Knowing Vs Doing

Philip Pape 0:02

49% of the people who come to me for coaching are struggling with getting enough protein. And it's not because they don't understand it. They know it matters. They know how much they need oftentimes. And they could explain it to a friend. They maybe listen to this podcast. They struggle because knowing and consistently doing are two different skills. And only one of them responds to more information. Today I'm going to show you what's actually missing when you know what to do, but you can't make it work, and why the answer's not just gutting it out harder, it's not motivation, and it's not another program. Welcome to Wits and Weights, where I put a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. And if you've been doing all the things, you're lifting weights, you're tracking your nutrition, you're doing what you believe is all the right stuff. Maybe you're not doing all of it, but you're doing some of it, and your body still doesn't reflect any of that effort. This episode is going to explain why. And it's probably not the reason you think. After 500 episodes of this show, you would think I would have explained this by now, but it's important. It is really important because I'm working with a lot of people in their 40s and 50s. They come to me after years of trying to figure this out on their own. I did that for decades. And even now I'm still trying to figure it out, and I have coaches helping me. They are smart, they are educated, they've listened to a hundred podcast episodes, they've read the books, they've tried the programs. Does that sound like you? And they're still stuck in one way or the other. Something might be moving forward and something else is not. Or they go in this pattern where they make some progress, or then the progress unwinds itself. And it is absolutely not because they lack knowledge. The fitness

The Information Trap

Philip Pape 2:02

industry has convinced them that more information is the answer. Podcasts like this one thrive on giving you information because I do think information is or should be free. However, information is usually not the answer after a certain point. What I mean by that is when you go from a zero level of knowledge, you need information to get started. But after you get to about a two out of 10, the information becomes less and less the actual factor that gives you success. So today we're gonna cover why learning more about nutrition, about fitness, training can actually make things worse after a certain threshold. We're gonna talk about three specific things that are missing when you know what to do, but you can't make that knowledge work for you. And we're gonna talk about what effective coaching looks like versus what most people think it means. In case you're looking for a coach or a program or an app or a tool or whatever, how can you evaluate what's out there? How do I evaluate the people I hire as coaches? And stick around to the very end because I'm gonna give you a three-question audit that you can do in 30 seconds to figure out whether you're stuck because of a knowledge gap or an implementation gap. It's quick, it's honest, right? You can be honest with yourself when you take it, and it might help you reframe the thinking about the next step. And I'm a big fan of reframing. All right, let's talk about the information trap first. The conventional wisdom in the fitness industry is if you're not getting results, you have to learn more. You gotta watch my video, you gotta read my article, you have to listen to my podcast, you have to try a different program, you have to buy this, buy that. And I totally get it. I'm an engineer, I'm also someone who has to market my own products and offers. And my instinct when something is not working is find more data, get more something, something. There's something out there that I don't know. And that's how I'm wired, and how many of you are probably wired as well. And for a long while, learning more actually does help. And by a long while, I mean when you're a kid, when you're a teenager, and maybe partway into your 20s. And then there's this thing called wisdom that starts to creep in. Um, and and by the way, I the more wise I supposedly get, the more I know what I don't know, and the more ignorant I realize I am. And I think that's true wisdom. Um, and yet ignorance implies a lack of knowledge. So I don't want to go there just yet. Now, if you've never done certain things, if you've never tracked a macro or your food, and if you've never learned about energy balance, right, if you've never learned about progressive overload, then learning that is a huge step change and can blow your mind and change the trajectory of your life. I actually do agree with that. I think there is a step change where information has real tangible value at a certain stage. For me, that was around the year 2020, the couple years leading into before I launched this podcast when I discovered starting strength and I discovered, you know, macro tracking, and I discovered recovery, and I discovered periodization of your nutrition for fat loss and all these different things. I discovered barbells, you know, how to use them effectively, all of that. And it just like blew my mind and changed the trajectory immediately for the better, but up to a point. And there is that point. Most of you are listening, maybe getting there or maybe you're past it, where more information just makes it worse. Okay, makes it worse. And the reason is simple in that the more you learn, the more conflicting advice you encounter and is swimming in your head. You have all of these quote unquote experts, and I put quotes around that because who the heck knows what an expert is today? It's even very hard to figure that out. Credentials doesn't mean you're an expert. Others calling you an expert doesn't mean you're an expert. Being a good marketer doesn't mean you're an expert. So what is it? That's a very hard thing to answer. But there are a lot of people purporting to be experts who will say one thing or another that's a complete opposite. Cut carbs for fat loss. Nope, carbs are essential. Train, you know, X number day a week days a week with these kinds of reps or high volume program for body recomp. No, you need to do, you know, two days a week with three full body movements and go for intensity. You know, all of these counter-arguments that you can't make sense of. And there's so many more. Like that's just barely scratching the surface. And the thing is, every one of those claims is polished really well, has a bunch of studies that can they can probably point to to back them up, and they sound very authoritative. So what do you do, right? What do you do? Well, what you have actually done, tell me if you're wrong. I'm wrong here. You try a little of everything. You taste a little bit of this, a little bit of that, the buffet, the buffet of the fitness industry. Right? You try this, and then two weeks later, you second guess it because it's not quite quite

