Ep 20: How to Stay On Track with Meals, Fat Loss, and Fitness No Matter Where You Are

In this episode, we’re talking about what to do with your carefully-honed, consistent, so-far-successful training and nutrition plans when you go on vacation!

Summer’s here, and despite exorbitant gas prices and airfare, we can’t help but get away from it all, even for just a week or even a long weekend. Vacations are the perfect time to shut off those devices, relax with a drink in your hand, and enjoy that well-deserved leisure.

But that raises the question, should I continue my current health and fitness behaviors when I’m off jetting about in faraway lands (or even a road trip to the next state over)? If so, to what extent?

What do I do on vacation?!

RELATED LINKS

• MacroFactor diet sidekick (use discount code WITSANDWEIGHTS)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

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• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

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• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

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• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:31] Welcome to episode 20 of Wits & Weights today. We're talking about what to do with your carefully honed consistent so far successful training and nutrition plans. When you go on vacation, summer's. At least in the Northern hemisphere and despite exorbitant gas prices and airfare, we can't help, but get away from it all even for just a week or even a long weekend vacations are the perfect time to shut off those devices, relax with a drink in your hand and enjoy that well deserved leisure, but that raises the question.

[00:01:07] Should I continue my current health and fitness behaviors when I'm off jetting about in far away land. Or even a road trip to the next state over. And if so, to what extent, right around the time we were packing up for vacation down the Florida for a family reunion on the beach, no less a listener wrote in with that exact question, what to do on vacation.

[00:01:30] Let's talk about some ideas I had from one side of the spectrum to another, whether to stick with or partially put on hold your habits without being that weird visitor who carries their food scale everywhere they go. Um, and I'm kind of pointing at myself because I did that when I visited my parents last year, they were cool with it, but not everybody is.

[00:01:53] First up, we have a shout out to listener Dina who writes quote, I started following your podcast and love it. Your information is explained so well, and I've seen a lot of positive results with my weight loss and starting to see gains in muscle development. Macro factor has been an excellent suggestion.

[00:02:12] So here's my question. I'm about five weeks into my weight loss and seeing great steady results. I'm five, two and was 138 pounds. And now, after not being obsessive about cardio and tracking macros, I'm down to 1 33 over the last five weeks. I have a vacation coming up in two weeks and I'm developing a lot of anxiety about it.

[00:02:34] Gaining weight, losing progress, being unable to track food and losing current momentum. Do you have any suggestions for vacation things to keep in mind, ways to adjust goals, et cetera. End quote, thanks, Dina for the question and the positive feedback about the show. I love hearing this. I love hearing from listeners.

[00:02:53] Uh, it warms the cockles of my heart. When any listener gains value from this podcast, especially when it improves your health and your life. It just so happens that I thought about this topic quite deeply before our recent vacation to Florida, the quandary was, should I. Find a gym and train. Should I bring bands?

[00:03:13] Should I do body weight exercises or just not worry about it at all? Similarly, should I estimate and track my food? Should I stick to my macros? Should I plan for binges and events or just eat whatever I want and stop tracking the answer is yes. Any of these can work depending on your goals, your needs and what you can tolerate from a psychological stand.

[00:03:39] For some people giving it all up for a. Is a break. They need it's it's that break. They need to stay sane to stay refreshed. Just enjoy it, forget about all this, and then come back firing on all cylinders. But for others, any derailment from their carefully crafted process could be the slippery slope to further lapses.

[00:04:00] So, therefore I wanna lay out some strategies on this episode today, so that you can think about this ahead of time, and then I'm gonna tie these options to together for what you can actually do when you're on vacation. First and foremost, if you're not consistent yet at home, if you don't actually have a routine that's working for you right now, before you even think about vacation, it's going to be tough to carry any sort of routine or discipline to your vacation.

[00:04:30] just logically speaking, in which case it's probably not worth sweating over it and worrying about what you're gonna do on vacation. So if you have a few weeks or more before the trip, this is the time to take advantage of setting up good behaviors at home. So when you return, you have something that you've already established that you're used to, and then you could just pick right back up as if nothing ever happened.

[00:04:56] Another thing to think about beforehand, before you go on the vacation is potentially timing your nutrition, your training, your fat loss, your maintenance, your building phase with your vacation schedule, if possible. Um, it's a lot easier to eat beyond a high calorie plan. Let me tell you when you're on vacation, uh, then on a diet.

[00:05:19] You avoid strain too much for your goals that way, just by default, because you're able to eat more. Speaking of nutrition, let's get into some of the details there. You've heard the expression that food is fuel and that's true, but also we're human beings who enjoy. Eating food. We enjoy it in social settings, especially when we're on vacation.

[00:05:41] This is the time when people want to go out. They want to hang out, hang around. They want to have some drinks. They want to have some, maybe some dessert or nice dinner. So think of planning ahead for specific meals on your vacation, that will be special experiences. They can be considered treats or feasts, whatever you wanna call them.

[00:06:02] I wouldn't call them cheat meals because that implies you're cheating or strain from something. Instead we want to plan these in these are thoughtfully forecasted, higher calorie events. That's all. And then when you're actually there, so you've done your planning. You've said. I'm gonna pick a few dinners, maybe lunches, maybe going out for ice cream that are planned in.

[00:06:27] So I know that at other times I may have a little bit less or eat a little bit more protein, knowing that there'll be, uh, high, fat, high carb options at the event. And I'm gonna get my protein ahead of time when you actually get to the event and that food is staring you in the. uh, this might be the event or it could even be the continental breakfast at your hotel.

[00:06:47] I mean, really anywhere where somebody else is providing food. Ask yourself this question. Would I eat this as part of a normal meal at home? Would I eat this at home? If the answer's yes, then go ahead and make the choice and eat the food. If the answer's no, which is probably more often the case on vacation.

[00:07:07] Ask yourself why you wouldn't normally eat it at home and then make your choice. You can still choose to eat it, but you've taken a breath to consider the why behind it. Now if the place where you're staying on vacation has a refrigerator or better yet a kitchen, maybe it has a microwave, a stove oven, things like that.

[00:07:28] Go ahead and stock up on groceries for a few of your meals each day. I mean, I know it's kind of a bummer. You're on vacation. You don't wanna get groceries, but it actually might make it more convenient and save you a little bit of money and you could make a few meals every day as if you were at home pick easy meals like breakfast.

[00:07:46] You're perfectly fine. Just having the same thing every day, being consistent. And they're also not associated with big events or social gatherings. Those are usually later in the day, like dinner. So if you know, you're gonna have your oatmeal every day with some blueberries, pick it up at the grocery store and just have that for your breakfast.

[00:08:03] Uh, also don't forget to pack your. Protein powder or snacks like protein bars. For example, these are just nice to have in reserve as an easy way to get your protein while a vacation. Cuz sometimes it's hard to find enough protein when we're not making all the same choices. and it gives you an option.

[00:08:23] You know, if the choices aren't there, they're not optimal, or, you know, you're gonna go to a, a big feast that has a lot of high, fat, high carb foods, but not much protein. Well, there you go. You've got your protein powder. You could take a nice two scoop shake earlier in the day. Good to go. And then when you go to restaurants and this applies, whether you're on vacation or not, Always think about the simpler, the better, the fewer ingredients, the better.

[00:08:48] And I would look for things like lean proteins and vegetables, maybe salads, but, you know, sauces, dressings, oils, fats, that's where all this calories kind of sneak in, but you could still have a great steak that's, you know, charbroiled or grilled with some steamed vegetables, with some seasoning. Delicious.

[00:09:09] So those are some strategies, some ideas to think about before you leave and while you're on vacation, but let's talk a little bit about tracking. If you are currently tracking your macros, if you're using an app like macro factor, um, there's a few big options. I'm gonna break it down into maybe three options.

[00:09:29] The first option is just enjoy your vacation and don't track it all. I mean, you can enjoy it either way. I know. You know, don't worry about it. Just try the intuitive approach and go by how you feel. Now, if you've been tracking for any length of time, let's say a few months, at least you probably have a better idea than you realize of.

[00:09:51] Roughly where you are for your calories, your macros for the day, how much a portion size of protein is, and a starch and vegetables, you know, how much, few tablespoons of oil or butter might be. So you can get within, within spitting distance of estimating with your eyes intuitively that that's what they say without tracking.

[00:10:14] And then you could just resume tracking when you get back on. You know, previous macros, when you get back home from vacation and let everything catch up again now. Pros of this approach is this extra freedom while you're on vacation, you just don't have to think about it. You don't have to track food.

[00:10:32] You don't have to have a food scale. You know, even if you're tracking, you could track without a scale, of course, but you don't need any of this stuff. And you might learn something about your ability to estimate and eat intuitively for. The future, you know, because this is a lifelong thing we don't wanna be tracking forever.

[00:10:50] Tracking is an awesome tool. It's great to use. You can use it for long stretches of time, but we don't wanna be so dependent on it that we couldn't, uh, succeed without it. The cons of this approach of. Not tracking at all is you might be the type of person that gets stressed out, thinking that you're falling behind on your goal.

[00:11:10] You might get a little setback because you know, sky's the limit. You could eat, whatever you want. The tracking is the thing that kept you grounded and, uh, making certain choices. And now you just have everything at your whim, and that could be a negative depending on your psychological approach to. So that's option one, don't track, option two is track your food, but just estimate, you know, plan, plan to have meals in a certain way.

[00:11:39] So that they're similar to what you have at home, even when you're eating out. You know? So even if you go to a restaurant or do takeout, or what have you, you're still going to eat the lean protein and the vegetables and the things you normally. , but you're gonna leave room for those fun family, feasts, those social events, or even drinking alcohol, if that's what you enjoy.

[00:12:02] So for example, you could have a light breakfast and lunch and then skip a snack and then have a giant dinner at a restaurant. Enjoy yourself. You could log that based on what you estimate get within about 30%, but don't sweat being too precise. So the pros of this approach where you are tracking, but you're just estimating everything is it does keep you closer to on track for your goals.

[00:12:26] And the negative is probably that. Now you still have the inconvenience of tracking. Now, granted tracking has become habit for you most likely. So maybe it's not that inconvenient, but the fact you don't have a food scale and you don't have the same control or choice over your food options. Um, don't get me wrong.

[00:12:45] You choose what you put in your mouth, but you don't necessarily have a choice of what's available to choose from. And then the third option is really to change your goal on vacation. So if you're dieting, um, this kind of ties to what we were talking about earlier about aligning your schedule, but you can say, Hey, I'm going to vacation.

[00:13:05] I'm just gonna change my goal to maintenance. When I'm done, I'm gonna go back to dieting. Now this is essentially a diet break. I mean, that's the term we use, right? And, and nutrition is a diet break. That's when you just stop dieting for a while, it could be a few days, a few weeks, maybe even a few months so that you have more calories to work with on, on vacation.

[00:13:26] and then go ahead and either track or don't track, but you're doing it with more calories available to you. So the pros are obviously less restriction on the amount of food. You can eat less restriction on maintaining your weight, and this could actually be a breather for you. This could help your metabolism recover a bit.

[00:13:45] It acts as a feed. It's a diet break that pushes your daily expi. The cons of this approach of going to maintenance is it's of course gonna slow down your progress toward weight loss. If you were in a weight loss or fat loss phase, it's gonna slow it down. Just a tad. We were talking about a week or two of vacation.

[00:14:03] You might even gain a little bit of weight. So what you resume when you get back, you don't try to make it up. You don't try to undereat when you get back, you just continue where you were before. Now, as far as measuring your body weight. Since we're talking about tracking, I would say don't worry about it on vacation.

[00:14:20] If wherever you're staying actually has a scale in the bathroom. Maybe it's a friend's house and they have a scale or a nice hotel that has a scale. I mean, it's really up to you if you want to track, if it's part of your routine anyway. now keep in mind that, uh, another person's scale might not have the same accuracy or calibration as your scale at home, but it's probably close enough.

[00:14:41] Uh, but I don't think it's a big deal not to track your weight. So you could just resume weighing yourself when you get home.

[00:15:02] Hey guys. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again.

[00:15:21] An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Let's shift to activity and training since you're on vacation. I just want you to enjoy being active, being in a new place, enjoying the experience, the adventure, and even walking more, if it fits with your plans. Now, when we stayed on the beach a few weeks back, I did plenty of lying around, but then I'd play some Frisbee with my brother or I'd go for a swim.

[00:15:52] Or I remember one day walking down the beach all the way down to this nice pier, walking back. And if you've ever walked through. Thick wet beach sand, because it had rained recently, as it does in Florida in spring every afternoon, then, you know, you have to fight for each step. Uh, it's kind of a calf exercise in a way.

[00:16:13] So that's, that's just general activity. I would say, enjoy yourself. And if you have the opportunity to get the steps in the activity, Go for it, but don't force yourself to, uh, but then we get to discussing training specifically, you know, weight lifting, resistance training. If you really enjoy training like I do.

[00:16:30] And you think it will be. Relaxing fun. Just natural part of your vacation. Feel free by all means, go to the local gym once or twice during the week and do a deload style program. You know, if you're going for a week and you normally do a five day program, I don't think you're gonna wanna spend five days in the gym while on vacation, but it's really up to you.

[00:16:54] My recommendation is make this a de-load week. Keep the session short, maybe 45 to 60 minutes and do maybe three to five movements at a high intensity. And by intensity, again, going back to basic definitions, we mean, wait on the bar, not, you know, oh, um, it's CrossFit. I intense. And I'm sweaty. Wait on the bar.

[00:17:13] without too much volume. So for example, if you normally do a, um, let's say a three day full body routine, or a four day body part split where you have one or two big compound lifts and two or three accessory movements. On the vacation pick two days that are spaced apart. And on those two days, do a short session of maybe two compound lifts.

[00:17:37] Keep the weight high, the reps low, and then maybe one or two accessories, just to add a little volume, get, get a pump, you know, a little extra activity, whatever it is. Now, if you feel like training will be a chore on vacation or highly inconvenient, or you just can't access a facility, then don't do. Just take the week off and you might actually find that the rest is what your body needed to recover.

[00:18:01] And to set you up for bigger batter gains with a Z, when you get back gains with a Z multiple Zs. Now if you wanna train, but you don't have access to a facility, then you do have a few other options, right? Cause we're, we are not the type of people to make excuses on this podcast and you, the listener is not that type.

[00:18:22] So I know that if you wanna train, you're gonna find a way to do it. So I'm gonna give you three options to do that. And I'm sure you can come up with more. The first is just to stay active, so play some sports. Go for a swim walk, a lot hike, hang out with your friends and family, do something adventurous and that'll keep you active.

[00:18:41] That'll give you, uh, you know, maybe not the same training you're used to, but a different stimulus and it'll be a lot of fun. The second option. is body weight movements, the classics, pushups, chin ups. If you can find a bar or, you know, a, uh, door frame that can hold your weight, that's not gonna break. Um, or maybe the side of a Tiki hut squats with a big rock in your hand.

[00:19:04] Hey, maybe this is a good opportunity for strong man training. Get creative. Uh, the third option is to bring some resistance bands, either the kind with handles or the, the classic, um, like mini bands or the weight lifting or CrossFit bands. And these give you a ton of ways to hit the same movement patterns you would with your weightlifting routine.

[00:19:25] And there's ton of guides online. Just Google it for movements and routines to use resistance span. last but not least. I wanna share what I did on our trip to Florida. This was in June. So it was a little bit warm there. It's it's nice. You know, nice time of year for nutrition. I just didn't track. At this point, I've been tracking long enough that I could eat intuitively I could get pretty close to what I want, but here's the kicker.

[00:19:53] I deliberately timed my last fat loss phase to end two weeks prior so that I could go back to maintenance ahead of time and up my calories. And this gave me some flexibility to enjoy myself and I did. I had to have Cuban food at least twice while I was there. Uh, and of course, ice cream, a few times, that's my vice and ice cream in Florida is, you know, match made in heaven.

[00:20:19] And I knew that I might gain a few pounds over that week. And in fact, on the scale, I probably gained about six or seven pounds, but a lot of that was glycogen and water cuz it quickly came off and I just simply resumed where I left. I switched to a building phase when I got home. So it was actually ideal, right?

[00:20:37] I went from a, a 16 week cut to a two week maintenance, upping my maintenance calories going on the trip, eating whatever I wanted, but, you know, I knew how to restrain myself and then going to a building phase when I got home. So it naturally trended into the new phase. Now I could tell on the trip by my hunger signal.

[00:20:58] Or, or lack thereof let's say, and the occasional feelings of bloat and digestive distress when, when I'd eaten or drunk more than usual. Um, and when I did that, I sort of tapered off the next day. Took it a little bit easy. um, or if it was my choice, I continued my hedonistic ways, but rest assured I didn't abuse this freedom and I just had a few select, very high calorie meals during the week.

[00:21:24] Um, planned it out, thought about it ahead of time, made sure to have enough protein on hand, et cetera, things I talked about before. For training. I coaxed my 70 plus year old dad and my younger brother just younger by a few years to go to the local big box gym on two different days, one upper body, one lower body.

[00:21:44] I just wanted to show them the barbell lifts. Hey guys, you do machines. Let's, you know, try something different. Um, And I think how did we do it? We used the free three day promotional pass they had, so we went one day and then two days later within that window, of course, then we're on their mailing list AF after that point.

[00:22:01] But, uh, as expected. Okay. I totally expected this. There was literally only one squat rack. There were a couple Smith machines. There were a million cardio machines and body building machines. It was a good dumbbell rack, but one squat rack. And it wasn't even the traditional rack with the vertical. Um, the vertical steel rod rods.

[00:22:23] I can't speak right now. It was one of those, uh, like triangular trapezoidal, contraptions. I can't really explain it other than it was not ideal for unring for a squat. You really had to be a little bit careful. But we spotted each other and we used good form and technique to be as safe as we could. We got it done.

[00:22:43] So we spent about a solid hour slinging, barbells, dumbbells, and trying some of the machines. What's fun about being on vacation at a different gym is you get to try some other machines you don't normally have. I mean, simple things that I. Wouldn't take for granted like, um, a seated leg curl, you know, I have a line leg curled home, so I said, well, now I can do it seated.

[00:23:03] That's great. Or a cafe machine, something like that, you know, just for fun. So we felt energized for the day. We had a great time. Well, at least. I did. I think my dad and brother maybe have regretted the decision, but we'll have something to talk about for years to come. Okay. That that's it for me. I think that covers the solid list of some of the unique challenges that I could think about when going on vacation.

[00:23:27] Uh, and I hope it answered Dina's question as well. I think it did. I hope some of these ideas and strategies are helpful for you the next time. Adventure calls.

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Ep 19: Functional Strength, Longevity, and Martial Arts with Ken Caputo

Ken Caputo is a lifelong athlete who eventually found his way to strength training in his late 30s—something he and I have in common!

From an early age, he competed in swimming, track, cross country, and even pole vaulting and spring board diving at the University of Connecticut, eventually becoming an expert in martial arts.

I invited Ken on today because of his passion for lifting and nutrition, and how they can keep someone healthy physically, mentally, and emotionally, as well as recover from injury.

Related links:

• Ken Caputo at ken@questersway.com

• Ken Caputo’s Linktree

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

👨‍💻 HOSTED BY

• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

👏 ENJOY THE SHOW? 

• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 19 of Wits & Weights. Today, we have another special interview guests. Ken Kaputo is a lifelong athlete who eventually found his way to strength training in his late thirties. And that's something he and I have in common, uh, from an early age.

[00:00:47] He competed in swimming track, cross country, even pole vaulting and springboard diving at the university of Connecticut. Eventually becoming an expert in martial arts. I invited Ken on today because of his passion for lifting and nutrition and how they can keep someone healthy physically, mentally, and emotionally, as well as recover from injury.

[00:01:07] Ken Kaputo. Thanks for joining me on the.

[00:01:10] Ken Caputo: Glad to be here. Um,

[00:01:13] Philip Pape: you've been an athlete since you were a teenager and you've dabbled, recreationally and competitively in probably more sports than I've ever even thought of. Um, tell us, tell us more about your fitness background and your current approach to training and nutrition.

[00:01:30] Ken Caputo: Yeah, so I really, I think. I would say I became an athlete in my mid teens, you know, like around high school age. Um, prior to that, I was the skinny kid who couldn't, you know, I did little league and stuff like that, but did all of it poorly. And, um, and, uh, I was became attracted to more like endurance.

[00:01:51] Activities. So running. I did really well with swimming, uh, embody controls stuff, and I found that it just it's, it was a joy. It was like, I think the main thing, especially younger was it was a way to decompress, relieve stressors that, you know, all the teenagers are feeling. I think the hormonal highs, especially from endurance activities, with something I became kind of addicted to.

[00:02:17] Uh, so that really was. The start was, you know, and I think the other thing that attracted me to these kinds of individual, um, physical activities and sports was just, it was really just you against the clock, you know? And it was just kind of, you know, this time yeah. You know, a time where you're testing yourself and you know, that kind of fit.

[00:02:39] Personality and style early on. I think now where

[00:02:42] Philip Pape: you, were you encouraged to do this or did you find it on your own? Do you say you're a little skinny kid? Cause I was like the little fat kid who stayed out of sports when I was young. So nobody you'd have to, you know, pay me to do it. So, you know, how did you get into it that.

[00:02:55] So

[00:02:55] Ken Caputo: it's kind of funny because my, my dad, um, is a, he was like a big time football based, Paul, you know, he was into more of the traditional kind of team sports and he always really encouraged us to do those things. So I tried them all and that was just terrible. It just wasn't good at any of them and,

[00:03:13] Philip Pape: you know, something physical, just not those sports.

[00:03:17] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Yeah. And I really just, you know, I mean, I, I remember just as a, like a 12, 13 year old, pretty much. Reading a lot of books and hiding in the basement and just kind of, you know, just nothing was working out that way. And it was, uh, a good friend of mine in high school who had joined up on the swim team to become a springboard diver.

[00:03:37] And he was like, you want to try. I said, I knew nothing about diving and neither did the coach, honestly. I mean, this is like a high school team. There was a board there, so it was me and him. And they literally showed us this eight millimeter reel of the required dives,

[00:03:53] Philip Pape: poems, or trays. Like you ever see Dodge ball.

[00:03:55] Like, I don't think it up now, this the springboard. So versus the, I don't know what you call the other one that's doesn't spring, but is this very high or is it pretty close to the water?

[00:04:08] Ken Caputo: It's pretty close. So one meter. So at the high school level, it's all one meter. Once you get into the collegiate level, uh, there is no one meter it's three meter.

[00:04:17] And then, especially as you get into the higher levels, you've got platform, usually, uh, a five meter and 10 meter platform. So, you know, starting out of this one meter and, um, you know, and I just, I loved it. And. As I got into it, I also started swimming because you could do both so you can compete. So I started competing in a hundred free and breasts and stuff like that.

[00:04:39] And, um, so this was my freshman year of high school. And what happened was that spring, they were looking for pole vaulters and the track coach said, Hey, you know, you diverse your, these skinny light guys who have good body control. Why don't you try out for the track team and see if we can pull all, okay.

[00:04:58] Philip Pape: Okay. I was going to say, it sounds like a totally random sport, but you've got, yeah,

[00:05:04] Ken Caputo: yeah, exactly. And I'd actually tried out for track when I was in junior high and got cut. Cause I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't run. I was just not athletic. So, uh, so anyway, so I tried pole vaulting and, and again, as part of that, decided to try running again and got hooked on the 3,200.

[00:05:22] Which is basically two miles on the track. And that that fall I did cross country can take you to swim, dive and became a three sport athlete right through all of high school. Um, and then that carried over university of Connecticut. I was actually, um, recruited to be euphoric. But didn't get enough money to actually go there.

[00:05:45] So I walked on to the swim team at Yukon and, uh, made it as a diver and a dove for a couple of years there. Um, that's pretty cool.

[00:05:55] Philip Pape: What were you Yukon for? What was your major?

[00:05:57] Ken Caputo: Uh, actually I went in for psychologists. Okay. And, um, and ended up, uh, just not doing well. Um, you know, I was doing a bunch of stuff.

[00:06:06] I was, you know, kind of working my way through. I actually had joined the national guard to pay my tuition. So I was doing that once a month, you know, doing a army infantry men type thing. And, uh, and eventually just kind of ran out of money and motivation for the whole college thing. So. You know, so I left campus, I was still doing some classes part-time working nights and was looking for something physical to do, because at this point I understood the value of physical activity and just was looking for something that would kind of hit that body control part, but also something that would bring in a little bit more of a, I guess you would say a mindfulness, although I didn't really have those words at that time.

[00:06:47] So another friend said, Hey, there's a karate school in town. Check it out. So I went in, you know, so this is probably around 20 at the time. And, um, went in, try to class, fell in love with it. And. About a year later realized that I loved it so much. I actually came in a little early and saw Southern working with the kids and I was thinking, oh my God, I, I could see myself doing this with my life.

[00:07:14] You know, I mean, it's, it's, it's healthy for me. I could really transform a lot of lives. So I started teaching, volunteering my time and eventually took over a school that was failing and, um, It's still going strong 30 plus years later. Well,

[00:07:31] Philip Pape: that's amazing how opportunities come out of nowhere. Right? We seeking that a kind of individualistic pursuit, right.

[00:07:37] Of something that would channel your energy. So it wasn't even for self-defense or anything like that, which is probably why I would think to take martial arts and then you fell into it found that you could teach kids. And that was another passion of yours kind of combining the two.

[00:07:50] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Yeah. And I had actually, uh, because of the swimming, I had, uh, been a lifeguard through high school that was kind of my job.

[00:07:56] And I taught swim lessons and loved teaching the kids. So there is, so that kind of came back, bubbling out to the surface when I saw this, this opportunity with the martial arts and it all just kind of came together and, you know, so I started doing it professionally and Doug, you know, really dug into that and competed in tournaments and, you know, Six days a week and you know, really just became a lifestyle.

[00:08:22] Philip Pape: That's pretty cool. My only foray into karate. Well, there's two first is I tried it as a kid and I was too scared to actually go up in front in front of everybody for the first demonstration. And I told my parents, I don't want to do this. Um, and then the second is, is my love for Cobra, Kai, which I know is completely realistic.

[00:08:39] Uh, the show on Netflix, right? And that's about it. It's hilarious. It's very entertaining, um, tongue in cheek and all that, especially if you grew up around that time. Um, but so I've wondered, I understand you've taught. So this is Shalon. Kempo is the style that from your email, hopefully I pronounce that.

[00:08:55] Right. Um, and you're a seventh degree black belt. And again, I don't know anything about martial arts in general. So why that style? What, what excites you about.

[00:09:05] Ken Caputo: Uh, it was really the first one that I stepped into and, you know, and what I tell people all the time there's, there are so many different styles and it really just comes down to, does the, does the way the system is set up, compliment the way that you kind of move.

[00:09:24] And does it feel good to you? And more importantly, do you like the environment? Do you like the teachers? Do you like the students that are with you? It's really a community. Uh, so as long as those things, the actual name of the style or the specific of the style never really seemed as relevant. Um, they all have advantages and disadvantages.

[00:09:43] Um, like you said, I was more interested in being a balanced human, so I wasn't really into Intuit for like a con. Type of, you know, hardcore. Yeah. You know, and it, it just, it wasn't. And, you know, and if I was, I probably would've picked a different style, although there's, you know, the style I'm in is very, um, there's obviously self-defense application there always is, but what it's really about is living a long, healthy life, you know, and that's, that was what really appealed to me.

[00:10:15] Not only for myself. Teaching that you know, to communities and, you know, here I am at, I literally trained multiple generations, you know, so watch kids become parents and have kids and, you know, live healthy, abundant lives with this martial arts system being kind of, part of that. Part of that experience for sure.

[00:10:37] Philip Pape: Yeah. And I think this, you hit on the community aspect. I think that's attracted a lot of people to all sorts of pursuits. Right? CrossFit is a big one I can think of that took off 15 years ago. Um, you also mentioned longevity and health, and I want to get into some of that with this discussion because.

[00:10:55] You know, so sometimes goals are contradictory, right? There's the performance goals, there's strength, goals, longevity, and health. They don't always align perfectly if you're trying to build and you need to cut body fat and, you know, be hungry and suffer through all that. And you're messing with your hormones.

[00:11:13] And so on that doesn't necessarily translate to living to 110, if that's what you meant by long, but you know, you get the point. So, I mean, what's your take on balance. Yeah,

[00:11:25] Ken Caputo: it's, it's really an interesting thing. And the funny part, I, I, I trained as a lifelong athlete. It was all, it was, it was pretty well balanced just because I wasn't looking to be like some crazy.

[00:11:38] You know, MMA fighter, whereas taking a lot of hits, like even competed in tournaments, but there's, what's called point fighting. So there's contact, but it's, it's like tag, you know, when someone hits you, everything stops and you're accumulating five points and then you advance. So. You take some shots, you know, but it's not the sheer abuse that like an MMA fighter or a boxer, you know?

[00:12:01] I mean, they're like taking such a pounding. So I didn't have that element. What was interesting is, you know, by the time I was in my mid thirties, I had reached, uh, a rank in these, in the system that I was training where you really couldn't compete anymore. I started racing mountain bikes

[00:12:19] Philip Pape: and, uh, had the bug.

[00:12:21] And yet somehow

[00:12:23] Ken Caputo: I've always needed to do something competitive. And this was cross-country. So, you know, so you start off as a beginner and, you know, it's like maybe like a 45 minute, uh, you know, race. And by the time you reached back then what was the expert level? What's now cat one. These are two, three hour races.

[00:12:39] So they're very demanding. Um, doing point series. So you're talking 14 races between like April and October. So that's where you start seeing what you're talking about. Like balancing that level of training and conditioning, um, against the demands of the sport. Can really throw you out of whack. And I remember very vividly, uh, when I first started racing, you know, I got like blown out my first year.

[00:13:07] I did terrible. And it was just part of the learning curve, um, led to a lot of nutritional insights we can talk about, but there were posters up for dealing with. And a lot of, a lot of these racers were pushing themselves so hard, physically logging so many hours to be competitive, that it was creating damage emotionally, you know, not enough time committed to their relationships.

[00:13:31] So, so I learned a lot about that and really, you know, my goal was doing this because the best way for me to stay healthy was to have some kind of a physical event to train for in a cyclical way. You know, so, and that's when I started really thinking about all right, what's the best way to be efficient and to be smart.

[00:13:53] So. I, I feel imbalanced. I'm not like getting moody or, you know, eating things that are leaving me all doubled over and cramped up after a race or impacting my, my business. I mean, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a business owner, so I had to invest all of that. So I learned, I think, more from the mountain biking experience and did that for about a decade.

[00:14:15] Um, did I did from anything I had done previously to that, you know?

[00:14:19] Philip Pape: Yeah. So it sounds like what you're talking about is the need for period of. The need for, I guess, seasons in your training and your competitions. I mean, CrossFitters learn this over the years of the open and the games where the organization, I guess, added more and more competitions.

[00:14:34] And the top ranks guys wanted to compete all year and they found they couldn't do it. And, you know, because you get over-trained, you get over fatigued and you really need to peak peak for that. Right? You need to have a building phase, you have to have an off season, et cetera. It sounds like what you're talking about now, could these bikers.

[00:14:51] Just skip a bunch of competitions and choose the ones they wanted or did they have to compete in all of these

[00:14:56] Ken Caputo: it's upended. So, you know what, for those of us that were into it from a point serious perspective, it was, you could miss one race, which usually was going to be a DNF. Like you went to race and something broke on your bike or you crashed and broke yourself and that kind of thing.

[00:15:14] Yeah. But I mean, you really, you had to, you know, the ones that would win. I won states. I won new England. So I took it as high as I could go at the expert level. Um, and it was really attrition. It was who could raise consistently pretty much top five race after race, after race, through the whole series. So, yeah, it was very challenging because you really couldn't, you know, and you found yourself like during the training season balancing, like your, your main physical effort was the race and then everything else was kind of recovery, maintaining fitness.

[00:15:48] You know, you could sustain it. And what's interesting is there's this, and you see this a lot in athletics. There's this. Tough guy culture. Like, you know, one of the things we used to say is, you know, the one who breaks last wins, you know, the one who could and, and cycling is sustained pain, like mountain biking, especially cause it's very anaerobic and aerobic.

[00:16:13] So, you know, you're, you're going up and up Mount snow with your heart rate at 180 5 for 15 minutes, and then you're exhausted and trying to traverse and go back down and do it again. You know, so you, you almost didn't recognize how important it was to take care of yourself and focus on recovery because the tough guy would just take it, you know, and not break it.

[00:16:40] No, it really was. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:43] Philip Pape: Wow. That's cool. So w so we, we touched on balance and periodization then, so then that brings me to. I know you're doing OTRs now, but, um, you, you also do strength training and that's, that's my passion. Right? You came into that, I guess, in, around in your thirties, sort of similar timeframe that I did.

[00:17:00] Um, I guess my question is, you know, how did you fall into this?

[00:17:05] Ken Caputo: So, yeah, so it was really interesting. So with the cycling, you know, one of the things, especially road cyclist, they'll tend to, um, you know, there's a lot mass amounts of cardiovascular fitness and they're there, you know, your legs just get huge, but your upper body on a mountain bike, you need a lot of upper body strength, but it's hard to actually work.

[00:17:27] On the bike, you know what I mean? It's to, to actually get like, kind of balanced musculature and it was also starting to, you know, there's a lot more research I had. Um, my first started racing, um, I was just pumping calories, you know, five, 6,000 calories a day, and I'm doing it with feeding anything, hot dogs, ice cream, whatever I could, I didn't know, you know?

[00:17:48] Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so I'm starting to get like cramps. So I started studying nutrition and started learning about, you know, how it's not just the calories, the macronutrients, the types of foods, all of that started coming into play. And that led me to understanding a little bit more about body composition and the value of maintaining muscle mass.

[00:18:14] Not only for just strength, competitively, but overall health and longevity. And at this point, Almost 20 years ago. So the research wasn't even really that strong, like now, I mean,

[00:18:26] Philip Pape: science phase still.

[00:18:28] Ken Caputo: Yeah. You know, and I, I was really kind of turned off by the idea of muscle building, like bulking up because as a martial artist, who is all about everything being balanced and functional strength.

[00:18:40] So, you know, I mean, Fighting. I, I weighed 150 pounds, you know, and it was about hitting, like you weighed 250 pounds sure. Through structure, not necessarily too big. So, so I had kind of, I was misinformed about what resistance training could actually do for you. And as I started reaching it, uh, researching, and I was like, okay, now this is starting to make sense.

[00:19:05] And I recognized that I had worked a lot on. The other cornerstones of fitness, there's like five things that I think about, uh, conditions. Um, flexibility, which you do a lot in martial arts stability, which you do a lot in martial arts is just so much balance and mobility movement. But what I missed was strength and

[00:19:29] Philip Pape: which you could argue, could bring all these other things up another level.

[00:19:33] Ken Caputo: Exactly what happened. So, so I, and I found that I just had, um, I was doing a lot of upper body, uh, not upper body. Um, just like, uh, Strength training always had tons of pushups, pull ups, just explosive movements with the body, but not adding in actual weights. And when I started adding in the way. All of a sudden, like it was kind of scary, like how much more energy I had.

[00:19:58] I started hitting like a lot harder. Um, I was moving more exclusively when I was training in the arts, my, uh, ability to perform my mountain bike racing got better. It just, it just brought everything together. It was like the glue that brought all these different things together.

[00:20:16] Philip Pape: Um, I'm not surprised at all.

[00:20:18] What I'm curious about is what, what style or what focus of strength training that you've found most effective, you know, is it the big compound lifts or was it just adding weight to, to anything or what was it.

[00:20:29] Ken Caputo: It was, it's kind of funny. I think, um, I, I just started reading books on it. Um, and there were a few good ones that, uh, um, I think there's one body for life, uh, early on.

[00:20:40] And there are a few like that. And, um, and so I was just kind of learning. How to lift and, you know, the difference between low rep high rep, figuring out what your one lift max was and just the basics, you know, I mean, bench, press deadlift, squat, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, but I actually found this guy is probably still around his name is shin or talkie and he, he was big on.

[00:21:05] Understanding how to do compound movements. And he was like doing a lot more of like the Olympic lifts, like Queens and you know, that kind of stuff. And, but all the dumbbells. So I really got kind of fascinated by that. It made a lot of sense, as far as working through connect kinetic chains of movement, like you do much more bilateral.

[00:21:27] Yeah. Yeah. So, and there was just, and also the core state of stabilization. So I felt like it, it was causing me to use my body the way I trained it to work for two decades and all these other things I did. So, so I kind of started digging into his stuff for a while. Um, and then, so a few years after. I think it was when Jeff cavalier showed up on the scene with YouTube and he

[00:21:55] Philip Pape: just really, yeah.

[00:21:57] Athlete next.

[00:21:58] Ken Caputo: Yeah. And that's what I use to this day. I just use various of his programs because I like the way he kinda, you know, he, he varies it up. He, he sets you up on, you know, a training regimen. That's not too time intensive, but you know, it doesn't leave any gaps. It's smart and intelligent. And now I just kind of cycle through a bunch of his different programs and, you know, that's what I've found has been most effective for me.

[00:22:24] Philip Pape: I mean, that. You know, you came through with the compound lifts and also the dumbbells. I mean, I I've heard it said that if, if you had no problem lifting any weight dumbbell, it would be the most effective, you know, implement. Um, but when you get heavy enough, you just can't wield them. You know, they're just too, and that's why you tend to use both.

[00:22:44] Um, if you have the training volume and you have the time, but, um, Consistency. Right. When did you say, like, I know a lot of folks, they can pick up fairly mediocre program. I'm not saying, um, Cavaliers program is that, but you could pick one and as long as you're consistent, you're gonna have, you're gonna be in the top 90% of people in terms of your

[00:23:02] Ken Caputo: progress.

[00:23:03] Yeah. Yeah, no. And when people ask me, you know, I mean, that's, that's, I'm, I'm always very clear. There's a difference between like I'm choosing to live my life. For as long as I possibly can as a high performing athlete. And obviously what high performing is, is relative to, you know, the event, the time I put in age, all those other things as they just naturally occur.

[00:23:27] Um, but for most people tell them, look, I mean, just if you stress the muscles, you know, two, three times a week, it's just, it's all good for you. You know? So find something you can do safely and smart that you can commit to. And, you know, and if it's just body weight and you just want to pull a bar and do pushups and you know, that's going to be what it is, it's, it's definitely better than nothing.

[00:23:51] And you may find that over time, as you get stronger, you get curious and you know, and now you do sign up for the gym and get a couple of personals and. Learn a few things about how to lift safely and smart and that kind of thing. But, um, but yeah, I just tell people, look, it's just the act of strength training on a regular basis.

[00:24:12] Like you said, consistently. Is going to have a tremendous impact on your overall health and wellness over time period.

[00:24:20] Philip Pape: Yep. Totally agree. Preaching to the choir on that, you know? Yeah. You know, and it's funny. I don't know. Let's see. Did it come out? Yeah, I did an episode on injury that just came out. And then you had mentioned that you suffered, um, at a grade three AC tear the lout three ligaments, but, but.

[00:24:39] You were, had gotten stronger up to that point and you believe that that helped you through or help the recovery process versus if you hadn't.

[00:24:47] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Yeah. When Fe, so that happened in 2015 on Thanksgiving morning. So we're talking, you know, almost seven years

[00:24:56] Philip Pape: ago.

[00:24:59] Ken Caputo: This was so basically that morning before going to do all the family stuff, I just went for a run, um, as soon a trailer.

[00:25:06] With my golden retriever. So I had her on my leash and, you know, and we ran this trail. It was very clear and everything just kind of like a gravel road bed. So, you know, so it's doing some sprints and she, she saw whatever squirrel type thing cut across my legs. So I went over the top, which was fine. One of the things I really good at is rolling out.

[00:25:27] You know, I've gotten over the type of bicycles and all that kind of stuff, but she pulled the leash. Exactly when I was upside down and I came down on the top of my right shoulder, the ortho guy said it was perfect. Like there was no fracture in my collarbone at all. Like I hit exactly on the top of the joy and basically your arms held to your collarbone by three ligaments.

[00:25:52] Uh, and I sheared right through all three of those ligaments. So, you know, so like your collarbone. Like 3g and see it right through a t-shirt even it's like, it was like almost an inch, you know, raised up and, you know, so,

[00:26:07] Philip Pape: so also you said, so are you saying that was preferable to having broken your. Well, the

[00:26:13] Ken Caputo: vantage to it, not

[00:26:14] Philip Pape: preferable

[00:26:16] Ken Caputo: vantage was, I didn't need like surgery and things.

[00:26:19] So no pins in the collarbone, nothing like that. But basically you have two choices with a grade three tear, cause there's not a sprain or a partial tear. There's literally nothing holding your arm attached to your collarbone other than muscle and skin at that point. So you can either, uh, let it heal up naturally.

[00:26:37] And it'll do what's called scar. And scar tissue will basically replace the ligaments or they go in and they string up piece of wire around your collarbone and they just kind of cinch it up. So, so I decided to let it heal non-surgically and, and the doc had told me, he said, look, you got nine months. Uh, if at the end of nine months, it hasn't healed.

[00:26:57] Well, we can go in and we can do the surgery and do that. So, so basically you spend about six months holding your arm in your. And like you can't pick anything up, you know, at all, because you'll tear all the scar tissue. Um, so I lost, probably close to, at that point, I, I was probably like one 60 somewhere in there.

[00:27:19] Um, you know, a decent amount of muscle mass. I lost about 12 pounds of muscle mass, my whole right side atrophied. I had done so much work to strengthen and build muscle that I healed completely and asymptomatically and have absolutely no limitations. Now it actually, the doctor even was a little surprised at how well it healed.

[00:27:41] Um, and he said you have years of prehab. Yours. And especially the resistance training doing these, these complex lifts and everything. I had strengthened the shoulder, all the support muscles were balanced and in good shape. So my body was naturally trying to bring everything back into alignment, which gave me a better opportunity for it to scar up and heal.

[00:28:03] Right.

[00:28:04] Philip Pape: Um, it was sort of like a muscle memory in a way everybody's trying to get back to that point.

[00:28:09] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Yeah. And it took me. It was two years from the injury before I regained everything that I had lost as far as strength and mobility and everything. But now almost seven years later, I'm doing everything I could do and more priors, incredible jury.

[00:28:26] So, yeah. And I think what really struck me about just maintaining your, your, you know, just to exercise fitness, lifting, all of those things is there. You're putting money in the bank. These are investments that will pay dividends if and when something happens, you know, and so many people, you know, I was talking to him and he was showing me pictures and he said, a lot of people don't recover well from this injury because they've been sedentary.

[00:28:54] So, you know, so now they're trying to actually develop muscle. To protect and help them overcome the damage they did. But it's too late. It's like learning to defend yourself after you got mugged. Right. It doesn't

[00:29:10] Philip Pape: get insurance after you don't need it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Have you ever seen the, uh, there, this cross, the cross-sectional pictures.

[00:29:18] Of somebody's thigh as they get older on, if you've ever seen something like that, where you see the diameter of the thighs the same, but the muscle area just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks because of the as you get older. Right. So it's just, like you said, you, you basically waste away, especially as we start getting into your fifties and sixties.

[00:29:37] I mean, it's never too late to start strength training, but like you said, injury wise, the risk of not being able to recover goes yeah. The older you are. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you'd be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media.

[00:29:53] Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful in how I can improve again, an incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the. And

[00:30:09] Ken Caputo: what's cool though, is from my understanding your body responds really well.

[00:30:12] I mean, you can start lifting when you're in your sixties and you're going to regain muscle mass and, you know, and it's gonna it's and there's just this whole, like kind of domino effect of benefits that come from that, you know, the big thing is making sure that you're safe.

[00:30:30] Philip Pape: Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. What the answer doing the right forum.

[00:30:33] My dad is in his seventies and has finally picked up weight training for the first time. And he's seen the benefits. I agree. You can build additional muscle even in your seventies. It's crazy.

[00:30:44] Ken Caputo: Yeah. And you're talking like the, and I know you've talked about on some of your episodes, the metabolic. Oh, of course, you know,

[00:30:51] Philip Pape: that testosterone and

[00:30:54] Ken Caputo: yup.

[00:30:54] And the proportion of muscle to fat, you know, the ratio and it's, and I don't care what age you are. That is, that is going to be good for you. Oh, absolutely.

[00:31:03] Philip Pape: Just having a higher metabolism for sure. Yep. Um, all right. So. OCR. I want to get back to that. Cause I, you seem like a guy who is high energy always has to be busy doing something, and you're trying to balance everything and not get injured.

[00:31:18] You want to live a long life. You want to perform, you want to go out and win. So that sounds like a good outlet for that. Is that how you got into. Yeah.

[00:31:25] Ken Caputo: Yeah. So, so it's kind of funny. And again, you know, these things are so random. It was, uh, uh, someone just asked me if I wanted to go do one of a rugged maniac, which was, you know, and, and at that point, um, I wasn't really doing anything competitively.

[00:31:40] I had kind of retired from the cycling, you know, I was doing it recreationally. Um, but it just kind of ran its course and I wasn't interested in continue to compete. You know, I kind of took it to. You know, as high an amateur level as I could. And it was just, I lost my interest in it. So I was kind of in between interesting athletic things to challenge myself.

[00:32:02] I hadn't already done. Um, you know, when skydiving, when I turned 50, that was fun, but I, it was an adrenaline kick, but it's not really a sport. It would

[00:32:12] Philip Pape: be a skydiver. Yeah,

[00:32:14] Ken Caputo: it was, I loved it. I did it a few times. It was such a blast, you know, but, uh, but anyway, you know, so. So they invited me to go do one of these rugged maniac things and it was a blast and the culture was very celebratory.

[00:32:29] It reminded me a little bit about, uh, um, how mountain biking was when I had done that. Just the, the type of people that would show up and, you know, so, so I did, let me stop you there.

[00:32:39] Philip Pape: Did you do the one. Yes. Okay. Because I did that twice. It'd be interesting to know if we competed the same years. Was that like within the last 10 years or was that much more recently?

[00:32:48] Yes, I did

[00:32:50] Ken Caputo: it. So I want to say the first year I did, it was probably 2017. Cause it would have been, I wouldn't have been able to do it the year before that because I, I wasn't healed enough yet. I was less than a year off of my injury. So I think it was, I think it was 2017 and I was really just at a point where I was starting to get back.

[00:33:10] Physically to the condition I was used to operating it. Um, that's a good way to say it would've made sense. Yeah.

[00:33:17] Philip Pape: So like tough Mudder or something like that.

[00:33:20] Ken Caputo: Yeah. And of course, you know, so I tried it. I had a blast. I think I went back, did it the next year. Yeah. So that would have been 2018 and I'm started looking into the fact that they would do an elite heat.

[00:33:33] Um, so which the first heat in the morning, you could actually have a timed race. You could key in it. So I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. And of course I was going with a group of people and they weren't interested in that. So, so I ended up running the course in 20, 19 3 times and I did it, uh, once competitively, um, did okay.

[00:33:56] You know, like I didn't, I didn't win or anything, but I get relatively well. And then I did it with a small group and then I did it one more time with a big group and just was really, it was a lot of fun. So

[00:34:09] Philip Pape: for the listener, this is a 5k with like 20 or 30 obstacles. Yeah. So a good time is, is somewhere in the upper twenties maybe or low thirties,

[00:34:22] Ken Caputo: low

[00:34:22] Philip Pape: thirties.

[00:34:24] Ken Caputo: There's times where, depending on the course for the 5k, um, and how muddy it is that day, um, anywhere between 30 and 35 minutes. Uh, and the, so the first year I did it competitively, I did it in about 38 minutes. Um, you know, so I, I did it well enough. That it seemed like something that was interesting to pursue.

[00:34:44] And then of course, 20, 20 the pandemic. So it didn't happen. Uh, so, so last fall, you know, so I kind of trained, I decided last fall in 2021, I was going to train for this thing and try to do well. So, and they actually have, um, competitively, they have, uh, a 50 and up division and then they have just an all age division.

[00:35:06] So I ended up winning the 50 and up and finishing third overall. Two metals. Yeah. No. And it was, it was fun, you know, and it was what I really enjoyed was the preparation because it, the process. Yeah. You know that the endurance part of it. So you gotta be running, you know, Hadn't run. I'd been focusing on cycling.

[00:35:29] So it's kind of cool getting back to running. It's very pure. I love trail running. Um, but then, you know, you need a lot of body strength and a lot of body coordination because of all the obstacles. So, so I did that placed high enough that I got an email about OCR world championships, which happens every year.

[00:35:50] It's strategy. It's at Stratton this year. Um, I was like, Why not. So, so I decided I was going to train for that. And as part of that, um, I started researching the different OCR, like kind of circuits going around and found Spartan racing. Really like, you know, the way that looked. So, uh, so signed up for a trifecta, which is basically doing the multiple distances.

[00:36:19] Um, worlds for OCR is a 15 K race. So, you know, so long, get a little

[00:36:25] Philip Pape: more hardcore here. Yeah,

[00:36:27] Ken Caputo: yeah, yeah. More endurance. And, uh, the, the really fascinating thing about it is they basically, they give you a risk. And, um, if you don't clear an obstacle, they cut your wristband. You're done so you can finish the race, but you're disqualified.

[00:36:40] So you've got to be able to clear all the obstacles and you can try it more than once, you know, like if you slip off or whatever, but, um, oh,

[00:36:48] Philip Pape: okay. You can try them on. What, what what's is that not the one where they make you do a bunch of burpees if you miss it, or is that like at the non. Oh, that is fine.

[00:36:55] Yes. Spartan does that 30 burpees or something? Yeah.

[00:36:59] Ken Caputo: 25 burpees. So yeah. So if you miss an obstacle, you got to go to the penalty box and they actually, for the competitive, you can do Spartan, just recreationally. But if you know, the, the preparation and how it relates to this idea of being an integrated athlete, that's really.

[00:37:16] Kind of focus off of all of it. So,

[00:37:19] Philip Pape: yeah. So, so let's talk about the, the terms here, right? You've used the terms, functional strength, um, integrated movement, integrated athlete. The first time I came across functional movement was CrossFit again, back back in the day, um, where I get introduced to barbells and, and power cleans and such.

[00:37:35] Um, I guess, what do you, in your words, what does that mean? What does functional strength mean?

[00:37:41] Ken Caputo: So for me, I mean, there's a lot of different ways that people think of it, but it's, for me, it's being able to do the things that I love to do. To live the life of my choosing. So, you know, and for some people that could be hiking with their grandkids or being able to go to a waterpark and actually go down the slides and climb up the stairs, um, it could be being able to do yard work in your nineties.

[00:38:07] You know, it's just, you know, to me that the, the, the preparation for athletic events. For me has always been in service to being able to do the things that I want to do. Not only physically, but mentally and emotionally keeping my energy levels stay strong. My mind is clear. I'm on zero medications, you know, I mean, it's.

[00:38:34] I stay healthy. I get to live the life that I want to live. So, you know, so to me, what I think functional strength, it's like even this, uh, you know, this OCR stuff, it's, you're pushing, you're pulling, you're crawling, you're climbing. You're you're doing like actual movements that, you know, show up in your life.

[00:38:54] It's funny. One of the things I would tell people in martial arts is the one skill I guarantee you will use that you'll learn in a martial arts class is how to fall safely. At some point, you're going to fall down, you know, and most people that's how they, especially as they age, you break a bone, you dislocate a hip, you get.

[00:39:12] Because, you know, two things, number one, falling is a skill. It's a skill develop. Um, let me down when I blew up my AC, but Hey, no, there's no guarantees. Right. You know, but then the other thing is how well have you practiced your body being functionally sound and structurally sound. So. It has a higher tolerance for the unexpected things that happen in our lives, you know, and if something does go wrong, you can recover from it better on the other side.

[00:39:42] So,

[00:39:42] Philip Pape: yeah, it's just, it seems like there's a spectrum because. For example, if, if somewhere to come to someone where to come to me and say, I want to get stronger, I'd say, all right, we're going to start with the very basics. Right? We're going to squat. We're going to deadlift. Cause squatting is bending down, right?

[00:39:57] Like you would do if you were sitting, if you were outside with your tribe or whatever, um, deadlifting is picking stuff up, you know, overhead pressing is reaching over your head. And Ben's pressings kind of the odd man out, even though we all love it, but it's kind of pushing, you know, being able to push something heavy forward in a way.

[00:40:13] So those are functional movements and they develop stability, mobility, et cetera, but you are still lacking some, like I couldn't do a back flip and I haven't really learned to fall properly. So things like that, um, would expand the repertoire, I guess if I, you know, focused on those skills. So it it's an interesting perception.

[00:40:31] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Like we went to a trampoline park and I'm out there literally doing backflips and bouncing all over the place. You know, like I'm a teenager and you know, and I'm not sore from it the next day. Like I train trampolining is part of diving and you would not believe how sore you can get if you're not used to doing.

[00:40:52] But, yeah, so it's just, you know, for me, it's, it's that, and you know, in the idea of being an integrated athlete is actually kind of these five components. Um, you know, we talk about move, think connect, fuel, empower, uh, with the idea being every day, make an investment in your ability to move somehow, you know, every day do something that's good for your mind.

[00:41:15] You know, and, you know, learn something new, read something, listen to something and get the blood going, you know, get the blood into your brain, oxygenate your brain through. So the movement helps with that. Fuel is obviously the nutrition, you know, the nourishment you bring in connect. This is the relationships that you've.

[00:41:35] Through all of this, you know, so, I mean, going for a walk with, with a partner or a friend, that's powerful on a lot of different levels, you know? And then, um, through the martial arts, I do a lot of, uh, cheat dog, meditation, mindfulness stuff. So empower is just, you know, being present in whatever it is you're doing.

[00:41:54] And when you do all those, all those things a little bit every day, it kind of, for me anyway, it helps keep everything. And balance. So you don't get caught up in lifting for the sake of lifting. You're lifting for a purpose that adds value to your life over the longterm. And if your body changes or your environment changes or something changes professionally, you don't feel like you're losing something because it will just adapt to the needs that you now have, and it will grow and evolve with you over time.

[00:42:26] Instead of, you know, ah, I used to be able to run a mile. Five 15. I can't do that anymore. I shouldn't be running. Yeah.

[00:42:36] Philip Pape: Yeah, no, I, I like it. I like where you're going with that too. You have to have a goal and you can have intermediate goals. You could have long-term goals, right. And then you break it down to the process.

[00:42:46] Um, don't, don't. Either extreme. In other words, like you said, don't just do the process for its own sake. Cause then eventually you might not have purpose and don't just focus on the end goal thinking that's all there is. So that's a good balance. What would you say to people who are listening, who either want to get started in what you do, maybe with the martial arts or somebody who's not as active because you threw out a bunch of things, right.

[00:43:11] And you develop these over time, but what are the big priorities? The big rocks for people.

[00:43:18] Ken Caputo: Uh, I think honestly, the very first thing is understanding the value of recovery. Right? I think you almost have to start there. You know, understanding how much sleep you need. Um, I I'm like a geek when it comes to the technology.

[00:43:33] So like I use whoop, you know,

[00:43:36] Philip Pape: which is that the mat, the mattress, or is that the device in your wrist? That's

[00:43:39] Ken Caputo: the device. Yeah. And it's basically that same thing as the exact same, well, different companies. Same thing, you know, and it helps you understand how well based on the effort you put in how well you're sleeping and recovering based on that understanding of hydration needs and understanding the nourishment of the foods you bring in and how it's really just.

[00:44:07] I think, uh, the confusion I see in a lot of people that I've worked with over the years is they get caught up in the output and, you know, I need to, I need to do my 10,000 steps or I need to get to the gym three days a week. And yes, there, there is all of that, but that's just stimulation, you know, that you have to create the space in your life to receive the benefit.

[00:44:29] And you know, and sometimes the best thing to do is stop. You know, like I definitely, I, I go off every Finn, you know, I do like little supplementation, like created and then sure. You know, omega stuff like that, but I stop everything, stop lifting and just walk for a week and just stop.

[00:44:49] Philip Pape: You can, you know, you can say it's de-load, but you, you really just unplug and disconnect and, and let your body fully

[00:44:54] Ken Caputo: recover.

[00:44:55] Yeah. And I'm actually thinking about that. I'm thinking about muscle repair. And how much better I'm going to feel on the other side of it, you know, and that kind of thing. So, you know, so that's the first thing. And then, um, the second thing that I always recommend to people is find movements that you enjoy, you know?

[00:45:16] So, cause that's the first thing. If you're, if you're doing something that makes you and you hate it every time you think about doing it, they're not going to, you're not going to stay with it. You've got to find things that you now. Yes. You know, an exercise. Isn't always fun. I remember, uh, an adult saying to me a few years ago, he's like you saying, I'm gonna have to do this for the rest of my life.

[00:45:38] And I'm like,

[00:45:42] if you want to be healthy. Yeah. So, you know, gotta do

[00:45:46] Philip Pape: your squats, but maybe you don't want to do back squats. Maybe you want to do front squats. They either do it with a dumbbell, whatever leg, press, you know, do something.

[00:45:56] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's resistance bands, you know, or, or maybe it's, you know, putting your kid on your back and doing squats with them, feedbacks, you know, or just.

[00:46:08] Grab a dumbbell walk up and downstairs, you know, the farmer, Hey, asymmetric, farmers carries. Those are great. So, you know,

[00:46:15] Philip Pape: so no excuses, what you're getting at. It's like, if you don't like something, you find something you do. Like at the end of the day, it's going to be hard at some point. Right. And that's part of, part of the fun really is when you do hard things and you see the results can be funded,

[00:46:28] Ken Caputo: but, and you're looking forward to the result.

[00:46:31] So while you're engaged in the activity, you're thinking about the value you're creating, you know, and what that means to you. And. I think I've been fortunate in that, um, like physically, what it does to me has been symptomatic. So like, you know how ripped my abs are. Yeah. The reason I work out. It's just something that you notice as you're going through the training cycles and you know, my body composition, you know, I weigh myself every day and use an impedance scale just so they can kind of monitor how I'm doing and you know, but it's not, I'm not obsessed with how I look.

[00:47:07] I'm just thinking about the value I'm Korean. So, yeah, I

[00:47:11] Philip Pape: agree. Like if, if, um, for new nutrition coaching, you know, I talk about the using biofeedback and data and measurements. It's just that just data it's. In fact, when you do it regularly, if you weigh yourself every day, it, you almost stop thinking about it and you stop obsessing about it.

[00:47:27] Yeah. But it's easier said than done because people have there's, there's all sorts of emotional, mental issues people have, and there's disordered eating and things like that. Um, but I, I love where.

[00:47:37] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Oh, sorry. I was just thinking that could be so hard. Like, you know, especially when I've worked with younger people, they're, you know, they're on Instagram and they're, you know, they're seeing all those visuals are kind of hitting them.

[00:47:49] And it's really hard to balance that, you know, against doing what's best for you and not getting caught up in, you know, these kind of unrealistic images or. Whatever, maybe they are realistic, but if it becomes and in and of itself, it's all very impermanent. You know, anything you win, any metals, you get any picture you take, you're not going to look or be able to do that.

[00:48:14] It's a new world,

[00:48:15] Philip Pape: social media. It's crazy. Yeah. This is all. This is all great stuff, man. I mean, recovery and, uh, you know, food and fuel and finding something that you like for sure. Is there anything else you want to share with the listener before? Wrap it up.

[00:48:33] Ken Caputo: Yeah. I think the last thing that has been helpful is understanding how to lower resistance environmentally.

[00:48:40] Um, and one of the things I'll help people with, we call it the swapping grid. We look at. Rather cause a lot of people, I think they're thinking they have to add more to more, you know, I've got to now get up an hour earlier to get into the gym and they're, so their approach is something that can lead to being out of balance because you're trying to find more time and especially

[00:49:02] Philip Pape: stressors by trying to do exactly.

[00:49:04] Ken Caputo: Exactly. So, so we talk about looking for, um, things that you already have built into your life. That maybe aren't serving you and then swapping them out. So, you know, so a simple example could be, um, like what I've had a lot of people have success with is they, you know, they're trying to cut down on like soda nutritionally, because it's just a lot of junk carbs and not good for him.

[00:49:29] So either they stopped buying it or they put it in the back of the fridge and they put a pitcher of water in front of it. So, so you're just trading out the choice to drink the soda. For drinking water. And sometimes they'll do that. Sometimes you won't, but a lot of more. Pretty quickly, they've reduced their intake by 50% and that has all kinds of effects they can experience.

[00:49:54] So, you know, so maybe you're, you're tired at the end of the day and you like to decompress with half-hour and Netflix and, you know, you just go for a walk instead, you know, or maybe you find like a podcast that you like and you listen to it and walk. So it's, how can I find. Time that's already there and reclaim it by swapping out something that fits with my long-term goals instead of just these habituated patterns.

[00:50:22] Are just kind of there that I don't even think about anymore. And

[00:50:25] Philip Pape: I like that, Ken. Yeah, that reminds me of a, I don't know if it was a Freakonomics episode, years ago, talked about how I think it was Angela Duckworth, maybe that you know about the habits that show. Yeah. And it was, it was sort of rewarding.

[00:50:38] By doing the activity. And the example they gave was being on a treadmill while watching Netflix, you know, like I only allow myself to watch Netflix while I'm going to try them on and sort of, uh, you're, you're leveraging that same time, but now you're doing something, you know, I got a treadmill, a treadmill for, to work with now that I work from home, mostly for that same reason, like, well, I gotta, I gotta get my steps in and I will go for a walk, but yeah.

[00:51:01] Walk all day, so I can walk all day now while I'm working, you know?

[00:51:05] Ken Caputo: Yep. Yeah. And you just, you find ways and yeah, I've done that for years. Like audio books have been my best friend cause I can do them while I'm doing cardio. Right. You know? So whether I'm on a run or a bike ride. Yes. So I'm nursing my mind at the same time.

[00:51:22] Training my body and, you know, and it's helped me reach my goals for how many books I want to read each year and, you know, stimulate the brain. So, yeah. And it's, it's interesting. Having talked to a lot of people, they, they, once you pointed out. They come up with these amazing like solutions for their own lives.

[00:51:41] They just hadn't thought about it. They just needed someone to say, Hey, have you thought about this? And then they're like, no. And then they do. And it's like really cool. I've had some people telling me some really wild things that they've done that, you know, not only added to their own physical wellbeing, but improve relationships, like, you know, all of a sudden they're doing things with their kids.

[00:52:00] You know, when they never felt like they had enough time and then they, they found this new solution. That's better for everyone, you know? So yeah. It's been really helpful. Um,

[00:52:12] Philip Pape: that's awesome. All right. Well, very cool stuff. Um, where can listeners learn more about you or.

[00:52:18] Ken Caputo: Uh, my goodness. Um, so I'm doing a lot of, uh, projects right now.

[00:52:25] Um, but nothing really. I think that would be of much interest to anyone, uh, that will probably change in a few months if it, if they wanted to contact me, you know, email is probably the simplest thing. To do. And, um, that's just ken@questersway.com and

[00:52:46] Philip Pape: I'll put it in the show notes. Sure.

[00:52:48] Ken Caputo: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and that's question's way is one of the, it's actually a business we created, uh, ran for four years and now we're ready to relaunch it.

[00:52:56] Post pandemic here that it's basically an entire center built around this idea of moving connect, fuel and power

[00:53:04] Philip Pape: all about

[00:53:05] Ken Caputo: it. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. So that's a really cool. Project. So, but right now, you know, I just kinda, you know, I, I, I work with different people in different things. We're going to be working with, um, actually the Yukon football team this summer, helping them out a little

[00:53:20] Philip Pape: bit.

[00:53:20] Oh, that's amazing. What are you doing with them? Yeah.

[00:53:23] Ken Caputo: Yeah. A combination of things, but a lot of it's going to be, um, helping there. They're defensive and offensive lineman with, uh, getting a little bit more of a competitive advantage, especially with the way they use their hands and just where their heads at, before the snap of the ball.

[00:53:42] So, yeah, it's just gonna be a lot of fun. We're looking to work.

[00:53:45] Philip Pape: So we're going to see them in the top 10 before long, huh? Oh

[00:53:48] Ken Caputo: boy. That would be really cool. I'm sure they would love that. They've been struggling for a few years, but they've got a new head coach now and, um, they're making some. Significant changes.

[00:53:58] Like even just, they redid the whole locker room and it's like amazing. They gave us a cool tour,

[00:54:03] Philip Pape: Jackson, better recruits, but Hey, w what you're doing with that, you know, could have a big difference. You never know.

[00:54:08] Ken Caputo: So, yeah. No, and that's exactly it. So, you know, so they reached out and we had a little conversation with them, and there are some ways that we could kind of apply some of the principles that we've learned over time to help them out.

[00:54:19] So, uh, you know, so that's what I kind of do, but it's nothing super formal. I'm kind of at a place of picking and choosing. Projects and who I work with and stuff like that. So. Awesome.

[00:54:30] Philip Pape: Well, Ken, thanks for coming on the show. It was really cool to, with you learned a lot of, a lot of really neat stuff here today.

[00:54:35] So thanks again. We

[00:54:36] Ken Caputo: learned a lot. I've been following your podcast and it's just been super helpful. Really good information. Keep it

[00:54:43] Philip Pape: up. Yeah. If there's anything you want to hear on there, you think I should talk about, let me know or anybody who wants to come on, let me know. So great talking to. Take take it easy.

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Ep 18: 25 Ways to Improve Sleep (The Missing Ingredient to Nutrition and Recovery)

Today’s topic may not seem exciting, but it could be the critical missing ingredient to your nutrition and recovery, whether everything else is dialed in or not.

I’m talking about sleep: too little sleep, low quality sleep, irregular sleep, and poor sleep habits.

Many people suffer from insomnia or a sleep disorder, and a lack of sleep can lead to terrible consequences like medical errors and car accidents. A lack of sleep can increase hunger, reduce your metabolism, impair memory, affect hormone balance, and even accelerate aging.

