#026 The Art of Self-Coaching

Welcome back to the 26th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here.

As you know, I’m a big advocate of focussing on the fundamentals to make gains sustainably. But at some point, you will run into challenges you need to overcome to keep making gains. I’m trying my best to give you as much advice here as possible, but as I - of course - can’t cover every possibility, you will eventually run into challenges I haven’t answered (yet) in the newsletter.

Hiring a coach can be a great way to overcome these challenges and get close to maximizing your gains, but coaches are quite expensive, and spending a lot of money on building muscle might not be what you are looking for when you are just doing it as a hobby on the side.

Therefore, I want to give you a blueprint for successfully self-coaching yourself.

The key to successfully self-coaching yourself is knowing the fundamentals of training, recovery, and nutrition. If you are struggling to get the progress you want, you should check the basics first:

1. Are you doing 10 sets to failure per muscle each week?
2. Are you eating at least 0.7-1.0 grams of protein per lb. of body weight each day?
3. Are you reaching your calorie goal every day?
4. Are you sleeping at least 7 hours per night?

If you have a problem building muscle, the odds are high that you fail to do at least one of these things correctly.

Or phrased differently: If you are really doing all these things right, it’s EXTREMELY unlikely that you won’t make progress.

But it can be hard to determine where your mistake is.

Assuming you don’t know where your mistake is, you must go through a “trial-and-error phase” in your self-coaching journey. Especially as a beginner or intermediate lifter, you are still learning to understand how your body works and reacts, and as part of this process, you need to run experiments on yourself.

You should do this by checking the fundamentals one by one.

The easiest fundamental to check is proper sleep. Most of you should be fine with 7 hours of sleep per night - some may need more, others less. But if you are getting 7 hours per night and feel well-rested during the day, your sleep is probably not the limiting factor, and you can move on to the next fundamental.

For protein intake, we can simply check if we are eating enough protein. If it’s at least around 0.7g, you should be good. There may be some instances where your protein quality is low, and 0.7g may not be enough. So, if you believe that protein intake is a limiting factor, increase it to around 1.0g of protein per lb. of body weight. If you reach this, you can be sure that protein won’t be the limiting factor.

That leaves us with two variables. Your workout and your calorie intake.

I’ve discussed it before, but calculating your calorie intake can be challenging. Many people underestimate the deficit they need to lose weight or the surplus they need to gain weight. Whether you try to set up a calorie deficit or surplus, if you don’t see the results you want to see and have checked the points mentioned before, you should consider increasing your surplus or deficit.

If you have checked all these points, you can also check if you are doing something wrong with your workouts. I put this one to the end because, for most people, working out is not the limiting factor. As long as you are doing around 10 sets per muscle each week and are taking those to failure, you have a good foundation to make gains.

Changing around your workouts probably won’t result in much additional gain and will take your focus away from the topics we discussed before.

The key mistake I see people making is that they are not training hard enough - despite believing that they are training to failure. Here is an easy guide to check if you are training hard enough:

1. Are you doing all the steps above right?
A) Yes → Great. Move on to 2.
B) No → Fix those first.

2. Are you able to add more weight or reps at least every other workout to your exercises?
A) Yes → You are training hard enough
B) No → You are not training hard enough

Everything else is mostly noise. If you are doing around ten sets per week per muscle and are training to failure, changing exercises or splits probably won’t result in a big difference.

And if you are doing all these things right but are still not progressing as fast as you like, there is a big chance that you are just impatient. Building muscle takes time but it is guaranteed if you are doing the basics as described above right.

During this whole phase of trial-and-error, you should track your development quite closely to make sure that you can spot trends that indicate whether your change is working or not. If the trend goes in the right direction, keep doing what you are doing, and if not, move on to the next fundamental to find out what causes the problem.

But of course, there can also be more nuanced questions. Maybe you can’t do an exercise because you are lacking the equipment in the gym or the movement simply doesn’t feel good to you. Or maybe you have problems reaching your nutrition goals because your body doesn’t digest well a popular fitness food, you are allergic to it, or you simply don’t like it.

In these cases, you are lucky to live in an era with a good answer to (nearly) every question just a click away. I try to answer as many questions as I can here in this newsletter or on my Instagram page, but in case I haven’t touched a topic, check out other creators. Some resources I highly recommend that cover a wide range of topics and challenges are Renaissance Periodization and Jeff Nippard.

As I said many times before, don’t watch every single video to find the 110% best science-backed way to make gains. Instead, use these accounts like a search engine to find ways how to tackle your current challenges.

You can and should watch multiple people talk about a specific problem. They often present different viewpoints, which helps you understand the topic in greater nuance.

To sum up, you need to have a good understanding of the fundamentals for self-coaching. If you feel like you are starting to run into problems, run experiments on yourself first to check if you are doing the fundamentals right. If questions occur during this process or you have more advanced questions, look up some trusted resources on the Internet.

Thank you for reading today's newsletter. If you have further questions, simply DM me on Instagram.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.