Episode 19: When to Deload Your Workouts
Deloading your workouts allows your body to catch up on recovery while resensitizing your muscles to training. It can also help relieve the symptoms of overtraining and reduce your risk of injury.
Deloading your workouts allows your body to catch up on recovery while resensitizing your muscles to training. It can also help relieve the symptoms of overtraining and reduce your risk of injury.
Hey there 👋 I'm personal trainer Jayd Harrison, and in this episode, I explain the concept of 'deloading,' which is a period of training where you reduce the intensity of your workouts to prevent over-training syndrome.
Over-training syndrome occurs when your body cannot keep up with the damage caused by intense workouts, which leads to slower recovery, decreased performance, and a higher risk of injury.
I cover how to tell when your body needs a deload period by noticing the signs of over-training, which include:
recurring aches and pains
decreased performance during workouts or competitions
feeling unmotivated to train
feeling like you need more sleep or rest than usual
tightness in the muscles that doesn’t seem to get better
an erratic appetite (sometimes you feel super hungry, other times you may have no appetite at all)
trouble sleeping (even though you feel tired all the time)
If you start to notice the signs of overtraining, consider planning a deload period in your training by reducing your workout intensity by 40-50%. You can even take a week off from training altogether (or longer, depending on the severity of your overtraining syndrome, you may need as long as a month to deload. This allows your body to heal and become resensitized to the training stimulus, leading to better gains in the long run.
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Jayd (00:00):
After you have added on so much weight and so much weight and so much weight and so much volume, so much volume, so much volume, you're going to reach a tipping point. Most of us reach a tipping point where your body just cannot keep up with the amount of damage that you're doing in your workouts, and when you reach that point, then your body is going to get slower at recovering and you're going to have a harder time recovering and your body's going to start to exhibit a lot of these other symptoms that are usually associated with over training syndrome.
(00:36)
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I am Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a health coach and personal trainer and I've created this podcast to help you to build a body that you love and live a healthier lifestyle. In this episode, we're going to talk about how to notice when your body's giving you signs that it's time to deload or when you are getting into some over-training syndrome territory. We're also going to talk about how to deload and things that you can do to prevent your body from needing to deload in the first place. Now, if you do any kind of intense exercise like lifting heavy weights or doing some kind of a sport, it's likely that at some point you're going to need to deload and you may start to develop some symptoms of over-training or overreaching. It happens to everybody, so it's a totally normal thing, but you want to be prepared for how to respond to it correctly so that you don't over exhaust your body and put yourself at an increased risk of injury. And before we get started, make sure to hit the follow button and subscribe wherever you're listening to or watching this podcast. And also keep in mind that I have an email newsletter that you can join at my website that's jd gaines.com. This email newsletter will give you notifications of when new podcast episodes drop, as well as other things that are going on in my community. You can sign up for that in the link that's in the show notes. Now without further ado, let's get started on the episode.
(02:07)
Okay. We do need to talk about deloading. Not everybody has to deload. It's not something that everybody has to do, but it is a thing to be aware of. If you spend time with people who train hard, who lift heavy weights, you'll probably hear the term deload where they'll be like, you ask them what are they training today? And they might be like, well, I'm on a deload week or I'm deloading right now. And a deload is a planned period of time where you are lifting or you're doing your training program at a reduced intensity or reduced volume, and the point of the deload is to give your body some time to catch up on healing essentially. So a deload might occur anywhere between every four and six weeks to just whenever you feel like it, but it's a planned period of time that you are reducing your volume, reducing your intensity.
(03:04)
A general rule of thumb, you can reduce the intensity or whatever it is that you're doing by 40 to 50% or even more. Some people will take an entire week off of lifting altogether when they deload. There's no one size fits all of how you should deload, just like there's no one size fits all question when it comes to when or how often you should deload, but it is something that you want to keep in your back pocket as an option for yourself if you start to notice your body showing symptoms of overreaching, non-functional overreaching I should say, or if you suspect that you might be kind of venturing into some over-training territory. So that's in essence what a deload is. It's a planned period of time where you're still working out. Maybe if you are working out, you're going to reduce the intensity by 40 to 50% or even more and you're just can still work out, but you're just not pushing yourself because the priority during a deload period is to allow your body to catch up on the rest and the recovery that it's maybe not been able to keep up with over the course of your training block.
(04:26)
Okay, so that's kind of an essence what a deload is. Does that make sense? Some coaches will plan deload periods in their training programs where they'll say they have your program that you train continuously for four to six weeks progressively overloading, and then at week five or at week seven, they'll plan a deload where you will reduce intensity in your workouts for that week or you might not lift at all and you might do some mobility or some recovery type workouts during that week. Other coaches or during other programs, a deload would be recommended, not necessarily by terms of how many weeks have you been training, but more along the lines of how does your body feel. There's certain symptoms that your body will exhibit when it's time to deload, when you are approaching non what's called non-functional overreaching. So in order to get stronger over time, we need to overreach.
(05:35)
We need to constantly be giving our muscles more load than what they're used to and push them to do more than what they currently can. And when we push our bodies with heavier weight or higher volume than what they're used to, that triggers the adaptations in the body to get stronger. So it's like we're doing a little bit of damage to the body when we're working out and we're overreaching in our workouts by pushing with more weight or more volume. We create microscopic tears along the muscle tissue and also, but our ligaments also receive some damage and other tissues also receive some damage. As long as you are able to balance out the amount of damage that you do to your body and your workouts with adequate rest, then you shouldn't really need to deload. Some people never deload and those are the people who maybe only workout two or three times a week where they're lifting only two or three times a week.
(06:38)
They're getting for every week like four rest days, three or four rest days, and for them, that's long enough for their bodies to recover and repair the damage that's done during their workouts. But for people who are on more frequent training programs where they are working out five, six days a week, sometimes even four days a week, you can need a deload with only one or two rest days per week after you have added on so much weight and so much weight and so much weight and so much volume, so much volume, so much volume, you're going to reach a tipping point. Most of us reach a tipping point where your body just cannot keep up with the amount of damage that you're doing in your workouts, and when you reach that point, then your body is going to get slower at recovering and you're going to have a harder time recovering and your body's going to start to exhibit a lot of these other symptoms that are usually associated with over-training syndrome.
(07:36)
So or when it's time for you to deload, here are some of the symptoms of that. One is you get recurring aches and pains, especially in your joints if you are getting all these little minor injuries and it just keeps popping up. It's like one thing right after another, or you have this nagging little injury that just keeps happening again and again and again and again. These are signs that either your training program itself is too much load for your body or if you have been doing that and now all of a sudden if you've been doing that training program and it was fine for a couple of months and then all of a sudden you're having trouble recovering, it may be time for you to do a deload. If you notice a decreased performance in the gym, all other factors are accounted for. Nothing else has changed, but you're all of a sudden just having a really hard time moving the bar or adding weight to the bar and increasing your performance in that sense, then that may be a sign that your body is having a really hard time keeping up with the load of your workouts.
(08:43)
If you are suddenly starting to feel really unmotivated to train, you just really don't want to do your workouts or you start dreading doing your workouts again, nothing's really changed. You've been following your program, you've been eating and just all of a sudden you're just like, I just don't want to do this anymore. That can be a sign that you're overreaching and you're entering into what we call non-functional overreaching zone. So we need a little bit of overreaching just to get the muscles to adapt, but there comes a point where it's not functional anymore because your body can't keep up with it. If you feel like you need more rest and you feel like you need to nap all the time or a lot more than you usually do, this is also a sign that your body is entering into that non-functional overreaching zone or that you might need to deload if you have this ongoing tightness in the muscles and it's just like no matter what you do, you cannot get them to relax and you can't get them to loosen up.
(09:46)
This can be a sign of inflammation that just isn't going away in your body, that inflammation isn't going down. That's a sign of overtraining and overreaching, and you may need to deload. Your appetite might also be suppressed. So even though your output has the same, and maybe in the beginning of your program you were eating a lot and you had a lot of an appetite, you were growing so much muscle. When you start to enter into that non-functional over training zone, you often will experience a drop in your appetite along with other things, a drop in your libido. Again, just feeling really tired. A lot of people report that they just feel heavy, especially in their legs. They just feel really, really heavy, just like, oh my God, just moving, just walking just feels so hard. That's another sign. And then another sign of over-training or entering to that non-functional overreaching where you may need to deload.
(10:52)
Another sign is trouble sleeping. So if you feel tired all the time, but you have trouble getting to sleep or you have trouble staying asleep or you have trouble getting restful sleep, all of these are signs that your body is struggling to keep up with the amount of damage that you're doing to it in your workouts. Again, I want to just make super clear, we need to give our muscles more than what they're used to in order to stimulate growth, in order to stimulate strength gains. And as long as you're able to adequately balance that out with rest because it's when you're resting that your body actually rebuilds the tissue and makes it stronger. But if you're not balanced out with adequate rest, then you can start to venture into that non-functional overreaching and that non-functional overreaching is when you're pushing yourself and you're kicking your ass in the workouts or you're getting your ass kicked in the workouts and it's not actually doing your body any because you're not actually doing the repairs, what makes you stronger?
(11:58)
It's the repairs that make you stronger. It doesn't matter how hard you push yourself in the gym if you cannot adequately balance that out with proper rest. So again, for athletes who are only working out two or three days a week with resistance training and then they're getting three or four days of rest every week, they rarely need to deload because that's plenty of rest for them. So they're balancing out the effort that they're putting in the gym with adequate rest. But for the people who are working out four or five, six days a week, that's where after weeks or months of training, you can start to exhibit these symptoms of overreaching, non-functional overreaching, or even further into over-training syndrome, which can have many long-term negative effects, negative effects on your gains and on your health. One thing that I didn't mention before is mood instability is a big part of over training, irritability, agitation, just not having a lot, not having a lot of patience, just feeling really irritable if you're a person who menstruates, sometimes over training can feel like that irritability right before you're going to start your period or when you're on your period.
(13:19)
That just heightened just like everything is just too much. That's something that you can also experience when you are in that non-functional overreaching or if you are actually fully in over training syndrome. Another thing that also tends to accompany over training is what's called bradycardia. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. I've never actually heard the word spoken out loud. I've only ever read it. Bradycardia, Brady, bradycardia, hold on. Let me see. That's different from what I thought. Bradycardia. So bradycardia is when your resting heart rate is super low, so a normal resting heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, and if you resting, heart rate is normally somewhere between 60 and 100 beats per minute, but then you're getting all these other symptoms of over-training syndrome, and then your resting heart rate is also really, really low. This is another sign that you could be over-training.
(14:18)
Another sign is tachycardia, which is when your heart rate is higher than 100 beats per minute. If your heart rate is doing something different from what it normally does, then that can be a sign that you're in over-training syndrome. The thing about over-training syndrome is it's not really something that someone can diagnose in the moment. It's usually something that's diagnosed after you have actually rested after a period of time, either a week, two weeks to a month of resting and then your symptoms go away. That looking back, you can get diagnosed with, oh yeah, you had over-training syndrome, lack of mental concentration as well. There's cognitive effects to over-training syndrome, and we'll talk a little bit more about the mechanics of what might be going on in over-training syndrome and why it affects us in these ways. But there's cognitive effects related to feeling irritable suffering, depression, agitation, but also lack of mental concentration.
(15:27)
So taken altogether, if you are feeling like shit in your workouts and you're eating the way that you should be, or at least you're trying to follow your macros, you're eating the amount of calories that you should be eating and nothing has changed. First of all, you do want to make sure that you check with your doctor to rule out any kind of illness, particularly any kind of thyroid illness because thyroid illnesses can cause these symptoms as well. So you want to of course get your blood drawn and get tested. That's always kind of like best practices is checked with a doctor and gets some blood tests, but if everything comes back normal and there's no other underlying issue, and you also know, Hey, you know what? I actually have been training pretty hard for the last at least four weeks and nothing else has changed and I'm getting all of these symptoms. Why don't I take a week to deload? And you try that, just give yourself a week. Sometimes you're going to need longer, though. Some athletes, especially depending on how deep into over-training syndrome you are, some athletes need to take as much as a month off, right?
(16:41)
Mundo Dia, right? We know him as Diabolic Dia Mundo Fitness, that was his name back when we first started on Twitch, but Dia, I believe it was last year, took an entire month off of lifting because he was just feeling really fucked up. He was getting a lot of recurring aches and pains, and I believe it was his back got really fucked up or something, and so he just took an entire and he was burned out. Yeah, burnout is another word for a deload, which we can get into other terms for it or over-training, sorry, burnout is another word for over-training or that's commonly used. But yeah, so he ended up just taking an entire month off from lifting and just did yoga. Just hung out and he said it was just the best thing that he could do for his gains, and then when he came back to lifting, everything felt so much better and he started also making gains again, because this is one of the things that's another thing that really is a big red flag for me is you slow down in progress that decrease in performance.
(17:57)
You might notice that, oh, I was able to add on more weight pretty consistently or do more reps pretty consistently, and all of a sudden I am just struggling just to get one more rep and I'm struggling even to keep up with what I was doing before. Or you may notice, and this is really important why I say take video of your lifts and analyze them during your workouts or after your workouts. If you start notice, you're getting little technique errors that normally you would never do. You're making technique errors that are not out of character. Why am I doing that? That's so weird that I started doing that. That's a performance, that's a dip in performance, and that can be one of those signs. So when you take all of these things together, if you suspect that you are either in that non-functional overreaching zone or in the more extreme you have over training syndrome, which is more of like a medical diagnosis, it's a good idea to plan a deload period for yourself.
(19:04)
You'll hear over training called many, many things. It's not something that has been studied. I mean there are studies, but it's not something that's been as extensively studied as maybe it should be, and it is such a hard thing to study because some of many of the symptoms are so subjective, and again, it's something that can usually only be diagnosed after the fact because if you rest and you take a deload and then you get better, then it's like, oh, yeah, that was over training syndrome. But you might also hear this referred to as burnout. Burnout is a big thing. I've heard it called burnout staleness. I feel stale. You might hear that. Failure adaptation is another term that's a lot of times used under recovery training, stress syndrome, and chronic fatigue. These are all other terms that mean basically kind of the same thing.
(20:08)
I do want to say, if you do start to suspect that you're developing over-training syndrome or non-functional overreaching, please don't beat yourself up over this. This is something that is so, so common, which is why so many coaches just go ahead and program deload weeks into their programs for their athletes. It's something that I would say, I don't know, a single lifter who lifts more than three days a week who hasn't at one point or another experienced what they might call burnout. So common for example, there was one study that found nonfunctional overtraining happened in roughly 60% of elite male and female runners. It's more likely to happen with elite runners than it is with non elite runners, but it is very pretty common. 33% in non-elite female runners. There was another survey that found 35% of adolescent swimmers had been overtrained at least once.
(21:16)
You know that other terms staleness estimates of staleness were reported five to 30% of swimmers over the course of a season. 50% of elite British elite athletes reported at least once in their careers the duration of your over-training, non-functional overreaching or over-training syndrome really varies. You can take a deload week off, but sometimes that's not always going to be enough for these British athletes. Their episodes, they averaged two episodes over the course of their careers lasting about four weeks. So if you feel like, oh, damn, I feel like what's going on, I feel like shit, my lifts are feeling shitty, I'm tired, I'm cranky. It's so easy to internalize that and interpret it as I'm doing something wrong. You're not doing anything wrong. It's just part of the life lifecycle. Remember, just like everything else, your fitness has different seasons. It's not reasonable to expect your body to be able to give the exact same output 24 7, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, okay?
(22:36)
There's going to be seasons where you're going to need to step back in your intensity because remember, your workouts are only going to benefit you as much as you can recover from them, but sometimes you don't know that you're overreaching until you've overreached. That's the other thing to keep in mind. It's hard to prevent. It is very hard to prevent. You can preemptively handle it if you do say for yourself, oh, I'm going to deload every four to six weeks. I'm going to take a deload week, depending on the intensity and the volume of your program, but that's not always going to be, not going to be 100% surefire way to prevent over-training or overreaching, non-functional overreaching. What a lot of coaches that I have worked with have said is they go by, your body will tell you when it's time to deload, so train according to your program, continue to progressively overload according to your program.
(23:37)
If you're not following a written program, just continue to progressively overload within reason, adding between 10 and 20% to your workload at a time. Safest thing to do is to go by a rule of two. If you can do the same exercise with the same weight and the same number of reps two times in a row, then it's time to progress. If you progress that way, that's a nice way to be a little bit more gradual, which can help to prevent you going into non-functional overreaching. It's just enough overreaching to give your body a stimulus. These are just rules of thumb that you can follow. Again, it's not going to 100% prevent you from needing a deload week, but if you start to notice yourself exhibiting those symptoms that we talked about earlier and you know that you've been training for four to six weeks pretty consistently and nothing else has changed, you've ruled out any underlying illness that might be happening, then it may be time to deload.
(24:40)
Another symptom that we didn't talk about before, but it is something that is observed in non functionally overtrained or overreached athletes is if you find that you are getting sick a lot, this is a big thing. Upper respiratory illnesses are more likely to occur when you are in that non-functional overreaching zone, so that's something that if you're like, damn, I'm sick again, you keep getting this. Upper respiratory infections is a really common thing, but again, the evidence is not super definitive in terms of the study showing that, yeah, this is what happens, but it's not uncommon for that to occur as well aside from needing to deload because you've just been pushing, pushing, pushing in your training program maybe too long, too much for too long. There are other things that can trigger over training syndrome, and I think it's worthwhile keeping these things in mind because I mean, you still probably should take a deload if you end up in Overtraining syndrome. If you end up overreaching, it's probably best practices to plan a deload anyway, but sometimes other things can trigger it beyond just, well, your program is too much and you've been doing it for too long.
(26:06)
Again, if you increase your training load too fast without adequate recovery, that can cause you to enter into Overtraining syndrome. So say your coach gives you a program and you're supposed to be just gradually increasing the percentage of the weight over time or the gradually increasing the number of reps that you're doing over time, and then you decide to go off program one day and test your PRS or something. This could potentially cause you to go over what your body can recover from, and you can put yourself into over-training syndrome, so then at that point, you're going to have a harder time catching up with the recovery that's needed from your workouts. Sometimes the monotony of training, if you've had the exact same program for a really long time and you've progressively overloaded, you've added more reps, you've added more sets, you've added more, you've added more weight over time, and you just haven't changed anything about your program, that can also overtrain you too just by the sheer monotony of it.
(27:10)
If you are a competitor, if you're an athlete and you compete in some way, if you have too many competitions, that can cause you to go into Overtraining syndrome because when you're in competition, you're giving it all you got, right? You're given 110%. Well, if you're given 110%, then you need to recover 110%, but if you've got competition after competition, after competition with not enough recovery time for you to recover and heal from the damage that your body sustains during those competitions, then you put yourself at risk of developing over training syndrome, sleep disturbances, I see this a lot with my athletes who just had kids. If you had a baby, if your wife just had a baby, you just adopted a baby. If you just adopted a puppy or I don't know, for some reason you're just not sleeping, and this is where it can become like a chicken and the egg kind of thing.
(28:04)
The sleep disturbances can cause over-training, which can make it harder for you to sleep, which just continues, but that can make it harder for you to recover from your workouts. Stresses outside of your workouts like personal life stresses, emotional stresses, any kind of stressor at work, these put you at. This makes it harder for your body to recover from your workouts. So if you push yourself really, really hard in your workouts and you're also stress the fuck out at work or you're going through a breakup or a divorce or your kid is sick, these extra stressors make it harder for you to recover and put you at risk of developing Overtraining syndrome. It becomes easier to overreach, non functionally overreach. If you've had previous illness, this is like what we talked about a couple weeks ago on the podcast, coming back to training after being sick.
(29:00)
You want to do what I call a reload, which is like a deload week, but you're coming back into training after being sick. If you hit the gym too hard, too much intensity, too much volume after you've been sick, you can risk putting yourself into that non-functional overreaching or over-training syndrome, altitude exposure. I have clients and besties who live in Colorado and Colorado is a mountain place and they'll go skiing or something and they'll try to keep their workouts that they do with me when they're at lower, closer to sea level, and then they come back from their trip just totally exhausted because the altitude exposure, the higher you are up in the atmosphere, the harder your workouts are going to be, the harder it's going to be for you to recover from your workouts. A heat injury episode also makes it harder for you to recover, and then also if you have an injury of some type, which the authors of the article that I'm referencing here that I'm pulling a lot of this information from, listed this symptom as, or this trigger as a severe bunk.
(30:13)
If you suffer a severe bunk, if you get hit on the head or you get injured and you have an injury that your body is healing, remember your body's process for building muscle is the healing process. So if you get a severe bonk, if you get hit in the head, if you get an injury, if you get cut, if you get a huge bruise, if you end up in a car accident and there's some kind of other trauma done to your body, it's hard to recover from your workout. So just all of these will necessitate you reducing your workload, reducing the volume, the intensity of your workouts. It's just going to make it harder for you to recover. Note to self, avoid bonks. I'm serious. That's the term they use. It's so funny. Let me pull it up here. This is the study that I'm pulling this information from. Really good study. It's a survey diagnosed with bonk induced ey.
