If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, self-in-intertainment podcast in the world approaching over half a billion downloads. This is Mind Pump today's episode. It's six things that nobody tells you about fat loss after the age of 30. Now, we have a brand new workout program that we recommend to people, especially those looking to preserve muscle during fat loss phases. It's called Maps Upper Lower. It's 40% off right now. You can go to mapsupperlower.com. The code launch will give you the 40% off. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Seed. So Seed is the world's best probiotic. Now, here's what's cool about probiotics. First of all, the data and science supporting their use is massive. You probably already know that probiotics are good for gut health. 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If you love us, like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at MindPumpsDore.com? I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to MindPumpsDore.com. That's it. Joy rest of the show. All right, let's talk about fat loss after 30. Look, there's six things that nobody tells you about that you need to know. We're going to talk about them right now. Let's talk about them. Let's go. I like these. All these things. These are important things. This is important for everybody. But after 30, as you get older, they become even more important things to consider. And if you don't consider these things, what tends to happen is you fail. You fail. You either lose weight and gain it back, which is most people, or you lose weight in a significant percentage of it as muscle, which causes you to gain it back. Or it feels like it's impossible, and it just doesn't want to work. So that's where we're going to cover these things. So the first thing we're going to talk about, this is the most important thing to consider with any fat loss goal. Most people, when you think about, or when you ask them, what's the most important thing to consider with fat loss? They're going to say it's the fat loss. Like that's the number one thing. I'm trying to lose fat. Well, that's a given. Obviously, your goal is to lose fat. They would say that, or the calorie. Yeah, right. The calorie burn or the calorie deficit. Right. And it's all related to the fat. Look, weight loss. I want the number on the scale to go down. But here's the most important thing to consider with weight loss, or fat loss is to protect your muscle by all means necessary. By all means necessary, protect your muscle. And here's why. And it's not because muscle looks great, although it does. And it's not because, you know, you necessarily need to be really strong, although it's a good thing to be strong. Those are all important. But the main reason is, as you lose muscle, you start to get this metabolic adaptation that happens in a downward way. In other words, but by the way, this will happen no matter what, but you allow yourself to lose muscle. And this will happen in a big way. What that means is your body is learning to burn less calories. And part of the way that it would do this, or a big way that it would do this, is get rid of this kind of calorie burning, machining known as muscle. And so if you lose a significant amount of weight, let's say you lose 10% of your body weight, what the data shows is on average, that typically 40% of that, almost half, comes from muscle. And in many cases, in some cases, people lose more than that. And they end up smaller, weaker, similar body fat percentages they had before, because I lost so much muscle. With a metabolism now that makes it very difficult to sustain, because it's slower, it's much slower. You know, I always have this visual of a sculptor with like a block of wood or a block of ice that sculpting like this, beautiful sculpture, picture image, body, whatever. And the thought of that sculptor just, you know, taking an axe or a chainsaw to it, is the approach that so many people apply to fat loss. And what ends up happening when you take these big chunks out of it, and what are you left with? Yeah, what are you left with? And you end up losing a lot of the good, hard work or what you need to make this all come together. And you're far better off using a finer tool and just chiseling away and taking your time and being patient. And then something so much better will come out of that. And I always think of that, because I think of like, that's how people go after this, is they just, I just want to get the weight down at all costs, whatever is the fastest way. Well, they just want to chisel away at the wood and just get rid of it as quick as you can. Then yeah, a big tool like a chainsaw or axe is going to do that. But then it ends up your left with nothing to sculpt with or a piece that you can put together. And I think that's what happens is I think we get in this hurry and we get in a rush to just calorie deficit, calorie deficit. And to your point, right now, you should be trying to preserve that muscle that you have hopefully built or have more than anything else. Let me give an example that I think might illustrate this. Right. Let's say you had a woman who weighed 200 pounds who wanted to lose 50 pounds. So her ideal goal in her mind is I need to weigh 150 pounds. And let's say there were two approaches, right. Approach one, protect muscle at all costs. Approach two, just lose the weight. I just want to lose the weight. Okay. Just lose the weight approach. Let's say she loses 50 pounds. But let's say, you know, 30 of it is fat. 20 of it is muscle, which is not unheard of. That's actually kind of expected if you do things the way that people typically do. So she lost 50 pounds on the scale, 30 body fat, 20 pounds was muscle. Now let's say she did it the right way. And all she lost on the scale was 38 pounds. So she's heavier because she didn't lose 50 pounds. But all 38 pounds was body fat. What you have is more fat loss, a better looking body, even though she's heavier, even though instead of weighing 150 pounds, she weighs 162 pounds. A lot more flexible. She looks more sculpted. She's got better curves. And she's actually leaner body fat percentage wise. There's less flab on her body. And by the way, much faster metabolism. She can eat way more and maintain her lean. I'll take that to a morgue stream analogy than you just gave because you gave an analogy where that where both cases the person lost 30 pounds or more fat. Yeah. But one lost more muscle than one. I'll give you a