Barbell Shrugged - How to Find The Right Fat Loss Coach - Diesel Dad Episode 24

Episode Date: July 13, 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 ► Connect with Anders Varner: https://www.instagram.com/andersvarner

Welcome to the Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can find the right coach to help you get to your goals. And I'm going to do this in the backdrop that right now, if you're a busy dad that wants to lose between 20 and 40 pounds, you need to get into the description because we are helping dads all over the world do that without restrictive diets and spending 60 to 90 minutes in the gym. The reason I wanted to bring into the podcast and onto this channel today of finding the right coach is because as I have gone through the last 25 summers,

lifting weights, that's right, 25 summers. Every single summer for the last 25 years, I've been lifting weights and training with purpose. The goals that I have had have radically shifted from the time that I was 13 to the time that I am today at 38 years old. When I was hiring coaches, which has been pretty much the entirety of my strength

training career, the goal at which I was lifting weights for is the impetus to who I hired as a coach. When I was 13 through 18 years old, my entire purpose of lifting weights was to get better at playing ice hockey. By the time I was 18 years old and I realized that I was 5'8 and no hockey coach in the entire world cares about 5'8 slightly above average hockey players, I realized I probably don't need a pure strength and conditioning coach anymore. At the time, I was working out with the wrestling team at my high school or during the summers and then working out with my hockey team during the winters or while I was at school.

And that's the perfect scenario to create a strength and conditioning program that's going to allow you to be strong and fast and more skilled on the ice is to work out with a pure strength and conditioning coach that allows you to get stronger and faster with the intent to get you stronger and faster. That carries over onto the ice and it makes you as good of an athlete as possible. When I got out of that, I had no idea what I was going to be doing,

but I liked lifting weights, so I kept at it. And what I did at that time was I found a way to be strong and also reach the goals of what my end goal was, which was getting girls, right? I was in college. The whole point of lifting weights when you're in college is likely to get girls. So what did I do? I went to the bodybuilding people because they're the ones that are on stage getting their pump on. They look huge. They're super shredded. They take their shirt off and everybody in the whole audience is looking.

So you go, I wonder what those guys do. I need to do that because they look really good. And when everyone takes their shirt, when those guys take their shirts off, everyone notices and everyone cheers. And I want that. So what did I do? I did four or five years of bodybuilding.

I never went on stage. I never got super shredded lean want that. So what did I do? I did four or five years of bodybuilding. I never went on stage. I never got super shredded lean like that. I never ever sought out the extreme scenarios that bodybuilding can take you to. However, those were the programs I followed because that is the coaches and the goals that I wanted to get to. That was my ideal state. When CrossFit showed up, I immediately joined a gym, found coaches, found Olympic weightlifting coaches, and even inside that, I hired gymnastics coaches to help me with handstands and help me with backflips and help me become more athletic and help me with kipping pull-ups and butterfly pull-ups and all the gymnastics components. There was a time in the middle of my CrossFit career in which I could clean 300 pounds

but could not put anything more than 255 pounds over my head, which is insanely frustrating and almost led me to the point of quitting CrossFit completely. So what did I do? I hired an Olympic weightlifting coach. Somebody that specialized in a specific thing to make me better and get me to my goal in a faster, straighter line. That really is the goal of hiring a coach. To take you from where you are to where you want to go in the straightest amount of time so that you don't have to go back and learn everything from the ground up. Could I have gone and learned everything

that my Olympic weightlifting coach knew? Sure, but that's not the point. You hire the coach so that you don't have to go through all the pitfalls. They just take you on a straight line journey to where you want to go. Immediately after my CrossFit career ended, I sold my gym, my body was broken, and I spent two years basically doing rehab.

And what I mean by rehab is I stopped lifting with barbells for the most part. I had been training at such high intensities that I needed to get a coach that allowed me the ability and space to actually understand how to slow down, recover, repair my body and I hired a yoga coach and she was so awesome. We went to yin yoga classes, my wife and I. I had a physical therapist that I started a business with to help people with low back pain. I was on a rehab journey for two straight years to get my body from completely broken to being functional because if you play CrossFit at a competitive level and you're training really, really hard for 12 straight years, I can guarantee you, you're going to be broken. Nobody plays that game as hard as you can for

12 years without walking out completely broken. So what I needed was a physical therapist, somebody that knew how to help me. I needed a yoga instructor that knew how to bring my joints back to health, to teach me how to slow down, to get the stress out of my body, to relieve all of that intensity and be able to train on the other side of the pair on this intensity paradigm. The other thing that happened during that time was I was able to develop some mindfulness and a skill set that I didn't have in the CrossFit world because I had been pumping intensity so hard. And I got to a place where

if I wasn't doing Metcons at 100% every single day, I felt like I just wasn't getting any benefit. But we all know that you can only play that game for a certain amount of time before everything breaks down. And you have to go to the other side. You have to go create a well-rounded human. Go find some mindfulness. Spend some time in a yoga studio.