(31:14)
This maybe laugh was reading it like 5:00 AM this morning here, Izzy, I'm not making it up. Potential triggers of over-training syndrome, increased training load without adequate recovery, monotony of training, excessive number of competitions, severe bunk. It's amazing, but apparently this, it comes from this study prevention diagnosis, treatment of overtraining syndrome. I couldn't actually read the full study because I'd have to pay for it and I didn't want to pay for it. I can read the abstract, but I kind of want to pay for it so that I can see the use of bon in a scientific paper. Thankfully, I've only suffered a moderate bonk. Isn't that so funny, Sai, have you ever seen the word bonk used in a scientific paper? So either these people, anytime I see concussion now I'm just replacing it with severe bonk.
(32:11)
Yeah, dude, isn't that so funny? So cute. I love scientists. I don't think I've ever suffered a severe bonk myself. Yeah, concussion or just any kind of trauma, body trauma, whatever. So that's like over training syndrome. What causes it? How to notice if you are over training. Again, it can't really be diagnosed until after the fact, but let's talk about what to do if you do suspect like, Hey, I might be overreaching non functionally, or I might be actually an over training syndrome. Then what you want to do is you want to plan a deload, and a deload can be anywhere between one week to four weeks. It depends on how intense the overtraining syndrome is or how overreached you are. Basically, you deload until your symptoms get better. In general, like a rule of thumb is a global load reduction, global load reduction, meaning overall reduction of the intensity or the energy output.
(33:21)
I talk a lot about deload in terms of weight training, but deload can be also from running or whatever your sport is overall, you want to bring the intensity, bring your energy output down 40 to 50%, sometimes even more. Sometimes you may want to take an entire week off of training altogether or a month off of training altogether. A deload is a good time to try other types of training to focus on mobility work. You could try yoga just as long as it's not a really intense type of yoga because these days they've got yoga classes that are basically strength training classes. You want to avoid that kind of thing. You want to avoid pushing your body. That's the name of the deal, name of the game, that's the name of the game. That's the deal. You want to avoid stressing your body, so everything that you do during your deload time should be more about let's move.
(34:17)
Let's get some blood flow. Let's just work on mobility. Let's just keep things moving, but not stress. So we don't want to put stress on the body during this time. Let's see if you don't, you just continue to push yourself, push yourself, push yourself, push yourself. You may think, oh, I'm going to lose all my gains if I do a deload, I can't possibly stop lifting this heavy or I'm going to just lose everything or I'm going to get all the fat back. The opposite is true, especially if you've noticed a reduction or a decrease in your performance. If you're having a hard time executing your lifts or executing your sport with good technique, you're getting sloppy or you're just having a hard time continuing to add on more and more and more and more. Your body probably needs that time not only to heal, but to become sensitive to the training again by taking some time off, either by reducing the intensity of your training, you still do your workouts, but you do at a reduced intensity or you take completely off when you come back to your workout program, when you come back to your training program, your body is going to be resensitized to the stimulus, so you will be able to start making gains again, and if you don't take that time off, if you don't do that deload, you're just not going to make those gains.
(35:42)
So it's like the difference between like, oh, without a deload, you're just going to plateau and probably even see a reduction because when you are in Overtraining syndrome, your body goes from being anabolic. You may have been anabolic and you're going to be more catabolic at that point, meaning there's going to be more breaking down of tissue that's happening in your body than there is building up of tissue, and so you may reach a point where your body starts actually metabolizing the protein in your muscles because it's not able to keep up with the recovery that's going on. So by not deloading or by just continuing to overtrain and over push yourself, you're actually taking your gains and just pouring them out. You're sacrificing gains for that, so it is worthwhile. And then there's other things that can result. Not only will you maybe plateau in your progress, but you also increase the risk of injury.
(36:43)
Again, your body is not able to keep up with the damage that you're doing to your body, and this can lead to serious injury, especially as your form and your technique gets sloppier and sloppier. That's where ACL tears happen. That's where sprains happen. So as you have a harder time keeping up with the recovery and your performance is going down, you're just increasing your risk of injury little bit by little bit, which ultimately if you get injured, then you can't train at all. You might suffer an injury so bad that you have to completely get out of training for however long it takes you, especially if you end up having to have surgery that's going to take you out of training for a really long time, so that's going to cause you to lose more gains than anything. So either you give your body the rest that it needs or it is going to force that rest on you.
(37:44)
So for my boys and girls, then thems who like to chase the pump ego lift or try to prove how much of a badass they are in their workouts, just watch out. That's not training smart. You can only do that for so long, so you want to make sure you're managing your energy and be ready to deload when your body starts to give these signs that it's like, okay, we're overreaching. There's nothing wrong with taking a deload. It's very, very normal. It's what most experienced lifters end up having to do. It's what most elite athletes end up having to do, and by planning deloads, you can help to prevent your body from getting into over-training syndrome and also by just being more intentional and smart about your training and how you schedule your energy output when you're planning out your workout program, making sure that you can work out six days a week, but not every one of those days is going to be a heavy day or a high intensity day or high volume day.
(38:52)
Some of those days are going to be more recovery like days. Some of those days are going to have to be not as energy intensive. If you're giving 100% on all six days of the week that you're working out, then you're probably going to reach over training much sooner. Then if you were just following a three or four days a week, maybe five days a week training program where you have two or three days of rest each week, your body will have an easier time recovering from that and you'll be less likely to need to over or you would be less likely to need to deload. So it's just a matter of the more intense, the more frequent you train, the more frequently you're probably going to need to. Deload is what I would say is a general rule of thumb.
(39:44)
Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. If you would like to hang out with me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, just go to twitch.tv/jaydigains and hit the follow button. If you'd like to join my Coaching Corner Discord community to get even more content and interact with me when I'm not live, go to the link that is in the show notes. For more information on my training programs and other content, go to my website, jaydigains.com, where you can also sign up for my email newsletter. This newsletter will give you notifications when new episodes of the podcast drop and other announcements and coaching tips. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure to eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink some water, and prioritize your self-care.
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Episode 18: How to Get Your Friends & Family into the Gym
The most important thing you can do to influence your loved ones to start a fitness journey is to focus on your own fitness journey.
The most important thing you can do to influence your loved ones to start a fitness journey is to focus on your own fitness journey.
In today's episode, I share a conversation I had with my Twitch chat after one of my followers asked "How do I get my friends to go to the gym?"
No matter your best intentions, it's important to respect others' boundaries and consent.
I live by the motto "Be responsible for your own gains." This means focusing on your own journey and letting others make decisions for their own health.
Pressuring people to go to the gym could potentially harm your relationships and also push people away from wanting to get in shape. The best way to influence others is to live a healthy lifestyle and respect their autonomy.
With that said, in this discussion, we also go over some ways to invite someone to the gym without pressuring them or making them feel bad.
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Jayd (00:00):
When you're on a fitness journey, you need to be focused on your fitness journey. Don't be looking at other people and judging other people for not doing what you're doing. They have their own journey. Their path is their path. Their life is their life, and you have to respect their consent and their boundaries. Focus on you. Focus on, because here's the thing, you don't know who you are inspiring. When you do focus your energy inward and focus on what you have control and responsibility over, which is your path and your fitness. When you're just minding your goddamn business and just doing the thing, you actually are going to have a lot more influence over people than if you are approaching them trying to nudge, nudge, nudge consciously. Don't try to nudge people. Live your life, keep pursuing your fitness and the people who are receptive and who want that as well, they're going to see that and they're going to be inspired by it, and then when they're ready, they can come with questions.
(01:12)
Hey there. Welcome back to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you a conversation that I had with my Twitch chat when I was live on Twitch and one chatter asked the question, how do I get my friends or family into the gym? And the answer that I gave might surprise you, especially considering that I am a professional fitness influencer and content creator and personal trainer. I live by the saying, you are responsible for your own gains. Everyone is responsible for their own health journey. It's not really the responsibility of any one person to make another person take better care of themselves. And in fact, if you do try this approach of trying to manipulate somebody into getting in shape, you may actually be doing some more harm than good. So we talk about the essential mindset shift that you need to have as a fitness advocate if you really want to have that type of influence on the people that you love and you want to approach this in a way that respects consent and boundaries.
(02:21)
With that said, I do also give some actionable tips for how you can cultivate more influence in your circle and maybe open the door to one of your friends or family members to start taking better care of themselves, but it's a topic that is very sensitive and it takes a lot of emotional and social intelligence to do well. So today we're going to dive into that topic. Now, before we get into the episode, keep in mind that I do have an email newsletter and if you sign up for that, you will get notified every time that there's a new podcast episode that goes live. You'll also get notified on new services and products that I come out with, so make sure to check that out. That's at jaydigains.com. So now let's get into the episode.
(03:20)
I know you can't make anyone go to the gym, but how do you encourage friends and clients to go? I'm going to just say that I can only speak from my personal point of view and ethics. Consent is everything. To me, consent is a really important core value. It's like at the bedrock of everything that I do. I'm never ever trying to just make someone do something that they don't already want to do, even if it's something they like that's better for them. At the end of the day, I respect people's ability to be grown ass adults and make decisions for themselves. What I can do is make what I see as the right choice or the better choice, more accessible, and if they want to make that choice, then I can help them make that choice and I can help them to build structures into their lives that make it easier for them to make those choices.
(04:13)
But you cannot, if you are really, really concerned with making another person do anything, my encouragement would be to redirect that back towards yourself. Are and you alone are responsible for you. Everybody else is only responsible for themselves because if you are in a space in your relationships where you're constantly trying to influence or manipulate someone, they will feel that energy and they will resent it unless they've consented and specifically asked for it, but you should not be trying to manipulate anybody even if it's for their own good. You should not be trying to manipulate someone to go to the gym or to eat a certain way because at the end of the day, you're not in their head, you're not in their body. You don't know what their life is like and what likely you'll end up doing is causing more harm because a lot of times when people are trying to manipulate people or influence them, what you end up doing is you end up piling on more frustration and shame because you don't know what that person is going through and you don't know what they've tried in the past.
(05:22)
The best that you can do is live your best life and set an example of self-love and self-responsibility and that might inspire them, and if you are not pushing stuff onto them, you actually make yourself more of a trustworthy source that when if and when they're ready to make that change, they'll actually be more likely to come to you for advice or encouragement or resources, but if you're trying to push it on them all the time, they're going to actually shut you out and you may actually be pushing them further away from the thing that you're trying to influence them to do. Respectfully, I think we all need to mind our own goddamn business.
(06:13)
I hate that shit. I do not like when someone is trying to manipulate me, even if it's for something that maybe is for my own good. You are responsible for your own gains and they are responsible for their own gains and you have to respect other people's consent. You have to respect other people's autonomy, and if you don't, then you're actually doing the opposite of what you're trying to do. You're going to make them associate the thing that you're trying to influence with manipulation, with all these negative connotations, so they're going to be less likely to actually make the choice that you want them to make because especially from a trauma-informed perspective, I do a lot of work and I talk to a lot of counselors and a lot of trauma therapists, even therapists will tell you, you can't make other people do things. All you can do is be the example of what you think is good and try to be that person more and more every day, but it is overstepping to even.
(07:26)
It's overstepping to just look at a person and decide that you know better than them because a lot of unhealthy behaviors, what we consider as unhealthy behaviors, they're coping mechanisms dude, people who overeat, people who stress eat, people who undereat people who don't exercise, people who rot in bed over the weekend every weekend after work, it's not because they're fucking lazy, it's not because they're sloths or they're, I don't know, whatever judgment you want to pass on them. Most of the time, and this is what trauma therapists will tell you, this is what counselors will tell you most of the time, our behavior is governed by our nervous systems. These are coping mechanisms that these people need to regulate, and it's a big red flag for someone to look at another person and decide that they know better what they should be doing with their lives.
(08:29)
I'm a personal trainer, I'm a health professional, and I know what the recommendations are for if you want to live your healthiest. I put it as, hey, you get to choose how you live and I love you and I support you, whatever choices you make because you are in control of your life, but if you want to do this, if you want to feel more energized, if you want to feel stronger, if you want to have more energy, if you want to live independently for longer, these are some things that you could do, but you don't have to and I'm not going to judge you if you don't. I'm not going to judge you if you don't exercise, if you don't eat vegetables three times a day. Ultimately, you have reasons for why you live the way you live and I ultimately respect your autonomy.
(09:24)
I'm never going to try to influence someone without their consent, and that's just a hard line for me. Not trying to manipulate, just want what's best, just want to be there for them best way I can. If you want to really be there for them, then you need to actually be there for them and treat them like an adult. It's very easy from the outside to look at someone and diagnose all of their problems. It's very easy to look at them and be like, oh, they should X, Y, z, but you can't do that if you want to have a good relationship with them. If you actually want to have influence, that's the worst thing that you can do. The worst thing that you can do is approach a relationship with someone with a spirit of I know better. I know what's best for you than what I mean.
(10:12)
I'm telling you, if someone approaches me like that, I can smell that right away and it's an immediate red flag that's an immediate shutdown. That's immediately like, okay, I'm going to sign you to the outer circles. You're not coming anywhere close to my inner circle. You're not going to be a close friend to me if I can sense that you are trying to do that. If you approach me with this attitude of even if you think that you're hiding it well, no, people can sense that. People can sense when you're judging them and that's a good way to lose your influence over them. If you want to have influence, you have to let go of the power and you have to let go of the assumption that you know better than the other person. If you want to have influence, you have to let go of this idea that you're the hero of the story.
(11:03)
You're not, and if you want to be the hero of the story, then you're not going to have as much influence as you want. You have to approach the other person like they are the hero of the story. They are the one who makes the choices. You're just the guide you're there for when they ask questions and if they choose the path that you're an expert in, then they know that they can come to you and they trust you and you have a good connection with them. They'll ask you questions and they'll trust your planning and your advice that you give, but if you're constantly approaching them with this error of better than them, you're going to lose that position of you're not going to be able to be their guide. They're not going to go to you. This is why a lot of teenagers do not go to their parents by the way, because especially once you become a teenager, you get really allergic to your parents trying to treat you like they know better and a lot of times they do know better, but nobody likes to be talked down to.
(11:56)
Nobody likes to be looked down on and it's the people who empower other people and say, you are the one with all the choices and are the one. You have the power. It's those people who end up having more influence, so I think that that's something that we maybe all need to reflect on a little bit more. When you're on a fitness journey, you need to be focused on your fitness journey. Don't be looking at other people and judging other people for not doing what you're doing. They have their own journey. Their path is their path. Their life is their life and you have to respect their consent and their boundaries focus on you because here's the thing, you don't know who you are inspiring when you do focus your energy inward and focus on what you have control and responsibility over, which is your path and your fitness.
(12:54)
When you're just minding your goddamn business and just doing the thing, you actually are going to have a lot more influence over people than if you are kind of approaching them trying to kind of nudge, nudge, nudge consciously. Don't try to nudge people. Live your life, keep pursuing your fitness and the people who are receptive and who want that as well, they're going to see that and they're going to be inspired by it and then when they're ready, they can come with questions, but you really got to, I know it's exciting and I know you love all of the benefits that have come from getting in shape for yourself and you want that for your friends. You want that for your family and that's okay, but at the end of the day, you have to remind yourself of boundaries. You and you alone are responsible for your gains and they alone are responsible for their gains. You haven't tried it yet, but you do plan to encourage your younger brother to work out with you at least once a week. Be careful with that because I'm telling you right now, I've been doing this for over 10 years. You want to be very, very careful when you are encouraging or trying to influence the people in your life to get on a fitness journey because it can often be read as you judging them and you might not realize that you're adding more shame onto something they already feel badly about.
(14:23)
Just be very careful in how you approach it. Try not to approach it with this sense of you should do this and try to bully them into it. Sometimes people will try that approach that really just does nothing but turn people off and actually pushes them further away. What I would say is you want to extend an invitation, but always make sure it is just like the rules of consent. The rules of consent apply, that there has to be an enthusiastic yes and that consent can be revoked at any time. You have to make sure that it's absolutely explicit that it's okay for them to say no and that they don't have to and that you're not trying to pressure them, you're not trying to shame them. It's just that you want to spend time with them and you think it would be fun and they don't even have to do your workout.
(15:19)
You would just like them to be around. Make sure that you make it super, super, super explicit that they can say no and that you're not trying to pressure them and that you support them whichever choice they make. That is key here, guys. You got to support them. Whichever choice they make. If you make it so that it's like if they say no, you're going to give them a hard time that I'm just telling you, if you want to have any kind of influence on them, that is going to be going in the opposite direction. You got to keep it positive. You have to empower them, and part of empowering people is allowing them to make the other choice and supporting them and making that other choice. They're allowed to. You should encourage them to make choices for themselves and knowing that the choices that they make are not always going to be the choices that you want them to make.
(16:12)
That's okay because they're responsible for their own gains and you are responsible for your gains. My wife eats plenty of healthy food and moves around plenty, but she hates exercising in the traditional sense. Yeah, totally fine. She feels bad about her body and says so to you. Often, I just do my best to remind her that I don't see her body in any kind of negative way and remind myself that we live in a culture that programs people to see their bodies that way. That is what I'm fucking ducking about. I love to see it pa because you've been on your fitness journey and you've been seeing the benefits and I really, really love that you tell her, you don't have to do what I'm doing. I love you. I love you as you are. You don't have to make the choices that I'm making.
(17:00)
I think that that's really such a powerful, you don't realize how powerful that is and it's just probably nudging her a little bit further along to maybe doing something that might help her body to feel better. I would only do it with Karen without any form of pressure. Yeah, that's the way to do it. You got to be super duper careful. Just don't put pressure. Don't put pressure. Pressure is the worst thing you can do if you're trying to influence somebody to get fit. If you really want to influence someone to get fit, the best thing you can do is live your fitness journey, walk your walk and do not try to push it on anybody else or tell anybody else this is the way you should be doing it too. Mind your business. Do the thing, put it on display. Be open about it, but you got to make sure that nobody likes a self-righteous person.
(17:56)
Nobody likes someone with a moral superiority complex, whatever it is, religiously health-wise, smartness wise, nobody likes a self-righteous person coming along and telling them, oh, you should be living the way that I'm living. Never, never do that. Please don't do that if you're part of my community, if you're part of the Gains gang, please don't do that. That's not part of our group ethos, okay? Part of our group ethos, part of how we do this is we are all responsible for our own gains individually and we share our growth with each other for encouragement and to encourage other people, but we are also just as supportive and just as hype about people's growth journeys that maybe don't have anything to do with fitness. We are just as hype about our friends. Many of our friends in the community do not work out. Many of our friends in the community don't eat healthy, but they still have a place here.
(19:04)
We still love them. We still celebrate them. We still want them around. We still celebrate them and I would say if you want to have influence, hype your friends up, hype your family up, whatever it is that they're into, whatever it is that they're into, whatever it is that they are, make a big deal out of that. Make them feel like you are a big fan of them as a person. Celebrate them as a person. That's the best way that you can actually have real influence because when you celebrate them as a person and you also support their autonomy, you support their consent, you support their boundaries, that actually makes it more likely that they would if they were like, you know what? I really like that. I really like that rich guy. He always makes me feel so good about myself and I'm thinking I want to get strong and he knows a lot of stuff about strength, so maybe I'll ask him some questions.
(20:04)
That is the best way that you can form that relationship with them, but please, please be careful about how you're trying to go about influencing people towards health. You got to be a fan of the person whether regardless of whether they are actually doing strength training or eating healthy or losing weight, you got to just love the people as they are and know that sometimes they might not ever get on a fitness journey and that's okay. It's okay. You're still going to love them. You're still going to be a big fan of them. I hate to give tough love, but I've been on the receiving end of that. I've been on the receiving end of that and it doesn't feel good and it actually makes me hate the person. If someone approaches me and they have this can just sense it that they have this attitude of they think they know better than me. It's been health-wise received that from a religious perspective. I've experienced this from people who think that they know something about my business and they want to critique something about my business, but they're not even fucking doing what I'm doing.
(21:21)
That irritates me and then it actually makes it so that I don't even want to talk to that person and maybe they actually do have some value to offer in other aspects, but I close myself off to that person. I'm not going to listen to what they have to say at that point because they think they know better than me and I don't fuck with people like that. I've been that person and this is another reason probably why it's a little bit more on the tough love side. I've been that person and I've hurt a lot of people by being that person. I've hurt a lot of people. I've hurt a lot of people's self-esteem. I've hurt a lot of people's progress and their self love by approaching them with that attitude and that's something that I look back on in a period of my life when I really had that.
(22:10)
I think I know better than you attitude and I will always mourn the negative impact that I had on people because now I only want to leave people better than I found them and I just know from experience the harm that it does approaching people. Even if you do know maybe better in a certain topic, you might know more, right, but you got to at the end of the day, you got to respect people and their autonomy. If you want to really have a benefit to their life, your heart may be in the right place, but at the end of the day you got to be very aware of your approach. I think that we all need a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy training. We all need a little bit of trauma-informed therapy training as well because I'm telling you right now, it has been the quest of my life for the last 10 years.
(23:09)
How do I help people live a healthier life? That's literally my profession. I've made it my professional quest to discover how do I influence people to eat better and to exercise? What I found is it has to be a choice that people are empowered to make but not pressured or shamed into making. At the end of the day, it's about connection, it's about empowerment, and I support all of my friends in everything that they do, and I found that when I've kind of stepped back and I make very explicitly clear to my friends, I love you and I support you. Whatever you want to do, you don't have to do what I do, right? I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd about strength. I love getting strong and I know a lot about fat loss if that's something that you want to do, but you don't have to.
