- Ooh, morning, Trainiacs?
Lovely little day here in the sun.
It's actually like only six degrees Celsius right now,
so we had four days of summer, that was enjoyable
while it lasted.
So just about an hour or two ago here,
little clip of it right now,
I finished a 5k run that was probably
the second fastest timed 5k run that I've ever done.
19:34, now the whole time thing is completely irrelevant,
whether it's 19:34 or 14:30 or 30 minutes,
if you're running, hey great.
The vast majority of people who get into endurance sports,
start, not because they wanna crush a bunch of fast times,
but because they want to essentially just lose weight,
look better naked.
And that's totally okay because that's how I got into it.
Endurance sports was the muse that allowed me
to eventually end up losing a total of 65 pounds.
And it ended up being the starting point
for me living a better life, for feeling healthier,
for feeling better, for feeling more confident,
for being daring enough to leave a career in finance
and start this business here.
It all started because I really just wanted
to start losing weight and I did it through endurance sport.
Now here's the thing though.
I learned a lot of lessons about how to lose that weight,
and I ended up getting down to like as low as 149 pounds,
but I also ended up falling into some of those traps
that actually end up undoing the weight loss
and that's part of why I've gained back the weight
over the past year.
It's starting to come back down now.
What we're gonna talk about today are the rules
for how to lose weight without falling into those traps
that might allow you to gain that weight back.
Now, if you end up using the system
that I'm going to explain to you in this video,
you are surely going to lose weight
and hopefully, ideally let's cross our fingers,
do it right and keep it off.
So let's go through a few
of the very big picture things that you have to get in place
if you're just starting out.
The first thing is that if you are just starting out
what you are thinking you need to do, is probably too much.
You can dial it way back in most cases,
because athletes who are just starting out
are really just starting out and going from zero
to something, the something that they need to do
to start seeing improvements in weight loss and fat loss,
isn't really that much, as little as a 10 to 15 minute run,
three, four times a week, that's gonna be burning
more calories than your body is used to.
And what you really need to do is
you have to have your body burning a set amount of calories
which it tries to fall into kind of a sweet spot,
based off of the amount of activity that you're doing,
combined with the amount of food that you're intaking,
it's gonna wanna hover around there,
and if you can just burn a little bit more,
a little bit more weight loss and fat loss
is going to happen.
So you don't have to go and all of a sudden, boom!
Burn a ton more calories
and create this massive calorie deficit,
'cause when you do that, it's going to boom!
Cause your body to react really, really strongly.
But if you create a subtle calorie deficit,
you are going to lose weight and then gradually
you can build up, and what this is going to do
is it's going to create longer, lasting weight loss.
The second and the third thing that you need to focus on,
is getting the training intensity that you're working in,
in the right area, the right zone.
Now you can go and do a bunch of moderate intensity running,
and this is probably what you're doing.
This is somewhere in the ballpark of let's say a heart rate
between like 140 and 160.
This is typically moderate intensity running
for a lot of people.
What happens at this intensity is you're burning
a fair amount of calories, but what is actually going
to happen is you're going to be burning less fat
while you're doing it, so you're gonna be burning
a lot of calories, but those calories won't necessarily
be coming from fat and what I have experienced
and what a lot of people have experienced is,
they end up running at this intensity
for a long period of time, a lot of time
and you aren't actually improving your metabolic function
and why this is a downside is because,
as you go into moderate intensity training,
which you can hold for a really long time,
your body builds up a ton of lactic acid
and it creates this big stress response
that big stress response can cause your body
to actually hold a little bit of extra weight,
due to inflammation and excess cortisol and poor hormones.
So what you want to focus on are two different intensities.
This is where points number two and three come in.
The first intensity that you wanna focus on
is low level cardio and build up roughly about 80%
of your total training time at what would be called
your map zone or the top of zone two
or your aerobic training zone.
You can use all different types of calculators online,
but the key is to keep your heart rate
under that heart rate cap.
This is going to allow you to burn a huge amount of fat
every single minute because it's the fat burning zone.
It's gonna teach your body to be aerobically more efficient,
you're gonna build more mitochondria in a safer way,
which is going to keep those stress hormones low
and it's going to end up actually allowing you
to train longer, making more gains as you go.
The second intensity that you wanna focus on
is similar to what we did today.
You see my face out there in some of the videos
I did a rip my legs off, think that I wanted to cry
kind of effort.
That 20% of intensity that needs to be done,
aside from the low intensity, needs to be very hard
and we're talking anywhere from 15 seconds,
to eight minute intervals.
Again, I'd recommend that if you're just starting out,
start in like 15 to 32 second sprints
and then gradually build your way up.
This intensity level doesn't necessarily burn
a ton of fat during the exercise, but over the course
of the 24 to 48 hours after the exercise because
of something called post exercise oxygen consumption.
And then the fourth and final big picture thing
that you have to have in place is you need to have
a calorie deficit.
I recommend two things to actually get this right.
The first is using the Mito Calc.
Now, I'll put a link in the description below
to the calculator that I like to use, which customizes
for your body weight, for your activity level,
for the amount of carbs, versus protein, versus fat
that you actually intake, how much approximately
you're burning every single day,
and then I like to use an app called Senza
to start tracking calories.
