Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Harry Barnes on Overcoming Fat Loss Plateaus

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Are you doing everything right but still not seeing progress on the scale? If you're eating in a calorie deficit, training hard, and still not losing weight, don't worry—you're not alone. And more importantly, there are solutions. In this episode, I talk with Harry Barnes, who not only has 12 years of experience helping clients break through fat loss plateaus, but has been working with Legion’s One-on-One Coaching since its start in 2015, and now oversees a team of nearly 20 coaches as Legion’s Lead Coach. Harry’s problem-solving approach offers a fresh perspective on weight loss that prioritizes flexibility, self-awareness, and personal responsibility. In this interview, you'll learn . . . - Why personalized problem solving is more important than generic meal plans for fat loss - How to evaluate your entire lifestyle to identify subtle issues impeding your progress - Strategies for breaking through plateaus by optimizing nutrition, training, and cardio - Signs you might be overreaching in your training and how to dial it back - When and how to use diet breaks to mitigate negative symptoms during prolonged cutting - How to find a sustainable fat loss approach that aligns with your preferences and lifestyle - And more . . . So, if you want to learn how to finally break through those pesky fat loss plateaus and achieve sustainable results, click the play button now! Timestamps: (0:00) Please leave a review of the show wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to subscribe! (3:36) My free meal planning tool: buylegion.com/mealplan (05:43) How do you troubleshoot a fat loss plateau and identify the obstacles causing it? (06:56) What are the most common obstacles that lead to fat loss plateaus? (12:22) Why does coaching need to go beyond just providing a meal plan and training program? (19:14) Is stress drinking a common barrier to successful fat loss? (21:20) What are effective strategies for managing stress? (23:28) If stress isn't the issue, what's the next most common culprit behind stalled fat loss? (28:46) Is it better to increase physical activity or decrease food intake to break through a plateau? (30:39) Please share the podcast with a friend! www.muscleforlife.show (31:16) Can you share examples of how you've helped clients break through their fat loss plateaus? (34:12) Have you noticed any patterns or different types of people when it comes to fat loss struggles? (37:17) What's your approach to incorporating cardio for fat loss? (39:55) How much cardio, particularly high-intensity, is too much? Is there an upper limit? (44:21) What size adjustments do you typically make in terms of energy balance to break a plateau? (46:30) How can someone develop a problem-solving mindset for their fat loss journey? (48:04) Why is taking personal responsibility crucial for overcoming obstacles? (51:49) What are the signs that you might be overtraining or pushing yourself too hard? (54:02) How can you tell if your recovery is worsening during a fat loss phase? (55:51) Do you usually make adjustments to lifting or cardio when recovery suffers? (56:45) When is the right time to consider reverse dieting? (1:01:17) In your experience, has reverse dieting been a useful tool for fat loss? (1:04:15) What role do diet breaks play in a successful fat loss plan? (1:13:44) What does success look like when it comes to sustainable fat loss? Mentioned on the Show: Legion One-on-One Coaching: https://www.muscleforlife.show/vip Want a free meal planning tool that figures out your calories, macros, and micros, and allows you to create custom meal plans for cutting, lean gaining, and maintaining in under 5 minutes? Go to https://buylegion.com/mealplan and download the tool for free!

Howdy, howdy there. This is Muscle for Life and I am your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a new episode on troubleshooting weight loss. So if you are cutting and you feel like you are doing at least the most important things, mostly right, most of the time, but you're not seeing progress, this episode is going to help you. And if you are not currently cutting, but you have experienced that in the past, and you never got it fully resolved, you never got it fully figured out, maybe you actually reached your body composition goal through a brute force, maybe by dramatically increasing exercise or dramatically decreasing calories, if the period of plateau that you experienced left you a little bit puzzled and a little bit unsure of what else you could possibly do in the future if you were to experience

something like that again, then this episode is for you as well. And if you've never experienced a weight loss plateau and you are going to stick with this fitness thing for a while, this episode is for you too, because you will. Eventually everybody experiences weight loss plateaus and they can be mysterious. And so all of that broadly is what you are going to be learning about in today's episode. It's going to be a practical focus on troubleshooting the most common mistakes that people unwittingly make when cutting the most common obstacles that prevent people from achieving their fat loss goals. And you are going to be hearing mostly from my guest, Harry Barnes, who not only has over 10 years of coaching experience helping people break through fat

loss plateaus, but he's also the head of coaching for my sports nutrition company, Legion's one-on-one coaching program. And he's been in that position since we launched it back in 2015. And he helps run a team of nearly 20 coaches that have worked now with thousands of people of all ages, all circumstances, and many different preferences, many different goals. We've seen a lot over the years. and Harry has been there in the trenches the entire time. And so as you will see in this episode, Harry not only has a good understanding of the science of weight loss, he also understands the art of it. By that I mean the practicalities. He has a very pragmatic perspective and approach because sometimes what is theoretically optimal, which you could find in research, is practically suboptimal because, for example, someone you're working with is not going to be able to stick to that theoretically optimal approach. And so you have to be able to find the right balance

of compromises that allow that person to actually reach their goal. And then that person's basket of compromises may not work for the next person that you are working with. For that person, you have to tweak the dials in different ways, and so on and so on. And again, Harry has been doing this for a long time. And in this episode, he is going to share some of the biggest insights he has learned along the way. Before we get started, how would you like a free meal planning tool that figures out your calories, your macros, even your micros, and then allows you to create 100% custom meal plans for cutting, lean gaining, or maintaining in under five minutes.

Well, all you got to do is go to buylegion.com slash meal plan, B-U-Y legion.com slash meal plan and download the tool. And if I may say this tool really is fantastic. My team and I spent over six months on this thing, working with an Excel wizard and inferior versions of this are often sold for 50, 60, even a hundred dollars, or you have to download an app and pay every month or sign up for a weight loss service and pay every month, 10, 20, 40, 50, even $60 a month for what is essentially in this free tool. So if you are struggling to improve your body composition, if you are struggling to lose fat or gain muscle, the right meal plan can change everything. Dieting can go from feeling like running in the sand in a sandstorm to riding a bike on a breezy day down a hill. So again,

if you want my free meal planning tool, go to buylegion.com slash meal plan, buylegion.com slash meal plan, enter your email address and you will get instant access. plan, enter your email address, and you will get instant access. Hey, Harry, thanks for taking some time to come and talk with me and the listeners. Yeah, no problem. How's it going? Pretty good. Is this our first interview, I think, right?

Yeah. So I know, obviously, chatting between, but I don't think we've kind of formally sat down and gone through. Yeah, formal interview. I mean, we've talked about many things over the years, but formal interview. Well, cool. I'm glad that I think Army brought this up. So thanks to Army for the idea. Because when you brought it up, I was, that is a good idea.

