What Your Personal Trainer *Doesn't* Know, How To Get Fit FAST & Injury-Free, Ben's Weird Fitness Education & More With Coach Raychel Kosh

My name is Ben Greenfield.

And on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

When I went through their locker room and I was already kind of tuned into things like endocrine disruptors, forever chemicals, microplastics, things like that at the time, I was shocked at how little attention was paid to— I know this sounds silly, but you know about this, Rachel— the shaving cream, the deodorant, the cologne, the bright overhead fluorescent LED light, the unfiltered water. The training table where it was a lot of just like straight-up sugar, whole grains, you know, seed oils. The reason I bring that up is because if you're putting a bunch of money, which many of these clubs are, into developing essentially an elite Ferrari, why would you put all of that into an athlete and then at the same time have them surrounded by endocrine disruptors, circadian rhythm-disrupting light, poor air quality, poor water quality, poor food quality. And especially, why would you do that when it's so easy these days to have cleaner versions?

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

I've known today's podcast guest for a while. How long have we known each other, Rachel? It's been like, what, 4 years?

Yeah, just about.

Yep. So, Rachel Kosch who's joining me on today's show is, I don't want to make you sound old, Rachel, but a real OG in strength conditioning fitness. And, I met her through my company, Ben Greenfield Life, and she quickly took the helm of the coaching program with Ben Greenfield Life and now is the head coach and managing the entire company of Triumph Coaching, our brand-new coaching arm within the Life's Network. So, Rachel herself has deep experience. She's got a master's degree in exercise science and nutrition. She incorporates all the stuff you hear me talking about because we kind of read from the same playbook when it comes to biohacking, nutrition, et cetera. She has a deeper working knowledge of working with women and hormone fluctuations and catering workouts to be specific to female anatomy and physiology than I do for sure. And, she's just a wealth of knowledge in the realm of coaching, strength, conditioning. So, we're recording this close to the new year. It's January 2025 at the time of this recording. So, I know a lot of you are retooling your fitness programs, your exercise programs, looking for direction, workouts, exercises, et cetera. So, I figured what the heck, let's talk all things fitness programming, workouts, online coaching, and beyond. What do you think, Rachel?

Sounds good to me. This is going to be fun. Let's do it.

Awesome. And, the shownotes, by the way, are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/TriumphPodcast, just like it sounds, Triumph Podcast. If you don't know how to spell triumph, I'm sorry. Normally, I would say Google it, but now it's ChatGPT it. Are you using ChatGPT much right now, Rachel?

Oh, it comes in handy for sure. And, the more I use it, the more I'm starting to like it. So, we'll get into that and how it intersects with coaching a little bit later on. But yeah, lots of fun stuff there.

Actually, I plan to ask you about AI and coaching, so we can talk about that why maybe asking GPT to write your workout program, which I've tried a few times, just for me personally when I want to outsource thinking and I'm going to the gym. And, I'll do this when I'm traveling sometimes, which actually kind of works if you know your way around the weight room. You just basically tell GPT, "Alright, I got this, this, this, this, this vibration platform, 2 sets of dumbbells, a kettlebell, and a treadmill. Write me a 45-minute workout that is geared towards whatever hypertrophy." It does a halfway decent job.

Yeah, I agree. And I always say the output is only as good as the input, right? Like you have to have some foundational knowledge of what you're shooting for when you're typing into ChatGPT. And if you do, then it's golden because you're going to get a much better output on the other side to follow.

Right. You don't get a lot of the accountability and things like that and tracking, but we can talk about that later. So I guess big picture before we jump into it, some of the philosophy behind the workout programming and what you do to get the results you get because we've been getting incredible results with Triph coaching. Tell me a little bit about how you got into this. You can skip the part where I kick your butt at pickleball, but besides that because I know it's a painful story, how did you actually get into the exercise science scene?

Yeah. Well, I will bring up pickleball later on to mess with you a little bit, Ben, but just to start off with my journey. So, kind of similar to yours, like a self-experimentation approach. So, basketball was my life for over 20 years. And, when I went through that journey as an athlete, I was just obsessed with optimizing my own performance. And, along the way, I picked up habits, routines. Naturally, you start working with people throughout the years, they start asking you questions, and just really started my journey from a strength training standpoint actually in 8th grade. So I always had really strong strength and conditioning coaches like throughout college, all throughout my career. And that really inspired me to step more into that world. So did have the background in college as well, studying. And I actually have a question for you in just a moment, but the best class I took in my master's program was actually like a counseling class. So I had to sit down with someone, have a mock conversation, coach them through some things, and that was the most value truthfully I got through that experience of studying it in school.

Wow. Did, did they, did they pay this person extra to really freak out on you or just a, just a standard problem?

It was less of that and more of the disengagement. So I had to really pull the conversation and tease it out of this guy, which was a good challenge for me, uh, being an introvert and more, you know, nervous with those types of things. And I've just had to practice and get through that. But, um, That's a little bit about me and my journey.

Real quick, the term strength conditioning has come up a few times. I think people may not understand unless they're really inside baseball fitness business people, the difference between something like that and personal training. And, they are, I think, different. It is different to work with, let's say, someone who has let's say, a certified strength conditioning coach certification through, let's say, the NSCA and someone who has a personal training certification through something like ACE or NASM or something like that. Can you differentiate?

Yeah. So, in my experience, in my opinion, I think the CSCS is the gold standard when it comes to performance strength training. So, this is an approach where not only training athletes, because I do think that we're all athletes in some way, right? Like, we want to perform in life, not just on the court, not just in the weight room. Like, we need to be able to perform in life and show up in business as professionals. So when it comes to that strength training approach, it's more of that functional standpoint, right? Like, we're progressing you, we're keeping an eye on you. I think that some of the strength coaches I worked with in college were just at the top tier of the industry, right? Like there's advancements, there's tools, there's equipment. We're tracking data at a really high level, which I think is key and what we actually use in our program as well to incorporate that personalization piece at a greater level. So there's definitely a differentiation when you're looking for a coach and trainer of somebody that might have taken an online course that maybe took them 2 or 3 hours versus something like a CSCS, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, where you have to have a bachelor's degree in the field, you have to pass a rigorous exam that truthfully less than half of people actually pass. So, there's some standards and barriers there that you have to have the educational background.

