’s not how I want to feel on the day-to-day.

0:13:26.3 Jordan Syatt: You gotta dollar cost average your work every day, just a little bit every day.

0:13:30.4 Mike Vacanti: Wow. Wow.

0:13:31.0 Jordan Syatt: How good was that?

[laughter]

0:13:32.1 Mike Vacanti: For all of my finance and investor people listening to the podcast, Jordan’s a wizard. Dollar cost average.

0:13:41.3 Jordan Syatt: The whole time you were talking, I was like, “That’s the line I’m gonna say.” And I was hoping for that reaction, so I appreciate that.

[laughter]

0:13:49.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, that’s exactly right and a great use of that term.

0:13:53.8 Jordan Syatt: Yes.

0:13:55.0 Mike Vacanti: You’ve still been dollar cost averaging?

0:13:55.1 Jordan Syatt: Dude, every month.

0:13:55.9 Mike Vacanti: Good.

0:13:56.4 Jordan Syatt: Every month, dollar cost average, dollar cost average, invest every month.

0:14:00.2 Mike Vacanti: Good man.

0:14:01.8 Jordan Syatt: Little bits, little bits. Dave Ramsey had a great post recently about, I just like his finance advice, he’s just so simple about it. Actually, you know what? He made a post that inspired one of my posts. He made a post, and this is important and we could talk about this, we won’t even be able to clip this, Clips Nation coming in hot. Dave Ramsey is a finance guy, super smart from what I can tell and I just really like him. He’s very well spoken, great content. He had this post, it was like seven baby steps for getting your finances in order, something like that. It was a great post and then I was like, you know what? I’m gonna do the seven baby steps to getting your health and fitness in order. And it’s one of those things where I think you and I were talking about it on the mentorship Q&A yesterday.

0:14:49.8 Mike Vacanti: Literally, on the live yesterday.

0:14:51.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, where I think a lot of people, especially in the fitness industry, coaches will… They don’t know where to find content ideas. And obviously number one, the content ideas come from the questions your clients ask, answer those questions, but you’re going to answer the same questions over and over and over and over and over again. I think it was Dylan who had asked the question, “How do I spice it up? How do I make things new?” And one of the suggestions was get out of the fitness industry and look at other industries in which people are making content and take ideas from them. Because this way you can look at different ways they’re presenting things and then transfer it over to fitness. So if you’re sort of stuck with not only what content to make or what questions to answer, but how to answer those questions in a new way, get out of the fitness industry and go look at other industries, ’cause if you just look at the vacuum, the echo chamber you’re in, you’re never gonna get new ideas.

0:15:45.3 Mike Vacanti: It’s absolutely right. And we’re not saying copy paste someone’s caption and use that as your own…

0:15:51.5 Jordan Syatt: Correct, yeah.

0:15:51.6 Mike Vacanti: We’re talking about borrowing the structure and format of a particular post within the fitness industry or in a different industry that, one, performs well, or two, just really resonates with you and is something that, just like you did with that Dave Ramsey post, you’re like, “Oh, this is a great idea that I can easily do for fitness that my followers will love to see and will benefit from.”

0:16:15.6 Jordan Syatt: I like Dave Ramsey ’cause he really targets the average person, and he’s very good at breaking it down in a no bullshit way. I really think him and I are similar just in different industries in how we educate. So, I don’t know, I’ve learned a lot from him. I like him a lot. So if anyone wants some finance advice, Dave Ramsey.

0:16:34.9 Mike Vacanti: I’ll go somewhere with it that is interesting to me, but probably not to most people, to double down on what you just said, you guys actually, one thing you do that is very similar on a specific instance is you break something down in a way that I wouldn’t call 100% optimal or 100% accurate or even 100% true or right, but it is the proper… Both of your intention is to do it so that the maximum number of people can actually understand and execute on that advice. And here’s the example, he says, when you’re paying off debt, you should pay it off… If you have student loans, credit card debt, like someone who has like three, four, five different sources of debt…

0:17:29.1 Jordan Syatt: Pick the easiest one first.

0:17:32.4 Mike Vacanti: The smallest amount of debt first, when in reality that is gonna cost you money over time. What I would… ISTJ, I would be like, and even just like logic, math numbers, you should pick the one with the highest interest rate and you should pay that one first. But he has worked with enough people and his theory on this is no, you pick the smallest one first because people need momentum. People need to see that checkbox. People need to see… This is so overwhelming. I have six sources of debt, I need to get one paid off completely. I need to see that progress. I need to see one down. Okay, now I’m moving on to the next one. And then you go to your site, say you have 3K in credit card, 4K in here, here, here, regardless of the interest rate, and it reminds me, for example, of your… Do you know what I’m gonna say actually?

0:18:15.8 Jordan Syatt: No, I don’t. I don’t.

0:18:18.3 Mike Vacanti: Of a goal body weight times 12.

0:18:21.3 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:18:22.6 Mike Vacanti: It’s like, look, this might not be technically scientifically the exact way to calculate your calorie target, but a lot of people see the words lean body mass and see like, oh, one minus 0.3 and then you multiply that by something, just like gone, you lost them.

0:18:39.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, they’re stopped. Exactly. Yeah. That’s exactly right.

0:18:43.1 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, so when you said you guys are similar, I think you’re right in a lot of ways.

