The Food Medic - S9 E2: Creating healthy habits for busy people with David Birtwistle

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

This week I'm joined by David Birtwistle, a renowned online fitness and nutrition coach.He’s the founder and head coach of the personal online coaching company Endeavour Life, helping to integrate sustainable healthy habits into busy lives. And for those who don't know, he's also my boyfriend.David completed his undergraduate in Strength & Conditioning Science at London’s St Mary’s University and since then has been working in the industry for over a decade, as an in-person coach and subsequently moving online to create his 6-figure online coaching company.Find more about David on Instagram @David.Birtwistle & check out his resources and coaching services at: https://linktr.ee/david.birtwistleIn this episode: New Year resolutions and common mistakes when goal setting What David has learned from coaching clients for over 10 years Healthy behaviours to prioritise when short on time Overrated health trends and products Advice for people joining the gym (or returning) in January The importance of rest days Overcoming the challenges of personal training online If you enjoyed this episode, you know what to do – please leave us a review, a rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with someone you think will love it too. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. I'm your host as always Dr. Hazel Wallace. So today's guest is David Birtwistle who many of you will remember from the last season but he interviewed me then so I'm going to interview him today. You might also know him as my boyfriend. David is a highly experienced online fitness and nutrition coach. He's also founder and head coach of the personal online coaching company Endeavor Life, which provides proper coaching for everyday people. I'm lucky to see David coach clients from all over the world when it comes to their health and fitness. And so the reason I wanted to get him on the podcast was to share some of that knowledge

with us today. In this episode, we talk about mistakes people often make when it comes to New Year's resolutions, overrated health trends, and advice for people who are starting a new health and fitness journey this year. As a small disclaimer, when we recorded this episode, I had just recovered from the flu, so I sound a little bit bunged up and chesty. I hope this doesn't take away from the quality of the episode. It's a brand new year and naturally many of us are setting goals and resolutions for 2023 and one of my resolutions is to be more consistent with my bedtime routine so that I can set myself up for better sleep and recovery overall. One tool I'll be using to help me with this is my Whoop. Many of you will know I'm a huge fan of WHOOP already, and I've recently joined their scientific advisory board. But if you haven't heard of WHOOP before, let me quickly explain.

WHOOP isn't just another fitness tracker. WHOOP is constantly measuring important metrics and vital signs like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, activity levels and sleep performance. The WHOOP algorithms then process all of these inputs to provide you with personalised recommendations and coaching feedback to help you accomplish your goals, whatever they might be. So if you're setting some goals, whether it's preparing for your first half marathon or like me, trying to get more sleep, WHOOP are here to help each and every member in their community set and smash their goals and resolutions for 2023. If you're interested in improving your health and overall performance, you can go to join.whoop.com slash thefoodmedic to get started. David, welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. Thank you. Oh, it's good to be back.

I wasn't sure I'd be back in here quite this fast, if I'm honest. Not many people come on a second time. So you're one of a very few. I actually do feel honoured. Although, to be fair, the last time I was on, I was interviewing you. Yeah. So I thought it'd be nice to chat to you this time. And not only did I think it would be nice to have you on,

lots of my followers and listeners requested you specifically. So shout out to those people who are listening. Shout out to the crew. And for people who don't know, David is my boyfriend and we live together. And I get a very much fly on the wall experience to the work that you do.

I hear you speaking to clients all the time, and the information that you give out to them is so valuable. And because this podcast is going out in January, I was thinking there are so many good nuggets of information that I think you can share with people. And I'm hoping that's what you're going to bring today I'm going to do my best it is quite I mean it's quite interesting because I know that when we first started dating your perception of what I do versus what I actually did was quite

disconnected wasn't it but then as a result of you literally watching me do client calls you're like oh okay that makes a lot of sense yeah and I think I mean we connected years ago like pre-relationship and I personally feel like you as a coach have really evolved over that time and you've also done a few things in that in between that time frame which we can talk about in a minute which I'm sure also added to your experience like personal experience but also your business experience so let's just go back to the start tell us like about your journey how you came to be David Britt Whittle who you are today and yeah db all right let's do it so I'm gonna try and keep it short and sweet. Just give the highlights.

So I was born up north in Lancashire and was quite a high energy kid. Got into a bit of trouble. Shock. Shock, I know, right. Couldn't sit still. Just really struggled with learning and focusing on stuff. My parents moved down south and i used

to get in a bit of trouble at school and then one of the parents at school were like oh you should go and play rugby right you got too much energy go and get that take it out on the pitch so i started doing that and i was quite good and then i got selected to play for england under 16s which as a result of playing for england waspsby Club scouted me so I then moved to London to train full-time with Wasps unfortunately although the goal was to go pro I couldn't because I had a complete tear of my ACL which were on the ligaments of my knee so I spent like about half the time I was with them actually in recovery and rehab which was such a massive shame and a massive like block and it was like the first

real setback I ever had in life because it was the the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world was to be a professional rugby player like to you know at the time like England won the world cup in 2003 and I'm in a position to go pro in 2006 2007 and so like all I wanted I did not care about girls I did not care about school I did not care about anything else that was going on in the world I just wanted to go pro and then it got you know shattered and then that dream disappeared and um that was like really hard to deal with but as a result of spending so much time working with the rehabilitation coaches and the physios I like really started to develop a love for improving the physical abilities of people.

