Phil Nash - Exos Coaching Education

In this two-part conversation, Phil Nash of EXOS Education breaks down what it takes to become an effective coach in today’s human performance landscape. From building confidence and mastering both soft and technical skills to creating positive training environments, Phil shares practical insights drawn from years of coaching and education.

The discussion also explores how feedback, reflection, and continuous refinement shape better program design and long-term success. Phil emphasizes that great coaching isn’t static — it’s an evolving process that requires adaptability, strong communication, and a commitment to learning in order to better serve athletes and clients.

All right, welcome back to the Keiser Human Performance podcast. I have Phil Nash here from Exos Education. Phil, how are we doing today? Good, man. Can't complain. Thank you for having me on. Can you hold up that shirt for us? I want to I want to see that real quick. Be stoked. The Arizona T. Since I'm not in Arizona, this is a it's a rare find. It's a hard one to get. So, it's a it's a a hot commodity. Yeah, absolutely. So, we were just chatting offline here for a second about the Philadelphia Eagles. I have to know your take on the tush push. Where do you stand on that? I mean, obviously completely unbiased take on the tushbush that it's probably the most beautiful play in NFL history. I can't I can't think of anything that represents the city, that represents football more than a bunch of guys pushing one guy over a bunch of other guys. I think it's just it's a it's a perfect play. I wish they would do it on every down. I will have you know that my Bears stopped the tush bushes successfully actually ripping the ball out causing a fumble on it while running for over 200 yards against your Eagles. So it was a great listen at at our at our house too. So it was a tough a tough show. Yeah. Yeah. Had a nice Thanksgiving. So thank you. So all right. Well I'm excited to talk about education today. Obviously Exos, you know, some of the leaders in human performance education. So sitting down with you is an awesome way for me to learn, for our audience to learn a little bit more about how you guys do things. you've been very involved in the process. So, super excited to chat with you today. Maybe just to give somebody who's listening just a little bit of background on your role within Keiser might be within Exos, excuse me, might be some helpful context. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I started Exos I think back in 2017. I bounced around within Exos a ton. I've worked on the corporate wellness side. I've worked on the sport performance side. So, had a a pretty cool path that's given me the opportunity to to train, you know, pro athletes or, you know, a 60-year-old guy who's trying to lose some weight before he gets his knee replaced like and everything in between. So, I think it's a a nice well-rounded unique experience that led me to working now on our education team that sits kind of within our innovation and methodology team. Um, and I've been doing this for the past 5 years. And basically, we handle all things education. So we'll help build courses that we sell externally like our you know phase one two and three inerson mentorships or like you know our digital courses that we come out with that anyone can access. Uh and then we do a lot of training for our coaches internally. So whether it's coaches who work in sport who are leading the combine prep right now or our coaches who are working with corporate wellness clients in you know companies around the world. It's a little bit of a mixed bag. Like sometimes it's like hey we got new Keiser equipment coming in and this is how we're going to roll it out. this is how you're going to use it to help get your clients ready or you know it might be here's some new software coming out and here's how you're going to use it right so it's kind of it's kind of running the full gambit but it's nice to have the opportunity to connect with coaches help them grow and ultimately like help them impact the people that they're working with every day yeah it's cool I mean you are really you know indirectly impacting the lives of so many different types of people you mentioned not just athletes right a lot of people know exos athletes performance but but the reach is so much wider you mentioned corporate you mentioned PT, um, things like that. So, pretty unique situation that you're sitting in, being able to impact so many lives, which I imagine is very cool. Yeah. And I don't think people understand fully the corporate reach. I know I didn't when I first joined Exos. Like, I knew I knew about the combine. I knew about NFL offseason prep and MLB offseason prep and and kind of things like that. But when I heard that Exos was running a fitness center in a company that was in my hometown, like five minutes from where I was born, I was like, what? like that doesn't that doesn't make any sense. And yeah, I mean we have on the corporate side probably thousands of coaches like over just over a thousand coaches um all over the world in in a ton of different you know fortune 500, Fortune 100, 100 companies and so like the impact of people that are getting quality strength and conditioning is is really really high. So in terms of rolling out education I mean you are not just dealing with athletes and and coaches work with athletes but also everybody on the corporate side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I we all like on the team we're we're a small and scrappy team we like to say but you know everyone kind of has their hands in different pots but yeah mine mine tends to be like 50/50ish 6040ish like it'll swing but I kind of sit in the middle and have a chance to do you know half my time working with the corporate staff half my time helping the sport staff. Cool. So we're going to talk more about how you do that. My question for you though before we get started is how do you define what is effective education in the human performance space? Yeah. And I you know looking at education as a whole I I don't think it's too dissimilar to how you might define effective education if you're like going through high school or you're in undergrad or you know in learning and development in in the corporate setting in a traditional company like it's all kind of this similar outcome. And the question that I always ask is like what are you doing differently now? Like what what have you changed about your process, your coaching, about what you do after going through a course, whether that's in person or