One, having you on the podcast is a good idea. And two, this is a good idea for the topic. So I'm looking forward to getting into it. And for people listening, the topic is going to be, I guess you could say broadly, troubleshooting fat loss. So let me just give the circumstances, and then I'm going to turn it over to you, Harry. So let's talk to people who generally know what they're supposed to do. They understand energy balance. They understand macronutrient balance. They don't have any delusions about what it takes to lose fat. And they are dieting. They're trying to lose fat. Maybe they've had some success and then now they're not, or maybe this is in the beginning and they haven't really even

been able to achieve much success yet, despite, they think, doing what they're supposed to do. So they believe that they are maintaining a consistent calorie deficit, ultimately, one way or another, however they're going about it. They think that they're doing what they need to do to accomplish that, yet they're not getting the results that they want. How do you go about troubleshooting this with clients? Because you see this regularly in your work and you've seen it, I'm guessing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times over the years. Yeah, or thousands. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So pretty much everyone, especially when it comes to fat loss, pretty much everyone who comes into the coaching service or chats you one-to-one,

when you look at their typical week, typical month, there's probably one or two big things that's usually holding them back. Something very specific like stress eating after work a few times per week. So the main things before, it is important, of course, to go through good program design,

make sure they understand how energy balance works, getting those lifting plans in place, daily activity. But once that's set in place, which is people can do quite straightforwardly with the blog and books and so forth, I'm going to be looking at the main couple of things that are tripping them up and working backwards from them. So if, for instance, someone is, let's say stress eating, I can work two or three days per week and it's quite significant enough where it's putting a

couple of thousand calories in excess two, three, four days a week. I would look at something like that and think that's going to be the biggest ROI for this person. If they can get that in check and their goal is to lose 30 pounds, they might get 20, 25 pounds just getting that one thing in place. And once you've identified what that one thing is or two things, then you should work upstream. So if someone gets through, you can almost imagine in real time,

if you put yourself in that person's position, they would walk through the door, stressy for however long and not feel great and then probably rinse your feet a few times a week so we'd look at that instance as hey i'm overeating pretty dramatically at 6 p.m a couple of times a week what's happening the one two three four five hours leading up to that and then it's going to be looking at it in detail, probably more detail than they may be comfortable asking themselves at first and reflecting on it. And it might be things like I'm not setting any boundaries at work and work through my dinner break and then

just grazing on crappy food that's brought into the office through afternoon and then driving home in traffic. And I could probably do with maybe sitting and give myself a 10 minute breather before I go to my home. And it's those kind of one-on-one solutions that it's very tough people to find on blogs and books. And there's no, there's not going to be an article. There's no SEO value in that article.

So no one's writing the article. Yeah. It's hard to like package that up for, for someone like for someone. How do you create that curated one-on-one solution? And that's where thinking frameworks and problem-solving tools come in place where this is the unsexy stuff that no one's going to Google problem-solving frameworks for not over-reading after work three days a week. That article doesn't exist, but that's where that person will find results. Like if they can fix that, that could be the thing that they've struggled with for a decade and then allows them to get the weight off.

It's usually those kind of solutions that is what also has been missing. Like it reminds me of the kind of short pitch that you put for the coaching or some of the podcast episodes where it's like, hey, you the passcode that you put on your computer and one of the digits is missing. That missing digit isn't, and it might be something obvious, like I'm not eating enough protein, but it is usually something not obvious, like how do I fix the stress eating I've been struggling with for a long time? Yeah. And just for people listening, if you're not familiar with the analogy, it's the password on your computer, right? You have to get it exactly right to get access to the computer. If you have one extra space or if it's lowercase instead of uppercase or vice versa, it's maybe one character out of

12 or 14 or however many characters are in your password. And yet it's a binary result fail. It's not, well, okay, you'll get access to most of the computer, but not all of it. It's no, you're just denied access. So similarly, especially in weight loss and in fat loss, it can be very binary where you're doing the most important things. You're doing most of them well, but there's this one thing that you're really not doing well enough and unfortunately that one mistake is enough to deny you access to consistent fat loss yeah absolutely and one of the i think one of the other skills that again i've not really seen this anywhere but it's maybe just intuition from working so many people is kind of the almost looking to like all those skills across

a given week like all the skills someone needs like good organization but problem solving like how to be in tune with how much stress you can tolerate like all these not obvious skills that make or break someone's results as you start digging into this process and looking at where people are screwing up and like what what's stopping them from getting the results they might be sometimes those uncomfortable conversations and realizations where oh i am only a two out of ten advantage of my stress and getting that in place first identifying it and seeing what it's going to take to get to a three out of ten a four out of ten five is it's just not obvious where the solutions are to people. But once you find it and start to get

a better understanding of where your skillset is lacking, and then it becomes clearer what the next step is going to be. And not to make this a thinly veiled pitch for the coaching service, but this is one of the big, I would say, probably actually one of the biggest areas of value in, it could be our coaching or any coaching that is a high quality coaching service. It's not giving you a meal plan to follow. That's fine. That's good. But like you mentioned, or somebody could just, they could just go to our website and just read a blog article too, and make a meal plan for themselves. They could even do take that diet quiz you put together and it gets them probably at least 50% there to just having a meal plan. Same thing with a training plan. Yes, that's important. It's what does it take in terms of non-obvious habits that often tie into attitudes and beliefs and other kind of

subjective psychological emotional elements that come into play that determine whether you can succeed with any meal plan, even the best meal plan that on paper you love, it checks every box for you and the training plan on paper you love. But as you've mentioned, I think this is just a point worth emphasizing is that to be able to put it all together and to be able to consistently do all of the tasks that culminate in successfully following a meal plan it doesn't mean perfectly but successfully and successfully following a training plan it it encompasses i think quite a bit more than many people realize if they're new to everything that we're talking about do you agree with that yeah yeah it is um

yeah i don't see some of the things you mentioned that it reminds me of uh like of course how you might approach like writing on user experience where you've got someone who whether they're new or experienced because even experienced people have fallen through these traps as well which is the more like intelligently put together on and off approach that they might fall into. If I've got a client where I'm trying to figure out what they're struggling with and what's stopping them from getting results, I would start really broad and just get everything on paper. Realistically, starting with behavior side, how often can you train? How much time do you have to prepare food? What does an ideal meal plan look like on paper?

What does an ideal training team look like? This is usually the first question I speak to people about on the intro call when I'm working with them is, a year from now, what does your ideal routine look like day to day? We can set the main point in the start of Atomic Habits. Winners and losers have the same goals. The goal is kind of, that doesn't get us there. It's figuring out what you can actually sustain day-to-day and what it's going to look like. So yeah, with a client, I look at their entire routine, what we've got. A good idea, like a rough draft, based on what they've told me, get a rough draft in place. And then during the first couple of weeks, almost, again, with a user experience approach, look at it.

Just every facet of it. Like, how is, say they're going to the gym four days a week, how are they feeling after each workout, which exercises are they enjoying more than others, which ones don't feel comfortable, are they enjoying training at that time of day, just going through all these things which are going to make it stick one time.

There was a client I had recently where he was doing and it's kind of a good example of someone who falls into, it was almost like an intelligently planned oner of approach where he's kind of a good example of someone who falls into, it's almost like an intelligently planned onerous approach where he's kind of struggled with the same, say, 20-pound weight loss and weight gain cycle for a long time. And he had a really good routine in place on paper, and everything looked great.

But a small shift from, say, three or four really taxing three-way exercises every day to one or two three-way exercises and a couple of machine exercises he suddenly felt like half the stress when he left the gym and it's it was just that reflection of like where is the stress coming from what's causing you to feel fatigued at the end of the day and it was just going through each of those variables of his routine his diet even outside of that as well like work stress is he again setting little breaks through the day is there any not to

get outside of scope start talking about relationship issues of course but just seeing if there's any big picture stuff that's going on where it's like screaming sleep or his recovery and again just putting just all the reversing and putting the building blocks in place to get the habits they're gonna lead to that ideal routine in 12 months time it's gonna sustain the 20 pound loss as opposed to follow up really well at the up later plan ignore some of those subtle issues like it's actually a little bit too stressful and then it's not going to be a crash diet to say that's a kind of effect that's going to happen but it's like that effect to stretch out over several months

where it's slowly going to fall off again and then's slowly come back on board. So it's not obvious. They're trying to just have a lot of good reframes and ask a lot of good questions about every part of the process as we go. Before I forget, you mentioned about meal planning as well. Again, this won't have a good meal planning place. And some of the questions we may ask them is to get them away from looking at it as the goal is to stick to the meal plan. We'd ask them questions of how are you enjoying each meal?