And to see what my capacity was as well, I thought that was really, really interesting. So I then went to study strength and conditioning science at university. Did that for three years, but kind of had never thought about the longevity of it. Came out and was like, right, I've got two options. Either I'm a PT and I work with general population people or I'm an S&C coach. But S&C coaches get paid pennies. Like it's a very underpaid job unless you're at the top

and in a very well-paid sport like the NFL. UK sports, not so much. So I was like, right, I'm going gonna go down the gem pop route and i started out as a pt doing it in gyms going to clients houses generally kind of building up a bit of a network of people but i always wanted to like do more and not just be like david burtisall but be a business or definitely premature like in hindsight it was definitely like i should have just focused on me but um i started running boot camps on the grass, like in the commons of West London. I was charging people like two pounds to come.

And I was just like, if it's wet, if it's dry, if it's dark, if it's bright, you know, if it's raining, we're out there training people for a couple of quid just to like transition from you know working with athletes to working with gen pop and then from there i was working as a pt for probably like five or six years and then started to go online about five years ago and now i've run endeavor life and we have clients all over the world and have developed a completely holistic approach to training and to having a healthy lifestyle that is so far from what I first did and my approach when I was younger that's um I think for like a lot of people they won't have expected you to have kind of started your journey so early on yeah I've been coached for like a decade i know

which is a long time the other thing which i know people won't forgive me if i don't bring this up is the dating shows that you're on yeah in that time frame um and when i did say that you're coming on the podcast there were so many questions about this they were like what did he learn from being on Too Hot To Handle was it a good experience would he do it again so let's just briefly touch on that the elephant in the room let's just debate let's go through this all right because it's it's something that happened between the first time we met and then when we started dating as well I know know. And it makes you so awkward, doesn't it? Well, actually, not really. I'm just like, it was one part of your life and we weren't together.

So it doesn't make any difference to me. And from our conversations, I know the reasons why you did it and that it really added to you as a person now. So I'm like it's fine by me all right well let's let's go through it then so too hot to handle that came out in April 2020 just as we're all in lockdown right we filmed it a year before it took a year to edit and I got cast on it six months before that. So from when you guys saw it on the first day, the process for me had been 18 months to two years in the making. After doing PT and coaching for like four years or three years, I was like, I don't know what the career path is here.

I don't know how I'm going to be able to provide for a family long term. I don't know how I'm going to progress things. Like, where do I go from here? I'm already a PT. What's the level up? And so I thought it was a dead end job, if I'm honest so I actually went back to university did a degree in engineering so I spent four years back at university I'm very proud to to say that I graduated with a first class honours degree in petroleum engineering and that was one of the things that really started to elevate my life not that I used that degree

in any way right I mean you tell me random science pieces of science knowledge it works when we're watching Breaking Bad but it's more like what I learned along the process of doing that and like my shift in mindset anyway so like I did that and I actually had started doing the online coaching stuff whilst doing that second degree. And I thought, right, well, like, this is great. Someone from the casting team contacted me about Too Hot. They didn't really give much away, but they said it's a new show. They said it's going to be for a major worldwide streaming service. I was like, well, that's either Amazon or Netflix, really.

And if it's Netflixflix netflix make great content so it's probably gonna be sick so i was like right i'll just go along for the ride if it goes well it'll really boost my profile and that'll put me in a better more advantageous position moving forward it's essentially free marketing so that's that's why i did it but my whole approach was like just be you be 100 you commit to the process but don't do or say anything that is going to get you in trouble because and you know we spoke to a psychologist before going in and they're like they can edit you however they want but they can't put words in your mouth so don't say something that you might later regret so i just like went into it with this this attitude and the show did really well and i got a lot of like positive attention off the back

of it um and that's really helped to like accelerate my business that I was already doing. But it was a pretty mad time, to be fair, because social media was exploding and we were in a lockdown. Yeah. So it was like a crazy juxtaposition. So, yeah, that's what happened. It was overall positive for sure yeah but certainly was stressful as well how did it change you from going to like how many followers you had to having a million followers overnight um it changed me in the sense of i became more aware that I was talking to more people so like the knock-on effects of things that you do become greater um I kind of started to take things a

bit more seriously almost like Instagram is a bit more of a business or it's like your marketing aim outside of your business yeah as far as it actually changing me because too hot to handle was actually about although the for the guys that watch you might not fully realize but like the way it's sold to us is like this is a show to help people create deeper more meaningful connections with other people right like that is like you wouldn't realize that that's literally what we do it's like going through therapy it was like being in group therapy for a month and everything's recorded there's so much that you guys didn't see like i'd spend hours in the diary room talking to a camera about my deepest fears and feelings and stuff they didn't show any of it there was challenges that we did that you guys

