Barbell Shrugged - Five Fitness Factors for Fat Loss - Diesel Dad Episode 18

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

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Welcome to episode 18 of the Diesel Dad and today's episode what I want to talk to you about is understanding how you can put together a training program that does not involve just lifting weights so that you can reach your fat loss goals faster and why this is not such a simple answer as go lift weights, move more, eat less, and how you can increase your fat loss and reach your goals faster. Now when I think about fat loss and when I think about pairing exercise with fat loss, there's five major components that I want to think about. In the middle is what I call hell. And the way that I describe fitness and exercise hell is sitting in a specific place, mainly in front of your computer or your phone, being bombarded with other people's information that causes an immense amount of stress on your brain and your body and having

nowhere to release that stress. It's literally the feeling of staring at your email. Somebody saying, I need you to do this. You taking that information in and sitting there and the only way that you can respond to that information is by typing an email back or doing what other people tell you to do. It's the same thing that happens on social media. It's the same thing that happens on this video right now. Me telling you what to do and you sitting there watching it without taking any

action. That's why I want you to take action on these videos so badly because the only way that you can get rid of the stress and the information that I'm giving you is to embody it, take it, use it, relieve the stress, and now you're outside of fitness hell. See, the thing about fitness hell is that we sit all day long. Whether you're in your car, whether you're at work, whether you're at home, watching TV, watching Netflix, there's no difference between watching your phone and social media and then turning Netflix on.

You can put your phone away all you want. That is hell. Taking in information, taking in somebody else's crap, not being able to process it through movement, and all of a sudden, you embody all of that stress. You hold it in so tight. Next thing you know, you're clenching your jaw, and it's just a frustrating way to go about it,

and that's how we spend most of our life, right? We spend it sitting at our desk or we're sitting in front of a computer, sitting on our phone, sitting in front of a TV, all of this. We're sitting in our car and cars are driving 80 miles an hour around us. It's just hell. We're taking in so much stress

and we have no way to relieve that stress because movement is the answer to all of this. And the way that I like to talk about getting out of fitness hell and helping you get to your fat loss goals faster is by understanding that there's other four components of understanding exercise and the things that you can do in order to relieve that stress. Now, I always like to start on the slow side of life, right? There's two main components to understanding the slower, less intense side of fitness. And the lowest level of intensity is going to start with sitting as still as possible. When I say sitting still, I don't mean sitting still on your phone because that's the stress coming in, right? I'm talking about

sitting as still as you possibly can. This is going to be low intensity, low stress. What is low intensity and low stress? Well, that could be a little thing called meditation. It could be journaling. It could be going for a walk. You see, these things are low intensity and we don't have other people's stress coming at us, other people's information,

other people coming into our space telling us what to do. That is the slowest side of this that we can possibly do. And it's also insanely important. The reason the low intensity slow state is important is because it allows us to process information, project our life out in the future, and really spend some time figuring out who we are, where our thoughts come from, are they positive thoughts, and using that information to set the course for where we want to go. This is quite literally step one of our mindset training and understanding how we run the Diesel Dad Mentorship. What are the facts? Where do we

want to go in the future? And the easiest way for us to understand all of that is to sit still, watch our brain, watch the thoughts, understand how positive they are, how negative they are, eliminate the negative ones because that's trash, and start to pay attention to the positive ones because that's the thought pattern that we want to be keeping moving forward as we attack your goals. Now when we go from this low intensity slow state whether it's journaling or walking or meditating sitting as still as possible we can start to scale the intensity along with movement again right. This is where we start to get into aer along with movement again, right? This is where we start to get into aerobic training.

This is how I like to think about maybe rowing for 20 minutes, rowing a 5K. Maybe it's going out for a jog or a long, slow, steady state run. Maybe it's a longer walk at a higher intensity, but anything to get that aerobic capacity moving, it doesn't have to mean that you're training. It just means that we're adding a little bit more stress to the environment, that's the increased intensity. And because we're moving,

we're able to react to that stress and process it along the way. That is literally the greatest part about fitness and fat loss is that you're able to process stress and move it into a positive way. So on the left side of this spectrum, we've got low intensity, steady state.

That's going to be something that allows us to watch our brain. We're allowed to process things and we're able to stay as steady, slow as possible. My personal preferences, that's going to be meditating, journaling, going for a walk without your headphones in. As you ramp up the intensity, this is going to provide additional intensity, but it also comes with additional movement practice to match that intensity where we are now working on running, jogging, walking at higher intensity. Maybe this is a yoga class that you want to be a part of where it's more

flowing so that you're meeting a higher level of stress with a higher level of movement. You're able to process that and you relieve stress. You feel at the end in the dead middle of this thing is fitness hell as I mentioned earlier fitness hell is bringing in all the stress and having zero opportunity to process that stress now once we start to move to the higher intensity state that is going to be a little bit more on the fitness side as you would normally put fitness in the box, right? That's going to be things like sprinting, resistance training, and maybe even some CrossFit, some high intensity interval training. Now, do you have to go to the nth degree? Do you have to go to the highest level extreme in order to reach your fat loss goals?