digitally. That's the outcome that we're ultimately looking for. Like giving them the tools or giving them what they need to do something differently. And hopefully that different is going to be more effective or or maybe more efficient. So sometimes that might look like they're actually doing something completely new like we're talking about program design and now the way they think about evaluating the needs of their athletes and clients are different which leads them to writing differently as they're you know designing their their end programs or it could be just doing something with some more confidence which I think is is something that we see a lot you know we have a lot of a lot of newer coaches in the system and they might be doing the right thing, but there's a lot of noise out there and they're, you know, maybe uncertain about, you know, the way they're coaching a specific movement or the way they're pairing different exercises together. But then after going through the education, if they can be more confident in their delivery, more confident they're doing the right thing and they're doing right by their members, I think that's just as an important outcome that allows them to, you know, yes, on paper they're doing the same thing, but the way it's delivered is going to be way more effective. is going to get way more buy in because of the confidence they have behind the things that they're doing. So, what's an example of something that you're rolling out in education that can ultimately help a coach be more confident? Yeah, I think a lot of our introductory stuff will kind of hit a high level like here's the EXOS training system, you know, here's the Exos game plan, you know, we're doing things around sleep and fueling and training and reflection and a couple different areas. you know, here's the training system all the way from the warm-up and pillar prep and movement prep down through, you know, pio, strength and power, regen, all that stuff. So, the coaches start to get this understanding of like, all right, this is the training system. These are the components. Here's how they work together. But they're coming in with this awesome background, you know, whether it's from collegiate strength and conditioning or professional strength and conditioning or or from a personal training gym. So, they have kind of their own methodologies that they've developed and taken from other places that they've learned. So when they come through like we'll do in-person mentorships for coaches and it's like a week-long course come they come in and it's kind of like an introduction or reintroduction to the training system. So it's taking that the their basically onboarding materials and really blowing it out and going really deep into each bucket. And I think throughout that we have this opportunity to to actually basically talk shop with them and give them the opportunity to say like hey you know I'm understanding how you program or how we program for strength at Exos this way but I love this you know loading scheme or I love this periodization scheme and it's like yeah you can we can we can make it all work we can make it all fit and I think that's probably the biggest confidence builder for coaches when They realized that, you know, our methodology is meant to be a framework. It's meant to be almost like this way to organize anything that you might do in a way that empowers you to be more effective, that helps you modify what you're doing based on the constraints of your environment or the clients that you're working with. And that's probably the biggest thing for even new coaches, but especially the seasoned coaches. It's like they they go through the methodology, they come to a course like that where we get to talk shop in person and they can really feel like, oh, okay, like I'm not not doing Exos quote unquote, but I'm actually like I'm doing it to its fullest extent and you know what I'm doing makes sense. It has an intentional thought behind it. Yeah, I like what you mentioned there about having that framework in place and then being able to move within that framework and operate within methodologies or programming principles that you truly believe in, you've seen success with, but it's still under this entire framework of maybe how you operate as a coach. So, you mentioned program design. Do you have specific buckets when you're when you're sitting back and evaluating different areas in which coaches can improve? Do you have these different buckets like communication skills, program design, like what are those buckets? if you're nodding yes. So yeah, I'm curious to know what what those buckets are. Yeah, I think two big ones we I think we create a lot of dichotoies in the industry. I don't want to I don't want this to come across like a dichotomy, but it's like we split the the art of coaching into two buckets being the communication, relationship building, creating psychologically safe environments. one side and then the other side being like your understanding of the human body and your understanding of how adaptation occurs and your understanding of program design and your understanding of coaching movement kind of the the more kind of like looking at like soft skills and hard skills so to speak. So those are kind of the the two major ways that we like to bucket things. We'll have courses that are centered on, you know, either or or sometimes both. But like again, we know that both are equally important, right? Like we you need both to be an effective coach. So, how do you rate these different buckets in these different programs? Like you have psychological safety, like the ability to create a psychologically safe environment. That's something that's challenging to objectively score, right? So, how do you go about assessing that? Yeah, it is. It's hard to put a number to it and it's kind of like we've gone back and forth. We've tried different things as far as like do we keep it objective and have like a rating of one to three or is it subjective and we're just going off of vibes like the vibes are there. Can't explain it, but the vibes are great. So, you pass this round. So, I think more than more than anything, it's looking at it on an individualized and kind of case byase basis as much as possible and like looking at so like I'm evaluating you as a coach. I'm watching one of your sessions. I'm reviewing one of your programs. It's looking at your individual strengths and weaknesses relative to yourself. So, it's like, "All right, Gabe, looking at your program, this thing's beautiful." Like, you got the X's and O's down. I can see the vision. I can see the intent behind everything you're doing. I love the way you're pairing exercises. I love the way you're changing things based how on how the person in front of you is showing up during the session. Thank you. Yeah, crushing it. But on the other side, but on the other side, it's like, hey, we could work on, you know, how you build rapport, how you create relationships, you know, with your clients, with your athletes. So like keeping it relative to the person looking at the strengths and weaknesses makes it a little bit easier as far as like giving objective or giving feedback that that they can actually take and use and do something different with because it can be like I think anytime we try to score and go too too deep. It gets a little because there's always going to be a subjective nature to it. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'm only joking but I'm thinking about like hey Gabe we noticed when you dab athletes up like it's brutal. Like you really got to work on that. We got to work. It's not good. Vibes. The vibes weren't there at times. Your water cooler talk is bad. We got to clean up the vibes. You asked someone what they thought about the weather. Okay. So, these items that are more objective, right? Let's let's dip into the more hard skills. Understanding, adaptation, movement. Are those ranked more on performance and data collection from athletes, from clients? A little bit more now. Yeah, I'd say a little bit more now. It's definitely where the direction that we're trying to go is like what are the outcomes that we're getting from the program and then let's see let's look at the outcomes of the program and then let's take a critical look at the program and see basically what needs to stay in and what can be removed from the program. So that's something whether it's in the corporate environment or the sport environment that we're trying to dive into a lot more and and get more objective data from from our clients from our athletes on the outcomes from from program design. But I think there are buckets within that that again maybe a tiny bit more subjective but there are objective components to it like you know looking at how we're balancing work and rest throughout the program right like how are you waving intensity throughout the week throughout the month and then looking at results from monitoring how people are showing up. So what we call like functional state, you can think about it like daily readiness. Like looking at these three weeks of training, we have high low, we have high days, we have low days, we have medium days. Here's how the athletes are responding. If they're all smoke from the training, it's like, all right, cool. Now we know for whatever reason this loading strategy with this group did not work. It was a little bit too intense. So moving forward, we need to turn the dial down a little bit and change how we're power programming. So are you collecting feedback from the athletes or clients as well at the same time like on their on their experience? Trying to trying to as as best as possible. I think more so I think we do a better job of it on the corporate side like getting maybe not getting the like outcomes all the time from every single phase of training. So like you know we gain x% of strength across the group or we we added x inches to our vertical jump across the group. But definitely in the corporate side, like getting the actual experience of like, hey, how much are you enjoying the program? Knowing that like that's going to be a big part of like if you're not bought in, if you're not enjoying the program, you might not come back, but also you're probably not going to get into the same amount of adaptation as you would if you were enjoying the program, right? And generally speaking, right? Generally speaking, cuz weekend warriors, bless them, myself included, we have goals, right? But success performance-wise, adaptation wise, like my life doesn't depend on if I'm able to hit a certain number like on a leg press or squat necessarily. For an athlete though, like force production, power, speed, those things matter. Like those metrics actually matter for their job and their livelihood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, a thousand%. That's that's why we're take the time and the resources to go through programs whether it's like the combine program being a big one because it's more it's more closely related to something like a stopwatch sport like track. So we get basically like we can see the objective outcomes from hey this 6 to 8 weeks of training led to these results at the combine in these athletes. So then that makes it way easier to say all right you know is it working is it not what do we need to cut out what do we need to add in and we can see immediately the response now even taking it like same sport different goal looking at NFL offseason going into the season now it's like well yes they may have like did they get faster cool does that show up on the field maybe not so then the waters get muddied even more right so yeah you layer on like the context of their actual sport, then their role within the sport and then the role within, you know, their specific skill set. You know, it's you can kind of go on and on and I I I can see how that get that can get kind of muddy. So, how often are you revisiting and evaluating? Is there a cadence of like once a month, once a quarter? Like is it different for different disciplines? Yeah, it's going to be a little bit different for where you should like where you are in the company, like what what client you're serving. sport started to almost quarterly go to different sites and and kind of see where they're at, see how the program design is, see how well they're implementing new technology, see how well they're doing with new assessment protocols and things like that. On the corporate side, like if they're a coach in the app that we have and serving clients and delivering coach consults and programs, that's going to be on a closer quarterly cadence as well. And then as far as like some of our kind of higher value clients in the book of business, we're going to try to get to that a little bit more, have more consistent conversations around programming. So it's almost more of a an ongoing dialogue than it is uh you know a set assessment date. Got it. So in terms of these buckets, these soft skills, hard skills, the things that you are assessing, how much input do the actual practitioners have in determining what is important to evaluate? Yeah. All right. So you know, we'll have a rubric so to speak like we'll have