Yeah, it's very rigorous. For my first 2 years, I was working in the fitness industry. I had a personal trainer certification. I believe it's through the NSCA, the NSCA-CPT, Certified Personal Trainer. And, the exam and the study materials for that, they were useful but it's generally pretty basic. You learn a little bit about joint angles, a decent amount of anatomy, some physiology, a little bit of nutrition, some special populations guidance. But then, when I began to study for the CSCS, which I eventually got, it is much deeper when it comes to force, power, hormonal adaptations and fluctuations, strength training, and power, cardiovascular, all the different physiological systems applied across a variety of sports. Sport specificity, which translates really to fitness specificity, the understanding the difference in how to train a basketball and soccer player develops the same type of knowledge that helps you understand the difference between training someone for, let's say, fat loss or muscle gain. And then, a lot of special population stuff as well, how to work with people who have cardiovascular disease, people who have arthritis, senior population, high school athletes, et cetera. And, I don't even know if I ever told you this, Rachel, but as I was going through and getting that certification, I interned for 2 years for University of Idaho football. So, I had 2 coaches. I was in the strength room every day. I had to learn how to coach the snatch, the clean and jerk, the deadlift, all the major lifts. I was spotting football players. I'm basically like this skinny— I was maybe 175, 180 pounds at this time in college. This was before I started bodybuilding. So, I'm like the skinny lean guy in the gym who's got the nerd hat on helping out the football players. Fun story, that's also where I met— well, I met my wife in 2nd grade Sunday school, but I started hanging out with her because she ran for the track and field team and they were working out at similar times as the football players. So, I kind of got to hang out and chat with her and get to know her. But yeah, I had a deep dive into the strength conditioning industry in college and it is remarkably different than just personal training.

Yeah, completely agree. I myself interned at St. John's University back when I was still playing basketball in college and would sleep in my car and go to my internship the next morning. And you know, it's just like being around that high-level approach, 'cause athletes, you're getting paid, right? Like your body is your moneymaker, so you better perform. So that's how you know, like there's a higher standard, a higher expectation. And I believe that iron sharpens iron approach of like, If you're around the best, then it's going to rub off on you. And from there, if you're working with the regular busy day-to-day 40-year-old mom, you can apply a lot of those principles but bring them down to a level that's realistic for somebody who's just getting back into a routine, but you have that baseline knowledge, right? And you can make the adjustments from there. And that's where the art of coaching comes in too. And that's what makes it fun.

Yeah. And when it comes to the strength conditioning piece, There was one other thing I was going to tell you when you brought up— gosh, I'm blanking here for a second about the internship that you did. This is another little thing I don't think I told you. I don't think I even talked about this much before on the podcast, but I did my internship. But, what happened was one of the people who got me into even understanding what a freaking barbell was in the first place because I was a total skinny homeschooled geek and I literally didn't even know what to do with a set of dumbbells. But, one of my dad's friends was the Washington State powerlifting champ. His name was Rafael Escamilla. And, all I knew about Rafael was he was the super strong guy who when he come over to the house, he lifts me and my brothers over his head. And, do freaking snatches with us when we were 10 years old or whatever. And, I always thought he was just an incredibly intelligent and impressive specimen physically and mentally, which he was. But, when I was a junior at University of Idaho and it was time for me to go off and do an internship, I thought of Rafael and he was managing the entire sports performance program at Duke University. So, I wound up connecting with him and going down to Duke for about 6 months and working with him in the biomechanics and sports performance lab down there. And again, learned a ton, got to work with NFL players who were there working offseason at Duke. I spent almost 3 months helping to rehab Will Rolfe. I think he was a linebacker at Kansas City Chiefs. And seeing the inside baseball of NFL. He would literally have me drive him and his homies out to, well, basically, I'll just come right out and say it, strip clubs in Durham, North Carolina. I was 17, I think. I couldn't get in and they'd just give me cash to go have a nice meal, eat some sushi or whatever nearby, and then I'd pick them up and drive them back. Get them to bed and then they get up the next morning and show up on the turf to train. So, I had my internship at Duke, but you just learn so much working with athletes that I think does translate really well to the general population once you dive into people who aren't getting paid to perform but just want to look, feel, and operate a little bit like an athlete like you refer to.

Yeah. And, I have a question for you, Ben. So, related to that because I know you've had the opportunity now to go back in and see some of these professional teams, right? Like, since we're still on the athlete sports topic, just curious, like, if you had a recommendation, if they're like, all right, we're bringing Ben in, we want our athletes to perform better, recover better, like, what would that step be for you? Like, what's the one glaring thing you see that some of these organizations are doing wrong?

Here's an illustrative story for you. Ben Greenfield: Let me start with this. First, I have no special secret sauce when it comes to joint angles, mechanics of training, strength training, anything related to the actual weightlifting cardiovascular conditioning component. That's just well-applied science and the ability to be able to coach and motivate. But, I think the differentiating characteristic for athletes or any individual is the environmental factor piece. There are other important pieces, but this is something that I think is something I take into consideration a lot more than the average personal trainer or health consultant or coach. When I raced for Team Timex in triathlon, so Team Timex was basically just a squad of elite triathletes and we travel around the globe racing anywhere from sprint distance to Ironman triathlon, and we were sponsored by Timex. So, they gave us our bikes and our fancy computers and hooked us up with wetsuit sponsors and shoes. And, we typically have training camps on an annual basis where we'd all show up at one hotspot and train. One year we did the Bollettieri Sports Academy down in Florida. And, for 3 years when I was there, we trained at Giants Stadium. So, we'd use their strength conditioning facility, we were on their turf, we were in their arena, and we're in their locker room. When I went through their locker room and I was already kind of tuned into things like endocrine disruptors, forever chemicals, microplastics, things like that at the time, I was shocked at how little attention was paid to— I know this sounds silly, but you know about this, Rachel— the shaving cream, the deodorant, the cologne, the bright overhead fluorescent LED light, the unfiltered water, the training table where it was a lot of just straight-up sugar, whole grains, seed oils, Gatorade Sports Science Institute type of stuff. And, The reason I bring that up is because if you're putting a bunch of money, which many of these clubs are, into developing essentially an elite Ferrari, it kind of shocked me how much attention was given to the training, which again, like I mentioned before, was stellar and way beyond anything that I could personally program with, I think, the excellence of an NFL strength and conditioning coach. But, why would you put all of that into an athlete and then at the same time have them surrounded by endocrine disruptors, circadian rhythm disrupting light, poor air quality, poor water quality, poor food quality? And especially, why would you do that when it's so easy these days to have cleaner versions? And since then, I've gotten to know other teams and coaches who are taking this into consideration like my friend Eric, the strength conditioning coach at Miami Heat. You walk into their facility, not only is it pretty clean, but they've also got infrared, PEMF, oxygen, all the biohacks that you'll see whatever Bryan Johnson doing on Netflix. They're doing that stuff. Golden State Warriors, another example. They're taking into consideration environmental factors, air, light, water, electricity, traditional if you call them this biohacking modalities for recovery and realizing that you can't just out-train a crappy diet and a crappy environment in an athlete. And furthermore, if you optimize the diet and the environment, you're going to have a lot. I wouldn't say better performance from the athlete because you and I both know that there's some really good athletes who will have Big Macs and a Coke and just crush the court, but better career longevity. If you're going to invest XYZ amount into an athlete, let's say $20 million for, I don't know, a 6-year contract, you want every year of that contract to be optimized. You don't want that person fading away when they're 35 because they're experiencing what I think a lot of us maybe experience who are listening in to make this more relatable to the average person. When I was in college, I could drink 6 beers, wake up the next morning, and run 10 miles. I can't do that now. And, an elite aging athlete is the same. They can no longer fuel their bodies with Mac and fries and Coke and go out and perform at the same level. So, I would say, long answer to your question, but what I take into consideration are the invisible variables that can make or break you. That I think a lot of folks don't pay attention to or at least they pay way more attention to exercise and training than they do that.