(24:04)
At the end of the day, I still think you're really cool. I still want to hear what you say. I want to hear everything about you. I am a big fan of you, and when I've had that approach, that is when people actually are more likely to approach me with questions and openness to cleaning up their diets and getting more active, but that's not something that I'm trying to do. My whole goal is I'm going to put this information out there for the people who want it. I'm no longer trying to convert people into do this because you should do this because it will make you healthy. I'm going to put this information out there for the people who want it, and if you don't want it, that's fine. We can vibe and we can bond over other things, but I'm putting this information out there because I know that there's people who want it and I know that people are, they have got questions and I want to help in whatever way that I can, so I'm going to put that out there, but I'm not going to pressure anybody to buy in.
(25:08)
I think that that is the healthiest way to try to influence people. Just put it out there, make it available, but don't push it on people. I don't think that it's ethical to approach your relationships with this sense of better than other people, and that's just part of my ethics. That's part of my moral code. That's part of how I move through the world. I don't think that you should be approaching other people with this. I'm going to set out to make you do something that I think you should do, even if it's something that would make them healthier. Maybe you got to focus on you. If you approach it as my hobby's better than your hobby, that's actually a pretty quick way to lose your friends too, and it's also going to make people not want to do. It's going to make people think that people who are into fitness are assholes or they think they know better than everybody.
(26:04)
You want to be really careful about that. The best thing you can do is focus on your own journey and then also connect with other people who are already on a fitness journey so that you can have your healthy competitions and encourage each other and at that point when you have people's consent, some people are like that and they're not fun to hang out with. They're not, and the thing is, you can be like that about any hobby you can be that you can be like that about whatever it is that you're into. We had someone in here the other day who, first of all, I 100% support the vegan diet and the vegan lifestyle. I have clients who are vegans. I love vegan diets. I love vegan food. That's like half of what I eat is vegan food. I'm mostly vegetarian, okay? I'm a big fan of veganism.
(26:52)
We had someone in chat here the other day who got really ugly and combative and pushy about veganism and it was a total turnoff and it was pissing people off because it was like, dude, you got to, at the end of the day, you have to respect other people's autonomy and choices even if you think you know better than them, just stop. Okay. If you want to invite your friends to the gym, you got to read the subtext. What is the subtext? How are they going to interpret that? You got to get out of your own head and you need to think about their experience. How is someone going to interpret your invitation? You got to be careful not to put it in a way of like, I'm inviting you to the gym because I think you're a fat ass and I think you need to work out more and I know better than you.
(27:43)
I would not invite someone to work out unless they themselves brought up the subject or fitness or health first. All you can do is focus on yourself, be real about your journey and them you don't know who you're going to be inspiring, and then the people who actually want it, they'll show up. They'll bring their questions, so a gym invitation when that person hasn't stated they're interested is just a coded way to shame them and shame is the worst thing that you can do if you really want this person to get healthy or get in shape. It's like saying, I'm offering you a solution to the problem I've decided you have. Yeah, exactly. God, I hate that. I hate that so much, and again, I've had people talk to me like that about so many things, but yeah, let people make their own decisions around their health.
(28:37)
Even if by certain measures, if they were to go to the gym, their heart health would improve measurably, their strength would improve, measurably, their bones would get stronger, which we can make a moral judgment of like, yeah, that's better. That's not always the case. And gyms also, you got to remember, a lot of people have a lot of anxiety around gyms. A lot of people have a lot of anxiety around gyms. They don't want to go to a gym and suggesting that they go to a gym is going to make them feel like stressed or threatened. I would say, again, I think it's really best sound advice is don't even bring it up unless they bring it up. If they say and they start to express, I want to get in shape or I want to eat healthier, then you can be like, oh, well, you can come to the gym with me sometime, but always make it super explicit that they can say no and that you're not going to judge them if they say, no, I can't stress how important that is.
(29:33)
If you already know that it's something that they want to do, that's one thing, right? If it's something they've already expressed that they want to do, then sure have at, but also I would also though ask for consent confirmation before you start really lobbying them because the thing is people sometimes do need that. I'll give that to you. Sometimes people do need their friends to be like, come on, let's go, let's go, let's go. Sometimes they're like they need the pressure, but only apply that pressure if they specifically asked for it and they specifically consented to it. You got to have a conversation around that. Otherwise, you might be doing more harm than good. I know plenty of people like, listen, I'm zombie mommy or whatever. I got plenty of my specifically male clients need me to bully them, but there's a conversation around that, right?
(30:29)
There's a conversation around that where I am not going to just bully them and pressure them for the sake of bullying and pressuring them unless I'm 100% sure that it's something that they have specifically asked for consented to, and we've talked about it and we've talked about boundaries around it and they have expressed that is what I need from a coach to stay motivated. That's a different story, but you can't be applying pressure or trying to push in any way unless someone has specifically asked for it or consented to it. Maybe they need the pressure if they say things like, man, I want to go get to the gym, but I can't find time, so if they say something like that, if they say something like that, if you hear your friend or your family member or partner say, I want, they express, I want to go to the gym or I want to eat healthy, but fill in the blank.
(31:28)
Again, if you want to have influence and you want to be a good influencer, you have to remember that your job is to be the guide. The guide has a plan, has ideas. Ultimately though it is the hero, the other person, it's their choice of like to follow the plan or get on the plan. You make the plan available as an option, well, would you like me to? Would you like some support? Would you like me to remind you or maybe put a little pressure? Is that something that you would like me to do to help you? And then you leave it up to them. You specifically ask for that consent and then go from there. They may have wanted to before I asked, but I definitely did not pick up on it. Just thought it was a good way for us to bond at the time.
(32:12)
I think it is also something to, there is a gendered experience here that I think we probably should touch on. There is a gendered experience here where especially for young men, the gym is traditionally, especially lifting weights has traditionally been one of those spaces, one of those third spaces where men go to outside of work, outside of the home, and that's where a lot of men do have bonding time with each other. That's where a lot of men make friends, so the gym is a social, can be the gym can be a social space, but again, it kind of depends on, you got to really know how is it that that other person sees it? Did they see it that way? I know plenty of men that I'm friends with and some of them who are my clients who, because where they are in their journey in their health at the moment, the suggestion of going to the gym can be really anxiety inducing, and again, it can induce shame.
(33:19)
So again, I would say if they have expressed, if they have specifically expressed that it's something that they want to do and that's an opening to invite them, you can talk about, this is something that I do. I have so much fun. I'm really proud of my progress that I've made. I really love the friends that I've made. This is a relationship lesson. If you want to have good relationships with people, what influence is about. Influence is about having a good relationship with people to where they trust you and they want to take your advice. My recommendation would be to focus on building relationships and build your own fitness journey and let the opportunities that come along come along, but don't force people into, don't force people into conversations that they're not already explicitly wanting to have when opening. I'm thinking of if you suspect that someone is interested in going to the gym, but they're too shy to say it out loud, you could frame it, I need help at the gym. Would you like to come and assist me? Oh, that's good. That's a good one. I can see this working for you. Don't even need to ask someone to be your spotter, but that can work. I'm going to the gym. I don't have a spotter. I'm scared to bench press without one would be interested in being my spotter. Also, you could ask them to be your camera person.
(34:46)
I need to get video of my bench press so that I can look at my form so that I can send it to my coach. Would you take the video for me? Would you hang out with me while I work out and take video of my form so I can send it to my coach so we can spend time together? No pressure. You don't have to hang out. I really need someone that I don't want to give my phone to some rando. You know what I mean? And I don't want to walk around with a tripod, which is a legitimate concern. That could be a way to include someone in your fitness journey without pressuring them and maybe making it more of an open space for them, a more welcoming space for them. But again, you just want to really want to make sure that you are super explicit that there's no pressure for them to work out.
(35:31)
Really make it annoyingly explicit. Make annoyingly explicit that you're not trying to make them work out, that you just need their help and that you would also love to spend time with them while you do something that you like, but then also give them the opportunity to do the same. Maybe they got something that maybe they could use a hand with, so do the same. Maybe they're like building miniatures or something and they need somebody to help them paint under their army, so it's more of like, I'm inviting you to be a part of my hobby. You don't have to do the thing, but I also want to be included in your hobbies too. It's a mutual thing, so if I were dating, and I'm going to say this specifically about my girlies, I feel like I had a friend, a friend who's a girl, or if I was dating a woman who is not really into the gym or if I was dating a dude who is not really into the gym, although the not going to happen, we all know that I'm feral for big muscles, but if I have a girlfriend or if I have a friend and she's a little intimidated by the gym and she wants to hang out with me and I want to include her in it, I'm not necessarily trying to get her to work out because her journey is her journey, but I might be like, will you be my camera person?
(36:49)
Because I need somebody who's not creepy and I don't want to hand my phone to these jokers at the gym and I don't want to carry around a fucking tripod. Then this would be a way for me to spend time with her. This would be a way for me to include her, and then if she decides I want to be able to do that, then okay, well, we're already here, so let me teach you a thing or two, but always let her, for them, they are the ones with the reins. Okay, this is a good discussion though. I think this is a good discussion. I'm happy that we talked it out because I think it's probably something that we should talk about maybe more often because we don't want to be those schmucks. We don't want to be those schmucks. We don't want to be those influencers who are assholes, who bully people.
(37:35)
We don't want to be those people in the gym who make people feel bad about their bodies. We certainly don't want to make the people that we love feel bad about themselves while we're on our finished journey. Everybody is the hero of their own story, which means that they're the ones who make the choices about what they're going to do with their time and what they're going to do with their bodies, and even if they make choices that you think are bad choices, you don't know why. There's really powerful reasons why people do the things that they do, especially when the things that they do are bad for them. I'm not going to lie. There's some pretty powerful reasons why people do things like drink a lot or abuse substances or overtrain. You can be addicted to working out or eat unhealthy or binge eat or starve themselves.
(38:26)
They're usually driven by trauma. They're usually driven by experiences that they've had, and you are not equipped to unravel that with them. You're not their therapist, nor should you try to be their therapist. They should be working with a therapist and even within the scope of a therapeutic context, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of building trust between the person and their therapist. It takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of exercise, and it can be very damaging psychologically to try to force a breakthrough on someone. Breakthroughs when people actually confront the causes of their, what we usually call maladaptive behaviors, that can be traumatic, that can cause a mental breakdown, that can cause a panic attack, and you, I'm going to just guess, are not equipped to handle that in a way that's healthy. We cannot be forcing deconstruction on people, so again, the best thing that you can do is lead with respect, love, empathy.
(39:36)
You can be open about what you're doing and just be open about just let them lead. Okay, so please do a respect, do a love. There are big reasons why people do the things that they do, and you do not know best for other people what they should be doing with their lives, especially if they do have a history of trauma and you're only going to damage your relationship with them. If you try to force the quote fitness or a healthy lifestyle on them, you may be doing way more damage. The best you can do is support them and love them and accept them for where they are, meet people where they are. I can't stress that enough. I, as a trauma-informed coach, I cannot stress enough how important that is.
(40:24)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to today's episode. I hope that you found it helpful. Remember that the best thing that you can do to have influence and promote a healthy lifestyle is to just live your best healthy life, respect your friendships, respect your relationships as they are, accept people as they are, regardless of whether they're going to the gym or not, and try not to put pressure on them. Let me know what you think about this episode. If you are watching on YouTube, leave a comment in the comments section, and also if you want to interact more with my community, hop into the Coaching Corner Discord server. The link for that is in the show notes. You get notifications when I go live on Twitch, and that's where I spend a lot of my time hanging out with my buddies and my friends. We talk about all kinds of different topics including fitness topics, but hobbies we share, pet pictures, all of that stuff, so you can hop into the discord if you want to hang out with me a little bit more. Thanks again for watching. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. For more information about my products and services, check out my website, which is jd gaines.com, and I'll see you guys in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink some water, and prioritize your self-care.
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ABOUT ME
Hey there! 👋 I’m Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), and I’m a personal trainer and health coach. I help people build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with my online coaching programs. Check out some of my coaching videos on Youtube, or join me live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 17: Exercises to Reduce Belly Fat
There’s no one exercise that will eliminate belly fat. Let’s look at the things that actually work to help you burn fat.
There’s no one exercise that will eliminate belly fat. Let’s look at the things that actually work to help you burn fat.
Hey there! I’m personal trainer and health coach Jayd Harrison, and in this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast, I’ll share with you the most effective ways to burn body fat, particularly belly fat.
Despite what many social media fitness influencers say, doing exercises for your abs, obliques, and other core muscles does nothing for burning fat in the belly. It does, however, help you to get a strong core—which is important for doing the kinds of exercises that can help you burn more fat (squats, lunges, deadlifts, etc).
Burning body fat is all about being in a calorie deficit, where you consume less energy through food than your body spends every day.
No matter what kinds of exercises you do, if you don’t manage what you eat, you won’t see results in your fat loss.
Beyond getting into a calorie deficit, some things can help your body burn more visceral fat in the belly, like limiting your sugar intake, eating more protein, and consuming plenty of fiber.
It’s also super important to exercise smart to burn fat, meaning your weekly training routine includes both cardio and strength training. Cardio will help your body to burn more calories and strength training will help to reduce muscle loss while you’re in a calorie deficit (which will help keep your metabolism fast).
Don’t fall for the myth that doing a bunch of crunches and planks will reduce your belly fat. Follow the tips in this episode, and you’ll see some measurable progress!
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Jayd (00:00):
As you can see, this is the main way to get your body in the most effective way to burn fat. You have to manage what you eat either by tracking what you eat every day or following a meal plan that is created around the number of calories that you need to eat every day.
(00:25)
Welcome to The Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a personal trainer and health coach, and I've created this podcast to help you learn how to build a body that you love and a healthy lifestyle. One of the most common questions that beginner clients ask me is, what are some exercises that I can do to reduce my belly fat? And my answer is always the same. There are none. There's no one exercise that is going to help you to reduce belly fat, and anyone who tells you differently is just giving you bad information or they're probably trying to sell you something. The truth is that when it comes to reducing belly fat, it has more to do with what you eat than any one exercise that you do. So in today's episode, we are going to go over what my professional personal trainer tips are for reducing belly fat and how you can tackle it through your diet and through exercise to see some progress there.
(01:25)
The biggest takeaway from today's episode is that burning body fat, whether it's in your belly or elsewhere, is all about being in a calorie deficit, right? Calories are the way that we measure the energy that we get through the food that we eat. When you take in less energy through the food that you eat than what your body spends every day, your body will tap into its fat stores and use the energy that's there, and that's how you burn fat. So think of body fat as your body's battery packs. Your body is going to tap into those battery packs when it's not getting the energy that it needs through the food that you eat. So in order to burn fat, we need to eat less energy than what our bodies burn. So that's what it is to be in a calorie deficit, and there's a couple different ways that we can get our bodies into a calorie deficit, but that is what it's all about. There's no one exercise like doing a bunch of crunches, we're planks or Pilates. That's going to reduce your belly fat if you are not managing what you eat and making sure that you are eating a calorie deficit.
(02:41)
So let's back up and talk about what exactly belly fat is. Most of belly fat is what we call visceral fat. There's a couple of different types of fat that we store in our bodies. One is subcutaneous fat. That's the fat that's under our skin and that you find all over your body in your arms, your legs also in your belly too. But visceral fat is particularly the type of fat that surrounds your organs and it's in the abdominal cavity. And this type of fat does serve a lot of purposes for a body. So it's not all bad. The amount of fat that you have, whether it's too much or too little, can affect your health in negative ways. So visceral fat's main function is to help to keep your core temperature where it needs to be for you to be healthy. It's also there to cushion your organs.
(03:31)
So if you get punched in the stomach or you bump up against something, you won't have to worry about your organs getting damaged because organ damage is devastating for your health. We also need fat for the absorption of certain vitamins, and it also plays a key role in the regulation of our hormones. So having a certain amount of fat is actually really good for your body. There's a healthy range of percentage of your body weight that's made up of fat for both men and women. So for women, a healthy body fat range is between 15 and 23%. Whereas for men, a healthy body fat range is between 8% and 21%. So this is where we generally want to try to shoot for our body fat to be at any given time throughout our fitness journeys, we want to have at least that 15 or 8% so that we can keep our bodies healthy so that we can continue to have healthy hormone balance, absorb certain vitamins, keep our body at the right temperature, and have just enough cushion to keep us safe.
(04:35)
Having a super high body fat percentage can lead to all kinds of health risks like the development of certain types of cancer, increased risk of type two diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Although these things can also be mitigated by having a healthy diet. Now you can measure your body fat percentage or how much of your body is made up of fat in a number of different ways. One way is that you can use a smart scale that measures bioelectrical impedance or bioelectrical impedance analysis. So it sends a little bit of electricity from one side of your body through to the other and measures the speed that that signal travels at and gives you a rough estimate of how much of your body weight is made up of lean muscle tissue versus fat. Electricity moves a lot faster through water, and your muscles are mainly made of water versus fat, so the signal will move faster through muscle, and that's how it's measuring it.
(05:31)
You can also measure your body fat percentage using calipers, which takes the skinfolds, and that's specifically looking at your subcutaneous fat. You can also get a professional measurement of your body fat by doing a hydrostatic analysis. A lot of gyms will have this and some specific weight loss facilities will have it as well. At the facility that I work at in person, they use what's called a FIT 3D scan that does a total body scan. Any of these are good ways to get an estimate of your body fat percentage. Keep in mind that all of these ways of measuring your body fat have a standard rate of error. So they're not always going to be 100% accurate, but they're good for giving us an idea of what your body fat percentage is. Now when it comes to actually changing your body fat percentage and reducing it, there is no one exercise that's going to do that for you.
(06:24)
There's a lot of bad influencers out there on social media who will create posts that are like five exercises to burn belly fat, and it'll be like a bunch of core training exercises. So like ab crunches or Russian twists, things that are exercises that hit the muscles in the torso, exercising the muscles in the torso is not necessarily going to help you to burn belly fat. It is going to make you stronger in your torso and probably give you more muscle there, but it's not going to reduce the belly fat. Reducing the belly fat is mainly an effect of being in a calorie deficit, so you need to make sure that you are managing what you eat if you are particularly concerned with reducing fat. So if your goal is to burn belly fat, you need to focus on overall fat loss and that belly fat will reduce over time as you continue to burn overall fat.
(07:15)
So to get into a calorie deficit, the main thing is that you need to manage what you're eating. You first need to figure out what your maintenance level of calories is. That is the number of calories that you need to eat every day for your body to stay exactly the same, not build muscle or not burn fat for your weight to stay completely level. Once you figure out what your maintenance level of calories is, then you can plan to eat below that number to burn fat. So to figure out what your maintenance level of calories is, you'll need to track what you eat every day and also track your body weight and figure out at what number of calories your body weight stays roughly the same over the course of a couple of weeks. You can get a rough estimate of what your maintenance level of calories would be using an online calculator, but keep in mind that this is really just a rough estimate.
(08:05)
Your body's actual maintenance level of calories may be different. So you'll need to test whichever number it is that you use and that you calculate to figure out what your actual maintenance level of calories is. So you can start with that calculated number and then try to eat that number of calories every day, tracking what you eat or following a meal plan that is created for that number of calories, and you do that for at least a week and weigh yourself every day. And if you see your weight go down, then that means that the number of calories that you're eating every day on average is actually below your maintenance level of calories. So you'll need to add between 50 and a hundred calories and then try again for another week, tracking what you eat and eating that new goal number of calories and continue to adjust until you see your weight staying the same over the course of a week.
(08:53)
The same thing goes if you see your weight go up after eating that calculated number, reduce the number of calories by between 50 and a hundred calories, and then eat that new goal. Keep adjusting and testing the number until your weight stays roughly the same. So once you've figured out what your maintenance level of calories is, then you have the power to actually put yourself into a calorie deficit. Each pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. So over the course of a week, if you want to burn a half a pound of fat, that would be about 250 calories below maintenance that you would need to eat every day. I would start there and eat that for two or three weeks. And then if you want to accelerate your fat loss, then you could bump it up to a 500 calorie deficit by taking away 250 more calories from your daily target goal, and then you're going to eat that 500 calories below your maintenance level for a couple of weeks to try to see about a pound of fat loss per week.
(09:54)
The most aggressive approach that I would take and that I would recommend is a 1000 calorie deficit, which could yield about two pounds of fat per week. If you wanted to really get your fat loss going, just keep in mind that the lower that you go, the faster your body is going to adapt to whatever calorie deficit that you're in. Eventually, your body is going to catch up to the fact that you're not giving it more food, and it's going to say, okay, we need to slow everything down and not burn as many calories every day. So over time, you might hit what's called a plateau where your body stops burning fat as much as it used to before. So the deeper your calorie deficit goes, the more likely you're going to hit a plateau eventually. And when you do hit that plateau, you're going to need to bring your calories back up.
(10:44)
You're going to need to reverse diet to increase your maintenance calories every day. But that is in general the process that I take my clients through. If you want more information on this process, I would check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program, which is linked in the show notes, or you can reach out to me and my coaching corner Discord server for some nutrition coaching if you need some help with your fat loss. So as you can see, this is the main way to get your body in the most effective way to burn fat. You have to manage what you eat either by tracking what you eat every day or following a meal plan that is created around the number of calories that you need to eat every day. And we can also get our bodies to burn more calories every day by exercising the type of exercise that you do can really help to increase your daily calorie burn.
