2682: Nine Fitness Coaches That Should Be Fired

0:00Hi, I'm Jake Rez, also known as Nurse Jake. As a travel nurse, I've worked in all kinds of places, different settings, cities, and climates. Every assignment brings on a new challenge, which is why I always bring my figs. These scrubs are built for whatever the job throws at you. They're breathable, flexible, and comfortable in any environment. No matter where I land, I know they're going to keep me looking and feeling my best. And don't sleep on the details. The pockets, the features, the finishing touches, everything has a purpose and it makes a real difference when you're moving nonstop. The fit is clean, tailored, and super polished, and they come in a huge range of colors.

0:34In other words, they feel great throughout a 12-hour shift, and they always look good. See every healthcare professional on Instagram. If you work in healthcare or know someone who does, check out Figs and get 15 % off your first order at wearfigs.com with code FIGSRX. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, There's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.

1:07Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about fitness coaches and trainers that should be fired if your trainer falls under one of these categories. It's time to give them their notice and find somebody else. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, 8Sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system in the world. It goes over your bed and it controls the temperature of your bed while it monitors your sleep and it adjusts on the fly using AI technology to maximize the quality of your sleep. Everybody listen, this is a huge, huge deal.

1:41Adam Schafer:Better sleep makes a big difference with fat loss and muscle gain. Anyway, go check them out. You can get up to$350 off. Go to 8sleep.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump to get that massive discount. Also, this month, look, ladies, go to musclemommymovement.com forward slash quiz. See if you fall under one of these categories, the comeback queen, the efficient powerhouse, the strength novice, or the lifestyle integrator. See which avatar you fall under. Get some customized advice and more. It's totally free. musclemommymovement.com forward slash quiz. Here comes the show. So fitness coaching, both virtual and in person, like personal training, has exploded.

2:25Adam Schafer:It's a growing field. There's more people interested today than there was just last year and the year before and the year before. But there's a problem. A good coach can have profound benefits on your fitness and health. A bad one, equally negative. Today, we're going to talk about the nine fitness coaches that need to be fired. If you listen to this episode and your coach falls under one of these categories, kindly let them know you'll be finding someone else. Stay away from these characters.

2:54Sal Di Stefano:Let's do it. Actually, this is cool because we get a lot of questions around how do I know I have a good coach or a bad coach or what to look for? So hopefully, as we go through your list, I think you got nine, right? Let you go through here. We can go through all the bad qualities or traits of these nine coaches.

3:14Adam Schafer:Yeah, 100%. And you know what I said in the intro, you know, a good, there's nothing like a good personal trainer or a good coach when it comes to health and fitness. There is no better guarantee that you can get if you want to lose weight or get healthy or fit or strong or build muscle and you want to be able to maintain it for the rest of your life. You want to figure this out for yourself so that you can always do it. You can do it forever. There is nothing that comes close to a good coach. Investment, hands down. Period. There's nothing. Nothing comes close to having that guide that can really bring you on this journey and set you up for the rest of your life.

3:51Adam Schafer:But on the other side of this are bad coaches. And bad coaches ruin this for people. In fact, bad coaches are worse for people than no coaches. Bad coaches have this, what they tend to do with people is they tend to do things the wrong way. So wrong, even if the person gets results, by the way, wrong doesn't mean they don't get results. wrong can sometimes mean the person gets results and gets back out of shape because of how it was, uh, how it was done in the first place. What they often do is get somebody to the point where they don't ever want to try again. Yeah, I know. You know, trying to get somebody, and I'll, I'll speak from personal experience as a personal trainer.

4:26Adam Schafer:It's easier to get somebody who's never worked with a trainer to hire me than it is to get somebody who's hired three or four bad trainers, uh, to then hire me because they've had such bad experiences. Um, and so, uh, yeah, this is something we're, we're very passionate about because this is our space. So good trainer worth their weight in gold, bad trainer. Woo. Run as fast as you can.

4:47Sal Di Stefano:I mean, I like you start right out the gates with one that I think is going to be a little bit of controversy, a little bit of controversy because I think inherently, I think people want a little bit of this. They're drawn to this guy.

