In this episode, we dive into the importance of nutritional awareness and learning to listen to your body’s signals in both diet and training. We discuss how tracking macros can be a valuable tool for understanding calorie density and satiety—but it’s not something you need to rely on forever. Plus, we break down the balance between progressive overload and knowing when to adjust your training based on recovery and readiness. Our goal as coaches is to help you build sustainable habits, develop autonomy in your fitness journey, and make these skills second nature.
📢 Highlights from this episode:
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The role of calorie density in satiety and meal planning
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Why tracking macros is a tool—not a lifelong requirement
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The importance of listening to your body in training and recovery
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How auto-regulation and RPE can help optimize your workouts
👉 Tune in for an honest, relatable chat that goes beyond the highlight reels and into the heart of what it means to connect authentically.
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🔎 Related Phrases:
intuitive eating, calorie density, progressive overload, tracking macros, RPE, nutritional awareness, muscle building strategies
Transcript:
[Dani:]
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Vegan Protein’s Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Ben.
[Ben:]
And I’m Dani.
[Dani:]
And this is episode 205. All right Dani, so you just got back from Run Disney, which was a big old beast to conquer and tackle. I heard you and Alice talk a little bit about it in the intro to the last podcast that was released publicly for Vegan Protein.
So I would love to know how that was. Last time I talked to Giacomo, it was right before Run Disney and you guys had gone out a couple days early. So how was it?
[Ben:]
Well, the couple days early were super fun because we just went to Disney with our nephews on Giacomo’s side. And that was that was cool. There’s nothing better than seeing Disney like through a little kid’s eyes.
It’s pretty fantastic even though we didn’t get to go on very many rides because they had lightning passes and we didn’t. So we did a lot of stroller watching, but it was still really fun. And we had one of the best meals ever in Disney.
If anybody ever goes to Hollywood Studios in the Toy Story Land, there’s a barbecue joint that they had picked for lunch months in advance. And I was like, great, a barbecue place. And they had one of the best vegan meals I’ve ever had.
It was very well put together. All the sides there, almost all the sides are like accidentally vegan. They had like vegan ribs and sausages and like a cauliflower thing, which normally would make me roll my eyes.
But it was really, really good. And it was the most vegetables I had the entire time we were in Florida. But the expo itself was not great.
I don’t think we’re going to do it again for reasons that were totally like outside of our control. Usually we vet these events before we do them. And we didn’t with this one.
And it’s not anybody’s fault. Usually when we do fitness events, it’s like hardcore fitness enthusiasts who are there. When we did that, even when we did the New York City Marathon, these are people coming to do all the biggest marathons and like, you know, hit them for time and stuff.
This was more like Disney fanatics who thought it would be fun to do the run, which is cool. Like that’s I mean, that’s probably the only way you could get me to run anything. But they still got to pay to get into the parks.
So if you had spent $200 a day to go into the parks, would you want to hang out in an expo hall? Probably not. So it’s just like a mad dash to get their t shirts or whatever and then just out the door.
But we have our little vegan strong quiz, which is awesome. It’s just eight questions about various things about a plant based diet like you know, which of these four has the least calcium and like the answer is milk. And that’s just one example.
And we got like 500 or so people to take the quiz. So that was cool. And Kathy and Dave and Tammy came out and helped us.
So it was like it was a good little crew we had going on. But yeah, it was it was a different kind of event than we normally do. And I was happy to come home.
How have you been? You’ve been south and north and I think multiple times since the last time we recorded a podcast together.
[Dani:]
So gone back and forth a lot over these past couple months. As I mentioned in the last podcast, I actually had some similar themes when I talked to Giacomo. But I mentioned a little bit in that last one, what’s been going on with me.
So if you didn’t get the context for all of that, you can go listen to what would have already been released by now the last one I did with Giacomo, where we talked about confidence and competence. So I moved to Raleigh at the start of November. And I’ve been back home for Thanksgiving and back here and then back for Christmas and back here.
And then our older dog was sick and passed. So I was back there saying goodbye to him and came back here. So it’s just been a lot of back and forth travel.
And then in like 10 days or so, or a little bit more than that, two weeks actually from tomorrow, I fly out to go visit Sawyer on the West Coast. And I’m there for about a week. And then I come back here.
And then I think I have four weeks before it’s the vegan cruise, which I’m really, really looking forward to. And then I come back to Raleigh for two more weeks. And then I’m moving back to Massachusetts, probably to live on the Cape for the summer with my brother.
That’s the plan right now. But as it happens with me, at least lately, I can change my plans on a whim. So we’ll see if that ends up being the story.
But yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling, which actually has been a goal of mine since I kind of ended my prep was like this next year. I want it to be a lot of traveling a lot to go visit people doing stuff with vegan proteins, whether that be the cruise or Mr. America or the meetup. And so I think that this year will be a little bit more scattered a little bit more free flowing than has been the past couple years of structure.
But that’s something that I want to do. So that’s what’s going on with me.
[Ben:]
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, it’s cool. It’s fun. I’m curious.
I will be curious to see how you feel about it all come the end of the year. Because I always have really mixed feelings about all the travel we do come the end of the year. Like all I have is good memories of hanging out with people and great conversations and this and that.
And then just so many days of just like fatigue when I get back. And I, it’s kind of worth it. Like it’s, it’s a fair trade off.
But sometimes I’m just like, okay, I just want not one human being to speak to me for five straight days. If we could just do that. That’d be great.
[Dani:]
It will be a little different. Because obviously, with all the travel you’re doing, it’s work related. So you’re you’re at the booth, you’re talking to people all day.
That’s a lot. That’s, to me a different level of going to hang out with friends. And of course, I’ll be working while I’m traveling for a lot of that time.
But I think when it’s a little bit more free flowing, and you’re not necessarily on your feet for eight to 10 hours a day in an expo hall, it hits a little differently. So we’ll see. But I’m also curious.
[Ben:]
Yeah. And I’m psyched for you and Sawyer to be together. I have to go through our like content list and be like, okay, I want you guys to do this and this and this and this while you’re hanging out together.
Because I think that would be cool. But I haven’t figured out which ones make the most sense yet. I should have you look at it too.
But anyway, we should get into what it is we’re talking about today, which is first of all, that the title of it is something like, why tracking is the key to success. And first, I want to hear if that is even like a sentiment that you agree with.
[Dani:]
I think what has been floating around in my mind are a couple different key points, what is relevant and useful to track for most people, why it’s relevant or useful to track and then maybe at what point does it become not necessary or not needed to track or actually counterproductive in some cases to be tracking certain variables. And I think kind of just those main points about like, what is important? You know, how long do you have to do this before before you develop some proficiency?
I don’t think there are a ton of black and white answers. But I would say that tracking is at a certain point, going to be necessary for 99% of people, just using nutrition as an example. If somebody who has no nutritional knowledge or literacy just tried to kind of eat based off what their body was telling them in the modern food environment, let’s say like in, you know, the Eastern Hemisphere in the United States, you can just look at the general health of our public and see how that goes for most people.
