Barbell Shrugged - Strong, Lean, and Athletic: Diesel Dad 30 Days Challenge w/ Anders Varner and Doug Larson- Barbell Shrugged #535

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

“We help busy dads get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness.” - Diesel Dad   What you want:   A strong, lean, and athletic body that you are proud of. What you are missing most right now. Confidence - Believing in yourself is hard when you don’t feel good in your body. Discipline - When time gets tough, you fall off the wagon, and struggle getting back on. Competence - The lack of confidence and discipline bleeds into every area of life. If you can’t take care of yourself it makes taking care of others even more challenging. These are the traits of leaders, role models, and every dad deserves to have them.   Fitness, Family, and Fatherhood are essential to happiness and busy dads should have a fitness program that ensures the success of all three.   Join the Diesel Dad Challenge Now.   We get it…   Our coaches are all dads and we know how busy life gets. Low energy turns into missing the gym, bad food choices, and without knowing it, you put 15 pounds on in all the wrong places. Even worse, it beats you down mentally and emotionally. It feels like the mountain is just too high to climb.  The Diesel Dad Challenge is by dads, for dads, to get you strong, lean, and athletic.   Let us be your guide.   Join the Diesel Dad Challenge Now.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: Why we created the Diesel Dad Challenge Why you need to get strong, lean, and athletic Why training is so hard being a dad Building consistency first thing in the morning How to training, eat, and win the Diesel Dad Challenge   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram ———————————————— Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa ———————————————— Please Support Our Sponsors   PowerDot - Save 20% using code BBS at http://PowerDot.com/BBS    InsideTracker: insidetracker.com use code “shrugged25” to save 25%   Fittogether - Fitness ONLY Social Media App   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes

This week on Barbell Shrug, the Diesel Dad 30-Day Challenge, getting you strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. Three major resources coming your way. The Diesel Dad 100, that's 30 workouts that you can do in under 10 minutes to kickstart your day. Diesel Dad Nutrition, simple, easy to follow, macronutrient templates for you to get strong, lean, and athletic. And that means those are customizable to your goal, three main goals of getting strong, lean, and athletic, as well as how you would like to structure your nutrition throughout the day with a major focus on total caloric intake, protein intake, and then allowing you to structure it over three meals, over four meals,

or choosing a carb cycling path in which you are structuring the majority of your carbohydrates around your workouts so you can burn them all up and then using a higher fat percentage in your meals the further away from your workout you get. I also want to let you know that you're going to be getting access to three training programs, EMOM Strength, EMOM Aesthetics, and the Density Weight Training, all dependent upon how long you have to train in your day. Just like us, your dad, you probably don't have a ton of time to train because you got busy, busy life. You got family, you got to be a husband, you've got a professional life. Fitting training and eating and morning routines in is almost impossible. That's why we created the Diesel Dad Challenge.

So in 30 days, you can structure the habits that you need to stay strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. And you can get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash Diesel Dad Challenge. Get registered. get signed up come rage with us we're so excited about it we're putting all the dads that love lifting weights into one place it's called the diesel dad dojo and that's where all of our friends are hanging out that's where all the community is and we're super stoked about having everybody be a part of it barbellshrug.com forward slash diesel dad before we get too far

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to buy seven different bottles of magnesium to get the complete dose. Go to bioptimizers.com forward slash shrugged. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com forward slash shrugged and use the coupon code shrugged to save up to 40% off select packages to get the most full spectrum and effective magnesium product on the market. Friends, we're going to talk about the Diesel Dad Challenge. Ready? 3, 2, 1, go. Welcome to Far Well Shrugged. I'm Anders Doug Larsen. Coach Travis Mash is in the bed today. He didn't make it up.

I think we're dealing with a little bit of COVID-19 over on the Mash side of the house today. But we wanted to hop on here and hang out and do some Diesel Dad Challenge. We're going to talk to you today about how to get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. And the Diesel Dad Challenge, which is our goal to get you strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. I said that twice, but here's the deal. We put together these three parts because we've been down this road. There aren't many awesome training programs out there for dads. On top of that, my whole life has completely radically shifted in how I train, how I eat, how I live my life after becoming a dad. It's been two and a half years of really building out in my brain how the hell I'm supposed to get to reach all of the goals

that I want to have from training hard, living a life in the gym, eating the way that I want to eat, all very goal-specific towards being this strong, lean, and athletic human. But doing it in the context of being a dad, which is really hard because there's way less time, there's way less energy. Sometimes you're up at like 4 a.m smashing peanut butter out of a jar wondering if you're gonna go to work if you should deal with a crying baby and i think it's even harder now because i'm not even at that stage yet but dude when people have these like at-home education things going on in this covet world i can't imagine how hard it must be being a parent and being a professional at whatever you do and trying to train and trying to eat and trying to be like the teacher.