didn't see um and so like i came out of it in such a better mental headspace with with regards to relationships and our the quality of our relationship i would largely put up to a lot of the benefits and and qualities that i developed as a result of being into your dandle it's quite like i i yeah but that's only because i committed to it and that's like it's always been my my attitude is like whatever you're doing do it properly do it really really well and then you'll get something out of it or like you'll fail and you'll learn something new yeah it's i think people will be shocked that i still haven't watched it don't watch it yeah i don't really intend to i think like that was part of your life that i wasn't part of and that's like a different chapter yeah but it's really interesting for me to hear the experience

yeah because also well the experience that i had is not the experience that you'll see either yeah so it yeah it's nothing it's actually quite impressive that you haven't watched it it shows a lot of integrity and and um mental strength on your part and it's not just one show there's two maybe we'll save that for another time right i'm conscious that we've just been chatting about random stuff so far and i really want to get into some nitty gritty habit building support for the new year conscious that this is a January podcast. When I was thinking about questions for you, I was like, what's David really good at? And it's really good at distilling health information and making it really easy and accessible for busy

people. And one of the most common New Year's resolutions is related to health and fitness. I think it's like the top, but not many people actually stick to it so I think we can talk a little bit about that today first of all are you making a new year's resolution uh not really no I systematically create new goals for myself as we go through the year and so I've not got any intention of creating a new resolution as such what are your what are your feelings about them because I feel like some people are either for or against New Year's resolutions. I mean they can be it can be a great trigger for people to do something positive in their life so often people oftentimes people need a trigger they need something to prompt them

to make a change either it could be a negative thing that's happened that they want to react to or it could be a social cue that they're reacting to it could be turning 30 or 50 sometimes people just need a trigger so I'm like absolutely for the idea of making new year's resolutions for sure goal setting is really important if you want to achieve something you've got to know what you want to achieve but then break it down into manageable steps and then just start taking action immediately repeatedly consistently until you get much closer to that goal yeah i think like regardless of the time of the year you can do this go through this process but i think that january is just like a stimulus for people to do it right yeah and i mean i i love using december as my like reflection month

and then at the end of december like planning my goals for the year ahead. And we're very different in that sense. And that like I make a spreadsheet for my New Year's resolutions and break it into personal goals and work goals and health goals. But I know that's not for everyone. And then I like to come back to it throughout the year and see how far I've gotten. But because a lot of people will get started and maybe super motivated for January and then fall off the bandwagon, so to speak. What are some like common obstacles or mistakes you see people make, especially when you're working with your clients when it comes to making these goals?

Is it that they're too big or? Yeah, the most common one that people do when they're doing it by themselves is they make goals that are too, not that the goal itself is too big, but the approach is too radical. It's too much change in a short space of time. That's the most common problem. So like we as humans, we get by by building habits that basically work autonomously without you thinking for you making decisions like most of the decisions you make in the day are autonomous right you don't think about everything you just do it and when you start changing those habits it becomes a conscious decision that you make and there's only so many times that you can make a conscious decision that

goes against a habit that you've already got instilled before you stop doing it and so if you try and change too many things at the same time the effect psychologically on you of making those decisions repeatedly and with big side effects that might have large knock-on effects into your life is dramatic and so pretty quickly people give up because they've tried to do too much too fast. So it might be committing to going to the gym too many times a week. It might be that you're going to completely overhaul your diet and do something completely different. You know, like any of the ridiculous diets like keto or Atkins or paleo is another one. Just doing too much, trying to create too much rigidity and whatnot too fast

is a surefire way that people will stop and it's usually about two weeks is about the cup usually so if someone's going to give in it'll probably be about two weeks and that's because you get like you start something you've got very high motivation right your desire to change things is very very high so you take action you create a plan if you're smart and you'll start doing that you'll do that for a couple of weeks you'll be still struggling with the changes to your normal routine you'll be still making conscious decisions because they've not become habits yet so it's still a challenge but your motivation is dropping off it's coming down because it doesn't it's not constant motivation is not a constant thing it's not something that we all have an abundance constantly it varies so this motivation starts to

come down after about two weeks you're finding that your motivation's dropped you are still struggling with things because they're not habit yet but you've not really seen the results you wanted yet because the truth is if someone's fat they didn't get fat in two weeks and if someone's thin they didn't get thin in two weeks changing your body shape happens over time changing your life happens over time everything happens over time building a career happens over time and so most people get to that two-week point and then they are oh this is this is too hard i'm not getting the results that i want and so they stop but if at that point when you get to that two-week mark even though your motivation is dropped you keep consistently doing the processes

and you build those habits out within about four weeks those habits start to really form properly they just become something that you do you stop thinking about them as much and they're something that just happens to be a constant in your life you're also going to get results by that point right four weeks of doing anything consistently will start to drive results and then as a result of that the motivation will come back up and so that then leads into this positive cycle of taking action getting results getting motivation taking action getting results getting motivation taking action getting results getting motivation then it just cycles but most people don't give it long enough to get through it because the thing they try and do at the start is too dramatic so the solution is smaller goal

or smaller steps to get in there yeah so there's a couple of solutions if you do something by yourself you've got to make sure that the plan that you put in place is a sustainable plan. When you think about it, you've got to think, can I do this for a while, like a month at least, maybe two months, is this something that is a sustainable thing based on the other considerations I have in my life? What's work life?