Yeah, 100% agree. And, that's spot on. That's actually how our worlds ended up colliding in the first place because like I said, my obsession with better performance brought me across your articles and podcasts way back when. And, you might not be able to tell from my pickleball performance, now, but I came from a very modest athleticism ability background. So, it was a lot of like doing those extra things like caring about my circadian rhythm and like recovering better in between the days that I was training and all those little things really do add up. And, I actually don't know if I've told you this story, Ben, of how I even started working at the company. I do get a lot of questions from people about like, "Hey, how'd you—" How'd you start working with Ben?

That's really cool opportunity. I can't remember, but I actually don't remember. Yeah, yeah.

So just a quick synopsis. You had that coach certification course that you ran a while back and something that I hope we can get running back up again soon in some way through Triumph Coaching. So anybody out there that's interested, just keep an eye on that. But went through the course. It was a huge investment for me at the time. I think it was like $5K. And, I literally took out a new credit card and paid off the interest over a year of monthly payments. Yeah.

I think it was like 36 weeks, something like that. Yeah, yeah. And, it was a new module each week for me and just a traditional course where I took all my knowledge, put it into a course, and coaches who are already personal trainers would come and pay to go through it. And then, when they finish, they would have a stamp of certification from me and then, kind of be featured as a Ben Greenfield Certified Coach, that type of thing.

Exactly. Yeah. But the investment was definitely worth the ROI because on the back end, we had a team now of certified coaches who went through your program, right? And they went through that intensive— something that I've never experienced before in other certs I've taken or other courses I've done, or even in my master's degree, right? It was an experience of educating the whole human on like how from everything like you talked about environment and all the way down to fitness programming. And, at the end, it came out with opportunity to work at your company, opportunity to coach clients. Like I said, we have a team now that came out of that. So, that's really the birth of how this all started.

Yeah. And, if I could refine that even more, the idea for that type of certification arose from a book that preceded "Boundless." The first book that I wrote was "Beyond Training." I guess the first big book, New York Times bestselling book that wasn't just kind of a flash-in-the-pan title but actually got some recognition and respect, which I was very proud of, put a lot of work into it. But, the title "Beyond Training" is It is that title because I wanted to write a book about all the things that went beyond just exercise and training. And, this was based on scratching my own itch. This was close to the end of my Ironman triathlon career. I had hypothyroidism, low testosterone, joint inflammation, ton of gut issues, but super fit, fit on the outside or healthy on the outside, unhealthy on the inside. So, that was when I took a very deep dive into hormone optimization, into self-quantification, blood and biomarker tracking, into what are things we can do for recovery that go beyond just sleep and putting your legs up, right? Like compression boots and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy and red light therapy and cryotherapy. And what are the emotional and mental factors that play into looking, feeling, and performing better? And oh, by the way, the food pyramid, that I was trained on in college in my nutrition classes. It turns out that there's some scary truths behind that. I had been following guys like OGs in the fitness industry like Paul Chek and Mark Sisson and learning, "Oh, hey, fat actually isn't that bad and the type of fats and whether they're damaged is an important thing to pay attention to." And, eating giant smoothies full of kale is actually potentially imbalanced and could be harmful for certain people. And, I just learned a lot more than I'd actually learned in nutrition in college. And, after I wrote that book, I essentially took a lot of those same materials and turned them into a course where I could train other coaches and personal trainers how to go beyond what they learned in college or from an average personal training cert and actually think about the body in a much more holistic way. And of course, that's progressed to Boundless and now what we're doing with Team Triumph. And that brings me full circle to what I wanted to ask you about because we've alluded to it a few times. I want to learn more about the actual workout programming and your philosophy when it comes to something like the programming within Team Triumph and the ungodly amount of hours we spent shooting exercise videos at my house Spokane. But before we do, what is Team Triumph exactly? Yes.

So, Team Triumph is a movement, right? This is a community-based movement and that's important because if we try to set a goal, so like you said, it's New Year's time, 2025, we all have high hopes of what we're going to accomplish this year, which is great. I want us to capitalize on that. But we can't do it alone, right? If we try to do it in isolation, we inevitably run across life, you know, punching us in the gut and we gotta pick things back up. But if you have that community around you, it's so much easier to lean on them when times get tough and to just motivate yourself and have that accountability piece. So what Triumph Coaching really represents is getting you amongst like-minded people so we can all work together towards our goals. And taking that a step further, it's the accessibility piece, right? So, we are trying to break down barriers in a world where prices are getting higher for basic things like groceries. You're in the longevity field. How many crazy gadgets if we had an à la carte budget we could go out and buy, right, in a perfect world?

And the FOMO that comes with that. "Oh, wait, I just bought that red light and this one has better frequencies and wavelengths apparently." Exactly.

Yeah, it's always a constant, you know, chase to try to get the latest and greatest shiny object. But at the core of it, we want to make it very simple, easy, and accessible for people to gain access to their data and to be able to apply that, um, to fitness, to nutrition, to lifestyle, um, for those that maybe haven't gotten any type of lab work or anything done before and they don't know where to start. So that's kind of what it's about. The two big pieces are community and accessibility.

Okay. So, we've got community, meaning Team Triumph is not a team that you have to apply to join, right? If you're part of the Life Network, essentially you have access to all of these Team Triumph workouts and all the people who are doing them along with you?

Exactly, yes. And, I want to shout out our other OGs, our Team Boundless members who we trained for several years and now we finally have our own platform. So, some of our loyal members like Patrice, Hamad, Vlad, Lisa, Anne.