Of course, there are people who just naturally don’t have much of an appetite or they’re raised in an environment where perhaps their upbringing had a lot of education around nutrition. Maybe their parents were really into it and were always fit and healthy. But I think, again, that’s not the majority of folks.
So for most people, it’s going to require an educational component and tracking is just an objective way to determine what am I doing and what is the result that I’m getting. I think that’s what really appealed to me when I first started getting into training and nutrition was for so long, I had felt like I didn’t have control over the way that my body looked or the way that things were. And then figuring out, oh, if I do these certain inputs, I get these certain outputs.
It was a very like, do this, get this response. I was like, oh, wow, there’s so much power in just paying attention to these variables and monitoring them and making the adjustments. And I think that’s where I kind of developed a passion or really got interested in like evidence-based content.
It was like all these different tools and strategies of how to be more efficient with things. And a lot of that involves tracking these different variables.
[Ben:]
Yeah, I agree. I think that it’s become kind of trendy to tell people like they don’t need to track anything. Like they can just learn to intuitively do these things.
And not that it’s entirely a lie. There’s a lot of stuff you can learn to intuitively do, but there’s a huge learning curve to get to that place. And what I see is a lot of folks trying to achieve like a physique goal or a body composition goal for the first time ever and trying to do it without tracking.
They might have little rules they’re trying to follow. Like I don’t eat after six, or I don’t have carbs with dinner or this and that, but it might work for a while. And then eventually it stops working and they’re like, okay, well, what now?
And there’s so much data hidden in what they were doing that could point them in the direction of what to do next. But if they don’t have it, they don’t have it. And they just think there’s one more like secret trick that they need to implement in order to move forward.
And it’s so much more boring than that.
[Dani:]
I often forget that before I started really getting into like fitness and training and stuff, I was playing ultimate Frisbee in college. And I started going to the gym just a little bit, I would go maybe some mornings before classes. I think some of the days I didn’t have lectures till like started at maybe like 11 or noon.
So I would go to the gym in the morning and then my first meal would be after that first class at like one. And then I would have classes, I would have maybe like practice in the evenings. And then I would have my last meal at eight or nine or something.
Sometimes we would get home really late at like 12 or one, because that was the only field time we could get in Vermont because it was just frozen over and everybody wanted it. So we got like the 10pm to 12pm practice time. So I would just come home and crash.
I wouldn’t even like eat after practice. So I just, I realized that I was like losing some weight through that. And so then that was kind of like, I was basically doing a form of like intermittent fasting without realizing it.
And so eventually, like I figured out what that was. And so I was doing that for a while, even at the start of when I started, you know, like tracking my nutrition and stuff. So I think you brought up a good point about sometimes there are these general heuristics or quote unquote, shortcuts that people will use just because it’s simple, like, oh, I’m just not going to eat carbs, or I’m just not going to eat any processed food.
And it works for a period of time. But I think either you run into practical constraints, like people just can’t stick to I think that’s usually what it is, or whatever you are doing, stops working because you just hit a limit of like the amount of attention to detail that you need to put into something. So that was the first point that I wanted to make.
And then the second point I wanted to make is, I think where a lot of this comes from the messaging that, oh, you can just do this intuitively, if you really like listen to you. I think a lot of that messaging comes from people who have tracked and have done that stuff for so many years. And now they’re like a 20 year veteran, maybe they’re like a coach or something or like a social media influencer.
And this is where they’re at in their journey. And maybe they’ve been like, really dialed in rigid for 15, 20 years, and they’re just burnt out from doing that. And so they’re moving into this new way of doing things.
And it’s working for them, because they have learned all these underlying skills, but they forget that their audience is like 80 or 90% beginners. And that advice that is going to work for them, or someone who’s in their same position is not going to work for the vast majority of people. And it can be really appealing to kind of get this like amnesia, like beginner amnesia of like what you did for the first 15 years that worked for you.
And just focus on what you’re doing right now, because it’s not really exciting to talk about like the basic stuff, and keep repeating that content to people who are coming into the space. But and I know you’re laughing, because that’s what you literally what we do all the time is just like similar content over and over. And it feels a little bit repetitive at times.
But the reality is, that’s what most people need, because there’s always new people discovering these things.
[Ben:]
Yeah, like we could at any point sit down and record a video about new supplement shown to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it would probably get better views and like, yo, sleep more like, but I don’t believe that that’s like what’s going to work. And I think you brought up a couple things there.
One, with the example of like, okay, I just won’t eat carbs. And then eventually it stops working. I think one of the things that happens, in addition to everything you said, people don’t realizing it, but they’re finding ways to skirt around their caloric deficit after a while.
So like, if they’re not eating carbs, at first, that will probably work, because they’re not even going to know what to do besides that. So just eliminating carbs is going to create this big fat caloric deficit. But over time, as they learn more about what it means to eat fewer carbs, blah, blah, blah, they’re going to start eating more, and they’re going to be hungrier, right, because they’re going to be dropping weight, they’re going to be like, Oh, well, I’ll just have like two avocados with dinner instead, like, but they’re not eating quote, unquote carbs.
But what they don’t realize is they’re just now they’re just replacing it with fat, that caloric deficit is no longer there, and it’s not working. So it was a correlation from the start with like, oh, I don’t eat carbs, and I drop weight. And then when that correlation stops working, they don’t, they feel like they did something wrong, they’re broken.
Oh, this just doesn’t work. For me, that happens with veganism, all the time, people go vegan, initially, they’ll probably drop some weight, because they don’t know what to eat. And they’re reducing their calories without realizing it.
And then like a month down the road, six weeks down the road, one of two things happens. One, they stopped losing weight, or they gain it back, because they figured out Oreos are vegan. And two, or two, I should say they just have no energy because they’ve been so low calorie now for such a while.
Either way, it ends with well, veganism doesn’t work for me. And it was veganism was never like a weight loss diet in the first place. So there’s that our bodies are smarter than we give them credit for I have in prep, like closed up my caloric deficit with spices, like, because I don’t generally track spices.
Even when I’m cutting, I’m not like tracking my garlic and onion powder. Well, guess what, like if you use enough of that, it will add calories to your food. And it’s not a conscious decision.
Your body is smarter than you like it’s going to almost kind of trick you into finding ways to get more food in even if it has no carbs, even if the label says zero calories. And the other thing about like influencers coaches that are in a place in their life where they can do things intuitively telling other people they can just do things intuitively is I think just a big flaw in the whole fitness system in general is just people coaching everybody as though everybody is them. And I think that’s actually one of the signs of like the worst kind of coach like if the only person you can coach is a clone of you that you’re not a very good coach.