What's my social life going to be like? What's my relationships? Am I going on holiday? Have I got anything else stressful coming up that I need to take into consideration? Look at your life as a broader thing and think is the plan that i'm putting in place going to be sustainable for four weeks if you're going to do it by yourself then you need to do that and for most people it's going to be less than you think right it might be like committing to going to the gym twice a week like that's fine that's much better than not going in at all right it might be something

like committing to making the lunch that you eat every day at work at home and taking it with you something like that that then builds into a habit however if you want to make a faster change and you have a coach like all the clients that work with me we can set bigger targets and we can make more change more quickly because when they get to the point of dropping off, their motivation is dropping. They've got accountability and support to keep them on track. So it's like, you know, going down a road or it's trying to get from A to B in a car. You've got a couple of different options. You can just get in a car by yourself, try and get from A to B, just looking around and stuff.

Probably take a bit longer. You might go wrong a couple of times, might hit a couple of dead ends. But if you try hard enough, you'll probably get to your destination. Or you can follow road signs and try and look and figure your own way out there using free information. That could be like a free guide on the internet. It could be listening to podcasts whatever or you can put the destination into a sat nav and get taken directly from a to b in the fastest most efficient and effective way

and that's essentially what the difference is between doing it by yourself figuring it out doing it by yourself with free information or having a coach and that's what I do. A lot of people who listen to this podcast are very busy isn't everyone and a lot of people work shift work and we're probably coming out of a period where we're pretty chill and coming out of the Christmas coma into another busy period. What are some of the kind of low hanging fruit that you recommend people start with when it comes to trying to improve their health? Because you've just identified where a lot of people go wrong. And I hear it as well on my platform. It's where do I start? And then they think they have to start with everything. They need to overhaul their diet. They need to be in the gym every day. I hear it as well on my platform. It's where do I start? And then they think they have to start

with everything. They need to overhaul their diet. They need to be in the gym every day. They need to be getting 10 hours of sleep. They're just adding in all these supplements. And it's just so overwhelming. What are the kind of really basic things that you think really move the needle forward? Love this because that's what I believe. It's all about what's the thing that's going to create the biggest change with the least effort and so the first thing i would say to everyone is sleep it is incredible the effect that sleeping properly has on your body um we love sleep we love sleep so much it's great being in a relationship with someone who loves sleep as well because what time do we get into bed at like 9 30 at 9 30 yeah sleep is the the number one recovery tool

don't come at me with foam rolling and ice baths and massage guns and cbd oil and talking about how beneficial if it is if you're not sleeping enough like they're a waste of your fucking time i'm honestly cannot get over how much value people place on these things when they're not sleeping enough it's like baffling the thing that really set it off for me was that we are helpless when we're asleep if we're in the in the wild, animals can just come and grab you. Do you know what I mean? You're helpless. From an evolutionary standpoint, being asleep, dumb idea. You want to be awake all the time, so you're alert, yeah?

So sleep must be so important that we need to spend a third of our life in that completely helpless state when i got my head around that i was like obviously yeah it must be really important then and it is like it has such a huge impact so getting a good night's sleep you need to prioritize it because a lot of people that are busy they'll work and that's a big priority obviously you got to earn money 100 agree with this and then because they've worked a long shift, they might think, oh, I want to unwind and watch Netflix and go on TikTok and Instagram and go out for drinks in the evening or whatever.

And then they'll sacrifice their sleep and they'll wake up really tired and everything just becomes a slog because they're not making you know seven to nine hours every night and non-negotiable like your ability to do literally everything in your life improves significantly if you sleep properly and not only does it prevent like almost every illness as well like it's it's incredible so yeah sleep is the number one number one tool but the great thing is you can like if you don't get seven to nine hours of good quality sleep at night you can have a nap in the

day yeah a guilt-free nap imagine taking 20 minutes in the day just to like snooze it's the tricky thing with naps in that like you have to get the sweet spot in terms of how long you nap so we're finding this week and it's like 25 minutes and i can never time it right because it takes me a little while to actually fall asleep and then i'm like how long should i set my alarm for and then like yeah you either nail it and you feel great in the afternoon or you just feel really groggy or it impacts your sleep later so um i think matthew walker says like to try do it like really early in the day i think he even recommended before midday but let's just say like pre-2 p.m is a safe nap time yeah and

