Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 416: James Cappola - Fitness Trends, Overcoming Doubters, Masculinity + More

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Progressive Overload Project. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and today I know Matt and Holden, but I am joined by our amazing guest, James Coppola. James and I sat down to talk about becoming a fitness coach, both of our journeys into becoming fitness coaches, our preferred version of masculinity in this kind of turbulent, time our thoughts about maha online trolls and negativity i think you guys will really enjoy the episode it was nice to chat with james and to just talk with somebody who i think has a really

really good grasp on what the world needs now enjoy the episode james how's it going man great great thanks for having me man i appreciate it absolutely dude so happy to chat i've been following your stuff for a few years, a lot more so recently, just because I generally love your tone and your tenacity. I feel like that's what you are known for is the way in which you approach these things in the passion. But what brought James Coppola to being kind of this? You're pretty sensational creator, dude. You make a ton of content, but you also change a ton of lives. You're not just a creator. You're also a coach. How'd you get to this place? well i've always loved the tension so me putting myself out there it's it's effortless for me for the most part

i just had to find a way to channel it so that a wasn't self-indulgent b there was a purpose to it and see i could have fun while doing it while not pleading for validation so essentially once i understood my demographic and who i was talking to and who i was helping i visualized them all the time with common problems, whether it's nutrition, toxic masculinity, dealing with bullying or anything like that, then I'm able to kind of be there for them and put myself in their shoes and articulate it in a way that's not only entertaining, but I can touch them emotionally. And then, like a tool, it just got stronger. And then before I know it, I just started cranking out about tempos a day. so what do you think like when because i probably produce a quarter of that content maybe some days

i find that i really have struck a vein of like passion and intensity and i can rip off several but like as somebody who's active who's a new dad congratulations by the way uh and has a thriving business how the hell do you manage to produce 10 pieces of obviously relevant content because A lot of it is on the spot. It's not just like, I'm going to sit down and produce this slowly. It's immediate. Right. So for the people who think that I spend all day, if I were to add up the amount of

minutes that it takes for me to do all that content, I would say it takes up maybe an hour of my day. Like what you see, if you see me that I posted something, unless it's a repost, or unless I'm doing multiple characters where they wardrobe changes and stuff. Sure. this was most likely filmed like five minutes before I post it I just see something I feel it I do a green screen of whatever I'm responding to or I talk about whatever I want to talk about and I just do it on the spot and I just pick a song and then I post I don't do I don't go nuts

with edits or anything just because I don't care but I think that allows you to capture your like immediate authentic emotion and I always appreciated that in your content which is as you begin to speak about something it's very not off the cuff and insincere it's actually very authentic and i find it encouraging to know that you can do it all in a limited amount of time because i think a lot of people probably to the point you may to be like well if i could sit around on my phone all day um you know that's not how i do it i very much too i'm like oh shit i have a minute and a thought and i'm going to just put this on the screen and see what happens but i feel like you very much mastered this bro it's it's cool

to watch and I've liked how you've navigated these different areas of whether it's culture or now politics, but of course, fitness, which I feel like is your main thing still. It's kind of the thing that I know you for. You literally, I can see the top of your shirt says dumbbells and deadlifts. How has your, and daughters, which kind of leads me to my first question, how has being a new dad been? How has it shown up in your life? How has it affected your relationship with health and fitness?

how you approach your clients, all this stuff. Sure. So I'm really empathetic to the parents who struggle with staying accountable and everything like that because I'm not a drill instructor. I'm not unrealistic. I understand that shit happens. It's just about reminding them, hey, even though this week didn't go, as you thought it would, you still accomplish this, this, and this and this.

You need to be proud of yourself and you need to give yourself grace. my wife and I are not perfect at all we miss things we're human beings but in the grand scheme of things we're still progressing the way we want it and if you don't lose sight of that and if you give yourself grace as a parent then it's very easy to be more optimistic about the entire journey as opposed to I'm never going to get back to like how I was before kids or anything like that I mean you're the best version of yourself now there's no reason to compare yourself to another time I think you're that's good bro and like with your own fitness specifically um how are you making time for it how are you

handling the sleep the challenge is because i think most new parents would say like dude the first year too just killed me my baby's 11 months it's it's a challenge yeah how have you handled the first the first chunk well it's not typical she was in the nick you for over six months yeah yeah and and she had over five different surgeries and it was hardest thing we've ever had to go through. I can't imagine. I broke down on my account a lot, but, and there were people like, why are you sharing this personal stuff?