4:58Adam Schafer:Yeah. That's right. That's right. It's the hype machine. This is the guy or girl where everything is about motivation, inspiration and excitement, which is great at first. The problem is the feeling of motivation is a feeling it will fade. It always does. It just doesn't, you can't be motivated all the time. It doesn't work that way. And so this trainer, uh, really does a terrible job because what they tend to do with people is through trying to keep them motivated and hyped. They try so many different things and they end up burning the person out. The person stops and never comes back. they're gone because they never help the client figure out how to do this when they're not motivated.

5:39Adam Schafer:Because here's a true statement. I've never had to convince a motivated client to exercise. I've never had a motivated client go off the rails with diet. It's when they're not motivated that it becomes a challenge. So now the answer isn't to hire somebody who motivates you all the time because that's impossible. It doesn't exist. And this hype machine person causes more injuries and problems than almost any other coach. And again, we see this in social media quite a bit. You see these trainers or these types that are all about like, make it happen. You can, you know, beast mode, you never stop, you know, and it's just a terrible message for long-term success.

6:20Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. I think this of all the ones that you created will be the most difficult for people to understand or to see, because I think that this is attractive. I think if you're a consumer and you are inspired to make change and you come across a very inspiring or motivational type of trainer, that's attractive, especially in that moment. Especially in that moment of, I need to make change. I'm not happy where I'm at. That guy seems like he's awesome. I want, I mean, he's full of energy and he says all the cool quotes and, you know, like I, they're going to be drawn to this character. So this is probably, I think the most difficult of all the ones you're going to talk about on seeing through this.

7:06Sal Di Stefano:And I think what you're, what you're looking for is cause it's like, Oh, so what do you go for? The opposite of that? Someone who's not motivated or not like, so it's like, but what you're looking for is somebody who leans more on behavioral change and discipline over hype and motivation. Well, I look at them a little bit too. It's more of like a drug dealer in a sense. Like they're dealing out the drug. Yeah. They're the person coming in is like, you know, they're looking for this external motivation. And this supplier of motivation. I can't generate this myself. It's like a very passive role that they're playing in this.

7:45It's so attractive, right? It's so attractive. It's like they can continuously feed me this motivation drug when I show up. and it's just like, it doesn't, it just burns out and it doesn't continue to benefit.

7:55Adam Schafer:No, and by the way, most trainers start off as hype machines. Yeah. This is what you think you're supposed to be as a personal trainer. I'll paint a scenario, right? You're 30 pounds overweight. You see a picture of yourself. Oh my God, that's it. I got to do something about this. And so, of course, there's a self-hate going on. I'm disgusted. Hate myself. That's it. I'm going to do something. And you've got this like extreme negative rooted motivation, right? I hate myself. Don't like the way I look. now I'm motivated. So you're looking for somebody to feed that. It doesn't last. It doesn't last for a couple of different reasons.

8:27Adam Schafer:One motivation, all motivation is a feeling and eventually it goes away. What do you do then? And two, if you've got that negative motivation and someone fuels that, well, you can't hate yourself into better health, at least not in the longterm. It just doesn't work that way. Um, hating yourself leads to over training injury, uh, over dieting, and then eventually rebelling in the opposite direction. Yeah. It masks a lot of like natural signals, your body's telling you that you need to adjust intensity. You need to adjust certain things and, and, you know, maybe change course with your training, but like, you're not going to be receptive to that if you're always about like pushing through and hyping your way.

9:06By the way, you know who else burns out is the hype machine trainer themselves.

9:10Adam Schafer:Oh yeah. So when I would hire a trainer like this and I'd see this in them, I'd coach them out of it because I was like, I'd tell him you're going to be burnt out. You can't keep trying to hype every client you train for long. You're going to last a year or two max. And after that, you're going to hit your job. I just pictured this trainer after he's done work, going around the corner, smoking a cigarette and just like, Oh God, I don't know if I can do it another day. Totally a hundred percent. Next up is the shame, shame, shame guy or girl. This is the trainer that when you make a mistake, you miss a workout, you ate a meal or whatever, you went off your diet, that they shame you into trying to shame you back into shape.

9:49Adam Schafer:This is terrible. What this leads to eventually is you not wanting to really talk to your trainer and tell them what you're struggling with. If you have a trainer that you're afraid to tell that you messed up, or if you feel like, oh man, I'm going to tell my trainer I did this and this is going to just, oh man, I'm not going to like it. You'll start hiding things from them. or what'll happen is maybe you like this because there's a little bit of a cathartic feeling when you're hating yourself, right? You hate yourself. So now my trainer tells me I'm a piece of crap and I'm lazy too. And I like that at first.

