And sometimes you have to do hard things to accomplish hard
goals. And that's something that runs
through my head sometimes. Literally last night I was a
little bit hungry. Around like 7:00, I walked past
the pantry. The thought crossed my mind.
That crosses all of our minds. And I thought to myself, you
know what, Jess? You got a hard goal.
No, you're not doing it. And most of the year, maybe I
do. But right now, I've got a very
specific goal to lose body fat. And you got to do hard things to
accomplish our goals. Welcome to STRONGER WEEKLY,
brought to you by Purest Nutrition.
I'm your host, Jesse Carajet. Thank you so much for being here
today, folks. I am.
I'm fired up. It's a Friday when I'm recording
this. Tomorrow, the Saint Patty's Day
parade comes back to Northern Colorado in Fort Collins.
And me and my family and some friends will be there
representing Saint Patty's Day is my absolute favorite day of
the entire year. Saint Patty's Day itself is
coming up on Tuesday, but all the festivities start tomorrow
and I couldn't be more excited. I got my beard going here.
We'll see how long that lasts. Got my green shirt, my Clover
behind me. I am ready to go.
Shout out to all my friends and family back in New Jersey in the
Jersey Shore that are listening to this.
I got to tell you now that I live out here in Colorado.
There ain't nothing like the Saint Patty's Day parade back on
the Jersey Shore. Man, those parades were
happening every Friday and Saturday, week over week
throughout the month. Lots of Irish heritage in New
Jersey because of those migration patterns of our Irish
ancestors coming into North Jersey through Ellis Island and
just going all throughout the region.
So there's some, there's some Irish folks and people that
celebrate Saint Patty's Day out here in Colorado, but there
ain't nothing like a New Jersey Irish heritage Saint Patty's Day
parade. So shout out all my friends and
family. Listen, thank you to everybody
being here. We've got a great episode for
you today. It's sitting here just about to
be the middle of March. I'm heading to Florida with my
family for a spring break trip in just about a month.
And right now I am in what's called cutting season.
The young kids out there say it's time to shred, shred for
summer. And a lot of people will use
Memorial Day as kind of a built in annual goal to just get lean
so you can feel good and look good going into the summer.
And I'm actively doing that right now leading up to
mid-april. So this episode's going to be
all about cutting. You might call it shredding,
bro, Shredding, but cutting. How do we lose fat and preserve
lean muscle mass and preserve our strength so we can look good
and feel good? So I'm going to share the secret
sauce, if you will, Exactly what I do, all rooted in science.
And just to say it right now, it is not going to be some crazy BS
influencer nonsense. I'm not going to have you buying
a sauna and sweating out pounds. I'm not going to have you buying
all sorts of crazy supplements and do some ridiculous detailed
nitty gritty calorie counting because as busy parents,
professionals, and just busy people, ain't nobody got time
for that. I'm going to give you the tool
kit of practical steps that you can take or levers that you can
pull so that you can responsibly and consistently lose body fat.
Personally, I've got about 10 lbs to lose.
I started about 15 days ago. I'm already down 4 lbs, so I
don't have much more to go. 6 lbs over the course of the next
30 days and I fully expect to lose it.
I do it every year. And I'm going to share the tips
in both nutrition, fitness, supplements, lifestyle that I
use to get it done. So stay tuned for that.
But first, like we do in every single episode, we're going to
kick off this episode with the health and fitness news of the
week. Let's jump in.
First up, if you're listening and you're under 50, colon
cancer probably isn't on your radar.
But maybe it should be. So a new study published in
Ajama confirms that colorectal cancer is now the leading cause
of cancer deaths for Americans under 50, surpassing lung,
breast, and all brain cancers. Deaths from colon cancer in this
age group have risen 1.1% every year since 2005, while deaths
from every other major cancer have declined.
Today, one in five colon cancer diagnosis is in someone under
the age of 55. I find that very surprising.
And three out of four of those are found at advanced stages.
By the time that they are found, when survival rates drop
dramatically. Dr. Rebecca Siegel, the study's
lead author, puts it simply quote.
This can no longer be called an old person's disease.
The take away screening is now recommended.
Start at just 45 years old. So if you're out there and
you're close to 45 or even after that and you haven't been
screened, please go do that. If you have symptoms such as
blood in your stool, persistent cramping, unexplained weight
loss, even chronic fatigue, do not wait.
Get it checked by your doctor immediately.
Do not become one of these statistics.