Which ones do you eat more variety? And then we can get to the habits which are going to stick. I kind of have the same breakfast every day forever. I need three options for lunch. I need five options for dinner. And just make sure that, again, kind of asking themselves the right questions and jokes and all the right things as you go about the process. the right questions and folks know the right things. Let's go about the process. And just to bring this back to, again, this theme of troubleshooting and just speaking to people listening who may be stuck in a weight loss plateau. And if they haven't experienced this

yet, listener, you will at some point. If you do this long enough, and if you go through periods of, let's say, lean bulking and cutting because you're building up your physique, and now if you're just going to maintain forever, then no, you're fine. But if you obstacle that is a good example of something that in a relatively small amount of time, unfortunately, from a fat loss perspective, you can undo all of your good work throughout all the rest of the week. And it's kind of obnoxious that it's true, but it just is that way. You're so good all week and you're sticking to your plan. And in what is cumulatively, maybe it's 30 minutes. Maybe that's the time it takes throughout the week, right? So you have like three episodes of you come home and you eat some stuff that maybe it was not on your plan and it put you into a surplus and it was five or 10 minutes per session, so to speak. So in the 15 to max 30 minutes a week, you've completely negated your fat loss for the week.

And I'm assuming that stress drinking is another one, especially with calorically dense, like maybe wine. Yeah, it can be. If not, I mean, again, I'm deferring to you here. I'm just thinking with things that I've heard many times over the years where it's, you know, it's like a joke now where I'll tell people just sometimes in the gym, you know, you get to know people. And I can think in particular, one guy who wants to lose weight and asking me, should I do keto? Should I do this? Should I do that? Right that right and and in the end i'm like you know

unfortunately it's gonna it's gonna mean giving up the wine every day that that's realistic because i mean he was drinking way too much i was like you're just gonna you're gonna have to cut that way back and i know that's what you don't want to hear but unfortunately there's really no way around it so yeah that's a good example of again where it can be case-by-taste is there'll be plenty of people who they can just stop and start it, okay? And then other people where you have clients who do get, say, 10% leaned and they

can't diligently just have 100 calories of wine with a dinner each night. So it's very case-by-taste. And again, asking them what it looks like long-term. And then as we go about those changes, like if that guy, for example was having let's say four glasses of wine several nights a week yes correct you know it cannot just be like you know one serving maybe not every day maybe every other day no it needs to be

it needs to be like a bottle a day or something yeah yeah there's there are two things that come to mind uh with whatever you know Whether it's alcohol or overeating on the weekend, whatever it is, the five-wise approach, which is like an asking tool, is in a lot of coaching courses and so on. When a client presents something like that, it's like, oh, why is that happening? Tell me more about that. Why is the root cause of that happening? And that's when a few of those layers down you start to get to yeah like i actually freaking hate all my co-workers and i'm just 10 out of 10 stressed at the end of the day it's uh now we're getting somewhere it's like see where some of the adjustments can be and practically speaking how do you make some of those adjustments because that's

i mean that that's too much stress is a very common problem. I'm sure a lot of people listening are dealing with this, even if they're not dealing with a weight loss plateau. So practically speaking, how do you help people mitigate that? Because that's a good example. Okay, it's my coworkers that are giving me all these problems, or maybe it's going through a rough time with a significant other or point being, it's not like it's just a lever you can pull. Okay, we'll just turn that off. Just stop interacting with your coworkers or your significant other and then you're fine. Yeah, there you go. And you're fine. And you'll stop stress eating and you'll get lean. Yes. Again, it is case by case. A lot of the start of that conversation would be certain clarifying questions, like exploratory questions, seeing what solutions they've found useful in the past, seeing what maybe just strikes them as good instincts, like, ah, this would be an obvious solution. and then once you've brainstormed a few solutions pulling them down going through them and maybe trimming it down to the one, two, three solutions that they're kind of most warm towards and then if needed

breaking those down a little bit finer until they feel like yep that change is the one of those three options that feels the most realistic and you know I'm in 8, 9, 10 out of 10 I can come back and make that happen and then from there it would be get that adjustment in place, give it a week, 10 days, whatever the timeframe,

makes sense to review it for and see how it sticks. And it kind of goes both ways, whether it's building a positive habit for someone brand new or trimming away a negative influx. The same thing is just looking at for each new down, smaller, smaller, smaller, until it feels like a 10 out of 10 doable task. And then you've almost got the thin end of the wedge.

And then you know what the thick end of the wedge looks like. Might be no drinking. The thin end might be three glasses instead of four glasses a day. And then it's like two and a half glasses. Two, one and a half, one. I'm just working it up with a frequency and readiness and willingness

the client is wanting to do. So that's stress calories, let's say. And so let's say that's not the issue. Again, we're stuck on a weight loss or in a weight loss plateau, and we're trying to troubleshoot here, and it's not stress calories. What's another common, if we were to view this as a flow chart, basically? Okay, no, it's not that. Where does this lead to next commonly? Yeah, so the kind of main three steps, like that process,

if a chancellor client agreed that, yes, this is going to be a plateau, the main thing is the first step would be address consistency and accuracy across the board with everything. Start with the more obvious and go into the subtle things. So the obvious ones would be weekdays versus weekends.

Are you using a food scale or reliably using portions of a total packet when you weigh out meals? Are you tracking condiments, coffees, butters, oil, all those things? Is there any day-to-day differences in terms of how consistent you are with those measuring tools? And then maybe a little less obvious might be if you go to a restaurant the same day each week, is the way the meal's prepared obviously different? Is someone else cooking any meals for you at home?

Are you chopping and changing between different brands of, say, rice or whatever it is? The calories are actually quite different on the portions that they present on the nutrition label. So if you're running the list of those, just trying to exhaust everything and again, asking if it's a two-way conversation, asking what they feel some of the more obvious ones might be or whether they're maybe being less attentive and diligent than they were a few months ago with tracking and just trying to troubleshoot that. And that might be kind of where the end of the line is. Like, oh, I'm obviously having like 200 calories of shrimp butter every day.

Okay, that's the obvious way to start that. That's an easy win, yeah. Yeah, but if all those are okay, then the next step would be just presenting the options for change. So you're kind of taking the personal stuff out of the equation with stress tolerance varying between different people on paper. And if this was to apply to BLS and CLS routines, it might look like a kind of full list of adjustments would be all the way up to,'s say five lifting days a week five cardio sessions and somewhere in like the 10 to 15k steps per day range and then all the way down to around

bmr and the calories that might be the ceiling for all those variables so we'd see where they are across that board and just to clarify for people listening that being the maximum recommended amount of exercise and the minimum let's say bmr being the cutoff for minimum recommended calories for for diet for most people just trying to give general guidelines because more exercise than that some people can get away with quite a bit more than that maybe not weight lifting that there probably is about a hard cutoff of i would say seven hours per week, especially if you're under deficit. Even if you're 20 years old and invincible, that's got to be more than that. It's just going to be a problem.

