Episode 130: My Prediction of 2 Huge Fitness Tends in 2022 + Flex Diet Cert OPEN Now

Find out what I believe will be the two biggest trends in fitness and exercise for 2022. And, learn more about the Flex Diet Certification course opening today, January 3rd through Monday, January 10th, 2022.

Episode Notes

• #1 Hybrid Training

  • in-person and online combined
  • nutrition
  • provide better service
• #2 All Training will Include a Lifestyle Component
  • mobility
  • warm-up
  • cool down
  • nutrition – food prep
  • stress- HRV
  • sleep
• Bonus: How to use the information
  • physiologic flexibility to be more robust
  • homeostatic stressors: temp, pH, fuels, O2 CO2
  • Eustress vs. distress

The Flex Diet Podcast is brought to you by the Flex Diet Certification. Go to the Flex Diet website for 8 interventions on nutrition and recovery. The course opens today, Jan. 3rd to Monday, Jan. 10th. If you are outside of the enrollment window, sign up to be notified when the course opens again.

Rock on!

Download the transcript

Full text below

Welcome back to the flex diet podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. Here we talk about all things to increase lean body mass and performance, improve body comp, and do all of it without destroying your health in the process. Today is just me, I’m going to talk about the two big trends I think will happen in 2022. Since as of this release, it is 2022, which is pretty crazy.

And today, it is brought to you once again by the flex diet certification, a flex diet certification is open as of to date, January 3 2022. If you’re looking for eight different interventions to maximize performance and body comp, primarily the nutrition and recovery, check out the flex diet certification, go to flex diet.com flxdt.com. For all the details. interventions are everything from protein, fat, carbohydrates, so neat, non exercise activity, thermogenesis, sleep, micro nutrition, exercise, and much more.

It’s broken down with the top item is going to be an overarching view or the big picture of the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting. And then for each intervention, there is a technical primer, that’s about one hour long, that will teach you everything you need to know about that topic.

Intervention number one is protein. And everything you need to know about amino acids, leucine muscle protein synthetic response, it is taught at a higher level, my bias is to bring people up to a level and not have it be so dumbed down that you’re not learning anything new. Because once you understand the background of it, then you can move into the action items. For each intervention, there is five explicit action items, so that you’ll know exactly what to do with the clients in front of you, or possibly yourself. And this is all done in a system. We walk you through and show you how to decide what action item is best for the client, and where to start. It is a complete system for nutrition and recovery. Even though we do talk about exercise just a little bit to this gets into my pick for the two big trends for 2022.

Number one is hybrid training. One of the things we have learned from the past couple of years, is I don’t think there’s any going back to only doing one on one in person training, without any online component at all. I just think that’s one too big of a risk to you as a trainer in terms of your income. And then too I think it also does your clients a disservice. If gyms decide to close again, who knows what’s going to happen. It’s different in different governments across the world, even in different states here potentially, in the US. I think it’s hard to predict what is going to happen. So you need to be prepared for kind of the worst case scenarios again, which unfortunately have already happened.

And the trainer’s I’ve seen who have done okay, already had some online component in place, or put one in place very rapidly. And this doesn’t need to be anything crazy, right? And my biased opinion, you could do training that’s delivered in an online format. And let’s say you’re an in person, one on one gym trainer primarily, clients would get their program that you would do, obviously you would charge an extra fee or have it be incorporated into your fee that they pay per month. My bias is paying per month instead of per session. Obviously, you’d have different amounts of sessions that there would be they would know what their training is ahead of time.

And if they are not with you on a certain day, you could then program that day. Or if something happens in the gym has to close. You can then rapidly change their programming. Maybe they only have one set of kettlebells at home or they don’t have anything they’ve only got bodyweight and a couple bands that are collecting dust somewhere, those would be your options then, and you can redo their training based on that. But it makes it much easier to transition if they’re already used to getting the program online. Of course, when they’re training with you in the gym, then you would do your normal one on one training there.