Ben Greenfield: Oh, we got to tell the story about that though, Rachel. So, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but I may inadvertently do so. So, I flew down to Austin, Texas for 3 days of filming for this fitness app called Ladders. And, We then took all of that content. I literally exercise all day long. I swore I'd never do it again, then I found myself 4 years later doing it with you at my house. But, just box jumps and kettlebell swings and videographers and go, go, go and just literally hundreds and hundreds of exercise to create an exercise database and workout templates for folks and a workout team that could follow my workouts. Well, long story short is we wound up migrating away from Ladder and having basically our own internal Team Boundless. And, I forget the— do you remember the platform we were using to coach Team Boundless members in the interim between Ladders and the now Team Triumph?

Yeah, we've been using Train Heroic, it's called.

Yeah, that's right, Train Heroic. So, you could go in with Train Heroic, third-party app, And, you'd be able to access all these videos and coaching from Rachel and I and a group of coaches using our style of programming. And then, what happened is when we launched Life Network, and for any of you who haven't yet checked it out, it's at golifenetwork.com. Within Life Network, we created Team Triumph. We took all that programming but then we beefed up the exercises Rachel and another coach of ours, Sarah. They flew up to the house. You remember the video shoot for sure, Rachel, right? Oh, yeah.

We had fun torturing you with a bunch of pull-up variations back to back to back. That was really fun.

Yeah, 104 degrees in Spokane. They had me out on the blacktop pavement for 3 hours swinging kettlebells and my feet kept getting burnt and I felt like a little crying baby switching out my socks to find a sock that could actually not give me toe blisters. And Rachel had me hanging from a pull-up bar doing This is probably just poor forethought and vision, but doing all 20 pull-up exercises back after back, which we probably should have interspersed with push-up exercises or squats or something. But basically, over several days, we created the entire database of exercise videos and coaching videos that we use in Team Triumph. But of course, having a giant list of exercises is not necessarily sufficient to have good programming. So, with the exercises, you have the community, you have the GoLife Network members, but what's the programming actually look like, Rachel, in terms of the philosophy behind the workouts themselves?

Yeah. So, it is all minimum effective dose style training. You preach, you practice what you preach, and we're going to program it too. So, this is for busy individuals who only have 30 to maybe 45 minutes max to to dedicate to their training but still get really great results along the way. So, that's the goal. We're focusing on 2 to 3 days a week of heavy strength training. So, we got to get our strength training in there for sure. We're focusing on intentional recovery. So, you're going to get a recovery day and it's not your average recovery. We had Ben film a gratitude breathwork walk and that was really fun to watch him do that and be on camera for that one. So, things like that that we're weaving in, our own unique style. And we've taken the feedback of those who've been training with us for several years now and what they enjoy the most about the program is really the fact that it's amplifying their life outside of the workouts. So, it's more about they can lift their kids up and they feel great. They can run outside, play with their grandkids. They like a little bit of that spiritual aspect as well. So, we will weave in the breathwork and the gratitude. Just the motivation around the why and purpose behind these things. So, I think that's what really sets us apart from other workout programs that you can do. And, the science is there, tried and true. Ben, you're top of the industry when it comes to the science of programming these things, but it's that extra piece where you're having the support around it, you're not doing it alone. And, it's how we get really great results with those that we work with.

Some of the intensity that people crave, I have to admit, I don't think that it's entirely necessary to have lactic acid coming out your eyeballs every workout, but it does feel good to climb a little miniature Mount Everest for a workout even just for the sake of catharsis as long as you don't fool yourself into thinking the best way to get fit is to be zone 4 for 10 minutes or whatever versus brief spurts of high-intensity interval training and lots of walking. I just did a podcast with Mark Sisson about this, by the way, which is why it's fresh on my mind. But, it's kind of like the occasional intensity of a CrossFit or F45 workout with a lot of the active recovery body restoration type of philosophies that you'll hear from guys like Paul Chek along with the functional longevity moves that kind of scratch that itch of, "Yo, I just want to be able to come back day after day and do this over and over again and be able to throw a football and beat Rachel at pickleball and bow hunt or go up and down hills or whatever along with the smart periodization. Now, I use the word periodization. What I mean by that is that a training year or a training block is split into certain periods. And so, we did this all the time with Team Boundless and we're continuing with Team Triumph where you'll have a period of time where you're training for strength, periods of time where you're training for muscle mass, recovery and mobility-oriented weeks, periods of time where you're training for more aerobic intensity. And so, by focusing on specific physiological systems like that, you're able to stair-step your way to greater and greater fitness throughout the year. And, I don't think we've started doing this yet with Team Triumph, Rachel, because I haven't even talked with you about this, but I've started to do what I call hormesive or hormesis-intensive weeks with my clients where about every 10 to 12 weeks, we'll have a 2-week block where it's almost purely red light, heat stress, cold stress. All the training is eccentric, meaning it's negative style training. There's a lot more hypoxic breath play. It's basically all of the things that would be considered kind of damaging to the body if you did them for long periods of time like oxygen, light, hypoxia, eccentric loading, et cetera. And, we'll use that as kind of like a reboot week which has less training but more of a focus on hormesis. And, well, we'll have to talk later on after this podcast because I'd love to actually start shifting some of that programming into Team Triumph as well. But, I find for myself as a coach, with a lot of my private one-on-one clients, that's one of the things that they like the best is that there's different blocks built in throughout the year and it prevents boredom and burnout and also allows for really good gradual improvements in fitness with low risk of injury. And then, the other thing, of course, is the community or accountability for working one-on-one with the coach.

I love that. Yeah, you nailed it there. And, I think even on a more micro level, we do a really good job of gamifying the experience, which is important, right? You want to be able to have fun with your workouts and have some variety. And we do things like tracking streaks, which I think is a huge motivation for people, just to see like, you know, the, the patterns start to light up on the calendar. And it's having that structure in place is huge. Like, even the best coaches need coaches. I need a coach to motivate me and just give me that structure so I don't have to think about it. You just show up, you get your workout in, you feel good about it, and you're able to go on with the rest of your day.

Ben Greenfield: No, our Life's Network members have access to, of course, the clothing that does have the— I'm wearing the Life's Network Life shirt right now, but a lot of the clothing is super slick. Our CEO Caleb Applegate, he's a total fashionista and he put a lot of work into the quality of the threads. But, some of them do say Triumph on them. However, some say Trial on the left arm and Triumph on the right arm. Can you speak to that idea of why we chose Triumph for the name of the coaching squad or the community of the team and also where the Trial part of that fits in? Yeah.