try to stick to 25 minutes yeah i would probably if i was going to do it i'd put a 30 minute timer on my phone yeah like right i'm gonna snooze timer's on head down but you can sleep anywhere we literally sit on the plane we've not even taken off and david's there snoring away it's the best place to snooze sleeping on a plane is guilt-free snoozing because you don't have any internet at all you don't have any contact with the outside world there's not really enough space to work on your laptop because i'm not quite rich enough to get business class and so i'm like i'm just gonna snooze they don't do business class to dublin babe they don't right now don't do business class and so i'm like i'm just gonna snooze they don't do business class to dublin babe they don't right now don't do business class today but so i'm just like yeah well this is

i'm just gonna fall asleep that's true that's true so we love sleep we do so sleep is definitely the absolute number one thing um the next thing would be reducing junk food maybe a better way of rephrasing that would be increasing vegetable intake, adding more vegetables. Because, I mean, the truth is if you prioritize vegetable intake, then you will naturally decrease the other stuff as well. Yeah. So adding in a big portion of vegetables to every meal that you have or fruit,

you know, so like they're interchangeable essentially, but you can just have like a big chunk of fruit at breakfast if you don't want to have a big heap of vegetables. But that would be a game changer as well. Not only is it going to help their digestion, but it will make people feel fuller for longer. They won't get that slump in the afternoon if they have a nice big meal at lunch with lots of vegetables in, vitamins and minerals. They'll just feel so much better. What are your simple ways of getting more veggies in?

Well, I tend to buy like it depends right so with food i feel that there's there's different categories of things for which will be prioritized by different people right so taste convenience cost and like quality it's very hard to get all four of those things in one thing. So generally for me, I prioritize convenience, taste and quality rather than price. I mean, I don't spend loads. I shop in Sainsbury's, but I'll buy the ready-made bags of microwavable vegetables that take two minutes to reheat. So I don't have to buy them individually and chop them all up

and then spend loads of time doing that. For me me i'd rather just buy the ready-made stuff you can go into sainsbury's or mark's and spencer's and tesco's and they all have salad bars which is super easy and convenient you can get even at mcdonald's they do the fruit bags so it's just like there's loads of convenient easy things that you can do it's just whether you want to spend the money to do it because obviously it's more expensive. But typically you can't have every single thing. It can't be really cheap and taste great and be healthy and be convenient, really. Yeah, and I think it's like thinking about how you can add it in

without it being a huge overhaul to what you're already doing. And so it could be just adding a side to whatever you normally have or if you always have a sandwich for lunch you have soup in a sandwich we love yeah we do that soup we're eating loads of soup recently that's a great it's so cold so cold at the moment that like soup is like a winter smoothie we change it up we want carrot carrot carrot carrot carrot carrot and tomato and i made a random veg soup this week so i feel like that's a great way to get in lots of different veggies and it's just like a hug hug in the mug i mean a really easy way of getting those vegetables in as well it's just like a hug in the mug. I mean, a really easy way of getting those vegetables in as well is just by roasting them.

Just get a variety of vegetables and just stick them on a tray, a bit of olive oil, and then stick it in the oven. Yeah, that's your kind of approach with all your cooking. It's just stick it in the oven at the same temperature for the same amount of time. Yeah. And hope for the best. Because the things that matter to me with food is that it's healthy that it hits the requirements that my body need as fuel that it's relatively convenient and that it doesn't taste that bad those are the things that matter in priority list right so it's

like these are the most important the first two the third one like if it doesn't taste great i'm still gonna eat it i know so it's very functional because for me like i don't want to waste time cooking not that cooking is a waste of time it's just that for me my priorities lay in other areas of my life at the moment yeah i hear you it kind of bodes well for both of us then because i love cooking and because you have like quite a low bar in terms of what you think what you think tastes good everything i make you have like quite a low bar in terms of what you think tastes good, everything I make, you're like, wow, wow, this is so good. And I'm like, wow, OK, thank you. I feel like a professional chef.

I absolutely love it. Anytime you cook something, it's such a privilege for me for someone to cook for me. I love it because I've been making my own food basically since i was 16 so anytime you cook i am keen yeah no i love it i find it so relaxing speaking of nutrition and kind of going back to work after the new year how can people kind of set up their nutrition around their work day for example um if they're going back into the office or that they're doing shift work or they're teachers or whatever and they need to be prepared ahead of time um so there's two things the first thing would be like the rules that you feel that there are

around food just just pick them all up and then throw them out the window right when you stop eating based on what you were taught as a child and what society kind of tells you to do and you start listening to your body and planning or structuring what you eat based on your own specific environment and things that you're dealing with then it's much better right so like you don't have to eat breakfast as soon as you wake up. Eat breakfast when you want to eat breakfast. Like when you're hungry, you don't have to eat lunch between the hours of 12 and two. You know, you don't have to eat dinner at seven o'clock at night. Do it whenever you want. You can have three meals a day. You can have five meals a day. Whatever works best for you based on your specific requirements but what i would generally