It's just crazy what's going on and how little time parents have when you have one, two, three kids to actually get out and take care of your own personal goals. Yeah, dude, if you're a regular person, like a corporate working professional, like you have to be there at 9 in the morning, and you have to stay until 5 o'clock, and you have to do it five days a week, and you really don't have much say in the matter, and then you also want to train, and you have a couple kids, you're either not going to see your kids barely ever,

or your training is going to have to get adjusted we'll say adjusted is is the is a very nice way of putting it i feel like my training got just completely clobbered is what happened is like because this is our job and we have to go to the gym i didn't really spend, I didn't change that much. It's actually really funny. We were talking about the other day how like you were coming, when I was in San Diego, you flew out and Ashton had like a two or three month old. She was like nursing and all these things. And you were sleeping in my living room because our house was so small in San Diego. And I was like, that shit just doesn't fly for most people because they're not professional fitnessers. And at the same time, like training, sleep, all that mess was so jacked up at that time. And I really had no idea how I

was going to continue training as hard as I was training and doing all of the snatch, clean, jerk, squat, dead accessories, spending 90 plus minutes in the gym, which I had done my entire life, and realizing there's no way that I can keep this going. And really maintaining and achieving the personal goals that I needed that make me really happy, that keep the family and keep me sane. But at the same time, there's no way that I could keep doing what I was doing and living and training as if I just had all the time in the world. Yeah, no, nobody can do it.

You look at the group of guys we already have in the Diesel That Challenge, every single one of them, once we get into a conversation, says, oh my God, this is perfect. Dude, when I started, when I had kids, I tried to keep training, but I just couldn't. You just can't do it for 90 minutes. We sometimes can do that on occasion just because this is what we do and we're always in the gym. I work in the gym like like i work in the gym all day long if i want to take a break for an hour i i have the option to

do that because i'm already there um and i have a home gym that i that i fucking love and i and i know exactly what to do so i can i can pop out there on a weekend and you know train for 45 minutes or an hour. But that's rare that I choose to either not work while I'm working at the gym and train for an hour or 90 minutes or if I'm at home but I choose to train for an hour

slash my wife doesn't want me to leave for an hour if I'm just home on a Saturday watching kids. So, so especially with when COVID hit, like I've said this on the show before, when COVID hit, that's like when I, when I actually made like even bigger changes to my training. So, you know, we're at home all day, every day, I got three kids.

My oldest is historically tough to deal with. And so I'm kind of always in the house, like being the bouncer, just making sure that that nobody's getting hurt uh by by you know my aggressive five-year-old and so given that like me and me and marcy we we set up this structure where we would do like 10 minute amraps you know just like once or twice a day where we just go out in the garage. It's a quick warm-up, 10 minutes of body weight only stuff, and then back in the house. And then we kind of slowly got back into like more kind of normal-ish training

as the boys ended up back in daycare and school and whatnot. But I liked having all of my workouts timed. So I knew, like, I'm going to do a 10-minute AMRAP, I'll be back in 15 minutes. And she knew how long it was going to take until I got back. I knew how long it was going to take until I got back rather than just being like, I got this big workout to do. I don't know when I'll get done. Probably an hour, I hope. And then it's like an hour and 25 minutes later, I walk in the house and she's like, where have you been? So I, I liked having the, that structure where I knew exactly how much time it was going to take

me i just worked as hard as i could for whatever the set amount of time was yeah 20 minutes 25 minutes 30 minutes or whatever it is uh which is you know a common time domain for emom aesthetics especially where it's just you know you get a 20 minute emom and then you're done yeah and you know 20 minutes later you're out once you're warm yeah actually when when i this was the easiest like mission statement i've ever written in my entire life like i wrote it one time and i was like strong lean and athletic that's pretty much everything i've always trained to do like if you walk around and i always joke about going to the airport and just observing the people that walk by like that that is what the majority of people in our country look like. And when you

look at the number of dads, like, I feel like all of the people and I've talked to many of them. So I know this is true is that, you know, most of the dads that have been training with us for the last six weeks, it's people that at one point in time lifted weights relatively seriously. They either went to a CrossFit gym, they were part of a high-intensity functional training program, and that's probably how they got their wife and how they became a breeder and had a child because they focused on how much they were eating. They were a part of a good gym community in which they could bounce ideas. Everybody that hung out together spoke words like paleo and keto or whatever else was like the cool fad diet at the time that they were doing or they were tracking their macros

and they had a really good idea of what they were eating and and they were a part of a great community they were getting strong they were lifting weights three to five days a week and then once that whole plan of getting strong and lean and athletic started to work they got married and then of course what happens they have to go and rub on each other and create a child like the one you're holding right now this is the ultimate diesel dad moment while you're podcasting and holding a baby that just woke up he's not really a baby he's a monster uh but they were a part of this like full community of healthy people and then all of a sudden you a sudden you get married and you have a kid.