Next up, GLP ones are all over the news and this week Novo
Nordisk dropped it's very public lawsuit against telehealth
company HIMS and HERS and the two will now partner to sell
branded Ozempic and Bugovi through the hymns platform.
So this deal ends a fight over compounded knock offs and
signals a shift. GLP one drugs are going
mainstream. They're coming folks.
Oral will Govi launched in January at just $149 a month,
which is far cheaper than the 1000 bucks these injectables
used to cost. And Eli Lilly's competing pill
is expected later this year. So these drugs, these
medications becoming more affordable, which means they
will also become more widespread.
So here's my take. GOP ones polarizing.
You got the Oscars coming up this weekend.
I've seen pictures of Hollywood actors and actresses just
becoming emaciated skeletons. It feels like, you know, the
richest people buy into these things first.
They have access to it and they kind of set the stage and model
for what the rest of the country then does.
It's award season. You see athletes that are
starting to use this as they're retired and just everyday people
who need help. But to me, here's the deal.
It's called a medication. And I think if a medication is
going to be prescribed, there needs to be, or at least there
should be a diagnosis. These drugs were originally
intended for folks who are legitimately struggling with
obesity and diabetes, other things that have proven to
basically kill people faster, right?
So I was all on board when I heard about them for people that
truly need them. But now it's becoming all about
vanity. It's becoming about shortcut,
right? We know the leverage we can pull
if we want to look good and feel good.
We can eat less and move more and sleep more and drink less,
right? I mean, we know what we can do.
These are shortcuts. I am not an early adopter.
This is a speech and a preach. Sorry, not sorry.
I'm not on for people jumping on this bandwagon because it's
easy. If you've got a legitimate
issue, do it under the guidance of your doctor.
I'm just a little concerned because there's conflicting
reports and data coming about people having terrifying side
effects to these drugs, especially when they're not done
under the supervision of a doctor.
So they're becoming more accessible.
They're more accessible now for people that aren't the ultra
rich and the rich. Just take caution and work with
your doctor if you're going to move in that direction.
Next up, some news about psilocybin as it relates to
addiction. So we know that smoking still
kills about 480,000 Americans each year.
And we have not had a new medication or breakthrough to
help people quit in the last two decades, but that's about to
change. So a John Hopkins study
published in Pajama Network Open found that a single dose of
psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.
Yes, magic mushrooms was significantly more effective
than nicotine patches for helping smokers quit.
At six months, 40.5% of psilocybin participants had quit
compared to just 10%. So it's five times more
effective of those on the pouch. That is incredible.
So lead author Doctor Matthew Johnson said, quote, I was
surprised by the sheer magnitude of the effect.
Yeah, all of us are. Both groups also did cognitive
behavioral therapy alongside those treatments.
So it's not just the drug, but it's been having amazing
effects. The results are striking enough
that the NIH is now funding a larger trial.
So more and more research coming out showing some potential
benefits from magic mushrooms. Stay tuned.
Next up, look, we all have someone annoying in our life or
maybe someone who stresses us out.
And a new study has found and may hint at the fact that that
person or those persons may actually literally be reducing
your health span and making you older.
So a new study published in PNAS, I'll say that acronym
PENIS, found that for each quote, Hassler as the study
defined as a hassler you regularly interact with, which
is, as defined in the study, someone who creates problems or
makes life difficult. Your biological aging speeds up
by about 1.5% as long as they stay in your life.
That adds up to roughly 9 extra months on your biological clock
over a decade. That's nearly two years of wear
and tear on your central nervous system and your health span and
family members who hassle you. They have the strongest effect,
probably because you just can't escape them.
And maybe you're too polite. So interestingly, difficult
spouses didn't show the same effect.
Only non spouse hasslers seem to have a detrimental impact on
healthspan. So perhaps a take away.
Boundaries aren't just good for your Peace of Mind, they are
literally good for your health. If you want to live longer, set
boundaries with these hasslers in your life and maybe you can
state these statistics as to why, I don't know.
And finally, where are Americans happiest in our country?
A new Wallet Hub study ranked over 180 U.S. cities, and the
results might surprise you as they surprised me.
So #1 The happiest city according to this study,
Fremont, CA. It has the lowest divorce rate
in the country, the highest share of household earnings over
75,000, and some of the highest life satisfaction scores
anywhere in the country. Rounding out the top 3.
Bismarck, ND, where people get the most leisure time in the
country and Scottsdale, AZ, which scores near the top for
physical activity, mental health, the happiest.
On the other side of the equation, Huntington, WV with
the nation's highest depression rate.