10:21Adam Schafer:Eventually that gets old and here's what happens to you. You just stop seeing them. And I've seen this before. I know the shame trainers. What happens is they'll get a clientele that sticks for a bit and then they just ghost them. They just disappear because they don't want to see them anymore because they themselves are like, I hate this shame spiral type of thing.

10:39Sal Di Stefano:This is like leaders that manage out of fear. It's kind of similar. It's like you get a little bit of positive feedback that it works because initially when you lead from fear, people are afraid to lose their job. And so they do what they tell you to. So you think, oh, that's a good approach. That's kind of how the shame game works in coaching is like, if I shame the client, there's a part of them that knows that. And then they'll try and be better because they don't want to fail me again. And so it gets you a little bit further, but it won't get you all the way there. And eventually, this is exactly what will happen.

11:09Sal Di Stefano:And that's the client or the trainer that uses the shame like that. The clients disappear. They don't call. They don't do it. They just don't want to. They don't want to see you anymore. They don't know how to break up with you. You don't say they just leave.

11:20Adam Schafer:And we know what shame leads to, by the way, is eventually it leads to self-medication with food, lack of activity. This is what often gets people in the cycle or spiral of weight gain, weight loss, weight gain, weight loss. It's the shame that's behind it. I'll put it differently. I'm like, if you screw up on your diet or you miss a week of workouts, the first person you should want to talk to is your trainer, not the last person. If you screw up on your diet and you're like, oh, man, I just ate. Yeah, I'm going to get berated for this. I just ate an entire box of Oreo cookies. I need to call my trainer.

11:56Adam Schafer:That's a good trainer versus, oh, my God, don't tell John what I just did. I'm not going to let them know what happened because then I'm going to hear it. Next up is the trainer or coach that prioritizes intensity over technique. This is an easy one to spot, right? It's about just do the reps, complete the reps. They're not watching your technique in form, making sure it's perfect. Exercise is only as effective as the way that they're performed. Okay, so I'll repeat that. The better you can perform an exercise or the better the technique is, the more you're going to get out of it. Intensity is never better than technique.

12:30Adam Schafer:When you start to sacrifice technique for intensity, Not only do you not get better results, you get worse results, but your risk of injury goes through the roof. And you just give yourself enough time and you'll see yourself, eventually you'll get an injury. And you can pick these coaches and trainers out in the gym because you can watch what they're doing. And they're just like, five more, four more, keep going, keep going. And there really is no - Always four more. Focus on the form.

12:50Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. They, a lot of times go hand in hand with the motivation person. That's right. Yeah. And this is, again, there's a few of these characteristics or avatars that you've built that I think will feel crossover or they'll be appealing to people. This is another one. I mean, how many clients do you guys remember having that thought they needed that or thought they wanted that? They wanted the punishment. They wanted, that wasn't hard enough. I mean, I can't remember how many clients I remember having to talk to where I'd catch them going and doing a workout after a workout because they think they needed more.

13:22Sal Di Stefano:And so a lot of times clients think that they need to be sweating and burning and they're walking out, limping out of the gym. And if they didn't, they didn't have a good workout. So this is another one that I think many times the consumer is drawn to thinking it's actually better. Some of these are like, oh yeah, I don't want to coach like that. But some of these are like, oh wait, I thought that's a good thing. And so this is another one of those.

13:44Adam Schafer:This is why it's your job if you're a good coach to educate your client on this. Why do you want to hire a trainer? Oh, I need someone to kick my butt.

13:52Sal Di Stefano:That's what you hear. I mean, I've even heard that. Oh yeah, that's a common one.

13:54Adam Schafer:And it's like, what do you mean by kick your butt? you literally want me to kick your butt or do you want to have good results? And so a good trainer or coach would educate the client on what actually produces good results. And technique when it comes to exercise is everything. Superior. By the way, you know what this looks like, this intensity over technique? If you ever watch a strength training group exercise class, that's a great example of intensity over technique. Body pump or whatever. Everybody's in the class and they're just, it's like it doesn't matter what exercise you're doing. You're just moving.

