This episode is from my appearance on Karen Martel's podcast, The Other Side of Weight Loss, where we demystified as much as we could about lifting, cardio, nutrition, fat loss, and more.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• What is the best way to train?

• What is the best cardio for weight loss?

• How long should our workouts ideally be?

• What does the science tell us about step counting when it comes to weight loss?

• What cardio is most stressful?

• How many times a week should we be lifting?

• How can we take it to the next level and should we?

• What is the ideal timing of days off and on from workouts?

• What are compounded movements and why do we want to do them?

• How often should we be adding more weight to our barbells and dumbbells?

• How often should we wait between sets?

• How many carbs, calories and protein should we be eating to build muscle yet lose weight?

• How to calculate your protein needs.

• What is the anchor macronutrient?

• What are the ideal set and reps?

• What are the signs that you are not lifting heavy enough?

• How long does it take to see results?

• Can we lose weight without calorie restricting and just lifting?

• and more!

RELATED LINKS

• Subscribe to The Other Side of Weight Loss podcast

• Visit Karen's website at karenmartel.com

• Find Karen on Instagram

• Watch the episode on video here

🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.

👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.

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Transcript

Philip Pape  00:08

Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, where we discuss getting strong and healthy with strength training and sustainable nutrition. I'm your host, Philip pape, and in each episode, we examine strategies to help you achieve physical self mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent nutrition and training for sustainable results. Welcome to another episode of Wits & Weights. This episode is a replay of my appearance on Karen Martel's podcast, the other side of weight loss. She interviewed me about everything we could cover in about an hour on lifting cardio nutrition, fat loss, so much more lots of nuances, lots of back and forth. She's really an amazing interviewer. Her podcast is fantastic, I encourage you to subscribe to it. It's called the other side of weight loss. But anyway, I hope you enjoy this replay of our interview together.

 

Karen Martel  01:05

Ladies, welcome back to the show. We've got a good one for you today. I mean, when don't I have a good one for you like, let's be honest. But today's something that I haven't gotten into on this podcast and you've been listening to me for the last year and a half talking about my my journey with losing weight in men of perimenopause and how I did that. And one of the biggest things that I did that impacted my finally my ability to get off some pounds was I started to take my exercise more seriously than I have ever taken it. Thanks to my lovely, gorgeous Pam Sherman, she really helped me get back into working out and I've talked about this on several podcasts and how instrumental it was to have that accountability with her. And really started to just get into the lifestyle of exercising on a on a regular and taking the lifting weights far more seriously. So of course, because of that I've been trying to just dive deeper into muscle building. And I think that that's something that's important to do to get excited about it. Rather than just like okay, I guess I should go to the gym because I have to because Karen said on her podcast, this is helpful for us menopausal women. You know, like it's super important to go. Okay, let's really dig into this. How do we build muscle? What is how much protein do I need to build muscle? How often should I be working out? How often should I be lifting? You know, increasing my weights, you know, is 20 minutes not enough is an hour too long. So ladies, this is what we're getting into today, we're gonna get into the nitty gritty of weightlifting and exercise. And I'm super happy that I found my guest today. Well, he kind of found Yeah, he found me actually. And he approached me and he wanted to do some ads on my podcast. And I was like, yes, because his stuff super aligned with mine. I knew that my audience would all could very easily be his audience as well. So we connected and then he asked me to be on his podcast and I was like, you've got to come on my podcast. So let me introduce you to my new friend, Philip Pape. He's a certified nutrition coach, mindset specialist, strength training expert and host of the Wits & Weights podcast. Through his personal journey of weight loss and strength Philip learned about evidence based nutrition, resistance training and body composition. He started sharing what he learned through the Wits & Weights podcast and eventually nutrition coaching. Philips approach emphasizes sustainability, consistency and mindset. Each person's path is unique and his mission is to help you balance optimal health with the zest for life without excessive dieting, cardio or food restrictions. Yay. Philip helps working professionals with busy lives, burn fat, get lean, feel energized and project confidence in their career and relationships as founder and head nutrition coach of Wits & Weights nutrition and health coaching. You can find Phil at wits & weights.com. So welcome Phil up.

 

Philip Pape  04:41

Thank you Karen so much. I'm really excited to be on the show and have this conversation with you. Yes.

 

Karen Martel  04:49

And okay, so what I love number one about you, Philip is you're not one of these people that came. This came naturally to Do you see a lot of that, you know, when you go on YouTube and you're looking for exercise programs or you're online trying to find an exercise program, and majority of it, you're seeing these women and men that are freaking shredded. And they're just like, and they're, you know, 1% of the population. It was like they came out of the womb lifting weights shredded, because it's just genetically that's their thing. They can very easily have these physiques. You were not like that.

 

Philip Pape  05:33

That's why I'm trying to get them. But yes, you.

 

Karen Martel  05:39

So tell us your story of how you got into this.

 

Philip Pape  05:44

Yeah, I guess it's more of the the average Joe type of story, which I think is relatable to a lot of people. As I was growing up, I was an active kid growing up in South Florida, we played outside a lot, but I was never in sports. And I was never into fitness. And frankly, my diet was never very good. And as I grew up, I started to gain weight, went to college and gain the sophomore 30 You know, the freshman 15 For me as a sophomore, 30. And, you know, I always chalk things up to genetics, like you said, I wasn't genetically blessed in any way overweight, most of my family struggled with weight. We had our disease, we had diabetes in the family. And I think most people walk around thinking, Okay, this is my lot in life, there's really a small envelope that I can actually improve within that I'm not going to be like you said these fitness influencers with a six pack that are totally jacked. And I spent probably two decades through my 20s and 30s, trying to figure it out, not really succeeding, but learning everything that didn't work, which is valuable. And I cycled through all the diets. I did Atkins back in the day I did. I went through paleo, my paleo phase, keto, a whole bunch of weird diets that I can't even remember that I did leading up to my wedding just told me Yeah, you know what I'm saying? And every time I did, I would look in the mirror and say, Okay, I lost weight. But what is that doing? For me, I'm just skinnier, more guns pasty version of myself, and I don't feel good. I don't look good. I don't like take my shirt off at the pool. Like, and these are important things for people, you know, in your 20s, just the vanity side of it, we can't under under estimate in our in terms of our body image. And let alone as we get older into our 30s and realize the other health effects that these things have, you know, things like blood pressure, and so on. So I, I went through these all these phases of what's the next big thing? What's the next quick fix that's going to do it? In parallel, I was not working out very much through my 20s. I tried machines at the gym, I tried cardio, you know, my idea of fitness, like most people was, move as much as you can and eat as little as you can. Right? That's the standard formula. And throughout my 30s I actually did do CrossFit. And I have to say that CrossFit turned me on to barbells, that, you know, I had, I had no comfort level whatsoever before then in the gym, near dumbbells or barbells, whatsoever. So it turned me on to, to barbells, to Olympic weightlifting, and to kind of working out hard, you know, getting that conditioning and see what it feels like to push yourself. So for all of its faults, it did that. But I still felt like I was stalling for years, I still felt like the the physique and the body composition wasn't there. If I lost or gained weight, it was primarily due to diet. But I'd have much muscle. And then when I turned 39, so this was just a few years ago, I vowed to get in the best shape of my life. By the time I was 40. You know, I said I'm gonna give myself a year. So start to figure it all out. And I talked to my coach, I had a coach at the time at the same gym. He's a strength and conditioning coach. They said, We got we've got to stop all the bootcamp stuff, and you got to focus on strength. I'm like, Yeah, but doesn't that mean I'm only working out three days a week and, you know, it doesn't look like as far as volume, how could I possibly nope, that's what you got to do. That's gonna work. Let's go figure it out. So he programmed some, some basic compound moves from movements for me, we'll get into that, you know, compound movements, with barbells in the gym to get stronger. So I started to do that. Not the high rep, high volume stuff, but low rep, very heavy barbell based training, maximum effort, you know what it feels like to workout hard, and then adding weight over time to get stronger. And we can get into some of those details in a bit. CrossFit wasn't doing that for me because they don't focus on progression over time. That then I realized the next revelation would have been nutrition. So up till now I realized I could get stronger, and then I needed to feed the muscles to get stronger. But I probably went a little bit overboard. I probably gained quite a bit of weight while doing that.