And three years go by and you haven't really trained that hard. You've probably gone in like little spurts of training hard, but you just can't figure out how to make it work. And the problem is that there's no – people that used to work out really hard have no interest including me they have no interest in like what the internet shows you as dad training because everyone is trying to like do like kid lunges and like show you that they're doing thrusters with their their son or it's like i have eight minutes and i'm gonna do this body weight workout in the middle of my living room. It's not reality and nobody wants to do that. If you were a strength athlete or somebody that trained hard at some point in your life,

there's no way you're going to fall that far from your old self that you think that that's a viable option for reaching your goals. It's just not the reality. People that want to train are still want to train. They have no idea if going from hardcore CrossFit, hardcore Olympic weightlifter, hardcore in their 20s or whatever it is, all the way down to now I think that me doing burpees while someone in my family is watching the morning news is a real, real thing. It's just, that's, that's not going to happen. And that's the thing that I'm like so stoked about because

what happens is when people lose that like level of, of training, they don't go from hardcore to like casual runner. They just stop. And and and that stopping over three years equates to like 15 pounds and you lose a lot of muscle and you get soft and every day you wake up and you go oh this sucks you just look in the mirror and you lack you start it starts to like chip away your confidence it starts to beat you down because you just, you realize how far you've fallen from whatever that 25, 32 year old self was when you were training really hard and eating and all of your friends trained really hard. And now every time you get together with your friends, it's like, you have to go and have two or three beers. You have to go and eat all the food.

Like everybody's always out doing relatively unhealthy things, and you don't have a system built into your life to go and get back in shape. And it seems like the mountain is just way too high to climb. And without being around people, which is so rad about the Diesel Dad Dojo group that we have, is like, they're all dads. They all work hard. They all know. Like, we have some strong-ass people in there that have trained really hard in their lives. And, none of them are like in the gym 60, 90 minutes a day, two hours a day or whatever it is.

Like they're all following a program that's going to get them in and out of the gym in 30, 45 minutes. And I think that that group of people, the people that trained really hard in their 20s, early 30s, got married, had kids, and now they look at themselves in the mirror and they're like, man, this mountain is just too high to climb. I don't know how to build this in because they've never reframed training. They've never had somebody teach them exactly how to do it with limited time, with limited energy. How do you get in and reach all your goals with just 20 minutes? You only have 30 minutes to get to the gym, get in, get out. How do you structure a program so that it all works? And that's what I'm the most proud about in this is that we're like really giving people and helping them on this journey to give them the tools that they need in order to like not feel like that mountain is so so high to

climb every single time when they when they wake up and they look in the mirror and they just go shit i've fallen off so hard and now i don't have any option because the only thing that they know is long training sessions joining some gym that doesn't fit their life and they don't have two hours a day to be training. It's just really hard. Yeah. If you're waiting for life to go back to normal after you have a kid, then you're kind of deluding yourself. Like, this is normal.

Whatever you're doing now with your kid is your new normal life. Yeah. So you have to make those adjustments. If you're just waiting for your life to go back to normal so you can go back to training normal which is you know like what you're saying 60 to 90 minutes you know five days a week or whatever it is uh you know it's just not going to happen like you have to make some adjustments like a lot of people do they just they just bail on training and they think like i'm i'm in shape i'm muscular i'm fine like i'll be all right and then a couple years later they go whoa i'm like not near where i was like i feel like i'm

like that right now like i feel like i'm not even near even close to where i was you know five ten years ago and i never stopped training i still train relatively hard you know most days of the week and just just like pure fat by the pure fact that i'm getting older like i can see how my fitness is not what it used to be my strength not what it used to be uh and i think that's obviously totally normal but i i i i shudder to think about what i would be what i would feel like and look like if i just straight up stopped training once my kids were born yeah that's a heard people do it all the time. Like, after high school football, I'm never doing a power clean ever again.

I heard people say that growing up all the time, like high school and college. Like, once you're done playing sports, you never lift the weight ever again. I was always like, what? No, this is the fun part. You only lift weights because you play soccer or because you play football or whatever it is? That's the only reason? Like, dude, you get your whole life ahead of you yeah well that's like uh it's like once you have a kid it's like i don't ever have to do this again well if you don't in a couple years you're gonna look into the mirror and go oh shit i wish i really never

stopped doing that um yeah the the other thing that like on even a deeper level of like, I went, I've told the story before, but I usually hang out in like the low 190s of weight. And that's like, pretty, pretty happy, pretty comfortable. And in the first six months of becoming a dad, I got all the way to a very unhealthy looking 205. And there's like a piece of that where you know it's kind of coming because sleep sucks so bad. And you know you're not eating great. And when your sleep sucks and your eating sucks, you might be training. But training isn't going to overcome those two giant rocks that are just out of line um and you're a fitness professional like you know what yeah imagine people that like don't they're not all the way sure what i should be doing they don't

really know how to train they don't have a lot of experience they don't really know that much about nutrition and cooking whatever else like and you you gain 10 pounds because your sleep was so erratic and your time was you know sucked away from you and you're stressed and whatever else. And if it could happen to you, it could fucking happen to anybody. It happens to everybody. It's not even a could. It's like it definitely happens to everybody. And the thing that's like super gnarly about it is like you have to reframe all of the pieces, right?

