(Adapted from our DadBod email newsletter)
Is 2020 the year we take control of our health and our body, lose the beer gut, and restore the energy we had when we were on the football field under those Friday night lights?
Or, are we just going to get older, fatter, and unhappier?
Hold that thought for a second…..
It’s been some time since you last heard from me, and I have a good reason for that – I’ve been studying, reading, and experimenting.
See, like you, I don’t have a lot of free time. Between my 9-5 job, Ageless, my family, and a handful of other obligations, I just don’t have the time to spend an hour or two in the gym every day like I did when I was twenty. Unfortunately, I have these little things called responsibilities now.
Normally that wouldn’t be an issue except for the fact that I like having abs, and if I don’t exercise, I feel like dogshit. So like you I have a problem → I don’t have a lot of time for the gym, but I like how the gym makes me look and feel.
So, I’ve spent the last 6 months reading, researching, and experimenting with what we call in the pharmacy world the minimum effective dose. Said in another way- How can I get the benefits of exercise with as little exercise as possible?
For the last decade, the gurus said HIIT, high-intensity interval training, was the answer. Thirty minutes of HIIT per day was equivalent of like 90 minutes of traditional cardio – burn fat, gain muscle, and get ripped. P90x, Tabata, and even a little Crossfit. We even offered HIIT-style classes at Ageless – Flow.
However, what a decade of results has shown is that if you only perform HIIT workouts you’ll probably get injured or burnt out. It’s like the Atkin’s Diet. It works great, but rarely can one sustain.
Think about it for a second.
Let’s say you’re forty years old and about 40lbs overweight, tipping the scales at 242lbs. You haven’t exercised seriously since you were in your early twenties. Of course, you do some physical labor around the house and at work, but no squats, deadlifts, pushups, or any other form of exercise. Your cardio consists of pushing the lawnmower and going up and down your basement steps.
One day you’re like screw it. Billy Blanks is on the TV looking shredded as hell, and you make an impulse purchase. Congratulations, your Tae-Bo DVDs are in the mail. Get out your sweatband and short shorts because Billy is going to get you that twenty-year-old body back baby. Honey, grab me a pair of speedos for our next vacation. Daddy is baaackkkk!
But wait a minute… You don’t have the testosterone levels you did at 20. So, now after work, you hop in the car and drive to the nearest supplement store. The jacked twenty-year-old behind the counter that’s obviously on more than just supplements (but you ignore that fact because you’re too excited about your workout with Billy) greets you with a big hello. Excited because you see a little bit of your younger self in him, you tell him all about your plan to regain control of your body. Before you know, you just dropped $400 on test boosters, protein, creatine, and preworkout. There’s goes little Bobby’s college tuition.
Your first Tae-bo workout is about as bad as you expected. There are squats, jumps, pushups, lunges, and a handful of other exercises that make your muscles, some you didn’t even know you had, scream. 5 minutes into the workout, you’re sweating like a pig. By the end of it, it looks like you just got out of the shower. You’re now questioning your sanity.
But, you just spent $400 on supplements, so you keep at it, persevering through one painful workout after another.
The good news is that the scale is dropping like crazy. It’s only been two weeks, and you’ve already dropped 20 pounds.
Your success numbs the pain until IT happens.
At first, you noticed your knees a little sore after the first week of workouts. You shake it off with a little Advil – that’s what happens when a 240lb man jumps and lands on forty-year-old knees 50 times in a 30-minute workout.
Then it’s your back. That beer gut is really putting a strain on it during your pushups and planks. The pain lingers a little longer than the knee pain so you pop a few more Advil.
And then IT happens… IT could be a variety of injuries – an ACL or MCL tear, a back that goes out, a hip that doesn’t allow you to bend over, a shoulder that doesn’t allow you to raise your arm over your head, etc..
It doesn’t matter what IT is specifically. The only thing that matters is IT stops you from working out for a significant period of time, doctor’s orders.
Son of a bitch. There goes the remote, right at Billy’s beautiful bald head.
4 weeks later you’re still laid up on the couch watching reruns of Gold Rush. Not only have you regained all the weight you lost, but you added a few extra pounds because now you can’t even do the normal things you did before you started doing Tae-Bo.
Screw exercise. Hand me another Bud Light.
Sound familiar?
It should because I see it happen all the time. In fact, I’ve done it to myself multiple times. Just replace Tae-Bo with whatever the new HIIT fad is, and I guarantee you’ll see high drop-out rates.
In fact, that’s why gym retention rates are as dismal as they are. We take a deconditioned person, someone who has literally not done more than 15 minutes of exercise in ALL of last year, and we throw him into HIIT workouts, where 240lbs of man beef is jumping, flopping, and lunging in every conceivable way as fast as he can move. That makes my joints hurt just thinking about it.
That’s like a college basketball coach coming up to me, and saying, “T.J., I know you haven’t played competitive basketball for 20 years but come play on our team. Practice starts tomorrow.” Imagine how that would go. Not only would I get embarrassed, but I’m pretty sure I’d tear 2 ACL’s by the end of the first week of practice.
But why do we do it then?
Because the guys we see doing it in the ads are the guys we want to look like, and we completely ignore the fact that they’re probably juicing and/or they may not have even used that same method they’re promoting to look like they do.
In short, we fall in love with the muscles we don’t have.
But there has to be a better, smarter way that doesn’t require us to kill ourselves in a HIIT class, spend 2 hours in the gym 7 days per week, or starve ourselves. Right?
I think so too.. So that’s why I’ve spent the last 6 months reading books by the legendary bodybuilding trainer Stuart McRoberts, a Russian strength coach named Pavel who brought the kettlebell to the U.S, a former collegiate All-American turned strength coach Dan John, running coach Jack Daniels, runner turned coach Steve Magness, a guy that can run for 20+ miles and still deadlift over 600lbs Alex Viada, and an eccentric fat loss and hypertrophy researcher named Lyle McDonald.
In the next email, I’m going to lay out my plan for 2020 – 30-minute workouts done daily that gets results without making me walk around like I’m an arthritic 90-year-old.
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