0:18:47.4 Jordan Syatt: Man, that’s such a good point. I didn’t even think about that in terms of the finance. I didn’t realize that would actually cost you more in the long run, if you actually do it. But I bet just like you said, he’s seeing people who maybe they try and go for the largest interest rate first, but it’s so overwhelming. So then they just stop paying it off. So it ends up costing them more because they don’t do it. So in his mind, he’s like, “I just want you out of debt. That has to be the first part, get you out of debt by any means necessary. So if that means building momentum, starting off by using the lowest amount to pay first, cool, start with that, because at least at some point, you’ll be out of debt, versus if you start with the largest interest rate, and you’re like most people, you’re gonna be buried and be overwhelmed and it’s not gonna work anyway.” So his his whole thesis is get you to take action, build momentum from there and then see those results. Yeah, it’s the exact same strategy in fitness. I didn’t realize that, that’s super interesting.

0:19:42.8 Mike Vacanti: Let’s fire up a question here. Got a couple nice fitnessy SEO-able topics here. Before that, a little fun brainstorm. I think a lot of coaches when they’re first starting out, I actually know a lot of coaches when they’re first starting out because I did it, you did it, just want to take on clients. And it doesn’t really matter who. It’s just like, I want to start working with people, which at that point is probably the right mindset, there are certain limiters. But yeah, you’re taking on all kinds of different people. But as you progress, you start to learn that you probably shouldn’t have taken on certain clients for certain reasons. And so I thought it’d be a fun brainstorm here to talk about the worst types of clients, or who you shouldn’t take on. And I’ll give you three examples that just came to mind recently. One, this is a rare instance, but I’ve found it unbelievably true across my career is when someone applies for coaching for someone else, never works out. Never. Could be like an adult child applying for their parent, like my dad’s in poor health, applies for coaching and then at the end, like fills out all his dad’s info and at the end says like, “Hey, I’m actually Josh, Steve, whatever, this is for my parent.”

0:21:09.4 Mike Vacanti: Doesn’t work out. Could be for like… I’ve had actually had a husband sign his wife up, paid for it, I don’t think she necessarily wanted to, this was many, many years ago, but very difficult. Always very difficult. That’s one. Two is the standard like, run on sentence application. If you get a coaching application and there’s this much straight text and it’s just poor grammar, just all over the place, you gotta remember…

0:21:42.4 Jordan Syatt: No breaks, no white space, just, in your words, a word salad, just like… Yeah, not good.

0:21:46.1 Mike Vacanti: That’s what emails are gonna be like, communication is gonna be hard, that ends up being not necessarily someone you shouldn’t work with, but it’s going to be a more difficult client, something to pay attention to. And another one that’s a little more obvious, but again, when you’re first starting out, you’re like, “I feel like I can help everybody,” someone with goals that are outside of your scope of practice, just on an ethical, moral level, but also on a practical like… If you’re a power lifter and someone wants to run a marathon and you’re like, “I need money and they’re willing to sign up, I could probably help them,” and power lifting, you can rationalize like, “Oh yeah, if we could get them…

0:22:23.9 Jordan Syatt: “Get you stronger, you’re gonna be a better runner.”

[laughter]

0:22:28.7 Mike Vacanti: Which is true. But if it’s like, okay, my goal is marathon performance and you’re like the power lifting guy, it’s like you have to just say no and refer out and you’re both gonna benefit massively in the long run.

0:22:41.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yeah. Man, I love the first one that you said, when they apply for someone else, that didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen a fistful of times. And you’re 100% right. Not only did it not work out once it actually happened, but it was a mess. Like onboarding, it was like so… It was like, “Hey, I know you filled all this out, but I need them to fill this shit out. And I need to have this conversation, you just told me what you perceive, but this doesn’t give me any information from their mind.” So you literally have to have them fill it out and then you have to get them communicate and they didn’t want it in the first place. So communicating with them is a bitch, so they don’t reply as quickly, they’re not as invested. They often feel resentful that the person wanted to sign them up anyway. It’s a terrible situation, and one of the tricky situations is when, let’s say it’s the husband-wife scenario, which did happen a number of times with the husband-wife or the wife-husband, whatever, where the husband wants to coach with you and he also wants his wife to coach with you.

0:23:50.3 Jordan Syatt: That’s also tricky because then you’re already gonna work with the husband, but then the husband is trying to push the wife on you or had it in reverse as well, the wife wanted to work with you, but she wanted the husband to work with you as well. And it was so difficult. I had multiple like, “Hey, maybe we can just do our check-ins together in the same email.” And it was like, this is a bad idea all around. If someone wants to work with you, they should be independently reaching out to you on their own. And if someone says like, “Hey, I wanna sign up my husband, wife, kid, whatever, parent,” say, “Cool, have them fill out this form from their email.” Because if someone else is doing it, dude, you’re a 100% right. That is a bad situation.

0:24:34.9 Mike Vacanti: It’s just… You hit the nail on the head too, with long response times and one word answers, which is something you don’t see, really very rarely in coaching are you seeing one word answers across the board, but I would get us like assessment replies where people would sink a half hour, 40 minutes to give you really detailed answers to open-ended questions, one word answer, one word answer, one word answer. It’s like, okay, this isn’t gonna be good.

0:25:02.9 Jordan Syatt: The worst is like when you have an open-ended question, like, how are you feeling, for example, and if they just say, “Good,” it’s not what you want, but all right, at least you’re feeling good. The worst is when you say, “How are you feeling?” And they say, “Not good.”

