Jeff is a Canadian based WNBF pro bodybuilder, coach for The Strength Guys,IPF Powerlifter, and co-founder of the IceCream4PRs YouTube Channel & Podcast.

Note from Matt: This interview was recorded from a Skype conversation and then transcribed by me.

Matt: Jeff, you’re a coach for one of my favorite online coaching brands, The Strength Guys. Can you tell me a little bit about how your relationship began with the team?

Jeff: Yeah, so first of all thank you for saying that we’re one of your favorite brands online. There’s a lot of great coaching brands out there, so I appreciate that.

I originally found The Strength Guys on Twitter, strangely enough, which is a platform I don’t use that often. Layne Norton gave them a shoutout and said that they were a group of young guys who were evidenced-based, a little more personal than the other stuff you saw out there, and affordable. At that time I was looking for a coach and they seemed to fit the type of coaching service that I wanted. I started working with them and they were incredible. They were extremely personable, quick to answer any questions I had, and just seemed like they genuinely cared about my goals. We developed rapport very quickly which was important to me as an athlete. A few months down the road I competed in my first powerlifting competition. I might have the timeline off on this, but soon after I was offered a sponsorship by them to become their first sponsored athlete. I was sponsored by them for quite a while and I earned my Pro card in the WBNF as a natural bodybuilder with their guidance. Shortly after that I was offered a position as a coach for The Strength Guys. Everything flowed very nicely. We’ve always gotten along on a personal level as well as on a professional one.

Matt: Did you ever think that becoming a coach with them was a possibility? You’ve taken over the nutrition role for the team, right?

Jeff: Yeah I take care of a lot of our contest prep and physique clients. The guys were offering nutrition services before I started coaching but when I was working with them I only used them for training. It was the training aspect of TSG that really attracted me to them orginally and the amazing client portfolio they’d built up. They’d had clients who were Nascar drivers, powerlifters, bodybuilders, and general population clients.

I never really saw coaching with TSG as an option because I was going to school to become a dentist. This is obviously a huge career change for me (laughing). Jason and I had talked about whether I could come on part-time while I was in school to take clients, but the program was just so demanding that it wasn’t feasible for me. Later I started to have this revelation that becoming a dentist wasn’t really the life I wanted and Jason, my girlfriend, and I had several long conversations that led to me choosing a new path. I don’t mean to downgrade the dentistry profession at all, but after making this decision I am much happier and less stressed. I feel much more fulfilled working with The Strength Guys as a coach and being in an industry where I can dedicate more time to my own individual goals as an athlete. For the first time I really can dedicate all of my time and energy into this.

Matt: What do you think makes The Strength Guys unique as an online coaching group? The brand has grown and gained the status of being an authority in a relatively short time span.

Jeff: The first thing that attracted me to Jason and the team was the personal nature of their coaching. I felt very valued as an athlete and that’s just something that’s pretty rare in the online community. It’s difficult to connect with someone in a fundamental level through email and messaging. I felt that the entire team at The Strength Guys did an excellent job at this. I think we, our team, are driven by our emotions and intuitions rather than the hard science and the connection with our client is an incredibly important part of coaching. These connections set the stage for other things such as being respected by authorities in the science community. Once that started to happen our growth evolved organically.

One of the things I really respected about The Strength Guys, and Jason specifically, was their ability to course correct. They are very open to new evidence and ideas. For example, we use to give protein recommendations based off of something like 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight. Very, very high. We recognized that this wasn’t supported by the latest literature even though a lot of evidenced-based coaches are still recommending high protein intakes. We were willing to change our outlook on this based on the new data we were coming across. I think that this openness, acceptance of criticism, and willingness to have a new outlook is important to evolving and we have been focused on doing this as a team. We don’t stay tied down to one cookie-cutter way to doing things online and it’s really helped our brand develop and grow over time.

It’s also worth mentioning that we’ve had the pleasure of working with great athletes, like myself for example (laughing). We currently have at least 20 athletes who will be at the Canadian nationals. It’s a big deal to get even one athlete to nationals. To be in contention for medals is something that we are extremely proud of as coaches. So, the fact that we’ve been able to work with so many great athletes over the years has attested to our abilities and I think people recognize that.

