Barbell Shrugged - How to Write Workouts to Boost Metabolism, Burn Fat, and Build Muscle - Diesel Dad Episode 23

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

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Welcome to episode 19 of the Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner. In today's episode, we're going to go over a very simple solution how busy dads can learn how to build muscle and write workouts so that they can live a strong, lean, and athletic life. And before we get into this, before we get into the actual structure of how to build workouts, we have to think about why we want to build muscle in the first place. Obviously, strength is really important, but what it really comes down to when it comes to losing fat or creating a body that you desire, the most important thing is how expensive it is for your body to keep muscle tissue.

If it was really cheap, muscle would be easy to build, but it's not. It's really difficult. And what that typically lends us to is understanding that muscle and metabolism are very closely linked together and they have a huge benefit on each other. The more muscle we have, the more calories you need to burn. And there's a simple reason for it. It's really like a three-step process. Step one is that while you're actually training and lifting weights, you have to have your metabolism through the roof because you're, you're expending a lot of energy. Number two is the repair of that muscle tissue. As you work out, you're breaking muscle tissue down. And then

in order for you to rebuild it, your body's going to have to take a lot of protein, get it to the muscles, carbohydrates, and use that energy to build and repair the muscle that you broke down. Ideally, over time, that muscle gets bigger, you look stronger, you move more weight, progressive overload on the bar. As you increase the weights on the bigger, you look stronger, you move more weight, progressive overload on the bar. As you increase the weights on the bar, you're creating an environment that is much more difficult to live in. Your body recognizes that in order to survive in said environment, you need to build more muscle and you need to maintain more muscle, which over time is going to increase your metabolism as well because it's just more expensive for your body to maintain muscle than it is to store fat.

Now, when it comes to fat loss, it's also extremely important because if we're eating in a slight caloric deficit, all of the stored energy that you have in your body that stores itself as body fat is then used because if you are on a 2,000, if you need 2,000 calories to be at maintenance, you are lifting weights that bumps it to 2,200 calories for your daily maintenance level and you're eating 2,000. Well, now there's a 200 calorie gap in there this is a very oversimplified version of understanding how we get into a caloric deficit and burn fat at the same time boost your metabolism because your strength training that requires energy out on top of that you have to repair the musculature and just maintaining the musculature.

All of that is very metabolically taxing. And because you are eating below your maintenance calories, all of the stored body fat of that 200 calorie delta is now going to come from stored energy, which is on your body as body fat. These are a very high level understanding of the relationship on how we burn fat, how you boost your metabolism and why muscle is so important in the first place for you to do all of those, of those bigger goals that you have. Now, how do you build muscle? It's, it's kind of, it's very similar to the metabolism thing where everyone knows they

have one, but nobody really understands what it is. Building muscle is its own giant confusing ass thing that everybody knows they can do, but nobody really knows the right structure. And then you go on the internet and there's a billion different people telling you a billion different things. And what we want to do with the Diesel Dad is simplify this as much as possible. So, there's three main ways to build muscle. Number one is mechanical tension. Number two is called metabolic stress. And number three is muscular damage.

Now, at the highest level, the most important thing for you to focus on for all of them is the idea of strength. I want you to be strong in low reps. I want you to be strong in medium reps and I want you to be strong in high reps. And how are you going to create workouts to get all of that done, increase your strength, increase weight on the bar and understand what's actually needed. And that's where we start to get into a little bit of the nerdier things that you can start to work on for creating workouts. And this actually is the exact formula on how we created our best-selling program. It's in the Diesel Dad

program. It's the most used program. We've got a couple hundred dads following this program right now, and it's called Emom Aesthetics. And the reason we've set this up, we just literally took the pieces, the most basic pieces of building muscle and designed a program to hit all of those things and put it in a window that we can do all of this very effectively in under half an hour because you're busy as hell. You've got business, you've got your professional life, because you're busy as hell you've got business you've got your professional life you've got your family you've got fitness and you've got to be a father you don't have time to be in the gym for 60 to 90 minutes and that's where we were as people that's where you are as a dad and that's how this diesel dad training program started now how do we

build a training program that builds muscle in under 30 minutes by keeping these essential pieces and understanding mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and muscular damage? Well, mechanical tension is really just about the ability to lift really heavy things. Now, what rep ranges are you going to be able to lift near maximal loads? Probably not like a set of 100, right? That's like the extreme absurdity example. I get it. The place you're going to be the strongest is most likely inside sets of five reps.