Do you have to go all the way to the exact opposite end of the spectrum from meditation and go balls to the walls into understanding how desperately bad CrossFit hurts in order to reach your fat loss goals? The answer is absolutely not. In fact, I like to think about the majority of my resistance training to be one step past where fitness hell lives. If you're talking about like a rate of perceived exertion,

I love hanging out in like the seven and a half to eight range. That allows me to lift weights without setting PRs, without pushing myself to the point that I'm going to be so sore the next day, without pushing myself to the point where I feel like I'm going to throw up. Like what the hell is the point of freaking throwing up at the end of your workout? Is that really what you need? Is that really what somebody that's like 35 to 40 years old and trying to lose fat needs in their day? No, what you need is to be under a little bit of weight so that you boost your metabolism, so that you start building muscle because muscle is incredibly important to the metabolic performance of your body. You need to

be able to understand that it's hard to build tissue. And over time, that rep range or that RPE, rate of perceived exertion of seven and a half to eight, is going to be able to allow you to create a long-term game plan to reaching your fat loss goals. Now, is there importance to going super high intensity? Of course. We all want to test ourselves. But the way that I like to think about this is we have training and we have testing, right? Training is very intelligent, somewhere in the 75%, 80, maybe 85% range. We can start to go maybe closer to 90%,

but we wanna hang out in rep ranges that build muscle, eight to 12, we want to do it heavy ish so that it's good movement, but we don't need to be testing maxes. We don't need to be throwing up. We don't need to be pushing ourselves so hard that fitness sucks and you don't want to come back. Those days are for testing and every once in a while, maybe one day a week, maybe twice a month, maybe a couple times a year, you can go and go balls to the walls. I just finished doing Murph and I did it at the most casual pace ever

because my goals have nothing to do with PRing my Murph. It seems like a ridiculous thing to me to think that I'm going to go push myself to the point of throwing up and tearing my hands and doing all this because fitness is just a part of my life that I love. And what I want you to do is adopt a mindset based around the fact that you can have

a healthy relationship with fitness that does not involve being stressed out at work, living in the middle of a box inside fitness hell where you are stuck in a seated position with constant barrage of information coming at you. Every time you look at your phone and look at your computer, instead of looking at them as a phone or a computer, I want you to start looking at them as other people taking your time, your energy, and throwing their stress at you. It's always somebody telling you what to do, how to think, and ways that you can change it to adopt to their life. And I'm well aware that I'm doing that right now. But my goal with this video series is always to give you the tools to help you lose fat, get stronger, get leaner, be more athletic

without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. So as soon as you're done watching this, I want you to cut it off because this is quite literally fitness hell. What I want you to do is partition in your day. Understand that the parts of your day that are all the way on the low and slow. It's so cool to go low and slow.

Sit down, meditate, figure out where your thoughts are coming from. Are they positive? Are they something that you enjoy thinking about? Are they negative? Do we need to have a better mindset around the negative thoughts and how do we transform them

and frame them in a positive way so that we can use them going forward? From there, we can scale that up. You can go from meditation and journaling and walking and yin yoga and scale that into a more of a flow yoga where you're doing specific poses. You can do that into a light jog or a run or a 5K row or an air bike and it doesn't have to kill you you can just be at a higher intensity working on getting oxygen to your muscles and blood flow fitness hell sits right in the middle where we don't want to stay ever nobody wants to nobody's pushing so hard in life to live life in the middle and it's the same thing for your for your fitness goals once we scale that up a little bit this is the sweet spot right this is the training zone somewhere in between 75 to 85

7.5 to 8.5 on the rpe scale rate of perceived exertion really high quality movement really high quality resistance training be able to build muscle boost metabolism, teach your body how to repair itself. This is where you get the bulk of that work done. And then every once in a while, head out to the extremes, work on testing fitness. That's where you can push the pedal down, test yourself, go hard, go all out. If something happens and you throw up, beautiful. It happens like maybe once a year. i think it's ridiculous still that you push yourself that hard but who am i to judge you if you want to go test yourself and see what it's all about the truth is i just want to expand your capacity to understand how important all aspects of fitness are understand that the thing you do the most throughout the day is sit in fitness hell and it sucks because it's always other people

stealing your attention, stealing your thoughts, stealing your mind, stealing the way that you think and feel without any movement attached to that stress at all. Understand that on the outsides is where all the magic happens and you should be able to sit still at the same rate that you play as hard as you possibly can and be able to dominate all aspects of fitness inside that spectrum my name is Anders Varner this is Diesel Dad episode 18 and if you were a busy dad that wants to lose between 20 and 40 pounds without restrictive diets crazy supplements and spending 60 to 90 minutes in the gym, the Diesel Dad Mentorship is taking applications right now. You can sign up, work directly with me, and I can't wait to get on a call with you. Get into the description of this show. My name is Anders Varner, Diesel Dad, episode 18. We'll see you guys next week.