OPtimum EXperience Exercise: Start With What You Are Capable Of
Frameworks with Carl Hardwick | CoachRx Podcast Network
Frameworks, Episode 52, with Carl Hardwick and James FitzGerald
Lisa sits down across from her coach for the first time. She has a goal, and it is probably ten pounds or a back squat number. The coach has a goal for her too, and it is not that. Before the first program is written, the coach says something most clients have never heard: here is the highest order version of you that we are aiming at, we both agree you will never fully arrive, and it is going to take nine months at two hundred and fifty dollars a month to get you to the point where you do not need me.
That is the conversation this episode is about. OPEX stands for Optimal Experience, capital O, capital P, capital E, capital X, and Carl and James spend the hour trying to pin down what the optimal version of a human life looks like when you say it out loud to a client. They planned to cover behavior, nourishment, and physical expression in one sitting. Twenty minutes in, Carl stopped them and made it a three part series, because physical expression alone would not fit. The reframe underneath all of it is simple to say and hard to live: stop starting from what people need to do, and start from what they are capable of.
The beam of light
Carl opened by asking where the idea came from. James said it came from the practice of coaching people, and from watching, over years, what actually mattered and what did not. Somewhere in that he started describing to clients what the ideal, the utopic version, should look like. Not because anyone would reach it, and not because it was the case for everyone, but because having it in view did something.
His language for it was a beam of light. Something radiant. An avatar of vitality. He was careful to say he does not mean anything pseudo-theological by it. What he means is that the avatar is built on a base of the optimal, and that is why the episode got its name. The whole conversation comes down to what experiences are, and how to fill a life with the ones that lead to flourishing, for your own mind and for the people around you.
He added one distinction early that matters for everything after it. The optimal experience is not mostly pleasure. It is doses of excitement, dopamine really, that fill you up and give you more rather than leaving you addicted to finding the exact same thing again. And it does not pretend there is no suffering in the world or that there will never be struggle. That is part and parcel of the concept.
Challenge the body, eat real food, be kind
When James used to ask himself what actions a human has to go through before reaching any of this, the answer was the one he and Carl have repeated for years. Challenge the body. Eat real food. Be kind. In his words from the coach's room, those three lead to the greatest mental acuity for the longest period of time. Sustainable energy, energy you give off, energy that lets you be as sensitive and as perceptive as you can be to what is happening around you. What are my thoughts? Are my thoughts real? How is that person feeling? How do my words and actions affect the person close to me, or further away?
In his own mind he called it the Vitality Project. The point of it is to let an individual get to a larger life. That is why the phrase is live a larger life. The largest life possible, the optimal, the ideal, the ultimate.
Where graduation fits
Carl asked how the concept of graduation sits inside this, and James said it fits because he wanted to make the conversation about the ideal more real. Dreams, visions, and feelings on their own were never going to hit home, and they were never going to add to his value as an educator. So he added objectivity to a subjective idea.
The objectivity is a date and a time combined with a cost. When you take everything about a client into account, sex, age, class, geography, culture, capabilities, you can say on the first day that out of a hundred billion people who have lived on this rock, there is a body of knowledge you can acquire to get you to vitality, and for you, Lisa, it is going to take nine months. Nine months at two hundred and fifty dollars a month.
James named what he had just done. He added real consequences to the vision and dreamy language of the optimal experience. The end result for Lisa is full independence, which is the base support under everything else she wants. If she wants to raise children, take on a specific physical challenge, be consistent in her physical life, or think about what she wants to do with her grandchildren, all of it is explicitly better if she is handed an exact date, a cost, and a clear picture of what she graduates with.
What it looks like in an onboarding flow
Carl wanted to put this into terms a coach could wrap their hands around, so he walked through it. You sit down with Lisa. You run whatever intake, assessment, and consultation your system uses. Her stated aim is X or Y or Z, and it does not matter which, because your aim for her is complete independence. Through that intake you are learning how far she is from it. In your head you land on a number. Nine months, twelve, eighteen, twenty-three. Then you propose it. Lisa, I believe it is going to take thirteen months to get you where you need to go. Here are the goals that sit inside that. We will actually reach your aim before we reach independence. Here is the roadmap. Are you ready?
