Telling clients to eat/sleep more when they don't get the results they want?

[Polishdude20]

I am by no means a coach so this is more of a curiosity type of question.

A major part of getting stronger is the diet and rest you get in addition to the stress you put on your body. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize this and stop making progress fairly quickly.
If you're coaching a client who wants to get strong, how do you convince them to eat more and sleep more when you only see them a few times a week or less?
Do you find that most of your clients are already motivated enough to do that and thus don't need much convincing?
Do a lot of you guys also offer diet advice or do you refer them to a dietitian?

[Michael Wolf]

You just tell them. Start at the first session. At the next session, ask what they ate that day and the day before. If it's not enough or completely the wrong things, you have a slightly longer conversation about nutrition and get them some basic info. Ask them again the next session. And the next. They start to understand that it's part of their training. Some will be stubborn, resistant, or just don't care enough to make that kind of change. Many of them change their tune when they start missing reps after a few weeks, and get their asses in gear.

I actually had a guy miss reps on his second workout once because he didn't eat. It was less than 150 lbs. We talked about eating every workout, and he got marginally better and I think put something like 25-30 lbs on his squat over two months, but he stopped training after that. He wasn't interested in putting in the work that it took. It's too bad because he probably could have doubled his squat had he been willing to eat properly. At least he learned good technique.

[Jeff Illingworth]

I've honestly been amazed at how common this problem is. It's one of those issues to which I cannot personally relate because I love to eat and, if anything, I have the opposite problem. I'd eat ribeyes and baked potatoes at every meal if I could get away with it!

Like Wolf said, it takes a lot of talking and patience on your end. I've got a 16 year old male trainee whose parents even have said he needs to eat more. We're finally almost to where he needs to be. One of the things that has helped was giving him Andy Baker's article on simple muscle meals and telling the kid he has to eat four times a day and telling him when to do it. Not everyone responds well to being told "exactly" what to do, but for some it is helpful. If you can get them to give eating more a try for a few days, the process sometimes gets easier as most of them will feel better, recover better, and lift better. People tend to pick up on when things get easier.

[Peter Dempster]

I think a lot of people who say they want to get stronger actually, in the back of their minds, want to lose weight or build ascetics. At least on some level. And, they have been told that it's possible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time from various sources in the past. That's kind of the premise behind every fad fitness class, right?

So, for a lot of people (including me, initially) you listen to the advice on nutrition and weight gain, but what you hear is "you need to get 30 pounds heavier (ie. fatter) to be stronger" which goes against your subconscious desire to lose weight and improve ascetics, and also against every men's health or shape or whatever magazine article they've ever read, every "buns and guns" class they have taken, etc.

It's a hard pill to swallow.