And on the cardio side of things, some people, for probably psychological and physical reasons, they can endure more abuse than others. But about five hours probably of each per week is, I think, a good general guideline. I agree. And then on the BMR, so that's for people listening, think of that as the amount of calories that your basal metabolic rate, or you could, it's not exactly the same as resting metabolic rate, but you maybe have heard resting metabolic rate more often, and that's the amount of calories your body burns over 24 hours at rest. So if you were just to basically lie in bed all day, how much energy does your body burn? And generally speaking, if you start eating less than that for a long enough period, you're going to experience more severe side effects, some of the negative stuff associated with dieting so anyway i didn't want to interject

just want to clarify for people not sure what that meant yeah sure so let's assume they have yes their diet is it is it's not the problem and you don't see any issues there yeah so got past that first step consistency accuracy especially in the nutrition room. Everything looks great. They're not missing workouts. Second step would be getting them looking good. This would also be probably giving it a good amount of time, like a solid two

weeks to identify water anomalies. We're happy with how the data looks and agreed we're at a plateau at this point. Moving on to the next step would be seeing what room they've got left in each of those areas. So if they're only doing four days per week and they could do five, that's an area for an increase.

If they're doing cardio twice a week, they could go to three days, four days, five days. If they're only walking 3,000 steps per day, they've got a lot of room to increase the daily steps. They might be 300 calories above the BMR. So they've got a lot of room to adjust that. So the usual options would be on average, I would just look at, you can either add a lifting session or a half a session to a full session. You can add a cardio workout. You could add a thousand, 2000 steps a day, or you could cut a hundred, 150 calories. And are kind of the what i would start as an average

range for each of those and do you prefer to start with increasing activity rather than decreasing food if possible that's one of those things where on paper you would probably say yeah i want to keep as much food as possible but that's where i would present those options to them and what makes sense for you yeah so so practically speaking to get to the goal in your experience it doesn't matter so much which way you go what matters more is that it works for the client and it's something that they are comfortable with and can stick with yeah exactly and then as at the same time i wouldn't kind of intentionally probe towards any perception of these changes. But if it seemed like someone was maybe really worried about a hundred calories, then I'm not going to get enough of this.

I'm not going to get enough of that. If there's anything that seems like you're majoring in the mines when everything else is fine, the protein is fine, the fruit and veg is fine. We might unpack that and just make sure they're not overly stressed about any of those adjustments. And again, just make sure that we're filling any blanks in their knowledge as we go. But for the most part, it would be presenting the options, let them have autonomy over the decision,

and own the decision as well. They can decide what is working well for them, what they enjoy. There's no, it's not an irreversible decision. Like if they trim their food intake a little bit and they get over that plateau, but they feel like, Hmm, actually I much prefer eating a little bit more food and I have way more time on the weekend than I realized then we just switch it.

I'm like, Oh, you know,, 100 calories back in and make that increase on the activity. Then that would be something where a little mental kind of shift of, it's the one, it's the one looking at those adjustments

is like irreversible and putting a huge amount of stress in there and making the process how it needs to be. Hey there, if you are hearing this, you are still listening,

which is awesome. Thank you. And if you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome. Thank you. And if you are enjoying this podcast, or if you just like my podcast in general, and you are getting at least something out of it, would you mind sharing it with a friend or a loved one or a not so loved one even who might want to learn something new. Word of mouth helps really bigly in growing the show. So if you think of someone who might like this episode or another one, please do tell them about it. Before we kind of continue on our flow chart, so to speak, could you give us a few examples and as many as you think would be worth sharing of just real life examples of how you have applied the stuff that you've been talking about with clients to unstick them to get the needle moving again. I just, I think it might be helpful for people to hear in real life terms in maybe some different circumstances how this actually goes yeah so

the main ones that come to mind are usually usually around doing deep dives on it tends to be as usually nutrition adjustment is the way to go for a lot of people because we get the the training tends to be a little bit more set and forget so So once that's in place, it's super rare that we adjust the training, but it's often just smart things around niggles in the gym, aches and pains, doesn't tend to be in relationship to fat loss plateaus. A lot of the, like in the weeds, examples tend to be, there's almost no, like there's no one person that comes to mind right now, but it's always the same kind of process of, again, that user experience kind of approach of like,

let's look at like how many meals you're having per day. Like how do you feel after each meal? Do you feel particularly satiated at certain points in the day of which you feel hungrier? Like you don't feel like eating, you're kind of just forcing the meal in robotically. And then looking at the upside and downside of that, there's always the upside of sticking to a routine

and just making it autonomous and's always the upside of sticking to a routine and just making it autonomous and just getting the reps in regardless and then at the same time not doing it to a point where you're doing a disservice to yourself and making things unenjoyable so it usually would go through each meal look at which ones make the most sense for reducing calories like maybe say someone prepares like overnight oats one evening for before work the next day and just looking at like okay i have the this this fruit today i might have a banana or two in it a little bit peanut butter i have x amount of oats and a scoop protein powder cool we might look at that meal and say okay we could very simply just take one banana out and

maybe a little bit of peanut butter off. And it's going to basically be still just as enjoyable, the same preparation time, but it's going to be that 150 calories less. That was my last cut was I just stopped eating the overnight oats. It was probably about 300 calories. I'm like, cool, I'm going to cut for a little bit. Yeah, I guess that's it. I'm just going to delete that.

And there it is. There's my nubial plant yeah and that's something where you know you'll have having done this for so long you have such a just inbuilt intuition for that whereas again someone who's maybe never done any kind of mindfulness practices on nuts and bolts nutrition stuff like deleting practices like that might be you know setting alarm bells off them and then you're just kind of snowballs into all the stresses which which actually is the question i want to ask you so then out of curiosity have you noticed certain patterns where people they tend to conform to pipes in a sense where you'll see certain people generally, okay, they follow this pattern

of they liked what they really prefer is they prefer to have most of their calories early versus later. So you have to make that kind of adjustment or they, let's see, they have a hard time controlling themselves when they eat certain types of foods, or maybe it's just sugar and it actually is better for them to just leave sugar out altogether or other such things where again, people listening might find that they tend to follow one of these patterns as well. Certain types of adjustments, or at least there are certain factors that could be very important for some people and not matter at all for others yes it's something i try i try not to almost maybe box box clients into different avatars or like behavior patterns or expectations just that i don't want to go into let's say problem

solving something with the client with any kind of heavy bias towards something or yeah yeah i mean i mean more just kind of retroactively like looking back on it and going oh that's kind of interesting there there seem to be some patterns here not that perfectly predicts yeah uh future behavior but yeah that that would really be it. That would be back and forth of looking for their patterns because then we can start to build solutions around it. Because we all have a lot of overlap and individually

we're all very messy in our own ways, but there is a lot of overlap between people especially when you take, say, somebody who's middle-aged, family life, career-focused, struggling with the weight for about a decade. There's going to be a lot of similarities that just have made differences between all those

people. So the same kind of thing again is we'll have that back and forth and maybe go right back to the start and look at the main one, two pain points that it comes to us with and look at why those are happening over and over again and try and look at maybe both the in the

trenches day-to-day things that again i'm stress eating after work these two or three triggers throughout the afternoon every day the things i need to get in check and address and then at the same time just seeing if there's anything that bleeds over everywhere else because then that might help us see oh this time i am someone who maybe struggles with all or nothing thinking a lot more than I realized. So just trying to look at maybe the presentation of those like habits or issues that recur. And just trying to, again, always those things go for therapists or doctors, but just trying to see where any of those habits and behaviors recur. So that you can see that might be that same issue I've grappled in various other places in their life. And that's something where we can maybe put some preventative measures in

place to help them avoid being too all or nothing with it. That makes sense. Let me come back to the exercise and to that dial, so to speak. So there's the frequency, there's the duration, and then there's the intensity, particularly with cardio. People will ask me this. They'll understand that, okay, so let's say I'm doing five cardio workouts per week, or maybe even seven, if though the duration and the intensity is also calibrated properly. But let's say they're going, I'm doing my five cardio sessions per week. Can I make those sessions longer? Can I make some of those sessions some sort of high intensity, maybe it's sprint training or high intensity interval training? How do you normally approach the cardio in particular?

