I’m an information junkie. I go to 8-12 seminars, workshops, conferences and classes per year, and spend probably around $5000-$7000 per year on education. I read and listen to fitness and health material for 2 hours per day, 7 days per week. In fact, those of you who know me pretty well know that I work 12-16 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, and the last time I took a day off was January 1, 2009 (is that dysfunctional? haha), and that’s because I had the flu.

So yes, I learn quite a lot from conventional sources. But because I meticulously pay attention to my clients’ results and experiences, I often pick up some golden nuggets that I’ve never heard about or read about in any other source.

This is just a short list of lessons I learned from clients:

• Very often, when we start working with a fat loss client, fat drops at a nice, steady pace and then hits a plateau (a period of no further fat loss). However, my client of the year 2012, Vicki Hooper was different. She went 11 months before hitting a plateau (way longer than anyone else). Was she just a freak of nature? No. The only things that I thought were different between her and most other clients is that we had certain staple supplements (zinc, magnesium and a high-quality multi-vitamin), and we did interval training all throughout.

• From Wendy Vaiopoulos (who by the way hosts the best parties in the world. Makes awesome, Igor-approved chimichangas and quesadillas) and another client, I learned that using a combination of B complex, B5 (pantothenic acid) and vitamin C helps bring down belly fat fast (much faster than just with good nutrition and exercise), but it only works for 4 weeks, and then it stops. Also, it only works on the fat covering the muscle. I haven’t found it to work very well for the fat underneath the muscle (so if you have a big belly, but it’s solid and not flabby, this strategy doesn’t work too well).

• From one of my long-time, muscle gaining clients, I learned how important sleep really is. If you’re a client of ours, you know that we do our measurements every 2 weeks. So we measured him, and to our surprise, he had lost 3 pounds of muscle. In 2 weeks!!! We dug deep. Was there anything different about his training? No. Was there anything different about his nutrition? No. Was there anything different about his supplementation? No. So what was it? I found out that he slept about 30 minutes less than usual. That was the only difference. And that was enough to make him lose 3 pounds of muscle (thereby setting him back about 4 weeks). At that point, I had a specific, quantifiable way to figure out how important sleep is.

Original source: here.

These are some of the lessons that I learned from clients (there are lots more).

What about you? From your own fitness and health experiences, what did you learn about your body that you didn’t learn in books, websites, workshops, etc.? Leave your comments below.