The Game with Alex Hormozi - ❌❌Why I Stopped Training My Clients Like I Trained Myself... ...and Why “Crappy Training” For You May Be Just What They Need | Ep 95

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

"All of the things we do should be geared around how can we get them to stick with it?" Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the importance of understanding individual needs and goals when it comes to fitness training, as well as the trade-offs of certain types of training in regard to long-term health. He also touches on the challenges of running a profitable gym and the need to optimize training for clients' maximum benefit.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:00) - Personal preference doesn't equal what's best for everyone's fitness.(4:51) - Personal experience with injuries led to a realization about sacrifices.(8:57) - Obsessive pursuit of growth and progress had negative physical outcomes.(10:47) - Informed decisions now may differ later, focus on lifelong training for profit.(13:03) - Minimize risk and prioritize business success when training clients differently.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Today, I wanted to say some things that will probably bug a few of you. But it stems from a conversation that I had on Friday on one of our legacy calls with a gym owner who is taking our advice or trying to figure out how to take our advice where we say you should transition your large group classes to three sessions a week. And that's purely math. I have no beef with training more. It's just that simply given the amount of space and how many people you can train per session, the math does not work out you will actually reach a point of full capacity

before your gym is profitable to the extent that most of us signed up for so you can probably make two three thousand dollars a month of profit where your gym is at full capacity at its main sessions but you're still not making any money and that's because you've basically sacrificed the capacity of the facility so that you could train people every single day because that's the belief that we had as gym owners or fitness people right and so So I came, and I just want to kind of tell you the story of how I came to this, because when I started my first location, I wanted every single person to lift weights and count their macros, right? Because that's how I trade, right?

And so I wanted to preach the gospel, right, of truth. The issue that I ran into is that everyone who I was training was not me. And the further along in this path I go, the more. reserved and more general I am when it comes to fitness stuff because I'm going to try and tie like a few different like big things into this one video about training. So one of the things is that people are actually, if you really look at this on a longer scale, like what's the goal here? It's like it's lifetime commitment for those people like lifestyle change. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but power lifters tend to act like power lifters. Crossfitters tend to act like

prosfitters. Yoga people tend to act like yoga people. Runners act like runners. I don't know if you've noticed, but like they are completely different personality types. And you could make one jump, which is that could be associative of the environment, like they're in that culture and then they

start to adopt those things. But the other is that some people's brain chemistry is actually more wired toward a certain type of activity. Have you noticed that people who are runners and measure all their volume like tend to be more particular? They tend to have more planning. They tend to know how much volume they're going to hit at each point in this.

Like Olympic lifters are totally different than bodybuilders are. Right. Like it's a totally different beast in terms of personality types. And so certain personality types are actually attracted to different types of exercise. And if our goal, our self-proclaimed goals that we're actually trying to make people healthier, then it doesn't mean giving them what we want. Now, we tend to look the way we do because our personalities were attracted to a certain type of exercise, like, we'd love to say that, like, I mean, I would love to say I'm super disciplined, and that's the reason that I got into training. Not really. Like, we all trained because we liked it, right? And then we kept doing, people were like,

oh, you're so disciplined. I wish I had your discipline. But the round is, like, we just liked it. That's it. I mean, like, maybe some of you guys did, but, like, most of us just liked it, right? So, the first point is that what you are prescribing for yourself in no way is related to what is good for everyone, right? That may seem obvious, but the brain chemistry thing is something that's been coming out more recently, and I think it's really fascinating, because you could actually test people based on personality type and then match them to the exercise thing that they're winning most attracted to and most likely to stick with based on who they are, which I think is, like, I trip out of that. I think that's super cool from the fitness side. Now, the reason I'm

bringing this up also is that I have these conversations because a lot of gym motors don't want to switch to going from the all day. Like we train back on Mondays and then we train back on Mondays and then we train push on Tuesdays and we train legs on Wednesdays and then we train, you know, Matt Conn on Thursdays, whatever, right? The reality is that most of your clients aren't even going to hit all the workouts anyways. And so it's like, well, I need to give them a balanced routine. It's like, well, most of them aren't showing, like Susie shows up on Tuesdays every week because that's the week, the day that it's convenient for her.