So you take the bar out of the rack and it says for five back squats, down and up, down and up for five, you're going to be able to do a set of five at a much heavier rate. Then you're going to be able to do a set of 15. That's pretty much as logical as it can get. You don't have to do as many reps. So you're going to be able to use more weight. And why this is super important. Mechanical tension is really like the pinnacle of understanding how we trigger our brain to tell the body to move or to build muscle. The more we move heavy weights, the more our body recognizes that the environment

that we are creating needs strength. So it signals to your muscles, go build strength, go build muscle tissue. Neuro neurologically create pathways that allow you to be strong in that environment. And the way that we increase and make that environment more challenging is by adding additional load to the bar. So if one week you squat 100 pounds, your body is going to be able to adapt to that 100 pounds.

If next week you put 110 pounds on the bar, it is a significantly more challenging environment that your body is then going to have to adapt to. And we can carry this out for months, years, for a very long time until you start to hit some more advanced levels of training. This is the basic idea of mechanical tension is that you need to be able to lift heavy weights and most likely that's going to be in rep ranges from one to five. Now if that is our peak expression of strength our next goal is to be able to operate at a very high level for longer periods of time. This is where some of the metabolic stress stuff comes in. And you can take this from rep ranges of eight to 20. And inside there, I think that there's actually a real sweet spot for eight to 12. And I like those because you're still at a

rep range where you can move relatively high weights, where that intensity level is near what a five rep max would be without having that huge breakdown, where you're able to get a set of eight, a set of 10, a set of 12, but you're not just under the bar for a set of 20, which can be just absolute torture. So if those are our two big ones, we've got our ability to move really heavy weights. Then we have our ability to move slightly less weight, but still heavy for about double the reps that we would when we're moving our heaviest weights, it leaves our ability now to focus on really high end rep ranges, somewhere in say the 15 to 20 range, 12 to 20. The idea of muscular damage is something that is important to building muscle and has been proven that is mandatory for building muscle. However, it's not as important as your ability to move heavy weights over many different rep ranges,

starting with mechanical tension being the highest level, metabolic stress being the second highest level, slightly lower weights, higher reps. And then this muscular damage thing really has a lot to do with how slow and how much time under tension you are spending. If you've ever heard of tempo training, where you might have a three or a five second descent, and then an explosion up in a squat, that is what we're looking for is just increasing the time under tension, which there's a lot of benefit for many reasons, but that is where a lot of the soreness comes from as the muscle tissues break down and need to be repaired. So when you're creating a training program, taking these methodologies into play, what I want you to think about is accumulating roughly 25 to say 40 reps of a given exercise. We could even back that down to maybe 15

to 40. And what you want to do is pick one exercise in which you could focus on a lot of the mechanical tension, top end strength. Pick two exercises that allow you to hang out in that 8 to 12 rep range and then pick one exercise that is going to be somewhere in that 12 to 20 rep range. Now the main goal of the high weight lower reps is to increase absolute strength. What we're going to be focusing on in that 8 to 12 rep range is going to be hypertrophy. That's going to just be activating, bringing a ton of blood to the muscles, making sure that you're getting a lot of volume built in, really building like a durable, strong muscle. And then the last part can be either rehab focused. It can be a structural integrity exercise.

It could just be to get a pump, move light weights for high reps so that you're filling that muscle belly up with a ton of fluids and feel like you're really doing a lot of work. That stuff's really good when it comes to like bicep curls, tricep curls, getting bigger arms, feeling like you have really big, swole legs.

