Intro
Co-Founder Fitocracy. Fitness coach to Miss America ‘13. Named one of most influential professionals in health & fitness. Known as the dog whisperer for fat people.

Matt: You recently became a fitness professional full-time after co-founding and building Fitocracy for the last few years. What’s it been like switching from the tech industry into the fitness/nutrition industries?

Dick: It’s been great! I think it gives me a different perspective than most fitness professionals have, right? When you’re in tech starting a new product you’re worried about things such as distribution, churn, and obviously monetization. These are things that are often neglected by fitness professionals, like for example I don’t think a lot of them spend time thinking about churn. The users they get are highly organic. These users have been reading your blog for a while and eventually you acquire them. For organic users churn does tend to be pretty low, so you don’t have to worry about that too much. Switching over full-time to the fitness industry has been interesting because I’m solving a lot of the same problems that I did in tech while with Fitocracy, except that I get to put on my coaching hat a lot more. I really enjoy getting dirty and dealing with macros and diet adherence, so it’s been really fun for me.

Matt: Your approach to fitness definitely stands out due to your background. You wrote on your blog that coaching should be more like dancing where you lead and guide, but make sure to really listen to the client. Could you elaborate on this a bit?

Dick: I actually got this quote from a book about motivational interviewing. I’ll give you a little bit of context behind motivational interviewing because it’s relevant. When most people try to coach or motivate someone they do it the wrong way. The typical example is a doctor telling a patient who smokes to stop this habit. What most doctors do is pull out facts and tell the patient to stop smoking because if they don’t stop they’ll have a 60% higher chance of passing away in the next ten years. The problem with that method is that the patient who smokes already knows that they have an elevated risk of dying. They are already aware of all the facts. What’s happening is that they are fighting this internal battle in their head all the time. When I say internal battle I’m referring to the good angel bad angel on opposite shoulders battle. Good angel says stop smoking because you’re going to die, bad angel says keep smoking because it’s fun. When the doctor tells the patient not to smoke all of a sudden that patient will gravitate towards the other side of the argument. They will try to push back against whatever they are being told. Ironically it would be a better argument for some people if you told them to keep on smoking if you’re trying to convince them not to (laughing). Motivational interviewing is this topic that kind of tells you how to motivate people or persuade them into doing something right. That’s where I got this term for dancing, not wrestling with the client. You dance with the client instead of telling them to not eat this or that and ask them questions to try to figure what you can do to help them. You try to help them and support them without becoming judgemental. Macros are a good example because they are so malleable. Putting my coaching hat on here you can swap fat for carbs to a certain extent. So if you work with someone rather than yell at them it’s a lot more likely that they will stay motivated, not resent you for being judgemental, and lastly not gravitate towards the bad angel telling them to do what the exact action you’re trying to prevent.

Matt: That segues perfectly into my next question. Along with psychology, what are some other aspects of health/fitness that you think professionals in the industry should be working on improving and understanding?

Dick: I believe you read my blog post on activation recently right?

Matt: Yup! I have it saved on Evernote.

Dick: Essentially for someone to stay motivated and be a low-churning user on anything they need to activate. They need to realize some value from the app, for example. I think that when it comes to fitness most trainers/coaches don’t emphasize this enough with their trainees and think about where their level of motivation is. When I think of every single trainee I think of their motivation like a health/power meter from video games like Streetfighter. Hypothetically, if I were to ask that trainee to reduce sodium in their diet or to run every single morning the cost of that action is most likely going to be reduced motivation. On the flip side, if they see results in some way – whether it’s a number going on the scale or choosing another notch on their belt – those type of things restore their health/power meter. These are the type of the things that I think about with my trainees. I can only push them to do so many things and those things have to yield positive ROI or otherwise the meter is going to drop to zero and they are going to churn. That’s why activation is so important because the first time they work with you they should realize the benefit. The health/power meter should be really high or otherwise they won’t trust you. That concept of the trade off between the cost of what you’re asking a client to do vs ROI vs the super-high importance of activating clients for the first time….I don’t think any coaches think about that at all. They give the client a diet and training program and then ask questions before putting themselves into the client’s shoes which can mistakenly overwhelm their client.

Matt: So you’ve entrenched yourself firmly into the evidenced-based camp of the fitness/nutrition industries. Can you tell me about the process that led up to this?

Dick: The first time I started losing weight I did so by simply running a ton and starving myself. I lost around 60 lbs overall within a few months. I ended up looking super sickly with loose skin and looked like a Shar-Pei. Because of that I did what every 16 year old kid would do and googled ‘how to get a six pack’. This led me to Bodybuilding.com and a bunch of other forums like Anabolic Mind. That’s where the battle between my bro and geek mentalities kicked in because when I was on Bodybuilding.com it was full of bros, but being a geek I ended up gravitating towards the guys who had evidence for what they were saying. I found guys like Alan Aragon and what they were saying just made a lot of sense. These trainers/coaches would justify their recommendations for clients. It wasn’t bro science, like recommending that clients eat every hour because it “keeps your metabolism up”. I’d always been skeptical of stuff like that.