The thing it is not, Carl said, is a twenty-four month contract that you make work as you go. The commitment exists because that is how long the coach believes it will take to get to graduation, not because everyone falls into a six, twelve, or twenty-four month bucket. Contract length and commitment length are relative to the graduation date. They are reverse engineered from it. There is no magic in nine months. Nine months is what the diagnosis said about Lisa.
He also pointed out the failure mode. A coach can have independence as the goal in their own head and simply forget to have the conversation with Lisa on the front end. Then the expectations are never clear to her. There has to be a moment in the system where it is said.
Why Lisa, and not humans
James explained why he keeps saying Lisa instead of humans. Saying Lisa, nine months, shows the value of the modern fitness coach, because it shows what individual prescription based on the client's capability, extracted in the diagnosis, is worth. Why nine months for Lisa? Because she is Lisa, and because the coach knows.
Then he said the part that makes him more concerned. If he steps out and says humans, he has to be honest about what he knows about the progress of artificial intelligence and technology, which is that the acquisition of the knowledge is much, much shorter. If he was being loose about it, he would say it takes about a month. So the model would be: onboard all these clients, charge a high price for the one month, set them free, and press repeat until you have enough in the coffers to spend the rest of your life kayaking and reading.
He went one step further, to a proposition he has made before. If every child finished their education with everything they need to know about nurturing themselves, nourishing themselves, and challenging themselves, this entire conversation would be wiped out. Everything he and Carl do would seem useless. Not useless, but it would seem that way, because all of it is rehabilitative. It is a fix on current modern adults. The actual question underneath the episode, in James's framing, is how do we fix the codependency between a coach and a client. And his simple answer is the same one. Create a date, a time, and a cost. Period.
Because then everything works backwards. The client is forced to download it. Every day they come in thinking, I have sixty days left, I have to get this in my head. Remind me what a pushing pattern is. Remind me how many pattern options there are. Three days later: coach, I found sixteen versions of pushing patterns. Cool. Now get out of here. When you move from the subjective down to the objective and put a date, a time, and a cost on it, things get real. Carl's analogy was the start of a semester. There are things you have to get through before it ends, and the clock is visible.
The knowledge is already out there, and it is free
James made everyone remember one thing before moving on. The knowledge of independence through physical challenge, real food, and being kind, with the be kind part opening into a whole book of behavior, is already out there for every human, and it is free. It is not like becoming educated to build bridges, or to wire electricity into your garage so you can train through the winter, which James had done the day before and would not trust to a few books. This is not hard to learn, and it is not hard to find. Carl's one caveat got a laugh: uranium is a cost. They tabled that for another chat.
Physical expression, and the ho-hum of repeating it
Carl set up the three areas, behavior, nourishment, physical expression, and asked for the optimal version of each from a principled standpoint for everyone, knowing the route gets individual once it is Lisa versus Bob. He started with physical expression and admitted they have said it so many times it risks sounding like challenge yourself, do something, all that. James said they should pause on exactly that ho-hum attitude. Repeating it ad nauseum is how they check that neither of them is suffering from cognitive dissonance or afraid to admit something has changed. And the reason he can honestly hold the same opinion is that these are physical truths of expression, built into humans innately.
His language for coaches is contractions. All of the physical action you partake in willfully, see it as contractions. There are contractions that happen when you sleep and never think about it, but the subject here is the willful ones, and they have stood the test of time inside us. In modern times they split into two kinds. Really challenging contractions, and contractions that go on and on and are sustainable. In the coach's brain, gain contractions and sustain contractions. Both are based on utility and practicality.
Then he named the third kind. As much as anyone, himself included, has sold you pain, pain contractions have no utility and no practicality. They are dysfunctional. Carl asked him to define it in thirty seconds, because the word lactate gets people technical. Lactate work, hard intervals, suffering, activities that are not sustainable. A tough set of pull-ups taken close to failure is not that; that is a gain contraction. James was willing to say it plainly. The high intensity fitness movement is dysfunctional. Take that and put your feather in it.
The last piece of the definition is that gain and sustain contractions are manufactured. They are willful things you have to do. But you do them because you can, and because they are for you. They do not injure you. They make the next day better and the next six months more resilient. They scaffold everything you want to be doing at eighty-five. Consistency of gain and sustain contractions in physical expression is the whole thing.