morgue stream. She only lost 20 pounds on the scale. But she lost all fat and added five pounds of muscle to her body. And so the scale has only gone down 20 pounds. Yeah, 20, 15 pounds. But she looks way better than the girl who lost 50 pounds and 30 pounds of fat. So think about that for a second. She lost even less fat. But because she put on some muscle and you're talking about a dramatic difference on the scale. That person who added five pounds of muscle and only lost 15 pounds of muscle will live better than the girl who lost 30 pounds of fat but also lost 20 pounds of muscle. Well, people need to realize you're brain around that. Well, here's what people need to understand about fat muscle. First off muscle adds shape sculpt in curve. Body fat. Well, we know body fat is and there's only a couple areas in the body where we don't mind body fat. Right. The body that maybe the boobs in the butt a little bit right where we wanted to jiggle. Yeah, but nowhere really nowhere else. Here's the thing about muscle muscle takes up roughly maybe a little little more than this, but right around three quarters of the space that the same mass of body fat would take. In other words, five pounds of muscle takes about about three quarters of the space that that five pounds of fat would take. Okay, so somebody losing pure body fat and even gaining a little muscle depending on the comparison would actually be smaller. And this is what people really care about right what they really care about isn't the scale way it's how they look and how they feel and more shapely. That's right because the difference of a body that lost 50 pounds like you said on the scale originally and 30 pounds of fat and 20 pounds of muscle looks dramatically different than the person who only lost 15 pounds of fat but added five pounds of muscle 15 pounds on the scale, but yeah, yeah, like they they're this person is not only going to have slim down, but then we'll have some muscle development and we'll have better shape curve firmness tightness tone. All the words that we hear that everyone says that they want they'll have that though that's what this is why I like us continuing to push this message of try and build into the body that you want instead of cutting into the body that you want and I promise you many times you'll get somebody who has this number either on the scale or a body fat percentage that they're not far off say from I'm at 25 pounds.
that I just want to be down to 22% and I make the argument that you will be happier with 10 more pounds of muscle and 26% body fat than you would be at 23% body fat and less muscle. - Unless muscle. - Yeah, you want to reveal your muscular body. I have this visual in my head of you guys know like shrink wrapping something where you take like all the air out and it just like compresses and it shows all the forms versus like just losing weight and deflating. So you know, I don't know, it's one of those things that's just like it's hard to you know, really just define this for people like that. - Well you can easily look, you can go online very easily and look up a, you can look up a comparison of a 200 pound six foot man at 10% body fat versus 20% body fat. They look radically different, same body weight. You can look up a five foot seven, 150 pound female at 30% body fat, same height, same weight, 20% body fat, put them next to each other. Radically different, radically different the way they look. And so what we want is body composition. And so when you're losing fat in order to give you a healthy metabolic rate, make it more sustainable, look better, all the things that we really want, protect the muscle. The next thing that nobody tells you about is that cardio isn't for fat loss. - Oh boy. - And this one really pisses the people off. - I mean, are you watching all the comments I'm getting right now on that post I just did? - No. - Yeah, I just did, I did the team, you know, did my shoe to a couple days back and they just started posting some of the videos. And of course we talked about cardio for fat loss. And I know it's a controversial take. It's a terrible strategy for fat loss. And the reason why and there are a point that I make in there is that because what it turns into is this race of how much can I cut and how much can I burn and that leads to a slower metabolism. And a lot of muscle loss along the way. And then a metabolism that adapts to this high activity low calorie intake, which is a recipe for the rebound. And so it's not, and I know the controversial statement is cardio makes you fat, right? It's like, I understand that running on the treadmill doesn't make you fat, but the result of chasing cardio for fat loss results in fat. - Yeah, so to be very clear, can you lose fat doing cardio? Can you lose fat doing other forms of exercise? Yes, you can. But here's how you need to view exercise. There is no form of exercise to be very clear that is for fat loss, okay? All forms of exercise induce athletic performance adaptations. That's how you view exercise everybody. So what is cardio good for? Endurance, okay? What is strength training good for? Strength. Now that we understand that, let's look at the downstream effects of those adaptations. Endurance requires almost no strength. You just don't need strong muscles for endurance. What you need are muscles that can move efficiently for long periods of time. You don't need strength. You really don't. If you're long distance running, long distance swimming, you don't need strong, you just need muscles that can keep going. Nothing wrong with that, but that's what happens. When you're strength training and building strength, you need muscles that are bigger that could produce more force. So now let's go downstream from that. I'm on a diet where I'm cutting my calories to lose body fat. Which one's gonna protect muscle? The one that tells my body I need bigger muscles or the one that tells my body I don't need big muscles. I just need lots of stamina. It's the one that tells your body to get stronger. This is why when they compare strength training to cardio for weight loss, both of them result in weight loss and a calorie, sub calorie diet. One of them results in more fat loss and that's strength training. And it's, again, it's not because strength training is this magical fat burning form of exercise, it's because strength training keeps muscle. And so this is-- - That's a healthy ratio. - This is why we, this is what we need to understand. And so