Yes. Similar to lifting, we would start with, much like you recommend on podcasts, books, So we would start with, much like you recommend on podcasts, books, a steady mix of mostly moderate intensity, a little bit of HIIT training if they want to, and then a solid step count each day, which as a floor might be 7,000 steps and ceiling 10,000, just because you stay in that range most of the time. So that might be a good on-paper place to start.

So depending on how much back and forth I've had with the client we might put some like that in place it noted down they have that capacity and willingness on the consultation form but then again when we go through that first conversation before diving into those variables and this again applies to nutrition training the cardio it can be very easy to kind of jump into those burrows rabbit holes of less discussed like the frequency the duration like exercises you enjoy before all that i would probably go level above and look at some of the broader behavior change things of what do you enjoy the most like what have you stuck to the most in the past it's realistic in your routine are there any like habits or things on the edges of your training sessions

that make it easier or harder to get in and then relating that to that goal like if you have say a more advanced lifter who again this may be been following bls for five six seven years and they want to cut they might be in a position where they suddenly have a very stressful job or personal circumstances have changed. And maybe just fluidly following BLS where they can just go in and enjoy getting the pump, keep the intensity a little bit lower, might be perfect for them. So jumping into the weeds of exercise selection and so forth for that person

might be, again, they might almost be majoring in the minors, even though on paper for pretty much everyone, those things are so there's a little bit a little bit of investigative work at the right at the very top and then it would go through like cranking those dials up and down according to what makes sense for them and with the cardio and with the higher intensity stuff in particular again i'm just thinking with the the questions that I often get asked, yeah. How much, if somebody, you said, if they want to do it. And so first I wanted to follow up on that because, I mean, there was a time going all the way back to at least the first edition of Bigger Than You're Stronger for sure. I think the second edition,

where I was pretty bullish on high intensity interval training, some of the research that was making the rounds at the time looked very promising, that you didn't just have the additional calorie burning, but you also had some other mechanistic stuff going on that meant you were burning even more body fat in those workouts and that your post-workout body fat burning was higher as well. And now you fast forward to today and the fourth edition of that book and also of the women's book is the cardio recommendations are very different basically in line with what we're talking about. And unfortunately, even I was just recently looking at some research showing that the way that most people do HIIT training, unfortunately, when you look at the total calorie expenditure per unit of time,

it actually isn't even that much higher because of the rest intervals. If you're in really good cardiovascular shape and you can do long sprints and relatively short rest intervals, then of course, I mean, then yeah, you're going to burn more calories in 15 minutes of that than 15 minutes of zone two. But if you're not in great cardiovascular shape and you're doing relatively short intervals with equal or longer rest periods, then unfortunately, you're not even getting really additional calorie burning out of it. And then unfortunately, the other physiological advantages that were speculated years ago didn't pan out. And so, let's not say that hit isn't good or it isn't useful, but I have heavily de-emphasized it in my, not just books, but podcasts and articles, the educational stuff that I continue to produce. to produce. And so anyway, when you're working with clients and if they want to do it, then do you have a ceiling on how much you recommend that they do of high intensity stuff? Yeah, it's a general ceiling. I mean, on paper, it would be similar to lifting of like, you know, if you're doing a long lifting, a couple of hours a week max and stuff like that,

like the old VLS approach where I actually do four or five days of lifting and you can work up to maybe 20 to 30 minutes of in sports on the back end of each of those sessions if that's what they're aiming for uh the usual approach though is looking at especially within most clients we work with the lifting of course is where the specific training is the cardio is more kind of just under the exercise bucket whereas not necessarily incremental each week it's the supplement it's the supplement of the yeah the training the training is the meal plan yeah and then the only the only real kind of boxes that we want to take with the cardio is stay to an amount that's going to be relatively similar

weeks a week so that you can you've got reliable data when you're. Try and get, it's good to get a mix across the board. Like if you think similar to lifting, like if you can have a little bit higher intense work and a good stretch of reasonably intense stuff and then like the walk on top of it, it's nice too. It would again be just looking at week to week, what's the volume of cardio that suits you in terms of time alongside the lifting? What types of cardio do you enjoy? And then just how is it going to,

and then once that's in place, just make sure it's not interfering with anything. It's not adding too much stress. It's manageable. It's enjoyable. It's easy to slot in alongside the weightlifting. And then we have the data then to look at, oh, we're two months into a program.

We have hit a plateau. We've done one hour of moderate intensity cardio per week over the weekend. And you've done two 10-minute HIIT sessions after you're lifting because you enjoy them. Cool. You've done that every week. We can add another small HIIT session if that's what you want. So we can increase the steady state or the step count each day. And when you're making these adjustments, how are you looking at it in

terms of adjusting energy balance? So if you're going to make a food adjustment, how many calories are you pulling out of their total daily caloric intake? If you're making an exercise adjustment, are you looking to achieve a certain number or range of additional calorie expenditure? What is enough to get through that plateau and to start losing weight steadily again, in your experience? Yeah, for the average person, it's probably going to be 100 to 150 calories removed from a day or an extra session, whether it's lifting or cardio or an extra thousand or so steps a day. You're just looking at those three or four options

and letting them decide based on their circumstances and preferences. And if someone's on the smaller side, we might cap it at 100 calories. If someone's only eating a chain client who are 100 hundred pounds and they saw a body fat lose because they're very small people. Yeah. Or if they're already like kind of lean and they're trying to get really lean. Yeah. I, I mean, Maggie, that, and then this would probably be a decision on their part of how it actually prefer to maybe just cut like 50 to a hundred calories and get them walking again, because then you can start looking at other questions, which are going to be

one of one solutions to them where they might start to build up intuition of, yeah, as I get deeper into a cut, I start to notice my stress, my sensitivity to stress gets, goes up. I prefer getting outside more. That's more important to me so the step count makes more sense than the cardio gym. It might even

be that we have to make some really nuanced changes that deep where we maybe even reduce the lifting volume a little bit if they're not recovering from it and increase the step count because that's the thing that they feel can kind of just keep going without any stress. It's also a good lifestyle habit. Yeah. Yeah. Just to be in the habit of moving enough outside of the gym is important for overall health and wellness. It's not just a fat loss intervention.

Yeah. And internally building that problem-solving skillset. If you reverse-engineer those things, you can apply issues of work and issues with maybe the relationship part my lifestyle with my friends and others, not where I wanted to be. Like, what solutions can I put in place? I can do more of this, do less of that. I can ask questions of what people want from me, more or less. It's a good, it's good, yeah, kind of a mental framework to think about things. And it is a mindset that you have to get into.

