Why 90% of Personal Trainers Fail at Client Programming

Are you injured? Can't seem to get on top of your niggles? They're annoying, they're preventing you from training, and you can't get where you wanna go. Well, today I've got my go-to guy here at Enterprise Fitness. Shant, welcome to the show. We are gonna get into it next level. You're gonna learn some things that you won't learn anywhere else. Let's begin. I wanna start in an unusual place today. I've been copping a lot of hate online.

You must be doing something right.

And I wanted to get your thoughts on this, right? Like, I'm always someone who, like, I wanna take on Critical thought, but with haters often it's not critical thought; it's jealousy. They want to be doing what you do. They're just going to tear it down. It's mismatching personalities. It's a lot of things, right? And sometimes you got to shift through and go, right? What what is what is credible here? And I looked at this and I'm like, man, it's just a straight up hater. Okay. But I wanted to show you.

I've never seen this video.

So yeah, I want to. I'm what I'm doing here is I'm teaching my trainer how to do a counterbalance squat at the bottom of the squat. He has a butt wink. So as a stabilizing exercise to teach his trunk stability, I'm giving him a counterbalance squat to get him stable. Let's have a look at the video.

But this coach genuinely has no clue what he's doing. The reason he fearmongers and creates these problems is because he's not competent enough to actually help someone that knows what they're doing.

People look at that and they go, well, there's no problem with it. Well, there is. He has a butt wink.

I do apologize for making you watch more of this fuckwit, but if you keep watching this little clip, I'm going to use it to prove That this coach has no clue what he's even doing himself.

Same thing, and just bring those arms down a little bit lower. Let's not cheat. And look at that, all of a sudden there's no butt wink. So why is that? We have to switch on our abs in this position. Your abs have to be on, which means it stabilizes your trunk, which that then eliminates our butt wink.

So he thinks that a counterbalance squat fixes a butt wink because it stabilizes the trunk. That is completely incorrect. What we've got is, if you look at where he's holding the dumbbell, or the kettlebell in this instance, That is a weight that is forwards further, okay? So we are shifting his center of mass forwards now. Normally when you squat, the reason that your back ends up curving at the bottom is because your chest needs to move forwards more in order to keep your mass over your midfoot. Right now, his hips are sunk all the way back and he can stay in this upright position because the kettlebell is counterbalancing him so he can stay more upright. It has nothing to do with fixing your butt wink. It's just moving your center of mass. Which if you were to do with like technique adjustments, you could do the same thing. Butt wink is not inherently bad. Some people are gonna need to do it in order to get the amount of range that is required. It just depends on your femur length, your torso length, your ankle mobility, a whole bunch of different factors. Go to somebody else, stop listening to coaches like this dude.

Okay. Hmm, look, I'll start with a little bit of a philosophical answer first, right? This is something I've learned being, you know, in this industry for about, what, 14, 15 years now. No one really, you know, talks shit about somebody who's doing worse than them.

Hmm.

People always talk shit up, right? So, you're not gonna see Ed Cohen or Stuart McGill or, you know, like many other leaders of the industry talking shit about somebody else because they're top of the food chain. What Ed Coan has been able to do in powerlifting, it's unmatched, right?

Mm-hmm.