 

Karen Martel  09:55

You're like, I'm gonna start walking. That's what it was. Yeah.

 

Philip Pape  09:59

Got a book, I was drinking whole milk. Okay, I was eating whatever right the seafood diet as they say. And I probably gained 30 pounds in like six months. And you know if I'm around 180, so that's a decent amount of weight again. And but but I but actually I was feeling better I was feeling stronger I was I was lighter on my feet, you know, I was being able to I was able to play with my kids in a way that didn't tire me. So I knew there were some benefits here even though I was getting a little bit fluffy. And so this was around 2020, the pandemic lockdowns occurred. And I had time now to kind of focus on learning and studying and reading listening to podcasts like yours. And listening to the evidence based experts talk about nutrition strength training, flexible dieting protein, you know, the the right rep ranges, all of these things, and I just dove in headfirst and learned as much as I could, and finally started to get it and figure out what the things I was missing. Some of the things we can get into today. And come late 2021, I made significant progress is in the best shape of my life as I get, I finally had decent body composition finally had some muscle. And I'm like, I want to tell people about this. I like to talk a lot. So how did I do that? I'm not a huge fan of writing a lot. So forget the blog. Let's go with the podcast. And that's how I started the Wits & Weights podcast in late 2021. And then fortuitously, one of my listeners who was also a co worker of mine, she was a powerlifter. And she came on my show, she was one of my earliest interviews. And afterwards, she said, You know, I learned so much in a week of binging your show, compared to what I had learned in years of lifting and nutrition. And I think you make a good coach. So that kind of gave me the bug to pursue nutrition coaching, became certified. And now I help people doing that as well and come on to podcasts like yours. And I think that's why I'm here today.

 

Karen Martel  12:00

Wow, oh my gosh, I see so many parallels between you and I like my story is so similar, but it's like the female version, trying you know, all the different diets and, and then thinking that CrossFit, it wasn't called CrossFit was identical to CrossFit, though, thinking that that was the answer that you know, what if I, if I really pushed it and did these, like super hardcore CrossFit like workouts, then for sure, I'm going to lose the weight, and trying paleo and Atkins and keto and vegan and all of these things, and just not coming up with results. And I feel like I did this dance for, oh my gosh, probably 15 years before I finally got went, Oh, this is not working. This is not what my body needs. And I had to go on a completely different path at that point than you did. Because that's what my body needed. But now come the last few years, I've gotten back into it and been like, Okay, how do I do this now for real? Like, and how do I sustain it? So I think, you know, I think you need to share with us what you feel was kind of, you know, you're a mindset specialist. So in this last two years, what really shifted in the mind to get you to do this, like isn't, stay with it? And, you know, did you just because you started seeing results, or just the education or you figured out how to do it, right? Like, what really got you to go this is it and I'm going to stick with it.

 

Philip Pape  13:38

Yeah, that's, that's always a great question. Because in hindsight, you can see, you can find key moments that might have caused the breakthrough. And in reality, in the moment, it was a combination of education, awareness and hard work. And when I say hard work, I don't mean to turn people off to the idea that, Oh, this is going to be a struggle. I actually mean that in the positive way in that once we start seeing those results from the process, and you know, process works, it literally is a matter of okay, repeating the process over and over again, and then refining it from there. So things like you mentioned cardio. For years, the mode of exercise, for me was running, lots of cardio, biking, running, rowing, and even the cardio conditioning. And I always thought, Okay, we need to burn calories. And then I read a book by Henry Ponsor, it was I think it's called Burn came out a few years back, which was about a different way to look at metabolism, not in the Okay, the more you move, the more you burn, but our bodies adapt, and there's not a lot you can do about that from an exercise perspective. But if you have more muscle mass, you can burn more calories. And that was just one of those little revelations that came along. I said, huh? So you're saying to people the same size in the same way, the person that has greater fat free mass simply burns more calories 23 hours a day when they're not extra? sizing. And it's those little revelations over time and starting to open your mind to, oh, I actually need twice as much protein as I've ever eaten before. That sounds crazy. Isn't that gonna hurt my kidneys? Or is it going to cause other problems? You know? No, those are myths. But until you look into it until you understand what the evidence says, You don't know that it works. So this is kind of a long winded answer. No, it's right. Yeah. But but it really is awareness and education I tried to do with my clients from day one is why do we do this? Why does it work? What does the evidence say? So that you buy in and you say, Okay, well, I can't argue with facts. Now. I just need to do it.

 

Karen Martel  15:39

Yeah, exactly. I used to think that if only I could become a runner, then I would be thin. I did a whole blog post on it was one of my first blog posts because I had that belief for so many years. And I would think, Okay, I'm just gonna get out there, I'm gonna start running every day would last like two days. And I'd be like, I hate it. They hate running. But I thought that that's how I could be thin. And I think women are so stuck still, in the headspace of cardio is key. Even though they've been hearing so much more than weightlifting, so important. And I think there's a blockage. Do you tell me if you think there's a blockage? Like when you're working with female clients? Do you not think that even though they're hearing so much about weight lifting weights, they still have this like subconscious belief that lifting heavy is going to make them bulky, that it's not like how is it that that's going to help them lose weight, if they're not sweating and running for an hour on a treadmill?

 

Philip Pape  16:41

I do get that. Although, right from our very first conversation, I think I try to let them know who I am and what I think and a lot of people that I meet clients, they come through listening to the podcast, for example, and, and they have that level of trust and knowledge. And fortunately, the knowledge is is disseminating more than in the past. Like I think the the noise of the fitness industry is starting to get some clarity with with these. But having said that, yes. If you have more clients, they love to do their Pilates and yoga and tennis and peloton and all the other things and like, okay, we can still do those. We have to dial it back. You know, let's think about how much we lift versus how much we run. And what do we care about? What do we prioritize? And let's do that. I'm not going to cut out something completely for you enjoy it. But like if you said, if you're just running because you think it's the right thing to do, but you hate running. We're not going to run anymore at all.

