Coaches can get away with a lot if a client buys into the process or better yet they personally like and trust you. The coaching process will be riddled with bias be it setting goals, choice of training tools, exercise selection, programming, food and macro splits. Everything from foods that you’d like the clients to try down to tools ...

Eat till you are xx percent full is the single most pointless advice one can give you. Your stomach is a balloon. A muscular balloon that stretches as you fill it with food or water. And shrinks as it empties. Your brain tracks this and regulates appetite. Only problem is all the other stimulus competing convincing you to eat again. Co...

But how successfully you grapple with hunger will determine how successful you are at sustaining any effort to reduce your calorie intake. The context here is most of us are eating too much. And we have no clue what the right amount of food to maintain status quo or achieve a more optimal body composition looks like. When you moderate ...

It’s easy to forget who your customer is and what they want from you. Especially when you are compelled to compete for attention. The easiest cop-out? Telling your client they are fine as they are and the route they take to become fitter does not matter. Or that you can be healthy at any body fat level. Details matter. It matters what ...

The odds are stacked against it working. Most people want their strength training to contain doses of community, outdoors, options, equipment, physical experiences and of course human interaction. Even with all of that, gyms suck at retaining members. And people also don’t try hard enough to make informed choices at gyms. Getting coach...

By a WHO estimate, 85 per cent of girls and 78 per cent of boys get less than the 1 hour of recommended activity level a day. In our drive to track steps, lift weights, do yoga and play sport, there is one very category of movement that is lost: randomly interacting with our environment to move and just exist. Calling it a category is ...

There’s a fair bit of skepticism as to why we need protein supplements. Can’t you get enough protein from whole foods? Yes, you could. Especially if you consume animal protein or processed plant protein such as soybean. But here’s the problem: the foods that dominate our daily eating are rice, wheat, grain and fat. Let’s say you are a ...

The brouhaha over protein and nutrition recommendations got me thinking. Do generic recommendations make sense? Not just for nutrition. Even exercise and training. Sleep. Stress management. Communication. Just everything that is necessary to produce reasonable wellness outcomes. Many roads to success I argue against one right plate or ...

My current client count is just under a third of the total clients I have worked with. More people have walked in, stayed for a bit and left than have stayed. This is reality. But here’s what I like to know from ex-clients when I run into them: Are you still training? Anywhere? In any form? Are you still active? Are you doing more than...

Do we truly care how crippled a client feels when they walk onto the gym floor. It is a thoroughly unfamiliar setting for most. There are many who through sheer desire or enthusiasm overcome this. But for most people who set foot on the gym floor, they have no clue what they can do there and what can be achieved. Gyms put a ludicrous a...

Why do we let celebs make us believe a product or service is good for us. Tobbacco, shoddily built real-estate and automobiles, terribly crafted educational and fitness offerings, gambling, ponzi schemes, steel products, sugar-laden aerated beverages, ‘functional’ health drinks, booze posing as soda, music records and bravery awards. C...

What do you remember about the gym you work out in ? The equipment? The coaches? The workouts? The amenities? The community? How you felt after working out? Takeaway I really buy the idea that the gym or coaching is like a quirky bookstore. You walk in and it’s filled with books you have never heard of but you feel the itch to read. No...

I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselv...

What does it tell us about ourselves and our consumer culture when an influencer can surprise you by telling you that foods that you eat every single day such as sauce contains sugar or that there’s this much sodium in some dish. It tells us that we have zero structure in how we choose our food. We do not plan our daily eating with any...

The dilemma for the Indian consumer. Our food regulator is asleep at the wheel. Tainted protein powder, milk, spices, fruits. You name it and food product has been tainted. It took independent studies or foreign regulators to highlight contaminants in our food supply. And there are several local companies that have been ringing the ala...

My daughter twirls and spins without inhibition and without giving a hoot as to who is watching or where she is. The kid next door jumps simply because she can. She jumps off cots, sofas, stairs, anything really. Kids do skin the cats on rusty monkey bars because they can. They move with a sense of wonder and fascination simply because...

I feel full … Can mean two things I am so stuffed, I can’t eat another bite. This ability of a food is called satiation. It is a meal or food’s ability to make you stop eating with smaller portions or fewer bites. I am so full from my last meal, I don’t feel like eating yet. This ability of a food is called satiety. It’s a food or meal...

85 per cent of girls and 78 per cent of boys get less than the 1 hour of recommended activity level a day. -WHO We don't move enough. There are more cars, bikes, buses, trains, planes per head than in the past. Life is convenient to the point of being counterproductive. Our ancestors had to walk more and more of our ancestors were farm...

Results matter. All the content you consume, all the activity you take on, the protein shakes, gym fees, equipment purchases and nutrition habits you foster need to yield and maintain results. One of the simplest ways to measure outcomes in your body composition. WHAT A DEXA SCAN SHOWS YOU The DEXA scan result below shows you what perc...

We loathe to advertise results. Don't get me wrong. Results matter A LOT. But here’s how we define what it is NOT: * Kgs/pounds lost * Before and after photos * Inches lost or gained * Improved strength as measured by force output, jumping, PR’s etc. All those metrics are measures of certain habits, processes, lifestyle changes that a ...

It is not the information that makes the difference, but better use of information through better judgment. We are not all equally gifted or talented. This will still be true in the information society. Lee Kuan Yew Does being presented with calorie information affect the decisions you take ? I had dinner at Little Italy. We ordered a ...

'I always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was that Man can be improved. I’m not sure he can be, but he can be trained, he can be disciplined. I’m not sure you can actually change the character of a man but you can discipline him and make him, you make a left-hander write with his right hand but you can’t rea...

Here’s a simple reason for an Indian/sub-continent brand to exist in the exercise space. Not just a brand that mindlessly imports equipment. But actually designs and make things that are meant for the audience they cater to. Dip bars in India are far too wide. Hack squats don’t allow people below five feet five inches in height to setu...

We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort. Maciej Ceglowski Replace the word knowledge in the above quote with strength, technique, habit, mobility, conditioning levels, eating habits, sleeping habits, laying off screens etc. Every small or b...

Our training facility isn’t open all day. This is a choice I made since Day 1. And I credit my former employers The Quad in shaping this choice. We are open for what I call peak demand hours. Much like pubs and restaurants, we are open for business for a few hours in the morning, an hour in the afternoon and a couple of hours in the ev...

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack? Saying no. Techniques and hacks are all about managing what happens when you say yes to too many things. All the techniques and hacks in the world never add up to the power of no. Having fewer things to do is the best way to get things done. I’m very careful with my time and attention...

Judging an athlete the way you would judge Chris Hemsworth or Hugh Jackman from that one 60 second sequence in a movie every two years is stupid and a disservice to the athlete. Firstly, most athletes who play cricket, tennis or any sport would not be well-served maintaining the low body fat levels and dehydrated status that would be a...

‘ At least yours is from just a weekend. My metabolism has been slowing down since I turned 30!’ The fault, dear reader, is not in our metabolism, but in our energy intake Metabolism like the word *uck means so many things. It comes attached with several adjectives or adverbs: slow, fast, high, low, medium are just a few that get strun...

All efforts to maintain muscle, bone density, tendon health come down to a key measure : the amount of force you can apply. What we think of as weakness, fragility or frailty is the inability to produce enough force when you need it. The force could be proactively or reactively exerted. But the capacity to produce it exists in our musc...

Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do. Walt Disney Here’s how people see gyms/workout spaces: 1. Monotonous 2. Boring 3. Lonely 4. Primarily for vanity for goals such as ...