Conflicting Advice And Paralysis

Philip Pape 6:45

working. Or you hear a really compelling argument for a different method, which we call shiny object syndrome. Then you pivot to that. You hear about a new tool, a new piece of equipment. Oh, I can do BFR or I can do vibration plates without having to lift as many weights, and I could build all this muscle. Great, that sounds great. Oh, there's a new pill or a new supplement or whatever. I'm not even getting into GLP wines, it's a whole different thing. Great, I'm gonna do that. And again, it's not, it's not that you lack discipline. I see a lot of people write in or comment in, like, oh, I just lack discipline. To me, a lack of discipline is just a lack of a system or lack of a structure or lack of a plan, right? It's not really the discipline piece. It's because you are actually making what your brain thinks of as a rational response to all of this conflicting information, but without a filter, without a filter. Because if if five credible sources on YouTube and this podcast and that podcast and people you respect that you listen to in your feed tell you five different things, how do you even commit to one of those, right? Like, how do you commit to one and know what the heck is the right path? And I see this in the intake data. Okay, so here's the cool thing. I've got about a thousand pieces of client intake data that I just looked at over the last few weeks. Literal forms that I was able to put through AI and do an analysis on them. And the average person who comes to me for coaching has tried three to four different nutrition programs. Nearly half of them, so 49.2%, still struggle with protein when they come to me. And it's not because they don't know protein matters for building muscle. Of course, they know this. Everybody knows that. I mean, think about protein today, is in all the foods too. Sometimes they can even explain complex things like leucine and muscle protein synthesis, you know, they and they impress me with their knowledge. I'm like, that's pretty cool, right? But then they struggle to get enough protein. And they they struggle because knowing why something matters and that you need a certain amount of food, and even that you could split it up by each meal, say 30 grams a meal, right? Even though you know all that, you are a human being with a real schedule who has to go to the grocery store. You have a family, you have to cook, you have to plan your days, you have a stressful job, you have, you have, you have. And these are skills that you haven't built. And they're it's not, they're not gonna get built automatically, and they're not gonna get built just because you have more information. Does that make sense? The fitness industry really loves this cycle, by the way. Every month there's a new program, a new method, a new secret that promises to be the one that finally works. And every one of those products is selling you more information. In fact, a lot of the like course and curriculum stuff, education stuff, you're seeing through it now, right? We're all like seeing through that. The webinars and everything are get they're getting more and more savvy, or they're just not working in the in the industry because people don't just want more information. And yet more information is often the product, and and a lot of it's just bad marketing too. But right, it's it's not a conspiracy or anything, it's just business models. And the person who who figures that out will stop buying, and more of you have figured that out. But the people who stay confused are the ones that keep subscribing. So they're kind of like the the the patsies, if you will, or I don't know what the word I'm thinking of, right? I don't want to say suckers because even I'm a sucker if that's the case. So if you're someone who knows a lot about what we talk about on the show, and look, if you just listen to like 10 episodes of this show, your level of education is gonna go way up for free. That's cool, that's awesome. So if you know about these things, if you know about training and nutrition and you could explain like body fat versus muscle, you know, even the basic concepts, and you're still not seeing the results that reflect that knowledge, then by definition, the problem is not that you need to learn another thing or you need to learn it better. Okay. I've had clients who would ask me a billion questions to learn, but it didn't change their skills until we took that information and applied it to them. So let's let's talk about that next section now. Okay. What's actually missing? If it's not information, what is missing? Well, there's three things. Okay. Information is not a bottleneck. There's plenty of it. There's plenty of it. It's not willpower, it's not motivation, it's not discipline, not all these buzzwords. Okay. Those are all I'll call downstream effects. Those are, I'll say, symptoms. They're outcomes of the constraints. Okay. Here they are. What are those three constraints? The first one is sequencing. What do I mean? This is the big one. You know 50 things that you can improve about your nutrition and training right now. I bet you could bet if you took out a piece of paper and I said, write 50 things down that could help you become fitter, you could write