And I was like, well, because we get hundreds and thousands of messages of people going through the same thing. And telling us that's going to be okay and reassuring us and giving us tips and advice. And I have no problem being vulnerable on my page. And I just knew that if I didn't take care of myself or if I didn't help my wife take care of herself, then we were just going to go off the deep end. And it's the one thing that we can't control, even though we would love to control the outcome of what was happening with Aria, there's nothing we could do.

So the only thing that we could control is how we show up for ourselves. And we were very blessed that when she came home, we didn't really lose a wink of sleep. She sleeps all throughout the night with that problem, eight, nine hours. Still had a lot to deal with, with her feeding tube and her oxygen and all that. For sure. but for the most part we just adapted and I was telling my wife like the silver lining of all this is the fact that if we did this we could do anything dude for sure I definitely I can I can remember of following along a little bit um but I remember thinking like wow this must be so challenging this is super difficult and I think that yeah Yeah, that's when most people would naturally turn away from their fitness. But for people like us, that's where we're like, look, if I don't maintain my physical,

I'm going to lose my mental. Yeah, yeah. I've done the numbing thing. I've done the avoidance. It only gets worse. You just put your depression on hold. So when you found fitness, I know we both of us have ADHD. Something that I discovered a little bit.

When you found fitness, how did you use it initially? were you because my my understanding of your story is that you didn't have this positive relationship with fitness no no no it was all it was all the same way I love attention now I just wanted attention then I had learning disabilities and ADHD grown up at a stammer I was fat I had a lot of things going against me so I just figured all right I think I can get jacked I think that I'm on the way there I think I understand this and I did I was one of the most jacked like people in our school and I just kept thinking, wow, this is cool. I'm getting the attention. I'm getting this. I'm getting that. I was on the football, wrestling, and track and field team. Not because I cared about sports.

I just wanted more exercise and more of a reason to be fit as opposed to just working out on my own because the motivation wasn't really there. It was more like punishment. And I treated food the same way. And when I wanted to break free, I just got blackout drunk or like anything like that. And it was my moment to eat what I want, to do what I want. But then I would become like a party animal again for validation and approval. So what I perceived as me just being fun and wild and stuff was just me being very depressed and approaching fitness for the wrong reasons.

And I'm very, very, very passionate about making sure that I'm. other people don't make that mistake. And it's so funny how many people just assume that I promote obesity because of that. Yeah, I've always thought that that was fascinating. I have always had the luxury of being a little bit on the thin side. Both of my parents are pretty small. And both of them are like underweight. And so my entire life, it was just, I'm thin.

I have abs. I want to put on some muscle. I think also being on ADHD medication as a young guy. I was so, like, not fond of eating, I was really little, but I never struggled with being overweight or seeing myself as being heavy. And I think I took that privilege to heart. And I started not necessarily using it for, yeah, certainly using it for validation, actually. I remember early in my life, I had a form of moral superiority.

Like, if I saw somebody who was overweight, like, if I met, the younger, fat, or you, and I was working out, I would have been like, oh, I'm better than this person because I have something that they don't, which is this incredible discipline. And I actually carried that with me into, like, my early 20s as a trainer, which, thank God for, like, the clients I met along the way who were like, hey, dude, you need to, like, temper this. Like, I also realize, like, they have so much shit together that I don't. I don't understand money.

I don't understand cars I don't fucking really know shit because I started training like that was my first job ever that's what I did when I left my house I knew nothing about the world the humility of being like okay

I really only know fitness and I'm only really okay at this because I haven't had the struggle yeah yeah it's like a hyper fixation I understand yeah but I do think that like people who don't people who have never been obese or struggle with their weight, they will look at somebody who is perhaps more sympathetic and kind.