There's some phenoms that are coming across, but they're building on the foundation he has built. And Ed Coan is the biggest supporter of that, right? So in an industry, I think it runs on this feeling of scarcity, right? It's like somebody else is winning, so that means I'm losing, so I'm gonna make that person lose too. That's the first thought that comes to my mind when I see that, right? You've been in the industry, what, for, I don't know, 21 years? 21 years, right? So, I'm sure you've done enough assessment before you got to that point to know exactly where the breakdown is going to happen and what countermechanism you need to put in place To correct that movement pattern, right? So, first of all, it looks like, you know, he started talking about, you know, like he's already setting the precedence. He is a shit trainer. He hasn't presented anything first. He's just like, he's a shit trainer. And then whatever he's trying to say. So, that would be my philosophical, you know, my answer. It's like people always talk shit down, not up. Sorry, talk shit up, not down. If I'm doing really well, I don't have time for people what's doing underneath, you know, let them do all the shit talking. And I've experienced that a lot in my career. I just don't pay attention to it at all, right? I have 24 hours in the day and I don't have much time to spend doing that because my commitment and my allegiance is to my clients to give them the result, right? So from there onwards, I am going to do what is the most important for that person that's sitting in front of me paid me good money to do that, right? Okay, now comes the counterbalance squat, right? Yes, center of mass is constantly moving, right? Unless you stand still in one position, your center of mass is constantly moving depending on the task, depending on the load distribution. And you have to engage certain musculature to, you know, manage that center of mass. So what is a counterbalance squat? A counterbalance squat is something that's going to get you into flexion, right? So the weight is in front of you, it's going to get you into flexion. What you have to do, you have to use your trunk stabilizers to create anti-flexion moment. Meaning, they're not moving, they're just engaging to make sure that your trunk is now stable enough against that weight in front of you from collapsing forward. Now, there's enough evidence to show that trunk stability has much better implication in proximal ability. So your trunk is stable, you are going to be able to do a lot of things more efficiently with your arms, with your legs, with your hips, so on. And this is the inherent In our underlying foundation of strength sports, we need to stabilize as stiff, as tight as we can get to make sure that we can move the maximum amount of load over the shortest distance. So, in this client now, I haven't seen the full assessment. I'm sure there has been a bigger assessment that you have done beforehand.

So, yeah.

It's true, like in some cases, butt wink is not a problem. Like if you're just sitting down, like I do have a butt wink at the moment. I don't have a problem with that. However, if I'm teaching somebody how to do a movement under load, I need to make sure that their movement proficiency is right before I can put load on them. That's a very, you know, responsible thing to do. So in this person's case, if they cannot control trunk stability where they're getting that end-range lumbar flexion to make up for that hip flexion, so that means their trunk is not Well, you have to do something to correct it. In your case, you have utilized a tool. I'm sure you have more than counterbalance squat in your toolbox. In this particular case, that's what you have used. Okay, it's an anti-flexion movement where you have used your trunk stabilizers to stabilize that force that you have just created, that external force, and that allowed him to move a little bit better. Now, is it a general statement that that you know, butt wink is good or bad. There's no such thing as definitive answers. Like in this particular case, yes, this is something you wanted to correct and you have been able to correct that. And you can see in the video that you have done that. That's my answer.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Well, you touched on a couple of things that I always present in all my videos, which is stability, mobility, strength, performance. Proximal stability creates distal output. So when I see someone on the floor, they have a butt wink, I totally agree. It's not inherently good or bad. It just is. When every assessment should tell a story and you see the story start to map out and you correct, like, does this assessment match this assessment? And if it doesn't, then it leads you on a different path. It's a hypothesis that you're trying to formulate on the floor with the client to see if these things line up to get insight. And with him, what I was going for was an activation before his squat.

Right.

So that he could get his trunk stable and we could create more force output under that bar. Simple strategy.

Yeah.

Whereas what I find online, it's like, I don't know if you've heard the saying where people say, you know, alcoholism is because you drink too much. It's like, well, no shit, Sherlock, right? It doesn't really tell you anything about anything.

I haven't heard that before, but right.

And I feel like sometimes like the feedback online that I've been getting when I present some of these ideas around stability, mobility, strength, performance, it's like, no, he had a butt wink because the center of mass was off. And I'm like, well, yeah, yeah, I put something in his hand and got his trunk stable.

Yeah.

You're saying it from the other side. We're saying the same thing, but you're saying it in a different way, whereas I'm coming at it from the aspect of— you're stating the problem, the client drinks too much, therefore they're alcoholic. I'm coming from it from a solution aspect, which is let's do this exercise and correct it.

Correct.

With stability.