like these are the areas we're looking at. So within, you know, the soft skills of communication, we're looking at how you lead the group and manage the group. we're looking at how well you communicate and kind of own the room. We're looking at if you have an individual moment with every single athlete or client in the group that you're training. And then on the other side, if we're looking at like, you know, more of the the coaching and queuing within that, looking at how well or how often you're giving verbal feedback or tactile feedback, how well you're using constraints to try to change people's movement and things like how often you're giving feedback relative to the complexity of the movement that you're doing. So there are, you know, identified buckets that we're looking at and there are identified buckets that the coaches know that we're looking at, but for for me specifically, like I'm always putting them in the driver's seat first and and asking them, all right, like what do you think you did well or what do you think you do well? What do you think you need to improve on? because, you know, whether we're assessing them quarterly or once a year or maybe they're in in an environment where they don't really get assessed and it's more their manager kind of watching them like I think they need to have the ability to to reflect on their own performance, their own coaching ability. Because if they can do that, if they can have this kind of this post reflection, this retroactive reflection after each session, then you can basically assess yourself every day and make some progress towards getting better as a coach in your weak areas every single day. So, starting with that question of, hey, you know, what do you think you do well? What do you think you need to improve upon and why? Starts to get the wheels turning for them. But it also lets me know, you know, what do you care about? like what do you think is important and why do you think that's important and I'm always I'm always open for that conversation because I'm not there with their members every single day right so right I've worked with many people who work with groups of engineers and they're just you know sitting behind a desk every day they love they love data they love numbers they love nerding out and I'm like yo why are you breaking down collagen synthesis and talking about like all this stuff when you're doing ISOs like what are we doing and they're like yeah Oh, we love it. They love it. So, we're going to do it. Like, all right. Like, not what I would think is effective, but it works. Whatever. Very helpful to think about. And I'm looking at this and really it's kind of taking a step back and identifying, well, what even makes a good training session, right? Like what are the key factors that make up a great training session? I think you mentioned individual moments. I think we bucket that in the soft skills, right? So taking this a step further, how did you come to the conclusion that that is an aspect of a training session that matters? Like the having an individual moment people. Yeah, these things having an individual moment. Um, of course queuing, right? We we all we can all agree that that matters, but something like that, right? Like is there research behind that decision? Is it just years of, hey, this is how we've done it and we've noticed that this has had an impact on people. Like why is that factor important? Yeah, it's it's definitely be that twofold, right? Like some of it is going to be research based. So like a lot of the coaching and queuing pieces are going to be based on research. So more we've been spending time looking into and thinking about and implementing coaches coaching through the constraints approach and understanding dynamic systems theory a little bit more and allowing for inter- individual variability between movements and and and kind of like letting people fail more and kind of things like that. There's also the kind of self-determination theory. One of the major models that we'll we'll think about like is there autonomy in the session? Are we building relatedness between you know me and the and the athletes and then the athletes and each other? And then are we supporting people's competency? So basically, you know, not setting them up for failure so much that they get frustrated and and you know, don't want to be a part of the training because they're so frustrated with their performance. So like that stuff's going to be pretty heavily rooted in in research whether it's motoral learning or or queuing or psychology. But then there are some things like thinking back to what you know the founder Mark Stagan was doing 30 years ago and that worked really well and that have continued to work really well and things that you know in assessing what other similar companies or other coaches are doing that we feel help differentiate us in the market a little bit. It's like the individual moments piece comes from years of experience and just our own practical lived experience like you know you're in a class and you know I've I've been to many a CrossFit gym many Orange Theory gym and like you know you feel like you're in the session and like you feel like you don't really get coached at all and you see other people getting coaches getting coached and it like doesn't really feel great but if you have that moment you know coach comes up to you connects with you gives you some feedback like that's great you know you're improving it's getting better you know whatever it might be like having that moment every session one, yeah, it builds related, but two, it just like feels good, you know? It's one of those things as a as a human to be seen, be heard, like things like that that just feel good, you know, saying people's names in the session. We have someone on our team who are like get really obsessive over the music and we'll like hammer coaches that the music's bad. I've seen that. Yeah. And it's like it's like one of those things where yes, there's research on how, you know, whatever rock music, rap music might improve performance, but it's just like goes back to the subjective vibes piece. Like, can you can you nail the vibes of the class where everyone they want to be there, they're having a good time, but they're also training hard. So, I think some of that stuff's going to come through the lived experience. And again, it's going to be different from group to group. And I something I always challenge coaches is to kind of qualify the groups that they're working with. Like are you working with a group of proathletes who love getting after it? Are you