Here is the whole pitch, up front, no gate: I will tell you everything I know.
Thirty-four years of strength work and sports nutrition. A gym in San Diego that I run as my own lab. Every formula I’ve built for getting a body stronger or a business steadier, yours, written out, for free. This Notebook is the proof. You can read it without paying me a dollar, and you should.
That sounds backwards. Most coaching in my world runs the other way. The playbook is the product. You pay to see how. The how is locked behind a checkout page, and the page is the whole business model. I understand why. It feels safe. If the method is the asset, you protect the asset.
I think that’s a mistake. I want to make the case for the opposite, not against the people who do it the old way, just for the model I actually run. Let me think out loud about why.
What I learned by giving it away anyway
I spent most of my career as the invisible architect. I’d build the program, hand it to someone, and watch them get the result and the credit. For years I told myself that was a problem to fix. Protect the formula. Get paid for the formula.
But here’s what I kept noticing over three decades. The formula never stayed protected. It can’t. You teach a movement to one lifter and twenty people on the floor see it. You write a nutrition protocol and it gets photographed, forwarded, screenshotted. Information leaks. It always has. Now it leaks at the speed of a phone.
So I started watching what actually held value. It was never the information. A novice can find a correct training split in an afternoon. What they can’t find is someone who will look at their body, their schedule, their injury, their business, and tell them which part of the correct answer applies to them this week, and which part will hurt them.
That’s the thing people will pay for. Not the map. The person standing next to them on the trail saying not that turn, this one.
The formula, then, what to give, what to charge for
I’ll give you the whole framework, because that’s the point of the article.
Give away everything you know. All of it. The method, the science, the mistakes you made, the sequence, the numbers. Write it down in full. Don’t tease it. Don’t hold back the “secret”, there usually isn’t one, and pretending there is just trains people not to trust you. A formula you protect dies with you. A formula you transmit multiplies, and every place it lands has your name on the shape of it.
Charge for proximity. Your undivided attention, applied to one specific situation. The room. The running infrastructure that someone else doesn’t want to build or maintain. That’s the paid product. Not “how to do it”, that’s free now, from me or from someone else, so you might as well be the one who gave it cleanly. The paid thing is me, here, looking only at you, while you do it.
Concretely, that’s the split:
- Free: the training method, the programming logic, the nutrition framework, the way I think about an independent gym’s numbers. Everything in this Notebook.
- Paid: sit down with me and I’ll apply it to your gym, your floor, your churn, your one stubborn lift, and stay on it until it moves.
The first is information. The second is attention. They are not the same product, and the moment you stop confusing them, the business gets simpler.
Why this is the stronger position, not the generous one
I don’t give the method away to be nice. I give it away because it’s the better position, and I want to be honest that it’s also self-interested.
When you hand someone the real thing, the actual working method, not a watered-down version that makes them come back for the rest, they find out fast whether it works. It does. Now they trust you, because you didn’t make them pay to discover that. Trust is the part nobody can copy. Your competitor can lift your program word for word. He cannot lift the three years of you being the person who told the truth for free.
That trust is the moat. It’s also the only thing that makes the paid part make sense. Nobody books undivided attention from someone they don’t already believe. The free method is how they come to believe. The proximity is what they buy once they do.
So the giveaway isn’t a loss leader in the cheap sense. It’s the entire trust-building engine, running in the open, where anyone can audit it.
There’s a quieter reason too, and I’ll name it once and then leave it alone. I came up as a Navy Corpsman. The job was to keep people alive and hand them off better than you found them. You don’t gate that. A thing worth knowing is worth transmitting so it outlives the room you’re standing in. The connections you build by giving the real thing away, those are the wealth. The money is downstream of that, and it shows up on its own when the trust is real.
What to do with this
If you run a gym, or any small operation, try the inversion. Take your most “protected” piece of knowledge, the thing you’d normally gate, and publish it in full this month. Write it the way you’d explain it to a friend who owns the same problem. Hold nothing back.
Then build the one thing you will charge for: your attention, applied to one person’s specific situation, for a defined stretch of time. Sell that. Let the free method bring them to the door.
You’ll lose nothing real by giving the information away, because it was already getting out. You’ll gain the one asset nobody can take, being the operator who told the truth before there was a checkout page.
That’s the model. Method in the open, attention for hire.
I live my truth and I make myself useful.