Ep 10: Focus on These 7 BIG Priorities for Strength and Fitness
Sometimes advice from the fitness industry can be overwhelming. There are so many ways to program your lifting, eat your food, and meet your goals that we often get lost in the small details.
At the end of the day, it’s the BIG details, applied consistently, that contribute the most to your progress and result in sustainable habits of success in getting big and strong, losing or gaining weight, and sculpting a healthier version of you.
In this episode, I wanted to take it to a higher level, so to speak, and go over 7 “big priorities” for strength and fitness that, if you can do these at least 80% of the time, will help you accomplish your goals.
Get moving!
Keep programming simple and fun
Get enough sleep (recovery)
Get enough protein (as part of hitting calories)
Make your own food for most meals
Track progress
Enjoy the PROCESS (the results will follow)
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.
[00:00:26] Welcome to episode 10 of Wits & Weights. Sometimes advice from the fitness industry can be overwhelming. There are so many ways to program your lifting, eat your food, and meet your goals that we often get lost in the small details. At the end of the day, it's the big details applied consistently that contribute the most of your products.
[00:00:56] And results in sustainable habits of success in getting big and strong, losing her gaining weight and sculpting a healthier version of you. In this episode, I wanted to take it to a higher level, so to speak and go over seven big priorities for strength and fitness, that if you can do these at least 80% of the time will help you accomplish your goal.
[00:01:23] The first big priority is just to get moving. I know we pay a lot of lip service to the idea of not sitting around just getting up and walking and moving around, but on a daily basis, moving, getting steps, being active, whether or not you're lifting or doing any particular exercise has a huge impact. All cause mortality.
[00:01:50] And I know from personal experience, it seems to have beneficial effects on your resting heart rate on your metabolism, on your ability to eat more on your general energy and mood on your flexibility, mobility, your joints, so many different things. And recently there was an article published that was analyzed by stronger by science.
[00:02:16] The study of. Daily step count and all cause mortality. And what they found was striking, and that is that quote, walking 2,700 steps per day was associated with a threefold greater risk. Of all cause mortality than walking 16,000 steps per day, they basically found a 12% reduction in all-cause mortality for every thousand steps.
[00:02:46] And apparently this is a bigger impact than the difference between smoking and not smoking or between having a high and a low. But I think even more than that, moving, getting into the habit of being an active person is a catalyst for everything else you do. It sets the stage for your day. It gives you a different mindset to how you approach things versus sitting around all day.
[00:03:14] Not to mention all of the health benefits. The second big priority is about your. And there are so many programs to choose from so many ways to lift weights. There is training for strength, there's bodybuilding power, building a ton of different ways to work out. But at the end of the day, if your programming is not fun, You're not going to do it.
[00:03:40] And if it's not simple, you're probably going to get frustrated and you're probably not going to do it. Although you have to still lift heavy and hard. If you're going to make progress and add muscle as a newer lift or even intermediate lifter, you can do this with very few different exercises. As simple as squat, deadlift bench overhead.
[00:04:04] And you can do it in a variety of different ways that is enjoyable for you. Whether enjoyable means getting up at five in the morning or doing it in the afternoon, whether it means lifting really heavy and focusing on little compound lifts or adding in some accessories for variety for bodybuilding, just because you want to.
[00:04:21] So as you evaluate the different programs, And try to avoid program hopping. I would go back and listen to one of my first episodes, which talks about how to choose a program. Many of the beginner programs I recommend are just that they're simple and I think they're fun, but of course, if you do it and you say that this is, this is torture.
[00:04:43] I really don't like this. There are always alternatives to make it more enjoyable because at the end of the day, what we care about is consistency, which leads to sustainable. That brings me to the third big priority. Something that many people myself included often don't give enough attention to. And that is getting enough sleep.
[00:05:05] Sleep is the cornerstone of recovery of having the energy to get up and do it the next day. Giving your body, the time it needs to repair itself. And I could do an entire podcast episode about all the intricacies of how to improve sleep quality. But as today's episode is about the big priorities, the priority is just to get into.
[00:05:31] Sleep. I think many of us failed to do, even that we limp along five, six hours a night and ideally should be up around seven to eight, maybe even nine, if you're able to pull that off, but figure out how to get enough sleep. Does that mean we have to readjust our schedule to work out either in the morning or in the evening or the afternoon?
[00:05:56] Doesn't mean simply going to bed. And then doing the things that it takes to ensure we get to bed early, making sure that we have our routine, maybe that we're avoiding activities that would distract us or keep us up, like scrolling on social media, watching TV, those sorts of things, which yes can also affect sleep quality.
[00:06:17] But my point is take an inventory of. Your sleep, you know how much you're getting every night. And if it's less than seven on a regular basis, I would suggest you want to find a way to add another 30 minutes to an hour every night so that you can then get into the gym, lift really hard and get the benefits of all that time, trying to build muscle.