You're solving a problem. And in this particular case, this is a problem, especially I'm guessing he's a trainer that you mentioned. So he's going to be going out there coaching other of their clients who's going to be doing all sorts of squat variations. So he needs to learn to have different tools available for himself to fix those things, because a lot of those clients, if they get injured, then it's his responsibility. He's the one who's going to have to bear the responsibility of injuring a client doing poor technique under load. So it's, I'm guessing that's a good learning experience for him as much as it is a good teaching experience for you.

100%, man, his squat has gone up from, I mean, I was watching when he started here squatting like 70 kilos. Now the other day he was doing 120 kilos for 12 reps.

Yeah.

Huge improvement from when he started and his whole physique has changed as well.

Yeah, it's not that he got, and this is a very good point, right? It's not like he gained strength in a few weeks. You just corrected his technique, whereas there's less energy leak is happening, so he's able to express the strength that he has acquired with the stability, with a better outcome.

Yeah, what I teach clients is that your current technique, if it's poor, if you have poor technique, there's a ceiling and a floor. And most people's ceiling of where they're going to achieve with their current technique is way lower than what they would like it to be. So we have to take that kind of 2 steps back to take those 2, 3, 4 giant leaps forward, which is we need to get the weight off the bar, get the technique that's gonna have a much higher ceiling, set you up for success in the long term, get the muscles that you weren't stabilizing stronger. Then we have a technique that we— it's got a much bigger ceiling.

Yeah, yeah. And something that you mentioned there is very important for people to understand is motor skill learning and development, right? Right, so I come from a background where I started my career in a very high level of strength and conditioning. Whereas I was working with national basketball players and football players and so on. And you have the same experience as well, right? And then we actually have some common clients, like you remember Heming Hu?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so he was, you know, he came to see me for some tendinopathy and he trained here as well. So for them, they don't have a lot of time, they don't have years To build the strength, right? And when we're talking about strength, we're talking about skill, right? So 2 people can squat, but one can squat more with the same level of strength, meaning they're moving more weight because they're proficient in that technique. So all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they just added 10 kilos to their lift. It's not that they got stronger, they just got better at that skill of expressing that strength And the outcome of that is a bigger number of load on the bar or whatever tool they're using.

Which then I remember the first time I low bar squatted. So I was stuck out on a high bar squat at 157 kilos, high bar squat. And when I used to squat, I'll stand up so you can see, but my traditional squat was very quad dominant. Like this, right? So I'd squat like that, straight back up, right? And I never low bar squatted.

Yeah.

It was all Poliquin style, PICP level 5, you know, that, that's— we breathed, slept, ate high bar squat, quad focused. Started training with a powerlifter, taught me the low bar squat. First time I low bar squatted, actually second day I low bar squatted, I squatted 180 kilos.

Right.

And I was like, what the hell?

Yeah.

The strength was there the whole time, but I've been using a high bar squat, obviously less range of motion with a low bar squat. But it reminds me of then I was able to get to 175 kilos on my high bar squat.

Yeah.

Because I was using the tool of the low bar squat to address the constraints, which for me were clearly my glutes. Actually, Andrew Lock, Yeah. he once said to me when he did my assessment, he said, I love it. He's like, if your erector spinae matched your glutes, you would have the ass the size of Kim Kardashian, right? Because it's all lower back.

Yeah.

And that's why my erector spinae, they're very well developed, but that's from the years and years of, you know, front squatting, deadlifting, uh, high bar squatting, no real low bar squatting.

Yeah.

And I started low bar squatting and it helped me overcome the constraints that I had with my high bar squat using the right— because I always talk about you can't can't divorce screening from programming.

Yep.

The screen— and I give the analogy that a good screening assessment is putting a pin in the map. It's saying you are here. And I don't have any attachment emotionally to where someone is, you know, whether they're— I had a lady yesterday who was, you know, like 10 out of 10.

Yeah.

