David Rosales of Roman Fitness Systems On The 5 Things You Need To Do To Achieve a Healthy Body Weight, And Keep It Permanently

Sleep is magical. I’ve come to determine that good health, good moods, good energy, all start with a good night’s sleep. But I’m not going to get into all the specific reasons why you need to prioritize your sleep. Instead, I think of sleep as emblematic of making your health a priority.

So many of us have tried dieting. All too often though, many of us lose 10–20 pounds, but we end up gaining it back. Not only is yo-yo dieting unhealthy, it is also demoralizing and makes us feel like giving up. What exactly do we have to do to achieve a healthy body weight and to stick with it forever?

In this interview series called “5 Things You Need To Do To Achieve A Healthy Body Weight And Keep It Permanently” we are interviewing health and wellness professionals who can share lessons from their research and experience about how to do this.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing David Rosales.

David Rosales is a writer, personal trainer, co-owner of Roman Fitness Systems, and editor of Pro Hockey Strength, the official website of NHL strength coaches. He has worked with athletes and coaches from beginners to NCAA Division 1 and professional hockey and been featured in many of the top fitness publications, from Muscle & Strength to Livestrong. Originally from Vermont, David lives in New York City. He loves books, pop-punk music, Vermont maple syrup, and heavy split squats.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I grew up in the beautiful state of Vermont, which many of you may know as the home of meme-legend Bernie Sanders, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and the best maple syrup on the planet (don’t @ me on this one, Canadians). My town, Jericho, is about the size of Manhattan, where I live now, but has only 6,000 people compared to 3 million, so it’s one of those towns with one “market” (not even a grocery store) and everybody knows everybody. I’m fortunate to have had one of those picture-perfect upbringings with a loving, stable family, an abundance of nature, and the typical drones of adolescent angst.

I played many sports growing up, but my main sport was ice hockey. Some of my fondest childhood memories are playing on frozen ponds in the valleys of the Green Mountains, and a lot of my fundamental early learning experiences arose because of the complex scenarios, both physical and social, that occurred in the backdrop of the competitive hockey environment.

What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.

My true passion, above both training, coaching, and writing, is learning. There’s nothing that excites me more than building connections from new knowledge to previous knowledge. This natural enjoyment and inclination has allowed me to do everything from excel as a trainer early on, to learn new languages, to get published as a writer.

I give that preamble because I know I was born at the perfect time in human history for me. With all the criticisms of social media and the internet, today we have all the collected knowledge of the ages in our pockets. Not only is that mind-blowing, but it means if you’re motivated to learn, you can develop skills in weeks that would have taken previous generations years, if it was possible at all.

With regards to training, that’s exactly what I did. When I was 13, 14 years old all I wanted to do was become a better athlete. I found myself browsing through all the popular fitness blogs at the time, from Mike Boyle, to Eric Cressey, to my eventual mentor John Romaniello.

When I was 18, I had the opportunity to continue my hockey career at the junior A level, but that required taking a gap year off from school. Luckily, the gym I had trained at since I was 13 years old was looking for a trainer, and since they knew me well, they gave me the job right out of high school.

I couldn’t get my personal trainer certification until I had my diploma. I graduated on a Saturday and they told me I would be teaching an adult fitness class on my own on Tuesday. I was scheduled to take the test on Monday and I really had no option to fail it. Luckily for all of us, I passed.

Right at 18 I was thrust into teaching adult and youth fitness classes, one-on-one personal training and team training. I got a ton of hands-on experience at a very young age.

My inspiration arose out of the interest to get better at sports, and then I had the perfect opportunity to slide into a career as a trainer, which even by 18 I was already prepared for. So shout out to John and Sheila Stawinski, the owners of my old gym Fit 2 Excel in Vermont; they gave me my start and the opportunity to learn as much as possible in a short amount of time.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?

Ah yes, the mentor question. This is my favorite phase of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which outlines what he calls the “monomyth,” or the similarities of the paths of heroes from Odysseus in The Odyssey to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

At 20 years old, I felt I had accomplished nearly all I could as an in-person trainer. I had worked for a top 15 division I hockey team, I’d filled up my client roster, and had exhausted all opportunities for growth where I was at. I loved my job, but I knew I didn’t want to be waking up at 4:30 am for the rest of my life. I also knew, while I loved training, my true passions were learning and writing.

Just as I’d learned to be a great trainer quickly, I saw no reason why I couldn’t become a great writer. I admired thinkers like Tim Ferriss, and Ryan Holiday and how their ideas impacted me personally and the world.