say is that the best thing for most people is to eat most of the food during the time that they're most active so when they are either physically the most active or when they're making decisions and they're like concentrating a lot your brain uses loads of energy to to do all this stuff right so like for most people a big lunch would actually be much more beneficial than a big dinner especially because most people are going to be in breakfast then lunch between 12 and 2 and then they're not going to eat until like maybe seven o'clock at night again so there's a big gap so yeah that'd be the first thing is kind of structure it based on what your body needs and your lifestyle is the second thing i'd say is like keep it really simple follow a protein first approach so that's what i typically teach a

lot of my clients because most of my clients have got a combination of aesthetic goals they want to look a certain way but they also want to make it fit in their lifestyle and they don't want to sacrifice everything so like right if you go with a protein first approach and just follow a simple step-by-step process choose the protein source that you want at that meal so that could be a meat a fish it could be a vegetarian option it could be a dairy whatever you want to do then add to that a big handful of either vegetables or fruit depending on on what that sauce is, because it might be that you want to have chicken and mixed veggies that you've cooked in the oven or you want to have fudge, yogurt and mixed berries. Do you know what I mean? So protein and a big source of vegetables or fruit and then your complex carbs and so you kind of get to build each of the meals that you have yourself looking at where what types of those foods you want to eat and so you're essentially going right

well i'm just going to follow this step-by-step process and it works anywhere you go if you're on holiday if you're eating at work if you're cooking something at home it's completely flexible you just go like what's my protein source where are my vegetables what kind of carbohydrates do i have with that like rice or pasta or bread or potatoes or sweet potatoes or butternut squash or whatever and then if you want to have a little something extra like a little bit of extra fat you can have like avocados or nuts or seeds or some olive oil or whatever but just those four steps protein veggies carbs and then a bit of extra fats at the end and then you can do it wherever and it keeps it super simple it's a really simple way

of getting a balanced meal i think oftentimes when you're buying food out of the home it tends to be more based on one particular macronutrient typically carbs yeah and lower in veggies and lower in protein yeah and it'll be higher in like saturated fat and salt which is fine some of the time like i definitely think it's fine to lean into convenience when you're really busy but if it's something that you're doing all of the time versus some other time then it can eat into your health a little bit this is another thing i talk to a lot of people about is life's about ratios it's about the amount of time you spend doing one thing versus the amount of

time you spend doing the other thing and they can be conflicting but as long as you have the right one in the right ratio percentage comparatively to the other thing you're gonna get a positive outcome so with nutrition is a really good example. Like you can have biscuits and you can have cookies and you can have cakes and you can have McDonald's and you can like eat a pret sandwich or whatever. And you can also make a lot of your food at home. It depends on what your specific goals are in the broader sense of the term health, not just aesthetic, performance lifestyle relationship social like all that kind of stuff but if you have a specific goal then as long as you're like 80 percent of the

way there you're gonna get the result you want without sacrificing everything else yeah and that's what my i'm a big advocate for like making the most of your life by doing the right amount of work to achieve the result you're looking for but also like keeping other things on the burner as well you know like the 80 20 rules a very simple way of putting this like if you do the right thing like 80 of the time you're going to pretty much get the right result and it's not going to take that much effort but the extra 20 is going to take a lot of a lot of effort yeah yeah that's very true. I mean, we've chatted a lot about nutrition. I feel like there's some really good takeaways from that.

But January is also a time where people are, like, stepping into the gym, sometimes for the first time, or going back to the gym. I know for me, like, the last couple of weeks, I've been, between travelling and being sick, I've not really gotten into a routine in the gym and I feel quite apprehensive of going back and for people who are doing it for the very first time the gym in January can be really daunting and there's some really rude people online who just

like make fun of people who like are gym newbies what advice do you have someone who's like starting out or is going back after a long time of being away well the first thing is your mindset has to be in the right place right so you deserve to be there is the first and most important thing that you need to retain that nugget of information at the front of your forehead every single time you step in because everyone is in the gym to better themselves in some way everyone's there doing something uncomfortable because they want to grow as a human being and you're in that same group with all those people everyone's the same we're all doing the same thing so you absolutely deserve

to be in that environment irrespective if it's your first time there or you've been doing it for 10 years like me like everyone has the right to be there so own that space 100 don't make yourself small don't hide away in the corner fucking make yourself big and own the environment that you're in right so that's the first thing have confidence with it now confidence does come with doing things repeatedly achievement accomplishment and repetition but you can fake it till you make it in this sense right but what will really help people is to have a plan and a badass playlist and a badass playlist for sure so if you have a plan be it a free guide off of the internet or you're working with a coach you know what you're going to

do right so it allows you to just really focus on the one thing that you've got so you walk into the gym and you might have looked at your program your workout before and you're like right i've got squats today so you know you walk into the gym you're going up to the squat rack you're going to get the barbell you're going to start setting it up you're going to make sure you're set up you've got your weightlifting belt maybe or whatever shoes you're going to wear and you know what your workout is and you can start doing your warm-ups and you get yourself prepared like you're in your space and that's the only thing that matters it's just what the thing is that you need to do in that moment and you want