You know, I have clients track stuff like pretty meticulously depending on the goal and where they’re at. But I don’t I don’t do that right now, unless I have a very, very specific goal. But for me to look at somebody who’s trying to, you know, lose 30 pounds for the first time and be like, well, I just listened to my hunger cues.
And that seems to work for me. So good luck. Like that sucks.
But I think a huge part of it is one telling people you don’t need to track obviously that sells more stuff. Because generally people have a huge resistance to tracking in general. Have you noticed that as well?
[Dani:]
I have noticed, I think in the past year or two, I guess of working with people, I think over time, it’s becoming more commonplace. Like people are understanding that it’s like within the fitness realm or fitness sphere, like weighing and tracking your food is something that people do. I think that’s becoming more accepted.
Like I definitely noticed when I first started coaching, I would get a lot more resistance on that. And now I feel like I get less because maybe part of it is that I’m better at explaining this is a temporary thing that you don’t need to do forever and giving people little tips and tricks that make it seem like less of a barrier. But I can say for myself, when I first read this book, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger by Mike Matthews, and he was describing, okay, well, in order to track your food, you know, you could do stuff like cup measurements, but you can pack it down more.
You can find these little ways of being like, oh, this is a, but you like, you really like pressed it in there. And like, that’s not the sandwich that’s kind of like lightly pouring it. So he was like, okay, you need to get a food scale.
Cause that’s the only like no BS way to know that you’re doing exactly, you know, what you say that you’re doing. And I was like, really, I have to like weigh all of my food out on this scale. Like that, that’s like, that’s so like ridiculous.
Like who would ever do that?
[Ben:]
It seems so anal.
[Dani:]
Yes. Yes, exactly. And then, you know, once you, once you see the results from that and that it’s actually working, you’re like, okay, I get it.
Like, this is why people do it because it’s a full, if you do literally track every single thing that you’re doing. Yeah. Of course, like there are small differences, like, you know, actually how ripe a banana is can change the, like the caloric content.
[Ben:]
I’ve Googled it. I remember a point in my life where I was trying to figure that out, like, but is the carb content different if it’s not sweet versus if it is like, don’t get there guys. That’s not, that’s not a fun place to be.
[Dani:]
Exactly. So like, of course there’s only some level of like meticulousness that we can do, but if you just generally don’t get so caught up in the minutia when it like to that level, but you, you weigh everything that you’re doing, you understand that there’s some margin of error. For example, when we give people a calorie target, some people will get so caught up on getting exactly down to the calorie and exactly down to the macro.
And I think usually I’m stressing like, this is a guideline. Like if you’re close to this most days, you can’t be a hundred percent accurate. You’re not going to take the same amount of steps.
You’re not going to fidget the same amount. Like you’re not going to put out the same amount of output every single day. And you’re not going to be able to closely monitor the input, but for the extent that we need that accuracy, getting close enough is going to work.
So we give ballparks, we give estimates of like, when you’re tracking these variables, what is like an acceptable range of deviation or error? And I think that’s the main thing to focus on is like, it doesn’t have to be exactly perfect. It just needs to be good enough to get the job done.
[Ben:]
Yeah. And if I’m working with somebody that’s never tracked their food before, I don’t even mention a food scale at the beginning. Like I do just have them use cups and I know that it’s an imperfect system for exactly the reasons you mentioned, which when I was talking about the prep thing, that same thing will happen.
Like my splash of soy milk that I had put in my coffee that I didn’t need to measure because it was the same every day that got so much more like it is an imperfect system, but if you’ve never tracked before, that’s a great place to start, you know? And sometimes I’ll just have people do that until that’s not working anymore. And then we’ll graduate to weighing, you know, certain things.
I’m not, I don’t like to have people weigh like their vegetables unless they have to, like, unless we’re in a place they have to. Uh, but you know, little things like, okay, are you logging your tofu cooked or raw? Like that’s potatoes, rice, like teaching people how to log stuff appropriately.
And the only thing I have not figured out, all right, this is a side side rant. And I want to hear your thoughts on it. Frickin canned beans.
You know what I’m thinking, right? Like, okay. It says a half a cup, but then it says 137 grams or whatever.
And then you pull out a half a cup and it’s nowhere near 137 grams, but you’re like, wait, is that the water? Are they counting the water? They are counting the water, but I don’t really know how you account for that 20 plus years.
I still don’t think I have that part completely figured out. So that’s one where I’m just like a half a cup. It is.
[Dani:]
Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, that’s honestly, I think that’s perfectly fine way of doing it.
I’m thinking about how I’ve done it in the past. If you rinse the beans, then measure the total amount of beans rinsed. You could do it that way.
Also, some people don’t like the bean water because it can make you more gassy. That’s a fun fact. Like if you take beans out of the can, you rinse them, you might get a little bit less farty from the beans because some of that water absorbs the bean content, I guess.
But if you wanted to just take it straight out of the can, you know, I guess what you could do is like just dump the entire can into like a Tupperware and then see how much it weighs and then like try to divide it by three and a half servings. And like some is going to have more water and some is going to have more beans. But like the main thing to note, honestly, is I used to get super, I used to be like super anal about this where I would make a recipe and I would want every single container that I put the recipe in to have the exact same amount of weight in it.
But it’s like the entire, if you eat it over the course of a week, the entire calorie content is still the same. So it doesn’t really matter if you have a little bit on one day and a little bit less on the other day, which is yeah, go ahead.
[Ben:]
Just, I was saying, and these are like weird tracking nuances that you don’t even think about until you are in a place where you like have to track meticulously, which, you know, I really think that kind of tracking we’re talking about now is like reserved for prep, like truly reserved for prep. If you’re doing that shit and you’re not in prep, you don’t need to. Still, there was a point where this really mattered for you.
And there was a point where this really mattered for me to move forward. But I think at that point, you know, 90 plus percent of people have already surpassed their goal and they don’t need to be there, uh, forever. But it is, it’s the price of admission, like tracking your food.
I know this is about tracking in general. There’s other types of tracking we could talk about as well, but I feel like at the bare minimum, if you’re trying to change your physique, tracking food, that’s just the price of admission. Like you don’t get to get there.
If you’re not willing to do this, unless you are very lucky and an outlier going back to the idea that you don’t have to be perfect with it.
[Dani:]
Even if you’re not weighing stuff out, even if you’re not using cup measures, just trying to estimate things that you’re eating can be helpful as well. So let’s say that you’re at home most of the day, you can use cup measures or scale, then you go out for a meal. Um, you know, if you don’t want to sit there at the meal, trying to like track it or whatever, take a picture of it.
And then later, um, like try to estimate it and put it into your tracker. And even if you’re over on whatever, like your calorie goal is, who cares? That’s not a big deal.
I think that the main thing is like getting an accurate idea of, okay, this is what this plate looks like. And this is kind of roughly what it is so that in future times you can kind of start to like form that mental picture of what that equates to. And just getting in the habit of tracking things.