working with a group of new trainees in a corporate environment who are a little bit nervous? I'm here with Phil Nash, the manager of performance learning and development at Exos. Pivoting to maybe onboarding new equipment, testing, assessment protocols. What is your process for evaluating a new product? I mean, we could even use Keiser as an example if you'd like or you can choose a different one. But I'm curious to know what that process is like. Obviously, that's a big part too of everything when you bring in new equipment, there's new capabilities. Well, you also have to roll out a system of education for that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Keiser is probably the perfect example like one because it's it's something we rolled out at scale across the entire book of business and kind of like revamped our education on and I think it's because of the process, right? Like and I think about it similarly to like if you went to a conference or you're reading a book or you're going through a course and you're trying to identify how you're going to take this new methodology or this new understanding and implement it into your program. I think first and foremost it's trying to understand the ins and outs of let's say like you know getting new A400 monitors on like leg press being a new piece of equipment or triple trainers in a corporate environment that never had them before as a new piece of equipment. And I literally got an email a second ago about someone who just got it was like hey what do I do? So understanding like all right what is this piece of equipment for? What can it do? What are its capabilities? And I think even for me who have you has used Keiser at a lot of the facilities that I worked at like when we started to think about this education and think about how we might use it differently like diving back into the difference between mass and pneumatics and being like wow like there's a lot of things in here that I wish that I understood better as a coach because I would have done it differently. So I think that's the positives of you know the top down approach that we have at Exos at times where it's like you know we have the team dedicated to methodology and dedicated to sports science and dedicated to education so we can really take the time get super deep in the weeds and and really understand you know what is this piece of equipment what is this piece of technology do and then we can really start to experiment. I think that's probably something that's often missed from coaches is like just being open to experimenting, playing around, trying different things, seeing how it feels, seeing how you respond to the training, actually taking the model out of the box. Like, you know, it's like, hey, if we do, you know, load velocity profile this way, we should get this outcome. What if we did it this way? Like, what what what's different? What's better? What's worse? If we try to have a standardized warm-up for a protocol, what's different? What's better? What's worse? like whatever it might be, really being open to experimentation. But then again, I think there's got to be a bottom up aspect to the education as well. So like, hey, I'm not in the gym every single day working with groups. You are. I need you to to experiment with this equipment as well and see like does it make sense practically, which is probably the biggest limiter for a lot of things. Like if it doesn't make sense practically, then it doesn't matter how good the research is. Like it's just not going to go. it's not going to work. So, you know, having a bit of top down where we're in the weeds, understanding the ins and outs, having the bottom up where it's like practically this makes sense, this doesn't make sense. Now, we have a two-way conversation so that when we go to scale it, our starting points a lot better. Like it makes a lot more sense. It's like especially for assessment, it's like here's what we need to do, the non-negotiables to get good quality consistent data from something like a load velocity profile on a Keiser squat. here's what we've learned from some practical experimentation. Put those two things together and that becomes our our starting point as education goes. But we're always looking to refine our education. So it's like, hey, we learned from a coach on the field or coach in the field that like, you know, they've been doing eight reps instead of five on the load velocity profile and they're getting better results. Cool. Let's try it out. Let's add it in. So is there a duty to report back to you and your team or do you have key coaches or practitioners around the world country that are responsible for experimentation before then rolling out? How does that work? Yeah, generally we'll have some kind of key people called out who we who want to to roll out and experiment with. Like it's definitely something that we did when Jenny Norles was running Keiser, our Keiser partnership, like immediately identified some key folks who were super into it, excited about it, and they became the ones who were reporting back. When I'm thinking about, you know, we we created a a sport science course a couple of years ago. It's like mostly centered around sport science and assessment and how you use data and rolling it out on the corporate side. There were a couple coaches there that I was like, "Hey, I need y'all to be the ones kind of championing this and and reporting back." So when you do a movement screen with your clients and do it on 20 clients like let's see is it feasible is it practical is the data valuable how can you use it right? So I think generally calling those coaches out from the start that way they have a seat at the table is is generally the starting point. How long does a process like that take though to work through the kinks to evaluate until you can confidently say hey this is viable this is practical? a while. Sometimes it takes a while. I think uh I don't know tight timelines aren't always a bad thing like that kind of force our hand. Like there are some times in the year that really force our hand. That's one of the nice things about the the corporate side is like we can take forever. There there are some things that are ongoing for you know a year like we've been working with a group doing ESD or conditioning assessments like doing maximum aerobic speed and max output assessments and we've just been kind of going back and forth for almost a year now just kind of like tweaking things refining things tinkering with it because there's no real hard timeline to it so we can take our time and make something really good whereas