Carl's list
Carl said he sometimes hates getting specific because it shrinks the idea, but he did it anyway. You should be able to get down to the floor and stand back up. Carry something heavy a long way. Squat down and stand up over and over. Bend over and pick something up over and over. Push things away from your body. Pull things toward your body. Go a really long way at a slow, easy pace without needing to stop. Get out of breath, stop, recover, and get out of breath again. Stand on one leg.
He flagged the get out of breath item with the line James had used the week before: when I am done, I can go inside and cook food or have a conversation with my kids. That is the difference between a tougher bout of sustain and high intensity interval training, because you cannot do that after pain training.
The item Carl found most interesting was the last one. You should be able to play, or put yourself in a situation where you learn something physically that you did not know how to do yesterday. James's shorthand for it was creativity, imagination, discovery. That goes way back.
What James added: flirting with the limit
James did not remove anything from the list. He added atmosphere and environment. Enjoyment. Curiosity. And a piece of language he needs: buttressing up against what you are capable of, in small amounts, at different times, really close to the limitations. Flirting with those limitations. Because that moves your buffer zone. It pushes the distance between complete failure and your resilience further apart, and that develops character.
That was the 1980s and 1990s thought around sport participation, he said, and it was real. There was character building inside of sport. Where it has gone is that all sport is entertainment today. Carl's two words: Remember the Titans.
The man who got pushed to the curb
Because he had been talking about him the day before, James brought up Ido Portal. Portal stood on the shoulders of giants with ideas about the creativity of movement, and none of it moved to scale, partly because of commercialization and partly because of how ugly people can be online. What was left was powerlifting and weightlifting coaches making fun of him for dancing in a room. He was stigmatized in the social world and pushed to the curb.
James brought him up as a sign of something. We want to wrap systems, science, and commercialization around all of this. But whatever was inside Portal's work, or inside Carl's words discovery, imagination, curiosity, creativity, can be learned, and can be the ignition point in someone's self-discovery of their physical expression. Society will come hunting for it. The old line was dance like no one is watching, and people are now born thinking everyone is watching and that they have to show everyone what they are doing. We have lost the capability, and Portal is just a sign of it in the fitness world.
What am I doing tomorrow is the wrong question
This is where James made the point he said he had to make. What am I doing tomorrow? That is the wrong question. People today think that what movements, how many reps, how many sets must be answered, and if it is not answered the whole thing is deemed useless. He called it the number one mistake everyone is making. It prevents your creativity. You are constraining yourself. You are putting yourself in a cage. And you are going to miss out on a lot of great experiences in life, unbelievable experiences, and you will not be a role model for the people you want to see those constraints taken off of.
Be creative, be imaginative, be curious. Learn something new every day. Why go back and do the same old thing? He added the obvious guardrail, do not be stupid and climb a tree you cannot climb, and then landed it. Imagination and creativity are individual. Inside of that is independence. It is self-love at its highest amount, because you are doing it out of curiosity and you do not care what anyone thinks.
Not good enough to step off a curb
After Carl made it a three part series on air, he raised the thing that bothers him about most of the lists people publish. It is not good enough to say you need to be able to step off a curb without breaking your hip. If that is the aim, what in the world are we doing? If the aim is get on the floor and get back up, what? It reminded him of the government guidance that you need to move your body for twenty minutes a day, which he then corrected on air to a hundred and fifty minutes a week of moderate exercise, because an NFL star had just said so in a commercial that weekend.
James's read was that it shows the power of the sports medicine paradigm. It has made people think that is the thing. Carl had used the word reimagine, and James said that is the wrong way to even start. You do not start from what we need to do. You start with what we are capable of doing. That is what connects back to the Vitality Project and the avatar. Lisa makes herself her brightest self, and what she looks at all the time is what she is capable of, not what someone says she needs to do.
His position, which he has held for a while, is that we do not need to move. You do not need to exercise. But in modern times we have to, so we have to construct it. Not stupid exercise like high intensity classes, but structuring your own gain and your own sustain for the rest of your life, with creativity, imagination, and discovery inside of it. Nowhere in that does he say this is what the ACSM says you need to be able to do, because that is rehab talk. How do we fix the deconditioned people is their starting point. And the people who are already fit go to the performance realm, which is sport, which is entertainment, which is a facade. If you think your performance work is leading to longevity or to being a better person, you are going the wrong direction. Go back a couple of episodes, where elite fitness sits right next to disease and sickness. Move more vanilla. Move backwards. Get to walking and resistance training because you are capable of it, not because you need to.
