Your 2026 Body Blueprint — Part 7: How to Build a Routine That Actually Works After 40

[MUSIC] What matters most isn't the routine itself when it comes to making progress. What matters is consistency, that's number one. So if you're, no, I want to do five or six days, but then in a month when life gets busy, you drop off, you just, you screw it up. You may understand intellectually that consistency is important, but in your behavior, you don't practice it. So I want you to practice consistency. Stick with something, show up over and over and over for the entire year. Hey guys, it's Ted here. Let me ask you something. You've got the money, the success, the career. But when you look in the mirror, do you see a tired out of shape die staring back at you? And you're tired of the weak body, the way you're close fit, and your lack of confidence about the way you look. This can end now. In my program, Lean After 40, I've created a four-phase system that helps high achieving men lose 20 pounds in just 10 weeks. While building muscle, while getting you to feel 10 years younger, and here's the kicker, it's only going to take you two hours a week in the gym. This plan is fully customized to your situation. And if you don't know me, well, I've worked with guys like Robert Downey Jr., Ricky Martin, Sir Richard Branson, plus thousands of CEOs and business leaders worldwide. But here's the deal. You need to earn at least 100k annually because my program, it's a premium program. I work with entrepreneurs, executives, and high performing professionals. So if that's you, and you want to shortcut the process to getting yourself in the best shape ever, book a body audit call now at legendarylipodcast.com/apply. And look, there's no pressure on the call. At this point in my career, I'm only looking for ideal clients. It's got to be a win for both of us. So even if we don't end up working together, you're going to leave with insight about your process, how to get in better shape, what you're doing wrong, what you need to do better. And if you do end up hiring me to help you, you don't pay unless you get results. Again, that's legendarylipodcast.com/apply. Welcome to the legendary live podcast where it's all about taking control of your health, losing fat, transforming your body, and living the life you deserve with celebrity fitness trainer and longevity enthusiast Ted Rice. So let me walk you through how I want you to think about this final episode. Because this is where everything in this series comes together. Up to this point, we've talked about strength, cardio, nutrition, sleep, stress, metabolic health. But information alone doesn't change behavior. And if you've been listening to this podcast, another podcast, and scrolling social media, you probably know a lot or at least think you do, but you don't take action on what you know. So what I find people actually need is a way to organize those ideas into a system they can follow without getting overwhelmed. So for this episode, I want you to think in terms of 12 months, not a two week challenge or a three month transformation, none of that stuff. I want you to build a system that you can realistically follow for a year. And we're going to start out by choosing just one outcome goal. Okay, very important. You need an outcome goal, but then we're going to focus on the process goals. So in other words, what is the ultimate outcome that you're looking for? And more importantly, what are you going to have to do every single week to make sure that outcome is achieved? So again, we're just going to choose one outcome goal. We're not going to choose fat loss and muscle growth and hitting a new PR on the bench press or deadlift. No, we're going to choose one goal. And if you're listening to this podcast, the most practical and motivating goal is fat loss. Chances are you are not where you need to be in terms of your metabolic health, in terms of having too much body fat on you. And I'll tell you something, it's also the hardest thing to do. So at the beginning of the year, focus on the hardest thing to achieve because you have the most motivation to change. And we're going to approach fat loss while keeping your muscle, your energy, and most importantly, your sanity. And again, here's an important distinction. The outcome goal gives you direction, but it doesn't tell you what to do day to day or week to week. And as I mentioned a minute ago, research shows that process goals outperform outcome goals when it comes to long term behavior change. In other words, even if you say I'm going to choose fat loss and I want to lose 20 pounds, it feels motivating for a moment and maybe you get in there and make something happen and just go all out, right? Try to show up to the gym as much as possible. Try to eat as clean as possible. But here's the thing, it's not a system that you can repeat over time that will just, I don't want to say effortlessly help you achieve the goal. But if you do the right process, you will achieve the goal by focusing on the process instead of just saying, oh, I got to lose 20 pounds. I want to lose 20 pounds. Oh, man, it's down. It's up. The way it's all over the place, right? Choose the outcome goal then we're going to focus on the process. So once fat loss is chosen as your outcome, everything else becomes a process goal. Daily actions, daily behaviors, simple decisions repeated over time. And the first real decision is training and specifically training structure. And we're not talking about the perfect routine with the best exercises. That stuff matters when you're already, let's say, far into your journey. What we're going to focus on right now is just how many days a week you're realistically going to train. So if you're training two or three days a week and you should be in the gym two days a week minimum. So if you're training