don't look at workouts as ways to lose weight necessarily. Look at workouts as ways to induce what kind of athletic performance gains do I want? And then what does that mean? Or what do I want? And what are the adaptations, the athletic adaptations that lead to what I want? Well, if I want to lose fat and keep muscle, I should probably focus on the one that tells my body to be strong, not that one that tells my body to be resilient for endurance. So that's that's kind of how you do it. - I mean, it's not even probably. It's that you have to do this if you're gonna want to sustain this. I just, the, and the reason why it's something that we've hammered for so long, why we're so passionate about it, why I get defensive when people try and argue this because of they try and use some sort of, epoch science or something to defend this argument of cardio for fat loss. It's just a, it ends up where this person, even if they reach their goal through this method of reducing calories and adding cardio and adding cardio, I've just never seen it sustained. - No. - Never. It's never sustainable. In the temporary window of, I've got six months to lose as much as I possibly can, and I can white knuckle my way through of eating chicken salads and running every single day, it might work in that window, but I've still yet to meet somebody who has that temporary goal that I go, do you also want to stay in shape for the rest of your life too, or did you just want to do for this wedding and then go back to being fat? None of them go, well, I want to go back to being fat. They all, what they all say is, I just want to focus on in that right now, and then I'll worry about it later. And then I'll figure out later, and what I always got to communicate is, well, you do know that we're going to make this far more difficult for us after the six months of, you don't care how to get there, just as fast as you want, whatever it takes to get that off the scale, is you can go that approach, but if you're telling me that you don't want to get fat afterwards, then we are setting ourselves up for a really rough time. - It's just cardio, again, it's great for, it's the best form of exercise for endurance. If you need endurance, you want endurance for something, it's a great form of exercise, but it does tell your body to become very efficient with calories. It is a manual form of burning calories. It doesn't lead to a faster metabolic rate. Bigger muscles that burn more calories are actually counterproductive to a lot of endurance. So you take a guy with big, strong muscles, and you have him trained really hard for lots of endurance, he's going to lose muscle. Why is he going to lose muscle? Because that's how you get more endurance. That's how the body becomes more efficient with that form of adaptation. And so cardio plus a diet for fat loss results in muscle loss. That's the important thing to kind of understand. So the form of exercise that you should focus on, unless you have this really specific endurance goal, but the form of exercise you should focus on for fat loss. If you want to make sure it's just fat that you lose, it's strength training. The next thing is diet. We'll talk about diet a little bit, which is rather than focusing on less food, let's focus on hitting protein targets. Now add a little bit to that. Stick to whole natural foods. Now, you may be thinking yourself, but don't I need less calories to lose weight? Well, yeah, you need less calories than you're burning to lose weight. That's a law of physics. We can't get around it. That's just how it works. So why then, what? Eating more protein or eating foods to hit these numbers that you're telling me to hit, which is one gram of protein per pound of target body weight? How is that going to work? I'm going to eat more. I'll tell you, protein is very, very satiety producing, number one, and so are whole natural foods. Here's what happens. This is what's beautiful about it. You hit your protein targets from whole natural foods, eat the protein first, your calories are going to drop naturally. You're going to feel like you're not, under eating, you're not going to feel like you're dieting. Fat loss becomes much easier. Oh, and by the way, the protein helps with the muscle, it helps preserve the muscle. And by the way, if you're doing all the things that we're saying, lifting weights to preserve muscle, hitting your protein team, and you accidentally go over by three or 500 calories. Just more muscle. More muscle. Yeah. More muscle. Okay. That's the part of this that people don't get, if the priority is protect muscle, and strength training is the cornerstone, and you eat whole foods and you eat protein. And that's 95% of the way. And that's 5% you slip up every now and then. You have the extra glass of wine, or you eat out of bounds a little bit. You are not going to get fat from that. Those extra surplus calories that once in a while is going to end up building muscle. Yeah. And it's going to end up working in your benefit. It's not, this is when you have that approach. It's such a better thing. Now flip that on the person who has just been cutting calories at all costs, running on the treadmill, I crazy. And then they eat out of bounds for a day. Under protein, strength training is not the core of the building signal. No muscle in your store fat. Yeah, store fat. That's right. That person can't get away with that 300, 500 extra calorie day that they should have done. There's no signal to move it to muscle. That's right. And so huge difference. That's right. This is why this is so important is because in the context of the real world, and very few people are in a diet, like a competition athlete where they measure weight, track everything, and they're perfect. They have these days where they have this little bit of fluctuation or extra. And hey, when strength training is a cornerstone, and you're hitting your protein intake, those extra calories tend to go to good, tend to help us out. That's right. But when you are running on a treadmill, eating 1200 calories to lose weight, and you've been doing that for three or four weeks, and then you have a day where you're just like, oh, it's just so difficult. Evan, I'm going to eat the big box of candy or the popcorn or have it, guess what happens? Yeah, you're doing body fat. Get stored as body fat. Totally. Huge difference. Totally. Now, the next thing that nobody tells you is that another big consideration around the sole process is recovery.