I think, um, something I’ve noticed with people is like, I’ll get some clients who will say to me like, well, I track 75% of my day. And then I started like snacking. And so I like, I didn’t track it.
I’m like, okay, even if you’re going to, I don’t like from now on, like, okay, if you’re going to snack, snack, but I want you to estimate it. And I want you to put it into your tracker regardless, because just the act of tracking is going to hold you more accountable. And you’re probably going to have less of whatever that thing is, even if it’s an estimate and you’re not weighing everything out.
[Ben:]
100%. So two things I, if clients really struggle with estimating their food, when they’re out to eat, I have them do exactly what you said, take a picture, send it to me. We’ll analyze it together, right?
Like you take a picture of what it is, take a picture of the menu description. Cause sometimes it’s hard to tell. Um, and we’ll, we’ll figure it out.
We’ll come up with something that is close enough. And sometimes they’re surprised at how loose my close enough is. Um, cause I’m like, Hey, probably has like this much oil in it.
So we’ll just throw a few grams of fat in there. And they’re just like, that’s, that’s not very precise. And I’m like, it’s good enough.
Like, um, but I find that exactly what you just said, when people go off track, they stop tracking and I’m, I’ve done it. I’m sure you’ve done it. Like, it’s not fun to plug in when you feel like you’ve been off track, but I have had more clients than I can count that we have gotten so much valuable data from their screw ups, basically that I want everybody to like, just track when you’re off your body could do something awesome, like on days after you’ve quote unquote screwed up.
And that can be really telling information for a coach or even yourself. If you’re just looking back to analyze this to be like, Oh, well, maybe I need to change what I’m actually doing. Or if this is happening over and over again, if there’s a pattern here, I got to analyze why this is happening.
Is it physiological? Is it psychological? Once you’ve been tracking for a long time, you can look back in your food journal or whatever years.
And I do it. I still look back years. Sometimes I see like, okay, sometimes it’s cause I’m bored with my food.
And I’m like, okay, what was I eating in 2017 that I was really loving? Maybe I’ll spark some creativity again. But sometimes it’s, you know, our bodies change, our lifestyles change.
And looking back at the big picture can really tell us some interesting and helpful facts about ourselves. If I hadn’t logged some of my like ugliest binges, I never would have realized that I was probably like religiously eating about 700 calories fewer per day than my body actually really needed at that time for that goal. So no wonder that was happening.
But if I just like hid my head in shame and hid from it, I never would have figured it out. And I would have felt even worse about myself.
[Dani:]
You also notice that sometimes people catastrophize things way more than is the damage that’s actually done. And by tracking, they can realize that they weren’t actually like that far off. Like I’ve had people be like, Oh, I snack so much.
And I went totally off plan. And I’ll be like, okay, next time, just track that for me. And they’re like, okay.
And they track it. And they’re like, Oh, I realized I was actually only like 100 calories over my target was. And I’m like, that’s really not a big deal.
Like you could easily eat under 100 calories on another day, and it just balances out. And so I think sometimes it can also go the other way, where it’s like, it just puts things in perspective, like, oh, I’m beating myself up so much. I think it comes back to what you and Alice were talking on the last podcast that got released about like, are you a pusher or a slacker?
Like, I think this is probably the pusher archetype is somebody who really beats themselves up for these deviations. And then just putting that into perspective to realize, Oh, I can track these things and understand that I can fit these things in. And it’s not a big deal.
It’s not the end of the world.
[Ben:]
Yeah. I have a couple of clients and I know they’re listening to this. So I know they’re gonna know exactly who I’m talking about.
They’ll be like, Oh, food was really great from Monday to Thursday. And then Friday, I totally effed it up and blah, blah, blah. And I go into their food journal and I look at it and I’m like, you were like 20 grams of carbs and like five grams of fat off.
Like you’re fine. You’re fine. And then, but again, that’s really telling for me, because if I didn’t look at the journal, if I didn’t look at the food journal, and I just took them at face value, I would think, Oh, they’re going off the rails every Friday night.
And when I look at the food journal, I say, Oh, okay. Friday night is like a hair looser than every other day. So this really tells me something about that client’s mentality, which I can then use in the way that we direct things in the future.
It’s like really good for me to know. Um, but yeah, a lot of people are afraid that they went way, way, way over their calories. And then when they plug it in, they realize like, yeah, it might’ve been off or maybe their protein was really low for that day, but they were still actually a lot closer to their calorie goal than they thought like all workable, all workable stuff.
And I think, I think at the end of the day, almost everything is workable. Um, you know, with a few exceptions, but if you’re, if you’re hiding from it, which I think there’s two reasons people don’t like to track. Um, one is it’s a pain in the ass, which I don’t think anybody’s going to refute that it is change hurts.
But the other one is that they are like too afraid to look at it. I hear about this with people in their finances a lot too. Like they know their finances are not good, but they just cannot bring themselves to actually look at their accounts.
People do the same thing with their nutrition, uh, with their weight, with their body measurements, et cetera, because it’s scary. But I find usually once they start, it’s not as bad as they thought.
[Dani:]
Defensifies yourself to it. I think it’s the same with like weighing yourself on the scale, uh, not for everyone, but for a lot of people who are a little bit hesitant to do that at first. I think that instead of doing it once a week and then sometimes it’s way up, sometimes it’s way down and then your emotions are all over the place.
And you’re like, Oh, I gained three pounds this week. And I’m like, you could have actually like lost a half a pound, but it’s just this one way. And that’s a little bit wacky.
So I guess this would be a decent transition to talking about some of the other things that we have clients track besides nutrition. I would say the main ones that are coming to mind right now for me, um, would be probably their body weight and just getting a weekly average, if that’s something that they’re open to doing, and that’s something that we can work on, but not necessarily something that is absolute. You have to do it for, for making progress.
There are other ways to track progress, but I think it’s very helpful. It’s a good tool, a step counter, a way to somehow quantify activity. Maybe you don’t do a step count, but you have like a set amount of cardio.
And generally you move the same amount day to day. That’s still a way of quantifying the amount of activity you’re doing. I think steps is just like an easy way for people because it quantifies maybe little things like going to the store, running errands, doing tours around the house.
It’s a pretty good metric that I find. And then training, I’d say those are the three that really come to mind for me. And there are other ones that sometimes can be helpful for people that they enjoy tracking, like maybe their sleep or their stress or whatever it is.
But usually it’s those, those other three, it’s like some way to quantify expenditure, their body weight, or if not body weight, then measurements or photos. And then training is just a, just a massive one. I think training and nutrition are really two that are like, so, so, so, so key.
[Ben:]
Yes. So I feel like, you know, we have clients track body weight. I have most of my clients track body weight and I have some of them track it every day.
Not everybody. There are good reasons to track your weight every day. And I think one of them is actually, so it doesn’t freak you out so much.
Like that doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for a lot of people. And then we have them do circumference measurements as well, especially if they have a physique goal. And sometimes that’s really annoying.