It'd be like, oh, you're just promoting obesity. It's like, no. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm being kind. I know, I know. I've never, never once have I thought that I was better than anyone. Actually, I usually thought that I was inferior than a lot of people. So that whole, even though I lived a very toxic lifestyle for myself, somehow I knew not to do

that to my clients or the people around me. Yeah. I think that what I knew intuitively as a younger trainer was like, I need these people to respect me. I'm young and I need to be seen as cool. And much to what you said about seeking some type of validation. And what I didn't realize was like, you're less likely to help people if you dangle your fitness over them

as a form of moral superiority. And when you make it more approachable, which is something you're excellent at, you can help more people. But you'll often get accused of, like, promoting obesity if you don't promote the very tight, rigid fitness industry version of fitness. If you don't promote that, you sell. I always put them on the spot.

I'm like, cool. And then I send them a video of me giving some advice. And I'm like, tell me one thing I told them that wasn't true or that's promoting obesity. And like, it's just that I'm kind. That's all for real. And I do think one, it's disarmines. to run into a man in the fitness industry who was kind,

which kind of brings me to my first question about the industry at large. What are you seeing in the fitness industry that you like? What are you seeing in the fitness industry that you just are not liking at all? I'm seeing that I love the people who are passionately fighting against diet culture and being like, no, this is me. I got value whether you say so or not. I'm metabolically fit. I don't give a shit if I looked apart or not.

And it's just like, it pisses me off so much when people just like look at these people and there's just like a certain level for people to accept it or be like, no, no, no, you're like delusional things like that. I'm like, they don't just like deadlift that or squat that like out of nowhere. They don't, they're doing what they say that they do. Whether or not they're acceptable to you doesn't allow you to dictate their worth. And it's just so bizarre to me How they're not embarrassed

Writing in the comment section like that That's what I can't believe Like your picture or name is next to this You're trying to hurt someone And you're not embarrassed That's so much more embarrassing Than body fat ever could be Dude for sure

I sometimes get videos in my feed And I'm like Why does this video have so much engagement And then I look at the comments And I'm like Oh This is just full of cruel comments, cruel, like, this video almost exists because it was a magnet for cruelty.

And people saw an opportunity to be mean to somebody. It's often about their body or who knows what. And I'm like, gosh, these are gross. And like, some of these comments get thousands of likes from other people who are also very angry and hateful. And, like, how do you navigate that, man? Like, how do you interface with the more hateful, negative side of social? media because there's so much of what people are not okay with inside they take out on social

media how can you engage with that and stay sane in my mind they already lost i know that i know that there's no one who's treating someone like that and going back to their happy life you would have to be insane somewhere somehow they're broken so therefore that's why i never get offended by them I try to remind the people, hey, hey, they're nothing. Don't worry, they're nothing. I know it hurts. I know the words hurt, but big picture-wise, you're doing better than them. They're, you just showing up for yourself and being happy and smiling speaks volumes.

This little comment says everything I need to know about them. And it's that kind of thinking that kind of just never lets me feel discouraged, never lets me feel. like we're losing never lets me feel like they're overpowering it's just yeah there might be a lot of them but they're weak and if we all have voices then we're going to show how weak they are i like that yeah and i've always believed that like these these hurtful people these comments that they are making they probably would never say this to your face never never and i don't think i've ever actually met somebody in the entire time i've been doing fitness where I've met

a follower, been at an event where I was speaking and somebody was like, yeah, I actually, I don't like your work or I don't like that one knows. No, no, they never would. I mean, I've had multiple people be like, meet me here to fight. Oh, my God. Sorry, I just can't imagine.

No, and one guy, I was like, all right, meet me like here. And I just gave him a random address. And then he's like, I'm here. I'm like, I'm not, you're fucking idiot. Oh, my God. Dude, that's pretty funny. Oh, you pussy. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to fight a kid.