That’s when I saw another one of those thinkers, John Romaniello, advertising writing coaching on his Instagram. If you were in the bro-fitness space from about 2011–2015, there’s a good chance you know John. He’s best known for his New York Times bestseller, Engineering The Alpha (HarperOne, 2013), which I read in 8th grade, so I was an OG John Romaniello fan.

The coaching would be a huge investment, especially for a 20-year-old personal trainer, but it became an easy decision with two realizations. Firstly, I remember reading a quote from Tim Ferriss’s book, Tribe of Mentors, from Graham Duncan, “I invest a disproportionate amount of my income into paying for an ever growing collection of trainers and coaches.” The best way to accelerate your learning is to hire those who are the best.

Secondly, I’d always been drawn to John’s work. He’d be the first to say that his success in fitness arose because of an interdisciplinary approach. Yes, he was a good trainer, but he made a name for himself because he’s a truly great writer. He hasn’t published much, but I can tell you, working with him intimately, his knack for word craft at his best awes me as much as my favorite authors like George Orwell and J.D. Salinger.

Accelerated learning is definitely a theme here, and I invested a big chunk of my savings to hire John. At the end of our 3 month coaching container, he told me he was looking for a research assistant. I was already planning on moving to New York to attend NYU, where John lives, so it was a perfect fit.

From then on, I not only continued to grow as a writer, but also learned what it’s like to run an online business. A year into our work together, John handed me the reins of his old fitness company, Roman Fitness Systems, which I run today.

More importantly than that, though, John and I connected on a deep emotional level. We talk more about relationships, life, and the fate of the universe then we do talking about business. Truly he’s become one of the most important people in my life, and has an imprint on nearly all the major pieces of my day-to-day life at this point.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?

When I was 19 years old, I had a great year both working and playing junior hockey, so I opted to stay for my last season of eligibility (junior hockey is the term for 20 & Under hockey leagues in North America). The previous season, our team was plagued by injuries and generally not in great physical condition. We had a gym in our rink but no structured training program. So I offered to be the strength coach of my team and our younger team. Yes, I was a coach of my own team, placing me in great company with the likes of Flint Tropics legend Jackie Moon.

I thought I could coach them like my middle schoolers or adults who were paying me. But, naturally, they weren’t as excited or interested in what I had to say. After all, they were my peers. I learned that I had to deliberately explain my stances and rationale and approach every situation with a calm conversation. I also had to scrap a lot of the planned program and instead focus on ways to show them I could help. I worked with them to reduce their hip flexor pain (a common theme among hockey players) which ultimately built trust and buy-in.

That was the experience that cemented the sentiment that coaching the Xs and Os means nothing if you don’t know how to connect with people. This is a field of relationships, and from that experience on I’ve spent way more time learning the art of coaching.

Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?

I have many which I’m constantly reflecting on. One that’s in line with these themes comes from Naval Ravikant: “Free education is abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”

I touched on this already in the context of our time in human history, and it’s a reminder that it takes no talent to want to learn more, and if you wanted to, you could become one of the smartest people in your circles in a remarkably short time. Ask yourself why you can’t achieve things sooner. Or better yet, if you HAD to acquire XYZ skill in a few months instead of years, what steps would you take to get there? Who would you reach out to? What resources would you invest (whether time, money, or otherwise) in?

Starting with a desire to constantly learn followed by actually taking advantage of the myriad resources available to us has been a pillar of my growth.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

In addition to what I’m doing with Roman Fitness Systems, I’ve also met some amazing people in the hockey training world. One of my side projects is as the head editor of the official website of SCAPH, the Strength and Conditioning Association of Professional Hockey. SCAPH is made up of all the NHL and AHL strength coaches.

This project has allowed me to leverage my writing and communication strengths to help some of the best trainers on the planet share their knowledge. If I have any critique of the strength and conditioning world, it’s that a lot of our language and communication isn’t accessible to the everyday person going to the gym. In this role I view myself as a translator, as the person who speaks the language of both groups and can bring it to everybody else.

There’s SO much amazing info to help people avoid injury, live longer, feel better and happier that I’ve learned from brilliant trainers like Mike Potenza (San Jose Sharks) and Devan McConnell (Arizona Coyotes), that I want to bring to a broader population to bridge that gap. I also have high-touch access to these trainers, who I’m constantly learning from.

For the benefit of our readers, can you briefly let us know why you are an authority in the fitness and wellness field?

I think I fly under the radar, and that’s deliberate. I see myself right now as the ultimate apprentice. Ryan Holiday has a chapter in his book Ego Is The Enemy called “The Canvas Strategy.” The concept behind it is to not worry about credit or recognition, worry about being a canvas for other people to paint on, and focus on making THEM look good.