 

Karen Martel  17:33

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So ideally, let's start kind of getting into the nitty gritty now myths and facts. Ideally, how much cardio versus weight training should the average woman that's in her 40s and beyond, because we're most of my listeners are in that mid life phase? What do you feel is ideal. As far as that balance goes, if somebody's goal is weight loss?

 

Philip Pape  18:02

Yes. So if your goal is, whatever your goal is, so I want to be clear whether your goal is weight loss, maintenance muscle building, you're going to want to train roughly the same amount. And it's going to be, you know, sufficient to build muscle and it's gonna be sufficient to retain muscle when you're losing weight. Because we don't just want to lose muscle and fat, we want to lose fat, right want to hold on to that muscle. So simple rule of thumb when you're a beginner, three days a week for about 45 minutes to an hour is what it's going to come out to, if you're doing some big compound lifts, compound lifts being the multi joint movements like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and so on. And cardio should be about half that. So for lifting three hours a week, cardio should be an hour and a half maximum. Ideally, I would say in a fat loss phase, the main form of cardio is going to be walking, right and a lot of people don't realize, okay, you know, walking right? Getting at least 7500 steps a day is correlated with a significant drop in mortality, and increase in ability to lose fat, and a ton of other health benefits. And it's a lot easier than running for most people and more enjoyable. Yeah, it's easy to fit into your day like pacing around the house and parking farther from the store, going up the stairs, just going for a walk for 10 minutes after a meal. And that'll be the primary primary form. But if you want to do other more intense forms of cardio you come from the CrossFit world or something. The next best thing would be high intensity interval training, maybe two or at most three times a week for about 10 to 20 minutes. And that would be the traditional one to two ratio of all out to rest. So for example, if you're gonna do 10 minute session of sprinting, you might sprint for 30 seconds and rest for a minute to a minute and a half. And then do that six times and you're done. Once or you know maybe once or twice Sweet.

 

Karen Martel  20:01

So if somebody's like, Oh, but I just love running and all I love hit so much is, is it bad to do more? Like, what happens if we're doing more, we're still doing what you say, and we're gonna go, Okay, I'm going to commit to three times a week, 45 minutes of lifting. But now I want to do cardio every day, I want to go for a run for 30 minutes. Is there a detriment to that? Or what starts to happen? Does it take away from the body building in any way?

 

Philip Pape  20:30

The answer is yes, to an extent. So there's something called the interference effect, which, like many these things, evolve over time, it used to be this this this scary thing, like if you do any cardio at all, you know, you're gonna interfere with your gains, and you know, cardio is gonna kill you or something. But it's a little more moderated than that. If you do a lot of cardio, especially running, you're going to interfere with your lifting in a few ways. Number one is recovery. So a lot of running is you're basically marshaling resources to recover from that stress, that now cannot be devoted to recovering from the stress you put on your muscles, so that they adapt, get stronger and bigger. Another way that interferes with recovery is physically with the joint impacts from running, you know, on your knees, for example, and also the fact that when you run, there's both concentric and eccentric motion involved, just like when you do squats, you go up and down. And that causes soreness. And that also causes recovery, to, again, require resources for recovery from the running more than does for the lifting. And then the last thing that can be a problem is if you run too much, you send your body and endurance signal that's sort of in conflict with the strength building signal, meaning your body is is saying, Hey, I'm an endurance athlete, for lack of a better word, and I need to be efficient with my calories. So this down regulates your metabolism. So it actually has the opposite opposite effect of what we want. A lot of people do cardio and running to burn calories, but too much of it will actually cause your metabolism to decline.

 

Karen Martel  22:05

Awesome. I love that cn CF, I did not know. And on a hormonal standpoint, I will just add, running is more far more of a stressor than weightlifting is and women in midlife have a lot of issues with cortisol. Naturally, this happens where our cortisol, we typically rise when we're going through perimenopause. So if when we think about it from that stress bucket view, and we're adding, you know, we've got all the all these stressors happening in our life, and then we're adding on top of that excessive amounts of cardio, then it's going to overfill that bucket, and then that stress becomes too much for the body. And when that happens, you can actually develop sarcopenia, so you can start eating away at those muscles that you're trying to build. Yeah. Okay, so here's the million dollar question. When I was on this journey I didn't, I started at the three times a week. So I think that that, you know, for anyone that's listening, that hasn't started out doing any weightlifting, I think that is super ideal. And it's such a great, easy place to start that can be easily committed to like, I think most people can say, Okay, three times a week is doable. I really wanted to take it up a notch. And so I wanted to do five days a week, four to five days a week of lifting. What I have noticed is I can I more so four than five. But I, when I started, I was like, I want to do it five days a week because I want to put even more muscle on is that a problem.

 

Philip Pape  23:44

So building strength and size requires a certain amount of intensity, which means weight on the bar and a certain amount of volume. And oddly enough, women can tend to handle a little bit more volume than men. And that's why they we sometimes have different rep schemes for women as they get stronger. But as a beginner, you have the capacity to recover very quickly. So if you, if you go three days a week, you can put in the most effort and intensity in that workout and get the most adaptation over the next 48 hours. Then if you were to go four or five days a week and have less of that recovery. So you're actually and for some people, especially as you get older, I mean 60s 70s, two days a week might be ideal, you know, every every third day or something like that. So it's always that we want to do so much we want so much volume, we think more is better. Yes. As you get stronger, and as you get into that intermediate phase, which is usually around six months of really solid intelligent lifting, then you're going to need more more days a week simply because you need long rest periods. And you're working with very high weights and it's just going to take too long in the gym otherwise, so you need to spread it out. Also you need more volume at that level, because you're not increasing the weight every session, you might be increasing it every week or two instead. Oh, so

 

Karen Martel  25:09

if so, kind of six months or more in, then you can do more days with more intensity, longer between sets.

 

Philip Pape  25:20

But more rest periods. Yeah, we can get into that as well. All those details. Yep.

 

Karen Martel  25:24

Okay, awesome. So I'm not doing anything wrong. Because I didn't start that till I was well into it.

 

Philip Pape  25:31

No, and I and I've done personally, I've done 345 And six day splits. But when I first started, the three days was where you could just put in the most effort. I mean, if you're going five days, what are you doing on those days? So for example, if you're going to squat, are you squatting every day? Are you splitting it up? There, there's a case to be made for splitting it. And then just having much shorter sessions, if it's a time thing, right? But systemically like squats and deadlifts, they're systemically fatiguing. So you'd rather have that rest in between to get the most adaptation?

 

Karen Martel  26:05

Right, yeah, because that's what I did. I went to less body parts per session. And I did do like two on one off three on one off, like I did split it up, because and I felt like that was needed. And I can really listen to my body now. And I'll be like, Oh, I really feel like I can't work out today, I need to rest I'll be super sore from that workout that I did. So. Okay, I love this. I get really excited. So just rewind a little bit and just share a little bit about what the compounded movements are. Why is it called compounded? Because I'm trying to like, you know, for the people that really have no clue because that's a big part of it to fill up is that women are super afraid. Because they're like, What is this jargon? You know, like, what's compounded exercise? What do they mean? Like, you know, my little nephew the other day, he's 16. And he's been lifting weights, and he's super into it. And I said, Where were you at the gym today? And he was like, Oh, I was there. You know, I, you know, it was it was there an hour later than you? And I was like, Oh, well, I could have used you today because I got, you know, I needed help with my I said, I went up in my shoulder press and I needed help. And he's like, Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You had a new PR did? Yeah. I was like PR was PR. He's like, personal record. My 16 year old obviously. It's true. I'm like, yeah, the new PR.