Cause like, your bicep might not change at all for six months. And then just one day it’s up like an eighth of an inch and it seems like nothing. But when you have that data over a really long period of time, you could be like, wow, my biceps have grown two and a half inches since I started doing this.
Like, that’s crazy. It’s that’s the data that’s really annoying to take, but like, you will be happy. You had it eventually, but like steps and sleep and even expenditure, I think is so easy to track these days with various types of wearables and they’re not perfect, but it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s not like you’re going to go around and count every one of your steps all day.
So, I think those ones are really super easy to track. I think the training and the nutrition are the ones that are pain because you have to manually put that stuff in. So let’s talk about what we we’ve talked about nutrition a lot.
Let’s talk about what we mean when we say tracking your training. Cause I feel like so many people that go to the gym, don’t do this. And it blows my mind.
[Dani:]
They at the bare minimum, it would mean when you go into the gym and you’re doing some sort of resistance training, you’re right down what you did. You write down the number of sets you did for each exercise. You write down the weight that you used and the number of reps that you did that I would say would be the kind of like the, the bare minimum things to do.
Now you could get more complicated than that. You could write down your rest times. You could write down the temple you use.
You could write down, I mean, some of these things, maybe you just might have in your program anyways, and they’re kind of a constant. You might write down what your perceived effort was. Did you shop stop to rep short of failure?
Did you go to failure? But I think oftentimes these are kind of built into the program. So the most helpful thing I would do is like write down every set that you do, write down the weight that you use and write down the number of reps that you did, and maybe make a note of like this thing kind of like bothered my shoulder a little bit, or, you know, the first set felt a little bit off, but the second set felt better.
Like these little kind of notes that you might forget otherwise. And I think the, the reason that we usually have people track things is because it gives us some measure of, are we making progress? Because the thing that we probably see the most often, and when people say I’m not getting results in the gym, there could be so many reasons why, and part of our job as coaches is diagnosing why is it could be something outside of the gym that’s affecting their in the gym progress.
But a lot of the time it’s people who go to the gym for 15 or 20 years straight. Jock and I shared a post on this on social media recently that was like really relevant to this. They’re like, oh, I’ve been going to the gym for the, you know, you get a new coaching client and they’re like, I’ve been going to the gym for 15 years.
And you’re like, oh, great. This person like definitely knows what they’re doing. And then you’re like, what progress have you made?
And they’re like, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve kind of just been spilling my wheels for like 10 years or 15 years, and I’m not sure why. And I’m like, okay, well, you know, can you give me like a log of your training?
Or like, what does training look like for you? And they’re like, kind of been all over the place. They’re like, generally, these are the exercises I do for, you know, three sets of 10 with 100 pounds.
And I do that every single time I come into the gym. And you’re like, okay, well, I hate to break it to you. But the reason you haven’t been making progress is because you’ve been going in and following the same exact routine, which is not a bad thing.
But you’ve also been doing the same weight and the same reps over and over and over and over. And you’re probably leaving something on the table by not just trying to get an extra rep or add a little bit more weight to this exercise. And that’s where this concept of progressive overload comes in.
And just once you adapt to a certain thing, you need to do a little bit more for your body to continue to adapt. And that’s how we grow muscle kind of at a very basic level.
[Ben:]
Yeah, it’s so many people are going into the gym and just winging it for years, like you said, like just going in and doing whatever they feel like doing that day. It’s not the worst thing you could do. Like it’s better than not training at all.
Right? I’d rather people lift anything than not. But man, when you’re showing up somewhere four or five days a week for years, you you’re doing that because you want something out of it.
Right. And maybe it’s just mental health benefits, in which case rock on. But if like you’re trying to change your body at all, like that will not cut it.
And even I feel like when people have a program that they’re following, because I mean, honestly, most programs like you can go to Google and be like, give me a program, blah, blah, blah. And like, it’ll probably work. You know, if certain factors are in place, people do not write down what they do, because they think they’re going to remember what they did.
And I’ve, I mean, there have been workouts where I’ve done this not in a very, very long time, because it’s just so habitual at this point to write it down. But like, no, no, no, I will remember that last time I did lateral raises at twelve and a half pounds, and I got 13 reps like, no, you won’t. You won’t.
You won’t. Maybe you will remember like the one or two highlight sets of your week next week. But next week when you show up, if you don’t have that written down, you’re going to just go based on feel, which is not good enough.
It’s not good enough. And it’s such a simple act. Just write it down.
Like there are so many apps that will help you do it. But I used just a little five by seven notebook and a pen for years. And it was, I just write the sets.
If it was a new high, and I felt like I was ready to move up in weight next week, I’d put a little star next to it. If, uh, if I had to move down on something and put a little down arrow, like it was just such a simple little system before I even knew what the word progressive overload meant, is what is the point in showing up if you’re not trying to get better?
[Dani:]
I think a funny little example that illustrates this point is I am home sometimes, and we have some weights up in my, my home. And my mom will like lift some weights kind of after riding the bike or going for a run or whatever it is. And so, you know, she’s doing the lateral raises with five pounds.
And I’m like, mom, how long have you been using those same five pounds? And she’s like, well, this is the most I can do. Like, I can’t get any more.
And I’m like, all right, you’re going to do a set and I’m going to like coach you through it and she’ll do it. And she’s like, oh, it’s burning. I’m like, keep going, keep going, keep going.
And then she’ll be like, oh, okay. I definitely got more than I thought I could get. And then I’ll be like, okay, next time I think you can, you know, go up to the seven and a half.
And she’ll do that and she’ll start doing a couple reps. Oh no, it’s way too heavy. I’m like, mom, keep going.
You can do it. You can do this. And so we get some reps and I’ll be like, okay, just do one set with the seven and a half and you can do your other sets with the fives.
And then just kind of slowly that process of like showing her like, okay, this is like what you think you can do. And this is what you can actually do. And now she’s using like the tens for the lateral raise and she’s able to do that.
So I’ve been able to see like over time, she’s using more and more and she’s applying that to other exercises as well. And I’m like it kind of, it kind of just illustrated for me, one people underestimate the amount of effort that they can, that they can give and that they can put in. And sometimes it’s a little scary to, I think, go up and wait or do more reps.
I think everyone has a different pain tolerance. And then some people are just a little bit more fearful of like injury and like, oh, if I go up and wait, I’m going to hurt myself. And it’s just, I think kind of like a gradual process of just see if you can do just a tiny bit more, even if it’s doing some more reps and you, that’s why we give people rep ranges and guidelines so that it’s like, Hey, when you get to this number of reps on this exercise, I want you to try going up to the next wave.
Um, and maybe they can do it. And maybe there’s kind of some mental blocks at first.
[Ben:]
And so I always tell people like, when you go up to the next weight, don’t be surprised when you lose a bunch of reps. That’s what I tell people because they think they’re going to be, if I could do 15 reps with this weight and then I move up, I better be able to do 15 reps again. It’s like, no, no, no.