So if you're paying attention there, what goes into these
studies? Low divorce rates, higher
income, higher physical fitness, more time outside and subjective
high life satisfaction scores. So the pattern across all the
happiest cities there, it's not just income, it's sleep,
community, physical health and strong social ties.
Money helps, but connection matters more.
And when I went through this report, I live in Colorado, I
was super surprised I had to scroll way down in the 50s and
60s to find the first Colorado City.
Didn't see a ton of New Jersey in my home state either.
So that's it. You can link to that report if
you want to see everything about that study in the episode
description. And that's it for your health
and fitness headlines of the week.
Real quick, I'm going to talk to you about pre workout
supplements. For years I've relied on pre
workouts. I love them, but I've never
actually focused on quality and I have used products that are
probably hurt my body instead of helping me.
And that's why I am so stoked that my partner Purest Nutrition
is launching their first pre workout supplement and I
couldn't be more excited. I've known it's coming and it is
now here. Purest is going to change the
game. This product is just built
differently. It is clean energy with real
focus. That's right, nootropics that
they put into their product. I don't want to feel wired.
I don't want to put junk. I want natural ingredients.
I want a lift, but I want to feel balanced and get after my
workout. It's got alpha, GPC, theanine
and science backed quality ingredients that all work
together and no junk, no artificial dyes, no sucralose,
no endocrine disrupting junk. Just clean fuel that work.
So go to purestnutrition.com, that's purest nutrition.com to
get your purest pre workout because how you fuel your
training matters just as much as the training itself.
All right folks, welcome to the main topic.
As I alluded to in the intro, I'm doing it.
I'm doing, I've got 30 days here to lose about 6 lbs of body fat
and I fully intend on doing that.
I've got a Florida trip to my family.
I'm really looking forward to it and I'm not weighing it.
This is something I'm doing. I'm 41 now.
This is something that I do every single year when the
summer comes around. I'm not a guy who bulks up.
I never really let go. I eat healthy and train hard all
year round, but I do kind of let go a little bit for almost like
my mental health in the fall and winter.
I'm not counting calories, I'm not obsessing over everything
that I eat. I always maintain a really
healthy body fat percentage, but I just like to dial it down.
It's a fun little goal as you head into the spring and summer.
And it just so happens that I've got this trip.
So I'm going to share with you exactly what I'm doing.
It's a real system, it's science backed, it's practical.
And I fully believe that anybody can and should do this if you're
trying to lean out or cut up, as the kids say.
And where I'm going to actually start, where I'm choosing to
start is why people fail. I think fat loss is a common
goal. A lot of people will say I'm
going to lose weight, I'm going to do it in a month or two or
three and they're not successful, which is
discouraging and can even discourage them from trying it
again. So I think the way that people
fail or the the universal, I say 3 reasons why people fail.
Number one is they go to extremes way too fast.
Crash diets twice a day, training, this stuff is just
unsustainable. They burn out, they feel like a
failure and they don't keep going.
We need to avoid that. Number 2, there's no feedback
system. They're not measuring results.
They're not being patient in discipline.
They're sort of just winging it. So you need to have tools and
some measurements, especially when you have a short amount of
time to make a pretty significant change to your body.
And then lastly, people quit. They don't have endurance, they
don't have grit. Things get uncomfortable and
they're just they, they set a goal and a game plan and they
just don't have the toughness to stick with it.
And discipline and toughness is necessary, especially when there
are some nights when you might be going to bed a little bit
hungry and you might be pushing yourself a little bit further,
particularly in your cardiovascular workouts.
More on that when we get to the fitness section.
But I think those are the three main reasons that people
basically fail when they have fat loss goals.
And I'll say just as a quick anecdote, something that always
surprises me in just a moment, we're going to jump into the
nutrition recommendations for this.
But on the topic of feedback systems and measurements, I do
not use a calorie counter throughout the year.
I do not count my calories. I have a general goal.
I eat intuitively. We've talked about this on the
show, but when I get to these 630 or 60 day fat loss crunches,
when I really want to lose weight and I start tracking my
calories and I use an app, I use an AI based app to do it.
I'm always, always surprised of how much I'm overeating.
I really am. Like, I know generally speaking,
what my baseline is for calories, what my maintenance
is, meaning that if I eat this many calories every single day,
I'll probably just stay the same when it comes to body fat.
And when I actually, for those first day or two track
everything I'm eating, I'm like, Oh my God, I'm eating so much
more than I thought. Those little snacks, those
little things that you grab walking by, you know, like a
seagull and grabbing a chicken nugget off my daughter's plate
if she doesn't finish it, that stuff adds up.