Yet there is hope. In a paper published in 2019 by Vitale et al., called Sleep Hygiene for Optimizing Recovery in Athletes: Review and Recommendations, the authors reviewed the effects of sleep deprivation and extension on athletes to see how applying sleep hygiene methods could improve their performance.

In this episode, I am shamelessly borrowing from their list of sleep hygiene recommendations. First, we talk about the tremendous benefits of improving your sleep, even just a little bit. Then, I review the list of 25 ways to improve sleep recommended by the authors, sharing some of my personal anecdotes and strategies along the way.

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 18 of Wits & Weights today's topic may not seem exciting, but it could be the critical missing ingredient to your nutrition and recovery, whether everything else is dialed in or not. I'm talking about sleep. Too little sleep, low quality sleep, irregular sleep, and poor sleep habits.

[00:00:54] Many people suffer from insomnia or sleep disorders, and a lack of sleep can lead to terrible consequences like medical errors and car acts. Uh, lack of sleep can increase hunger, reduce your metabolism, impair memory, affect hormone balance, and even accelerate aging. Yet there is hope in a paper published in 2019 by Vitaly at all called sleep hygiene for optimizing recovery in athletes review and recommendations.

[00:01:23] The authors reviewed the effects of sleep deprivation and extension on athletes to see how applying sleep hygiene methods could improve their. In this episode, I am shamelessly borrowing from their list of sleep hygiene recommendations. First, we talk about the tremendous benefits of improving your sleep even just a little bit.

[00:01:44] And then I'm going to review the list of 25 ways to improve sleep recommended by the authors, sharing some of my personal anecdotes and strategies along the way.

[00:02:03] Sleep is more beneficial than you could even imagine. According to the paper that I referenced earlier by Vitaly at all sleep deprivation can negatively affect quote, reaction, time, accuracy, vigor, submaximal strength and endurance in quote and quote, cognitive function such as judgment. And decision-making.

[00:02:24] And conversely, getting more sleep can improve reaction times, mood, sprint times tennis serve accuracy, swim turns, kicks, stroke efficiency, and increased free throw, and three point accuracy. Now I realize some of these are very specific, but you get the idea. Furthermore, more sleep can reduce chronic stress levels and prevent a spike in cortisol.

[00:02:50] The.

[00:02:59] Cortisol being the stress hormone, too little sleep can disrupt your regular cortisol pattern and having low cortisol during sleep is critical to Siler repair. That's one reason you can feel extremely fatigued when you don't sleep at night. Uh, lack of sleep can impede performance and recovery because it adds an additional stressor and even sleeping too often.

[00:03:23] So this goes back to sleep quality and sleep quantity can reduce estrogen, throwing off hormone balance, both in men and. Don't discount the impact of being in a caloric deficit. So when you're trying to lose weight, you're in a deficit, you could experience metabolic adaptation that along with the under eating negatively affect sleep and sleep quality, which then just requires you to prioritize the sleep even further.

[00:03:57] Now, before I get into the detailed list of sleep hygiene recommendations, because it's a long list, but I think there's a lot of great things you can try in there before I overwhelm you with that. I wanted to take a step back and just talk about habits, mindset. When it comes to sleep. My recommendation is simply to change one thing from this list that you're not doing today and give it maybe two weeks, see how it affects.

[00:04:25] If things improve, then that's great. If they don't, maybe you try something different. I think that's a, maybe a more appropriate approach for most people than to try five or 10 of these things all at once. Because first of all, it will be hard to. That many new habits. And secondly, it would be hard to tell which one of them had the biggest impact.

[00:04:46] Now, what we really care about the most is sleep quality, which is your ability to fall asleep and stay there throughout the night. Particularly getting enough deep sleep early on, there are trackers for these. Like, I have an aura ring that I wear on my index. And it tracks things like heart rate variability, but also my cycles of sleep deep sleep REM sleep.

[00:05:17] Sometimes we talk a lot about quantity and quantity is definitely a good thing. If you only get five hours of sleep every night increasing to six or seven can make a huge difference, but there's also the quality of the things you're doing throughout the day. The various hygiene habits that enabled the sleep itself to be of a high quality, even if it isn't as much as you possibly could get.

[00:05:39] Now I'm going to go through the long list and we're going to start with the first 10, which are they consider the top 10 recommendations. And the source that's credited is the UCS D center for pulmonary and sleep medicine, patient information handout. So this isn't something you couldn't just Google, but I'm compiling it all here into one episode.

[00:06:02] Hopefully you find it helpful and you can try one of those. Over the next couple of weeks as a new habit and see if it improves your sleep. All right. Number one, don't go to bed until you're sleepy. Sounds obvious, but if you're not sleeping and you try to go to bed, then. You may have trouble getting to sleep.

[00:06:21] So it's this vicious cycle. Simply wait until you are sleeping. Now there's other things we're going to talk about that can affect whether you're sleepy, like blue light, you know, doing too much activity right before bed, eating big meals, things like that, but don't go to bed. Tears, sleepy. Number two, having a ritual or routine can help you relax.

[00:06:44] This can help you prepare just like any other habit. It becomes a part of who you are for me. This is reading. I like to read. Maybe 20 minutes before I fall asleep, it helps me get to sleep. It sort of slows my mind down, even though it is reading, it's not as stimulating as for example, watching TV.

[00:07:05] Another technique is to take a warm bath as a bedtime routine or a warm shower instead of showering in the morning, maybe shower before you go to bed and maybe some sort of meditation routine, number three. Keep a consistent schedule get up at the same time every day, including weekends and holidays. I know this can be difficult.

[00:07:27] I, for one, like to get up very early on the weekdays that I work out and not as early on the days that I don't, but the spread is maybe only a half hour. And I think that. Good enough for most people just try not to get up at five in the morning on weekdays and then nine in the morning on weekends. Try to keep the same schedule.

[00:07:46] Number four, try to get a full night's sleep every night and avoid naps during the day. If possible. Now this one was interesting to me because I've also heard that taking maybe a 45 minute nap between say one and 3:00 PM could be helpful. To recovery, if you didn't get enough sleep the night before. And I think that still might be the case for some people, but the idea here is if you're trying to be consistent, get a full night's sleep every night so that you don't have to try to take a nap and definitely don't nap late in the day after 3:00 PM.

[00:08:23] Number five, use your bed for two activities and only two activities sleep. Intimacy, don't use them to watch TV, to work on your computer, to use your phone. And my only exception of this personally is I like to read. In the bed as I'm falling asleep versus outside the bed and then get into bed to me, it helps me wind down, but the idea here is stay off all the devices, anything stimulating, use your bed for what it's intended for and nothing more.

[00:08:56] Number six. Avoid caffeine, if possible. Now this is going to be very hard for us who lift. We like caffeine is a stimulant. So the exception to this is if you must use caffeine, avoid it after lunch avoided after say one or 2:00 PM because of the half-life of the calf. And getting it metabolized in your system, you should be fine by bedtime, but if you drink soda or coffee, any form of caffeine after two or three, especially around dinnertime or later, it can really disrupt your sleep.

[00:09:26] And by the way, I personally incorporated this habit maybe a month ago, I used to have a diet soda late in the afternoon, as I was getting a little bit tired from the Workday. And I stopped doing that. I switched to either seltzer, water, water, or caffeine free. Soda so that I stopped drinking caffeine around 2:00 PM and it did make a difference.

[00:09:47] I started having more restful sleep. Number seven, avoid alcohol, if possible, again, just like caffeine. It can disrupt your sleep. So if you must drink alcohol, then avoid drinking it really close to bed. This is not as restrictive as caffeine. You can still have a glass of wine or beer with your dinner to stone.

[00:10:07] Have it right before bed. Number eight. Don't smoke cigarettes or use nicotine ever. There's not much to say about this from a health perspective should be obvious by now we know better. Don't use it in fact, sleep as well as everything else that affects negatively. Number nine. Consider avoiding high intensity exercise right before bed, because it can increase your cortisol, which impairs sleep.

[00:10:36] Now high intensity exercise may be different than say a lifting session. 5:00 PM. So there are recommendations that if you have an issue with cortisol, shifting your workout from early in the morning, when your cortisol levels are high to the afternoon, when they're starting to come down is actually a good strategy for cortisol and for sleep.

[00:11:00] But this recommendation is to avoid high-intensity exercise right before bed. So I just want to be clear at the end of the day, though, if the only time you can exercise is close to. And you're still feel like you get adequate sleep. And the alternative is you wouldn't exercise at all. I'd rather you be consistent and do something that works for you and exercise when it makes sense.

[00:11:22] And then number 10 of the top 10 out of the full list of 25, make sure your bedroom is quiet, dark and cool. It says here, quote, unquote, similar to a. So there's a few things wrapped up in this one. This one suggestion, the quiet part of it just means you don't want to have honking horns, dogs, barking, car alarms, things like that, going off, not everyone can help.

[00:11:49] Where do they live? So considered that you might need earmuffs or earplugs to make it quiet. The dark as possible part is avoid. Light disrupting your sleep pattern of cortisol, especially blue light or big nightlights. I know in our bedroom, we have the computer router off in the corner that has some annoyingly, bright LEDs.

[00:12:11] So I covered them in tape. I also use orange. An orange light bulb in my nightstand light so that when I'm reading, I don't have any blue light. And then here's the kicker. This is a habit. I just started a few weeks ago. I wear a sleep mask. I know it sounds a little odd, but I suggest you try it. If you've got any light bleeding into your room and you can't use blackout curtains, for example, or let's say your spouse, doesn't like blackout curtains, try a very lightweight sleep mask.

[00:12:44] Covers your eyes and the area around your eyes, you get used to it pretty quickly, and you might find you get a more restful sleep that way. And then the third part of this number 10 suggestion is. Being on the cool side rather than the warm side. So this is temperature. And I understand if, if you've got a partner that she, and you may have different levels of what you consider cool and warm, you could always get special blankets or mats that contains change the temper.

[00:13:12] Or just make sure to set your thermostat to go low saves energy. Well, it saves energy in dirt, in the north, during the winter, I guess during the summer you can use fans, things like that. So just make sure it's on the cool side. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you'd be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media.

[00:13:33] Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again, an incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Moving on to the last 15 on this list, which are considered other tips and tricks for healthy sleep hygiene, we have number one, avoid blue or.

[00:14:00] Emitted from screens at least two hours before bed. So this would be your smartphone, your laptop monitors for a computer television, blue light suppresses melatonin, which you need to. Go to sleep. The worst thing you could do is be on your phone, text messaging, you browsing social media, playing games, using apps, all of this stuff, even watching TV right before bed and a two hour window might seem long, but this is where having an evening ritual to take that space can really help improve your sleep quality.

[00:14:36] Number two, get bright, natural. If possible the sun to wake you up. Now, the sun is ideal, but I get up at five 30 in the morning to work out. This time of year, the sun is starting to come up, but throughout the long dark winter, I actually use a smart bulb in my nightstand that starts to gradually Brighton to a normal sunlight type of bright white to coincide with my, the time I need to wake up.

[00:15:07] So the other suggestion here is eight, 10,000 Lux lamp to give you. Look, there are special lamps you could buy just for that purpose that having a built in alarm. Think about it. If you can't wake up to the sun and you wake up early, when it's dark, think about getting a special device that. Give you simulated sunlight, number three.

[00:15:27] And you probably have heard this one, many times before don't hit the snooze button and I'm guilty of this as well. I know I am. This, this is probably the next habit I need to break. Don't hit the snooze button. It doesn't improve your sleep quality to get the extra 10 minutes, especially if you do it over and over again, you might as well just get that extra time to sleep.

[00:15:46] And then. One trick that I've heard is just to put your alarm clock, your phone, whatever. On the other side of the room, forcing you to get out of bed to turn the darn thing off. Number four, if you have trouble waking up. So this is tied into number three, about the snooze button. If you have trouble, some people suggest using a Dawn simulator alarm clock, which is redundant with number two, I'm realizing now, but good to reiterate it.

[00:16:12] Number five, if you must use your computer at. Think about putting a color adjusting or blue light reducing software on it, or now here's the one I like where blue light blocking glasses. This is another habit I also recently incorporated. And I know it sounds like I'm doing a lot of these things. I did them over.

[00:16:33] I did them for a few weeks. Then I added something else that I added something else. I wear blue light blocking glasses, about two hours before I go to bed, I might wear it to watch TV. And then as I'm getting ready for bed, and then as I'm reading, I'm wearing those blue blocking glasses also on your computer.

[00:16:51] If you have, for example, a windows computer, you could turn on, I think it's called nightlight and you could do it earlier in the evening to get you ready. Your smartphone should have a night shift or similar feature. All of these tools can help you block out the blue light. Before we go to bed, number six, consider meditation some sort of relaxing mind based ritual.

[00:17:15] Now there's a mention in here of brainwave entrainment, such as binaural beats, and that's considered experimental in terms of helping you go to. I'm actually not sure what that is and I'm not going to look it up right now. Um, consider that a homework assignment. If you're interested, it's called brainwave entrainment.

[00:17:33] But anyway, the general recommendation here is meditation. Find some way to meditate. It could be helpful. Number seven, higher carbs, especially high-glycemic carbs at night can improve your sleep. And this is true. Sometimes people are in a low carb. They have trouble with their cortisol and adding your carbs helps break that pattern and can improve your sleep.

[00:17:55] Now they said also high protein, including trip to fan could help sleep. Whereas high fat intake at night can disrupt sleep. And this is all consistent with the nutrition airy advice. I tend to give people which is have a carbon protein meal or snack. If you're going to have something later. And limit the fats, a corollary to this is that if you don't get enough calories during the day, you may have also trouble sleeping at night.

[00:18:22] And this goes back to what I mentioned in the introduction that when you're in a caloric deficit trying to lose weight, and you've got that hunger and you're not eating as much, that also can cause you to have trouble sleeping. So this is where you might want to play around with the timing and shift some calories to right before.

[00:18:39] And it may be it's something as simple as a casein protein shake or a casing pudding mixture with almond milk. Number eight, topical or oral magnesium can help. If you are deficient by topical, they mean a salt bath or a topical mineral oil. And by oral, they mean a supplement. Now I also started taking magnesium recently, specifically magnesium.

[00:19:03] Glycinate. I think it's how it's pronounced, which is considered a highly bio available version of magnesium. And I take that with dinner because I've learned that it also can help you relax and get ready for bed, which then leads me to number nine, melatonin naturally occurring in foods, tart cherry juice, raspberries, goji, berries.

[00:19:28] Wow. Almonds tomatoes may improve sleep, but they recommend avoiding artificial melatonin supplements. Some people will say, there's no problem with those with taking melatonin. I don't do it myself, but I know it can work for some people. And there's always a prescription for individuals based on their unique circumstance, but melatonin, we know helps us sleep one way or the other.

[00:19:53] If you can get it from food, that's a good way to do it. Number 10, don't fall asleep to your. This kind of ties into the whole blue light and device thing, and that you shouldn't be watching TV in bed anyway, even if you're on the couch and it's late at night, don't just keep watching the TV mindlessly until you fall asleep.

[00:20:11] The sleep studies support that when you do this, you wake up multiple times during the night, and then this is juices, sleep quality. Number 11. Herbal supplements, which are not regulated, can cost side effects, which may impact your sleep. Let alone result in banned substance tests and failures for athletes.

[00:20:32] If they're on the prohibited list, but in general, just be aware of what you're taking and be aware if it could possibly impact your sleep. Number 12. Consider reducing your fluid intake before we go to bed. Just so you don't have to get up to go to the bathroom. This is a really important one. I like to drink throughout the day.

[00:20:49] I drink lots of water. Maybe I'll have some tea or diet soda. And sometimes I'm not thinking about when I'm drinking and I'll have a big glass of water at 8:30 PM. 9:00 PM. Well, for sure, given that I'm in my forties, now that will make me have to get up in the middle of the night one time, at least. So if you want to avoid that, if you want to have continuously through the night, stop drinking at a certain point that you know, works for you, as long as you're hydrated enough to prevent you from getting up in the.

[00:21:20] Okay, we're getting close to the end of the list here. Number 13, cooling your body temperature can help improve sleep. Now we talked about keeping the room cool already between 60 and 70 degrees, but keeping your hands and feet warm in the winter with socks or gloves can also help improve sleep. Number 14, they recommend checking your mattress.

[00:21:43] If your mattress is too old and, and the lifetime of mattress is supposed to be around 10 years. It may have allergens. Any allergens can disrupt your sleep, especially if you're particularly sensitive to allergens. So think about your mattress and hygiene in that, from that perspective, if it's clean, if it's been rotated, if it's too old, these could affect your sleep.

[00:22:01] And then the last item on the list. Number 15. Recovery from exercise, from training, isn't just about muscle repair. It's also about mental fatigue, reducing external stressors, and all of these things are tied in very closely to better quality. All right. That's all I have for you. I only have those 25 items to consider a lot of great stuff in there.

[00:22:29] A lot of great techniques, just to recap the things that I do personally, that have worked really well and are simple to. One is having a sleep mask to make it dark. Number two is to use blue blocking glasses. Number three is to avoid caffeine later in the day. Number four is to consider orange light bulbs in your bedroom.

[00:22:54] As you're getting ready for bed. Number five is to think about your supplementation. Something like magnesium. If you're deficient taking it close to bedtime could be. And number six, try not to use the snooze and think about an alarm that can wake you up similar to the sun or a time waking up with the sun.

[00:23:14] I hope these were helpful. I hope you can take at least one of these implemented right away, implement it to night. See how you fare over the next days and the coming few weeks, and then either jettison. And if it doesn't work. Or add something else and keep improving step by step. That's how we improve our sleep, improve our recovery, which translates to our nutrition.

[00:23:37] Our hormones are lifting our performance, everything holistically ties in to sleep. And that's why I call it the missing ingredient to nutrition and recovery.

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Ep 17: How to Get Stronger and Smarter in Less Time with Powerlifter Tyla Serro

I had the honor of hosting a very special guest, Tyle Serro, for the first ever interview on this podcast. Tyla is not only an engineering colleague of mine—we work for the same aerospace company—she finds time to train and compete as a raw powerlifter, placing second this March in the 2022 USPA Connecticut state championship in her weight class…and only missing first in a close tiebreaker against her training partner.

I invited her on the show because I think her story is very relatable to those of us who are working professionals with busy lives, maybe a full-time job and a family, who still want to find a way to get “big, strong, jacked, swole, ripped, fit, tone, lean, healthy” whatever term you want to use. Tyla juggles work, family, and the challenges of life using a sustainable approach to training and nutrition, so I wanted to pick her brain on how she makes it all work.

Related links:

• Tyla Serro on Instagram @tylaserro

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At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:28]Welcome to episode 17 of Wits & Weights. Today, I have the honor of hosting a very special guest Tyla Serro for the first ever interview on this podcast. Tyla is not only an engineering colleague of mine. We worked for the same aerospace company. She finds time to train and compete as a raw power lifter.

[00:00:50] Placing second, this March in the 2022 USPA Connecticut state championship in her weight class. And she only missed coming in first by a close tiebreaker against their training. I invited her on the show because I think her story is very relatable to those of us who are working professionals with busy lives, maybe a full-time job and a family who still want to find a way to get big, strong, jacked, ripped, fit, tone, lean, healthy, whatever term you want to use.

[00:01:16] Tyla juggles work family and the challenges of life using a sustainable approach to training and nutrition. So I wanted to pick her brain and how she makes it all work Tyla. Sarah, thanks for joining me on the show.

[00:01:28] Tyla Serro: Thank you, Phillip. It's an honor to be your first guest.

[00:01:31] Philip Pape: Absolutely. I'm really excited. I know we've talked a lot recently about training nutrition, um, excitement, frustration, all these things.

[00:01:40] I just want you to start off by telling us your story, you know, how did you get into lifting?

[00:01:46] Tyla Serro: Sure. So, as Phillip mentioned, um, I worked for the same company that he does. And since about March of 2020, we've been working with. And, um, I'm officially not going back into the office, probably ever. I opted to be completely remote.

[00:02:02] And for me personally, that has been a huge game changer life hack, in my opinion. Um, I'm not totally against going into the office if I absolutely need to. I can, but now, um, I became a parent since they started the pandemic too. So just having that. Almost two hours back and commuting time has really been huge in my ability to do all the things that Phillip just mentioned.

[00:02:29] So

[00:02:30] Philip Pape: that makes a huge difference. Doesn't it? All that time. Yeah.

[00:02:32] Tyla Serro: Yeah. But other than that, um, I am a wife, I'm a military spouse. My husband is actually in the air national guard and he works at Pratt and Whitney, which is a sister company to the company that Philip and I work for. And he actually just got home from a depression.

[00:02:48] He's we're both into health, wellness, fitness, if you will, but he's a runner and actually training for the Marine Corps marathon in DC. So I'm not into that

[00:03:02] Philip Pape: and different sides of the spectrum. Right? All fitness though.

[00:03:06] Tyla Serro: I'd much rather strength train. But, um, other than that, you know, those are probably the least interesting things about me.

[00:03:13] I think the most interesting thing about me is that I volunteer with, uh, Here in Connecticut called protectors of animals. And I've been with them since 2018. I work with the rescue dogs. Uh, they work with, they have cats as well, and I volunteer about two hours every week, uh, walking them, feeding them, cleaning, kettles, and doing that sort of thing.

[00:03:33] And that's kind of my passion other than lifting. Oh, that's that's

[00:03:37] Philip Pape: awesome. Yeah. We have a couple dogs. One of them is getting up there in age and yeah, they're, they're part of the family. So yes. Awesome. So a lot has happened during the pandemic in the last few years. It sounds like your, your family situation changed.

[00:03:51] Your husband, went on deployment and came back. Um, I've read a lot of your Insta posts about the, your powerlifting journey. You know, what, what got you into that? I mean, how, how did you get to that point here, knowing that you're a busy professional, like I am, and you know, there's only so much time for other.

[00:04:07] Tyla Serro: Sure. So I started competing in the sport of powerlifting in 2016. So it's been about six years that I've been competing. And what really got me into that was before then I had been lifting, you know, at like planet fitness, commercial type gyms. I did start work, um, working out at a CrossFit gym around 2013.

[00:04:28] That didn't last very long. I got hurt pretty soon into that doing like overhead snatches and things. I did something to my shoulder and was like, I just,

[00:04:39] Philip Pape: it sounds like a whole layer storage.

[00:04:42] Tyla Serro: Yeah. Everybody's intro to CrossFit, but I mean, I, I could go down a tangent on that, but, um, and so I then after that, I just, I wasn't, I was starting college and, you know, I wanted to look good and that was kind of my primary reason for working out, but I was definitely not doing the right things.

[00:04:59] You know, I was doing way too much cardio, not eating. Binge drinking and doing all sorts of things that were probably negating most of the stuff that I was doing inside of the gym. So I've been working out, I would say consistently since around 2013. Um, however, in 20 16, 1 of my best friends, who's actually my nutrition coach right now.

[00:05:21] She did her very first powerlifting meet, um, in Rhode Island and invited me to go be a second. And I went, I had no idea what to expect. I kind of had that stereotypical idea of what a powerlifter was or looked like as like somebody commits kind of fat kind of fit. Um, You know, maybe like Sumo wrestler. I didn't, I didn't really.

[00:05:45] Yeah. You know, I was like, that's not really for girls, is it? But whatever I went and I was amazed and an off by watching, you know, 63 kilogram girls. Lifting pulling 400 plus pounds squatting 300 plus pounds benching close to 200. And I literally was like, wow, can I be that strong? I want to be that strong.

[00:06:09] That's so cool. So right around that point, 2016, I was wrapping up my undergrad. I was getting ready to start graduate school and I started tranq training at, um, a local gym called lightning fitness. It's in Southwest. Um, it's a phenomenal, phenomenal facility. Uh, they keep the owner actually just bought a bigger space and there they're doing so much more than what it was back then.

[00:06:35] And that was really kind of like the PivotTable pit pit of.

[00:06:41] Philip Pape: Pivotal target

[00:06:44] Tyla Serro: point in my life where I really started to training kind of became a big part of my life. A lot of the relationships that I have today, friendships, um, stem from that gym and from the people that I met there. And so, yeah, it's been about six years that I, that I started powerlifting.

[00:07:00] I did my first competition. Three months into actually working with. So my very first coach was actually the owner of that gym. Um, Matt mills, and about three months into training with him. I did my first competition in, uh, USA PL down at Gleason's performance gym in Derby, Connecticut. And I fell in love.

[00:07:21] It was, it was so much fun.

[00:07:22] Philip Pape: So you jumped right in. So I want to, I want to take a step back. You, you mentioned how you started with CrossFit, your original goal was aesthetics and getting fit, getting, you know, um, you had some injuries, you maybe didn't see the results you wanted and eventually you found strength training and what it, what it sounds like to me at least is you have a passion for the training itself.

[00:07:42] Maybe the process, maybe the competition and getting strong, which is a very. Goal or, you know, immediate goal than aesthetics, even though it kind of gets you that result. Well, would

[00:07:52] Tyla Serro: you say? Yeah. And that's the interesting thing because you know, when you're, I think not even I was going to say a young person, but I think most people want to look good and.

[00:08:03] Um, a lot of times you'll hear people say like, I'm exercising, I'm eating right. I'm doing all these things. And do you know, I actually had a coworker recently reach out to me and say, Hey, I know, you know, a lot about like exercising. Um, this is what I'm doing. Like, do you think I should be doing more core workouts?

[00:08:18] And I, you know, that's the biggest thing is people will ask about like crunches and sit ups for abs. And I'm like, it sounds so corny, but you know, I remember hearing this years ago, like abs are made in the kitchen. And, uh, that really stuck with me. And it's you see it through the work that you put in that if you do eat well, 80% of the time, um, you know, more, if you can eat better more of the time.

[00:08:45] Great. You know, if that can just be like a habitual thing that you do, you just learn to like eating well, you're going to see body composition changes and the aesthetics will kind of come along. The, uh, strength training, if you will. So it's kind of, you get the best of both worlds. You get to be strong and you get to look good.

[00:09:04] Philip Pape: And I liked that you mentioned nutrition because you can't have one without the other, unless you want to be an old school powerlifting look right. Want to get bigger. Um, but yeah, you mentioned, uh, nutrition and you also mentioned core work and all of these things. I bet you're getting your squat up to a new PR help your stabilizer muscles as well, or.

[00:09:24] Tyla Serro: Yeah, definitely. So I'm going into core stuff. So. I have baby about two years ago. And actually during my pregnancy, I started to notice that my core was changing quite a bit, which is a total normal thing that happens during pregnancy. Um, your abs literally have to separate in order to make room for growing baby, but it really freaked me out.

[00:09:47] Um, I would be doing certain movements and exercises and I would just see this dome slash cone. They call it doning and combing, um, where you get this kind of like little mountain Ridge that kind of jumps out in between your. And, you know, if, if you're in tune with your body and you're paying attention and you see something like that, it looks really freaky.

[00:10:07] And, uh, I ended up going to work with a pelvic floor physical therapist, and that was really incredible, um, for, for a few reasons that that physical therapist taught me how to actually breathe and brace into those like deep transverse abdominal muscles that most people cannot properly. And even as like somebody who had been lifting for years at that point, doing a very, very simple exercise to try to get those, um, muscles engaged was really, really hard.

[00:10:43] Um, so I think that when you learn how to breathe right, and brace, right? Like you said, you know, my, my squat going up, I've noticed a huge change in the way that I squat and deadlift. And I can tell too, after I do a live. If my bracing was just off just a little bit, that lift is not going to move as easily if I engage properly.

[00:11:04] Philip Pape: So, and that's with a belt without a belt.

[00:11:08] Tyla Serro: Um, I like wearing a belt when I get past like an RPE seven or eight, or it depends too on reps. So if I'm doing more than like three reps, I prefer a belt because it's easier for me to feel myself bracing and I, and I don't think that. The way that I use my belt is I can feel it's at an actual physical barrier that I can feel my belly breathing out against and making that contact with the belt.

[00:11:38] So that way I know I'm engaged. Does it actually support my back or do anything like that to help me be stronger? No, I don't think so. Um, It maybe gives lifters a little bit of like a placebo effect, thinking like this is keeping me safe, but again, if you're, if you're bracing your core correctly, You don't really need a belt.

[00:12:01] Philip Pape: Yeah, no, I totally agree with everything you said, like, you know, if I'm working in the 65 or 75% range, I'm not going to wear a belt, but as I warm up to doubles, triple singles in that range, you right as it gets heavier, it helps with the inter abdominal pressure and you shouldn't rely on it for, you know, preventing an injury.

[00:12:18] Like I had back surgery last year and I know that breathing. It helps, but you don't rely on it to have bad form, you know? Um, so that's awesome. Uh, so we talked about you getting into powerlifting, your coach, uh, very soon after starting got you to compete. Was that hard to do, um, or did you jump at the chance?

[00:12:42] Tyla Serro: Um, so I was kind of cocky or arrogant, I guess when I first started my lifting career, I remember thinking. You know, oh, I just pulled three 15 for like the first time these are new beginnings. I'm going to be pulling 406 months. And, uh, I remember my first meet. So the thing with powerlifting too is you should, if you're training for a meet, you really should train with the committee.

[00:13:07] I don't know how much you want me to talk about

[00:13:08] Philip Pape: that, but I love to hear, because this is something I don't know much about. And I think the listeners would be fascinated with.

[00:13:14] Tyla Serro: Okay. So with powerlifting and with any sport, right? There's always rules. And within the different federations in powerlifting, there are different rules as well.

[00:13:24] So I've competed in USA, PL and USP. They have very similar rules at their, at the four, but they do have different rules as well. So what I'll be talking about is mostly as it relates to USDA, because that's what I'm most familiar with in that the last three or four competitions that I've done have been USPA.

[00:13:44] So in the sport of powerlifting, there are three main lists that you are tested or that you could be in, which is squat bench and deadlift. You have three attempts for each lift. So a total of nine lifts for the day. And there are three judges, one that sits darkly in front of you and two to the side. So often you'll hear like, um, something like three white lights and that's what you're going for.

[00:14:06] So the judges will all bass, you know, they're held to a standard, they have to be like either state qualified, nationally qualified judges. They have to sit through a test, um, in order to qualify to be a judge. And then they actually have to sit for a certain number of meats as. In order to be like, basically pass a standard that they're all judging to the same standard.

[00:14:27] And I make a point of that because different federations don't have standards like that. So if you go compete in, um, I don't, I don't want to throw shade, but I'm kind of going to like an RPS meat or something like that. I'm not really sure what their standards are for picking judges and stuff like that, but they're kind of notorious for people that squat really high or yeah.

[00:14:50] You know, like you'll just see the white light somebody, and then the next person will go and you'll be like what that call made no sense. So, yeah. That's why I prefer. Especially for new lifters. I think it's better to compete in like a USPA or USA, PL Federation they're, um, USA. PL is drug tested. USPA has tested and on tested competitions.

[00:15:15] Um, but they're both held, held, like I said, really high standards, so that that's important, you know? Um, so as I was saying, there's three judges and your goal is ultimately to get two out of the three judges to give you a white light, which means you pass a lit. Um, you have to so say, so you start with SWOT and if you fail your squat on your first attempt, you have to retake that attempt again.

[00:15:39] If you feel it a second time, you get one last chance to take that squat. And if you fail it a third time, this is called something, um, bombing out. You don't want to bomb out because then depending on the size of the meat, if it's a small local meat, they may still allow you to compete for the day, but it's not going to counter.

[00:15:58] Got it.

[00:15:58] Philip Pape: And it just, it ruins your total, of course. Yeah.

[00:16:02] Tyla Serro: Like you, you could potentially, you know, go have, you could have a really good day with bench and deadlift, but it doesn't actually count. Sure. You're not going to set any records or anything like that. Um, so you, you want to be conservative with at least your first attempt when you pick it, it should be something that you could do.

[00:16:17] You know, if you have a cold or flu, you're not feeling well, you're really confident you're going to go under that bar and you're going to be able to hit that.

[00:16:25] Philip Pape: Got you. So you're, you're not, you're not going to hit, go for your all time PR on the first, first

[00:16:28] Tyla Serro: lift. No, probably not a good idea. Um, so yeah, so that's, that's kind of how the day looks.

[00:16:36] And then there are things called lights, which are based on weight class usually. So there'll usually be a flight, a B, C, um, and depending on it, the meat is split up into like one large meat for the day. Sometimes, if it's a, they'll split it into two, which I prefer meats that are held on two days. Usually they'll have like the females on one day and the males on the other day.

[00:16:56] And that makes for a shorter day because otherwise, you know, like, you'll go squat, like meats typically start around 9:00 AM. I'm in one of the first classes because I'm a relatively small female and all squat and be done by like 10 squatting. And I'm not going to bench probably until like noon. And I'm not going to devil it until two or 3:00 PM.

[00:17:18] So it's a long day

[00:17:21] Philip Pape: on a rest between lifts. Okay.

[00:17:23] Tyla Serro: Yeah, a lot of, a lot of, so you have to be smart too with like how you warm up and how, you know, how quickly you do that. But ideally you have a coach and the handler, if your coach is not also your handler, um, and that handler should be somebody who can help you throughout the, literally handle you throughout your day to make sure that you're staying hydrated, you're eating.

[00:17:45] Um, you're not just sitting there eating candy, right? That was something that I did a lot during my first meet, because I remember going to that meet where I watched my friend compete and seeing all these powerlifters, eating donuts and sour patch kids, and like a bananas. Kind of crap food all day long.

[00:18:03] So I thought that's just what you do. That's what powerlifters do on, on the day of a meat. Yeah. But then as, as it went on and I competed more, um, I noticed that stuff would, is not something that I eat on a regular basis. And, you know, I don't have stomach issues per se, but if like, I, my nerves are going and then I'm eating something that I'm not used to eating.

[00:18:23] The last thing you want to have to be doing on the day of a meet is be running to the bathroom. That's not any fun. Yeah, definitely. Um, I would say for people who are just getting started into powerlifting, just pick a local meat, you know, if it's in the state that you live in, that's great. There's no point in traveling really far, um, for your first meet.

[00:18:45] It's that traveling in and of itself is stressful and you want to limit as many things as you can to. Have a good day. Yeah.

[00:18:55] Philip Pape: That makes sense. And it's cost last. You don't have to travel. Um, I, you mentioned powerlifting or competing in general can be intimidating for some people. It's not something I've ever considered, to be honest.

[00:19:06] Um, ma maybe in the masters class, it'd be a good thing to consider. But, um, you talked about at the beginning, you, you thought you were being a little arrogant about your lifts and so what happened there?

[00:19:18] Tyla Serro: Yeah. So. I actually had wrote down. I can find it in my notes, my first, uh, meet. So my first meet was in September of 2016.

[00:19:28] Like I said, I competed in USA, APL. I went six for nine for the day, which isn't great. Um, I think I had jumped some commands, so I remember hitting my third squat and I swatted it perfectly. But that's one of the things too, that I, I forgot. I neglected to mention earlier when I was talking about how powerlifting is set up, um, you're given commands.

[00:19:50] So for the first slip SWAT, there is, um, two commands and you'll on rack. The bar you have a minute to, so as soon as you get on, they'll say platform ready. The lifter walks out onto the platform. You have a minute to do the lift, which a lot. That's another thing too, that a lot of new lifters or new computers will think of they're rushing, rushing, rushing, and they, they go fast.

[00:20:12] A minute, seems like a short amount of time, but if you're ready, you're standing there. You're chopped up. You're ready to go. Your lift is going to take about 10 seconds. Take your time, take a breath, take a breath, set up. Try to tune all Alvin, all the noise. Don't look at the spectators. Focus on like that head judge.

[00:20:30] Cause he's going to have his hand up like this and he's going to say squat, and he's going to his hand is going to come down. You're going to squat. You're going to stand up and then you're gonna to. For the rack command. And that is something that a lot of new lifters don't do, especially if they nail the lift because they're excited, they're like, yes.

[00:20:49] And then they rack it too soon. And then you just, you got three red lights because you didn't wait for a command. Okay.

[00:20:55] Philip Pape: Now, now explain that to me. Cause I always wondered that command as well as the bench pause at the bottom, like I always wondered about why, why, why do they exist?

[00:21:04] Tyla Serro: Um, it's a country. It's one of, so don't quote me, right?

[00:21:07] I'm not a, I'm not a USPA judge, but it's a control thing for one. So I know for bench, right? The point of the, so with bench that's one of the more technical lifts, there's three commands. So they'll say start you'll unrack the, the bench or the bar and you'll. You'll bring the bar down and you want to bring that bar down, slow and control, the more slow and controlled that you bring that bar down the faster you're going to get a, um, an up command, um, or press command, I should say.

[00:21:37] So if you bring that bar down sloppily, and it's kind of like coming down and you're, you have no control over that bar. They're going to, what the judges are looking for is no movement in the barbell. That's so that's why those commands exist. And I think it's another thing that has to do with standards, right?

[00:21:54] You have to squat to a certain depth, which is like breaking parallel with bench, your butt. Can't come up off the bench, um, USP your head, 10 chemicals off the bench. USA cannot your feet. They can be up like you can be up on your toes. Some people I lift that way. Other people have their heels completely flat, but your feet cannot move.

[00:22:15] They cannot slide or anything like that. Or it can actually lift up off the floor. And it's just, in my opinion, it's a way to kind of. Make it, so that way there is a standard across the sport. That way everybody's kind of lifting to the same. It's hard. It's hard to grade something or judge something when you don't have like standards, I guess, you know, so deadlift is the easiest one.

[00:22:40] You, you go out there and you pull that bar and then they just say down and that's it. So a lot of things, a lot of times new lifters will, um, they'll go out there and no. They think like you're going to get a command to say, like start or something, but you don't. So it'll be like this awkward thing where like the judges aren't allowed to talk to the lift and then I'd be like, okay, go now.

[00:23:00] You know? So sometimes it's funny. You'll see, like when it's somebody that's like 60 years old and it's their first meet and they're super excited and it's a local meat to most, you know, like, um, a friend of mine is actually the meat director for USDA. They're not gonna take it that seriously. Like somebody is like, okay, you know, you just.

[00:23:18] It's not a big deal. Um, but if you're competing at like the national level or even higher than that, it's, you're not going to get that leeway. I guess that was another thing too. And I was talking about being arrogant. I remember doing my first meet and I had a few friends who had competed at the national level and I was like, oh, I'm going to go to nationals next.

[00:23:41] Philip Pape: You got to start somewhere. I mean, I like the ambition, right. You know, to push yourself. Um, I mean, let's, let's so let's talk numbers. You made a lot of progress over the years, especially even in the last few years I saw, you know, the excitement of getting back into it with your training partner. I mean, Y, you know, sharing your PRS or even just the process you went through to get to this point.

[00:24:02] Tyla Serro: So my very first meet, I totaled 650 pounds. I think I squatted about 2 25. Maybe I bench around 115 pounds and I dead lifted. I want to say like three 15 and I was, I was stoked to get an over 300 pound dead lift. I thought that was

[00:24:17] Philip Pape: so cool. Awesome. That's

[00:24:19] Tyla Serro: great. Yup. And then my second knee. A little less than a year later in may of 2017, I totaled 705 and a half pounds, which that's a decent jump.

[00:24:33] Right. I think that's probably no looking at it to add anything more than like, you know, At 50 pounds plus to your total,

[00:24:45] Philip Pape: right? Yeah.

[00:24:46] Tyla Serro: Yeah. Yeah. The following me I did was in August of 2018. So about a year later and I totaled seven 16, so there wasn't much progress there. That was only about 10 pounds that I added to my total.

[00:24:58] I did another meet the following spring in April of 2019, and I totaled 7 43 0.4. So, I mean, I'm still making progress. Every meet. My total was getting better. Which is something that I didn't actually even realize until I started preparing for this conversation, actually. So I was, I was proud of myself. I gave myself a little pat on the back for seeing that like, Hey, you know what, it doesn't, it doesn't always feel like you're going in a smooth line, right.

[00:25:28] With lifting. But overall, my, my journey with looking at it has been. '

[00:25:34] Philip Pape: cause in, in the moment you feel like you're, you're not quite where you want to be, but relative to the last time, if you're still getting stronger and that's the point, right? That's the point.

[00:25:41] Tyla Serro: Yeah, for sure. And, um, so the fifth meet that I did was in November of 2021.

[00:25:46] So can't believe that was already, almost like six months ago. I totaled over 800 pounds. That was a huge goal for me. I totaled 804.7 pounds. And I have to say that was probably the best meat of my life. For, for a bunch of reasons, there was a lot going on at that time. I, my husband was deployed. My kid had been sick.

[00:26:09] Like non-stop, I know you have children to fill up. And it's probably been awhile since they've been in daycare. But my goodness, like, you know, at that point I wasn't even worried about COVID. It was just like hand foot, mouth disease, stomach bug. It was so bad. And an I had gotten sick right before the MI.

[00:26:29] Wasn't good, but I ended up going nine for nine that day, which was, uh, that was the first I had never, I had never hit all of my attempts on all of my, uh, lifts. I squatted, um, 303 that day and it, it blew. And, uh, I could have cried, you know, for me to squat over 300 pounds that took six, six years for me to get to that point.

[00:26:52] So that was a really good day for me. And. Uh, my friend, my training partner was going to compete in March cause she had actually broke her foot that fall and it kind of threw things off because initially she was going to compete with me in that meet as well. Um, she didn't end up competing, but I still did.

[00:27:11] And despite all of the crazy stress that I had going on in my life, I had a great day. So I was really stoked about. And then the most recent meet that I did, I came in first to, at that meet. Awesome.

[00:27:23] Philip Pape: That was good.

[00:27:25] Tyla Serro: But there may have only been, I think there were only three people, two or three. I'll have to look at that.

[00:27:31] So there, there may have only been two people in the meat and I came in first, which whatever, but whatever still got the first place that was cool. My most recent meet was in March of this year and I told them 8 21 0.2. I did not squat over 300 pounds like I did in November. But I added about 10 pounds to my bench.

[00:27:52] So I benched 1 75 point something, which was really awesome. Um, I think for a lot of, I don't know about men, but for females, bench is probably one of the harder lifts to like see, go up and

[00:28:08] Philip Pape: pretty quickly on

[00:28:08] Tyla Serro: that one. Yeah. Like, you know, it's, it's pretty hard to make big. Achievements there, like usually a five pound PR couple pound PRS is huge.

[00:28:18] Whereas squat and deadlift, I feel that there's a little bit more room for bigger, bigger PRS. So for me to, for me to bench 1 75, like that was, and it wasn't, it wasn't super slow either. I felt like I saw more gas in the tank, which was pretty awesome to think that, you know, back in 2016, when I went to see my friend compete and I was watching female lifters about the same size as me benching close to 200 pounds.

[00:28:43] And me thinking, oh, that's going to be me next year. And then me a few years into Powelton being like, I am never going to bend over 150 pounds to now benching over 150 pounds. That's it's, it's a really, it's really cool to, to see that happen. And then deadlift

[00:28:58] Philip Pape: it. Was that something you, you specifically focused on that lift, uh, leading up to that, or just kind of got lucky and pushed it up more than the others?

[00:29:07] Tyla Serro: No. Um, I will have to credit that to having a really awesome coach. Uh, I think I'm benching more or doing more arm or upper body, like, uh, variations of benching, I think is important. Like don't just binge once, once a week or overhead pressing. And I know you're a big fan of that. That's huge too. Like if you can overhead press a lot, you could probably have a pretty big bench.

[00:29:34] So. Yeah, bench. That was probably, I don't know. It's hard to say between bench and deadlift. Cause devils has been a lift that I have struggled on for ever. And I'm like you not as severe, I've definitely have not had back surgery or anything like that, but I have had back pain on and off. Ever since I started trait training, like I can remember, you know, you you'll pull your back doing something or you might not feel it when it happens and then you go home and you're like, okay.

[00:30:03] Yeah, this isn't good. And then you lay down in bed and you're like, I can't get up. You can't walk. And it's just that like crippling feeling of pain and I've gone to PT and chiropractor. After a couple of weeks, it starts to get better. And I, and I still don't know whether or not that was because was it the dry needling?

[00:30:21] Was it all the PT was at the chiropractor or was it this, or was it just time? Right, like sometimes time just, it just takes time for you to heal a strain, muscle strain or something like that. But, um, hurting my back a couple of times, it made me kind of afraid to do. Um, I was so especially, so I pulled conventional for the longest time and I tend to pull out of position more so on conventional, you know, my back will round like a cat as I'm pulling, which you don't want that to happen.

[00:30:56] I mean, you, you wait, you want to

[00:30:58] Philip Pape: set you back. So some, some elite lifters get away with, you know, odd form and they develop and adapt to it over time. But yeah, generally you don't want to do. Right.

[00:31:08] Tyla Serro: Right. And that's the thing too, you know, like form is, is important. I think, I, I believe that it is. It may not be the only thing that keeps you from getting injured, but it's definitely going to minimize, minimize that.

[00:31:21] And it is a lot, a lot of weight too, you know, it's, it's a lot of weight.

[00:31:24] Philip Pape: Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you'd be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.

[00:31:40] And we can talk about what you found. And how I can improve again, an incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode.

[00:31:49] Tyla Serro: So I was afraid to like lift over 300 pounds for a long time and I would constantly sandbag deadlifts. Like I would just not put in a lot of effort because I don't want to push it.

[00:32:00] I don't want to. Yeah. But I'm at that meat. So the meat that I just did with my friend, Sam, it's funny because the whole day, right? Like, so. I just went squats, just weren't feeling good, but, um, I squatted 2 97 on my second attempt and salmon salmon, my, uh, our coach and everybody was like, you know, you squatted three or three at your last meat, go for 3 0 8.

[00:32:24] I kinda knew it wasn't there that day, but I was already at three a week. How did I have chosen 3 0 3? What I've gotten it I'm honestly not sure. I, I don't think so. 2 97 did not move that well. Um, But I ended up failing that third attempt. So I was calculating, right? Like, so I knew Sam had her, she got all three of her lifts in squat.

[00:32:45] She squat around 2 75. So then when bench came, I was doing the math in my head because as much as like, you know, I'm happy for my friend and I. The whole point of competing is you want to win? Why can't you don't want to win? Right. So I'm in my head thinking like, okay, what do I have to hit on bench? What do I have to hit on deadlift to get a first place here?

[00:33:07] And so, um, uh, I had failed my third attempt, so I knew I had like 10 pounds on the squat. And then for bench, um, we, we took the same attempts for bench or benches, very, very close, and she failed her third attempt at 1 75. So she just. 1 65 for bench, but her deadlift has like 20 plus pounds on mine. Okay. So I hit my third attempt in bench 1 75.

[00:33:31] So then I had, I had her in the squat and the bench by squat by like 10 pounds bench by 10 pounds. But I knew when deadlines were coming, I'm like, she's got like 20 to 25 pounds on by the same

[00:33:42] Philip Pape: amount. Yeah. You

[00:33:43] Tyla Serro: know, so in my head, I'm thinking like this is so close and I was so happy for Sam to like, like I said, we're training partners.

[00:33:52] It's friendly competition. So we go for Douglas and like her third devil's attempt was amazing. Like I was, I was as excited for her on that third attempt that I was for myself on my third attempt. I can't remember what she pulled, I think around like 3 70, 3, 69 or something like that, which is, is huge.

[00:34:11] And, uh, I had pulled 3 36 at my knee in November. Which was a PR by a couple of pounds. And, uh, I went for it on my third attempt, you know, I was like, whatever, I'm just going to go for it because if I don't hit this, I'm definitely not going to get first place. I went for 3 47 0.2, I think. I don't know what the

[00:34:31] Philip Pape: 10 pound PR you're saying.

[00:34:33] Tyla Serro: Yeah, 3, 3 36 in November 3 47. Yeah. 11 point something pounds. Um, and I pulled and I pulled and I pulled and I waited for that down command and I got it. And then I. And the lights were actually broken for my third attempt. So they have little buttons that they press for the red and white license. And in my, in the video, you can see me like, look, I look like you're crazy person.

[00:34:54] Cause I'm like, where's the light? Where are the lights? And, uh, they had papers. So they, everybody, the judges held up like a white sheet of paper and I was like,

[00:35:04] Philip Pape: I got three. And then you thought, okay, I won right.

[00:35:08] Tyla Serro: Well, I don't know. I didn't talk about the other Sam at that point. I had not, I was not convinced that I had won the meat or out totaled my friend, Sam, uh, because I have not talked about the other Sam who was competing in our weight class that day.

[00:35:21] So there was another Sam in our weight class and she, I think that might've been her first meet. She's definitely, she's a new lifter, but she's strong as hell. Um, she has phenomenal, dead lifting. Her squat and bench. Isn't that great. But most lifters aren't when they first start. And I think that if she sticks with the sport, she's going to be a national lever level athlete, like most likely, um, she pulled, she outpolled Sam and I, and like I said, she's been lumping for like six months, I think.

[00:35:53] I'm not sure. Um, but yeah, she was, she was really strong. So Sam and I out total, Sam R and I out totaled Sam. Um, however, Sam L polled significantly more than us, and she's younger than us too. She's still in college. So, um, she's got a lot of, a lot of years to get better and to get stronger. And I, I think she absolutely will.

[00:36:16] So I, that whole, so then after the meet, right, like I was saying, it's a long day after we got done competing. Because there were two sessions in one day, the whole meat day goes till about seven or eight o'clock, which kind of stinks. Like you're stuck there for a long time. Um, my husband and son did come down to, I think they saw like some of my bench and deadlift, but like I have a toddler and that's, he likes to be running and not in a gym, like.

[00:36:42] Cooped up. And it's not really something that's super fun for my husband. He said they weren't going to stick around until like, you know, metals were being handed out and stuff like that. And I wasn't sure that I was going to stick around to metal suit because if I'm not placing, I don't really care. Um, and it, it just takes too long, you know, to, to be there from you're there from 8:00 AM to like 8:00 PM.

[00:37:01] It's a long day. But, uh, I was, so me, Sam RN, Sam Al, we were all very friendly. And that's another thing that I love about the sport of powerlifting too, is most people aren't for lack of better word, like Dick's like most people are really kind and helpful and want to help you. Right. So if you're warming up and there's one, um, so at this path neatly used a squat bar, which has knurling all across it versus like a power bar that has knurling in the middle of knurling on the side.

[00:37:32] I prefer a power bar, just because that's what I've used for the last 10 plus years. So I know exactly where my hands go

[00:37:40] Philip Pape: comfortable.

[00:37:43] Tyla Serro: Absolutely. And you know, Sam are my training partner and I had been training on a squat bar for the last, the whole entire meat prep. But I still, when I walk up to that bar, I'm like, where the heck do I put my pinky?

[00:37:55] You need to like break out a friggin ruler and measure it because it's just, it throws. So I'm like I was saying though, like in the sport of powerlifting, I have found that most people are very kind and helpful and friendly and I have a pretty outgoing personality too. So when I'm at a meet, I'll just walk up to someone and be like, Hey, I really like your singlet.

[00:38:14] Where'd you get it? Just to start conversation and kind of have that icebreaker and like, let people know, like, yes, it is a competition, but we're all here to first and foremost have fun. And that that's been something that I've learned too over the years is that. Don't take yourself so seriously, if you do, if you walk into that meat and you've got your headphones on and you're like, you know, screw everybody.

[00:38:35] I'm just here to like crush PRS. If you fail a lift and you're in that mindset of like, oh, angry powerlifter, you're probably gonna get like down on yourself and it's just going to spiral. Yeah. It's going

[00:38:49] Philip Pape: to be devastating. Stay friendly, enjoy the community. It sounds like a great community. Um, and. And you've been doing it now for, like you said, six years, right?

[00:39:00] Um, you talked, so you talked about your training partner, Sam, you guys have like a friendly competition, so to speak and you also push each other. It looks like in training. I mean, what, what does your training look like? Um, and maybe talk about what it's like to have a training partner, what, you know, advice for some people listening as to how that works.

[00:39:16] Tyla Serro: Yeah. So I never had a training partner up until about the end of 2020, right. Um, I had powerlifting coaches who did my prescribed my training. And then I would, this was before I had a child. And, you know, that takes up a lot of my time now. But before then I would go to the gym and I would spend about three hours a day, maybe four or five, six days a week at the gym.

[00:39:41] Was I training for three hours? Absolutely not. I was probably training for an hour and a half, maybe two max, but it was a big social thing for me. So instead of like going to a bar or something like. That's what I did. And like I said, a lot of my close friends now are still people that, um, train at lightening fitness, but it just wasn't conducive for my life at that point anymore to train like that.

[00:40:03] And even like I had said,

[00:40:05] Philip Pape: because of how much time

[00:40:06] Tyla Serro: it took. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and just, it just, wasn't something that I was really super interested in. Um, I was breastfeeding, which that's a whole other thing too. Like I just, I didn't like to be away from my baby for that long. I didn't want to have to like bring a pump or anything like that.

[00:40:20] It was just too much. The thought was just very overwhelming and COVID was still, that was kind of the height of COVID as well. So the gym had just opened back up and I was not comfortable. I had a newborn baby vaccines were not a thing yet. It just wasn't comfortable being around a bunch of mass close people at the gym because.

[00:40:40] Totally understandable.

[00:40:43] Philip Pape: Yeah. You've got a baby at home. Like I understand. So,

[00:40:45] Tyla Serro: um, yeah, I, uh, I was kind of in this like depressed, maybe state and in the end of 2020, I, I stopped lifting. So if I back up a little bit to my pregnancy, when I noticed the whole diastasis recti thing going on, the coach that I had at the time was not very receptive.

[00:41:07] And I don't know how much experience he had with coaching pregnant. Well, I knew that that was a niche that other people, other coaches had more experience with. So I decided to

[00:41:16] Philip Pape: do this is the abdominal issue you talked about. Okay. Okay. Just to clarify for, yeah. And I can't, I can't relate,

[00:41:24] Tyla Serro: but, um, I had, I had read up on it that there were certain ways to breathe and my physical therapist who was like, absolutely no, I'm back.

[00:41:33] Is it called? Like. About valgus breathing. When you basically, when you do a squat or a w hold your breath. Yeah, that's it? Yup. Um, she was like, don't do that. Like imagine like your, your ad dominal area as a canister. And when you do salvo maneuver. You're putting so much pressure on like your pelvic floor and like there's already a baby growing there and you don't want to add all of that pressure because what happens when a pressure there's too much pressure it's Thanksgiving.

[00:42:03] Interesting.

[00:42:05] Philip Pape: Okay. So you're being advised not to do that because of your unique situation.

[00:42:09] Tyla Serro: Well, just, she just said during pregnancy, in general, not a good idea to breathe, breathe like that.

[00:42:17] Philip Pape: Got

[00:42:17] Tyla Serro: it. Yeah. You really should breathe through the lift, which that was completely foreign to me to breathe through a squat, breathe through a devil.

[00:42:23] Oh. So

[00:42:23] Philip Pape: it's like you have to brace while breathing. Is that the idea? Yeah.

[00:42:27] Tyla Serro: Like you're, you're not, you're not holding your breath at all. Um, you're trying to minimize as much pressure as you're putting on that, like pelvic girdle area. Um, so like I said, my coach didn't really know a lot about it. Wasn't really comfortable with it.

[00:42:41] So I started switched to, um, Briana battles. You are a female in this world and you have been pregnant or, you know, anything about that. Like, she's pretty big in that area. So she had a, uh, pregnant, pregnant and postpartum athlete training. And I actually really liked her program. It was more of like a CrossFit kind of like a power building type of thing.

[00:43:06] We still squatted a lot. Um, not really a lot of bench, but like I still deadlift. She was big on the, you know, breathing through each lift. Um, they had the app, I think, teachable. So it was, it was really easy to work with. Um, you could like watch a video of them doing the lifts.

[00:43:25] Philip Pape: If you needed the, she found something that worked for you.

[00:43:29] Tyla Serro: It worked really well. And then that was like three months into 2020, and that was one of the pandemic hit. So I stopped having access to a gym at the time. Did not have a home gym. Uh, and nobody knew what the heck was going on with COVID so, yeah, and I kinda just was like, oh, whatever. And I stopped training.

[00:43:51] My husband, like I said, has always been a runner. So he was like, well, why don't you like pick up running? So I started running like a mile around the neighborhood, two miles, three miles, like, okay, I can do this, which I do not recommend starting like a completely new exercise regimen, like 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

[00:44:06] Probably not a good idea. So my husband was going for a longer run out, like one of the rail trails in our area. And he's like, I'm doing a five mile or today I'm like, okay. At five miles, no big deal. He was like, you sure you've only like run two or three miles. Yeah, I've got it. No problem. So I ran the five miles.

[00:44:22] It was an Allen pack and I was playing it. Cool. Like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. And then by the time I got home, I was like, not fine. Uh, I think I ran maybe a couple more times. Um, and then I just kind of stopped lifting, like up until we, uh, we ended up getting a bunch of numbers. Bottom off of Facebook marketplace for a decent price.

[00:44:44] So I was doing some

[00:44:47] Philip Pape: actually, yeah, I can totally relate. Yeah. Very few people had home gyms at that point,

[00:44:51] Tyla Serro: but not structured. Like it was not structured at all. I'd stopped following that pregnant athlete program, wasn't really doing any. Then I had a baby, um, we bought a house. My husband was taking like a bunch of classes.

[00:45:04] He was going back into the office now. Cause at the time he was like active duty military leading up to his deployment. Um, so it was just really, really busy. And I could just feel my, and I, I had, okay. My, my maternity leave was up. I was going back to work. I was really stressed out about my son going to daycare because of course.

[00:45:24] Um, I wasn't sure how I would feel about going back to work. Thanks. I'm really grateful to be in a situation where had I had wanted to stay home. We would have been able to do that. Um, he went to daycare, I went back to work and I was like, yep. This is definitely where I like to be. So that worked out. And then, uh, that was probably around like November, October.

[00:45:43] December, our family ended up getting COVID and I was just bombed. I would just like, I didn't actually, I was asymptomatic that asymptomatic didn't have any symptoms. My husband was really sick. The baby was sick and I just was just not feeling good. And you know, it's so hard to look back on that time and say like, why wasn't I feeling good?

[00:46:03] Was it because I stopped lifting? Was it because I gave birth was because I gave birth during a pandemic. Was it, all these things combined, right, right. There was a lot going on, probably all the above. So I, I, my husband was like, you are miserable and you're kind of no fun to be around. And I really think you should go back to your gym because you're

[00:46:21] Philip Pape: tasting it.

[00:46:23] That's what you love. And that's what makes

[00:46:24] Tyla Serro: you feel good, right? Yeah. You know, and I was just like the thought, the thought of driving to the gym and like doing it. Like, it sounded good, but I wasn't sure if that was the right move. Um, So I had reached out to my friend, Sam and during the pandemic, her and her husband started building a really kick ass home gym.

[00:46:42] It took them some time, of course, over the year with all the shortages and whatnot, but they got some awesome equipment and she was like, Hey, why don't you come train with me? And that was actually, so the company that Phillip and I worked for, it shuts down between Christmas and new year's. We get like a week off.

[00:46:58] Um, so that week Sam invited me to come train. And I went there and, uh, Sam's husband, Carlos Rayez. He's a professional powerlifter, like ranked number eight in the world. Very strong guy. He and I look like, I look up to him like if Carlos gives me some advice, I'm definitely like, okay. Yup. Got it. So Carlos asked me that morning.

[00:47:21] He was like, what are you training today? No, I don't really know. I'm not sure. And Sam's like, well, why don't you do my program with. And I, and I was like looking at Sam and, you know, she's jacked and strong and those were programmed daily and I'm like, oh, I don't know if I can do your program, but I'll try it.

[00:47:41] Philip Pape: Maybe like a seven day

[00:47:42] Tyla Serro: program or? Oh, no, no. Sorry. She trains, like, I think she's been training like four days a week. Yeah. Um, for years now, but poor choice of words. So yeah, so she she's been training on a weekly basis, whatever consistently and I had not been, so I knew whatever I did that day, I was going to be sore about what.

[00:48:03] Um, so I was like, all right, I'll do it. So I did all the same movements as her, but, you know, she was squatting with weight on the bar. I was squatting with the barbell and 45 pounds felt really heavy. Um, and I remember like, I think the day or two later, she was like, okay, like you coming over to train. I'm like, nah, I don't think so, Sam, I don't think I'm going to make it.

[00:48:19] Like, I feel like I got hit by a bus. I can't remember what she said to me. I wish I, I wish I still had the texts, but she was basically. Come on. Don't be like a chicken, like I can imagine. Yeah. Like the soreness doesn't last forever. Like just, just get here and train. And I was like, fine. And so I went back and then the rest is kind of history, right?

[00:48:39] Like since then her and I have been training consistently for a year and a half now. Um, and well, we knew my husband was deploying that wasn't like a surprise. So leading up to the deployment, I had said to my husband, like, listen to. We have a two garage bays. And I said, we're turning one of them into a gym because I know I'm not going to be able to get to Sam's house to train four days a week.

[00:49:04] It's probably not going to happen. I'm going to be doing things completely solo for seven months. So we need to get gym equipment making that a priority. And we did. And I'm glad that. Um, because it, it made being able to train for like my power lifting, meet in November a possibility when my kid was really sick.

[00:49:21] And the only time I could train was at night after he went to bed, which I do not prefer training at night. I definitely prefer training if I had it my way and I didn't work, I would train at like 10:00 AM every day after breakfast. Okay. You

[00:49:34] Philip Pape: get the energy going? It's not too late in the day. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:49:39] And I hear you because I have to train early in the morning because of work. So there's a lot to unpack here. Um, because what I want to the heart of the matter here is the consistency. It sounds like you got significantly detrained we had the pandemic, so you didn't have a place to go. It's always a hassle to even go to a gym, right.

[00:49:56] Even when there is one available. So you had somebody that held you accountable, which, you know, maybe not everybody has that, but at the end of the day, it got you to try. Regularly. And then you did the home gym thing, which, which I've done. And I think I constantly encourage my listener to really think about that.

[00:50:12] It's a small investment compared to what you get out of it and the time you save and it's there, right. Staring you in the face. So you can't help it.

[00:50:21] Tyla Serro: Yeah, exactly. And you know, my husband uses it too, even though he is a runner, like he, he does do some stuff, so it's, it's getting its use and it'll last forever

[00:50:29] Philip Pape: runners.

[00:50:30] Don't try to do that,

[00:50:32] Tyla Serro: but, um, it'll it'll if it, if you take care of it, it's going to last forever and it's you just can't it's invaluable, I

[00:50:40] Philip Pape: guess. Absolutely. All right. Well, I would expect you to respect your time. I think I had, I had one last question I wanted to ask, um, and that is, do people have.

[00:50:49] Question or misunderstand what you're doing

[00:50:53] Tyla Serro: all of the time. I'll pick a couple of things to talk about. First thing is, um, older family members, not even older, just family members will be like, you're gonna break your back. You're gonna hurt yourself. That's too much weight like, or no, you just like the, the stereotypes about like me being a girl or me being a woman and lifting, and it's not feminine.

[00:51:16] Like, you know, like whatever. No actually like lifting and I don't

[00:51:21] Philip Pape: and I'm yeah, you're going to get too big. Right. Did you get that one? Like you're going to get too big or no,

[00:51:26] Tyla Serro: you know, and, uh, my coach actually said this to me the other day. Um, my nutrition coach, she had said like, uh, I forget something about giving out free advice and just don't do it basically.

[00:51:36] Cause people aren't going to listen to you. Um, I can't tell you how many people have asked me, like, oh, you're in shape you lift weights. Can I, can you help me? How do I get to your point? And you're just, you give them like really basic information and then they proceed to not do any of it, or they'll say like, well, I don't want to get like big muscles.

[00:51:55] I just want to get tone, like a bodybuilder.

[00:51:58] Philip Pape: And I hate the word you say, lifts those 10 pound dumbbells. I'm going to be, I'm going to look like a bodybuilder.

[00:52:02] Tyla Serro: Yeah. And I hate, I hate the word tone. So I'm like, what does tone even mean? Like, do you want, you want to put on some lean muscle mass? Like what, but, um, yeah, so I think that the biggest thing I get.

[00:52:14] You're going to hurt yourself. Um, that has been like from the start. And I, I mean, I look back on some videos, right? And I'm like, Ooh, that is a cringey looking. But

[00:52:27] Philip Pape: you have to figure it out at some point. Yeah. Cause I didn't want to mention the female angle. Right. Um, but, but you hit the nail on the head with the, I think they're not a double standard, but I mean like if, if somebody I'm a dude, you know what I'm saying?

[00:52:40] I'm working out. People are like, oh yeah, that makes sense. You know, that's generally accepted. But I imagine with, with being a woman that you get some weird looks sometimes. That's why I wanted to ask the

[00:52:49] Tyla Serro: question. Yeah. I mean, or just the fact when I say I'm like powerlifter, people are like, No like female powerlifter, but it's so weird because I'm so far removed from that stage in my life.

[00:53:00] Uh, I've been a powerlifter now for so many years. So a lot of the circles that I'm in and the feeds that I follow are curated to other female lifters. So it's just, that's just the world that I lived. And every so often I'll talk to. Who doesn't shrink train and they'll say something that's just wild to me, you know, like wearing waist trainers or they're doing just tons and tons of cardio.

[00:53:22] And they're like, I can't lose weight and they're eating like 1200 calories a day and I'm like, dude, my toddler eats more than you

[00:53:29] Philip Pape: too much cardio.

[00:53:31] Tyla Serro: Yeah. So it's just, uh it's thanks. Like, I, I really do think the strength is for everyone. Um, I'd sent Philip a video the other day of like a woman who's in her second.

[00:53:41] Shrank training. I was like, that is so cool. You know, like you're never, you're never too old to start strength training. It really is for everyone. And you're probably going to lead a longer, healthier life. If you do lift some weights,

[00:53:55] Philip Pape: that's what I totally advocate what you're saying. And how would you like, so people listen to this podcasts do want some advice.

