Why I Won't Coach Bodybuilders (The Health Line I Won't Cross)

Watch the full video on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7h32b2-why-i-wont-coach-bodybuilders-the-health-line-i-wont-cross.html

Why I Won't Coach Bodybuilders

I am not qualified to coach somebody to get onto a bodybuilding stage. I have never stood on one, and the skill set required to get a person there safely is a different job than the one I do.

Sure, I could probably do the research and spend the time investing to learn how, but to be quite honest with you, I personally don't have any interest in pursuing the bodybuilding side of things.

That deserves a real explanation, because the refusal is not about respect. I have close friends in the sport, I know IFBB pros, and I watched the Olympia and paid attention to the win Nick Walker put together.

The distinction is what the body is being asked to do.

Health optimization and stage prep share the same tools. Training, food, recovery, and in a lot of cases, hormones. The tools overlap almost completely, so people assume the goals must be close too, but stage prep is chasing something health optimization actively avoids.

Stage prep ends at a body fat level the body treats as a famine. In men that is usually somewhere under 5 percent, and at that point the hormonal response is the predictable result of starving the system that deep. Leptin, which is the hormone fat cells release to tell the brain there is enough energy around, falls as fat falls. The brain reads that signal and starts shutting down anything that is not immediately necessary for survival, which includes reproductive hormone output, thyroid conversion, and a meaningful slice of resting metabolic rate.

Then layer on the dehydration protocols, the diuretics in some cases, and the compounds used to hold muscle while in a deep deficit, and the stress on the heart and kidneys compounds in the final week rather than the final month.

Every one of those things is a choice an adult athlete is allowed to make. The part I will not do is be the person steering it.

I've been around, obviously adjacent to the bodybuilding industry for very long, but me personally, I think that bodybuilding itself as a sport, if that's what you wanna call it, crosses the line between health optimization and going overboard and risking your health to get a result on stage, which I'm on the fence about.

I have watched people come off a show with better discipline than they have ever had in their lives. I have also watched people come off a show with a metabolism that took eighteen months to behave again and a relationship with food that took longer than that, and that split is exactly why I sit on the fence about the sport as a whole.

Which one you get depends heavily on who is guiding the prep and how aggressively the final weeks are pushed, and I am not the person with the reps to make those calls.

The people I actually want in front of me are different. The middle-aged fathers, the moms who are struggling with postpartum and getting the baby weight, families that are trying to lead their children as an example and show them what a healthy lifestyle looks like.

That's what I care most about.

For that group the target is not a single day. It is a body that works in ten years, so the measure of a good plan is whether blood pressure comes down, whether labs improve, whether someone can train hard on Monday and still be a decent parent on Monday evening. Nothing in that list requires getting to 4 percent body fat, and most of it gets worse if you try.

Most of what I know about this came out of conversations in the free community, so if you want the rest of it and somewhere to ask, the men's group is here: https://www.skool.com/jh-iron-forge-brotherhood/about