Right? And she's in an awesome spot, she can do anything, versus the person who's maybe a 2 or a 1 out of 10. There's no emotional— I don't feel a certain way about one client or another client. It's just the honest reflection of this is where you're starting. You're starting with no constraints, you're starting with multiple constraints, either injury. Then what is your goal? Tell me what your goal is. Where are we going?

Right.

And it's very hard to draw a line if you— I don't know where you are and you say you want to get to Sydney, and you know, whether you're in Melbourne or you're in Perth and we want to get to Sydney, we need to know whether it's a 4-hour flight or it's a 1-hour flight. Then once we know the destination, the programming is the way we're going to get there. And that program can take, you know, you might have to do a stopover, you might be able to go directly there, you might go sideways a little bit and then get there. The program is going to be in— that's, that's the routes, that's how we're going to get there.

Yeah.

So when I do a screen, I'm always looking at what's the information that I need to understand where, A, where this client is, and where they want to go, then what are the constraints? Because you're only as strong— theory of constraints 101, right? Everything in physiology, in business, in life really will only grow to its constraints.

Yep.

What is constraining its growth? Well, let's— and I love the words of Mark Bell, which is strength is never a weakness, weakness is never a strength.

Yep.

And I'm looking at, well, what is the weakness? What is the constraint? Let's address that. And whether it's a movement, say for example someone's bench pressing, And they're not able to, like, they just, the technique's no good, we incorporate pauses. Likewise, their triceps are too weak on the bench, you know, we do more close grip work.

Yep.

Their technique's not good on the deadlift, we address it with like programming. We draw that, that becomes the program, and this is why clients get stronger and better. Thoughts?

Well, firstly, if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. That's the whole point of assessment or screening, right? So, you know, there's subtle differences between the wording in the clinical sense, what an assessment is and what a screening is. But in both cases, we are trying to objectively measure something to gather information, and based on that, we're going to make a hypothesis and intervene and retest to make sure that the hypothesis is correct. But you don't know what that hypothesis is unless you have an assessment or a screening protocol, right? And another very important thing that you mentioned, and I 100% agree with that, which is, um, anyone— any— like, this is how I filter out who's a good educator or who's a bad educator. First one is, if I see all they have is just this little talking head talking shit about somebody else, that's all their persona is in social media, I know that they're not going to be able to teach me something. The reason for it, because they don't have anything original to say, and being polarizing is the way to grow on social media these days. I think there's research came out, I think 2019, is 6 times more effective.

Wow.

Being more polarizing and being more novel and being more nuanced than the truth, right? So there was research done for over 10 years on Twitter or X, whatever it is now. So, and back to the point of assessment, my other filtering out is if somebody is If you're talking about anything in definitive terms, like this is the way or that is the way, this is good, this is bad, well, you don't really understand nuances then. Like something that you mentioned, how are we going to get there? The assessment is going to tell us. So you're not married to just one thing. You're not just trying to replicate this one generalized idea to everybody, right? Your assessment is going to tell you where the problem is, and that's your hypothesis. And you're going to apply that and you're going to retest it. And if you have improved the result or you have created the desired outcome, good, you have a very good assessment or a screening protocol. If you don't, then you have to go back to the— and it takes a bit of an experience to find out what is the right screening protocol or the assessment protocol is. Like, I've learned mine from Andrew. So again, I do my assessment. This is what the person is, this is what their problem is, they have told me what their problem This is what their goal is, so that means that's where they want to go. Even if I feel like they should go there, that's where they want to go. So I need to get that person there. It may take, you know, a year. It may take a month. It may take immediately just that one session to correct something. But if I don't do my assessment, I don't know what I am going to do next to get them where they want to go and what are the constraints. So, You mentioned the theory of constraints. So there's a gentleman called Carl Newell, and he had a theory of constraints, right? We have our individual constraints, we have our associative constraints, and we have environmental constraints. So individual constraints is, you know, your anthropometry, your hip structure, and, you know, your biological limitations or abilities, whatever you have. Associative is like you start adding some tasks to it. Environmental means in what environment You're doing that. So say, for example, running, right? This is the person's anthropometry, so that's their running technique. I'm going to work on that. Now, the associative would be, are they going to be a 100-meter sprinter, or are they going to be a marathon runner? That's my associative constraint. So I'm going to use that to develop that athlete. Now, my environmental constraints. Are they going to be a 100-meter sprinter on a track, Or are they trying to be a wide receiver on grass where they have to constantly turn and look back, watch where the ball is going to land, and catch it, and then run and cut?

