There are three things that you need to do well to have a great body, to have a great physique, to have a lean muscular physique, to have a good amount of muscle mass and a low amount of body fat.
Now, in this episode, I'm going to rank them, or not even rank them, I'm gonna explain them in order of easiest to most difficult, okay?
And when I'm explaining this, I'm talking about for the average adult here in the United States, or in most of the world, but let's just, let's speak about adults in the United States for now.Now, these three things,
If you put them in a pie chart in terms of like how much importance they have, it's about equal, okay?They're like equally important in my eyes and in my experience as a coach and a trainer.
They're of equal importance, but a couple of them are harder, like the first one is the easiest one to get right, in my opinion.The second and the third are a little bit harder, okay?But they have equal importance.Does that make sense?
And now the key thing you need to understand as well is that if you're thinking the things that are gonna get you into shape is gonna be, you know, some supplement or some crazy other like, you know, red light therapy or doing saunas and cold plunges and massages, and I don't know what else, all this extra stuff, or your crazy biohacking tools, some of the stuff that nerds like me are into, that's not it.
It's not gonna do it.There's a place for all that, but it pales in comparison to these three keys, okay?So what are these three keys? The first key is exercise.What do I mean when I say exercise and why is this the easiest of the three to get down?
When I say exercise, I mean strength training.What does strength training look like?
Strength training might be three days a week or as little as two days a week or it might be five or six days a week, but what it is is lifting weights or doing some other form of resistance training to build muscle. to build and preserve muscle.
And we could get into the weeds on what are the best rep ranges and how many sets you should do per exercise and how many sessions you should do per week and what your workout split should be, but for purposes of this episode,
I'm just going to leave it at that.You need to do strength training.Strength training sends a signal to the body saying, hey, we need to build and preserve as much muscle as possible.It also speeds up the metabolism a little bit naturally.
The more muscle you build, the higher your metabolism is going to be naturally. So, when I talk about exercise, I'm talking about strength training, not really cardio.Cardio is good for your health.
At rare times, it can have a place in building a physique, but if you're trying to optimize your physique, strength training is the way to go.
Like I said, cardio is good for your health, but strength training is the way to go when trying to optimize your physique, to have as good of a lean physique, as attractive of a physique as possible, okay?So, strength training.
Strength training looks like pushing yourself close to failure on lots of different exercises, full body exercises, some pushing, some pulling exercises, some leg exercises.Try to hit all of the major body parts.
There's lots of different ways you can do it, but do some strength training you know, let's call it anywhere between, you know, an hour and a half to two hours minimum, up to six or seven hours per week.
Beyond that is, you know, probably unnecessary and is crazy bodybuilder stuff.I mean, I myself strength train for about five to six hours a week of hard strength training, and I'm pretty freaking psycho when it comes to fitness.
So like most people, even for most people, I can make a good case for just one hour a week.If you've got two good 30 minute sessions, per week is good enough. Strength training, somewhere between one to two and up to five or six hours per week, okay?
So not that much dedication.The reason that this is the easiest is because it's not that much of, it doesn't require that much discipline or time.Well, okay, it does require discipline, but it doesn't require that much time out of your schedule.
Most busy adults, like if you take the average of what I just said, and I just said like three to four hours, say we do it one hour a day, three days a week, like three hours out of your week, most busy adults still have three hours a week that they could dedicate to exercise, okay?
This is the one that requires the least amount of, I would say, dedication in the modern world, okay?The other two elements, I would say, are actually a bit more challenging.And this is what people miss.
Because people still, when people are trying to build muscle and burn body fat, when they're trying to improve their physique, people think of exercise as the first and foremost thing.And yes, yes, it is important.
It's like one third of it, in my opinion and experience, okay? But it's like the main area that people focus on and they still neglect numbers two and three.They neglect number two more often than they should and number two is nutrition.
Now we can argue that nutrition is more important than exercise, maybe, yeah.But I'm gonna put it in, I'm gonna put it as an equal here, okay.
It's a bit more challenging than exercise because it requires a bit more discipline and I would even say a bit more time oftentimes.
Debatable, I suppose, but it requires a bit more of a sacrifice on your part to do really well with nutrition in a modern world that's filled with junky carbohydrates and fast meals, okay?
Because what is going to be the key to your nutrition to get the body you want?Well, it's gonna be hitting your macronutrient targets.So what are macronutrients?Macronutrients, ugh, I can't even talk.
Macronutrients are proteins, fats, and carbs, okay?These are the things that make up the amount of total calories that you're eating, okay?
Now, there is a place for talking about micronutrients, which are the vitamins and minerals, the things you're going to find in fruits and vegetables and some other foods, the things that are good for our health.
There is a place for talking about, you know, choosing whole foods versus processed foods.That's an important thing as well.But when it comes to strictly a body composition standpoint, what you should be mostly focused on are macronutrients.
And for most people, this is going to mean getting more protein. because most people do not eat enough protein to build and preserve muscle and to curb their appetite and take away their appetite for the junky carbs and fats.
Carbs and fats can be good sometimes, but we live in a world where we have a bunch of not very healthy versions of them.
And if you don't eat enough protein, like most people don't, then you're going to be more inclined to want to eat those junky fats and carbs.So, macronutrients are where it's at from a physique perspective.This is what you should be focused on.