 

Philip Pape  27:39

lingo. Okay. So, yeah, so compound is just because we're using multiple joints. So compound meaning multiple. That's what it means. Okay, so it's a multi jointed movement. So when you think of what you could do in the gym, you could do something like a squat, which uses multiple joints, hips, and knees and ankles, right? But if you did a barbell curl, or a dumbbell curl uses a single joint, your elbow. So you can kind of reverse engineer any move and say, Is it compound by how many joints are we using? The benefit of compound lifts is they allow you to lift the heaviest weight, using the most muscle mass, and also the biggest muscle fibers in the least amount of time. So it's kind of the dream movement, for getting the biggest bang for your buck with our time in the gym. So with beginners, a very efficient approach is going three days a week, and doing full body every single day, where you're squatting every day, deadlifting every day, and pressing every day, because you can handle that. And you don't need to be doing hip thrusts. Ladies, you don't need to be doing kickbacks. You don't need to be doing any of this isolation stuff, cable work machines, nothing because little bit of humor here, if I have a male client come in and say, hey, I want to get big and strong. Say, all right, we need to get you just strong all around. First we build that base, we're going to squat and deadlift. And a female client says, I want to get tone I want to get bigger but tighter but better legs. Okay, we got to squat and deadlift. It's the same answer, because that's how you use the most muscle mass and get significantly stronger. In a very short period. I'm talking three months, you could probably go from a 557 female waiting, I don't know 161 70 could probably go from 95 pounds on the bar to over 200 in that timeframe. You know, for sets of five, and the compound lifts are the way the way to do that. They're safe. You can use barbells and they, you know, they teach you how to work hard and work toward muscular failure. Yeah,

 

Karen Martel  29:48

and and it's, I think an inexpensive way to get started at home if you wanted to. Right like you could easily get some heavier dumbbells where you know You could just do squats, chest press, deadlift and shoulder press or all the compounds. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well,

 

Philip Pape  30:09

there are other movements that are compound movements. Technically, all the variants of those would be compound movements. And also things like a hip hinge like a Romanian deadlift, or vertical pole, like a pull up or chin up is also compound. Right? a bent over row is a compound. So there are a lot of things that are compound movements. And I would always start there before I started adding an accessory movements and isolation movements.

 

Karen Martel  30:34

Right? What is do the isolation movements, though, eventually have a place and can help to kind of get that more shredded look in the arms, for instance, let's say so some single ones, everybody would be, you know, tricep work, bicep work, hamstring work calves, right?

 

Philip Pape  30:57

Yeah, I think of it as like layers. So if you are a pyramid, you take the compound lifts will give you the big foundation at the bottom, they will make you strong overall, they'll use multiple muscle groups, every time you work them out, they'll keep things reasonably proportional to your own anatomy and your anthropometry meaning, like, if you do a squat out on the grass, you're gonna move in a certain way, if you lift a barbell, doing that same movement, you're gonna keep everything proportional, right? That's the first layer. The next layer would be things that support those movements. So it might be for example, a close grip bench press to support your triceps in the benchpress. So again, now you're starting to target the tricep a little bit more, because the movement you're doing emphasizes that but it's still using multiple muscle groups. Or another example would be like chin ups, I would tell people work chin ups before they start doing curls. Because that involve your back and your biceps. Right. And that's, that's the second layer. And then the third layer is okay, now I've got extra time. I'm an intermediate lifter, I want to improve my physique. I, you know, I have the extra day in the gym. Let's throw in pearls. So that's kind of the approach I take. Oh,

 

Karen Martel  32:09

I like that a little layered a stallion, we'll call it. Yeah.

 

Philip Pape  32:14

So you stack it stacked and get jacked.

 

Karen Martel  32:17

Nice. Oh, I like that. Put that as a little tagline in our for this interview? Hey, you said you know, three months, you can get results. However, I don't think many people do because they're not pushing themselves hard enough. So when it comes to how often should we be adding weight to that barbell? For instance? Like, if I can push out 10 And I'm struggling at 10? Is that a sign that I need to put more on? Like what how many reps should we be able to get to before failure in order to see results in three months and get some muscle built?

 

Philip Pape  33:04

Hey, this is Philip pape, letting you know that applications are now open for one on one coaching. If you're a busy working professional, who has tried dieting and exercising for years, with little in the way of results, and you want to lose fat, get lean or feel confident in your body without excessive dieting, cardio or restrictions, just go to wits & weights.com/coaching to apply. Right. So this is a this is a debated topic, because it does depend on whether you're going to use barbells dumbbells or what have you. And it would be my preference for someone who's new to use barbells. But I know that we don't have always have access to those, or a gym with barbells. Or we can't do that at our home gym. So then I would say dumbbells are the next best option. The challenge with dumbbells is going to be they get unwieldy as they get heavier, right. Like to get them into place for certain movements like a benchpress. Very much. So yeah, you risk you know, pulling your shoulder, your elbow and things like that. Whereas a barbell, you just unrack it. The other thing is it's hard to jump in weight, the amount you want with a dumbbell, because you either need, you need all the dumbbells first of all, and if you're not super strong yet, you don't want to make necessarily five pound jumps when you need to make a two and a half pound jump. Right? And so then you have to like look at getting microplate magnets or something like that. These are like little hacks, but let's just simplify it and talk about barbells. The first workout you ever do, you're going to pick a weight that you think is reasonable, whatever that is, I don't care, it might be too light for you that day. And our goal is to do a fixed set of reps and sets. So we're not working in rep ranges as a beginner. Like we're not working eight to 12 or six to eight we're saying alright, we're going to do three sets of five squats Monday, Wednesday, Friday for the indefinite future. That first day you come in, you put 95 pounds on the bar and three sets So five, yeah, that was no problem. Okay, great. So the next time you're gonna put five, maybe 10 pounds for, if I see that it's easy for you go up by 10, which is roughly 10%, cheer up to 105. No problem, then you have to 115. Okay, now it's starting to get hard. Alright, maybe we start making five pound jumps here, after maybe a month of that, now you're pushing upper one hundreds. And this is really hard, I don't think I could get all three set, no, you can get all three sets, because that's what we're doing. We're getting all three sets of five squats, like you've been doing every session. But next week, we're gonna go up by two and a half. So kind of logarithmically scales, right, you kind of go up 10% And maybe 5%, or maybe two and a half. But the goal is to never miss a rep. And you go in thinking, I'm never gonna miss a rep, it's a mindset thing, you're not going to miss a rep. And, you if you understand the reasons we fail reps, you'll do the things ahead of time to not miss a rep. Okay? So it's not really about feel, it's not about is this feeling hard, it's you are getting the three sets of five. And because you got it, you're gonna get a little stronger. Over the next 48 hours, your body's gonna adapt, and you're gonna be able to get five pounds more next time, because you got stronger. Same thing over and over repeated again and again until you start plateauing months down the line. Now, what are the three things that can cause us to fail reps? Number one, you're not taking long enough rest periods. So we talked about that earlier. A lot of people think 30 seconds is enough. I don't know what your experiences Karen, but 30 seconds to a minute. Let's just go to the next set, I just want to get this done, I would say you need at least two to three minutes. And after about a month or two of strength gains, probably three to five minutes between those compound lifts. Because you want to get all the reps, I don't want you to sweat or get sore, that's not the point. Or just to get it done. It's to get all the reps. So that's number one. Rest. Number two is recovery between workouts. So this goes back to don't do a crazy amount of cardio, eat enough food, get enough sleep, manage your stress. Now, it is pretty much a fact that you can't, most people cannot build much muscle unless you are at least at maintenance calories or in a surplus. But if you're very overweight, or if you're brand new, I definitely have seen people gain muscle even in a diet. So that that gets into the nuances of which direction do we go? If a client is coming to me and is 30 pounds overweight, is struggled with weight for years, and she just wants to feel better by getting that quick win. I'm not going to force her to start gaining weight, you know, to build muscle necessarily. On my mind, I'm like that might be the ideal thing to do. You're not going to like gaining another 10 pounds before we lose 30 pounds. Yes, that's tough. Yeah. So that mindset. So rest between sets, recovery between workouts. And then the last thing is not making jumps that are too big. So if you have all those in your mind, if you listen to your body, and you start jumping week to week, taking your session to session, taking the right rest and having the right recovery, you should be able to string that up for three to six months and get significantly stronger.