Matt: I want to switch over a little bit to the business side of The Strength Guys. I think your team is at the forefront of the next big step for online coaching which is great coaches working together to grow one brand and business. This isn’t brand new, of course, but as online coaching continues to grow I think this business model will become more and more popular. Coaches can work together, complement each others weaknesses, and work with more clients than before. Do you see this business model becoming a standard over the next few years?

Jeff: That’s a good question. I think I see online coaching in general growing, which has positive and potentially negative effects. Some people think that it takes away from the in-person training side of coaching and on some level I can be sympathetic to that view. You also have to look at the upsides of online coaching which Matty Fusaro talked about in your previous interview. In terms of online coaching teams growing I think it is a good model for the reasons you alluded to. With our team we really do complement and learn from each other. Jon is our powerlifting expert with a ton of experience. I have the background in biochemistry and nutrition so I can be the authority whenever anything comes up in this space. We have Vigotsky who is our research consultant and keeps us up to date with all the new literature. He allows us to keep on evolving as a team. Then you have Jason who is sort of a blend of all these things and oversees the rest of us. Alex work on the media side is extremely important to us as well. So, when you have a team like this of course you’re able to do and accomplish more compared to a team of one. I think that it could be done, but the danger is that the solo coach could burnout or miss something. With so much going on it would also be hard to keep up with the latest research and evolve. It really is a good business model.

Matt: In addition to coaching for The Strength Guys you also put energy into your own brand. Could you give our coaching community some background on the focus you have and the content you produce?

Jeff: Sure. Honestly I haven’t really turned my own brand into a business yet. I’m not super interested in the entrepreneurial aspect of it. I just do it for fun. I have a Youtube channel called IceCream4PRs. I actually stupidly monetized it a few weeks ago and quickly realized that it wasn’t worth it because I’d only make a fraction of a cent or something (laughing). I create these videos and additional content because I enjoy it and it’s a good way to connect to my clients. If my clients have a question for me and it’s a really common question it’s practical for me to explain it to them over video. When it comes up again I can just sent the video instead of having to write the same email response 10x in a week. The videos are really used as as way to give back to the community, if that makes sense? There were all these people that inspired me in the past and tons of Youtube channels that helped me as an athlete. I just felt that I had something to offer and wanted to share it. In terms of my Instagram it’s a similar sort of thing. I suppose it’s good for me to get exposure. I have clients who follow me on Instagram and really enjoy interacting there. I really just started the IG account as a food porn account. Eventually when I decided to compete at MuscleMania a few fellow competitors gave me shoutouts. I ended up winning and had a lot more people following me. It’s been an interesting experience for me to go to the Arnold Classic and have people ask to get a photo with me (laughing). None of this was ever done with the intent to make any money off of it because up until very recently I was a dental student. I wasn’t concerned with building my brand online other than to support The Strength Guys. With all that said, I think that if I continue to produce content on Youtube and through my Podcast it will could grow into something more. I might have to get t-shirts or whatever it is that people do to make money off of all this (laughing).

Matt: Well at the very least it’s good for lead generation for The Strength Guys.

Jeff: Absolutely. It seems to me that people really want to know and see who their connecting with online. I want people to hire me or work with me because they like what I represent. Unless I put that out there how else are they going to know that I’m a good match with them?

Matt: So there seems to be three or four coaches out there who have brands promoting heavy ice cream consumption. My question is how much ice cream do you consume weekly and why should you have the official Ice Cream fitness dude?

Jeff: I know! Man, that’s a really good question. The first one that I saw that had something ice cream fitness related was Jason Blaha. My girlfriend and I were talking about creating a YouTube channel and brainstorming. It was just so small so there wasn’t much thought put into it. We landed on IceCream4PRs and thought it sounded catchy. Since then I’ve seen a couple different Ice cream accounts and there’s obviously nothing wrong with that. Ice cream is unanimously appreciated so I see why people would want to use it. Sooo, I don’t eat ice cream a whole lot. Maybe once a week. I think when we made that channel we were both fresh off of competitions or at least Robin was. When you’re fresh off of a competition all you want is sweet stuff and you have a much higher appreciation for food than before. So our channel name was probably an artifact of that. I don’t know if I should be THE ice cream fitness dude (laughing). I’m willing to share.

Matt:Over the past week while preparing for this interview I actually became obsessed with the channel and in particular the powerlifting twerking intro you have (click here). I was curious about how this intro came about and the reaction you’ve received from it so far.