Now do this just at the start and start taking note
of how many calories you're intaking
and what happens with your body weight.
If your body weight comes down, that's a good sign.
If your body weight isn't coming down,
try lowering still a little bit more.
And assuming that your hormones are all healthy
and that your stress levels are all healthy
and that your gut bacteria is all healthy,
you just need that to have a calorie deficit and boom,
you are going to see weight loss and fat loss come.
But this is where I want to have the big but,
of making sure that you are doing things properly,
to make sure that that fat loss and weight loss
isn't going to cause long-term issues
that potentially cause it to come back later.
This is where we get into the pitfalls,
and in my opinion, there are three really big pitfalls
that are very common to new endurance athletes
that approach this sport with the intention
of losing a little bit of weight.
The first is doing fasted workouts.
And this is a really, really big thing as of 2021
when I'm recording this.
It's good in theory to do these fasted workouts
but in practice what often happens
when you look at the studies is yeah,
people end up burning more fat in that fasted workout,
and they end up seemingly setting themselves up
to lose weight, but more often than not
those fasted workouts end up creating cravings,
later in the day and you get uncontrollable cravings.
So remember that calorie in calorie out
and requiring a calorie deficit?
It's almost impossible to do because your cravings
are so high that you need to take in a huge amount
of calories just to satisfy your brain.
In addition to that, when you wake up in the morning,
you typically aren't very hungry.
The reason for that is because you have
a high amount of cortisol, first thing in the morning.
Cortisol is a stress hormone that blunts your appetite,
but it's a stress hormone that is not good,
we need to bring that down.
Now if you leave that high by not eating,
and then going and doing a workout on top of it,
bumping that stress hormone on top of
the already high stress, you have stress on top of stress,
and high levels of cortisol often lead to weight gain
and poor hormones, so you end up long-term,
actually setting yourself up to gain weight.
The second big thing, and this is kind of in that same realm
as the fasting people, it's the carb restriction people.
And carb restriction I think is okay,
I actually like to think of it more of timed carb,
where before an intense workout, you have carbs before.
For a not intense workout, definitely eat before,
but don't worry about the carbs.
Quite often when people end up going more towards
that Keto camp and that low carb camp,
what ends up getting cut out is not just some carbs,
but all carbs, so this means things like oatmeal,
which is really good for the stomach, chia seeds,
phenomenal for the stomach, salads, really, really good
for the stomach.
We need our stomach to be really healthy.
And when we restrict carbohydrates so severely
that we allow that bad gut bacteria to take over,
again, just like driving up the cortisol,
we're in the long run fighting a losing battle
because so much of our hormones, of our body weight,
of our mood, of everything is driven by what's going on
in our gut.
The third and final pitfall is always thinking
that more is always better.
In a lot of cases, when athletes end up coming
into an endurance sport to lose weight,
they're thinking it's just gonna be this constant drop
on the scale where it goes nothing but down, down,
down, down, down, down, down, down, down in my case,
because well, I'm on camera and I'm shirtless a lot,
I always just figured, well, year round let's look fit.
And what happened was that in 2019
when I ended up training a lot more,
I actually increased my training from nine hours in 2018,
to around 14 hours of weekly training in 2019
and guess what?
I gained weight, I actually gained weight that year
because I think my stomach wasn't very healthy,
and my body had slowed down so much that I just
couldn't restrict the calories enough,
while staying even somewhat sane, to keep that weight off.
So instead, accept that you can have periods of higher
and lower weight, keep it much more reasonable,
much more gradual, and allow your body these times
of just relaxing.
So train as little as possible, not to see the result
that you want, but to see a result
and this is going to be a long lasting benefit
that you can see week after week, month after a month,
hopefully year after year, keep around 80% of your training
low intensity, keep the other 20% super high intensity.
Let yourself go a little bit for maybe four to six months
a year, and then as race season or bikini season
or beach season or whatever it is that you're training for
starts coming around, then maybe restrict calories
while your training levels are still low.
And then come race season, if you start taking up races,
let the training take care of all of the calorie deficit
for you while not restricting your calories.
And then do not fall
into these really strict deprivation diets.
In my case, while I still believe in a timed carb approach,
I don't believe in a carb restriction approach.
They both have training benefits, but one comes
with some risks that if your body just
doesn't handle it right while it might take a while,
maybe years, to actually come back from it.
And I don't want people to have just temporary gains,
I want you to, as we said, look good naked
for the rest of your life.
Now, if you're interested in getting the training side
of things, figured out what this 80/20,
with the intense stuff and with the strength
that you need to have implemented into a training plan,
to make sure that your muscles density is nice and high
so that you have a higher base metabolic rate,
all of this is in our training app,
you can get it at app.mymotive.com
and everything is basically taken care of for you.
So if you do get to that point of losing the weight,
feeling good, feeling confident to get to
some of those endurance and ventures that are super fun,
we'll help you get there and live a very fulfilling,
challenged, daring and kind of bad-ass life.
So app.mymotive.com and if you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
Good luck Trainiac, it's an honor to just be even
a small part of it by having you watch up until the end.
Later.