two or three days a week, those workouts should be full body. That means every session, you include lower body movements, upper body movements. So lower body movements that emphasize your quadriceps like squats, leg presses, leg extensions. And then you need to emphasize the posterior side of your lower body, which is your glutes. So hip thrusts, Romanian deadlifts, hamstring curls, quote unquote back extensions, because back extensions really work your hamstrings and glutes more. But that's a story for another time. And with upper body, you want to equal amount of pushing and pulling. And I want to tell you something. If you feel like you need to have some core exercises in them, in your workouts, okay. But if your goal is to see your abdominals, you do not need to work your core right now. You do not need to do direct ab exercise. I'm not saying direct ab exercise is bad where you shouldn't do it. But if your time limited, you better be focusing on big muscle groups. So pushing and pulling and things like squats, deadlifts, etc. You want big muscle groups. Why? Because that's going to help you see your abs more than doing eight different ab exercises. Okay. We're not going to talk about that, but you're going to have to trust me for right now. And the goal here is not to destroy yourself. It's to send a clear signal to your body to keep muscle while you lose fat. In fact, while you're training, before I go on to the four day week split, while you're training with the goal of fat loss, my clients often see that their performance isn't great sometimes. In fact, I went to the gym today. My performance wasn't great. But guess what? In two weeks, I've lost five pounds. I'm in a calorie deficit. I shouldn't expect to lose fat and put up big numbers at the same time. Now, that might happen if you're really out of shape. But if you've been training somewhat consistently and certainly as you get deeper into your fat loss success, your fat loss goal, you may notice that the performance isn't so great in the gym. Your goal when that happens is to keep going and not stress about it because your goal isn't to put PRs on exercises. Your goal is to try to hit PRs, but your priority is fat loss. Now if you're training four days a week, an upper body, lower body split is best. Upper body one day, followed by lower body the next day, take a day rest and do upper and lower again. So four days a week, this structure makes recovery easier and allows you to do enough work without constantly feeling beat up. And so if you can do four days, this is the best split. It'll keep your workout shorter generally as well. And versus the full body exercise, full body workouts, which can really take a long time as you start to add more sets. Let's speak about sets here. I only want you to do two sets per exercise starting out. Not three, not four, not five. Two sets. even if you're pretty consistent with with your training at the moment, back off to two sets, you don't need so many sets and how many exercises? Do a minimum of six and up to 10. Minimum of six and up to 10. Now I wanna say something, what matters most isn't the routine itself when it comes to making progress. So if you're, no, I wanna do five or six days, but then in a month, when life gets busy, you drop off, you just, you screwed up. And then the second thing is progressive overload. One thing that happens with people over 40 who have kids and a stressful job 'cause they're working full time or running a business and seeing patients or closing contracts, your recovery isn't gonna be as good some days or some weeks. So focus on progressive overload, only do two sets. Progressive overload just simply means, try to show up and do one more rep than you did last time and eventually add weight. What I also recommend is sticking with the same weight for two to three workouts and focus on adding sets. I'm sorry, focus on adding repetitions. So if you're doing three sets, let's say two sets of 12 and then the next time you're gonna try to get 13. Speaking of which, how many repetitions should you do for each of those two sets? We know that you can build the same amount of muscle with five repetitions all the way up to 30. So what I tell you to do is to work in the rep range that you like most and stay there. So six to 12 is one of my favorites, 10 to 15. If you like lifting on the heavier side, it could be four to eight. Don't overthink it, do what you want, but focus on using the same weight for both sets and trying to add more reps for at least two workouts and then after keeping the same weight for at least two workouts then you can add a little bit of weight. How much weight? The least amount that you can. That will prevent injuries, that will make sure that you don't hit a plateau. And most importantly, that's the signal that preserves muscle during fat loss. Now, once lifting is set, the next decision is cardio. And this is where people get overly aggressive and end up sabotaging their progress. Yes, you can go hard for a couple of weeks, but what ends up happening is you see some results, but your appetite spikes, you get tired and you just feel like you can't keep it up or eat the calories back and then your weight loss stalls and you could have just avoided that whole thing by just keeping it simple. So for fat loss, my default recommendation is daily steps, steps for in calories without interfering too much with recovery. They're easy to scale, in other words, you can bump up a couple thousand every week. They're easy to recover from. They're easy to track. For example, I wear an oral ring. I know how many steps I get every single day. Oh, but it's not accurate. It's accurate enough to give me an idea. And by the way, for most people, 7,000 steps is a good minimum. So if you're currently less than 7,000 steps, and by the way, if you don't