Jeff: Yes! I have regular viewers of the channel tell me that they still laugh every single time they see that. Whenever I compete in powerlifting it seems that on my third lift I get too ambitious. I’ve always struggled with locking out a lift at the top and get really jittery. This is somewhat common but I do it really, really bad. My whole body just girates (laughing). My girlfriend and I were looking at the video of this competition after we had started our channel. We just died laughing and she thought of the song immediately. 100% her idea. So we put the song and the video together and it’s stuck since then.

Matt: Switching over to you as a coach, when you made the transition from being an athlete to a coach what challenges did you have? Did it take a while to become as effective as you wanted to be?

Jeff: It wasn’t really a sharp transition to be honest. I had a small handful of clients that I took on myself while in school so I did have previous experience with online coaching. My background as a coach also runs deep. I was the captain for several basketball teams going back to middle school up to University. In terms of adjustment it was mostly just logistical things. One big thing was the amount of emails I would get from clients. When I first started I found myself compulsively checking my inbox because there was always something in there. As a student I was used to having zero and now I could never below 30 emails. That took a little while to get used to and forced me to create blocks of time that I dedicate to checking emails rather than always being on my phone/computer. That was a pretty big obstacle for me, but it was always logistical things like this I had to work through instead of the coaching side of it all. The experience I had with competing and coaching really allowed me to connect with my clients.

I’m not an expert when it comes to templates and design so it did take me a while to get used to the way Jason wanted everything written and presented. It’s been a really good learning experience for me and he’s sort of catapulted me in this area because he’s so good at it. We were talking earlier about how TSG has been able to become so successful so quickly. I think that’s something that shouldn’t be undermined, the actual presentation of our work and content. When something looks very classy people are naturally going to be attracted to it. This was something I don’t think I ever really appreciated online. I appreciated it in my schoolwork, but it wasn’t something I could grasp online until Jason and I had all these conversations. It was interesting because we did a presentation for the Online Fitness Summit last week and the first thing that I said was that we should start with getting together our basic information and outline. Jason put the brakes on that quickly and had us focus on the format. We chose our font, where to put our logo….for him the presentation was everything. This was something I did have to learn and feel that I did learn quite quickly.

Matt: What are your goals for the rest of this year as an athlete and as a fitness professional? I saw that you just PR’d 370 in Bench Press which is awesome!

Jeff: Thanks! As an athlete my primary focus right now is on bodybuilding. I plan on making pro debut sometime next year in 2016. For me I have to work on body parts. I have to bring up my back, my biceps, and just overall get a little bit bigger over the next year. It’s hard to really nail down goals in bodybuilding because it’s not quite as tangible as powerlifting where you have a number to shoot for. I also have powerlifting goals. I’m going to do a meet this year, but I’m not entirely sure which one yet. Early summerish. My goals there would be to qualify for the Arnold Classic again because I wanted to compete in the Classic this year and was supposed to, but I had a nagging injury so had to pull out. Hopefully I can quality again so I can do the Classic as I’m right in the beginning of prepping for the stage. I don’t have specific numbers that I’m shooting for because my injury has forced my training to change.

As a fitness professional I have a few goals for my Youtube channel. I want to continue to grow this and do a video at least once a week with a Podcast every two weeks. Podcast require a bit more on the coordination side with Robin and the guests. Eventually I would like to get some t-shirts for the channel and pursue other avenues to help with marketing. With regards to The Strength Guys I just want to continue to improve myself as a coach. We are doing a presentation at the Epic Fitness Summit alongside some of the biggest names in the industry right now. It’s both an honor and a humbling experience so I’m sure it will be a great opportunity to learn for me. I just love keeping up with the literature and reading the blogs out there. I’m a huge fan of Greg Nuckols blog, Bret Contreras, Alan Aragon’s AARR. I love to stay on top of the newest information out there and involve myself in some way. With my clients I really would like to eventually make myself more available. I love dealing with passionate bodybuilders and powerlifters. If I can get more clients who have similar goals to myself than I feel as if I can connect with them a little bit better. Steer them in the right direction and be even more passionate about their goals because there is a connection between us. So, I’m going to focus on continuing to build my client base in that arena over the next year.

Matt: Huge thank you to Jeff for sharing his time and story with us. If you’d like to hear more from Jeff check out the links below:

– IceCream4PRs Youtube Channel
– IceCream4PRs Podcast
– Twitter @JeffNippard
– IG – @JeffNippard
– The Strength Guys Website