You might get like nine. That’s okay. For the second set, do what you did last week.
And then we’ll just, you know, uh, but I had the exact same experience with my mom, the exact same experience. And for a while she would be like, well, I’m using, I’m using the eights on my upper body. And I’m like, okay, so there’s a lot of muscles in your upper body.
And some of them, maybe that eight is perfect. And I was like, are you doing bicep curls with the eights? And she’s like, and I was like, okay, so you could probably do like bent over rows with like fifteens because that’s much bigger muscle.
Um, and now she gets it. She goes to the gym three times a week. I just got her versa grips for Christmas.
So, you know, things are getting serious for her. Every time she comes over, she shows me her, her back and her triceps. It’s adorable, but I hate to generalize, but when you’ve coached as many people for as long as I have, it’s kind of hard not to, and women are, are the, these are the ones, these are the ones that are doing the exact same weight for years.
Um, because women’s weight rooms often have only a few pairs of dumbbells. Like if you, if there’s a women’s section in your gym, they probably start at three pounds and maybe they go up to 15 or 20 pounds, which sucks. Uh, even, but you know, people will stick with the same weights forever.
Also a jump for a female from five pounds to 10 pounds on a exercise. That’s a big jump. If you don’t have that seven and a half and women just tend to lift more conservatively in general.
And I definitely think that they need to be pushed to lift heavier as a generalization. Um, even myself, I’ve told this story before, but there were, I can think of two distinct times in my lifting career that I thought I was pushing myself. And then I trained with Giacomo, like we did the same routine and he’s watching me and he’s like, Oh no.
And he’s like, you can do more than that. And he would just like move the pin down. And I’d be like, no, I don’t, I don’t think I can.
And then I got it. And my whole world just went and I was just like, Oh my God, have I been shorting myself this much for this long? And then again, like two years later, the same thing happened with a different exercise.
And, uh, you know, I, I should know better. Like this is literally what I do, but it’s really easy to underestimate yourself. And then, I mean, you tell me if you’ve seen the same thing happen with a lot of guys, but I feel like I almost see the opposite happen with guys where they are just like, no, I can do that.
And they, they pick up a weight. That’s probably heavier than what they should do. Bang out a few partial reps with mediocre form.
Um, and then that is how they go by feel every time they train, like sometimes they’ll feel stronger and they’ll just do more. And some days they’ll feel weaker and they’ll do less. And, you know, a degree of auto-regulation is really great and a sign of a fairly advanced lifter, but that’s not what that is.
You know, have you seen that?
[Dani:]
Yeah, I think that’s a fair generalization to make. Um, I I’d say as far as trends go, I’ve probably seen the same. Of course you get outliers and, you know, in either case where, um, where that might, that might not be, uh, I think in general in the weight room, men have a little men tend to have a little bit more ego or competition.
Like, oh, that guy’s lifting that over there. I want to look more over here. Whereas women, I think are just a little bit more focused on themselves and like, um, don’t necessarily care about like what somebody else is doing over there.
Um, one thing that I do think is cool, however, is I think it’s become a lot more, uh, trendy or accepted for women to lift heavier in the weight room and put in a lot of effort. So I almost wonder if part of that is like, you know, women don’t want to be seen like grunting or making faces or like training really hard because, um, they might be more concerned about what people will think. And part of that is like society’s expectations of like, oh, women should behave like this and they shouldn’t, um, you know, be so, you know, intense in the gym or, you know, that’s, that’s a manly way to do things, um, which is just so silly and ridiculous.
But as somebody who’s joined a fair amount of like more bodybuilding or powerlifting, um, kind of like adjacent gyms, I see women in there all the time, like super muscular training really hard. And I think that’s so cool to see that, um, not even just on like Instagram, but to see that in real life, uh, in the commercial gym setting, maybe not as common. Um, but I think it’s becoming more accepted for that to be a place for, for everyone.
Um, and, and not just like the dudes. And it’s, it’s interesting because when, when weightlifting or bodybuilding started, I think there was kind of more of a proportion of like, uh, women who were like lifting weights with the men. And at some point maybe it became less common.
I know there was, there was an era where it was like very, um, in for women to just be really skinny and like not, um, you know, just be small. And so I think maybe that’s when it kind of got away from that. Cause at the start, there were a lot of like women bodybuilders, um, you know, kind of in like the forties, the fifties, the sixties, it was just kind of like a general health thing to like lift weights and, um, kind of around the pumping iron time.
I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but I think it’s kind of coming back to that. Um, and it is, it is cool to see that.
[Ben:]
Definitely. I remember when I started lifting, so it was almost 20 years ago now, which is insane. Um, and I remember often being the only female on the weight room floor.
And it does still happen occasionally that I’m the only chick on the weight room floor, but most of the time it’s a lot closer to 50 50. And this is maybe I’m biased here, but the women that are on the weight room floor at my gym, a lot of them are training more seriously than the guys. Cause I think for a long time, gyms were like not just gyms, but also kind of social hangout spots for guys.
And it just maybe classes were that way for women, but not the weight floor. Um, so I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s totally accurate.
My gym, isn’t quite a bodybuilding. It’s like a cross between a commercial gym and a bodybuilding gym, I would say, cause it’s a commercial gym, but we have a lot of bodybuilders in there. And I’m not even close to the strongest girl in that gym.
Like not even close. There are, there’s a woman that comes in there and does muscle ups with a 25 pound plate strapped to her. And I just stand and she’s older than me and she’s got kids.
And I just stand there like in awe of her every time back to back to what we were kind of talking about. You’re not, you’re not going to be able to make progress past, like, I don’t know, maybe six months or so. Cause I think for the first six months, you can just kind of show up, do whatever the hell you want.
And you’re probably going to get good results because it’s something you’ve never done before. But after that, I think that’s how people end up staying like forever intermediate.
[Dani:]
Basically a lot of it comes down to effort and by writing stuff down, you kind of force yourself to have more effort because you have to do a little bit more than you did the previous time. And eventually you’re going to get to a point where that puts you close to muscular failure. Whereas if you don’t have that accountability of like trying to do a little bit more each time, you can easily kind of just mail it in and, um, you know, sandbag.
So I think effort and intensity will take you pretty far, but at a certain point, just doing more, just being more intense, isn’t going to do it for you and having more structure and more of kind of intention going in there, um, is really helpful.
[Ben:]
So, um, yeah, we didn’t really talk about this specifically, but having a record of the programs that you’ve done, like not just your sets and reps, but like, okay, what, what was the split that was working really well for you? What order of exercises was working really well for you or what didn’t work at all. Um, when you have those records, when you’ve been tracking that sort of stuff, you can look back and start to kind of pick pieces out to see, okay, well, this worked really well.