Like you have to reframe to sleep. You have to reframe when you create time for yourself. Because look, here's like the thing that really started to suck when I was at 205. It wasn't really the 205. It's like you look in the mirror and you go, oh, I suck. Like I don't want my daughter to look at me

and think her dad's some fat piece of shit. Like I don't want my daughter to look at me and think her dad's some fat piece of shit. I don't want that. I don't want that at all. I want her to look and be proud of her dad that's the in-shape dude. That's how I see myself. You get to 205 and you go, oh, I'm just one of those average- looking dads that, yeah, I work out, but I have no control over how much food I'm eating.

I have no control over like these like basic necessities that show that like doesn't mean you have to go and have some shredded six pack and you're ready to stand on stage at Olympia. But like you should have some like standard of quality life. You should be a strong dad. You should be able to take your shirt off and feel confident in yourself. You should be able to, in a way, look healthy. And having muscles is a part of that. Not carrying a ton of body fat is part of that. It really is just a symbol of the amount of discipline that you have in your life. And that is really what is the easiest thing to get chipped away is that discipline of eating and training and showing up and really taking some very simple core principles, which is what we've outlined in this 30-day challenge, and just putting them into your life, like waking up a little bit earlier, you know, doing some sort of morning routine to get your blood flow to get moving,

and then having some training programs that fit. The Diesel Dad nutrition piece, I'm like really stoked on because it's so simple. Like Like we've thrown out so much of the nonsense that goes into overthinking because most people don't need to be that far down the rabbit hole. And those are the three – really the like key components that we've put together in this 30-day challenge. I also want to like just say like I'm not huge into challenges. Like the idea that you're going to be here for 30 days, I don't want that. I want you to come train with us. But everybody needs a way to kickstart really good habits. And that is what is the most important piece of this 30 days is that you commit to taking these core concepts of a morning routine in which you start moving well,

you start thinking about your own body, you focus on yourself for the first 10 to 15 minutes of the day, you're awake before everybody so that you're not, the first thing that you're doing isn't just getting clobbered by kids, lunches, and all the madness of the day. Like you actually take 10 to 15 minutes to just get your life together, see how you feel, and move a little bit. And the second part, like training and nutrition, or second and third part of the training and nutrition, like learning how to structure all of this inside this 30 days so that the habits carry over into the future.

And because of that, you're going to have some sort of radical transformation, whether it's a physical transformation and you feel confident, you feel great when you look in the mirror, or just realizing that this is so simple. If you just take some very basic steps to eating, to waking up, and to training. And that way, it's kind of like when we had the CrossFit gyms. And I know you guys wrote an entire thing, but there's always some sort of beginner's roadmap to getting into the full program, whether it's a foundations class, whether it's some sort of 30-day commitment. But that's really what we're putting together. Yes,

it's a challenge. Yes, we want you to lose a bunch of weight and take dope selfies and show everybody your abs. But really what we're trying to get you to do is spend the next 30 days really committing to the process of establishing habits, reframing what training means to you, and having a really good conversation, objectively viewing what are your goals as a dad. What are you going to do in order to take control of the fact that you haven't been training that well, you've been inconsistent. And really, because of being inconsistent, it's led to poor habits, and you need to get back on the train. And this is a really simple way to do it for people that love lifting weights, and don't have the same amount of time and energy and focus that they used to, 30 days to hop in and reset all of those ideas and kind of reset those rocks that make the biggest difference. Yeah, I like the fact that this has, after the 30-day challenge, people can stay on the

programming as long as they want to. I like that there's a long-term component to it. Historically, we've done challenges, but they've been a one-year-long challenge or even longer. Some of our programs go up to two years long. As a fitness professional, I know it takes a long time to make any substantial change. You're looking at a three-month minimum to really see any tangible change that matters, especially being noticed by people that aren't like

your wife or your kids or whoever else. I've always been against 30-day challenges simply because I just know in 30 days you can do something, but if you want to do anything really significant, you have to just train all the time, you can do something. But if you want to do anything really significant, you have to just train all the time. You have to train for a long

time. So I like having the 30-day kickoff and then the ongoing programming that you can just essentially do as long as you want. That way, there's the option to stay for six months or a year and make some real change. Make sure you're getting over to barbellshrug.com forward slash Diesel Dad Challenge, helping busy dads get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. That's our mission statement. That's how we are here to help you.

And this 30-day challenge is your kickstart to building good habits, learning how to wake up in the morning with the Diesel Dad 100 to kickstart your day, get blood to the muscles, feel good, bring mental clarity, and kickstart your day the right way. Also, Diesel Dad Nutrition, your personalized goal-specific macronutrient guide to ensuring you're getting enough protein, finding the total caloric balance to get strong, get lean,

get athletic, and making it easy so you don't have to say no to everybody every time you go out to eat or an IPA rolls your way on Christmas. You can feel good and confident that you're still on track and that you're reaching your goals. As well as three training programs, EMOM Strength, EMOM Aesthetics, and Density Weight Training for you to have a goal specific training program that you can follow based on the amount of time that you have to work out. Easy, effective, efficient training modalities to get you strong, lean, and athletic. Get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash diesel dad challenge. barbellshrug.com forward slash diesel dad challenge. Get registered today. Let's get

back to the show. Yeah, we very easily could have done the full year. But, you know, the point of the 30 days is to get people to establish, to reestablish baselines. I mean, there's nothing more when you take a picture and your shirt's off, you go, oh, I really need to get to work. I really need to be able to change this. There's something about that static moment in life that once you take the picture, you definitely need to make some changes. And the thing about the 30 days is that it's really there to just establish a baseline, establish the big pillars that you need in your life in order to get things squared away, get them moving in the right direction. Yes, committing 30 days is going to help you lose body fat.