0:25:17.2 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, “Terrible.”

0:25:18.1 Jordan Syatt: And that’s all they say.

0:25:19.7 Mike Vacanti: Don’t explain.

[laughter]

0:25:23.5 Jordan Syatt: All right, you wanna tell me what’s going on and why you’re not feeling good? It’s so true.

0:25:29.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:25:29.9 Jordan Syatt: The other one, and I know this goes into what you were saying in terms of different goals or goals that you’re not educated on, it’s along those same lines, but someone who has an issue that you’re not educated on, like for example, if someone came to me and said they had a thyroid issue and they were not willing to be medicated, that was a no. And it was because I don’t know how to work with someone who doesn’t have healthy thyroid levels. If you’re medicated and your thyroid levels are up to a healthy level, great, I can absolutely help. But if you have below normal or above normal thyroid levels, I don’t know what to do. So I even put in my sheet, I said, “Here are disqualifications immediately. If you have this and you are not medicated, I cannot work with you. If you have this and it’s not being taken care of, I cannot work with you. If you are currently struggling with binge eating disorder, anorexia, bulimia, I cannot work with you.” I had an entire list of disqualifications so that people would know what I can and cannot take.

0:26:40.3 Jordan Syatt: And I would also have a list of what I expect of you as my client and what you can expect of me as your coach. I had this in a whole PDF that would be sent to them before they signed on. So it was like, all right, cool, once they send me all the answers to the questions, I decide this might be a good fit, “Here’s what we need to get out of the way from the very beginning before you send any money, before anything. I cannot work with you if this, this or this. In terms of coaching, I expect you to do this, this and this. And in terms of your coach, you can expect this, this and this from me,” which I think from the very beginning helped. Didn’t solve 100% of the problems, but solved a significant percentage, 90%, 95% of potential issues.

0:27:17.9 Mike Vacanti: It’s a great idea. The eating disorder one is huge. If that’s not your specialty, someone struggling with an eating disorder, and the worst part is that it’s an abundance of empathy that will often make a coach set aside the rationality and be like, “Oh no, I will be able to help this person.” It’s like, no, they’re struggling with a disorder that you aren’t qualified to help them with. That needs to be referred out. Another thought just came into my mind, by the way, we’re not saying that if someone runs and also wants to get into strength training, that you shouldn’t take them on as a client. We talked to… Deb asked a question about this in the Q&A yesterday in mentorship, and obviously there are times when a strength coach is gonna work with a runner on lifting weights, which is super beneficial and a good thing. But an elite level marathon runner, if for some reason wanted to hire you for it…

0:28:12.8 Jordan Syatt: Even if they’re not an elite level marathon runner, the difference is you can write their strength training program, but you better not try and write their fucking running program if you don’t know how to… I can write a strength program for a marathon runner, I cannot write their running program. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know the first thing… How many miles, what tempo you should be at, what heart rate we’re shooting for. I haven’t been educated on that.

0:28:37.0 Mike Vacanti: Exactly.

0:28:38.2 Jordan Syatt: So if you wanna do the strength training program with the knowledge of what runners go through, great. But don’t be like… If they say, “Hey, could you also write my running program?” “Absolutely the fuck not.”

0:28:51.1 Mike Vacanti: Yep. All right. YouTube Clips Nation, YouTube Clips, @personaltrainerpodcast on YouTube, by the way, if you’re interested. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, @personaltrainerpodcast, making high frequency… Excuse me, content, with just fire, fire captions, by the way.

0:29:13.3 Jordan Syatt: Whoever’s writing those…

0:29:16.8 Mike Vacanti: Unbelievable.

0:29:17.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:29:18.4 Mike Vacanti: Really something. I wonder if anyone can guess.

0:29:19.3 Jordan Syatt: Something else.

0:29:23.7 Mike Vacanti: [chuckle] Cardio or weight training for fat loss?

0:29:26.9 Jordan Syatt: Do you wanna begin with this one?

0:29:29.8 Mike Vacanti: Look, here’s the bottom line. I think the majority of us know this. In order to lose fat, you want to be eating fewer calories a day than you burn on average over time consistently. Really doesn’t matter what you’re doing from a weightlifting and cardiovascular perspective, if the end goal is just see the scale go down, lose body fat. Only restricting food intake and not doing any physical activity, while not being good for your health, is also going to lead to subpar results on your fat loss journey. One, more of the weight you lose is gonna be muscle tissue rather than just fat mass, which from a health and aesthetics perspective isn’t something that any of us are interested in, unless you just have so much lean mass that you want to lose some lean mass, which is a problem that basically no one has. Cardio actually burns more calories on average per bout than strength training. Now, what if you’re doing like, I don’t know, some crazy circuit where you’re working super hard and you compare that to a cardio session that’s very low intensity? Sure. There are some strength training workout routines where you’re burning more calories per minute than certain cardio routines.