you know if it's like hey it's October and we have combine coming up in two months like we have two months to to figure this thing out and design and build education for it. So in that in that instance, we got to sprint a little bit harder. But anytime we have a tight timeline, it's like that becomes the primary focus of like how can we get as much valuable info as we can. But then even after the program like so say Ronok Keiser for combine last year, two months, three months to do it, combine happens and then we start the process again right there where it's like what did we learn? Like I think that's probably the through line through all of the things that we do at Exos, whether it's education, whether it's program design and coaching, the ability to take a step back, have some retroactive reflection, and try to refine what you're doing, knowing that there's always going to be a way that we can tweak it and make it better. So like I look at education as this ongoing process. Like there's not a kind of finite like start and stop point. It's we can always make it better. We can always communicate better. we can always change our process or change our protocols. And so I think with that in mind, it helps us it helps us truly make like the best possible outcomes. Absolutely. Oh, that's well said. And I think you had mentioned previously when when we were chatting before this just the idea of rolling out education in phases, right? Like phase one, phase 2, phase three. Maybe some education courses are built that way. Why have you chosen to do things that way? And why has that been proven to be successful? Yeah, I mean some so some of it is like you know happened or had been happening long before me and before I before I'm in the role that I'm in now. But you know the reason that I stick with the kind of structure we have is because like you said like it's it's been successful. It's been effective for a lot of coaches in a lot of different a lot of different areas. I think for me I think back to like when I first started in this role and I was so excited like I love training. I love learning. I love teaching and I remember the first couple courses, the first couple, you know, either virtual or inerson sessions I had with with individual coaches or groups of coaches really leaning into the nuance and really leaning into the it depends and getting the feedback that they were like, "Yo, we don't know what to do." Like Phil just kind of came in and said, "It depends a bunch and I don't know. You tell me." And we didn't learn anything. And I was like, "Oh." I think the way we structure it now is like basically starting with these these kind of models that coaches can take and use immediately where it's like you know you come to phase one and we we talk about movement and we talk about how we understand it at EXOS and we talk about the training system and basically say like you know you can periodize your program this way and you kind of start from you know building capacity and focusing on movement efficiency and then over time you progress to you know try to improve some sort of output whether it's you know strength output or or you know the rate that you're producing for us or whatever it might be. You know, we talk about the training system and basically going in this process like you do the stuff in this order and that's how you do it. And then over time we slowly kind of peel the guard rails back and like not that there's there's always going to be nuance and injected into what we're doing, but it's kind of like starting with hey do this first. Like it's not perfect, but it's going to be really really useful. Like if you're designing a program for the GEM pop or an athlete and you go from a foundational phase to a hypertrophy phase to a strength phase to a power phase, like they're probably going to get better and they're they're probably going to work towards whatever it is their goal that they're working for is. But then over time as they come through courses, as we connect with them more, the guardrails get pulled off, the layers get pulled back. So it's like you start with this foundational understanding, this foundational knowledge, and then over time you get better and better and better. So you get to the point where it's like you can truly adapt what you're doing to the people in front of you. And that's kind of how our education structure is built, right? Like it starts foundational, peel back the layers, then it really puts the the power in the coach's hand. Got it. Another question for you. How do you handle disagreement? you know, when when you and a practitioner who's on the ground working with athletes or a member of your team or just anybody says, "No, I really think this is the better way to go about things." I mean, you obviously can't agree all the time, right? Yeah. So, how do you go about handling disagreement? my my manager who hired me or in my interview that was uh one of the questions in the interview and I bombed it and people still give me a hard time for it but he was like if you're I think at the time I was 27 when I was hired so he's like if you're you know teaching a course and you have a 50-year-old strength coach who's like worked in professional sport and he's like I don't agree with you what are you going to say and I was like okay cool I don't know I don't have an answer for that but no it's part of me is you you must have crushed watched every other part of that interview. I had to have cuz it was bad. That was not that was that was the low that was a low light for me on that one. But no, I think like honestly some of it for me is like taking a step back and being like in most instances I get for I get that the stakes are way higher in pro sport, but in a lot of instances like let's take a step back. It's not that deep. Like it's not life or death in a lot of in a lot of cases. Like we're talking about strength and conditioning. Let's be real here for a moment. But I think trying to really understand where they're coming from and like why they're disagreeing. So, you know, trying to ask questions. I think for me, I'm always trying to be curious. Like I've had many of disagreements. So, I always approach it from like not a place of like I'm right and you're wrong or like I'm I'm always very open that I do not have all the answers and I cannot and do not know everything. So, like I want to know where you're coming from. I want to seek to understand your perspective. Is it based in research? Is it based in your practical lived experience? You know, do you have good points? And then hopefully, I think generally that