Fitness Rewired Capsule #9: What Actually Works for Body Recomposition

Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I build Evo. Evo is science back strain training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evo now for two weeks free if you visit evlofitness.com. - Welcome to Fitness Rewired on the Dr. Shannon Show. A nine episode capsule designed to close the gap between fitness culture and exercise science so you can see higher return on your effort and finally feel like you're doing enough. Many fitness beliefs come from marketing and tradition and don't align with current evidence. When you learn the truth, you can rewire your thoughts around fitness. That shift leads to higher quality actions, better results, and health you can actually sustain. I'm your host, Shannon Richey. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the last episode of the fitness-rewired capsule. So you've learned that many of the things we've believed about fitness have been due to a combination of marketing and tradition, then reinforced through social media. We learned how calories burned don't really matter much at all. Why hard doesn't automatically mean a workout is more productive. What sweat and needed workouts are doing for you, that you don't have to be sore, what toning workouts are doing and when and why you get bulky. When you learn where these deep-seated beliefs came from, why they aren't true, then you can move forward towards changing your mindset. You'll no longer grind yourself into the ground in the pursuit of fitness. Your body will feel better. You'll be more consistent. Your workouts will be higher ROI. And all of this came from me. First, I had to learn all of this the hard way and it's things that I want to scream from the rooftops is things that I think we should be taught in high school. But if you're confused at this point, it's okay. I'm going to help you now focus on all the right things. If body recomposition is your goal, my last capsule goes into detail about that, but I'm going to summarize it very briefly here. So you went for primary things in your routine. Strength training, cardio, proper nutrition and recovery. For strength training, think reps, R-E-P-S. This is a framework I came up with to help keep it really simple. So the R stands for repetitions, getting close to muscular failure anywhere from about four reps all the way up to 30 reps. You can lift light or you can lift heavy as long as you're taking your sets, two failure or one to three reps shy of failure. That's reps R-E is exercise selection. Choose exercises that are simple and target one muscle group at a time. Avoid combination movements that work your upper body and your lower body at the same time and try to focus on one primary muscle group and take that exercise close to failure in 30 reps or less. P is protein. So eating about 0.75 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. S is structure. So working each muscle group two ish times per week on non-consecutive days. So that is what is important for strength training. Those are the basics. Now cardio. For cardio, think 150 minutes per week total. Mostly light to moderate intensity cardio like walking or jogging or steady state and maybe one or two short hit sessions like our intervals class. Our intervals class is only 10 minutes. Again, less is more when it comes to high intensity cardio. You want the majority of your cardio minutes to come from moderate or light intensity cardio because that's easier to recover from. It is less likely to interfere with your strength training sessions. Nutrition. If your goal is body recomposition, keep protein high 0.75 to 1 gram per pound of body weight per day and eat in a slight calorie deficit, maybe 200 to 400 calories from your maintenance. Make sure to check with an RD if you need more guidance beyond that since nutrition is not my formal training, but those are the basics. Recovery. Take at least two days off lifting each week. That's my recommendation. Recovery is part of the process. You can do your cardio on those days, but try to avoid anything that will really stress your muscles. When you apply proper strength training enough cardio, but not too much cardio, proper recovery and proper nutrition, you will start to see your body change. You don't have to focus on sweating, soreness, burning calories, how hard your workout is. You just need to focus on those things for long enough. I did a whole episode about the timeline of change, which I think is also really important so that you can set your expectations. That's episode number two of the body recomposition capsule if you want to check that out. Now, I'm the founder of Evelopitness, and I created it because I truly think there aren't fitness methods that are rooted in science. And this is part of the reason why fitness hasn't been working for so many people, or it's so common to have side effects, like joint pain and burnout. And I created this partly because I was one of those people. I over-exercised, I was working out sometimes twice a day for 60 minutes at least, prioritizing sweating, prioritizing calorie burn. If I didn't burn enough calories, I would do jumping jacks in my apartment at the end of the day to try to hit my calorie burn goal. I was working out really, really hard, and feeling totally burned out and broken down. I was seeing a massage therapist every week. I was going to PT every week, and I would temporarily feel better, but then I would go back to grinding my body into the ground and just feel worse again. And it was kind of this endless cycle of burnout and pain, all well, never really feeling like I reached my fitness goals. And when I was a treating physical therapist, my patients felt the exact same way. They were fitness-minded. They all had their Apple watches, and everyone was working out really hard, and yet they felt broken down. And I remember telling them at the time, this is just the price to pay to be fit. And I feel so guilty for telling so many people that, because it's so not true. And the reason why I started EvoLo is because when I started understanding that a lot of this isn't science, and what to really focus on is muscle, some cardio, nutrition, and recovery, when I started applying those things, my body composition completely changed. Over one year, I gained eight pounds of muscle and lost five pounds of fat. And over that year, I worked out for less than I ever had. My workouts were about 35 minutes. It was just the EvoLo workouts. And I took four weeks off training that year. I took about four reset weeks that year. So I had trained for less than I ever had, and yet my body composition had changed more than it ever had with a lot of intense sweaty, grueling workouts. And that's because my focus was in the right place. Not only that, but my mindset around fitness improved substantially. I didn't feel guilty for taking a recovery day. I didn't feel guilty for taking time off when I was on vacation. I understood that what I was doing was investing in my body. And more than anything, my chronic pain was gone. I suffered with back pain, hip pain, wrist pain, all of it. All over my body all the time. And I no longer struggle with that because I treat my body right, and my workouts have built me up, not tore me down. And as a practicing PT, I felt like there wasn't a workout that I could recommend to my patients. Maybe like, okay, I know that this workout that I'm doing is causing me all this pain, like what should I do instead? And I would honestly say, like, I guess just go like lift weights in the gym and they're like, well, what do I do? And I would have to like write them a program. And what I realized is there was this need for science-based training. And a lot of people like following a class. I personally love following a class. I always have, I've always been a group fitness instructor and I've always liked going to classes, but there wasn't fitness type classes that you could follow along that were following the science of building muscle without wearing down your body. So that's exactly why I created EVLO. And you don't need to do EVLO to apply the information that you've learned in this capsule and in the body decomposition capsule. You can take all of this and apply it on your own and absolutely see results. But if you are someone who you don't want the guesswork, you want to just show up and press play. You like following classes. You don't like programming. You want to stay consistent because the workouts are new every single week. We would love to have you in EVLO. EVLOFitness.com, you can try it for two weeks for free. And every class is taught by a doctor of physical therapy. And the reason why EVLO is so different than any other online group fitness program is because not only will you see better results because you're actually applying the science, but you can stick with it. You're learning in every single class. You're learning what it's like to get close to failure. Your body will feel better because we are omitting certain exercises that may cause joint stress, but aren't necessarily a high return on your investment for your muscles. I could go on and on and on, but we really want EVLO to feel more like personal training rather than group fitness classes. So again, EVLOFitness.com, you can join us for two weeks for free and just see how it feels in your body. You don't have to stay, but if you do find that it clicks, you can read our app testimonials, our app reviews. There are so many people in there who talk about the results that they've seen and talk about how it's different than other methods. And it's my passion project. It's my goal to help as many women as possible get as strong as possible because I've seen the transformation in my own body physically, but also in my mindset. And I'm so excited to be able to pass that down to my kids to pass down a better mindset around fitness and exercise to my kids. Thank you so much for listening to this. this capsule. I had so much fun putting these together and I'm honored that you're taking your time to be here. I will release another capsule maybe in a few months. So we'll see you then.