Barbell Shrugged - Best Exercises to Boost Metabolism - Diesel Dad Episode 5

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Busy Dads 👇👇 2 Steps to Start building a strong, lean, and athletic body you are proud of. Join my free Facebook group: http://bit.ly/DIESELDADDOJO Or Schedule a call with me here and will see if I can help you: https://bit.ly/DieselDadConsult Your body and brain do not want you to be jacked. Low body fat and large amounts of lean muscle mass is the holy grail of body composition. Unfortunately, your genetics disagree, and this is what makes metabolic function so frustrating. However, there is a magic pill to overcome this, but, before we get there, it’s important to understand why your body is fighting against you. You are hard wired for survival. For millions of years, hunter gatherer societies had limited resources, calories were difficult to find, and your body built mechanisms to store energy (fat). In modern times, food is abundant (grocery stores), insanely easy to find (every corner), and calories are cheap (fast food). However, those survival mechanisms were never turned off. Our bodies still think we need to store food for the cold winter ahead. The overeating and storing energy cycle continues until you are slow, soft, sluggish, 15 pounds overweight, unhappy, and dying to take the deep dive into the Diesel Dad Diet. The magic weapon to overcome your body’s backwards thinking is muscle. Metabolically, muscle is very expensive. To build muscle, you must create an environment in which you break down old muscle tissue and repair it with new, stronger muscle tissue capable of meeting the demands of this new, challenging environment. At its core, this is why lifting weights and getting stronger is so important. By creating an environment that breaks down weak tissue you force your body to adapt, repair, rebuild, and get stronger. That process of adapting, repairing, rebuilding, and getting stronger is like throwing gasoline on the fire that is your metabolism. Calories no longer need to be saved for the future. Fat stores become the fuel to build lean muscle mass. Of course your body doesn’t want you to be jacked. Muscle is expensive. Constantly repairing old, weak cells and replacing them with new, stronger cells is hard. Muscle is the magic pill. Soft, slow, and sluggish has no place in an environment where strong, lean, and athletic are necessary for survival. Muscle is the key to optimizing your metabolism. Muscle is the key to burning body fat. Muscle is the key to eliminating slow, soft, and sluggish. Muscle is the key to strong, lean, and athletic.

Welcome to episode 5 of The Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner and today we're talking about exercise. The single thing that everybody over exaggerates in their quest for fat loss, muscle gain, everybody thinks it's so important and what we're learning is that it's really about 15% of our total metabolic rate. In this series talking about metabolism, we've gone over our basal metabolic rate. That's 60% of where the energy goes while we are burning calories. We talked about NEAT, non-exercise activity

thermogenesis. Today, we're talking about exercise. And tomorrow, we're going to be talking about how we digest food, right? The thermal effect of food. When food goes into our mouth, how it digests and how we actually get to use the food that we're eating to build muscle, how it gets stored as fat, and how we get to use energy. Today, we're talking about exercise. And the reason I love talking about exercise is because I hope by the end of this video,

I will radically shift the way that you view exercise. Most of the time when people are thinking about exercise, they feel like they're in the middle of this badass montage video where there's some sick drum beat in the background, people going crazy, there's chalk flying in the air, there's like fans in a crowd and madness. But the reality is we have to think about fitness on a spectrum. We have to think about exercise on a spectrum. I like to think about exercise in just any intentional movement that you are doing throughout the day

in which you are focused on high quality movement and challenging the way that your body is moving through space that can be lifting weights that can be running that can be walking that can be oh man that can be crossfit that can be a hit class that can be yoga all of these things they're going to challenge our body in a way so that we have to make our brain connect with our body to move in a specific way to get a desired outcome. For if you're lifting weights, that's going to be lifting more weights through progressive overload. If you're doing yoga classes, getting into a pose that you've never gotten into. Now there are ways that are more metabolically challenging to your body. And those are the things that we want to