0:30:46.3 Mike Vacanti: That being said, on average, you’re burning more calories through cardio than you are through weight training. That being said, weight training is more important to be the pillar of your exercise regimen during a fat loss phase for many reasons. One, you’re gonna, like I said before, you’re gonna retain lean mass. Two, getting stronger is just a good thing for health and for life. Three, this is debatable, but I actually go with the bro science side of this more than the science side of this…

[chuckle]

0:31:22.5 Mike Vacanti: When you retain muscle during a deficit/build muscle around maintenance or in a slight surplus and you’ve made weight training part of your habit and routine and lifestyle and you consistently do it over time and you end up years down the road with 10, 20, 30 plus more pounds of muscle, you are gonna burn way more calories a day. Most of the research shows six to 10 calories per pound of lean tissue, which I think is an underestimate for reasons we actually mentioned in our book, Eat It!

0:31:54.1 Jordan Syatt: Do you?

0:31:54.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, I think it’s an underestimate because I think people who have more… Look, on a BMR level, I’m sure it’s accurate. I’m not gonna argue with the scientists, but on a total daily energy expenditure perspective, I think that the person who has 25 pounds more muscle lives their life completely differently, can do more things, helps their friend move, moves around… When they are training, they’re burning more calories training, takes more steps, does more things, is healthier, and ends up burning more calories, which allows you to eat more in the future, which allows you to live a lifestyle that lets you enjoy more things, more food, more events, and still not gain fat in the process. If you’ve added 300 calories to your total daily energy expenditure and you can eat 2,400 instead of 2,100 to maintain, that’s a lot. That’s 2,100 calories a week. That’s over 8,000 calories a month that you get to be eating without gaining fat that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t make strength training the core of your training regimen, if you only focused on cardio to get that rapid fat loss, create a big deficit, and then do cardio on top of it to lose as much weight and fat as possible, cool, that might maximize the scale number in the short term, but in the long term, it doesn’t help with maintaining that progress.

0:33:11.2 Mike Vacanti: It doesn’t help with how you feel. It doesn’t help with functionality, and it doesn’t help with the ability to stay leaner in the future, and it doesn’t help with the aesthetics, looking better. So weight training or cardio for fat loss, if I had to pick one, I would say weight training. I could go on, but I’ve been talking for a long time. There are…

0:33:27.8 Jordan Syatt: No, keep going, bro. Keep going. This is great.

0:33:32.5 Mike Vacanti: You could actually go in on this if you want to or don’t even touch it, but what I’m not saying with all of that is that you shouldn’t do any cardio, and I have in the past said you shouldn’t do any cardio when I was young and dumb and only thinking about things from an aesthetic perspective and not thinking about heart health and not thinking about longevity, only thinking about time, only thinking, okay, how can I create a calorie deficit in the most efficient way possible? Oh, okay, I can burn 200 calories in 45 minutes of low intensity cardio. I could also not eat those handful of Oreos, and one takes 45 minutes, one takes 45 seconds, boom, I just did that. Now I can take those 45 minutes, focus on work. That’s where my mind was. Cardio can be beneficial in many situations during a fat loss phase. One, if you’ve lost a good amount of body fat and you get to a place where you’ve stalled out a bit and you’ve been consistent with your nutrition and maybe your coach has reduced your intake a little bit over time and you don’t want to further reduce your intake, increasing calorie expenditure via cardio is a really good idea, makes a lot of sense in that situation.

0:34:35.4 Mike Vacanti: It makes a lot of sense just for general health and for longevity and for heart health and for living longer and for feeling better and for performance. Cardio is a really good idea on all of those fronts, but specifically for fat loss, the pillar of your training regimen during a fat loss phase, cardio versus weight training, should be weight training.

0:34:57.5 Jordan Syatt: I really think that point that you brought up around, about six to eight calories per pound of muscle is what, biologically, that muscle, that’s how much energy will burn a day, an extra six to eight calories. And I think a pound of fat will burn an extra two to four or something. It’s not like fat is inactive.

0:35:18.6 Mike Vacanti: What I remember seeing, and this could have changed, probably more than a year ago that I’ve seen this, was like three to six for fat and six to 10 for muscle.

0:35:27.1 Jordan Syatt: Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So either in that range, so we’ll call it like… Let’s call it three for fat, eight for muscle.

0:35:35.2 Mike Vacanti: Sure.

0:35:36.0 Jordan Syatt: Right? What’s interesting to me, and I don’t think this is gonna be a clip, I don’t think it will make sense in the clip, we’ll see, but what’s interesting for me is the lifestyle modifications as a result of having more or less of either of those. And this is really what you were talking about, where yeah, maybe a pound of muscle maybe only burns an extra eight calories per pound, but what happens if you increase your muscle by 15, 20 pounds? It’s not an extraordinary number of extra calories burned just from having that muscle, but what does your life look like as a result of having that muscle? How much more active are you, not even just right now, but how much more active can you be as you age because you have that strength in muscle? What happens if you don’t have that strength in muscle and you’ve been gaining more and more pounds of fat? Well, what happens? How active can you be? How much less are you gonna do as you age because of that?

0:36:35.2 Jordan Syatt: Every year you add five, 10 more pounds of fat, whatever it is. It might not seem like that much in a short term, but over 10, 15, 20 years, you’ve been consistently adding this fat, not building muscle, the amount of calories you burn goes down dramatically, but the lifestyle that happens as a result of it I think is dramatically different and that’s where the calorie burn from having more muscle actually matters the most is what does your lifestyle look like? I was just listening to Peter Attia on his podcast recently and he was talking about how right around 70 there seems to be this cliff, this cliff that people drop off once they hit 70 where it’s like strength goes down, muscle goes down, activity goes down dramatically and it seems like the best way to combat that is to build muscle, and obviously your habits and all of that, but if your habits are helping you build muscle, then that muscle will help you maintain those habits. If you don’t have that, then it’s gonna be dramatically more difficult. So if you want to live as long as you can with the highest quality of life… Obviously, listen, I’m no bodybuilder. I don’t have muscle, tons and tons and tons of muscle, I don’t look jacked, but building enough to where you can function and move and perform at a higher level as you age is just so important.

