Listen in for my #1 tip about exercise for fat loss and how many people hose it up.
Also, the Flex Diet Cert is closing tonight, Monday Jan 9, 2023 at midnight PST
Go to http://www.flexdiet.com to still enroll if you are listening today; or you can still get on the wait list there on Jan 10 or after.
FD-closes-jan9-2023
[00:00:00] Hey, what's going on? It's Dr. Mike Nelson here back once again with the Flex Diet Podcast and today talking about a tip for exercise performance when you are looking to lose fat, increase body composition cuz it's the beginning of January and that's, Very typical goal, and I'm gonna discuss a big mistake that I see many people making in that regards.
[00:00:36] I wanted to let you know if you're listening to this today, when the podcast comes out, today is Monday, January 9th, 2023, and the Flex Diet Certification does close tonight. At midnight Pacific Standard Time, go to www.flexdiet.com. For all the information and all of the details. So if you're listening right now, you can still get in before it closes.
[00:01:13] Right now, I don't have any plans to open it up until probably around June or so of this. and as a heads up, it will be significantly more expensive in June. So I've been in the background slowly adding a bunch of items to it and making sure everything is all up to date. So the price will be quite a bit higher in June.
[00:01:35] So if you wanna get in at the lowest price of this year by far, go to flex diet.com. The Flex Diet Cert is your complete cert for nutrition and recovery, although I do have a segment in there on exercise. We'll talk a little bit about here coming up, and it's a complete system to show you how to maximize nutrition and recovery for better body composition and performance with yourself or with your.
[00:02:05] And we've got lots of great expert interviews that haven't been released anywhere else that are in the certification. Everything from Dr. Dan Pardi talking about sleep. Dr. Eric Helms talking about flexible dieting. , Dr. Stu Phillips talking about protein. Dr. Jose Antonio. Also talk about protein overfeeding Dr.
[00:02:28] Steven guyent A about the neurobiology of appetite and many more. So go to flex diet.com. If you're listening to this after January 9th, 2023 and you missed it, you can still sign up to the wait list there and be not. The next time that it opens. So go to flex diet.com and check it out. Today we're talking about the number one mistake I see people make with exercise and primarily related to resistance training and fat loss.
[00:03:03] So very simply, again, this will be short and right to the point. If you want to lose weight, no matter what, the crazy people on the internet. You do have to be eating or burning calories that make you show up in a caloric deficit. So at the end of the day, calories do matter. Physics still wins. You have to be in a caloric deficit somehow, which can be from burning more calories via exercise, movement, metabolism, or consuming less calorie.
[00:03:43] Now how you do that is up for debate, and there's lots of different ways that can definitely work, which is why I design a flex diet certification and I put them in a priority order for things that you can focus on. And what I use there for priority is something I call coaching leverage, which is the physiologic response.
[00:04:08] times the client's ability to change or the psychological component, and that gives me an aggregate score in order to put the highest priority items at the top. So for example, everyone talks a lot about sleep. For good reason. We score sleep out of one out of a 10. On the physiology side. For better body composition and performance, I'd say sleep's probably a nine or a.
[00:04:35] However, on client's ability to change or the psychological aspect of it, it's pretty much dead Last. I'd give it a one or a two. If you are our coach, you know this, trying to talk to your clients about getting more sleep, and yes, there is things we can do to increase their quality of sleep, but at some point, if you're only in bed for five and a half hours, no matter how good your quality is, or unless.
[00:05:01] A deck two mutant gene person, which there's almost very, very few of them out there, you're going to need more sleep. And getting clients to sleep more is very difficult because of all the other things they have going on in their life, priorities, et cetera. So sleep. In terms of the eight interventions, the flex diet cert, it's number eight, not because of physiologic reasons.
[00:05:25] Primarily the score got whacked because of the psychological. . However, if we compare something like sleep to exercise, exercise is kind of right in the middle. It turns out protein was number one. Protein is a huge physiologic leverage, and most people with a little bit of education, if you tell them they can eat more protein, even though they're on a quote unquote diet.
[00:05:53] they're kind of shocked. They're like, wait a minute, I can eat more of this thing and I'm on a diet. Yes, that is correct. So it turns out protein is number one. Now, again, this doesn't mean that exercise or other things are not important. I just wanted some scale and some system so that people and coaches and clients, and even if you're doing this for your.
[00:06:16] Are starting on the big leverage items first so that you're getting the most bang for your buck. Regarding exercise. The big mistake I see people make is trying to do more exercise, especially resistance training as soon as they cut their calories. And you can get away with this for a little period of time.
[00:06:39] But what I found in general is that it's going to come back to haunt you. We see. Although it's kind of going away, we saw this more in the past with high intensity interval training. Now we can have a separate discussion, which I've had on this podcast a lot about are they really doing high intensity interval training?
[00:06:58] If you're doing Tabata preacher curls, you are not doing high intensity interval training. Or if you tell me your high intensity interval training session was 47 minutes. , you're definitely not doing high intensity interval training. But outside of those conversations, if you're doing more higher intensity work, it is gonna be more stress on your body.
[00:07:20] And when you are in a caloric deficit, being in a caloric deficit is a stressor to your body. And each person has a threshold of how many stressors they can handle before something must. . This is also why I like using technology such as heart rate variability, which I've been using for on clients now coming up close to a decade, because it gives us an accurate gauge as to what is going on with their physiologic stress.
[00:07:46] And this allows us to titrate and move different variables up and down. And what I've found over time, pretty much every time is at some point, if you are in a low enough caloric deficit, Doing higher intensity work becomes very difficult. Now you realize that there is an issue because we want to use resistance training possibly to add a little bit of muscle in a caloric deficit.