I think it goes back to that broader philosophy around what we really like to do with everyone we work with is take that personalized approach and set some expectations up up front. So typically with our clients, like, we'll do a roadmap call up front, gather some background information on people, kind of see where are those pain points, and then we talk them through, you know, identifying that deeper why. Like, what's your purpose behind wanting to show up and get better every day? So that's something that we're taking note of so we can continue to motivate people along the way. But when it comes to setting those expectations, it's is understanding that your training program is not going to go perfect. There are gonna be days that you might miss your workout. There are gonna be days when you don't feel like doing it, but you still do it. And I think most people go into a new program with an all or nothing mindset. Like, I see it all the time. I have to train 6 days a week or I'm not gonna get results. And then, you know, life tugs 'em back in the other direction of just sitting on the couch and doing nothing. So, we try to set the expectations of, hey, let's get 3 solid workouts in consistently over months and months at a time. This is what you're gonna expect. The first 2 weeks you're gonna feel some soreness. Your body's gonna adapt to this new style of training. By week 3, you're gonna start to see your energy levels pick back up a little bit. So kind of painting that picture and that roadmap for people of what to expect and kind of the journey that they're gonna go through. But when it comes to Back to the trial and triumph, that's really what it's about. We have to have the highs with the lows. We're going to go through tough times. We're going to go through those trials and we're going to come out victorious on the other side as a group. So, back to that community once again. Ben Greenfield: Right.

If life was easy all the time, it'd be boring. If you didn't have trials occurring, especially in your workouts, you wouldn't have any breakthroughs. You can even go as deep as neuroscience. With guys like Dr. Andrew Huberman talking about how if you got the same workout day in, day out and there is no biomechanical challenge, no, I'm feeling a little bit scared by or perhaps wobbly from a balance standpoint or something like that with this exercise, there's actually not a huge improvement in brain development if you're looking for the neural effects of the training routine. So, it's kind of this idea that You don't want to be in your comfort zone the entire time during any workout. And yeah, there's definitely going to be some that are easy and there are certainly some days where I've got whatever low HRV, low sleep, came back from a lot of travel and I'm kind of sticking to that tried and true whatever, just do the Big 6 super slow routine or whatever. And, I almost get no neural stimulus from that. But at least I'm moving and also taking advantage of the idea that exercise can assist with sleep deprivation. But, you make a really good point, Rachel, about the all-or-nothing piece because I made the mistake for years of programming my clients with a lot on their actual calendar and it was almost overwhelming. And now, most of the calendars are just the one main key workout for the day and occasionally two. For example, if you look at one of my clients' Mondays, they might have one key, let's say, kettlebell swing and lunge VO2 workout but maybe a morning fasted fat burning with cold on top of that. So, they don't have a whole list of to-dos. For a day. But then, you really helped me out with this. There's so many little things that add up that you can do consistently throughout the week. So, what we developed was a checklist for all of my clients. So, you just check yes or no or basically you just check the box, "Did I do this or didn't I do this?" for every day. And, I don't beat up my clients at the end of the week if they didn't achieve certain things, but it's the accountability piece and the dopamine release you get from having checked off a daily habit that basically involves the same daily habit routine that I do myself that I expect of my clients. And, we're not talking about going out and buying a $140,000 red light bed that you use every day or something like that, but the stuff that is free or easy but that adds up like brushing your teeth. So, for example, 32 ounces of water upon waking. You just check that off or you don't. Morning and evening oral and facial care, meaning your oil pulling, your tongue scraping, and doing your toothbrush and washing your face. 15 minutes of foam rolling or stretching, which I do first thing I get up. I like to start the day spiritually. I put on a sermon, I listen to a sermon, and I do 15 minutes of stretching and foam rolling. And obviously, Most sermons aren't 15 minutes long, but I put it on right when I get up. And, by the time I've gotten up, washed my face, had my water, gone out, done foam rolling and stretching, come back in, made some coffee, finally wound up at my office, I can usually get through a 45-minute-long sermon. Going upside down or getting the legs up against the wall for 2 to 5 minutes a day, right? Little things like that that kind of drain the legs and help with lymphatic circulation. Minimum of 8,000 steps a day. Just did you check that off? Or didn't you? Some type of cold stress, right? Have you been cold for 1 to 3 minutes today? Did you touch the earth for 15 to 20 minutes? For one phone call, you have your shoes off or you're sitting outside during lunch with your butt on the concrete patio, or maybe it's the deep dark of winter but you have one of those grounding pads and you're standing on that at your desk. 15 to 20 minutes of sunlight or red light exposure, 15 to 20 minutes of gratitude or prayer or journaling or meditation or something that lets you shut your brain off at some point during the day. For me, that's right after lunch. And then, did you log some sleep? And so, having that checklist really helps. And, it's not as though you're expected to do all those things every day, but I like the idea of having, okay, this is the one big rock I have to lift, the major workout, let's say the Team Triumph routine, And then, if I check all this other stuff off, these little things that really do become brushing your teeth every day, then you get incrementally better and you're doing the things that a lot of times they don't talk about in Men's Fitness magazine or Women's Health or whatever, these little things that add up freaking like oil pulling and you don't wind up with plaque accumulation in your mouth or your heart 10 years later or 32 ounces of water when you wake up and all of a sudden, over the course of a couple of weeks, your constipation starts to subside because you're actually hydrating. And so, I think that it's just— obviously, I'm going on about it, but something I'm kind of excited about, this concept of, "Hey, these are the little things. You lift the one big rock and then you throw all the little pebbles in there." You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I love it. And, I think it reminds me of a book I'm reading right now called "Effortless," and it talks about the more you can automate the more you can achieve. So when we're thinking about the checklist, the trend we'll start to see with clients is some of those things are just second nature. They're just automated after you've been checking them off every single day consistently, right? For weeks upon weeks upon weeks. So that's when it starts to become more of just a habit routine and we're able to then achieve more from there.

Yeah. Greg McKeown, Effortless. What's his other book? Ah, he's got another one. There's Effortless and Essentialism. And, what's so funny you bring up his name, I texted him a week and a half ago, Rachel, because I found out he's training for an Ironman. And, I'm like, "Well, if you need any tips, minimalist fitness routine for Ironman, et cetera, let me know." And, he's like, "Well, let's just do a podcast about it on my show." So, I think Greg and I are going to chat about his Ironman training here in the next couple of weeks. It should be fun. Oh, that's amazing. Small world. Yeah. Ironman is not effortless. So, when it comes to you personally and staying on top of the game from a knowledge standpoint, do you have— obviously, to maintain your personal trainer certification, your CSCS, you have to check off the box when it comes to certain CEUs, conferences, et cetera. But, even from just a self-learning standpoint, do you have certain resources, journals, mags, websites, et cetera, that you think really stand out that help you in the educational process?