0:38:00.2 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, there’s definitely an optimal amount of muscle for longevity. Even looking at the best bodybuilders and lifespan and frequency of heart attacks and there’s a lot of drugs and things that affect that, but it’s hard for the organs of the body to maintain such a massive body. But on the other side, if you have a very high body fat percentage and very little lean tissue, that also, the research is clear that the longevity outcomes and lifespan are worse in that situation. You die earlier. And so yeah, another benefit of making weight training the pillar of your training and building that habit even during fat loss phases is that you continue doing that over your lifespan. I’ve talked a lot over the years and when I was making content about getting my dad into weight training and he was a former… He was a college athlete, played goalie, had a real shot in the pros, he had an athletic background, didn’t do anything from 27, 28 until 55. I mean, didn’t do anything, worked his ass off his whole life, but he was providing for our family, wasn’t in the gym and got him into that and he’s benefited tremendously.

0:39:15.9 Mike Vacanti: My mom actually in the last year has started to get really consistent with her training and she’s 60, I think, 60 or 61, I think she’s 60, but like you mentioned 70 as a cliff, when you can even like two days a week, two to three days a week of strength training, and having more muscle and being stronger, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, it matters so much for not falling, for not breaking bones, for bone health, especially for women. Everything is fighting against you as you get older and just for living longer and a better quality of life in those later years, if you can make that a habit, the earlier you can the better.

0:40:04.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah. Dude, it’s so funny, ’cause I was thinking about, it’s very clear that if you have a severe amount of excess body fat, it’s not gonna be good for you, for your health. It’s also pretty obvious based on just even anecdotal research, but just looking at people, if you have excessive amounts of muscle, if you’re huge, odds are it’s also probably not that good for you, and I think it’s largely because the stress that it puts on your body, your organs, your heart, all of that. The other day I just Google searched, I wanted to get an actual picture in my head. I Googled the top 100 oldest people in the world and I imaged it, and it’s so interesting, I couldn’t find just one picture with all of them, but I found articles with all of them there, and I was looking at, dude, people well into their hundreds, like 104, 109, 114, and they all look… Obviously they look old as fuck, obviously, but they look fit. You can’t be 100 and not look old as fuck. They look old as… But they look fit. They don’t look like anything crazy from a physique perspective, like they were ever like a bodybuilder or anything like that, but they also don’t look like they were on the other end of the spectrum.

0:41:32.3 Jordan Syatt: They’re just like fit people who moved on a consistent basis. That’s it. It’s so interesting to me. It doesn’t look like they were huge hulking people, nor were they like on the other end of the spectrum like gluttonous people. For me, it’s just like moderation clearly seems to win out, but to answer that question going back to strength or cardio for weight loss, that does then make me wonder. It’s not either/or. It’s just not either/or. Do both is really what it boils down to. You should be doing fucking both. That’s it.

0:42:07.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, completely agree. And both doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to run a five-minute mile and do 20 hill sprints a day, your cardio doesn’t need to be high school sport style, go till you puke cardio. You know the research better than I do on this, but seemingly a few hours of zone two cardio a week seems to provide the majority of the longevity and the majority of the heart health benefits.

0:42:37.3 Jordan Syatt: 100%. And if anyone’s doing 20 sets of hill sprints in your programming, your shit is broken, you should not be doing it like that. You’ll be destroyed. That is a terrible idea.

[laughter]

0:42:50.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah. Not fun.

0:42:52.4 Jordan Syatt: I remember when I put Gary through some hill sprints at his parents’ house, his calves were sore for like a week after that. He was like, “We’re never doing that again.”

[laughter]

0:43:09.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, he does not like that. I like that… I think just pod random strategy talk in general, so many gurus and business coaches and mastermind funnel entrepreneur, whatevers…

[laughter]

0:43:31.6 Mike Vacanti: So much of what they say is hyper focused on money and business and strategies and cold DMing and outsourcing, yada, yada. And by the way, anytime I open my Instagram app, I get so many sponsored posts from like nobody doofuses trying to get me to join their 20,000 whatever program. I’m like, “Who are you? Do you lift? What is this? You look like you’re standing in front of a rented house,” like so silly.

[laughter]

0:44:01.7 Mike Vacanti: Not only do I like talking about this stuff with you, but I also think it’s a beneficial content strategy because I think a lot of coaches like to hear it and a lot of non-coaches like to hear it, which is continuing to talk about… Like for the last whatever, 20 minutes, talking about fitness related subjects that can be applied to clients rather than on just like tactical make more money, because if you get good at coaching and if you get smart at training, nutrition, etcetera, you can serve your clients better, business grows on the back end of that. I think it’s a win-win-win all around rather than just being hyper business focused.