Train and work out and be around physical therapists that know how to heal your body. See you have to find coaches that allow you to get to where you're going in a straighter line. Now, when I became a dad, I had no idea that two years later, two and a half years later, my sole focus would be to spend all of my time around other dads that like being in shape, helping them get to a body weight that they are proud of so that they can have a life that allows them to be a leader in their household, that allows them to show up and be the person that they want to be, to be the active dad, not the fat dad.

They don't want to go to the pool wearing all of the clothes and jumping in with a t-shirt on. That's not the life they want to live. And I create that straight line to help them get where they want to be faster. Now, all of this came because when I became a dad three years ago now, my whole life flipped. Training was always like the most important thing.

My relationship with my mind and my body, that was always like number one. Training never stopped in all of the last 25 years. It's always been priority. Even after I got married, I could still just peace out, go to the gym, train 60 to 90 minutes, no big deal. It's just, it's not a problem. When the kids showed up, training immediately got shoved to the bottom of the list. I needed to find more effective, more efficient ways to take this two plus decade library of information about strength training and fitness that I could be a great dad, be there when she gets home from daycare, be there in the morning when she wakes up and making healthy breakfasts and being a part of the morning routine so that I'm a part of my family. Also being a great husband, making sure that I'm supporting my wife, being there as much as I possibly can, being the emotional support

system she needs, bringing value to her life. I think about these things a lot. It's really important for me to be able to prioritize dad and husband, and then of course business, which is the thing that supports the first two. There has to be a financial side to this. And then underneath all of that is fitness. Going from number one to number four, that is an insane drop in importance and time priority and necessity. And how often do you think about the fourth most important thing in your day? You most likely wake up, you go about your business and hope you make it to the gym, but because it's the fourth most important thing, it likely doesn't happen that much. And then you don't feel that great because you haven't been moving. You haven't been training.

You haven't been in the gym. It turns into the kitchen. And what I had to do was radically reshift all of the information that I had in my life and fit it into this new puzzle that is being a dad. Because guess what? Being a dad's not going anywhere. It's not going anywhere whatsoever. I'm going to be doing this dad thing for the rest of my life. Hopefully one day I'm a granddad, but I'm still gonna be a dad for the rest of my life.

The reason why I wanted to do this is because it's so important for you to recognize who you are when you're hiring a coach to help you get to your goals. If you are going to be a busy dad and prioritize your family and your own fitness, it is important that you hire a coach that understands the balance between family and fitness and your business, your professional life is also super important thrown into that mix. It's going to take eight to 10 hours of your day. The reason is because you got to understand what these coaches are good at. We all lift weights.

We all can help you get stronger. We all can tell you relatively the exact same information that is going to help you lose weight. The difference is the context at which you do it. If you're a CrossFit coach, one of the most important things that you're trying to teach your clients and most likely the life that you're living as well, the person that you, the dad, is going to hire when you sign up with a CrossFit coach is that they're going to get you fit across broad time and modal domains. And in order to do that, you need to be strong. You need to be doing gymnastics. You need to be doing Olympic weightlifting. You need to be doing some sort of paleo type diet with additional carbs kicked in.

It's going to be a training session that's roughly 60 to 90 minutes long and that may not fit into your schedule. On top of that, there are testing periods inside CrossFit protocols, most notably the CrossFit Open in which you are going to be recommended to do that. So you are not only just signing up to be in shape,

but you're also signing up to be peaking at a specific time in the year, which is also going to take a ton of time and effort that is not going to be allocated towards your family, your business, or balancing all of it. There's nothing wrong with it. And if it fits your life and you're very

interested in being good at CrossFit, I highly recommend you being a good, going and finding a great CrossFit coach and doing that. If you want to go the physique route and follow some coach that's super shredded and post ad pictures on Instagram all the time, I highly recommend you do that if your goals align with that. And what you'll find is that these people and these coaches are very good over time throughout a year of lifting a lot of weights, applying a lot of science to their training, adding a lot of complexity to the coaching, eating in a specific way that allows them to build muscle throughout the year, and then over an 8 to 12 week period, 1 to 2 times a year, you will see them have massive caloric drops in which they drop their nutrition and calories