Highly encourage people, especially if you only got 30
days, to count your calories for those 30 days.
You can do it, but it's something to pay attention to.
Hey, real quick, I've spent a lot of time in my life on how I
eat and how I train. It took me embarrassingly too
long to apply that same standard to men's grooming products to
products I use in my hair and my skin, which is why I'm so
grateful to be partnered with Based Body Works.
I use their texture powder and sea salt spray for my hair and
the difference is obvious. It's a natural matte finish with
real hold, none of that kind of helmet looking slicked on gel
junk that overproduced look. When I use their product, it
takes 30 seconds. Dry my hair after the shower,
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go. I'm a busy guy.
I do not have time to be fine tuning my hair.
And perhaps the thing that I love the most, it's all natural
ingredients. There's no sulfates, no
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So you can go to basebodyworks.com.
You can use Stronger Weekly as a code for 20% off.
Again, that's basedbodyworks.com Stronger Weekly and you can find
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All right, let's start with nutrition.
And I'm starting here for a very specific reason, because when
you're losing fat, nutrition is the most important thing.
Absolutely the most important thing.
And we'll start with this. A calorie deficit is a
nonnegotiable, which means that you are eating less calories
everyday then you are actually burning.
And how many calories less? Anywhere between 250 and 500.
But most people think 500 calories per day deficit is the
sweet spot and that should equate to.
And these are rough numbers and it's hard to apply them to
everybody. Roughly 1 LB of fat loss per
week depending on your starting point.
And that math is real. So you need to start to know how
much you need to eat. You need to start by knowing how
many calories you burn everyday. If you are like me and you wear
a decent fitness tracker worth its salt.
And in my case I use Whoop, whatever you need.
But you have to have some sense of a starting point of how many
calories you burn everyday. And I'm not just referring to
what you burn in intentional exercise.
I'm talking about throughout the day.
How many calories as you walk around the block, stand up, go
up and down the stairs, commute to work, go shopping, exercise,
all of that combined, you should have a baseline.
So if you have a tracker, I recommend you open up your
smartphone and figure out it's probably, if you have an Apple
Watch, for example, it's probably been tracking that data
for a long time and you just don't know it.
If you've got something like a Whoop or an Aura, they have apps
that you can go into. And if you don't and you don't
want to invest in a fitness tracker, there are calculators
that you can find online that you can put in your age and you
can do some estimates. But the point is to get a
starting point because we're going to adjust it over time.
But you have to have a baseline so you can make sure you're
eating to be in that 500 calorie per day episode.
So that's really .1. Now once you have that baseline,
for me it's about 2800 calories a day.
Once you have that baseline, you're doing simple math.
So I'm taking 2800 calories and I'm subtracting 500.
So my caloric goal for the day right now is 2300 calories,
which puts me in that deficit. And if you multiply that 500
calorie daily deficit times 7, that's 3500 calories per week.
There's some great thinkers out there that actually say, hey,
you know what? We get caught up so much in the
daily tracking. Let's look at it on a week over
week basis, meaning you can have a day where you eat more and a
day that you eat less. Either way, I don't care as long
as you're tracking and you're shooting for that goal of a 500
calorie deficit every single day.
How do we make sure that we're eating our target calorie goal
again, mine's 2300. That's where I highly recommend.
There are free ones. Highly recommend an actual
calorie counter. Everybody I think these days
knows about My Fitness Pal. There were the O GS on the
space. There's so many other options
out there that you can use. I'm not going to name mine.
I'm not connected to them or fill you with them.
But what I love about it is I can snap a picture of what I'm
eating and it uses AI to guess and it's usually very accurate.
Exactly. Not only.
What I'm eating but how much I'm eating and when I snap the photo
it tells me what it thinks it is.
I can go in and make a couple adjustments.
If it was off, log it. I'm on my way and I love that
it's convenient. But unless you want to get into
weighing your food and keeping a paper and pen journal, which I
highly doubt you want to do, go find a free tracker and start
tracking your meals because you'll be surprised you're
either under eating or overeating.
My guess is you're probably overeating right?
So know your baseline, subtract 500, get to your daily caloric
goal and then start tracking. And let's drill down just a
little bit deeper so you know your calorie goal.
Now we need to talk about macros.
There are three and I think most people these days know what they
are. They are fats, protein, and
carbohydrates. So you're going to take those
calories for the day and you're going to divide those calories
into those 3 macros. So it's very hard for me to
recommend a one-size-fits-all on the macros.