You're definitely going to get stronger. You're definitely going to have some form of transformation that's going to happen. Our goal really is to make it as simple as possible. Literally, to make it as simple as possible. And literally to make it as simple as possible. Right now you can head over to barbellshrug.com forward slash Diesel Dad Challenge. You'll see all the information on there. But basically the simplest way, you're going to sign up, click the Buy Now button, download the entire guide.

I believe it's 56 pages that's going to walk you through the entire process in 30 days. We also have the emails and how you're going to be able to track all of your results that you'll be getting emailed upon confirmation of your purchase. And all that can be found over at barbellshrug.com forward slash Diesel Dad Challenge. But the three pillars we keep talking about, we call it the Diesel Dad 100. This was, and you've heard us talk about it on the show before, but this was really designed just because we needed a way to get up, get moving, especially once COVID hit.

I say once COVID hit. I mean, this is just going to be our lives. If you've got kids at home doing at-home education and you wake up as soon as your kids run into the room, you're already just behind. You have no chance of recovering from that. You're automatically on someone else's schedule. And that someone else is like a five-year-old that has a million ideas a minute and you're trying to just go downstairs and get a cup of coffee or take a shower. Like you've got to figure out a way

to enter your day in a much healthier way. And the way that we created, we call it the Diesel Dad 100 in which you're just doing 100 reps of two exercises and it gets all the blood out of your organs, into your muscles, and prepares you for the day. It's just this simple little check-in. Yes, it's a morning routine, but honestly, I've been morning routine guy. What a disaster morning routine guy thinks he is. Every time you see one of those, some kid that doesn't have i call them kids now because they're probably 23 years

old and that's just a kid to me um they're like you need to wake up and you need to meditate and you need to journal and i go you don't know shit you don't have a clue you need to go back to san diego and go sit on the beach and shut up because you have no idea what it's like when you wake up and there's kids flying around and you haven't slept. You need a way to prepare yourself for the day, much less the fact that we sit here at 6.30 in the morning and we got to go talk to thousands of people. Yeah, right. You think you're just going to wake up and go hop on the microphone? No. You think you're just going to wake up and go to work and it's going to be great and you have an extra hour and a half to sit around and meditate and

journal and then maybe you'll go for like a two hour? No, it doesn't work. Parents don't live by that SoCal hippie life. It doesn't exist. That's why we created the Diesel Dad 100. It takes less than 10 minutes. You just wake up, make a coffee. While your coffee's brewing, you go out, you do your pushups, you do the 30 workouts that we've given you. Under 10 minutes, you kickstarted the day, you're boosting your metabolism, you're doing the whole, your whole day starts better because you start moving and makes me so happy. I do it every day. I'm probably like in the last nine months, 10 months since I started doing this, probably only missed maybe 10 days. And most of those were because of traveling.

Christmas, I took off like Christmas, Christmas day. And that weekend I took off, I actually slept in for four straight days because all of my family was here and they sleep right above my garage gym, which means if I'm clanging a barbell into a squat rack, they're going to disown me. So I had to sleep in. But it really is the thing that I'm the most happy that I do on a daily basis now is wake up and just go move to get prepared for the day before the entire house wakes up. I think we talked a little bit on Monday about the morning routine and stuff that you have because you're an hour behind me. You're recording at 5.30 a.m. Central Time, which is so gnarly.

It's actually been really nice in some ways, but of course not nice in other ways. Like I have to get up at 5 on those days. But I pretty much get up at 5 a.m. anyway these days. Like once COVID hit and I knew my kids were going to be home all day every day, I was like, well, fuck. I got to start waking up at 4 in the morning to get a couple hours of work in before my day really gets smashed by family stuff. That's what I did for a long time. Then I was trying to get naps. Sometimes I'd miss and all that. I was getting really worn down because my oldest wouldn't go to sleep until like 9.30, which means I go to sleep at 10, 10.15, something like that. I'd wake up at 4 o'clock and then do

that seven days a week. I really, once COVID hit, tried to get work done in the morning before I had all that craziness, but at the same time, my sleep schedule was just totally screwed up. I backed it down to five o'clock and now we do these shows twice a week, but the other days I get up, i don't typically train in the morning because i feel like that's not it's not exactly what i need to do in the morning i know i'm going to train i'm going to go to jiu-jitsu uh i feel like for me the morning when i had a match this the other day on the show is like it's really more about doing like a little bit of mobility work which i often skip um and reading real books, which, which I, I hadn't done as much of lately in the last

like couple of years because of kids I've been doing all audio books, but I really wanted to get back to reading real books. So I just do mobility work, uh, as my movement practice in the mornings. And then, and I read a book while I'm doing it usually. And that's been fantastic for me. I've like, it's very peaceful. I still get some movement. I still, I still feel good. It wakes me up.

