Barbell Shrugged - Fitness: An Ethical Responsibility - Diesel Dad Episode 1

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Schedule Your Diesel Dad Discovery Call Fitness: An Ethical Responsibility  I hate the term “motivation.” Motivation is overrated. The entire fitness industry is built on short selling aesthetics. Looking good naked is awesome but the goal you have in mind is rarely attainable without a lifestyle you cannot sustain. Performance plays to the long game until your joints despise you, consistency wains, and you’re telling stories of yesteryears bench press. In the last year, over 42% of Americans gained an average of 29 pounds. Millennials, age 25-40, gained an average of 41 pounds during lockdowns. As an industry, it is time to move past motivation, aesthetics, and performance. I believe you have an ethical responsibility to being strong, lean, and athletic. Fitness is a conversation of ethics. A conversation about being an asset, not a liability. Increasing strength and decreasing fragility. Carrying a low body fat percentage to reduce the risk of disease. Athleticism to be an active participant in life. These are learned behaviors modeled by leaders in our own lives. Before teachers, coaches, and mentors, there were parents that laid a foundation for right and wrong. Fitness is an ethical responsibility in the same manner that we have agreed lying, cheating, and stealing are detrimental to a functioning society. This is accepting that over time, motivation, aesthetics, and performance will vary. However, the ethical responsibility is a constant. Accepting this requires developing a physical education on movement, strength, and conditioning. An education on metabolic health, macronutrients, and muscle. An education on running, jumping, playing, and physical freedom. Accepting fitness as an ethical responsibility requires leadership. It requires you to get off the sidelines, step into the arena, and lead by example. Because strong families, raising strong kids, are led by Diesel Dads.  

My name is Anders Varner and welcome to the Diesel Dad. I believe it is an ethical responsibility to be strong, lean, and athletic. I hate the term motivation. Motivation is overrated. The entire fitness industry is built on short-selling aesthetics. Looking good naked is awesome,

but the goal you have in mind is rarely attainable without a lifestyle you cannot sustain. Performance plays to the long game until your joints despise you. Consistency wanes, and you're telling stories of yesteryear's bench press. In the last year, over 42% of Americans gained an average of 29 pounds. Millennials aged 25 to 40 gained an average of 29 pounds. Millennials aged 25 to 40 gained an average of 41 pounds during lockdowns. As an industry, it is time to move past motivation, aesthetics, and performance. I believe you have an ethical responsibility to being strong, lean, and athletic.

Fitness is a conversation of ethics, a conversation about being an asset, not a liability. Increasing strength and decreasing fragility. Carrying a low body fat percentage to reduce the risk of disease. The athleticism to be an active participant in life. These learned behaviors modeled by leaders in our own lives. Before teachers, coaches, and mentors, there were parents that laid a foundation for right and wrong. Fitness is an ethical responsibility in the same manner that we have agreed that lying, cheating, and stealing are detrimental to a functioning society.

This is accepting that over time, motivation, aesthetics, and performance will vary. However, the ethical responsibility is a constant. Accepting this requires that you develop a physical education on movement, strength, and conditioning, an education on metabolic health, macronutrients, and muscle, an education on running, jumping, playing, and physical freedom. Accepting fitness as an ethical responsibility requires leadership. It requires you to get off the sidelines, step into the arena, and lead by example. Because strong families raising strong kids are led by Diesel Dads. I wrote this because we launched a strength training program called the Diesel Dad.

And the original outline was to get busy dads efficient and effective workouts without sacrificing family fatherhood and fitness. It's very obvious that once you become a parent, time gets short, you get scattered, things stack on top of each other, and it just gets harder and harder to focus on your personal goals. But as this thing has progressed, it's become just as important to me that we become very aware of the mechanisms in play to optimize your metabolism. Being able to arm people with the education of understanding how you build strength, how you build muscle, why muscle is so important. It's also very important to understand the foundational principles of nutrition, understanding macronutrients, how protein, fats, and carbohydrates play into living a healthy life. And in the middle of a five-mile run the

other day where I do my best thinking and where I'm allowed to just watch my brain flow as I move through space and get a good sweat on, it hit me that the Diesel Dad is important in that we're able to build a community of dads that are interested in being strong, lean, and athletic, but it's more important that we're building a platform for leadership. What happens one day when your kid walks up to you and says, Dad, how do I lose weight? Dad, how do I get strong? Dad, how do I be healthy? And the only thing that we know is that we say, go to the gym, go lift weights, eat less. But we don't have the education program

to understand how to do that. Or what is the basic outline of understanding your metabolic rate? What is the basic understanding? What are the principles in play of understanding how your metabolism works, which is the largest piece to understanding losing weight or understanding how you burn calories?