What is Lisa's optimal
Carl put Lisa back in the chair. She is capable of whatever she is capable of right now. You are having the physical freedom conversation. She asks: what is my optimal version of this, even if I never get there? What should I aim to be capable of?
James's answer was to be able to teach others. Inside the path of being able to teach someone else is the answer to her question, because it requires all of the acquired knowledge of movement expression that is best for Lisa. The optimal for Lisa is the most knowledge she can gain about herself and her own movement expression experiences. And it ties to something they have discussed before in the context of being a parent, a friend, a peer, a neighbor, things that are more prescient in society than anything inside the fitness bubble. Gain the knowledge so that you can help someone else be independent. Not look at me, I am so independent. Sit on your chair and ask how that is a contribution to humans as a whole.
What that looks like is almost nothing. There are all these patterns, go experience them, just try. Go for a walk, come back and talk about it. Go longer. Why could you not go longer? Then try going longer. Two weeks later: I can go this far. How could you challenge that further? Learn this thing with hanging. It never stops, and over time the person Lisa is having coffee with gets it. There was no cost to any of it. The ultimate of Lisa is being able to pass that on.
The manufactured principles
Carl asked James to spend a couple of minutes on the manufactured principles Lisa would need to understand. James said it would not take a couple of minutes. It is gain and sustain. Inside gain are the patterns: pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, lifting. Locomotion is the sustain. Inside locomotion there are geographical, seasonal, temperature, environmental, and biological constraints that let someone explore all the diversity available inside the sustainable work. The manufactured principles are: understand and do varying efforts, varied bouts of gain and sustain. They are all contractions. The public needs to hear that. They are all just willful contractions, and you are the one coming up with them.
Carl noted, as a sign of a softening society, that we now say SkiErg where it used to be VersaClimber. Try forty minutes on either.
But only walking is truly sustainable
Carl raised the objection he could see coming. Someone will say very few activities are truly sustainable, so you should not even be doing the get out of breath and recover work, because the only truly sustainable thing is walking. He asked for James's retort.
James said that argument always comes from the people in the power grab area of the fitness industry. If it is not reps and sets under scientism, you have no proof it will be effective for that person. He does not enter those arguments anymore. You end up in a corner on philosophical bedrock, and then you end up on Twitter for five years acting as a nutrition expert. You have to be a little more open to the possibility of discovery and figuring things out, and no, there is no certainty about what it will look like. Then the real answer: be careful entering those arguments at all, because the person asking is already on the wrong foot. They have forgotten the entire intention, which is to do physical expression, movement expression, and challenges for yourself, every day.
Every day, and leave a little on the table
Carl asked, with a smirk, whether we want to challenge ourselves physically every single day. James said yes, why not, and then took the question seriously, because the sports medicine paradigm that produced most of what people believe about fitness is locked into performance contractions or rehab contractions. When you are locked to your watch, your schedule, or your split, you forget all the creativity that lives inside the enjoyment of physical expression.
He was fair to the principles. Someone ten years trained who does two sets of three really tough back squats on Wednesday could do tough back squats on Thursday, but with carryover, post-training effect, and nervous system recovery, there is more to gain by waiting four or five days. Rest periods have benefits. But in the vitality world, doing it every day makes more sense, and one thing you gain from it is a piece of language he took from Arthur Lydiard's writings: leave a little on the table each time. Do not be afraid of walking out of a physical challenge saying, I am out. There is freedom in it, and there is intelligence and intuition in it. Why did you stop there? Because I would like to train for the next twenty thousand days in a row, and I can see building on this if I walk out of here and have a sandwich. Versus: books and social media and fantasy media told me I was supposed to do something, I dug too deep, now I need a day off. Is that day off functional? No. It contributes nothing to the scaffolding for being pushed off a cliff at eighty-five and smiling.