What’s Actually Missing

Philip Pape 11:25

them down. You know your protein could be higher, you know your sleep could be better, you know you're not periodizing your training the right way, you know you're not managing your stress, you know you're not eating enough on your training day, you know your fiber is too low, shall I go on? And all of those might be true. And knowing all of them right now is paralyzing, is it not? It's paralyzing you because you can't fix 50 things at the same time. But what you can do is you can fix one thing this week. Maybe two, at the most three. This is the human's capacity, human's capacity to change. And the question of which one to fix first and in what order, that is not a knowledge question. That is a sequencing question. Because it depends entirely on your specific situation. Okay, now we're gonna, now we're getting to some truths, aren't we? Because a lot of this is gonna be context dependent. And this is when we talk about personalization, this is what we mean. Now, a lot of programs, strength programs, nutrition programs, even yes, my physique university, which is about learning and learning to apply with some accountability and support, dump everything on you in week one. All right. Here's your meal plan, here's your training split, here's your supplement list. He track these 15 metrics, track this, use this tool, join the community, watch the onboarding videos. And I'm mentioning this because my current program kind of takes this approach, right? And and it's a slightly flawed approach. And you're like, why is Philip saying this? Is he trying to not have me join? You, you'll you'll understand in a bit because my my thinking is evolving on this. And I also had a listener that challenged me to talk about the honest truth about what I thought about coaching and the industry and my own products and offerings. So I'm doing that. So you see this big mass of stuff, of features, of things that you get, but nobody tells you which piece to focus on first, which one matters the most for your situation right now, which ones you can safely ignore for the next eight weeks. You know, in a in a better version of this program, like what I try to do in when when you join our group program is give you an onboarding ramp and a set of a sequence to go through that at least makes it a lot more manageable, and you know that you can ask for help to answer these questions as you go, right? Which is kind of the best you can do in that kind of situation without working with a one-on-one coach. And so when I do start working with someone one-on-one, and by the way, I take very few of those clients now because I'm trying to scale up what we do to more people, we spend the first several weeks doing almost nothing except building a measurement and a tracking system so that you can stop guessing and you start to think in terms of, okay, I need to collect information about myself to so that I can stop guessing. And that's where you have a baseline and you focus on just one or two things a week. And it's not because all this stuff doesn't matter, but look, you've been trying to fix all these things simultaneously or in the wrong order, and they've often made the other problems worse. You know, you might be eating low calories and exercising too much, and now you're trying to do 15 more things to optimize them. And if you're a go-getter who listens to wits and weights, if I give you 15 things, you're literally going to try to do them. And that could be the problem, right? So if you take someone who's,