start thinking about, right? So I like to think about exercise on the spectrum. And if you think about the easiest things being over here and the hardest things being over here, or the most metabolically demanding things over here, now we start to get into a spectrum where we're all exercises, not created equal. See on the very far end, there's like walking. Walking is not very challenging. You could go walk many, many, many miles in a day and it's all going to be a part of the total calories burned throughout the day. When you take a step and add a little bit of intensity to that, you may be jogging, right? That jogging is going to be a little bit higher demand on your metabolic rate. You're going to burn slightly more calories by going for a jog than just going for a walk. And if you want to take that one step further,

maybe you're sprinting. That's going to be a significantly higher intensity because it's all out effort as hard as you can go for a specific amount of time. That could be like a 400 meter run. It could be an 800 meter run. It could be a hundred meter sprint done multiple times. It could be a Tabata. There's many ways in which we can think about moving from walk, jog, run, sprint, but we can all agree that sprinting is much more demanding than walking. Jogging is going to be much more demanding than running, higher than jogging, walking. In that spectrum, we can all understand those things. I would even consider some forms of yoga, all of those to be on that easier side of the spectrum in which, yes, your body is moving. Yes, you're intentionally moving through space. You're intentionally trying to get some sort of result

out of that. And we could all lump that into the idea of exercise. If you are intentionally doing movement and you're intentionally thinking about how your body is moving through space to get a specific result, high five to you. You're doing it. You're working on exercise. You're burning calories, hopefully with the intent of moving well so that you can lose

body fat and you can gain muscle. Now, the thing about muscle is you're probably not going to build much of it by doing low intensity, non-weight bearing training. It's sad to say, but that's why runners look the way they look and that's why weightlifters look the way they look because the amount of weight that you lift matters. Building muscle matters and we kind of hang our hat on three key components when we're talking about transformations. We talk about metabolism, which is what this series is about. We talk about macronutrients, which is what the next series is

going to be about. And that muscle is the number three. Muscle is the third one, in which we're going to do an entire series on muscle as well. These three components of understanding your metabolism and what it's made of, macronutrients, how you eat, and the desired outcome of the macronutrients going into your body, and building muscle are the major components of transformation when it comes to your physical body. What's great about exercise is that muscle

is on that more metabolically challenging side, which is why it's one of the pillars of what we want to work on when we're shifting your body from soft, slow and sluggish to strong, lean and athletic. Muscle matters. And in order for us to talk about muscle and how it relates to the metabolism,

we have to talk about a couple things. You're going to be getting a stimulus when you work out. That's going to boost metabolism. That's energy out, right? That's the training. That's hard work that you're doing towards a specific goal. And in order to do that work, your body has to burn the calories, to burn the fuel for you to be able to go and perform that task. That's awesome. What's extra cool about building muscle and lifting weights is that not only are you getting the benefit of doing the work, but after you do the work you have now broken down the muscle tissue that your body now needs

to repair. That is the massive benefit is that is one of the biggest benefits of having muscle and lifting weights is that you're going to get a big stimulus that's going to be you working out and then for many many hours many days after you are done working out your body is still going to be in that rebuilding process it's going to be tailing those old cells. Hey, you're no good anymore. You got to go. You're done. It's this environment that we live in is way too aggressive for weak cells to be around here. Sometimes those cells have even been broken down to the point where they're tearing muscle. There's a lot of muscular damage. We're going to get into that when we talk about hypertrophy.

And then the additional piece is that just carrying and maintaining muscle is also metabolically expensive. So muscle, yes, it's the third pillar of what we're doing, but it's so incredibly important for us to understand that muscle and lifting weights and consistently increasing the amount of weight or the amount of load or the amount of volume that we are doing the or that we are lifting weights under is incredibly important to increasing your metabolic rate to having a strong lean and athletic body and we can all agree that if you're on the easy side of

this spectrum that your body probably isn't spending a ton of time after that walk to go repair the cells right like you just went for a walk your body doesn't get to go kick into overdrive thinking oh my gosh the environment we live in is so dangerous right now. We're really going to need so many new strong cells in order to survive in this chaotic environment where walking doesn't exist, right? Running, I think running is important. I think it's a great skill. I think that everybody should be able to go get up and go run four or five miles. It's a skill that everybody should have, but your body doesn't

