PAC Talk with Pieter Vodden

What stories do you keep telling yourself, and are they helping you become the person you want to be?

In this mini episode, Emylee talks about a week of negative self-talk and what she took from it: the words you repeat shape what you expect of yourself, how you act, and what you believe is possible. She describes how a frustrating moment turns into a judgment about who you are, so "I procrastinated" becomes "I'm lazy," and why one experience doesn't have to become your identity.

She walks through a simple exercise with a paper, an eraser, and a shredder. Write down the stories that may not be serving you, challenge the "always" and "never" language, and let go of what no longer fits. Then write a version you're willing to practice, such as "I struggle with follow-through, but I'll take one small action today."

She also covers why you don't have to feel confident, motivated, or ready before you act, and how that applies to starting at the gym before you feel like a fit person.

Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fitness advice keeps swinging between extremes. One side says go hard or go home. The other says zone 2 and a few strength sessions are all you need. At the same time, competitions like HYROX, ATHX, and DECA are growing fast, and many people aren't sure whether they're ready to enter one or how to train for it while also working toward longevity.

On today's episode, Piet talks about why he thinks the answer sits between those extremes, and why longevity training and performance training feed each other. He traces how fitness got here, starting with the 2007 movie 300 and the mainstream start of CrossFit, and explains why he thinks many CrossFit athletes burned out and why HYROX is easier for beginners to enter. He says people want a physical challenge with a date and a result, and that you don't need to be great at something before you sign up.

He also explains how general physical preparedness (GPP) shapes the Build, Hybrid, and Train classes at Pharos, why he thinks zone 2 and basic strength work alone aren't enough for longevity, and why he says to commit to a program instead of moving between gyms. He ends with how to get started: an intro with a coach, InBody measurements, and a six-week plan.

Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it take to build a business, raise a family, and keep pursuing goals of your own?

In this episode, I reconnect with longtime friend Rose Avera—the very first coach I hired back in 2014. Since then, Rose has co-founded Florida’s Cali Coffee with her husband, Craig, become a mama, and recently celebrated winning the open division in HYROX this year being only 11 months postpartum.

We catch up on her journey from fitness coach to business owner, motherhood, and making room for health and athletic ambition alongside a full life.

Find Cali Coffee at calicoffee.com

Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stop Failing Your Morning Before It Starts

If you’ve ever hit snooze and immediately felt like you failed yourself, this Shorty episode is for you. A client’s goal of becoming an early bird, set herself up to start each day feeling like she failed a test. Listen in to see how we redirected her actions to set her up for success … here’s a hint… Make it actually within reach.

Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Built to Last: Defining Your Gold Standard

Highlights from our conversation with gym owners across the country about resilience, purpose and building something that lasts.

Piet and Emylee break down the four-pillar framework — Economics, People, Brand, and Self — that's kept Pharos Athletic Club standing through ten years, four locations, and a $5M year. They don't sugarcoat how they got here: the $1.3M first buildout in Echo Park, growing to 750 members and $2M in annual revenue with zero paid ads, and the Redondo Beach acquisition that quietly cost them $15–30K a month for years before they turned it around.

This is a real look at the math and the mistakes behind running a multi-location gym — auto-pay revenue vs. top-line revenue, payroll percentage, why they hire for anti-fragility instead of just likability, and the questions that keep a brand consistent as it scales. It's less "how we built a five-million-dollar gym" and more "here's what we got wrong, and what we'd tell you before you make the same mistakes."

In this episode:

• Why chasing revenue without tracking auto-pay revenue is a trap
• What it actually costs to take over someone else's gym (the Redondo Beach story)
• Hiring and firing by core values — the questions Pharos asks in every interview
• Building an org chart and knowing when to make the sales director hire
• Emylee's personal operating system for running a CEO's schedule without burning out

💪 Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back — this is a new kind of conversation for us. Real check-ins with real Pharos members and coaching clients, no script, just an honest look at where they actually are.

This one is with Rachel. I've been coaching her for the past nine months through a huge life transition — stepping out of a season as a stay-at-home mom and back into a demanding leadership role in aerospace. We go over her real numbers: down 6.5 pounds, body fat down 7.5 pounds, body fat percentage down 3.6%, muscle mass held steady, and her basal metabolic rate trending in the right direction.

But the numbers aren't really the story. We talk about what it actually took to get there — rebuilding a healthy relationship with food after years of tracking, guilt, and restriction, and finding her way back to eating for fuel, results, and joy. We get into fitting training into an unpredictable travel schedule, her peptide protocol, the idea of "positive shame" and living up to the identity you want for yourself, and why data should always be treated as neutral — information, not a verdict on who you are.

This is what real coaching looks like. Not a highlight reel. An honest conversation about progress, setbacks, and everything in between.

This conversation is educational and not medical advice. Decisions about medications, compounded products or peptide therapies should be made with an appropriately licensed healthcare professional.

💪 Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us 

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Got the Zoomies? Two Bare-Minimum Ways to Get Present” 

Meditation didn’t click for Emylee until she realized she wasn’t supposed to solve anything—only “sit with it,” notice and be present.

In this Mini PAC Talk, she shares two simple “gateway habits” for slowing down when life feels like nonstop go, go, go:

No perfect meditation practice required. Just a few minutes to feel more present, grounded and ready for whatever comes next.

