Ten years into coaching people in North Burnaby, Josko and Brandon have changed their minds about a lot of things. Not because they got soft. Because they got results, and the results kept telling them the same thing: the client wasn’t the problem, the plan was. In this episode of the Kraken Power Podcast, they walk through the coaching mistakes they used to make, the moment they realized what was actually going on, and what they do differently now.
Catch the Full Episode
Stop Blaming Clients When They Don’t Follow the Plan
For years, Josko’s default reaction to a client not getting results was to check the boxes: did they do the workouts, did they hit the steps, did they follow the plan. If the answer was no, that was the whole explanation. The client just wasn’t willing to put in the work.
That framing let him off the hook, and it was wrong. A guy with two kids and a full-time job doesn’t need four workouts pushing him to his limit with a 10,000-step day tacked on for Saturday, the one day he’s actually free to be with his family. He needs a plan built for the life he already has, not the plan a textbook says should work. Getting frustrated at someone for not following instructions they were never going to be able to follow isn’t coaching. It’s a trainer protecting their own ego.
The fix Kraken’s trainers use now is small, weekly improvement instead of a perfect program handed down on day one. Bump average daily steps from 2,000 to 2,500. Nothing dramatic, nothing that feels like a real change in the moment. Ten weeks later, that person is walking triple what they started with and barely notices it happened. That’s the whole model: a client who actually does a mediocre plan beats a client who quits a great one in week two.
Why Complicated Programs Fail (Even Good Ones)
A complicated program isn’t automatically a better program. For a long time, Kraken’s coaches believed complexity was the same thing as effectiveness, more variables, more precision, more sophistication. It looks impressive on paper. It’s also a lot harder to actually stick to.
That belief cost results, not because the programming was bad, but because a plan nobody can follow consistently doesn’t matter how well it’s built. A strict meal plan, six gym sessions a week, exercises pulled straight from a certification textbook, none of it produces anything if the person can’t sustain it past the first two weeks. Consistency beats sophistication every time, because the body responds to what actually gets done, not what got written down.
This is also where the trainer’s-ego problem shows up again. Every coach wants the story where the client follows everything perfectly and loses 100 pounds. That client exists, but they’re the 10 to 20 percent, not the norm. The other 80 percent need a program that fits around their actual life in North Burnaby, not one that assumes unlimited time, energy, and motivation. Building for the 80 percent instead of chasing the highlight-reel client is the difference between a program that looks good and one that works.
You Don’t Have to Track Calories to Get Results
Calorie tracking used to be treated as mandatory at Kraken, something every client needed to do to see results, no exceptions. That’s no longer the case, and it wasn’t necessary for most people even back then.
Tracking calories can work, and it’s a useful tool for specific goals like competitive bodybuilding. But telling every client they have to log every meal to make progress is an unnecessary barrier for most of them. Plenty of people get leaner and stay leaner without ever opening a tracking app, once the bigger levers, sleep, stress, movement, and consistent protein, are actually in place. Today, more than 60 percent of Kraken’s clients don’t track calories at all and still get coached through their nutrition successfully.
Pushing tracking on everyone as the only path to results is closer to a copout than good coaching. It’s an easy instruction to hand someone, but it ignores that meal prepping four hours every Sunday and eating the same five meals all week is miserable for most people and rarely lasts. For roughly 90 percent of clients, it’s simply not the right tool, and there are simpler ways to get the same outcome.
Food Isn’t the First Domino, Stress and Sleep Are
Food matters, but it’s downstream of stress, cortisol, sleep, and movement, not the starting point. Coaching that leads with “just fix your diet” skips over the things that make following any diet possible in the first place.
Kraken’s trainers used to focus almost entirely on food because it’s the most visible lever and the one everyone expects a trainer to talk about. But a client running on five hours of sleep and constant work stress is fighting their own biology before they’ve even opened the fridge. Get those upstream pieces working, and sticking to a nutrition plan gets dramatically easier. Skip them, and no amount of meal planning fixes what’s actually going on.
This ties back to the bigger lesson: fitness has to be looked at as a whole picture, not a checklist. Checking off “did cardio” and “ate clean” doesn’t mean much if stress and sleep are working against both of those boxes the entire time. Weight loss and fitness results come from how all the pieces fit together, not from any single piece done perfectly in isolation.
Meeting Clients Where They Actually Are
The single biggest shift in how Kraken coaches now is meeting people at their actual level instead of the level a certification program says they should be at. That means smaller asks, more realistic expectations, and letting sustainable beat impressive.