(11:32)
So a lot of people when they are in a fat loss phase will do a lot of what's called cardio cardiovascular exercise, and cardiovascular exercise is a style of training where you're basically kept moving for an extended period of time. Your goal is to get your heart rate up. You keep moving, and the more you move, the more you burn calories. So a lot of my athletes will add cardio or increase their cardio in their training programs and in their weekly schedule when they're trying to burn fat. Also, it's super important to include strength training into your fat loss workout routine because building muscle is a calorie expensive activity for your body, and maintaining more muscle is also a calorie expensive process. And also you want to keep in mind that when we are in a calorie deficit, your body is going to burn fat, but it's also going to break down muscle tissue to access the energy that is stored there.
(12:29)
And as your body breaks down muscle tissue, that can actually decrease your daily calorie burn, it can suppress your metabolism. So to combat that process to combat muscle loss, which will slow down your metabolism, the best thing that you can do is do traditional strength training. And you can do this two to three times a week. Follow a very simple pattern of hitting total body two or three times a week, making sure that you are building muscle throughout your entire body. You're going to get the most bang for your buck by practicing compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench press, lunges, these types of exercises that use your whole body because the more that you stimulate your muscles, the more muscle growth you're going to get overall. Now, for those of you who are afraid of building muscle because you think that it's going to make you bulky, the truth is that it's not okay.
(13:21)
Muscle is very dense. When we build muscle, it actually just gets more compressed and dense. It's not going to make you appear bigger. It's not going to make your body bigger. What makes you look bulky is fat. So if you are focusing on reducing fat, you're going to reduce the bulk or the overall size of your body. Building muscle is not necessarily going to make you bulky or make your body bigger. In fact, when you build muscle and burn fat and you're doing a recomposition at the same time, most of the time what you're going to see is that your body shrinks and it becomes more dense. Okay? That is how you get what fitness influencers call that toned look, right? When you want muscle definition, you want to reduce your body fat percentage. You want to reduce the amount of fat that you have, and you want to look like you have some muscle definition.
(14:13)
In order to get that look, you have to build muscle, okay? It's not going to make you bulky. It's going to make you look more toned. And also it's just really important for your health as well as you lose muscle when you're in a calorie deficit that puts you at risk of weakening your bones and losing coordination, losing balance, all of these things decline enough already as we age. So doing some resistance training and building muscle is really important just for maintaining health. But it's especially important when you are in a calorie deficit and you're losing weight. Now, there are a couple of things that we can do to help our body to burn visceral fat in particular. So visceral fat, that fat that's in our abdomen surrounding our organs is less responsive to being in a calorie deficit than subcutaneous fat. You will reduce visceral fat when you're in a calorie deficit, but there are certain things that will cause your body to actually hold onto visceral fat even if you are in a calorie deficit.
(15:15)
So one thing that you want to do is try to limit your intake of sugar or sugary beverages. So sugar is half glucose and half fructose, and when you eat a lot of added sugar, your liver gets overloaded with fructose, and it's forced to convert that into fat. So when you reduce your intake of refined sugars and added sugars, you're reducing the amounts of that energy that's going to be converted into belly fat. Another thing that you can do is eat more protein. Protein is so important, especially when you're in a calorie deficit. It's one going to give you the building blocks that you need to reduce the loss of muscle tissue and to help you build muscle more effectively. But protein is also a very satiating macronutrient when you eat it and makes it less likely that you're going to have sugar cravings. And also, many sources of protein are pretty low calorie, so you're going to feel more full off of less calories by eating good sources of protein.
(16:16)
And there was one study that actually showed that people who had a high quality high protein diet had less abdominal fat, and you can find the link to that study in the show notes. Now, also, eating plenty of fiber, particularly soluble fiber, is a great way to help reduce your visceral fat. When you eat soluble fiber, it forms a gel. It bonds with water in your digestive tract, and that helps to suppress your appetite, and so that reduces your overall cravings, which means that you're less likely to mindlessly snack or have intense sugar cravings. This also slows the movement of the food through your digestive tract, which means that your body is going to be better able to absorb the nutrients from that food, and you're going to need to eat less food, and you'll get more benefit out of the food that you actually do eat.
(17:06)
So one five-year study reported that eating 10 grams of soluble fiber per day was linked to a 3.7% reduction in the amount of visceral fat in the abdominal cavity. Another review study found that an additional 14 grams of fiber per day was linked to a 10% decrease in total calorie intake and a weight loss of around 4.5 pounds or two kilograms over four months. Links for those studies are also in the show notes. So these are great ways that you can help to push your body to reduce that belly fat, but you also need to make sure that you're doing the other things to reduce your overall body fat, right? So maintaining a calorie deficit, making sure that you're exercising smart, which includes both cardio and strength training. Make sure that you are tracking what you eat or following a meal plan that is built around your daily calorie goal.
(18:03)
Again, if you want more help in figuring out what your maintenance level of calories is and what your calorie deficit should be, check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program that's linked in the show notes, or you can reach out to me for nutrition coaching, and we can get you on track in six weeks towards figuring out what your calorie deficit should be and making some progress in your fat loss. Remember, doing a bunch of ABS workouts is not going to reduce that belly fat, but it is important because it helps to promote stability and will keep your spine safe when you're doing the compound exercises that do actually help your body to burn more fat like squats and deadlifts. So the stronger your core is, the better you're going to be able to do those types of exercises, but it's not necessarily going to reduce that belly fat.
(18:52)
So that is the episode for today. I hope you found it helpful. Thank you so much for watching or listening wherever it is that you are. If you found this helpful and you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment and make sure to subscribe to get notified anytime I post a new video to my YouTube channel. If you're listening to this podcast, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. If you want more content from me, make sure to sign up for the email newsletter from my website. That's jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. You can also join me live when I go live on my Twitch channel on Tuesdays and Fridays in the fitness and health category, and ask your questions there. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. Make sure to follow me there so you get notified when I go live. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you drink plenty of water, eat your veggies, eat your protein, and prioritize your self-care.
Links
References:
Stanhope KL, Havel PJ. Fructose consumption: considerations for future research on its effects on adipose distribution, lipid metabolism, and insulin sensitivity in humans. J Nutr. 2009 Jun;139(6):1236S-1241S. doi: 10.3945/jn.109.106641. Epub 2009 Apr 29. PMID: 19403712; PMCID: PMC3151025. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3151025/
Pollock NK, Bundy V, Kanto W, Davis CL, Bernard PJ, Zhu H, Gutin B, Dong Y. Greater fructose consumption is associated with cardiometabolic risk markers and visceral adiposity in adolescents. J Nutr. 2012 Feb;142(2):251-7. doi: 10.3945/jn.111.150219. Epub 2011 Dec 21. Erratum in: J Nutr. 2013 Jan;143(1):123. PMID: 22190023; PMCID: PMC3260058. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22190023
Loenneke, J.P., Wilson, J.M., Manninen, A.H. et al. Quality protein intake is inversely related with abdominal fat. Nutr Metab (Lond) 9, 5 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-7075-9-5
Leidy HJ, Tang M, Armstrong CL, Martin CB, Campbell WW. The effects of consuming frequent, higher protein meals on appetite and satiety during weight loss in overweight/obese men. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2011 Apr;19(4):818-24. doi: 10.1038/oby.2010.203. Epub 2010 Sep 16. PMID: 20847729; PMCID: PMC4564867. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4564867/
Howarth NC, Saltzman E, Roberts SB. Dietary fiber and weight regulation. Nutr Rev. 2001 May;59(5):129-39. doi: 10.1111/j.1753-4887.2001.tb07001.x. PMID: 11396693. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11396693/
Hairston KG, Vitolins MZ, Norris JM, Anderson AM, Hanley AJ, Wagenknecht LE. Lifestyle factors and 5-year abdominal fat accumulation in a minority cohort: the IRAS Family Study. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2012 Feb;20(2):421-7. doi: 10.1038/oby.2011.171. Epub 2011 Jun 16. PMID: 21681224; PMCID: PMC3856431. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3856431/
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 16: My Doctor's Recommendations to Avoid Getting Sick
I sat down with my doctor to create a plan for navigating this allergy & germ season to avoid getting sick.
I sat down with my doctor to create a plan for navigating this allergy & germ season to avoid getting sick. What’s your plan?
If you’ve been following me on Twitch, you’ll know that over the last few weeks, I have been dealing with a nasty respiratory illness that I picked up while hanging out with my nieces and nephew.
Since I was little, I’ve always struggled to stay well when respiratory bugs are going around. Having allergies and asthma makes me particularly sensitive to getting sick and staying sick.
In this latest bout, I sat down with my doctor to create a plan to help my body fight off illness and bounce back faster. In this episode, I share the plan that we came up with.*
*Disclaimer: The content provided in this blog and podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website. Reliance on any information provided in this blog is solely at your own risk.
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Jayd (00:00):
The deal is that she expects me to get sick a lot more in the coming year because during lockdown, we lost a lot of our immunities to just everyday germs that because we had two or three years where we were having limited exposure to each other. And now that we're in the mix, really common viruses that we would've had immunity to we're now getting exposed to and it's making us sick, and that's why everybody is sick.
(00:35)
Hey there. Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains here. Today I'm going to share with you a conversation that I had with my Twitch chat after I came back from about of being sick. Now, if you've been following the Coaching Corner podcast, you'll know that a couple of episodes ago I talked about recommendations for how to get back into the gym after being sick. And after I recorded that podcast a couple days after that, I went to go visit my brother, and my brother has three daycare babies and they shared daycare germs with me. And I ended up getting sick and losing my voice for about a week. So when I came back, I was sharing with my Twitch chat the recommendations that I talked about with my doctor for how I'm going to handle sickness in the future because I lost my voice for so long and I was out of being able to record podcasts and stream normally and even teach my personal training clients.
(01:31)
It was a mess. So I wanted to brainstorm with my doctor how do I navigate in the future? So we put together my doctor and I a little plan of action for how we're going to navigate the coming year as I get exposed to more germs thanks to the babies. And then just in post covid life, as things continue to open up, we are going to continue to be exposed to things that we've probably lost a little bit of immunity to. So if you find that you keep getting sick or if you have a hard time getting over it when you're sick, you're not alone. A lot of us are struggling with that right now, but especially if you have asthma, these tips that my doctor gave me may be helpful for you. So give it a listen and let me know what you think. If you are following me on YouTube, you can leave a comment in the comments below this video. Make sure that you subscribe wherever it is that you are, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening via podcasts. So without further ado, let's get into the tips that my doctor gave me for staying healthy and getting over sicknesses faster in the coming year.
(02:42)
I just went to the doctor. Do you know what she told me? Silly woman. She's like, yeah, you're going to need to rest your voice as much as you can when you're not working. And I was like, woman, I'm always working. What else can I do? And she's like, you want some steroids? And I was like, yes. So it turns out I'm not actually sick, sick. It's just my asthma being asthma. E, it used to happen a lot when I was younger is that when I would get a respiratory illness, it would just stick around for a month or two and it was just like my asthma just going nuts. But now I am on steroids now, so I'm going to get fucking huge. Just kidding. I have some recommendations from my doctor to help me stay healthy. Now that we know that I'm probably just going to be getting exposed to a lot of yucky stuff because of my brother's babies.
(03:38)
Thanks guys. Thanks. The deal is that she expects me to get sick a lot more in the coming year because during lockdown, we lost a lot of our immunities to just everyday germs that because we had two or three years where we were having limited exposure to each other, and now that we're in the mix, really common viruses that we would've had immunity to we're now getting exposed to and it's making us sick. And that's why everybody is sick. Flu and cold and strep throat and RSV, it's all in the mix, and we had had very little immunity to it. So buckle up guys, because you're probably going to get sick. I never fear though, because my doctor gave me, we created a little plan. We created a plan specifically for me and how to navigate this as a person with asthma, because as a person with asthma, it's just a given that if I catch one of these respiratory illnesses, I'm going to be sick with it for a long time.
(04:45)
So y'all are just going to have to get used to hearing scratchy voice. Jade and Jade will not be able to redeem sing me a song for probably at least a good third of the time. But here is part of our plan. I'm not going to share this without saying first, I am not a doctor. My doctor is not your doctor, and this is not medical advice. You need to see your own damn doctor and create your own plan of action for how you are going to navigate all of the germs that are going around right now. However, I thought that sharing the plan that my doctor and I created together might be helpful for some of you. So one of the things is she wants me taking my vitamins two times a day to make sure that I am blasting my system with particularly vitamin C and zinc because those help boost the immune system.
(05:42)
And zinc also helps you to cut down on the amount of time that you spend sick. So I'm already taking a multivitamin and she recommended that I take it twice a day so that I'm just really making sure I'm covering my bases on those guys. And I am not mad about this because I love my multivitamins. They're delicious. They're delicious, yummy gummies. So I get to eat them twice a day. Another thing is something that we have talked about before on Stream and on the podcast, maybe on the podcast, I'm not sure I've talked about on the podcast, but staying in a calorie surplus is going to be really, really important for me on a number of levels. One, I am trying to build muscle, and it's really hard to build muscle when you are staying right at maintenance with your calories or if you're in a calorie deficit.
(06:34)
And I've talked about before, how much I have struggled to even eat maintenance because I have untreated, well sort of treated. I have band-aid treated A DHD, I'm not on Adderall or anything like that, was when I was younger. I was misdiagnosed as just having run of the mill anxiety and OCD, which is largely the case with little girls. When little girls have a DHD, a lot of times it's misdiagnosed as anxiety or OCD, and we get put on SSRIs, which they do help, at least with the anxiety side of things. What a bki boy, my doctor just thought, oh, she just has anxiety. And it come to find, I'm one of the late diagnosed people who actually have a DHD and autism who, anyway, I don't have, I'm not on one of those focus stimulants, but I do drink a lot of coffee and I am on an SSRI, which does help to a certain extent.
(07:43)
But no matter how medicated you are, you still have a DHD, you're always going to have a DHD. It's just that being medicated in whatever way helps you to manage it a little bit better. But you're never going to just magically be cured than be a neurotypical person. So A DHD, the way that interacts with a lot of people's dietary habits is it can go one of two ways, and the same person can have both expressions at different times. Sometimes they might have one expression, sometimes they might have another. For me in general, I spend most of the time in the expression of A DHD in that I hyperfocus on whatever it is that I'm working on, and I will go hours without eating or drinking or going to the bathroom and I'm in the zone and I don't even realize that I feel hungry or I've just gotten so used to ignoring my hunger.
(08:41)
And this is a real problem because what it ends up is that I'm malnourished and I lift heavy. I work out hard, and I have a very active job. I cannot afford not be eating the amount of energy that my body needs. And so I end up in a calorie deficit way more than I need to be and way more than is healthy, and it makes me further exposed to getting sick. And it's always that I get sick when I have been slacking on my eating, my planned eating starvation. I know a lot of people will always be like, oh, I need that load out of a DHD. Trust me. It's not actually something that you want because it means you're malnourished. Eating not enough calories for your body to be healthy is just as bad as eating too many calories and accumulating too much adipose tissue.
(09:38)
They're both unhealthy, they're both not desirable, right? You want to eat within that middle range of what's healthy. And I've struggled to be on a bulk for the better part of last three years. Every time I've tried to go on a bulk, something has happened in my life that I've had to really focus and problem solve, and that almost always ends up in me slacking on eating the way that I need to eat. So staying in a calorie surplus is number one as part of my plan for trying to avoid getting sick and trying to cut down the amount of time that I spend sick when I do get sick, because my body is starved of the energy and the nutrients that it needs. And this is not to say that it happens all the time, it's just particularly when I'm working on a project, and again, this is not something that is desirable, so that's one way that it can go.
(10:29)
The other way that it can go, especially if you have a DHD, is that you can eat for a stem is a behavior that you do to keep your nervous system stimulated so that you can function at a baseline. We all have STEM behaviors, even neurotypical people have STEM behaviors like fidgeting, right? It's just that for a DHD people, fidgeting is a lot more prevalent and necessary for our brains to function. And so for a lot of people, they get the stimulus from eating, and that's their preferred stimulus to keep their brain functioning. So they find themselves often eating when they're not actually hungry or mindlessly snacking or it's like an emotional coping mechanism to help them maintain a good emotional baseline. And neither is good. Neither is good. So one is in one case, the case that's more often the case for me is that food is overstimulating.
(11:29)
The fact thinking of when I'm hungry, it's like, okay, well, what am I going to eat? And if I haven't meal prepped, if I haven't meal planned, if I don't have anything ready to go at that moment, then the whole having to stop what I'm doing, switch mindsets, think about what am I going to eat and then make the thing and then sit down to eat it. By the time I sit down to eat it, I am overstimulated because I've already been hyper-focused, and then I overload my brain further with these extra processes of planning what I'm going to eat and then prepping what I'm going to eat by the time I sit down. If I try to put that food in my mouth, I will feel nauseous and gag because I'm overstimulated. That's a really common thing to happen for people with A DHD, I have a bunch of things that I'm going to be doing, and I'm going to share them on my podcast of meal prep tips specifically for people with a DHD of things and share my loadout of plans or my strategy for how I'm going to navigate this in the future to make sure that I'm nourishing my body with the nutrition that it needs to stay healthy and to avoid getting sick.
(12:41)
So that's going to be a future episode that will come out probably in a couple of weeks or maybe next week, who knows? But yeah, staying in a calorie surplus is going to be really important. If you think about it, when you are in a calorie deficit, which is what we always say is just be aware that when you're in a calorie deficit, your immune system is going to be suppressed, right? All of your systems will be suppressed. You'll notice that your skin will start to look really dry, maybe poor quality. Your hair will be more brittle, your nails will be more brittle. All of your systems are suppressed when you're in a calorie deficit and including your immune system, so you're more likely to get sick. So for me, staying in a calorie surplus is going to be number one, and I have a couple of strategies that I'm going to put into place to help me tackle that.
(13:27)
And then there's a couple of daily things that she wants me to do. Of course, I'm on an oral steroid now, and I also have a steroid inhaler to help keep my lungs from going super crazy and help manage my asthma a little bit better so that my lungs will be strong enough to kick whatever it is that I pick up and get rid of the current thing that I'm struggling with. She also recommended that I netty pot every day to help me especially navigate the allergy season, because here in North Carolina, allergy season is bad. We literally have, it looks like it snows sometimes the pollen will be so thick. It's pine pollen. I think it's so thick. It looks like it has snowed green snow. It's super gross, dude. It's so gross. And then when it rains, the good news is that it rains often during the pine pollen season, but when it rains, the rainwater gets green and it looks like there's slime on the ground.
(14:35)
It's so gross, and you end up breathing that stuff, you'll blow your nose and it'll be green and you're not sick. It's just pollen. It's so gross, dude. Yeah, the green clouds, it's so gross. I'll be standing here Back when used to podcast back, I used to stream over there. I would be looking out the window while I was talking to the camera, and I remember a couple of years ago just talking to you guys, and I think I stopped and I was like, oh my God, I just saw this cloud of pollen just over the road as someone drove by. It was so gross. So netty potting every day, but if you are going to be netty potting, what she and the Netty pot people also recommend is you got to keep that shit clean. You got to wash it with hot water and soap, and it's also a good idea to pop it in the microwave for 40 seconds to sterilize it, and you want to use only distilled water.
(15:36)
And I asked her specifically, if I buy a jug of distilled water, how long can I use that on my nutty pot? And she said, about a month, throw it away after a month with me nutty potting every day. I'm probably going to go through that really fast. But if you're doing it like every once in a while, just don't keep your nutty pot. I'm sorry. Don't keep your distilled water for longer than a month. But yeah, you want to disinfect it before every use or maybe after every use and before every use, and make sure you're only using distilled water. I feel like here where I live, the city I live, the city that I live has immaculate water. We have crazy good water in this city. I feel like I could probably get away with using the city water, but there's also lots of ways that bacteria can get in the water, even if the water from the city is good because your faucets or whatever.
(16:27)
So you just want to use distilled water with that. There are these little neti pot and similar companies. They make these electronic nasal rinse systems that actually disinfect the water before it even goes through. It's electronic, so you can use one of those if you don't have access to distilled water, if you don't want to be buying distilled water all the time, you can do that. I said, I am on a steroid inhaler. I'm on an oral steroid, which particularly for me because I have asthma, that's just what I have to do. And we talked about, I don't necessarily need to be on these things all the time all year round, but because I am seeing these fucking Petri dishes once a month. Side note, I love my nieces and nephew. Please don't get me wrong. I adore them. I love them to pieces. I would lay down my life for them.
(17:22)
I'm just really annoyed with them right now, and I know it's not their fault for passing along illnesses. They're just babies. They're in daycare. It's not their fault, but it's still very frustrating. So I'm seeing the fucking Petri dishes at least once a month. Our plan is, well, during allergy season, I'm going to be using the steroid inhaler every fucking day, twice a day. Once allergy season calms down, I'm probably just going to use it in the week leading up to when I go spend the weekend over there, and then in the week when I come back, and then so two weeks out of every month so that I'm not always using the steroid and my body stays sensitized to it, right? Hot tea and honey. Of course, we've been doing a lot of that. We've been doing a lot of hot liquids, hot, hot tea.
(18:06)
I love tea. You don't have to convince me, you don't have to pull my arm to drink hot tea with honey. Cough drops is one that I wasn't really using a whole lot of that I need to reinvest in. I need to order a bunch of new cough drops that really did help that day that I used, and that yes, sinking green. You're absolutely right. A good household filter. I have lots of filters in my house because I as a person with asthma and allergies, especially living in North Cackie where the pollen is so bad, it's really important to me to have good filters. And also because I see clients at my house, I have a couple of clients who actually come to my house, and so I want to make sure that I'm not bringing any germs to them. So I have a UV light filter that sterilizes the air as it goes through that stays by my desk.