Sequencing Your First Wins

Philip Pape 14:30

say, under-eating, what's the first thing she needs to do? Probably eat more, right? And and and someone needs to look at that data to make sure she's doing that, whether she's doing it for herself or a coach is doing it or an app or something like that. If she jumps into an aggressive training program and a fat loss phase, but hasn't done the the you know restoration of her metabolic rate first, she's just gonna burn out and she's gonna be in the same cycle again. So the sequence matters as much as the content in that case. So that's number one. Number two, the second constraint people have is of course context. Context. Because generic advice doesn't account for your life. It never has and never does. And even all the new tools and whizbang, AI, and everything else today has a hard time understanding you unless you can feed the information about yourself to it. That's where humans are helpful, right? Because a human can ask you a question and then get you give them an answer. And if the answer is not good enough, they can ask you a follow-up question, right? And and when we talk about personalization, by the way, I don't mean in the vague like everyone's different way, like the demographics-based differences. So, for example, you can go to a calculator online to calculate your metabolism and it's gonna ask things like your age or your weight, your training activity, like a few things like that. I don't mean that level of personalization, although that that's a start, right? Because you're telling it something about yourself. But I mean like the very complex web of things that makes you you, right? I mean, look, I have some that I mentioned data from my intake. 54.5% of people I coach report hormonal hormonal concerns affecting their nutrition and training. Now, whether it actually is that is different from the fact that they feel it's that. And I'm not gaslighting people. What I mean is a lot of what we feel or experience could be hormonal or we think it's hormonal because of age and because of how things don't work like they used to. You know, for women, that's perimenopause, menopause, thyroid changes. For men, it's the declining testosterone, slower recovery, disrupted sleep. And so that's over half my clients who deal with this variable that is very hard for a template or a generic approach to kind of address without digging an extra layer or two or three deeper. Another statistic from my intakes nearly 39% of people struggle with consistency around social situations and weekends. Okay, that's again almost half. And it's not because they're not committed to, trust me, they're committed. They they are to the verge of tears sometimes that they're not able to get this right with the weekends. And again, I'm talking about when they come to us, not once we start working with them, because that's when we can help them do this. But it's simply because their weekday strategy falls apart when something else happens, like a work dinner, or their teenager ate all the protein in the fridge, or they're traveling every third week for their job, or the weekend, hashtag weekend, right? Which which tends to be very chaotic for a lot of people. You know, I have clients who track perfectly Monday through Thursday, and everything's cool and it's just a super routine. Day, day Monday through Thursday, hit their protein, they stay in the calorie range, all that great stuff. And then the structure just falls off a cliff Friday night. And by Sunday, you've consumed some unmeasured, because you're not tracking, amount of wine and takeout. And then you try to make it up on Monday, right? And you cut a whole bunch of calories, and then the cycle repeats over and over, and then your weekly average pushes you at maintenance or maybe even a surplus, and that's why nothing changes, or you gain weight, even though you think you're eating less. And you get what I'm saying. So you don't need more information. You need a system, okay? And the system has to have this middle gear of life between perfect and screw it. It has to, it has to work with life, guys, right? Right in the middle. So context means someone or something or whatever, knowing your schedule, your stressors, your triggers, your hormonal patterns, your training history, your actual food environment. Like what does your personal life look like, your relationships, all that stuff. And then sees your plan and says, you know what, this is not going to work for you on Wednesdays. Let's adjust it, right? That's it. Now, that that's what we mean by context. But again, it gets, it gets context gets complex, doesn't it? Okay, so that's sequencing and context. Now, the third thing, and this is the one that probably holds everything together, is feedback loops. Feedback loops. I've talked about this before as a control systems engineer, the idea of inputs and outputs, feeding and outputs feeding back into the inputs. You need someone or something watching that data. You need the data to be observed in some way or tracked in some way, you know, and it's not just your scale weight,

Context Beats Generic Plans

Philip Pape 19:10

but it's a whole bunch of things like your sleep quality, your energy, your stress, your training performance, maybe your hormone patterns in your cycle. And basically being able to predict, okay, not just see what happens after the fact, but able to predict what's working now, what might not work in the near term before you spiral into the oh, nothing works for me. Just put up, you know, hands up, shrug emoji, nothing works for me. Because without that, without that feedback loop, here's what happens: you start a new plan, you start a new program, new nutrition approach, you're all excited, it's Monday. You follow it for three weeks, your scale doesn't move, maybe it goes up, and you're like, ah, it doesn't work. Doesn't work. So what do you do? You change something, right? You cut calories, maybe you add cardio, maybe you scrap the whole thing, you try something else. But what if you had the data that said, you know what? Your metabolism was exact adapting exactly as expected. And by the way, your waist held steady, but your neck and your biceps went up by an inch, right? Or your waist went down. I actually had a client recently, we looked at her data. Her weight is the same because we're keeping her at maintenance, but she actually lost like three inches on her waist. And like, look, you gained a bunch of muscle. Her body fat's down 4% without losing a weight weight, a pound on the scale, right? You wouldn't know that without the data, and then you would give up and you'd want to switch up. What if your training log showed, hey, my lifts are going up? I'm probably gaining strength and muscle. And three weeks just wasn't enough time for that to show results on the scale because the scale's a terrible indicator of what happened in those three weeks. Every other indicator, though, said it was working without having the data to be observed, read, understood, analyzed, and telling you, hey, let's stay the course. It's actually working. It's actually working. And let's let's get it away from the edge of the cliff, okay? Put bring your feet back here. Let's not fall off the cliff right now and make reactive decisions based on incomplete information. Let's not drive with our eyes closed and turn the wheel every time we feel a bump. Okay. That is the gap. It is not the knowledge gap. It is the sequencing, the context, and the feedback loops. Those three things are the difference between information and implementation, between knowing what to do and getting it done in a way that produces results for your body. Now, that's actually why I wanted to share something with you. Because if what I've described so far sounds like your situation, and it is for so many people, and it was for me. If you're someone who has the knowledge, you listen to the podcast, but you haven't had the structure. I am working on something pretty cool. It is designed to close this gap. Okay, it's not one on one coaching, and it is not the physique university. It is also not the app that I have out fitness lab. That that can do a lot of these things in a different way for a certain type of people, and it's awesome for that. But I'm not ready to share all the details. I will be soon. Sorry for the tease. However, however, if you're on my wait list, you're going to hear about it first. And if you want to be on that wait list and hear about it first, and by the way, when it comes out, you're going to get rock bottom founders pricing that will never be that low in the future. Go to wits and weights.com slash eatmore. Yes, you heard right. Eat more. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to tell you what it is. You know me. You know I create some pretty cool things that I believe in and I'm passionate about. This is years of coaching, knowing what works and what doesn't work. Coming soon. Eat more. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. Put your name on the list. Totally free. There's no charge to get your name on it. And then I'm going to tell you everything when it's ready very, very soon. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more. Okay. Now, what does good coaching actually look like? I want to talk about it. We're going to talk about coaching because I think there's a massive misunderstanding about what the word means, like what that word means in fitness. Because if your mental model of coaching is wrong, then you're going to just avoid it altogether, like, no, I would never get a coach. Or you're going to buy the wrong thing and I want you to waste your money. Right. I hate wasting money. I hate blowing money on things that don't work. So most people think coaching is one of two things. Either it's a personal trainer standing next to