have a wearable, go get a fit bit, go get a cheap one or if you're already rocking a $600 garment, great. But make sure you're getting 7,000 steps. And if you're not getting there, that is your minimum to shoot for. That's what you should be working towards. Now, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to even up to 15,000 is very effective for fat loss, but it comes at a cost of time. Now, if you want to do more incline walking, is usually a better option than running unless you're already a runner. It's easier to recover from. And if you use a treadmill, it counts toward your step goal. It's really easy. In fact, that's what I'm currently doing right now. I'm getting almost all of my cardio from steps. And that means I go into the gym and use the treadmill. Now, what about all that talk about high intensity cardio and how you need to implement it? Yes, it has its place, but not at the beginning. If you're significant, if you have a belly, focus on lifting, focus on steps. And of course, we're going to talk about it in a second. Focus on nutrition. And once you've lost 10 to 20 pounds in your recovery is better, you can replace one lifting session with something like a Norwegian 4x4 interval workout or sprint interval training, which is 30 seconds on, four minutes off, repeated six to eight times. But here's the thing. The key is replacing. You do not add more high intensity exercise and think it's going to work out for you. That is super dumb. It's one of the most common dumb mistakes that very smart people make. More is not always better. You have to manage this appropriately. So once you're down 10 to 20 pounds, then you can start asking yourself, OK, how good is my cardiovascular conditioning? What's my resting heart rate? Is it under 50? And-- or we can say 60 to give you a little bit of a leeway here. But I think under 50 is optimal. And also HRV over 50. So if you're not there after 10 to 20 pounds, switching one of your workouts to high-intensity interval training is a good idea. But again, please, please, please, don't make the dumb, dumb, dumb stupid mistake of saying, well, I'm training four days with weights. Let me hit throw an interval training session there. It's like you're going to get injured. You're going to get burnt out. There's a cost-- a recovery cost to this, right? So be smart about training. And when I say training, I'm talking about your weekly program that you follow. Anyway, after movement comes nutrition. And this is where I want to be very clear. Fat loss becomes dramatically easier when you track calories. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, people quit early. And that's why it works, track your food. Even two weeks will teach you more about fat loss than any diet book you've ever read on fat loss. So not any diet book, but any fat loss diet book. And you don't need the perfect app. I use my fitness pal. It's regarded as not the best one. It doesn't matter that much. Use lose it. In my coaching program, we use my fitness pal for our clients who track calories. Because it sinks with our app that we coach our clients with. But you can use anything that you want. You just need something you'll use consistently. And tracking food works the same way tracking spending works. Most people don't overspend in one big moment. They overspend in small amounts repeatedly, and often and not often. All the time without noticing and food works the same way. Awareness changes behavior. And once your calories are being tracked, the next priority is protein. And this is where precision matters. Most people think they're eating enough protein. Then I'll ask them, okay, cool. What's your breakfast? Well, I had three eggs for breakfast today. It's like, okay, you're a 220 pound man. Okay, and you think that's a high protein breakfast because you read on the internet that eggs are a good source of protein, which anyway, how many grams of protein are in one egg or in three eggs? They're like, whoa, I don't know. It's like that's why you don't look the way you want. You think nutrition is a game of eggs are a good source of protein. So I eat eggs in the morning. And look, I'm trying not to sound too condescending here, but I hear, because I was once there, but I made the same mistake, but I'll tell you, track your calories and track your protein. That's how you know if you're getting enough. Not, oh, steak has protein. It does, and depending on the cut of steak, it has a ton of fat too, anyway. So look, when it comes to protein, a simple rule works well here, aim for 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. And that is if you're calculate your BMI, by the way, and if your BMI is in the normal range, which you probably still have too much fat, because body, body mass index doesn't give you your body fat percentage, but if you can't see your abs, but your BMI is normal, then use around 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Now, if you're overweight or obese, use 0.8. Okay, use 0.8. Do not, you don't, if you're 250 pounds in five foot nine, you do not need to eat 250 grams of protein per day. That's not what you should be doing, okay? 200 grams would work in that case. And this is where people have real light bulb moments. Again, three eggs sounds like a high protein meal, but it's under 20 grams of protein. And when you do the math, the problem becomes obvious. And fat loss gets easier. Food quality does matter too for all of you who have heard arguments against tracking calories or calories and calories out. But it comes after a calorie total is in protein. And when people track calories and protein, food quality usually improves on its own. Fruit veggies, berries, whole foods, tend to increase naturally. You don't fix fat loss by chasing perfect foods or the perfect diet. You fix it by being consistent with the