So I'm going to to speak in generalities for what works for
most people. Caveat there.
If you for a very particular reason, if it's an ethical
reason and you're a vegan, it's going to be harder for you to
have the protein recommendations that you're going to find in the
fitness world, right? If you're carb sensitive, if
you're gluten intolerant, lactose intolerant, whatever it
is, you can modify this based on what your preferences are and
why you have those preferences. But that said, let's talk about
like a general recommendation. So I'm just going to talk about
what I do because this is rooted, I think in science, but
I tailor it a little bit for what has worked for me.
So my split again, ready 2300 calories a day. 35% of those
calories for me come from protein.
All right, now there's 4 calories per gram of protein.
My goal is 200 grams of protein. You take 200, you multiply it by
4, that's 800. Subtract that from 2300 and
that's how many calories I have left to get from fats and carbs.
So 35% come from protein. Lots of reliable research out
there on the importance of it eating at least 1g per pound of
body weight protein. So I start there, consider it my
anchor, and then I fill in the carbs and the fats around that.
Now when it gets to carbs, I tend to come in a little bit on
the lower side versus a lot of the stuff that you'll find
recommended out there in the fitness world.
I found that I don't need to have 202 hundred and 5300 grams
of carbohydrates to perform well in the gym.
I also found that when I eat a lot of carbohydrates, I retain
water, I get bloaty and I have a harder time losing weight.
So for me, only 30% of my calories from carbohydrates.
So in this case it's around 175 carbs.
And then lastly, I fill in the remaining calories with fats.
35% of my 2300 calories per day come from fats.
That's around 102 per day. And I find this really works
well for me. So choose something that works
for yourself. You might split them equally
amongst the three different macros, whatever works for you.
But I do recommend that you start with anchoring it in the
protein. Make sure you're getting
adequate protein and choose your target body weight to establish
those the protein count. The next thing this works for
me, pay attention to this that this really works well for me
carbohydrate timing. So take those 175 carbs that I'm
eating and consume them strategically around the most
active arts of your day, which is for me when I do my training.
More on that in a little bit. O what I'll do is my life is a
little bit hectic and crazy. I've got essentially 2 jobs and
three kids. I can't always train at the same
time. I try to but I can't always.
So I manage my carbohydrates in two different ways.
One, if I'm going to work out fasted in the morning, I have
not only do I have no carbs before I train, I don't eat
anything and I feel fine. I have my my purest nutrition
pre workout supplement, some creatine and I'm off to the
races right little plug there for purest.
So what I do is I'll just train fasted and then I will have my
most carb heavy meal right after that, replenish all those
stores, right? Just get the carbs in there and
then I will taper them down by basically mid afternoon and then
I have no more carbs for the rest of the day.
If I'm training mid morning, maybe afternoon, I will have
that first carbohydrate meal about 30 grams before I train
and then the rest of them right afterwards.
But the point is, try to surround your training with your
carbohydrates. Don't just eat them randomly and
sporadically throughout the day. And there's a reason for that,
but just try to use some carb time.
And I find that it helps really, really much with fat loss.
And my next suggestion, this is something that I actually do
year round, but it's time restricted eating, right?
Some people, some people might call it fasting Tre Tre is it's
First off, it's a structural tool.
It's not a magic trick. And what it does when you're
focusing on only eating during certain times throughout the
day, it works because it helps you be more disciplined around
when you eat. And there's also some studies
suggest that eating late at night before bed, depending on
when you train is not the best for you.
Let's just put it that way. You might store more fat if you
do that and time restricted eating, especially if that fed
window as they call it, closes further out from when you go to
bed, can be a really effective discipline tool to help you get
to those calorie goals that we talked about South.
Me personally, my protocol and I tend to do this year round, but
when I'm cutting intentionally like I'm doing right now, I just
get more discipline with it. I just refuse to fail when it
comes to my fed window and mine is 8 to 6.
Eight to six is a 10 hour fed window plenty of time to get
those calories in. And also I find it particularly
helpful if I just, I'm very disciplined to say I'm done
consuming or ingesting calories after 6:00.
I just get super disciplined with it.
So I strongly suggest you consider doing some type of a
window just to prevent yourself from overeating, especially as
you get closer to bedtime. OK, so we talked about
establishing your baseline 500 calories deficit per day.
We talked about macros, how to break them apart.
We even talked a little bit about time restricted eating.