(18:59)
I have a HEPA filter that lives in the dining room, and then I also have a HEPA filter that lives in the upstairs in my bedroom. Yeah, filters are a good idea as well. And it's not a bad idea to just wear a fucking mask, especially if you're going to a place where it's really heavily populated and you want to reduce your exposure. I know a lot of people feel some type of way about wearing a mask, but if you're concerned about your exposure, it's an easy way to kind of at least reduce that. And if you do get sick, it's conscientious for you to wear a mask to avoid sharing germs with other people. Also, in addition, as part of calorie surplus is of course, and I say this all the time, you need to make sure you're eating enough protein and enough vegetables.
(19:47)
And those two things actually play a key role in your immune system. In addition to just trying to eat in a calorie surplus, I'm going to really focus on getting lots of good veggies in and make sure that I'm reaching my calorie goal. Jade is just a bunch of filters in a trench coat. Yeah, basically. So yeah, that's our plan. And I'm hoping that I can reduce the amount of time that I spend sick in the coming year. But again, she was saying is because now I work in a facility like an in-person facility, however, that in-person facility also has UV filters. We use UV filters in my facility, which I think that's another reason why I'm a big fan of that place. I feel safe working there from germs. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, with me working in a facility and visiting the babies, it's just kind of a given that I'm going to spend more time in the coming months sick than I did in the same months last year.
(20:49)
And so what I can do is try to keep myself healthy and reduce the amount of time that I spend sick, but it's something that we kind of have to plan for and plan to mitigate. So that's our plan. I thought I would share it with you guys because I know some of you guys also might have asthma or you guys are probably also getting exposed to all this stuff, and we are in this together. But I also don't want you guys to fear losing your gains when you get sick. It's a part of everybody gets sick, even competitive bodybuilders, competitive power lifters, everybody gets sick. And so what if you lose a little bit of strength? It's going to come back. You might feel like shit because your cardio, especially if you get a respiratory illness, your cardio is going to go downhill, but it will come back, especially once you get healthy, it'll come back.
(21:41)
It'll come back pretty fast. So don't worry about that. Thank you so much for watching or listening wherever you are. Make sure that you subscribe to the Coaching Corner podcast, either on YouTube or wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. You can come hang out with me when I'm live on my Twitch channel. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. I go live twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. And also make sure that you subscribe to the email newsletter where I send out lots of goodies every week, including announcements for the podcast, as well as different things that we have going on in the community. If you are interested in working with me, we want to try one of my workout programs. Check out my website, jaydigains.com. Now, I will see you in the next episode. I hope that you enjoyed this one. Don't forget to make sure you drink some water, eat your veggies, eat your protein, and prioritize your self-care, and I will see you soon.
My doctor’s tips for navigating allergy and sick season
1 Take a multivitamin
Taking a multivitamin can boost your immune system by providing essential vitamins and minerals that may be lacking in your diet. Vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc are particularly important for strengthening the body's immune response and reducing oxidative damage from free radicals. This, in turn, will help you to better fend off infections and illnesses. Keep in mind, however, that multivitamins should complement a healthy diet—not replace it!
2 Use a neti pot
Using a nasal rinse system like a neti pot, pressure irrigation system, or electronic system can help prevent illness by clearing nasal passages of irritants, allergens, and pathogens. This can reduce the likelihood of contracting a respiratory infection.
It definitely takes some getting used to when performing nasal rinses—but I think it’s well worth it. Just make sure that you use distilled water and clean your nasal rinse system before and after every use (use hot water and soap). For good measure, I like to pop my Neti pot in the microwave for 40 seconds to disinfect it after washing before every use.
3 Eat enough calories
Eating enough calories is another essential part of my doctor’s plan for keeping me healthy. This has been a struggle for me with my ADHD and busy schedule—but I’ve noticed that I tend to only get sick when I have been slacking on my nutrition and not eating enough.
When your body is well-nourished and has enough energy, it can most efficiently produce immune cells and antibodies to fight off infections and pathogens. Eating sufficient calories also helps to keep inflammation in check and ensures that you can repair any damaged tissue. Plus, you’ll recover better from your workouts and build more muscle.
To ensure that I’m eating enough, I’m going to plan and prep my meals ahead of time. This will allow me to grab and go, even when I’m busy and focused on a project.
4 Eat protein & veggies
In addition to eating enough calories, it’s also important to be mindful of the kinds of foods that those calories come from. Our bodies need a variety of vitamins and minerals to stay healthy and fight off infection.
Eating plenty of protein helps with the production and function of immune cells, antibodies, and other molecules involved in immune response. This, in turn, helps the body fight off infections. Great sources of protein include lean cuts of meat, poultry, egg whites, beans, and low-fat dairy. In general, shoot for between 0.7 and 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day (or 1.5 - 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight).
Vegetables are packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytochemicals that boost immune function too. Vitamins A, C, and E are found in many vegetables and help maintain the integrity of the skin, respiratory tract, and other barriers that protect against pathogens. Antioxidants in vegetables also help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress—which can weaken the immune system. The dietary fiber in vegetables also promotes a healthy gut microbiome, which plays a key role in immune function. It’s important to eat a serving of vegetables at every meal to get the most benefit from this food group.
5 Take your medicine
I’ll also be taking a few medicines to help get me through allergy season and visits with the babies. However, it’s important to consult with your own healthcare provider before adding any medicines (even over the counter) to your health routine. I’ll be taking a daily antihistamine to keep my allergy symptoms under control—especially right now during pollen season in North Carolina. I’ve been using Allegra for this for years, and I really like it because it doesn’t make me drowsy.
I’ll also be using a nasal corticosteroid (Flonase) to keep my sinuses from getting overly inflamed—which can lead to infection. I’ll limit this to just allergy season and whenever I visit the babies so that I’m not on a steroid all the time, since this can have other negative health effects.
Although I haven’t needed to use it in years, my doctor also refilled my prescription for an emergency inhaler just in case. I also have a corticosteroid inhaler on hand just in case I get sick again and have a hard time kicking the cough (this last one stuck around for 3 weeks).
So that’s our plan! I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that this can cut down on how often I get sick over the coming months. However, my doctor did note that illnesses are becoming more common now as a result of lockdown—when we lost a lot of our normal immunities. Maybe with these measures in place, however, I can at least reduce the amount of time that I’m down for the count 🤞
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ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 15: 5 Quick & Easy Meal Prep Ideas
Meal Prep is a great way to save time, money, and brainpower while reaching your daily nutrition goals.
Meal Prep is a great way to save time, money, and brainpower while reaching your daily nutrition goals.
As a busy coach and athlete with ADHD, I’m a BIG fan of meal prep. This involves preparing my food ahead of when I plan to eat it, which allows me to go about my day-to-day life without the hassle of deciding what to eat.
This way of organizing your eating can help you to:
stay consistent in reaching your daily nutrition goals
avoid overeating while practicing portion control
spend less time in the kitchen at meal times
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Jayd (00:00):
So by meal prepping and having my food ready, I'm able to continue to hyperfocus on whatever it is that I'm working on. I don't have to break my concentration, I can just grab and go.
(00:18)
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I am Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've created this podcast that I can share some of my most commonly asked questions among my personal training clients and my Twitch followers about fitness. My hope is that the topics in this podcast will help you to get on track in your fitness journey and build a body that you love. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about some meal prep strategies that you can use to save time and energy to reach your nutrition goals every single day. Now, as a busy coach and person with ADHD, it's really important for me to plan ahead and prep ahead what I'm going to eat every day. Otherwise, I really struggle to meet my nutrition goals. So when I meal prep and when I plan ahead, I just notice that everything feels so much better, I have more energy and recovering better and I make more gains. So meal prep and meal planning are a big part of how I reach my goals, and it's a big part of how many of my clients are also able to reach their nutrition goals. We're going to take a look at a couple of different strategies that you can use to plan and prep ahead for your nutrition, and these tips will help you regardless of whether you have ADHD or not and regardless of how busy you are. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:44)
Let's talk about meal prep. Now, meal prep is probably a term that you've heard if you hang out anywhere on the internet in the fitness and health social media landscape. So let's talk about what meal prep is. Meal prep is the practice of preparing your food ahead of time ahead of when you're going to actually eat it. Now, there's lots of different strategies for how you can do this, but the most typical way that I tend to see meal prep practiced is that you prepare your food ahead of time and actually split the servings up into separate entree containers that you store in your refrigerator or in your freezer. That way when you're ready to eat, you just grab and go, and this helps in a number of ways. One is that it takes the guesswork out of when you are hungry. I don't know about you, but when I'm already hungry, I don't tend to make the best choices, right?
(02:41)
If I'm already hungry, especially if I'm already hungry and I've been hungry for a while, I'm usually going to grab whatever sounds tastiest or I'm going to grab whatever is most convenient and it may not be the most nutritious. When you practice meal prep, basically your food is already prepared for you. You've already planned ahead, so you've made sure that the food that you have available is going to reach your nutrition goals, like how many calories you should be eating, what your macros need to be, right? You've got the right food groups in there, your veggies, your protein, your whole grains. It saves you from that. What am I going to eat? And then just grabbing something that's convenient but not actually nutritious. Now, another thing that it really helps with as a person with A DHD, I tend to get really hyper-focused on whatever it is that I'm working on.
(03:32)
I love my work. I'm very passionate about it, and sometimes I get a little bit sucked into whatever I'm doing, and it can be really disorienting to have to stop and interrupt what I'm doing to decide what am I going to eat, and then cook whatever it is that I'm going to eat. If I have meal prepped, I don't really have to break my concentration. All I have to do is walk over to my refrigerator, pop, whatever it is into the microwave, and then I can come right back to whatever it is that I was doing with very little interruption to my focus. And this is really big for me and my A DHD because the way that my brain will work is like if I have to stop what I'm doing to decide what to eat and then prepare what I'm going to eat, like spend 20 minutes cooking or whatever, I'm going to just opt to not eat.
(04:24)
And this is a problem. It's a big problem because it tends to leave me underfed, malnourished, and then I later on have to pay for it in my workouts, and I have a really hard time recovering from my workouts, and I sacrifice my gains, which is not what I want. I'm trying to build muscle. I'm trying to get strong. So by meal prepping and having my food ready, I'm able to continue to hyperfocus on whatever it is that I'm working on. I don't have to break my concentration. I can just grab and go. Another thing that a lot of people find meal prep helpful for is portion control. When you go ahead and you prepare your food ahead of time, you don't have to worry as much about overeating if you miss your body's fullness cues because what you have to eat is what you have meal prepped in that single container entree that you have prepared for your lunch or for your dinner.
(05:20)
That is what you have to eat. And so it helps to cut down on if you have the habit of continuing to eat past when you're actually full or if you tend to overshoot your calories at mealtimes because you continue to eat, you have a select portion of what is available and you eat just that. So if you are especially on a fat loss phase of your journey and you struggle with portion control, meal prep can really help with that. So these are just a few of the benefits that I've found to be really powerful for myself and for my personal clients in helping us all to stay on track with our nutrition. So I really think that meal prep is just like God gamer when it comes to reaching your nutrition goals every day. So now let's talk about a couple of different strategies that you can use for meal prep because it's not really a one size fits all strategy.
(06:14)
There's lots of different ways that you can prepare your food ahead of time. Today we're going to look at five different strategies that I have found really helpful for myself and for my clients, but I would love to hear what strategies you are using. If you practice meal prep, you can leave them in the comments of the YouTube video that is associated with this podcast episode. You can also talk about it in my Coaching corner Discord server. The link for that is in the show notes to this episode. So here's five of my favorite meal prep strategies. The first strategy, which is my personal favorite is batch cooking. Batch cooking is when you prepare one dish with lots of servings and then you just divide out those servings so that you can grab and go throughout the week. So a good example of this would be like a crockpot or slow cooker recipe like making a soup or a stew.
(07:09)
This works really well with casserole, but there's lots of different dishes that work well with batch cooking. But essentially you just pick a recipe that makes enough for six to eight servings, so you have a family of six to eight, but you're preparing it for yourself and you're dividing up those servings for yourself. Now, I really like this strategy because many years ago when I first started trying to meal prep, I did not know about batch cooking, and so I was preparing a bunch of separate dishes at once, and I would spend hours in the kitchen over the weekend. I remember one Sunday, many years ago, I was in the kitchen for four hours just preparing my dinners, just preparing my dinners for that week because I was making a bunch of separate dishes. I had my vegetable dish, and that was like 45 minutes of cooking, and then I had my protein dish, which was another 45 minutes of cooking and prep with all the together.
(08:07)
It ended up being about four hours with all the stuff together and all the components. I do not recommend this unless you really like cooking. If you love being in the kitchen, go for it. Go crazy, create separate dishes and then put them all together. Wonderful. I love that for you, not for me. I need to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. I hate being in the kitchen. My kitchen is really small, so it feels really claustrophobic and I just feel it under stimulating as a person with a DHD. Cooking is one of those activities that I just find incredibly boring and tedious, so I want to make sure that a little bit goes a long way. And so for myself, I'm going to be cooking dishes that make a lot of servings and it's the full dish. So a couple of examples of types of dishes that work really well for this, a lot of slow cooker recipes, slow cooker or crockpot recipes.
(09:01)
These are awesome because you basically can just dump all of your ingredients into the crockpot and press cook and the recipe will just cook itself over the course of four to eight or 10 hours. Another thing that I really like about this is you don't have to babysit the food. You literally can just put it in the crockpot and then walk away. You can go to bed, you can go to work, and you don't have to worry about actually doing anything to the dish, and it just cooks itself. And by the end of the time that it's cooking, it's ready to eat and you can divide it up among your meal prep containers and then stick it in the refrigerator and you're good to go. That's my top tier. Favorite way to meal prep. I love the slow cooker stuff, but one pan recipes also work really well for this because that'll save you a lot of time and a lot of mess.
(09:51)
And that's basically where you bake everything on one pan in the oven. So you dump your vegetables, your protein, whatever your starchy vegetable is, or if you're doing grains, you dump all of that into one pan, put it in the oven, roast it or bake it, and it's good to go. This works really well with casseroles as well. You put everything into a casserole dish, but you can also batch cook cold dishes like salads, and you'll probably hear meal prep bowls or sea meal prep bowls on social media. These are basically cold dishes that are salads where all of the ingredients are put together into a container, and you don't have to cook anything. You can eat it cold right out of the refrigerator. Salads are super, super easy to batch cook because you just get all of the ingredients together. You lay out your entree containers and you can just dump in all of your lettuce and then your carrots and then whatever toppings.
(10:50)
I would suggest, however, getting some separate little containers for your dressing or your sauce because if you're storing a week's worth of salads in the refrigerator by the end of the week, that salad's going to be pretty soggy if you go ahead and put your dressing or if you go ahead and put your sauce on it. So you may want to have some separate containers for your sauces and your dressing, but that's a real quick way. You don't have to cook, you don't have to fire up the oven, you don't have to use a crock pot. Just drop everything together in those containers, salads and meal prep bowls. Awesome. I love them. And then wraps and sandwiches are also really good for batch cooking because just like with the salads, you can lay out your breads or your wraps and then just dump all your salad greens and then your proteins and then whatever other toppings, and then wrap them up, pop 'em in the fridge, they're good to go.
(11:47)
Easy peasy lemon squeezy. So batch cooking is probably the most popular way to meal prep. It's probably the way that if you've seen anything about meal prep on social media, this is probably the style that you've seen and it works really well. I would say that the drawback though, especially for those hot dishes, is if you don't like reheated food, if you don't like the taste and the consistency of leftovers, because for the hot dishes, you are going to probably have to pop them in the microwave before you eat them. They're already cooked, right? And you're not going to necessarily be eating them right after they've been cooked. And for some people that is a no-go, right? I have a couple of clients who just absolutely hate the taste of meat when it has been reheated in the microwave and some stuff just doesn't have a good consistency.
(12:41)
When you reheat it in the microwave, a lot of times you'll lose the crispiness that maybe had the topping before you popped it in the refrigerator. So for people who really don't like the taste or consistency of leftovers, I think one of the best options is to do a partial prep strategy. So the next two strategies will help with that if that's your issue with meal prep. So we're going to do a partial prep, which means we're going to get all of the ingredients together, but we're not going to actually cook them until right before you eat them. So one of my favorite ways to do this is to marinade and then cook right before you're going to eat something. So you can get a bunch of glass containers and put your chicken or whatever protein you're going to be doing, your vegetables, everything, all of the components of the meal into that container, and then 20 to 30 minutes before you're going to actually eat it, that's when you pop it in the oven or that's when you dump it into a frying pan or a wok or something.
(13:46)
So basically you're going to assemble all of the ingredients together, but you're not going to actually cook them until you're ready to eat. So this does a couple of different things. One, you're already getting the portion control that you would get for the regular meal prep, right? You already have in that container. That is your entree, that is what you're going to be eating, and you also don't have to decide right before you're going to eat, what am I going to eat? It's already there. It's already prepared, but you don't have to worry about that leftover microwaved consistency or flavor of the food because you're going to actually cook it right before you eat it. This works really well for stir fry recipes or just marinated meat and vegetables. You can just leave them marinating in the refrigerator. In fact, the longer that you leave it marinating in the refrigerator, it's going to have way more flavor by the time you actually cook it and eat it.
(14:44)
So this is a great strategy that can make sure that you're getting the consistency and the flavor that you like without having to do all of the cooking or all of the deciding of what you're going to eat at mealtimes. And third, a similar strategy to this, which is freezer meal prep. Now, this is kind of a new strategy for me. I've been reading a lot about it and I'm intrigued. I haven't quite practiced it as much myself, but this is similar to that like marinade and prep. But basically, you're going to take all of the ingredients of your meal. You're going to go ahead and chop up your vegetables, add your seasonings, and dump everything together into a freezer safe bag, like a Ziploc bag or one of those endurable silicone bags. And you're going to put all of that in the freezer before you cook it, and then at mealtime, you just take out that bag, thaw the ingredients, and then you cook it.
(15:44)
So this is a really interesting strategy that I think would work really, really well if you're super busy. And the thing that I also really like about it is that this will keep for a lot longer than if you do the marinade and cook strategy or even the cook before you eat it, the traditional batch cooking. Because a lot of times there's weeks where I don't have time to meal prep. I don't have time to plan what I'm going to eat, and that can be really stressful because either it might be birthday parties or maybe a project over the weekend, and I just don't have as much time as I would like to go ahead and just put everything together for the week. Having something in the freezer that's ready to go, all I have to do is thaw it and I maybe prepared it a month ago.
(16:35)
What a great strategy for saving more time and more energy and more saving on stress about your meals. So I really love this idea. There's a creator that I really like who makes great content around freezer prep. It's Olga's Flavor Factory. The link for that website is in the show notes to this episode. So Olga makes a lot of freezer prep meals, and she talks a lot about how it can be helpful for if you're entering into a busy season, if you know that you're going to have time where you're just not going to have as much time to meal prep or you're not going to have as much time to think about what am I going to eat? For example, Olga used this strategy right before she was going to have her baby because she knew after having her baby that she wasn't going to have a whole lot of time for cooking and planning her meals.
(17:27)
So she went ahead and stocked her freezer with a bunch of ready to cook meals, which is so smart. But if you have a really busy job where you have seasons that are just super, super busy, if you're an accountant or something going into a couple of weeks that you're not going to have as much time to meal prep and meal plan freezer, meal prep is the way to go. I love the strategy. And the other thing that I like about it is, again, if you are the type of person where you don't really like the taste of leftovers in general, you're going to be cooking these meals right before you're going to eat them. You just have to thaw them and then pop them in the oven or however it is that you're going to be cooking them. What a great strategy. So you don't have to worry about that reheated meat taste.
(18:14)
This is a really great option that I'm going to be exploring a lot more of in the coming months. Now, another really cool strategy that can help save time and energy is the partial prep or ingredient prep. So with ingredient prep, you're not actually preparing the whole meal. You're just going ahead and preparing and cooking different components of the meals, like cooking the vegetables, cooking the rice, and you assemble your meals right before you eat them. Or you may have certain components that you cook right before you eat them, but you have other components that are already ready to go. They're cooked, and all you have to do is add them. Nikki gets Fit is a YouTube channel that gives a lot of information and a lot of strategies for how to do this well. So the link for Nikki gets fit is going to be in the show notes to this episode as well.
(19:07)
She does a really great job of explaining how to do ingredient prep or partial prep. So the way that this strategy can be super helpful is if you tend to not like to eat the same thing every day. So if you're batch cooking, for example, you're going to be eating the same thing at lunchtime every day for a couple of days, if not the entire week. I don't mind this for me and my brain type that works just fine. I love the consistency, but for some people that will drive them crazy, they will get so sick of eating the same thing every day. If you ingredient prep, it adds a variety to your meals because you have all of these ingredients that are ready to go, but you can combine them in different ways at mealtime, so you can make some sandwiches by using the prepped onions, the cheese, and whatever meat.