to block out the rest of the world get some big fuck off headphones and put on some decent music that just sends you into like a little fairy tale land and that will really really help but for a lot of people the difficulty is they go i'm going to get a gym membership so they get a gym membership and they go but when they get there i don't know what they're doing they have no idea and the truth is like if you just stand there like no one's gonna help you i mean a random pt might come up and like try talking to you and that but in that moment they're not really going to help that much the best thing you can do is have a plan and know what you're going to do i agree i think like having a plan and having a

program is really great and i mean i could write my own program but i have you do it for me because i think like having someone to do it for you also like your buy-in is greater and you feel like you're accountable and you have to like they're checking in on you as well which is great why but not everyone can afford a coach and i appreciate that and i think like guides are great but they also are self-directed so you have to do with it what you will and sometimes they'll use jargon or they'll describe reps or tempo and if you're very new it can just feel like another language i think i mean it depends on the gym that you're in but i would definitely say like utilize the pts you're on the gym floor and that are hired by the gym because oftentimes they're just walking around and have nothing else to do

and as someone who's been lifting for many years I don't mind when people ask me how to use machines if anything I kind of enjoy it because I'm like I remember being that girl who didn't know how to use the machines and like sometimes I'll go to a new gym and I don't know how to use those machines and I have to ask or if I'm doing a new movement that maybe you've programmed I have to get you to like walk me through it because I would much rather do it right than do it wrong and hurt myself or feel like an idiot yeah absolutely I it kind of comes back to like what we're saying about food with you can get taste or health or convenience or price well like with almost anything you either have it happen quickly it happened very very good or cost comes into it you typically can't get

something very low cost that happens fast into a very high standard um so with going to the gym like there's so much free information on YouTube. And Instagram and TikTok. And Instagram and TikTok. Like you're constantly getting new information put out there, but it's disorganized. So you have to figure it out for yourself. So that's time, but it's cheap. Yeah. You know, so there's that.

But then what coaches do and other people, they provide the programs because then it's organized and it's structured and it's somewhat personalized so that reduces your time uh you have to pay a little bit but then the quality goes up and then you can go even further than that where you might have someone like literally take everything out of your hands give you the absolute best service it costs a bit but it takes no time at all right so it's just dependent on what the thing is that's a priority for you and then that'll happen accordingly yeah I completely agree and I think like also the online space for coaches as well as like rowing quite quickly and so you can have a coach from another side of the world who can coach and zoom you or zoom in and you guys can have a regular consultation it doesn't

have to be like a physical PT session which most of us think about when we think about having a PT a lot of people who are listeners to the podcast are PTs and coaches and obviously follow the work that you do. So one of the questions where quite a few people were asking is, if I'm a PT working in a traditional gym and I want to move away from that and move online, what's the best advice that you can give them? Yeah, it's a good question. Being an online coach and being a PT are different skill sets. To be a PT, you have to obviously be very technically capable. You have to have good relations with someone and programming needs to be quite good as well, right? They're like the main qualities.

To be a good online coach, you need to have those skills plus ideally a knowledge of nutrition um you need to have the experience of problem solving people's lifestyle issues and you also then need to know online marketing and sales and business development and how to structure your online business because if you work in a gym and you're a pt it's like pretty pretty straightforward either you're employed by the gym and they pay you and then you might get a commission on pts um or you're a freelance working in a gym where you kind of have an you have a group of people that you can sell to and so it's pretty straightforward whereas the online space is just a huge huge huge huge huge space you know there's

so many people and there's no borders on it so you're competing against all these other people the skills you need to be a good online coach is online sales online marketing branding and then you have to be a good coach on top of that yeah and that's what i've been working so hard on for the past for multiple years is developing my understanding of online marketing social media and uh sales and brand and then how they have such a huge impact on your business and that's not something that we would that pts are taught you're just not taught it no no so you have to learn from someone in my life i spent like almost 30 000 pounds on coaches and mentors teaching me stuff about how to run my business do you think you've earned that back yeah 100 it's

the best investment yeah i'll tell you when i was at university the second time the day that i finished my last my final exam of my engineering degree i paid ten thousand dollars the same day on my credit card because i didn't have the cash to a coach to a mentor a guy called chris dufay who was based out of australia paid him ten thousand dollars i just spent four years at university and the first thing i did was pay ten grand to an australian coach that i'd never met so that he would coach me on how to set up my online business I was like I'll I'll make that money back yeah and it took about six months but I did it there is a lot of value in having a mentor someone who's done it before I completely agree with you on that I'm conscious we need to wrap this podcast up but we finish each episode with three questions

that we ask every guest. I actually let my audience decide on the questions for the season. So this is, shout out to everyone who submitted your questions. There were so many good ones. The first question is, what is one thing you've changed your mind about? Probably the importance of aesthetics in happiness. When I was in my early 20s,