Yeah, dude, I'm not leaving my house today to fight you. Like, I will say when you make content about a particular type of theme that triggers men, it does tend to quickly become, let's make this physical, you are effeminate, you are gay, you are beta, you are soy, all of it. all the bottom of the barrel insults, it's no substance, nothing to do with the subject material we're talking about, and they call me hypocritical. I'm like, I did not say one personal insult. I talked about the subject matter, and I talked about how

you're dumb fuck because of the subject matter, but I didn't say anything about you personally. You already called me fat, bald, you made fun of my wife. Like, just, you're terrible at this. You're terrible at talking shit, and that's why you want to fight now. You're weak, just

like I said. Yeah, that's a good point there is generally the case that the i'm going to beat you up comes as the rebuke to something that they just they can't come back to it they're hoping that their insults hurt me as much as they hurt them yeah my therapist my therapist told me something last week that i liked he said they're not saying anything that hurt you they're trying to pull the hurt out of you and i was like yeah bro and you know they would know where it was because they're basically just projecting all of these insecurities that a lot of men have and they're just trying all of them all at once very quickly and uh i'll ask you this question like bro to bro

because i still struggle with this i'm a little bit younger than you but i'm too old to be doing this okay um how it how does one manage to check that insecurity of like hey i am not gay but when you called me that. It freaking pissed me off like I was in the fourth grade. Being called a beta, a simp, gay, like whatever. All of these pejoratives, whatever they are.

I know who they listen to and I know who they follow. I know how they view life and I know that they're a joke. I smile, I laugh. I go, I'm married, you're not, you're projecting, you're mad at me because I spoke truth and you guys are always the ones who want to say the brutal truth,

so you're a fucking hypocrite. so like you're still losing and the fact that you're on your fourth comment already still losing and i'm already moving on to the next video i forgot that you exist so good point dude there are there are a deluge of these negative people that have kind of infiltrated the what i thought used to be positive space when i'm disregulated like for instance last year um with everything going on with my daughter i was just always just regulate how could you not be right so yes i was a lot more irritable and i stayed in the comments a little bit longer than i should have like just not mad at what they're saying but just mad at the like stupidity like like for instance um a parent saying that like they only give their

children like orange juice on Christmas and it's like half a cup and like one of the gifts is like one piece of candy or something like that and that's like all they have all year and I'm like this is so harmful this is that and then someone's like no this is like discipline this is great parenting and I'm like you fucking idiot you fucking yeah yeah that is hard like I know that they're not going to get it and I know that they don't want to get it but I just want to fucking shake them and be like do you really think that's good parenting do you not understand the nuance of what I'm trying to say. It's like, well, like, apparently you just hate, like, clean food.

I'm like, what is it that you call it intentionally airheaded or intentionally? No, no, intentionally obtuse. Yes, potentially obtuse. That's my favorite game Scabola signature line. And it's just like, I want to be like, are you messing with me? Dude, I swear a lot of them are. I think a lot of them are, which almost makes. makes me more disturbed by how many people exist, have an existence where they're like,

I get off on adding nothing to the discourse other than just negativity or trollage. Yep. Once I realize that, like, I'm trying to, like, do something else, but I keep getting pulled back to it. If I get pulled back, like, the third time, I just delete the comment or I block. Excellent. If it's taking, that's, like, my rule. If I get, like, pull back three times of the same, I'm done. I think that's good and it's healthy to have boundaries.

One area where I can no longer have boundaries and I'm kind of happy to see that you don't have boundaries here. I don't know if you ever did is around kind of the intersectionality of health and politics. And I do feel like a lot of what's going on not only with the administration writ large, but specifically with Maha. It's actually very antithetical to health and inclusivity. And I see a lot of this shit. And I just go, what the fuck is this crap? And so as a kind of natural truth teller, debunker, bullshit, you know, finder, how are you feeling about Maha? And what are you thinking?

I feel like you have a group of people who didn't really have the balls to speak up or have an original thought or their own thought because they were afraid of being judged or wrong or stupid. and now they have a community where pseudoscience is the science. They do their research with a quick Google search with the top searches, and now they just feel like they have the community backing them to make the dumbest claims, and they don't have to stay on the subject material. They just call you a lib. They just call you this. They're just like, you don't even care about our health.