Build Feedback Loops

Philip Pape 23:20

you in the gym counting your reps, which is fine, right? But that's that's like a tiny piece of what a coach would do. It's not even coaching in many cases, it's supervising your training. I mean, you're lucky if that person even gives you a good program. That that's one thought. Okay. The other thought of coaching is a premium service where you pay $500 a month, $600 a month for a one-on-one coach, and someone gives you a plan, a meal plan, texts you every day, maybe creates a dependent relationship instead of helping you build skills. And a lot of you are like, well, I want that. I want somebody to tell me what to do. But it's not going to work long term because you don't know what to do after that point, unless you want to keep working with somebody for $500 a month for the rest of your life. I would say that effective coaching that actually produces change looks very different. The first thing it has is a timeline. It actually has a start point and an end point. And a lot of the coaches listening are like, why are you doing that? What about the long-term value of customers? What about, you know, you get customers a result, clients a result, and then they keep, they stay with you for the long term. Well, I love it when clients, we get them a result in three or six months. And then they're like, I want to keep working with you because I'm learning and there's another goal that I have. That doesn't preclude the fact that there's a start and an end point to the first goal. So you should be able to get a goal that you're trying to achieve. And it has to be a realistic goal, of course. But then, and then you could do another goal after. There's nothing that stops you. But it shouldn't be this like content feed that you're subscribing to forever, right? And and when I think of physique university as it is today, that's more like the it's more like the ladder in that it gives you a lot of great information and education, the ability to engage constantly and the beginning, ability to get coaching support constantly. And we do help you with your goals, but I feel like we could do a better job of having a start and end point, right? Which alludes to the thing I mentioned earlier, witswaits.com slash eat more. Stay tuned. So the goal of coaching is that at the end, you can manage your nutrition and training without a coach. You can fire the coach. I'm sorry, other coaches, if that's not the model you want me to tell people about, but it's the one that I think is super, super effective because if you get a result with me, you're gonna tell everybody about me anyway. You're gonna say, hey, Philip was a good guy. He helped me out, he didn't lie, he was honest, he had integrity, he helped me get a result that I'm happy with. It was realistic too. He didn't sugarcoat it, he didn't promise what he couldn't deliver. And hey, go check him out. Or hey, I'm gonna work with them again on my next goal, you know? So if a program doesn't have a plan for doing that, for making you independent by building skills and getting a result, ask yourself who that program is really designed to serve. Okay. Second, is it sequential? Does it build on itself and actually help you build those skills? Does each week build on the last? Right? You're not just browsing or floating around or doing, I'll say, 20 habits from day one, and now you just do those habits for the next six months. You've or you're following some sort of progression where the, you know, day one builds into week one, builds into week two, builds into month two. And it it makes logical sense and is super achievable. Like the bar is very low. So what that might look like is well, in the first phase, you're gonna build your measurement system. Then the middle phase, you're gonna execute that system, but have real-time adjustments with the feedback loops. And then maybe the final phase is I'm gonna build autonomy and maintain those results. So then I also have the skills to do this again in the future. So that's really important. Is it sequential? Does it have a process? Does it have phases, et cetera, periodization? The third thing is that there is some human or entity, I'm gonna put it that way, watching your data and helping you make decisions or make calls. All right. And I say human or entity because today we do have AI, we do have software, we do have,