And again, having some nutrition component, I believe is essential, the vast majority of people are looking to perform better and look better just going to be some element of the body composition. And you don’t need any convincing that nutrition is a huge component of that beautiful thing is you can do most of the nutrition work online. And I would have a separate fee for that or incorporated into the package that you are doing. And when you would have to transition online, the nutrition component really wouldn’t change at all. And you would already be doing that primarily online, you could have a short part of maybe Monday session as part of your nutrition check in or you can make your check ins 100% online also. Now of course, I’m biased. That’s one of the reasons I developed the flex diet certification was I looked around. And it just seemed like a lot of gyms were just doing random stuff for nutrition.

It was, oh, let’s do a 30 Days Challenge of hardcore keto, and then 30 days of old 30 or 30 days of carnivore or it just didn’t really make any sense at all. And clients were really confused. It’s like, wait a minute, last month, carbohydrates are bad. Now, you know, they’re okay, oops, now everything except for me is bad. And they don’t really build a skill set, I get confused. And a lot of times, their training doesn’t match up at all, there isn’t much thought put into, hey, if you’re doing a ketogenic diet, and it’s a very low carbohydrate approach, maybe doing a lot of speed and power isn’t really the best thing, maybe we’re not going to have you do a lot of intervals on the rower because you’re even going to hate life even more near remove carbohydrates.

My bias is having a nutrition system that you can use that allows you a flexible approach to manage multiple clients and a semi customized approach online. That’s the main reason I designed the flex diet certification. And from the title, as you note, it’s using a flexible approach, there are two main items we’re going to have people start with number one is going to be protein.

Number two came out to be intermittent fasting. But again, you’re going to have up to 40 different action items to pick through. And they’re already arranged in the highest leverage items first. So you’re rigging the system in the clients favor. If something happens to the gym, then the nutrition portion would just carry forward online as it did before the Win Win, his clients will get better results, because you’re doing nutrition, they are bought into that part of the system, they are paying for it. So they have skin in the game. And then you will look better, because you’re getting them faster to their overall goals, which in general is some type of performance and body composition.

One of my big things for 2022 Is that all gyms should be doing some type of hybrid training, where it’s a mix of in person and online. That way of gym closes or something happens that are is out of your control as a trainer, it is a relatively easy transition to online, you’re doing your clients a better service, because we all know that if they are not checking in with someone, and they don’t know what to do, odds are they’re going to do something really stupid, or they’re not going to do anything at all, which again, I don’t blame them, it would be like me going to my CPA, and they’re saying, Well, you know, I’m just not gonna do your taxes this year. So my taxes are either gonna be not get done, which would be really bad. So I probably figure out a way to get them done, but probably wouldn’t be the best outcome. And if it was even an OK outcome, it would have taken me a lot of time spent to try to figure it out.

Number one, everybody should be on some type of hybrid training approach. Obviously, I’m biased because the flex diet certification is open now. And I teach you how to do nutrition 100% online. So if you’re doing all your training online now pretty Easy to drop and plug it in. If you’re doing in person training, I would argue that having that online component, even if you only started doing nutrition online, is going to get your clients a better result, allow you to make a little bit more income as a trainer, and be in a better position, if something were to happen, where you could not train people in person.

Number two, for what I think are big trends coming in 2022. All training will include some lifestyle component, I think the day is of just counting reps, and even doing programming for clients. And it’s even getting to the point where doing some nutrition work with clients, which again, in almost every stage, you are illegal to discuss different components of nutrition, research and health. Of course, you are not a purview to treat any disease or make any claims or prescriptions or anything like that. But you can talk to clients about what they eat long as you stay in your lane of health parameters. So I think in the future, having a plan, having training guidance, having some basic nutrition information, that is all going to be very standard, that is going to be the basic that is expected across the board, I believe a way to differentiate yourself.