0:44:39.5 Jordan Syatt: 100%. We were talking about this on the Mentorship Live Q&A yesterday. We were talking about the launch and I forget who it was, someone was talking about they were struggling with the launch and how they didn’t wanna sell. And what we’ve always said is, the best sales tactic is being an amazing coach that gives away incredible content for free. If you want people to sign up for your program, yes, copywriting can help, yes, understanding email marketing can help, yes, understanding psychology can help, yes, all of this can help, sales tactics, all that, it can help. I’m not saying it’s worthless. But if you don’t wanna have to do that shit, if you don’t wanna have to learn copywriting, if you don’t wanna have to learn marketing, if you don’t wanna have to learn any of this stuff, you could build an unbelievably successful coaching business where you have a wait list and people wanting to work with you from all over the world just because you are really good at what you do and you give amazing, helpful, practically applicable content for free online every day for years. That’s it. You don’t need to learn marketing.

0:45:52.2 Jordan Syatt: You don’t need to learn copywriting. You don’t need to learn email funnels if you’re a good coach who gives great content for free. You don’t have to do it. So the best sales strategy, be a great coach that helps people for free and you will never go out of business.

0:46:05.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, I love that.

0:46:07.0 Jordan Syatt: Clips Nation.

0:46:09.4 Mike Vacanti: Man, you’re such a P. You can just make clips out of thin air. You don’t need to plan. You don’t need to have a question. You’re just like, see it, make it, clip nation.

0:46:18.1 Jordan Syatt: Eat it.

0:46:18.8 Mike Vacanti: Believe it, lift it, eat it.

0:46:20.9 Jordan Syatt: See, believe, achieve.

[laughter]

0:46:27.2 Jordan Syatt: All right. Question. Can you bank steps like calories as long as you average them out to 70,000 per week? What do you think, Mike?

0:46:38.5 Mike Vacanti: So, just to explain the concept, if you burn 2500 calories a day and you want to lose body fat, you don’t need to eat 2000 calories exactly every single day for the week to lose one pound. You could eat 1800 one day, 2200 another day, 2500 one day, 1500 one day. If it averages out to 2000 that’s banking. You can have a few super low calorie days, you know, weekend warrior, for example, Monday through Thursday, like in a more extreme deficit, and then Thursday, Friday, Saturday, closer to maintenance, fits your lifestyle better. What matters most is the weekly average banking calories. Can you bank steps? I think that you can. I mean, are we talking about the… For the purposes of health here? I do bank steps because there are certain days where I decide to go on like a really long walk. I get 16,000 steps in one day, I get 18,000 steps in whatever. And then the next day I’m just not gonna move as much. If I’m keeping nutrition pretty consistent, I don’t have as much energy. Maybe I only take 5000 steps the next day. My gut and intuition is that if it averages your weekly average matters way more than hitting an exact number each day.

0:47:58.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. I think that looking at the annual average is a really good way to look at it. I like looking at, okay, over the last year, what was your average daily step count? I think that’s a really good way to look at it. I don’t… It’s funny, with banking calories, I prefer using a week-to-week approach. I don’t want to use like a monthly or annual approach with that ’cause then you could just have ridiculous binge days that don’t make sense. With steps, I actually prefer to zoom out and look at your overall year ’cause that tells you, what did your year look like from an activity perspective, whereas if you do it from a week perspective, I know there are gonna be some people out there who are like, “Okay, I’ll just sit on the couch and watch Netflix for five days and then spend two days and go out outrageously insane,” and that’s when, aside from the potential negative health effects of that, but that’s when you get injured, that’s when you hurt yourself, it doesn’t make sense. So I think for me, yes, most important, annual average steps per day is a really, really good way to look at it.

0:49:00.7 Jordan Syatt: But I also… The more I just… I get into this and look at this stuff, I think it’s really fucking important to move. Now, for example, I was really sick the other week during Thanksgiving week. There were a couple of days where I got a couple of hundred steps ’cause I was sick in bed and I couldn’t move and that’s fine. There are some days like occasionally where, you know, just here with the family and we hang out, watch documentaries all day, we relax, don’t get that many steps. But that’s like 1% of my year in terms of like that. That’s not many days. I really think in terms of just overall circulation overall, like we’ll take mental and emotional health out of it, just purely physiological. I think getting up and moving, even if it’s just stretching or whatever, but moving is so… It should be a daily practice like brushing your teeth, like whatever it is. I think it’s better off being a daily practice as opposed to thinking of, okay, I’m deliberately gonna try and bank these. I do think, and this is all based up in my head, I think you’ll get better health results if you move every day than if you try and bank them.

0:50:10.3 Mike Vacanti: Well, it’s interesting, two things. When I hear bank, I think like, “Oh, I can have some days that are only 5000.” I don’t think, “Oh, I’m gonna have days where I don’t walk at all… “

[laughter]

0:50:24.0 Mike Vacanti: Because I would feel terrible after like two of those in a row. And so it’s interesting when you think that, and I assume you’re right, you’re the people guy, that if people, or at least a subset of people hear that you can bank steps, it’s, “Oh, cool. I’m not gonna take any for five days and then I’m gonna do 25,000 on Saturday and 25,000 on Sunday to hit 50K for the week.” In my mind, it’s like, “Why would anyone want to do that when you know that that’s gonna make you feel terrible?”

0:50:56.0 Jordan Syatt: Well, dude, I think just looking at population base…

0:51:00.6 Mike Vacanti: No, I agree with you.