I drink two big glasses of water. I drink my coffee while I'm doing it. Then by the time breakfast rolls around, I'm totally hydrated and awake. I can just eat my breakfast without drinking anything. Yeah. The other part in putting all this together, we talk about the Diesel Dad nutrition templates that we put together. It's super interesting because we get to talk to literally the smartest people in the whole country, sometimes in the whole world, that are actually in the lab studying all of the every tiny little piece of nutrition that you could ever imagine and even when you talk to people that have just way too much experience or testing things at the highest possible levels it's like what they really always come back and say is you need to eat an amount of food that calorically is aimed at a goal that you want and you need to eat enough protein those are pretty much like the two biggest possible things and everything else

is kind of flexible depending upon how who you are as a person and what you like. Like the amount of carbohydrates and the amount of fat that you need to eat in a day, sure. It's kind of not up to me to decide and it kind of doesn't matter. It's not that it doesn't matter if you're an elite athlete and you're doing blood work and figuring out your DNA and what's the perfect everything for you. But if you can keep your calories aimed at a direction that you'd like to go, whether it's to add muscle and eat in a little bit of a surplus, if it's about some sort of long-term recomp and eating at maintenance and just being healthy or trying to lose weight and being under some sort of caloric goal, doing that is the way in which you're going to lose or gain weight.

And making sure that you eat enough protein throughout the day is going to ensure that you keep or gain muscle. And however many carbs you want to eat, awesome. Just keep it underneath the total calories. If you want to eat fat as your main source, awesome. Eat it under the – or eat around whatever the total caloric intake is that's in the template. And those two rocks are the things that I focus on like 98% of the time. Because no matter how many smart people you talk to, it always comes back to total calories and making sure you're eating enough protein to sustain and grow muscle. And those are the two pillars that we've focused on in the Diesel Dad Nutrition

templates. It's just making sure that you're eating the right amount of calories and getting enough protein and everything else is going to fall into place. Yeah, I guess it's a super easy way to think about it. Like if you're a dad and you're smashed on time and all the things that we've been talking about the whole show, then you really need to start focusing on your nutrition even more. You can't have okay nutrition and then train 90 minutes anymore and just keep your body where you want it to be, low enough body fat percentage, muscle mass, the whole deal, where you're out-training a bad which, of course, you can't do, but it helps. And so if your training volume is much lower, and then as you get older, your body starts to wear down, you kind of accumulate injuries, your joints get achier as you age. Controlling how you look with exercise becomes more difficult as you age,

but you're going to be eating every day no matter what. And so improving the quality of your nutrition becomes a bigger part of the game, in my opinion, as you get older, as far as just being generally healthy. And so focusing on protein and calories, like two very simple things. For the challenge, we're tracking protein on a daily basis. If you've got enough protein, you get points for that day. We haven't actually talked about the point system yet. We can roll into that. So the Diesel Dad 100 that you mentioned, two exercises a day, 100 reps total for the two exercises. So you might do 50 push-ups and 25 lunges per leg. Done.

Correct. Easy. Break it up however you want. And it's a little different every day, of course. It tells you how many reps to do and how many sets and all that. If you do that, you get one point for the day. If you have training that day,

one of the three programs that we can talk about here in a second, we have EMOM Strength, which is like our longer 40 to 60 minute EMOM Aesthetic, which is like 20 to 40 minutes. And then Density Weight Training, which is only 15 minute AMRAPs. That way way if you just really have the minimum amount of time you hopefully can still squeeze in a 15 minute amrap that you don't have to warm up a whole lot for

if you do that then you get two points on the day and then if you hit your protein you do protein and calories or we just do protein i thought it was just protein protein and calories protein is like the you get two points for just hitting protein? I thought it was just protein. Protein and calories. Protein is like the – you get two points for just hitting the protein goals because it's the easiest metric to track. But along those lines, it's going to spit out the total caloric amount. So if you want to actually achieve what your goals are for the 30 days, you should pay attention to both. But as far as tracking goes, if you can eat, the majority of people aren't going to be eating their total protein allotment. It's just the problem isn't you eating enough chicken breasts. The problem is eating butter and sugar mixed together and then melting it, which turns into a cookie. And it's impossible to not eat more than three of them or less than three of them um but protein is is the metric that we are tracking to keep it as simple as possible and to start establishing like how much actual lean protein you should be eating in a day right okay that's what i thought i thought

was just protein so yeah so again we have diesel diet 100 which is the the hunter rep workouts that you're going to do every morning normally workout's just like a wake-up workout. You get a point for that. If you do your training, you get two points. If you hit your protein, you get three points. You have a possibility of six points per day for 30 days, so that's 180. If you get a perfect score,