You should be focused on trying to eat probably one gram or close of protein per pound of target body weight per day Okay, you can figure that out very easily do some math You probably have to adjust your diet a little bit.
But the reason that this is the
It's of equal importance, arguably even more important than exercise, is because if you do all that exercise but you're getting half the protein that you need and you're getting a bunch of junky carbs and fats, your body is not really going to recomposition.
You're not sending the right building blocks to the muscles.So we need to recomposition the diet in order to recomposition the body.Most people, just as a general statement, do not eat enough protein and over consume carbs and fats.
It's just general population, that's just most people, okay?
We'd have to dig into the details of your specific diet for me to help you out specifically, but that's just a general statement about most people that I work with and just general population, okay?
And so, focusing on it, the reason it's more difficult than the exercise portion is because it requires a bit more discipline in the modern world.Like I said, dedicating three hours of your week to working out
It's not that hard, but what is hard is saying, okay, every time I go have dinner with people, every time I go to a restaurant, every time I'm in a place where I don't have much time to eat and I'm just trying to grab something quick, maybe I'm at a gas station, I don't know what, you say, okay, does this fit my macros?
Is this a decent amount of protein and not that many calories? you know, carbs and fats and certainly not a lot of added sugars or junky stuff.You know, does this actually fit what I'm looking for?
Because that's a choice you're going to have to make multiple times per day, okay?It's not just the choose to go to the gym for one hour.
It's a choice you have to make multiple times per day and stay disciplined oftentimes in social situations as well, okay?
You know, I'd like to talk to you about like the fancy rosy way to like make it all fun and nice and have like a balance Of whatever but it just sometimes it doesn't work that way Sometimes you just got to be hardcore and be like hey, I'm not eating the stuff that you people are eating Okay, the 80-20 rule can work sometimes but sometimes you also just got to be like no I'm going hardcore on my diet if you really want to have a great physique.
Okay, so nutrition is equally important as exercise and it's more challenging in the modern world and The third and the most challenging is sleep.
It is of equal importance, and it is the most challenging of the three in a modern world, especially if you're a busy adult, okay?I was working with another trainer today.
I was talking to her about everything, and she's talking about how she plateaued a little bit recently, you know, like with her strength goals, and it's like, we got the workouts dialed, we got the nutritionist dialed, but, like, the reality is, she's not sleeping well.
probably enough.The alarm wakes her up every day, which is a sign of sleep deprivation.I'm a big believer at this point that if an alarm wakes you up every day, you are in a state of sleep deprivation.
We don't really think about it because we've been in this state since we were six years old.We've just been trained to live life in a state of sleep deprivation. Most of us did it all throughout school and still do it in our adult lives.
And it is the way it is.But when we get out of that state of sleep deprivation, that's when we can start to really, number one, feel better, more energy and see more gains.Okay.
And it's also like just in terms of burning body fat, like when you're in a state of sleep deprivation, the more often you are and the more you are, the more it messes with your hormones.Now, medical disclaimer, not a doctor.
I don't know that much about hormones, but I do know that when the body is in a state of stress, which I'll come back to in a sec, sleep deprivation is a form of stress, the body says, okay, we need to be able to survive.And what do we do to survive?
When we have to survive, we want to preserve a little bit of body fat.Preserving body fat is a survival mechanism.Having a lot of muscle is not necessarily a good thing for survival because muscle is expensive tissue.Muscle
It burns a lot of calories, like I talked about, and it requires a lot of calories.So when the body is in a stress state and trying to survive, the body is more inclined to say, hey, I want to keep some body fat.
So you being sleep deprived on a fairly regular basis is going to make it tougher hormonally for your body to build and preserve muscle and to burn body fat.Okay, that's not where we want to be.Once again, medical disclaimer, not a doctor.
Go talk to your doctor about it, maybe.Your doctor may or may not know that.Okay, anyway. It is very, very hard in the modern world.I've met very few people, like I almost fall into this category, but still not quite.
I've met very few people who sleep consistently, you know, seven to nine hours a night and don't wake up to an alarm and go to bed at roughly the same time and wake up at roughly the same time every day and sleep pretty well through the night.
Like very, very few.And it's no, you know, we all know why.It's because we have stressful jobs.We have to wake up super early.
It's because if you go to school, if you're, you know, a young person going to school, you have to wake up super early for your school. It's because all the entertainment that we have in the modern world is late at night.
The cool television shows, the sporting events, the concerts, the clubs, the parties, the everything, the family dinners that start at 10 p.m.I could go on and on.It's all late at night and is all set up for you to get crappy suboptimal sleep.
Most of us just live in this. We live in it.It's very, very hard.Our phones, the technology is working against us.We're stimulated all the time.I could go on and on, but you don't need me to.You understand.
You understand why sleeping good is so hard in this world and I hope you understand why it's so important. for having the physique you want.
So these are the three key elements and you need to look to yourself and say, okay, so which one of those elements do I have the biggest room for improvement in if you're looking to improve your physique?
Because the go-to is always, I need to work out harder.That's what people think. But oftentimes that's not really the case.
Like we could work out, we could strength train great for five days a week, but if we're eating 40 grams of protein a day and sleeping four hours a night, we're not getting anywhere.And we're probably just going backwards.Okay.
So look into those three areas, figure out where you need to make improvements and make improvements there.All right.Love y'all.Talk to you soon.Peace.
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