[00:06:40] So just focus on getting enough sleep for. Big priority. Number four has to do with nutrition. How do we meet our goals for the longterm? Whether we're trying to lose, maintain, or gain weight, you probably think I'm going to say you have to hit your calories low. I think that's obvious at this point to a lot of us, I'm not saying it's easy, but you could wake up in the morning and say to yourself, okay, I know I have to hit 2100 calories.
[00:07:11] And as I go along and I make my food choices, if I'm tracking, I know where I am against those calories during the day. And it's fairly easy to gauge when I'm going to hit those and how to pace myself. But what's a little more nuanced is. And so big priority. Number four is to make sure you get enough protein.
[00:07:33] I'm assuming you're going to hate your calories or try to as part of your tracking, but it's easy to get two or three meals into the day and really. I haven't been eating enough protein and it's not really something you can make up later in the day. You can make it up, but it won't have as beneficial of an effect because of protein synthesis, the ability of your body to use amino acids for that process.
[00:08:00] And you really want to space it out more now getting your protein one. It's fine, but where I'm going with this is to prioritize protein at every meal. Don't make it complicated from the time you wake up and have your first meal, ask yourself the question. Do I have enough food of the right types to start getting me toward my protein goal?
[00:08:23] If you would normally have, let's say a bowl of oatmeal and a banana and a bagel with cream cheese. Well, you're gonna have very little protein in that breakfast, a little bit in the cream cheese and the oatmeal. If you replaced one of those items with say some eggs or even a protein shake, you're off to a great start.
[00:08:42] You're you're up maybe 15, 20, 25 grams of protein, and you're getting yourself primed for the rest of the. Now let's take the example of a 200 pound male who's shooting for one gram of protein a day. That's 200 grams. If he's going to eat, say five meals during. That's an average of 40 grams of protein per meal, just quite a bit.
[00:09:05] So he's going to either have to add a snack or two that has primarily protein, or he's just going to have to be on top of the fact that he needs sufficient protein in each meal. And that might mean having, you know, more meat for lunch and dinner and making sure there's enough. Each other meals so that the total adds up to meet your goal, the fats and carbs, as I've talked about before, they're fairly interchangeable.
[00:09:29] You need to get enough carbs for your training. You need to get enough fat for your health, but there's a lot of flexibility in one versus the other, as long as you hit your calories. But if you don't get enough protein, you're going to hold yourself back in terms of building muscle, but also in terms of maintaining or retaining the muscle you have, when you.
[00:09:49] On a cut. The other thing about prioritizing protein is when you're craving a snack, for example, and you go to the kitchen, you're just, you're just a little bit hungry. You want something to eat and normally you would just go grab something. Well, if protein comes to. As your priority, you would say, huh? Is what I'm going to grab.
[00:10:08] Have enough to meet my protein goals. Maybe not. So maybe I should go for the cottage cheese instead of the pretzels, or maybe for convenience. I need to have a protein shake or protein bar and fit it in to keep me toward my protein goals. Get enough protein as part of hitting your calories. And you'll be all right.
[00:10:27] Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find. You'd be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again.
[00:10:46] An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. The fifth priority, which is also about nutrition is to try to make your own food. For most of your meals and that's about as complicated as I'm going to make it. That's why these are big priorities. I've said before.
[00:11:05] It's not so much about what you eat as whether you have the right calories and macros to. But of course what you eat can make it harder, highly palatable process foods, for example, and they taste great, but they go down so easy and you could eat so much of them. They're high in fat and carbs and whatever and calories.
[00:11:28] That you might be hungry half an hour later, and this is going to make it more difficult to hit your calorie target. Particularly if you're losing weight. Of course, if you're gaining weight, you may actually use some processed foods as a strategy to get in the extra calories. But if you make your own food for most meals, it has a variety of benefits.
[00:11:47] The first benefit is, you know, what's in your food, even if you're making something tasty complicated. Even if you're making a dessert or baked good, you still know what's in it. You're going to make the, your grandma's favorite French bread. You still know it's got flour and the various other ingredients, whereas something you buy in the store.
[00:12:05] Me. 20 other ingredients or worse yet, if you go to a restaurant and get bread, you really don't know what's in it and you have to estimate. So if you're tracking, it just makes tracking easier to know what's in your food. You can prepare meals ahead of time and put them into a recipe in your food tracking.
[00:12:23] Like macro factor, which is what I use. And then the apple just calculate the macros and calories based on the proportion of the food. And it will be highly accurate. Another reason to make your own food for most of your meals is you can control the macronutrients much more easily. If you want to go ahead and make, make a special bread recipe with protein powder in it to up the.
[00:12:44] Go for it. If you want to use the high-protein filtered milk instead of just whatever milk. Well, now, you know, you've got your delicious milk, but you also are meeting your protein targets. Another reason to make your own food. It's a lot cheaper. It's a lot less expensive than going to restaurants all the time or getting takeout.
