Todd Mendelsohn

Todd came up in the era before online coaching existed as a product. You trained in a real gym with people who had been doing it longer than you, you got corrected in person, and if you were doing something stupid somebody told you that morning rather than in a weekly summary email. That immediacy is the thing the internet quietly removed.

He spent years writing plans, and good ones: diets built off real body composition, programmes phased properly across a year. Then he watched most of them get abandoned around week six. The training was fine. Life happened on a Tuesday, nobody was watching, and the plan quietly stopped.

So he changed what he sold. Same document, plus himself, three times a day. Morning, afternoon, night. Weight, food, training. Thirty seconds of the client’s day and several hours of his. To make that work he had to shrink his client list. That trade is the whole business.

The supplements came later, and for an unromantic reason: getting two grams of protein per pound of lean mass out of chicken alone is a grind, and a genuine hard gainer eating 7,500 calories a day physically cannot chew that much. Short ingredient lists, the full panel printed on the tub, nothing in there you would have to look up.