(20:05)
This works really well because at meal times, you can combine all of the different ingredients that you have ready to go in your refrigerator or in your kitchen, and you can put them into different combinations to give yourself some variety so you're not eating the same thing every day. But you also know that what you are eating is going to be nutritious, it's homemade, and you're in total control of what goes on your plate. I do actually do ingredient prep from time to time. One of my favorite ways to do this is like I will cook a bunch of chicken breast at the beginning of the week, so I'll either put it in the slow cooker or I'll bake it or roast it in the oven, and then throughout the week, I will put that chicken into different dishes. I'll make a chicken salad, which I can have on crackers or in a wrap or on a sandwich, and then I'll also add it to a salad or a sandwich or a wrap, or I'll top it into another thing that I've prepped like soup or a pasta dish.
(21:12)
So ingredient prep can save some time for you and also ensure that you're reaching your nutrition goals, especially if you're doing it with your proteins or your veggies. Having them prepped and ready to go is a great way to make sure that you're getting them in at meal times, but you're also not eating the same thing all the time. So I like this strategy, especially for my clients who really hate to eat the same thing every day. So check out Nikki gets fit. She's got so many videos and so many resources on how to do ingredient prep. Now, for the last strategy, I want to remind you that you do not have to cook everything that you eat. I think that sometimes we get this idea in our minds that there's this moral imperative that you have to prepare from scratch everything that you eat to do it well to be healthy.
(22:02)
And that's just not realistic for many of us. And I know some of my clients tend to feel really guilty because they're just like, I don't want to be cooking all the time, and I don't like to cook all the time. How can I meal prep? Can I still meal prep and can I still eat healthy? And the answer is absolutely yes. You can use already pre-prepared or pre-cooked stuff. You do not have to cook everything from scratch. There are some people who love cooking and they're good at it, and they want to cook everything from scratch. Awesome. I love that for them. But for myself and for many of my clients, we do not have the patience or the time, and you're not a bad person if you want to use already prepared or pre-cooked food in your meal prep. In fact, you'll probably save some time and some energy for yourself.
(22:53)
So I really like to use pre-prepared stuff from the grocery store. For example, I really hate cooking chicken. I will do it. I will cook meat, but I hate to do it. And so sometimes I'll just straight up buy already cooked rotisserie chickens from my grocery store, and then I will use that in my chicken salad or on my sandwiches or topping salads and pasta dishes. There's nothing wrong with using something that's already pre-prepared, especially if it means that it's the difference between you actually meal prepping and reaching your nutrition goals versus just yolo dieting and just eating whatever or not eating at all. So rotisserie chicken, that's one of my favorite things, but a lot of times will peruse the deli section of my grocery store because there's a lot of pre-prepared stuff that you can add to your meal prep to just save time.
(23:57)
There's also already cooked protein and vegetables in the freezer aisle of your grocery store. All of these things are totally fine to use in your meal prep. You do not have to cook everything from scratch. Now, if you cook everything from scratch, the benefit is that you are going to have less sodium, less preservatives. You have more control over what actually goes on your plate. But for most of us, especially if you're in a really busy season or you have a really busy day or busy week, just go ahead and use what's already prepared. There's a lot of really healthy options in the deli section or in the freezer section of your grocery store. Also, there's nothing wrong with stocking up your freezer with actually frozen meals. There are a lot of great options. Now, we've come a long way in the food industry over the last 20 years in preparing frozen food that's nutritious.
(24:54)
It has a minimum amount of sodium and preservatives, lean cuisine, healthy choice meals. These are all really great options. If you haven't meal prepped or you don't have time to meal prep, just grab one of those from your freezer. There's nothing wrong with that. Just know that these tend to have a little bit higher sodium though when you're going with these pre-prepared and frozen foods. And so if you eat a lot of them, and if you go through a week and that's what most of what you're eating is, you may notice that the scale goes up because your body is going to be retaining more water. And you also just want to be careful about your sodium intake in general because high sodium can lead to high blood pressure. But there's nothing wrong with incorporating these things into your meal prep strategy. You can combine them with batch cooking.
(25:46)
You do a little bit of batch cooking, and then you have a few meals that you just eat frozen, like Lean cuisine. You can use any of these strategies in combination. You don't have to just pick one. Now, when we're talking about meal prep, it's really important to also consider storage solutions. I have for many, many years used little plastic entree containers. I've liked these because they allow me to divvy out all of the servings and stack them in my refrigerator so I can grab and go throughout the week. However, one of my goals in this year is to reduce my use of plastics. And so I recently invested in a bunch of glass meal prep containers, and I really like these for a number of reasons. One, I know that I'm reducing my exposure to microplastics because when you store food in plastic, there's always a little bit of microplastic leakage that can happen.
(26:38)
And so I'm trying to reduce that in my own diet. Also, meal prep containers that are plastic over time tend to take on the flavors and odors of the food that you store in them, which can carry over into whatever food that you store in them later, which is really gross. So I am using glass containers. Another thing that I like about the glass containers is you can actually cook the food right in them. So glass containers work really well for those partial prep strategies. If you're marinating and then you're going to cook right before you eat, you can just marinate and store your food in the glass containers, and then you can pop that glass container right into the oven. So there's a number of reasons why I love these. They do tend to be heavier, and they are more fragile, of course, than your plastic containers.
(27:27)
But for me, I've been using them for half a year at this point, and I really love them. I don't have that carryover flavor from past meals. And also plastic containers sometimes can just, even if it doesn't pass on food flavors from previous dishes, there's still that plasticy type of flavor or smell, and I absolutely hate that. So I love that my glass containers kind of just allow the food to keep its own flavor. However, if you're going to be practicing the freezer prep or if you're concerned with the glass containers, breaking plastic is okay. But personally, I would recommend getting something that's like a non-plastic lightweight type of container like made of silicone or get some BPA free plastic containers. I have links to suggested containers in the show notes of this episode. For some food, especially for that freezer prep, you may want to use Ziploc bags, but if you want to reduce your use of plastics, Ziploc actually makes silicone-based bags of all sizes that work well in the freezer.
(28:36)
They're re washable and reusable links for that are in the show notes. Another of my absolute favorite meal prep containers is insulated containers or thermos. Now, I love these because you can take whatever the food is that you're going to be eating, and if it's hot or if it's cold, these containers will keep the food the same temperature without you having to reheat it or put it in the refrigerator. So if you're on the go, you don't have access to a refrigerator or a microwave to reheat your food. These are awesome. And if you are on the go a lot, I do recommend investing in a lunchbox that's insulated. I love my lunchbox. It has two compartments. So I have the bottom compartment that I'll put sometimes my cold dishes in, and then I'll put my hot components in the top compartment. I've got links for some suggested lunchboxes there.
(29:32)
So this will allow you to carry your food with you and keep your meal prep with you, and you can stock up on all of your snacks, keep all of your snacks, all of your dishes for the day with you. So check out the show notes for suggested links for those different types of storage solutions because that is going to help you to stay consistent on your meal prep and make sure that you're actually eating what you prepare for yourself. So that is the episode for today. I hope that you found it helpful. I'm really curious to see what strategies you actually like for practicing meal prep and reaching your daily nutrition goals. Again, you can leave your comments in the comment section on the YouTube channel for this episode of the podcast, or you can join my Coaching Corner Discord server and keep the conversation going there in the nutrition section.
(30:21)
I would really like to know what your favorite meal prep strategies are. Don't forget also to sign up for my email list where I send notifications about new podcast episodes every week, as well as lots of free trainer tips for moving forward and staying motivated in your fitness journey. I've also created some meal planning worksheets that can help you to plan out your meal prep every week. The link for that is in the show notes to this episode. It's a free download, so check that out. And also, if you are not really sure what your nutrition goals should be, check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program. I break down everything you need to know in terms of how to build a healthy plate and how many calories you should be eating, how to split up your calories among macronutrients, and more tips on meal prep. All of the information for that is linked in the show notes.
(31:18)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, aka Jaydigains. And if you'd like to hang out with me while I'm live on Twitch, check on my Twitch channel, which is twitch.tv/jaydigains. You can also find a lot more information on the services that I provide and more coaching tips on my website, which is jaydigains.com. If you are interested in diving a little bit deeper into planning your nutrition and figuring out what your nutrition goals should be, make sure to check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program. This is a short course that will teach you everything you need to know from how to put the right types of food on your plate to how many calories you should be eating every day, and where those calories should be coming from in terms of your macronutrients.
(32:04)
We also cover a lot more in detail about how to meal plan and meal prep in that course. So you can check that out in the links that are in the show notes to this episode. That's the Healthy Diet Makeover program. And also make sure to check out my free downloadable meal planning worksheets, which are linked in the show notes to this episode. Thank you once again for watching. I will see you next time. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Don't forget to eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink water, and prioritize your self-care.
Meal Prep Strategies
There are many different variations of meal prep strategies to choose from. In this episode, we’ll take a look at 5 of my favorite strategies to prep ahead and stay on track in my nutrition.
1 Batch Cooking
Batch cooking is perhaps the most popular style of meal prep. This involves cooking a large batch of a meal ahead of time. Most people do this over the weekend and then store the separate servings in entree containers to take with them to work throughout the week.
When I first started meal prepping, I made the mistake of making super complicated meals that had too many different parts. I’d be stuck in my kitchen for 4 hours or more on a Sunday. I don’t recommend doing this! Since then, I’ve figured out much faster and easier ways to meal prep with much less cleanup afterwards.
Slow Cooker recipes are one of my favorite minimal-cleanup options for batch cooking. You just dump a bunch of ingredients into a slow cooker or crock pot, set it and forget it. The food will cook over the course of between 4 and 10 hours without you having to do anything to it. You can literally leave the food to cook while you sleep or work. When the food is done, separate the servings into separate containers, or you can literally throw the entire pot and lid into your refrigerator in a pinch and just divy out new servings for youself throughout the week.
One Pan Recipes are great if you especially want to cook something with a crispier or more charred texture and flavor. My favorite one pan recipes include things like casseroles, or just a ton of veggies and protein cooked together with some seasoning or marinade.
One Pot Recipes are similar to slow cooker recipes in that you dump everything into a single large pot to cook, but they usually cook in a much shorter time period.
Salads & Meal Prep Bowls are one of my go-to options for cold dishes if I don’t want to worry about microwaving something. You can throw together a bunch of nutritious items with a variety of textures and flavors into an entree container and add dressing just before you eat it.
Wraps & Sandwiches are another super simple way to prepare cold dishes with tons of nutrition, with the added benefit that you can literally eat them while you’re on the move. No fork or spoon needed!
2 Marinate Prep
Another great way to cut down on time in the kitchen before you eat is to do a partial prep strategy—where you get the meal ingredients ready ahead of time and bunched together so that all you have to do is pop it in the oven or into a frying pan just before you eat it.
3 Ingredient Prep
Some dishes work best if you go ahead and cook a few parts ahead of time. You can later add them to different dishes. This is a great option if you hate eating the same thing every day and want some variety.
For example, I’ll often slow cook or bake 2 pounds of chicken breast at the beginning of the week. Then throughout the week, I’ll add that chicken to salads, pasta, and sandwiches when I feel like I need the variety. This works well for dishes like:
chicken salad, tuna salad, or salmon salad
sandwiches and wraps
adding protein to top other dishes like soups, pasta, or salads
Ingredient prep also works really well if you don’t like the taste or consistency of leftovers. By having the meal ingredients ready ahead of time and bunched together, all you have to do is assemble and pop the meal into the oven or into a frying pan just before you eat it.
I suggest subscribing to Nikki Gets Fit on YouTube for more information on how to ingredient prep. She makes tons of content with tips and tricks that many of my clients swear by!
4 Using Pre-Prepared Foods
Another variation of this is to buy already-prepared items from the grocery store or food market to incorporate into your meal prep. I’ll often buy a rotisserie chicken from my local Harris Teeter and add it to my meals throughout the week.
Frozen foods are also a really convenient option for pre-prepared foods. I keep certain veggies like peas, edamame, and broccoli in my freezer at all times to quickly microwave or steam and add to my meals. I also try to keep one or two ready-to-eat meals in my freezer at all times for when I haven’t meal prepped and need nutrition in a pinch. Healthy Choice and Lean Cuisine make some great options for dishes that are packed with protein vegetables.
5 Freezer Meal Prep
Freezer prep is something that I honestly don’t do nearly as often as I should! There are two main ways to use your freezer for meal prep.
The first method involves cooking your meals and then freezing the individual servings to eat later. It’s like making your own Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine meals—but more tailored to your nutrition goals and with fewer preservatives.
The other method involves chopping & assembling ingredients, then freezing everything BEFORE you cook the meal. Later, when you’re ready to eat, simply thaw and cook. This is a great option if you don’t like the taste or texture of re-heated meals!
Olga’s Flavor Factory is an excellent resource for recipes, tips, and tricks for making delicious and nutritious freezer-prep meals.
Recommended Equipment:
Before you start practicing meal prep, make sure that you have the proper containers to store the food until you’re ready to eat it!
I recommend investing in some sort of entree-size containers so that you can more easily grab and go at meal times. This also makes your food easier to pack in a lunch box if you’re on the go.
For years I used plastic entree containers because they were cheap and lightweight. But over time, these containers tend to absorb odors and get stained, and I also worry about ingesting microplastics.
So recently I invested in glass meal prep containers and I absolutely love them!
Glass food storage containers are not only more durable and sustainable, but they also don’t tend to retain any odors or stains. Also, you can cook your food directly in a glass container—which cuts down on cleanup after cooking. Here are the ones I suggest:
Although they can be heavier and more fragile than plastic meal prep containers, glass containers are my preferred go-to option.
However, if you plan on freezing your meal prep, you might want to use either silicone or BPA-free plastic containers:
For some food items, you may want to use a bag with a zip lock. For plastic-free options, check out reusable and washable silicone bags:
Another favorite storage solution is stainless steel insulated food containers or thermoses. I love these especially for days when I want to keep the temperature of my food consistent until mealtime and won’t have access to either a refrigerator or microwave.
If you’re on the go a lot of times, I also suggest getting a lunch box that will keep your food insulated. I have a multi-compartment lunch box that I use on days when I’ll be in the office for long periods of time.
Clean up your diet 🥦
Clean up your diet and reach your fitness goals in 5 steps.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 14: 10 Reasons You’re Not Losing Weight
Learn how to break past weight loss plateaus with this checklist of 10 things that might be holding you back.
Learn how to break past weight loss plateaus with this checklist of 10 things that might be holding you back.
One of the most common things I hear from new personal training clients is:
“I don’t understand! I’m exercising and eating healthy, why am I not losing weight?”
Years ago, before I became a personal trainer, I had that exact same problem. I was taking group fitness classes every week and eating what I thought was a healthy diet. And yet, it seemed like I could never break past the weight I was at and get lean.
It wasn’t until I learned how to balance my energy budget and work out effectively that I began to get that “toned” look of having more lean muscle and less body fat.
Today I’m going to share with you my checklist that I use to help my clients identify what might be holding them back from shedding their excess body weight.
But first, it’s important to understand the difference between your body being in an anabolic versus catabolic state.
Anabolism vs Catabolism
Anabolism and catabolism are both processes of your metabolism, and they involve either breaking body tissue down or building new tissue. Both of these processes help organize molecules by freeing and capturing energy to keep your body running strong.
Anabolism involves growth and building new tissue. In this process, smaller molecules are built up into larger, more complex ones. An example of this is muscle protein synthesis, which involves turning amino acids into the proteins that make up your muscle tissue. Anabolism involves the hormones like estrogen, insulin, growth hormone, and testosterone.
Catabolism involves breaking large, complex molecules down into smaller, more simple ones. This is what happens when you digest food or during lipolysis—the process involved in breaking down fat for energy. Catabolism involves hormones like adrenaline, cortisol, cytokines, and glucagon.
Anabolic and catabolic processes can happen at the same time in our bodies. However certain things can cause our bodies to run more of one type of process:
When your body is running more anabolic processes, this is called being in an anabolic state—which means you’re building and maintaining your muscle mass.
Running more catabolic processes is called being in a catabolic state—which means you’re breaking down or losing overall mass, both fat and muscle.
Whether your body is in an anabolic or catabolic state will have an impact on what the scale reads every day. Both building muscle and storing fat can cause your body to be heavier, whereas losing mass (muscle or fat) can cause your weight to go down.
For this reason, the scale may not always be the best way to measure your fitness progress. On weeks when your body is more anabolic, you may see your weight stay the same or even increase as you build more muscle. On other weeks where you’re more catabolic, you may see your weight go down—but there’s no way to know how much of that weight loss is fat versus muscle by measuring weight alone.
Whether your body is running more anabolic versus catabolic processes is determined by a few factors.
Certain thyroid problems can affect the release of hormones into your body, so it’s always a good idea to check with a healthcare provider and get tested if you suspect a hormonal imbalance.
How you eat and exercise can also impact whether your body runs more anabolic versus catabolic.
Anabolism is encouraged when you perform resistance training regularly and eat either a maintenance level of calories or a surplus.
Catabolism is encouraged when you perform cardiovascular exercise and eat below a maintenance level of calories (i.e., a calorie deficit).
So as we go through the checklist of 10 things that could be preventing you from losing weight, keep these concepts in mind.
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Jayd (00:08):
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm your host, Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for about 10 years and I created this podcast to educate my clients and followers on everything you need to know to get started and make progress in your fitness journey. We're going to talk about everything from how to exercise to how to eat to build a body that you love. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you 10 reasons why you're not losing weight. So if you've been at a weight loss plateau for a while, or maybe you've just started one creeping in, or maybe you want to prevent one from happening in the first place, you might want to take out a pen and some paper to write down these 10 things. Now, before we move forward, keep in mind that I do have an email newsletter that you can sign up for and I will send you podcast updates as well as announcements of the things that are going on in my community. You can sign up for that in the link in the show notes, and without further ado, let's go ahead and get started.
(01:05)
If you have ever caught yourself saying something like, I don't understand, I'm exercising, I'm eating healthy, but I'm not losing any weight, what is happening? This is a super common problem that a lot of my new clients and followers face on their fitness journey. When you reach a point where your weight isn't moving and it hasn't been moving for two weeks or more, we tend to call this a weight loss plateau. So a plateau, you think about in topography, that's when the land, it is like a top of a mountain and it just kind of is flat. That's a plateau and a plateau when it happens with our weight loss is when we just don't see our weight moving anywhere. Now, there's a lot of things that can lead to a weight loss plateau. Not all of them mean that you're not making progress. So in today's episode, I'm going to share with you 10 things that could be contributing to you not seeing the scale move very much.
(02:01)
But before we get into those 10 reasons why you're not losing weight, we first need to talk about the way that our bodies store energy and burn energy. So if you are trying to lose weight, I can wager that your actual goal is fat loss. Remember that all of our body's tissues make up our total body weight. It's not just fat, it's bones, it's muscle, it's the water that your body retains as well as the fat if you're trying to lose weight. Keep in mind that not all weight loss is good weight loss. So body fat is our body's stores of energy. It's like our battery packs, right? And when we eat more energy than what our bodies burn, our bodies will store that energy as fat. So you'll notice it subcutaneous fat underneath your skin and that's everywhere, all over your body. You also have visceral fat that's around your organs, right?
(02:56)
So belly fat and then there's brown fat usually is in infants and little children and that reduces as they age. Now, our bodies do actually need a certain amount of fat to just be healthy. So there's a certain range of body fat percentage, which is the amount of your body weight that's made up by fat that you need in order to stay healthy. For men, that's usually around seven or 8% minimum, and for women it's about 15% minimum. So that's like the bare minimum amount of body fat that you need to just stay healthy because fat is important for the regulation of our hormones, for the absorption of vitamins, our brain function, keeping our skin tissue and other tissues healthy. And also it's good to have some extra stores of energy just in case. And when we want to reduce our body fat, if we have a high body fat percentage or if we want to get lean like for bodybuilding competition, what we need to do is put our bodies into an energy deficit so that our bodies can tap into those energy stores.
(04:03)
And when we do this, we're actually putting our body into what's called a catabolic state. This is as opposed to an anabolic state. These are two main functions of our metabolism. So catabolic processes are processes that break stuff down, right? It breaks food down into molecules so that your body can access that for energy as well as apply the vitamins and the minerals and your food to your actual body tissues to keep you healthy. So whenever our bodies are breaking things down, that's a catabolic process. Now we also have anabolic processes where our bodies build tissue or build stuff up, arrange smaller molecules into bigger molecules. So things like protein, muscle synthesis. When your body is actually building the muscle in your body, that is an anabolic process. So anabolic and catabolic processes are happening in your body all the time, and whether you burn fat or build muscle has a lot to do with the percentage of your metabolism that is going towards catabolic or anabolic processes.
(05:11)
In general, if you want to break tissue down, namely fat, you need to be in what we call a calorie deficit, which means that your body is taking in less energy than what your body spends on average for the anabolic processes. These run so much better when our bodies are in what's called a calorie surplus. When you're actually eating more energy than what your body is burning on average, having that excess energy gives your body that extra energy that it needs to build new tissue. So this is why a lot of times you might hear people say, oh, I'm a hard gainer. I have a really hard time building muscle. Almost 100% of the time when someone is a hard gainer and they have a hard time building muscle, it's because they can't get into a calorie surplus. They're having trouble getting as much of their metabolism to go towards anabolism or anabolic processes as they can.