[00:54:02] What is your advice for somebody who's maybe the brand new, or even maybe recreational wants to get more into.

[00:54:09] Tyla Serro: Work with a coach. That's, that's probably the biggest thing in order for it to be sustainable. And for you to not actually hurt yourself, if you don't know what you're doing, um, because I don't know the science behind it and why I lift the way that I lift.

[00:54:20] Like, if you ask them, what kind of program are you on? I'm like, I think it's a power building right now, the phase that we're in, but I don't know, like the reason that we lift in the way that we do, but I know that it works. Um, and I have full faith in my coach to, to prescribe a program. That's going to keep me healthy and safe and having fun.

[00:54:40] Right. So that's probably my number one piece of advice. And the second advice is just pick a meet and sign up and sign up and do it. Don't don't yeah, don't wait until like you're oh, I have to be this strong for, I can do it because the sport of powerlifting, unless you are at that like elite national level, you're really competing against yourself at the end of the day.

[00:55:01] So if you're making PRS and you're, you know, Continuing to, to have progress. Then at the new day, you can copy because you're just competing against yourself. Really

[00:55:12] Philip Pape: awesome. So find a good coach. However, you can get into it. Be consistent, have fun with it. Sign up for me. Go, go get at it and have fun and get strong.

[00:55:22] Um, so Tyla, where can listeners find more?

[00:55:27] Tyla Serro: I am on Instagram @tylaserro. And, uh, yeah, if you have any questions or if you're new into lifting, I'd be happy to give you some advice. I'm not an expert, not a coach, but I can at least talk about my own personal experiences with the

[00:55:40] Philip Pape: sport. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate.

[00:55:45] Tyla Serro: Thank you Philip.

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Ep 16: Strength, Lifting, and Recovery with Pain, Injury, or Even Back Surgery

Last year, I went under the knife for a microdiscectomy, a type of minimally invasive spine surgery where a portion of a herniated disc is removed using microsurgical tools.

In this episode, I share my story of what happened, how I dealt with low back pain in the context of health and fitness, the surgery and recovery process, and lessons I learned along the way. 

I hope my story sheds light on some productive ways to think about pain and injury and even inspires you to consider multiple options when faced with a situation like this.

Medical Disclaimer
One last thing. I am NOT a medical practitioner and am NOT dispensing medical advice in this podcast. Everything I say is my personal opinion and experience. Do NOT use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition. Consult your own physician for any medical issues! 

RELATED LINKS

• Book about dealing with pain through screening and corrective movements:
  Rebuilding Milo: A Lifter's Guide to Fixing Common Injuries and Building a Strong Foundation for Enhancing Performance (by Dr. Aaron Horschig)

• Starting Strength article about "pin firing" for elbow tendinopathy:
  Elbow Tendonitis: How It Occurs and What to Do About It

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape:Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26]Welcome to episode 16 of Wits & Weights. Blasts year, I went under the knife for a micro diskectomy. This is a type of minimally invasive spine surgery, where a portion of a herniated disc is removed using microsurgical tools. And in this episode, I share my story of what.

[00:00:54] How I dealt with low back pain in the context of health and fitness, the surgery and recovery process and lessons I learned along the way. I hope my story sheds light on some productive ways to think about pain and injury, and even inspires you to consider multiple options when faced with a situation like.

[00:01:17] One last thing. I am not a medical practitioner. I am not dispensing medical advice in this podcast. Everything I say is my personal opinion and experience do not use this podcast as medical device to treat any medical condition, consult your own physician for any medical issues. So I want to take you back to what happened to get me to this point.

[00:01:39] So about 10 years earlier than the surgery. So this is around 2011. I was doing CrossFit and I had just been doing CrossFit for a few months at that point. And if you know anything about CrossFit, it's a lot of high intensity interval training combined with power movements combined with barbells. Uh, it's kind of a recipe for.

[00:02:02] Potential injury, especially if you're not used to it, especially if you're not trained and you're trying to throw around big weights. Um, and I'm not blaming CrossFit at all, but at some point I was warming up with very lightweights with a back squat and back then it was a high bar back squat. I didn't have very good form and I felt something pop in my lower back and I could barely stand up.

[00:02:24] And a lot of you have had low back pain over the years, whether you lift or not may have experienced something like this, it could have been. Reaching over to pick up your kid's toy. Uh, it could happen anywhere, but it happened. And I went ahead and got an MRI and discovered I had a herniated L five S one verb, which is very common.

[00:02:46] And in fact, Once you get to your thirties. Pretty much every human being on the planet is going to start having disc degeneration, bulging some sort of issue, and many don't have any symptoms, but it was very painful and I allowed it to recover. It took a few days. I got back to what I was doing before it happened.

[00:03:09] And this time I went to see a, an orthopedic surgeon, I think at the time. And the recommendation was to get a steroid injection in my spine. I did that. It seemed to make the pain go away. I didn't think about it anymore. And then I moved on with my life in the next 10 years, maybe five years, seven years later, something like that.

[00:03:29] It happened again. And this time it didn't happen. And I was, I was lifting. I was just, uh, doing some everyday activity. Might might've been getting in the car or getting up out of my seat and I felt it again. And this time again, I just went about my day. I got some rest and after a few days, it started to get better.

[00:03:49] So fast forward to 2021. It is, I think the end of March. And again, I am warming up with my back squat and you might think there's a common theme here. Oh, the squatting is causing your injury, which is not the case at all. And even the doctors and surgeons will say, you know, we don't know what causes this.

[00:04:08] Everyone has some sort of degeneration in their spine, but for some people that just gets a little worse than others and a particular event along the way. Good causes. My wife and I both think maybe there was a snowboarding accident 10 years earlier that caused this where I effectively flipped over a few times.

[00:04:27] The edge of my board smashed into my lower back, who knows the point is last year I had the pain again, it was severe. And again, it was warming. With a lightweight on the back squat. And I could barely move. I had to lay down. I couldn't walk for like two or three days. This time, the pain wasn't going away as significantly, meaning I still had some pain and it started to radiate down into my left.

[00:04:57] Well, if anyone's familiar with this symptom, you've heard of sciatica. The, the idea that something is impinging on your nerve that goes down your leg and it results in some level of pain. And for some people it's worse than others. And for some folks that goes all the way down to your toes. For me, it went down to roughly my ankle.

[00:05:15] Um, and it sort of progressed over time, but over about a six week period, I had this pain now, initially I went to get an x-ray nothing. Uh, then I went to the orthopedic surgeon and he said, okay, well, the first thing we need to do is send you the physical thing. So I went to physical therapy and did that for about three or four weeks.

[00:05:40] I did everything to the letter and nothing helped. And the physical therapist even said, yeah, I think you need surgery. So then finally I was cleared for an MRI. The MRI showed that the herniation that I had had over all these years had gotten so severe that it bulged out into the canal where it impinged on.

[00:06:00] The nerve. So he said, all right, you need surgery. You definitely need this surgery. Now, before I get into the process of planning for, and then the surgery and then the recovery, because I think there's some important lessons there for folks, especially if your lifter, I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about.

[00:06:20] Pain in general, especially for those of us who lift those of us who exercise and there's different levels of pain, right. There's soreness, which is, could be the delayed onset muscle soreness also called Dom's where you either have you either have soreness in the workout, right. Immediately from the pump, the burn, whatever.

[00:06:41] And then you, or you can have Dom's where you get it a day or two later. And you know, you know, the feeling when you've done some heavy quad workout and. Maybe it's a new movement for you. Maybe it's an extremely intense weight compared to what you're used to, uh, or maybe even just, uh, biked 20 miles. And you know, you hadn't ridden a bike in a year and then the next day you just can't walk well, that's soreness.

[00:07:03] Right? And I think we're all familiar with that. And we know that that goes away, you know, fluids and hydration, electrolytes, all that tend to help. There's all, all tricks that people learn over the years. That's soreness. So let's put that aside. That's manageable pain. That's part of lifting get used to it.

[00:07:20] Then there is something like tendinopathy, and this is. Uh, pain, swelling, inflammation in attendance. For example, I'll give you one that affected me and affects a lot of lifters. And that is golfer's elbow. The medical term is medial epicondylitis, and this is where you get pain on the inside part of your arm, right?

[00:07:45] Where the up the bicep attaches to the forearm golfer's elbow, because people who swing a lot of golf balls, get it. But. I've also seen it quite frequently with those of us who back squat heavy when you don't have a very good grip on the back squat. And your hand is overextended to the point where you're basically supporting the bar.

[00:08:09] With your forearms and with your elbow. Uh, and ideally when you do a, especially a low bar back squat, your arms should simply be there to lock the bar to your back and your body does the work, your legs do the work. But if you have a poor grip, you can definitely develop pain eventually on your elbow known as golfer's elbow.

[00:08:30] Now, for something like that, traditionally people thought, well, I sit and take ibuprofen, and now we know that icing is probably not the way to go and that we need to. Use the tissue that is having the problem. So that is kind of what your father or grandfather used to say. Just walk it off. Basically you have to move the injured area and find some sort of pain, free exercise or tolerable exercise that will accelerate the muscle repair and the generation and limit scar tissue.

[00:09:05] So going back to the example of golfer's elbow, You know, I had it for quite a while and I tried all these different things, stretching. I'm scraping. I tried the ibuprofen, I tried the IEC and I tried heat and finally came across a recommendation, I think, through the starting strength community of. A high number of chin-ups, you know, doing, doing a few reps, um, maybe at 30% of your max.

[00:09:33] So if you could do 10 chin-ups you go ahead and do two or three and you do it like 20 times, and then you. A break and do it again. So you do three sets of that, and then you do this every few days. Now I don't have the precise, um, regimen. You can look it up. The point is it forces you to do a movement that exercises that tendon, and you, you kind of feel a little bit of the pain as you're using it, but it's.

[00:09:59] So the point where you feel like you're making it worse, uh, if anything, you're, reinflating the tissue, so to speak and helping it to heal and avoiding scar tissue. Right? So that's just kind of a tangent. I wanted to take on some of the types of pain that are not, um, not a real acute injury or something that is more severe.

[00:10:17] Now I wanted to talk about a book that was actually very helpful to me called rebuilding Milo by Dr. Erin Horshack and the subtitle is. The lifters guide to fixing common injuries and building a strong foundation for enhancing performance. And I'll include a link to this book in the show notes, because if you are having any sort of pain, okay.

[00:10:41] Back pain, hip pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, elbow pain, ankle pain. He has chapters on all of these and it takes you through. The specific sub injury types that you might have within each of those. So if you have low back pain, you know, is it herniated disc or is it something else? It takes you through movements you can do to screen for the specific pain and identify it.

[00:11:04] And then corrective exercises, including loaded. Because using barbells using dumbbells, using strength related exercises to address injury can be an important part of rehab. And it helps you change how you work out in the short term to get around the pain, but facilitate healing. Uh, and this author, you know, he's one of the ones that recommends against icing for injuries and sore muscles, and instead, you know, using movement to heal.

[00:11:35] And in some cases you have to load. The effected muscles. You just have to, through some form of moderate lifting, it could be body weight, or it could be loaded. Um, and this lesson has paid off for me throughout this whole process. I'm going to get to that in a bit. When I talk about the. However, if nothing works and the pain gets worse, that's where doctors come in.

[00:11:58] I lived with this, for this condition for about 10 years. It bothered me off and on, but it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't until it actually got worse and just would not get better. Then I finally took the next step now, before taking that. There are other things you might consider. Some of those are recommended in the book that I mentioned, rebuilding Milo.

[00:12:18] Um, but others are, are things that might work for you. For example, some forms of pain. Are for lack of a better term mental or psychological they're associated with some form of stress or underlying trigger that leads to chronic pain. And I definitely explored that for my condition, but then it turned out my condition was just an acute problem that could easily be fixed by surgery.

[00:12:43] But I also know individuals who dealt with pain. It was stress-induced. Didn't know where it came from. All of a sudden they felt a pop in their back and they were in pain. They would have to lay on the floor with their legs up on a chair. And this might've gone on for years and dealing with the mental side of things often helps for, for some of these conditions.

[00:13:03] So consider that, and then. Also consider of course the physical therapy, the mobility, the stretching, the massage, all of those things. Um, in addition to of course, the loaded movements and exercises that work around the pain. So all of these things could be solutions before you go to the point of involving a physician or a surgeon.

[00:13:28] Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the. If you find it valuable, you'd be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again.

[00:13:47] An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. All right now. Go ahead and talk about the process that I went through, which some of you may, may relate to. So I mentioned that I had the injury and. Lead to pain radiating down my leg. It wouldn't get better. I went through all of these steps, physical therapy, MRI, and then I finally scheduled the surgery.

[00:14:14] Well, throughout those six weeks, I took the advice of in, in the book, I was talking about rebuilding Milo and I continued to work out because I realized. Continuing to squat deadlift and all the other movements. If I was able to do them without making the pain worse, it was a, probably a good thing, not only for preventing scarring and keeping me moving, but for staying strong.

[00:14:41] So here's the thing I had only been doing. I'll call intelligent strength training for maybe not quite a year and a half at that point. And I had gotten stronger and stronger, stronger in terms of my maximum production, meaning all my lifts were going up, uh, but also increased muscle mass. You know, I like to do some power building, throwing some accessories to go along with my, the big lifts.

[00:15:05] And I would say that is like my number one piece of advice for those of you listening who want a. Much less painful, quicker, easier recovery. If you ever do get injured, if you ever get injured and you ever have to deal with surgery or anything like that, having been strong and fit to begin with, we'll give you a huge head start.

[00:15:28] And you see this with older folks who fall and then they break their hip and because they're weak, the other things break and then they can't move. Uh, and then the recovery takes longer and then they get an ammonia and then it sort of cascades. There's this cascade of issues from one to the next to the next, you start taking different medications.

[00:15:48] You know, I know I'm painting a grim picture, but you've heard it all before. So being strong and fit. Going into the potential for injury gives you a big advantage. So I wanted to mention that I kept working out. I didn't just give up. I knew my surgery was coming, but I kept doing all the movements that I could do.

[00:16:07] Right then I had surgery. And I went in, I had general anesthesia, the surgery probably took half an hour. As many of these things do. There's a lot of buildup, a lot of forms you have to sign. There's a lot of medication involved and then the surgery takes 30 minutes. And then I woke up. Now, keep in mind for six weeks.

[00:16:28] I had been effectively laying down on my back most of the day or working out because it was painful to stay. And to walk. And that was very limited. We tried to go on a hike and I actually had to stop every two minutes to sit on a log, to lay down on a log because I couldn't walk. I couldn't just stand around because the pain would start to radiate.

[00:16:53] It would feel like tingles in my leg and it would get worse and worse and worse until my body was like, you gotta lay down. But of course I could work out because that kept me moving. I could ride a stationary bike cause it can be moving very interesting. So here I am recovering from surgery. I wake up and.

[00:17:10] All of a sudden, I feel that there's no pain because the pain was always there. Even when I was laying down, I could feel something in my life and it wasn't there. And I was like, ah, that must be the pain medication. And they said, no, let's try to get up and walk. So I got up and I stood, no pain walked around, no pain.

[00:17:25] All I could feel was a little, a little bit of throbbing in the back where they had cut me. And over the next few days, as I recovered, that was really the only pain I had. So to speak was from where the incision was made, which is to be expected when you've been cut open and given a bunch of drugs and sewed up.

[00:17:42] That's fine. But I was able to walk again without pain. The issue was fixed. And that's not the case with everyone who has back pain. I know that back surgery can be playing the odds, so to speak, depending on what type of issue you have, especially if you have to have a, you know, a fusion or some sort of more invasive surgery than I had.

[00:18:06] I I'm pretty, I consider myself lucky in that regard. That it was an easy issue with a fairly easy fix, but it was still surgery. And so I had to take some pain meds for the first few days and I was encouraged to get up and walk whenever I want it to. So I took that advice. I won't say it to the extreme, but the fact that I could walk again, after not walking for six weeks, all of a sudden walking was my favorite new thing in the world.

[00:18:33] And we are talking may. In new England. So the weather was perfect. It was in the upper sixties, sunny, nice breeze, beautiful walking weather. And the first few days, you know, my wife and kids went out with being, I was like a, like a little old man, you know, kind of shuffling along, but I was walking and then by day three or four, I was had no problem walking, pretty good distances.

[00:18:58] And I realized that I loved walking. Took it for granted much of my life to that point and that I would now be an integral part of my movement going forward. Well, little did I know. How beneficial walking is for your mortality, for your overall health, for fat loss for giving you more room in your diet.

[00:19:18] All these things I've talked before about on this podcast. And I think I've posted about it. Um, but I think walking's the best form of cardio. So throughout this process, I realized that movement in the use of the tissue is key to your recovery because every day as I would get up and walk around and really move as much as I could, I felt less and less pain, more and more mobility.

[00:19:40] Things started to come back. And after only about a week, I got cleared by the doctor to start lifting lightweights. And then after about a week after that, I said, Hey doc, could I, could I go heavier? And he's like, You know, you can go a little heavier for you. And I said, oh, for me, you mean relative to what I can lift.

[00:20:00] Yeah, go ahead. And that kind of gave me license to start progressing again on. The lifts that I loved, you know, the back squats, deadlifts RD, ELs bench, press, everything. You read a lot of stories about how people have microdiscectomy that they're done back squat and they're done dead lifting forever. Uh, and that's sad.

[00:20:19] That's really sad because a year ago today I'm actually recording this exactly a year ago, uh, to the surgery. I don't know how many times I've squatted and deadlifts since then, since then, but it's just making me stronger. I love doing it. There's no problem with it. When I had my final checkup with the doctor, he said, you know what, I'm not going to tell you not to do anything because you're probably going to do it anyway.

[00:20:42] And it's probably not going to cause issues anyway. So go ahead. Enjoy your life. So I did, and I started to progress on my lifts again, and then. In July, we were coming back from a trip to Maine and it was the day we were driving back. So thank goodness it wasn't while we were up there. And I started to have a pain in my stomach, which developed over several hours to check myself into the hospital.

[00:21:07] I had appendicitis. So only two months after having surgery for my spine, I had to have an appendectomy. So they cut me in the open in the back. Then they cut me open in the front and interestingly, the recovery was pretty similar. Um, there was pain, you know, from recovering from the incision. I couldn't lift anything.

[00:21:27] Warren you getting a hurting enough, you do it, but I still walked a lot. And then I quickly resumed light-weight lifting as quickly as I could. I didn't wait. I didn't want to wait because I knew that movement is healing. It helps avoid scar tissue and you just have to progress in it. Um, I don't want to say slowly, but smartly and here we are.

[00:21:49] One year later. And I would say that I'm healthier than ever. And there were quite a few lessons that I learned from this whole process. The first, as I already mentioned, being strong is better than being weak. If you're strong going into an injury, you can recover better from that injury and you don't have the cascade of issues that other people experience.

[00:22:10] Number two recovery from most types of injuries requires movement and use of the effected area. Even if you have a surgery or you have a broken bone or whatever, generally, you're going to be advised to rest. You should always follow your doctor's advice, but there are cases where you can rest too much and actually prevent the affected area from healing sufficiently.

[00:22:35] So consider all the possibilities is what I'm suggesting. Don't just take one opinion, take multiple opinions and just realize that there are multiple options than the conventional, you know, staff feet and just recover option. And then the third thing is that at least for the injury. The spinal injury with the micro diskectomy.

[00:22:55] I'm not prevented from doing any particular lift, just because of that. And in fact, I would argue that doing your deadlifts, your squats, your accessory movements, they all strengthen your back and having a strong quote unquote bad back is preferable to having any weak, bad back. That is your back muscles are going to support that spine.

[00:23:17] And would you rather have a. Set of muscles, such that the spine is more easily susceptible to getting injured, especially the older you get, or would you rather have strong muscles that can support your back? Because it wasn't the squatting that caused my injury, but the squatting, the deadlifting make me stronger to prevent future injury and to support myself going forward.

[00:23:41] So that's my story. I wanted to talk about injury pain. I wanted to share the book rebuilding Milo. It was very helpful. Talk about some different options for recovery and rehab and encourage and inspire you to get back under the barbell. Keep lifting, stay consistent, you know, nutrition, walking in those things are all part of this, but loading those weights, getting stronger, developing muscle will better equip you for the future.

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Ep 15: Maximize Your Lifting Sessions: Warmups, Supersets, Rest Periods, and More

Let’s say you’re a busy, working professional, perhaps in your 40’s with a family, a mortgage, and a high-stress job. But you want to improve your health through lifting and nutrition. That’s why you’re listening to this podcast!

The last thing you want is a one-size-fits-all training program that has you lifting six days per week with 90-minute-long sessions. Something so out of whack with your current lifestyle is not exactly sustainable, and it’s a surefire way to bomb out within weeks if not days.

On this podcast, we focus on maximizing your time, inside and outside the gym, for a sustainable, long-term approach you can stick to consistently. Results only come with steady application over time. That is the “first principle” of this whole deal, or else the rest is irrelevant.

Therefore, you’ll probably want a training program that has you in the gym maybe 3 or 4 days a week (of course, if you can swing more and that makes sense for YOU, go for it) for maybe an hour, not counting commute time. Although we talked about the benefits of a home gym back in Episode 8, today I want to cover how to maximize your lifting sessions regardless of where you train so you can get the most out of your workout without it taking forever, while also producing the results you want.

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26]Welcome to episode 15 of Wits & Weights. Let's say you're a busy working professional perhaps in your forties with a family, a mortgage. And a high stress job, but you want to improve your health through lifting and nutrition. That's why you're listening to this podcast.

[00:00:50] The last thing you want is a one size fits all training program that has you lifting six days a week with 90 minute long sessions, something. So out of whack with your current lifestyle is not exactly sustainable. And it's a surefire way to bomb out within weeks. If not days. On this podcast, we focus on maximizing your time inside and outside the gym for a sustainable long-term approach.

[00:01:17] You can stick to consistently results only come with steady application over time. That is the first principle of this whole deal or else. The rest is irrelevant. Therefore you'll probably want a training program that has you in the gym, maybe three or four days. Of course, if you can swing more in that makes sense for you.

[00:01:37] Go for it for maybe an hour, not counting. Although we talked about the benefits of a home gym back in episode eight. Today, I want to cover how to maximize your lifting sessions regardless of where you train. So you can get the most out of your workout without it taking forever while also producing the results you want.

[00:01:57] In today's episode, we cover planning for success, staying focused, using smart programming, warmups, super sets and rest periods. All right. The first thing that I think about before even leaving your house for the gym is having a plan. Now we've talked in previous episodes about the specifics of planning, your training programming ahead of time for.

[00:02:25] The next day, the next week, the next month. But in general, what I'm getting at here is you don't want to just leave your house, go to the gym and work out without having a specific plan of what you're going to accomplish during that session. And ideally this is documented in a notebook or an app, and you've got everything laid out, such that you don't even have to think about it when you're in the gym.

[00:02:48] So that would be each movement you're going to accomplish. And within each. The number of sets reps, the specific weights, as well as the warm-up sets and even the rest periods. And some apps actually let you pre-program some or all of that, including automated timers for your rest periods, whatever makes it easier for you to be consistent and make sure that you go in and don't get distracted and get the work.

[00:03:14] The other thing I would suggest before leaving your house is to prepare substitute movements for your workout. Now, if there are things, you know, for sure you're going to be able to do, you know, your gym has plenty of power racks, plenty of barbells over certain machines that you want. And they're always available.

[00:03:31] Find. But if either you expect the gym, you're going to, to lack certain equipment and get your programming calls for, let's say a double cable crossover, and they only have a single cable machine, you know, with a single cable. Well, then you can't do that movement. So you have to come up with the substitute.

[00:03:51] Am I going to do a one-arm crossover? Am I going to switch to dumbbell flies? What am I going to do? Prepare that ahead of time. Also prepare for the fact that if the gym is busy, Occasionally have a lack of availability of certain machines that you have a substitute in place, just in case sort of your plan B like, okay, if I can't do this, I can do this instead.

[00:04:13] You don't want to just not do the movement and give up and move on, try to do something that is a good substitute. So those are two ways to make sure that when you get to the gym, you don't waste any. All right now you are at the gym ready to get the work done. And the next thing I want to talk about, which is probably the most important for a lot of folks and where we waste a ton of time, often unconsciously or subconsciously is avoiding distractions and just focusing on getting the work done.

[00:04:46] And there's a lot of things tied in with this. For example, during your rest periods, you might. Decide. You want to check out social media or watch a video or check your email. And before long you could be stretching your rest period out much longer than you intended. That's one way that you can waste time.

[00:05:06] And so going in with a rule that, Hey, I'm not going to browse social media. I'm not going to do any work. Anything I do is related to my workout. Like if I'm going to watch a video, it's going to be to help with my movement, or if I'm going to browse social media, it's because it has to do with. My training programming specifically, but I would suggest that you don't even need to do any of that stuff.

[00:05:29] Maybe listen to some music, if that helps you focus or in many, for some of us not listening to music and just having it nice and quiet is a way to focus, being efficient with your time while you're working. If you're doing other things like taking video. Okay. That's a big challenge. Make sure you've got your equipment set up ahead of time, whether you're putting your camera in a shoe or on a tripod, but things like editing and posting and all that can be done later.

[00:05:56] Don't waste time while you're in the gym. So that's avoiding distractions. From doing the work, but I want to talk about actually doing the work itself. A lot of folks go into a movement thinking, okay, I got to get the movement done. I'm going to just get under the bar, bang out the reps and I'm done. But what I want to suggest is that you have both an attentional focus and an intentional focus on the movement and the results.

[00:06:24] So what do I mean by this? Let's talk about the attentional focus. That is a focus on the outcome. So if you're going to do a set of five squats, you're focused on getting all five squats and you're going to get there regardless, right? I mean, in your mind mentally, you're saying I'm going to get the five squats.

[00:06:47] Now, as you're doing the squats, you're going to have certain cues that help you with the movement. Once you've gotten past the initial. Neuromuscular adaptation muscle memory learning the basic form phase, you know, in the first few weeks of learning. Hopefully, you've got the number of queues whittled down to maybe one or two cues each time you do the movement.

[00:07:10] So you're not thinking of every single little piece of the movement. And instead let's just get the squat done, but you might use a cue or two to do a proper. Um, I think we never perfect these movements. So there's always something you want to think about, but having both an intentional focus on the movement with a cue or two and a cue could be simple.

[00:07:32] If you're doing a, let's say an isolation movement, like a barbell curl, it could simply be every time you bring the rep up, you focus on squeezing the biceps and then going down slowly in the concentric or in the east centric. But you're also thinking. My target here is 10 reps, and I'm going to get to the 10 reps.

[00:07:52] I'm going to train hard when I think I'm close to failure. I'm probably not. I'm going to go for another rep, those kinds of mental games that we played at. Pushing through and getting the work done without of course going overboard without cheat reps, without, uh, pushing past failure, so to speak. But for newer and intermediate lifters, we generally don't train hard enough.

[00:08:15] So that kind of focus can help us train hard enough to get the result we're looking. Now a side tangent to this whole thing is being assertive with our movement. Basically being in control, owning the barbell, owning the dumbbells in such a way that we are not too relaxed. We don't have too much slack that we stayed.

[00:08:37] When we need to, that we keep a neutral spine. When we need to that we're going through the full range of motion and doing it at a reasonable tempo and all of these things. Again are things to think about initially, but eventually become a little bit more automatic. Getting your gym session done efficiently is partly helped by the fact that you are focusing on the.

[00:09:01] And being assertive about it and getting it done so that you don't get hurt, you don't get injured and you can get all the reps done. You're trying to get. Now, before I continue to talk about some techniques we can use in the session itself, let's just take a step back. If you find that the sessions are still longer than you can handle because of not just because of fatigue, but also because of your schedule and because of your commute.

[00:09:27] And now you're, you're in there for two hours, even though you might be going three days a week, they're just way too long. Well, then you can consider, should I go in an extra day or two? But with much shorter sessions. So instead of doing a full body, three or four full body workouts that might take an hour and a half, I'm going to do four or five split workouts, you know, push, pull legs or body part that are only say 45 minutes long.

[00:09:53] And depending on whether you're driving to a gym or doing it at home, that could factor in, you know, if you're at home, you don't have to commute. So you can do a higher frequency. You know, you can have more sessions because you don't have that fixed time of the. So think about that. And you may not quite know until you get into your lifting and maybe even a few months in when you get stronger and you realize you need longer rest periods and longer recovery, you might find that the sessions are too long or too short or too frequent or not frequent.

[00:10:26] And so always consider that as a possible way to tweak what you're doing so that you can fit in with your schedule to remain consistent. The other piece to this is the style of programming you're doing, could also impact the efficiency in the gym. For example, we talked about full body versus split, but also the movements that you're doing.

[00:10:47] So if you are focused on strength and you're going to do a lot of compound moves, Squat deadlift, press overhead, press. And you're going to be working with a high intensity, meaning a high weight on the bar. Then you're just by definition, going to require longer rest periods. And that is going to extend your session.

[00:11:05] Now you may have fewer movements and it may all even out, but let's say you're doing a bodybuilding or I should say power building program where you have compound movements combined with accessories. You could easily get to a situation where you just have too much. In terms of time where, you know, you might be doing five or six movements, but because of the rest periods during the compound lifts, even if the rest periods are shorter for the others, you're now extended into pushing an hour and a half, maybe even longer.

[00:11:35] So consider all of those, consider the split, consider full body versus. You know, compounds versus a conjugate style or power building, whatever it is, and just pick the one that you're going to be able to stick to, um, consider whether it's enjoyable, whether you're going to stick to it, whether it works for your schedule.

[00:11:51] All right. Now, back to the lifting session, I want to talk about. Warmups, and I can do an entire episode just about executing warmups, but what I want to talk about is first of all, do you need them? Um, and the answer is, it depends on how you define a warmup. So the, the old school or a classic warmup. Like that was done in CrossFit, for example, or you think of bodybuilders back in the day where you, you know, do 20 minutes on a bike and then he might do some stretching.

[00:12:23] And before you know, it you're half an hour in and you haven't even started to work out. That is not the type of warmup we need. We also know that the evidence shows potentially deleterious effects from warming up the muscles too much with stretching when you lift, uh, In colloquial terms, it kind of makes you too flexible if you will.

[00:12:43] And we actually want to be a little bit tighter and stronger when we get into that movement. So the there's a couple of types of warmups that are beneficial. The first type is one that literally warms you up. That is it raises your body temperature. It gets the blood flowing, gets your heart rate up. And that could be just a very short bout of cardio or a dynamic workout.

[00:13:04] So for me, that would be a couple minutes on an assault bike, and that's it. You know, I work out in the morning, it's cold here in new England, I'm over the garage. So it's even colder there. And I jumped on the bike a couple minutes, that's it? And it warms me up and I'm ready to go. And, and all of a sudden it feels 10 degrees warmer when I hit the Barbeau.

[00:13:23] You could do a dynamic workout and going to do some pushups, jumping jacks, whatever you want to do, really just, just to get you warmed up, but don't take too much time on it. Uh, don't tire yourself out. Now, the real warmup that I would suggest is warming up using the movements themselves. So, if you're doing compound lifts focused on strength, you're doing, let's say a squat is your first movement.

[00:13:47] Then you warm up with the squat. It's as simple as that, where you take, for example, let's start with a squat and let's say your average strength, and you're doing a set of five and 2 65. The way I would suggest warming up is start. An empty bar, especially on the squat. Maybe not as much for the other movements, but the squat.

[00:14:08] Do you have this, uh, complex movement that requires some muscle memory, and it's good to start with the empty bar to stretch out your elbows, stretch out your shoulders, getting get into that slightly awkward position and feel the range of motion, you know, for a set of five or maybe a couple sets of five.

[00:14:24] And then you start adding weight to the bar. And what you do is you do a certain amount of reps. You take a short rest. Uh, maybe very short, you add weight to the bar and you do fewer reps, add weight, do fewer reps. And so you're doing something like 5, 3, 2, 1 or 5, 4, 3, 2. Um, if you have a higher weight that you're going to get to, you might have to throw in some singles in there at incrementally higher weights until you hit your working set.

[00:14:52] So what does this look like at two 60? And the way I would do that is, you know, warm up with the empty bar, maybe a set of five, just get the field gets stretched out. Then I might jump right to 1 35, but you could jump to 95 and then 1 35, the key is try to use the big, the bigger. You know, start with the 40 fives, but if you need to use 20 fives, if the weight isn't fair, if the final target working weight, isn't that high, you're going to have to jump up with the 20 fives and the 40 fives, then 20 fives and 40 fives.

[00:15:23] So let's just keep it simple. You're going to put on the 40 fives and now you're at 1 35, do a set of five. You can put. Now the 20 fives and you're at 180 5, set a three, and then do you know, replace those with the 40 fives and nine to 25. Do a double. Now you could pretty much jump to 2 65 at this point.

[00:15:47] If you were, deadlifting say 4 0 5, you might just use 40 fives to jump up. You might do, you know, 1 30, 5 or five to 25 for. For for, uh, you might do then three 15 for a triple or even a double. Then you might go to 365 for a single, and then finally do you're working Senate for. So it doesn't have to be perfect.

[00:16:11] Just take reasonable jumps and do fewer reps for each jump. As you warm up the rest, doesn't have to be very long between them until till you get to very high weights. You know, if you're a powerlifter you're working in the higher strength range and you have to have some singles on the way. And then you might need a little more time between your warm-up sets.

[00:16:31] Uh, but that's it. And then you get to your working set. I take a little bit extra time, right before that working set. And then you do your normal working set with the full rest periods between each. Now, if you're doing accessory movements or isolation movements, you can probably just jump right into that movement potentially with the, the called four reps, just go right into the working set.

[00:16:59] If you're in, say the eight to 12 or higher rep range, you may not even need to warm up. Uh, it's kind of your call. If it's the first movement of the workout, you may need one warmup. Like halfway there to the final weight or maybe three quarters of the way toward the weight, you know, even if it's something like barbell curls, but you're working down in the say four to eight rep range.

[00:17:20] Yeah. You may want to put on two thirds of the weight. Hang on a set of five and then do the working. Wait. So in general, for isolation or accessory type movements, you could probably jump right in, uh, the bigger they are, the more compound they are, the more you're going to need to warm up. Like if you're doing a, let's say a close grip bench press for your triceps, that's a compound movement.

[00:17:43] That's very much like just a bench press and you should be warming up. Now here's the exception. If you just finished a movement, that's very similar. It uses a similar muscles as the next movement where you are warmed up. An example of that might be you just. A bunch of bench bench pressing. Now you're going to do shoulder pressing.

[00:18:04] You could, you can still do a little bit of a warmup, but you're, you're mostly warmed up. Or if you're going to go from an overhead press on the barbell and then to an incline shoulder, press a dumbbells, you're totally warmed up for that. You don't even need to do another warmup assuming you haven't rested for 20 weeks.

[00:18:21] So where I'm going with all of this is that you can save time by being intelligent about your warmups. Don't take 20 minutes doing a dynamic CrossFit style warmup, just warm yourself up with a little bit of cardio and then use the actual movements to warm you up. Don't warm up movements that are, you know, in the higher rep range, don't need them.

[00:18:42] You don't have to warm up movements that have already been warmed up because of similar movements before them. And these are all ways to save. Hey guys. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.

[00:19:06] And we can talk about what you found helpful in how I can improve again, an incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the. Now there's another technique to save time. It's more of a, maybe a bodybuilding approach, but the way we're going to discuss it is, is a smart way to use this, to save time, not a way to get certain muscle groups faster to fatigue, and that is super sets.

[00:19:33] So you may be familiar with a super set it's basically doing at least two different movements back to back. So let's say. Uh, bicep curls, and then hammer curls, both of which work, the bicep you do set of bicep curls. You know that let's say barbell curls, and then with very little rest at all, you go right into hammer curl.

[00:19:54] So you've fatigued the muscles. Now you're hitting them at a different angle. You kind of go back and forth. That's like a bodybuilding style approach. I'm not a huge advocate of that because I believe in sufficient rest periods and recovery, even when doing isolation movements to get the full amount of reps and really get the full muscular failure that we're looking for across the range of sets right across.

[00:20:18] You know, if you're trying to hit 10, getting 10 in, rather than just getting six or three in, because you're just so fatigued. So the super set approach we're going to talk about is the antagonist muscle approach, mainly for accessory or isolation movements. And that would be. If you're doing, let's say a bicep movement, you then super set it with a tricep movement.

[00:20:41] So it's the, the, the antagonist the opposite muscle, so that you're not really fatiguing one or the other in between the others set. And you're effectively getting two movements for one within that time period. Now, even doing that, I would suggest a short rest period. So if you were normally gonna rest three minutes, Between sets, you might rest say 45 seconds to a minute before you do this super set alternative and kind of back and forth.

[00:21:10] That's still going to save you a ton of time, but it's gonna give you a rest from the general fatigue you get from the movement, you know, not the specific muscle that's targeted, but the general fatigue. So that you can still get in your full sets. All right. I wouldn't suggest super setting big movements.

[00:21:26] I wouldn't do squat. And then, oh, it's my rest period. I'm going to do a full, heavy working set of deadlifts. Now I wouldn't do that. I would just focus on doing this for antagonist accessory movements. And that could save you a little bit of time. If you've got some power building or bodybuilding in there, uh, you might be able to save, let's say three or four minutes on a movement because you've combined it with another.

[00:21:52] All right. And finally, we get to rest periods and I saved this for last, because I think there's a lot of opportunity here to save time or sabotage ourselves either way. And I wanted to make sure it was the last thing you remembered before the podcast ends. So I think rest periods or something, there's a lot of misconceptions about a lot of misunderstanding and I've spent probably more time than I wanted to learning about reading about and thinking about this topic, because it is so important when it comes to recovery to getting your sets completed, to doing the work, to going to failure, you know, all these other concepts I grew up in Brazil.

[00:22:32] Um, the bodybuilding concepts, like rest, pause sets, super sets, et cetera. Uh, rest periods are kind of the glue that binds all of these, and it can have a big impact on your results, but also the time in the gym. So I think in general, for most people, rest periods need to be longer than you think. I know that's a very general statement, but I think a lot of.

[00:22:57] I think rest periods are just, you know, take a few breaths, wait 30 seconds. Do the next set. Now for some isolation, bodybuilding movements, there's a time and place for that. For example, there's something called rest pause sets or Mio sets where you do a set of, let's say eight to 12 and then you rest 30 seconds.

[00:23:17] And then you try to do as many as you can again, and it's, you're going to get half as many sets or half as many reps. You wait 30 seconds, do it again. You're, you're fatiguing yourself and not letting yourself recover. And so you're just pushing toward that upper limit of failure. Um, more and more quote, unquote efficiently, which does save you time.

[00:23:36] But there's a value to getting the full set of reps in, uh, as supported by the evidence supported by the literature. And it's why you don't want to just use rest pause sets for everything. So let's take a step back and talk about rescue. If we're talking about compound movements, the big compound movements, and if you're a newer lifter, I strongly suggest focusing on strength, focus in the lower rep range, higher intensity, you know, around sets of five with the compound lifts.

[00:24:05] I think it's efficient. I think it gives you a great stimulus. I think it really helps you develop and learn the movements before you start branching out into these accessories and bodybuilding style exercises. So for compound. When you're fairly new, they don't have to be extremely long. I would say around three to four minutes, you know, maybe two to five, if you want to stretch that out, could work for your rest periods between sets of five on squats, dead lifts, press bench press, but before long.

[00:24:39] And, and I mean, as little as two to three months, as you start to get stronger, you realize that the stimulus and the fatigue or. The weight is higher. They're harder to get the set's done. You're going to need extra time. So it generally starts to stretch up into more of the four to six, four to seven minute range.

[00:25:00] And of course, when you get really strong, you could be waiting 8, 9, 10 minutes or more between between sets, but let's focus on, you know, the average person, which is probably my listener. Is reasonably strong are getting they're working toward that between your squats, between your deadlifts. You want to give yourself more than enough time so that you can get the entire next set completed without the reason for you not completing it, being that you simply didn't rest enough.

[00:25:27] So we talk about all the things that are important. We talk about food, nutrition. We talk about sleep, uh, In this session itself, rest periods are probably the, the biggest factor in you failing a rep on the next set, all things equal, you know, assuming you're strong enough to get it done. If you fail a rep, it could very well be because you did not rest long enough.

[00:25:49] So think about that. And if you are finding that you're not making progress. If you're plateauing. It could be your rest periods, try longer rest periods and see what happens. You can't really rest too long. I mean, I say that with an asterisk. Of course, if you, if you wait 20 minutes and you totally cool down, I mean, that's ridiculous.

[00:26:08] And that's also going to just cost you hours and hours in the gym that you don't need to spend. What I mean is you don't, you know, you can't really go too long as in, if you wait seven or even eight minutes instead of five, you might find that that's just what you needed at this point in. Uh, trajectory, like let's say, you're squatting now you're getting up to 3 0 5, 3 15.

[00:26:31] And all of a sudden you get stuck. You may need to stretch out your rest periods. Rest periods can be shorter. However, for accessory movements and bodybuilding movements, that's for sure. So if you're doing something like a compound or compound ish, um, accessory like lying, tricep, extensions with an easy curl bar, you know, you might be able to rest two to three minutes or even four minutes.

[00:26:53] Uh, the point is wrestling with. To get the whole set done. It's better to rest a little longer than a little shorter is my opinion. Unless you were specifically trying to over fatigue the muscle with a special technique that requires shorter rest periods. Or if you're trying to train cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, and that sort of part of your programming, and you want to have a few sets of isolation movements.

[00:27:18] Bang, bang, bang, bang them out with very short rest periods and get your heart rate up. And it's more of a cardio workout. Fine, but that's a specific application that has nothing to do with developing strength or muscular size. It's more for in. Now here's a trick with rest periods. I'm telling you to make them longer than you think they need to be, but there's also a benefit to this.

[00:27:40] So if you're doing a strength-based full body workout, you probably have two or maybe three compound lifts in there. At least you can warm up the next movement during the rest periods for the current movement. It's perfectly fine. If you're going to squat and then deadlift, for example, you get your.

[00:27:58] Squats none. And yeah, it was hard. And your heart, rate's a little bit high. You're taking a breather. Um, you know, wait 30 seconds, maybe a minute, you still have a good four or five, six minutes left in your rest. Period. Go ahead and warm up your deadlift. You're going to be in a very lightweight, it's not going to be taxing at all.

[00:28:16] You're simply trying to get the, the movement, you know, burned into your brain. You're trying to get the blood flow to the right places. Get the right. Or I'm sorry. Get the warmup set done. Then you've got three, four or five more minutes of rest. You get back to your second set of squats of working at your working weight.

[00:28:35] Can you get that done? Yeah, it's really hard. It's really heavy. It should be should be tough. You get them done. All right. Again, now you go up a little bit higher weight on your deadlift warmup and you do your next warm-up set. Then finally you do your final set of squats, and then soon after doing another warmup set for deadlifts and before you know it now, Ready to hit your working set of dead lifts and without spending another 5, 6, 7 minutes just warming up.

[00:29:00] So that's your big technique to take advantage of rest periods while keeping the longer rest periods that you need and not feeling that you're just twiddling your. Now earlier in this episode, I talked about avoiding distractions and rest periods are where those distractions really rear their ugly head.

[00:29:16] You sit down on the bench, you pull out your phone, you start browsing. And before you know it it's been 12 minutes, 15 minutes. That's, that's where the rest period can get too long. And you get distracted. Maybe you start talking with people and you just cool down way too much or worse. And this happened to me.

[00:29:34] Uh, last year is I was deadlifting and I got distracted talking to someone, took a little bit too long, forgot to put my straps on for the next set. And I also didn't get tight. Like all of these things were a result of getting distressed. And that goes back to the attentional and the intentional focus.

[00:29:52] So what can you do during your rest period? You can just rest and listen to music. You can walk around. It's a great way to get extra steps in, or you can throw in your warm-up set for the next movement. Like we talked about. There's also other things you can do. You can go around and get your next movement set up.

[00:30:11] Even if you're not going to warm it up, you might be able to. The machine or the plates or what have you. Um, if you're at a home gym, you know, I like to plan ahead to the next movement or to move my stuff around. You know, you can't always do that in a commercial gym kind of hog space and hog equipment, but in a home gym can so pay attention to your rest periods.

[00:30:32] They're very important for recovery, but you can also use some techniques to save time during your rest periods without making them too. All right. That is my list of ideas to help you maximize your time during lifting sessions. All I ask is that you take a step back and consider your current approach to training.

[00:30:53] If you can incorporate better planning, use of downtime and rest periods, other approaches like warmups and super sets, you might experience more. But more time efficient workouts so that you can get back to all the other important and urgent things in your life. And if you have any other ideas to be more efficient, just send me an email at philip@witsandweights.com or DM me on Instagram.

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Ep 14: Avoid These Common Mistakes That Sabotage Your Fat Loss Goals

As a follow-up to the last episode on losing weight without losing muscle, I want to address the frustration many of us have experienced with either not being able to lose weight or hitting a plateau, usually in the form of scale weight no longer going down.

This is a complex, nuanced topic that ultimately comes down to understanding the root cause behind being unable to lose weight and taking back control so YOU can do something that will nudge your fat loss back in the right direction.

That’s not to say this is your “fault” but rather that, 99% of the time, we just need to identify the problem so we can apply the right solution, and YOU are empowered to uncover the problem with the right tools and information. That is the goal of this podcast!

Every fat loss phase is just a bit different, even for an individual. You may sail through and shed the pounds with ease, or you may struggle with fits-and-starts, ravenous hunger, and the feeling that there’s just something else going on beyond calories in, calories out.

However, at the end of the day, it really is about energy balance. The challenge is identifying which SIDE of that balance (diet vs. metabolism) and accounting for recent changes and other factors that could mess with this balance, often in subtle ways like a sneaky ninja trying to sabotage your hard-earned progress.

Before I get into the list, a few caveats. First, these reasons aren’t always in a vacuum: you may be experiencing more than one at the same time, and some of these may be interrelated. Second, I want to reiterate this isn’t a blame game; while a weight-loss stall ultimately comes down to energy balance, it can indeed be challenging to identify the true root cause, which often stems from something out of your control. My intent is to empower you to take back control.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
02:42 - The 20 common mistakes that sabotage your fat loss goals

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 13 of Wits & Weights. The last episode covered why gaining weight while training hard is an effective way to get lean by packing on muscle increasing metabolism and making it easier to lose fat later today, we're tackling the losing fat part of.

[00:00:53] If you haven't listened to episode 12, go back and do that first. If you're a new lifter who is not extremely overweight, your best gains will come through hard strength, training and eating at maintenance or in a slight surplus to improve your body composition. I recommend focusing on building muscle before you worry about losing.

[00:01:15] However, if you're a late novice or intermediate lifter who has spent time in a building phase and is ready to lean out through a fat loss phase, this episode is for you after all, most of us want to maintain a healthy weight and we can't keep packing on muscle along with some fat. The body adapts muscle building slows down, and sometimes we need to rev the engine, so to speak by taking a break, cutting some weight and resetting ourselves for the next building.

[00:01:48] The challenge is losing weight at a reasonable pace while retaining as much of that hard, one muscle as possible through appropriate training and nutrition choices, just as we want to maximize muscle size and growth while gaining weight, we want to minimize muscle loss and maximize fat loss while losing weight.

[00:02:09] In this episode, I cover when it makes sense to enter a weight loss phase, how fast you should lose. Training and diet strategies to retain as much muscle as possible metabolic adaptation and taking diet breaks, listening to biofeedback, especially as you get really lean. And my recent successful 12 week weight loss phase, and the current cut that I'm going through.

[00:02:38] Right. The first thing I want to address is the question. When does it make sense to enter a weight loss phase? It seems obvious. Well, I just want to lose weight don't we all? And if you are skinny or average or slightly overweight and you are a newer lifter. I would say you want to build first if you're not extremely overweight and you're a newer lifter work on building muscle, don't worry about losing weight or losing fat.

[00:03:08] You could go on a maintenance diet for awhile to try to get some body recomposition or go into a surplus. Doesn't really matter that much, but it is not the time to lose weight. If you are very overweight, then losing weight could be a good idea to prioritize. Overbuilding muscle, even though you're going to continue lifting hard to at the very least preserve what muscle you have and still possibly engage in body recomposition, especially if you're newer, where fat loss and weight loss makes complete sense is if you're you've been lifting for a little while you're in late novice or an internal.

[00:03:47] Lifter or, or more advanced and you have some amount of weight to lose then this episode and these strategies definitely apply to you. So then the question is how fast and how much weight do you lose first? Let's talk about the goal weight. So I always recommend setting a target weight, not a body fat percentage target.

[00:04:12] And this is for a few reasons, a weight on the scale is object. It's just a number and, you know, when you get their body fat percentage, it would be objective. It could, if it could be measured objectively, but the problem is most forms of measurement have error. And unless you're very good with calipers or tracking really, really closely, which is definitely possible.

[00:04:35] And we've talked about doing that with tape measures and calibers, unless you're doing that, it's a much harder target to hit. And to really know that you've got. So you want to set a weight target to get down to however, I wouldn't set a goal that's insanely low for a single phase. I'd go for no more than say eight to 10%.

[00:04:57] At one time before you then might take a diet break or a maintenance break for awhile has meant as long as a few months. And then continue if you have a lot of weights. But if we take our an example, 200 pound male, I would target getting to no less than 180 pounds. So that's 20 pounds of weight loss in one continuous phase.

[00:05:20] Now the actual target weight you're going to hit depends on your personal goal is your goal just to get to. Quote unquote, healthy weight, which we'll talk about in a second, or is it to get really lean for a specific goal? Like a physique competition, bodybuilding, a vanity goal, like looking good on the beach or even a photo shoot.

[00:05:42] Those are very different goals. We're just going to assume that your goal is to get to a healthy weight. And I realized that that is a somewhat subjective thing. There's something called the BMI, the body mass index, which is often used to determine whether someone is healthy, overweight, or obese. Now, if you don't have much lean mass, if you're sort of the average American who doesn't lift, it's a pretty reasonable reflection of whether you are at a healthy.

[00:06:09] But the more lean mass you have, the more body fat itself becomes a better proxy for quote unquote healthy and take myself as an example, I currently weigh 1 75 and I'm five nine. If I plug that into a BMI calculator, it says that I'm. But I have a pretty lean body composition of probably around 13 to 15%, which I would consider healthy from all aspects.

[00:06:34] But if you were say skinny fat at 1 75 and five nine, you very well could be at a, maybe an unhealthy weight. So I would keep all those in mind based on where you are today. If you're a newer lifter, you haven't put on much muscle BMI's. Window to look at, to decide if I want to get to the lower end of the overweight range or down into the quote unquote healthy weight range.

[00:06:58] So that's the target. Then we want to target how much weight we want to lose per week. And the generally recommended range is 0.25 to 1% of your body weight per week. The newer lifter you are the higher you can go. And any more than that is just too aggressive. It would probably lead to more muscle loss, more hunger.

[00:07:22] You have fewer calories to work with, which makes it hard to hit your protein probably makes you miserable and it could cause more rapid metabolic adaptation. All of these things, you can do it if you're, if this is the very first time you're doing this and you're overweight or very overweight and you just want to be very aggressive and you just started with.

[00:07:41] You might be able to go a little higher, but generally the range is 0.2, five to 1% of your body weight per week. Even just, if you think about a 200 pound person, half a percent is still one pound per week, which is still 52 pounds per year. So if you have 50 pounds to lose, you can lose. Approximately a year and chances are, you're going to go a little bit more aggressive than that at that weight, which would speed up the process.

[00:08:08] But remember, we want to take a break. If it's any more than roughly 10% of weight loss, we want to take a break. Once we get to 10% and then we're going to continue later on. So if we take a 200 pound male who wants to lose 1% body weight per week and lose 20 pounds, that's going to be up to two pounds per week loss, and it's going to take 10 weeks.

[00:08:29] So using the 3,500 calorie per pound rule of thumb, the very rough rule of thumb that's 7,000 calories deficit per week, 3,500 times to 7,000 deficit calories of deficit per week. You divide that by seven days and that's a thousand calories per day below maintenance as a very rough. Frame of reference to start.

[00:08:53] So if this person's expenditure, if his total daily energy expenditure is currently 3,200 calories, he would target 2200 calories per day for the diet. And then you would try. Your weight on a regular basis. I recommend every morning, I've said this before, but you can do it a few times a week. It's gotta be enough to get a moving average so that you're not beholding to big swings, big fluctuations in scale weight that naturally occur due to changes in glycogen and water in your body every day.

[00:09:27] So we need to have something to smooth it out. And then after a week, and then another week we'll know whether we're losing that two pounds per week. The problem is. Total daily energy expenditure is very dynamic. You cannot just set it and forget it. This is why it's extremely important to log food and weight.

[00:09:48] So you have objective data to tell you how the calories in affects your change in weight week to week. So I would consider using an app. I said this before an app, like macro factor. Which I'm a big advocate of, I use it myself, a discount code, Whitson weights, macro factor uses an advanced algorithm that adjusts your calories.

[00:10:12] Individual goals that you put into the app based on your food intake and a predicted change in your body composition. And if I'm going to share my current macros as an example, my current calories, a macro. So you get an idea of what this looks like when your weight loss phase. I currently weigh about 1 75 and my target right now is pretty aggressive at 2,130 calories a day.

[00:10:34] And that's made up of 185 grams of protein, 70 grams of. 190 grams of carbs. Now that 185 grams of protein you'll notice is a little bit more than a gram per pound, sort of the gold standard we've talked about. And it's been constant even when I was gaining weight, it was that. And when I'm losing weight, it's that, but when I'm losing weight, I'm cutting the calories quite a bit.

[00:10:58] So the fats and carbs have had to drop IX extensively as the calories have dropped. So as not to touch the. You can see at 190 grams of carbs, it's still okay. Amount. It's roughly a gram per pound of carbs and in 70 grams of fat. So I have to be really careful to get my protein in, but make choices that limit the other macros so that I can get my protein while hitting my calories.

[00:11:24] So to summarize this section, choose a target. Don't try to lose more than 10% of your weight in one, go and choose a target rate of loss per week between a quarter to 1% of your body weight and use that to drive your calorie and macro plan. All right, next, I want to talk about training and diet strategies so that you can retain as much muscle as.

[00:11:50] For people who aren't lifters, which has many of us, myself included for much of my life, weight loss is often seen as a way to get thin. And you just do it at all costs. In other words, typically you do it by. Eating less and you might do it by following a fad diet, keto, or carnival or whatever, but at the end of the day, you're cutting calories, but you often don't care where the calories come from and how much protein you're getting, because you're not really lifting and muscle.

[00:12:21] It doesn't seem that important to you. But now that we are focused on being healthier, being fit, gaining muscle and improving body composition, the training and diet strategy is very important when we're losing weight. So when we talk about training, we have to continue lifting heart. It's really, as simple as that, what I recommend is whatever you're doing today for your programming, whether it's starting strength or a four day split or an intense bodybuilding program, continue the same program into your diet.

[00:12:55] Recognizing that progress may eventually start to stall and that's okay. Because as we get deeper into our diet, we're going to lose strength and we may lose some muscle mass and you're not going to have the same performance. Now that's a small sacrifice that we make, but by continuing to provide a strong muscle building stimulus, usually in the form of intensity, meaning we're lifting heavy weights, high weights on the bar, but not necessarily variety of programming styles.

[00:13:27] We are preserving as much muscle as we can now do not expect strength or muscle gains while losing weight, unless you're in that small sweet spot of a new lifter, who's undergoing body composition, but that is a very short window. So if you get that, that's a bonus. Don't expect it instead. We're focusing on minimizing muscle loss.

[00:13:50] So that's for training. It's pretty simple. Just keep training hard and be consistent. Consistency is the most important. And of course recovery. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.

[00:14:15] And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again. An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the. Now for diet protein on a fat loss phase will be even more important than when regaining weight. And by more, I don't mean you're going to eat more protein, although some suggest that as a strategy, but the fact that you still need as much protein as when you're gaining weight means that you're going to have to sacrifice the fats and carbs, which takes some rebalancing in what you eat.

[00:14:50] So you're still going to target around one gram per pound or whatever you were doing on your weight gain. That makes sense for you. And that's going to help preserve that hard one muscle as you lose weight, but carbs and fat are going to come way down. So to make sure you have sufficient carbs for recovery and for training, you may want to cut more of the fat than you do the carbs, which can be a sacrifice for some of us, depending on what we like.

[00:15:17] I also recommend trying to get lots of your carbs Perry workout that is in the window before, during, and after your workout. It doesn't, we're not talking about this crazy anabolic window where you have to do it precisely half an hour for up to precisely half an hour after or anything like that. Just roughly around your workout window, three, four hours around that window.

[00:15:39] Try to get a lot or most of your car. Also focus on satiety, promoting foods by society. I mean, things that fill you up that are less calorie dense, and this might require adding more greens, salad, fruit, vegetables, instead of calorie dense foods, it might mean eating leaner cuts of meat. Maybe a little more chicken, even chicken thighs, instead of say beef, occasionally staying hydrated, you know, drinking water can help you stave off hunger, fill you up and maybe even spacing your meals in a way that minimizes hunger.

[00:16:19] I know when I was gaining weight, I could eat six times a day and each meal would have quite a few calories and that was heaven. But when I'm losing. I need to be judicious about having say four strategic meals or even three meals with a strategic snack. So that there's just enough time between meals where I can have a big meal, but not get too.

[00:16:44] And I would say that because protein, the need for protein is still high thinking your mind protein first when constructing your meals. So for example, if you want an afternoon snack consider cottage cheese, which is pretty high in protein, in moderate to low in fat and carbs, where on a bulky, you might've had a bagel with cream cheese, you know, more carb.

[00:17:07] And if you're only going to have, say three big meals, each meal has to have sufficient protein so that the total adds up to your needs. So if you're shooting for 180 grams of protein for the day, and you're going to have three meals, then that means an average of 60 grams of protein per meal, which is quite a bit.

[00:17:26] So this is where you might end up supplementing with the occasional protein. All right. So I want to talk now about this concept of metabolic adaptation and then what we can do about it. If it becomes an issue for you, as you lose weight, your TDE, total daily energy expenditure will inevitably decline.

[00:17:46] It just will. The longer you go through a weight loss phase, it's going to start to drop for a number of reasons. Some of the. Include the fact that you simply way less, you have, you're carrying less mass around, which reduces your BMS. You might see a natural reduction in meat, non exercise activity, thermogenesis.

[00:18:07] And that often comes with just being on a diet. You tend to move around less. You just don't have as much energy. You might have a reduction in eat exercise, activity, thermogenesis, because you simply can't train as hard. So when you're not performing as well. You're not burning as many calories. And also finally, the body's stubborn desire to survive will cause you to conserve calories and adapt, you know, so you don't starve and the leaner you get, the more aggressive this quote unquote metabolic adaptation might become.

[00:18:42] So it's very individual. Some people don't experience experience this until they're extremely lean while others get hit right away. As soon as they start going on. And I've experienced both. In fact, it seems to change based on your individual circumstances at the time. Are you coming off of a big bulking phase or are you coming off of maintenance that might affect it or have you been a lot more active for the past few months or not versus a different time than you went on a weight loss phase?

[00:19:12] There are a lot of conditions that can change this. Now, one way to offset this reduction is to intentionally increase your active. But you have to do it intelligently and strategically. So the best way to do this, in my opinion, this is just me is low intensity cardio, like walking, walking, especially I've talked about the benefit benefits before it is low stress.

[00:19:37] It can be. Right. Especially if you go outside with fresh air and sunshine, um, it's spring now, it's almost going to be summer. I'm really looking forward to a lot of those outside walks. It doesn't interfere at all with your lifting. And in fact, it can have the opposite effect and improve your recovery, your mobility, your joint.

[00:19:57] Uh, and of course it's great for your cardiovascular health, your resting heart rate, and your overall markers of, of health. Now you can also incorporate two or three moderate to high intensity cardio sessions throughout the week. Just don't overdo it, especially when you're losing weight, because your ability to lift hard and preserve muscle is still the primary.

[00:20:19] But a bit of extra cardio can increase your TDE and give you a little more room to either eat more or increase your rate of weight loss without eating less. So for example, a lot of bodybuilders, when they get deep into their cut, you see them trying to get a ton of steps, trying to get 20,000 steps a day, for example.

[00:20:40] And I'm not saying go that. But if you can increase from what most people get today, which is like maybe four or 5,000 steps and increase up to 10 or even 12, most days, you will see a big difference. It's going to add a few hundred calories to your material. Every day, which gives you extra room in your diet.

[00:20:59] Now, the last thing related to this metabolic adaptation concept is the idea that as our body adapts, it gets harder and harder to lose weight. We have to reduce our calories more and more, and we're just kind of pushing against a wall to break that wall. We can take a diet break and a diet break is just a fancy term for eating at maintenance for a while, maybe a few days to a few weeks.

[00:21:26] Could even be a few months. If we're talking about a very, very long fat loss phase, and then you continue your diet and there's some evidence that this could help your TD E recover, restore your glycogen, your energy, give you a psychological break from the incessant deficit and the hunger from. Now, this could slow down your diet a little bit, or it could give you a jumpstart that you need to continue.

[00:21:51] So I just suggest trying this out. If you're on a longer, more aggressive diet to see if it helps. All right. The next topic is biofeedback. As you lose more and more weight, your body's going to give you information through biofeedback, things like hunger, fatigue, loss of strength. When you train all of these little things are clues to what's going on and hints that you may or may not need to adjust.

[00:22:19] Now, if you also take body measurements, As I've recommended, you should see things like your waist circumference declining, and that's a good sign. That's a sign you're losing body fat, but you might also see a decline in your other measurements, like your chest biceps, thighs, calves, et cetera. And that could indicate a combination of fat and muscle loss.

[00:22:41] Hopefully mostly fat if you're doing this right, but you can't know entirely. Now just because you have a particular weight target. So let's say you're 200 pounds. You want to get to 180. It doesn't mean that you should just keep pushing and pushing and pushing toward that goal. If the experience has become too negative, right?

[00:23:01] If it's getting harder and harder, if your metabolism is dropping like a rock, if you're having a cut in your calories, if you're super hungry and you're miserable, you might just need a diet break or it might be time to end the cut and get back to me. For awhile or even a building phase because we're in this for the long-term folks, we're in this for sustainability over the long-term.

[00:23:21] We're not talking crash diets here. We're talking reasonable. I'll call it slow weight loss to preserve muscle until you get to your goal. But it has to be something you can sustain for the rest of your. All right. The last thing I want to cover here is the 12 week cut that I went through last year. And then the cut that I'm undergoing currently, which is roughly an 18 week cut with some breaks.

[00:23:49] So talking about the 12 week cut, going back to early August of 2021, I had just finished a muscle building phase and my weight was 180 7 point. And when I ended the cut in late October, my weight was 1 67 0.8. So that was a total decrease of 19.4 pounds, which was 1.6 pounds per week. So that's roughly 0.8, 5% of my starting week, weight per week.

[00:24:22] Right in that range of half of quarter to 1% that we talked about, it was 0.8, 5%. So moderate to moderately agree. Now I also did calculate my body fat percentage. I use two methods. One is the Navy method with the neck and. Measurements with tape. And the other was the three site caliber measurements. And then I would average them because they're pretty far off from each other most of the time, but the average gives you a reasonable number and then the trend is what's most important.

[00:24:54] So I started. 18.6, 2% body fat. And I ended at 10.69. So fairly lean. In fact, it was probably the leanest I had been ever before. Um, and now I'm actually on track to try to beat that. I basically lost 17 pounds of fat and I lost 2.4 pounds of muscle, which isn't too bad. So I preserved most of my muscle. I lost a little bit of lean mass and not all that.

[00:25:23] Is necessarily muscle, but some of it is now when I started my cut, I had a fairly moderate expenditure in the low to mid two thousands. And actually my expenditure increased somewhat during the cut and then it leveled. And what happened there is I had actually started this not long after recovering from surgery.

[00:25:47] So I was not coming off of a big muscle building phase immediately. I'd actually taken quite a bit of a break and my metabolism had come down. So if anything, I was actually training more than before during this cut. So you see that everybody's situation is different and everybody's going to respond differently.

[00:26:04] What I did notice is that deep into the cut, the expenditure leveled out. My nutrition was. Around 2200 calories. And the important thing here is how did I know when the cup was ready to end? Because I did have a target in mind and I just met the target, but I could also tell it was ready to, I was ready to be done with this.

[00:26:27] First of all, is the increased appetite. Very common increased appetite. Now. I definitely had a loss of muscle mass from my measurements, but definitely because of my loss of strength. So that was an objective way to measure that things had declined my press and my bench press started to backslide. My squat was feeling super heavy.

[00:26:49] I think my deadlifts stalled also, I had spent 12 weeks in this cut, which was a nice duration and the trend. Sort of my average weight fell below what was originally my goal of one 70 and I was happy with that. So then I said, well, it's time, time to bulk again, time neither, go on maintenance and take a break or time to bulk again.

[00:27:08] That's what I did. And in the last episode, episode 12 is where I talked about that recent building phase. But now I want to talk about my current cut because I think that's more representative of what a lot of people see after they've gone through a building. And for the current cut. My goal is more or less to get as lean as I've ever gotten before.

[00:27:29] Just for fun to see if I can do. Ahead of a big event on the beach with the family in June and the summer months, where are you going to be wearing shorts and sandals, all that kind of vanity thing that lots of us have. And the goal is to do that before I then go out on a nice long building phase. So for this time around, because I have about 18 weeks to get it done, I could have taken a few different approaches.

[00:27:53] I could have just done a linear approach and just kind of time to that. But what I wanted to do instead, I wanted to be more aggressive at the beginning for about eight or nine weeks. So I'm targeting 1% per week for that. Then take a diet break for a week, then go in a more moderate cut for about six weeks and then go back on to maintenance for a couple of weeks before the event.