And odds are almost every good trainer I talked to is already doing this. They just haven’t really put it in a formal system. And they usually are not getting paid for it, which is a separate issue. Having some lifestyle component and going above and beyond sets and reps and basic nutrition is going to be a way to differentiate yourself and get clients a better result. So this can include simple things like you’re probably already doing mobility drills, warm ups, cooldowns, and then expanding that into other areas such as with nutrition, helping them with planning some meals planning out what are the big rocks, they’re going to work on for nutrition?

How are they going to get that done sitting down looking at their calendar to see when they’re actually doing their food prep, or they go into the grocery store to buy food and they having it delivered? What are their systems look like? Going further down the list, I would add in heart rate variability as a marker of stress. Again, I’m biased in that area, because I’ve been doing that online with clients for oh man, probably over eight years coming up on now. And it’s really not that difficult to learn. Again, I’ve got a whole course on it if you want to learn more.

But it gives you a very objective way online to see what the status of stress of your clients is. And you also have context indicators telling you about their sleep, nutrition, etc. So you have a way of monitoring it. And I think this is just going to be very commonplace in the near future. Right? Gone are the days of hey, here’s your training plan, just to shut up and do it, it’s going to be more mobile more flexible, you’re going to try to find a way to make it fit with their lifestyle. If something happens, they will have an automatic, easy day they can do instead.

For example, with HRV, if someone has kind of what’s called an amber or they’re more stressed, an option that I’ll have clients to do is if they still want to train that day, I may cut their volume by 50%. They may drop to do an aerobic day instead of a strength training day. They may take a complete rest day and push everything out by a day. For example, a lot of programs I build Have a rest day on Sunday. Most clients I have are normally trainers, so they have the ability to train on Sunday. Not everybody does. And they can just take the rest day earlier. So a Friday, it looks like man, I’m super stressed. I’m just gonna take a walk my HRV was red.

I’m just gonna bump all my training out by one day. So I’m going to train Saturday now per normal. And then I’m going to train also on Sunday, right? So there’s simple ways you can make it programmable. It does take more work. And it does take a little bit more knowledge to know what you’re looking at. But I think in the future, this is going to become commonplace. Sleep is already becoming a very big thing. I’ve did a podcast a previous week on my thoughts on sleep so I’m not going to belabor that point anymore. But the big thing was sleep again. It’s more lifestyle.

Possibly increasing the quality of their sleep, their sleep environment, and then having an actual discussion about, you know, priorities, what are they trying to prioritize? If they’re only sleeping four hours a night, then you know, you may have the, you know, come to Jesus chat about, well, it may be very hard to make your body count goals, if you’re only sleeping four hours a night, how can we rearrange this, to make sure we are prioritizing the big items.

So trend for number two, in 2022, I believe it’s going to be Lifestyle coaching, is going to be just included as part of the package. Now, again, I’m super biased in this area, because I’ve created the flex diet cert. And for online training that I’ve been doing for almost a decade now. I’ve always had some component of lifestyle in it, I had the advantage because my research projects, were looking at heart rate variability. I already had training in that area. So once apps like the Isolate app became available, it was pretty easy for me to drop that into training. And even just that by getting an idea online of stress has been a huge help. Because if you’re in person training, you have the advantage of walking, watching the clients walk in, when I was training in the gym, and even here, when I have people come over, I do spy on them through the window. So I know it’s kind of creepy.

But I want to see how are they walking? How are they moving? What are they looking at, you can tell a lot from tone of voice, just posture, their movement. When you’re online, you don’t have that advantage, you can get some videos, you can get some other data. But I think having something as simple as heart rate variability is very useful, at least in the beginning, until people have a better idea of how to read their own body. I don’t think you need to do it for the rest of their life. Although I do find that sometimes you have unconscious stressors that show up that you may not realize and HRV is quite good at picking them up. Again, you can go deep down the rabbit hole looking at aura, which has HRV, body temp, sleep, etc. So it’s becoming easier with metrics to do more Lifestyle coaching. And my bonus item number three, which is related is how are you using that information?