Right.

Again, if you don't have a good screening process, if you don't have your good assessment tools on hand, I don't know how can somebody start from, like, without having that information available. And from my experience, like, look at every single athletic programs. It doesn't matter what the sport is. It starts the draft. It starts with assessment. NFL is one of my favorite sports, right? The bench press test or the 40-yard dash test or their agility test, they're starting with measuring to see the athletic attribute of that person, if this person is suitable for these variables. So they can go to the field and perform the task that they need to perform. And that's why you see a lot of really talented young athletes, they fall away because they heavily rely on their talent, but they never had a good coach to help them build that physical attribute that they need to build to express those talent and the skills that need to perform at the highest level.

Amen. You just reminded me of something that before we go to the floor, this same guy, he put up a photo of Dmitry Koglov.

Right.

Now I had the pleasure— I've trained with Dmitry Koglov, spent 4 days with him. Yeah, amazing experience. And also trained with Glenn Penlay, US Olympic weightlifting coach, and also trained with Roy Perrier, who was the Canadian weightlifting coach. And the thing that struck me about, well, all of them is they did have an assessment. But Koglov, wow, man, like the level of assessment, level of detail, you know, I thought I was Spreading the knees, or as Eddie Cohn would say, spread the gooch when I was squatting. When he started like cueing me, like I started shaking. I'm like, what the hell? Like it's he goes, it's not enough. He's like, put your feet down. I was like, this is next level. And then I remember being on the floor and all doing these like mobility drills, and everyone was like dying. And he comes over to me, he goes, too good. Walked off because I had the mobility. And anyway, the point is there's that famous picture on. of Dmitry Koglov doing an overhead squat. I'm not sure if you've seen it, and he's a little forward, right?

Yeah.

It's not like the ideal, and people look at that and go, oh, well, see, there's— you don't need to be perfect in an overhead squat. And I'm like, well, back up, guys, back up one second. He is doing an assessment, and if you look at the picture, there's, I think, like 3 coaches looking at him in the assessment deciding, what are we gonna do with this?

Yeah.

It's not that he needed to be perfect. I mean, he's one of the greatest, in my opinion, he's the GOAT of weightlifting. Like, I love Dimitri.

We're talking about Olympic weightlifting.

Yeah, Olympic weightlifting. Interesting, like I was watching some of Dimitri's stuff where he would grab the 25-kilo plates and he would throw it up and catch it, throw it up, just beast of an athlete. And point being is that even Dimitri Koglov has an assessment.

Yeah.

It's not that him doing the overhead squat had to be ideal or whatever it is. It's all it is, and this is the point that I drove home to everyone, is it's just information. Data inherently, whether it's a business, whether it's a client, whether it's life, data informs. The more data I have on something, the better decisions I can make.

Yes.

And ultimately, the better decisions I can make, the better results I can get. And it's a form of management.

Yeah.

That's all it is. That's how I look at it.