[00:28:17] So I could sort of fill in with carbs, get my diet back up before I go on vacation and eat my heart out and not track and not care about how much. So the first few weeks of the phase actually went really well. This is the aggressive 1% per week. Cut my trend weight decreased from where I started around 180 2 and got down to 1 77 and for about three weeks.

[00:28:41] So I was actually overshooting. Now I ascribed that partially to coming off of a bulk, probably losing some of that waterway, that glycogen as well as some fat, my body fat started to drop a bit from about 15 to about 13. Now, initially the scale weight didn't move very much during the first week or two.

[00:28:59] And then there was a big whoosh, and this is one of the things people experienced. The whoosh for me, it was about five pounds from one day to the next. And this highlights, the fact that scale weight is. Volatile and you can't necessarily trust it without smoothing it out by averaging the weight over time.

[00:29:17] My metabolism started to steadily declined from about 34 50 to a little over 3000 calories kind of bottomed out, but it has since started to decline. My macro plan. I think I mentioned earlier is around 2130 calories. Now, after the first few weeks, it was up around 2,400. Now it's getting closer to 2100 and that's because my metabolism has been declining.

[00:29:42] So my protein is stayed in the one eighties, but the fat and the carbs have come quite a bit down as I've been cutting my deficit. I started at around 900 calorie deficit and it's been. I'm still lifting six days a week, trying to get about 12,000 steps a day. Maybe on the weekend. I get half that, but on the weekdays with the treadmill and I take lunch walks when I can I get the 12,000.

[00:30:07] So the first three or four weeks of the cut were great. Then I started to see a big drop in my expenditure, and then I saw it climb again. And the problem was the weight started to stall. So I think the app was probably maybe overshooting or undershooting. Based on my inputs because my metabolism is dropping, but I have a big fluctuation in activity some weeks, you know, I'm lifting hard and my diet is changing.

[00:30:33] So all of these variables interacting together, I've seen my metabolism effectively declined to. Roughly where it was during my last cut. So that might just be more or less my set point for metabolism when I'm at roughly the same level of activity, which kind of makes sense. Right. Just intuitively the point is it's changes all the time and you have to track food.

[00:30:59] You have to track weight. If you're going to more precisely keep your calories where they need to be to stay. X pounds per week of reduction. You know, for me, it's around 1.7, 1.8 pounds per week. And some weeks I don't lose any weight. And then other weeks I lose way more and it kind of averages out. But if it's not hitting that target, that I'm going to adjust my calories accordingly.

[00:31:21] So I'm looking forward to a maintenance week pretty soon when I hit my interim target of 1 68. And then the plan is to kind of. Gradual glide path in less aggressively, hopefully allows my TDE to recover. And then coming in around the low one sixties. Now notice that I'm not targeting any specific body fat, but I know where I was last time at one 70.

[00:31:49] So I'm going to be something more lean than that below one 70. And yet I also have about five pounds more muscle, some of which I'm also going to lose. So that's a lot of information I threw at you, a lot of lessons that I've learned, um, some tips and strategies that I hope will help you. It's all about losing weight so that you burn fat without losing muscle.

[00:32:13] You keep lifting hard. Keep your protein high, follow us on these other basics. And then I hope you can take these, apply them to your own situation as you strive for a better healthier you for the long term.

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Ep 13: Losing Weight Without Losing Muscle

The last episode covered why gaining weight while training hard is an effective way to get lean by packing on muscle, increasing metabolism, and making it easier to lose fat later.

Today we’re tackling the “losing fat” part of getting lean. If you haven’t listened to episode 12, go back and do that first. If you’re a newer lifter who is not extremely overweight, your best gains will come through hard strength training and eating at maintenance or in a slight surplus to improve your body composition. I recommend focusing on building muscle before you worry about losing fat.

However, if you’re a late novice or intermediate lifter who has spent time in a building phase and is ready to “lean out” through a fat-loss phase, this episode is for you. After all, most of us want to maintain a healthy weight, and we can’t keep packing on muscle (along with some fat) forever. The body adapts, muscle-building slows down, and sometimes we need to “rev the engine” so-to-speak by taking a break, cutting some weight, and resetting ourselves for the next building phase.

The challenge is losing weight at a reasonable pace while retaining as much of that hard-won muscle as possible through appropriate training and nutrition choices. Just as we want to maximize muscle size and growth while gaining weight, we want to minimize muscle loss and maximize fat loss while losing weight.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• When it makes sense to enter a weight-loss phase

• How fast you should lose weight

• Training and diet strategies to retain as much muscle as possible

• Metabolic adaptation and taking “diet breaks”

• Listening to biofeedback, especially as you get really lean

• My recent, successful 12-week weight-loss phase and current cut

RELATED LINKS:

• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use discount code "WITSANDWEIGHTS")

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At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 13 of Wits & Weights. The last episode covered why gaining weight while training hard is an effective way to get lean by packing on muscle increasing metabolism and making it easier to lose fat later today, we're tackling the losing fat part of.

[00:00:53] If you haven't listened to episode 12, go back and do that first. If you're a new lifter who is not extremely overweight, your best gains will come through hard strength, training and eating at maintenance or in a slight surplus to improve your body composition. I recommend focusing on building muscle before you worry about losing.

[00:01:15] However, if you're a late novice or intermediate lifter who has spent time in a building phase and is ready to lean out through a fat loss phase, this episode is for you after all, most of us want to maintain a healthy weight and we can't keep packing on muscle along with some fat. The body adapts muscle building slows down, and sometimes we need to rev the engine, so to speak by taking a break, cutting some weight and resetting ourselves for the next building.

[00:01:48] The challenge is losing weight at a reasonable pace while retaining as much of that hard, one muscle as possible through appropriate training and nutrition choices, just as we want to maximize muscle size and growth while gaining weight, we want to minimize muscle loss and maximize fat loss while losing weight.

[00:02:09] In this episode, I cover when it makes sense to enter a weight loss phase, how fast you should lose. Training and diet strategies to retain as much muscle as possible metabolic adaptation and taking diet breaks, listening to biofeedback, especially as you get really lean. And my recent successful 12 week weight loss phase, and the current cut that I'm going through.

[00:02:38] Right. The first thing I want to address is the question. When does it make sense to enter a weight loss phase? It seems obvious. Well, I just want to lose weight don't we all? And if you are skinny or average or slightly overweight and you are a newer lifter. I would say you want to build first if you're not extremely overweight and you're a newer lifter work on building muscle, don't worry about losing weight or losing fat.

[00:03:08] You could go on a maintenance diet for awhile to try to get some body recomposition or go into a surplus. Doesn't really matter that much, but it is not the time to lose weight. If you are very overweight, then losing weight could be a good idea to prioritize. Overbuilding muscle, even though you're going to continue lifting hard to at the very least preserve what muscle you have and still possibly engage in body recomposition, especially if you're newer, where fat loss and weight loss makes complete sense is if you're you've been lifting for a little while you're in late novice or an internal.

[00:03:47] Lifter or, or more advanced and you have some amount of weight to lose then this episode and these strategies definitely apply to you. So then the question is how fast and how much weight do you lose first? Let's talk about the goal weight. So I always recommend setting a target weight, not a body fat percentage target.

[00:04:12] And this is for a few reasons, a weight on the scale is object. It's just a number and, you know, when you get their body fat percentage, it would be objective. It could, if it could be measured objectively, but the problem is most forms of measurement have error. And unless you're very good with calipers or tracking really, really closely, which is definitely possible.

[00:04:35] And we've talked about doing that with tape measures and calibers, unless you're doing that, it's a much harder target to hit. And to really know that you've got. So you want to set a weight target to get down to however, I wouldn't set a goal that's insanely low for a single phase. I'd go for no more than say eight to 10%.

[00:04:57] At one time before you then might take a diet break or a maintenance break for awhile has meant as long as a few months. And then continue if you have a lot of weights. But if we take our an example, 200 pound male, I would target getting to no less than 180 pounds. So that's 20 pounds of weight loss in one continuous phase.

[00:05:20] Now the actual target weight you're going to hit depends on your personal goal is your goal just to get to. Quote unquote, healthy weight, which we'll talk about in a second, or is it to get really lean for a specific goal? Like a physique competition, bodybuilding, a vanity goal, like looking good on the beach or even a photo shoot.

[00:05:42] Those are very different goals. We're just going to assume that your goal is to get to a healthy weight. And I realized that that is a somewhat subjective thing. There's something called the BMI, the body mass index, which is often used to determine whether someone is healthy, overweight, or obese. Now, if you don't have much lean mass, if you're sort of the average American who doesn't lift, it's a pretty reasonable reflection of whether you are at a healthy.

[00:06:09] But the more lean mass you have, the more body fat itself becomes a better proxy for quote unquote healthy and take myself as an example, I currently weigh 1 75 and I'm five nine. If I plug that into a BMI calculator, it says that I'm. But I have a pretty lean body composition of probably around 13 to 15%, which I would consider healthy from all aspects.

[00:06:34] But if you were say skinny fat at 1 75 and five nine, you very well could be at a, maybe an unhealthy weight. So I would keep all those in mind based on where you are today. If you're a newer lifter, you haven't put on much muscle BMI's. Window to look at, to decide if I want to get to the lower end of the overweight range or down into the quote unquote healthy weight range.

[00:06:58] So that's the target. Then we want to target how much weight we want to lose per week. And the generally recommended range is 0.25 to 1% of your body weight per week. The newer lifter you are the higher you can go. And any more than that is just too aggressive. It would probably lead to more muscle loss, more hunger.

[00:07:22] You have fewer calories to work with, which makes it hard to hit your protein probably makes you miserable and it could cause more rapid metabolic adaptation. All of these things, you can do it if you're, if this is the very first time you're doing this and you're overweight or very overweight and you just want to be very aggressive and you just started with.

[00:07:41] You might be able to go a little higher, but generally the range is 0.2, five to 1% of your body weight per week. Even just, if you think about a 200 pound person, half a percent is still one pound per week, which is still 52 pounds per year. So if you have 50 pounds to lose, you can lose. Approximately a year and chances are, you're going to go a little bit more aggressive than that at that weight, which would speed up the process.

[00:08:08] But remember, we want to take a break. If it's any more than roughly 10% of weight loss, we want to take a break. Once we get to 10% and then we're going to continue later on. So if we take a 200 pound male who wants to lose 1% body weight per week and lose 20 pounds, that's going to be up to two pounds per week loss, and it's going to take 10 weeks.

[00:08:29] So using the 3,500 calorie per pound rule of thumb, the very rough rule of thumb that's 7,000 calories deficit per week, 3,500 times to 7,000 deficit calories of deficit per week. You divide that by seven days and that's a thousand calories per day below maintenance as a very rough. Frame of reference to start.

[00:08:53] So if this person's expenditure, if his total daily energy expenditure is currently 3,200 calories, he would target 2200 calories per day for the diet. And then you would try. Your weight on a regular basis. I recommend every morning, I've said this before, but you can do it a few times a week. It's gotta be enough to get a moving average so that you're not beholding to big swings, big fluctuations in scale weight that naturally occur due to changes in glycogen and water in your body every day.

[00:09:27] So we need to have something to smooth it out. And then after a week, and then another week we'll know whether we're losing that two pounds per week. The problem is. Total daily energy expenditure is very dynamic. You cannot just set it and forget it. This is why it's extremely important to log food and weight.

[00:09:48] So you have objective data to tell you how the calories in affects your change in weight week to week. So I would consider using an app. I said this before an app, like macro factor. Which I'm a big advocate of, I use it myself, a discount code, Whitson weights, macro factor uses an advanced algorithm that adjusts your calories.

[00:10:12] Individual goals that you put into the app based on your food intake and a predicted change in your body composition. And if I'm going to share my current macros as an example, my current calories, a macro. So you get an idea of what this looks like when your weight loss phase. I currently weigh about 1 75 and my target right now is pretty aggressive at 2,130 calories a day.

[00:10:34] And that's made up of 185 grams of protein, 70 grams of. 190 grams of carbs. Now that 185 grams of protein you'll notice is a little bit more than a gram per pound, sort of the gold standard we've talked about. And it's been constant even when I was gaining weight, it was that. And when I'm losing weight, it's that, but when I'm losing weight, I'm cutting the calories quite a bit.

[00:10:58] So the fats and carbs have had to drop IX extensively as the calories have dropped. So as not to touch the. You can see at 190 grams of carbs, it's still okay. Amount. It's roughly a gram per pound of carbs and in 70 grams of fat. So I have to be really careful to get my protein in, but make choices that limit the other macros so that I can get my protein while hitting my calories.

[00:11:24] So to summarize this section, choose a target. Don't try to lose more than 10% of your weight in one, go and choose a target rate of loss per week between a quarter to 1% of your body weight and use that to drive your calorie and macro plan. All right, next, I want to talk about training and diet strategies so that you can retain as much muscle as.

[00:11:50] For people who aren't lifters, which has many of us, myself included for much of my life, weight loss is often seen as a way to get thin. And you just do it at all costs. In other words, typically you do it by. Eating less and you might do it by following a fad diet, keto, or carnival or whatever, but at the end of the day, you're cutting calories, but you often don't care where the calories come from and how much protein you're getting, because you're not really lifting and muscle.

[00:12:21] It doesn't seem that important to you. But now that we are focused on being healthier, being fit, gaining muscle and improving body composition, the training and diet strategy is very important when we're losing weight. So when we talk about training, we have to continue lifting heart. It's really, as simple as that, what I recommend is whatever you're doing today for your programming, whether it's starting strength or a four day split or an intense bodybuilding program, continue the same program into your diet.

[00:12:55] Recognizing that progress may eventually start to stall and that's okay. Because as we get deeper into our diet, we're going to lose strength and we may lose some muscle mass and you're not going to have the same performance. Now that's a small sacrifice that we make, but by continuing to provide a strong muscle building stimulus, usually in the form of intensity, meaning we're lifting heavy weights, high weights on the bar, but not necessarily variety of programming styles.

[00:13:27] We are preserving as much muscle as we can now do not expect strength or muscle gains while losing weight, unless you're in that small sweet spot of a new lifter, who's undergoing body composition, but that is a very short window. So if you get that, that's a bonus. Don't expect it instead. We're focusing on minimizing muscle loss.

[00:13:50] So that's for training. It's pretty simple. Just keep training hard and be consistent. Consistency is the most important. And of course recovery. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.

[00:14:15] And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again. An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the. Now for diet protein on a fat loss phase will be even more important than when regaining weight. And by more, I don't mean you're going to eat more protein, although some suggest that as a strategy, but the fact that you still need as much protein as when you're gaining weight means that you're going to have to sacrifice the fats and carbs, which takes some rebalancing in what you eat.

[00:14:50] So you're still going to target around one gram per pound or whatever you were doing on your weight gain. That makes sense for you. And that's going to help preserve that hard one muscle as you lose weight, but carbs and fat are going to come way down. So to make sure you have sufficient carbs for recovery and for training, you may want to cut more of the fat than you do the carbs, which can be a sacrifice for some of us, depending on what we like.

[00:15:17] I also recommend trying to get lots of your carbs Perry workout that is in the window before, during, and after your workout. It doesn't, we're not talking about this crazy anabolic window where you have to do it precisely half an hour for up to precisely half an hour after or anything like that. Just roughly around your workout window, three, four hours around that window.

[00:15:39] Try to get a lot or most of your car. Also focus on satiety, promoting foods by society. I mean, things that fill you up that are less calorie dense, and this might require adding more greens, salad, fruit, vegetables, instead of calorie dense foods, it might mean eating leaner cuts of meat. Maybe a little more chicken, even chicken thighs, instead of say beef, occasionally staying hydrated, you know, drinking water can help you stave off hunger, fill you up and maybe even spacing your meals in a way that minimizes hunger.

[00:16:19] I know when I was gaining weight, I could eat six times a day and each meal would have quite a few calories and that was heaven. But when I'm losing. I need to be judicious about having say four strategic meals or even three meals with a strategic snack. So that there's just enough time between meals where I can have a big meal, but not get too.

[00:16:44] And I would say that because protein, the need for protein is still high thinking your mind protein first when constructing your meals. So for example, if you want an afternoon snack consider cottage cheese, which is pretty high in protein, in moderate to low in fat and carbs, where on a bulky, you might've had a bagel with cream cheese, you know, more carb.

[00:17:07] And if you're only going to have, say three big meals, each meal has to have sufficient protein so that the total adds up to your needs. So if you're shooting for 180 grams of protein for the day, and you're going to have three meals, then that means an average of 60 grams of protein per meal, which is quite a bit.

[00:17:26] So this is where you might end up supplementing with the occasional protein. All right. So I want to talk now about this concept of metabolic adaptation and then what we can do about it. If it becomes an issue for you, as you lose weight, your TDE, total daily energy expenditure will inevitably decline.

[00:17:46] It just will. The longer you go through a weight loss phase, it's going to start to drop for a number of reasons. Some of the. Include the fact that you simply way less, you have, you're carrying less mass around, which reduces your BMS. You might see a natural reduction in meat, non exercise activity, thermogenesis.

[00:18:07] And that often comes with just being on a diet. You tend to move around less. You just don't have as much energy. You might have a reduction in eat exercise, activity, thermogenesis, because you simply can't train as hard. So when you're not performing as well. You're not burning as many calories. And also finally, the body's stubborn desire to survive will cause you to conserve calories and adapt, you know, so you don't starve and the leaner you get, the more aggressive this quote unquote metabolic adaptation might become.

[00:18:42] So it's very individual. Some people don't experience experience this until they're extremely lean while others get hit right away. As soon as they start going on. And I've experienced both. In fact, it seems to change based on your individual circumstances at the time. Are you coming off of a big bulking phase or are you coming off of maintenance that might affect it or have you been a lot more active for the past few months or not versus a different time than you went on a weight loss phase?

[00:19:12] There are a lot of conditions that can change this. Now, one way to offset this reduction is to intentionally increase your active. But you have to do it intelligently and strategically. So the best way to do this, in my opinion, this is just me is low intensity cardio, like walking, walking, especially I've talked about the benefit benefits before it is low stress.

[00:19:37] It can be. Right. Especially if you go outside with fresh air and sunshine, um, it's spring now, it's almost going to be summer. I'm really looking forward to a lot of those outside walks. It doesn't interfere at all with your lifting. And in fact, it can have the opposite effect and improve your recovery, your mobility, your joint.

[00:19:57] Uh, and of course it's great for your cardiovascular health, your resting heart rate, and your overall markers of, of health. Now you can also incorporate two or three moderate to high intensity cardio sessions throughout the week. Just don't overdo it, especially when you're losing weight, because your ability to lift hard and preserve muscle is still the primary.

[00:20:19] But a bit of extra cardio can increase your TDE and give you a little more room to either eat more or increase your rate of weight loss without eating less. So for example, a lot of bodybuilders, when they get deep into their cut, you see them trying to get a ton of steps, trying to get 20,000 steps a day, for example.

[00:20:40] And I'm not saying go that. But if you can increase from what most people get today, which is like maybe four or 5,000 steps and increase up to 10 or even 12, most days, you will see a big difference. It's going to add a few hundred calories to your material. Every day, which gives you extra room in your diet.

[00:20:59] Now, the last thing related to this metabolic adaptation concept is the idea that as our body adapts, it gets harder and harder to lose weight. We have to reduce our calories more and more, and we're just kind of pushing against a wall to break that wall. We can take a diet break and a diet break is just a fancy term for eating at maintenance for a while, maybe a few days to a few weeks.

[00:21:26] Could even be a few months. If we're talking about a very, very long fat loss phase, and then you continue your diet and there's some evidence that this could help your TD E recover, restore your glycogen, your energy, give you a psychological break from the incessant deficit and the hunger from. Now, this could slow down your diet a little bit, or it could give you a jumpstart that you need to continue.

[00:21:51] So I just suggest trying this out. If you're on a longer, more aggressive diet to see if it helps. All right. The next topic is biofeedback. As you lose more and more weight, your body's going to give you information through biofeedback, things like hunger, fatigue, loss of strength. When you train all of these little things are clues to what's going on and hints that you may or may not need to adjust.

[00:22:19] Now, if you also take body measurements, As I've recommended, you should see things like your waist circumference declining, and that's a good sign. That's a sign you're losing body fat, but you might also see a decline in your other measurements, like your chest biceps, thighs, calves, et cetera. And that could indicate a combination of fat and muscle loss.

[00:22:41] Hopefully mostly fat if you're doing this right, but you can't know entirely. Now just because you have a particular weight target. So let's say you're 200 pounds. You want to get to 180. It doesn't mean that you should just keep pushing and pushing and pushing toward that goal. If the experience has become too negative, right?

[00:23:01] If it's getting harder and harder, if your metabolism is dropping like a rock, if you're having a cut in your calories, if you're super hungry and you're miserable, you might just need a diet break or it might be time to end the cut and get back to me. For awhile or even a building phase because we're in this for the long-term folks, we're in this for sustainability over the long-term.

[00:23:21] We're not talking crash diets here. We're talking reasonable. I'll call it slow weight loss to preserve muscle until you get to your goal. But it has to be something you can sustain for the rest of your. All right. The last thing I want to cover here is the 12 week cut that I went through last year. And then the cut that I'm undergoing currently, which is roughly an 18 week cut with some breaks.

[00:23:49] So talking about the 12 week cut, going back to early August of 2021, I had just finished a muscle building phase and my weight was 180 7 point. And when I ended the cut in late October, my weight was 1 67 0.8. So that was a total decrease of 19.4 pounds, which was 1.6 pounds per week. So that's roughly 0.8, 5% of my starting week, weight per week.

[00:24:22] Right in that range of half of quarter to 1% that we talked about, it was 0.8, 5%. So moderate to moderately agree. Now I also did calculate my body fat percentage. I use two methods. One is the Navy method with the neck and. Measurements with tape. And the other was the three site caliber measurements. And then I would average them because they're pretty far off from each other most of the time, but the average gives you a reasonable number and then the trend is what's most important.

[00:24:54] So I started. 18.6, 2% body fat. And I ended at 10.69. So fairly lean. In fact, it was probably the leanest I had been ever before. Um, and now I'm actually on track to try to beat that. I basically lost 17 pounds of fat and I lost 2.4 pounds of muscle, which isn't too bad. So I preserved most of my muscle. I lost a little bit of lean mass and not all that.

[00:25:23] Is necessarily muscle, but some of it is now when I started my cut, I had a fairly moderate expenditure in the low to mid two thousands. And actually my expenditure increased somewhat during the cut and then it leveled. And what happened there is I had actually started this not long after recovering from surgery.

[00:25:47] So I was not coming off of a big muscle building phase immediately. I'd actually taken quite a bit of a break and my metabolism had come down. So if anything, I was actually training more than before during this cut. So you see that everybody's situation is different and everybody's going to respond differently.

[00:26:04] What I did notice is that deep into the cut, the expenditure leveled out. My nutrition was. Around 2200 calories. And the important thing here is how did I know when the cup was ready to end? Because I did have a target in mind and I just met the target, but I could also tell it was ready to, I was ready to be done with this.

[00:26:27] First of all, is the increased appetite. Very common increased appetite. Now. I definitely had a loss of muscle mass from my measurements, but definitely because of my loss of strength. So that was an objective way to measure that things had declined my press and my bench press started to backslide. My squat was feeling super heavy.

[00:26:49] I think my deadlifts stalled also, I had spent 12 weeks in this cut, which was a nice duration and the trend. Sort of my average weight fell below what was originally my goal of one 70 and I was happy with that. So then I said, well, it's time, time to bulk again, time neither, go on maintenance and take a break or time to bulk again.

[00:27:08] That's what I did. And in the last episode, episode 12 is where I talked about that recent building phase. But now I want to talk about my current cut because I think that's more representative of what a lot of people see after they've gone through a building. And for the current cut. My goal is more or less to get as lean as I've ever gotten before.

[00:27:29] Just for fun to see if I can do. Ahead of a big event on the beach with the family in June and the summer months, where are you going to be wearing shorts and sandals, all that kind of vanity thing that lots of us have. And the goal is to do that before I then go out on a nice long building phase. So for this time around, because I have about 18 weeks to get it done, I could have taken a few different approaches.

[00:27:53] I could have just done a linear approach and just kind of time to that. But what I wanted to do instead, I wanted to be more aggressive at the beginning for about eight or nine weeks. So I'm targeting 1% per week for that. Then take a diet break for a week, then go in a more moderate cut for about six weeks and then go back on to maintenance for a couple of weeks before the event.

[00:28:17] So I could sort of fill in with carbs, get my diet back up before I go on vacation and eat my heart out and not track and not care about how much. So the first few weeks of the phase actually went really well. This is the aggressive 1% per week. Cut my trend weight decreased from where I started around 180 2 and got down to 1 77 and for about three weeks.

[00:28:41] So I was actually overshooting. Now I ascribed that partially to coming off of a bulk, probably losing some of that waterway, that glycogen as well as some fat, my body fat started to drop a bit from about 15 to about 13. Now, initially the scale weight didn't move very much during the first week or two.

[00:28:59] And then there was a big whoosh, and this is one of the things people experienced. The whoosh for me, it was about five pounds from one day to the next. And this highlights, the fact that scale weight is. Volatile and you can't necessarily trust it without smoothing it out by averaging the weight over time.

[00:29:17] My metabolism started to steadily declined from about 34 50 to a little over 3000 calories kind of bottomed out, but it has since started to decline. My macro plan. I think I mentioned earlier is around 2130 calories. Now, after the first few weeks, it was up around 2,400. Now it's getting closer to 2100 and that's because my metabolism has been declining.

[00:29:42] So my protein is stayed in the one eighties, but the fat and the carbs have come quite a bit down as I've been cutting my deficit. I started at around 900 calorie deficit and it's been. I'm still lifting six days a week, trying to get about 12,000 steps a day. Maybe on the weekend. I get half that, but on the weekdays with the treadmill and I take lunch walks when I can I get the 12,000.

[00:30:07] So the first three or four weeks of the cut were great. Then I started to see a big drop in my expenditure, and then I saw it climb again. And the problem was the weight started to stall. So I think the app was probably maybe overshooting or undershooting. Based on my inputs because my metabolism is dropping, but I have a big fluctuation in activity some weeks, you know, I'm lifting hard and my diet is changing.

[00:30:33] So all of these variables interacting together, I've seen my metabolism effectively declined to. Roughly where it was during my last cut. So that might just be more or less my set point for metabolism when I'm at roughly the same level of activity, which kind of makes sense. Right. Just intuitively the point is it's changes all the time and you have to track food.

[00:30:59] You have to track weight. If you're going to more precisely keep your calories where they need to be to stay. X pounds per week of reduction. You know, for me, it's around 1.7, 1.8 pounds per week. And some weeks I don't lose any weight. And then other weeks I lose way more and it kind of averages out. But if it's not hitting that target, that I'm going to adjust my calories accordingly.

[00:31:21] So I'm looking forward to a maintenance week pretty soon when I hit my interim target of 1 68. And then the plan is to kind of. Gradual glide path in less aggressively, hopefully allows my TDE to recover. And then coming in around the low one sixties. Now notice that I'm not targeting any specific body fat, but I know where I was last time at one 70.

[00:31:49] So I'm going to be something more lean than that below one 70. And yet I also have about five pounds more muscle, some of which I'm also going to lose. So that's a lot of information I threw at you, a lot of lessons that I've learned, um, some tips and strategies that I hope will help you. It's all about losing weight so that you burn fat without losing muscle.

[00:32:13] You keep lifting hard. Keep your protein high, follow us on these other basics. And then I hope you can take these, apply them to your own situation as you strive for a better healthier you for the long term.

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Ep 12: Gaining Weight to Get Lean

It seems that everyone wants to get “lean” these days. There’s almost an obsession with six-pack abs, visual muscularity, and thinness if you’re to believe the legions of fitness influencers who appear ready for an instant photo shoot on any given day.

I’ve got nothing against maintaining a healthy weight, and in fact this podcast is all about finding a sustainable way to get stronger, build muscle, and stay healthy. But if you were to ask yourself, “what exactly is my goal when it comes to body composition?,” most of us would answer that we want to be lean, as in lower our body fat percentage.

The reasons why are many, from improved performance and cardiovascular health to just feeling and looking good, often measured by whether we can fit into our favorite pair of pants again.

But it often leads to a cycle of aggressive dieting and gaining back the weight (and then some) in an attempt to “see our abs” rather than a steady, consistent approach that results in “leanness” without the extreme dieting, hunger, and disappointment at failing to reach this coveted goal.

Today I want to talk about a refreshingly sustainable, enjoyable approach to getting lean by gaining weight! This episode is all about the benefits of using a nice, long building phase to develop muscle, increase your metabolism, and set yourself up for a much easier dieting phase later on. You’ll be able to perform better in the gym, eat more, and eventually reach your goal without (as much) suffering.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• Two approaches to getting lean, one which often fails

• My recent, successful 15-week muscle-building phase

• Listener Q&A about wearables, calories, and dieting

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• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:27]Welcome to episode 12 of Wits & Weights. It seems that everyone wants to get quote unquote lean these days. There's almost an obsession with six pack abs visual muscularity and thinness. If are to believe the legions of fitness influencers who appear ready for an instant photo shoot on any given day.

[00:00:55] And now I've got nothing against maintaining a healthy weight. And in fact, this podcast is all about finding a sustainable way to get stronger, build muscle and stay healthy. But if you were to ask yourself what exactly is my goal, when it comes to body composition, most of us would answer that we want to be E lean as in lower our body fat percentage.

[00:01:19] Now the reasons why are many from improved performance and cardiovascular health to just feeling and looking good, often measured by whether we can fit into our favorite pair of pants again. But this often leads to a cycle of aggressive dieting and gaining back the weight and then some in an attempt to quote unquote, see our abs rather than a steady, consistent approach that results in leanness without the extreme dieting, hunger and disappointment at failing to reach this coveted goal.

[00:01:54] Today. I want to talk about a refreshingly sustainable, enjoyable approach to getting lean by gaining weight. This episode is all about the benefits of using a nice long building phase to develop muscle, increase your metabolism and set yourself up for a much easier dieting phase later or on you'll be able to perform better in the gym, eat more and eventually reach your goal without suffering.

[00:02:21] So in today's episode, I cover. Two approaches to getting lean. One of which often fails and one which is much more sustainable. My recent successful 15 week muscle building phase. As an example of one way, you can do this. And finally, I have listener Q and a, a question I'll be answering about wearables, calories and dieting.

[00:02:45] Let's get into the show. All right. The first thing I wanna cover is this idea that the best way to get lean is to burn fat. And it sounds great. Uh, oftentimes it's a combination of dieting and excessive exercise, usually in the form of cardio that is at least in the common zeitgeist of how to do the us.

[00:03:07] But what happens is if you've never gone through a muscle building phase, if you've never added muscle to your frame, through lifting. And you're just trying to get thinner so that you can see your abs or your muscles, whatever, what you're gonna end up doing is being a lighter skinnier, but fatter version of yourself who has a lower metabolism, meaning you're not gonna eat as much in as you diet.

[00:03:34] You'll have to eat less and less. To reduce weight, which is gonna make you miserable. Let's just admit it. It often leads to yo-yo dieting where you rebound, you hit your weight. Great. I'm I've got my goal. I'm thin. Uh, but I'm pretty disappointed at how I look, but I'm thin and now I need to eat again. And then you start gaining the weight and because you've undergone this metabolic adaptation to a small extent, or sometimes an extreme extent.

[00:04:06] Your body is that much more primed to gain more weight and potentially more than you had before. Furthermore, if you're always cutting calories, always trying to get lean or thin, you will never have the performance you need in the gym, especially if you're cutting carbs, for example, to do it, which is a, a common approach these days.

[00:04:28] And this is just an overall inability to get stronger. Keeps you weak. You won't have muscle and you'll just be. Miserable skinnier, but fatter version of yourself. Now, I'm sorry to say, many of us have gone through this in trying to get lean. You may be overweight today, but at some point in your life, I'm going to bet that you've tried a fat loss phase and you were somewhat successful in the short term often through some sort of.

[00:04:56] Diet like keto, low carb Atkins. You didn't add any form of progressive lifting or an idea of building muscle and you got kind of thin or skinny, but you still didn't really see any muscle. Didn't really see the abs. You just look skinny and weak. Let's contrast that with a different approach, the approach that I'm in favor of the approach that.

[00:05:22] Many of us have discovered through a different strategy, one based on improving your body composition in the other direction. And that is getting bigger by adding muscle, adding lean tissue and then dieting. And the idea with this approach is that you enter a long and slow. Muscle building phase, you supply sufficient calories to your body so that as you are lifting, using progressive overload using the.

[00:05:54] Tried and true principles that we've talked about before on this podcast. And we'll talk about again, of objective progress, training, hard, doing it consistently. You will grow muscle over time, especially if you were a newer lifter, newer lifters can gain anywhere from one to maybe even four pounds of muscle in a month, which is quite a bit of lean tissue.

[00:06:18] And the more muscle you have, we've talked about this before, as well, the higher, your total daily energy expenditure metabolism for a variety of reasons, some of which we still can't fully explain some of which come down to the tissue itself. The fact that muscle tissue is more expensive. But there's a systemic effect that you see it inevitably.

[00:06:36] I've seen it myself. I see it with all the other folks in our community who go through phases of building phases of dieting. And inevitably, there's this shift up in your metabolism as you gain weight and muscle. Now, as you gain muscle while lifting and eating more, that is eating in a caloric surplus.

[00:06:54] You are gonna gain a bit of fat. That's just inevitable. And I think this is the thing that scares most people. The thought that there's no magic way to just gain muscle. You're going to gain all types of tissue. The thing is, again, if you are a newer lifter or even intermediate, you can still gain quite a BI bit of muscle as a percentage of that game.

[00:07:16] And then it's a lot easier. To lose fat fairly quickly versus the gaining of the muscle. And you're able to lose fat without losing much muscle. You retain that muscle and that will ultimately result in you being leaner than you were before at the same body weight. Now, if you've ever seen athletes or powerless or body builders or anybody, who's worked hard on their physique, And you try to guess their weight chances are you're gonna underestimate their weight by a pretty good margin because a leaner body will look thinner.

[00:07:53] It's filled out with a, a, a tighter kind of physique to it, but you can still be a heavier weight because muscle's denser. It sort of skews our perception of what we do talk about when we mean fat versus thin. What we mean by lean. And then we get into the rat race of just trying to lose weight, to get lean.

[00:08:11] My argument today that I, that I'm trying to get to here is that. By eating and lifting. We get stronger. We build muscle, we take in more calories, we have better performance. We then enjoy ourselves in the gym. As we see progress, the more progress we make and the bigger we get, the more progress we make still.

[00:08:32] And we get to a point where we say, you know, I'm putting on maybe a little too much fat, but I've, I know I've gained a lot of muscle as evidence by the objective progress in the gym. And now I can go on a steady or maybe slightly aggressive if I want to fat cutting phase, where I try to retain as much muscle as I can.

[00:08:51] Cut off that little bit of extra fat or even more and result in a leaner version of myself. In fact, you may end up at a slightly higher weight than before you started the building and then cutting phases, and yet still be leaner. And isn't that our goal, best of all, not only that you probably have shifted up your TDE, your energy expenditure.

[00:09:15] To the point where now you can eat more at the same weight than you used to. And that to me is an extremely sustainable approach. Let's just walk through an example, right? I'm gonna use my typical 180 pound male. And we're talking about a new-ish lifter. Let's say you've been lifting for six months.

[00:09:33] You've gotten past the, the new beef phase. You've gotten past the awkwardness of learning the lifts, and now you're starting to make. Steady consistent progress. And you're 180 pound man with 22% body fat. Now in subjective terms, if you were to look at someone with 22% body fat, you would say they actually look pretty healthy, but maybe with a little fluff, maybe a little gut or love handles, maybe a little bit on the backside, you know, wherever ends to collect for an individual, we all have our spots.

[00:10:04] You know, I'm not gonna talk about, um, obese or extremely overweight folks on this example, because that's a different scenario. I, I feel that if you are very overweight to an unhealthy level and yes, having too high of a weight is a health concern. It's not about the physique. It's not about the antibody image.

[00:10:25] It's about health, cardiovascular health, uh, and metabolic disease, et cetera. So if you're very overweight, my suggestion would be hit the gym hard, lift heavy and eat roughly at maintenance. And you're probably gonna see some sort of body composition you're gonna lose fat. Anyway, that's a unique scenario.

[00:10:42] There are a lot of sort of use cases that are on the corner like that one, but I wanna focus on the person who's not quite lean, has a little extra fat and wants to become lean. And I think this applies to men and women, you would just shift the body fat percentage by about five to 10% higher for women.

[00:11:01] So the 180 pound man with 22% body fat, if you do the math, that's about 140 pounds of lean mass and 40 pounds of fat. Now we're gonna go on a gaining phase. So this is the trick, right? We need to gain weight to gain muscle in this scenario. There are, there's no way around it. There's no magic formula to some sort of massive body recomposition.

[00:11:25] Yes, body recom recom is possible. But if we're talking about doing this in a fairly effective, efficient manner, rather than over a long period where we have to optimize everything. Uh, this is the more typical approach. So we're gonna target, for example, a pound a week of gain, which is pretty aggressive, but we're talking about a newer lifter, which makes sense.

[00:11:51] And we're gonna assume that half of that gain is muscle. Just for this example, it may be less, it may only be a quarter or a third. It actually may be slightly more depending on the individual responder. And the more advanced you get the less of the percentage of what you gain is muscle. And so you tend to dial back how aggressive you are to increase that percentage back to a higher level, which simply means it's gonna take longer to build muscle.

[00:12:17] But again, going back to this newish lifter, one pound a week, assume how half of that is muscle, which is about four pounds a month of weight gain with two pounds a month of muscle. I think that's reasonable. So after 16 weeks, so here you go, about four months getting to eat more food. If you're using an app like macro factor to track your food and track your weight, you can see how your metabolism fluctuates.

[00:12:47] You're probably gonna see it climb over time. It's generally what happens, which is great. Eight, because then each week you're gonna check in the, app's gonna say, Hey, you get another 125 calories a day this week, next week, Hey, you get another 80 calories a day this week. And you keep pushing and pushing and you enjoy this process of getting to, to taste new foods and try different combinations to hit your macros and all that great stuff that we like about gaining weight.

[00:13:12] So after 16 weeks you've gained 16 pounds. And if half of that is muscle, you've gained eight pounds of muscle. Now you weigh 190. Pounds now, there are people walking around at 180 and I was one of them who never could imagine pushing myself up close to 200 pounds on purpose. Just seemed crazy. I had gotten to 210 in college.

[00:13:36] Totally not on purpose. Uh, and I, I was not lean and I was not lifting. So that was a very different scenario. The kind in that we don't want to follow, but you've been lifting hard three days, four days a week following a linear progression. Or maybe a, an intermediate program. If you're at that level, maybe a four day split, and now you weigh 196 pounds of which 148 is lean mass because you've gained eight pounds of muscle and 48 pounds of fat because you've gained eight pounds of fat.

[00:14:09] So now your body fat percentage has climbed up a little bit to 24 or percent. So you might look in the mirror and say, huh, I'm looking a little fluffy. Uh, my pants are a little bit tight, but it's, it's an incremental change and you've been training hard and eating a lot for about four months, which is a pretty good stretch.

[00:14:27] So now you're slightly quote unquote fatter, but you have quite a bit more muscle. Eight pounds of muscle is nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of extra lean tissue on your body. So now you just, so I'm gonna go on a diet phase. For eight weeks and eight weeks is a perfectly reasonable sanity maintaining length of time.

[00:14:46] Uh, some people might even call this a mini cut where you're gonna go pretty aggressive. You're gonna go maybe two pounds a week, which again, for a newish lifter at 24% body fat is totally reasonable. In fact, I'm on a cut right now, now where I I'm at 1.7 pounds a week. And the second phase of my cut will be less than that, but it's still pretty aggressive.

[00:15:07] So you're gonna go on a diet phase for eight weeks. At two pounds a week. Cause the goal here is we're gonna take all that, all those pounds that we added, we're gonna take them right back off. But you're gonna find that at the end, you actually have more muscle than you did before. So after eight weeks you've lost 16 pounds.

[00:15:26] You're back to 180 pounds. Now we're gonna assume that of those 16 pounds, you've lost two pounds of muscle. There's always gonna be some level of muscle mass. And there there's different evidence that supports different rates of fat loss. You know, you go, you can go very quick and make sure you have the intensity and volume to the where you retain your muscle in your lifting program.

[00:15:50] But inevitably there's gonna be some loss. So there's no easy way to predict how much it's going to be. The key is just to keep training hard throughout that period. So we're just gonna assume you've lost two pounds of muscle. And now you're back to 180 pounds with 146 pounds of lean mass. Now that's six more pounds of muscle than you used to have.

[00:16:12] And then 34 34 pounds of fat. So that's six pounds, less of fat. So your body fat percentage is 19% at 180 pounds. You just went from 22. It's a 19% body fat. At the same weight, not by reducing fat, but by essentially replacing some fat with muscle, obviously not directly, but you've built muscle. And then lost fat.

[00:16:41] And now you're leaner. Technically, if you wanted to be at the same fat level you were before, you'd actually have to carry a heavier weight than you are now. And as you build muscle, you may find that's what you wanna do, that you actually have a. Nice healthy lean look at a heavier body weight than before.

[00:17:01] And you'll start to change a mindset of what scale weight even means that it's not so much about the number as how you feel. How you're performing in the gym, how healthy you are and your overall leanness in terms of body composition, even better. And here's the bonus. This is the thing that I've actually really enjoyed the past few years.

[00:17:21] Going through this process, your metabolism has likely shifted higher due to the extra muscle on your frame. So your daily food needs. Are at a more comfortable level than before, even when you're just gonna go at maintenance. Now you can switch to maintenance. You've you have this extra muscle and spend a good 2, 3, 4, 6 months a year at this higher metabolism, enjoying more freedom to eat what you want during that building phase, you would've pushed up your metabolism constantly.

[00:17:53] As you're growing in size as you're gaining muscle. And then as you were dieting, the metabolism probably came back down, but chances are, it did not come down to what it was before. And you had a higher level than you were before. Uh, similar phenomenon occurs when someone's in a diet dieting phase and then goes into a maintenance phase or reverse diet as it's called kind of slowly coming out of it, where you can recover some of your metabolism before continuing your diet.

[00:18:19] So all of these are mechanisms to shift your metabolism up, but the, I idea of putting, putting on muscle to do it is one that's sustainable and will last for months or years to come as you retain that muscle. The cool thing is you can repeat this process multiple times over and over again, perhaps with weeks or months of maintenance in between.

[00:18:40] Meaning just not losing weight, not gaining weight, just sitting around, getting a feel for your body, letting things recover, training hard, seeing how you respond and then deciding, okay. Do I need to push it up to add muscle? Do I need to cut to get leaner. Sometimes we do have short term goals. Maybe it's some big event where we just, you know, what a feel and look our best, or if we've got a good six or eight months ahead of us, of the deep, cold winter of new England where I live, I might say, you know, screw it.

[00:19:11] I don't. I don't need to be lean during that period when I'm bundled up. Anyway, it's cold. I just want to eat. I just wanna hunker down. Let me build muscle. Let me just eat at a steady pace. Grow, grow, grow, add that muscle. And then it won't be very hard to spend a couple months. Cutting the fat on top of this, if you add in walking, okay.

[00:19:33] I'm a huge advocate of walking. I've talked about it before. Step count, I think is the most sustainable form of cardio to give you the most impact. So it's not the most effective. In other words, it high intensity interval training and other forms of cardio like that might burn the most calories. But they're not sustainable.

[00:19:53] They beat you up. They're hard on the joints. They make it harder to recover in some cases where they might interfere with your lifting, all of these reasons, but walking doesn't do any of those. Walking's enjoyable. Uh, we're getting to the warmer seasons here. So you get your vitamin D you get your sunshine.

[00:20:10] Get to enjoy nature. It's mentally relaxing. It's great on the joints and the bonus from walking is it adds some cushion to your calories. So as you're lifting, for example, it's a way not to interfere with your lifting and not get to fatigued while still allowing you to keep bumping up your calories.

[00:20:30] And then conversely, with dieting it's even perhaps even more pivotal in that it prevents you from having to cut your calories too much. So I don't know about you, but. Adding muscle by having some fun lifting in the gym while eating more food and increasing my metabolism and hitting these goals, sounds like a pretty reasonable way to get leaner.

[00:20:51] Feel good about yourself after all a said and done. And it's also quite sustainable, which is what we're all about on this podcast. And I wanna talk now about the building phase that I just completed. Uh, as I, as I'm recording this podcast, it was about six or seven weeks ago. I took 15 weeks to bulk after I had cut.

[00:21:12] I had cut to a fairly lean level. About 11% body fat. And if you're wondering how I measure that every week, Sunday morning, I use a tape measure to measure my neck and my waist. I also take measurements of, for muscle mass of my biceps and thighs and chest. And then I also use hallers and I take a few points on my chest, abs and thigh, and I plug those into a couple calculators online and I average them out.

[00:21:43] To get my body fat. So there tends to be a big tolerance or I should say a big, I don't wanna say error, but there's a big variance between these calculators. So for example, I might be. Uh, 12% on one and 15 or 16% on another. So then I average 'em out to about 14% and what I really care about is the trend.

[00:22:02] So over time I can see both numbers shifting up or shifting down in tandem. It's pretty consistently. And so I just take the average. I don't really care about the absolute number. I care about the change, how look, and how I feel. So I dieted down to about 11, 12% body fat, and I was now ready to. Bulk and my goal, because I've been seriously lifting for about two to three years.

[00:22:26] It's not 5, 10, 15 years. Like some folks, you know, I got in my forties finally started to be healthy and started training seriously. And that's what this podcast is all about is sharing these things. I've learned with people maybe in similar, or maybe completely different circumstances who do just want to get healthier.

[00:22:43] And I decided at this point I wanted to bulk and gain a bunch of muscle so that I could do it in time to do another dieting phase leading into the summer, which is a common cycle for a lot of people follow. When you know, you're going to be swimming and be wearing shorts, showing more skin, you know, you wanna feel better about yourself in those leaner months.

[00:23:05] So in late October, just before my birthday, my starting weight was. 167.8. And then the ending weight in February of 2022 was 182.3. So I went from 167.8 to 182.3, the average change being 0.8 pounds per week. And right toward the end of the bulk, I actually had a week long vacation where I didn't do any lifting.

[00:23:34] There was a little bit of a, a burst in my weight there, which. Makes perfect sense. Right? Cuz my activity level was lower during that week. And that gave me a loss of some of my calories for my diet, but I kept my diet the same. So I gained a little bit more weight during that week. It's it's science, you know, it works like you expected to work.

[00:23:55] So the, the true average was 1.0, but the. Trend average throughout the most of the phase was 0.8 pounds a week. By the way, I tracked all of this using macro factor. This is by far my favorite app for this. I've talked about it before. I do have a discount code. It's wits and weights. If you go download the app, but as I am an avid daily user of the app and gained tremendous benefit from it, I have no problem plugging it or being affiliated with them.

[00:24:25] Great developers over stronger by science. So shout out to them. All right back to the bulk. So I gained 14 and a half pounds in 15 weeks, and I would call that a moderately aggressive gaining phase. It's a perfect rate of change for somebody who is still new to intermediate. In fact, you could go faster than that.

[00:24:43] If you wanted to, if you were newer, Um, and if you were more intermediate or you just didn't wanna gain that much fat that quickly, you can go at about maybe a half pound a week if you're around my weight. So it resulted in about a half percent of my weight per week. My starting body fat percentage was about or not about, but the average was 10.7%.

[00:25:06] And I ended at 15%. So I gained about four, a little over 4% of body fat, which you'll tend to gain more. At a leaner level at the rate that I was going, then in the earlier example, I talked about where he went from 22 to 24. So I gained 9.7 pounds of fat and 4.9 pounds. Of lean mass. So about a third of the gain was lean mass lean mass is a combination of muscle water, bone, et cetera.

[00:25:34] It's everything. That's not fat, but most of it's gonna be, you could just use it as a proxy for muscle. So about a third of what I gained was not fat. And I was very happy with that. Remember, in the example earlier, I, I said, assume that. Of what you gain is muscle and for a newer lifter that's that could be true for me going at the rate, I was going a third was pretty good.

[00:25:55] And then I mentioned before that I measured my body measurements and body measurements are a great proxy of your composition, your body fat, as well as your. Muscle mass. And that's why I encourage taking them. I know it's a pain, it's a little bit extra, uh, uh, obsession there. If, if you have body image issues, but I'm a big fan of objective data, especially trends.

[00:26:18] So I collected body measurements. My waist went from 30.8 to 33.8. So I gained three inches by, by no means, you know, fat, obviously still in the low thirties for male. Uh, most of my pants still fit fine. My chest went from 37 to 38. You know, I don't have the biggest chest. I admit it, but I gained an inch biceps.

[00:26:37] I gained a half inch thighs. I gained 1.6 inches. So I'm very happy with this bulk in terms of gaining, you know, a third of the weight as muscle. And I've had two plus years of what I'll call intelligent, serious training that I think has helped, uh, get me to this point of being able to do this. Now let's talk about total daily energy expenditure.

[00:27:01] This is your metabolism. And why? I think using an app like macro factor is important is because the premise is that you track what's coming in, that's your food and you track what's going out based on how much you weigh and that will help you determine your energy expenditure. You don't need any other.

[00:27:23] Variables in the way you don't need to track your exercise calories. For example, your walk, you don't need to track steps. None of those have to be tracked to determine your expenditure because it's all so called built in. Uh, if you use food and weight now, of course you have to smooth the weight over time.

[00:27:41] And that's where it gets a little bit complicated. And that's why using an app or a spreadsheet, uh, is helpful with this. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you.

[00:28:04] And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again. An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. So when I started the bulk, my metabolism was burning 2,965 calories. So Al almost 3000 calories a day. So it was Al already a pretty robust metabolism from the previous muscle building cycles I had gone through, but through the bulk, I actually ended up at 3,500 calories.

[00:28:35] So I was really happy because every week my targets just kept going up and up and up and up. And if you look at the graph. It sort of looks like kind of like a smooth stock market chart in good times when it's going up, comes down a little, goes up, comes down a little bit. Generally the trends is upward.

[00:28:51] And then right at the end it had a small dip. I think that was correlated with the week off that I took the D load, the vacation that I took now, because I switched from. A cut to a bulk, which some people, some coaches don't always recommend that sometimes it's recommended that you have an intermediate maintenance phase.

[00:29:10] You know, you switch to maintenance, say how your body responds, see where your maintenance really is, and then start to. Push it up, you know, that's sort of a reverse diet is the term sometimes used, but I've also heard. And for me, it seems to be perfectly fine that you can switch just like a light bulb, go from a cut, right to a bulk, no big deal.

[00:29:31] Your body will handle it as long as you're tracking it. So that's what I did. And so if you looked at my nutrition every day, I went from eating. A little bit over 2000 calories because I was in a cut to eating well over 3000 calories on a bulk, which I was pretty happy with the first week. I actually had to kind of hunt around for more food to make sure I got enough calories.

[00:29:50] And I know people are groaning listening to this podcast like, oh, don't complain that you had to eat too much. And I'm not, I'm not complaining. I had to eat too much. I was actually very happy at it. And this is why gaining weight and bulking can be, can be a fun process if you don't overdo it. And you stick primarily to.

[00:30:07] Healthy foods, quote unquote, but you still have to throw in some other snacks, treats desserts, things like that to, to get it all in and you might as well, you might as well enjoy life. That's that's my philosophy. At least, you know, the occasional pop. Tart's not gonna hurt you as long as you're also having sweet potato rice and broccoli, uh, for most your meals.

[00:30:26] So by the final week of the gaining phase, I was. Eating 200 grams of protein. My protein always tracked a little bit more than one gram per pound. I'm a, I'm a big fan of, of hitting that target, especially on a cut, but on a bulk is important and I was hitting 450 grams of carbs. And this is somebody folks.

[00:30:48] Let me tell you. I used to be a low carb advocate. And to think that I would be intentionally eating more than 400 grams in a day, would've seemed insane. But the carbs are your friend. When it comes to training, you need them, you love them. The body thrives on them. Don't shy away from it. It's a different way of thinking.

[00:31:09] I know for many of us, but if you're lifting hard in the gym, you need the calories, you need the carbs. It's all good. So to fit all this in I'm, I'm, I'm going through this process by the way, so that you can get a visual of what it's like to do this, and maybe some of the positives. So it doesn't, you don't shy away from it, but you also know what's acquired to be successful.

[00:31:29] So for me, it was three big meals, plus two snacks every day. I would shoot for an average of 40 grams of protein per feeding. So that's an average. I might have 60 on one and 20 on another, but generally I shop for shoot for 40. Um, I try to, you know, really get the protein synthesis triggered. Um, some evidence says it doesn't really matter the timing and, uh, how and the frequency try to get it these three meals and get all your protein and that'll get you most of the way there.

[00:31:59] So here are some things that I. Was consistent about to meet these targets. And I think consistency is. So important. If you generally eat similar foods, it's gonna be a lot easier. If you make your own food, it's gonna be a lot easier. If you're going out to restaurants a lot and eating completely different things every day, it's gonna be a little harder, not impossible if you're okay.

[00:32:20] Fight, figuring it all out, weighing, tracking. And so, and looking up nutrients on cha you know, rest, front websites, et cetera. That's fine. And in fact, while I was bulking, it gave me the opportunity to eat out a little more, but the foundation is consistency. So in a typical day, I'd get up at around five 30.

[00:32:39] Yep. It might be early for some of you. Sorry. That's just me. I like to work out in the morning. I get up at five 30 and I have a, pre-workout a protein shake and a large banana. So that's 30 grams of protein, 25 carbs about half an hour, 45 minutes later. I do my workout. Currently, I am doing a body building program, so I'm working out six days a week and it takes about an hour when I was bulking.

[00:33:04] For most of that time, I was actually doing a, either four or five day split conjugate style programming with maximum effort and dynamic effort days. And this is more advanced training, not gonna get into the details here, but it was a good, good high intensity training with a decent amount of volume and some, uh, physi work as well.

[00:33:24] Um, then I would have a post workout at around eight 30, which is oatmeal with peanut butter and a protein shake. 40 grams of protein, 20 grams of fat 40 grams of carbs. Then mid morning, I'd have to get a snack. Usually it was bagel with cream cheese. A little bit of protein, little bit of fat, a lot of carbs for lunch.

[00:33:42] Some sort of meat might be chicken. Thighs might be pork chops leftover from dinner might be roast beef and then a starch and a veggie. So the starch or other carb, it could be rice, but it could be potato, something like that. And, and then a veggie. So that would gimme about six grams of protein, 20 to 30 of fat and 80 to a hundred of.

[00:34:03] Carbs mid-afternoon snack a protein carb snack of some kind. It might be like a quest bar if I'm feeling lazy, but it might be something like cottage, cheese and some pretzels. And that would gimme about 30 grams of protein, a tiny bit of fat, and about 40 to 60 of carbs. Then for dinner, similar to lunch, I'd have meat starch.

[00:34:23] Veggie. My wife cooks a lot. She makes great food. I sometimes cook. And oftentimes the dinner becomes the next day's lunch. And then I might even have a carby dessert if I'm lowering my carbs for the day. And then before bed, I usually have a pre pre-bed snack of casing pudding, which is another 20 or 30 grams of protein.

[00:34:43] And the only reason I do that is it's just hard to get all that protein in through the other meals consistently. So I would just assume I was gonna have this snack at the end of the night to, to punch it in right before I went to bed. But if I met the macros or calories during the day, I would just skip the pre-bed stack.

[00:35:01] All right now, I took notes as I was bulking the whole time to see how it affected me and some things I observed, some things I learned, and I wanna share some of those today. Using a tracking app or a spreadsheet. So in my case, again, macro factor made this a much easier process because it could calculate my rapidly changing metabolic rate.

[00:35:23] And so I could adjust my macro plan every week, much more dynamically without getting too far off of my, my rate of change. The second thing is that when you're bulking, when you're eating, you definitely see a performance improvement. Just it's inevitable. You're gonna make progress in the gym. All your lifts are gonna go up.

[00:35:42] It's gonna feel great some days. I mean, when I would deadlift, if I had a nice big meal the night before and ate a lot, the deadlift just felt great. Even at six in the morning. And I was never hungry. The third thing that walking every day. So in my case, I shoot for 12,000 steps a day. Which is reasonable, kind of maybe above average, especially since I work from home, I'm not in the city, so I kinda have to force myself to walk, but walking's great.

[00:36:08] A great form of cardio didn't interfere with lifting or recovery while I was bulking and allowed me to just eat a ton of food. And then speaking of eating a lot. Eating 3,600 calories was probably the most I ever had to eat on purpose in my life. So it required consistency. I had to make sure to eat frequently enough.

[00:36:28] Like you can't just fast. You can't wait too long for your first meal, or then you're trying to catch up in the rest of the day and, and stuff yourself. And you don't want to be there. Air. Also try to get EV enough carbs into every meal does require sometimes adding processed foods and by process, I mean, bread.

[00:36:46] I did eat some pop tarts, an occasional donut, maybe, but that was rare. I'm just saying it opens up the options and allows you to throw some of these extra things in there. And then when I wasn't sure how many calories or macros were in a meal, like, you know, my wife cooks, so I, I can't just weigh everything as she's making it at the risk of insulting her.

[00:37:05] And then I had to slightly. Underestimate when I wasn't sure. So if it was my, my wife's cooking or going to a restaurant and I didn't have the exact calories of macros, I would want to slightly underestimate because when you're bulking, it's the opposite of dieting. You're actually trying to eat enough.

[00:37:21] And so you wanna be conservative. The other direction, assume something has fewer calories than it might so that it forces you to make sure you eat enough, to go at least to your target and, and slightly exceed your target. Now, having said all this stuff about eating a lot, I'd never went totally crazy.

[00:37:39] Just eating anything and everything like some people wanna do. They call that. The dreamer bulk, but I did get to enjoy some luxuries ice cream. For example, I love ice cream and I could just enjoy that much more frequently than when I'm dieting also alcohol. You know, if I just want to have a glass of wine or a beer or some liquor, I can do that.

[00:38:00] I still track it, but it fits in nicely. Although always recommend keeping alcohol. To a minimum at any given time, just period. If you're trying to live a healthy lifestyle and perform in the gym, when I'm bulking, I might have alcohol once or twice a week. And when I'm dieting, I usually don't have it at all.

[00:38:16] I know that sounds crazy, but it feels great. And then I did go on that week long vacation at the end of January and I didn't lift at all that week. I didn't get enough steps. I even ate a bit more than usual because I was enjoying myself. And as a result because of science, my weight change rate almost doubled the last few weeks because my metabolism came down and my calories went up.

[00:38:43] But at the end it didn't really matter. I still had the data. I knew what was happening. It was objective and it was kind of my last rah before I turned around and went on a cut. So the bulk was successful. I hope I gave you a good idea of what's involved. And I'm currently now on a cut, which is something I'm going to talk about in the next podcast.

[00:39:03] We'll talk about the other side of this coin, dieting, you know, reasonable dieting, but I wanted to take the last few minutes of today's episode to answer a listener question. Judy in Connecticut. So the same state as me right in the neighborhood says, Hey, Philip, I recently started listening to your podcast.

[00:39:26] I really enjoy it. And I have a question about dieting without dieting. I understand all the info about macros and losing weight, but does my daily exercise fit into the calorie count in any way? I use my fitness pal and it adds your exercise, your calories burned to the daily calorie allotment. Should I not enter my workouts?

[00:39:48] And should I ignore those extra calories that I'm allowed to consume? So thanks for reaching out Judy, and, and this is a great question. I actually hear it. A lot when it comes to, how do we calculate metabolism? If I take the pie chart of metabolism and part of that is my basal metabolic rate. And then you've got your neat, right?

[00:40:10] Your, your, um, like steps in fidgeting and things like that. And then you have your thermic effective feeding. And then finally you have your exercise. Well, shouldn't I be tracking exercise as part of my cat calories. You know, I'm going to eat 2000 calories. But now I'm gonna burn 300 calories. So shouldn't I add or subtract.

[00:40:30] And my response to that is. First of all the data from wearables or machines regarding calories are highly unreliable. The devices themselves tend to be very unreliable as evidenced by any test where they compare these devices. Each individual also burns a different fr of those estimated calories from the device were all different.

[00:40:57] And so if your apple watch says 350 active calories, You may have only burned 70% of that or 245 calories. So even if you were to rely on that, the data itself is not precise, but, but more importantly, the most accurate way to determine your maintenance calories is simply to compare how your weight responds to your food exercise.

[00:41:18] Neat. All these other things are, are lots of variables in the middle of the process and trying to track them separately would be a nightmare. And frankly, F futile. But if you know how much you weigh and you know how much you eat and you eat the exact same amount every day, And you track your weight over say two weeks.

[00:41:35] And you look at the change in the average weight seven day, moving average, for example, you'll know if you're eating too much, too little or just the right amount of calories to maintain your weight. And that builds in all this other stuff that affects your metabolism, including exercise eyes. Now, having said that additional activity in the form of lifting your steps.

[00:41:58] Even cardio, as long as we don't overdo, it usually increases your TDE E E because you are burning more calories and this allows you to eat more. So if you're getting 12,000 steps a day, like I try to do my TDE is probably a few hundred calories higher than if I weren't, but I will see that I, my weight not increasing as much as it would have if I wasn't walking.

[00:42:24] And as a result, it does account for the exercise without me having to track it separately. So, if you're fairly active, your maintenance calories are likely higher. All things equal, but TDE E fluctuates so much and it fluctuates while you're losing weight tends to go down while you're gaining weight tends to go up and even then it's more like a roller coaster.

[00:42:41] Such that I would never recommend counting activity. As part of calculating the calories you need to eat instead base your calories and macros off of your calculated TDE, based on your weight change, do it for the week. Leave it alone. You have your plan in place, and then next week you adjust it again, adjust it weekly, and you'll be just fine.

[00:43:01] So, thanks again, Judy, for that excellent question. I'm sure it's on a lot of people's minds and thank you all for listening to this episode. I had a lot of fun talking about this journey of becoming lean by gaining weight. It's a fantastic, enjoyable process. If you remain consistent, you'll see. Great results.

[00:43:23] Hopefully the things that I shared about my own experience will give you a little view into what it's like as always, I'm happy to answer any questions you have about this. Just reach out and be happy to reply by email and share your answer on a future episode of the podcast.

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Ep 11: Your First Year of Lifting (Doing What Matters)

You decided to get stronger, improve your body composition, and become more healthy. You selected a simple but effective barbell-based strength training program and committed to consistent training. During your first year of lifting, there will be many new things to learn, habits to develop, and temptations to lead you off your chosen path.

After going through the process myself and talking with hundreds of other lifters, I wanted to share some thoughts to help you keep making progress and avoid some common pitfalls that could derail you. When I started lifting seriously and intelligently a few years ago, it was thanks to those who came before me that I could avoid making some big mistakes while still figuring out what worked for me as an individual. I hope these ideas help you in your first year of lifting or really any time during your fitness journey!

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 11 of wits and weights. You decided to get stronger, improve your body composition and become more healthy. You selected a simple but effective barbell beast strength training program, and committed to consistent traits. During your first year of lifting, there'll be many new things to learn habits, to develop and temptations to lead you off your chosen path.

[00:00:59] After going through the process, myself and talking with hundreds of other lifters, I wanted to share some thoughts to help you keep making progress and avoid some common pitfalls that could derail. When I started lifting seriously and intelligently a few years ago, it was thanks to those who came before me, that I could avoid making some big mistakes while still figuring out what worked for me as an individual.

[00:01:25] I hope these ideas help you in your first year of lifting or really any time during your fitness. Let's just jump right in. The first thing I'm going to talk about is the fact that when you start something new, when you want to get fit, you want to start working out and training. You want to start eating right.

[00:01:47] There are a lot of new habits. That you have to develop. And initially this is going to require some form of extrinsic motivation reward system and even willpower and discipline. And I know we don't like to say that something requires willpower, but the initial getting over that hump of creating something, that's a system, that's a habit that you can do everyday for the rest of your life.

[00:02:15] Initially requires. A shock to the system. And this is why I think it's important right off the bat to take that excitement. You have that enthusiasm that, you know, I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to gain weight. I'm going to start working out regularly and use that energy to properly put in place those systems that will help you continue to have it days, weeks, and months down the road, when you might not have as much excitement or motivation.

[00:02:42] And I did talk about this in an earlier episode about automating your fitness journey with things like preparing your gym bag and preparing your training, preparing your nutrition, setting things up so that not only. Is it easier to do them each day, but it's hard to avoid doing them. You make it hard on yourself to not do them.

[00:03:06] And what works for you might work, not work for someone else. And the point is rather than just jumping into this and going take the hour or the day or the week to plan. To a little bit greater extent, knowing that this is something that's going to change your life. And so you have to change your life to develop the new habits that will get you there.

[00:03:32] But I assure you that once you get over that initial few weeks or month or two of consistent training and eating that it will be so much easier. It will become a habit. It will be something that you miss. If you don't. And after about, ah, say three to six months, it's just going to be an ingrained part of your life that you're going to enjoy, especially as you then start to see the results, enjoy the process, enjoy the results, set yourself up for success with systems so that the habits become easier to develop.

[00:04:08] Okay. That was more of a mindset thing. Now we're going to get a little more detailed nitty-gritty tactical. The second. Is to make sure that you log your workouts so that you can see progress. I'm not talking about just logging your workouts. I'm talking specifically about the fact that you want to see something going up and improving over time.

[00:04:33] Now as a novice lifters, a new lifter, this is most likely weight on the bar. It's as simple as that, as you see the weight. For the same movements and the same sets and reps, you know, you're making progress. And the purpose of doing this is so that the process becomes your focus rather than the results.