I mean, I have one training program from like 2015 that I go back to all the time because it just all the pieces fit. It just worked for me. Um, and that doesn’t mean I don’t try new things, but if I didn’t have that, all of that data still, I’d just be like, huh, what did I do?
Cause I know I would have rewritten it in my brain like 10 times at this point. Cause there’s a leg day that just has two sets of like five exercises, uh, which I would struggle to write that for myself because it sounds so minimal, but it, uh, it crushed it for me. So I just think that a lot of people think the act of going to the gym is enough, even if they don’t write it down and you’re going to put in all that effort, you’re going to put in all that time, like just track it and you will get at least two fold the results out of it.
[Dani:]
At least I think an important thing that I want to note about tracking when it comes to nutrition or training is that just because you have a record of what has worked for you in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work for you in the future. So say you were able to lose weight on a certain number of calories, or you had this training program you did in the past that worked really well for you. You might have a different life circumstance.
Now you might have more stress or, you know, you’re a little bit older, whatever it is. So I think tracking is useful to see where are you at right now? And it gives you kind of like, this is my starting point.
This is where I can go from here. Um, I think that was one thing that I wanted to say. Um, I’m curious if we should take this into kind of the conversation of like when tracking becomes counterproductive and maybe in what circumstances will we not have somebody track something and then maybe just a quick note on like when you know that you’re ready to transition away from tracking something.
[Ben:]
Yeah. So first of all, thank you for bringing, thank you for mentioning that, that just because something worked before, it doesn’t mean it always will. Cause that is definitely, definitely true.
And I hope I didn’t make it sound like that was the case, but yeah, we can transition this to when, when tracking can become counterproductive. I think an easy one to kind of start with, I don’t know if it’s counterproductive, but I feel like it can cause more stress than it’s worth is actually tracking sleep. And you know, I have wearable devices that track it all for me every day anyway.
And I do always look at it, but it’s a tough one. I think because there’s only so much you can do about it, all of these other things we’ve talked about, you can give direct inputs and, um, actions to change them. And there’s some you can do to improve your sleep, like get your ass in bed when you need to get in bed, shut your screens down, all of that stuff.
Sometimes you can do everything correctly and still get terrible sleep. And sometimes you wake up and see that terrible number, and it actually makes you feel worse than maybe you would have felt if you had not seen that number. So that’s not really something, like I said, if you’re wearing a wearable device, it’s going to track it no matter what, but just something for people to think about when they’re looking at their sleep data.
Cause I find that it can be very frustrating.
[Dani:]
If it doesn’t give you anything actionable to do off of it, if it’s just a data for the sake of data, especially if it’s adding stress, it’s not useful and it’s not worth it. I would say you only want to track the things that by tracking them are going to allow you to make some sort of decision that is going to help you. And the pros outweigh the cons like, okay, yeah, maybe there are some cons for tracking your nutrition because it’s a little bit annoying, but the pros far outweigh that.
[Ben:]
But sometimes it gets to a point where the cons will outweigh the pros for certain people. And I think the very, very simple way to boil that one down is if you are finding yourself becoming neurotic about it and saying that is hard because a lot of times people don’t realize when they’re starting to become neurotic about something, but if it’s causing you stress, like you’re stressing about either having to plug everything in. I mean, like I said, that’s always kind of a pain, but if you’re stressing because the numbers are not like where they need to be exactly to the macro, like you said at the beginning, and you’re feeling like an overwhelming sense of guilt about that, you’re thinking about it when you’re not eating, you’re planning your next meals, like many hours in advance in your head.
I feel like those are some of the red flags that I see in some of my clients. And then I will try to find a different way if I start seeing that.
[Dani:]
I think what that illustrates to me is that there’s way more cons than there are pros, even if this person thinks that body composition is the most important thing in their life, and they’re willing to sacrifice everything else. I think at a certain point you either realize all right, I was willing to do that for a period of time. I’m not anymore because my social life is deteriorating or my mental health is deteriorating.
So you might be able to do that for some amount of time and kind of grit your teeth. But at a certain point, like you said, it just becomes not worth that trade off. And sometimes you can say that, and it takes actually going through that for somebody to kind of learn that lesson for themselves.
[Ben:]
And there’s a lot of people that will suffer through a lot, like they’ll suffer through a lot for the sake of hitting their macros or getting to their goal or staying in a calorie deficit, or obsessively tracking everything and looking up chickpea water on the internet. And it’s almost like they can’t see that it’s a bigger con than a pro at that point. And I find as a coach, that’s the trickiest part is trying to gently talk to somebody and ask questions that might open their eyes to the fact that this is affecting them more negatively than they realize, and that there might be a better way, a simpler way, or can we just back our foot off the gas a little bit?
Because just having those conversations can be really tough and go very differently depending on the person.
[Dani:]
I think also if it’s affecting someone’s adherence in any way, it’s probably not worth it anymore, at least for a period of time. So if tracking so rigidly is then causing them to go out and eat a bunch of things that they weren’t planning on eating because they feel so restricted, okay, case of it probably not being worth it. Maybe let’s take a step back and focus on habits as opposed to tracking so rigidly.
Maybe they just need a week in the gym of not tracking anything and just going in there and training and just training for the sake of enjoyment and having fun. A vacation is a great time for that, for instance. Maybe with tracking their body weight, maybe you find that if they have a high weigh-in, they get into this F it mentality where then they’re just eating whatever it is because it’s so discouraging to them.
Okay, maybe it’s not worth doing the daily weigh-ins or weighing themselves as frequently. So you learn what is valuable to track and what isn’t with every single person and every single individual and finding a way to keep them progressing forward and tracking whatever needs to be tracked, but not anymore than that.
[Ben:]
Yeah. With the body weight specifically, I ask people like, what mood were you in before you stepped on the scale and saw that number? And then what mood were you in after?
And if it’s a big difference, then we got to work on that. At the very least, we have to work on that response. And if we’re not really getting anywhere with that response, then we have to not rely on the scale.
We just have to. And that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to do it without telling me, but it goes both ways. If you stand on the scale and it’s lower than you expected, and suddenly you’re elated about it, that is also not great because that too is temporary.
Whatever your body weight is on any given moment, it’s temporary. It’s going to change. You can bet on that.
So that’s a very common one, I feel like, is the body weight one that can really stress people out a lot. And a lot of people see their body weight today as a reflection of what they did yesterday or the day before. And a lot of times that’s just not how it works.
But if your brain is correlating, okay, well, my weight was up today and yesterday I did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I can’t do blah, blah, blah, blah anymore. That’s an example of having too little data to actually make any kind of conclusion.
It can all be worked on, I feel like. But if at any point, any of these things are stressing someone out a lot, then they’re not worth it. I mean, I have clients who are slipping over into neuroses about tracking their food and I’ll be like, okay, here’s your homework on Saturday night.