Yeah, so I'll be honest, my word of the year is go because I've always been a break person. I need to research more, I need to dig into the books before I act and do stuff. And this year I'm actually trying to just act some more. So I actually own a small group personal training brick and mortar studio. So I'm like more hands-on with those people at times throughout the day, like early mornings. And, just actually getting in the ring, I know you talk about this a lot, Ben, with how did you build up your experience and repertoire. Getting in the ring, getting the reps in, it doesn't always work the way you read about in the book, right?

The Theodore Roosevelt-esque woman in the arena. It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the doer of deeds stumbled or what. I don't have the whole thing memorized, but yeah, being in the trenches.

Exactly. Yeah. And I've, I've learned so much from that of even just— I'm really into right now, like persuasive communication, right? Because if we can't sell someone, we can't help them. If we can't get them to buy into the process and to understand why this is important and resell them every single day because it's so easy not to do the work, we're not going to get results with people. So that's another thing we really focus on with Triumph Coaching is that support system of we're reaching out, we're keeping you accountable, you're getting a message, we're checking in, "Hey, did you do your workout today?" That piece I think is so huge because in reality, a lot of plans will work. Most plans out there if you're a more sedentary person or even if you're in a training mode and you have a structured plan, it will work. You just have to follow it.

And, that's where I think a lot of people fall off. Yeah, persuasive communication. I think the GOAT of that is somebody you and I have exchange communications about on Slack multiple times, Alex Hormozi. I think that dude's rhetoric is through the roof when it comes to really good communication style, linguistics, use of language, and also persuasion, marketing, selling, et cetera. Honestly, I'd love to meet him someday or do a workout with him or something. So, if anybody knows Alex or you're listening to him, connect Rachel and I because we've learned a little bit from him. But, business aside, What about any journals that you subscribe to or digest or anything like that?

Yeah, I think I am really enjoying a lot of the short-form content that's coming out. So, to give you an example, I just ran across a great piece on Substack that talked about— I know another topic we were going to go into, the differences of training between women and men. Like what does that look like? And breaking down some studies around 65 and older where they either had the women doing a high resistance progressive strength training routine or they just did light walking and stretching routine, um, of the two groups. And as you can imagine how the results came out, they just, for bone mass and osteoporosis prevention, the strength training group was just off the charts in comparison.

I was going to say, you got to tell me that the Gwyneth Paltrow group didn't win.

Yeah. Good prediction there.

You had a crystal ball on that one. What else? And, I think one of the better resources that came out this year was Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO interviewed Stacy Sims, kind of an OG in the customization of fitness and nutrition routines to women guru. So, that's a great resource. I'll try and put some of the resources Rachel and I are talking about in the shownotes, by the way, at BenGreenfieldLife.com/TriumphPodcast. But, when it comes to things that women need to take into consideration that they often don't, have you picked up any real gems? Yeah.

So, I would say my biggest— this is the hill that I will die on when it comes to women and training is that we're a lot stronger than we think. There's a lot of marketing out there pushing women towards the Pilates, the barre, the yoga, which I think is all great as a component of an overall fitness regimen, but it can't be the only thing that we're hanging our hats on.

I did, by the way, one of my friends in a WhatsApp group thread that we're part of, he's like, "Guys, convince your wives to do Pilates. You'll thank me later." I know where he was going with that. But yeah, there's some benefit, of course, if we look at pelvic musculature and things like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, no, I think it comes down to we've been kind of sold the idea that we need to have this certain toned look and that there's a lot, you know, Pilates industry does a great job of marketing that and selling that and making it seem like that's achievable only through Pilates and to avoid the strength training because of the bulking aspect. And I talk with women all the time where their husbands don't want them to strength train. It's crazy. But then, there's that educational piece of getting back to the body recomposition results that we see with our clients that we work with, with women in particular, is just amazing from the fat loss to the muscle building and how particularly around— A lot of women have the waistline issue when I'm talking to them, they want to spot reduce fat like most people, but nothing's going to outperform strength training when it comes to that. Just the frailty myth of women. And there's a lot of trends and messaging around cortisol spikes and wanting to avoid intense workouts because it doesn't sync up with our cycle or thought processes like that. My approach is let's just lift heavy because we know the benefits are there. Like, we have to have some type of impact weight-bearing load on our bones, on our musculature. I got moms carrying around a 40-pound kid pushing a stroller with a grocery bag on the other arm and their doctors telling them they can't lift over 25 pounds and it's just not, it's not true. They have to train to be able to do those things that they need to operate in regular life. So, when it comes to women, I think for most women just that personalization piece for them. So, I don't think it's a gender-based approach necessarily. I think it's working with a coach, I think it's tracking the data that we can track to make sure your body's responding to the program. For a lot of my women, we like to work with the RPE scale, especially with strength training. So, trying to hit that sweet spot of an 8 out of 10. So, maybe we're not pushing to failure, 10 out of 10 every single day, but we're at an 8. So, it's enough of an intensity that we're actually gonna see some progression over time. So, that's something we're closely tracking there.

Do you take into account, as you mentioned it, cycle syncing at all? I mean, beyond Stacy Sims, there's Elisa Vitti with her book "Flow." There's Dr. Stephanie, I forget her name, Giovanni Morascu's wife. She's got a podcast. Anyway, she's one I've run into at a few conferences giving talks about cycle syncing based on the idea that there could be more fatty acid utilization in an estrogen-rich environment, which might dictate higher amounts of attention given to aerobic training and zone 2 style training during those times of the month. Looking at things like joint laxity close to ovulation and understanding that your 1RM might change based on that surge that occurs right there. Focusing more on high-intensity training or power training 7 to 10 days out from ovulation, I believe it is. Do you look at that much at all?

Yeah. And, I think it comes down to what data are we able to track, right? I have my Oura Ring, some of the clients have Oura Rings as well. So, we can use that in concert with an app like Natural Cycles. So, we can start to see because every cycle is going to be different, right? We don't know exactly when ovulation occurs, but there's There's certain metrics and things we can look out for to actually track like the temperature spike. So, we usually can't confirm ovulation. There's really no way until several days after it's actually happened. So, we're starting off in a realm of a little bit of unpredictability to begin with, right? So, I think sometimes women are overthinking it to the point of maybe inaction. So, like, "Oh, I don't want to do the right thing," or "I don't want to eat something wrong," or "I don't want to train the wrong way." And, there are maybe issues at certain points in the menstrual cycle, right? If I'm experiencing heavy cramping day 1 or day 2 of my cycle, I might not feel like going to the gym. But, what I tell women is just go get moving, try it for 5 minutes, and we have that pain approach of if the body's experiencing pain, the blood flow is moving to other areas of the body, the cramping might actually reduce or subside. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to the cycle. And I work with a lot of women that are in perimenopause, navigating menopause, postmenopausal journey. So it's— there's variations for every single woman. And that's why I think it's really important to work hand in hand with a coach so we can look at things even like an HRV score. Like maybe you're crushing a certain point of your cycle and you feel great and it is time to train a little bit harder and your body's recovering well. Maybe you are in the tank because your stress bucket's overfilling and now you're at the menstrual phase of your cycle and it's just too much going on outside of the cycle. So, I think taking that holistic approach even when it comes to something like a cycle syncing because there's other factors outside of just the cycle itself that can affect your training and your approach to that.