 

Karen Martel  38:10

Okay, so let me get this right. So when we want to, you know, let's say we need to get to five, we're doing five reps, how many times are we doing that? Three sets of five, three sets of five for a squat? It's so it's not about like, Was that too easy? It's more about making sure you're adding weight to that on a weekly basis.

 

Philip Pape  38:39

No on a session by session basis. Oh,

 

Karen Martel  38:41

out. Okay. Yes,

 

Philip Pape  38:43

yeah. That's progressive overload, right? Let's just throw the phrase out there in case people are familiar. That's what we mean by progressive overload, you're, it's kind of a misnomer, because you're not really overloading beyond what you can handle. You're loading just to the limit of what you can handle in that session. And then your body adapts to that because you said hey, I need to handle heavyweight body. And your body says, Okay, let's grab the protein. Let's break it into amino acids and build muscle tissue and make it a little bit stronger. And then two days later, you come back. Oh, now I can lift five more pounds.

 

Karen Martel  39:17

And just to be clear, so in case I talk to my nephew again, would that be po progressive overload? Is that? Is there an acronym for that? No, no. Okay. So it shouldn't be like, Hey, did you pee? Oh, today?

 

Philip Pape  39:33

You never know. Right?

 

Karen Martel  39:35

Okay, well, I just want to get this right the slang right. So it can be cool to my my young nephews. Okay, I don't do that. Oh my gosh. Okay. That's very cool. And I'm really excited about it. So each day of the week, we're going up in weights.

 

Philip Pape  39:55

Yeah, so if we're squatting, it's going to be every time if we're deadlift then we're probably not going to do three sets because it's so fatiguing on the body that you might do one set. And after a few weeks or maybe a month, you might alternate deadlifts with another pole like pull ups, because it's just so fatiguing you, this is where we have to balance recovery and stress.

 

Karen Martel  40:18

Right, and I guess when you're working with this is where you can come in to like, where it's so valuable to work with a trainer because like, I wasn't doing this on my own, you know, and to have somebody there, that's gonna say, Okay, that looks like, you know, it was really, we're really struggling. So we're going to now pair this with, you know, a chin up or whatever, you know, to watch what we're doing and to tweak it however necessary at that time. I think that that's definitely take somebody a trainer, when you're starting out to help you with that. But that's so cool. Okay, so we're going up every session. And if need be, you're waiting three to five minutes between sets, right? If it was part, yeah, ideally, yeah. Probably. Yeah. Ideally,

 

Philip Pape  41:07

it's as long as you need to get all the reps,

 

Karen Martel  41:11

right. And if you don't, let's say you're doing that squat, and you can only do three,

 

Philip Pape  41:20

then you just can't. And that's where it's like, we have to play the mind game and the thought experiment, say, Okay, we, our goal is never to miss reps. We don't go in and getting three. So what do we need to do ahead of time to get to be successful next time in the gym? And it might be, well, we only go up by two and a half pounds this time, or might be, hey, we need to, we need to get more sleep. Because we're only getting six and a half hours, we need to get seven or seven and a half. Little things like that before we start saying I'm just not getting stronger and plateauing. Right? Yeah. And you see the same thing when it comes to dieting and other things like we look at biofeedback. And we try to bounce get the whole system in balance before we make drastic moves and say, okay, you've got a medical condition, or you've got something else going on. I do want to address Karen, the other thing is, so a lot of my clients don't necessarily follow and don't necessarily use barbells, because they don't have access to them. And they don't necessarily have to do sets of five, right? So you are saying you don't do that you do probably rep ranges, maybe you work eight to 10 reps, or dumbbell movement. So for dumbbells that actually makes more sense, because you don't want to go extremely heavy with dumbbells just Yeah, I can. We'll do. Yeah. So that's okay. And as long as the the goal is to get close to muscular failure, right, so if you're doing a compound movement, that's usually two to three reps shy of failure. A beginner doesn't really know where that is, though, let's be honest, they really don't know, because the beginner doesn't know their maximum strength, they can't express that yet, they don't have the training, they don't have the experience, they don't have the form. So in that case, if your rep ranges eight to 12, I would say your first set should definitely be no more than 12. Right. And if if you get to 12, you're like I can keep going keep going. But know that that was too late, right? So your first set should be no more than 12. And your last set should be no less than eight, right. And if every set is around 11 or 12, then you're going to increase the weight next week, you're going to increase or the next time, you're going to keep doing it just like we do with the barbells until one of those sets can't get to eight. So one of those sets comes out at seven. And that's absolutely the last one you can do. That is where you do a reset. That is where you say I'm now going to go back down to a weight. That's a little bit more for 12 than I did before.

 

Karen Martel  43:49

Just because we're limited with dumbbells.