fundamentals. Now, supplements come much later in the priority list. If everything we've talked about already feels like a lot, skip the supplements. Fat loss will work without them, you don't need it. But if you do choose to use supplements, keep them supportive, keep them evidence based. For example, adding five grams of fiber with each meal will help with your appetite, will drop your cholesterol to a healthy level without taking medication. And will lower your blood sugar levels because if you've got a belly, I guarantee you, you are not metabolically healthy. Creatine is the next one. It helps preserve muscle and performance during fat loss, even if the scale bumps up slightly from water weight, which is something to pay attention to. How much? I would take 10 grams a day. Magnesium, if you feel a little on edge and you don't sleep the best and maybe need a boost in recovery, get a good magnesium, torrate or magnesium glycate supplement and take three to 400 milligrams before bed each night. Don't overthink it, experiment what works. Magnesium is a mineral. Mineral is typically you have to be careful with. Like you wouldn't want to do that with zinc, for example, or other minerals, but magnesium is pretty safe. Again, check with a doctor. I'm not a doctor. And a mega threes, two grams a day would also be useful here. Keep in mind, none of these, if you don't do the other stuff, the supplements aren't going to do much for you. So supplements are like the cherry on top. So let's talk about measurement because this is where people either get empowered or emotionally derailed. Get a dexascane. Unless you don't have access to one because where you live, get a dexascane. After that, weigh yourself daily. But only look at trends. Don't judge yourself. Don't get pissed off because you had a social night out, had a heavier meal than usual and maybe a couple drinks, wait, fluctuates. So don't be the person who's looking, you're, oh, I'm happy. The wait's down. Oh, I'm sad. Even though yesterday I was happy, but the wait went back up a little bit. That happened to me yesterday. The wait went back up. I didn't emotionally react to it. Why? Because trends tell the truth. You want to look at your weekly trend. And alongside that, track your calories. Track your protein, track your steps and track your workouts. That's going to make this, it's going to turn this into something that you can control because you have data. Versus like, I feel I'm doing all the right things. The story that I'm telling myself is I'm working hard. I'm eating well. I'm sleeping well. And I'm making good choices with nutrition. But what you're missing is that this is a scientific process that where the data matters and your feelings don't. So whereables can also be helpful for tracking steps and sleep. I recommend you get one. Their tools not a requirement, but man, it makes it so much easier. You want to quantify this as much as possible. That is how I get such great results with my clients. I we quantify what our clients are doing. We measure their results. If something needs to change, we know exactly what to change. But you can only do that if you have the data informing you of what decision to make next. So recovery matters more than most people realize fat loss doesn't fail because people don't work hard enough. It fails because they burn out or they took on too much. They're like, I'm going to work out with ways four times week that I'm going to do high intensity interval training, three times a week, that's some days a week. Then I'm going to get 15,000 steps per day. And I'm going to eat chicken and broccoli. And yeah, you're going to burn yourself out. You're going to get super hungry. People fail at this all the time. And it's just like, man, it's sad to see because if you just did it the right way, you wouldn't fail. It's really that simple. In fact, people have failed so many times that they don't even believe it's possible when in reality, they're right. It's not possible with the way that they're doing it. You're not going to become a millionaire digging ditches unless you take that money and invest. There's actually a famous story from the book, The Psychology of Money. I think it was a janitor invested well. But that's not what we're talking about here. You need to be smart. It is not about working hard. Of course, there's hard work. But the hard work is really doing the setting yourself up by being smart. Now, another thing I want to recommend is schedule one intentional recovery practice per week, a long walk in nature, a massage. I love float tanks. So make sure you give yourself time to downshift. Something that tells your nervous system that, hey, relax, it's good. We're fine. You're not training too hard. Life isn't too stressful. Calm yourself down. And every two to four weeks, do a simple check-in. Look at your dad. Are you training consistently? Are you hitting your steps consistently? Are you tracking your food? Honestly. Because your body weight trending down over time. If something isn't working, adjust one variable, not everything at once. And when you step back, the system, it's actually really simple, right? Train a few days a week, walk every day, track your food, hit your protein, recover intentionally. What makes it hard isn't complexity. It's the execution over time. And if this feels clear, but still hard to do on your own, look, that's the number one thing that our clients hire us for. Yes, we have better-- listen, I've been doing this 27 years. If you think that I don't know how to do things better than you, you're crazy. I've interviewed over 500 experts. But that said, probably the most important thing. And something I don't talk about enough, because I feel like it's not very marketable. But people quit on themselves. Why? If you ask some people, they'll say, well, you