0:51:01.9 Jordan Syatt: So many people are sedentary getting less than 2000 a day, even most people I think are sub 2000, so if they hear they can bank it, then they’ll be like, “Well, then I won’t move at all. I’m gonna get one of these electric wheelchairs, move around. I’m not gonna take any steps until the weekend comes,” and they’re just like…

0:51:20.7 Mike Vacanti: 5:00 PM on Sunday and they’re like, “Okay, I have seven hours to take 40,000 steps.”

[laughter]

0:51:28.8 Jordan Syatt: Bro, I know people would do that. I know for a fact.

0:51:31.1 Mike Vacanti: It’s fascinating. Once you internalize the fact… This is like… We’ve had this discussion and you’ve been impressed with my ability to do this historically is when I’m about to eat a food, think about, how is this food gonna make me feel 60-90 minutes from now.

0:51:46.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, you’re very good with that.

0:51:48.4 Mike Vacanti: And like, I know that the six chocolate chip cookies are gonna be like heroin on my tongue right now, but I know that I’m not gonna feel as good is if I have the protein shake and banana or whatever, and can do that. Same thing with steps at this point. And it’s probably way easier when you’re at a adequate cardiovascular base, strength base and a healthy body fat percentage, I think it’s easier to make these decisions and be more in tune with this. I just have fully internalized that movement leads to me feeling better. There’s some research showing what a 20-minute walk does. We should link… You know what, let’s link this up. We’re gonna link this up in the show notes. I saw a recent thread on this, but some research backing it up. A 20-minute walk leads to all these insane improvements in ability to focus immediately after performance on like some cognitive tests immediately after, they showed the brain scans of sedentary 20 minutes compared to just one on a 20-minute walk. The walk is just all lit up. There’s so many benefits and a lot of this was in the context of school and recess. A lot of schools are taking away recess or like… We were talking this morning about this like, “Oh, it’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit, recess is canceled today.” These kids are only getting 20 minutes a day. You’re taking that away from them, it’s so detrimental to not only their physical health, but also their ability to learn, that movement is so important.

0:53:20.0 Jordan Syatt: Man, it’s so funny, my wife and daughter and I, we all spent Saturday, we went on a long walk, went out on the park, went out to buy tea and we were walking for a while and it was just like, dude, walking outside is the best, the best, it’s the best. The fresh air, the movement, it feels so good, especially when the weather is at least okay. It’s the best and it’s… Man, we really need to make walking great again.

0:53:49.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. 100%. I immediately start trying to steal, man, the other side of the conversation.

0:54:00.7 Jordan Syatt: Why do you do that?

[laughter]

0:54:04.6 Mike Vacanti: Because I think it’s a…

0:54:06.0 Jordan Syatt: Are you trying to imagine what other people would say?

0:54:08.9 Mike Vacanti: Nope. Nope. I’m trying to be as intellectually honest as possible.

0:54:14.3 Jordan Syatt: Cool. Okay. Got it.

0:54:14.4 Mike Vacanti: Because I know I have a way easier time executing on this right now than I did when I was straight out of college working my public accounting job in busy season, auditing 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM Monday-Friday, working half days on Saturday, expectation to have your computer open at home on Sunday, 45-minute commute both ways, zero degrees, January, Minnesota. It was not easy at all to get activity in. And so certain people’s lifestyles do make it much, much more difficult. And then you end up getting in a hole, right? And a hole in many ways. You add body fat, you stop training consistently. Sleep is probably the biggest one, to be honest. I’ve come to realize over the last few years, people who are chronically deprived of sleep, more difficult making nutrition decisions, less energy to execute on getting those steps in and movement.

0:55:11.5 Mike Vacanti: And it spirals negative, but you have obligations and things in your life. You get what I’m saying? Bottom line is, it’s harder for a lot of people to do this, which doesn’t invalidate its importance, but…

0:55:28.2 Jordan Syatt: There’s a difference between whether or not it’s harder and just the fact of its importance, right?

0:55:32.4 Mike Vacanti: Agreed.

0:55:32.8 Jordan Syatt: It’s like the fact is, this is important. This is what needs to be done in order to optimize health. But I understand, like when I was coaching Gary, living in my 400-square foot apartment, traveling all the time, barely able to work out, barely getting any steps, working like crazy, I don’t think with all the knowledge that I have now, if I were to randomly be warped back into that time, I don’t think I would change anything. I think I would do it exactly as I did it, knowing that it wasn’t good for me, but also knowing I can turn it around as soon as I want. Once my life changes and once I have the ability to prioritize myself and prioritize my health and get more steps in, I think I would do the exact same thing right over again, just because… I don’t know, I think what I did then allows me to do what I do now.

0:56:34.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, that’s true. Periods of imbalance in life.

0:56:38.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. And it’s harder. Yeah, different people have different levels of difficulty in their life for different things. Yeah, it’s harder, but it’s a fucking fact. Period. I’m sorry that it’s harder for you so we can make a decision. What do you do now?

0:56:56.9 Mike Vacanti: There’s also a very interesting discussion to be had that we don’t have to. We probably shouldn’t. We’re getting close to the end of this, but when I hear you say, if I go back, I’d do it exactly the same and I hope that the outcome would be the same, what’s interesting is if you run that simulation thousands of times and maybe this means that you have to run it with different people because personalities and everyone’s different, but what you were during that period was hyper singularly focused versus now where you have more breadth and variety in your life and how you spend your time between hobbies, personal fitness, wife, child, relationships, and work and how you’ve balanced everything, whereas then it was purely work growth. A lot of people who go purely work growth never get out of that.