The split that took Lisa years
Carl said the last thing he wanted to cover was where self-regulation and intuition fall inside Lisa's optimal experience, and James had just walked into it. Sometimes the principles, even the manufactured ones, float to the top just through doing. Maybe Lisa does not know everything, but she is doing it day in and day out, and if she is paying attention there is a natural self-regulation. Really tough back squats on Wednesday, so something long and easy on Thursday. Long and easy on Friday. Long and easy on Saturday, and something felt off about Saturday, like she had too much left on the table, so next Saturday she goes a little tougher. Over time you look at her split and say, that is a really well thought out split. How did you get to that, Lisa? It took me a lot of years. I just did a lot of physical expression and this is what I found works best for me and my recovery and my ability to come back and do it every single day.
It made James think of all the clients who landed in front of him having already laid out something close to perfect. He would ask them, why are you here for me? And the answer was that society had told them they needed refinement and an upgrade, so he gave them whatever he thought that was. He reflects on it now and wishes he had captured all of those stories and put gasoline on them, because those people had found their own independence through their intuition.
Sally wants to talk about speed of contractions
Carl allowed that some clients will want to go deeper. Sally comes in tomorrow, and Sally is interested in speed of contractions and what a two second pause at the bottom of a movement does to how she expresses it. James's first response was that this is interesting for a very few amount of people. His claim is that all humans can fall into a date and time of knowledge acquisition to be completely independent, it is out there, it takes about a couple of weeks, and it is free.
He granted the point that some people are more inquisitive about physical expression. In the nineties those people ended up in colleges and universities. In the early 2000s they ended up in front of a number of people in micro gyms. Some of them were trying to heal themselves and wanted to be around others doing the same. But the gig is up. We all know now that you do not need to be deeply knowledgeable about those things to gain independence in physical expression. You can still read the books, and there is a lot people can fill their lives with, as long as they are doing push-ups and lunges on Wednesday and going for a long walk on Thursday.
The coach's opening, right now
Carl's objection to his own argument was that physical independence is not the aim for most people. They are thinking through the lens of I need to lose ten pounds. James: all rehab, all therapeutics, and that is what keeps the market going, because it makes a lot of money.
Carl's logic from there is worth following. If the market started saying I just want to be physically independent and move every day, the coach is in trouble. But the market is saying I want to lose ten pounds, and that client walks in to a coach who says, stop worrying about the ten pounds, let us talk about physical freedom and expressing yourself every day. There is a tail there, and the coach can be the teacher in it. The relationship ends, and graduation happens, when the student becomes the teacher. James agreed, and sharpened the timing. At this very moment the market is not actively seeking physical independence or physical expression, so the coach, right now, can be the one who introduces the client to those ideas.
They closed that thread with a prediction to check in 2030. Carl's is that as artificial superintelligence arrives, people will not wise up and become more attracted to physical freedom. They will see superintelligence as a faster way to lose ten pounds, rehabilitate, and acquire knowledge quicker. The masses will not be chasing physical independence in 2030. James agreed.
Reallocate, buddy
Carl told James about the CCP office hours the day before, where a group of coaches carried forward the commoditization conversation from Episode 51. He asked them to picture their value as a bucket filled to a hundred percent and to say what percentage of it was their ability to write great training programs. The answers were mixed, and to the ones who said fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty percent, his response was: reallocate, buddy. Reallocate now.
One coach, Ronel, walked the group through how he has been rehabbing himself away from his program design identity for a few years. Carl told him there are twelve steps and it sounded like he was on step six, then withheld the step six coin until Ronel would admit he had a problem, because without that you are back on step one. From here forward, every call opens with: hi, I'm James, and I'm an exercise addict.
What is impact, and what is contribution
James's closing thought was gratitude that these conversations exist outside his own head, and interest in watching the misdiagnosis roll so quickly through the movement of acquiring information and then knowledge. For him, the intention behind the show is to voice things, to say what is on his mind and maybe reach an understanding for himself. If people in the periphery are listening and it makes them uncomfortable or comfortable but injects a new thought, everyone is better off.
He would not leave it there, though. He still wants coaches to hammer on the question he raised the week before. What is impact, and what is contribution? Because he will not be content having had the conversations and gotten everything off his head. Next week is nourishment. Behavior after that. The optimal experience, in three parts, and this was the first.
Frameworks is part of the CoachRx Podcast Network. New episodes weekly.
If you want to coach this way, with a diagnosis that produces a date, a time, and a cost, and a relationship built to end in independence, that is what the OPEX Method Mentorship teaches. Book a strategy call.
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