That’s what I’m focused on right now. I’m focused on helping John sharpen his thinking and writing, helping the NHL strength coaches get their message out, helping any client who comes into my life leave not only in better shape, but a sharper thinker, a better student, a more fulfilled human. I think the numerous high-level people who trust me to help them speaks for itself.

I believe that any person, no matter how successful they are, can come to me and I’ll have a fresh take and perspective to share, or at the least, I’ll be able to ask a good question that will spur new thinking on their end.

OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about achieving a healthy body weight. Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define a “Healthy Body Weight”?

While this may seem like an easy question, I think any tendency to give clear-cut answers here can be not only shortsighted, but problematic. On a population scale, the typical measurement for a healthy body weight is BMI, which is only a measurement of height and weight, completely ignoring body composition.

A slightly better definition would entail body fat percentage, but people are built differently and can be perfectly healthy at different body fat percentages, not to mention broad differences between men and women. You can be too low to the point where it’s damaging to your health and we see this is people who compete in physique competitions like bodybuilding and in those with eating disorders.

Taken all together, I don’t define a healthy body weight by weight at all with my clients. Instead, I focus on external outcomes. I understand this bias comes from my background working mostly with athletes, but the basic premise is simple. In order for your body to accomplish a certain goal, like doing a certain exercise for a certain amount of weight and reps, or reducing your sprint time, or whatever, it has to improve physically.

For example, if you set goals like being able to do 8 pull-ups and 8 split squats with 50 pounds, you almost have to be at a healthy body weight to do so. I think this works better for most people for a few reasons. Firstly, in our culture body dysmorphia and eating disorders are a huge problem, and talking in terms of “healthy weights” only exacerbates that on both an individual and societal level. It eliminates the desire to worry about the scale every day and fit into a certain “mold.” If there’s a better means to the ends, why don’t we just use that language?

Secondly, I find the activity-oriented goals provide easier wins early on. Fat loss and muscle gain typically occur after strength and performance increases. If your goal is to do more reps of an exercise, you can see progress within weeks, which then inspires you to keep going towards a goal.

With consistent training focused on performance or strength goals, the body composition changes occur as a result. After all, athletes have some of the most desirable physiques around, and they only worry about body weight if it affects their performance. In our everyday lives, we’re all athletes, only with different movement and performance goals.

How can an individual learn what is a healthy body weight for them? How can we discern what is “too overweight” or what is “too underweight”?

Again, I don’t want my clients to focus on weight, except in specific circumstances (weight-class sports like wrestling).

What are your performance goals? Do you just want to be able to walk up five flights of stairs without losing breath? Do you need to walk around the city without my back hurting? Are you training (or do you want to train) for a more serious competitive event? If you’re achieving your performance goals, even if they’re modest, you’re moving towards a healthy body weight.

This might be intuitive to you, but it will be instructive to expressly articulate this. Can you please share a few reasons why being over your healthy body weight, or under your healthy body weight, can be harmful to your health?

Like nearly anything in life, body weight can be too high or too low. Excessive body fat has been linked to everything from heart disease to early mortality. Being underweight, which is common in eating disorders, leads to everything from malnutrition (starvation, effectively,) and decreased immune function to fertility problems. They are equally terrible.

In contrast, can you help articulate a few examples of how a person who achieves and maintains a healthy body weight will feel better and perform better in many areas of life?

Again, I flip the language here. You feel and perform better and that leads to a healthy body weight.

Ok, fantastic. Here is the main question of our discussion. Can you please share your “5 Things You Need To Do To Achieve a Healthy Body Weight And Keep It Permanently?”. If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

Sustainable solutions aren’t sexy, they don’t sell the way ‘6 weeks to abs’ programs do. However, as someone who works with clients for the long-term (most of my people have been with me for 1–3 years), we work on developing sustainable training and life routines so that they can lose weight and keep it off permanently.

The first step is to understand that this is a long-term game. If your goal is to lose weight and keep it off, you have to let go of the attachment to achieve your dream body in the next six weeks. Like most things in life, anything that comes quickly is fickle. What you achieve over a longer period of time maintains a solid foundation that doesn’t crack. As an analogy, think of your training as investing. Everybody who tries to play the “get rich quick” games, like lotteries, gambling, and risky investments, stand very little chance of creating wealth for themselves in the long term. However, those who start saving a little bit at a time, month after month year after year wind up with massive wealth with very little work. Think of your training like investing. You’re trying to make modest, regular deposits, NOT win the lottery.