0:57:49.0 Jordan Syatt: That is interesting. I honestly think for me, there are many reasons. Dude, there’s so many reasons why I think that is. I think part of it is because I spent time being able to travel and seeing a lifestyle that I would like. I think part of it is also being lucky to have enough mentors to see what their lives were like and knowing, okay, I can take what I like, leave what I don’t like. For example, watching Gary’s life early on, I got really sucked in. I was like, “I want this, I want to live like this.” But after three years, I was like…

0:58:23.7 Mike Vacanti: I’m tired.

0:58:24.0 Jordan Syatt: “I don’t wanna live… I’m exhausted. I don’t have this guy’s DNA. I don’t have it.” And I wonder how many people stay on whatever track they’re on either because they feel like they’re supposed to and/or because they feel like the thought of changing it is scary, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t type thing. You know what, I’m on this track. It is what it is. I’m just gonna stay here ’cause I don’t know what will happen if I go the other way. You know what I mean?

0:59:03.0 Mike Vacanti: Absolutely. I think there are lots of people who make the decision to stay because they don’t know… The known is way easier than the unknown. With Gary specifically, I think he continues to live this way because this is how he’s built and this is the only… He loves having his schedule packed minute-to-minute, scheduled all the way out. Boredom would crush him. He loves the way that he has it set up. And for me, I don’t love having a packed schedule at all. Quite the opposite. I like more freedom and flexibility within my day. And I fell into the trap just like you. When I rolled off Gary in 2016 and you started with him, I was like, “Yep, I’m gonna build a massive fitness company. Maybe it’ll be like the VaynerMedia of fitness.”

[laughter]

0:59:53.0 Mike Vacanti: And quickly realized that, no, that’s not how I’m built. That’s not what I want. And that’s okay. Yeah. So getting to see it, that’s an interesting point. Getting to see other people live it gives you the insight required to understand what you do and don’t want for yourself.

1:00:13.0 Jordan Syatt: Dude, I wanna ask you a question. I know we’re getting to the end. I know I’ve probably taken all your coins. Are you able to talk about something a little bit more philosophical?

1:00:20.9 Mike Vacanti: Oh, jeez.

1:00:22.0 Jordan Syatt: It’s not Clips Nation based.

1:00:23.3 Mike Vacanti: Well, it might be end of the podcast right here.

1:00:25.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, let’s go. All right, we’ll see. So devil you know is better than devil you don’t. JP says this a lot, talks about it a lot. I don’t know if I believe that to be so blanket true. Devil you know is better than devil you don’t. Do you know what I mean?

1:00:45.0 Mike Vacanti: Are you saying that that statement is… Okay.

1:00:51.3 Jordan Syatt: Either I don’t fully understand the statement or I don’t know if I always agree with that statement.

1:00:55.9 Mike Vacanti: When I hear that statement, I just think that people are afraid of change.

1:01:00.3 Jordan Syatt: Okay, cool. Then that’s correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:01:02.4 Mike Vacanti: Is that not what you interpret by that statement?

1:01:05.9 Jordan Syatt: That is one way that I was like, maybe that’s what he means. But when I hear the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, is that the correct phrase? Is that correct?

1:01:16.1 Mike Vacanti: I don’t use it.

1:01:17.6 Jordan Syatt: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. That’s the saying. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Okay, so this is why I’ve struggled with this one is because… When you’re saying better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, is you’re giving up an opportunity…

1:01:33.5 Mike Vacanti: For something better.

1:01:34.5 Jordan Syatt: To see a huge change for something better, right?

1:01:37.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

1:01:38.4 Jordan Syatt: Because what you’re essentially saying is, well, you don’t want to change because it could be worse than it is right now. But what if it’s not? What if it’s not? And if you just keep doing exactly what you’re doing, and it doesn’t have to be a person, it could be a situation in your life, it could be whatever it is, it’s like, essentially what you’re saying is just to resign yourself to do exactly what you’re doing because if you make a change, it might be worse. But if you have the mindset of, I’ll change and I can change, I can change, you can deal with any devil that comes your way and always change an audible and move, football term, audible. You could always change and try and get better and improve. I don’t like the saying better the devil you know than the devil you don’t because it prevents you from wanting to make a change.

1:02:26.6 Mike Vacanti: I agree with you. I think you’re right. I think it’s a saying that I wouldn’t want to live my life by.

1:02:30.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

1:02:33.4 Mike Vacanti: Continue to do this thing that I don’t like for the next 60 years because I’m afraid that what I switch to is gonna be worse? No. I’m gonna switch and then I could switch again if I want or need to.

1:02:45.8 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

1:02:46.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

1:02:47.9 Jordan Syatt: Good little philosophical talk on the pod as well.

1:02:50.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, a little philosophical to wrap it up. Thank you very much for listening. We appreciate you. We upload weekly Tuesdays, video pods, cross-platform, high frequency. Thank you for listening. Have a great day. Great week. Get after that strength training. Get after that cardio. We’ll see you soon.

1:03:05.3 Jordan Syatt: Leave us a review, five-star, nothing less. Love you. See ya. Bye.