(06:03)
People who struggle to lose weight or burn fat tend to have a hard time getting into a catabolic state. They have a hard time getting into a calorie deficit. So there are lots of reasons why you may struggle to get your body to be more catabolic or breaking stuff down, breaking down fat versus being in a more anabolic state. When you are trying to achieve a healthy physique, most of the time what we recommend is that you focus on burning fat, but preserving or building muscle. And the reason for that is because muscle is one of the best drivers of your metabolism. You can get your body to actually burn more calories and then therefore burn more fat If you build muscle, having more muscle means that your body is going to on average, burn more calories on a day-to-day basis, even on the days that you don't work out.
(06:52)
So when you're working on recomposition in your body or losing weight, you want as much of that weight loss to come from body fat and as little as possible to come from muscle. You want to minimize the breakdown or the catabolism of your muscle and you want to maximize the amount of metabolism that happens towards your fat, and there are some things that we can do to help encourage our bodies to do that. So let's go over my checklist of 10 things that I like to go over with my clients when they are struggling to see the scale move and they're not seeing any more weight loss. So number one on this list is that your calorie intake is still too high. You can eat healthy and still be eating a calorie surplus. Remember that when you're in a calorie surplus, you're eating more energy than what your body is burning, and you can do this with healthy food.
(07:46)
There are calorie dense healthy foods that a lot of people don't realize they're actually overshooting their energy budget. Things like nuts and seeds are a big one for a lot of my clients. Also, oil, even if you're using olive oil and healthy vegetable oils, a little bit goes a long way. Fat in general is very calorie dense. One gram of fat is nine calories as opposed to one gram of protein or one gram of carbohydrates, which is four calories. So it's very energy dense and a little bit goes a long way. So if you're not tracking what you eat in a calorie tracking app or a food journal or using one of my nutrition tracking sheets that are downloadable, and I'll include a link to that in the show notes. If you're not tracking what you eat, you may not be aware that you're actually eating more energy than your body is burning, even though the foods that you're eating are healthy.
(08:42)
So that can make it so that your body isn't actually burning fat because you're not getting into that catabolic state. You're staying in a calorie surplus, you're still eating more energy than what your body's burning Number two is, maybe your calorie intake is actually too low for too long. This is another really common thing that I see with new clients in particular, whenever I have taken on a nutrition coaching client almost every single time when they tell me that they're struggling to lose weight, we take a look at how many calories they've been eating over the course of months, and it's almost always the case that their calorie intake is too low and it's been that way for a really long time. So you might be thinking, that doesn't make any sense If I eat less calories, shouldn't I be in a calorie deficit? Your body is going to adapt to whatever calorie intake you give it, and this is actually a good system.
(09:39)
This helps to keep you alive. If we were in olden times and experienced famine or crop failure, your body has this ability to rev everything down so that you burn less calories every day so that you can stay alive during periods of scarcity. So if you have been eating a really low calorie intake for a really long time, your body will set into this mode where it's going to be burning fewer calories than it used to. So everything will slow down and you're going to have a hard time burning fat at that point. You're not even in a calorie deficit anymore because your body slowed down to bring your maintenance level of calories down to meet the average number of calories that you're eating every day. So this is why I usually like to have my clients cut or go on a diet for short periods at a time because your body is eventually going to adapt and in order to get your body burning fat again, you either need to cut calories again, which there's only so many that you can take away before you get into dangerous territory.
(10:39)
You don't want to eat less than a thousand calories a day, especially if you're a big dude, you know what I mean? So if you've been eating too little for too long, that's also going to stop your weight loss. In that case, I would recommend doing a reverse diet and starting to gradually add calories into your daily intake on a very gradual basis, like on a week by week basis, adding only 50 calories to a hundred calories at a time, and slowly bring your calorie intake up to the point where you're able to eat more calories and your body weight is still staying the same. And once you reach a point where you're eating the amount of calories that someone of your size should be eating, then you can cut again. Then you can cut calories. But again, you want to make sure that it's a short period of time, six to 12 weeks because your body will eventually adapt to that.
(11:30)
Number three is you're not building muscle. If you have been eating healthy and exercising, but you're not exercising in the right way, this can also impact your weight loss. So remember that we talked about how muscle is a main driver of your metabolism. If you are not careful, if you're in a calorie deficit and you're not actually training to build muscle, your body will actually break down muscle in addition to fat, to access the energy that's stored there. As this happens, your overall daily calorie expenditure is going to go down. If you're not actively building muscle or trying to preserve the muscle that you have, you're going to see your daily calorie expenditure go down. That means your body's going to burn fewer calories. So if you want to prevent this from happening and keep your metabolism revved up, one of the best things you can do is resistance training.
(12:26)
Resistance training. You don't even need more than two or three times a week. But if you're doing a lot of cardio, especially a lot of high intensity cardio like beach body workouts or group fitness or HIIT workouts, then you're likely burning away your muscle. So it's really important to incorporate strength training, traditional strength training, learn how to lift weights, learn how to do calisthenics in a way that builds muscle because this is going to keep your metabolism revved up so that it doesn't slow down and you can prevent a weight loss plateau. Number four is you aren't sleeping enough. Sleep is so important when it comes to fat loss, weight loss and just establishing health and wellness. When we don't get enough sleep, it completely disrupts our hormonal balance. Leptin is the hormone that signals fullness, so you know when to stop eating, so when you don't sleep enough, your body doesn't actually produce enough leptin so you have a harder time knowing when it's time to stop eating.
(13:28)
So this can lead to overeating and over-consuming calories, ghrelin increases and that makes it so that you feel like you have more of an appetite and you feel like you need to eat more. So with these two things combined, it's just a recipe for overeating and mindless snacking. Also, when you don't sleep enough, you're likely going to feel tired, which is going to make it harder for you to show up and exercise or do your workouts. And if you do this often enough and you experience chronic sleep deprivation, there's a lot of long-term down the road effects that this can have that will impact your weight loss, not only disrupting your metabolism, but also impacting your insulin sensitivity and putting you at an increased risk of developing diabetes or complications from diabetes. So please make sure that you're getting enough sleep. Everybody's sleep needs are different, so you want to make sure that you do a sleep journal or a sleep study to figure out how much sleep that your body needs, and if you have a condition that makes it hard for you to sleep, I strongly recommend doing a sleep study or getting on medicine to help you because this is going to impact so many areas of your life even beyond your ability to lose weight.
(14:41)
Now, number five, very similar to number four is that you're overstressed. Now when you are really stressed, just like when you haven't slept enough, your hormonal is going to be totally out of whack and your body is going to produce a lot more specifically of the hormone called cortisol, and cortisol is essentially like your stress hormone. Now, a little bit of stress is actually healthy for us. Acute stress that happens in the moment, it helps to motivate us to get ourselves to safety or to take action when we need to. But the problem comes when we have chronic stress and we're in this fight or flight state for long periods of time very often, and this can lead to all kinds of problems for our health and also impact our weight loss. Cortisol, which is the main stress hormone, can actually cause your body to store more visceral fat, which is the fat in your belly that surrounds your organs.
(15:39)
Now, having a lot of visceral fat is associated with a lot of other comorbidities, meaning illnesses. People who have higher visceral fat are usually at increased risk of certain types of cancers, diabetes, heart disease, so it's not really good. We don't want visceral fat or we don't want too much visceral fat. Also, when we're stressed, we tend to reach for comfort foods, which a lot of times are calorie dense. So if you're stressed eating or if you do emotional eating or you eat a lot of comfort foods, you may not realize that you're actually eating more energy and this can cause you to stay in a calorie surplus, which makes it hard for your body to burn fat and to lose weight. So it's super important to practice stress management, and there are a number of ways that you can do this from learning breathing exercises like in yoga and looking into mindfulness practice and seeing a therapist is also a good idea.
(16:38)
One of my favorite types of therapies as a neurodiverse person is EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and this is a somatic therapy that helps you to process trauma as well as regulate a dysregulated nervous system. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you to organize your life and structure your life in a way that minimizes stress as well. So a lot of options out there. You do not have to live in this chronic stress, and if you want to lose weight, it's going to be really important that you get a handle on it. Number six is that you may actually be working out too much. This is related to being overstressed because a lot of the impact is the same. When you work out too much or too hard and you don't have a good balance of the intensity or the volume of your workouts, you may be overstressing your body, which again makes your body release more cortisol, which is going to make it harder for your body to recover from your workouts and is actually going to lead to you retaining more visceral fat.
(17:47)
Also really intense can increase your appetite, and a lot of people don't realize that after they have done a really hard workout, they end up mindlessly snacking, they eat more, and they end up actually overshooting their calories and keeping their body in a calorie surplus. I remember it. To burn fat, we want our bodies to be in a calorie deficit. So if you work out really, really hard and then you treat yourself with a high calorie after workout snack or smoothie or something, you're not going to be really impacting your fat loss. However, you may actually be helping yourself to build more muscle because building muscle happens best when you're in a calorie surplus, but if you see the weight is not moving, if you see that your scale isn't moving and you tend to do a lot of really hard, really intense workouts, but you're not tracking what you eat, you may want to take a look at what you're eating, especially on the days that you work out or the days following that you work out.
(18:44)
You don't really need to blast yourself in the gym to make progress in your fat loss. It is all about managing your energy budget. You can work out very moderately and still make a lot of progress, but it's important that you are only working out as intense as your body can actually recover from overstressing. The body is going to just add more problems. So try to strike a balance with your exercise intensity, frequency and duration with proper rest and make sure that you are monitoring what you're eating. Another thing to keep in mind if you work out really, really hard is how does that actually impact your frequency? Because a lot of people when they first start in the gym, they hit it really, really hard and then they end up being really, really sore and they end up not really showing up for the gym again after the first week because they were so sore, they had such a hard time and they got off their schedule and then they just can't get back on, right?
(19:44)
It's better for you to do a lighter intensity workout that you can recover from and then show up the next day and do it again. Frequency, being able to show up again and again and again is going to be so much more impactful to your weight loss than hitting a workout really, really hard just once a week and then spending the rest of the week recovering. It's better to be more active at a lower intensity than it is to just really blast yourself, and that leads us also to number seven. Your workouts are inconsistent. Frequency is everything when it comes to burning fats and achieving a body that you love, you have to put that consistent work in. So just like with number six, if you're working out too much and that's impacting your consistency and your ability to show up consistently to do your workouts or to consistently eat the way that you need to eat, then you need to reexamine how you're spending your time and you need to get organized.
(20:44)
So I would recommend getting on a training program with an actual schedule of when to do your workouts and what you're going to do when you do your workouts so that you can build some consistency. Now, I create workout plans like this for all of my clients. Every single one of them has a training program that we run for between four and six weeks usually, and the routine is the same for those four to six weeks. They work on the same exercises, trying to add more reps and more weight over time, and this gives them that sense of consistency that they need. And I highly recommend getting on a schedule, get your workouts done on the same days every week at the same time, set it as a recurring event in your calendar so that you can show up consistently because that is going to be key when it comes to consistently making progress in your weight loss.
(21:37)
Now number eight has to do with your food intake. If you're not eating enough protein, you are going to struggle to lose fat and to lose weight protein is so important for helping your body to burn more calories. Eating a higher protein diet actually makes your body burn more calories during the digestion process, but also the protein is a building block for your muscles. And remember, we want to preserve as much muscle as possible when we are in a fat loss phase or when we're on a weight loss phase. If you don't have enough protein in your diet, you increase the likelihood that your body is going to take away energy from your muscles and break your muscles down to make up for the energy that you're not getting in your diet. So eating a high protein diet is super important at all times, but especially when you are in a fat loss phase.
(22:30)
The recommendations for these range really, but a good rule of thumb is to say 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. If you are really overweight and you have a high amount of body fat, you can base that off of your centimeters of height and you can say one gram per centimeter of height. This is usually a pretty good rule of thumb. Now, one of the places that I work at actually does these 3D body scans and they can tell you exactly how much of your body weight is fat versus lean muscle tissue, and a lot of times registered dieticians will take a look at that and they'll base your protein intake off of your actual lean tissue and how much lean tissue you have in your body and how much of your body weight is lean tissue. But just I think good rule of thumb between 0.7 and one gram per pound of body weight is how many grams of protein you should eat every day is a pretty good rule of thumb.
(23:27)
And if you are really overweight, then you can just use the centimeters of height. But if you want a more specific number, I would say talk to a registered dietician. Number nine related to this is you may not actually be drinking enough water. Your body needs water. Water is what hydrates us. It keeps us healthy, keeps our immune system strong. It helps to flush out cellular waste from all of our body's processes. In addition to this, a lot of people actually mistake the cue that your body says, I'm thirsty for, I'm hungry. So you've probably experienced this before where you just feel hungry or you feel like your appetite is up and you want to eat something. A lot of times it has to do with sugary stuff in my experience, and a lot of times my body will crave like sugary stuff and I'll think like, wait, when was the last time I had some water and I drink a bunch of water, and then the craving goes away.
(24:19)
So if you tend to experience sugar cravings like that throughout the day, check to see how much water you're drinking and make sure that you are drinking plenty of water. Your specific water needs are really individual to you, your body, your level of activity, and it will change on a day-to-day basis. But the best rule of thumb that you can do is check the toilet when you pee. So the darker that your urine is the more water you need to drink. So if you see a really dark orange or yellow color in the toilet, that means that you need to drink some more water. We want our pee to be watered down lemonade kind of color. Okay, I know that's kind of gross, but to think about and to talk about, but it's really important. Your dehydration levels is really a life or death kind of situation.
(25:08)
You need to stay hydrated to stay healthy, but then also if you really want to see your fat loss go anywhere, you need to make sure that you're drinking plenty of water. Now finally, number 10, the reason why you might not be seeing the scale move and you may not be losing weight is because your body is in a recomp. A recomp is short for recomposition. Now this means that your body is doing both burning fat and building muscle at the same time. And when this happens, you're likely not going to see the scale move very much at all over a really long period of time. But that doesn't mean that you're not making progress because you absolutely are. You're building muscle and you're burning fat, but remember that both muscle and fat add weight to your body. So as you build muscle, your body is naturally going to be heavier.
(25:58)
And then as you burn fats, your body is going to be lighter as you're doing both. Sometimes they can cancel each other out and look like the scale is not moving at all, but you'll know that you're making progress because you can see some other indicators. For instance, your clothes may be fitting really loosely. You might have to go down in a belt size. Maybe your pants are fitting really loose, maybe you need to get some new clothes. If you take your measurements, you should see your measurements changing, especially around the belly. If you can see your inches or your centimeters going down around your belly, this is usually a good indication that you are making progress and burning fat, but you're also building muscle and that's why you're not seeing the scale move. Again, getting a fit 3D scan or some kind of a body fat analysis is one of the best ways that you can check to see if you are making progress, if you're really worried about not seeing the scale move.
(26:55)
But this is really common. A lot of people in the first year or two of their fitness journey and in advance people as well, anybody can do a recomp. It's just that when you're doing both burning fat and building muscle at the same time, it's very slow. And that's where it can be kind of frustrating, is that you're making progress, but you're making progress in both directions, burning fat and building muscle. And so it's just going to be slower than if you were in a real calorie deficit, not a real, but a deeper calorie deficit where more of your body system is going towards catabolism, breaking down tissue, breaking down fat. The more catabolic you are, the more you're going to burn fat and break tissue down. And some of that is going to be muscle. So a lot of people say when they're in a deep calorie deficit, they lose measurably, they lose strength, they lose muscle because it's just a battle to keep that muscle, to keep your body from breaking that down as well as the fat.
(27:54)
When you're in a really catabolic state and when you're in an anabolic state, that's really the best place that you can be if you really want to put on muscle. If you're a skinny guy and you're really concerned with putting on weight, putting on size, you need to keep your body more anabolic. So if you're trying to do both at the same time, you're going to see pretty slow progress in both directions. But that doesn't mean that you're not making progress, but you can turn some dials by increasing your calorie surplus or decreasing your calorie surplus to affect whether your metabolism is going to be more anabolic or catabolic. And just remember, the more anabolic you are, the more that your adaptation to your workouts is going to be build muscle, and you're also going to store a little bit of fat. It's hard to avoid that even if you had a very, very small calorie surplus, you're going to have a little bit of fat gains when you are in anabolic state.
(28:52)
Now, when you are really catabolic and you're blasting the fat, you're going to lose some muscle likely as well. So that's the trade-off, but they're faster, right? So you'll make faster progress in your muscle gains if you're more anabolic, you'll make faster progress in your fat loss if you're more catabolic. But the downside is that you're going to trade off that muscle loss for the fat loss as well, and you're going to trade off a little bit of fat gain when you are also gaining muscle. So I hope that this gave you a lot to think about in terms of your own weight loss progress, and let me know if you found something confusing and you would like a little bit more information. If you are following me on YouTube, you can leave those comments and questions in the comments underneath the video for this podcast episode.
(29:42)
If you're in my Coaching Corner Discord server, you can also post your questions in the public chat channel and make sure that you also join my email list so that you can always get notified when I drop new podcast episodes, and you can get announcements about other things that are going on in the community. So make sure to check out all of those resources. They are linked in the show notes of this episode. Thank you so much for watching or listening wherever it is that you are. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Don't forget to eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink water, and prioritize your self-care. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and I will see you soon.
Checklist: 10 Things That Might Be Keeping You From Losing Weight
1 Your calorie intake is still too high
You can eat healthy but still be in a calorie surplus. Many people don’t realize that even certain healthy foods are pretty high in calories (nuts, avocados, and fruit). If you’re not tracking what you eat to learn the caloric content of your food then you may not realize you’re overshooting your calories.
2 Your calorie intake is too low for too long
If you have been eating a low number of calories for a long period of time (at least six weeks) your body will adapt to that caloric intake level. So you won’t be burning as many calories as you used to. This is the case for many of my new clients, and for these people, it’s usually recommended to first reverse diet before cutting calories again.
3 You’re not building muscle
When you’re in a caloric deficit, your body is more catabolic, meaning it’s breaking down muscle tissue as well as fat. Over time, this can cause your body to burn fewer calories every day. Building muscle, on the other hand, is a great way to increase your daily calorie burn—even on the days you don’t work out.
If you’re doing lots of cardio or boot camp-style classes, chances are you’re not really building muscle. Even if you’re using weights and other equipment, most classes like this are aimed at keeping your heart rate up—which isn’t the same as training to build muscle.
4 You’re not sleeping enough
Insufficient sleep can disrupt your hormone balance, especially for the hormones that regulate hunger and satiety (leptin and ghrelin). When you don’t get enough sleep, your leptin levels decrease and your ghrelin levels increase. This leads you to experience more hunger while having a difficult time feeling “full.” This hormonal imbalance often results in increased caloric intake, particularly for high-carb and sugary foods.
Moreover, fatigue from lack of sleep can decrease your motivation to get up and moving. So you’re more likely to skip your workouts and burn fewer calories.
5 You’re overstressed
A little bit of stress here and there is good for you. But when you’re stressed out most of the time, that can wreak havoc on your body weight and overall health.
When we’re stressed, the body releases a hormone called cortisol. High cortisol levels can lead to increased appetite, particularly for comfort foods rich in carbohydrates and fats. Many people stress eat as a coping mechanism, which leads to over-eating and mindless snacking.
Having too much cortisol in your system can also cause you to accumulate visceral fat (belly fat) and can slow down metabolism—making it easier to gain weight and harder to burn fat.
As you can see, it’s important to manage your stress through various coping strategies. You can do this through exercise, mindfulness, and regulation techniques.
6 You’re working out *too* much
When it comes to a healthy exercise routine, more isn’t always better. In general, you should seek to be active on most days. However too much exercise (or too intense exercise) can actually do more harm than good in your weight loss.
Working out too much or too hard can elevate stress hormones (particularly cortisol). This can cause your body to store fat, especially around the abdominal region.
Intense exercise can also increase your appetite, which can lead to mindless snacking or overeating.
7 Your workouts are inconsistent
When you’re trying to lose weight, consistency is so important for making progress. If you struggle to show up consistently for your healthy eating or workouts, this can definitely stall your weight loss. Not only are you missing out on an opportunity to increase your daily calorie burn by getting your muscles moving, but you also miss out on other benefits like getting stronger and improving your coordination. Get on a schedule and stick to it!
8 You’re not eating enough protein
Not eating enough protein can have a major impact on your body’s ability to burn calories and build muscle. Eating plenty of protein will increase your daily calorie burn but can also decrease your calorie intake—since many protein-dense foods are also low-calorie. Try to get between 0.7 and 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day.
9 You’re not drinking enough water
It’s easy to mistake the body’s thirst signal for appetite or hunger. This can lead to unnecessary snacking—which can increase your calorie consumption and keep you in a calorie surplus or maintenance level. Next time you get an intense craving for a snack or sugary treat, ask yourself “when was the last time I had a glass of water?” Drink up, and see if the craving goes away.
10 You’re in a recomp
Sometimes you can still be making progress while not seeing the scale move at all. That’s because you’re both burning fat and building muscle at the same time. Although you may be getting lighter because of fat loss, the muscle that you build still adds to your weight. This is why it’s important to track the size of your body in addition to your weight when you’re trying to measure fat loss. If the inches or centimeters around your belly are going down or if your clothes are fitting looser, these are signs that your body is moving in the right direction.
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ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 13: How to Get Back Into the Gym After Being Sick
Personal trainer Jayd Harrison gives tips for getting back into your workout routine after time away to avoid injury and getting sick (again).
Personal trainer Jayd Harrison gives tips for getting back into your workout routine after time away to avoid injury and getting sick (again).
