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The link is in the show notes.
Okay, let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
How are you doing Ben?
Really good.
Thanks Patrick.
We're going to do something.
We're doing something.
It's not really different.
We're going to do it slightly differently.
We have been over the last couple months answering one single question from a member of our Chase Club.
We've been keeping that just for Chase Club members.
But truthfully, I think we're going to start sharing them everywhere.
We're still going to take one or two questions a month from our Chase Club members.
But then we're just going to share the answers anywhere and everywhere.
So that's what we've got today.
It's going to be our first kind of public one of these.
Two things.
If you want to get a question into an episode like this, join the Chase Club chasingexcellenceemail.
The link is also in the show description.
But also, we're going to start returning to... your questions out there.
Ben, you're going to start doing something we're going to call the five by five, which is harkens back to old school chasing three by three.
We used to do a three by three and we used to do a two minute drill.
So I'm kind of doing a little bit of both in one.
Five by five?
Is you're going to answer five listener questions, all of them inside a single one of the five factors?
So I think the first one we're going to do in a week or two is going to be in the think factor.
And then next month, we'll do one in the train factor.
So if you want to get a question into that queue, make sure you're signed up for the newsletter at chasingexcellenceemail, just the free one.
And we're going to continue sending out links so you folks out there can get a question in the queue.
And we'd love to get a bunch of new ones.
We've got a handful already, but going forward, we'd love to get some new ones.
So again, chasingexcellence.email for all that stuff.
And I'm excited to get back to listener questions because we did for many, many years.
We answered so many listener questions and then we kind of went away from them.
So I really want to bring them back.
So I'm excited about that.
All right, one question from Christina, member of our Chase Club.
Here's what she's asked.
Recently, I wanted to hire a coach for one month, just to compare my knowledge of fueling my body and what I'm doing for workouts.
She knows my goals and has plenty of success with previous clients, but just told me to take six days off and stick to walking, swimming and yoga.
My first thought was no way in all caps.
But then I'm thinking.
I don't remember the last time I took more than two days off on purpose for my gym slash workouts.
Do you think I should see how this goes and lock in, even if this means trying not to work out?
I would still walk, swim, and do yoga, of course.
But I'm nervous to see how my brain functions without training with my weights and intensity.
What would you recommend?
Is it time to recover?
So, Christina, thank you for the question.
What do you think, bud?
Is she crazy?
Is her coach crazy?
No, she's not crazy.
Who's crazy here?
Yeah.
I'm reading Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money right now and literally the first chapter is called No One is Crazy.
Yeah.
And it's kind of that it's the same thing.
It's like none of us are like and the way he starts it off is we all come from different backgrounds, different cultures, different times, different communities, different education.
It's like.
So because somebody in his case responds to the concept of money different than you do, doesn't mean they're crazy.
They're doing it exactly the way that they feel like they should be doing it.
And they look at you like you're crazy.
This is the same thing with fitness, right?
It's the same deal.
Somebody looks at someone like Christina and is like, oh my God, you're bonkers.
You're off the rails.
You are writing into a podcast to ask if it's okay to take six days off from training.
Where Christina is going like, oh my gosh, I can't believe people don't train every single day.
What are they doing?
That's crazy.
So the first part of this is, no, she's not crazy and none of us are.
Or we all are.
It doesn't matter.
One or the other.
So here's where I would start with this is Christina hired a coach for a reason.
Yep.
I think this happens a lot, when you kind of get like a little tweak in your shoulder or something like that and you go to the doctor and the doctor is like well, you definitely need to stop lifting.
And you're like – not listen to that doctor.
And you go to the next doctor and the doctor's like, you really need to lay off exercise.
You're like, nope, they don't know what they're talking about.
You finally get to a doctor who's like, just keep doing what you're doing.
And I think it'll get better.
You're like, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
Like we just want to, a lot of times we seek confirmation bias.
So we look for coaches.
In Christina's case, She's interested in getting an understanding of her outside opinion on her workouts and her fueling.
And my sense in this is like if you're seeking that out for someone to validate, to say like Hey, I think you're doing all the right things.
Why are we seeking a coach at all?
We, as you know, we work with a business coach.
And that's been on and off over the last 10 years.
We had our quarterly meeting the last two days.
And we go around the room and to start the meeting off, we share a bunch of things as a segue.
And one of the things are, what's your expectations for the meeting?
And my expectations were... to have something unexpected come out of it.
That's what I want from the coach.
I was like, if you just give me all of the things that I'm already expecting, I don't think I'm going to feel like I got the time and value out of this.
What I am so desperately hoping is that something I'm not planning on us talking about some issue that I don't see pops up.
And it did.
And when it happened, I was like, yes.
And that's what, when we closed the meeting, we were around, it was like, what do we feel?
I was like I'm just so glad that something that I didn't realize was a blind spot that we had popped up and now we can work on it.
I'll just fill in the blank because, if there's curiosity, we do a really good job creating team-wide, organizational-wide Objectives and key results.
That's how we run our business.
What we've done a poor job of and I didn't realize this until it came up was departmental objectives and key results that are measured and held people accountable to on a weekly basis.