if you get 180, those people have the possibility of coming on the show and telling their story. Can we give them a gift card to the store? Yeah, there's three categories of the winners in that the largest physical transformation, but also, and it kind of goes back to how we're not like huge 30-day challenge and then stop on day 31. But there are going to be physical transformations that happen that are just awesome because people are finally getting their, telling their body it's okay to do exactly what

it wants to do, which is to be strong and lean. So, the physical transformation is definitely a piece of it and we're going to have one winner for that. The other one is going to be kind of like the lifestyle thing. I've talked to a lot of dads now that we have launched this that are really going through a crazy time, whether they haven't trained in a while and they finally have found something that they can hold on to and it fits their life and they're just so grateful for it. It's been really interesting actually talking to them. So that is the second winner of kind of like becoming the diesel dad of like the the full life transformation of putting the habits together and and fully taking the deep dive like if you weigh 280 pounds you're not gonna go to 225 and get shredded in 30 days like that's just not a real it's not we don't even want that that would be you not eating but it doesn't mean that you won't feel more confident you won't be able to go run with your kids it doesn't mean that you

won't um you know wake up and be excited and have like a new zest for life and i think that's uh really important and and going to be a part of this. The people that I talk to that have been on the program for four to six weeks now, that's a lot of the messaging that you get from these people. They just go, holy shit, this is so perfect for what I need. The amount of time, the craziness of life, the fact that they're spending time in the group talking to other dads that are doing the other thing. We had a guy yesterday. Even the EM Like we had a guy yesterday, it's like even the EMOM aesthetics program, it's like a 20 minute workout. He does part a gets through halfway of part B and it's like, he had to go, I shouldn't say he had to,

he got to go run like a mile with his one son came back home and he's playing like games in the yard. He's like, I didn't even get through the 20 minute workout because kids come in the garage. Like you don't want to be the dad that says, no, I don't want to go run with you. I don't want to be able to go play in the yard. And I think a lot of that, that really is overall the most important part is that you become this leader in your household that you really want to take an active role in being a great dad. And weightlifting and getting stronger, getting leaner is such an awesome entry point into building confidence and that discipline that gives you the idea or gives you the feeling that you can go out and do those things. So that's what the second winner is. And then the third one is really like just overall embodying everything from the physical

transformation to the lifestyle transformation, developing the confidence, developing a lot of that discipline and just the overall transformation. So there's three big people in which that we're then going to. One, they win $200, so you get all your money back as well, or a gift card to the store that you can go buy, all the schwag, all the programs, anything you want. You can even apply it to really anything that you want inside our programs and products. And then we're going to have you on the show so you can tell your story and talk about

how the 30 days kind of changed your life and what you're looking forward to and the struggles that you had before you found the Diesel Dad programs. And I'm fired up to meet everybody. The people that I've already actually talked to on the phone, their stories are so rad because so many people are going through them. But being – there's something about being like male that you feel like you have to be so tough. You're not allowed to say that life's hard. And then you don't have an outlet until all of a sudden there's like 120 dudes in a facebook group um that you're training with and like you write in there hey i'm divorced and

everyone's like rad we're still here like we're all just lifting weights together it's like a real gym community of dads that just get it between one, three, four kids. I see people in there with four kids. First off, I want to be like, yo, chill out. Stop having babies. Your life is never going to stop. You're just going to be raising kids until you're 110 years old. Stop. I got off on a tangent, of course, but those are the three, how we're choosing the three winners of the 30 days in that there's the physical transformation component, the lifestyle, and then what we're calling the diesel dad, which is just the overall, yes, there's a physical component. Yes, uh the emotional like the the lifestyle component and

then just embodying all of the the pieces that go into the morning routine getting control the way you eat and and having some stability in your training and and having consistency that that leads to the long-term results which is which what we're really focused on. Yeah, so those are the three winners that we're picking based on the criteria you just outlined. But then anyone that does well in the program gets a small reward. If you get more than 160 out of 180 points, then we're also going to give a $50 gift card to the store. So if you do really well, then it basically pays for the program or at least a good chunk of it. And that, that 180 is the, the total points that you can score on a daily basis from the three components, um, times 30. So getting to 160 points, uh, it's basically 90% compliance, which is going to get you exactly where you want to be. And we want to reward people that just commit to the program and do it.

And if you're at 90% compliance, you're going to see radical transformation already. It's just not probably worthy of winning. Winning is for people that are like fully committed and end up doing everything to get to a specific end point. I think the community piece that you just mentioned, by the way, is like, especially right now in the world that we live in, where a lot of people are just stuck at home, not

training at the gym, they don't get to see their in-person community, friends, family, et cetera, nearly as often as they used to or would like to. And so having a community online, it's kind of the way of the world right now but it's hard to find that like what where who are my people where are they like it's hard to find those people online something that like really uh is a good fit and aligned with with who you believe you are and so uh all the guys that are already in the diesel Dad Dojo, which is what we call the Facebook group, dude, they're fucking stoked that they got a bunch of other dads that like to train hard and have the same challenges,

again, especially right now, like with kids at home with COVID. There's more challenges than normal. And so having extra support from people that get it, the people that understand what you're going through, man, I've just seen that to be really valuable for so many guys in that group. We actually have – I've had two super cool things outside of the people that I've actually talked to on the phone and done some more private type coaching and guidance. But there's a guy out in Hawaii that I just love. He's like a branding guy,

but he also founded the company Shaka's and Snatches or Snatches and Shaka's. Do you remember that branding company? He's in there, which is really awesome. But there's also, so there's, I believe the guy's name is Will. Um, I hope I got that right. Uh, but there's multiple people from North Carolina that are like right around where I live. Um, hopefully in the new year, we're all going to be getting together to train.