Send this episode to a friend who’s got the zoomies.

💪 Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us 

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peptides are everywhere right now — BPC-157, the Wolverine Stack, GLP-1s, NAD+, MOTS-C, GHK-Cu. You've probably heard at least one of them by now. So what are they actually, what does the science support, and where does the hype get ahead of the evidence?

In this conversation, Emylee + Pieter Vodden are joined by Coach Vincent to unpack the rapidly evolving world of peptide therapy — without trying to convince you to be pro- or anti-peptide.

We talk about:

→ What peptides are and how they signal the body

→ The Core 4: energy, recovery, metabolism + hormone health

→ Why peptide medicine isn't actually new

→ Why human research is still limited for many popular compounds

→ BPC-157 + TB-500 and the "Wolverine Stack"

→ GLP-1s + the rapidly changing metabolic peptide space

→ Why sourcing matters — grey-market products vs. medically supervised care

→ Bloodwork, cycling + physician oversight

→ Where peptides may fit alongside training, nutrition, sleep + recovery

The biggest takeaway? Emerging ≠ proven. But emerging ≠ worthless either.

Our position at Pharos is simple: build the foundation first, stay curious, stay informed, and don't confuse hype with evidence.

This conversation is educational and is not medical advice. Decisions about medications, compounded products or peptide therapies should be made with an appropriately licensed healthcare professional.

Interested in peptide therapy through Pharos? Link in bio to connect with a licensed physician through our partner network.

Interested in getting started with peptides through Pharos? We're launching in Palm Springs first with full medical guidance, doctor consultation and 503A compliant sourcing.

Click the link for our bio-performance survey.

💪 Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us 

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Five years ago Dr. Sofi first joined Pac Talk. A lot has changed since — for her business, her body, and for Piet too. This episode is a full catch-up covering three big things: how to actually prevent ACL injuries in young athletes, why she's dedicating part of her career to training the next generation of physical therapists, and what it really looks like to balance being a business owner, physical therapist, gym owner, athlete, and wife all at once.

Dr. Sofi runs Raw Performance in San Dimas, where roughly 60% of her caseload is kids. She breaks down what she's actually seeing in her clinic — the majority of ACL tears she treats come from soccer and flag football, roughly 75% in female athletes, driven by a combination of overtraining without recovery, inadequate strength training, and in some cases nutrition trends swinging back toward "skinny is better." She also gets into the research connecting hormonal fluctuations during ovulation to increased ligament laxity and ACL risk — an important, underdiscussed piece of the picture for parents of young female athletes.

They tackle the biggest myth head-on: that lifting weights stunts a child's growth. It doesn't. Dr. Sofi trains kids as young as four, and the evidence is clear that properly supervised strength training builds resilient tendons, ligaments, and joints — the exact opposite of what old-school thinking assumed.

Beyond the clinical side, this episode gets personal. Dr. Sofi opens up about teaching at Azusa Pacific to help train the next generation of PTs, training for the Chicago Marathon while running her own practice, learning to set boundaries with clients, and why choosing to do something that scares you — whether that's a marathon or standing in front of a room of grad students — is exactly what keeps you growing.

This one's for parents of young athletes, for anyone juggling multiple roles and wondering how to do it without burning out, and for anyone who believes community and education are just as important as reps in the gym.

Connect with Dr. Sofi

Instagram

💪 Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us 

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seven years ago, Graham Jenkins walked into Pharos Echo Park a month before COVID hit. Today he's the head boxing coach, about to step into a head coach role at the club — and about to take on the biggest physical challenge of his life.

In this episode, Piet sits down with Graham to talk about seven years of growth, what actually makes a great coach, and why experience will always beat certification. They dig into why boxing might be one of the most complete fitness disciplines that exists — building explosive power, coordination, cardiovascular health, and confidence all at once — and why so much of boxing conditioning is still stuck using outdated methods while combat sports as a whole have evolved dramatically over the last decade, largely thanks to the UFC's influence on strength and conditioning.

Graham opens up about his own boxing journey starting at age five, thirty-one years of training built entirely around power and explosiveness, and the genetic wildcards that separate fighters like Tyson, Fury, and Mayweather. Then the conversation shifts into new territory: Graham's decision to step into natural bodybuilding for the first time in his life, working with coach Tyler Bowman to completely restructure his training and nutrition — including pushing his calories up to 3,500 a day and learning, for the first time, how to eat enough instead of doing too much.

They also get into the real conversation nobody has enough — the mental side of a body recomposition journey, protecting your relationship with food during a diet phase, and why "everything works but nothing works forever" when it comes to training adaptation.

This one covers coaching philosophy, the business side of running a gym, and why human connection and community will always matter more than any app or AI ever could.

Pharos Redondo turns 3 this weekend — come celebrate with a beach party.

Reach out to schedule a consultation and discover whether our programs are the right fit for you.

Connect with Graham

Instagram

💪 Join the 7-Day Results Accelerator to build clarity, momentum, and sustainable joy in your routine. pharosathleticclub.com

If you are in Southern California come train with us 

Echo Park

Redondo Beach

Idyllwild

Palm Springs

Follow Pharos, Piet and Emylee on Instagram for more fitness related content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.