I used to just like really focus on the aesthetic side of training, right? That was the main thing that I like trained for after I stopped playing rugby. But then I kind of like lost motivation for it. So many people put a high value on aesthetics in their goal. But actually for the vast majority of people the more important thing is developing confidence and a habit and what typically happens is people come in they've got an aesthetic goal we'll start working towards that goal but kind of I subtly start getting them to work on other things as well and then they really start to pick up on

those other things like strength or performance or fitness or confidence or posture or being pain-free or having healthier habits and being more energized or sleeping better all of these things and then those are the things that they really start to care about now yes we're all vain people we all have some desire to look good but what i realized is that being in single digit body fat percentages is fucking pointless it is such a waste of energy because it's such a hassle to do and it gives you nothing in return there's like no benefit to it um if you try and do it for a long period of time chances are your performance is going to decrease you have to sacrifice a lot of social occasions honestly it's just like a waste of energy to do your your return on investment is minimal unless you do it for a job stop wasting

your time yeah also no one else cares yeah i think that i'll be happy when I'm like X size or X body fat or whatever is something that like a lot of people grapple with. And it very, very often provides you happiness. I can tell you what provides people more happiness. Progressing. If you've gone from a size 20 to a size 18, you'll be as happy as someone who's gone from a size 10 to a size 8 it's the personal progression and development that people enjoy about themselves walking forward

is what people enjoy and it creates confidence it creates empowerment and energy and that is something it's just about people moving forward people don't like it when they go backwards the second one is what's a non-negotiable in your day making hazel coffee making hazel coffee in the morning would be always the first thing that we do to be honest that is sleep sleep is an absolute non-negotiable for me yeah if i'm going to perform if i've got loads of stuff going on I'm just not sacrificing my sleep especially in the week yeah it's just the absolute number one thing it reduces my stress and anxiety significantly I feel better more energized everything is easier to do I perform better

in the gym I recover quicker I make better decisions around food I can concentrate more I can make better decisions with work I can do do more work. I can think for longer. We have more cuddles. I'm more relaxed. All of these things are directly related to me getting a good night's sleep. And finally, what would be your death row meal? Anything that Hazel makes. Right answer.

I actually think I could probably guess. Can I guess? You can go for it. Yeah, yeah, go. Starters, I think you would have a burrata because you think it's a smooth mozzarella and you love it it's a smooth mozzarella you always get it with especially when like tomatoes are in season a really really lovely tomato and then your main only because you talk about it all the time would be your dad's roast dinner that's nostalgia and deliciously well cooked meat roast potatoes

yorkshire puddings oh just on one plate and then your dessert i would say you'd be pretty happy with an apple crumble especially one that i make i'd be very happy with an apple crumble with a lot of crumble did i get that right yeah it's pretty spot on what do you think mine would be oh this is a much harder question to answer i think we actually asked each other this on our second date so you should know okay 14 months later get it right but your your dietary choices have changed quite a lot in the past year. Come on. I don't actually know.

I definitely can't remember what you said. I'm very sorry. For a starter, put like some sort of like a fish dish. David, that's so vague. Like a white fish. I feel like this is so far from what I would say. I actually don't know. Honestly, I'm not quite sure. You like so many different things,

and they're so nice. I don't know. And they're so nice. Are you uncomfortable? I don't know. And they're so nice. Are you uncomfortable? I just, you know, didn't really answer the question very well, so I feel bad. But what would you have?

I think as my starter, I would go... Fish, right? No. Well, actually, I wouldn't mind, like, calamari, but I was thinking something more bread-based. I quite like, you know, like, bread based i like quite like you know like bread and and kind of like dips like hummus and kind of a bit of a meze to start yeah i remember you saying i'm here for that and then my main i said was would be like a really good italian pizza and a glass of wine and maybe some truffle fries on the side. Nice. Maybe. And my dessert is also my mum's apple crumble with ice cream and custard.

And an espresso martini. So that's it. So don't forget it. Okay. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me back. It was my pleasure. If people want to find out more about you and the work that you do.

And maybe they want to get a new online coach perhaps. Where is the best place to find you? place would be instagram to be honest if you just message me at david.berksall uh drop me a dm and then we can talk but then there's like links in my bio as well where people can go straight to that to get some free stuff amazing let us know what you think of the podcast and if you want david back for third time, Patrick, we'll see. Has anyone done that before? Adrienne's coming on for the third time. So, yeah.

That's all from us. Thank you very much for having me, Hazel. You're welcome. Thank you very much for listening, everyone, as well. Love you, bye. Love you, bye. If you loved it, you know what to do. Leave us a review, a rating, hopefully five stars, and share it with someone you know what to do leave us a review a rating hopefully five stars and

share it with someone you know will love it too thank you so much for tuning in today make sure to subscribe so that you're the first to hear about any new episodes that's all from me see you again next time