And sometimes you have to will yourself into it there's the two very clearly distinguished mindsets you have the problem making mindset and you have the problem solving mindset and sometimes we all get stuck in the problem making mindset where we are not even if we're going to be honest with ourselves we're not even really trying to find a solution we're still just kind of wallowing in the problem yeah and it's again that's where some of the almost vulnerability coaching happens where when you're talking to someone you're looking looking at, again, going back to that same example, maybe someone who's stress eating after work and they've been thinking for years, like, oh, if this person wasn't at work, that person wasn't at work, or if I didn't have a

boss that forced me to go through these things. And it's like, it takes a long time to make that shift of like, maybe this is on me to fix to fix yeah and that doesn't necessarily mean it's the person's fault too i think fault that word has the wrong connotations it's their you could say it's on them or it's their responsibility to do something about it even if it's not their fault per se that i mean in in some cases it is our fault. Sometimes we make bad decisions, we do stupid things that create stupid problems, and then we have to fix them. Okay, fine. That's our fault. But other times it's not so cut and dried. We find ourselves in situations that seem out of our control and anyone, and the most objective observer would be hard pressed to explain why it's

our quote unquote fault. And that's okay. I think it's important though, just to understand that if you say, okay, it's my responsibility to fix this. I'm going to do something to fix this. That isn't also saying, oh, well, this is all my fault and I'm wrong because of the outcome. And it's just a mindset point that I personally have found helpful in dealing with difficult situations.

Yeah. Yes. It seems small, but that's one of those really significant shifts that can overhaul the trajectory of someone's willingness to change as they go through all these uncomfortable shifts. someone's willingness to change as they go through all these uncomfortable shifts. And it does present like an opportunity for, you know, improving our self-talk, how

fairly or unfairly we judge ourselves because of those decisions and as a result the decisions we make thereafter. It does present like, you know, there's always going to be that initial discomfort of realizing, not necessarily realizing, but thinking over like, what could I have done better here? What could I have done better there? Which I think that's useful too personally i mean i i am a big advocate

of thinking that way again without blame or fault or guilt but objectively assessing a situation and asking, so did I do something to contribute to this situation? Even if it is in an oblique way, it's indirect, could I have done something differently that maybe would have improved the outcome, would have averted some element of whatever happened? And then what lessons or what lesson can I learn from this? What's something I can take away from this to avoid getting myself into the same situation again? And I think that's a useful, just a useful process to work through when, I mean, I find it when I get an outcome that I didn't want. when, I mean, I find it, when I get an outcome that I didn't want. And just to take a little bit of time and to think through those things, again, without blame, without fault, and then move on. Yeah.

Again, kind of going back to one of the questions you asked before about the, is there any maybe recurring themes or clients or similar trends, but it's something where someone can identify something that's come up over and over again. Once they go through that initial, maybe, internal discomfort and start to ride the wave and not allow themselves to get pulled into those rabbit holes of snowballing or negative self-talk or so on, and start to move towards being objective, it's actually life-changing for a lot of people when they realize that, oh, maybe I'm a little bit more all or nothing with some of my behaviors. And if I just acted a little bit more in the middle of some of these things,

I would have A out from there and B out from there. And it would be maybe not quite as a dramatic shift as I expect, but just a couple of small adjustments from doing day-to-day. It could be that missing digit on the password that unlocks that binary difference for that 5% shift. I want to come back to something you mentioned, which is you didn't say the word overtraining, but many people, when they hear you or anyone talk about when you're doing too much, Here, you or anyone talk about when you're doing too much, and then they think of that as overtraining, which if we look to scientific literature, overtraining syndrome is much harder to achieve than many people think. However, you can push things too far, especially when you're dieting and you can experience symptoms, I guess you could say, that are related to overtraining. can experience symptoms, I guess you could say that are related to overtraining. There's an imbalance in terms of stress and recovery that certainly can happen. And practically speaking,

what does that usually look like in clients? What are the symptoms? What are the red flags that when you start seeing these things, you know that, okay, we're probably redlining or we're getting close to it. And then what works, practically speaking, and I want to throw something else out there just because it's related. A lot of people talk about it. It's still kind of controversial, reverse dieting, because many people would say, oh yeah, well, you just need to reverse diet. Here are the things that you're going to share, signs that you're probably doing too much and you should just reverse diet. So you can comment on that as well as you were answering.

Yeah. Just to look at some of the warning signs around overtraining or kind of issues that people fall into with that. It kind of depends on where a coach is with a client or a client service, how much they'd like to have done as to what the issue is going to be. So when we have a client form the program, we might put them on a standard routine, a standard BLS, CLAS routine, and we might find as we go that the overtraining actually shows up differently. As they get stronger,

they might need to do a little bit less barbell work and barbell on the front and machines on the back end. Some of those things may just actually iterate through them as they come up. And what would occur to make you think of that? What feedback are you getting? Yeah, things like several weeks of training consistency, but then diet compliance is slowly slipping off. Recovery is slowly worsening. And when you say recovery is worsening,

sorry to inject, I just want to make sure I get these questions so I don't just forget them. But when you say recovery is worsening, what does that look like specifically? Because again, if people are new to this, they don't really know what, am I recovered? I don't know. My muscles are sore. Is that good? Is that bad? Yeah. Yeah. If you find that the soreness is probably worsening week to week, even though the training is very stable, if you find that your mood is generally getting a little bit worse,

if sleep isn't as consistent, general stress levels are going up, irritability is worse, general mood and outlook is a little bit dampened. Any of those, and it might vary versus person. If you overtrain, your sleep might be terrible.

If I overtrain, I may just get really stiff joints. It can vary versus person. Yeah, joints were always a thing for me. Yeah. My joints would just, it wouldn't feel good when I'm working out. Everything would just feel kind of stiff

in between workouts. Yes, we kind of look at those and that's the you know case like the training on paper looks great so it'd then be looking at some of the simple adjustments around it you know we've got a deload planned after 10 weeks let's maybe do one every six weeks instead until we get to our goal again looking at individual workouts you might find for one person a a back workout, for instance, might look like barbell deadlifts, barbell row, weighted pull-ups.

Just switching maybe, keep the barbell deadlift in place, and then maybe doing a cable row and a pull-down. It's going to be 90% as effective, but it might be half the stress for some people because it's a little bit less free weight work, a little bit less overall load. So yeah, just saying about tracking

and seeing if there's any subtle changes that are going to not allow that stress to accrue. It's probably what we'd look at once some of those symptoms start to kick in. And are the adjustments normally made to the weightlifting rather than the cardio? And is that more often the culprit if the excess stress is coming from the exercise? Probably. I would almost say like the HIIT training, if you're doing high intensity cardio and lifting, I would further look at that in the same bracket because it's really the same on paper. It's kind of both pushing close to failure

and much higher intensity and then the lower intensity work is generally much easier to recover from. Especially if the HIIT training, I'm sure you don't recommend this, but if people insist on doing something that is high impact, like just sprinting on a hard surface, for example. Like box jumps, burpees, things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And further, I would pull into

the looping as well. But to answer the second one. And what about reverse dieting? Yeah, exactly. What about... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's more... When I say reversed, I think I kind of always use it as a loose term of just coming out of a deficit back to maintenance. Some people, they feel fine to jump right up. Some people like the traditional approach of going with increments. Some people like to go somewhere in between. It really, again, really comes down to almost looking at... back and forth with the client to get their take on it and what we've done in the past but

you might find that one person has finished a very lengthy cut and they're maybe just generally quite relaxed they're not overthink much of the process, they're very much just like, it's something I'm able to do I'm happy to go about it, I don't have some of the stresses going on that makes this

difficult for me. And they can just like, cool, I can just jump straight back to maintenance, just the training volume down a little bit. And if the scale goes up a couple of pounds, I'm cool with that. Other people may find that even if it's not necessarily essential, they would just feel better working up in maybe,

if they're a 700 calorie deficit, 150-ish calorie jumps, three or four of those might uh see them better so in my experience over the years many women have preferred that just because they didn't want to see a big jump on the scale even though they understood they knew what they were doing and it just was a matter of personal preference and and i think that's a perfectly valid reason to do it that way yeah i. I also wonder if this is one that, you know, maybe even if we don't articulate it all, I'm going to suddenly think it at the time.