This part is kind of important. I think this is the difference between how I think about fitness and how a lot of fitness professionals think about their craft. I don’t attach my beliefs about fitness to my ego so I don’t get butthurt when something I strongly believed in ends up being wrong. I think that’s what dictated me ending up in evidenced-based fitness. A good example of this is that I used to follow a low-carb Paleo diet because there seemed to be some evidence there. The evidence ended up being things that were very cherry-picked with insulin and the fact that when insulin levels are low dietary fat can’t be stored adequately because there’s no other pathway…and that seemed fairly convincing to me so I followed it for a period of time. Then I stumbled across this blog called Carb-Sane Asylum which is put together by this lady named Evelyn Kocur. It had a lot of very convincing arguments as to why Paleo is not necessarily correct.  Because I didn’t attach my sense of self to my beliefs it allowed me to be very malleable and say ‘Ok, this makes a lot of sense. I think it makes more sense than Paleo so I think this going to be my new belief now.’ You compare that to someone who attaches their beliefs about nutrition to their sense of self and the automatic reflex is to fire back. They would read Evelyn’s blog and think, ‘Well this is bullshit.’ They’d automatically write if off without even really thinking the arguments through. So, the main reason that I’m evidenced-based is because I don’t have an ego about fitness. The secondary reason is because I was to be exposed to people like Alan Aragon and Evelyn who helped me refine my beliefs about fitness with their wealth of knowledge and experience.

Matt: Who are a few trainers/coaches in the industry that you think have the right approach and are learning from?

Dick: Yeah, so when it comes to the physiological aspects of fitness you have Alan, Evelyn….as bat-shit crazy as Lyle Mcdonald is he has some pretty good stuff. Even Martin Berkhan, who tends to be kind of serious about fitness in the stuff he writes about psychology and how it’s better overall to be consistent than rigid when dieting. I wouldn’t say his work is for the average joe. There are some people in the psychological and philosophical areas that I really respect like Matt Perryman. You know, there was actually a period of time where I think most evidenced-based professionals went too evidenced-based. It’s usually either or, where someone’s either bro-science or evidenced based and I was definitely in the evidenced-based camp. Reading Matt’s stuff about philosophy, fitness,  and the limitations of science really got me into thinking of fitness as more of an art. Science is one of the best tools we have, but even if you have a lot of scientific evidence for something it doesn’t always mean that the science is going to be based off of the right methodology. It’s hard to reduce everything into models. So, Matt Perryman really helped me realize that. Reading his stuff has had the biggest effect on my evolution as a coach.

Matt: What are some of the changes you see happening in the fitness industry that we should all be aware of preparing for?

Dick: I think there’s a much bigger movement towards the psychology of it all. You look at people who are really doing well and moving towards the top…someone like Jill Coleman who bases the majority of her things on psychology and lifestyle. They’re doing very well because they are moving away from the purely evidenced-based, physiological advised recommendation system for fitness. What I mean by that is that there are some coaches who give the perfect amount of carbohydrates and fat to consume post workout for optimized muscle synthesis for example…. but now they’re moving away from that to a more psychology-based approach. Sure something might not be truly physiological optimal, but it could be something to adhere to because fitness has very high costs to switching programs. Being highly adherent to a suboptimal program is overall better than continually switching between optimal programs. I think that realization has really dictated this rise of the lifestyle, psychology based coaching that I’m a part of. The other thing that’s really brought this to the front and center is the accessibility of the fitness industry to the mainstream. If you look at people who were trying to get fit before, let’s say the 90’s or early 2000’s, who were able to go from 30% body fat to getting a six pack it was all the bros and jocks. Usually people who had great genetics of some sort or were able to spend more time on fitness. Now you have a lot more mainstream consumers who are able to access this space. These people are a lot more impacted by psychology and lifestyle coaching right? If you work 80 hours a week you simply aren’t going to be able to do what’s physiologically optimal. What’s going to be best for you is to be consistent. Because of the rise of this market you’re seeing coaches who are very evidenced-based getting a larger amount of clientele.

Matt: You’ve been doing online coaching and getting some great success so far. Could you pass along some words of advice to the fitness professionals who are getting into this space?

Dick: I think the first thing you should do is find your niche. There is only so much room for ripped white dudes with abs who want to help people lose fat (laughing). That’s just the nature of it. With so many professionals moving into online coaching because of the viability of that income stream you’re going to need to separate yourself from the competitors out there. A great way to figure out your niche is to find out what type of clientele you resonate with and can be authentic for. Lets say you’re a mother who used to be overweight then lost 50 lbs and stays in shape year round like Kellie Davis you’re going to resonate with other mothers. That’s going to be your niche where you can be authentic. You have something that other trainers don’t really have in you and it can be used to your advantage. Personally, I resonate with former fat kids and women who have bad relationships with food because I think like that. Unless you find out who resonate with it’s going to be really difficult to cut through the noise and find your clientele.

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