[00:04:58] If you can focus on the process, the results will come. But if you focus on the results, you can sometimes screw yourself up during the process. So chances are, if you've identified a really good training, That's also fairly simple and easy to track, you know, and may have as few as say, five movements, the big barbell lifts and maybe some pull-ups that it should be fairly easy to track your progress as you get experienced.

[00:05:27] And you get stronger to the point where you have to shift to intermediate programming, which may be as early as three to six months. Then not only will you have this habit in place, but then as things get a little more complicated, for example, if you start prac V start progressing against reps or sets, or when you start moving your movements around or adding new movements, it'll be that much easier to see progress.

[00:05:55] Next, I want to talk about the programming itself, not what program you're doing, but the fact that newer lifters are always attracted to the next shiny object. The next fun program you've been on a program for, let's say eight or 12 weeks. And you say to yourself, this seems to be getting repetitive, although I'm making progress, but you know, I want to do some more tricep work.

[00:06:20] I want to do some more back work. Some bodybuilding Hyper-V. And you start to hop around to different programs and you go off the path a little bit and then a little bit more. And before you know it, you're doing some high volume or super squat programming or something with a lot of conditioning that's way off from the original plan of just getting.

[00:06:44] And this is one of the biggest temptations for newer lifters in your first year. So the counter to that is to find a simple, fun training program that doesn't have a lot of movements because we're really looking for efficiency with our limited time in the gym, and we're looking to improve technique and get stronger.

[00:07:07] So when you find that program, stick with it, avoid the temptation to program. If you think you are quote-unquote plateauing chances, are there something else to look at? For example, is it time for a de-load or a reset or are you not getting enough recovery? Are you jumping too quickly in terms of your.

[00:07:33] From session to session, you know, is it time to reduce the increments you were going up 10 pounds, time to go up five. You're going up five time to go up two and a half. These micro plates, if needed. Are you resting sufficiently between sets? I would look at all of those things before you say, ah, that's it, I've just gotten as strong as I'm going to do after four months as a new lifter.

[00:07:57] And I need to get a new. But the next thing I want to talk about is the thought that you just want to get lean. Don't worry about getting quote unquote lean focus instead. Okay. And this comes back to process versus results focus instead on building strengthening. The best way to get lean is to get bigger, to add muscle, not the other way around, not to reduce fat.

[00:08:27] Yes. Reducing fat could make a dent in your body fat percentage, but adding muscle will immediately alter your body composition, increase your metabolism and make it such that getting leaner even at a heavier weight is possible. That is our. So stop trying to get lean, get a six pack. It ripped jacked, whatever in your first year, focus on building the neuromuscular adaptation and then the actual strength and muscle mass.

[00:08:58] As you get stronger and stronger session after session by adding weight to the bar for most new lifters, you're going to want to eat more than you were eating before so that you can provide your body, the nutrition and the environment it needs to build. I'm not talking about dirty bulk or dreamer bulk.

[00:09:18] I'm simply talking about eating enough to make progress, unless you're significantly overweight, you know, you're trying to lose weight. And that is your primary goal. In which case you may want to be at maintenance or even a. You're probably going to need to eat more than you thought you needed to, as you train harder and harder, and it's this eating more and building muscle mass, that'll give you the opportunity later on to get quote unquote lean.

[00:09:47] We're actually going to talk about that in the next episode, because I just completed a building phase or a bulking cycle that I want to talk about in detail, as far as why this concept of eating more and getting. Okay, is the key to getting leaner. The next thing that's super important. When you first start and it's really important for the rest of your life as a lifter, but if you focus on this from day one, it will take you so much farther and give you the progress you're looking for.

[00:10:20] And that is form and technique study. Practice it become one with the technique of the lifts that you are mastering. And by using a simple barbell based strength training program, that's limited to maybe five movements, you know, the squat deadlift press bench press, and then some pole. You can have the focus required to really master form with those techniques.

[00:10:51] And that means when you first start, you picking a reasonable weight, you're not trying to overshoot, even if you've lifted before we're trying to do it, right. Pick a reasonable weight on the bar so that you can do a full range of motion rep with beautiful form. Now it's not going to be beautiful at all.

[00:11:09] When you first start, it's going to be downright ugly most. And this is actually bringing me to the next point, which is to either get a coach or join some sort of group, like an online group where you can get form checks early on. Don't wait, six months later, when you've been squatting two or three times a week for six months, you may have been doing it wrong the whole time.

[00:11:32] And now you've developed a habit with poor form. And I'll tell you a quick story about this. When I was learning the low bar back squat. I had a lot of habits from CrossFit where we learn to high bar back squat and who, you know, asked to grass high reps, all of the things that are not what you need when you're doing low bar back squats for strength, for, you know, in the range of around five reps and much heavier loads.

[00:12:02] Grateful. So for awhile, I tried to figure it out on my own. I read starting strength. They watch videos. You know, I took my time to take notes and practice without a bar practice with an empty bar practice with a bar, looking at my feet, my knees, the angle of my back, all of these things. And I thought I had it pretty good.

[00:12:25] Until I decided to hire a coach for one hour. It was a starting strength coach here in Connecticut to help me with my squat and press the overhead press. And within about 10 minutes he had fixed 15 or 20 different things. I was doing wrong on my squat, despite me being completely certain, I, I was almost.

[00:12:49] And he fixed everything. He fixed my stance, how I pointed my toes, the angle of my knuckles on the bar, the width on the bar, where it was on my back and on and on and on. And by the way, I'd love to talk about some of these in a future episode, specifically about individual lifts. And we'll talk about the back squat.

[00:13:12] But my point of this story is he fixed all these things in less than an hour. That was the best money spent in terms of my lifting progress, because then I could go home. I could apply proper form. I could video myself and keep refining that, and I could start making significant progress because correct form allows you to recruit your muscles in the right way, avoid injury, lift the heaviest loads.

[00:13:40] And that's what we're trying to do so that we can make. If you can't afford a coach or can't get access to one, or there's not any good coach in your area, the next best thing is to join something like a Facebook Reddit group, where you could post a video of yourself doing the lift. And by the way, let's use good etiquette.

[00:14:00] Please make sure your videos are trends. Make sure they're at the right angle with the right lighting so people can help you out and you post the video and hopefully get some good feedback and can self-correct from there. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media.

[00:14:23] Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again, an incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. The next thing I want to talk about is the fact that when you are a new lifter or you've been away from it for a long time, You're going to make some pretty quick progress.

[00:14:51] Initially, in terms of load on the bar, you're going to be able to jump at fairly large increments, perhaps 10 or even 15 pounds on the deadlift, five or 10 pounds on the squat, five pounds on the. And some of that is what they called neuro muscular adaptation. The idea that you have the capability to lift that weight already sort of a base strength, but you are clumsy and your body hasn't been trained in those movements, in those patterns.

[00:15:21] So now that you learn the patterns pretty quickly, your body sort of catches up to its own. It's not that you're adding significant strength or muscle mass that quickly it's that you're converging to your initial set point. Then it starts to get a little. Right. It starts to flatten out the curve just a little bit and your jumps decrease, but you start to get to that sweet spot where you really are now gaining true strength and muscle mass in the process through this linear progression.

[00:15:53] Eventually though you start to hit the wall, the wall, and you know this because it starts to get a little grindy toward the end of your. It really feels hard. And so expect this to happen. At some point, this is going to come. It may not actually be too far into your, your journey, maybe about 3, 4, 5 months in.

[00:16:14] And one way to prepare for this is to always plan not to fail any reps. If you're going four sets of five, Your plan is to get all sets of all five reps, no matter what. And then your counter-argument is why, how do you do that? You know, what if you're just not as strong that day and not feeling it all right.

[00:16:36] It's not really about what you feel. It's about what you're capable of and the adaptation you've experienced. You may feel terrible and still be able to get all your reps. You may feel great. And it's. But as you reach that point, there are a few things to consider. One is to decrease the increase that's to decrease the increase, decrease the jump for the next workout.

[00:16:58] Plan ahead, knowing that you're reaching that point. Don't keep jumping five pounds. If you should be going up to. Also make sure you have consistent recovery that is sleep consistent. You're consistently eating and you're taking enough rest between sets. I mentioned this earlier, but all of these things, if you do them consistently, then you can compare the progress objectively from session to session.

[00:17:24] But if you all of a sudden, only get four hours of sleep one night and you have. 14 hours. Well, that's going to significantly impact your performance. You may then fail a rep and it's not necessarily because of a lack of adaptation so much as you've hurt yourself by limiting these other factors, recovery, rest, food, so on.

[00:17:46] So it's important to be keenly aware of your performing. In that session and get a feel for what you probably probably are capable of next session and plan accordingly. Don't just blindly jumped by 10 pounds, five pounds. What have you jumped the appropriate amount based on where you think you are in almost hitting that wall.

[00:18:08] Now eventually you'll get to a point where you truly would fail a rep. If you tried to increase the weight on the bar. And at that point, you're probably ready for intermediate. Where you start to split things up and go to something like a heavy light, medium programming or a 40 split, or even a five day something like a power building program that allows you to spread out the work a little bit.

[00:18:33] And then you're looking for weekly increases, not session to session, and eventually even less frequent increases than that, but you're still gonna measure progress somehow. All right, the next thing. And it's somewhat related to some of the recent things we talked about is always listened to your. And what I mean by that is not in it, not in a subjective sense.

[00:18:56] In other words, if you're going to go and do a set of five for squats and you just feel kind of tired that day, and this is going to be a grind, it's going to be terrible. I'm not sure I'm up for it. That's not what I'm talking about in that case. Get yourself under the bar and do the reps I'm talking about.

[00:19:13] You've got this weird tweak in your elbow and it clicks a little bit. When you try to do a bench press or your knee, all of a sudden starts to hurt or here's what happened to me? I got bicep tendonitis because my squat. Wasn't optimal for me. I was actually putting too much strain on my elbow because of too much extension of the wrist.

[00:19:38] And once I fixed my squat grip, the pain in my elbow went away and I no longer feared doing. Supinated chin-ups for example, you know, I was avoiding him. I was avoiding barbell curls, things like that because my barbell tendon hurts so much, but I had to find the root cause and I had to listen to my body and kind of trace it, do the research, try things out until I could figure out what was happening.

[00:20:06] So this is biofeedback. This is the kind of thing it gives you personalized feedback on something going on with your form and technique. Usually the gut reaction is just to not do whatever is causing the feeling or the pain. And that may be true in the short term that you need to avoid that temporarily, but more likely there's something else down the chain that's causing the issue.

[00:20:33] And so this is where we go back to form and technique, evaluate all of your movements and see if there's anything that really could be the root cause. This issue that is pain, and this is separate from true injury or true pain. For example, I had a herniated disc that was impinging impinging on my Sadek nerve.

[00:20:56] Okay. And that caused pain that couldn't go away with any other solution, then a microdiscectomy to get rid of the tissue, and then it solved the problem. That was a clear cause and effect medical issue. And. Affected by my form. Now having said that, did it make me even more rigorous about my squatting and my dead lifting in terms of keeping a neutral spine driving with the hips and my squat, having the right hip angle back angle, et cetera.

[00:21:28] In my deadlift, yes. I pay even more attention to those things. Now, just in case any of them could have contributed to that. So as you begin this journey, you're going to be super excited about trying all these lifts and making progress. And initially you're going to make progress across the board. Even if you have bad form, you could even continue for years like that with bad form.

[00:21:51] But some of these movement issues could cause injury or pain down the road. And so being a student of good form and technique and listening to your body are very helpful as it gets stronger. The last thing I want to talk about. Is a little bit different because this is a new endeavor. You want to try to absorb as much information as possible and also filter that information, using judgment and intelligence, corroborating evidence science experience.

[00:22:25] I implore you to read as many books as you can to listen to podcasts. Thankfully, you're already doing that right here right now, but there are lots of other great podcasts that are a ton of great books. Watch videos, go to YouTube to learn and develop expertise in this field of lifting. Treat it like a skill that you want to master.

[00:22:48] And yes, it takes practice. Yes, it takes training, but it also takes information and knowledge. And the scientific literature is changing all the time. We discover new, exciting things. We discover new techniques and then there's new nut jobs popping up all the time on social media that we want to learn to filter out.

[00:23:08] So reading books, listening to podcasts, watching videos, gaining knowledge, and just being aware of everything going on out there we'll emerge. In this field, to the extent that you're a student of it, as well as a practitioner and at least in my opinion, that makes it even more exciting as you continue to develop this habit through the years.

[00:23:29] Okay. Those. Some tips that I came up with for continuing to make progress and avoid the big mistakes that some people make during their first year of lifting. I'm sure there are many more that you can think of, or others have shared. And that we'll talk about on this podcast in the future, but the ones today can have a huge impact on your enjoyment, your consistency, your sustainable.

[00:23:59] As you transform your strength and body composition for better health.

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Ep 10: Focus on These 7 BIG Priorities for Strength and Fitness

Sometimes advice from the fitness industry can be overwhelming. There are so many ways to program your lifting, eat your food, and meet your goals that we often get lost in the small details.

At the end of the day, it’s the BIG details, applied consistently, that contribute the most to your progress and result in sustainable habits of success in getting big and strong, losing or gaining weight, and sculpting a healthier version of you.

In this episode, I wanted to take it to a higher level, so to speak, and go over 7 “big priorities” for strength and fitness that, if you can do these at least 80% of the time, will help you accomplish your goals.

1. Get moving!

2. Keep programming simple and fun

3. Get enough sleep (recovery)

4. Get enough protein (as part of hitting calories)

5. Make your own food for most meals

6. Track progress

7. Enjoy the PROCESS (the results will follow)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 10 of Wits & Weights. Sometimes advice from the fitness industry can be overwhelming. There are so many ways to program your lifting, eat your food, and meet your goals that we often get lost in the small details. At the end of the day, it's the big details applied consistently that contribute the most of your products.

[00:00:56] And results in sustainable habits of success in getting big and strong, losing her gaining weight and sculpting a healthier version of you. In this episode, I wanted to take it to a higher level, so to speak and go over seven big priorities for strength and fitness, that if you can do these at least 80% of the time will help you accomplish your goal.

[00:01:23] The first big priority is just to get moving. I know we pay a lot of lip service to the idea of not sitting around just getting up and walking and moving around, but on a daily basis, moving, getting steps, being active, whether or not you're lifting or doing any particular exercise has a huge impact. All cause mortality.

[00:01:50] And I know from personal experience, it seems to have beneficial effects on your resting heart rate on your metabolism, on your ability to eat more on your general energy and mood on your flexibility, mobility, your joints, so many different things. And recently there was an article published that was analyzed by stronger by science.

[00:02:16] The study of. Daily step count and all cause mortality. And what they found was striking, and that is that quote, walking 2,700 steps per day was associated with a threefold greater risk. Of all cause mortality than walking 16,000 steps per day, they basically found a 12% reduction in all-cause mortality for every thousand steps.

[00:02:46] And apparently this is a bigger impact than the difference between smoking and not smoking or between having a high and a low. But I think even more than that, moving, getting into the habit of being an active person is a catalyst for everything else you do. It sets the stage for your day. It gives you a different mindset to how you approach things versus sitting around all day.

[00:03:14] Not to mention all of the health benefits. The second big priority is about your. And there are so many programs to choose from so many ways to lift weights. There is training for strength, there's bodybuilding power, building a ton of different ways to work out. But at the end of the day, if your programming is not fun, You're not going to do it.

[00:03:40] And if it's not simple, you're probably going to get frustrated and you're probably not going to do it. Although you have to still lift heavy and hard. If you're going to make progress and add muscle as a newer lift or even intermediate lifter, you can do this with very few different exercises. As simple as squat, deadlift bench overhead.

[00:04:04] And you can do it in a variety of different ways that is enjoyable for you. Whether enjoyable means getting up at five in the morning or doing it in the afternoon, whether it means lifting really heavy and focusing on little compound lifts or adding in some accessories for variety for bodybuilding, just because you want to.

[00:04:21] So as you evaluate the different programs, And try to avoid program hopping. I would go back and listen to one of my first episodes, which talks about how to choose a program. Many of the beginner programs I recommend are just that they're simple and I think they're fun, but of course, if you do it and you say that this is, this is torture.

[00:04:43] I really don't like this. There are always alternatives to make it more enjoyable because at the end of the day, what we care about is consistency, which leads to sustainable. That brings me to the third big priority. Something that many people myself included often don't give enough attention to. And that is getting enough sleep.

[00:05:05] Sleep is the cornerstone of recovery of having the energy to get up and do it the next day. Giving your body, the time it needs to repair itself. And I could do an entire podcast episode about all the intricacies of how to improve sleep quality. But as today's episode is about the big priorities, the priority is just to get into.

[00:05:31] Sleep. I think many of us failed to do, even that we limp along five, six hours a night and ideally should be up around seven to eight, maybe even nine, if you're able to pull that off, but figure out how to get enough sleep. Does that mean we have to readjust our schedule to work out either in the morning or in the evening or the afternoon?

[00:05:56] Doesn't mean simply going to bed. And then doing the things that it takes to ensure we get to bed early, making sure that we have our routine, maybe that we're avoiding activities that would distract us or keep us up, like scrolling on social media, watching TV, those sorts of things, which yes can also affect sleep quality.

[00:06:17] But my point is take an inventory of. Your sleep, you know how much you're getting every night. And if it's less than seven on a regular basis, I would suggest you want to find a way to add another 30 minutes to an hour every night so that you can then get into the gym, lift really hard and get the benefits of all that time, trying to build muscle.

[00:06:40] So just focus on getting enough sleep for. Big priority. Number four has to do with nutrition. How do we meet our goals for the longterm? Whether we're trying to lose, maintain, or gain weight, you probably think I'm going to say you have to hit your calories low. I think that's obvious at this point to a lot of us, I'm not saying it's easy, but you could wake up in the morning and say to yourself, okay, I know I have to hit 2100 calories.

[00:07:11] And as I go along and I make my food choices, if I'm tracking, I know where I am against those calories during the day. And it's fairly easy to gauge when I'm going to hit those and how to pace myself. But what's a little more nuanced is. And so big priority. Number four is to make sure you get enough protein.

[00:07:33] I'm assuming you're going to hate your calories or try to as part of your tracking, but it's easy to get two or three meals into the day and really. I haven't been eating enough protein and it's not really something you can make up later in the day. You can make it up, but it won't have as beneficial of an effect because of protein synthesis, the ability of your body to use amino acids for that process.

[00:08:00] And you really want to space it out more now getting your protein one. It's fine, but where I'm going with this is to prioritize protein at every meal. Don't make it complicated from the time you wake up and have your first meal, ask yourself the question. Do I have enough food of the right types to start getting me toward my protein goal?

[00:08:23] If you would normally have, let's say a bowl of oatmeal and a banana and a bagel with cream cheese. Well, you're gonna have very little protein in that breakfast, a little bit in the cream cheese and the oatmeal. If you replaced one of those items with say some eggs or even a protein shake, you're off to a great start.

[00:08:42] You're you're up maybe 15, 20, 25 grams of protein, and you're getting yourself primed for the rest of the. Now let's take the example of a 200 pound male who's shooting for one gram of protein a day. That's 200 grams. If he's going to eat, say five meals during. That's an average of 40 grams of protein per meal, just quite a bit.

[00:09:05] So he's going to either have to add a snack or two that has primarily protein, or he's just going to have to be on top of the fact that he needs sufficient protein in each meal. And that might mean having, you know, more meat for lunch and dinner and making sure there's enough. Each other meals so that the total adds up to meet your goal, the fats and carbs, as I've talked about before, they're fairly interchangeable.

[00:09:29] You need to get enough carbs for your training. You need to get enough fat for your health, but there's a lot of flexibility in one versus the other, as long as you hit your calories. But if you don't get enough protein, you're going to hold yourself back in terms of building muscle, but also in terms of maintaining or retaining the muscle you have, when you.

[00:09:49] On a cut. The other thing about prioritizing protein is when you're craving a snack, for example, and you go to the kitchen, you're just, you're just a little bit hungry. You want something to eat and normally you would just go grab something. Well, if protein comes to. As your priority, you would say, huh? Is what I'm going to grab.

[00:10:08] Have enough to meet my protein goals. Maybe not. So maybe I should go for the cottage cheese instead of the pretzels, or maybe for convenience. I need to have a protein shake or protein bar and fit it in to keep me toward my protein goals. Get enough protein as part of hitting your calories. And you'll be all right.

[00:10:27] Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find. You'd be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again.

[00:10:46] An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. The fifth priority, which is also about nutrition is to try to make your own food. For most of your meals and that's about as complicated as I'm going to make it. That's why these are big priorities. I've said before.

[00:11:05] It's not so much about what you eat as whether you have the right calories and macros to. But of course what you eat can make it harder, highly palatable process foods, for example, and they taste great, but they go down so easy and you could eat so much of them. They're high in fat and carbs and whatever and calories.

[00:11:28] That you might be hungry half an hour later, and this is going to make it more difficult to hit your calorie target. Particularly if you're losing weight. Of course, if you're gaining weight, you may actually use some processed foods as a strategy to get in the extra calories. But if you make your own food for most meals, it has a variety of benefits.

[00:11:47] The first benefit is, you know, what's in your food, even if you're making something tasty complicated. Even if you're making a dessert or baked good, you still know what's in it. You're going to make the, your grandma's favorite French bread. You still know it's got flour and the various other ingredients, whereas something you buy in the store.

[00:12:05] Me. 20 other ingredients or worse yet, if you go to a restaurant and get bread, you really don't know what's in it and you have to estimate. So if you're tracking, it just makes tracking easier to know what's in your food. You can prepare meals ahead of time and put them into a recipe in your food tracking.

[00:12:23] Like macro factor, which is what I use. And then the apple just calculate the macros and calories based on the proportion of the food. And it will be highly accurate. Another reason to make your own food for most of your meals is you can control the macronutrients much more easily. If you want to go ahead and make, make a special bread recipe with protein powder in it to up the.

[00:12:44] Go for it. If you want to use the high-protein filtered milk instead of just whatever milk. Well, now, you know, you've got your delicious milk, but you also are meeting your protein targets. Another reason to make your own food. It's a lot cheaper. It's a lot less expensive than going to restaurants all the time or getting takeout.

[00:13:02] And before you say, well, you know, I like the social experience of restaurants. You can have a great social experience with friends and family cooking your own food, having a barbecue. Inviting them over for dinner. So making your own food has a ton of benefits. The main benefit for our purpose being that, you know, what's in it in it's easy to track.

[00:13:20] Speaking of tracking big priority, number six is to track your progress. And this is sort of a catch-all priority because then your next question is, what am I tracking? Am I tracking 50 different things? Because to me that doesn't sound very easy. And again, today we're talking about big priorities, so let's prioritize what we want to track.

[00:13:45] And I would say the big things to track are going. Your food and your weight. You're also going to track your progress in the gym. And then if you want to go further than that and get more into the data and be a little more optimal with all of this, of course you can track other things like your body measurements, but the big things are your food.

[00:14:05] So we want to track calories and Adam. Protein, but usually if you're using an app, you're going to end up tracking your calories with protein fat carbs, because it's all fairly automated. You can use barcodes, you can put in common foods. It's pretty easy to do that. The hard part about tracking food.

[00:14:25] Taking the time to do it, you know, weighing your food, not being weird, uh, learning how to estimate food that other people might've made. It's definitely an art to some extent, but if you don't track, you just don't know the calories that are coming in. So tracking your food is one side of it tracking your weight is of course the other side, you can take a very laid back approach and just weigh yourself once a week on the same day.

[00:14:48] Same. And compare that over time. And if you're going up or going down and it's more or less than the rate that you want, then you just adjust the food side of the equation. If you want to be a little more proactive, a little more precise, then you can weigh yourself a few times a week. Or like I do every day.

[00:15:08] It's just a habit I get up in the morning. Four, use the bathroom step on my smart scale. It beams it to my phone. It takes five seconds. I don't really think about it. It doesn't become an obsession. The scale weight doesn't really do anything emotionally for me at this point, because it's just a data point every day.

[00:15:25] But however you do it, that gives you the two sides of the equation. You need to understand your metabolism and whether you're eating the right amount of food to meet your goal. And then as far as tracking your progress in the gym, we've talked before about the fact that a good training program. And we are training.

[00:15:45] We're not just exercising a good training program. We'll show objective progress, whether that's weight on the bar sets or reps. And then if you want to go to that next level, of course you can measure yourself, measure your waist, measure your arms, things like that, to measure muscle gain and weight loss.

[00:16:02] And I guess this priority really applies to anything you're trying to accomplish in life. Any goal that you're trying to achieve, how do you know if you've gone from a to B to C to all get all the way to. You know that by tracking your progress in some objective measurable way and the last big pre. Is just to enjoy the process.

[00:16:24] The results will follow. We get so hung up on the results. You know, where I have arrived on any given day that we fail to enjoy the process. And in some cases it's because we have a process that we don't enjoy and that's what makes it unsustainable. And so to have something sustainable and consistent that we can do.

[00:16:49] Months years, the rest of our life, both in diet and nutrition, the process itself should be as enjoyable as possible. Now I talked earlier about the priority of keeping your programming, simple and fun. And the fun part of that is what I'm talking about in terms of the process being enjoyable. When I get up at five 30 in the morning to work out and that's usually when I work out.

[00:17:16] Yeah, it's a little bit. And it's a little bit cold and I'm not quite warmed up, but I know that I'm going to get in there and it's going to be tons of fun to lift heavy weight, because I know the results are going to follow now. That is not at all fun for you. And even if you've done it for three months, it's still not fun for you.

[00:17:34] Then it's probably time to change it up to something that you can enjoy. Even if the results are a little less quote, unquote optimal, the same thing goes for diet. I talk a lot about. About macros calories and all this, if all of that stuff is just torture to you, even after you've tried it, even if you seen results, then for you as an individual, you'll have to have a different approach.

[00:17:59] And there are other ways to do things there's other ways to track progress in a little more laid back fashion, where maybe you, you gather data points. Once a month and you don't track your food, but you learn how to estimate based on what you see on the plate. I mean, you can't just totally wing it, especially when you're a beginner to this whole process, because that's probably what got you to the.

[00:18:24] Where you've been in the past where you may not have met your goal. So there is some element of willpower to start the process. There's some element of sacrifice and discipline and hard work, of course, but to be sustainable, you want to settle into the approach that both. And is enjoyable along the way.

[00:18:43] I mean, this is life, this is our life, and we're going to be doing this for many years. So that's why I wanted to include this priority because I know from personal experience, I've done things in the past that worked, but we're no fun at. And those are the kinds of things that lead to yo-yo dieting and program hopping.

[00:19:02] And we want this to be a fun process, a sustainable process, and one that gets results. I hope you found this episode useful and are excited to focus on some or hopefully all of these seven big. That should get you most of the gains and help establish a long-term sustainable approach to strengthen fitness.

[00:19:24] Hit me up with questions by going to the link in the show notes or by email or Instagram.

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Ep 9: 10 Fitness and Nutrition “Facts” I Changed My Mind About

Today I share some helpful and sometimes counterintuitive things I’ve learned over the last year about fitness and nutrition that either changed my mind or were completely new to me.

As a 40-something-year-old lifter who has only been training seriously and effectively for the last few years, I used to believe a lot of nonsense—ideas, myths, preconceptions, assumptions, whatever you want to call them—that often held me back from progress or, even worse, were counterproductive.

Chances are that you’ve heard some of these too, and it’s quite possible you’ll be surprised by some of my thoughts in this episode—or perhaps not. At the very least, I hope you’ll learn something new that will help you continue to remain skeptical, ask questions, and become even more informed on your journey to greater strength, better health, and long-term consistency.

1. More muscle means you can eat more

2. Metabolism is determined by body composition

3. Genetics are no excuse

4. Calories are the LEAST important reason to exercise

5. Walking has more benefits than you think

6. Carbs are not the enemy (they are crucial for training)

7. Losing weight is as "simple" as being in a caloric deficit

8. There are multiple ways to make objective progress

9. Being strong makes it easy to recover from injury or surgery

10. We don't know everything yet but learn new insights every day!

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

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• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

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• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

👏 ENJOY THE SHOW? 

• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.

[00:00:26]Welcome to episode nine of Wits & Weights. Today, I wanted to share some helpful and sometimes counter intuitive things I've learned over the last year about fitness and nutrition that either changed my mind or were completely new to me that I found.

[00:00:51] And as a 40 something year old lifter, who's only been training seriously and effectively for the last few years, I used to believe a lot of nonsense ideas, myths, preconceptions, assumptions, whatever you want to call them that often held me back from progress or even worse were counterproductive.

[00:01:11] Chances are, you've heard some of these too, and it's quite possible. You'll be surprised by some of the thoughts that I have in this episode, or perhaps not at the very least. I hope you'll learn something new that will help you continue to remain skeptical, ask questions and become even more informed on your journey to greater strength, better health and longterm consistency.

[00:01:35] Number one. Adding muscle, lets you eat more food, even in a deficit. Now this is a big one because for most of my life, when I was either sedentary or doing things like CrossFit and not really lifting and adding. It was always a struggle to maintain my weight. At least for me, I would call it a quote unquote, slow metabolism, which is not really a thing.

[00:02:04] And we'll get to that in, uh, the second item. The, the fact is that whatever my metabolism was based on my activity levels and based on my body composition, I would have to always be in a slight state of hunger to maintain my weight and definitely to lose weight. So I couldn't necessarily, at least in my mind enjoy eating without the risk of gaining weight.

[00:02:30] And if that sounds like you, the revelation I had over the past few years, when I. Singularly on strength, training and building muscle. Is that muscles and expensive tissue. You probably heard that before. It's more expensive than your other tissue. And having more of it generally increases your metabolism relative to your.

[00:02:53] Baseline. So it essentially increases your set point, but the idea is that while everyone is on the hamster wheel of cardio, trying to burn the fat off with burning calories, I was here lifting three or four days a week, which is a lot of fun. At least for me building muscle, not doing much, if any cardio not doing CrossFit anymore.

[00:03:18] And all of a sudden. I could eat more and more and more without gaining weight, or if I wanted to gain weight on purpose, I would have to even more. And then when I went into a cut last year, I had to reduce my calories, but it was reasonable. I'm five, nine, and I had to get it down to maybe 20 to 2300 calories a day, which is not starving.

[00:03:45] And before I had gained that muscle, I would have had to go much lower than that. If I were to lose any significant weight. And now that I've been in a bulk, I found that my metabolism continues to go up and up and up as I add muscle, allowing me to just eat tons of food. So the moral of the story is if you like to eat, like I do, you can eat more.

[00:04:07] If you add more. Number two, your metabolism is explained primarily by your body composition. We often talk about how metabolism is different for everybody, and it slows down as you age and men have a higher metabolism than women and all of these. Um, what I now know to be proxies of metabolism, but not direct causes.

[00:04:35] It turns out that the largest explanatory variable of a higher or lower metabolism is how much fat free mass you have. That is simply the more muscle you have, the less fat you have. So in other words, the lower body fat percentage, you have a higher metabolism. You have. If you took two individual. That were roughly the same height, same weight, but one had a significantly better body composition.

[00:05:03] That person would have a high on average, a higher metabolism. Now, if you extend that logic and say, okay, well, why do older people have slower metabolisms? It's because as you age sarcopenia and osteopenia kick in your muscles and tissue degrade waste away, whatever you want to call it. And your fat free mass declines.

[00:05:23] So your metabolism decline. Why do men have a higher metabolism than women? Well, again, all things equal. Men have a higher fat free mass they're leaner women carry more fat, just biologically. So men are going to have a higher metabolism. And what this means is that you can actually flip the switch and turn the dial and increase your metabolism simply by improving your body composition and adding muscle.

[00:05:49] Oh, that's exactly consistent with the first item I was talking about. Which brings me to number three related to these. And that is genetics are not really an excuse. Having a quote unquote, slow metabolism is not an excuse. And I know this from personal experience, but we also see this in the literature.

[00:06:09] And we see this among the population that if you engage in really any form of fitness, but especially resistance training. Eat properly, meaning to maintain a healthy weight that no matter what you are born with genetically, you can significantly improve and transform your own body. No, not everybody is going to look like the rock or Arnold or whoever your ideal physique.

[00:06:38] Of course not. There are differences between people and genetics do give you a different baseline and a different set point. But in relative terms, you can go from what you are now to a significantly improved, healthier version of yourself through your own effort. And this is liberating. Number four calories burn.

[00:07:04] Is the least important thing about exercise for many years, I came to realize that diet was definitely the most important factor in whether you gain or lose weight in general terms. But I also thought that calories burned while performing exercise was significant. And you've heard the phrase that you can't outrun a diet.

[00:07:26] That's true, but even more important than. I think lots of folks in society have gotten into their head that lots of cardio, that should be the primary form of exercise and that the more you run and the more you bike and the more you swim, the more calories you burn, that's how you stay on top of your weight gain.

[00:07:46] When in fact prioritizing cardio and not doing resistance training will send your body a signal that endurance is. And you will become more efficient, meaning your metabolism will actually decline. And you may even see reduction in muscle tissue, which is the opposite of what we want. What we instead, what are, what I talked about in number one, and number two, you build more.

[00:08:15] You drive up your metabolism. You don't have to do a crazy amount of cardio. Cardio is great. Cardio is healthy for you. There are a lot of reasons to cardio, but not as the primary driver of fitness in the context we're talking about, which is improved body composition, additional muscle ability to eat more, to eat in a healthy way to maintain a healthy weight.

[00:08:36] And therefore we don't perform exercise to burn calories. We perform exercise to lift weights and add. And to get healthy. Now having said that I'm going to contradict myself slightly with number five, and that is that while. Has so many more benefits than I realized, including the fact that if you walk regularly, you are going to burn a few more calories and those extra calories will give you a little bit of cushion in your.

[00:09:08] But that is different from doing medium or high intensity cardio on a regular basis for the sole purpose of burning calories, which then may lead to you adapting to endurance, which is counter to our goals of building muscle becoming less efficient so that we have a higher metabolism, but walking is such a great movement.

[00:09:32] I had back surgery last year, a microdiscectomy. And the best way to rehab that in the early weeks after the surgery, because I couldn't do much else was to walk now all of my life, I've not been a huge fan of walking. I've talked about this before. My wife would have to drag me out to go on a walk. I just thought it was kind of boring and a waste of time.

[00:09:56] I'd rather be, I'd rather be doing just about anything else, but. All of a sudden, it's the only thing I can do. It helped me heal. And I, all of a sudden had a new, found psychological link to the benefits of walking and I wanted to do it. And so I started to give myself a daily target of, I think it was initially 8,000, then 10,000.

[00:10:18] And currently it's 12,000 steps a day. And I think that's planning for most people. In fact, it's a little bit tough to get that if you work at home or are you work. Sedentary at a desk, you have to force yourself to either go for walks or have a treadmill, or get on a bike even, and get some steps that way at a low intensity by.

[00:10:41] But I've found that there are so many benefits to walking. One of those is it keeps you generally active. Meaning if you know, you want to get certain step amount of steps in for a day, you're going to find a way to do it. You're going to go get some vitamin D outside, go for a walk. After lunch, after dinner with your family, you're going to maybe walk around the house and pace a little bit while you're on the phone or doing work, it keeps you generally active as opposed to just sitting around all day.

[00:11:10] Second. It does burn a bunch of calories, almost you, without you realizing it, you know, several hundred more calories a day and it doesn't do so in a way that causes your body to adapt and go into the endurance mode. Walking gives you the opportunity to enjoy your surroundings, your environment. Get out into nature.

[00:11:30] You look for any excuse to walk more. You park farther from the grocery store entrance. You look for a reason to go upstairs. And then as I get older, I'm in my forties and I realized walking keeps me. It keeps the joints lubricated, so to speak. It's great for just general movement and joint health. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast.

[00:11:56] If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again, an incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode.

[00:12:17] Okay. The next couple items are related to nutrition. And the first one, which is this is number six, is that carbs are not the enemy. And not only that, they are crucial for training. If you're doing resistance training and trying to build. I followed low carb diets for many years from Atkins to paleo and primal, which by default are low carb because you're avoiding grains to Quito.

[00:12:48] And all of them helped me lose weight to an extent simply because I was excluding many food groups and many sources of calories, including processed foods, but none of them are sustaining. Nonetheless, I kept trying them over and over again under the mantra that carbs are somehow evil. And then when I got into serious lifting a few years ago and I had to really eat for the first time in my life, I couldn't do so.

[00:13:14] Without having some amount of carbs over 150, 200 grams a day, otherwise I'd be eating just a ton of protein and fat and nothing else. And I found that it just gave me a huge burst of energy and this is not unheard of. And some people may operate perfectly fine. Without too many carbs in their diet, but generally the, the evidence supports the idea that if you are training hard, whether you're doing endurance or heavy lifting, that you've got to have some carbs in your diet, and it doesn't have to be a massive amount, but if you're trying to shovel in 4,000 calories a day on a bulk, it's going to be meaningful.

[00:13:51] It's going to be probably. Four, maybe 500 grams of carbs. Now want to know when you're on a cut, when you're keeping your calories low and you're trying to lose weight, the carbs will naturally decline because you're keeping your protein high and you might to keep a little fat in there. And so your carbs may be down in the hundreds, which by some definitions is bordering on low carb.

[00:14:13] Anyway. So I have come to embrace carbs and they're just a macronutrient they're found in all sorts of delicious, healthy, natural foods. And it is a liberating experience to focus more on what's my target for calories and macros and not worrying that any particular macronutrient is good or bad. And that brings me to numbers.

[00:14:36] Losing weight is really as simple quote-unquote as hitting your calories, whether it is low carb, high carb, whatever, if you are training hard and you're trying to build muscle, you've got to hit your protein target no matter what, but when it comes to gaining weight or losing weight, especially losing weight, there is no magic to it.

[00:15:00] There's no special diet. I covered this in my episode, all about. All about dieting without being on a diet. That is as simple as the first law of thermal dynamics. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If you want to lose weight, you simply have to be in an appropriate reasonable caloric deficit and be consistent.

[00:15:24] And generally, as I always advise that does require some form of tracking. So you know how much you're eating and eventually if you get good at that, you may not need to track it. But like many of the other insights I've talked about today, this is also quite liberating because it means you don't have to be on a specific diet and restrict all sorts of foods.

[00:15:45] You can enjoy what you like, as long as it fits your calories or your macros. You're good to go. The next to number eight and nine have to do with training. Number eight, you can make progress. In multiple ways in the gym, not just with weight on the bar, although that is the best place to start when you're doing a novice linear progression, but you can also progress the number of reps with the same weight.

[00:16:15] You can even add sets, whatever you use to measure progress. Make sure it is objective and demonstrates. So, for example, I've recently started a power building type program where I do a combination of the big strength movements, the compound lifts combined with some accessories, for physic development and on the accessory movements.

[00:16:43] The progress is sometimes with. But sometimes I use different rep ranges and I keep the weight on the bar and I try to hit slightly more reps. It really depends on the type of movement. Isn't an isolation movement. Is it something heavy multi-joint and so on, but the point is, have your notebook, have your app and make sure that every week you are making.

[00:17:09] Somewhere when you initially start that's five pounds on the bar, 10 pounds on the bar, two and a half pounds on the bar, whatever it might be for the same number of reps. But as you get more advanced, you may have different schemes that rotate using periodization. You may go through different rep ranges and you may be progressing weight within a rep range, and then you reset and try to get more reps and progress the way to get, or you may progress using.

[00:17:38] And then you add a fourth set and then maybe a fifth set, and then you reset back to three sets, but with a higher weight, always make objective progress and you will eventually hit your goals. Number nine, being strong makes it easier to recover from injury or surgery. And I have personal experience here.

[00:18:03] Because of my back surgery last year, which was followed two months later by an appendectomy. And in both cases, I felt during preparing for the surgery, the surgery itself, the early recovery, and then the rehab. That I could quickly bounce back. I had the willpower to do it. The discipline, I felt strong. I felt that if I just moved and use my joints, I could quickly get back to lifting and making progress.

[00:18:33] And indeed, that is what happened. It wasn't long before I was back to heavy deadlifts, heavy squats, everything I'm doing today and it's as if it never happened, but I attribute much of that to the year and a half or two years of discipline. Efficient effective strength training that I had performed prior to those surgeries.

[00:18:57] And if you go back to, I think my second episode, which was about all about strength, we talk about the benefits of being strong and health and recovery, vitality being useful are key parts of that. And number 10, the last item on the list today, we don't know everything. We really don't, but we learned fascinating new mechanisms about how our bodies work.

[00:19:25] Every single. For example, last year I was reading the newspaper and it referred to a recent scientific article that had come out called mechanical overload, induced muscle derived, extracellular, vesicles, promote adipose tissue lipolysis. And you're asking, why am I sharing this? Well from the abstract, the authors wrote.

[00:19:48] That their findings demonstrate that skeletal muscle promotes metabolic adaptations in adipose tissue. And what it seemed to suggest is that strength training and specifically the act of actually doing the resistance training and the results shortly thereafter causes your muscle cells to release some sort of genetic material.

[00:20:10] They called it intracellular. That and this material normally suppresses hypertrophy prevents your muscles from growing. And when you work out your muscles apparently release this material and it gets transmitted through these bubbles called vesicles to your fat cells and their, they signal your fat cells to break down and release energy.

[00:20:36] Now it's just one paper of many, but it seemed to indicate that maybe there are multiple complex mechanisms for how building muscle and working out, help us burn fat things that we still don't understand. I've heard it said that muscle is an expensive tissue, but the calories burned just from the additional muscle on your body.

[00:21:00] When you gain muscle are not enough to explain the increase in metabolism you get when you start building muscle. And perhaps this is just one of the many insights into those possible mechanisms. Th the point is it's fascinating. The body is fascinating and we know lots of things anecdotally, and by the way, anecdotes are a part of gathering data and research.

[00:21:25] And we know a lot of things from the scientific literature, and we know a lot of things from repeated practical use over thousands. Millions of real life people over decades. And I think the point here is not that we need to just latch onto the latest study to say, okay, this proves this or proves that, but that we don't know everything.

[00:21:48] And so we should make the best with what we do know. And the only way as an individual to try things out is to try things out and equals one. You are your own experiment. So get in the gym, start trying. Start making progress. See what works, see what doesn't and iterate until you get something that works for you that sustainable, that helps you be consistent.

[00:22:15] And most importantly is. And that's it. 10 things I learned over the last year that changed my perspective for the better. And we'll hopefully give you some insights that make it easier to progress toward your goals.

---

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Ep 8: Build the Ultimate Home Gym to Make Gains, Save Time, and Be Consistent

One of our big goals on this podcast is sustainability and consistency, and the whole process of going to the gym is a huge barrier for many of us.

The hassle of preparing your clothing, gym bag, nutrition, and then factoring in drive time, weather, convenience within our schedules, compounded by access to random equipment at the gym, sharing a rack or barbell with other members, and sometimes dealing with policies like “no deadlifting” are just some of the many reasons we find to just hit the snooze button and avoid our workouts altogether.

That’s why building your own home gym can be a huge factor in developing good habits and consistency with your workout routine. It saves a ton of time, you can choose exactly the equipment you need, you can control the entire experience, and you can be more flexible with your training schedule. It’s a simple but highly effective step you can take to eliminate excuses and keep making progress.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• The pros and cons of a home gym

• Where in your home and how much space you need for your home gym

• What type of flooring to use

• Basic equipment to get started for the main lifts

• Extra equipment for accessory and bodybuilding movements

• Nice to have equipment to cover almost everything else

RELATED LINKS

• Fitness Reality Power Rack (Amazon)

• Vertical Leg Press (Titan Fitness)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

👨‍💻 HOSTED BY

• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

👏 ENJOY THE SHOW? 

• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:29]Welcome to episode eight of Wits & Weights. One of our big goals on this podcast is sustainability and consistency. And the whole process of going to the gym is sometimes a huge barrier for many of us to just that the hassle of preparing your clothes, your gym bag, your food factoring in drive time, whether.

[00:00:55] Convenience within our schedules compounded by access to random equipment at the gym, sharing a rack or barbell with other members waiting your turn. Sometimes dealing with policies like no deadlifting. These are just some of the many reasons we find to just hit the snooze button and avoid our workouts.

[00:01:15] That's why building your own home gym can be a huge factor in developing good habits and consistency with your workout routine. It saves a ton of time. You can choose exactly the equipment you need. You can control the entire experience and environment, and you can be more flexible with your training schedule.

[00:01:36] It's a simple but highly effective step you can take to eliminate excuses and keep making. In today's episode, we cover the pros and cons of a home gym. Where in your home and how much space you need for your home gym. What type of flooring to use the basic equipment to get you started and make tons of gains on the mainland.

[00:02:01] Then some extra equipment you might need for accessory or bodybuilding movements. And finally, nice to have equipment to cover almost everything else and build the ultimate home gym. First, let's start by talking about the pros and cons of. Jim, the biggest pro the biggest benefit of a home gym is just that you don't have to drive anywhere.

[00:02:24] It saves you a ton of time. It could be anywhere from 30 minutes, but more likely to one or two hours because of the entire process of getting ready and traveling and getting your session going at the gym. And, and doing that times two because of the round trip. And because you don't have that extra fixed time of traveling to the gym, you could split up your sessions for example, or you can have smaller or larger sessions, uh, much more flexibly.

[00:02:54] So there's flexibility with your time. You can squeeze in an hour at lunch. If you're working from home, for example, or you can sleep in an extra 30 minutes and just get a little bit more recovery before you work out, of course you don't need to pack a big gym bag or a change of clothes where, and you might forget something, you have it all right there, convenient to you.

[00:03:17] All of your equipment is there. Everything's waiting for you ready to go with the settings you'd like with consistently marked barbells, consistent weights between plates and dumbbells. And if you are taking care of your family, if you have children to care for where you need to be there for them, or you're single parent, it's just that much more convenient because you're in the same space.

[00:03:42] You're only a few steps away. So that's the big one related to time and convenience. The second thing is you could research and buy the exact equipment you need over time for your specific goals. The equipment will be consistent from one workout to the next. You know, I mentioned the plates and I mentioned the dumbbells, but you might also consider the barbell, the narrowing on the barbell, the height of your rack, the height of the hooks on the rack, the height of your bench, the angle of your bench, and so on.

[00:04:14] You could also make sure that it's safe. You know, you have the right pins in the rack, the spotter arm. You know how things are balanced, how things are level, you have complete control over the equipment to become familiar with it and make sure that it's safe, which is a huge component of lifting over the longterm and lifting, sustaining.

[00:04:35] And of course you can keep expanding your gym over time and add equipment as you need it. When you need it for your particular goals, this is your environment. And now that is a huge one. For some people you can wear whatever you want. You can throw on whatever clothes you want. Don't have to worry about the judgment of others or how you look.

[00:04:54] You can listen to your music as loud as you want, whatever type of music you want. You could change the temperature. You could change the light. For example, I actually have a smart bulb right over my rack so that when I do bench presses, I can dim or turn off the lights. So it's not shining in my face.

[00:05:12] You have privacy to practice your form without other others commenting or trying to give you advice or bothering you. And for some people, this is much more of a problem than others. In some of these big box gyms, having a home gym helps you establish consistency and accountability. Because it's always visible.

[00:05:32] It's easy to access. It helps you stick to your routine. Totally eliminating that excuse of going to the gym. And of course you won't get the flu or COVID from those other disgusting gym patrons. I'm kidding. Or am I. All right now, let's talk about some of the disadvantages that might come up that we have to consider.

[00:05:52] The first one is it takes space. You have to have enough space for all your equipment, but it's not as much space as you think. And we can get creative with this. If you're able to find space for some of the other things in your house, you should probably be able to find space for if this is something serious for your life.

[00:06:12] In addition to two dimensional space. There's the three-dimensional space, the height that is required for not only pull and chin ups, but pressing. And we'll talk about the height requirements in a bit costs. Okay. Some people think this is a disadvantage because now you have to buy all of this.

[00:06:33] Expensive equipment or seemingly expensive. And there are strategies where you can shop used. You could simply acquire what you need over time, so it's manageable within your budget. But I would actually say that the cost could also be an advantage because the equipment you invest in can easily. Decades, if not your entire life, if well-maintained and comparing that to a monthly membership at a gym over time, there is a payback of probably five to 10 years.

[00:07:04] And once you get over that initial hump of equipment, after that, it's really more of an elective process of if you need this or that over time and small investments here. Now, the next advantage is really a more practical one. And that is that you're going to have limited equipment, at least initially, you're not going to have the 50 machines that a big box gym might have.

[00:07:29] So what you might do is keep paying your gym membership, which are usually pretty inexpensive, 20, $30 a month. There's really not that much for a typical gym membership, just so that you can go in maybe once or twice a week. Or every now and then for special equipment, like a calf raise machine or cable crossover, or some other specialized device that you don't have space or budget for in your home gym, or it just wouldn't be worth investing in given the cost versus how often you're going to.

[00:08:00] And I guess the last disadvantage is that for some people, a home gym is maybe too flexible. It's not structured enough and you may want the accountability of having to go to another place to work out. But even in that case, consider a hybrid option where you have a very basic gym and home for the big compound lifts, you know, the rack, the barbell, et cetera.

[00:08:22] We'll talk about and continue to use the membership, which gives you the option to go either direction on any given day for your work. Those are what I would say are the big pros and cons of a home gym and maybe I'm biased, but I think there's a heavy lean toward the advantages of a home gym and some of the disadvantages can be mitigated in most cases.

[00:08:46] All right. Now let's talk about the location in your home and the space requirements for a home gym, just so you can think ahead about this. Really plan it out. So you don't just start throwing equipment in some random spot in your house and then regret it a few months later, especially how heavy some of this equipment is.

[00:09:07] The first consideration is a solid floor that can support enough weight. This may seem obvious, but some of you might live in an apartment, a condominium. Be considering the second or third floor of your house. And you just have to make sure that the load that it can support is sufficient. This usually that leads to using a garage or basement, which tend to have concrete floors.

[00:09:34] Or some sort of extra room on the first floor or a corner of a big room. Now I actually have my gym in, what's called a bonus room. It's a room over the garage, but it's climate controlled and I'm fortunate enough to have the space there. I also know how the house was built because I built it myself and per today's code.

[00:09:56] You have to have these massive. Uh, laminated beams, it supports thousands of pounds of weight. I did the calculations. There's no way I'm going to exceed that in whatever configuration I use. Uh, garage in most places, you're going to have to deal with the climate meaning cold, cold space in the winter, a hot humid space in the summer.

[00:10:17] The humidity could be a challenge for your barbell and your plates, but plenty of people have garage gyms. It works. And if that's the best space for your gym, go for it. Basements tend to be a little more temperature controlled, a little more stable throughout. A little bit on the cool land, but stable. So those will work.

[00:10:35] The problem with the basement tends to be height. Uh, most older houses or even modern houses sometimes have a low ceiling as low as say seven feet. And we're going to talk soon about the need. Eight feet to do everything you need to do. If you can't, then you'll be limited in what you can do. Or you can split up in your house where you perform certain movements like pull-ups and presses might have to be performed in a different spot than everything.

[00:11:03] I would say maybe the best option is if you have an extra room on the first floor, climate controlled supports the weight. That's a great option. Something like a spare bedroom or office, or if there's a corner or a section of a larger room, most people don't want a bunch of gym equipment staring at them in their living room when they're hanging out at the kitchen or watching TV.

[00:11:25] So again, you have to consider all these lifestyle and comfort factor. Now, what about the space needed? All right. I was remeasuring my gym. I was looking at it again. I was checking out some equipment online and I think that a reasonable space to cover most of your needs for the vast majority of your early lifting career is 12 feet by 12 feet.

[00:11:51] And this will allow you to lay down. Some solid flooring, have a power rack clearance for your barbell. Consider that a barbells little over seven feet long. So when it's sitting in the rack, it's you need at least the seven feet, but you also need room to maneuver to the sides of the bar to load plates.

[00:12:13] And you don't want to be crammed up against the wall either. And you don't want to be slamming your bar into the dry. So you want that extra space. So 12 feet gives you the room and then 12 feet, the other direction, the depth gives you room for your bench or inclined bench to stick out as well as room in front of the rack for pressing, for dead lifting.

[00:12:36] And for other movements, you're going to want to do dumbbell movements, say with an inclined bench and you, you don't necessarily want that crammed inside your power. So the space of 12 feet by 12 feet should be fine. My own gym. It's about 13 feet wide, which has plenty of space. I actually have extra equipment on either side and then it's 12 feet deep and I actually even have a vertical leg press machine in the corner of that 12 feet in front of the rack.

[00:13:04] And it still gives me enough room to. And then as far as height, you need eight feet and that's because typically a pull up bar you'll want it to be about seven feet height. If you buy a, uh, economy, I'll call it or a value, power rack. The pull-up bar tends to be raised a bit, and it's at about seven feet, which is tall enough to hang from it and do your poles, but then you also need a one foot clearance.

[00:13:31] Above that for your head and your shoulders when you do those polls, but also for overhead presses or shoulder presses, consider that a six foot tall male would push the bar up to about seven feet, but then the plates that the radius of a. Is eight inches. So you definitely want that extra foot above the seven feet.

[00:13:52] And of course, if you're extra tall, you may need slightly more than that. So that then tends to limit you to a garage or a typical house has eight foot tall ceilings or many in many cases. First floors today have nine feet tall ceilings. And this goes back to my comment about basements being a little bit low.

[00:14:10] If it's not eight feet, you're gonna have to consider what to do in that situation. For pull-ups and chin-ups, you could always put a rig anywhere, basically a pull-up rig or a doorframe bar. One that sticks out enough. So you're not hitting yourself on the doorframe, but you still need that extra height for the overhead presses.

[00:14:29] Otherwise you'd be limiting to doing Z presses and seated presses, things like that. But what we really want to do the full standing overhead. The only other space that you'll want to consider is for the extra equipment you might have like a dumbbell rack or extra benches or a stand, a freestanding plant stand for your plates.

[00:14:49] And this is where again, like let's, let's talk about the plates for a second. I have played holders that attach into the holes on my power rack, that saves space, or there are wall mounted, racks, and shelves for different things. So you can get. Of course you can have other gear. You're going to have your dip belt and your shoes and collars and all these things.

[00:15:09] And for that, you can go with a storage bin or shelving or something like that. Now let's talk about flooring, right? We're working our way up from the floor on up. We've got our space and now we have to have florid. Well, In a garage or basement, you've got concrete flooring. I don't think you want to be doing certain movements and dropping your bar and dropping your dumbbells on right onto the concrete.

[00:15:34] And similarly, if you're in a carpeted area or hardwood flooring, you don't want to damage. So we want something that's hard, but somewhat shock absorbing and a very common solution. And one that I use myself and I'm sure there are superior solutions depending on time, money, resources, creativity. What I use are, is plywood covered by horse stall mats, and you see this as a very common solution, Google it online.

[00:16:01] You'll see floor plans to see how to do. But you can easily take, say half inch or three quarter inch plywood. Go ahead and get the finished grade plywood. That's really smooth that you can just lay right on your carpet, right on the concrete and then horse stall mats. You can go anywhere from specialized gym, rubber flooring, which tends to be a bit pricey all the way down to.

[00:16:26] The horse stall mats, a tractor supply, which is what I got. And they do give off a little bit of a smell initially to go through what's called offgassing. But if you let them sit in your garage for say a week, bring them in. They're fine. And they're great. They're thick, they're shock absorbing, and they make a perfect cover on top of the plywood to give you.

[00:16:49] Now, some people like to have a deadlift platform. In addition to that, you can make your own, or you can purchase one. They tend to be a little more expensive. And I'm not really including this in the initial equipment because you don't have to. When I do deadlifts, I don't throw the bar on the ground.

[00:17:05] Like I learned to do in CrossFit with bumper plates, I use iron plates. So I'm lowering the bar to the ground. If the flooring supports the weight and you've got some shock absorption, you should be fine. But if you're worried about it, there is something called the deadlift platform meant to absorb the shock from deadlifts and protect your floor further.

[00:17:26] You can also get dropped pads, drop pads. Go on either side of you, so you could drop the bar onto the past and they absorb the shock. The problem there is you need to then be on a platform yourself so that the bar isn't elevated anyway, that's flooring. And again, I would just start with the basic plywood and rubber mats and it should be fine for quite a long time.

[00:17:48] Now let's talk about the basic equipment. If. Can acquire the things we'll talk about in this section of the episode, then that will be enough to get you going pretty far before we become intermediate or advanced. And if it works for you, you'll quickly decide that you want to start gathering some of the other equipment.

[00:18:09] Cause you'll see how convenient, how much fun it is, but I'll let you get there on your own. Let's just talk about the equipment. The first thing, the most important piece of equipment, and one of the best investments you can make is of course, the barbell and we are looking for a barbell that will last you a lifetime that will support all the weight you could ever.

[00:18:31] That is of high quality that has the right markings, the right knurling that can be maintained. That has the proper coding. There's all these things. So we're looking forward to the standard Olympic or seven foot PowerBar or similar that has several features. And I'm going to tell you what I like about.

[00:18:50] And it's not what I had in my first bar. So when I bought my first bar, it was from a guy off of, I think, Facebook market. And I met him in a parking lot, but he was a college student who could deadlift 600 pounds. That's what he'd used the bar for was all of his training. I think he was. Football or hockey player.

[00:19:09] And he was going to be an engineer. He was upgrading his gym and he didn't need the bar anymore. And I think I paid something like 75 bucks for it, but that bar lasted me a long time and I did tons of work with it, but it lacks some of the features that I got with my current bar. My current bar is a rogue Ohio power bar, and you'll probably hear.

[00:19:30] All over the place. The more you get into this, because it's one of the most popular, effective bars out there. It's a high quality piece of equipment. Now I bought it as part of their bone yard sale. So this is one of my pieces of advice is just look for sales, buy used. When you can, as you build your gym, save some.

[00:19:49] Get the same quality. The boneyard bars from rogue are just bars that have some sort of imperfection that is non-functional. And I don't even know what the problem is with my bar, to be honest, it's a beautiful bar. Now here's some of the features that it has, that I would look for in any bar that will last you a lifetime.

[00:20:09] First of all. The knurling does it have fairly aggressive? Knarly knurling is the crosshatching that's etched into the bar and I would look for center knurling. Okay. So right in the middle there's knurling, which is great for squats because the bar will stick to your back. And then I would look for a smooth section on either side of that.

[00:20:33] And that's where your shins will be when you deadlift and then more knurling beyond that, up to the. On that outer knurling, there should be at least one ring grooved in either side at 32 inches apart. And this is the standard width for power lifting for the bench. And it serves as a reference point for bench pressing, pressing, um, So that you can standardize your lifts.

[00:21:00] This is one of the benefits of being at home and using the same bar over and over, you know, where your grip's going to be and you know how the bar is going to feel. The next thing is look on the end of the bar and you should see no hex. In the center of the end, you should just see it, it just look flat or slightly recessed, but no nut at the end of the bar, that indicates that it's a good quality bar that it's smooth at the end.

[00:21:27] The sleeves themselves should spin very easily. And then the material. I have a raw steel bar now, raw steel bar. It's gonna last me forever. It's strong. It looks great. It's just metal. And all I have to do is wipe it and oil it with three in one oil and a bristle brush. Occasionally. Now I don't have a human environment.

[00:21:50] It's climate control. I have a lot of leeway in half. And I do that. If you are in a human environment and you go with raw steel, you just have to keep it maintained to avoid rust and oxidation, but there are many other coatings and a lot of it's based on preference and feel, you know, there's zinc coatings as black coatings, different colors, different materials.

[00:22:12] So just do the research and pick something that you think will work for you. Now cost-wise a barbell. A good barbell should run you anywhere from, I mean, on the low, low, low end, maybe 200 and then up to mid four hundreds, $500. So the robo higher power bar last I checked was in the low four hundreds. And the version I got on sale, I think it was like two 50 or 2 75.

[00:22:38] So it was. But budget about three or $400 for your barbell, unless you get it used. And then you might get a great deal. And then to go with a barbell, we need a power rack, also called a power cage. In some cases, some folks go ahead and. A squat stand, for example, which doesn't have the full four or six uprights.

[00:23:01] It's not a box. It's just a stand. I would recommend going straight for the power rack because it's very versatile. It's going to provide you a lot more capabilities for accessories, for expandability in the future. It's strong. It's safe. It's just the way to go. Especially given the price difference today.

[00:23:21] It's not very much. I would go straight for a power rack. A power rack is simply a box of steel angle iron post. It's typically a budget or value, power rack. Like the one I have it's for upright posts with a base connected at the top with a couple pull-up bars with neutral handle bars, connecting the two polo.

[00:23:46] Mine has two by two. Uh, but you can find three by two or a three by three steel with holes at different, at different distances. And the holes are where you will Fasten the hook. So put your barbell in, you can put in your pins, your safety pins, your spotter arms, and in all sorts of other attachments like placeholders, a power rack is typically about four feet by four feet in terms of footprint, unless you go with bigger, more expensive, maybe one that has six upright, something like the soar and ax, or, you know, in the really pricey range, then you start to take up more and more space.

[00:24:26] But consider about four by four. And this is where you've got your power rack. You've got your bar, the 12 feet total with makes a lot of sense and the 12 feet depth, because it gives you all that extra space around it to get all your work. I would say today, you could get a decent power rack for anywhere on the low end, as low as potentially $300.

[00:24:48] If you go to Amazon or something like that, you can find decent power racks. You look at the reviews, you look at how it's tested. They hold up really well. Uh, but then the price of a power that can go up to four or four or five, $600 for pretty good one up to a thousand dollars and up. I mean, you know, sky's the limit depending on what your budget is and what you're looking.

[00:25:09] With the power rack, it should add a minimum, have safety pins or spotter arms. You have to have that for safety during bench, press and squats. So when you bench, you're going to set the pins between your chest and neck height, so that if you fail. You're just going to gently lay it onto the pins. It's not going to crush you.

[00:25:30] It is as the least safe movement when it comes to working by yourself. So you have to have those pins, squats. Similarly, you would set the squats low enough so that if you failed it, you could just, you could just drop the bar onto the pins. I would also recommend if the power rack doesn't come with J hooks.

[00:25:51] If it comes with these small hooks that don't have much of a vertical back to them that goes up maybe 6, 8, 10 inches along the upright to get a separate set of J hooks and J hooks are nice because then when you slam the bar back onto the upright. When you, when you push it into the rack, when you're racking it, they hit the back of the J hook and not the upright itself.

[00:26:17] So you're not going to wear or damage the uprights. You're going to push it on the hood. So we've got our barbell and we've got our rack, the other things we need our bench and plates. So let's talk about the bench at a minimum. You want a flat bench and there are many options there as well, but make sure the bench can support plenty of weight.

[00:26:40] And then look at the base of the bench. Look at the feet, make sure they're high. And there are some benches that are more like power lifting style, like a tripod. They may have a single leg in front to give you plenty of clearance for your feet, but almost any bench will work. And if you want to invest now in something that will give you more flexibility down the road.

[00:27:05] Adjustable bench that can go into an incline also called an FID, which is flat incline decline bench. So that allows you to incline press. And other movements like declined sit-ups. And then on top of that, if you can find an FID bench that allows for attachments, like the one I have now, I actually just acquired an FID bench that has a leg developer attachment for curls and extensions.

[00:27:34] It also has a preacher curl attachment. The more you want in something like this, the more it's going to cost. So from a starter perspective, a flat bench, that's a hundred, 150 bucks. Should be fine, but you can go all the way up to four or five, $600 for these more advanced benches. And finally you need plates of course, to go with your barbell and at a minimum, I would say you need at least three.

[00:27:58] Or four pairs of 40 fives, depending on how strong you are. If you're a pretty weak, if you're just getting started, then three pairs should be enough because three pairs will get you to 315 pounds on the bar. And you can always go a little bit higher than that with the smaller weights added to it, but get four pairs, if you're a little bit stronger than that.

[00:28:18] So three or four pairs of 40 fives, at least one pair of 25. At least two pairs of tens, a pair of fives and a pair of two and a half. Also, I would suggest micro plates, micro plates. You could usually buy a package of micro plates that give you a quarter, a half, three quarter, and one pound plates. This is for more incremental loading on something like the overhead press.

[00:28:48] And then when you buy your plates, make sure to weigh them, take out your scale, right? When the plates come in and right when you buy them, weigh the plates and make sure they're very close to what's marked you don't want a 45 pound plate. That's 41 pounds. This has happened to me a couple of times, and I had to reach out to the manufacturer and say, Hey guys, what are you giving me here?

[00:29:07] I need to send these back, send me something that's close to what. Now iron plates, cast iron plates are the cheapest. The last you forever. That's what I use. That's what most serious lifters use, who don't want to then invest in. Uh, Olympic or bumper plates, which tend to be more expensive, but they're nice because they save your floor.

[00:29:30] They're great to put onto the bar with dead lifts, you could do a hybrid approach. You can get a pair, one pair of bumper, plate, 40 fives, throw those on the bar and then use iron plates for the rest of the weight. When you do a deadlift and that'll soften the landing. When the. Is lowered when it's lowered, not dropped when it's lowered, because we're not going to be dropping our bars in our house.

[00:29:54] We're going to be lowering them. The price of plates can vary widely, especially in today's supply chain and crazy market. There's places like rogue and tightened fitness. And even Amazon that sells, I think the cap. And as long as it's a piece of iron with a two inch hole at ways, what you need to, it's probably gonna work.

[00:30:15] Now. The only other consideration wood plates are, where are you going to store them? So if you have a power rack, then you might be able to put on plate holder attachments, they look like the two inch rods that stick. Onto a base that attaches to a hole on the rack and you might need four or six of those to hold all your weights.