That's what I mentioned. If you don't measure it, you don't know how to manage it. And it applies to every aspect of life, you know. How do you graduate from university? You go to exams and you are measured, you know, on whatever the mark that your exams is, and you're measured against that, and then you graduate because you have gone past the measurement that is required for you to graduate. So even at educational level, You have to get a certain amount of marks, and that's their way of assessing you as a student. Is this person qualified enough to graduate and have this degree and go into the public scene and perform? Now, what that education system is like in my field, I can have a lot of things to say about that, but nonetheless, they still have some level of measurement there, right? It's the same way when it comes to, you know, like, I know you have an incredible experience in teaching personal trainers business. I work with a lot of coaches who came from Wolfpack that are actually very, very successful clients, like businesses that send me clients. So I'm pretty sure you teach them the very fundamentals of where your business actually at, like how many clients do you have, how much do you charge, what is your retention rate? You're doing exactly the same thing. You're assessing. doing a screening process to gather information, you're finding out where the bottlenecks are and you're trying to fix that. In other words, you're finding constraints and you're figuring out how am I going to, you know, get past that constraint.

Yeah, I certainly find the best coaches are the ones that are a little bit on the side of— well, then they are, they're scientists. They're— and I mean scientists as not they're academics, and I think there's a difference between a scientist and an academic. An academic is someone who just simply, in my opinion, wants to learn things for the sake of learning things and isn't really about the application. It's like, I published a paper today, great, maybe it pushed the field forward, maybe it didn't. I researched something that maybe had value, maybe it didn't. Whereas a scientist, they're in the trenches. It's, I want to test this hypothesis, am I right or am I wrong? And really all I want to know is the answer.

Yeah.

Because if I'm wrong, that's And I'm just going to try and replicate this with different variables to find out whether I'm right. And I find like the best coaches are the ones that are able to detach themselves, look at the client objectively. This is what's happening. Here is my intervention. Did I get my outcome?

Yeah.

No. Okay, reassess. New intervention. Did I get my outcome? And you might do several iterations of this. Until you get outcome and then you are going, wow, hang on, there is a theme here. Every time I do this, I get this.

Pattern recognition. Yeah. Look, so I am going to fall back a little bit on my mentor, Andrew Lock, who I spent almost 11, 12 years working together, learning together, presenting seminars together. Andrew always used to say he got influenced by the triple Ms: Maitland, McKenzie, and McGill. Now, Maitland, he's a very good manual physiotherapist, and he had one of the highest level of requirement from students to become a physiotherapist. But Maitland had something very important thing to say about assessment, and that also ties in with what it takes to be a good scientist. It's you have to have a very good inquiring mind. You have to also have the intellectual ability To dissect the information and figure out why this is working, why is this not working. You also have to have the mental agility to work around those constraints that you are coming across. So it's not just this works or this doesn't work. It's you having the ability, like I said, you have to have the inquiring mind, like, okay, this worked, but that didn't work.

All right.

Now, I have to have the intellectual ability to break down that information to find out what worked and what didn't work and why that didn't work and also why did that work. Then you have to have the agility to find out, okay, this is the person sitting in front of me that I'm going to work with. So how am I going to get all this objective information in a realistic sense and get this person closer to what I need to get to?

You touched on something just what I hear in my head. And we can go back to this point about the industry itself and the controversial takes and things. But you know, I'm 41. When I was 23, the average age of a trainer was 23, right? When I was 30, the average age of a trainer was 23. Now that I'm 41, the average age of a trainer is 23. And I think going through the cycles, what I see a lot of is ego.

Yeah.

And I can say, because that's where I was at 23, I wanted to prove myself. It's kind of that Warrior story of let me you know kill the bear and bring it over my shoulders and show you all how good I am and how big my dick is and pissing contests. And I think a lot of young males go through that. And when I see things online, I'm like ah it's just another 23-year-old right trying to prove themselves to the world. But I look at that and what we're talking about now, it's anti-ego. It's opposite of ego. It's death of ego because in in what you and I are talking about, no ego could possibly exist because all that matters. Is the result. I don't have an emotional attachment whether this worked or that worked. I just want it to work, and I want the objective reality of what is happening and the— to measure the outcome so that I can get to the truth. And when you start inserting ego, and that's where the death of the ego is such a powerful thing, I think, in coaching, because it allows you to really look at information on face value and you can see with clear eyes what is valuable and what is dogshit.