A Brand New Solution

Philip Pape 27:10

you know, I'll say automated systems that can do an effective job at some of this kind of thing, but not all of it. And, you know, I like the approach where if there's if you need a human involved because your situation has a little bit of complexity, having it be a combination of automated things that make it convenient for you, where like the data is easy to track, it's easy to get a quick answer on things that like are somewhat automated, and then a human can jump in for the more complex stuff so that it's convenient for you and it's fast. Like I want you to get an answer quickly. I don't want you to have to wait till the next call or like wait to get a response from your coach. Right. I I'm seeing it from both sides here. Okay. And yeah, it helps when you have a video library or education or guides or something like that. Like we all do, like all good coaches have those things. But if if someone can access your training history, your hormone context, your schedule, you know, maybe, maybe your photos, maybe your measurements, like whatever makes sense, or at least be able to get them quickly and then say, hey, based on what I'm seeing, here's what you need to change. So there's got to be some level of that. All right. Like in my app, for example, it it's doing that almost fully automated and it's really impressive. And it uses AI to do that. And yet some people want the human connection as well. And that's why I think there's a place for both in the world. The fourth thing it does is it integrates nutrition and training. Now, there's a lot of other pieces of lifestyle

What Good Coaching Looks Like

Philip Pape 28:30

we talk about, sleep, stress, et cetera. But to me, the nutrition and training are the two big ones that come together. And they're not separate problems. That's the thing, they're not separate. I can't tell you how many people join my list or find the podcast and they reach out and they're like, I really want to lose weight. I really want to improve my health. I really, first question I ask is, Are you lifting weights? Oh no, I'm not doing that. Like, oh, I am so glad you met me because that is so important. It's not just the nutrition, it's the training. And some people have the opposite problem. They're like all into training and PRs and lifting weights and everything, but they eat like crap. You know, they they they just don't know how to make it work together. So they both go together. They affect each other tremendously as a system. And so I think any coaching program that addresses just one side of that is only solving half the equation. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have a program for one side if you're addressing the other side a different way. I'm not trying to criticize all the great programs out there that do like just training. I'm just saying that you have to have them both addressed in some way. Okay, now I know some of you are thinking, wow, that actually does sound like that sounds like more expensive than one-on-one coaching, what you just talked about. Like, how am I gonna find somebody or something that does all of that? I definitely can't afford, let's say, 500 a month for personalized one-on-one. And for a lot of people, honestly, that is overkill. Most experienced people, they don't, they don't need like a human texting them every day or they or constantly following up on them. But what they do need is structure, they need a sequence, and they need periodic check-ins. Like to me, that's a good balance because this isn't your life. Let's be honest. It's it's kind of my life because I'm a podcaster and I'm a coach, but it's not your life. And I get it. I don't want to be imposing on you some system where you feel overwhelmed by your coach. That's not the point. I think there's a middle ground between, you know, here's information, here's some, here's a group, here's some content, you know, like think about physique university, which is $27 a month. I mean, that's dirt cheap, right? For it, it's practically like a Netflix subscription. And that's kind of the model, right? But then the other side is, oh, full-time personal nutritionist, you know, you're like Mr. Hollywood, Will Smith, or whoever who needs the nutrition guy following you around. But there's like gotta be this middle ground, and it barely exists in the industry because I think people are going full on what they call high ticket, or they're going low tuck to low ticket where they want to upsell you to high ticket. All right. Now, let me tell you what I'm not saying here because this message always gets misread. I'm not saying the information is useless. I'm not saying podcasts and books and YouTube don't help. I have a podcast to help people. I learn an enormous amount that way myself. And I'm not saying that everyone needs a coach. Some people do figure this out on their own, and that is awesome. What I am saying is that past a certain point for a certain type of person, and you know if this is you listening, more information has diminishing returns, whereas structure has exponentially increasing returns. And the gap between knowing and doing is a real gap. It is not a flaw in your character or your discipline or something like that. Stop beating yourself up. Stop being guilty. It's not you. I mean, you can feel guilty, but I'm just telling you, it's not you. It's a problem with the design. And design problems have design solutions. Hey, hey, physique engineer here. Okay, I can help you with that. Now, I want you to stay to the end because I still