With that said, these five strategies focus on how you continually make deposits. Once you’re in a place where you can do that, and are training consistently with sound routines, you’ll lose weight and achieve all your health and performance goals just by sticking to your routines. In other words, it’s all about consistently, and like building any long-term habits it takes time.

These strategies are aimed at easing the transition to a healthy lifestyle.

1. Taper the training volume

When you start a new training program, or a new anything in life really, the tendency is to go all in to it. In the context of working out this means going from not training at all to training 4 or 5 times a week for 60 minutes. This is problematic for a few reasons.

During your first workout you’ll muster all the willpower you have to get through everything. On the second day, you’ll be sore and less motivated, and that’s a recipe to abandon your workout early. By the end of week one you’ll be so exhausted you’ll think, “how can I possibly sustain this?” and quit. Both physically and psychologically, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Instead, think about tapering your training volume and frequency. For at least the first three weeks, you should train only twice per week, and cut the volume in half to about 30 minutes of training.

This will give you an on-ramp for your body to gradually adapt. You won’t be super sore, which will make it easier to keep going, and even though this doesn’t seem like a lot, you’ll still make progress because it’s more than you were doing before.

Perhaps more importantly, though, you’ll gain confidence because the goal is much more achievable. With that confidence you’ll keep going and continue the cycle.

Over the course of 24 weeks here’s what your program can look like:

Weeks 1–3: 2x/week for 30 minutes (~2 sets of everything)

Weeks 3–6 2x/week for 45 minutes (~3 sets of everything)

Weeks 7–12 3x/week for 45 minutes

*Note. You can stay here forever and get amazing results. However if you want to be more ambitious or have specific performance goals that require more training…

Weeks 13–18 3x/week for 60 minutes (~4 sets of everything)

Weeks 19–24 4x/week for 60 minutes← This last phase only needs to be used for groups like athletes or those training for specific events. You can also go a hybrid and make your 4x/week workouts only 45 minutes.

2. Regress all major exercises

Another common mistake when starting out is to jump into the exercise that you see everybody else doing, or that you see all the time on Instagram. Instead of thinking in terms of specific exercises, think in terms of movement categories and select an easier option of that movement.

For example, you may see everybody doing a back squat, but a barbell back squat requires lots of pelvic control, shoulder mobility, and strength to perform effectively. A much simpler squat variation to start out is a goblet squat, where you hold one dumbbell in front of you. This variation makes it easier to learn sound squat mechanics and is generally more comfortable.

This holds true for all the major movements, and you should start out with basic regressions and then go from there, again, not rushing.

3. Integrate systems and strategies so you have to show up

In order to lose weight and keep it off you have to form the habit of going to the gym. We can do that by tapering your program in terms of volume, frequency, and exercise selection, but you still have to find a way to show up, and that’s much easier said than done. Here’s where many coaches would talk about the importance of ‘willpower’ and ‘discipline,’ two ill-defined words that just make you feel bad about yourself. Willpower is the worst friend. I prefer to take the approach of creating systems and strategies so you HAVE to go to the gym.

A simple one is to block off your gym time in the calendar. This sounds obvious but if you don’t have a set time and day, you’re much more likely to let your other activities bleed into the time you said you would go to the gym. Another, if you train in the morning, is to put your alarm clock far away from your bed so you have to physically get up, and by that point you’re more likely to go to the gym instead of going back to bed. It may mean you have a specific reward for yourself at the end of your training, like a favorite smoothie or snack, but you only buy it if you make it to all your gym sessions for the week. There are many strategies, but the idea is to implement tactics to make willpower less important so that you succeed even on the days you don’t want to go (and you’ll have those days).

4. Create external accountability

Adjacent to this idea is the concept of creating accountability. If you have a gym partner, then you’re much less likely to skip because then you’re also blowing them off. This is a big selling point of personal trainers as well, and why even many trainers have trainers. You can up the stakes by telling your friend, “Here’s $200. Do not give it back to me unless I make it to all my workouts this week.” Again, this is along the principles of NOT relying on will power to succeed.

Find a gym partner, hire a trainer, or set up negative incentives that will all but guarantee you show up. Whatever the incentives are, they have to hurt at least a little. If you’re wealthy, $200 might mean nothing to you, so it won’t be effective in getting you to go. Get creative with the incentives, especially negative incentives. We’re more motivated by the prospect of losing something than gaining something.

5. Prioritize Sleep

Sleep is magical. I’ve come to determine that good health, good moods, good energy, all start with a good night’s sleep. But I’m not going to get into all the specific reasons why you need to prioritize your sleep. Instead, I think of sleep as emblematic of making your health a priority. Crafting your days with your sleep in mind means you’ll institute habits like putting screens away at night, getting movement in the morning, and other little strategies that support our circadian rhythms. When your sleep is an important part of the day, you’ll set the structure for the rest of the day to prioritize health, and this includes going to the gym.