You want our kids to eat poison. and it's just like you have no idea what you're talking about you never do it it's just now you just believe it it's challenging and i'll i'll enter this as why i think that might be i feel that for a lot of these people they reject the status quo they like have a blatant dislike of the government they want to be in the they want to be in the no yeah they want to see themselves as like countercultural in a way um and i do think when somebody says hey you know this maha point is like refutable and not factual yeah they're just like okay well not only that matter to you're a liberal and right and liberals are bad because that's the status quo and you wouldn't want to stick up for the status quo like you know health

doesn't want to stick up for the blue hair people that's all they fucking say i oh how many times do people tell you when it comes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that, well, before he was head of HHS, it used to be a trans lady. Right, right, right. I get 50 DMs about Rachel Levin every day. I'm like, you guys, I know that the, like, it kills me because I'm like, do you understand that she wasn't running HHS? She was the deputy secretary? The guy who is running for HHS is running for governor of California right now. Some guy named Xavier Bacera, but no one cares about him because he wasn't a trans woman. Right, right.

Right. It's any ammo they can use. What do you feel about how this has kind of proliferated the fitness space specifically? Because I think Mahas on-ramped to a lot of fitness people, even fitness professionals. It's status at this point. Like, if you eat food with seed oils or seed oils in general, then you're just a beta fat cuck. And then if you don't have a certain level of testosterone, which people won't shut up about, then again, you're just a beta cuck. And you're a lib.

And I just don't know any libs. I can lift this. Who equates their political ideologies to their fitness level? It's so lame. It's lame. There is something seeking. These men are seeking something, for sure. And I do think that they find, hey, if I affiliate with the winning side, that's good.

If I affiliate with the losing side, that's bad. Right. I want to be as masculine as possible. I want to be seen and strong. And I do genuinely feel like the left has kind of abandoned a lot of its opportunity to appeal to men voluntarily. And I feel that the right has seized the opportunity. They're like, hey, men are insecure. They're unhappy.

They're not doing well in the mating market, the dating market. And if we pull on those strings and tug on those insecurities and say, hey, well. And blame everyone else for their shortcoming so that they don't grow and they keep them broken. That's what all the myrons and Andy Elliott's and like Andrew Tates, they, They know that each one of their customers are suckers. They know that. It's a great point. It is often the case that the young men who are drawn to these kind of pro-macho, pro-masculent types are searching for guidance and they're finding it in these nasty men who are totally aware that these young guys don't need to be hearing this shit at all.

They need to be hearing the opposite. it. But the more I pump them full of hatred and vitriol, the better, you know, the more they're going to stay down and the more I can kind of build my empire on the backs of these young guys who have every reason to be frustrated, but I feel that they should be getting offered a version of masculinity that's better than this. Well, the problem with the fitness space and adapting to this sort of like model is because a lot of their content and their approach, even though their intended demographic is like their clientele

of either obese people or like whatever they're doing it for their peers they're doing it for the acceptance of their peers they're not listening I'm like hey we're trying to tell you that positive reinforcement is statistically so much better but you just you're just choosing not to listen because you be soft

yeah well I think a lot of the people in our space they didn't actually coach people and I know you actually coached people in person. And I think that totally changes how you not only interact with people, but it changes your whole worldview because you are forced to deal with people from all different walks of life. And was it crunch for you? I started at 24 hour.

Yeah, yeah. I started at golds and then crunch. So if you do golds, crunch 24, L.A., Bali, valleys, whatever, any of them, you're going to have to interface with all kinds of people from all different walks of life. but if you're just like yeah i did a bodybuilding show principally because i was insecure and i just wanted to be seen as a mostly buff naked man which my opinions on that aside like if i take a bunch of drugs and i get really big and then i say i'm a coach but i've never helped that many people i know i know i think that's why we see a lot of these coaches who are kind of just really nasty it's

like you're not really a coach you just did a show and put that in your body you're broke and working something else you got fit you don't work on any other skills besides doing that by any needs necessary and now you think that you can teach people without applying your knowledge without listening to them without being empathetic fucking this is why they come off so insecure in their content because they're pissed they're pissed like i don't get it look at my body this was like supposed to work i thought people wanted this yeah i i catch that a lot because i'm constantly made fun of for being like too small or not looking like i live i get fat shamed every day for sure and i'm like well are we going here because i'm ultimately doing something you're not

