Article Review: Doctor Detective

Over on Precision Nutrition, there is an excellent series called the Doctor Detective.

Doctor Detective 3 was just recently published.

This article is really about sleep and sleep quality, as well as nutrition, but there is an interesting moment in it:

"He and his wife were intrigued by the notion of increasing testosterone naturally. I explained the relationship behind healthy dietary habits and testosterone. His wife, the household cook, insisted that her food was healthy. Discussion closed."

So an obvious way to address his issue of low testosterone was dismissed out of hand by the clients. Basically, no, I'm not doing that, what else have you got?

As a trainer, how do you overcome this? It's not often someone just rejects changes out of hand, but it's common to have someone just no do something that they need to do to succeed. That could be dietary changes, extra workouts, stretching, rehab protocols, more sleep, or whatever. Sometimes you can succeed with only a partial change (here, they add an easy breakfast shake to get in some nutrition he wouldn't get otherwise), sometimes you can't. Working around an "End of discussion" pronouncement can you your job much harder.

As a client, how do you overcome this? Learn to recognize your roadblocks. If quitting drinking or eating a good breakfast or stretching on your off days will get you much improved results, can you do it? Will you? Are you putting up "End of discussion" blocks that make it harder to get you the results you are after?

This article is interesting in and of itself, but the question of working around a client refusal (or a self-refusal) is especially so. Well worth reading.