Yeah, yeah. And obviously, when you're working with an entire team, the consistency of the workouts, the accountability, and the motivation from being with a team in many cases can trump the idea that this is not the perfect workout for the current day that I'm on of my period or my cycle, but I'm going to jump in and do the training anyways. It's kind of like that idea that, yeah, there's a best time of day to train technically if you get into circadian rhythmicity, but also the best time of day to train is the time you're most likely to do it. Exactly, yeah.

We keep it simple for sure, and that's I think why we see really great results. But, the other aspect I will say where I do notice a little bit different trends when it comes to genders, particularly with environment, is I see women thrive in a community-based wellness approach.

Not me. I like to crank up my headphones and avoid eye contact.

I'm not— I know, Ben. I've been around you when you go for your workout.

You're just like, were you mad at me at the gym this morning? No, I was working out. You're my best friend in the world and I wouldn't even say hi to you if I'm working out. Exactly.

My husband does the same thing. He throws on a podcast and he's like, don't talk to me. So that's where I see the biggest difference with men are cool, just isolating themselves and getting it done and pushing hard. And women, we love to just be able to connect in that workout experience.

Yeah, but back to that idea of CEUs, I'll just toss a few out there that I like. There's a A guy named Alan Argon, I subscribed to his research review for a decade. He puts out really great research and content and commentaries. The folks at Stronger By Science, I like some of the research reviews that they do. For better or worse, I'll check out some of Layne Norton's stuff sometimes. He does have good comments that are steeped in science. So, I like some of his stuff. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, I was just reading at the breakfast table this morning. Because I have no friends or no life, and so I read strength journals at breakfast. So, that's another good one, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. And then, examine.com, of course. An examine.com membership to their study summary section is incredible. And honestly, I don't know if you follow any of the stuff I put out on Twitter, Rachel, but I'm usually taking all— because I carve out about an hour a day for learning and reading, and I will typically create 2 or 3 tweets based on my top takeaways from that day's learnings, and I just kind of bleed those out throughout the week. So, I guess what I'm getting at selfishly enough is that if you have no time for any of that stuff, just follow me on Twitter. So, what about the self-quantification piece? We haven't talked much about this, but I think it may also reflect the idea of simplicity, accessibility, affordability. And convenience because we're using a very unique way to allow people within the Life Network and on Team Triumph to keep track of biomarkers.

Yeah, I love it. So, we've actually developed something brand new. We've never done this before, but it's been in the works actually for quite some time now. And, I'm super excited about our LifePrint offering. And, really what the method is with LifePrints is to gather, empower, and sustain. So upfront, we're gathering your data. So if you're somebody that, you know, you've been listening to Ben's podcast forever, but you're just kind of stuck with where to get started when it comes to like blood work and do you wanna poop in a cup and mail it back to a company? Like there's just a lot of barriers to entry when it comes to the lab. Usually, usually more like a hot dog tray than a cup, but, but no. Okay, you would know from plenty of experience, so thank you for sharing. They're getting easier.

Most of them now are just a swab or a little off the toilet paper, but yeah, there's, there's some that get a little messy.

Um, but regardless, so the data that we're going to capture is actually through an HTMA test, and Ben, you're really the expert on this, but what it is is hair trace mineral analysis. So, it's really easy. You get your kit in the mail, you're doing a little clipping of hair. So, it's painless, takes 5 minutes or less, super simple. And the cool part about this test is that it's not just a snapshot in time of your blood, it's actually giving you historical data because obviously your hair is growing out of your head for months at a time. When it comes to that test, you're shipping it back. And the cool part is we could actually see your mineral status. So, we're looking a lot at different ratios and we actually have an expert on the team who's gonna be analyzing all these for us. And we're also looking at heavy metal toxicity levels and things of that nature. So there's a lot of takeaways we can get from a very simple test. So that's our gather portion. From there, you're gonna get back a report, which is very easy to understand. So we have synthesized this down to the biggest needle movers and making it very actionable, very tangible takeaways from fitness, nutrition, lifestyle based on your results. So this is for anybody to be able to understand. Like, you don't have to be a doctor or have some crazy certification to understand what to do with your results. So we're really big on that, breaking it down so you can understand and then act on it. From there, we're putting you into a community. So you're gonna be in a micro community, um, with other like-minded individuals, and that's the sustain portion of it. So let's actually implement these results together. Let's get you on coaching calls as a group with our expert coaches so we can break this down for you and make it very, very sustainable. Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

And, the HTMA, the hair tissue mineral analysis, which there's kind of two ways it's described, hair trace, hair tissue. But, the idea that was first introduced to me, by the way, by Dr. Leland Stillman. And, you're looking at around, I think it's around $100, I think, for an HTMA on average. You send in a little bit of hair and like Rachel described, you look at mineral ratios, you can see toxins, you see metals, and you can learn a lot from it. I actually went through Leland's entire HTMA interpretation course. I'm like, holy cow, I could spend 4 years just learning what you can derive from hair with an example being whether based on ratios you're a slow oxidizer or a fast oxidizer. If you're a fast oxidizer, you burn carbohydrates quickly. You might have energy dips if you don't have a couple of snacks in between lunch and dinner. You'll tend to have higher adrenal activity, higher thyroid activity, lower calcium levels because of that, which necessitates a more steady fuel source. Slow oxidizers, they're the complete opposite. These are the people who thrive on a ketogenic diet, can go a long period of time without eating, tend to oxidize fat really efficiently, tend to sometimes err, as the name implies, slow oxidizer towards lower metabolisms. And, it's actually really incredible that you can get all of this, again, back to the idea of accessibility without necessarily doing what I call often the gold standard list of tests because I won't lie, if an elite athlete or a VIP exec comes to me or they want one-on-one coaching within Triumph, their blood test, stool test, you know, the hot dog tray, urinary hormone test, genetic panel, micronutrient panel, often a food allergy panel, and sometimes depending on their health history, a couple of others. But at the same time, you're looking at north of $2,500 and more easily with all of the tests. And then, it's also It's a lot of interpretation on my end to go through all of that. But, the HTMA, what we were looking for was a really good shotgun approach to give you a whole bunch of data at a really good price. And, I know you and I have talked about this, Rachel, we eventually want to build in some tiers where you could tack on blood test to your HTMA or genetic test to your HTMA. But, within Team Triumph itself, we want this to be accessible, affordable, and something that you can literally just snip, snip down there or up here and send it off in a little envelope. And, it's easy and it's repeatable and it gives good data. And, for those who are wondering, well, we'll link in the shownotes to some of Dr. Stillman who's one of our Life Network experts, some of his videos about the HTMA. And, it is incredible. As a matter of fact, if you're a personal trainer or a coach, going through a certification like his to learn how to interpret that test suddenly allows you to take the clients that can only afford $100 on a lab test and give them a lot of value out of the results of that one test.