Let's talk about maybe a couple other little things that I would
strongly consider throwing in there to help with your fat loss
goals. The first one, I'm going to call
it the skip dinner move. That's exactly what it is.
Skip dinner move. There are times when I look, I
just know whether I'm tracking or not that I basically just
overdid it throughout the day. Dinner time comes around.
Sometimes my wife, God bless her, she she'll make an amazing
meal and I'll sit down and with the whole family and there's,
you know, there's some pasta on the plate, there's some lean
proteins, etcetera. And I just think, OK, you know,
I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to eat because I want to have
dinner with my family, right? I mean, that's, that's just what
I do, but when I'm, when I'm cutting, when I just know that I
I overshot and I had too many calories every once in a while,
I'll just intuitively say, you know what?
I had a snack at 4. I don't need to have this dinner
at 6:30. I know some people might roll
their eyes at that, but what I'll do is I'll just take maybe
like a really, really small portion just to sit and partake
in dinner with my family. And this is a little hack to pay
attention to this tea I found, believe it or not, a hot tea,
like a green tea, something like that.
Maybe yerba mate, there's some caffeine there, but really helps
to suppress my appetite. So I will just very
strategically and somewhat randomly just cut dinner out.
And I found that when I do that, it shrinks my, my window, my fed
window. I wake up the next day.
The scale always agrees with that decision.
So consider sometimes if you just know it intuitively being,
you know what, I'm not too hungry.
I don't have to eat. Why am I going to eat this?
It's just a strategic way to cut off maybe 4 or 500 calories to
keep you under that goal for the day.
So give that some thought. And the last thing I'll say on
that, that might even sound hard, it might sound hard to say
skip dinner. Like really.
And I would say this to that, you know what, there is a reason
that a very, very small percentage of the American
population has 6 pack as or is even lean, right?
There's a reason for that. And the reason is because it's
hard. The goal itself is hard.
If you have a vision of you yourself looking like that
person who has some muscular definition, is lean enough to
show it, guess what? That is a hard goal.
You have an ambitious goal and sometimes you have to do hard
things to accomplish hard goals. And that's something that runs
through my head sometimes. Literally last night I was a
little bit hungry around like 7:00, I walked past the pantry.
The thought crossed my mind. That crosses all of our minds.
And I thought to myself, you know what, Jess, you've got a
hard goal. No, you're not doing it.
And most of the year, maybe I do, but right now I've got a
very specific goal to lose body fat.
And you got to do hard things to accomplish our goals.
So give that some thought. And then just some final
suggestions on, I'll call the nutrition.
I'll call the nutrition front here.
Alcohol, guys, alcohol, we talk about it so much on this show,
but let me just remind you or maybe inform you for the first
time, it is bad for you. It kills your metabolism.
It saps you of your motivation. If you over drink it, it's going
to give you worse performance in the gym, which is your
opportunity to really spark that fat loss and that calorie loss.
And it kills your sleep. It's it's just bad for you and
it's empty calories. You don't need it.
So I, I would suggest, strongly suggest go if you're drinking
often, maybe go to like a a specific goal every week and
really moderate it. And as you get closer to your
deadline for your cut, maybe just cutting it out completely
if you just need that extra boost.
So alcohol is something that I would certainly consider
removing during your 30 or 60 day process to lose fat.
Focus on Whole Foods for better micronutrients.
I'm talking in general when you're trying to eat every day
and where possible, especially which I say when possible,
especially for protein, consider a supplement.
Consider like a whey protein supplement.
Again, busy guy running around all the time, 200 grams per day
of protein is is pretty ambitious.
And there's just times when I'm jumping from meeting to meeting
or car ride to car ride with my kids and I'm just running around
frantically. And it is so helpful to have a
high quality, reliable whey protein that I can just throw
into a shaker, mix it up and just hit it and go.
So consider supplements if you're trying to get to your
protein goals. All right, so let's talk about
training a little bit. We talked about nutrition quite
a bit. And here's, here's the training
modifications for me, right? I train, I strength train year
round and I tend to run a similar split as they call it a
similar program. What I do when I'm cutting is
primarily 2 things. At least this is the mindset,
right? I'm going to do everything I can
to preserve my strength and muscle mass, meaning my main
goal isn't to lift more weights to put more on the bar and to
use progressive overload as aggressively as I normally do
year round. So I'm happy if in a 30 to 60
day cut if I can just stay the same strength because that means
I'm probably preserving my muscles.
So the point there is don't try to have two goals that are at
opposites with each other, right?