Like there might be certain reasons we're in tune with it. Like just knowing that I know my compliance is going to be better if I do it steady. Like I don't need to explain it to myself. I just feel it. That's another good point too. Some people, I'm just thinking over the years, answering many emails from people and seeing a lot of different situations. And that was definitely seemed to be one of those things, just like how some people I had mentioned earlier,

they find that they have trouble controlling their food intake with certain kinds of foods. You had mentioned earlier, a hundred calories of wine. Some people can do that and that they're totally fine with that and they're happy and they generally don't drink any more than that. And other people, a hundred calories of wine. I would liken that to, I don't drink, but I can relate to it with ice cream. For me, a hundred calories of ice cream, it's not that I'm going to spiral out of control and eat the whole pint, but it's so unsatisfying. I just wouldn't even bother. If I'm going to eat ice cream and I want to get satisfied, at least half of the pint has to be eaten or I'm just completely unsatisfied. So if it's only 100 calories, I'm going to go for dark chocolate because at least

I know I find that satisfying. And so anyway, there are how people can find that for them, they either should completely avoid certain things like chips, for example, 100 calories of chips. Nope, doesn't work for me. I just don't want to even have chips in my pantry because I like them too much and I just know that it's going to be a problem. Similarly, and again, I've seen this to your point of people who they're done cutting or they're going to be taking a break and they know that if they add those 500 or 700 calories to their meal plan, it's going to include foods that maybe they're able to stick to a plan of gradually working their calories back up rather than just adding a large number of calories that may increase hunger, for example. I mean, that's how it's always been for me. Ironically, I experience more hunger when I'm lean bulking than when I'm cutting. Even if I've been cutting for a couple of months in the past, I've gotten pretty lean for photo shoots and so forth. Generally speaking, more hunger, lean bulking, especially leading up to meals where I actually really get hungry when I'm lean bulking leading up to a meal. Whereas if I'm cutting or maintaining, not really. Maybe I feel a little bit of hunger here and there. And so just generally

related to this personalization theme of this talk is it's important to know how you respond to things, even if in the case of reverse dieting, the most recent scientific literature, I would say it more or less debunks, I think, some of the claims that have been made about reverse dieting over the last several years, implying that it's superior to just raising calories to maintenance or that you can even use it to kind of supercharge your metabolism. Do you agree with that? Practically speaking, working with people, have you found any form of reverse dieting useful? And let's exclude just

bringing your calories back to maintenance because I would say that's just bringing your calories back to maintenance. But aside from the people who just prefer to do it that way, I'm just curious, has it been a useful tool or not really? It's just for the people who don't want to increase their calories by large amounts overnight? Yeah, I think in the early days, before more of the recent research came out, people would probably have just done it

out of more security. Like, we know this works. Exactly, yeah. Always out of caution. It's like, it's not going to hurt. Yeah. Two weeks to maybe not screw up last six

months is probably wise. Let's just take a little bit longer. Once we got over that and it was more of a case-by-case, whatever option suits you approach, there really wasn't anything major, really. It was probably again, it kind of just reversed back to that. What is your preference?

What should I tell you? What feels right for you in terms of pacing and because again i think even if we didn't necessarily go back and forth the clients over like sure maybe you'll get more food and be able to like feel a little bit better in the gym sooner because those things tend to just be more intuition for especially people who if they're at a point where they're doing a reverse diet, they've done at least a few weeks and months of this where they know the way around the gym, they know the way around the kitchen, they understand how to pace things, both in terms of strength training and weight loss and weight gain.

So they've got a good intuition of everything. And it's often those small upsides of, yeah, I may be able to get a little bit stronger in the gym next month if I just jump straight to maintenance instead of reverse diet. It doesn't tend to be, it just doesn't tend to necessarily be a topic of conversation. It just becomes more of what suits me with this reverse diet and not even necessarily trying to, again, trying to like dig really deep into it or like, you know, fighting against someone if they're like, I really want to reverse that cautiously.

It's just whatever suits you. Like it's, you know, you're in the deep end of code, you're stressed. Like we don't need to add more complication or friction to this. Like, you know, our brains are just like pattern recognition machines. Like we'll just do what feels best. And we have a few options in front of us. Whatever's comfortable. Let's go with that.

And, you know, I don't care if it takes an extra ten days, then it might have been doing it the fast way. Let's just get it done in a way that suits you. And again, you take ownership over it. You do it this way this time. If you want to try it a different way next time, great. And then you've got your circumstances and preferences. You've got that data then. This is how I felt doing it slowly. This is how I felt doing it quickly. Makes sense. And last question for you,

and that's diet breaks. And I wanted to bring this up because if you only looked at the scientific literature, you might be a little bit confused because you're going to find some literature that suggests that it's very useful, maybe even advantageous to include diet breaks, similar to how you would include deloads. If you were to take a diet period of six months, you can find some research that would suggest that you're going to get better results with regular diet breaks over those six months than not taking diet breaks, then you could find research that contradicts that and says, no, you won't. On average, you actually might get worse results because you're going to spend less time in a deficit. So practically speaking, how have you used diet breaks? How useful has that been? How necessary has that been? When might you call for that or not? Yes. Similar to the overtraining, it's like looking at when someone's in a deficit and they're cutting. I kind of look at things like hunger, fatigue, brain fog, irritability. I kind of just call them like dieting symptoms, like my head when I'm thinking all these things and

looking at them on a 1 to 10 scale. And as the dial cranks up and you know for a lot of people they're gonna have maybe a two or three ish out of ten hunger a couple of times a day like it's just before the main meals for instance like you're just probably gonna have that for the next three months whilst you cook it's kind of just the reality of it and we'll do what we can around it to minimize it some people don't any, but that's maybe just a standard baseline. And it's okay for people listening. It's okay to feel hungry, especially when you're dieting. It doesn't mean anything's wrong. Yeah. It opens up the avenue for not going to the extension. It opens up the avenue for other things like not reacting to the hunger,

knowing it's okay, testing out the stress, managing stress. But yeah, going through the dieting symptoms seeing how much like the training in the gym, how stress and fatigue in the gym might increase over time. Same for those if hunger, irritability focus, all those things are creeping in the wrong direction in steady

increments. Diet break would make sense preventatively like no one it's often a bit of a back and forth in steady increments. Diet break would make sense preventatively. It's often a bit of a back and forth when clients, several weeks into a cut, they're doing very well and those things are moving in the wrong direction where it makes sense to diet break.

It is with some folks to get them on board with the idea of let's eat in maintenance for a week. I'm doing so well I don't want to stop now. But oftentimes, they'll push it that extra two or three weeks and have they just had a diet break there. Those dieting symptoms would have been

dialed all the way back to a healthy baseline and they would have been able to push for another 10 weeks. It's more about prevention in that case. Always, much like deloads, if you can do a diet break every somewhere in like the six to twelve week range whatever suits to sue someone if depending on the size of the deficit or the stress is going on in life just seeing where it makes sense to put that in

again just short circuit that increase of negative symptoms is what uh what we'll be looking at and i'm sure that you've you yeah, I know that you've worked with many, I guess you'd say, kind of type A personalities and those types of people in particular. I understand. I lean that way myself. We can be stubborn about- All's everything. Yeah. Yeah. Bludgeoning our way through. We've decided this is what we're going to do. And generally speaking, we don't want to let people or things stop us. And so I do understand that. But as you said, it can be, there's a point where it can

make things harder than they need to be, or it can actually become counterproductive because if you build up too much stress and so you've been in a deficit now for a while, you're training pretty intensely, and maybe you should have taken it easier a couple of weeks ago to bring the, let's just say the overall stress down from, let's say a seven to a four or something like that. And now it's at a nine, that same little intervention, that little one week diet break, it may not be enough actually that may only bring it down to a seven so now you have to you actually have to take it easy for two weeks to get it down to the four so you can so you can go at it for another you know a couple of

months or or you don't do that you just take the let's say five days at maintenance and maybe you take a deload and okay, stress comes from nine to seven. And now you're running into the same problems though, three weeks later. And then what? And many people in my experience, again, especially people who are more driven, kind of like tougher, masculine type of people, they then maybe are even more reluctant to address it this second time because it's only been three weeks and I'm not going to take another diet break. I'm just going to rub some dirt on it

and keep going. Yeah, in those instances, you've probably looked at it again, like the system as a whole, like is the training plan a little too strenuous? Is the deficit set a little too aggressive? Are there other stresses outside the gym that we can dial back?