So we created a whole new structure to where yes, we are going to accomplish these things objectively as a quarter, but we're also going to do this departmentally.
And you can do so much more.
And I knew once it popped up, I was like, I know that's the missing link for us.
Just knew it.
So, all right, getting back to Christina.
You hired a coach for a reason.
What coaches should be – the whole coaching relationship is built off of basically two fundamental things.
Experimentation and trust.
Hmm.
That's basically what this is about.
It's like you have to go, oh, okay, I will try that.
That's the experiment part.
And the reason I'm going to try that is because I trust you.
And she said, like, this coach has gotten phenomenal results for other people.
So there's a level of trust there.
We, if we're not doing that, we're not ready for coaching.
That's really what that comes down to and it's okay.
Or at least you're not ready to make that big of a change, and i get it.
Change is scary, so that's and, by the way, like the reason that we do that is because the reason we look outside of ourselves is because good coaches have a different perspective.
When they're coming something from the outside, they have not only different, but probably more context.
A good coach, right?
A good coach should have more context.
In this example with the business coach, he's literally led 8,000 plus quarterly meetings.
Eight, like a whole lot.
That's a lot.
He just sees it and he just knows it, right?
It's just like...
Whereas I bring in so many more reps than you have.
Yeah, exactly.
And because that he's been able to connect dots.
Yeah.
And has different viewpoint that I I don't have.
And I'm so far into it with so many biases and so many other things.
And same thing with Christina.
Like this coach has worked with.
I don't know, dozens or hundreds of other people that are going through the same things.
And she's very easy to go, oh, okay, I've seen this.
It's kind of like I went down and I met with a kind of physio about some Achilles issue I was having.
And I'd seen so many people over it over so many years, finally saw this guy.
First question he asks is how do you sleep?
Right.
Perspective, be able to connect the dots.
And you weren't there because you thought you were having trouble sleeping or because you had the issue with sleep.
Absolutely not.
I was doing all the different and took his advice on a couple of different things.
And literally this Achilles thing that I've been dealing with for over 10 years went away in 10 days.
And it hasn't come back.
It's like, oh, this is a good coach, right?
They have different perspective, different context, the ability to connect dots that you don't even see.
So the first question to Christina is like, You're looking to hire a coach.
Are you ready to be coached?
That's kind of the deal.
And maybe you don't think she's that good.
That's okay.
You can use your gut to kind of like feel that out as well.
Because just because someone says something doesn't mean you have to follow a letter to the law or accept it as truth at all.
And I think that you should challenge.
So, but if you trust... then it's your turn to experiment.
All that in-between stuff.
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I love that, experiment and trust.
And I think we've said the word perspective a handful of times now.
I think that's the thing that bubbles up to me, which is we have to recognize that our perspective is limited Always, even if we do a good job of being in perspective, even if we journal, like our perspective is so specific to our experience, our context.
That if we're not willing to take a step back and say I probably am not seeing everything as clearly as I could,
Not probably.
I am not seeing everything as clearly as I could.
And if you find somebody out there, whether it's a business coach, whether it's a good friend, whether it's a coach like Christina, who in many ways to your point, like you're hiring them for their perspective, really like start and finish.
Their perspective is what you're hiring them for.
If you don't trust their perspective, then that's a different question.
But if you trust them enough to say, yes, sure, I will give you money.
I will work with you for a month.
I will work with you for a year.
What you are saying is I believe that you have a perspective that I could benefit from.
And then if you immediately then say yeah, but your perspective is wrong to your point well, what are we doing here?
We're wasting everybody's time.
And I think the last thing that you made me think of as you were going through that is, you know the thing we talk about all the time, which is curiosity over judgment.
Right.
So if Christina gets this feedback, she says, I want you to take a week off.
I want you to walk in yoga.
Immediately, the immediate response is judgment.
No, that's wrong.
That can't be right.
What's going to happen if I don't work out for five days?
Or it could be, oh, that's interesting.
I wonder what she's trying to get at by making me take a week off.
I wonder why she says swimming's okay, but heavy barbell lifts aren't.
Right?
Why?
What's going on here?
And ask questions and go back and forth and use that coach's perspective to fill in the gaps that you yourself have.
I think that's the opportunity anytime you hire somebody or anytime you open yourself up to say I need some help.
I don't exactly know what I'm doing here.
I'm doing all these things.
Two of them might be wrong.
Seven of them might be right.
But I can't tell which is the two and which is the seven.
Yeah, that's right.
That perspective and that ability to kind of like say, you know, I don't know whether it's the two or the seven.
Just to kind of like give some, maybe all like.
If Christina was to come to me and say this, what's going through my brain is this is one of like.
Why would I give this advice to someone?
And it comes down to basically the physiological and the psychological.
So the first part is the physiological and what Christina is probably afraid of, which is psychological.
But the physiological thing of actually what happens with six or seven or ten days off.
There is negligible and most likely zero loss in strength or aerobic capacity from a one week deload.
That just doesn't happen.
And in fact, many times the opposite happens.
And if there is what probably is, this coach is seeing if there's a cumulative chronic fatigue or stress or degradation because of overload, this little break has the potential to restore the nervous system, some hormones, some connective tissue, and we know from our adaptation curve that it might actually allow for some super compensation.