That's a big piece of it. The next piece is how do we start to structure these so that you're not in the gym for 60 to 90 minutes? And this is something that I am super passionate about as a dad and somebody that doesn't have a ton of time with business to run. We've got a husband, we've got kids, we've got a new kid on the way. Life is going to be crazy. How am I going to actually create a workout program in which I am not in the gym, just killing myself and having this like FOMO slash like regret slash all these things. Am I wasting too much time? We're going to come home. What am I missing? All these things happen when I'm at the gym too long. And I love being at the gym, but not when I feel like I'm sacrificing my life to be training. So say we're doing a lower body day and we want to work on top

end strength for the first piece. We can take a front squat. That's a very good compound movement. We're able to load the bar very heavy and say you're going to hit five sets of five that's five sets five reps for each set a total of 25 reps now say you can do that with 185 pounds on the bar that's a great goal if you're not there if you are there you understand that you know 25 reps at 185 is no joke and then you want to pair it with an exercise that you're going to be doing in the 8 to 12 rep range. Now, you don't want those two to cancel each other out or overtax the musculature

that you're going to be using in the squat. So you may be picking a hamstring exercise in there. So you can very easily go from a front squat and a dumbbell RDL in which you're getting a lot of quad and glute and moving that into a glute and a hamstring now the magic of the EMOM aesthetics program and what we're doing with the Diesel Dad program to combine and push all these together is taking that squat doing doing it in an EMOM format. So you're going to be hitting five front squats. And in the next minute, you're going to come in

and do eight, 10, 12 RDLs with the dumbbell. We do that for 10 total minutes, which is five rounds of each. So you accumulate 25 front squats. You're going to accumulate 40, 40 RDLs. We're going to take a short break, bring our heart rate down, change the weights out. And then you can go into even more isolated things. So maybe you're going with like a heels elevated goblet squat for 12. And then you want to do something in the super high rep range, or maybe you're doing some like banded hamstring curls. So in the next one, you have another 10 minute EMOM. You're going to do five rounds of heels, elevated goblet squats for 12. You're going to do a set of 20 hamstring curls. Minute one, you're doing the goblet squats,

minute two, and you're alter two, you're doing the hamstring curls and you're alternating back and forth now the beauty in all of this when you look at most training programs they start out with speed work with some sort of olympic lifting then they go to their strength work and that's you're going to be your front squat and then they go to hypertrophy work and that's going to be the other things that we laid out and then they're going to go to some sort of conditioning piece next thing you know you just spent 90 minutes at the gym and you're just totally waxed while you missed everything that's going on at your house. What I have done and what we have done with the EMOM Aesthetics Program inside the Diesel Dad

is we have taken these, combined them into these two EMOMs and because we have a desire to do conditioning work without the idea of absolutely killing ourselves all the time, it makes it very easy for us to get a good dose of intensity on the conditioning piece by doing these in a superset, lowering the rest periods. Is it going to be the best strength program as if you're trying to be the world's strongest man? It's not. Is it going to be the best strength program as if you're trying to be the world's strongest man? It's not.

Is it going to be conditioning on a level that is going to get you to the CrossFit Games? No, it's not. You should do all the Metcons if you want to do that. Is it going to be a hypertrophy program that's going to get you on stage at Mr. Olympia? Absolutely not. But what it does do is hit all of the major categories for building muscle, which allows you to boost your metabolism, which allows you to burn fat faster. What it also does is gets you into that like 80, 85, 90% range of all the things, making it the most well-rounded,

best fit training program for busy dads that want to be strong lean and athletic my name is Anders Varner this is episode 19 of the diesel dad get into the description right now click the link if you want to come hang out with us if you are a busy dad that wants to lose between 20 and 40 pounds without restricted diets crazy supplements it's been 60 to 90 minutes in the gym schedule a call with me. The Diesel Dad Mentorship is live, open. Applications are in the description right now. We'll see you guys on Friday.