Yeah, I love it. And it's that data-driven approach, right? Like, we— I think something that's unique about what we do also on the back end is I've researched a lot of other programs out there because you connect me to people all the time, Ben, but I haven't seen people take lab data and transform that into a 12-week fitness program based on what the data says, you know, a 12-week nutrition plan to follow. Like, on the nutrition side, I think a lot of coaches and experts out there are doing a good job of obviously bio-individualizing the data based on lab results, but on the fitness side, I haven't seen that done as much. Um, so we weave both of those in as well as lifestyle stuff.. So, all the things we talked about earlier when it comes to the environment, all of those factors. So, it's really that all-in-one approach. Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah.

And, I swear GPT still can't do it. It's okay for one workout like I was describing earlier, but I'll sometimes try having it do— I did this for my sons and I a few weeks ago. I was like, "Yeah, I'm lazy." I'm feeling like outsourcing this. I'm just going to have GPT design our next kettlebell routine. And, it totally sucked. It was hitting the same muscle groups 3 days in a row. It was having you do kettlebell swings right after a 5-rep max deadlift, so you had no grip. It would do things like max push-ups as a finisher, but then the next workout the next day would have 100 push-ups in it. It's just like it kind of thinks it's being smart and creative, but still, it doesn't take into account joint biomechanics recovery, much less if you have 3 people working out and 1 pull-up bar, GPT can't figure that out. It'll just be like, "Do 10 pull-ups and 1 person just stands there watching." I'm like, "Why don't you just give 3 options for a pull?" pull-down, pull-up, or standing upright kettlebell row so all 3 people can be on the same round of the circuit at the same time. And, just things like that, it just can't figure things out like a human coach can.

Yeah. It's the same on the meal plan side too for nutrition because a lot of what we're doing is so high level. And, Ben, I can't even tell you some of the nutrition plans you've sent me with clients and just the odd approaches.

Yeah. I'll give you an example. We'll have a client I'm like, "Well, after going through health history," just inside baseball, what happens is I'll get— for VIP client, I'll get all their labs. I'm typically spending about 8 to 10 hours going through everything with a fine-tooth comb, looking at genetics, food allergies, micronutrient deficiencies, everything, how much activity that client is going to be doing because I'm the one writing out their exercise programming, their their health risks, their goals, right? Maybe they're supposed to be low-carb keto, but they also really, really like to do high-intensity workouts and have asked to do those 4 days a week, so I can't keep them super low carb. Spell all that out and then I'll pass it on to the team to start programming, let's say, a gluten-free, green bean-free, high-fat soluble vitamin version of a Mediterranean diet with fasting on all of these different days and activity factor of XYZ based on their amount of time spent training. And yeah, I mean, it's a curveball. And I won't lie, we're not stupid. We look for ways to automate and we look for ways to use AI and we really can't automate meal plans that effectively either.

No. And, I'll remember that the next time you email me and say, "Hey, can we speed this process up with AI?" And, I'm like, "Uh, not really." Yeah.

We've tried. About every month or so, I'll look and be like, "Hey, is there anything new out there that could do this, this, and this for me and I could write out more nutrition plans faster?" And, like, "Nope." Yeah. But, it's getting better. I think 10 years from now, you and I are going to have to just start farming or something, Rachel, because AI will do everything. But, in the meantime, we're here to help.

We could just play pickleball all day at that point.

I'm in. I'm in. Well, Rachel, this has been fascinating. And my last question for you is, let's say someone's listening right now, they're like, "All right, dope. How many dollars a month? I want to join Team Triumph. Sounds affordable. Sounds accessible." How do they onboard? Yeah.

So, we can start off as low as $17 a month if you join the Life Network and then you instantly get access to not only everything that the Life Network platform provides, like exclusive content, podcasts, the whole community forum thread with hot topics coming in and your raw podcast is on there that you can't get anywhere else. So, not only that but you're getting those daily— Ad-free. Ad-free, which a lot of people request. I see the requests come in. So, I can confirm.

As much as they want to hear me talking about the 7 kinds of magnesium, I get it.

Yeah. Yep, that's it. So, that's the special sauce. But not only that, you're getting literally a daily workout program programmed by us, like all the experts on Ben's team. Ben is reviewing a lot of this stuff, overseeing it, and it's everything we talked about, right? Like it's the minimum effective dose style training, getting great results, having access to the community. And then from there, we really have like a, a ladder of success you can climb. So you can start at that entry level for the $17 a month and just ride with us and work out with us on a daily basis. Or if you want to take the next steps to that data gathering with the HTMA test, we do have LifePrints, which are really under $500 and below and as low as around $200 price point. So, for lab data, like Ben mentioned, that's— we literally can't even offer a discount on it because we've priced it as low as we possibly can because our mission is truly to provide accessibility to this level of coaching.

We try our best. And again, not to throw people under the bus, but most of the lab testing services that you hear advertised on most of the popular health podcasts, yes, it's convenient because you're going through one source, but the markup on those things is no secret behind the scenes in the health industry. Lab tests are like a cash cow and you put them together and you offer them and you mark them up. And, there's some people that don't do that, but yeah, we don't want to make an arm and a leg off of the lab tests or the coaching or anything else. We want to have literally millions of people able to just log in and work out and follow the things I know, the things Rachel knows, the things all the coaches who have studied under us know, and to have it all in one place with all your experts, your ad-free podcasts, your challenges, your accountability, your marketplace with discounts, everything and your Team Triumph hoodie, which is pretty dope. So, well, Rachel, this is awesome. And, I think this is the first time that I've really opened the kimono on Triumph Coaching and kind of done a big reveal on everything that's going on inside there. So again, all the shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/TriumphPodcast with a PH, not an Triumph Podcast.

Rachel, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Alright, folks, have an incredible week.

To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks, and content to become the most complete boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items, but the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion LLC, the makers of Kion-branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support, and with full authenticity and transparency recommend in good conscience. I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body, and spirit, and I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.