This mindset shift came from repeatedly watching well-designed plans fail for reasons that had nothing to do with the plan’s quality. The client wasn’t lazy or unmotivated. The plan just didn’t match their real life, their stress load, or their schedule. Once Kraken’s coaches started building around the person instead of the textbook, adherence went up and results followed, because results were never really about having the most technically correct program.
None of this means the standards have dropped. It means the standard changed from “did they follow the perfect plan” to “did they make progress they could actually sustain.” A trainer who’s still doing everything the exact same way they did it ten years ago probably isn’t paying attention to what’s actually working for the people in front of them.
FAQ
Why do some clients not follow their training program?
Most clients who fall off a program aren’t lacking willpower, they have a plan that doesn’t fit their real schedule, stress load, or energy levels. A program built for a 25-year-old with unlimited time rarely works for someone juggling a full-time job and kids.
Do I need to track calories to lose weight?
No. Calorie tracking is one tool, not a requirement. More than 60 percent of Kraken’s clients get results without tracking a single meal by focusing on sleep, stress, movement, and consistent protein instead.
Why does a simple workout plan sometimes work better than a complex one?
A simple plan gets followed consistently, and consistency drives results more than program sophistication does. A complicated program that gets abandoned after two weeks produces nothing, no matter how well it was designed.
What should I actually focus on before worrying about my diet?
Sleep, stress, and daily movement come first. They’re the things that make following a nutrition plan realistic in the first place, which is why Kraken’s coaches address them before overhauling anyone’s food.
Ready to Start?
If you’ve tried the picture-perfect plan before and it didn’t stick, that’s not a willpower problem, it’s the wrong plan. Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby builds around your actual life, not a textbook version of it. Come try a week and meet a coach who’ll meet you where you’re at.
Listen and Watch
Watch this episode on YouTube:
Listen on Spotify:
About the Author
Josko is the Founder & CEO of Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He’s spent 10 years coaching everyday people to real, sustainable results.
Brandon is the Co-Owner & COO of Kraken Fitness and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He brings the kinesiology background and translates the science into what actually works for clients.
Full Transcript
[Josko]
Food is really important, but that’s downstream of things like focusing on your stress, your cortisol, your sleep, your movement. Things need to be looked at from a holistic view. You have to see where the pieces kind of fall to paint the full picture of whatever your weight loss or your fitness journey is.
Welcome back to the Kraken Power Podcast.
The Dunning Kruger effect is when you overestimate how much you know about a certain subject. It’s because you lack knowledge of other areas of that subject. So for me, I’ve been in fitness for 10 years now. I’ve learned a lot over these last 10 years, but I remember when I was just starting out, let’s say two years in, I thought I knew everything. I thought I could help every single person out there. And I was struggling with the Dunning Kruger effect. And then I learned a new area about fitness and then I realized I know absolutely nothing. And then once you learn that entire subset of training or fitness or nutrition, then you’re like, okay, I know everything about it now. And then a few years go by and you find a new area of fitness that you know nothing about. And so this has been going on for the last 10 years for me. And I always humble myself realizing that I don’t know everything in fitness. And the problem a lot of the times is all the studies that were fed over the years, you’ve read so many studies proving this, proving that, and turns out that the studies are wrong, that there’s people paying the publishers of the study to write them. So you never know what you’re right about. So today what I want to talk about is just about all the things that we used to believe that we don’t believe anymore.
[Brandon]
I just want to touch on a little bit of what you were just saying. And I think the reason why the fitness industry in its entirety is so polarizing is because of this effect, because something might work for someone and they think that that’s the only thing that everyone should do. And I would be lying if I didn’t fall victim to that myself, especially when coaching my clients.
[Josko]
One thing that I used to do before that I don’t do at all anymore is blaming people for not following through my instructions. So let’s say for example you get a client and you tell them like, oh, I’m going to write you a program, it’s going to be four days a week, it’s going to be upper lower, and I’m going to also give like 10,000 steps and all this stuff, and then they don’t follow, and you’re like, well, I mean, you’re not seeing any results because you’re not following my instructions. But the reality is that this person just couldn’t follow your crappy instructions. Like, yes, if they did follow your instructions they would lose weight, but you can’t just expect every single person to follow all of your plans. Every individual is going to be different, and so they all need a different plan. And I think when you’re going through PT school or university, you want to do everything super textbook because that’s what the science says, that’s what these studies say, or that’s what this guy on YouTube says. But that might not be exactly what your client needs, especially if he’s a guy with two kids and a full-time job. He might not have time to do four workouts that are pushing him to his absolute limits and be able to recover from that. And so when you’re saying like, “Hey dude, why didn’t you follow that fifth workout or go on that 10,000 step day on the Saturday when you’re spending time with your kids,” getting mad at them is unrealistic.