[00:30:37] That's how I do it. Or you can get a free standing plate holder that goes on the. And then don't forget to get bar collars. They might get thrown in with the rack or some of the other equipment, the spring loaded colors, and there's different variations of colors. But basically these go on to the end of the bar to hold the plates on for certain movements.

[00:30:56] I wouldn't use bar callers for bench presses, for example, because you might want to shift the plates off from a safety perspective, but any movement where the plates can slide off, you would use. And that's it for basic equipment that will let you perform the deadlift, the squat, the bench, press the overhead press pull-ups and chin-ups, that'll take you very far.

[00:31:21] And if you have just that, you can do a lot of your programming, even as you get into intermediate and advanced stages. And you can combine that with a commercial. For some of the other work and that's a pretty good, a reasonable approach. But if you want like me to continue to build your home gym and do more and more from home to the point where you probably don't even need to go to the gym, let's talk about some of the extra equipment that we'll cover.

[00:31:48] I'll say 10 to 15% of the remaining 20%. And the first is going to be dumbbell. You could either acquire individual pairs. They're not too expensive. They've definitely gone up in price over the last couple of years. This is 2022 and we saw them go up during the pandemic. And some of them are so fairly expensive or go ahead and invest in a pair of adjustable dumbbells.

[00:32:14] I have a pair that's similar to the Bowflex. I think select texts. There's similar to that, but it's an offering. There's also the power blocks. There's other brands coming out all the time. I would look for dumbbells that can go up to at least 90 pounds. Don't get the ones that are limited to 52 and a half, because those will just you'll hit a wall pretty quickly when you get to things like pressing or shrugs or something like that.

[00:32:42] So get as heavy as you can that you can afford. And these tend to be fairly expensive. Let's say anywhere from four to $800 for the pair or even more, but comparing that to a bunch of different pairs of iron dumbbells, it may be the better. And then you of course, need a stand or a rack to hold the dumbbells or even the adjustable dumbbells, but dumbbells open up a ton of movements where your arms can move independently.

[00:33:11] Whether it's bench presses, overhead presses, rose, shrugs, all sorts of bodybuilding movements like side laterals, front raises, and. And these are the kinds of things you will start to incorporate as you become more advanced, as variations of the main lifts or accessories for weak spots. And for bodybuilding, if you're really on a budget, you could just get dumbbell handles that you can load plates onto either the one inch plates, but then you would need to buy the special one inch plates or the Olympic size where you can throw your two inch plates right onto.

[00:33:46] The handles the downside of that is the inconvenience and the hassle of constantly taking off and loading the weight. Especially if you want to do something like drop sets or you want to change the load or go from one movement to the next, it really is kind of a hassle. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that if you can go ahead, right, for full dumbbells or the adjustable dumbbells that have the dial on it while you're getting acquiring dumbbells, you might want to.

[00:34:12] By one or two medium or heavy kettlebells, if that's part of your programming or what I have is actually a kettlebell handle. It's a plastic handle with a rubber insert where it wraps around the dumbbell handle in terms of the dumbbell into okay. The second piece of equipment would be a dip attachment for your power rack.

[00:34:35] You can obviously buy a separate dip machine, but you don't really need that. If you could just get either the Matador attachment or like what I have are two separate handles that go into the holes on the power rack, and now you can do dips. And if you have a dip belt, you can also do weighted. And dips are a fantastic movement as an accessory to your pressing into your triceps.

[00:35:00] All right, then the next big piece of equipment would be a lat pull down cable attachment, and you could buy a free standing all in one. Functional fitness machine is what I think they call them, which tend to be quite expensive. We're we're looking at maybe at least a thousand dollars just for that. But if you planned ahead and you purchased a power rack that can support a lat pull down that lat pull down itself may only be a couple hundred dollars as an attachment to the power rack.

[00:35:29] And that's what I have. And what's great about it. It is. So it's not a stack. If you'd rather have a stack, you're probably going to pay a little more for that it's plate loaded, but it has a cable at the top and it has a cable at the bottom and it attaches to the power racks of the rack itself provides stability.

[00:35:45] Now this is where if you have extra space and extra money, if I went back to square one and budget was no limit, I might actually consider. Uh, functional fitness machine or a crossover, a cable crossover machine where you have two separate cables, it's really opens up a ton of more movements. Things like flies and lots of other things, but you don't need that.

[00:36:06] A straight pull down cable attachment will still work. Lat pull downs with wide or narrow grips, seated rows, tricep, press downs, rope curls, one-arm cable variations, like flies. Lateral raises a ton of versatility. A lot of these are, as you can tell bodybuilding movements, but still we're talking about the next level of your home gym.

[00:36:29] All right, let's go through some more equipment. Um, and this isn't, this isn't an exhaustive list or a list where you have to get everything. This is to give you ideas. How you can add versatility and movements to your home gym and start to whittle away the reasons that you need to go to another gym outside your house.

[00:36:49] So the next thing is a landmine attachment and these actually are fairly inexpensive. They would attach to the base of Iraq and it looks like a cylinder on a pivot and the cylinder, which tends to be about maybe six or eight inches long. Is where the end of the barbell is inserted. And then there tends to be a tightening.

[00:37:11] And now you have a free floating barbell attached to on the floor that can pivot. And it opens up movements like T-bar rows and landmine presses, and you can get attachments that go in the end for those types of movements. So for example, I like to do T-bar rows occasionally really hit the lats, the upper back and load a lot of weight for not much extra investment.

[00:37:36] All right to enhance all of this are some smaller items that I would consider. One of those is an easy curl bar. An easy curl bar is pretty inexpensive. You can get one on Amazon for probably as little as a hundred dollars or less. And they're great for curl variations, lying, tricep, extensions, French overhead, press.

[00:37:58] And it's just one of those extra types of bars that you can get for very little additional investment. Okay. The next item is a box, a strong box, probably 12 inches high. Sometimes it's called a plyo box or maybe one of those wood boxes that you see for box jumps and CrossFit or a steel box, or you can make your own, and these would be four box squats.

[00:38:23] So it has to be low enough that you get. Below parallel or right around or below parallel, but they could also be used as a platform. You know, you can stand on them before you do your dips, or you could put your feet on them for deficit pushups. Very versatile. The next item is a bar holder. Now that you have an easy bar and the bar.

[00:38:44] And when we get to the next section, we talk about other types of bars. You may need a place to hold all these, or if you have dumbbell handles that are the two inch dumbbell handles, you might need a bar holder that can hold something like five barbells. The next item is a deadlift Jack. Now I only got one of these recently.

[00:39:04] I saw Jujimufu talk about how this is the first piece of equipment you should get, which I thought was a little bit of hyperbole. And I realized how useful it can be. It's basically what it sounds like. It's a. Jack and they come in different styles, different designs that you can insert under a bar, prop the bar up, and then load your plates.

[00:39:25] It holds the bar up just high enough. So you can load your plates and avoid the awkwardness of trying to Jimmy on all of your 40 fives before you do your deadlifts. The next item is an app. Yeah, as seen on TV from the 1990s infomercials, but the app will is still around because AB wheel roll outs are a fantastic app.

[00:39:47] Exercise also called a roller AB roller there's the traditional wheel with the two handles. And there's something like the Sora annex roller, which looks more like a rectangular frame. That's flat on the ground with. Great for AB workouts. And then the last piece of equipment might be a calf. You could make your own, just look it up, how to make a calf block, make it out of wood, or you can buy one made out of metal.

[00:40:15] That's a simple horizontal bar, or some of them are triangular to put your feet on a wedge at an angle. And these are for you guessed at calf raises, CDs, seated, or standing calf raises. It just gives you a nice stable platform so you can get the full stretch and the full range of. With your calves. And finally we get to the ultimate.

[00:40:39] Gym equipment. You've covered all the other bases. Here are a few other things you might want to add to your gym. And again, this is like kind of like a menu. These last two sections here, the one I just covered in this one, in that you can pick the pieces from each that makes sense for your programming and your goals.

[00:40:57] I have some pieces from all of these lists, but I don't necessarily have them all. So for ultimate equipment, the first one. Cardio machines. Now I talk a lot about how cardio isn't all that important when it comes to lifting for strength, but it's still important. And cardio machines can come in handy for warmups.

[00:41:19] You know, if it's a cold day and you want to just jump on your assault, bike, your fan bike, they're good for a quick. Session right. High interval intensity interval training. Or if you're just trying to get an extra steps or low intensity cardio on the bike, on a rower, on a treadmill, whatever works for you, they tend to be a little more expensive.

[00:41:42] I personally have a fan bike. I think I got it from tightened fitness. I'd love to have the rogue echo bike. It's it's super smooth, but it's very expensive. So. You have to balance budget with quality with your needs. So a cardio machines are going to take up space, but they could be a great addition to your.

[00:42:03] The next item would be something like a glute ham developer, a GHD machine where you could do back extensions and glute ham raises. Now I have a very simple version of that where I could do back extensions, but I can't do . So I tend to do those at a commercial gym, but if you can get the all in one, which tends to be more expensive and it takes up more space, then go for it.

[00:42:28] Great hamstring workout. Great. Lower back. Great posterior chain. So related to this would be a reverse hyper reverse hyper extension machine. We're getting into very specialized equipment here, but the footprint isn't very big they're plate loaded. And if you've got back issues, or this is a important part of your workouts, if you follow the west side, a conjugate programming, you do a lot of posterior chain work.

[00:42:56] The reverse hyper could be useful. The next item would be one or more. Pieces of equipment for legwork, and I'm thinking the leg press the hack squat. I have a vertical leg press. It really doesn't take up much space. It's maybe two by two and it's plate loaded, but there are more expensive machines and some of them are multifunctional with the track, you know, for the hack squat or the leg, press the track of the plate loading.

[00:43:24] They take up more space. They cost more. If you have the room and that's part of your programming again, it's something to consider. And even more specialized piece of equipment would be a calf raise machine standing or seated calf raises. That's basically all they're good for. I don't have one of those.

[00:43:40] I like to hack up my calf movements. I'll either do a calf raise on my leg press or I'll rig up some sort of donkey raise with a barbell, or I will do seated calf raises with. And then finally there are lots of different specialty bars. There's a specialty bar, which is the kind that has multiple hand positions and angles.

[00:44:09] There are safety squat bars. There's the transformer bar by. Kabuki strength, I think which can go into multiple positions for things like front squats, there's Canberra bars. For example, if you want to get really deep into a bench, press a Canberra bar can be a great tool. And there are lots of other variations of bars out there.

[00:44:32] If you want to look for them, as you can see, although you can eventually build your ultimate dream home gym with time and money, all you need to start are around. Bar bench and plates. At the very least, you should be able to do one or two full workouts from home each week, as you design and build your home gym over time.

[00:44:54] I personally find that the option to roll out of bed, throw all my gym clothes, get in a good session from the comfort of my home is a big motivator when compared to the hassle of going to a gym, but I still have a membership so that I can work on specific movements like reverse hypers since I don't have that.

[00:45:13] Look for deals, buy used. If needed, check out Craigslist or Facebook, get started on creating that fun space for you to make gains at home. And as always hit me up with questions by email or Instagram.

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Ep 7: A Journey of Strength (Interview on Finding Your Strength Radio)

I had the pleasure of being on another podcast called Finding Your Strength Radio Powered by Romeo Athletics, where I was interviewed by Andrew Romeo. He’s an excellent host, experienced coach, and the owner of my long-time gym, Romeo Athletics (in Enfield, CT).

He asked me a ton of great questions about my journey to fitness, how I got into lifting and strength training, different movements and programming, my recent bulk and cut, body recomposition, sustainable nutrition, and other random topics like metabolism, walking, and even the similarities between music and lifting.

I think the conversation has some interesting and valuable information for those of you looking to transform your life in terms of strength, diet, and overall fitness.

It was a fun interview, and if you want to learn more about Andrew’s podcast, Finding Your Strength Radio, I’ve linked to it below, and I encourage you to check it out and subscribe.

Enjoy the conversation!

RELATED LINKS:

• Finding Your Strength Radio podcast (Romeo Athletics)

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:29] Welcome to episode seven of Wits & Weights. I had the pleasure of being on another podcast a few months ago called finding your strength, radio powered by Romeo athletics, where I was interviewed by Andrew Romeo. He's an excellent host experienced coach, and he's also the owner of my long time gym, Romeo athletics.

[00:00:53] He asked me a ton of great questions about my journey to fitness, how I got into lifting and strength, training, different movements and programs. My recent bulk and cut body recomposition sustainable nutrition and lots of other random topics like metabolism walking, and even the similarities between music and lifting.

[00:01:13] I think the conversation has some interesting and valuable information for those of you looking to transform your life in terms of. Diet and overall fitness. It was a fun interview. And if you want to learn more about Andrew's podcast, finding your strength radio, I've linked to it in the show notes, and I encourage you to check it out and subscribe.

[00:01:34] And if you enjoy this episode, I really appreciate if you could leave a five-star rating on apple podcasts for Wits & Weights, strength training for skeptics, enjoy the conversation.

[00:01:46] Andrew Romeo:What's up everybody. Welcome to another episode of finding your strength, radio. I'm your host, Andrew Romeo guys. I'm super lucky today.

[00:01:53] And I think you guys are super lucky as well for our guests. Our guest is Phillip. Phillip Phillips has been with me since 2011. So if you're doing the math on that right now, that's a decade. Phillip has been training at Romeo athletics, which used to be across at revelation for 10 years. So he's seen a lot of our changes, a lot of.

[00:02:13] Come what's gone what we've prioritized, but we don't prioritize and how the whole gym works. So welcome to the

[00:02:18] Philip Pape: show, Philip. Hey, thanks for having me. You trying to say I'm old here. I am

[00:02:22] Andrew Romeo: not trying to say you're old by any means, because I've been here for 12 years. I'm calling myself even older.

[00:02:27] Philip Pape: Thanks for having me on the podcast.

[00:02:28] Andrew Romeo: Yeah, man, I was really excited to bring you on. I know we were chatting the other day. We briefly mentioned podcasting. Immediately popped into my head. I was like, ellipse should come on the podcast. Um, so here we are here we are, um, to dive into this, I know a lot of members do know who you are, but there's also probably a lot of members who don't know who you are.

[00:02:48] So if you want to just give us a quick background of w where are you coming from? What's your background look like? What do you do? All that kind of

[00:02:53] Philip Pape: stuff. The problem, I kind of keep to myself here at the gym. So. So I am a, an engineering manager at Raytheon technologies based here out of Windsor locks.

[00:03:03] Um, I bet in technology, product development, software, and project engineering for about 20 years, that'll be 20 years next year. Um, and you know, I love my job there. I love working on products that keep people safe in the air that protect our military really cool stuff. Um, and that's, that's like my day job, but as you know, I have a lot of side ventures and hustles and endeavors that are.

[00:03:26] Andrew Romeo: Were you ever involved in sports was sports, anything that was ever, uh, like kind of put physical activity and that kind of stuff in the back of your brain where you're like, I like being active. What did that look like for you? Yeah,

[00:03:36] Philip Pape: the answer is an emphatic. No. So I have a very different background from a lot of folks.

[00:03:41] I was not in organized sports. We grew up in Florida. The weather was great all year round. So I played football in the street. My brother and friends played baseball on the street. So it was active in that sense, but never an organized. I went to an arts high school. Cool. Didn't even have athletics. Okay. I went to college, gained the freshmen 15, then the sophomore 15.

[00:04:02] Gotcha. Skinny, fat, fluffy, you know, my whole life. And finally the senior of college, they built a brand new gym. This is over at RPI. New York. And I decided to try some machine, some cardio kind of flare around in the gym. Like most people didn't know what I was doing. And then that's it graduated college still?

[00:04:21] Not, not in great shape and didn't know what to do in the gym. I knew how to maintain my weight. Diets, so to speak Atkins, what do I do? All

[00:04:31] Andrew Romeo: right, nice. See this ad for Atkins, as you're referring to that'll help me lose my freshmen 15. Let's go

[00:04:37] Philip Pape: for it. Yeah. It's like conflicting sources of information

[00:04:39] Andrew Romeo: all the time.

[00:04:40] Of course. That's what's out there. Right. I try to be the beacon of a truth for a lot of people in that

[00:04:45] Philip Pape: regard. Tell me about it. And today it's a lot, it's both a lot easier and a lot more difficult with the internet, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:51] Andrew Romeo: The information era where everything is at our fingertips and we can do anything.

[00:04:55] But there's a downside to that because there's a lot of misinformation out there. That'll lead you down a bad path. Um, diving back into one thing you said. So you went to an art school. What, what type of art did you practice?

[00:05:05] Philip Pape: Yeah, I was a musician, so I played saxophone jazz, and I did that well after college.

[00:05:10] I mean, when I met my wife, we were set up on. We were set up on a date when I was actually playing a gig. Wow. You know, and this is while I'm an engineer and this is just the thing I do on the side of the chair. Right. So I played music for three years and it was one of these high schools where you had to travel on a bus and a Metro rail at a Metro mover into downtown Miami.

[00:05:30] You were there for probably three hours longer than average high school kids because half of your day is music. Very cool. So it was a great experience. It was a small school, especially being in a big city, you know, and they had a good academic program as well.

[00:05:45] Andrew Romeo: Absolutely. I mean, if you become an engineer and gone to the lengths that you've gone with your education, they must've had a good education system.

[00:05:50] You did. That's very cool, man. Cause one interesting thing that I have noticed from musicians that come into weightlifting is typically musicians are meticulous in terms of wanting things to be perfect, right? Because when you're making music want it to sound perfect, and then you come into the world of lifting and they have that same mindset of how do I make this movement?

[00:06:10] How do I make what I'm doing? Perfect. And it really gives people a solid work ethic and also an ideal. Trying to do things really well. So I think that's a great background to come into probably engineering. Cause I'm assuming if you're designing flight controls or whatever you're designing, it needs

[00:06:28] Philip Pape: to be, it is funny, you link all of those because I've always linked music to engineering.

[00:06:34] The math that's inherent in music. You know, the music kids in my art school were always the top of the class compared to let's say the artists or dancers, right. Just different type of minds. So that's the way your brain works. Pretty mathematical. But I hadn't thought of the fact that lifting is its own science that can be thought of in that way.

[00:06:52] And I remember when I first met you, we talked about plate math. You know, you could just, just say a hundred thirty five, one hundred five to 25. Right. And I was like, what are you doing? I have to calculate what's on the box.

[00:07:02] Andrew Romeo: Right. I've just seen those combinations so many times where there's no thought behind it anymore.

[00:07:07] And I'm there

[00:07:07] Philip Pape: and I'm finding that. I'm sure you are.

[00:07:09] Andrew Romeo: Absolutely. It's the only thing that always throws you for a wrench is when there's a 35 pound bar. Wait a second. Hold on. Minus Ted,

[00:07:16] Philip Pape: or have you heard the joke about 35 pound plates from

[00:07:18] Andrew Romeo: Kabuki? How they absolutely hate them, but

[00:07:20] Philip Pape: what's the joke? Well, well, how do you make a 35 pound plate?

[00:07:23] Well, together a 25 and a 10, because you're not supposed to have 3,500 places. The joke, right?

[00:07:27] Andrew Romeo: That is Kabuki did a big thing out there with Christophe and about trying to get. 35 pounds. It's just obviously joking. And, but for the most part, you don't use them that

[00:07:37] Philip Pape: often they're here, they're convenient.

[00:07:39] Um, or you can use them for calf raises, you know, have you ever

[00:07:43] Andrew Romeo: looked into, um, why they decided to go with 45 pounds things and not 50? I, I mean, I've been in the strength industry for probably over two decades and I've never looked into that, but like, why would you make a 45 pound plate and not a 50 pound plate?

[00:07:57] Philip Pape: That is a good question. I don't know if it's really to be in 20

[00:07:59] Andrew Romeo: kilos. It's probably something that came from lifting of like 20 kilos is a 44 pounds for closest to 44 is 45. We'll cast them that way. Do that. So super interesting stuff. So a little bit of background where you're coming from. So you get out of college and you're you, did you go right into the engineering world and you also, you stayed in the music world.

[00:08:19] So you're in both of them, um, was physical fitness part of your life at that point?

[00:08:24] Philip Pape: Not really. Um, I, there was a gym at, I actually lived at Bigelow comments right here. And there was a, a little gym there with just like every gym. You've got some cardio machines and you've got some like Nautilus style machines, maybe a couple of dumbbells.

[00:08:40] Definitely. No barbells it's too dangerous. So before, up until I was 30, so that was like my first eight years living here, um, on and off global gyms didn't have program. He didn't have a plan and pretty much stayed where I was.

[00:08:54] Andrew Romeo: Gotcha. So how old were you when you decided to venture into the world of CrossFit?

[00:09:00] And look me up on the internet and go down that path. When was that in your life?

[00:09:05] Philip Pape: I had just turned 30 when we got pregnant with our first child interests. You know, it's these moments in life that make you think right. I'm going to be a father. I need to get in shape. I don't know how to do it, but I can figure it out.

[00:09:17] So I did the research and there's this big craze called CrossFit, right? There was 2011. It's getting toward its peak. I think CrossFits peak was like mid, I

[00:09:27] Andrew Romeo: would say to you probably. Yeah, like 2013, 2014. It was like every week there's a new gym charting. There's more. And you're like, oh my God, how big does this bubble get before?

[00:09:39] Philip Pape: Yeah. It's like bank branches. You see a new one, like every week on every corner. Um, yeah, so that was, I saw I, so I tried a couple gyms and I ended up here, I think it was convenient to work and I definitely liked the vibe and the culture. And you guys were pretty small back then. It was like a third, the size of this today.

[00:09:56] So yeah, I'm trying to

[00:09:57] Andrew Romeo: think back. I think when you first started, we were probably the L-shaped facility where it was, you walked in. You walked into the bay where all like the exercise equipment is right now, like the sore and extra eggs and the turf as you would walk in there, but it was a green carpet and a wall with a big window.

[00:10:16] And you walked through that and there was a standalone rig that went the language. Yes. And then to the right there was like another little, like half bay where I built a pull-up bar out of two by four, by whatever, by eight and then plumbing pipe that I ran through and connected to both sides of the wall.

[00:10:35] And everybody loved that pull apart. Cause it had like this big flex to it. So when people were doing pull ups, the bar would flex down and like kind of prop you back up. Yeah, exactly. Right. It was popping back up and down, but, um, did that was. A long time ago. It seems like it. Right. So coming into the CrossFit world, what was, what were you looking to do?

[00:10:54] Well, I don't even know if you remember, it was long ago, a long time ago at this point, but what was your goal? What were you trying to get get into at that point?

[00:11:01] Philip Pape: Yeah, I, I didn't, I figured that I couldn't do things on my own successfully in that space. And I needed somebody to tell me what to do. It was basically what it came down to CrossFit sold itself.

[00:11:12] Small group classes with coaching in a, in a good community environment. Right. And with all this cool stuff that I just didn't know about. And I say stuff like that, cause that's what it was in my head at the time. And I think CrossFit for introducing me to some things that were new to me, barbells. Sure.

[00:11:29] I mean, I had never picked up a by my entire life.

[00:11:31] Andrew Romeo: I think that might be one of the greatest gifts that cross it has given the world is putting barbells in people's hands and somewhat like rejuvenating. Even rejuvenated in powerlifting, rejuvenating, Olympic lifting, rejuvenating, all of these things where before people looked at a barbell and they're like, you can bench press with it.

[00:11:49] You can incline bench, press with it. And people didn't even think like dead lifting or squatting with it. Cause they're like yeah.

[00:11:56] Philip Pape: Cleaning and snatch. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[00:11:58] Andrew Romeo: Nevermind that stuff that is outrageous.

[00:12:00] Philip Pape: It's crazy. Yeah, exactly. So, and I agree because I think there was several decades between, I don't know, the seventies and eighties when power lifting and bodybuilding and kind of on the wane at the big gym model came into,

[00:12:13] Andrew Romeo: into play and the Nautilus machines are big.

[00:12:16] Did you look to the, to what you were saying, like your, your last year of college or P everybody that goes to the global gyms while I don't have a lot of money, so I can join this gym for 20 bucks, 30 bucks. And the machine right here has this little diagram that says, put my hands here, press this direction.

[00:12:33] And I work my, sorry, sorry. If you guys can't see what I'm doing, do sitting down and doing like a skull cross hopping around on a machine. Um, so it's like, uh, I mean it's very convenient and they kind of figured out

[00:12:44] Philip Pape: the scalability could sit down and do all your workouts, just sitting down and you can look

[00:12:48] Andrew Romeo: like Arnold Schwartzenegger when you're doing.

[00:12:51] And that's the hard part of, we were talking about booth misinformation. If they sell you a bad bag of goods of you can get all of this and they're not wrong, if you dialed in your diet and did all of the machines stuff, you could look really

[00:13:02] Philip Pape: good, but sure. I mean, there's value in, in some of those, especially the cable machines and some of them.

[00:13:07] Yeah,

[00:13:07] Andrew Romeo: absolutely. I mean, that's why I bought a lat pull down and a cable stack. They're awesome. Um, there's a lot of good stuff with that. Um, and I know as we've trained together for a long time, you've had history of back stuff going on. Was that prior to gyms or is that developed in

[00:13:23] Philip Pape: gym? I don't think I'll ever know.

[00:13:26] I, my wife and I have a theory that it was a snowboarding accident I had around that time 10 years ago, where I just took a hard fall, the board smacked right into my, um, like rear oblique area.

[00:13:40] Andrew Romeo: So you went forward, then you went forwards and your feet

[00:13:42] Philip Pape: kicked into what direction? I don't even remember. I just know I got hit really hard extras on the left side.

[00:13:49] Um, and then it wasn't long after that, that I would occasionally squat and it was always in a warm-up it was never with heavy load. Sure. And it would just. Go like that's the best way I can put it. You know, you feel that playing twins, a lot of people have spoken about that, such a bad feeling, but it, but it always recovered within a few days and I got back to normal stuff.

[00:14:12] And finally this year, uh, again, I was warming up a back squat at home and I felt. And this time it got worse over several days to the point where I couldn't walk, sit or stand, the pain was so bad all the way down my left leg lay down. And all you do is lay down with your feet up in the air. Like people people know back pain, know about that.

[00:14:34] I know exactly

[00:14:34] Andrew Romeo: I've had, I've had to the point where. Lay in a bed where it was like, I, and that, but I found out with Elvis was stuck in a certain position. So it was just creating a lot of tension where I just had to get everything popped and put back in and it was fine. But to your point yet back pain is very debilitating where you can't put your socks or your shoes on.

[00:14:52] Philip Pape: Yeah. And it, and it never really held me back all those years really. Um, and the funny thing is this year, I would say I've had my best fitness year this year, despite. Which is kind of funny, but I had the, I had the issue back in March, late March and all through April, went through the physical therapy and then finally had to have surgery microdiscectomy.

[00:15:14] Okay. What is that? That is where they make an incision in the spine between the vertebra of where the issue is and incise or cut out the tissue. That's herniated disc. So, okay. Which was impinging on my,

[00:15:29] Andrew Romeo: what was pushing them nurses. They just cut that away in Pinterest goes away. Optimally life

[00:15:35] goes

[00:15:35] Philip Pape: back to normal.

[00:15:36] And the thing is back surgeries is they don't have the highest, uh, success rate. It depends on what you have. So what I had was is a very acute issue that the surgeon literally said, the tissue like flew out when he opened me up, you know, it was just easier to just get rid of it,

[00:15:51] Andrew Romeo: waiting pressure on this thing where it's like,

[00:15:54] Philip Pape: oh, look at that popped her.

[00:15:55] Exactly. And so when I woke up. From the surgery. I Amelie felt no pain. I could stand up. I could walk. And the recovery for that is just a lot of walking. Can't really do any weights until you get green-lighted. Sure. And of course, when he said, all right, you can start lightweights. And I said, is that light for me?

[00:16:13] Or just, is this an absolute number? And he's like, not in a light for you. He works with athletes and people like that. And he could die. Yeah, no good doctor, because when everything was done, he's like, I'm not going to tell you what else to do. Just go have. You know, if you're back here again, you're back here again, but you'll be fine.

[00:16:28] Go

[00:16:28] Andrew Romeo: live your life. That's awesome, man. And I gave you a ton of credit because a lot of people that have been battling the back stuff that you've been battling at a certain point, you'd be like, well, I'm done lifting weights. I guess this is never again. Will I do that? Then that's where you took a different approach to that where you're like, okay, clearly there's something that's missing.

[00:16:45] That's triggering this. How do I strengthen everything up around it? What do I need to do to combat this, to stay active and achieve my goals whilst. Moving forward, which is awesome. Then I gave you a ton of credit for that.

[00:16:58] Philip Pape: Um, yeah, I I'd rather have, like, they say a strong, bad back than a weak, bad back.

[00:17:02] Like, I don't want to be 70 bending over to pick up a ball and then there's an issue just because I didn't strengthen my back.

[00:17:09] Andrew Romeo: Yeah. And I mean, you hear a lot of these doctors talk and I've talked to PAs that are in these surgeries where they're like, most people have some fucked up discs, something is wrong, somewhere in there, but as long as you're not that aware of it and it doesn't hurt you every day, you can pretty much, as you're saying, just develop strength around it and you're going to be okay and you're going to be able to do whatever you need to do.

[00:17:32] And I, I feel the same way where I, I I've gotten pretty good at self-diagnosing. I feel something out of alignment with my background, like, all right, I just need to get a pop out of this area. Right. And I'll get all of this tension relief and I'll be fine. Um,

[00:17:47] Philip Pape: but don't you find that working out usually makes it feel better?

[00:17:49] Not

[00:17:50] Andrew Romeo: 100%, man. I mean, so I'm in the middle of squat Tobar right now. Um, so if you're ever have. Uh, tired back is now in a day that you don't look forward to getting back under a barbell. The squad is right now for me, and today's a great example yesterday. I squatted heavier, went up to like 92% of my best and like a Seesaw.

[00:18:08] And then today I had to go back under the barbell and do paused back squats. I didn't look forward to it, but when I walked away from the session, I was like, man, I feel a lot better way. Things are, things are popping. Things are moving. I'm feeling. So we're, we're diving into kind of, you're in, you just got into the cross that world.

[00:18:28] Um, you had a back injury early on. It was snowboarding and squatting and it was some stuff through there. We're not attributing to the squatting, but how you felt it while you were squatting lightweights while you were warming up and things were popping with that. Um, as you progressed over the last decade, It seems like your goals have shifted, um, and your goals have shifted from, Hey, I just need to get fit and healthy to where are you now with your goals?

[00:18:50] What are you doing

[00:18:51] Philip Pape: now? You're like a mind reader, man. I mean, you, you, you know this all about me without me telling you, right? Um, so I want a good coach. So I agreed like about eight, nine years of that timeframe was. Fairly inconsistent. You know, I came in maybe two or three days a week.

[00:19:07] Andrew Romeo: So I would see you in the mornings, typically around 7:00 AM, 7:00 AM

[00:19:09] Philip Pape: is the only one.

[00:19:10] Sometimes

[00:19:11] Andrew Romeo: that timeframe of the Jim's history for a lot of people that don't see me coaching a lot. Now I used to coach almost every class, um, in, for a little while. Brian CARF, Brian you're listening. Hi, Brian. Um, Brian used to coach along with me and we had some other coaches that coached as well, but for the majority of classes, I ran ran them all.

[00:19:29] So Phillip and I got to know each other really, really well throughout classes, because as you said, sometimes it's like right now, seven 30 is a really popular time. Right. A lot of people come in, but back then, no one came to seven. Right. Maybe Phillip, maybe mark did when mark wasn't retired yet. Um, so I will, yeah, Lauren and I'd have an opportunity to talk to these guys for an hour.

[00:19:48] Three times a week, which is actually a really interesting and unique opportunity because how often do you have an opportunity to connect with somebody for an hour, three times a week? It doesn't happen often.

[00:19:58] Philip Pape: It's like a fun social club and get together.

[00:20:01] Andrew Romeo: I mean, I call my parents once a week for 15 minutes, like nevermind three hours a week.

[00:20:06] So you get to know, I get to know all of the clients and athletes and everybody really, really well. Um, so Phillip, when you went from training kind of inconsistently two to three times a week, 7:00 AM, and then. It wasn't just COVID shift of training at home, but there was, I feel like you were shifting before COVID happened, um, into more of the strengths.

[00:20:26] Philip Pape: Did you take a look at my notes? I know I was thinking, how do I do, I was looking back at that timeframe. I said, you know, 2019 is really when I made the shift. Cause I started doing RA strength. I, so

[00:20:37] Andrew Romeo: the way that I. The way that my mind works. I can specifically remember when the Soren next rigs were against that wall.

[00:20:44] So the far wall where the bay doors there in the middle bay against that, and I can remember squatting in the rack next to Philip and chatting, chatting about strength and that kind of stuff. So that, that's where my pinpoint comes from of being like somewhere around that timeframe, your mind switched from being like, Hey, I want to exercise for time and fitness.

[00:21:02] I want to start prioritizing strength a little bit more.

[00:21:04] Philip Pape: Exactly. Yeah. And I didn't entirely know why, like I have a much better grasp now of how important strength is as a foundation to everything.

[00:21:13] Andrew Romeo: I agree. I couldn't agree. More

[00:21:15] Philip Pape: aging and mood and energy and productivity at work. Like everything that's, that's better now from a physical standpoint is because of strength.

[00:21:22] That's awesome. That that's my opinion. But, uh, yeah, it was around 2019 doing RA strength, which for the listeners is, is rooms. Custom group programming for people used to be called the barbell

[00:21:33] Andrew Romeo: class. It was Barbara and we still have a barbell club and I kept that as Olympic weightlifting. So that's now before it was like a mix of whatever kind of strength things my head was at.

[00:21:42] And I've peeled that off to be like, all right, barbell club is straight Olympic weightlifting, and now RA strength is kind of like. My training program that I run through that I put everybody else through this at the same

[00:21:53] Philip Pape: time I would, I would classify it as like power building. Yes. Because you always have the compound lift to start one or two of those and then some form of hypertrophy or.

[00:22:04] Accessories, barbell rows,

[00:22:05] Andrew Romeo: things like that. Exactly. Yeah. 100%. I mean, you're definitely dead on with that. We'll start out with a squat or a deadlift or a bench press, and then we move into the auxiliary movement and more so for our listeners that don't know what hypertrophy is, anything over eight reps, uh, or, I mean, so you're talking what a four to eight reps is, um, Mio fibrillary hypertrophy.

[00:22:26] And then eight to 12 reps are talking about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. So if you guys don't know what I mean by that is four to eight is get stronger. Eight to 12 is get bigger. And then above 12, you're talking more about muscular endurance. Yeah. So right around that timeframe, you're switching over to RA strength in somewhere in your brain.

[00:22:43] It's making the connection of, I think I might like

[00:22:46] Philip Pape: this more. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah. Cause, uh, co COVID, I mean really did a lot for me in our car because everything shut down. We started working from home. All of a sudden I had all this extra times, I said, well, why don't I just work out five days a week now?

[00:23:01] Right. And then you offered custom individualized programming to all your members. That was,

[00:23:06] Andrew Romeo: yeah. As soon as we kicked off COVID. What do we do? How do we keep people engaged? If I give you equipment and give you a program, will you do it? You will. Great. Let's do that then.

[00:23:15] Philip Pape: And what do you have? Right. Like I said, okay, I've got some fifties, some 25 Dumbo, no barbell, you know, maybe a ball or a limited.

[00:23:24] Andrew Romeo: Let's make it work, man. Let's make it work. And I've, as I've watched you, it seems like you're very similar to me in this, regardless. You've just slowly started collecting equipment and finding deals for equipment. I'm like, dude, I, if anybody is a fitness equipment junkie, it's me like, and I've had to pull like reel myself in recently because shit's gotten so expensive out there, but I am the same.

[00:23:46] Pick

[00:23:46] Philip Pape: this up. Well, rogue has her boneyard sale right now

[00:23:51] Andrew Romeo: because I just saw an email from them or they're like, just so people know for our black Friday stuff. Like the price of steel has gone up 300%. Nevermind. The price of cardboard. Nevermind. The price of tape. Nevermind the price of stickers. So take that into consideration when you're purchasing equipment, nothing.

[00:24:09] Philip Pape: Yeah. So I, I didn't have any equipment at the time. Right. And so you programmed for me, something like a moderate strength program with what I did have with. Yep. And here's the thing like when you're newbie, right? The newbie gains are still there on the table. I got to take advantage of that because my tonnage of volume went up, even though my load went down.

[00:24:28] Gotcha. Right. And I think, and then I also went on kind of a unintentional cut, you know, I just wasn't eating that much,

[00:24:35] Andrew Romeo: not eating that much. And you're lifting five days a week. So your caloric expenditure just went

[00:24:38] Philip Pape: through the roof, metallic metabolisms, going up with the muscle mass. Right. My activity is going up my energy inputs coming down.

[00:24:46] Um, You started to see it physically. I started to see the physical transformation, which was very motivating because my whole life, I thought, ah, my genes, you know, there's no way you can look like this or that. And it's not all about looks, but for a lot of dudes, it is somewhat about looks right.

[00:25:01] Andrew Romeo: And even if it's not about looks when you circuiting results in that category, as you said, it's very motivating.

[00:25:07] It's motive. You're like, wow, that, that traffic is starting to pop out a little bit more. Oh, my shoulder. No matter what anybody says, you're going to enjoy the, that aspect

[00:25:17] Philip Pape: of it. Exactly. And it feels great. You know, you feel lighter, you feel stronger. So it started to get me into. A little bit, I won't say an obsession, but a hobby of learning about strength.

[00:25:28] Right. And so I started to read a lot more and listen to a lot more, you know, starting strength and bigger leaner, stronger. And, you know, you've got the power athlete guys and, uh, RA and all the, the old timers. What's his name, Marty Gallagher and the power I can just listen on and on. And those are great

[00:25:44] Andrew Romeo: resources.

[00:25:45] And I mean, Phillip and I will talk about the podcast that he's going to be launching soon and what he's starting to do with that. But the resources that you're citing are all solid and quality resources, which I'm super happy that you found compared to finding people. Aren't going to lead you down a bad, bad path that you're like this, this doesn't look.

[00:26:05] Yeah.

[00:26:05] Philip Pape: Like the men's health guys or the supplement folks and whatnot. Yeah. Um, so once, once I did that, I started collecting equipment. As you mentioned, you know, I found, I found a bar about found some plates. Then I bought a power rack and it went on from there to the point where, okay, I've got everything I need.

[00:26:23] What do I do now? What do I really want to focus on? So I said, let me, let me strip everything away. I even said, you know, RA strength is great, but it's got a lot of stuff I don't even want to worry about at the moment. I just want to learn the lifts. I mean, big lists. We're looking

[00:26:37] Andrew Romeo: at primarily, you're looking at squat, dead bench and press and press.

[00:26:41] Okay. I love the overhead press. How many people do cause it moves. So. Uh, that's like the technician in you.

[00:26:49] Philip Pape: It's a very technical lift. People don't realize that. Right? Most people think the squad is the most technical, but the press is very technical and there are, I would say three styles of press. Right?

[00:26:58] You have the strict press. Everybody's familiar. But then you also have the Olympic press that went on a favor back and you get, you get hit. You get the,

[00:27:07] Andrew Romeo: if you had anybody has ever, if, so Steve Powell is listening to this. People used to refer to him as old Steve, and that's not an insult. And Steve knew we were calling him that at the same time, but he had the Olympic style press where he would like to go up Steve's Emma, would it be like your front squatting?

[00:27:20] He would come up and say, Pressure barbell, but you'd always look at it and be like, well, he's not push pressing, and almost looks like

[00:27:26] Philip Pape: the hip. And then it looks almost like a bench press lean

[00:27:29] Andrew Romeo: back and press it over

[00:27:30] Philip Pape: your head. Yep. And then, and then there's an intermediate form of that, or there's a combination of two where you can do the Olympic on the first rep and do strict with the stretch reflex on the subsequent reps.

[00:27:42] And.

[00:27:43] Andrew Romeo: I will say I dabble in a little of those, uh, those they're almost cheater reps, but it's how do you move a bigger weight? Well, if I let this bar even like, sometimes you take it out of the rack and you let it just drop like an inch or two and then boom, use that stretch reflex to drive it up. And you're like, well, I can press 10 more pounds doing it.

[00:27:58] Like, yeah.

[00:27:59] Philip Pape: Is there anything part of the range of motion that then gets the benefit from exactly that. Lion tricep extensions, full range back with your shoulders. Right. You can do a higher load. So part of the, yeah,

[00:28:11] Andrew Romeo: exactly. And then if you slip that tricep creep back or that four, or that you're to get your tricep creep back a little bit and then pull going, boom.

[00:28:17] And you're like, wow, that's all. And I mean, again, that comes back down to the training principle of overload. How do you overload a specific training? A body part? Well, sometimes giving a little body English. Isn't the worst thing in the world. Like the cheater curls, but that's fine because at the top of your curl, your.

[00:28:33] Philip Pape: Yep. Curling it. Yeah. So I basically those four, the big four. Also Paul's right. Cause I couldn't deadlift twice or three times a week. So I'd alternate with poles and chins and then some power cleans as well. Cool. For polling. Um, and I did kind of a variation of starting strength in some of Andy Baker's programming and some other things that I mixed in there, uh, like a novice linear progression.

[00:28:57] Andrew Romeo: Yup. I liked the fact that you mentioned a linear progression because typically. Uh, a lifter is considered a novice lifter until you've completed a linear progression and it doesn't have to be power athletes bedrock, or Jim Wendler is 5, 3, 1, or anybody else's, it can be one of your own creating, but if you don't know how much strength you can accumulate or what you're leaving on the table until you fully go through a linear progression where you're failing, and then you go back down and you reload it, you go through it and push it up again.

[00:29:28] And then you. Honestly, I've been veneer. Progressions are probably one of the hardest things I've ever done because with mine, I'd be squatting twice a week and you barely squeak through squatting session one. And you know, two days later you have to add more weight to the bar and try to do it again, force your body to adapt to it.

[00:29:43] Like linear progressions are hard.

[00:29:45] Philip Pape: Yeah, no, no. They're super hard. And each lift wants to go at its own rate of progress. Yep. And. You got to eat like yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually the shoulder press is the first install in my, my personal experience with

[00:29:58] Andrew Romeo: all shoulder presses. That's why I, that's why I said I was surprised at your favorite.

[00:30:02] Cause it's the most fickle fucking lift in the world where you're like, why doesn't this thing move.

[00:30:07] Philip Pape: Yeah. And, and one week to the next you could, all of a sudden lose 10% of Australia. Let's go.

[00:30:11] Andrew Romeo: What happened here? Teeny bit fatigue. All right, fine.

[00:30:14] Philip Pape: And do you remember, I don't know if you remember when I was doing, I was pressing like three or four times a week.

[00:30:19] I was doing like singles one day strict one day Olympic one day. And, and I've heard that that's what you need to do a lot of volume on the press for it to keep going up. So that works well for you. It worked at the time. Like if I wanted to get into it again and push, push the press up, that would work cool.

[00:30:34] Then. What's his name? Bill Starr had his athletes years ago doing weighted dips. He did a way to dip progression to where you were repping a hundred pounds hanging off of you. Dibs are awesome.

[00:30:48] Andrew Romeo: So bill SARS, big influencer, not so people think influencer and they think Instagram bill Starr was alive when there was no such thing as Instagram, um, by influencer, I mean, he had a big influence on these strength community.

[00:31:01] Um, there's even something called a star shrug, which is named after him for his shrug. I was aware of that. So it's more of like you at the bar slide down to the top of your knee. And then as you. Where you would normally shrug. You get a little bit more momentum and you can pop that shrug up. So you can go a little bit heavier rather than holding the shrug and just shrugging

[00:31:20] Philip Pape: kind of like a power shrug, putting pins.

[00:31:23] Andrew Romeo: You hold it, hold it the whole time. So he was a, um, more of than the Olympic side of things. And that's kind of where if you look at a clean or a snatch, that's where that's coming from and trying to get some hip momentum behind it. But, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know where I was.

[00:31:38] Philip Pape: You're talking to that linear progression.

[00:31:40] Yeah. If you want to get strong, just, just strip away all the nonsense and all the accessories and all the bodybuilding stuff and just focus on heavy lifting and adding weight to the bar. Yup.

[00:31:51] Andrew Romeo: And in a consistent controlled pattern, it's very measurable. It's actually really satisfying. Yeah,

[00:31:58] Philip Pape: it's

[00:31:58] Andrew Romeo: active.

[00:32:00] And if you talk to any strength person, pretty much anywhere, they're going to be like, well, if you are you a novice athlete, are you an advanced athlete? And the way that you're going to differentiate between the two is have you completed any type of linear progression? Yes or no? So it sounds like the beginning of COVID you took that opportunity to focus on your big four to five lifts.

[00:32:17] You went through your linear progressions. So that's probably bringing you to like mid 2020.

[00:32:22] Philip Pape: That was, I didn't really start that til the fall ish of 2020. Got you. Okay. Yeah. So I started eating a lot. I mean, I gained 30 pounds in like four or five months. Just really fast for you. I know I'm fine with it.

[00:32:35] Like normally you'd call that almost a dirty bowl for some people you don't look like you put on any bad weight. Well, no, I didn't put on that's the thing. It's the first time I ever put on muscle at a decent clip. And then, uh, and then I maintain that for a long time. And then I'm about done with a cut.

[00:32:52] Okay. So I'm about done with the three month. Gotcha.

[00:32:55] Andrew Romeo: What if you don't mind sharing, what weight did you start at and what weight did you go to and where are you cutting to what's that look

[00:33:01] Philip Pape: like? Yeah. So I started in like the one sixties kind of not skinny fat. I mean, I had a little bit of muscle, but that was, you definitely had muscle on

[00:33:10] Andrew Romeo: you because you've been exercising.

[00:33:12] So at that point you've been exercising for eight years, as you said, inconsistently, but. You're leaner. Yeah. But you're like, you're not bigger. You don't have

[00:33:21] Philip Pape: a lot of exactly. So I went from that to 1 95. Wow. I was thinking of getting to 200, but, but it's true when you start, when you start getting up above where you normally sit there's impacts, right?

[00:33:34] Like it's hard, it's hard to eat. You don't feel as good. Even my blood didn't look your sweaty, like higher blood pressure and cholesterol. I mean, these things do start to creep up. They do, um, very strong correlation. So I was like, okay, this is it. So that's when I did my first real cut, that was last summer heading up to my brother's wedding.

[00:33:55] It was just coincidence, but it was a way on the beach side. It wouldn't be, you know, fat, Hey, we're going to

[00:34:00] Andrew Romeo: a beach and

[00:34:02] Philip Pape: I want to look good for this. Right. So, uh, that, that was, uh, that was kind of a random cut. I think I was trying to do keto or something at the time. I still wasn't dialing in my nutrition.

[00:34:11] Like I do today. And that worked out. And then I kind of maintain that, uh, for a while until then my back surgery. Right. So I was starting to get back into the end of my linear progression, moving into an intermediate four day split. So where

[00:34:27] Andrew Romeo: did you cut down to with the keto thing for the. 1 65. When, so you went for it, you started the one sixties, you went up to 1 95 and you went back down to,

[00:34:35] Philip Pape: okay.

[00:34:35] Yep. And then I kind of gradually got back up into the one eighties. Gotcha. And just hovered. Um, but I was working hard. I was training hard, so I still was building muscle, but I was more in a maintenance, so I don't know how anabolic it was. Who knows. Right. Um, then Baxter. Kind of interrupted and that was making good gains.

[00:34:55] You know, I was, I had just, and my deadlifts, like two weeks before, right here in the gym. So yeah, I had the back surgery then after about a month started to get back in. Then we went on a trip to Maine for 10 days. And I had appendicitis. I think

[00:35:11] Andrew Romeo: that you and I were communicating at this point about something on the digital side of things.

[00:35:15] And I think you were like, I just got back from vacation and I'm down and out for a while. Oh

[00:35:20] Philip Pape: man. Yeah, exactly. It was on, it was on the day back. So silver lining, we enjoyed our whole vacation. It was not till the day we came home. When St. Francis hospital, they had me sitting there all day. P three times had to give me painkillers.

[00:35:32] So it's like, man, you're just not a priority compared to these, you know, people losing their arms and whatnot over

[00:35:37] Andrew Romeo: here, your stomach hurts and your side hurts or whatever. You'll

[00:35:40] Philip Pape: be fine. You're good. Yeah. Yeah. More than pills. That's rough. So whatever, you know, I read, read books all day or whatever. I listen to podcasts.

[00:35:50] Find your straight radio who knows. And finally, they got me in at like 6:00 PM, took half an hour for the surgery. I mean, I was out completely cut you open and they do the appendectomy. And that was a lot faster recovery than back surgery. Absolutely. Maybe a week or two,

[00:36:05] Andrew Romeo: make sure that those stitches hold and when your blood pressure goes through the roof, you're not ripping anything or tearing it.

[00:36:10] Yeah.

[00:36:11] Philip Pape: So then I got back to me again and I said, you know, what, if I can't live heavy, why don't I lose weight? Sure. And go on a real cut. Okay. And I started to do it properly. So by properly, I mean, in my, for me, it's more of a flexible dieting. I track my calories, check my macros. Okay. Eat whatever. As long as it fits in

[00:36:30] there.

[00:36:31] Andrew Romeo: Absolutely. I mean, you'll hear it. Think there's so many different opinions on dieting and shit like that. And in my opinion, if that's what worked really well for. Awesome. That's an adherence. If you can adhere to it and you can achieve the goals that you want.

[00:36:46] Philip Pape: That's great. If you can eat keto for the rest of your life, go for it.

[00:36:49] Sure.

[00:36:50] Andrew Romeo: And I know with me, I can't do that. I can't, I mean, I, I work out, I lift weights five days a week and I can have a pretty open diet, but my primary, my state, my principals of my dieters, there has to be animal based protein throughout the course of the day, some solid carbohydrates throughout the course of the day.

[00:37:07] And then I filter in a bunch of junk, unfortunately, and that's probably why I have more fluff than I have on me than I need, because when you're lifting it like the middle of squats, I crushed one of the grand day home record burritos today for Moe's and it was awesome. And I had

[00:37:20] Philip Pape: enjoyed it. And if it fits overall in your plans, that's fine.

[00:37:24] Right? That's

[00:37:25] Andrew Romeo: fine. So on this final cut, where

[00:37:28] Philip Pape: did you come down to? All right. So I started at one 90 and I'm today at like one 60. And my goal was 1 65. Okay. I measure myself every week in terms of body fat. And I do that with calipers. I do it with the Navy tape measurement because I'm not going to go do Dex or bod pod or something that there's,

[00:37:48] Andrew Romeo: there's so much, as long as you're using the same thing consistently, that's all that matters.

[00:37:53] It's like consistency of the tool is what matters. It doesn't matter necessarily if it's the bod pod or a DEXA scan or. Uh, hydrostatic weighing or whatever, as long as it's the same tool every time. Cool.

[00:38:05] Philip Pape: And honestly, for most people, if you measure waste yes. You know, you drop inches on your way, so you probably dropped body fat.

[00:38:10] Yeah.

[00:38:10] Andrew Romeo: I've gone back to, and I know what April, April does tape tape measurements as well in terms of that is the least, um, variants. Right? As long as I'm the same person, as long as I measure the first time and I measured the same with a second. I'm going to have consistent, consistent, trackable results where there's no machine, there's nothing that comes in between what we're trying to get.

[00:38:31] Philip Pape: Exactly. Right. And you can measure both fat loss and muscle gain, right? Because you can measure your biceps in your thighs and your chest. And of course, I've seen those slightly dip because as you're leaning, I'm leaning down and again, for people listening, you know, when you really go farther into a cut because.

[00:38:49] I started around 18, 19% body fat and probably around 11, 12, maybe, I don't know, around 11 or 12. And that's what I'm gonna end up. Cause I don't want to go any further. You know, you start getting hungry, you start to, you know, you lose muscle mass first and then you lose strength is what I've found. And. My deadlifts going up, my squats about stalled, the benches stalled and the press going back.

[00:39:11] Gosh. And I'm like, I'm done. I need to start.

[00:39:14] Andrew Romeo: I was going to ask. So that was my next question, because I know myself personally, I have a specific number where if one of my body weight drops under it, I know it. I can feel it in my lifts. And I'm like, I'm too light. I know that I'm too. I don't know. Have you found that number yet where you're like, okay, I think this is

[00:39:27] Philip Pape: it.

[00:39:27] I think this is it like to go beyond this would be more of the obsessive. You're going to do a physique show or something. Sure.

[00:39:34] Andrew Romeo: And then you're doing it for the pure aesthetic aspect. You're

[00:39:37] Philip Pape: suffering on purpose and I don't need to do that. So now my goal is five pounds and five months of muscle. Wow. So to do that, I probably have to gain about 15 pounds in the next five months,

[00:39:50] Andrew Romeo: but it's good that you have that.

[00:39:52] Yeah, because a lot of people are like, so again like seven pounds and five, it will be muscle. No,

[00:39:57] Philip Pape: I think if you're new to. Like a third of it will be muscle.

[00:40:02] Andrew Romeo: And it's like for me to do that, like, it's real hard

[00:40:05] Philip Pape: now for you. It's probably like I have a training.

[00:40:08] Andrew Romeo: I have a training age of over 20 years at this point where like to change my, like, to put on five pounds in five months, I would be slamming steaks.

[00:40:16] Yeah, like steak three times a day and sleeping my face off

[00:40:19] Philip Pape: 300 grams of protein a

[00:40:21] Andrew Romeo: day. Yeah. That's awesome though, man, you have a plan, so you know what you're going to, so this next game you said you're going to get about 15 pounds. So it's going to put you back in the low one

[00:40:29] Philip Pape: eighties. Yeah, that sounds about right.

[00:40:31] Yeah. So about half a percent up to a half percent of. Of body weight gain. So like, if you, you got to plan all this out, like this is one of my big takeaways for sustainability, right? You have to track, you have to track it and know what your numbers are. If I know I want to gain a half percent of my body weight, I know exactly what I need to weigh on a seven day moving average week to week.

[00:40:52] And if I'm going higher or lower than that, adjust the calories. No.

[00:40:56] Andrew Romeo: This is the concept that you're talking about is really hard for a lot of people,

[00:41:03] Philip Pape: because it is hard, super

[00:41:05] Andrew Romeo: hard, and people don't understand the journey like, so I talked to people a lot about the journey that you need to go on. Like, if you want to make a body change, it's not something that you can do in six months, or you can, you can change.

[00:41:17] Don't get me wrong. You can lose a lot of weight quickly and you can keep weight off quickly, but the journey that Phillip's going on, it's a very similar journey that I went on. Takes a long time. Um, I went from somewhere around, one 70 up to, so my bulk brought me up to about 2 25. I gained about 55 pounds doing that.

[00:41:37] Um, and that was, I was eating a lot of five guys and they took me five, six years to do it. And then I would do what you're saying. And I pulled back down to one. And then I popped back up to two 20 and then I went back down to like 1 95. Then I popped back up to like two 20 again. And I've just yo-yo that.

[00:41:54] And that's not a yo-yo diet thing. I've done intentionally. These are all intentional mass gains and cuts and mass gains. And it's just slowly, every time you're just layering on a little bit of more muscle and a little bit more muscle. So you're just stacking that on and over the years and over your training age.

[00:42:10] You just find yourself, you get a little bit thicker and a little bit stronger and things just as long as you're consistent with it, move in the right direction,

[00:42:17] Philip Pape: stock Monterey up and down, up and down, but always up. It

[00:42:20] Andrew Romeo: always slowly works its way up magically. Um, and I, I admire the journey you're on.

[00:42:26] Cause it's not easy. It's not an easy journey. And to have the mental fortitude being like it's okay to get a little bit. Um, cause I'll pull it off eventually and then I'll put it back on and then I'll pull it back off because as you said, there's a plan and it's all trackable and you're going to do it in a way that makes sense to you.

[00:42:41] And if you like. Super hard thing, especially what I've found is people that come from being overweight and they've lost all that weight. And then I tell them, well, you need to put on some fat. They're like, I'm not doing that. And you're like, well, I can understand. You've worked really hard to get down into your body weight, but unfortunately you're going to need to put on some fat, if you're gonna put on muscle, it's just the.

[00:43:03] I guess I would say the only way that you can put on just straight muscles, if you play with drugs. Uh, and if you, if you play with drugs yeah. You can do it. And that's when you see people put on 20 pounds of just straight muscle and they're super vascular and they're purple. And you're like, well, what the fuck happened to that guy?

[00:43:20] He's probably playing with some drugs along. So that's kind of brought us to where we're currently at, right? This is what you're currently doing. And it seems like over the last decade, you've really developed a big passion for strength, training and fitness and trying to help people put them in the right, um, the right paths.

[00:43:37] Anything that I missed anything that we didn't talk about that I should

[00:43:40] Philip Pape: have taught. Uh, the only other thing I want to mention was how, how walking has kind of changed my life to really fill me in. And so when I broke my back, broke my back, when I hurt my back and had to recover, I had to walk, right. And I used to hate walking, found it boring.

[00:43:58] My wife loved walking and she had always drag me out to go on a walk and. When, when I recovered and started walking again, I eventually started building up where I, I was getting like 12,000 steps a day. And that's what I do every day now, effort,

[00:44:13] Andrew Romeo: especially because as you said, you're working from home.

[00:44:15] So treadmill, a treadmill

[00:44:17] Philip Pape: treadmill, and then walking outside. Cool. Cause I would say

[00:44:19] Andrew Romeo: if you were at an office, you could try to make a loop or find something, but I could see a lot of people falling into the trap of when they work at home, they walk from their bed to. Table or the refrigerator back to their class and their steps drastically decreased.

[00:44:33] Nevermind. Going the direction where you're seeing where they yeah. Right. It sounds like yours have drastically increased.

[00:44:40] Philip Pape: And I've found that because of that, I really don't need to do any other type of cardio. And I also, my resting heart rate has come down. So for my whole life, it was in the upper fifties.

[00:44:51] I mean, at least for the last 10 years or so. And it dropped to like 52. Wow. When I started walking, interesting cholesterol went down, you know, all these things improved. Um, and my metabolism has shot up beyond what I think it would have from lifting. And this is while I'm on a cut. So I'm just, it's just this epiphany.

[00:45:10] Is this all from the walking and there's no other variable. It seems to correlate. Have you read the book

[00:45:15] Andrew Romeo: comfort crisis? No. Okay. So there's a, there's a book out there. A lot of people have read it recently. It's called comfort crisis. And what it does, it talks about how we're more comfortable now than we've ever been in the history of humankind's right in the last a hundred years, our, our technological developments, our food, our.

[00:45:31] The ability to be comfortable has increased drastically, but they talk, he also breaks down part of it, how we are genetically designed to walk, um, and. Designed to be fast, right? If we're not out outrunning animals and he was making some analogy in the book or not knowledge comparison of, um, a kitten that's like 10 weeks old can run faster than us.

[00:45:52] Um, and there's more equipped to kill something than we are with our bare hands. Cause we don't have claws. Sharp sharp teeth and, um, all of these things, but what we're genetically designed to do is walk long distances and then carry loads over long distances. I E we're designed to walk down an animal until it dies and then process the animal and carry it back at that.

[00:46:16] Exactly. So we've been designed to walk and there's a lot of really big health benefits that come with walking, which we are discovering. And, and another part of it, what was really interesting, he was talking about the mental benefits that come from walking are exponential, but to receive them, you have to put your phone away where if you're walking and you're on your phone, checking your email, checking, whatever, which I find myself guilty of.

[00:46:40] Um, technical. A lot of times I try to listen to a book, um,

[00:46:44] Philip Pape: Is it okay to listen to something and still be looking at nature? You have to think

[00:46:51] Andrew Romeo: I do the same thing. Right? Um, it's so it's, it's really interesting. I literally just read this book where it really connects that all together of like, that's what we're designed to do.

[00:47:00] And going back to it, you're finding a lot of these really big benefits. Um, and I also know from a recovery side on the weightlifting side, walking shoes.

[00:47:07] Philip Pape: Oh, it's huge. No interference. Yeah. And even, even rucking, like I actually have a backpack and throw some weights in there and that'll, you know, step it up a little bit.

[00:47:16] And they actually

[00:47:16] Andrew Romeo: talk about, um, in that book, they talk about the guy that created the GORUCK challenge, where it came from, what he did, what he was designing to do with it, how he was designing and all of that fun stuff. So for any of our listeners, I actually really, really enjoyed the book. Um, comfort crisis, check it out.

[00:47:30] Uh, I have no ties to the book. I'm I get nothing from you buying this book, but I thought it was.

[00:47:36] Philip Pape: Amazon link in the show notes. I will drop that in there actually. So another book somewhat related, it's called burn. It came out earlier this year by Henry ponsor. He's like a very well-known researcher in, in the metabolism space.

[00:47:50] He's the one who came up with a constrained model of energy as opposed to the additive model. So we all, we all are familiar with the additive model where. The idea is the more activity you do, the more calories you burn indefinitely, the constraint model suggests that after a certain amount of activity, your body starts to adapt metabolic adaptation.

[00:48:10] And so the total calories level out plateau. Now a lot of people took this to mean, oh, so I shouldn't even do exercise, right. Because it's going to be one where I get to a certain point and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But. First part of the graph that does show an increase anyway. So you should still be exercising and walking does that, but he, he did all the studies with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, where they did the double isotope water analysis.

[00:48:35] I think it's called when they can measure precisely calories in calories out. Interesting. And they can, and they found that HODs HODs are highly active, right? Westerner is not very active at all, but they have similar metabolisms because of this phenomenon. But the other cool thing was where do the HODs that get their activity walking.

[00:48:54] They pairing

[00:48:55] Andrew Romeo: water to carry they're

[00:48:56] Philip Pape: hunter gatherers.

[00:48:58] Andrew Romeo: So where we originally

[00:48:59] Philip Pape: came here, an animal and they walk all day and they walk up back and they get about 15,000 steps a day, 20,000. It's not a crazy

[00:49:06] Andrew Romeo: amount. And the big difference is they're doing it because their lives depend on it. We're doing it because we're like, man, I want to close this ring on my iWatch today.

[00:49:14] Like I better get out there so

[00:49:15] Philip Pape: true when I'm good today. Yeah. Okay. There you go. So you're close

[00:49:18] Andrew Romeo: to rings already. You're good to go. I think that's awesome, Phil, but I think that's a great place to leave it.

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Ep 6: Set Your Fitness and Nutrition Habits on Autopilot

We wrap up our foundational series by diving into some practical strategies, tools, and life hacks to set your fitness and nutrition habits on autopilot.

If you’re at all familiar with the autopilot in an airplane—and as a side note, I used to fly small planes years ago and still work as an engineer in the aerospace industry—you know it’s a tool to eliminate constant manual intervention by the pilot.

In a similar way, we want to find ways to create consistency with our lifting and eating by using systems and tools to eliminate manual steps, barriers, and—frankly, excuses—that prevent us from taking action and developing solid habits.

Given that you have enough to think about between your profession, your family, and the million other things you enjoy, why not put in place some “life hacks” so you can just get to it and make progress! A word of warning—none of this relieves you of discipline and hard work—but a little preparation when you’re more motivated will set you up for long-term success, even when you’re not.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• Establishing a plan for your lifting ritual

• Locking in your programming calendar to make consistent progress

• Removing the most common barriers that prevent you from going to the gym or working out

• Establishing a plan for your diet and weight phases, and

• Planning ahead for consistent meals and successful nutrition progress

RELATED LINKS:

• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:29] Welcome to episode six of Wits & Weights. Today, we wrap up our foundational series by diving into some practical strategies, tools, and life hacks to set your. And nutrition habits on autopilot. If you're at all familiar with the autopilot in an airplane. And as a side note, I used to fly small planes years ago, and I still work as an engineer in the aerospace industry.

[00:00:56] You know, it's a tool to eliminate constant manual intervention by the. In a similar way. We want to find ways to create consistency with our lifting and eating, by using systems and tools to eliminate manual steps and barriers, and frankly, excuses that prevent us from taking action and developing solid habits.

[00:01:21] Given that you probably have enough to think about between your profession, your family, and the million other things you enjoy. Why not put in place some life hacks so you can just get to it and make progress. A word of warning, none of this relieves you of discipline and hard work, but a little preparation when you're more motivated will set you up for long-term success.

[00:01:44] Even when you're not in today's episode. Establishing a plan for your lifting ritual, locking in your programming calendar to make consistent progress, removing the most common barriers that prevent you from going to the gym or working out, establishing a plan for your diet and weight phases and planning ahead for consistent meals and successful nutrition products.

[00:02:13] Almost everything we talk about today involves planning ahead taking action when you feel the energy and motivation to do so, rather than acting in the moment, which is a surefire way of sabotaging your progress. Instead, we want to build the scaffolding of your new fitness and nutrition habits. So you can just focus on executing your plan in the moment without any excuses to fall back.

[00:02:40] Let's start with planning ahead with your lifting. The first thing I want to talk about is picking a gym that is convenient in terms of distance equipment and the type of policies they have. So if you pick a gym that's an hour away, it's going to be tough to feel that you can find the time to get there.

[00:03:00] So picking a gym that's closer is probably a good idea. However, it's got to have the right equipment, meaning at a minimum. Iraq rack and some barbells, but even better yet. Some of the other equipment you might need for the other movements as you plan out your programming. And then it has to have good policies that are friendly to lifters like us.

[00:03:22] For example, they don't let you deadlift. That's going to be a non-starter. So picking a gym that meets all of these criteria is going to reduce the excuses for going to the gym. Now here's a bonus. If you can start building your home gym earlier than later, and do it in a way where you can do at least one workout each week from.

[00:03:45] Then that's one less barrier to worry about in terms of working out. And then as you acquire and collect more equipment and you will do that as you get into this and find out how much fun it is, then eventually you can do more workouts per week and perhaps all of your workouts at home. And this just eliminates the excuse of needing to leave the house and drive to the.