opens the door for them to do the same. Not that it's always a a perfect world, but you know, sometimes there's going to be like, hey, I know you don't agree. Let's try it and see what happens. And if it doesn't work, we can change it. Yeah. Sometimes people just want to be heard, right? It's a very different experience to say you disagree with something or to hear somebody out say, "Okay, I understand the value in that. I understand why you're thinking this way. I think we're still going to go in this direction." You know, however, like I can appreciate where you're coming from with that. It's a very different experience for the person proposing a new idea. Yeah. And G and giving them giving them the platform to be heard. But I think often times we can find the similarities and the commonalities like you know hey like we're we're agreeing on you know 95% of the stuff here and this is the the kind of 5% where there's a gap between our thought processes like I think that's also helpful for them to see like all right like maybe I don't totally agree you know with everything but for the most part I I think it's a it's a quality idea or a quality protocol or whatever it might be that we're talking about. As you take a step back and evaluate everything you're doing from an education standpoint, imagine sometimes you sit there and say like, "Do we need to scrap all of this and just do it a different way?" Yes. You're trying to constantly evolve. As you said, education is constantly like evolving, right? Like it's fair to question the way you do things, even if it's been repeated for a long period of time. You had a lot of success. So, is there something that you're thinking about a certain way about doing things that you're curious about now? It might be part of the future that you're excited to maybe roll out like is there anything that you're thinking about about how we can do this differently? Yeah, I think more bottoms up stuff like more bottoms up learnings that that kind of make their way up into our methodology that we then scale like again having you know a thousand plus coaches in different environments around the world like we have a lot of awesome practitioners doing really cool stuff with their clients. So I think the the stuff that really excites me is again like coming from a place of curiosity, going out into the field, you know, breaking bread, talking shop with coaches and seeing what they're doing, like what's working, what's not working, you know, what's allowing you to be successful. you know, if you're on the corporate side and you know, your clients love you and you're you're constantly, you know, doing really well on the personal training front and you're, you know, getting great results from your program and and you know, have a great community in your facility, like what's what about what you're doing is working. What can we steal from you and scale to everyone else? You know, on the sports side, it's like, you know, athletes love coming in. They're coming back year over year. They're constantly making great improvements. They're constantly staying healthy throughout the season. Like, what are you doing differently? what's working, what can we steal and scale. So I think you know historically it's not it's not unique to Exos but it's a lot of organizations like things come from the top down and sometimes they have to right because again we have the time and the bandwidth to get deep in the weeds and and fully understand what we're rolling out but you know some of the stuff that we've seen with what coaches are are using Keiser for like you know doing different movements or or different pairings on a triple trainer or a rack or whatever it might be like yeah that's awesome let's take that and steal that. Yeah. But for me, it's allowing the the bottoms up stuff to to come to life a little bit more. How many training sessions have you observed? A lot. I know. I know it is a lot and not an exact number, but but the reason I asked this is you've seen so much, right? You've seen so many sessions. If you were to like boil it down to here are the key things that make for a great training session, right? regardless of if these are athletes, regardless of this is corporate clients, like if you could boil it down to three basic things, what would they be? Yeah, I think first one is meeting the people where they are. So trying to whether it's objectively through wearable data, jump testing, sleep scores, whatever, or subjectively like, you know, hey, how are you feeling today? How's your energy today? What's your training willingness today? like trying to understand the person in front of you and how they're showing up today physically, you know, cognitively, psychologically. Like if you can understand that and change things on the fly, not only are you going to provide a a better stimulus for them in that moment and ultimately like lead to better adaptations in the long term, but I think there's just a big piece in there from a relationship management standpoint that's like, you know, this coach genuinely cares about me as a person. Like they want the best for me and I feel that every single day. Like I think that's a a massive a massive element to it. From there getting into you know how you coach, how you communicate. I think providing autonomy is a big piece. So finding ways to pro provide appropriate amounts of autonomy and also making the the athlete, the client a part of the training process, a part of the learning process and not always just giving them the answers, but you know, can you ask ask them how a movement felt or ask them how they think they did on a on a on a rep of, you know, a flying 10 or whatever it is. You know, bring them to the table, make them a part of the learning process. you know, help educate them, help them grow, and help them understand their own body and their own performance. That's massive. And then the third one, going back to the vibes, has to be something vibes related. Like I and again, for me personally and and some of what we do in education, like yes, training can be serious. Yes, training can be and is hard and intense, but I think the environment that we create should be fun and welcoming and creating a space that people want to be in. So, you know, when I'm looking at the environment that coaches create, like simply, is it a is it a space? Is it a place that the members, the athletes, they want to be in? They're hanging out after the session. They're coming in early if they can. Like, you can tell they genuinely love it and they genuinely want to be there and they're bought into the