[00:13:02] And before you say, well, you know, I like the social experience of restaurants. You can have a great social experience with friends and family cooking your own food, having a barbecue. Inviting them over for dinner. So making your own food has a ton of benefits. The main benefit for our purpose being that, you know, what's in it in it's easy to track.
[00:13:20] Speaking of tracking big priority, number six is to track your progress. And this is sort of a catch-all priority because then your next question is, what am I tracking? Am I tracking 50 different things? Because to me that doesn't sound very easy. And again, today we're talking about big priorities, so let's prioritize what we want to track.
[00:13:45] And I would say the big things to track are going. Your food and your weight. You're also going to track your progress in the gym. And then if you want to go further than that and get more into the data and be a little more optimal with all of this, of course you can track other things like your body measurements, but the big things are your food.
[00:14:05] So we want to track calories and Adam. Protein, but usually if you're using an app, you're going to end up tracking your calories with protein fat carbs, because it's all fairly automated. You can use barcodes, you can put in common foods. It's pretty easy to do that. The hard part about tracking food.
[00:14:25] Taking the time to do it, you know, weighing your food, not being weird, uh, learning how to estimate food that other people might've made. It's definitely an art to some extent, but if you don't track, you just don't know the calories that are coming in. So tracking your food is one side of it tracking your weight is of course the other side, you can take a very laid back approach and just weigh yourself once a week on the same day.
[00:14:48] Same. And compare that over time. And if you're going up or going down and it's more or less than the rate that you want, then you just adjust the food side of the equation. If you want to be a little more proactive, a little more precise, then you can weigh yourself a few times a week. Or like I do every day.
[00:15:08] It's just a habit I get up in the morning. Four, use the bathroom step on my smart scale. It beams it to my phone. It takes five seconds. I don't really think about it. It doesn't become an obsession. The scale weight doesn't really do anything emotionally for me at this point, because it's just a data point every day.
[00:15:25] But however you do it, that gives you the two sides of the equation. You need to understand your metabolism and whether you're eating the right amount of food to meet your goal. And then as far as tracking your progress in the gym, we've talked before about the fact that a good training program. And we are training.
[00:15:45] We're not just exercising a good training program. We'll show objective progress, whether that's weight on the bar sets or reps. And then if you want to go to that next level, of course you can measure yourself, measure your waist, measure your arms, things like that, to measure muscle gain and weight loss.
[00:16:02] And I guess this priority really applies to anything you're trying to accomplish in life. Any goal that you're trying to achieve, how do you know if you've gone from a to B to C to all get all the way to. You know that by tracking your progress in some objective measurable way and the last big pre. Is just to enjoy the process.
[00:16:24] The results will follow. We get so hung up on the results. You know, where I have arrived on any given day that we fail to enjoy the process. And in some cases it's because we have a process that we don't enjoy and that's what makes it unsustainable. And so to have something sustainable and consistent that we can do.
[00:16:49] Months years, the rest of our life, both in diet and nutrition, the process itself should be as enjoyable as possible. Now I talked earlier about the priority of keeping your programming, simple and fun. And the fun part of that is what I'm talking about in terms of the process being enjoyable. When I get up at five 30 in the morning to work out and that's usually when I work out.
[00:17:16] Yeah, it's a little bit. And it's a little bit cold and I'm not quite warmed up, but I know that I'm going to get in there and it's going to be tons of fun to lift heavy weight, because I know the results are going to follow now. That is not at all fun for you. And even if you've done it for three months, it's still not fun for you.
[00:17:34] Then it's probably time to change it up to something that you can enjoy. Even if the results are a little less quote, unquote optimal, the same thing goes for diet. I talk a lot about. About macros calories and all this, if all of that stuff is just torture to you, even after you've tried it, even if you seen results, then for you as an individual, you'll have to have a different approach.
[00:17:59] And there are other ways to do things there's other ways to track progress in a little more laid back fashion, where maybe you, you gather data points. Once a month and you don't track your food, but you learn how to estimate based on what you see on the plate. I mean, you can't just totally wing it, especially when you're a beginner to this whole process, because that's probably what got you to the.
[00:18:24] Where you've been in the past where you may not have met your goal. So there is some element of willpower to start the process. There's some element of sacrifice and discipline and hard work, of course, but to be sustainable, you want to settle into the approach that both. And is enjoyable along the way.
[00:18:43] I mean, this is life, this is our life, and we're going to be doing this for many years. So that's why I wanted to include this priority because I know from personal experience, I've done things in the past that worked, but we're no fun at. And those are the kinds of things that lead to yo-yo dieting and program hopping.
[00:19:02] And we want this to be a fun process, a sustainable process, and one that gets results. I hope you found this episode useful and are excited to focus on some or hopefully all of these seven big. That should get you most of the gains and help establish a long-term sustainable approach to strengthen fitness.
[00:19:24] Hit me up with questions by going to the link in the show notes or by email or Instagram.
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