[00:04:07] The next thing is to pick a training program that works with your schedule. If you are extremely busy and it's very hard to find more than say two or three days a week to work out, you don't want to pick a six day. Program. And in fact, if you go back and listen to, I think it's episode two, where we talk about choosing a strength training program that is inadvisable anyway for a new lifter, ideally you would pick something like a three-day per week, full body program.

[00:04:39] If you're a beginner or even intermediate, and then later you can progress to say a four day split or even a five day program. I currently work out five days a week. So from day one, picking a program that works with your schedule will eliminate excuses from doing that program. You could even, let's say you have only two days a week.

[00:05:00] You can take a three-day per week program and just stretch it. The next little tip I have is to pre schedule your lifting sessions. And you can do this with appointments, whether it's in a, an appointment book or your smartphone or on your computer or work calendar or reminders, whatever works for you.

[00:05:20] The point is, look ahead. And actually block that time out. That that means you have, it's like going to a doctor appointment or going to an important meeting. It's just going to happen. You are committed. It's in your schedule. And the next thing related to planning ahead for your lifting is deciding on the best time that works for you.

[00:05:42] Again, to minimize excuses. If you are a morning person, you love to get up early and start being productive, then go ahead and do your workout. First thing it gets you energized helps you continue with your day. You've got it out of the way. That's what I do. I've been doing that for years. I couldn't do it any other way.

[00:06:01] Now. Other people. I want to sleep in, or they couldn't imagine training in the morning, whether due to energy or motivation or whatever else. So they might work out at lunch and this is convenient if you're working out from home or if you're working from home and you can squeeze it in between meetings or working out in the evening.

[00:06:22] And that could be right after work or it could be after dinner or even later in the evening before. And some people might have more energy at this time and it see it as a good way to cap off your day. It's a reward. It feels good. Helps you sleep. Whatever reason motivates you choose the best time of the day.

[00:06:39] Right now, as you get started with your training, that will help you commit, help you enjoy it and helping you remain. Next, let's talk about planning ahead with your programming. So we talked about lifting in terms of the facility, time of day, things like that. Now let's talk about the programming itself, and this is really critical because most people just go to the gym and they just go to exercise and build up a sweat and fill in the time.

[00:07:08] We're not doing that. Here we are. So we have to plan for our training in a methodical way, but we can do it to significantly reduce the amount of thinking and work we have to do when the time comes to actually lift. So let's start from the. We need to look out at our upcoming cycle. What do you call that?

[00:07:28] A cycle? A mesocycle macrocycle whatever makes sense. It could be four weeks. It could be eight, could be 12 weeks. I like to do 12 weeks, but if you're just getting started and it's fairly consistent, repetitive type programming, like an AB AB or ABC type program, you don't need to look too far out and what you want to.

[00:07:49] Identify is exactly what your progression is. Meaning. And am I doing a linear progression where I'm going to increase weight on the bar for all the main lifts? Am I doing a 8 5, 2 or 5, 3, 1 type progression? Am I doing double progression? Whatever your progression is and your programming, and it gets more advanced.

[00:08:08] The more advanced you are as. But you can plan out the next four weeks and say, okay, I'm doing squats on Monday and I'm going to go up five pounds a week or 10 pounds, whatever it is or I'm doing, I'm doing bench press on Thursdays, and I'm going to cycle through eight reps, five reps, two reps, and then I'm going to repeat eight reps, five reps, two reps.

[00:08:31] Then you want to choose which weeks and days you're performing those workouts, the actual. Days in this cycle, given this calendar and time of year, look at your vacation, special events appointments, and basically eliminate all your excuses. If you know, you're going to have a big event in the morning on a day that you would do a heavy workout in the morning.

[00:08:58] Well, the you're probably not gonna be able to do that workout on that day. So can you do it later in the day, or can you shift your work? Your workouts by one day that week, plan it ahead so that you've got it booked in your calendar. And you know, when you're going to do it, there's no excuses. And you can track all of this in a spreadsheet, in a notebook in your app, whatever is your favorite medium for doing this.

[00:09:22] Okay. Then we bring it down a level and we want to plan ahead for the upcoming. So you've got your, your next four to 12 weeks mapped out at a high level. Now we say it's Sunday, for example. And we're going to look at the upcoming week, which days of the week am I working out based on what I planned earlier.

[00:09:44] Am I doing Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Am I doing Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Are there any special times this week because of what's going on and based on that, now you can preplan. All of your lifts sets, reps and loads because you know what you lifted last week, and now you can plan out this week at that greater level of detail and do it all in one day.

[00:10:06] It's like meal planning, just get it all done, take the effort, plan it out. And then when the time comes, you just have to execute. Look at the week as a whole, and then move things around if needed. If you find that Thursday's workout just can not be as long as it normally is. Maybe you move something to Saturday or you eliminate a movement.

[00:10:28] And then finally, we get down to the one day, look ahead. We're looking at tomorrow. So let's say it's Tuesday and we are looking ahead to our Wednesday workout. Go ahead. And pre-fill. Your notebook or your app with the exact lifts sets, reps and loads. If you're using an app, for example, you can enter the movements in, you can put in your reps and loads and all you have to do then in the gym is check it off.

[00:10:56] As you execute, add any specific cues or notes, if. If you're doing a particular movement and want to remind yourself to use a particular form or queue, go ahead and put that in now for the next day. And then again, all you do the next day is execute. Now, let's talk about the logistics of going to the gym of doing your workout and all the excuses we make for ourselves to just hit the snooze button and sleep in or whatever other excuse not to go to the gym.

[00:11:27] And the first thing we'll talk about is preparing a go-bag. Now, you've got your programming all set up, you know what you're going to do the next day. You've already entered it in your notebook or your app. So you're already somewhat committed, but now you can select the exact equipment you're going to need for the gym.

[00:11:44] Some examples might be your lifting belt, your lifting shoes, a chalk bag, or liquid chalk lifting straps. Wrist straps. These are just some examples. I might bring a neck pad if I'm doing, I don't know, calf raises with a barbell in the gym. Cause I don't want to use somebody. Else's use neck pad. I might have to pack my three in one soap and clothes.

[00:12:10] If I'm going to shower and change, if I'm headed out to work. Now we're talking about preparing your bag the day before at a time, when you feel motivated, you have energy. You're getting things ready? You have no problem doing this. There's no pressure to actually go to the gym at that time. Go ahead and prepare this bag.

[00:12:29] You could also remove your jewelry. Like if you have a wedding ring and you want to zip it up securely, or your personal items, like your wallet or keys, all that stuff, get it ready. And then place the bag right near the door where you're going to leave. That is one less excuse for the next day. Not only that I know I've, I've been in situations where I wake up think, do I really have to go to the gym?

[00:12:50] And then I realized, you know, it's gonna be a lot of work. Unpack the bag I just packed up and I'm going to not feel so great about myself. If I do that site might as well just. The next thing for preparing for the gym is to prepare your clothes, lay it out, lay out your shirt, your pants, socks, shoes, pick them all out ahead of time.

[00:13:11] Lay them out in advance. I work out really early, so it's dark. And if I had to find all that stuff, well, my wife is sleeping. That would be a problem. That would be one more. Excuse me, hunting around my flashlight, realizing something's not clean. Can't find my socks. You get the idea, prepare entertainment.

[00:13:29] If you need to download the latest episodes of your favorite podcast to enjoy during your drive or at the gym. And then if you're working out from home, instead of going to the gym, some of the previous steps may not apply, but most of them do you still want to prepare all that stuff, even in your home gym, go ahead and prepare the equipment in your gym.

[00:13:50] Move. J hooks and your pins or spotter arms on the rack for your first lift of the next day, a ranger bench and your barbell, wherever you need it prepare any special equipment, your easy curl bar, your calf block, your cable attachment, whatever it might be. And that will save you time in getting started and potentially between exercises.

[00:14:14] All right. So we've talked about preparing for lifting your programming and going to the gym. We are knocking down excuses one by one. We're being disciplined. We're setting ourselves up for really good habits here. Next let's move to the food side of the equation. Let's talk about preparing your workout nutrition.

[00:14:33] Now this may be going to the gym or at home, but it's just one more thing you can do ahead of. For example, if you use blender bottles, the shake bottles for protein shakes, I like to have four or five of them in the kitchen available so that if I've used one or two yesterday and haven't washed them yet, for example, I've still have new ones available.

[00:14:56] Again, one less excuse to think about having plenty of bottles, plenty of vessels for your powders and whatever you need. Also grab or prepare. Pre-workout pre and post-workout nutrition as best you can. For example, if you eat a banana, like I do, or something that you can hold like that it doesn't have to be refrigerated, get it ready and put it on the counter.

[00:15:19] You could also preload your protein powder, your creatine, your pre and post-workout drinks. Put them all in either the shakers or in little containers. So that they're all organized, ready to go. So when you need him and he's just, boom, boom, boom. Pull them out. Go ahead and place all of that on the most convenient counter.

[00:15:40] So it takes just a few minutes to prepare before you leave for the gym or before you work out at home. Again, we're trying to eliminate excuses, do this all before the day before when you've got the energy or gone around doing things around the house, get it right. And then the next day it's all set up.

[00:15:57] All right. We're going to shift the discussion a little bit now and talk about nutrition. We'll start with. Goals for your weight change. That is whether you're trying to gain weight, lose weight, or maintain. You should refer back to the last episode, episode five, which is all about going on a diet without being on a diet.

[00:16:20] And it talks about estimating your maintenance calories and setting a reasonable weight loss or weight gain. We talked about adjusting that each week. So what we're talking about today is, okay, you've got that information. Now you use those inputs, your maintenance calories, and your goal, your change goal to plan your calories and macros for the upcoming week.

[00:16:45] So again, we're saying Sunday, isn't. You want to plan it out? Are you going to increase your calories by 50 a day? Are you reducing them by a hundred a day? You've had a certain target this week and the next week it'll be something else, but you want to know what it is now. I'm going to plug macro factor again because that's the app that I use to do this pretty much automatically.

[00:17:07] I get up in the morning on Monday, the app checks in and says, we're going to increase your calories by 25 calories a day based on. T D E right, your total daily energy expenditure over the past few weeks, as well as your food intake. And that takes about five seconds, which is why I like to use that. So if you want to download macro factor, check out the show notes for how to do it.

[00:17:30] And now that you know how many calories you're shooting for in your macros, you can plan your meals for the week and, or work around special occasions. Or high calorie days, if you know, Thanksgiving is this week or there's a birthday party, or you want to go out with your friends and there's a big social event.

[00:17:48] Plan for it. It's it's Sunday, the events on Friday, you know, you're going to consume an extra, say 1500 or 2000 calories that day. Now you can plan for it for the week and know that you're going to stay on track going into the subsequent weeks. You can also take this further and look ahead to the next 12 months and even plan.

[00:18:11] Cuts and bulks to coincide with the seasons or special events and make it easier to stick with during those times. Again, things like holidays where you want to bulk during the holidays, because that's when you want to enjoy eating a lot more. Or if you want to cut for a bigger. So even if your plan right now is to say, lose 20 pounds and you do doing it at a reasonable rate of say a pound and a half per week, and you know, how many weeks it's going to take.

[00:18:40] Well then great look ahead toward when you will hit that goal and decide what will be my next goal and sort of plan out three months, maybe six or even 12 months to, to deal with the ups and downs or maintenance that coincide with the seasons or the. That's from the numbers side. Now we want to talk about planning ahead for your actual meals, the food you will be eating, and I'm not one of these obsessive.

[00:19:07] Meal preppers. And I admire people who are people who can basically, they can prepare all their meals for the week and store them all individually in Tupperware. And then they just pull every single one out when the, that takes quite a level of planning and discipline. And it may be to such an extent that you would not stick to your plan if you had to do that.

[00:19:29] But if that sounds awesome. If you're like an organizational guru and love doing that, by all means do it. I'm just going to share with you my experience. So the first thing I like to do is buy food in bulk. That's a simple thing that most of us understand many of us already do this, but this might look like choosing one meat of the.

[00:19:50] For your protein for lunch. Okay. Now I work from home currently. And so I can go ahead and easily pull that out of the microwave, but even if you go to work, you can pack it up. And this might enable you to cook one or two big recipes, say on Sunday and then just portion it out and heat it up when you need them during the week.

[00:20:11] And this, this could be fairly. So you would save the recipe probably in your nutrition app. So if you're using macro factor, you can just enter each bulk amount of food. The total grams of total macros, put them all in as a recipe. And then when you measure it out individually later, the combined recipe it'll automatically enter.

[00:20:35] Calories and macros for that portion. Pretty simple. So here are some ideas. For example, you can buy five pounds of ground beef and then cook it up with some rice, some Jasmine or basmati rice, throwing some taco seasoning. And now you've got a pretty rich, uh, modestly high fat, high protein, lot of carbs.

[00:20:58] Good lunch that you can. Or you can get a 10 pound pork roast and do pulled pork in the oven that allows you all week. You can get a Turkey, you know, do it Thanksgiving style, get a 15 pound Turkey, carve it up. And now you got 6, 7, 8 pounds of meat. Or I like chicken thighs. I love chicken thighs. So I might get a dozen chicken thighs, bake them all at once with some sort of very light seasoning or sauce on it.

[00:21:22] And then they're versatile. I can just eat them straight. Heat them up for lunch, where I can chop them up and mix with a salad or eat them with my carb or veggie of choice during the week. And again, you can go more extreme and, and make individual meals and split them all out if you want, but you don't have to do it that way.

[00:21:40] Just make things easier so that during the week you can quickly grab something. That's not junk food, that's not processed food necessarily, but it's something you enjoy. And you've already prepared it and you don't have to do this for every meal. I'm suggesting start with lunches. Dinners might be a little bit more of an involved affair depending on you and your family, but a similar thing can apply when you make dinners make a lot more than you normally would.

[00:22:06] So you have plenty of leftovers. Here's another tip related to meal planning. A lot of people don't do this, but you can pre enter food in your nutrition app to quote unquote, reserve those calories or macros. And. For example, if I want to have my casein pudding at the end of the night, I know it sounds kind of gross, but it's basically just casing.

[00:22:29] Vanilla flavored caisson powder mixed with some Oland milk. And it's probably 200 calories with maybe 40 grams of protein. It's slow digesting, so I can have it at the end of the evening, you know, watch some Netflix or something and relax right before I go to bed. Get the protein bolus in there. So that I can have protein synthesis going on for the next few hours.

[00:22:51] These are those advanced timing strategies don't necessarily have to worry about at this point, but it's fun to do. And I will enter that into my app. I might do it at 10 in the morning, but I'll enter it for eight or nine. And now I've reserved those 210 calories. So as the day goes on and I see the calories left, that's already accounted for, and you can do this for anything.

[00:23:13] If you know, you're going to have a huge party meal with family, it's going to be 2,500 calories. You're going to have Thanksgiving, whatever, reserve them ahead of time. Just to give you the signal that maybe you can take it easy the rest of the day and stay on track. All right next. I just want to talk about some of the technology that can help with some of the tips that we've discussed.

[00:23:38] And we'll start with apps, smartphone apps. There's really only one that I strongly recommend, and that is macro factor, which we talked about already for nutrition, because it's a food logger combined with an energy expenditure estimator, and. Adherents neutral. It does not penalize you for going over or under your calories.

[00:23:59] It simply tells you the data gives you the plan and then it adjusts based on what you do. Check that out in the show notes, as far as lifting goes, a lot of folks just love a plain notebook notebooks, great whiteboard if you work out from home. But if you'd like to use technology, there are plenty of apps out there like stacked, which I think is from Legion athletics.

[00:24:21] Mike Matthews strong is popular with a lot of folks. I use train heroic because I'm associated with a gym that has a coach that I work with sometimes, but also. In a program on train heroic, you can create your own sessions. And I have several years of history in the app. And the reason I like apps for this purpose is you can easily track all of your maxes, your one, RM three, RM, five RM, et cetera.

[00:24:50] You can see what you did last time. You know, there's a lot of. Ways to help the next time you have to go to the gym, which again, I like things that make it easier for me because it reduces excuses. Then there's the health integration, whether you have an iPhone or an Android device, there's apple health and there's Google.

[00:25:11] And they both are the defacto standards on those platforms that can link to most other. So, if you're using a nutrition app, like macro factor, you can then link it to apple health to pulling your weight. And eventually it might pull in fitness data, which really isn't that important from a calorie perspective.

[00:25:30] But because I use a smart scale, the smart sale can connect to apple health, apple health connects to macro factor. It's all Daisy chain again, making it super easy where I don't have to manually enter. I even have a blood pressure cuff that does the same thing. And you can link these to fitness wearables.

[00:25:49] When you have the apple watch Fitbit or whatever. Another way you can use technology is reminders set up reminders on your smartphone. A couple of examples would be a daily reminder to weigh yourself. I know it seems simple and eventually it'll just become. But if you get up at six, am you set the reminder for, you know, 5:45 AM?

[00:26:08] So when you wake up, you see it there. Oh, I got to weigh myself. Just don't want to forget first thing in the morning or a weekly reminder to take body measures. I strongly encourage measuring your waist, your arms, your chest, your thighs, or even your body fat with calipers or the Navy measurement using a tape measure of your neck and abdomen.

[00:26:32] But a weekly reminder, let's say Sunday. That says, make sure to take measurements and even photos of you want to take body photos. And I have one final bonus tip when it comes to setting your fitness and nutrition on autopilot. And that is to join a like-minded community, either up the place you work out, it could be at your.

[00:26:58] Or it can be online, a place to share ideas, videos, get form checks, keep each other accountable. You can yourself contribute to these communities as you learn and help others, which is extremely rewarding. And then you can continue to learn yourself and stay on top of things as they evolve, as they change over time.

[00:27:19] As we learn new information in this. Exciting, but sometimes confusing and complicated world of fitness and nutrition and one such group would be our wits and weights listener community Facebook group, which you can find in the show now. Okay. I think we've covered everything I wanted to get to. And I hope you find these ideas helpful and practical.

[00:27:42] You don't have to do them all at once. Just start with your biggest sticking points, figure out where you tend to struggle and the things that tend to hold you back from turning these actions into habits, and then just experiment with automating things, using technology, planning ahead, removing barriers to progress using some of that.

[00:28:05] We've talked about. I'd also love to hear your ideas for strategies or tools you've used to put your fitness and nutrition on autopilot. Just drop me a line by email or on Instagram at Whitson weights or on Facebook. This concludes our foundational series two. The wits and waits podcasts, but I think the fun has just begun.

[00:28:28] Stay tuned for exciting topics related to resistance, training, diet, programming, even mindset, and lots more to come in upcoming episodes.

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Ep 5: How to Diet Without Being "On" a Diet

Today is the DIET and NUTRITION episode, one of my favorite topics. Although this IS a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat—and more importantly, HOW MUCH you eat—plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat (while preserving muscle) or gain muscle (while limiting fat gain).

You can’t have one without the other—and I’m going to assume you’re here because you want to get stronger AND leaner, and you want to do it productively without spinning your wheels.

I’m very passionate about taking a SUSTAINABLE approach to diet because, like many of you, I’ve personally experienced yo-yo dieting, fad diets, and all sorts of crazy food restrictions and questionable supplements over the years. Only in the last two years or so did I finally make peace with the nutrition gods and realize that proper nutrition is not nearly as complicated or restrictive as I once thought.

Today we’re going on a journey together that will equip you with the tools you need to eat a balanced, enjoyable diet for the rest of your life.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• The spectrum of dieting and why traditional diets don’t work over the long-term

• A balanced, flexible, and sustainable approach that won’t drive you crazy

• Focusing on what’s important and not sweating the rest

• An overview of calories and macronutrients, and the phases of weight change

• Determining your individual energy needs for your goal and then adjusting for success

• The phases of weight change and how they align with your goals as a lifter

• And finally, a brief foray regarding some specific foods and supplements

RELATED LINKS

• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

👨‍💻 HOSTED BY

• Philip Pape of Wits & Weight

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:31] Hey guys, welcome to episode five of Wits & Weights. Today is the diet and nutrition episode. One of my favorite topics, although this is a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat and more importantly, how much you eat, plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat while preserving muscle or to gain muscle while limiting fat.

[00:00:59] You can't have one without the other. And I'm going to assume you're here because you want to get stronger and leaner and you want to do it productively without spinning your wheels. I'm very passionate about taking a sustainable approach to diet because like many of you I've personally experienced yo-yo diets, fad diets, all sorts of crazy food restrictions and questionable supplements over the years, only in the last couple of years or so.

[00:01:31] Did I finally make peace with the nutrition gods and realize that proper nutrition is not nearly as complicated or restrictive as I once thought today, we're going on a journey together that will equip you with the tools you need to eat a balanced, enjoyable diet for the rest of your life. In today's episode, we cover the spectrum of dieting and why traditional diets don't work over the long-term a balanced, flexible, and sustainable approach that won't drive you crazy, focusing on what's important and not sweating the rest and overview of calories and macronutrients and the phases of weight change, determining your individual energy needs for your goal, and then adjusting for success.

[00:02:23] How to align the phases of weight change with your goals, especially as a lifter and finally a brief foray regarding some specific foods I like. And a couple of. Let's start by talking about the spectrum of dieting we have on one extreme are the diets that have specific names. You know what? They are, things like keto, paleo carnivore, Atkins zone.

[00:02:55] And one thing these diets have in common is they typically list good or bad foods or clean versus dirty foods. They tend to be somewhat complicated and somewhat restrictive. There are obviously differences from one to the next and each one has their advocates. But the main thing about them is they use.

[00:03:17] Prescribe how you should eat, eat this, donate that perhaps they give you what time you should eat this or that. And there are often what I will call unbalanced from a macronutrient perspective, meaning they might require very high, fat and very low carb or very high carb, very low fat. And the evidence shows that these are.

[00:03:38] Not sustainable diets in the longterm because they often lead to yo-yo dieting. You lose a lot of weight. Initially, the they're super successful because you might lose a lot of waterway, glycogen and actual fat loss because you've changed your eating patterns. For example, on keto, you try to go very low carb, very high fat, and as a rule, it starts to eliminate a ton of processed foods that might've been in your diet.

[00:04:08] Many of the highly palatable processed foods are a combination of carbs and fat. Well, if you're going to cut out carbs drastically, you're going to severely limit your food choices primarily to whole foods, animal-based products and things like that. And then that results in you significantly cutting your calories.

[00:04:29] If these diets work and they work for some people, it's because of calories in. So that's one extreme. And I put that on an extreme, because this podcast is all about sustainability. How can you eat in a way that will satisfy you? It won't drive you crazy and you could do so for years and decades for the rest of your life.

[00:04:53] If you could do that with say Quito or the zone diet good for you, if it meets your goals, go for it. But I think there's an easier way on the other extreme of this dieting spectrum is what's called intuitive eating. And that's just what it sounds it's eating. When you feel like it, based on the signals your body's giving you and not worrying about tracking or what you eat or really.

[00:05:23] And intuitive eating sounds great, but it's very hard to know how many calories you're eating or whether you need to eat more or less if you've never tracked your food. And if you have a difficult time telling the difference between one food and another, in terms of nutritional density, for example, take a tablespoon of peanut butter and put it next to a large bowl of salted popcorn.

[00:05:50] Chances are the popcorn has fewer calories. Furthermore, most of us who have had let's call them less than optimal eating habits over the years have trained our bodies in a way where we can not recognize those hunger signals as efficiently as somebody who maybe has been eating properly for years. And so if to eat intuitively means to continue eating as much pizza doughnuts and Coca-Cola, as you'd like, it's probably not going to help you meet your goals, but we're going to come back to this later because I believe intuitive eating can be a great approach for someone who has gone through a more balanced approach based on tracking, which is the focus of this podcast.

[00:06:35] Which will then teach you to understand what is in a certain type of food in a certain quantity of food, the nutritional density, and you could eyeball this stuff in the future. If you're not the type of person who likes to track. And that brings me to the middle part of the spectrum, the balanced, sustainable approach to eating that we'll talk about today, which is tracking calories and macronutrients, eating what you enjoy, making choices based on your goal, and eventually to learn enough about food portions and nutrient density to shift more toward intuitive eating.

[00:07:15] If preferred this approach is also called flexible dieting. If it fits your macros, I. Whatever you want to call it because we have, obviously I have a fondness for names when it comes to diets, this approach is significantly more sustainable than the highly restrictive named diets. And I'll give you just a few reasons why you might come up with more than these.

[00:07:40] The first reason is more sustainable is you don't have good or bad foods. You don't have clean or dirty foods. You can eat anything you prefer. As long as you meet your goal. The second reason it's more sustainable is there's no incentive to binge because you've avoided or deprived yourself of some particular food.

[00:08:04] We're not doing that. We're not restricting food groups or types or specific foods in any way with this approach. The next reason it's more sustainable is you're not going to be weird on this diet. What do I mean by that? Meaning your spouse cooks you food. You can enjoy it. You don't have to be picky or control exactly.

[00:08:25] What's in the food. You can go to restaurants, you can go to social events, you can go hang out with your friends and you don't have to be weird. You're not the person bringing your own Tupperware or your own shake bottle. You can just go out and pick from the options that are out there. And as long as it fits your plan, you are good.

[00:08:43] Another reason this is sustainable is it's flexible enough. You can continue to change your foods over time, or even on a. Isn't that great. So a few months from now, the seasons change you go from fall to winter to summer, you have different available options at the grocery store, different produce fresh products available.

[00:09:04] You might just have a new craving. You want to eat more fish now instead of beef, go for it. And finally, the reason the flexible dieting approach is sustainable is it is consistent with the laws of physics it's based on energy balance and nothing more. So it works in something that works and has all of these other benefits we just discussed sounds like a pretty sustainable approach to me.

[00:09:29] Have you ever heard of the parades principle? It basically states that in many cases, 80% of the outcome is from 20% of the causes. Some people call this the 80 20 rule. It just means that there are a few things that are very important and many things that are less. So, so why don't we focus our energy on the few things that impact 80% of the results or 80% of the outcome.

[00:09:59] And in our case, when it comes to diet, the most important aspect is calories or energy balance. And we talked about this and the first law of thermodynamics in episode four, if you want to go revisit that, we talked all about metabolism, the energy out side of the equation. And today we're going to focus on the energy in side of the equation.

[00:10:24] At the end of the day, would you gain or lose weight comes down to the energy coming into your body from food period. But then there is another priority just below calories that makes up the 80 20. And that is macronutrients. The stuff in your food that provides the calories. The proportion of these can be important depending on your goals and optimizing your outcomes.

[00:10:54] Everything else, other than calories and macronutrients is in the 20% things like supplements, micronutrients, meal, timing, food, quality. Yes, you heard it right. We are not going to focus on food quality when it comes to diet. Remember what I said before? You can eat whatever you like, as long as it fits within your calories and your macros, let's start then with calories.

[00:11:21] And we are going to go through a lot of detail on this podcast. Step-by-step lots of calculations. I encourage you to take notes or at the very least use the timestamps in the show notes to find your place later on and revisit some of these topics. The first thing we're going to do is calculate your maintenance calories.

[00:11:40] These are the calories that you need every day just to live and maintain your weight. And again, back in the previous episode, we talked about the breakdown, the various components of metabolism. We're not going to recover all that today. We're just going to talk about the numbers and how to set up. In that episode, we talked about estimating your calories, using a calculator.

[00:12:04] You can do that if you'd like, but the best way to estimate your calories is to track them over two weeks with your current diet, don't change anything. Don't change your lifestyle. Do it in a phase where you've been maintaining your weight. Not much is going to change over the next two weeks. Your activity level, isn't going to change much and you're able to track consistently be consistent and see how your weight changes.

[00:12:28] Ideally, the weight stays roughly the same in which case your daily calorie needs are the average daily calories. You can see. As simple as that. Now, if your weight went up slightly, then your daily calorie needs are a little bit less than what you consumed and vice versa, but it gives you a pretty good estimate.

[00:12:48] If I were to use a calculator today, it would probably say that my total daily energy expenditures, maybe around 25, 2600, but in reality, it's closer to 3000. I'm on, I've been bulking. I'm very active and I've been tracking and that is my current Mattel. Now I am going to mention this particular app several times in the podcast, it's called macro factor.

[00:13:13] It's by the guys at stronger by science. And I personally use this app. I think it is by far the best app on the market, not just for food logging, but for calculating your metabolism, adjusting your plan every week, and then presenting it to you in a way that is compliance neutral. It doesn't beat you over the head for missing your target.

[00:13:36] It simply gives you the data gives you the plan, what you need for the week. You either hit it. You don't no big deal. Here's where you are the next week. Do it again. So if you can get an app like that, it's going to make this entire process. We talk about today, much easier. You're still going to have to log your food.

[00:13:54] You're still going to have to weigh yourself, but all the numbers of calculating calories and macronutrients and metabolism are essentially done for you with some of these. So I'll include a link in the show notes for that there are other apps like my fitness pal chronometer or chronometer carbon and many others that do similar things.

[00:14:16] But again, my favorite is macro factor. So you start by determining your caloric maintenance, how many calories do you need every day to maintain your weight? And you're going to start tracking your food and tracking your weight every day. This is critical. This is integral to everything else we talk about.

[00:14:35] So if you're not willing to, or able to do that, it's going to be more difficult, not impossible, but much more difficult. And we're talking about changing our habits to change our lives for the long-term. And I know from personal experience tracking food and weight is cumbersome at first, but it quickly becomes quite easy, especially with these apps.

[00:14:58] Ma maintain your history. They make it easy to search, to use bar codes. It's really not that bad at all. And you'll be glad you did it because you'll have a much higher level of precision in terms of estimating the food that you're eating. Even if you decide to not track in the future. So how do you track your food?

[00:15:17] If you're eating packaged foods that have a barcode, the app that you use should have a barcode scanner, you scan it in assuming the data is accurate. It spits out the numbers. Boom. If you're eating whole foods like broccoli or meat or something that you can weigh, this is where a food scale comes in. I suggest going to Amazon or wherever you buy your inexpensive likely Chinese made electronics and get yourself a cheap food scale that measures in fractions of grams ideally would also measure in ounces and milliliters.

[00:15:50] So you've got all your liquids and solids. And between the food scale barcodes, the databases that are in the app. And then let's say you go to a restaurant, RET many restaurants, especially chain restaurants, have their nutrition facts posted online in the app that you use. Many of them also have branded food.

[00:16:10] So you want to track your food every day. That's everything you consume. Morning, noon, and night with the exception of small things that you consume every day in the same amount. For example, I take fish oil supplements. I take four capsules. It's probably 40 calories worth of fat. I don't track that because it's consistent every single day.

[00:16:33] So the relative change in metabolism and calories would be the same either way, whether I tracked it or not, because it's consistent. Perhaps you have a splash of half and half in your coffee every day. I wouldn't even track that. If it's an issue with convenience versus accuracy, you make the call, but those things don't necessarily need to be tracked, but all of your food and beverages should be tracked.

[00:16:56] And the other part of this is weighing yourself every day. You have to know how your weight is changing to adjust your calories. I recommend weighing yourself daily in the morning. Before you use the bathroom wearing very little clothing around the same time every day. I actually have a smart scale. I bought it a few months ago.

[00:17:15] I can include a link in the show notes. Connects to apple health on my iPhone and an apple health connects to macro factor. So all I have to do is open the app in the morning. Step on the scale. It beams my way, all the way through to the food log or app. I'm a big fan of automating and making things sustainable and making things much easier for yourself.

[00:17:38] Now that you've determined your maintenance calories, and you have a system in place to track your food and your weight, ask yourself, what is your goal? Are you trying to lose weight, gain, weight, or maintain? If your goal is to maintain your weight, it's pretty simple. You're going to eat as many calories as you burn so that your daily calories equals your estimated calories from the first step.

[00:18:06] That's it? It gets slightly more complicated. If you want to lose or gain weight, if you want to lose weight, the goal is to lose fat. I'm sure that that's your goal is to improve your body composition, which also means not losing too much muscle. And so we want to lose at a reasonable rate that is not overly aggressive, such that we would start to lose lean body mass, but just enough to burn fat at a good rate, to have a reasonable food or calorie plan where we're not starving ourselves.

[00:18:42] Now, if you're very overweight, you could push this a little bit further, be more aggressive. There are always special use cases, but for today, we're just going to talk more or less in the averages, and then we can go from there. So if you want to lose weight, the generally accepted range is going to be to set your.

[00:19:04] That is your caloric deficit, so that you lose between a quarter and 1% of your body weight per week. So what I suggest for your calories to establish a deficit of around 20 to 30% from your maintenance, and later on, you can adjust this based on your weight, that how your weight is changing versus your goal.

[00:19:27] But to start, we're going to say 20 to 30% of your maintenance. Let's go through an example. Let's say you're 200 pounds and you want to lose 20 pounds. And let's say your goal is on the higher end of 1% of your body weight per week or two pounds per week. That's going to take you roughly 10 weeks to lose the weight.

[00:19:48] If your maintenance calories are 2,500 and you're going to target 20 to 30%, let's go slightly on the higher end at 30. 30% of 2,500 is 750 calories per day deficit. If we subtract 750 from 2,500, that leaves you with 1,750 calories a day. So 1,750 calories a day would be your initial plan for your diet in hopes of losing two pounds per week.

[00:20:21] Okay. This is just the starting week. Every week. You're going to adjust this that's one example. Let's talk about gaining weight. Now, why would you want to gain weight? You would want to gain weight to build muscle or to improve performance, or if you're a powerlifter, there are a lot of reasons people can gain weight and we'll talk later on about some specific scenarios, but again, let's talk about the reasonable range for weight gain is probably between 0.1 and 0.25% of your body weight per week.

[00:20:51] Notice that's quite a bit less. Then the rate of weight loss. When you're losing weight, you can lose weight and lose fat quite quickly with not too much impact to muscle loss. But if you gain weight too quickly, it is inevitable that most of that weight will be fat. If you're too aggressive about it, you can only gain muscle at a certain rate.

[00:21:13] And it's not as fast as you might think. So what we want to avoid is what they call the dirty bulk. If you've never heard that term before, that just means eating as much and anything you find and see and want some people call it the seafood diet. You see it, you eat it. You're talking 4, 5, 6, 7,000 calories a day.

[00:21:32] Uninhibited. You are definitely going to gain muscle at a good clip that way, but you're going to gain a ton of fat and that fat later on is going to have to be cut down. So why don't we be smart about it? Why don't we gain in a reasonable fashion? 0.1 to 0.2, 5% of your body weight per week. And the initial target here would be half the target if you were losing weight.

[00:21:56] So if you want to gain weight, we're looking at a 10 to 15% surplus to start. Let's do another example. If you're 200 pounds and you want to gain 20 pounds and you want to go on the higher end of the gaining of quarter percent of your body weight, that's half a pound per week. So that's going to take you 40 weeks to get there, which is a nice drawn out period where you'll get to do a lot of lifting and training.

[00:22:23] You'll get to eat a nice, full, healthy satiating diet, but you're not going to get fat. If your maintenance calories are 2,500 and we go on the higher end of the target at 15%, in terms of our surplus, 15% of 2,500 is 375 calories. You add the two together. And you get 28 75, 2,875 calories a day. That would be your calorie target to gain the weight.

[00:22:50] So we've talked about establishing your maintenance calories, and we've talked about coming up with a goal and setting your either deficit to lose weight or your surplus to gain weight for that initial week. And we'll come back to these examples later, after we talk about the next most important priority, which is macro nutrients.

[00:23:13] If you just want to gain and lose weight, indiscriminately calories will get you there. But we want to be a little bit more discriminant about how we gained the weight, why we gained the weight, what goal we trying to achieve. So now we're going to talk about the three big macronutrients that we care about protein, fat, and carbs.

[00:23:36] We're going to. Explain the purpose of each one in our energy systems. And then more importantly, talk about the target amounts and some eating strategies around those that might help you meet those targets. I like to start with protein because that is, I'll say the most important macronutrient when it comes to muscle building and lifters.

[00:24:01] It's the one that has a solid target that you want to hit every time. Or get close to it. And in the fat and the carbs have a lot more flexibility. Protein is critical to your health. It facilitates muscle protein, synthesis, muscle building. It makes you full. It helps you recover. And it's found in a lot of really delicious foods.

[00:24:27] In my opinion, proteins are comprised of amino acids. There are essential amino acids and non essential. There are 20. And I'm not going to get into the science of that today. What I really want to focus on is the importance of protein for kick-starting what's called muscle protein synthesis. But the idea here is to feed your body with enough protein, that you are engaged in more protein synthesis than protein breakdown, so that the net effect is you gain muscle.

[00:25:01] Furthermore, the evidence seems to support the idea that you need to consume protein. Reasonable amounts, you know, certain minimum amounts multiple times throughout the day to maximize or optimize muscle protein synthesis. So we did talk about how meal timing isn't nearly as important as of course, calories and macronutrients, but there are some timing strategies with protein that will optimize how you use that protein that should fit just fine into your normal eating plan without doing anything crazy.

[00:25:36] So we'll get to that in a bit. Another aspect of protein that I think as well established is the importance of leucine, which is one of the amino acids, as well as the essential amino acids. So getting enough of both is easier when you're eating high quality proteins, such as those from animal sources, whey protein, egg meat, fish, chicken, other forms of poultry and so on.

[00:26:01] So if you are a vegetarian, for example, or a vegan, it's going to be harder to include the. Set of amino acids and loosening in your diet without being very deliberate and careful about your food choices. At the end of the day, you need sufficient protein. You need to eat it enough times per day. And the types that give you the protein that you need for muscle building, the next macronutrient is fat despite its bad reputation over the years, which fortunately, I think we've moved beyond that.

[00:26:34] Fat is particularly important for hormone production. It also, for many people has a positive impact on society. It makes you full it's what you hear often with people who eat the keto diet. For example, although I think people can go too far the other direction. And the third macronutrient of course is carbs.

[00:26:54] And back in the day when I tried Atkins and later on paleo primal and keto carbs were my enemy. And a lot of people have this mindset when it comes to some of the more modern diets. When it comes to people who train people who lift folks like you and me, people listening to this podcast, those of you who are getting into training carbs are your friend.

[00:27:18] When it comes to glucose glycogen, they fuel your training. They help recovery because of glycogen stores. It's actually very hard to be low carb and train, to build muscle when you're losing weight. It's definitely possible to get those carbs down as you're losing weight, because you're simply trying to hold on to muscle.

[00:27:38] You're not trying to train as hard, but when you're building muscle and you're in a bulk carbs, are your friend, at least in my opinion. And you'll find from the strategy we set up here for your macronutrient targets, that carbs are a robust aspect of the eating strategy. Before we talk about amounts and eating strategies, we need to understand what is the energy contained in these macronutrients.

[00:28:04] And it's as simple as. Protein has four calories per gram. Fat has nine calories per gram and carbs have four calories per gram. So both protein and carbs have approximately four calories per gram. Whereas fat has more than twice as much in nine calories per gram. So if we're trying to convert between calories and grams, that's how we would do it.

[00:28:33] If we know our protein target every day is 200 grams. Then, you know, since there are four calories per gram, that's 800 calories and you could do the inverse. If you need to convert from calories two grams, and we'll be doing that in some of the examples later on. Now let's talk about the amounts that we want to target for each macronutrient and some eating strategies, some ideas around these, so that you can determine exactly how many grams or calories of each you want to target based on your goals.

[00:29:08] If you use a food logging app, something like macro factor, many of these apps will calculate this for you, or at least allow you to select some sort of goal. And it will suggest reasonable targets, but we're going to do it by hand on this podcast, giving you the tools to do it yourself in whatever way you wish, whether it's on a notebook or in a spreadsheet or using an app.

[00:29:32] So let's start with protein. The evidence suggests that a reasonable target, especially if you're lifting a reasonable target is 0.82. Gram per pound of body, weight of protein. And you can push that all the way up to 1.2, 1.3 grams per pound, which you might consider, for example, during a cut, when you're losing weight in order to preserve muscle mass.

[00:29:57] And it helps us to tidy as well. You can push that up a bit, but the key is that you must be lifting. If you're sedentary, if you're not lifting the targets go way down. And we're not concerned with that population, we are concerned with folks like you and me who want to get stronger. And it's really as simple as that, where it gets a little more tricky is the evidence that shows when and how much protein to optimize.

[00:30:24] Muscle protein synthesis. And from what I've gathered, the consensus is shoot for 25 to 50 grams of protein in a meal. It's going to depend on your weight and age. For example, the older you are, the more protein you want to try to get at each meal or even overall, but this is a range 25 to 50 grams per meal, roughly four to six hours apart.

[00:30:50] Now I'm not going to tell you that if it's three in the afternoon and you've got to have a snack to avoid having protein in your snack, because it's only 15 or 20 grams, if it gets you to your target. Go for it. We're talking about sustainability and flexibility, but if you want to optimize it and you're okay having say four meals during the day three or four meals, each meal, you shoot to get 25 to 50 grams, some of your bigger meals, your lunch or dinner, where you have a little extra pork or steak or whatever your protein is of choice.

[00:31:23] You might get into the 60, 70 gram range and it all evens out and gets you to your target for a 200 pound person shooting for 200 grams of protein you would need on average four meals containing 50 grams per meal. Now, one of those might just be a to scoop protein shake before or after or during your workout.

[00:31:45] And remember what we talked about before the importance of leucine and good high quality sources of protein to get you to that target most effectively would be things like whey casein eggs. And fish. So good rule of thumb that I live by is one gram per pound. It's easy to remember. It's a nice round number that brings us to fat.

[00:32:06] The amount of fat in your diet can range considerably primarily based on your preferences and goals, such as how much room you want to leave for carbs or what kind of foods you enjoy eating. It really is as simple as that. And the range is anywhere from 0.2 on the low end to maybe 0.6 on the upper end grams per pound, or another way to look at it is 20 to 30% of your calories.

[00:32:33] So, if you're going to pick a nice round number to forget all those ranges, you could say 25% of your calories start there and then adjust up or down based on your other goals. Now I've read over the years and I've heard and seen it supported with the. That it's possibly a good idea to limit how many fats you have in your Perry workout, nutrition, peri, meaning during or in the vicinity just before, during or after your workout in that window to limit your fats and prefer instead carbs and protein, and to distribute your fats throughout your other meals.

[00:33:10] During the day. Now we talked about the fact that there are no good or bad foods, no clean or dirty foods. The one exception to all of that, that I would ever make is trans fats, artificial, trans fats. I don't think anybody agrees. They're a good thing to include in any substantive amount in your diet. So you probably want to limit artificial trans fats.

[00:33:30] That's the only thing in this entire discussion, I would say, try to limit. There's still lots of debate about saturated fats. And I think at the end of the day, if you have a pretty balanced diet, pretty good foods, it's going to balance out between saturated, Moto and saturated polyunsaturated. And that's a good point.

[00:33:49] And we're not trying to artificially bias toward one or the other with some radical food choices, just eat what you enjoy, have a good balanced diet. And it's going to work out. That brings us to carbs. Carbs would make up the remainder of your calories. If protein is one gram per pound and fat is roughly 25% of the cow.

[00:34:11] Then based on your calorie allotment for the day, which we talked about earlier, are you in a surplus? Are you in a deficit or are you maintaining relative to your maintenance calories? Whatever those calories are, the remaining calories or carbs. Now, when you eat carbs, pretty much anytime you want, but there are some benefits eating them at specific times.

[00:34:34] Pre-workout especially if it's your first meal of the day. Like it is for me. I have at the very minimum, I'll have a banana about a half hour to an hour before I work out. So that's a good time. Post-workout seems to be an excellent time to eat carbs, to replenish your glycogen stores. If you've ever heard of the anabolic window, it's actually much larger than people claim or used to think it was probably four to six hours after your workout.

[00:35:04] And that's a good time to replenish and eat your carbs. Some studies even suggest. Roughly 60% of your carbs for the day, peri workout in the vicinity of training. So it's something to consider. If you're eating 300 grams of carbs a day, then perhaps 180 of those are smushed closer to your workout, depending on when that is during the day.

[00:35:27] But again, don't radically alter things just to meet these timing suggestions I would eat when it makes sense to eat, eat normal way. Don't be weird. And it generally is going to work out. These are just extra tips to optimize when and how you. Another thing, more intense workouts require more carbs, and this could be a high volume lifting session, or it could be endurance related exercise if you're using high weight on the bar, but you're working in a very low rep range with lots of rest periods.

[00:36:02] It may not rise to the level of the endurance that requires extra carbs. So again, don't go out of your way, but if, if it's a high volume session or endurance, something like that, then it could be a good idea to bias your carbs close to or in the vicinity of that workout. Now, what about keto? We're talking about carbs and if you're on keto or a low carb, very low carb diet, you're trying to avoid carbs.

[00:36:26] You're trying to stay a hundred under a hundred grams. Maybe even less than that. Maybe under 50 for the day. Keto can work for you if you're losing or maintaining weight. But I think it's going to severely hinder muscle building and performance in the gym. If you're trying to gain. So just keep that in mind, it works for some people, it may work for you.

[00:36:48] I'm not saying this is a hard and fast rule, but given that carbs are the source of glycogen and that's an important input to your performance. When you train the logic goes that it's better to have more carbs than. The last thing about carbs is fiber, which is a type of carbohydrate. You want to get enough fiber, and if you're eating pretty well, if you're eating fruits, vegetables, grains, you're going to get it.

[00:37:14] You could of course seek it out. Quest bars have a lot of fiber. For example, there's obviously fiber supplements, but you want to get your fiber. And the general recommendation is something like 14 grams per thousand calories. So if you, if you have a 2,500 calorie diet, you're up in the thirties terms of grams of fiber.

[00:37:34] Now the only other macronutrient we haven't talked about, or the only big one that people are familiar with is alcohol. What about alcohol? I love a glass of wine or a, a nice stout or, you know, a mixed drink every now and then a couple of times a week. In fact, now that I'm on a bulk, I can drink a little bit more than when I was cutting.

[00:37:54] And it's an integral part of many people's social lives. Some people suggest take. The calories and alcohol and treating it as a carbohydrate, which means you would take the calories and you, and multiply it by four. For example, I had, I think it was founder's breakfast stout the other day, which is 270 calories.

[00:38:16] So divide that by four. I could track that as 68 grams of carbs. Now let's start to put all of this together. We've established our maintenance calories. We've talked about macro nutrients and a way to target each one. How much protein, how much fat, how much carbs. Now let's talk about the different phases of weight change and how to adjust your diet to fit each.

[00:38:45] So these are phases of weight change in how they align with their goals. We're starting with weight loss. Typically, this is associated with a goal to lose weight, reduce your body fat and improve your body composition. And the idea here is not just to reduce the number on the scale, but to reduce fat while limiting muscle loss.

[00:39:12] If you are not trained at all and you're overweight. Or even skinny fat as, as it's called, you may decide that you'd like to lose some of that fat before he then bulk up and gain muscle. Now, I would caution you if you are not severely overweight, a more effective approach may be to just eat at maintenance or even in a surplus and start training.

[00:39:36] If you've never trained before this could result in somewhat of a body composition where you actually burn fat while gaining muscle, but let's for the sake of this example, assume you want to lose weight. You're either overweight, you're skinny fat, and you want to lose that fat before he gained weight, or you have been training.

[00:39:56] And now you're just ready for a weight loss phase to lean out before he bulk up. Again, our example will be a 200 pound person who needs to lose 20 pounds with a total daily energy expense. Of 2,500 calories. We previously calculated a starting deficit of 750 calories, which leaves us with 1,750 calories or less per day as our target.

[00:40:26] So to lose weight because our maintenance calories are 2,500. We're going to eat 1,750 calories a day to try to lose weight. And here's how we're going to break up our macronutrients. We're going to start with protein. One gram per pound for a 200 pound person. That's easy, 200 grams of protein. You multiply that by four and you get 800 calories now because we're talking about weight loss.

[00:40:53] Some of the literature supports going even higher for your protein target as you're losing weight to preserve muscle mass. So you might even target 1.2 grams per pound, which would get you up to two 20 grams, which is a lot of protein. I understand if you're not used to eating that, but it's a worthwhile target based on what the evidence supports.

[00:41:13] Then we go to fat again, rule of thumb before I said, just start with 25%. You can adjust up or down to based on your needs, but let's just start with 25% of 7,050 calories is 438 calories. You divide that by nine and remember fat has nine calories per gram, and that gives you, and we're rounding here 50.

[00:41:34] So you got 200 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat. Then we get to carbs. Carbs are simply the remainder of your calories. So you start with 1,750 calories subtract the 800 calories of protein subtract the 438 calories of fat. And you're left with 512 calories divided by four. That gives you around 130 grams.

[00:41:57] Now 130 grams of carbs, depending on how you've been eating for the past few years might seem fairly low for a lot of people who are used to eating three, 400 grams of carbs every day. And if that's you and you want to eat more carbs, just reduce the fat to say 20% instead of 25%. And that'll free up some room for more carbs or vice versa.

[00:42:21] If you want to be in a very low carb diet like keto, and you want the fat to dominate and have very few carbs. But for this example, which is a little more balanced approach in summary, it's 200 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat, 130 grams of carbs. That's your goal. You get in the ballpark of that every day plus or minus 20%, you're going to be pretty good.

[00:42:46] And then later on you can start seeing the results and adjusting accordingly. And we'll talk about that. That was weight loss. Now what about weight gain? Typically you want to gain weight for one reason and one reason alone, and that is to build muscle, but you want to do it while limiting fat gain. So if you're a newbie, you'll probably see some pretty good results, whatever you do.

[00:43:11] And if you are lean but trained, this is where it is even more important to gain weight at a reasonable pace. So you don't gain too much fat because the more experienced you are under the. The slower, the rate of muscle gain, because you've already gained a lot of your muscle. Let's go to the same example, 200 pounds.

[00:43:31] In this case, you want to gain 20 pounds and your maintenance calories are 2,500 calories. So earlier on we talked about the surplus. We calculated a surplus of 375 calories giving you a calorie target of 28 75 now because you're gaining weight. I see that as a floor, meaning you're trying to hit at least that many calories a day.

[00:43:55] It's kind of a nice position to be in, to want to eat a minimum. And you'll get there. If you start lifting, if you lean out and then you're ready to bulk, you'll be in that position. So let's calculate the macronutrients again, protein, same thing. One gram per pound, 200 grams or 800 calories, easy fat.

[00:44:16] We're going to stick with 25%, but now it's 25% of a higher calorie target 28 75. So that's going to result in 719 calories of fat divided by nine gives you 80 grams and then carbs are the remainder. So the carbs are going to be higher as well. Again, cause we're working with more calories and we haven't changed the protein.

[00:44:39] So we take 28, 75 minus 800 calories of protein minus 719 calories of fat leaving us with 1,356 calories of carbs divided by four gives you 340 grams. So in summary, that's 200 grams of protein, 80 grams of fat. So 80, instead of the 50 grams, when you were losing weight, you get to eat 80 grams, all gaining weight.

[00:45:05] So a nice little bump there and then 340 grams of carbs. So that's well more than double. In fact, it's almost triple the amount of carbs you would have been equally while losing weight. And this is what we want to see. If we're training to build muscle. This big bump in carbs is. But you can always swap some fat for carbs and vice versa, depending on your preferences, angles and how you feel.

[00:45:31] All these keeping in mind that fat is nine calories per gram and carbs is four calories per gram. All right, in the last type of weight goal would be maintenance. Your goal is simply to maintain the weight where you are. Now, if you are a newbie, if you're just starting lifting, this could be a good place to start for you where you just try to keep your weight, where it is.

[00:45:55] You start lifting heavy. And what will start to happen is you'll burn fat while gaining muscle in weight really won't change, but your body composition will improve. Another reason we maintain weight is when you're transitioning from a cut to a bulk, for some people they want to break, but they don't want to start gaining heavy right away.

[00:46:16] So they go into a maintenance phase for a few weeks. Or even a month or two before bulking. And finally, if you are trained and you're just trying to maintain your muscle and you're not looking to bulk at this time, maintenance is a good strategy going with our same example, our 200 pound person who wants to maintain and has maintenance calories of 2,500, then you're going to eat 2,500 calories a day.

[00:46:41] And the breakdown is as follows protein 200 grams, same thing, right? One gram per pound. So 200 grams or 800 pounds. Fat 25% of 2,500 is 625 calories divided by nine that's, 70 grams. So it's, in-between the weight loss and the weight gain amount of fat. And then finally carbs is the remainder 2,500 minus 800 calories of protein, minus 625 calories of fat leaving you with 1,075 calories of carbs divided by four that's 270 grams, which is lower than the weight gain, but quite a bit higher, right?

[00:47:24] More than double of the weight loss, which is a nicely balanced, sustainable diet for the longterm. It's you could find a good balance of delicious foods. You can fit in dessert. You can fit in alcohol. Even at that maintenance level in summary, 200 grams of protein, 70 grams of fat and 270 grams of carbs.

[00:47:45] We've just talked about. The calories and the macronutrients, but this really is just for week one. And you might be thinking, oh man, now I have to do this every single week. So hear me out. What are you going to do is weigh yourself every day. And at the end of the first week, I want you to take the seven day average of your weight.

[00:48:09] I don't want you to worry about individual fluctuations. Just take the seven day average. That's the first week compare that seven day average to your starting weight. If the change is in the vicinity of what you're targeting. So let's say you're trying to lose two pounds in a week. If it's in the vicinity of that, I would continue with the exact same calories and macronutrients if however, it's quite a bit off.

[00:48:38] So if you're trying to lose two pounds and you only lost half a pound. Just adjust in the opposite direction conservatively. And I don't want to give you a specific number, a specific target. You can. It really doesn't matter because you're going to converge over time. Let's put it that way. It's not going to be perfect first month or so it'll converge over time.

[00:49:01] So if you intended to lose two pounds and you lost only half a pound, then you were eating too many calories. The data is telling you that either your metabolism is lower than you thought or decreased. Or you ate more calories than you thought you did. Now, I'm making the assumption that you properly tracked all your food, because if you're missing meals in your food logger, that's going to make a big difference on how many calories you think you ate.

[00:49:31] So assuming that you've been tracking it properly and by properly, I mean, within 20%, it really doesn't have to be super precise. Then chances are, it's really your metabolism that is lower than you thought at least for that week. So what do you do? You simply reduce your caloric requirement for the next week and recalculate your macros?

[00:49:54] Just like we did before. So if you're in a weight loss, And your calories were 1,750 and you realize that you're not losing as quickly as you'd like, then reduce it by say a hundred calories, reduce it to 1,650 and recalculate your protein, fat and carbs. Your protein is going to be the same. So it's really your fat and carbs that are going to come down and guess what you do the same thing the following week, the next week you keep taking the moving average.

[00:50:22] You can continue using a seven day average, or if you're a math geek, you can use a, a longer average or another special algorithm. It's really up to you to play around. But you'll keep assessing it this way. If the following week, now that you've cut your calories by a hundred calories a day. If the following week you lost say 1.8 pounds, that's pretty darn close to the two pounds you were shooting for.

[00:50:44] I would keep it the same. Or if you lost 2.2, if it's in the vicinity, keep it the same, make it easy on yourself. You don't have to do all the math again until you see that the change is drifting farther away from what you want. It's that simple. And it goes both directions. Weight gain is the same thing.

[00:51:01] Now I know that was a lot of numbers and each of these sections will be timestamped in the show notes so you can review them again. And again, I'll reiterate that using an app like macro factor makes this much easier, but of course you can also use a spreadsheet or a notebook, and it's just fine, depending on convenience versus results.

[00:51:23] Some important things to keep in mind. The first is that your daily expenditure, your metabolism can fluctuate. All the time and it can do so quite dramatically, based on your weight, your activity level, stress, sleep, your overall lifestyle, your job. So you have to track continuously just to stay on top of how your metabolism is fluctuating.

[00:51:50] The second thing is using an app like macro factor will make this much easier, and I encourage you to use technology. If that's your thing, I'm a big fan of putting things on autopilot. Putting habits in place, tools, technologies, things in place where you don't have to think about things, you just do them or they happen for you.

[00:52:09] I suggest adjusting weekly at first. Meaning at the end of every week, as we talked about earlier, you're going to assess your average weight for the seven. Versus your weight change goal. And if it has drifted from your goal, you're going to adjust your calories for the next week, accordingly at a reasonable level, that doesn't create some big overshoot.

[00:52:35] Eventually you should be able to shift toward an intuitive eating approach if you want, because you'll have the experience to know the calorie content and the macronutrients, the density of the foods you're eating based on having gone through this process, you've developed a skill and a knowledge base that will be with you for the rest of your life.

[00:52:57] I personally continue to track every day because I have very specific goals. It does keep me honest to an extent it's, it's a built-in habit that I've just been doing. And I don't really have to think about it. And I enjoy the science and the numbers behind this whole process. That's just me. I'm a geek.

[00:53:15] What can I. Notice that we have not talked once about specific foods that you can and cannot eat. I've mentioned some examples of foods that will give you higher quality protein, but it's totally up to you. If you want to eat those, there's nothing that you can or cannot eat. However, there are foods that can make the process a little bit easier, depending on which phase you're in.

[00:53:38] And I'd like to share just some of those foods, just to give you some ideas, if you're wondering, Hmm. What, what do I want to pick up at the grocery store or try in some new recipes, starting with weight loss. When you're, when you're losing weight, things become a little bit more restrictive, just because you only have so many calories to play with your fat and carbs have been lowered your protein still up.

[00:54:03] But it, it limits your choices a little bit if you want to avoid being super hungry, for example. So when it comes to protein sources, pretty much any protein source is, is still going to be great, even when you're losing weight. But if you compare to say 80, 20 ground beef to chicken or fish or even pork, there's obviously a difference in content and calories, right?

[00:54:25] The beef is going to have a higher content of fat. So you'd have to eat more of it to get the similar amount of protein. But now you're eating into your fat target. Doesn't mean I haven't done it. I love beef. I love a simple dish of ground beef and rice with some taco seasoning as a, as a nice pre-made lunch for the week.

[00:54:44] But generally the lower fat leaner meats might make it a little easier to get the protein you need while avoiding hitting those targets. And I think, you know what? Those are things like chicken and. I'm I love chicken thighs. So I'm not a big chicken breasts advocate necessarily, but of course chicken breast is going to be leaner, but eat what you enjoy and then make it work.

[00:55:09] So chicken fish even lean cuts of beef steak. And so on. Certain dairy products are excellent sources of protein like cottage cheese. That's a really nicely balanced snack, cottage, cheese, and Greek yogurt. Eggs are great. But again, if you're on a cut, you've got the protein in there along with the fat, if you're eating whole eggs.

[00:55:31] And frankly, I don't like to eat my eggs any other way than hole, so I make it work, but you could just eat egg whites and you'll get a lot of protein. You're not going to get the fat that way. The standard grains like wheat, right? Barley oats. I love oatmeal, oatmeal. It's got protein and it gives me my carbs and it's got fiber kind of has everything in it.

[00:55:51] And it mixes well with things like peanut butter fruit. You can use almond milk, you can use whole milk again, depending on what you're gaining or losing weight. You can adjust some of these ingredients and the amount to hit. Vegetables are always great. Vegetables are effectively free when we're talking about things like green vegetables, broccoli, and green beans, I consider them almost free.

[00:56:13] So when you're trying to lose weight, those are excellent fillers to cram into your diet and to every meal, eat big salads and whatnot because they'll fill you up and they'll keep the calories where you need them. And then as far as carbs go tos, there's always the potato variants, sweet potatoes, white potato.

[00:56:29] In addition to the grains we talked about. So you notice, I'm not telling you anything surprising any super foods, any special foods you have to get in some organic local food source or anything like that. However you notice, I didn't mention say sour patch, kids or Hershey. Chocolate bars, even though I love all those things.

[00:56:53] I have a sweet tooth, chocolate brownies, muffins, all this delicious stuff. If those are parts of your diet, you can still eat them. You just have to track your macros and calories and make it work. But the idea is I was sharing with you where those that will maximize your ability to get your protein, keep the fats and carbs and moderate range and still enjoy it.

[00:57:13] All right now, foods for bulking. Okay. We talked about a dirty bulk, which is the idea of just eating whatever you want. We're not going to do that. There are so many delicious foods in existence on this planet for your protein, carbs, and fat. When it comes to bulking, when your calorie limit is higher, everything is higher and you could really enjoy yourself.

[00:57:34] Let's take proteins. For example, all the meats are on the table. Lean fatty from beef to chicken, to seafood eggs, the dairy sources, as we talked about cottage, cheese, Greek yogurt, but even milk, even whole milk. I love whole milk. They're all on the table. And they're excellent. Sources of protein. Think about the grains, think about potatoes, rice keenwah.

[00:57:59] And then as far as fats go, here's where you've got a little more licensed to use some more butter, olive oil, eggs, eat some nuts, things like that. And I'm not saying any of these things won't work while losing weight. It just comes back to your calories and your macros. All right. The last thing I want to talk about is supplements and it really isn't going to take very long.

[00:58:21] I plan to do a future episode exclusively about the whole variety of supplements out there, things that work things that don't things, where the science is out. But today I want to talk about just two of them, whey protein. And Creotine whey protein really isn't even a supplement. In my opinion, it's just a food that's been processed.

[00:58:42] It comes from milk. We're talking about whey protein, isolate in particular. There's also casein protein, which has slower digesting, but let's just focus on way. I have way every day that I work out and usually on days that I don't. And the only reason I have it is because it's a quickly digestible, convenient, ready source of lots of protein and not much else.

[00:59:06] So the way I consume protein is before and after my workouts, I might have 30 grams before and 50 grams after, along with carbs, that's my preference. And that's it. And then the rest of the day, I get my protein from whole food sources, from meat, from dairy eggs, fish. So whey protein, there's nothing wrong with it.

[00:59:26] Yes, it's processed, but so is just about everything else in our diet. And it's an excellent source of all the complete proteins we talked about, including leucine. It's probably the ideal source of leucine from a convenience perspective and one scoop of a minimally flavored high quality whey protein will give you something like 25 grams of protein.

[00:59:49] Okay. So that's enough said about that. Now let's talk about creatine. Creatine is the one supplement that has been validated to actually be effective in a way that's meaningful in a way that most would suggest that you should take it, especially if you're lifting, but now we're coming to find. Various populations would probably benefit from creatine, the elderly, the sedentary kids.

[01:00:12] And I'm not going to go there and I'm not going to bring up the studies. You can look those up. I'm just focusing on us as lifters. The recommendation is three to five grams of creatine every day. Creatine monohydrate it's dirt cheap. It's easy to just throw in your post-workout shake or a glass of water.

[01:00:30] It doesn't taste like anything goes down easy, and there is plenty of evidence through hundreds of studies that it helps you build muscle and gain strength more quickly. If you're taking creatine than if you're not, it helps with your endurance specifically anaerobic endurance and between sessions that helps with recovery.

[01:00:51] It's perfectly safe. It's totally natural. You get creatine from food. You just don't get as much as you should from an optimal perspective. If you want to take it as a supplement for training, if you're going to take creatine, you might hear about a loading phase where you take 20 grams a day for the first week or so, but there's research that shows you probably don't need to do this.

[01:01:14] Just take three to five grams a day. It'll be saturated in your body soon enough. And then you just keep taking it and you could just take it for the rest of your life. It has no side effects whatsoever. It's good stuff. Enough said, let's recap. Everything we've talked about today. Cause I know this was a long episode.

[01:01:33] But I hope it was extremely useful to setting up and adjusting your diet to meet your goals. We talked about how to estimate your maintenance calories and the best way to do that is to track for two weeks, track your calories that you eat and track your weight. We talked about identifying your goal.

[01:01:53] Are you trying to lose weight because you want to burn fat? Are you trying to gain weight so you can build muscle or maintain your weight and how aggressive do you want to be? We talked about establishing your calories for the deficit or surplus consistent with that. Then we talked about macro nutrients, what they are protein, fat, and carbs, and how to set up your targets, proteins easy.

[01:02:19] One, one gram per pound fat. We talked about 20 to 30% in carbs, the remainder, but fat and carbs can be adjusted based on your preferences and training needs. We talked about logging your food every day, preferably using an app. So it's easier weigh in yourself every day and you can use something like a smart scale to make it easier, and then measuring your weight change each week and adjusting the calories up or down by tweaking the fat and carbs accordingly.

[01:02:50] If you have questions about any of the specifics in this episode, or want to share with me your personal experience and your individual goals, I'd be happy to get back to you by email@phillipatwhitsonwaits.com or you can DM me on Instagram at Whitson weights. I'd be happy to go over those details with you.

[01:03:10] That should cover it regarding the basic plan of attack for fat loss and muscle building. When it comes to calories, macronutrients, and even supplements. Stay tuned for episode six, where we introduce systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot. If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear on future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook.

[01:03:34] All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.

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Ep 4: The Truth about Metabolism, Cardio, and Fat Loss

Today we’re focusing on the “calories out” side of energy balance with a discussion of metabolism, as well as whether and how we can manipulate this “calories out” side of the equation.

We will not discuss diet or nutrition, which is the “calories in” side of the equation. Stay tuned for the next episode. In the meantime, understanding metabolism and especially how to accurately calculate your own energy expenditure sets the foundation for a sustainable approach to diet later on.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• What is metabolism in the context of your total daily energy expenditure?

• How to estimate your expenditure, which will be useful later for weight management

• Whether it’s possible change your baseline metabolism, both short- and long-term

• The truth about cardio and its effect on metabolism and fat loss

• A more efficient, sustainable way to burn fat

RELATED LINKS

• Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy by Herman Pontzer, PhD

• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

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• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

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• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

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---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:29] Welcome to episode four of Wits & Weights. As pedestrian as it sounds, your ability to manage weight comes down, not to food, quality, carbs versus fat meal timing or any other new and improved fat loss secret. But rather to the age old first law of thermodynamics energy can neither be created nor destroyed, or in our context, calories in calories out, we refer to this as energy.