In other words, when your sleep routines improve, you won’t skip the gym as much. Not to mention you’ll feel better, be in a better mood, and tap into all the other benefits of great sleep.

This doesn’t mean you can’t stay out late of course, but it means that on an average day, you’re developing habits to have the best night of sleep you can. Don’t worry so much about how you sleep on a Friday night out with friends for now, but if your sleep is messed up on an ordinary Tuesday, creating better sleep habits can change your daily life.

Here are some simple strategies to improve your sleep:

1. Caffeine curfew at 12pm. The half life of caffeine is twelve hours, which means that one fourth of the caffeine we consume at noon is still in our bodies at midnight. While we may still be able to fall asleep, it will reduce our sleep quality.
2. Put screens away one hour before bed. The blue light on our screens confuses our hormonal cycles. Putting phones away also helps us relax.
3. Get sunlight and movement in the morning. I like the “20 reps of something” rule when you wake up. 20 jumping jacks, 20 squats, whatever. Even better if you can do it outside.

The emphasis of this series is how to maintain an ideal weight for the long term, and how to avoid yo-yo dieting. Specifically, how does a person who loses weight maintain that permanently and sustainably?

It comes back to being in it for the long-term. You focus on sound habits and consistency, thinking of training and dieting like investing rather than trying to win the lottery. You shouldn’t be concerned with how you’re going to look next week, or even next month. Think about how you want to feel and perform next year. I like the saying that humans overestimate what they can accomplish in the short term, and underestimate what we can in the long-term. In exercise and developing a healthy lifestyle that is 100% the case.

What are a few of the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they try to lose weight? What errors cause people to just snap back to their old unhealthy selves? What can they do to avoid those mistakes?

The biggest errors I see revolve around doing the opposite of what I’ve discussed. They buy a fancy program, follow it to a tee for 12 weeks, and make great progress. But because it was unsustainable to begin with and they didn’t actually integrate it into their lifestyle, after the 12 weeks they go back to exactly how they were before. When you focus on sustainably building habits and tapering up, you’ll never go back because your routines will have fundamentally changed by the time you reach your goal.

How do we take all this information and integrate it into our actual lives? The truth is that we all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?

Staying in line with everything I’ve mentioned, I think it’s trying to change too much too soon. Start small. Start as small as you need to. I mentioned starting at training twice a week for 30 minutes. You can go even LESS than that if that’s what you need. Start with taking a 10 minute walk in the morning, or anything really. Then build on it.

I like the quote, “if more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six pack abs.” The key is to implement what we know little by little so the changes become who we are.

On the flip side, how can we prevent these ideas from just being trapped in a rarified, theoretical ideal that never gets put into practice? What specific habits can we develop to take these intellectual ideas and integrate them into our normal routine?

Of everything listed, choose ONE element to apply. Maybe that’s moving your alarm clock further away. Maybe that’s organizing your calendar to block off gym time. Maybe that’s eliminating ONE snack that’s your worst enemy. Maybe that’s getting sunlight in the morning. Make one change, focus on that for one or two or three weeks, then once it’s your new normal, make one more change.

Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Education. Nearly all of the world’s problems come back to a lack of education, in my opinion. From scientific literacy, to political literacy, a more intelligent society is a better society. I would invest into changes to k-12 education in the US, and especially invest in lower-income communities. I would give teachers a massive pay raise so we encourage our smartest students to go into teaching instead of, say, banking. What separates us from the rest of the species on this earth is our ability to think. Yet, our resources to tap into that vary widely, and even at our best, we still succumb to many irrational mistakes. Improving education can be a small step towards improving this.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)

Hmmm well I wish George Orwell were still alive because I would love to fill him in on everything that’s happened and get his take. He’s a thinker whose moral courage I’ve always admired and continue to turn to. But in terms of living people, I think Devon Werkheiser (from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide fame) and I would be boys if we met. Our humor and personalities line up. So, yeah, Dev, send me an IG DM.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Roman Fitness Systems is the hub not only for most of my non-literary writing on fitness and personal development, and we also publish articles from many other great trainers and those adjacent to the fitness industry. We send out emails with strategies to become the best person you can be to serve the world about twice a week, completely free. So our email list is a great place to interact with me directly.

I don’t post much on Instagram, but I’m happy to DM with anybody, so you can find me there as well, @davidrosalesfitness. Because I’m a member of Gen Z, I’m addicted to my phone and will probably reply right away.

Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.