My good buddy, Dr. Ben house has talked a lot about this. So again, my lens of how I look at it is we’re using data to make people be more robust and harder to kill. We’re not using data to kind of belabor them and beat them over the head with it and make them feel like a horrible human being because they’ve only got 10 minutes deep sleep on their aura the night before. Those things are gonna happen. I mean, my deep sleep on aura last night was 47 minutes. The night before was five minutes. Not even entirely sure why the difference there was. But the goal. bonus item number three is to be more robust. And I think you can do that by adding things called the homeostatic stressors. Again, I’m biased because I’ve got a whole course on this, which is a physiologic flexibility certification.

Things like temperature difference, body has to hold homeostatic temperature, people are homeo therms we want to hold 98.6 It’s actually about 97.7. But we can do things like cold water immersion, we can get in a sauna, and we can train the ability to do better at hot and do better at cold. And number two for homeostatic stressor that you can add to your training programs would be changes in pH. Your body wants to keep a very neutral pH, but you can do hideous things like a 500 meters on the rower concept to rower. It’s pretty horrible, not a lot of fun. But you will dump a lot of quote unquote lactic acid, it’s actually lactate plus hydrogen ions into your blood. And your body has to buffer that including the muscles. There’s different ways you can try to alter pH without exercise, different breathing techniques, you can do breath holds, or becoming more slightly hypoxic and you can do very fast are super ventilatory methods kind of like a Wim Hof type method and go the other direction. Right so breathing methods itself can attempt to alter pH. Again, we’re not looking for a change in pH. We’re looking for the ability to balance out or to buffer, more acid going in or more basic on the other side.

Area number three would be fuels from fasting to glucose regulation to the use of even ketones at specific times for specific cases, and the number four would be oxygen and carbon dioxide. How do you regulate these, these are obviously regulated by breathing. But there’s other things you can do via exercise, and even breathing techniques to get better at oxygenating muscle possibly get better at holding more co2 or getting rid of more co2. That gets really complicated really fast. And the flex diet started, I tried to simplify it as best I could. But I think in that area, I still have the technical lectures are like three and a half hours. So it is a fair amount of material. But I think that is the next level.

And those can be easily tied into point number two, which is lifestyle, right. And again, this doesn’t need to be super complicated for what clients are actually doing. So one of my favorite phrases is that physiology is complex, but your actions should be relatively simple. So for training, the homeostatic regulation system of temperature, we can add homeostatic stressors, such as 10 seconds of a cold shower, once you are done, right, that’s literally 10 seconds you’ve added into their day. But I do think there’s some benefits. Now 10 seconds, you’re probably more on the psychological benefits and the physiologic benefits. But I think there’s still some benefits there. It’s pretty easy to do.

Some of the other stuff, you can import or just bake into their programs, which I’ve done this for many years, you may have a longer slower cardio day, you may have various specific intervals that you’re doing. So anyone who’s worked with me online knows about the the fun interval programs that I have for the rower, one of them is 30 seconds on. And then if you want to be really heinous 30 seconds off, and then you have to maintain a set amount of watts on the rower and then see how many rounds of that you can complete. That’s a pretty advanced one.

Most the time, it’s gonna be 30 seconds on with complete rest. But there are ways you can challenge the pH system. There are ways you can challenge your fuel system, maybe you’re doing some fasted training in the morning, it’s could be weight training, this could be a robic training. Again, I talked about that in the flex diet certification also in the carbohydrates section. So you can set everything up with a use dress, which is EU STR ESS, where you are providing a matched macronutrient approach. So I’m providing the higher carbohydrate amount on days that I’m doing more glycolytic carbohydrate II, like exercise. Good example is weight training and intervals. I may then set up a day where I’m doing more low, slow distance training. And I may do that fasted or I may pull carbohydrates down a little bit on those days. That is still a use stress approach where we are purposely matching the macronutrients we’re providing via nutrition to the exercise that is being done.

The other end of that, which is going to be a small percentage of the time is going to be a distress session where we are going to purposely mismatch macronutrients, so capital m small m capital M, we’re mismatching macronutrients on purpose. So you may do a weight training session in the morning after an overnight fast. So that is going to be done on primarily lower glycogen stores, but only in the liver. You can then get fancy and do an even more distressed session where you will do a carbohydrate depletion training, which is extremely brutal, not a lot of fun.