[00:08:14] Again, different topic for a different time. It's probably not gonna happen much with the exception of somebody being new or the use of other drugs or compound. Maybe a few freaks can do it, but your main goal with lifting during theoric deficit for fat loss is to retain as much muscle tissue as you can, because the goal is to reduce the amount of fat and keep as much muscle as you can.
[00:08:44] So resistance training there, the goal is to keep as much muscle mass so to your body. It's thinking, Hey, wait a minute. This crazy guy went to the. lifted a bunch of heavy weights. Uhoh, we should probably not get rid of some of this muscle tissue cuz this crazy person goes back to the gym and does it again the next day or two days later.
[00:09:07] Ad nauseam with violent consistency. So the goal of weight training, in my biased opinion, when you are in a caloric deficit for fat loss is to retain as much muscle as possible. The next question then is, well, what to do to me, the principle of that isn't really that much difference from trying to gain strength or lean body mass.
[00:09:32] All the same principles still apply. We wanna apply overload. We wanna do the highest quality work that we can. We want to do those over and over. So that means that performance is still gonna be one of the top things to look for during your lifting sessions for. I usually find that it's the volume or the amount of work you can do that does tend to go down.
[00:09:58] And again, there is a lot of variability from one person to the next, but the mistake I see is people going, oh yeah, I'm gonna train for fat loss and I'm going to, normally, we're training three days a week lifting. I'm gonna jump that up to five days per week, and I'm gonna try to do even more volume per session.
[00:10:21] and then I'll almost always backfire on you. If you want to do more work, I would look at doing some lower intensity cardiovascular work cardio again, I like that being done first thing in the morning. In a fasted state, we can have another discussion about, you know, fasted cardio. Is that really beneficial or not?
[00:10:42] For body composition, it might be split, but I do think there are some other health advantages to it. Teaching your body to use fat more as a fuel source and it's just generally easier for people to actually get it done, which makes the biggest difference. Another thing would be looking at step count on the flex diet insert.
[00:11:02] I've got a whole session on neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis, how much you move around Twitch walk, et cetera. Is a very good way of determining body composition. In general. The more active you are, that does correlate to being leaner. Now, of course you can out eat that and there are people that do that, but in general, if you are more active, odds are from a population standpoint, I would bet you're probably going to be leaner.
[00:11:33] So what does this mean in English for fat loss? Yes, you do need to be in a caloric deficit. , I would still prioritize weight training. I would, if anything, potentially decrease the volume as your caloric deficit gets more extreme. Again, we want to keep the performance of what you're doing as high as possible, so you want to keep the loads relatively heavy.
[00:11:59] Keep the rep range as close to where you were before, as long as you possibly. I don't really like adding the munch of volume, cuz that will tend to backfire. If anything you might sub some compound exercise for some maybe more body building isolation type exercises. Sometimes that works a little bit better, but generally your volume of training's gonna go down a little bit, but we don't want to drive it all the way to zero.
[00:12:27] So you want that stimulus to hold on to as much lean tissue as. areas where you would increase? I would say activity would be things like recreation. Do something for fun walking, and then if you want to add some lower intensity cardio stuff, that would be great. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to do zero high intensity of work.
[00:12:51] It just means you mean to modify it so that it is not the number one item in your program. So for most clients, I'll still have them do. Maybe just like a 500 meter all out on the rower once a week. Again, that's not a lot of volume. But I find that, you know, getting up to those really high heart rates once or twice a week can be beneficial from holding on to some of those adaptations.
[00:13:17] Again, I would not really push them super hard in a caloric deficit unless I was pulling back on weight training. And again, this is all scaled to the individual. These are general. , yes. We'll have high level athletes that can get by with a lot more of this. If your aerobic system is more developed, I find you can generally get away with a lot more exercise volume, also even at around the same caloric deficit.
[00:13:46] So there you go. That's my biggest mistake I see people make, is trying to increase the volume of lifting. Generally the quality tends to go down. And at some point they just kinda run out of runway. So I do keeping your weight trending as close to what you were doing before as possible.
[00:14:06] Monitoring your volume, monitor your stress level using something like heart rate variability or there's other scales you can use without technology, palm scale, et cetera. And then adding more lower intensity work, especially walking, which is also great for recovery. And then if you want to some easy, lower level cardiovascular exercise.
[00:14:33] And again, if you want more information on all of these different systems, check out the Flex Diet certification. It's based on the concept of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting. So metabolic flexibility is how well can you use carbohydrates for higher intensity exercise and perform. And then how well can you down-regulate and shift to using fat, which provides a lot of other health benefits and makes obtaining ideal body composition much easier.
[00:15:02] So go to www.flexdiet.com to. It is still open as of January 9th, the today of this recording, 2023 until midnight Pacific Standard Time, so flex diet.com. If you're listening to this podcast outside of that time, you can still go there and get onto the wait list for the next time that it is open and stay tuned.
[00:15:29] This week we have another bonus podcast episode coming. With my good buddy, Dr. Guillermo Escalante, where we'll be talking all about different aspects of professional bodybuilders and why it appears so many of them have unfortunately been dying at a much higher rate. There's something related to their training habits, cardiovascular fitness, cardiac health, drugs, et cetera.
[00:15:56] So look forward to that podcast coming out. This. If you wanna enroll in the Flex Diet Certification, you're listening to this on January 9th. Today is your last chance. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Greatly appreciate it, and we will talk to you all very soon.