It is without advanced supplements, I'll call them,
it's very difficult to basically cut and get stronger at the same
time. It can be done, but it's very
hard for most of us. So as far as strength training
goes, I don't change that much. But one thing I do change is
I'll use more super sets to shorten the length of the
training session. So that, and this is the second
thing that I do, I can layer in more cardio and I monitor that
closely because you don't want to do so much cardio that you
start to lose strength, but you can burn more calories in your
cardio session. So my strength training does not
change all that much when I'm cutting and if anything, I want
to maintain and maybe just get slight, slight improvements in
some of my lifts. What is my training program?
I've talked about it on the show, but just to really hit it
high level, I use a four day training split.
I've been using it. The first day is upper strength
so my entire upper body. My second day is lower with a
quad focus and I do do some strength so some lower reps
heavier weights there. Wednesdays, my third day, is a
long cardio day, which is a zone 2 day and I tend to do core as
well there. Coming back to Thursday is
another upper session but it's hypertrophy focused so I'm doing
a lot more reps, more time under tension to try to breakdown
muscle. And then Friday is my second
lower day but it's more of a glutes and hams focus and I do
do some quads. Saturday's is another cardio
day, but that's my zone 5 day. Try to get my heart rate way up
there. So once more, upper lower
cardio, upper 2, lower 2 cardio. And that's my split.
And the main thing and the main take away here when it comes to
training is the opportunity in those cardio sessions.
So I'll start here. Normally my cardio is Monday,
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and those Monday through Friday
cardio sessions tend to be Zone 2.
And I focus on zone 2 because I've seen enough evidence that
that is a really good heart rate zone for both fat loss and
health span, Being leaner, living longer, who doesn't want
that? But what I tend to do,
especially if I have 30 days like I have right now, is in
those zone 2 cardio sessions, I just make them harder.
I might run faster, it might, I might not even extend the
duration of them, but I just look to burn more calories in
those sessions. Now when I'm focusing on zone 2,
that's not necessarily the case because I'm intentionally
sometimes running slower so I don't get outside of that zone.
It's because I don't want to have my cardio efforts have an
interference on my strength training because your body will
adapt if you're forcing it to run too fast, too much.
But I would say throw caution to the wind, especially as you get
close to your goal date for whatever you want your body fat
percentage to be. Run harder.
Try to maximize those sessions. Don't overdo it, but just put a
little bit more effort in those zone 2 sessions.
So I would recommend at least 90 minutes of intentional cardio
every single week. And in those sessions, if you're
already have been doing cardio, just work a little bit harder
and burn some more calories in those sessions.
And then also another strong recommendation is if you're not
doing HIT currently high intensity interval training, if
you haven't been doing it, you're not doing it.
I strongly suggest you layer at least one HIT session into your
training. Alright, that could be one
session at 15 minutes. If you want to do 2 sessions a
week, just try not to do them too close to some of your
strength training. You can do 210 to 15 minute
sessions, but you want to make sure you're doing intervals of
Max effort with a rest, Max effort with the rest.
That could be sprints, could be hill sprints, assault bike, box
jump, burpees, cycling, swimming, whatever you enjoy
doing but also pushes you so that you can work to near
maximal efforts. Because there is no question
that by working into HIT training, getting your heart
rate way up, you are going to burn more calories after those
sessions. There's this after burn kind of
phenomena. And I found personally that when
I lean into HIT and really make sure I'm doing it on a regular
basis, that's where I can really burn off those extra kind of
stubborn pounds of body fat. So you want to combine Zone 2
and HIT on top of your normal strength training.
You should be good to go, especially if you're following
the nutrition protocols we already talked about in this
episode. All right, let's be honest,
you're probably not a professional athlete with a
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As you do. And then my last recommendation,
we talked about nutrition, we talked about fitness.
I'm going to call this kind of daily routines.
The first thing I'm going to recommend.
This is a universal thing that everybody should do when you're
cutting daily weigh insurance at the same time every single day.
My routine right now is I wake up, I use the bathroom, I jump
on a scale every single morning, especially when I'm focused on
cutting. And this is important.
You can see daily fluctuations in weight ±.5 lbs, sometimes
even a pound, right? Even if you're really dialed in
on your fitness, nutrition, that doesn't matter as much.
What you want to look at is the trends week over week.
You do want to see decreases in body weight.
And if you don't, and this is the reason that we weigh in
every single morning, if you don't, you can pull the levers
that we just talked about. You can focus on getting more
disciplined around eating or maybe even adjust that calorie
goal if you've been hitting the goal down lower.