But, um, one of the guys was on the road for Christmas and was not going to have any gyms open, any way to go hang out with anybody. Somehow they connected in real life and he let him borrow a weight vest for the weekend, which is super awesome. He got to go and train and actually have some weights at whatever in-laws house he's going to. Still, the number of people that are more consistent on this training program than they have been in the last couple of years is crazy. Then there's a dude that lives down in Fayetteville. His name is Will for sure. I know this for a fact. No, the other guy that let him borrow the weight vest, his name is Manny.

I got that wrong. But Will, he lives down in Fayetteville. Dude, he's into anime. He likes Japanese animation and the characters, which I don't know anything about. But I told him one day he posted a video of himself with his training in his anime costume and i was like dude i need superheroes every week out of you now once a week you post videos getting super jacked in his garage wearing like a superhero costume of people i have no idea who these characters are but it's so rad because he's got a place to go be himself it's like this is dad life. And it's awesome. It's like what he likes to do.

He's finding people that he likes lifting weights with. And my guess is wherever he lives or whatever he does, it's probably really hard. I mean, just in my neighborhood, I've joked many times that it's way harder for me to find a training partner that I want to be around than a date when I was in my dating years. Like if I'm going to be training with somebody, I have to like really like them and like really invest into wanting to be around them a lot. And this thing that's like the most important, you can find a date in many places. It's a lot easier than finding a training partner. So if you can find one or finding someone to truly train with and follow the same programs as you in your neighborhood is fucking hard. It's like really, really hard.

And we're kind of creating that space for a bunch of dads to get together, love lifting weights. They realize that this is just part of their, part of their life. They have to go to the gym. They got to train hard. Um, but the biggest thing in their life is, is being there for, to be a good husband, be a good father. Um, this is just, we have the community of, of other dads that all that all live by the same code. I haven't had a consistent training partner basically since me and you used to train together in San Diego. It's been a couple of years. Even then, I had a bunch of kids and you probably had a kid just toward the very end there. Even then, we're training partners we're

business partners now where uh we see each other fairly frequently but you know but training together we're still only like once or twice a week it's hard to find somebody to train with four or five days a week every week consistently where you can where you can match schedules and all that and so having everyone in the in the online group doing the same program on the same day where you can share your results. When you have questions, you can just say, hey, what's the deal with this and that? And everyone comes back and says, here's what I did. I made these modifications.

Like you have that support not only from the other athletes, but then, of course, from me and you as well to, you know, if you've got a shoulder injury or whatever it is, like here's how to scale or alter your movements. It's just really nice to be able to, to have that, that connection with other people that are doing the same thing you're doing, especially when you're stuck at home all day.

Yeah. If you are listening to this and you want to come hang out with us, make sure you get over to barbell shrug.com forward slash diesel dad. That's where all the strong dads are hanging out uh but a diesel dad challenge it's barbell shrug.com forward slash diesel dad challenge strong lean and athletic without sacrifice and family fatherhood or fitness increased strength lose body fat simplify some nutrition have a morning routine that starts your day with success and most importantly building a bunch of confidence feeling good about yourself so that you can go balance family fatherhood and fitness and not have to sacrifice

any and all of that um doug larson we're missing coach travis mass today the ultimate diesel dad front squat and 500 pounds but uh where can people find you man you bet i'm on instagram douglas larson yeah we're fired up about this about this. And I never thought that I would get to the place where I really just want to hang out with dads that like lifting weights. And we're in this really cool position that we get to kind of grow with the audience of people that listen to us. And we know that you guys are fathers. And we know that you guys need good training programs. And we know that you guys are fathers and you know, that we know that you guys need good training programs. And we know that because we are, we are there with you guys. And, uh, all of this was stemmed out of finding or filling a void that we had, um, making, making this thing of

strength conditioning. That's so important to us in our lives still work, even though our lives have changed so much in becoming dads. So get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash diesel dad. And I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrugged at barbell shrugged. We will see you guys next week. That's a wrap friends barbellshrug.com forward slash diesel dad challenge. That's where all the strong dads are hanging out. We've got a whole community of them. I'm so excited about it. Also, friends, I want to tell you something. Get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged.

That is where you are going to save 20% on the green, red, and the gold juices. Also, bioptimizers.com forward slash shrugged. B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S, biooptimizers.com forward slash shrugged. Save 10% using the code shrugged and up to 40% on their breakthrough magnesium product, magnesium breakthrough. You like how I did that? Friends, we'll see you on Monday. So exciting.