You might come back stronger, but I can almost promise you won't come back weaker.
So, in terms of the physiological standpoint of this Christina, you have nothing to fear from losing any sort of performance.
And this goes right down to like, Jack Daniels, not the drink, but he created a program called VDOT.
He's one of the world's leading aerobic minds.
He's tested this with actually literally muscle biopsies.
And I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but I think it's.
There is no from an actual muscular biopsy standpoint in terms of capacity of muscle tissue to perform.
I think you maintain 90 of peak, for I think it's 70 days.
Hmm.
Hmm.
That's kind of wild, right?
We're worried about seven days.
So there's only a 10% drop after two and a half months.
That's kind of wild.
Okay, then there's the physiological, right?
And the physiological is sort of the same and this coach might just be seeing a couple things which might be some overstress overuse, or it might be the type of thing where she's sort of recognizing that There might be some identity rolled into this.
I need this for my identity.
Um, because here's the other part.
I don't even know if she said, like my coach said, it would be okay if I did swimming, yoga and walking.
Did she say that?
Or she's like, no, I would still.
Yeah.
She said, uh, she told me to take six days off and stick to walking, swimming and yoga.
Oh, she told the coach.
Okay.
That's good.
Okay.
By the way.
Some people have a hard time doing that as an exercise routine.
That's not nothing at all.
Some people only do yoga.
There's a whole sport called Olympic swimming.
Those people are crazy fit and crazy jacked.
So this is not nothing at all.
So my guess is that this coach is seeing a little bit more of the identity thing.
Maybe she's not looking for you to peak your performance.
It's that this is this might be too much.
And what?
Training is – the purpose of training is to support your life, not to have you trapped by it.
So this is probably – this is where I'm guessing this coach is coming from.
If somebody comes in and their whole world is wrapped up in this, they're seeing something so much more.
Maybe this is a phenomenal coach.
They're seeing something beyond the fueling and the workouts.
They're seeing the whole human.
And they really aren't as concerned if your back squat goes from 205 to 200 in these seven days.
They're not that concerned if your VO2 max drops by a point or two in these seven days.
They're not even concerned if it goes up after these few days.
They're seeing the full picture and they're seeing what's happening to the human being.
And What we want to be able to do is have that little breath, step away and do the stuff that other people call training.
That you're saying is nothing.
And maybe this is a nice little reset.
So you know the bottom line is I would basically you know the idea is treat this like an experiment.
That's why I'm open minded with curiosity, as Patrick said.
If you want us with an experiment, but with judgmental, you're going to have all the confirmation bias that you went into this with.
Jordan Metzl that we had on did such a great job of this, right?
He lays out, we have dozens and dozens of biases.
I think he laid out 10, 15, or 20 of them.
And basically the idea is if you, if you are, um, too biased, it's nothing's going to override it.
So if you go into this thing, like, Nope, this isn't gonna work.
This isn't gonna work.
This isn't gonna work.
Um, It's not going to work.
But if you go in with open-minded curiosity, no judgment and go.
I truly want to see the experiment of what's on the other side of this.
And then see how you feel afterwards.
And, and maybe like, may I get back in this, you know, more back to the, the, why would you do this?
From the physiological, sorry, from the psychological standpoint, if.
Or why would you not do this is the right question, right?
Because I'm not saying.
The reason not to do this would be if she's saying take a week off, but you are recovering great, right.
You are making progress.
You are making gains.
You are getting closer to your goals.
You are excited to train.
You are constantly in a good mood.
Like, you love the process of this.
Not that you love being someone who trains.
This is the difference between, like there are people that love being a golfer but actually hate the game of golf.
They don't realize it, right?
But when they're actually playing golf, they're kind of miserable.
They like the idea of being a golfer. do you truly love it or do you like the idea of this?
And if the answer to those are all like yes, like I'm sleeping well, I'm in good moods, I have no little aches and pains, my hormones are right, I have a regular cycle and all these things, and I'm recovering and you know all this, then
Yeah, then the coach is probably off with saying this.
You don't probably need to do that.
But if any – not all, but any one of those – or even not, a hell yes, then it'd be a cool experiment to take.
And then at the other side, you go, okay, how does it feel?
Am I sleeping better?
Is my mood better?
Are the aches and pains gone away?
Am I more excited?
Am I enjoying the process more?
Do I value this more?
Is my identity wrapped in this a little bit less?
And whether... the outcome is positive or not, you learned.
Right?
And you learned because you didn't keep doing the same thing.
You tried something new, you experimented and you took a seven-day little thing to learn something new.
And if you are with a coach that, as Christina said, has had great success with other people.
This is such a low risk experiment.
Thank you so much for being here.
Two quick things before you go.
First, the 531 listener guide for this episode is in the show notes.
Five big ideas, three reflection questions, and one key takeaway.
Check it out at the link in in the show notes.
And second, if you're ready to do the daily work, not just listen to the show, the Chase Club is where the crew does that together.
Daily lessons, monthly challenges, a Friday Chase Club, chat club all of it at the link in the show notes and chasing excellence dot email.