How do we have a quality discussion and education system around what your baseline metabolism is? How do we discuss the importance of exercise, the importance of walking, the importance of non-exercise throughout your day? And how do we discuss macronutrients, understanding how important protein is to a functioning body? How do we build muscle in an efficient and effective manner? And how are we able to develop a structure around living your life in the arena, not sitting on the sidelines, accepting that play and physical education and physical freedom creates a

vulnerability in which you should build confidence by leading from the front. You should be in the arena. This all changed, obviously, in my life. I was a a professional athlete I've coached thousands of people two and a half years ago I had my daughter and after competing in CrossFit after competing and playing the CrossFit game till the end my body was beat up I really haven't had any specific goals for the last three years of my life as far as fitness goes outside of to just do it. And I love training. Training is fun. But as with everything that's fun, there has to be a deeper purpose to this. And it took me a while. When you're training and when you're doing things and you don't actually have specific goals or a specific purpose, a really deep why to what you do, fun is great.

But it's important to understand that things have to be more than just fun. Fun is very temporary. And many times I'm doing this and not having fun. It's not enjoyable. I'm doing it for a deeper purpose. And that deeper purpose took me three years to find. And the truth is, is that the Diesel Dad is a platform in which we are bringing dads together that are trying to have an impact in their family, lead by example. They want to live a strong, lean, and athletic life.

It's insanely important for us to be able to build an education platform, to build a leadership platform in which we're not just telling people what to do, but we're getting people to practice these core principles of living a strong, lean, and athletic life. It's very clear that over time, your goals and your purpose are going to change. There was a day in which I would only focus on training. I only cared about getting to the gym 60 to 90 minutes a day working as hard as I possibly could in hopes of getting a better ranking in the open. I don't have any of those goals right now.

I don't have any of those pieces that are driving me. But what I do have is a family. And when you have a family, it becomes very easy to see how fitness can go from the most important aspect in your life down to the fourth. And what I mean by that is it can always be fitness number one, business and professional life number two, wife even number three, no matter how sad that may sound. You may even get married. I got married and it doesn't really change all that much. There's a piece of paper that says you're married,

but without kids, you can look at your wife any day of the week and say, "'Hey, I gotta go to the gym.'" And it's just as if you're going to the gym. It doesn't matter. There's no responsibility really involved in that outside of just being around each other more and having a marriage to go along with it.

Kids change all of that. Now, all of a sudden you want to be home more. You don't want to miss out on those precious opportunities and you don't want to waste your time doing things that seem less important. Most specifically, doing another back squat may not seem that important every single day. This is really the purpose of the Diesel Dad. We have to understand that at the very top level, our purpose is to be leaders in our household.

Being dad is number one. Being a great husband is number two. Being a great business owner, professional, whatever you do is number three. Being a great husband is number two. Being a great business owner, professional, whatever you do is number three. Being able to provide for your family. And then training comes in at number four. And the difference between training being number one and training being number four is very,

most of the time comes down to having the time to do it, having the energy to do it, and finding purpose behind it. Because if training is the fourth most important thing in your life, you probably don't have lofty goals. You probably don't understand why it's even important day in and day out to put in the work, to fight for your time, and truly put in the effort to be in the gym and working hard. When you start to understand that fitness is an ethical responsibility, it can stay number four, but it raises the importance of what number four does for you in your life. It makes it mandatory. There's no more not getting to your workout. You have to do it because it makes number one, number two, and number three work better. Fitness is in the core. Training

makes you strong. Eating well keeps you lean. Being an active participant in life keeps you athletic. You do not want to live your life on the sidelines. You want to be in the arena. When there's a kickball game outside, you need to be in it. When the kids are lining up and they want to race, you need to be in it. There is no time to be sitting on the sidelines, being out of shape, not trusting yourself physically to not be able to get up and play at any given moment. Those are the moments you should be training for. Those are the things that are most important. And the Diesel Dad is the answer to that. We help busy dads get strong, lean,

and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. We created the Diesel Dad Diet to optimize your metabolism so that you can build, so you can lose 13 pounds in 13 weeks and build a strong, lean, and athletic body that you're proud of. We have created this platform, yes, to get you strong, lean, and athletic, but also as a leadership platform to provide the education that you need to have a better conversation about strength, conditioning, nutrition in your household so that you can practice these methods and lead from the front. And the most effective way for us to do this is to create conversations, to create a culture of health, nutrition, strength, and conditioning in our households so that you can raise strong kids and a strong family. And all of that is led by Diesel Dads. This show is going to be posting very frequently,

whether it's on podcasts, whether it's on YouTube, you can count on us to be bringing you the education that you need to have a better conversation, to accept that fitness is an ethical responsibility, to be able to build cultures of health in your family, to lead by example. And those are the reasons that we created the Diesel Dad. This platform has grown. The number of dads that we're coaching has grown. And we can't help, can't wait to help you get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. And on a deeper level, we can't wait to help you recognize and take responsibility for the fact that fitness is an ethical responsibility. And that strong families raising strong kids are led by Diesel Dads.

Make sure you tune in. Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you leave a comment. If you want to connect with me on Instagram, I'm at Anders Varner. We are at Barbell Shrugged. You can head over to dieseldad.com to find three efficient and effective strength training programs to get you strong, lean, and athletic. You can also head over to dieseldaddiet.com in which you will find ways to optimize your metabolism, lose 13 pounds in 13 weeks and build a strong athletic body that you are proud of. I can't wait to connect with you more. I appreciate you for tuning into this

and we'll see you guys next time.