really need to adapt that much. It's not breaking down muscle tissue so much that it just kicks into overdrive and it's like rebuilding muscle all the time because, oh my gosh, we went for a four mile run. I like to think about running and jogging in this. It's basically high intensity walking. You're just doing it with a little bit bigger kick. And then when you're sprinting, we can all agree that that's going to be a much more higher intensity. And if you've ever gone sprinting

and recognized how sore you can get the next day, there's a lot of muscle that you need to create that kind of speed and power. So as we move down that spectrum, there's a higher demand on your metabolism to for the for the amount of energy that you're putting out for rebuilding that muscle that you have torn down or needs to be upgraded to meet the demands of your of your movement practice. And in order to keep that muscle, it's going to be slightly more expensive just to maintain it.

So there's three big benefits to having muscle. And the easiest way for us to understand that is that you have to lift weights. You have to lift weights. It's so important for you to be in the gym, progressively overloading, increasing load, increasing volume, increasing or decreasing the amount of time that you're lifting the same amount of weight. There's so many ways in which we can understand progressive overload that we will get to, but we all have to agree that muscle is mandatory for increasing metabolic rate.

Now check it out. There's three main ways in which we can start to understand how we build muscle. Overall, this is called hypertrophy. The most important one is mechanical tension. That is literally lifting heavy stuff. The other one is called muscular stress, metabolic stress. That's called the pump. In layman's terms, that's just the pump. That's when all the muscle fills up with all the fluid. You can do a whole bunch of sets and all of a sudden you feel this big pump. Skin stretches. Everything's awesome.

Metabolic stress. That's cool. Everybody likes the pump. The other piece is muscle breakdown, muscle damage, in which your body lifts too much. It tears the old cells. Your body's got to go in there and rebuild them. That's three ways to do it, but check it out.

I want to speak to you like a real human. Myofibrillar, you know what that word means? Don't worry about it. Sarcoplasmic, do you know what that means? Don't worry about it. All you need to know is that mechanical tension is overwhelmingly the most important piece to growing muscle.

You need to be able to lift a weight for a specific number of reps. And once you complete that, the next task is to go in and increase the weight and lift that weight for the same number of reps, telling your body that it needs to get stronger, that the old cells got to go. The new cells need to be stronger because we live in an environment in which strength matters and the only way that you're going to get that strength is to build more muscle now you're going to hear a lot of people talk about these three components and I want everybody to know that it's they're real myofibrillar sarcoplasmic muscular damage, all those pieces are really,

really important, right? Mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and muscular damage. They're really important when it comes to understanding how muscle is built. The number one piece though is mechanical tension. And we can prove that in a very simple way. Most importantly, mechanical tension. I want you to be strong when you're doing a one rep max. I want you to be strong when you're doing a three rep max. I want you to be strong when you're doing a five, an eight, a 10, a 12, a 15, a 20, a 30.

I don't care how high we go with the reps, how low we go with the reps, the most important thing is that you are going to be strong throughout that entire rep range. There's going to be times where you go totally off the rails with your training and have as much fun as possible and you wanna do like a 100 rep max back squat and try and do something crazy with your friends.

Sweet, I bet in order for you to win that battle, you're gonna need to be strong. back squat, and try and do something crazy with your friends. Sweet. I bet in order for you to win that battle, you're going to need to be strong. I also think that most people want to work on one rep maxes. Killer. The most important thing is to be strong, to have muscle. So it does not matter where we are at in the spectrum. It doesn't matter if you're doing a 30 rep max and you think that you're trying to get a pump. It doesn't matter if you're doing a one rep max

and you're thinking about the highest level of power output that you can do into one single motion. It doesn't matter. The thing that matters the most is that you're very strong. Mechanical tension is the number one way that you're going to build that muscle. And it's going to signal to your brain that the environment that you're creating, strength matters. order for that to happen you need muscle right now you can get

down into the the link the description in the show notes there's a link to a facebook group that you can get into the diesel dad dojo that's where all the dads are getting strong lean and athletic you can also schedule a call with me right in the link right now. We will get on there and we'll talk about your goals. I'm excited to chat with you. Check it out. Diesel Dad, episode five. We're coming two days a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, just for you. I'm Anders Varner. This is the Diesel Dad. We'll see you guys next time.