Maybe you will just replace it with a little bit of protein. Again, that can be done overnight, or what’s called this sleep low fashion. And then you’ll do another training session the next morning. Again, this is incredibly brutal, you will see a stress go up, but you’re prioritizing some of the molecular adaptations from doing that kind of work. And that is a mismatch macronutrients approach again, so there are ways you can bake in these homeostatic stressors. Some of those I do talk about in the flex diet cert. I obviously talk a lot about them in the physiologic flexibility assert, and you can bake them into train with your clients. You don’t even have to explain a lot of it to them, but I think Loading that will be more common in the future.

My two big things for trends in 2022. Number one hybrid training for everyone. It’s my bias, you should have an online component to everything you’re doing. I think the easiest on ramp is to have your nutrition online using a system for it. Again, I like the flex diet cert because I created it. But precision nutrition is great. There are other systems out there that you can use my biases. I like the flex diet cert. But even if you’re using another form of nutrition, your clients are going to do better by doing that. So do some type of nutrition work, and then get fancier and have a hybrid approach for everyone. Number two is going to be adding the lifestyle components into your training program. Odds are since you’re listening to this podcast, you’re looking to get better, you’re most likely already doing this, like most of the better trainers I talked to almost all of them are doing this already.

Again, I think you should get paid for it and should be more of a formal system. What are you doing for mobility warmups, cooldowns all that’s going to be in your training program. Looking at monitoring stress, with heart rate variability, or even just resting heart rate, robic measures, sleep and working with your clients via their schedule to make sure we can set it up into a system that they can then complete and get done. bonus item number three is looking at physiologic flexibility to be more robust, harder to kill, increasing your recovery capacity doing this by looking at the homeostatic regulators. Or if you’re looking at stressing those systems would be homeostatic stressors. These would be one temperature regulation to pH, three fuel systems for oxygen and carbon dioxide regulation. Yeah, and those can be baked into your current training program, or simply added on for recovery.

Most clients I find actually do like that. And, you know, everyone I think wants to kind of feel like more of a professional athlete to and if they’re done in the correct way, I think there’s a benefit to it and really not much harm. Most of them you can start off with with not a lot of additional time either. So for clients who have a very limited time, this is an easy add on.

So those are my two plus a bonus items for trends coming into 2022. Of course, I would love your opinion. You can post anything up in the reviews if you want. You can send me an email, which is just contact at Mike T Nelson calm subject line at action podcast. And if you want more information on how to do a flexible nutrition based approach, check out the flex diet certification. It is now open January 3 2022. through January 10 2022. Go to flexdiet.com that will have all the information. If you are listening to this outside of that time period, you can still go to flex diet calm and you will be able to get on the waitlist for the next time that it opens via the newsletter. So when the flex diet start we’ve got eight different interventions, talking about nutrition and recovery.

We do go quite deep in some of the technical lectures, and we’ve got great interviews with researchers and practitioners. Everybody from like protein Dr. Stu Phillips, Dr. Jose Antonio, flexible dieting with Dr. Eric Helms, how your brain regulates hunger, Dr. Stephen DNA. Dr. Dan party talking about metabolic issues and sleep. Dr. Hunter talking about metabolic flexibility. Also, Jeff Chilton, talking about mushrooms and the different micro nutrient components in them.

Dr. Mike Ormsby, talking about protein before sleep and how your body regulates the use of fat and glycogen, and much more. So there’s over eight different expert interviews included in the certification. So go to Flux diet comm check it out. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. We’ve got some awesome interviews, teed up for this year so far, coming up very soon from Precision nutrition. Dr. Krista Scott Dixon will be on Dr. Lisa Lewis, talking about more of the psychological aspects of fitness and training and many more people so stay tuned thank you so much if you enjoyed this share it with a friend hit the subscribe button and leave us a review talk to you very soon