down incredibly low to cut for photo shoots or for getting on stages, competing in competitions. These are what bodybuilding coaches type do, physique coaches do. They want you to lift weights throughout the year and then they're going to diet you down so that you can get super shredded for specific events or times of the year, most notably probably summer. If you want to be spending roughly 60 to 90 minutes in the gym eating in a specific way to get you to a specific weight to put on a specific amount of muscle and then chop those calories and progressively reduce that caloric amount so that you can then be ready for a specific time of the year or a photo shoot or a competition you should absolutely go hire a bodybuilding slash physique coach because they are the ones that are going to get you to the place that you

want to go now when i started training when i was 13 years old i hired a strength and conditioning coach what i think of when i think of a strength conditioning coach is quite often somebody that is a college high school college or professional level strength coach for athletes their specific job is to get you stronger bigger faster to play a sport those training sessions will look very similar to a crossfit structure and they're going to require 45, 60 minutes, just like everything else, to get you to a specific place so that you can be bigger, stronger, faster. That is the skill set. Those coaches are very good at periodizing out an entire year and writing workouts that are going to have you prepped to be playing bigger, stronger, faster in a specific sport so that you can perform on game day.

That is their job. They are strength and conditioning coaches that coach athletes. And if you are an athlete looking for a specific thing to play a specific sport, you should hire a strength and conditioning coach. I coach dads. I coach people that are looking to balance family, fatherhood, and fitness. I want you to train between 15 and 40 minutes, 45 days a week. I want you to take a sustainable approach to nutrition that allows you to maintain and build muscle, maintain a low level of body fat, and I want you to understand what physical

freedom means. When you hire me, I'm uninterested in you peaking for the CrossFit Open. There's nothing wrong with going and doing the CrossFit Open, but I'm not going to prepare you for the CrossFit Open. I also have no interest in you getting on stage and flexing. I think those people are awesome, but that's not what I do. I want you to understand that I'm not preparing you to go play sports. If you want to go play sports, I highly recommend you do it. I love playing sports, but that's not the type of coaching that we do at the Diesel Dad. The type of coaching that we do at the Diesel Dad is to get you to understand what your life looks and feels like when you drop between 20 and 40 pounds. The concept that we put to that is the idea of physical freedom.

Physical freedom means that you are capable on any given day to get up, go outside, go play, go on long hikes, go to the pool and feel confident taking your shirt off. Look in the mirror in the morning and understand that you like what you see. You don't have the negative self-talk. You don't have to worry about your not being the leader in your household, not showing up and aligning the person you want to be with the actions that you currently take. The most important part of the Diesel Dad is that you create the vision of who you want to be in the future. You have to decide who this person is. My job is to get you to a place in which we lose the body fat, we create a strong, lean, and athletic body,

and we do it in a sustainable way so that it does not have to sacrifice family and fatherhood or your fitness. Because at the center of all of those, at the center of the idea that you are a family man that leads from the front, you're building a strong family, raising strong kids, all of this is centered around having healthy nutrition in your household. All of it is centered around the idea that you need to be leading and showing your kids that living an active lifestyle is important. All of that boils down to one concept called physical freedom. And inside that physical freedom, you develop the confidence in yourself that you can do things. And because

you're the type of person that can do things, you achieve the goals that you set out to do. That first goal is most likely losing the weight. That next goal is the one that's super fun because now you're experiencing the world through a very different lens in which you're able to go and do things. You're able to go experience what it's like to go on the hike and not feel like you're going to bonk in the middle of it. You're allowed to go climb at the climbing gym. You're allowed to go to the CrossFit gym. You're allowed to go lift the weights. You're allowed to go out and run wind sprints with your kids and chase after them and play tag. These are the things that when you're

20 to 40 pounds overweight that you don't get to do and it crushes you. And I want to coach people that need to understand the balance between family, fatherhood, and fitness. When you hire a coach, your goal in hiring your coach and spending that money is getting a straight line approach to the exact place that you want to be. Where you are today is a product of the past. There's a whole lot of situations and routines, systems, functions that got you to this place, feeling the way you feel. And many times people are ashamed of that father figure that they've created. It's not the person that they want to be

and it's not aligned with how they see themselves as dads. My job at the Diesel Dad is to take you from where you are, set that trajectory, pinpoint exactly who you want to be. We shed the weight, we get you fit and we experience physical freedom so that you can go live a strong, lean, and athletic life without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. When you pick a coach, pick the person that is going to get you to the goal in the straightest line, in the most

effective and efficient manner. My name is Anders Varner. Make sure you get into the show description. Apply to the Diesel Dad Mentorship where you're going to work with me one-on-one. We're going to make this thing happen. No restrictive diets. You're not going to spend 60 to 90 minutes in the gym and I can't wait to help you. Physical freedom's coming. We'll see you guys next week.