But I'm going to call it something a little different. I'm going to call it adaptation. Because when I say recovery, what people tend to think is I need to heal from the workout that I just had. So now I'm recovered. I'm going to go, that's not really what we're looking for. What we're looking for is adaptation. What we're looking for is, is your body making itself more resilient to the stress that you've placed upon it with your exercise. That's what we want, right? If I'm strength training, strength gains are an adaptation. If I'm doing cardio for endurance, endurance is an adaptation. So recovery needs to be a very strong consideration. Because the signal that you send with your workout means nothing if you don't give your body the time and the ability to adapt. All exercise is, if we take out adaptation recovery, is stress. All you've done is added stress to your body. And what is stress without recovery and stress without adaptation look like? Get down, hormone profile goes to crap and you feel horrible. So this is a very, very strong consideration. And there's a few things around that. Oh yeah, just saying, especially in this age category, as you get into your 30s, it changes. That's right. A lot. Like, you realize how important recovery and how intentional it all has to be and even scheduled out and you're focusing on actually getting those solid eight hours of sleep or being able to eat in a way that's recovery based and have that active recovery in between. Like all those things are such a huge consideration to be able to move forward. Yeah, there's a couple of things that we, we, we need to understand why recovery becomes, recovery is always important, by the way. I don't care what age you are. Recovery and adaptation are key to getting the results. That's what, that's where you get the results, right? But as you get into your 30s, your body becomes a bit less resistant, resilient. Not a lot less resilient, not until you get into your late 30s, but it is a little bit less resilient than it was when you were in your 20s. But you also have, typically in your 30s, way more of the stress, more responsibility, way more of the responsibility, like just sneaks in there. Yeah, you know, you're in your 20s and you go to bed late, you know, real late one night or whatever. It's like, oh cool, tomorrow I'll just sleep in or I'll take a nap or I'll do something like that. You know, when you get in your 30s, you might have kids. Look, I have kids. You know what happens with kids? You, it doesn't matter what time you go to bed, they wake up early no matter what. You're going to get up, you've got to be a, you might have more bills. You might have a career now that's more stress on your body. So your body just is dealing with more. And so recovery and adaptation become a stronger consideration as responsibilities start to pile on. Well, that being said, this is a, and if, if protecting muscle is, is, is one of the cornerstone things here, that also includes the way you approach your strength training. Because if we are in a caloric deficit and we're in this process of trying to lose fat, then the mistake that I see a lot of people make is this is also when they start ramping up intensity and ramping up volume in their strength training. We're just trying to keep the muscle at this point. We're not trying to increase the intensity. And so this is where this can go wrong is where you have someone who decides to go on a cut and you're cutting calories. And then they also decide to add days of strength training or add a bunch of sets or these circuit training or put like at this point, less is more like we just want to keep the muscle and we don't want to add a bunch of more stress to this is just there's a nice balance. And so that recovery process is you don't have the extra calories to recover from that higher intensity, higher volume program. So you need to consider that that, oh, I'm in a diet and a deficit. This is not the time for me to be chasing PRs or adding a bunch more volume or intensity workouts. This should be what I should be maintained. Let the diet do the work. So if someone is listening right now and they're relatively healthy and they're dedicated and they're like, what's the perfect routine with this with what you're talking about? I want to burn body fat. I don't want to lose muscle. I want to look good. What does my work routine look like? I'll tell you right now a four days a week strength training, no additional cardio, except for steps at 10,000 steps a day. The program that we have and this is a moderate to high volume strength training program. So if you're total beginner, this is going to be too much for you. But if you're working out and you're like, I've been working out for a little while, I want to get these results. What do I follow? Maps upper lower is the program. It's a brand new program. It's a bodybuilding split, four days a week in the gym. It's pretty much all you need for workouts aside from just training to stay active on a daily basis, which I said was steps. Hit your protein targets and you're going to get phenomenal results. So it's maps upper lower calm. It's 40% off right now because it's a brand new program. So if you use the code launch, that gives you the 40% off. You can also find us on Instagram. It's MindPump Media. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB
[email protected]. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is MindPump.
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