and like the only way you can come me down is to like be like well at least my physique is better than yours like that's completely fine broke yeah good for you Like that doesn't affect that doesn't impact my ability to train the clients that I have that you don't like no but that would wreck them and that's why they think it would hurt you yeah and I will say it doesn't feel good But a lot of times you do if you've worked with the general population it will Soften and enhance your your view of yourself you know what man? I do look pretty fucking good when I train a lot of average people I if all I trained with bodybuilders maybe I would feel shittier but I train a lot of normal people who have challenges like I do and I'm doing solid and I I can connect with them better when I'm kinder to myself absolutely um when I was like 30 pounds lighter and like the height of my body

dysmorphia and um anti eating disorders a comment about my body would kill me because that was my only sense of like worth basically so i listened to everything i thought i was 10 times fatter than i am now and i'm 30 pounds heavier now so that's why i always uh people are just like why don't you just get shredded this or that and i'm like why it's just i'm i'm happy i'm healthy i would just be doing that for other people would you ever consider taking like pEDs or something like that? No, I mean, I'm on TRT because I've screwed up my body so much with eating disorders for almost like a decade and drugs and alcohol. And just my like testosterone was shot by like 32. So that's when I got prescribed. That's that's very different though. But would you ever

add additional compounds? No, just rocking that. I think that's good. I think when I ask myself that question i go yeah probably would because there's still like that young man in me that's like you never done a cycle bro come on you know if you did you could shut up those haters you'd look good but i i go like bro i have i don't even have the desire or bandwidth to do it right to yeah do the needles not only that i'm sure you got a lot more love than hate well for sure and for myself absolutely i worry about my health um i also think to myself psychologically if I were to watch my body change drastically and my testosterone were to spike and I were to step into this like version of myself I'd never been, would I be

able to leave that and go back to a non-enhanced physique? I think that would make me very uncomfortable and I'm not ready to do that. And that's why I'm not doing it either because I know with my work ethic, my intensity and everything, I think I would get to the size of a house and I would only want more to the point where I just look like ridiculous. And then I lost sight of what I wanted. And it's not about health anymore. It's about just looking the part, which is exactly what my whole, the platform is against. So, yeah.

Well, what is the kind of primary motivation for you now? not only to stay in shape but also to keep showing up as like a good version of masculinity and to fight the good fight every day yeah so as far as just personally i just want to be a unit i just want to be as strong as possible um like mobile healthy feeling great i don't exactly like pinpoint like exact goals per se i just keep in track of my life setting I keep progressively overloading, increasing cardio, whatever. I just always want me to better myself in a way that never feels like a chore again. And I just want to teach people that you can reach this level of peace if you're kinder to yourself.

And you could be more consistent than you ever imagined. All throughout my career, I've never been as consistent as when I switched mindsets. Never. I've always went up and down, up and down, up and down. and it's because of how poorly I treated myself with extreme dieting and exercise and exercise bulimia and then been drinking and Coke and Molly and my body just couldn't take any more. But once I finally just stopped living a fake life and two separate ones, I started living one consistent one for me, then I don't have any regrets.

I do what I want when I want. If my body's not up to someone's standards, that's fine. I know what I can do. I know how strong I am. I know how capable I am. And that's enough. And as long as my wife and my daughter are my biggest fans, I don't need any others. That's one of my next questions.

What's the best part about being a dad? So I'm always afraid of being, like, underwhelmed and, like, not knowing, like, when I'm wowed or not really understanding what it feels like to be wild. Like, I'm a really big foodie, and I'm like, I want a food to, like, take my breath away. I don't just want to say that's really good. I want to know what that feels like when you're like, oh my God. And I feel that way about like movies and stuff. Like I want to be like blown away.

And I feel like I'm chasing that feeling a lot when it comes to certain things. But with my daughter, it's day after day after day of a feeling that I never thought that I would have. And I just have this feeling of like, oh my God, nothing else matters. Nothing else matters at all. This is what I've been waiting for in my entire life. this just sincere joy that I'm never getting tired of. And you're telling me that I have this for the rest of my life. Oh, my God.