And then what's happening is she just hits back every single, like every single week and doesn't hit any other muscle groups. And so that was one of my major, like, transitions where I went from like, a push-full leg split to a full-body split every day. Because then from a business standpoint, everyone could come at different days. And if they had Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week, and then next week they hit Monday and Friday and Saturday, it's okay because they're still getting a full-body workout.

Now, the conversation that I had with the gym owner was Claire was like, you know what, can people still get a good, can people still get good results training full body? Which I thought was, it was, I'm only laughing because like, I think I trained the first like eight years of my career where I set multiple state records training full body. And so the answer is yes. I mean, and I'm only, like some of you guys are fitness practitioners and I get that and I'm not trying to preach down to me. That's not my intention at all.

I'm just saying that like you're not doing your clients a disservice by switching from a body part split to a full body split. It's matching the training that you have to the realities of their circumstances and their goals. Now, here's one that might get you really tripped up. So I've been trained for 15 years, and I would say like training, training, like I had programming. I started like messing around with weights before that, but I've been training hard for 15 years. Now, I have been, I've had back injuries, I've had knee injuries, I've had hip injuries,

shoulder, trap, bicep, I mean, like everything that you can name, right? And I went to Bill Hartman, who's in, he's, I fast, he owns I fast in Indianapolis. And he's like, world-renowned doctors fly in, just to, you know, he's a lot. to be with this guy's disease. He's truly a savant when it comes to biomechanics, right? And so I flew in there and I was like, listen, man, fix me. Dr. Cashie told me that you were the best and that you would be able to, like, basically get me so I could not feel like I got kicked in the balls in my hip every time

I want to pull sumo, right? And so he was like, before we get to that, let's look at your, let's look at your mobility. And so what he had me do is I was sitting on this bench, right? And he's like, I want you to put your hands like this and then turn. right see how little i can turn now that's normal for anyone who's really strong so if you've been weight training or barbara training for any extended period of time you put on an appreciable amount of muscle mass what happens is the stronger you get the less mobile you become because the stir to you you are right it's specific adaptation to imply demand said principle right and so we want to

output power right from the ground that's when you're squatting or dead lifting or doing whatever right And so your body becomes more rigid so that you can transmit power more efficient, right? So you get stronger. You can lift more weight. But here's the thing. I'm sacrificing my lifestyle because of the training that I have done for so long. And so my body looks fit. But most of the people who come in, if I were to say, hey, like the body that you want is going to have massive sacrifices in terms of what you're able to do from a mobility standpoint later down the road when you're,

actually achieve what you want. I don't know, and I'm being really honest with you, I don't know if I would have signed up for this if I had known what I know now. So real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, you don't know. you, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me, and you'll throw some good

karma out there for another entrepreneur. Bill basically took a picture. He's like, this is what a normal, ah, man, I wish I had my whiteboard, but basically he drew this nice circle and was like, this is what most people look like if you look from the top down. Spine is in the back, nice and round, right? Because they can breathe, they have in the body, whatever. He's like, this is what yours looks like.

And he was like a rectangle like this. It was wider and basically compressed like this. Okay. And so what happens is my skeleton, right, has literally compressed inwards so that I can handle more weight, right? I'm more sturdy. It's a wider base, right? And my hips are so rotated down, right? Like I can touch my toes like this.

I mean, like I have a lot of mobility here. Why? Because my hips are totally forward, right? Because power transmits more easily to the ground. But what does that mean? It means when I get out of my car, I still have to lift my leg up. sometimes because the hip pain is so important. Right?