 

Philip Pape  43:53

Well, this is more of the double. This is called double progression where if we're working in a rep range, I don't want you to try to hit 10. Exactly, I'd rather you push with the dumbbells. So it's going to be in a range. That's why we have the range. But my point is if you get you're going to increase the weight each session, if you then have a session where one of those sets is seven and you can't get eight, then you hit your limit. And the next week you're going to reduce the weight on the dumbbells, but it's going to be higher than the last time you got 12 You know what I mean? So if you started Yes. 1520 2530 And now you hit your limit. And last time you did 15 pounds for 12 will now go for 20 for 12. Right? For 12. Yeah microplates. Yeah,

 

Karen Martel  44:42

great. Those are little nuances. That's awesome. I love that. Yeah, I definitely I was doing everything from home and I got I have a barbell I got a rack that dumbbells, but I did 100% get to a point where I was became limited with what I was used. Same as, especially with the dumbbells, I as a woman I did, I used to do massage therapy. So I don't have strong hands, just to pick up the dumbbell that I needed to do a chest press with became, I couldn't do it. And same with even just, you know, bent over rows, I was like, I can't this is this is too little too late for me. And so I had to go to the gym, where I could get access to people helping me and supporting me and being able to do the barbell with help. And instead of doing dumbbells, and so I did have to go to the gym eventually, if I wanted to continue building the muscle, and it definitely helped me to jump up. And so I think those that are listening, I think, you know, you can get limited from home. I think yeah,

 

Philip Pape  45:50

it's about maximizing versus get it's progress is progress. So I agree doing any form of strength training is going to get you stronger and build muscle, but it just may take a lot longer than you'd like, unless you're pushing it with the right tools. And in this case, that would be barbells, for example, or it could be certain cable machines and things like that, where you can load them heavy, but barbells are the safest way to go.

 

Karen Martel  46:14

Yeah, I feel like with this was like, I feel like I just got like a secret for everybody. Because I just just that just how to do this, I think this is so awesome. Because most women that you speak to will tell you that they're doing what I was doing, which is 12 reps, you know, three sets of 12. And you know, they're making sure that they get so that it's a little bit tough, but they're never going beyond that, you know, 10 pound 15 pound dumbbell, it's just like we have this block or something I think a lot of us do. And it's you get into routine, really. And so knowing that you should should be putting an emphasis on putting weight on maybe every session, like you said, there's nuances to that. But that this weight is always increasing, I think that is so key, because most people don't get results within three months. And they and then they give up because they're like, I'm not seeing any difference. I'm not losing weight I'm done. You know, this is and they can't stick to it. So knowing that, oh, this is a different way to make sure that we are progressively building muscle. And that we could see results in as little as three months. And I know you're not saying like we're going to be bikini models in three months or anything. But just knowing that as a goal to keep in mind, like, because when you get started working out, it can be really hard to stick with it and build up this new habit. So knowing like, okay, but you know, in three months, I could start seeing results. I feel like that's really encouraging for the people that are just starting out.

 

Philip Pape  47:54

Yeah, totally agree. Yes. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I did CrossFit for eight years. And if anybody listening you know about CrossFit, there's a lot of barbell work, right? There's an Olympic lifts, and there's deadlifts and all that, but doesn't use this progressive overload. So you kind of tap out pretty quickly, you get little stronger, just naturally, but you don't your weight kind of plateaus for years. And then it wasn't until I said, Okay, I need to do it this other way that I realized within months, you know, I took my squat from like, what was it 215 to 315. In a few months. It's a huge jump for a male to do that. Of course, I haven't taken it much more than that since then, because you start to plateau, but I'm happy where I got.

 

Karen Martel  48:36

Okay, so the next million dollar question, protein, how much protein does do we need to be doing this style of muscle growth, where we're really putting an emphasis on putting more weight on and we're not wanting to balk, but we need to feed the muscle. And if we're in this extreme caloric deficit, you just can't get enough protein in. So how do we balance this? How did it how can we keep losing weight, get enough protein in and put muscle on?

 

Philip Pape  49:09

Yeah, Protein Protein is like the anchor macronutrient. It's the one that we peg the rest of our nutrition to. It's the one that we pick first, and we target first. And whether you're gaining weight or losing weight, the protein needs are about the same. So on a diet, it makes it harder because now you're sacrificing fats and carbs. When you're building, it's usually not as difficult. So the amount of protein we need, the quick rule of thumb is one gram per pound. So that's whatever you weigh. Take a gram per pound. The more nuanced answer is. There's a range between point seven and one that's considered optimal for most people, maybe even a little more when you're losing weight, and it's based on your target weight. So if you're very overweight, let's say you're 250 and your goal weight is 190. I'm going to have you shoot pretend that you're 190 pounds and base your protein off of that. So what I find is, especially for women, they tend to be under eating protein by roughly half, that's usually what I see. Yeah, so 160 pound female should be eating at least around 140, you don't have to get all the way to the one gram. And she's usually eating around 60 to 80. Right. And that's what happens when you just when you don't eat a lot of meat, but you eat some meat, and you usually don't have much protein with breakfast, and you're not having a lot of snacks. Or if you'd like intermittent fast, something like that. You just can't cram in all that protein, unless you intentionally do it. So every single plant I have struggled with this when they come in. And every single client I have this is one of our primary priorities from week one is getting that protein where it needs to be. And we talk about things like meal planning for that. So if you need to get I mean cared, if you need 160 grams of protein, you don't want to cram those into two meals, right? That's 80 grams. So by definition, do the math you need to eat four or five times a day. But one or two of those might just be a protein shake, or a small snack with dairy if you eat dairy, you know, like cottage cheese or Greek yogurt or something like that. And it's just simple math. And once you do that, you satisfy your protein requirements, no matter what your goal is, you get your enough protein for the day, and you spread it out evenly. You're good.

 

Karen Martel  51:25

Is there a? Is there an amount that we shouldn't go over per meal? As far as protein goes?

 

Philip Pape  51:31

There's no so there's no limit to protein per meal per day? Absolutely not. There used to be some concern about kidneys and whatnot. All of that is is a myth.

 

Karen Martel  51:41

Wow. Okay. And something that one of my trainers told me, she said, Because I said, I have trouble getting in that much protein because I'm not hungry. So I'll prioritize protein, and then find that by the end of the day, I still haven't eaten enough, but I'm not hungry. So it's hard. It was really hard for me. And she said, as you start lifting more, and then your hunger will go up. And so then the need for protein will increase. But so is that, you know, if we're listening to our body, we're not trying to overfeed ourselves. Correct?

 

Philip Pape  52:16

Right with the protein has been within our calorie needs, depending on what our deficit requirement or surplus requirement is.

 

Karen Martel  52:24

Okay. And so I would think especially doing this kind of style of workout that you're talking about, I could really see then that, yes, hunger would start to increase. And so the first and foremost thing to be eating is the protein because that's telling your body's telling you, you need more protein, because you're hungry.

 

Philip Pape  52:44

Yeah, that's a good point. And protein has a lot of benefits that are associated with that. One is protein is the most satiating macronutrient. So it will fill you up the most, which would explain why somebody trying to eat a lot would get fuller, more easily. But it's a good thing when you're dieting it helps. The second thing is it has the highest thermic effect of feeding. So it burns the most calories when being digested compared to the other macros. So just eating more protein burns more calories. And then what was the third thing? I can't remember off the top? But that's good enough for now.

 

Karen Martel  53:19

Yeah. And so with your clients and what you're seeing, even just with your own experience, and what's out there, how do we lose weight? Are we is it? Is it that we're just putting on muscle, we don't really have to pay attention as as long as we're eating healthy, we're getting a protein requirement. Do we need to be in still a caloric deficit to lose the fat part?