[00:01:01] Today, we're focusing on the calories out side of energy balance with the discussion of metabolism, as well as weather and how we can manipulate this calories outside of the equation. I don't plan on discussing diet or nutrition. Which is the calories in side of the equation. You can stay tuned for the next episode for that, but in the meantime, understanding metabolism and especially how to accurately calculate your own energy expenditure, sets the foundation for a sustainable approach to diet.

[00:01:34] Later on in today's episode, we cover what metabolism is in the context of your total daily energy expense. How to estimate your expenditure, which will be useful later for weight management, whether it's possible to change your baseline metabolism, both in the short and long-term. The truth about cardio and its effect on metabolism and fat loss and a more efficient, sustainable way to burn fat.

[00:02:05] Let's start by defining metabolism. Metabolism is basically all the chemical reactions going on inside your body that keep you alive. If you look up the definition on Wikipedia or anywhere else, You'll see three purposes for your metabolism. The first is to convert energy from the food you eat to run cellular processes.

[00:02:30] The second is to convert the stuff that comes from food, into building blocks, for things like proteins to build your muscle. And the third is to eliminate metabolic waste. So this would be through excretion urination, CO2. And the inner workings of this can get very complicated and it could be worth exploring in a future episode.

[00:02:54] But today I really want to keep it at a higher level and talk about the constituents of your metabolism and the various models that are, that exist to define how you might manipulate metabolism. We'll talk about how to track it, how to calculate it. Can you change it? And all of those sorts of things.

[00:03:13] Now, if we want to get objective and start tracking what we mean by metabolism. Total daily energy expenditure or T D E E. And I found a pretty good breakdown of this that you, you can consider an average for most people who are generally active or just mildly active, uh, some of these components change based on your activity level, but generally they hold for the average person, your TD E again, your total daily energy expense.

[00:03:43] Can be broken down into four components. The largest component is your BMR, your basal metabolic rate. And this could comprise roughly two thirds to maybe 70, even 75% of your expenditure. This is just the energy you need to stay alive. This is the energy you would burn. If you were sleeping. The next component of metabolism is the thermic effect of feeding.

[00:04:12] And this is the energy you burn to eat, to digest metabolize and store your food. And that makes up roughly 10%. And some people argue, you can increase that by eating more protein. And, you know, these things are probably true, but. Amount by which you can manipulate. It may not be significant. The next component is neat.

[00:04:33] Non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. That's all the energy you expend throughout the day, doing stuff, not necessarily intentionally like standing, walking yard work, doing your job, fidgeting, typing on the computer. So that's your non-exercise activity thermogenesis that represents roughly 15%. This is the, the one that I think possibly fluctuates most from person to person and even within a single individual, depending on.

[00:05:06] Your circumstances, right? How much sleep you're getting, how much activity you're doing, whether what your job is also, whether you're on a diet or gaining weight. And then the last component, which happens to be the smallest is exercise activity, thermogenesis. And this could be as little as 5% of your metabolism, which you might be thinking, well, that's not very high.

[00:05:27] Is it? Isn't the point of exercise and activity to burn calories? Well, not. And we'll get back to that. That actually brings me to the next topic, which is energy expenditure models. Now just to keep it simple, I'm going to compare what I'll call the traditional model, which is called the additive expenditure model and something proposed by Herman.

[00:05:55] Ponsor called the constrained energy model. And I'm not saying one is right or wrong. They're evidence, there's evidence to support both. And even if the constraint model is. Quote unquote accurate. It has to be interpreted properly. I think people take some of these to the extreme, to make a wild claims and recommendations.

[00:06:16] So if we look at the additive model, this is what I'll call the traditional model. The idea is simply. The more activity you engage in, the more calories you burn and it's linear and it goes up forever. So if you're running two hours a day or you're preparing for the tour de France or Olympic swimming, you're just going to burn tons and tons and tons more calories a day than somebody who's less active or sedentary.

[00:06:44] That's the traditional model. What Herman ponsor. His colleagues have found, and other researchers who have analyzed precisely calories in calories out in many different populations is that perhaps there's a, an adaptation that occurs with higher activity levels. When you go from sedentary to lightly active, to active, the more activity you engage in, the more calories you burn, but then your body starts to adapt your BMS.

[00:07:14] Declines and thus the total calories burns starts to level off. It starts to plateau rather than continuing to increase. If we're to accept this, then the extreme conclusion some people have made is, Ugh, well then I don't even need to exercise because if I exercise more, my body adapts by burning fewer calories and my net calories are the same.

[00:07:38] I just should just sit around all day because it doesn't make it. Well, the problem with that taken to the extreme is it's just that it's the extreme. When you look at the graph, when you look at the model, there's an entire first segment that shows your activity level does correlate with an increase in calories.

[00:07:57] It's just that perhaps doing lots of activity in the form of cardio could be counterproductive because of this adaptation. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that because that conclusion is supported by what we've discovered when it comes to cardio versus strength training, for example.

[00:08:16] So the constraint model is not a license, not to exercise. Now that we've established the objective definition of metabolism that is total daily energy expenditure, which is comprised of several constituents BMI. Thermic effect of feeding non-exercise and exercise activity, thermogenesis, and that perhaps the curve does not increase forever with activity.

[00:08:44] The next thing we want to understand is, well, how do we measure this? How do we calculate our TDE and then continue to measure it so that we know what to do about it in terms of diet, exercise, or any other levers that we can. And the thing about tracking your TDE, your daily expenditure was just simply how many calories you burn every day.

[00:09:07] Is there tends to be an inverse relationship between the convenience of doing so and the accuracy. That is the easier it is. The more convenient it is, the less accurate it is, but the more complicated and advanced the more algorithms and calculations you do, that's great, but that takes a lot of work and it may not be sustained.

[00:09:29] So we're going to talk about three ways to estimate your daily expenditure from the quick and easy, quick and dirty method that is not very accurate to an intermediate way to do it. That's somewhat accurate to vote way that's most accurate, but not necessarily convenient. And then I'm going to talk about an app that I use that takes the high accuracy.

[00:09:52] But also makes it convenient. So you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. We'll talk about that at the end. So starting with a quick and easy approach, the quickest way to estimate your potential calories burned is purely based on body, weight and calories per pound. So let's say you are. 200 pounds.

[00:10:15] The general number range you see is around 15 or 16 calories per pound. This is your total daily expenditure on average for your weight. So if you're 200 pounds and you assume 15 calories per pound, simple math, 3000 calories, or for example, I'm closer to 180. So 180 pounds, times 15. 2,700 calories. Now in reality, my.

[00:10:44] Daily expenditure at the moment is close to 3000 and the day I'm recording this podcast, I weigh only 1 71, cause I just finished a cut. I just started a bulk. So the 15 calories would be way off. And that's because I'm quite a bit more active. I have a higher metabolism. I have more muscle tissue, all these things that take me away from.

[00:11:09] The center portion of the normal curve in the population. So that's why the accuracy could be way off with this approach. But it's, if, if you have never thought about this before, and you're wondering, Hmm, how many calories do I burn every day? Add maintenance. Take your weight, multiply it by 15. Okay. The next.

[00:11:29] Where you get to a more accurate estimate for most people, but it takes a little more work is to use one of the validated formulas based on research. And most of these formulas are named after the researchers who were involved. And I, there are three formulas that I see used most often. Now the nice thing about these is because they're so.

[00:11:50] You can find calculators online, where you just enter the input data, and then it does the calculation for you. So I'm not saying you have to set up a spreadsheet or, or use Mathematica or something to calculate these, but there are three formulas that I wanted to mention. One is the revised Harris Benedict.

[00:12:09] This uses your gender height, weight, age, and activity level to determine your. TD E and I want to take a quick tangent and talk about this activity level. The big challenge with activity level. They don't decouple deliberate bouts of activity, like going to the gym and lifting heavy five days a week from all the other activity people perform.

[00:12:37] So for example, if you lift heavy and then you sit on your ass all day at a desk job, the rest of the time, another person never goes to the gym, but they're a construction worker who does lots of yard work and chops, whatever. Who has a higher activity level. That's the challenge. So if you're going to use one of these calculators, Look at how they define activity and probably be a little bit conservative just to make sure that you underestimate your expenditure.

[00:13:05] And then there are a couple others. There's the Mifflin St. Jor I think is how you pronounce it, which I think is more accurate than the Harris Bennett Benedict. And you don't have to know your body fat percentage. If you do know your body fat percentage, I would recommend the catch McArdle formula. I will mention these in the show notes.

[00:13:27] But you can go online and Google calculate TDE, and you'll find all these calculators. And most of these websites will say what's recommended. Also be aware to take any recommendations as to what calories and macronutrients you should use to gain or lose weight from those calculators, because they may have very different philosophies than what we're trying to achieve here on this podcast.

[00:13:52] Then we get to the most accurate approach. To collect real data on yourself. And there's two types of data we need, we need our food coming in and we need our wait. The best way to do this as it was some sort of food logger, usually an app where you can log your food every day and figure out how many calories you're eating.

[00:14:14] And then you use a scale every day, weigh yourself in the morning after you've gone to the bathroom with minimal clothing, and then you use a smooth version of your weight, something like a seven day. After about, I would say 14 days, you will have determined how your weight is changing relative to the calories you're eating.

[00:14:38] And that'll tell you how close you are to maintenance. So if you're somebody who has been roughly the same weight for months and months and more. And you're eating fairly consistently. You start measuring that food and you continue weighing yourself and you confirm, yeah, I'm not changing my weight, but I'm eating 2,400 calories a day and I weigh 180 pounds.

[00:15:00] Well, there, you know, you have a data point that tells you that your metabolism is somewhat lower than what these calculators might produce. Conversely, it might be much higher, but the point is it's individually. Now you might say, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. Well, we're going to talk in the next episode about diet and in the following episode about systems to track things on autopilot.

[00:15:23] I am going to be recommending that you log food and weigh yourself daily, at least for a period, if nothing else, then to learn about yourself and to learn about the calorie content and density of foods. But this brings me to what I mentioned earlier, that there are food bloggers that do some of these for.

[00:15:44] But there's only one that I found it's called macro factor and it's by the guys at stronger by science. I have no affiliation with them. They don't even do affiliate links. There's no program or sponsorship with them. I just love the app. I use it every day. And the best thing about it is that it's an adherence.

[00:16:05] It doesn't penalize you for going over or under your calories and macros like many other tools do, but the best part about it is it can calculate your TD E based on some sophisticated algorithms that they've worked out that account for many of these factors and more things like body fat things like are you lifting and doing cardio and can tell you within a few short weeks, roughly what your expenditure is, and then adjust your food plan.

[00:16:32] Going forward week after week to hit your target. And we're not talking about diet today, but I wanted to mention the app because of its ability to calculate for you, your individual TDE based on your food. And. Without you having to do any calculations. All right. We've covered what metabolism is the different models of metabolism and how to calculate it.

[00:16:59] So the next question you might be thinking is, okay, great. That that'll come in handy for diet, but can I actually change my metabolism? Can I change the energy outside meaningfully? I'd like you to ponder something. Think about the calculators we talked about and how most of those calculators. Ask for things like age, gender, height, and weight.

[00:17:19] And the reason they do that is because those factors tend to be correlated with body fat percentage. And it turns out that fat free mass is the strongest explanatory predictor of metabolism. Now, what is fat free? Mass fat free mass is just everything that's not fat in your body, which will be things like Oregon's.

[00:17:41] But more importantly, it includes your muscle tissue. And your bones. Ah, we're going to start to connect the dots here. How can we increase muscle tissue and bone? Resistance training. And we're going to hammer home this message time and again, on this podcast by resistance training, especially with a focus on strength so that you can increase muscle mass and bone density.

[00:18:07] You thus increase your fat free mass and that results in a higher metallic. If you were to take two people that weighed the same, let's say two men that weighed 285 pounds, both six foot eight, but one had significantly lower body fat. Let's say the first person is in the 30% range of body fat and has maybe 20% muscle.

[00:18:34] The second person is down near 10% with 60 something percent. The second person is going to have a higher metabolism by virtue of the extra muscle mass. And you've probably heard muscle is more expensive than fat muscle tissue requires more calories and fat tissue, and it goes beyond just the tissue itself.

[00:18:54] Some people. We'll say, oh, but I've heard it's very few calories per day, extra from muscle versus a pound of fat. And that might be true, but there are other systemic effects of having the extra muscle tissue that also lead to additional calories burned. And we can get into details behind the science, perhaps in another episode, some really cool stuff.

[00:19:15] That's been discovered even in just the last year or so, but suffice it to say it's well understood that a higher fat free mass, which occurs because you have more muscle higher bone density from resistance training will give you a higher metallic. So the best way to do that is through strength, training, the focus, the very focus of this podcast.

[00:19:37] Now, what are some other things you could do to increase your metabolism on a day-to-day level? Because I look at strength and resistance training as the long-term way to increase your overall metabolism, but in the short term, there's some other things you can do. Generally, you're going to burn more calories with more activity.

[00:19:54] Now, many of us can't really help what we're doing for our jobs. You know, if we're working a desk job, If we're sitting behind a desk all day, but we can walk more. We can take a few more walks, take, take a walk after lunch, take a walk after dinner for half an hour, get a couple miles in maybe five, 6,000 more steps for the day than you normally do.

[00:20:13] That's going to burn some more calories. And if you develop a habit of doing that, you might find you enjoy it, and it helps take the edge off of your need to cut your calories on the diets. Also your weight affects your metabolism. When you, if you've lost weight, you're probably going to have a slightly lower metabolism.

[00:20:31] Also things like eating more meals. When you're gaining, when you're bulking, you might end up eating an extra meal or two every day. You're, you're eating more. You're digesting more, you're eating more protein, you're eating more frequently. All of those things can affect your thermic effect of feeding your neat, those.

[00:20:49] The challenge is that metabolism fluctuates constantly. I've seen in my own tracking, my metabolism fluctuate between 2300 and almost 3000 calories just in the last three months or so. And I can't always necessarily explain why, well, what about cardio? I go to the gym and I hit the treadmill. I jog for half an hour, 45 minutes.

[00:21:16] I do the elliptical machine. I swim. What's the problem with lots of medium intensity cardio. Doesn't that burn a lot of calories? Well, here's the problem with too much cardio. And when I say too much, there's a F there's a balance. I'm not one of those hardliners that says you can't do any cardio at all, because it completely interferes with your strength training.

[00:21:36] No, I think there's a balance. I think it is okay to do some cardio. And I think you have to be smart about it, both in terms. What and when, but too much cardio, we're talking 3, 4, 5 days a week, half an hour to an hour or more of medium intensity cardio, where you are doing as much cardio as you are lifting, or perhaps even more, it sends a signal to the body to do two things.

[00:22:04] First, it tells your body to become more efficient, to conserve energy. And it does that by reducing your metabolism. And this is actually. The part that is supported by Herman pantsers constraint, energy model that shows as you, as your activity level goes quite a bit higher, your body starts to adapt and down-regulate parts of your metabolism and thus your overall calorie burn, doesn't go up very high.

[00:22:29] And this is why you see folks. Only do cardio as a form of exercise, often get into a hamster wheel of having to do more and more, eat less and less, not really lose weight, or even if you lose weight, you don't have much muscle and you become. What they call skinny fat, which is the second part of this in that doing too much cardio actually inhibits muscle growth, or even reduces or cannibalizes muscle tissue in the quest to become efficient because of a signal you're sending your body.

[00:23:03] Now it does interfere to some extent with lifting and that's a more nuanced topic for another time, but the take home message here is that some cardio is okay. And you have to be smart about it. For example, when I lift the forms of cardio, I like to use are walking. I think walking is awesome because it doesn't affect your joints.

[00:23:23] It doesn't interfere with recovery, between lifting sessions. You can enjoy nature if you're walking outside and it still burns a bunch of calories and it takes the edge off of your dieting. But other forms of cardio, I like occasionally would be some forms of high intensity interval. Like Tabata sprints are running shuttle runs and sled pushes sled poles, sled, drags, but re you want to limit the total amount of cardio time-wise to something like a quarter to half of your lifting time.

[00:23:53] Not really including things like walking again, walking or very easygoing biking, you could probably do. A lot of it, and it wouldn't interfere with your, if we piece all of this together, we get a good picture of maybe a more optimal way to burn fat. The most immediate route to fat loss is through your diet.

[00:24:13] We're talking about reducing fat, but as we know, reducing fat will take some muscle with it. So there's a smart approach to doing that. And we'll be talking about that in the next episode. The longterm sustainable route to fat loss is like we mentioned before, add muscle. And to do that, you have to do resistance training the way I've heard it said, which I really like is cardio burns, fat while exercising muscle burns fat while you're not exercising more lean tissue equals a higher metabolism, which makes it easier to lose weight later on.

[00:24:51] Or avoid getting fat while still eating more calories. And that is why I love strength training. That is why we're going to hammer that message home time. And again, the importance of adding lean mass to your body, because it helps your metabolism helps you control your diet, helps with fat loss. It's a more sustainable approach.

[00:25:10] And it's a lot of fun. All right, last but not least, I'm introducing a new segment today called the internet. Gets it wrong again. Where I look at the kind of information you get from a Google search when you're just trying to get a simple question answered and Google spits out tons of information that you have to sift through.

[00:25:28] Some of which is right, but most of which is not so right. For example, if you search for ways to increase my metabolism, you'll find several claims that just are not supported by the evidence or if they are they're so insignificant, they're not worth your. Now, the first claim is that metabolism just goes down when you get old and there's not much you can do about it.

[00:25:53] And that is just not true. The reason metabolism decreases as you age comes back to fat, free mass. As you age, you lose muscle mass and bone density. Therefore the lower fat free mass results in a lower metabolism. It's not just because of age. If you can counteract or increase your muscle tissue or bone density.

[00:26:14] As we've discussed multiple times through resistance training, then you can offset this idea that your metabolism declines with age. The second claim is about all these magic foods that can speed up your metabolism. I've seen green tea, chili peppers, even just eating more. We'll increase my metabolism.

[00:26:35] Now, now there might be a little kernel of truth to those in that they affect your digestion and they might burn a few extra calories here or there, but it really is insignificant and it's not worth deliberately going out of your way to try to eat more chili peppers, just to increase your. Just eat a good diet and you'll be fine.

[00:26:55] And the third claim is about using meal. Timing, eating early, eating late skipping meals to jumpstart, weight loss. At the end of the day, the calendar. Inside of the equation comes down to just that calories. And any attempt to manipulate that at the end of the day is measured in terms of calories. So stop trying to use quirky, weird ways to manipulate how and when to eat just in the interest of jump-starting your weight.

[00:27:25] I hope you enjoyed this examination of metabolism and its relationship with cardio fat loss and resistance training. And you're excited to use this information as we delve into diet in episode five, then in episode six, we'll talk about the systems and habits you can put in place to put your fitness and diet on auto.

[00:27:48] If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear in future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook. All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.

---

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Ep 3: Why is Strength so Important?

Today’s episode is all about the “S” word—STRENGTH. What is it, why is it important, and how to get it.

If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s a safe bet that you have some sort of fitness related goal. You want to improve yourself physically in some way: build muscle, burn fat, get lean, get strong, improve athletic performance, look good in a bathing suit, or even improve mobility, flexibility, or balance.

What if there is one attribute above all others that permeates each of these attributes of fitness—that if you just focus on this attribute for a while as your top priority, it will translate to improvements in all those other attributes?

Well you’re in luck, and if I haven’t made it painfully obvious by the title and intro of this episode, that one fitness attribute is…strength!

In today’s episode, we cover:

• What do we mean by strength?

• Why is strength the most important fitness attribute?

• Assuming strength is so important, how do you get it?

RELATED LINKS

• Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

• The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40

• The Fitness Wiki

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

👨‍💻 HOSTED BY

• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

👏 ENJOY THE SHOW? 

• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:31] Welcome to episode three of Wits & Weights. Today's episode is all about the S word strength. What is it? Why is it important and how to get it? If you're listening to this podcast, it's a safe bet that you have some sort of fitness related goal that is you want to improve yourself physically in some way, build muscle burn fat, get lean, get strong, improve athletic performance.

[00:00:59] Look good in a bathing suit. Or even improve mobility, flexibility, or. What if I told you there is one attribute above all others that permeates each of these fitness attributes, that if you just focus on this attribute for awhile as your top priority, it will translate to improvements in all the others while you're in luck.

[00:01:22] And if I haven't made it painfully obvious by the title and intro of this episode, that one fitness attribute is strength. In today's episode, we cover, what do we mean by. Why is strength the most important fitness attribute and assuming it's so important, how do you get it? Let's start by defining strength.

[00:01:44] Although 10 people might give 10 different answers. The definition we're concerned with is the production of force against. We're not concerned with power speed, your ability to do something without getting tired or your ability to do something quickly. Only your ability to overcome a force or load measured by absolute physical.

[00:02:08] Absolute strength is measured simply by the amount of force you can produce. As indicated by the weight you can lift. This could be measured by your one repetition, maximum, or one RM on a barbell movement. Like the squat bench press or deadlift, or it could be measured on other movements like the overhead press, the barbell row, or any number of exercises across multiple numbers of repetitions weather, three, five.

[00:02:37] If you're following a program where you perform three sets of five, you can measure strength by your maximum three by five weight. Once more strength is simply your ability to exert force on an object. And we'll measure that by the weight. Having to find strength. The next question is why is strength relevant in starting strength?

[00:03:00] Mark Rippetoe writes quote, physical strength is the most important thing in life. Our strength, more than any other thing, we possess still determines the quality and quantity of our time. Here in these bodies, a weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong and. Andy baker wrote that quote strength is foundational to a better life.

[00:03:24] There is no instance in life or sport where stronger isn't better and quote, these may sound like exaggerations, but my personal experience has shown me time. And again, that strength is so much more important than people think. Once you have it, you realize the physical and mental doors and opens, let alone vastly improving your health, fitness, and lunch.

[00:03:47] Unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called fitness programs from CrossFit to bootcamps, to orange theory, to P90X, and many others attempt to generalize across multiple fitness attributes without focusing on any one. In particular, for example, CrossFit claims to improve 10 attributes, cardiovascular and respiratory endurance, stamina strength, flexible.

[00:04:15] Power speed coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Yet the physical reality is that all of these attributes have a common baseline in stress. Although many of these programs recognize this fact in their descriptions and guides, they don't prioritize strength above all else. I personally was stuck in this hamster wheel with a generalized fitness approach for many years when I finally prioritized strength, that is my ability to handle greater and greater loads on the bar.

[00:04:47] Everything else related to fitness became easier and progressed more. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the benefits of strength training? For many, it's getting big or jacked, but building mass, like that takes hard work and dedication over a very extended period. In fact, strength has a cornucopia of benefits that almost make it seem like a magical elixir.

[00:05:13] And for many who have worked to gain strength, that's not too far from the. In the barbell prescription strength training for life after 40 Jonathan Sullivan wrote that quote, strength training can slow arrest or even reverse many of the degenerative effects of aging, loss of muscle and strength, brittle bones, floppy ligaments, dysfunctional joints, and the decline of mobility and balance and quote.

[00:05:40] Now that sounds like the fountain of youth. According to the fitness Wiki, here are 10 more benefits of building. Improved ability to manipulate or move objects in day-to-day life, including yourself increased bone density, reduced risk of osteoporosis, improve balance, and reduce risk of falls. Reduce symptoms of arthritis, back pain, obesity, heart disease, depression, and diabetes.

[00:06:08] It can improve cognitive ability in older adults. It can improve blood pressure triglycerides. HDL cholesterol can reduce the risk of cancer. Broadly reduces the risk of injury can help maintain joint flexibility and improved ability to control weight gain through increased calorie. For athletes, strength can correct.

[00:06:31] Muscular imbalances, prevent injury, increase power or explosiveness and increase muscular endurance. Whoa, what a list I'm assuming you're now completely convinced that getting stronger is probably a wonderful idea, which brings us to the final question. How do we build strength? It really comes down to lift weights.

[00:06:56] Eat. Lift weights, eat and sleep. Repeat that's it. But I would be doing you a disservice if I left it at that, because as we know, a lot of things can be simple, but they're not necessarily easy. There are many roads that lead to the same destination, some more serpentine than others. And we are going to pay for ourselves the most efficient road we can to get to that destination based on.

[00:07:23] The decades of experience, personal anecdotes, research, knowledge and outcomes. We've seen whether it's among powerlifters, bodybuilders, or everyday folks like you and me who have been successful doing this at a high level, becoming stronger requires a few key elements, heavy resistance training with sufficient frequency and recovery.

[00:07:49] That includes. Eating enough food to create what we call an anabolic environment and eating enough protein to provide sufficient material to build muscle. Let's cover each of these in detail, we'll start with resistance training. There are many strength building programs out there. Some are much more optimal than others.

[00:08:14] And generally, if you pick one of them, you work hard, you stick to it. You'll make much more progress than someone who jumps around from program to program or even worse. Does. In episode two, we talked about how to choose a strength training program. So if you didn't listen to that episode, go back, revisit it, choose a program and start training.

[00:08:39] We established that the optimal approach is one that uses barbells and compound lifts. Namely the squat, deadlift and bench press with the addition of the overhead press and even power clean or barbell rows in some. The conclusion is that you must train heavy with sufficient frequency to build strength by heavy.

[00:09:04] I mean, the load on the bar is high enough to drive the appropriate stress on your body to put it objectively when you're a rank novice following a linear progression, that would be heavier than last time by some meaningful amount, whether that's two and a half, five or 10 more. This is why we use barbells and compound lifts.

[00:09:27] Let's reiterate that barbells allow you to train your entire physical system in a full range of motion with multiple joints recruiting, significant muscle mass. It aligns with the neuromuscular functional reality of our human anatomy, both skeletal and. Barbells let you control the weight over time.

[00:09:50] Whereas machines are the ones controlling you barbells also allow you to scale from very light, to very heavy in an efficient, consistent way. Therefore you can train heavy and progress. Also by heavy, I mean, not so heavy that you can't use proper form and control the movement as Greg knuckles puts it, quote, you should use something between the heaviest weight that you feel very comfortable and confident with and about 15% less than that.

[00:10:21] And if you choose a program like starting strength or the big three routine, you'll see that sets of five are a cornerstone of effective beginner strength. The strength spectrum is generally considered between one and eight reps, where five is the sweet spot for new lifters. And here's why let's say you did only singles the, so those are sets of just one rep you would be required to recruit the maximum force possible for the movement, fully engaging your neuromuscular system, which would provide an excellent stimulus for strength.

[00:10:58] But the volume perhaps is too low. On the other hand. Sets of say eight and above require much more muscular endurance because of the duration and cardiovascular requirements sets of five are a good compromise for novice. To stimulate an increase in strength while maintaining good form consistency, muscular coordination, and still benefit from multiple hard reps from an endurance perspective.

[00:11:26] If you followed my advice in episode two and started. You'll find soon enough, if you haven't already that sets a five can be very hard, especially the last few reps of the last few sets, but that's a good sign that you're applying a stimulus that your body has never experienced before. It teaches you how to do hard things.

[00:11:49] One of the realities you'll come to value over the years. And I say this from experience. Now when you're training this hard, you need time to recover before hitting those same muscles. Again, newer lifters can train more often because they recover quickly as quickly as 48 hours, even for the leg muscles.

[00:12:11] Workout sessions are shorter because rest periods are shorter when you were a newer lifter, as you get stronger, or as they say closer to your genetic potential over months and years, you'll place more stress on the body in each session requiring longer recipes. Thus longer workout sessions and more recovery between sessions.

[00:12:33] At that point, you transitioned from a beginner three days per week, full body style program to either a modified intensity program with longer sessions or something like a four or five day body parts split. Now, one of the keys to recovery, when you are resistance training is to avoid over. And that is when your performance can't recover sufficiently to enable the appropriate adaptation.

[00:13:02] And this leads to much harder and ineffective workouts, which then just sabotages your ability to recover and adapt. Lastly, you have to get sufficient and high quality. And for many, that means not being on a screen till right before bed and getting at least seven or eight hours of sleep per night, which may sound like an insane requirement for busy working professionals based on your habits, but is something that will pay off big time when it comes to recovery between lifting stuff.

[00:13:34] So that's resistance training. That is how we build strength in the gym. And we'll be talking about many more details behind lifting, training, rest periods, and so on in future episodes. But the next thing I want to talk about is getting enough food and getting enough protein. Now, maybe you didn't think we would talk about diet today and it's true.

[00:13:56] Today's episode, isn't the diet episode, but it's a fact that. Your body's a system and building strength requires lifting combined with the right kind of environment from a food perspective so that you're lifting actually pays off. So you have to eat enough food. It's a fact of biology that to build muscle, you must be in a caloric surplus, even if you're a brand new lifter, who's able to build muscle while losing.

[00:14:27] A caloric surplus is simply taking in more energy through your diet than your body burns each day. The easiest way to tell if you're doing this is by the weight on the scale. If you're gaining weight each week, you're headed in the right direction for packing on muscle and taking advantage of that new training program of yours that you're working so hard at.

[00:14:49] Let me go on a little. If you think you can't eat enough or gain weight, I want you to get out of your head. All the silly nonsense about being a quote, hard gainer or having any quote, fast metabolism. These aren't real, they're just excuses to avoid eating enough. If you are a human being. Your energy system is ruled by the law of energy balance.

[00:15:13] We'll get into much more detail on this in the next episode, which will be an exciting one full of useful information and plenty of myth-busting. But for now, just accept the fact that if you start training hard to build strength, you must eat enough to be in a caloric surplus. No excuses. Part of eating enough is also making sure you get enough protein.

[00:15:35] Even if you're eating enough calories, you'll need a sufficient amount of protein within those calories, they can't be all fat or carbs. Protein is required for muscle protein synthesis or put simply gaining muscle mass. Now how much protein is enough? This has always been the. And the subject has been exhaustively researched in recent years.

[00:15:56] The consensus seems to be that around 0.8 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight is a good target with no need to go much higher than 1.3 grams per pound. Despite all the bro science out there suggesting that you need hundreds of grams of protein per day. I personally shoot for one gram per pound each day.

[00:16:20] It's a nice round number. And if you fall short, you're still well in the ballpark. What does this look like for a 200 pound man? That's 200 grams of protein per day for a 150 pound woman. That's 150 grams. Now this might sound like a lot. This might be hard if you are not using. So stay tuned for our upcoming episode on diet and nutrition, where I break down a plan of action and some ideas for getting sufficient protein.

[00:16:48] But for now, look for ways to get closer to this target of 0.8 to one gram per pound, starting with things like. Eggs and dairy. All of this leads me to a concept called the stress recovery adaptation model, stress recovery adaptation, which neatly captures much of what we just talked about. First, you apply a new stress to your body with very heavy weight.

[00:17:17] At moderately low reps, we're talking the F one to eight rep range, but primarily around five for most of the effective beginner programs. Second, you give yourself enough time to recover. By resting, sleeping enough, eating enough and getting enough protein. Finally, your body then adapts as a protective survival mechanism to handle a slightly higher level of stress.

[00:17:42] Next time, next time you go to the gym, you have a new baseline and you should be able to lift a little more weight, and it does this by increasing your neuromuscular strength and muscle size, but only if you gave it enough fuel rest and sleep to. Stress recovery adaptation, the magical formula to building strength.

[00:18:05] All it requires of you is hard work, dedication, and consistency. Now here's a bonus tip. Even if your goal is just to have a better physique, just to look. You must have a baseline of strength to grow big dense muscles and support your ability to handle heavy enough high rep exercises. If, and when you Wade into the bodybuilding and hypertrophy world, you can't just jump in and start doing hypertrophy in the eight to 12 rep range and hope to gain much muscle mass.

[00:18:40] You have to lift heavy and gain strength. Let's recap, today's episode, we covered a lot of material, but I think it's important to understand deeply that which might become the foundation of your health and fitness for the rest of your life. My goal in this podcast is to help you become a highly educated, informed consumer and practitioner, an independent thinker and beholden to so-called fitness experts.

[00:19:09] Today, we talked about what we mean by strict. From a fitness perspective, why it's critical to the very essence of your health and all fitness attributes and how you can achieve greater strength through resistance training, eating enough food, getting enough protein and sufficient recovery to exploit the stress recovery adaptation model inherent in our biology.

[00:19:35] In our next episode, we'll talk about cardio fat loss and Metabo. Then episode five, we'll discuss how to approach your diet without going on a diet. We'll dive into a lot of the things we discussed here regarding calories and protein at a much deeper level and how you can put it into practice. And in episode six, we talk about developing systems and habits to put your fitness on auto-pay.

[00:20:01] If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear on future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook. All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.

---

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Get notified of new episodes. Use your favorite podcast app or one of the buttons below. Then hit “Subscribe” or “Follow” and you’re good to go!

Ep 2: How to Choose a Strength Training Program

This is the episode where we lay out our fitness philosophy and give you steps to take action right away.

Strength training is by far the most effective way to increase muscle mass, boost your metabolism, and improve your health in more ways than you can imagine, from mobility, balance, and flexibility to reduced risk of metabolic disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and injury. It also tests you physically and mentally because it’s hard—one of the best reasons for doing it!

Today is about getting you moving on a training program right away.

We will definitely cover some basic principles of strength training and muscle building, but we’ll save a deep dive into all things strength-related for the next episode, where we’ll examine in great detail WHY strength and resistance training are so important.

But today is all about ACTION. Getting you moving and lifting right away. No excuses.

RELATED LINKS

• Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training

• Greg Nuckols - 28 Free Programs

• Andy Morgan - The Big 3 Routine

• Barbell Logic "Gym Shorts" YouTube playlist

• The Fitness Wiki

• MyoTape Body Measure Tape

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

• 👉 If you have any questions, just click here.

👨‍💻 HOSTED BY

• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

👏 ENJOY THE SHOW? 

• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

---

Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape, and in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.

[00:00:31] Welcome to episode two of Wits & Weights. This is the episode where we lay out our fitness philosophy and give you steps to take action right away. Strength training is by far the most effective way to increase muscle mass boost your metabolism and improve your health in more ways than you can imagine.

[00:00:50] From mobility, balance and flexibility to reduce risk of metabolic disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It also tests you physically and mentally, because it's hard and that's one of the best reasons for doing it. Today's about getting you moving on a training program right away. We'll definitely cover some basic principles of strength, training, and muscle building, but we're going to save a deep dive into all things, strength related for the next episode, where we'll examine in great detail, why strength and resistance training are so.

[00:01:28] But today is all about action. Getting you moving and lifting right away. No excuses. In today's episode, we cover strength, training lingo. We'll define key terms. So you can speak the language, the importance of training with a program instead of just exercising the requirements to train effectively for strength, the one category of lifting that meets all of those requirements and overview of the movements.

[00:01:55] You'll be. Choosing a program and measuring progress. And finally what to do next to get started this week. First, let's take a moment to define some terms. I'm not going to do this every episode, of course, but I think it's important to get familiar with what people mean when they say certain things in this universe, which can be kind of strange if you've never been in it before.

[00:02:23] So the first thing we're going to define is. Strength is simply the ability to exert force on an object. And for our purposes, strength can be measured by how much weight. That's it. If you're doing a squat, how much weight is on the barbell that measures your strength? The next term is hypertrophy. And I'm defining this early because I know you're going to want to hear about it.

[00:02:50] Uh, and most people getting into strain, training programs, you know, they just want to get big and muscular or they want to increase their muscle mass and hypertrophy is the increase in muscle mass due to. Muscle cell size or quantity increase, but here's a thing. Hypertrophy comes with strength. You don't need to separate the two until you're an immediate, intermediate or advanced lifter.

[00:03:16] And all you need to focus on now is to get stronger. You need to get bigger, but to get bigger, you need to get stronger. Thus, we focus on. Don't worry about hypertrophy. Worrying about hypertrophy takes you down a dark path of tons of exercise, variety, and all sorts of movements that you really don't need early on when you're just trying to build strength.

[00:03:43] The next definition is intensity intensity for our purposes is the weight or load. That's it, it's not how hard you're working or the reps you have left in the tank, or whether you're getting in a good sweat or how sore you are. It's just the weight on the bar. Let's talk about reps and sets and you're probably familiar with these concepts.

[00:04:09] Most people are, but let's just define them. A rep is a repetition or the number of times doing a complete movement. So, if you're doing deadlifts, how many times do you lift the bar off the ground and set it back down? That's a rep. Sets are the number of consecutive reps before taking a rest period. So if we go with that deadlift, if you do one deadlift, you set the bar down, you take a breath, you do another set the bar down, take a breath, and you do this five times and then you stop.

[00:04:46] That's a set of five. However, if you do a deadlift, set it down and you take 15 breaths and then do it again. I would consider those two separate sets of one rep. Now there's nomenclature. When it comes to sets and reps, that gets a little bit confusing for the most part, we're going to use the scheme of sets times reps.

[00:05:12] So if you do three sets of five reps, each we're going to say three by five and that's three X five. If you write it out. So three by five, if you see three by five, three sets of five, the next thing I wanted to find is a rest or rest period. And this is simply the time spent resting between sets. So that you can recover for the next set.

[00:05:39] So when, back to my deadlift example, if you did a set of five and you put the bar down and then you rested for one minute or three minutes or 10 minutes, that's your rest period. The next term, within the last two terms, I want to define our exercise and. Exercise can be one of two things. It can either be the movement itself.

[00:06:07] The back squat is an exercise or physical activity done for its own sake. So by just playing football, you're exercising or running, you're exercising or doing back squats, your exercise. Training on the other hand is physical activity or exercise to achieve a goal. And his goal could be strength. As in the weight on the bar keeps going up.

[00:06:35] It could be physique or aesthetics for some people, it could be performance. If you're. Regardless, you have a goal and then you have to have a plan to get there. And that's the way we are going to operate on this podcast and how I'd like you to operate in your life when you try to build muscle and get stronger and fitter as we move forward.

[00:06:56] Now, the question is, why should you follow a program or training versus random exercise? It really comes down to long-term sustainability and motivation, which is the number one reason people stick to or abandon a particular type of training or diet. If you have a structured plan to follow with specific days of the week, exercises , sets, reps and intensity, it's a lot easier to get motivated to go in the next day and execute you, preplan your workouts, you track your progress. You align all of these with your training goal, which in our case early on will simply be linear progression of weight on the bar and all of these things. They save you a ton of time and they eliminate excuses versus just randomly going to the gym.

[00:07:56] If we want to train for strength, we have to establish the requirements for our training program. What exactly are our parameters? What are our constraints? Because if we don't have those, then we're open to a whole world of possible selection. Do we use dumbbells? Do we use Bosu balls? Do we use yoga? Do we use high intensity interval training?

[00:08:24] What, what do we do exactly? So let's establish five requirements for an effective strength training program. The first is going to be intensity, as we said before, intensity is weighton the bar. So an effective training program will allow us to lift as much weight as possible. The second is efficiency.

[00:08:48] We're busy. We don't have time to go to the gym twice a day, six times a week, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding encyclopedia, or like somebody competing for a powerlifting competition. We want to maximize our time in the. Train the most amount of muscle using the fewest number of lifts. The third requirement for an effective strength training program is progression.

[00:09:16] We need to be able to measure strength and progress objectively, session to session week to week, but also continue to increase over time. There are many exercises and movements that do not allow you to increase the weight beyond a few sessions they stall out, or it just doesn't make sense based on the movement and the muscles being recruited.

[00:09:42] So it has to be scaled. You have to be able to go from extremely light for somebody who may not be very strong or an older person, somebody who's physically limited all the way to very, very heavy using the same movement without changing the movement. The fourth criteria is safety. We want to avoid extreme high impact high stress type.

[00:10:09] And we'd like to take advantage of the range of motion that is natural to our anatomy, the longest range of motion that our body permits. This is a safe way to exercise and build strength. And finally, The last criteria is recovery. We need a program that allows us to recover so that we can continue to progress.

[00:10:34] And recovery means eating enough, sleeping enough and minimizing stress, which brings us back to what is the most appropriate type of exercise type of equipment that satisfies all of these requirements. And the answer is compound. Put simply a compound lift is a lift that involves more than one joint as opposed to a single joint movement.

[00:11:02] For example, when you do a barbell curl, you're only bending at your elbow. It's a single joint movement. In contrast, when you're doing a back squat, you're bending at the knees and the hips you're bending at the ankles. So it involves multiple genes. Compound lifts like these with barbells satisfy all five criteria.

[00:11:24] We mentioned earlier, let's go through them one by one intensity barbells by far, allow you to lift the heaviest. What about efficiency compound lifts because they involve multiple joints. They recruit many different muscles. Therefore you can minimize the number of exercises, reduce the exercise, variety, keep things simple and thus get through your workout much more quickly, fewer times per week and satisfy the efficiency.

[00:11:59] Next we have progression with barbells and compound lifts. We can continue to add weight for a very long time. We're going to use something called linear progress. We're the only thing you change from session to session is the weight on the bar and barbells are highly scalable. You can go from a, an empty barbell or even an empty lighter version of a barbell all the way up till you start adding weight.

[00:12:29] And then you can continue to add weight with the simple use of plates. The fourth criteria is safety and barbells. Really stand out here because with barbells, you can move in a full range of motion when you're doing a compound lift without undue stress on your joints. If you're doing it properly and with equipment like bar collars pins in the rack spot or on.

[00:12:55] You can have additional safety in the event of a failed rep, such as on a bench press. And of course, failed reps is something we want to avoid, but if, and when they happen, you want it to be safe and finally recovery, heavy lifting. Means that you only need to work out two or three days per week as a new lifter.

[00:13:17] And it gives you plenty of time between sessions to eat and sleep enough as opposed to doing five or six days a week of lots and lots of accessory or isolation exercises. It doesn't add undue stress like running or other quote unquote intense exercise. The next thing you might be asking is what if I don't have access to barbells and power racks, you're telling me I needed to do barbell lifts, but my gym only has machines and cardio equipment.

[00:13:47] My answer would simply be, get access right away. However you can, and you have a few options for this. So this, this should not be an excuse because barbell lifts are the way to go for maximum strength, gains and efficiency and all the other criteria we talked about. Your first option is to find the closest gym that does have barbells and power racks.

[00:14:11] And we'll let you deadlift, even if it's just a commercial gym, find one. The next option is to find a more specialized gym like power powerlifting, bodybuilding style, starting strength, gym that is geared toward clients like yourself who want that equipment. The third option, and this I highly recommend.

[00:14:34] Is to just buy a power rack, barbell and plates. However you can hustle. Look for sale. Go to the Facebook marketplace or Craigslist. That's how I got my first barbell in 40 fives is from a kid who graduated college. He no longer needed his equipment. Bought it from him, met him in a parking lot. It was cheap.

[00:14:55] Good deal. Good equipment. Talk to your friends, look for gyms going out of business, man. There's CrossFit gyms going out of business left and right, unfortunately, but during COVID, that's obviously an opportunity for you to find equipment. And then the other option is to mooch off of a friend who has their own home gym and buy them a bottle of whiskey.

[00:15:16] You've got to have that basic equipment to get started, what we will not be doing. And you do not have to worry about on any of these programs. Things like kettlebells medicine or Bosu balls, fixed plane, weight machines, you know, the kind in the gym where you sit down high intensity interval training, medium intensity, cardio, like running, or really any other cardio initially, other than brisk walking, if you love to do any of these things.

[00:15:47] Sorry, you want to not do them during the novice phase here and focus just on lifting. You can incorporate them later for fun, or if you have specific goals, but any cardio you do now will likely interfere with your ability to recover. And we want to focus on one goal at a time. And then later on, we can pull in sled pushes or things like that, that you might just enjoy sports and such.

[00:16:13] Now that we've established that. The big compound lifts with barbells are the most effective way to go for a strength training program. What do we do with those? What kind of movements are we talking about? And what we're going to examine now is what we call the big four. The big four movements are the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, and the press, which some people call the overhead press or the shoulder press.

[00:16:45] And we will just call the. Now you'll find a lot of programs, leave out the press and focus only on what they call the big three squat deadlift bench press, which are found in powerlifting competitions, but the overhead press, the press is in my opinion, an elegant, beautiful, technical exercise. You can tell I'm passionate about it, and it's superb for developing upper body strength.

[00:17:14] As well as things like balance and awareness, it's not just a shoulder exercise. Like people think it recruits lots of muscle mass from head to toe, but it can be a fickle themed to progress. So it teaches you resilience, precision timing, how to tackle hard things. If you can build to a one times body weight press, you're pretty darn strong.

[00:17:43] Programs like starting strength also incorporate a fifth big lift, the power clean. This is an Olympic lift, which is an explosive dynamic pulling movement that you can alternate with deadlifts to keep progressing. And you'll learn about these lifts in greater detail. Once you dive into the program you choose to go with.

[00:18:05] Now, we have to use correct form to avoid injury and optimize. Your results and your progress. There's so much misinformation out there about whether weightlifting or lifting is safe or not. And it usually comes down to people just not using correct form. And in my opinion, you want to treat this like a skill every time you do the movement, every warmup.

[00:18:30] Treat it like a skill that you're constantly refining and getting better at. There are many ways to improve your form. And I want to focus on this just for a minute before we talk about choosing a program, because I think it's that. The first thing you can do is start to read definitive guides on each of the movements.

[00:18:49] I would recommend something like starting strength by mark Rippetoe, which in my opinion has the most exhaustive, detailed explanation of each of the lifts. The explanation of the low bar back squat itself is probably 30 or 40 pages long. And for that very reason, you should seek it out. There are other guides online.

[00:19:11] Andy Morgan's ripped body website, I think has some good definitive guides on the big three. You can watch form videos. Go to YouTube places like barbell logic. Another way to improve form as you start training is to video all of your lifts and then watch them back yourself and compare them to high quality examples, whether they're online or in a book or even a written description, and just continue to find and be your own worst critic, find where you can.

[00:19:42] You can also post your videos online and get what's called a form. Check my warning. There is just to be very careful where you post them. For example, Reddit, although an awesome place for most communities and discussions, isn't often the best source of quality feedback on a form check. So look for groups that make sense.

[00:20:02] For example, I'll mention starting strength. Again, they have an open Facebook group you can join and people get some really good form checks. The next two tips I have in terms of form and technique has to do with hiring a coach. I strongly believe hiring a coach, even for one or two sessions will help greatly accelerate your ability to do the form correctly because you'll get that second pair of eyes who can tell you immediately the 10 things you're doing wrong.

[00:20:31] Can work on, and I've done this several times where I'll just hire a coach for one session and say, I want to work on my squat today. And out of it, I learned so much way more than I would have learned from these other methods. You could also find a good power lifting type. Make friends with the other lifters, with the coaches and get feedback that way or hire an online coach, especially with the pandemic and people working remotely, everyone starting to build their own home gyms.

[00:21:00] This is an excellent option for getting feedback and working on your skill. The way it works is typically you take a video, you send it to your coach and they get back to you. I have heard of coaching where they'll do it live over. The next step is choosing a program. I suggest selecting a program that lots of people have used successfully rather than trying to write your own program, especially if you're just getting started.

[00:21:26] There's no need to do that. We're going to talk about four. Programs, you could consider, there are many, many more out there, but these are four that I would recommend you look into and choose what works best for you. And the first program we'll talk about, which is the program that really helped me make significant progress is starting strength.

[00:21:48] This is a book written by mark. Rippetoe the thing that I really like about it and why I recommend it highly is it is extremely. It focuses on just the big lifts and you will make significant progress. And that's all we're looking for. The starting training program focuses exclusively on sets of five important.

[00:22:11] Not, not for the reason. A lot of people think a lot of people say, well, the strength rep range is one to five and then the hypertrophy rep ranges, maybe six to 12. So it's more on the strength side, although it is a balance between those and maybe it's that kind of sweets. The most important thing is that it keeps you focused on going heavy.

[00:22:36] If you're doing sets of eight or 12, it disincentivizes really pushing the intensity up. Also doing sets of five keeps things simple from a numbers perspective, from an exercise and movement perspective. You're not going to do leg presses or bicep curls. If you're trying to do heavy sets of five.

[00:22:57] Starting strength also provides, I mentioned this earlier, but a definitive explanation, a guide to form and technique on the big lifts on the squat, the deadlift, the bench press the press and the power clean. And the book does go into other accessory movements. It talks about chin ups and even things like barbell.

[00:23:23] Practically speaking, what does it look like? It's extremely simple. When you are brand new, when you're a novice, there are two workouts and you alternate these two workouts over three days a week. So we'll call them workout a and work out. So week one, you'll do a, B a, then we too. It's B a B, and you continue in that fashion until you get to the next phase.

[00:23:53] Workout a is three by five squats, three by five, press one by five deadlifts, deadlifts are considered highly stressful and they don't recommend doing more than one. So it's squats, press deadlift. Workout. B is three by five squats. So notice you're doing squats again, three by five bench and one by five deadlift.

[00:24:22] So you're squatting and deadlifting every other day during the week, then you take the weekend off and you do it again. And then you're alternating the press and the bench. Again, work out a is three by five squats, three by five, press one, buy five deadlift workout. B is three by five squat, three by five bench, press one by five deadlift.

[00:24:44] So the only difference being the press and the bench press, and you want to pick the days that are convenient for you generally, this is going to be Monday, Wednesday. But you could do Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And if you are extremely pressed for time, you could reduce the frequency to two days a week.

[00:25:04] You just won't make progress as quickly. It is critical that you have at least one day off between any two training days. This is key to recovery. And as the saying goes, you don't get strong under the bar. You get strong. Between workouts, you don't get strong while you're working out. You get strong while you sleep.

[00:25:25] Now, the one thing I didn't mention it is probably the most important aspect of this program that you need to add weight to the bar. Every time you do a movement, the next day you do that movement. So you're squatting every single cell. You should be adding five pounds or initially it could be as high as 10 pounds.

[00:25:43] If you're brand new and not very strong at all, it might be 10 pounds than it'll be five and it could even drop to two and a half pounds on something like the press or the bench press deadlifts might go up by 10 pounds for quite a while, till you scale them back to going up by five pounds. Now, eventually the deadlift is going to get quite hard.

[00:26:06] It's generally going to be. Far ahead of the squat. And this is pretty quickly like within a month, potentially of starting, in which case you then move to the next phase and you're going to replace the deadlift with a power clean, every other workout. And the power clean is a whole different movement that requires a special skill, and you really have to pay attention to the explanation of the.

[00:26:31] Watch videos get a coach, if you can. It's a lot of fun if you're older, like, and when I say older, I mean maybe in your sixties or higher, or for whatever reason, can't do a power clean, not everybody has to power clean. There are alternatives like doing other pole movements. Pull-ups chin-ups even barbell rows, but this is the program.

[00:26:56] Then when, after a few more weeks and you get the power of. Inc. You moved to the next phase of the novice linear progression. And in this case, you're actually going to add in chin. To get some more upper body volume. And for the guys out there who want big guns, big biceps, chin-ups, we'll do wonders for your biceps.

[00:27:16] You don't even need girls. This phase can actually go on for quite a while and you're going to start feeling it get harder and harder, especially as you push up for guys. For example, once you get into the two hundreds on the squat for the first time ever. You might start to feel it now everybody's different.

[00:27:35] Some guys are very strong naturally. So they're going to push up toward maybe the three hundreds and their novice progression, but most sits somewhere between. I want to say 2 25 and 2 75, by the time they get toward the end of their linear progression and you get to the final phase and you're backing off on frequency of the deadlifts and the power cleans because the deadlifts are just getting so heavy in terms of progression.

[00:28:04] The suggestion is that you start with an empty bar. Now, if you've been lifting for a long. You may be able to start with more weight than that. If you know, for a fact on a back squat, you could easily start at 95 pounds or 135 pounds, you know, your body, you know what you can do, do what makes sense. But the recommendation is to start with an empty bar and then start adding weight because you're doing the lifts so frequently.

[00:28:28] It won't take long to increase to a reasonable level of intense. Now the thing is here. You, you want to be proactive in terms of when you think you're starting to get to your limit, do you think you're actually going to potentially fail one of your sets in the next workout? If you go up by five pounds again, could you then instead go up by two and a half to avoid failing.

[00:28:50] We want to avoid failing the reps for as long as we can, but if you do you try it the next time you try the same weight next. Eventually you will start to plateau. And this is when you're heading towards your intermediate phase. And if you're listening to this and just getting started on this, you haven't even started training.

[00:29:09] So we're talking several months out from now, but it will happen. And at that point we have to discuss things like backing off resetting deloads moving to four day or five days, splits, changing frequency, changing to periodization, all of those kinds of advanced concepts. When you're done with linear progression, but for now, the key is to add weight to the bar, every session and get big and strong.

[00:29:37] That's all I'm going to say on that program. I could get into things like warmups and diet and so on, but go ahead and look it up. Read the book. Go to the website, startingstrength.com. I have no affiliation. I just love the program. It worked wonders for me, and I think it's great for a lot of folks that try it because it's simple and it works and you progress pretty quickly and get bigger and stronger.

[00:30:01] Let's move on to the second program you might want to check out, which is by Greg knuckles. Greg knuckles is the head of content at stronger by site. And I absolutely love their podcasts that are one of the podcasts that I've inspired me over the years. And I listened to it every time it comes out. He also is behind the new nutrition app.

[00:30:23] This is the app that I've been using since it came out not very long ago, it's called macro factor. And I will be talking more about that app in the upcoming episode about diet. But in the meantime, I think if you subscribe to the stronger by science newsletter, I'll include a link in the show notes.

[00:30:42] You'll get 28 free. Programs that he's put together. And they're very simple. What I like about his free programs is he simply splits the programs up by Lyft, the big three. In his case, he lets you choose a frequency and how to put them together. And then he gives you various combinations of how you can do this.

[00:31:03] So if you're looking for kind of a mix and match with the big three and keeping it super simple, check out Greg knuckles, 28 free program. The next program I want to mention is called the big three routine by Andy Morgan at rippedbody.com. And again, I'm not affiliated with any of these. I just think they're good programs, but again, I'll have a link in the notes.

[00:31:26] This again is focused on the big three. Five by five and it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and he has them split up in a certain way. That's explained on the website, he's got some very definitive guides, tutorials and videos that I think would be extremely helpful, even if you don't use one of his programs.

[00:31:47] And then the last resource I'll mention. The fitness.wiki, which is associated with the fitness subreddit. And I recommend checking out this site because it has a bunch of guides on muscle building, strength, training programs, and so on. And they actually have something called a beginner routine. They suggest running it for no more than three months after which you're ready to move on to intermediate.

[00:32:16] It is actually quite similar to starting strength in some ways, because it's three by fives. It's a workout, a and a workout B and three days a week. Alternating workout a is three by five barbell rows three by five bench, three by five squat. So the squat comes last and then workout B is three by five.

[00:32:38] Chin-ups, three by five press and three by five debts. And then they suggest a specific progression two and a half pounds for the upper body lifts, five pounds to the lower body lifts. And then some rules based on how many reps you get, or if you fail and so on, it's has a little more complexity. It also incorporates some specific conditioning requirements, but I think it's still a good program to check out.

[00:33:05] And that brings us to the first action for you in this podcast. And that is to choose one of these programs. Do this today, pick a program, review some of these by the books, or get the eBooks or borrow it, go to the library, whatever it takes, learn about them. There's plenty of information online and then figure out how you're going to track your.

[00:33:31] The simplest way is just use a notebook. I do love technology. So there are apps out there like strong or stacked or train heroic. If you're working with a coach to track. Now that you've chosen a program and have a way to track it. I'd like you to consider measuring progress, taking a baseline, and then measuring yourself going forward.

[00:33:54] Since you're just getting started, it'll be an excellent resource to look back on in the. And to do this first, I would suggest taking some before photos, then take some before measurements. Now I think these are a bit more important for tracking progress, and these would include your weight, your waist, your chest, your biceps, and your thoughts.

[00:34:19] You can use something like the Mio tape and I'll include a link in the show notes. And this allows you to measure yourself without the help of someone else. And I suggest taking measurements now and then every week and write them down or use a spreadsheet. Now I want to give you a couple of bonus tips that are important before we recap the episode and talk about your plan.

[00:34:43] When building muscle, you must eat enough to gain weight. If you do not eat enough, everything else we talked about will be somewhat of a waste of time. You're just not going to make gains. Yes. If you're totally new to this, you will gain initial strength through what's called neuromuscular Adams. And you'll even gain muscle and lose fat because you've never lifted heavy things before, but that will plateau quickly enough without enough food.

[00:35:15] We'll be talking about diet in episode five, but at a minimum to start, just make sure your weight every week is going up. Not down second. You must get enough sleep to recover. And don't do silly things like long distance running or other physical activities that will exhaust you and prevent you from coming into the gym.

[00:35:37] The next session, adding weight to the bar and hitting all your reps. This will only slow you way down. Let's recap. And talk about your plan of action. We talked about the requirements for an effective strength training program. Why compound lifts are the most efficient way to do. And they satisfy all of those criteria and the best programs for getting started.

[00:36:04] Here's what you'll do next first, choose a program. Second, get access to a barbell third, get a notebook or download a workout app to track. Fourth, take initial body measurements and repeat every week, fifth start training right away. Get under a barbell in our next episode, we'll talk about why we care so much about strength in episode four, we'll cover cardio fat loss and metabolism.

[00:36:36] Episode five. We'll discuss how to approach your diet without going on a. And in episode six, we talk about developing systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot.

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Ep 1: Let's Get Strong Together

Welcome to the very first episode of Wits and Weights: Strength Training for Skeptics.

If you’re a skeptical, critically-minded person like me, you’ve probably gotten tired of what the modern-day so-called fitness industry has to offer, and you just want to know what actually works.

Not only that, you’re probably a busy, working professional with a full-time job or perhaps you own your own business or run several side hustles, so time is at a premium. Can you actually build a stronger, healthier body and maintain a sustainable, active lifestyle?

The answer is an emphatic YES.

Plenty of everyday folks have figured out what works in terms of exercise, nutrition, habits, mindset, and lifestyle, but there is so much information out there—even from highly respectable sources—that it can be overwhelming to distill it down to a single, focused plan that works for you.

That’s why I created this podcast.

On this very first episode, learn about my background, the importance of strength, and what you can expect in future episodes.

RELATED LINKS

• Finding Your Strength Radio podcast (Romeo Athletics)

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.

🙋‍♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW

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• Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)

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• Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts

👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching

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Transcript

This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.

[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable diet. I am your host Philip Pape, and in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right..

[00:00:32] Hey guys, welcome to the very first episode of Wits and Weights: strength training for skeptics. I'm extremely excited to let you know what I'm all about and give you a sneak preview of what you can expect on this podcast. If you're a skeptical, critically minded person like me, you've probably gotten tired of what the modern day so-called fitness industry has to offer.

[00:00:54] And you just want to know what actually works. Not only that you're probably a busy working professional with a full-time job, maybe two or three, or perhaps you own your own business or run several side hustles. So time is at a premium, let's say you can only get to the gym two days a week. Can you actually build a stronger, healthier body and maintain a sustainable active lifestyle?

[00:01:18] This way? The answer is an emphatic. Yes. Plenty of everyday folks have figured out what works in terms of exercise, nutrition, habits, mindset, and lifestyle. But there is just so much information out there even from highly respectable sources that it can be overwhelming to distill it down to a single focused plan that works for.

[00:01:43] That's why I created this podcast. Like you, I'm busy with a career and family, and I didn't truly understand the importance of strength as a foundation of fitness until my late thirties, just a few short years ago, just to get it out there. I turned 41 right before this podcast went live on this episode.

[00:02:03] First, I'd like to tell you my story and why the heck you'd even want to listen. Then we'll talk about why strength is so important. Perhaps the most important aspect of fitness and health. Finally, we'll preview some of the really cool topics we'll examine in upcoming episodes related to resistance training, especially with barbells fat loss and body recomposition exercise, selection, form technique, programming, recovery, and adaptation, and many other topics from foundational to.

[00:02:38] All right, please indulge me while I share a bit about my background. So you'll understand why this podcast and becoming strong and healthy are so important to me. For most of my life. I was not at all. Athletic, never participated in organized sports and lived the sedentary life of a desk jockey with a job that has me sitting in front of a computer.

[00:03:01] All. During my twenties and thirties, I very inconsistently went to commercial gyms and very inconsistently, tried to quote unquote exercise. Usually this involved, the clumsy sweat inducing use of a treadmill or elliptical machine, and maybe 10 minutes playing around with strength machines. You know, the ones where you get to sit down, there's a label that tells you how to use it.

[00:03:26] And you whip out a few sets of lots of lightweight. Needless to say this, didn't put a single pound of lean muscle on my frame, which vacillated between skinny, fat and fluffy. Over the years in my thirties, I found CrossFit. I had decided that with my wife pregnant with our first daughter and me about to become a father, I needed to step it up and get in shape.

[00:03:52] Although it's far from the most effective way to gain strength and I don't do it anymore. CrossFit introduced me to three new concepts that changed my life: barbells, coaching, and physical transformation. First barbells, many people correctly, in my opinion, credit CrossFit with reintroducing barbells to the general population, not to mention the squat, deadlift and Olympic.

[00:04:19] I had never touched a barbell in my entire life. So the first time I realized an empty bar, weighed a whopping 45 pounds, surprised me, but I also learned that a barbell holds great power due to its uncanny ability to allow a human being, to move very heavy loads, using safe, natural, full range of motion, multi jointed.

[00:04:44] After all squatting picking things up, pushing and pulling our primal to our anatomy.

[00:04:50] Second is coaching other than low paid unskilled, personal trainers and commercial gyms. I had never worked with a coach who would watch me lift and then give me immediate cues and feedback to. Say what you will about certifications and experience the value of having a training partner, coach, or even someone online to look at a video of you lifting cannot be understated if you want to make meaningful progress and improve your form and technique.

[00:05:21] Third CrossFit introduced me to the idea that I could physically manipulate and transform my body through sheer effort. And. Mind you CrossFit doesn't use the principles of linear progression, periodization and objective tracking that we'll talk about in later episodes when it comes to having an effective strength training program.

[00:05:45] But given that I was previously sedentary, the sudden use of barbells and conditioning workouts showed me that. Yes, despite what I thought was my so-called bad genetics. I can indeed improve my fitness and body. By the way the CrossFit gym I attended later evolved into a strength focused facility called Romeo athletics in Enfield, Connecticut of which I'm still a proud member.

[00:06:11] It's owned by Andrew Romeo and you'll hear clips of an interview I did on his podcast. Finding your strength radio in a future episode. It wasn't until two years ago, when I realized progress had stalled years earlier, that I changed my mindset on this whole fitness thing from an inconsistent hobby to a dedicated, focused educational and training pursuit.

[00:06:35] I discovered I needed to take my research and learning to a completely new level. And I began to voraciously consume books, videos, interviews, and podcasts on the subject while gaining direct expertise and experience through heavy barbell training. I also engaged various mentors and coaches posted form checks became active in online communities and started tracking everything with the most contemplative, serious ethos I could.

[00:07:04] That led me to the epiphany. That strength appears to be the pillar of all other aspects of health. And. Want to lose fat, add muscle Want to throw your grandkids in the air. When you're 70, get stronger. Want to avoid injury, metabolic diseases of aging, sarcopenia osteopenia, you need more muscle. Want to increase your metabolism, increase your athletic power or survive a harrowing physical ordeal.

[00:07:31] The answer is strength. And for those fathers out there who want to be an intimidating presence to your daughter's future suitors get big and strong. Having realized this universal truth. I got honest about my training. I buckled down, selected the appropriate program, dialed in my nutrition, which often means eating more, not less and proceeded to gradually get stronger and pack on muscle.

[00:07:56] I'm excited to share the details of my personal habits, training, eating, and progress in future episodes. Strength training is setting a goal, developing a plan, executing that plan and objectively measuring your progress toward that goal until it's achieved. And that is what we're going to do together on this.

[00:08:18] With wits and weights. My goal is to help busy professionals get strong and lean through lifting and eating like a normal human being so they can achieve physical self-mastery to do that. I'm going to draw on personal experience, well vetted sources of information, such as people who have been successful in their fitness.

[00:08:40] The latest evidence-based, but practical findings from the research and comments, reviews, and Q&A from you the listener, I may also experiment with different formats. Initially this'll be a solo podcast, but I may also do interviews live Q&A or even live mentor, coaching and future. Most importantly, I plan to lay out specific actions.

[00:09:04] In each episode you can use and apply right away. Here's a sneak preview of what you can expect in the next few episodes. The next episode is already available for download and future episodes will come out every two weeks. So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out. In episode two, which as I said, should already be in your download queue.

[00:09:25] If you subscribe to the podcast, I cover how to choose a training program. I think this will get you started in thinking about and taking action on learning to lift properly and developing your initial foundation of strength. We keep things simple and discuss the various programs out there. Programs I have used and how to choose the right one.

[00:09:47] Episodes three through six cover foundational topics to give you a well-rounded base of information to help you separate what's important from what's not as important, including why do we care so much about. The truth about cardio fat loss and metabolism, how to approach diet without being on a diet and developing systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot.

[00:10:14] After episode six, we will start to dig deeper into all of these topics and more such as dissecting form and technique on the big barbell lifts , rest periods, warmups, how to calculate metabolism and body fat. The truth about supplements, why walking is awesome, how to build a sweet home gym and many more.

[00:10:37] Finally, each episode will have one or more unique segments, such as listener Q&A. Just send me an email, DM me on Instagram @witsandweights or post in our WitsAndWeights subreddit. And we'll feature those on future episodes. I personally love listening to Q&A episodes on other podcasts. So I think it could be awesome to take those topics that you really care about and talk about them here.

[00:11:02] In other segments, I might break down a research paper or critically examine what the internet has to say about a particular fitness. That's just a sampling of what's to come. And I, for one, am extremely excited to start this adventure with you, the listener in a way I'm envious of those who are in an early phase of their strength training journey, because that's when all the wonderful discoveries and progress.

[00:11:28] But I'm equally excited for our more advanced listeners and lifters who might learn something new or contribute to the podcast through our listener community.

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