And it's my ability that like when things aren't going great, whether it's with me personally, the business, whatever it might be, I can quickly just go, well, she's there. Everything's good. I'll be fine. As long as she's in my life, everything's fine. And I'll take care of everything to keep it fine. so that's yeah that's basically it dude that's beautiful i think that's cool and uh i can definitely

i can relate to that i feel that no matter how turbulent the things in my mind or in my heart or in the world when i remember like i have abundance in this literal person it's a it's a level of wealth that is incalculable it's an amount of joy that you can't bottle up it's so much fun like you you don't even know and i have that okay we're going to be all right we're going to be all right and i do feel you know going back to all that negativity and the haters or the negative people on the internet um the trolls or if you want to call them i feel now that i have this love in my life i feel that wow it's probably the case that you don't and it's not that i wish them that but i you can when you have that level of love come into your life you

it changes how you look at things i see i now see so many men as like oh you were a little boy who was never loved or like it's really unique and different but i i am on a mission to not raise one of these guys now you know oh yeah yeah and i'm on a mission to protect my daughter from one of these guys yeah it's pretty interesting when you first found out you were going to be having a baby did you feel like it would be a boy or a girl did you we were hoping it was a girl we were hoping it was a girl very cool and aria is is that a game of thrones are you no actually it's it's i I love Italian opera and Arias and stuff. So I sit down with that since my wife is a musician.

So I was like, it just made sense. What is the best part of being a coach? Watching someone in real time reach their full potential or reach a level of potential that they never thought was possible. And mainly because they just surround themselves with self-doubt and inflate their limiting beliefs or work. with a coach who reinforces the limiting beliefs, which I hate so much. And I just reassure them like, hey, when you sign up, I know you're very, I know you're very optimistic. That's great.

Life is still going to happen. Shit's still going to happen. You're still going to have trouble. This is going to be hard. I'm here, though. Okay? Don't run away. That's your pattern.

I'm here. Keep going. I'll teach you how to keep going. And I promise you, you'll finally be consistent. because yeah you've been consistently trying to lose weight but you've been consistently having shiny ball syndrome with every fad and everything and you've tried everything except for just trusting yourself for like a month and that's like oh my god I feel so much better and this and that my I'm wearing jeans I never wore before I'm finally walking like 7,000 steps and it's like yeah I knew you could you just didn't know that you could If you could go back in time and give yourself a piece of advice, when would you go back? And what would you say? I would go back to my 18-year-old self and is taking a picture in the living room, just like miserable and just like angry with my shirt off.

And I'll be, why are you so like angry? You're fit. You're in shape. You're a good guy. Why are you so angry? And I would finally be like, because I hate myself, because I don't think I'm in shape. I don't think I'm a good guy. I don't think I have anything.

I just put on a facade and wait to get drunk for the next weekend to be a party animal. And I really think that I would have saved a lot of years of self-torture and not knowing my value and not trusting that I could show myself in front of people or be. be myself or have flaws and I think it would have saved a lot of misery but also that's what made me who I am today so I can't be that upset about it. What advice would you give to someone who is maybe on a journey of improving their health, maybe it's improving their fitness, maybe it's finding a version of masculinity that doesn't suck, maybe it's saying something that they believe to be true about the world that they're afraid to say. So what advice would I give someone just looking for

guidance? Yeah, that's a better way to put it. What do you want? I know what you think that people would want. I know what you believe you should do. You should be strong. You should be in shape. What does that mean to you? Why do you want that? You need to answer specifically. Otherwise, you're going to be doing so many different things for so many different reasons and you'll never be able to keep track. But if you pinpoint what it is that you want out of this, then you can actually you have something tangible and you can see your progress in real time and be realistic and patient with yourself. But if you really go and by other people's expectations or you have an idea in mind that you compared yourself to, it's always going to be draining and daunting and you'll

subconsciously be pulled away. So find out what it is that you really want, why you want it, how you're going to get it. And let's make an actual game plan on how to do this sustainably so that you're not starting over again in a month. James Coppola, where can they find you and keep up with your work? Instagram, James underscore Coppola, C-A-P-P-O-L-A. TikTok is J- underscore Copp-C-C-P-C-C-P-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-O-P-O-P-O, but my YouTube sucks. It's just, it's just nothing. And James, thank you so much for coming on, and we'll do this again soon.

Great, man, thank you. Thank you.