Now, it means I have a really good deadlift and I could squat a lot, but like, is it really good for life? Maybe. The tradeoff of where performance and aesthetics and health benefits were there stopped probably a year and a half, two years into my training. And then everything after that was really no longer beneficial for my health, right? it was really just an obsessive pursuit of growth in progress despite the physical outcomes that it was like the physical outcomes that had on my body. So I'm going back to the headline of this, which is like why I stop training my clients like myself, because they're not us.

They don't have the goals that we have. And the reality is that most of them have goals of just looking better and feeling better. And those are all goals that can be accomplished three days a week, training in 45 minutes a day. And those are things where you can have some metabolic conditioning in addition to the resistance training that you have. Now, most people are going to achieve 80% of their muscular gains within their first nine months, 12 months of training. Real talk, right? And that's like, that's the talk of like where genetics really plays like a factor. Like, I haven't gained an appreciable amount of muscle mass.

Like the last 15 years or last probably 10 years, I haven't really gained any muscle like any real amount of muscle mass. all I have done is gotten stronger and stronger and made my body more structurally efficient, right, my tendons harder, right, so that I can transmit power so I can lift an arbitrary amount of weight that means nothing, right? I'm just being super real with you. And so if I look back on like my own training career, like I don't know if I would have made the decisions that I have now. And so I'm just saying this to you so that if you have guilt around like, well, I don't train that way, it's like, okay, but they're not you. And probably if informed about all of the tradeoffs that are going to happen, as a result of some of the decisions that you're putting them through right now,

they might not make the same decision, right? And so to bring this full circle, if you want to have a profitable gym, which means that you actually want to train these people for life, your gym needs to be around for life, which means you need to make it profitable, actually, which means that most of their goals can be achieved at three days weeks that you can have a margin and have the amount of capacity to fulfill those people

and actually stay in business long enough to see them through the goals that you originally promised and sign them up for them. So that is my long-winded argument for why. It's okay to have some cardio during the workouts because the endorphin levels that they're going to ever be much higher and it's more addicting than weight training. And some people are going to be more responsive to that.

And if you hit both, then you're going to cover both aspects of personality, which means you're going to have training that is more likely to attract everyone and actually keep them in because there's going to be some aspects that they like and some aspects that they don't. But that's okay. They need both. But you need to make sure that you have that. both within your sessions so that they get more likely to be addicted and that you actually help them in the long term, which is what you promised.

So it's okay to train full body. It's okay to have people train three days a week. They're going to get great results as long as they stick with it. And so all of the things that we do should be geared around how can we get them to stick with it. How can we make exercise that is exciting, that is addicting, that is actually not going to have, like, is not going to be likely to explain. expose them to more risk than is necessary? What does a house mom really get from increasing her deadlift? Are there other ways that we can train her glutes so that she has more developed glutes that aren't deadlifts? If you don't know the answer to that, you should. The answer is yes. There's a lot of ways we can train someone's glutes that isn't a deadlift that doesn't expose them to the amount of risk, right? And just because we powerlifted and we think it's cool to add weight to that, it's probably exposing her to too much risk, given the reward for

her right it doesn't hurt her life was not going to really get any better if she adds 50 80 pounds to her deadlift she develops her glutes there's lots of ways to do it that aren't are nearly as risky and that aren't as risky for your business so um anyways that was a bit of a rant but um i hope you found that valuable in terms of like being okay with with not training people the way that you train because they are not us they're not and so we shouldn't treat them that like and They're not also running a business. And if we had, okay, every single session is two hours, right, or an hour and a half, and we do mobility, right, which a lot of us do, is that going to be a profitable business?

No. So you need to optimize it based on, like, the maximum good for the maximum amount of people so that you can have a business. If you want to train people individually, you want to do things like that, then by all means do it. But like, it's not going to be a scalable model, which is hopefully why you all are here, is like how can I make this thing that I love into something that can actually pay. So anyways, guys, have an amazing tactical Tuesday, lots of love.

Keep being awesome, and I hope you found value with that. That's a lot.