process. They're bought into the coach. Like, if you can check those three boxes, even if the program's less than perfect, like, you're going to get incredible outcomes. That's awesome. So, I'm recapping because I loved your answers. I really did. Number one, meeting people where they're at, providing autonomy, and then just creating an environment. And that environment can change depending on, you know, the time of season and time of year, how many people are there. I know we've probably felt victim to it. Just like you kind of get that feeling after a session where everyone's just hanging out still and you have no idea how much time passed, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like it's a great it's a space you want to be in. Like, you know, if I'm if I'm a client in a gym, like that's the space that I want to be in. Yeah. Absolutely. So, okay. So, a couple questions here to wrap up and I really appreciate your time. So, thank you so much. For any coach that's listening who wants to grow but feels maybe overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, what advice would you give them on how to maybe be more intentional with their education? Yeah. No, there's a lot out there. That's a great question. I think one thing that I always talk about especially like a phase one mentorship or like you know when I'm onboarding coaches at a at a new site or you know they're they're new to the system is the the noise filter and the relationship between signal and noise like I mean 5 years ago 10 years ago because of social media there was already too much noise like access to information is not the issue anymore which is on one hand is a is a great problem to have like I'm sure you also remember like surfing bodybuilding forums and like getting information from some like weird dude on the internet about how you should cycle. Still do still do. It's out there. Still exists. Thank goodness. But like now with where social media is and how big of a market, you know, strength and conditioning and fitness and health is and now with like entering this age of AI, like information and and a ton of information is at everybody's fingertips. So for a coach, that's one thing I really like about, you know, how we set up our education and our training system and our methodology in general is like it acts as this this filter for all the noise. It helps them organize the things that they're learning or the things that they might be doing. So, you know, with the the amount of noise in mind, I think it's remembering that like no one's going to have all the answers. No one can know everything. There's a lot more out there that's going to be designed to to maybe be a little bit contrarian and and you know they're people are designing their education and their ideas for the algorithm and not so much for the coach or for the the athletes or the clients that the coaches might be working with. So, you know, with that in mind, it's it's being open to to trying things, being open to experimentation, being open to refining, and again, always coming back to like who you're actually working with. Like, who is the person in front of me? What do they want to do? Where are they at right now? Where's the gap? How can I close that gap? Like, if you can keep that m in mind with everything you do, like there's stuff that I'll learn or see on social media or a course I'll take. And I'm like, man, that's really interesting. I'll probably never use that. But it was it was a fun thing to learn. Like I I feel like I I learned a little bit. It was a great experience. Whatever. But when it comes back to like is this going to help me help a coach? Is this going to help a coach help their member? Like if you can keep that main thing in mind the entire time, that makes the stuff that you're consuming a lot easier to digest. It's like that's your filter. It's like, cool. Hey, that thing that that post that that guy put out was super interesting. probably doesn't make sense for my clients. Maybe it makes sense for a client on the road, but I'm just going to stay solely focused on who's in front of me. 100% agree. I mean, at the end of the day, it's what ultimately is going to help you provide the most value for the people that you're working with, right? Because if you're able to provide value that makes you more valuable, right? And that depends on your environment for sure. If you're in the private sector, it's a different ballgame than working in a team organization, right? 100%. Okay. Hey, so if anyone wants to learn more, check out the educational resources that Exos has. Where do they go? Yeah. So, you look us on Instagram, Exo Education. All of our stuff will be on there. Website, everything. Exoslearning.com. Have all our stuff in there. Yeah. Phase one, two, and three mentorships in person. We have our performance specialist, fitness specialists, courses online. Yeah. I think we'll throw a little couple discount codes in the in the show notes for for folks who are interested in learning more from Exos. But yeah, I think you know starting with the phase one mentorship, starting with performance specialist certification again like that's that's the the framework, right? That's the the noise filter for you that that base to allow you to organize everything you're doing, everything you're learning and and you know help you better make decisions. I think that's a invaluable starting point for people. Love it. Phil, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. As he mentioned, you can go ahead and check out their website, exoslearn.inspire360.com. Also, check them out. Exoseducation Instagram. There are some discount codes that we will throw into the show notes if you're listening. Keiser 25 will get you 25% off digital products. Live 2026 will get you 250 off in-person mentorships. Phil, we got a big game this weekend. We got the Super Bowl. I need a prediction from you. I'm I'm going Hawks by 10. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good about Sam Darnold. I'm going Hawks by 10. You had a great defense. I think they get a ball on Drake May, even though I love what the Pats have done this year. Crazy turnar around from Rabbel and that team. But yeah, I'm I'm going to stick with the NFC on this one. Heads or tails? Coin flip. Tails never fails, baby. Lock it in. Okay. Well, we'll have to check it out after this is published and see if it did fail or not. So, Phil, thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thank you for joining me today, man. Awesome catching up with you and and can't wait to do it again soon. Yeah, man. Thank you for having me on.