Yeah, I'm just trying to, it's tough. There's a lot of, you know, we've had hundreds of people who are like very type A and some people can just genuinely grind all the way to the finish line and then be fine. Other people can grind all the way through, have a horrible bounce back. And then other people are on the other end of, they'll just keep getting to like that 8-10 week wall and just bouncing back because they're not getting those resting sooner rather than later. So it is tricky

especially because in other areas of the life it may have worked very well just brute forcing things even if it could have been done a little bit calmer or more elegantly if you can brute force it. That's the basis that they've got it and I'm just going to apply that to everything else. And it works in that department.

So it should work here as well. So it does become a tricky, again, one of those tricky things to overcome of questioning, like reflecting and look at ourselves, like looking at what we're doing wrong. It gets uncomfortable for people at that stage. But that could be where some of those really, really crucial pillars happen.

Some folks who are maybe very type A, we may see them, you know, almost instead of making, like you can apply this to say diet policy, where you have people who are clean eating and they're going to be a hundred percent on a hundred percent of their diet, whereas like you can be a hundred percent focused on being 80, 20 is like apply that same kind of type of attitude about like 80, 20 is what perfection looks like make that the goal, because it's a small shift for

some people, but it makes a thing that can be the difference of like, yeah, I'm going to rest, I'm going to rest better than anyone else rests when I'm resting like that's, that's how I'm going to be type A about this. Yeah. No, I think that's a great point. And I can relate to that. I've always been, in my fitness in particular, the just get it done. If it gets hard, just keep going. And that's worked fine for me. And some of the, if we're talking about cutting in the past, none of it was particularly grueling, but could I have made it a little bit more pleasant by incorporating a diet break here and there, maybe doing a little bit more deloading?

Yes, but I did it the way I did it and there were no negative circumstances or negative consequences of that. And so if someone, if you're that kind of person, that's fine too. If you know that, yeah, you know that physiologically nothing's wrong, as you said, you have these symptoms and they're a little bit annoying, but you know that you're not breaking your metabolism. You're not losing a bunch of muscle. It's fine. You just don't feel great. And you'd rather just gut it out for another three weeks and be done. Okay, good. Then do it. But again, this is a point of self-awareness and knowing that that isn't going to then result in a big

rebound because you are so sick of controlling your food and you're so hungry and your sleep is so bad and your mood is so terrible that you're going to undo you know six months of work in the following month yeah yeah and that intensity lever of like being more on a plan for a certain time frame versus not like you can push pull in as you want and almost come in full circle to the conversation happening people is like deciding what things look like long term isn't it's not we're not looking at like what is a perfect day in a year's time it's like what is you know a yearly cycle or a few years look like for you and for some people it may be you know I'll just have like a nice maintenance phase you know say someone's in your position where they've built a lot of muscle, they've gotten as lean as they want, and for them it might be

have fun just maintaining them for 10 months. I'll let myself eat what I want over the holidays, and then I'll just do a six to eight week cut, and that's when I'll crank the intensity up, because I'm choosing to do so. I'm not succumbing to what feels like an out-of-control

crash diet. I'm choosing and the ownership to crank that intensity up. That's what I'm going to do. And then I'm going to enjoy it in a way that I enjoy it the rest of the time. And I can paint that picture however I want and change it whenever I want. As long as I can take ownership and it leads to the outcome I want, most of the behaviors are aligned. And that's what's successful for most people. That's the dream. That's really the end game for people listening who are relatively new to this,

or maybe just in the middle of this. I think that is the big payoff, aside from health and longevity and all the other benefits. But if we're talking about body composition, that is the big payoff of all the work that you do on the front end for the first few years. Then you have the flexibility to do exactly what Harry just said. I mean, that's what I do. I'm maintaining in the gym. And so I'm making sure that I enjoy my workouts. I'm doing exercises that I like to do. I'm doing enough volume to obviously maintain most of the strength and all of the muscle that I have. And it is about three to four hours of lifting per week. That's all the weightlifting I want to do right now. I do cardio on top of that.

That's most of the year. And over the holidays, I mean, I probably gain a little bit of fat. I don't care that much to eat large amounts of calories, but to your point, I'm also not making sure that I'm not measuring, I'm not weighing and measuring my Thanksgiving dinner. I'll eat what I'm going to eat. And then at the end of that, if I gained more fat than I wanted, then I cut for a little bit and rinse and repeat. And it's great. And it's a lifestyle that I enjoy and it's something that I'll be able to do and you and everybody listening we can do that for the rest of our life and we can stay in really really good shape doing it that way yeah it is it is for most people that is yeah the ideal spot where they just get to loosely

maintain a blst last time routine would you actually have some clients though? They just love the process and science of it that much that even though they're only at say beginning of pound of muscle a year, two pounds of muscle, they just still love doing like a step bulk, a set cut each year, a little bit of maintenance.

And again, so it's all the others there. Which I also, I mean, I actually do understand. I mean, I did that for a while too. I guess that maybe this is just the season I'm in my life, but I get that as well. I mean, it also is fun, especially when you're maintaining a consistent calorie surplus. And if somebody hasn't done that before, I find that, or I've found that they're often surprised at how big of a difference that makes in the gym. Once you've established that for a couple of weeks, it seems to take a couple of weeks to really get the physiological gears

moving faster. But once that reaches a certain threshold, it can be shocking just how much stronger you get in the gym and how much more energy you have for your workouts and and even just how your body feels and how you feel that additional recovery and so forth so i get it that's fun too actually yeah yeah it's huge like the especially by say like sleep quality someone's systemic stress and that food like all those things in the right or wrong direction. It can be, especially on big exercises like squats and deadlifts where 10% is a huge amount of weight.

It can be a drastic, like 40, 50 pounds swing. It's huge. Well, that was everything that I had on my list. I think that was a great conversation. Is there anything that you think that we should have covered, I should have asked, that you want to say

before we wrap up? I don't think so. Yeah, I think that's kind of everything I can think of on the client side. It may be worth doing for a coaching tool

perspective at some point, but I think, again, a lot of the tools and processes that we worked through and covered, I guess, yeah, if anyone has any questions, you can always step out of the moment and processes that we work through. I think COVID, I guess, yeah, anyone has any questions,

you can always step out of the moment and see me. Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking the time, Harry. And why don't we tell people where they can find you, find your work, as soon as anything in particular that you want them to know about. Honestly, there's not,

I've not got like much of a web presence doing this. I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure, but I thought I would ask. Yeah, I'm happy just to like quietly get on with my work. That suits me. Well, I guess if anyone wants to reach me, Harry and Legion Supplements is the way to go. Okay, great.

Well, thanks, Harry. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about

the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.