[Brandon]
Yeah, I don’t know if I would ever get mad at them. I would just blame them for it. I would just say like, oh, you suck because you suck, or you have no willpower.
[Josko]
Yeah. You have no willpower.
[Brandon]
Exactly.
[Josko]
So the thing that I really changed over the years is meeting people where they are and just giving them like a 1% improvement week to week until they’ve completely changed their life over the course of like a hundred weeks. That is my specialty now, and I think that people end up seeing better results, more consistent results, more sustainable results when they follow those kind of methods. So yeah, this can be things like, oh, you’re walking 2,000 steps on average, let’s try to bump it up to 2,500 this week. And that might be really small for some people, they think this isn’t meaningful at all, but 10 weeks from now the person’s walking triple the amount of steps that they did and it feels like nothing. It feels like their life’s barely changed.
By the way, if you’re watching this thinking, I wish I had a coach like that, you can. We coach people online. You get a real dedicated Kraken coach writing your program, checking in every single week through video, all through your phone. The links in the description.
Yeah, setting these unrealistic expectations on yourself and on other people if you’re a coach, getting them to follow plans that are like meal prepping. A lot of coaches will tell their clients to do meal preps, or people will decide to start meal prepping, and it’s unsustainable in their life because you don’t want to spend every Sunday for four hours meal prepping for the entire week and then you’re locked into this diet for the whole week as well. So if you made something that doesn’t taste that good, it’s like, oh, I still got five more of those meals to go. It’s unrealistic to expect that out of a lot of people. Maybe it looks cool on Instagram, posting all of your meals planned out, but if your wife or husband cooks for you, your meal prep may not be as appetizing that day. So it’s the expectations that you put on people that need to be lowered and met. You need to meet them on their level.
[Brandon]
And I think that is a little bit of the trainer’s ego, where you want to have that picture-perfect story of you saying, “Hey, I had this client who was really overweight, he was run down and stressed, and he followed exactly everything that I told him, and he lost 100 pounds.” But it’s not always like that. You have maybe 10 to 20% of clients that are like that, and then you have the 80% that just can’t follow anything that you’re saying.
[Josko]
Totally. And so one thing that I previously did very, very wrong was I made the programs way too complicated. And I even did this for myself, thinking that complexity always gave a greater benefit or higher yield. And so when you have a very high complex program, it may seem good on the surface, but it’s actually a lot harder to follow. And if you’re not doing things consistently, then you’re not going to get results no matter how complex your program really is. And this can be for how strict your meal plan is, or how many times a week you go to the gym, or the types of movements that you’re actually doing in the gym, that may not even be at the right level that you are.
[Brandon]
About five years ago, the thing that I was really pushing myself to do, and also my clients and just other people in general, was to track their calories. I used to be just preaching it, saying that I’m going to do it for the rest of my life. And then I was doing it when I had kids as well, so this isn’t something that I was doing just while I didn’t have kids and telling people who have kids to track their calories, I was doing it while I had kids. But the point that I’m trying to make is that although it wasn’t crazy complicated or anything, it’s just not necessary for my goals right now, which don’t have much to do with bodybuilding or building muscle or anything like that. It’s not necessary for me to track my calories. I’m still leaner than I was back then, and I don’t track my calories right now. So what’s the point? To push people to say that you have to track your calories to see results is just wrong, in my opinion. And we’ve completely changed how our nutrition program works at our gym, where now I would say about maybe 60%, if not more, of people don’t actually track their calories at all, and we’re still able to coach them in nutrition. To say that you have to track your calories, to me, almost feels like a copout. It’s just unnecessary for 90% of people.
[Josko]
Another thing too was always focusing way too much on food. And I know that sounds crazy because yes, food is extremely important, it’s obviously going to be the thing that’s going to give you the most results, whether you’re trying to build muscle, lose weight, or your health in general. Food is really important, but that’s downstream of things like focusing on your stress, your cortisol, your sleep, your movement. Those kind of things are going to be the thing that makes following your nutrition plan and your fitness plan easier. So focus on those first, and everything else will get unclogged, and you’ll be able to focus on the other things much easier.
[Brandon]
So what you’re trying to say is things need to be looked at from a holistic view. You can’t just say, oh, check off fitness, check off food, and everything’s going to be great. There’s a lot more. And bring it back to the Dunning Kruger effect, you have to see where the pieces kind of fall to paint the full picture of whatever your weight loss or your fitness journey is.
[Josko]
And so to come full circle, it means that we’re still getting things wrong even today, and we probably will, and we’ll probably change our minds. But that is how you learn and how you grow over time as a trainer, and as someone who is trying to learn more about their craft.