I want you to go out to a restaurant and have a meal and I don’t want you to track it at all. And I want you to just eat till you’re satisfied, not stuffed, not hungry, satisfied, whatever you want, and don’t track it. And they could be like, it’s terrifying, I think at first.
And then over time when they realize, okay, then it’s not always pretty. Sometimes they end up having a lot more than they expected. But over time, they get better at it because it’s a skill.
When you have been tracking for so long that you are not listening to your body at all anymore because you’re like, I live and die by these numbers here, then moving to a more intuitive approach is almost impossible because you’ve basically cut off all communication with your body signals. So then it’s like, okay, well, how do we get back in touch with these? Now that you have the knowledge of like, okay, here’s what 30 grams of protein on a plate actually looks like and feels like, here’s what it is like to get enough vegetables throughout the day.
Here’s how I like to space my food out throughout the day. Once you have that knowledge, then it’s just like music. I think we talked about this at some point like the jazz musicians, they got to learn all the classical stuff before they can start to break the rules.
And it’s very similar with going from strict tracking to a more intuitive approach.
[Dani:]
I think the most powerful way to use something like tracking is specifically talking about nutrition here, tracking things, but then also just paying attention to how you feel with certain variables and still being able to not shut that part of your brain off where you’re kind of sensing, okay, I’m full and I’m eating generally about this much. And that can depend where your body weight is at and the range that you kind of fluctuate to. But yeah, being able to be mindful of that, because I know when I transitioned kind of away from tracking, I tracked my macros very religiously every single day, kind of in my logger for a couple of years, and then transitioned kind of away from that.
And it was really difficult at first to really figure out, am I hungry? Am I not hungry? Why am I eating?
Sometimes what I’ll have somebody do if they kind of struggle with mindful eating is just having a journal. And before they go to eat something, how am I feeling right now? What emotions am I feeling?
What am I about to eat? Why am I eating it? And how am I going to feel afterwards?
And just taking kind of that second to pause and reflect, I think is often very powerful for people. And so just bringing more awareness to that, I think helps if you do, first of all, develop that nutritional literacy, but then have that desire to transition away, starting to get very in tune with these things. And you need to have an understanding of calorie density, because you can feel full on wildly different amounts of calories, depending on how voluminous those foods are, if you’re eating a ton of berries and lettuce and tofu versus going out somewhere and eating an impossible burger and fries, it’s going to be a different level of satiety for the same number of calories.
And so being able to pay attention to your hunger, but then also having that knowledge of what is going to help me to feel more full or not, or just what are generally my needs based on the phase that I’m in. Like you said, it takes that experience to know and to be able to do that and still get the results that you want to get.
[Ben:]
Yeah. And you don’t easily forget those things that you learned while you were tracking. It’s like they’re ingrained in you at that point.
I kind of think about it like learning a foreign language. When you’re first learning a foreign language, you have to learn all of this, like, okay, first person, present, second person, perfect. What I, all of these very complicated concepts that you have to like really, really think about what is the right word for this sentence that makes grammatical sense.
But as you become more fluent, like if you ask somebody who’s fluent in a language, okay, but why, why do you say this word instead of that word? Like, that’s a very hard question to answer once you get to a certain point, because you just, you just know. Right.
And I feel like that’s what we’re trying to do with all of the tracking is get you to a place, especially with the food, um, where you just know it, but you have to learn all of those annoying rules and make all the mistakes and all of that stuff before you can just know. And I feel like in the gym, the way people do this is they also don’t listen to their body. It’s like progressive overload at all costs, right?
Today I will go up in weight and, uh, maybe you can, but maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you start doing your warmup sets and you’re like, oh, this is not the day today is not the day. Um, but if you’re just like hell bent on getting that next weight or getting that extra couple reps, even if your body is just like, no, we slept like trash last night.
There’s a lot of stress going on. If you try to push through that, like you might get lucky or you might get hurt. And, uh, or you might just start getting such diminishing returns that your training actually starts to get worse over time, no matter how hard you try to push.
That’s another way that like, yes, we want to focus on progressive overload, but we cannot 100% cut off all of the communication to our body. It’s really easy to do it because training properly, like it hurts, it’s, it’s uncomfortable, right? I shouldn’t say hurts.
That sounds like an injury, but like it burns, uh, everything in your body is like, please stop doing this. Um, and you have to push through that. Uh, but there’s also some signals like you, you do not want to lose those signals.
So that would be a good time to, you know, if I had a client that was getting in a place where they just kept doing that over and over again, we’d start doing some kind of auto regulation where before we even went into the gym, it would be like, how do you feel today? Like, how did you sleep? Um, you know, bend over, how are your hamstrings feeling today?
Like that sort of thing, uh, to decide whether this is like an all out day or, uh, hold back a little bit kind of day. Uh, because that’s a, that’s a very true, even just incorporating RPE or RIR. That’s such a challenging skill for a lot of people to learn.
I mean, I still question some of my own, uh, RPE sometimes I’m like, I think that was this, but if someone had a gun to my head, would it have actually been this like, you know, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. So very important skills to try to incorporate at a certain point.
[Dani:]
I think having a coach is something that is very helpful in this process. If it sounds all of what we’re talking about right now, sounds really overwhelming figuring that all by out by yourself. That’s what we do with a lot of clients is kind of take them along that journey of tracking and developing those skills, developing that, uh, you know, that internal awareness as well.
And then I think my goal for most people is to be able to kind of just like have these habits in place without having to be super meticulous about tracking everything all the time. And there might be phases like you said, where maybe we have a bodybuilder and prep where they have to tighten things up. But for most people who want to just be healthy and fit and put on some muscle and loose body fat.
Um, yeah, there’s a time where you have to track things and learn how to do that, but it doesn’t have to be forever. And it’s a, they’re useful tools to have in the toolbox.
[Ben:]
Yeah. And I do think that’s a huge part of our job. I always say like my job as a coach is to hopefully get somebody to a place where they don’t need me anymore.
And sometimes that takes, you know, eight months. And sometimes that takes three years. It just depends on the person, but that’s, that should be the goal.
And the, your coach should guide you through this, but they can’t do it for you. So that’s the only way this works is if both parties are like willing to show up and be honest and do the work and do the hard work because sometimes the hard work is not what you would expect it to be, right? Sometimes it’s loosening up or relaxing a little bit or taking your foot off the gas.
Sometimes that is the hard work for some people, um, as messes with your brain a little bit in certain cases. So I think that’s a good place for us to wrap this up. What do you think?
All right. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. If you are interested in working with the coaches at vegan proteins, we do have some spots available in the show notes as a link for the application.
Just go ahead and fill that out. And you’ll probably hear back from Giacomo within a day. If you have any ideas for podcasts or YouTube videos you want to see or hear to shoot us an email coach at vegan proteins or any other inquiries you might have, you can follow us on Instagram.
I’m vegan proteins. And Ben is Ben Mitchell on Instagram. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
My name is Dani and we will talk to you soon. Bye.