 

Philip Pape  53:47

Yeah, what what is our goal can't so this is where we can pick a scenario is this someone who feels that they're 20 to 30 pounds overweight, and they're trying to lose weight? Yeah. And so if it were a male client, and I said, Let's build muscle first, they'll listen to me, and let's just do it, a female clinic, and they'll lose 20

 

Karen Martel  54:05

pounds in a week without even trying. So let's just hear women are different.

 

Philip Pape  54:09

It's totally the opposite. So man, I struggle to have them getting away. But for women, what we would do first is, before we do any fat loss, we're gonna get you into a maintenance phase and discover your true maintenance calories and get some of these skills in place. So the most important skills for me are going to be enough protein training and steps. Okay, there are other things like sleep and stress that are also important, but it depends on the individual, you may have those handled. But if it's a big red flag that might pop to the top of the list. So once those are in place, and you're at maintenance for anywhere from two to four weeks, usually, and we see what your typical calorie burn is that we know that deficit is required to lose weight. So you have to be in a deficit to lose weight period. That's just energy balance. You know, this, I know is a rhetorical question, but

 

Karen Martel  54:57

no, no, but no, but yeah, I think It's good to remind people I'm

 

Philip Pape  55:01

good, my people. So then let's say you're you burn 2000 calories a day, that's your metabolism, and you want to lose weight, you want to lose about 20 or 30 pounds, you're gonna want to lose it at a reasonable rate of a quarter to 1% of your weight per week. So if let's just for number, say you starting at 200 pounds, so you could go up to two pounds a week, that's going to be tough in terms of the calorie deficit. So in the middle, let's say a pound a week. So a pound a week is about 3500 calories week, divided by seven, it's 500 calories a day. So your deficit is going to be 500 calories. So if your metabolism is 2000, you need to be eating 1500. And I'm sure a lot of women listening or are familiar with numbers like 1600 1200 calorie diets, even the very restrictive 800, which is crazy. Yeah. So 1500, I think is, is reasonable, if not slightly aggressive. But most people have done that. You take that number, and you start with protein. Now you say, Okay, we need, um, 200 pounds, and I want to get down to 170, I need about 170 grams of protein. So whatever calories that is, you know, multiply it by four your calories, then you go with fat. So fat is typically around 25 30% of your calories. Now, if you come from keto, you're probably used to it being like 50, or 60%. But guess what happens if you do that now you crowd out your carbs completely, which is going to be detrimental when we're trying to retain muscle or even build muscle. So that's, that's been a discussion about carbs. We need carbs for recovery. And we need it for glycogen when we work out. That's the main purpose. Even though our brain doesn't, even though our body, it's not essential, right? Carbs are not essential. You learn this with keto that you don't have to ingest any carbs and you can survive. But when we're trying to build muscle retain muscle, we need them. So if you've got Yeah, sorry

 

Karen Martel  56:55

to interrupt, but I just heard this great saying with this guy was like, Yeah, carbs aren't essential. However, that doesn't mean they're necessary that they're not necessary. It just means that you could survive without them. It doesn't mean there's not purpose to them.

 

Philip Pape  57:10

Right? Isn't there not optimal, and so on? Yeah, so if you're on 1600 calories, and you have 170 grams of protein, and then whatever the fat comes out to be, you're probably going to be in the one hundreds for carbs, which is not really, it's not keto. And it's not even low carb in some people's minds, right? It's going to be enough to to give you the energy you need. So that's the formula. One A lot of people do when they diet those, they don't eat enough protein. And so now they're trying to make up for it with fats and carbs. And they're just under eating in general. Yeah,

 

Karen Martel  57:41

yeah. Or they're eating and then they're eating too many carbs, just trying to meet that protein threshold that their body wants. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then once again, everybody, there's nuances to that. So don't take it as it's written in stone, I always like to say we're all individual. Because if somebody's not lifting, then they should probably be still prioritizing protein 100%. But they probably shouldn't be eating as many carbs in my world, like, not try. I don't I don't, not one for like, Let's go below 50 Every single day. And being that keto, I think that that's super detrimental. Yeah, I agree. Some nuances there

 

Philip Pape  58:25

sedentary, a lot of these rules change. But it also, if you're talking truly sedentary and not doing any resistance training, is going to be hard to avoid losing muscle if you're on a diet as well. You know, that's, I mean, honestly, every one of my clients, I've got to have them trained. Like, I've even thought of having that as a prerequisite to getting clients because I think it's so important that you do that.

 

Karen Martel  58:49

Yeah, I know, I wish I could as well. A membership group, like I do these weekly meal plans inside my membership group, and there's always at least 150 members in there. And it's so hard for me to decide what the macros are going to be each day. Because there's such a wide variety, I have some women that are coming in that's that don't have an exercise for years, and they're sedentary. And then it's like ooh, or they're, you know, insulin resistant or type two diabetic. We have these problems. But then you have the next woman who's working out five days a week, who's putting on muscle, and she's like, 1500 calories. That's not enough, Karen, I need to eat more than that. I work out a lot. And then I'll have some people come in and be like, Oh, you've got more than 50 grams of carbs in this diet. I can't do that. I've been keto for two years. I'll put on five pounds overnight if I do eat like that. So it's like, oh, it's so frustrating for me because it's, I want to be able to have each person create their own but yeah, you know, yeah, so it's always challenging. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's just important. for everybody to know, you have to make it your own. And listen to this formula that Philips talking about and apply that to yourself. And then you may just if you're getting a meal plan from somewhere, whether it's from me or somewhere else that you adjust it to meet those needs for you. That's super key.

 

Philip Pape  1:00:17

Yeah, yeah. And I think meal planning is a good skill to develop on your own as well. Because it helps you avoid decision making in the moment, it actually helps with emotional eating helps with overeating, in that you can, like if today is Tuesday, tomorrow's Wednesday, go ahead and plan out your day and make it fit these numbers and see what it takes to do that, you might find it very difficult. And that's why you're struggling every day to hit it in the moment because you can't even do it on paper, you know, ahead of time, of course, it's going to be impossible to do in the moment. So let's, let's play the game of Tetris. And let's figure out how to move things around or go with a low fat version of dairy instead of a full fat or, you know, add some more meat here and take something out here and so on. Yeah, I think that's a good skill.

 

Karen Martel  1:00:59

That's great. Great, great, great. Okay, so mindset. Last couple questions here. You know, that's probably everybody's biggest failure, as far as working out goes is they have that, that their mindset hasn't changed. So then they get into these programs, and you know, a month in, they fall off the old wagon. And next thing, you know, they haven't worked out and I did this everybody, I did this, like, I feel like my entire life, the start, stop, stop, start stop when it came to working out because of so many different things that would just be like, oh, yeah, I'm tired today. I don't want to work out. So how can you give us some pointers? For those women that find it tough to stick to? What would you say to somebody that has a hard time sticking to working out.