don't want it bad enough. Or you say you want to prioritize this, but it's not really your priority. I disagree. Again, I've been doing this almost 27 years now. Here's the truth. We all run behavioral programs. For example, when you first started to learn how to drive a car, you were completely overwhelmed if you were like me. I shouldn't have even gotten my driver's license. I felt like I almost-- I didn't almost wreck, but I was a danger on the road a little bit, right? Not really. I'm exaggerating a tiny bit. But I think she shouldn't have passed me. That is sure. But now I can drive. I can talk on the phone. Have you ever been driving, talking to your wife or your kids or your friend? And all of a sudden, you just ended up at the place you were driving to. And you don't even know how you got there. That's because you're running. At first, you were having to practice. And looking at the rear view mirror, change the hands on the wheel, change the-- oh, gosh. Shift gears, all that stuff. Now you just do it. You don't even think about it. And I want to make the argument here that your habits right now, your body is 100% a result of your default habits, 100%. And what you need to do is to reprogram those habits. And it's hard because it takes repetitions to do it before it becomes natural, just like driving a car, learning how to play tennis or anything else you've done. Getting in shape, it seems like it should be easier than playing tennis. Playing tennis is so easy or driving cars so easy, to understand that if you play tennis and drive a car. But getting in shape, people have this disconnect. And they don't see it the same way. But it is the same. You're learning how to do certain things in the moment, regardless of the external circumstances. Just like if you're driving and it starts raining, you don't freak out. You adjust, you slow down, you turn on the wipers, and you're more vigilant. But you don't stop driving. But with that loss, what happens, people get thrown off. off and then they just quit. And if you've quit, you know what I'm saying is true. And so what makes coaching so effective is that we work through that with you until you are reprogrammed as a fitter person with habits that you do default. And it's tricky. That's the tricky part about this. And that's where I'm an expert, by the way. I wanna give you an example before I wrap this up. At a client, Chad, shout out to you if you're listening. Achieve great results with us still in the process of working with us. He's lost over 20 pounds. When he first started going to the gym, he does not like going to the gym or did not. 'Cause now he's Chad 2.0, which is our nickname for him. He didn't like going to the gym. So what he did was he started, he went to the gym and sat in the massage chairs. And if I weren't the coach, I am today and understand behavior change. I would have said, what are you doing sitting in the massage chair? You lazy bastard? Get your ass in the gym and go get a workout. But that's not what I did because I knew that was not the right thing to do. I said, you know what? I love it. Keep doing it. But what ended up happening? He would go there. He would do the massage chair. And he was like, man, I'm already here. Might as well start working out. And guess what? Now he skips the massage chair. He just goes and works out. But if I would have beat him over the head and did some David Goggins, you know, performative drill sergeant coaching, right? Which isn't really coaching. He might not have made that shift. He might have said, you know what? I hate working out. I'd rather sit in the massage chair. Ted's kind of an ass. And like that's, you know, I'm not that person. So I'm gonna quit. But he didn't do that because I didn't do that. But we worked together and it ended up shifting on its own. But it took time and it didn't look the way that someone from the outside might agree with. So like, why didn't you tell him to go work out and get out of that massage chair? It's like, 'cause I know what I'm doing. That's why I understand behavior change. I understand human psychology. Of course, not, you know, I'm not, no, I might be HD in it, but I'll tell you, we get people to consistently shift who they are and we know how to do that. So if you feel like you have the information, but you just, for whatever reason, you're not sure why, you can't make the shift to be more consistent and walk this in. It's a behavioral change issue and I can help you with it. So I hope you got out a lot out of this episode. I hope you have a better idea of how to be successful with this because ultimately being in shape is not about, hey, I'm an out of shape guy who eats too much and likes desserts and has too much alcohol and how can I lose some weight and get back in shape? It's ultimately about being the person becoming the person who's identity shifts in a way where I can't, I's harder for me to skip workouts now. It's harder for me to skip workouts than it is to get myself to the gym because skipping the gym is not in alignment with who I believe myself to be anymore. And I didn't do it by looking in the mirror and doing like what do you call them, the affirmations. I did it through repetitions of showing up in the gym and that's how Chad did it, that's how our clients do it or struggling with this in particular. Or if you're getting injured, right, that's another thing. So that's what I wanna leave you with. Kick some serious ass this year and believe that you this can be done because it can. And again, if you are struggling with it, whether it's like what I talked about where you're having trouble with consistency or you're having trouble because you keep getting injured because you push too hard, let's have a conversation and see if it makes sense to work together. Go crush it, have a great year and talk to you soon.