14:24Adam Schafer:So you might as well just sit in the corner and do jumping jacks and that's literally true by the way it's actually better because your risk of injury is lower than the people doing 15 exercise in row with no form or technique whatsoever just to get the reps in yeah that's what that looks like it goes such hand in hand with that motivation oh yeah it's just like yeah because the only way you can get through a lot of these like reps is if somebody's like hounding you to get through it and it's again yeah it's it's attractive to most people don't know that it's yeah not beneficial biggest loser strength training look like this yeah exactly exactly like that uh next up is the low calorie solves everything person oh you're not losing enough weight drop your calories yeah oh you plateaued drop your calories and it starts getting really ridiculous uh these are people that i would have to try to fix they have one button yeah they'd come to me and they'd be like you know i lost 20 pounds i had 15 more to go i plateaued and i'm like what were your calories at?

15:16Adam Schafer:Like where you at? Oh, I'm at 1100 calories. Okay. We can't go any lower. We got to bring this up and figure something else out. Low calorie, you know, calorie deficit is how you lose weight, but a deficit just means a deficit. It doesn't mean your calories get so low that it's unsustainable. And now you're sacrificing things like energy and lifestyle to the point where it's just like, this isn't happening. I can create a deficit by speeding up your metabolism, building muscle, making things more efficient uh when your calories get so low to where it's like this is just unbearable yeah we got to figure this out we had a nickname for this coach it was the jenny craig

15:54Sal Di Stefano:coach and the and i'm dating myself a little bit but you know 20 years ago that was so popular of a diet and it's a point system and it was it's completely built around just eating less and so the trainers that either one had gone through that and had success with weight loss themselves or had seen people have success with that. So that was like their go-to move was just like turned everything in. Even if they weren't using Jenny Craig's diet or thing, they make everything into just as low as possible, like a point system. And if I could just get these clients to eat as low a calorie, they'll lose the weight.

16:30Sal Di Stefano:And so that was the go-to strategy. And again, here's another one of these things where initially this kind of can work. I mean, you get somebody who eats terrible and you tell them, hey, you only get to eat 1 ,500 calories or less, and they do that consistently, they will lose weight. Unfortunately, it's not sustainable, and what, 80%, 90 % of those people gain it all back, but it tends to be a go-to move for the trainers that have had a lot of weight loss success through just calorie cutting. That's right.

16:55Adam Schafer:Next up is the absent coach. So this is typically the virtual coach who sends you the workout, the macros or whatever, and then you're not really getting any coaching. So this is like the chat GBT coach. You might as well go with chat GBT and get your nutrition and exercise advice. They're just absent. You're just not getting much coaching whatsoever, in which case I say, why did you hire them in the first place? Where's the value? And this, you know, the space started trending this way a little bit. I think it's moving out of this direction because people kind of saw like this doesn't work. But there was a second there.

17:31It was a little while there where there was a lot of virtual coaching. A lot of influencers kind of started this whole thing and got called out because it's like this is a lot of times the consumer, it's really it's their fault because they're the ones approaching this influence or this person looks great. I want to look just like you. Then they take them on as a client. Then they take everybody on as a client. And then they try to kind of bring people in and figure it out. But you're not getting good service at all.

17:57Sal Di Stefano:This wasn't an avatar until online coaching. That's right. This didn't exist. I mean, back in the days when you trained someone, you couldn't be absent. You had to show up to their appointment. They'd be like, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah. So that didn't exist until then. And I would say this is the most popular one now for the point that Justin's bringing up is that you get all this fame and attention online for your body. And you've got a million people following you. And these trainers, they have 100 clients, 500 clients. I mean, it's wild what you hear some of these internet trainers. It's like, dude, I remember when my book, when you get around like 25 clients, that's a lot of people to manage.

18:34Sal Di Stefano:To offer them good value. Yes, to really be able to help them individualize things, to be constantly tweaking. Managing 25 is a lot. Managing 50, 100, some of these hundreds of people. They're just sending out emails. Yeah, you're getting a generic program, a generic diet sent to you. And so, yeah, this is that coach. And that coach didn't exist until online coaching really popped up.

18:58Adam Schafer:Next is the everything but the kitchen sink all at once coach. You hire them and it's like, boom, diet, program, sleep regimen, supplements, everything all at once. This is a surefire way to fail. This was me. There's a couple of these that fit me as the early trainer. This was me, man. I got a new client. I'm giving you all the answers. Just follow all this stuff and we're going to fix this. Terrible way to coach because this is a guaranteed way to make somebody fail.