 

Philip Pape  1:01:55

So this is where, of course, of course, you're gonna have to ask the why, right? Because the reason is going to be different. But this is where I think controlling your environments, and maybe a concept like habit stacking could be helpful, just a couple things that come to mind. So controlling your environment, meaning if your reason you're not going to the gym is because it's early in the morning, you get out of bed, you're like oh nine to get my gym clothes, and my protein powder, and this and that, and it's cold outside, and then I have to jump like, forget it snooze. Well, maybe you take the day before you work out, or you're fresh and you know, excited. You put your gym bag together, you grab your blender bottle, you get everything set up, put it near the door. And then the next day, when you wake up, you're like, you know, that'd be way too much work to undo everything I just did. Let me just go to the gym. It's kind of controlling your environment, right to reduce friction. Another thought is habit stacking. It's a cool concept. I think that came from atomic habits, the book atomic habits, where you pick a thing that you really enjoy, and couple it with the thing that you don't enjoy as much. And only allow yourself to do the thing you don't enjoy, or the thing you enjoy with that. So that could be like, I'm gonna watch streaming while I get my steps on the treadmill. And I'm not gonna allow myself to watch unless I go on the treadmill, or things like that, I can't think of an example. I'll

 

Karen Martel  1:03:12

give you a map because that that was one of my biggest blocks was, I had so much work to do. And I could I just was like, I was so addicted to working, that it was so hard for me to pull away and have this block of time to go work out because I'd be like, Oh my gosh, I have so much to do today. I can't even I don't have time for working out. And so I decided that that's an excuse. And so I'm like, I'm gonna I didn't know it was called habit stacking. I'm gonna have it stack. I didn't say those words. But, and I started in between my sets because I was lifting pretty heavy. I always took a couple of minutes in between sets is I started doing I would agree with putting an agreement with myself, I would say to myself, you can check your email while you work out and respond. And so in between sets, I would I would reply to all my emails, but I had to do so that took away because that's usually the first thing I do when I get to work every day is check emails and respond to them so that I just put them together and it worked out beautifully. And now I don't have a problem oral listen to a podcast teaching me something so that I have this because I think I have a little add or something because I need like that constant stimulate. So if I'm educating my brain as I'm working my body Oh, that's just like the dream team. Right? They're totally, totally good. Yeah, yeah. Mine's going which takes care of that. So I don't feel unsettled there as well as my body's working out. So it really helped with that because it helps with people. I think too that find working boring.

 

Philip Pape  1:04:54

Yes, yes. And that's the other thing is the boring working out part. It's like again, why are you bored because it's a lack of variety. There's a there's a solution for that. But if it's just like you said, just you just always find it boring. Maybe you stack it with checking your email. Yeah, for sure.

 

Karen Martel  1:05:10

Oh, I love it. Okay, so tell us now, what it looks like to work with you. How does? What does that? Look? Are we doing weekly check ins? I mean, are you working with only people in person? How does it work? Virtually? Yep. Tell us?

 

Philip Pape  1:05:25

Yeah, no, it's online only. So I can work with anyone around the world, in the modern day. And basically, we work on getting you through an initial phase that when we prepare your metabolism for fat loss, so most of my clients that come in, they want to lose weight, they want to lose fat. So we want to spend that time up front with a lot of the skills we just talked about, protein steps, and so on. And there's a whole bunch of other little things that I can work with, and tools and resources and guides. And the value of having a coach and Karen understands this and our listeners is the accountability and that extrinsic motivation, because we all want to do this and know we have to do it. But we don't always do it. Having somebody to push you day after day, give you some tough love, whatever communication style works for you can be super helpful and keeping you on path till those things become habits. So you may know you have to get a lot of protein, but you continue to struggle doing it, somebody there's looking over your shoulder and looking at your numbers and having to track, you're probably going to do it. And if you don't do it, we're gonna have a conversation, we're gonna understand why we're gonna say roadblocks remove all the things you just talked about, so that you are successful,

 

Karen Martel  1:06:37

Philips gonna ground you and you're gonna be in big trouble.

 

Philip Pape  1:06:42

Whatever your communication styles, it's all good. I try try to be empathetic best I can. And so we go through that phase. And that might be as short as two weeks, it might be as long as four to six weeks. And I don't want to say you necessarily earn your fat loss. But effectively, I don't want you to start losing weight until those other things are in place. Because then it'd be successful training and all those other things. So you get the benefit of of also working with me that I tend to understand training and can give you recommendations and do form checks and all that, then we do the fat loss phase. And that can take whatever it takes for your particular situation, the entire time are focused on not restricting and not cutting out food groups, and not taking away the things you enjoy. But incorporating those at the right level, the right level of restraint and learning skills to manage things like going out on the weekends and social events and so on. Once we're done with that, and hit your target, and you're super happy now we're like what's next? Well, do we maintain our weight? Do we start building muscle, and you might now be inclined to actually gain weight and build muscle because you know, you can control your environment, you can control your, your health. And that's kind of the long and short of it care.

 

Karen Martel  1:07:52

I love it. I think it's so important. And I think everybody listening needs to ask themselves, you know, what has been your history with working out like when I was honest with myself, and I could see that I was a yo yo exerciser that I would you know, I've always had the eating down, it's always come very easily to me, I eat really well. But the working out did not come easy to me. And it was like I kept waiting for it to come easy. I kept waiting for the energy to want to go work out and the desire to be like, yes, it's looks like so much fun. I want to go work out and do this every day. And it never did. You know, in 40 years, I never got those feelings. And so I had to be very honest with myself. And I want everybody to be honest with themselves and ask what you know yourself. If it's if what you've been doing hasn't worked up until now, then you need to do something different. And that accountability and having somebody watch over your shoulder, as Philip said, is priceless. In my eyes. It really truly is. It's what got me into it for the first time in my life was simply by having a trainer, looking at my food, looking at my workouts and checking in with me on a weekly basis. It was amazing.

 

Philip Pape  1:09:16

Yeah, and I like to say that if if you can fire me and say six months and be successful for the rest of your life, and I did my job. I don't care that I'm losing a client. You can tell everyone Yeah.

 

Karen Martel  1:09:28

Oh, yeah, that's that's like what what our goal is, I want you to fire me in six months. There we go. Like that's awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, I think I'm gonna have to have you back. I would love to do a q&a style with you fill out with one from the listeners. You know, everybody can send in their questions and we can set it up for those that are working out or just getting started. And in the meantime, though, you guys you got to check out Philips podcast Wits & Weights I've been listening to Do it. It's great. He's got great information on there. Plus, he's got a really good Facebook group that I'm part of. I also got Philips free gift, which you guys can all go get. Which is it the still the same because I did this months ago it is yes. And Ken. So tell us about what

 

Philip Pape  1:10:16

that is. It's a 14 day protein power transformation program that will just help you instill those habits of getting more protein.

 

Karen Martel  1:10:24

Yes, which I think most of us ladies could really use. So go check it out. It was great. I did it. And it definitely helped me to see how else I could be getting some more protein into my diet. So thank you so much, Philip. I am really excited about this new friendship

 

Philip Pape  1:10:42

to ecstatic this is this is great love. Yes, it was so good.

 

Karen Martel  1:10:45

All right. I'm gonna have you back again. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

 

Philip Pape  1:10:50

Thank you, Karen. It's great to be here. Thanks for listening to the show. Before you go, I have a quick favorite ask. If you enjoy the podcast, let me know by leaving a five star review in Apple podcasts and telling others about the show. Thanks again for joining me Philip Pape in this episode of Wits & Weights. I'll see you next time and stay strong.