have that three-question audit to tell you if your bottleneck is knowledge or implementation, so you don't go down the right path. But I do want to zoom in on why this is relevant if you're older. If you're among us older dudes and gals who are over 40, we lift, the stakes get a little bit higher now. And whether you're a man or a woman, okay, the specifics look different, but the principles are universal. Go back in time to your 20s or your early 30s. What could you do back then? Just about anything with a suboptimal approach, right? Your hormones were very forgiving and fiery, and your recovery was super fast, your joints felt great. You could out-train a bad nutrition plan, you could do gross fit terribly like I did for eight years, and you had this huge margin for error, and it was great. Life was great, okay? You do whatever. And that margin starts to shrink. It starts to shrink in your 40s and your 50s. Those are the key decades where this happens. For women, you've got perimenopause, menopause, which change hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. That affects your muscle protein synthesis, it affects your sleep, it gives you all these symptoms that affect everything. It affects your body fat distribution. For men, testosterone is declining starting at the age of 30. And by 50, you could be at like 70% of your peak, especially if you're not lifting weights. And that means slower recovery, less energy, stubborn body fat. And then the information landscape for us over 40 is a complete mess right now. It's a mess. Half of the advice says you just accept the declining strength and do all these other longevity hacks, biohacking. It's a huge thing. Or they're going to sell you a hormone-specific supplement stack, or they go right to HRT but forget all the lifestyle, or GLPs and forget the lifestyle, right? What you need is someone or something or a method or system to understand how your body is operating under all of these new constraints that didn't exist before, and then work within those constraints intelligently, not as a fear-monger, not to say you can't. No, you can absolutely thrive in the best ways this time of life. Okay. And that's just not something that a guide can do or podcast can do, including this one, including this one. I give you the principles every week. I give you lots of tips too. I bring in a lot of cool guests, but the application of those to your body and your hormones and your schedule and your data requires more than information, requires a structured process. All right, that tip is coming up in a second, but if this episode made you think, hey, that is me, that is my situation, I want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. I am building something for people who lift weights, who don't mean more need more information, who are not beginners, but you need a structured, week-by-week coaching process with a real sequence, with actual context, with someone watching your data, a human in the a human in the loop. I'm going to be sharing the details with my weight list. So to get on that list, go to with witsandweights.com slash eatmore. The link will be in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash eatmore. And I'm going to be sharing more soon. I, you know, everybody loves to be teased, right? Like, what is Philip doing here? This is not an April Fool's joke, by the way. Because I know we're getting close to that time. Witsandwaits.com slash eat more. Also, text this episode to a friend if you think they need to hear it, because a lot of people need to hear this message. Okay, here's a quick way to figure out whether you're stuck because of knowledge or implementation. It's three questions. They're yes or no questions. Question one can you explain right now what you would need to do with your nutrition and training to move toward your goal? Okay, not perfectly, but just a general approach. Okay, can you explain what you need to do with your nutrition and training generally right now to move toward your goal? If the answer is yes, knowledge is not your problem. Question two, have you followed that approach consistently for at least six weeks? Okay, that's about 45 days, six weeks without changing it. Okay, have so if question one was yes, you know what to do. Question two is have you followed that consistently for six weeks without changing it? Now, if the answer is no, well then you have a commitment or structure problem, don't you? It's not an information problem. Something is preventing you from sticking with what you already know works. And now question three Do you have a way to measure whether your approach is actually working beyond just the scale? Okay, so things like training logs, biofeedback, stuff like that. All

The Middle Ground Approach

Philip Pape 36:20

right, if the answer is no, you are flying blind. You might be making progress or you might not be. And you just don't know. You might be stuck in a cycle and no way to catch what to do next. You just don't know. So if you answered yes, no, no, then you do not need more information. You don't need another podcast episode. I have a lot of them, I can send you, but you don't need it. You need a system that takes what you already know and turns it into a structured, measurable process. That is the gap. And remember that closing that gap is what's gonna change everything for you. That is it. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the gap between knowing and doing is not discipline, it is structure. I'm Philip Hate, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.