And you can add movement to increase the calories that
you're burning. And those two things together
are what creates that 500 daily calorie deficit.
But you can't know to do that unless you're tracking
something. And in this case, you're
stepping on the scale every single morning, logging it down
somewhere and then adjust those levers.
And the mirror helps too. You know, sometimes you know,
you can, you can get off the scale and be like, oh, I gained
a pound. And then you look in the mirror
and you look even leaner than you did the day or the day or
two before, right? So don't, don't overlook the
significance of your own subjective view of yourself, but
make sure you're stepping on a scale every single morning and
tracking it. And this last one, I think is
one of the most overlooked, but most important parts of losing
fat. And it's what's called NEAT.
It's an acronym NEAT, non exercise, activity
thermogenesis. NEAT essentially is this, it's
how many calories do you burn outside of intentional workouts,
right? Intentional exercise.
It's again, it's The Walking, it's the standing up, it's the
carrying things, you know, dealing with kids jumping
around. NEAT is so, so overlooked.
I had a guest on the show that just talked about the fact that
most of us will just bust our ass in like a 60 minute workout
and think I'm good for the rest of the day.
And then we just sit at a desk all day.
We don't really move. And people who maybe aren't even
training as hard or as much intentionally or burning more
calories because they have more active lifestyles.
Who do you think is going to be leaner based on what we learned
earlier about having a daily caloric deficit?
It's the person who's who's active all the time.
So don't be that guy or gal. Focus on your training, but then
also be intentional to move every single day.
And that's something that I do and I embrace.
I actually just bought a weighted vest from Rep Fitness.
What I'll do is I have two slots every single day.
They're 15 minutes each. I've got a half mile route.
I will basically just throw on 20 lbs.
You don't have to do that. You can just go for a walk, but
I'll throw on 20 lbs. I have a little timer.
It's at 12:00. I'll go out and I'll just walk.
I'll do my half mile. I might do a bit longer.
I set a timer for 15 minutes. I come back in, guess how many
steps I'm getting a lot. And then I do the same thing at
the end of the day. Just little steps like that,
little intentionality. Set some alarms, have a plan,
stand up more at your desk, but be intentional to move more
every single day because again, what you're doing is you're
just. Adding to those calories burned
and increasing the likelihood that you'll create that deficit.
And if you nail that every single day for your 30 or 60
days, you are going to see the results that you're looking for.
And if you haven't used one, I highly recommend if you get a
smartwatch or a fitness tracker, make sure you're checking in and
measuring your steps. Because there's been so many
times when I thought to myself subjectively, oh man, I, I was
moving today must have been like a busy day.
And then I look down wah wah, and I see 8000 steps, 9000
steps. And this is where you might call
me a psychopath, I don't know. But if I see that at the end of
the day, if I see that I didn't hit my daily step goal, which
for me is 10,000, average about 12,000, I will literally go for
a final walk just to get to that goal.
I don't do that year round. But again, hard things require
hard effort, right? Hard goal, losing body fat.
This is the time when you're in the middle of a cut where you
got to step it up. And that's exactly what I
recommend. So don't overlook the impact of
the calories that you're burning outside of the workouts that
you're actually doing, because that could be the difference
maker to lose the body fat that you're looking for, to look and
to feel great. All right, folks, I hope that
was helpful. I hope you learned something.
I hope it was encouraging. Just in summary, number one,
track everything. Do not guess.
There's tools that you can have to measure your progress #2 nail
down the nutrition. It's the most important part of
the whole thing. You need to be in a deficit,
which comes down to calories and macros, and track those as well.
Train smart. You don't necessarily have to
change your strength training all that much, but just think
about cardio and more effort. Make sure you're again
maintaining that deficit through the calories that you're
burning. Don't overlook, and this is
number 4, the importance of non exercise calories burn, right?
The neat part of it, just be active and moving throughout the
day and then make sure you are tracking and jumping on a scale
just to measure your success. Check out the description in the
show notes. I'll link to some tools that you
might find helpful, things like calories, trackers, things like
that. And of course you have my my
sponsors, my partners in there too, if you're looking for like
whey protein, pre workout, things like that.
But yeah, I hope that was helpful.
I hope you can apply some of those things.
You can always ask any questions if you have them.
You can e-mail us at contact@strongerweekly.com or
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We certainly hope you check it out, but thank you so much for
joining the show. We hope you had an amazing Saint
Patty's Day and we will see you next week.