Many people work out way too hard on their first workout back in the gym after being sick or taking time off. In this episode, I spoke with my Twitch chat about how to get back into training in a way that will help, not harm, your body.
We also talked about why people feel the need to “punish” themselves or “catch up” from time away from the gym—and why that’s not necessary to get back in shape.
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(00:00):
A lot of people feel really guilty and they feel really bad when they haven't worked out for an extended period of time. There's a lot of shame. You want to be really careful about that. You want to keep an eye on that kind a disordered relationship with exercise that you think like now you have to punish yourself extra, right? Or you feel like you got to make up for the time that you lost. And that leads a lot of people to pushing themselves way too hard when their body is still fighting off an infection or the immune system is still suppressed.
(00:37)
Hey there friend. It's Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Welcome back to the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, we are going to talk about how to get back into the gym after some time away, especially if you have been sick. Now, this is one area that I find a lot of people make really common mistake, which is hitting the gym way too hard to make up for the time that they had away. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about the problem with doing that and what the possible results could be from hitting the gym too hard after you have had some time away, and I'm going to give some actionable tips for how to get back into the gym in a way that's not going to put you at further risk of getting sick again or injuring yourself. But first I want to remind you that I have a lot of new products and services coming this way, so make sure that you are subscribed to my email list. You can subscribe to that at jaydigains.com. Also, if you are interested in hanging out with me when I'm live on my Twitch channel, you can follow me there. That's Twitch.tv/jaydigains. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:44)
One big mistake that I see a lot of people make when they take time off from the gym or if they get sick and they come back or whatever the case is, the last thing that you want to do is jump right back into your program at the same intensity level, the same volume that you left off with when you stopped because your body is deconditioned. You had to work up to the point of being able to lift that much weight or do that many reps or that many exercises. If you do try to jump back in at the same intensity, the same volume, et cetera, you risk hurting yourself or just blasting your body to the point where you have a really hard time recovering and you may not feel like working out the rest of the week.
(02:29)
And so it can really, really make it difficult to get back in again. Or, oh my gosh, one of the worst is, oh geez, this happens if you hit the gym too hard on your first day back. You can actually cause yourself to have a relapse if you're coming back from being sick. Because if you think about it, building muscle is an immune system response and your body recovering from your workouts is an immune system function. And when your immune system is already suppressed, even if you're feeling better, you're going to be suppressing your immune system even more when it's already working hard to clear out your system of whatever it was that you had when you were sick. So when you hit the gym way harder than you need to on your first or second workouts back, you can actually cause your body to get sick again.
(03:18)
Some people are able to continue lifting and working out through being sick. It can be good for getting the blood flowing right, but even then you still, it's best practice to just reduce the intensity. You don't want to be hitting it super, super hard when you're sick, when you're working out, if you do decide to work out while you're sick. I would just recommend working at a deload intensity because again, if you hit your workout super, super hard, you're going to be triggering that immune system response and your immune system is already going to be suppressed from whatever it is that you're fighting. That's just something to keep in mind. If you do want to work out, it might make you feel better just to get the blood flowing, but work at a reduced intensity is what I would say. A lot of people feel really guilty and they feel really bad when they haven't worked out for an extended period of time.
(04:13)
There's a lot of shame. You want to be really careful about that. You want to keep an eye on that kind of a disordered relationship with exercise that you think now you have to punish yourself extra, right? Or you feel like you got to make up for the time that you lost. And that leads a lot of people to pushing themselves way too hard when their body is still fighting off an infection or the immune system is still suppressed. You don't need to make up for anything. You were sick. Your system has been like high, high functioning, trying to kick whatever infection you have or whatever the illness is, and that is work that's work on your body, that's energy expended. Don't feel guilty for that. If you do feel guilty for that, just remind yourself that your body has been doing what it's supposed to do, which is kicking the infection, kicking the illness, and you want to be careful about your energy management because some of your energy is still going to be going towards recovering your immune system and recovering your whole system.
(05:13)
And so when you work out, you want to be conscious of that. Energy management is everything. You don't need to push super, super hard to get yourself reconditioned properly and pushing super, super hard when you're just getting back into it can be dangerous. It can put you at risk of injury or getting sick again, so it's not worth it. So what I recommend for people when they take some time off from the gym is do a reconditioning block, set the foundations again, and basically you're going to do the same kind of level of intensity that you would if you were doing a deload or that you would do if you were a beginner with my clients who do online training or if they do it for their homework workouts, I try to stress to them, your first time back, I want you to work in an RPE seven, right?
(06:03)
That means leaving three reps in the tank. You're not going all the way towards muscle failure. You're just kind of approaching it a little bit, but you're leaving plenty of room between yourself and muscle failure at the end of every set. And the reason we do that is because your immune system is still suppressed. So that's going to do two things. One, it's going to make it harder for you to recover from that workout as it is. So even if you did RPE seven workout, you're still going to struggle to recover from that more than what you think you should, and that's because your immune system is already super, super pressed, right? But two, you're going to make yourself susceptible to getting sick. Again, it may not be a relapse of exactly what you just got sick from and you just got over because your immune system has probably kicked it, but you make yourself more susceptible to some new infection, and I see it all the time, all the time.
(06:53)
And so what I stress with my clients, especially the ones that I see for one-on-one personal training sessions when they come back and they restart their sessions after being sick for the first week, sometimes week or two, but for the first workout back, especially I'd say for the first week, we work at a deload. We do, I call it a reload or reconditioning, and you're doing everything at an RPE six or seven. Treat it like a mobility kind of training where you're not trying to approach muscle failure too, too much because even just that, even working at a lower intensity, you're still going to build muscle from that because your body has gotten no stimulus. You don't need quite as much stimulus to get the muscles building again as you don't need as much as you did when you stopped. Just do a deload intensity for the first workout, maybe the first two or three workouts.
(07:46)
It depends on how sick you were, and it depends on what kind of sickness it is. Sometimes you're going to be feeling kind of off or yucky, especially if it's a respiratory thing, you might be feeling kind of gross for a while, so just listen to your body deload as needed and just let your body heal. You're going to get back to where you were. That's just your brain lying to you. If it says like, oh, I'm never going to get back to where I was, yes you are. Shut up. Yes you are. You're going to keep showing up now that you can. You're going to get your butt in the gym. You're going to stay consistent. You're going to clean up your diet, you're going to start eating your protein. You're going to start eating your veggies again. It's going to happen. You're going to get back to where you were and then you're going to get even further along than you ever have been.
(08:28)
Okay? So that's just your brain, that's just your anxieties. That's just your insecurities, but they're not telling the truth. It's not the truth. You're going to get back to where you were, I promise you. And the another secret to keep in mind is this happens to all of us. It doesn't matter how in shape you are, it doesn't matter how athletic you are. Even competitive athletes, we all go through these cycles and setbacks. It is part of the healthy lifestyle. This is literally part of a fit lifestyle is experiencing setbacks and then coming back into it. I think some people have this misunderstanding of what it is to be fit and what it is. To be healthy, you have to be working out all the time, and you have to be eating exactly right all the time. We all experience setbacks, but the thing is, what you do most of the time on the grand scale is what matters most.
(09:25)
That's what your body is going to reflect. So if you get yourself back into the place where most of the time you're hitting your workouts, and most of the time you're eating the right number of calories, most of the time you're hitting your protein goals, most of the time you're getting enough sleep. If are most of the time doing the things that you've committed to, you're not going to be as affected or set back as you think you would be. I will say the one thing that's going to make it difficult, and I think that sometimes can lead to this spiral, is when you get sick and it doesn't take very long of not working out for your cardio system to go downhill, that system goes downhill very quickly, and that's the part that's really difficult to recover, and it takes time to build up.
(10:16)
But even with that, if you stay consistent, you're going to make gains. So don't worry about the past. Don't worry about even if you took time off and it wasn't because you were sick, maybe you took time off for other reasons. It doesn't matter. What matters is what are you going to do right now? What matters is, are you going to continue to show up? Can you let it go, and can you show up consistently for the things you've committed to? If you can do that, you're going to reach your goals. It's going to happen. It's just going to happen. Okay, I promise. I promise. So whenever you're doing any kind of workout, especially with resistance training, I encourage you to listen to your body in more than one way. One is like, listen to your body. Read your overall energy levels. If you feel something like a sharp pain, stop what you're doing immediately check your form.
(11:07)
Reduce the weight. Sharp pain is something we never want to experience while we're working out. Muscle fatigue, muscle burning, that type of sensation, that's fine. But there's also kind of different degrees to that, right? The closer that you get to muscle failure, which is when your muscles completely give out in the context of a muscle building workout, you're going to experience a lot of burning as lactic acid builds up in your muscles. If you were to go to RPE 10, you would go until your muscles completely give out, right? RPE seven is like trying to leave three more reps. You think about leaving three more reps, estimating for yourself. If I did three more reps, then my muscles would give out after that. So that's kind of where we want to be in your first workout, at least for your big exercises like squats and deadlifts, you can push yourself to an RPE eight on your accessories.
(11:58)
That's like your isolation exercises that just work one muscle or maybe like a small muscle group. That's fine. But again, listen to your body. If you're starting to get really, really gassed, remember, especially if you're sick and your body's still recovering, you probably want to back off a little bit. Now, you can repeat the same workout in the second week. If you do it a second time, then you can start to push yourself a little bit more, get a little bit closer to an RPE eight, which would be like approaching muscle failure, leaving two more reps in reserve so you stop when you feel like you could do two more reps and then your muscles would fail. And then when you've been working out for weeks and weeks and weeks and you're used to your routine and you're feeling good, your energy levels are good, you're conditioned.
(12:41)
Again, that's where you can start to bring in that RPE nine where you're leaving one rep in the tank. Best practices though, in general for most of the time, is to leave one rep in the tank. Unless your program says to do an AM rep, set as many reps as possible, that's when you actually go to muscle failure. Or if you're doing a max test where you're trying to lift as much as you can or hold a position or do as many reps as you can, that kind of thing, then you actually allow your muscles to fail. If you're going to be doing full muscle failure or going really close to muscle failure like an RPE nine, it's a good idea to have some safeties up if you're squatting or benching or have someone there to spot you, because sometimes it's hard to judge how close we are to muscle failure, and sometimes we don't know that we're close to muscle failure until our muscles literally fail.
(13:32)
So again, the first time that you do a new workout or a new routine, especially if it's been a long time since you've lifted, or if you are brand new, you want to think about on a scale of one to 10, how hard am I working overall, you want to work at about a 7, 7, 8 ish. Okay? As you get more and more shape, you can push it to an RPE eight/nine.
(13:53)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Remember that this podcast is available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, so you can watch or listen wherever you are. I hope that you found this information helpful, and let me know what you think about what we talked about in this episode. You can leave a comment below if you are watching on YouTube, or you can leave a comment on the website page associated with this episode on my website, jaydigains.com. Just click on podcast in the top menu. I will see you soon for another episode. In the meantime, make sure that you eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink your water, and prioritize your self-care, and I will see you soon.
I filmed this podcast episode just before recording my first guided workout in my new Body Sculpt program. This program will help you build a solid foundation in the gym, either for the first time or while reconditioning. See more info below:
Body Sculpt
Build strength and tone your body with expert-guided workouts by Jayd Harrison.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 12: 5 Types of Resistance Training Programs
In this week’s episode of the Coaching Corner Podcast, we’re talking about 5 different options for scheduling your workouts according to your experience level and goals.
Check out these 5 ways to organize your resistance training to get strong and build muscle consistently each week.
A great way to stay consistent and make gains is to get onto a program that focuses your training on specific muscles or movements in each session.
In this week’s episode of the Coaching Corner Podcast, we’re talking about 5 different options for scheduling your workouts according to your experience level and goals.
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(00:00):
When it comes to resistance training, it's one of the best ways that you can keep your metabolism high and increase your daily calorie burn if your goal is to burn fat. And it's also the pathway to developing that toned look that a lot of people are after. A lot of people don't just want to lose weight and be skinny. They want to look strong and healthy and resistance training is the way to do that. So there's lots of reasons to do resistance training.
(00:33)
Hey there, Jayd Harrison here, AKA Jaydigains. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. In today's episode, I'm excited to share with you five different ways that you can organize your resistance training. This is one of my favorite topics to discuss with my Twitch chat and to write about and talk about with my clients because resistance training is honestly the secret magic bullet of getting in shape. A lot of people don't realize just how powerful it is to do resistance training and develop your muscles. Now, resistance training isn't going to automatically turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is a common fear that a lot of people have, especially women. But resistance training is so much more than just trying to get your muscles to be big. Also, side note, if you are a woman, it's actually really, really hard to get your muscles to grow big.
(01:22)
Even if you're a man, it's hard to get big muscles. It takes many, many years of training, training in a specific way, eating a specific way to grow big muscles. So if you have some hesitance about starting to incorporate resistance training into your weekly exercise routine, and you're afraid that you're going to turn into a bodybuilder and look super masculine and look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is just not going to happen. Okay, so rest at ease. It's not going to happen. I'm telling you, even if you were to try to get big muscles as a woman or as a beginner, it's just literally not going to happen. And if you want to get big muscles, that's another discussion for another day that takes a lot of work and a lot of specific training. So when we talk about resistance training and its role in a healthy, active lifestyle, we do it because it has so many benefits for our bodies.
(02:28)
Did you know that actually as we age, our bodies get weaker over time and we actually lose muscle as we get older? This is a process called sarcopenia, and it especially is a threat to people who have a sedentary lifestyle. So when it comes to your muscles, it's use it or lose it unfortunately. So if you don't use your muscles, you're going to lose them. Your body will break that tissue down to access the energy that's there. Remember that our bodies are super systems and they will react to whatever stimulus you give it. So if you don't need to be strong in your everyday day-to-day life, then your body is going to be like, but we don't really need much muscle because we're not really using our bodies anyway. Now, the problem with this, with sarcopenia and the loss of muscle is that it has a direct negative impact on our overall health.
(03:23)
As our muscular strength declines, as our lean muscle mass declines in our bodies, we lose coordination. We lose bone density and we lose balance, which are all things that can contribute to injury as people age, there's a common saying that as soon as someone falls down and breaks a hip and has to get a hip replacement and then they're sedentary, it's really not long after that that they end up actually passing away. This is a really common thing, but if we keep our muscles strong, we can improve our coordination, we can improve our bone density and our overall mechanical control and ability to live longer, live healthier for longer. Now, there's a bunch of other benefits of keeping your muscles strong. For example, whenever you build muscle, you actually improve your body's insulin and glucose sensitivity. So if you are at risk of diabetes or if you have diabetes, performing resistance training and building muscle is one of the best things that you can do to help manage that condition.
(04:26)
Resistance training and building muscle can also help to improve your blood lipid profiles. That is your cholesterol as well as your blood pressure. So you'll actually improve your heart health and reduce your risk of developing heart disease or having a heart attack or a stroke. As you make your muscle stronger, you also improve your bone density. And this is especially important for women because as we age, our bone density tends to decline pretty rapidly and we develop a high risk of osteoporosis, which is when our bones become more porous, which means that they're more likely to break and have a harder time healing when they do break. And then of course, when it comes to resistance training, it's one of the best ways that you can keep your metabolism high and increase your daily calorie burn if your goal is to burn fat. And it's also the pathway to developing that toned look that a lot of people are after, right?
(05:20)
A lot of people don't just want to lose weight and be skinny. They want to look strong and healthy and resistance training is the way to do that. So there's lots of reasons to do resistance training, and for that reason resistance training is a huge part of the personal training sessions that I run for my one-on-one clients and in the training programs that I create. So in today's episode, let's take a look at the recommendations for resistance training, incorporating it into your weekly exercise routine, and we'll go over five different ways that you can organize your weekly schedule to make sure that you are hitting the as often as they need to be hit to stay strong and improve your lean muscle tissue. Now, what is resistance training specifically when you think of resistance training, you probably imagine people going into the weight room at the gym and pumping some iron, right?
(06:12)
They might be doing some bicep curls, maybe some deadlifts and some squats. All of these are examples of resistance training exercises, but specifically resistance training is any type of exercise where you are challenging your muscles to perform or do their job against some form of resistance. So if I want to make my bicep muscles stronger, then I'm going to make my bicep do its job, which has bend the elbow using some kind of resistance. A lot of times people use weights like dumbbells or barbells, maybe kettlebells. Sometimes you can use machines which add resistance using a pulley system, usually with some weights that are scaled against some kind of mechanism that you're sitting in. But you can also use resistance bands and even your own body weight to add more resistance to a movement. So in the example with the biceps, I could perform a biceps curl with the dumbbells or with a resistance band, and the goal here is to make the bicep do its job against resistance to the point where the muscle starts to fatigue or get tired.
(07:22)
Now, in practice, what this often looks like for a lot of people is that the muscle starts to burn. That's typically the sensation that people describe it as. It's like a burn. As the muscle starts to get tired, you can feel it getting tired. And for building strength and growing muscle, we want to allow the muscle to approach the point where it would completely tire out, which we call muscular failure. So muscular failure is the point where your muscle just completely gives up and it cannot do even a single rep more. Now for beginners and even intermediate exercisers, you don't necessarily need to train all the way to muscle failure to the point where your muscles give out. In fact, it may not really be safe, especially when you're still learning the technique of different exercises. In general, what we want to do is what we call approach muscle failure, where you do an exercise fatigue the muscle to the point where it's close to the point where it would give out or stop working.
(08:19)
And usually what I tell my clients is you want to stop when you feel like you could do maybe one, two, or three more reps. So at the end of a set, when you have just maybe one, two, or three more reps in the tank, you stop your set, you stop the exercise, and then you rest. You let the muscles recharge for about 30 to 60 seconds, and then you do the exercise again to fatigue the muscle. You do this usually two to three sets. Sometimes you'll do more sets, but in essence, you're doing these sets to try to fatigue your muscle practice doing repetition after repetition until your muscles are burning and you feel like you could only do 1, 2, 3 more reps. So what this does is you are actually causing microscopic damage to your muscles while you're training like this, and that microscopic damage is what your body is going to read as injury.
(09:10)
So after you finish your workout, when you go home, you eat a good meal with protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats, and then you go to sleep and while you're sleeping, your body is going to start the repair process. It's going to flood that area with some healing hormones, protein, white blood cells, and it's just going to send all of that into that muscle area and your body is going to start the repair process. So it's going to repair the damage that's done to the muscle fibers, and it's also going to fortify them. So that next time you go to do that same task, your body is stronger, you're able to perform that same task, that same amount of weight, that same number of reps. You'll be able to do it without getting as tired. So this process of over and over and over again, over the course of weeks, if not months, of doing microscopic damage to the muscles, letting them heal, get fortified, and then doing it again is how your muscles get stronger and stronger over time.
(10:08)
So now let's talk about what the recommendations would be for how often you should do resistance training, how hard you should train. We'll go a little bit more into detail of that, and then I'm going to talk about how you can actually split up your resistance training over the course of a week to make sure that you're hitting all of the muscles and you're going to be improving the strength of your muscles throughout your whole body. So let's talk about how often you should train. So this really depends on a lot of factors. First and foremost, it depends on your level of experience. So if you're a brand new beginner to resistance training, you really don't need more than two or three days a week to improve your muscular strength and build some muscle. So if you've been exercising for less than six months consistently, I would recommend starting with two to three days a week of incorporating resistance training into your routine, and you don't need to set more than 30 to 60 minutes aside for resistance training here.
(11:08)
If you are more intermediate and you have been doing resistance training for more than six months, then you can add on another day and work out for three to four days a week. However, I do have to say there are plenty of advanced exercises who only train resistance training two or three times a week, and it does depend on the block of their training and what they're focusing on, but don't feel like you have to add in more days. But just keep in mind that as you get stronger and as you get more advanced, your muscles are going to need more of something to continue to get stronger and improve their strength. So for some people, that might look like adding in another training day or adding two more training days, but for some people they might not have the availability to do that. In that case, you might just add more exercises or more difficult exercises or more weight so you don't have to add on another day.
(12:01)
But I wouldn't recommend as a beginner starting out with four, five, or six days of training a week, if you have been training for less than six months, stick to that two to three day range. Now, if you are advanced and you have been working out for one to two years and you've been doing resistance training, you can do four to five days a week according to the American College of Sports Medicine. Now, keep in mind that the more frequently you train, the more you're going to have to moderate what we call the intensity, which is how hard you push yourself and what muscles you're pushing during your resistance training workouts. We'll talk about that a little bit more when we get into the different training program, splits or schemes and how you can split out what muscles you're working. If you're doing something that's like a body part split, you can get away with training six to seven days, but in general, you do not need to train for six or seven days a week in order to make gains.
(12:59)
Now today we're going to talk about five common ways that you can organize your resistance training to split out which muscles you're hitting every time you train, when you're a beginner, when you've been training for less than six months, I recommend taking your two to three days a week of resistance training and doing what we call a total body training. So in a total body training session, you are hitting muscles everywhere. You're hitting upper body, lower body, and your core. So upper body would be the muscles in your arms as well as in your back and in your chest. Lower body exercises are going to target the muscles in your legs primarily, and then your core is the muscles in your torso, so your abs obliques your back muscles. So in a beginner level training program, I'm usually going to recommend total body training two to three days a week.
(13:52)
So you're hitting each muscle group one time with one to two exercises for two to three sets per exercise. I like this because when you are a beginner, you don't really need that many exercises on a muscle group to make gains. You might only need to hit the quadriceps for three sets with one exercise in order to get stronger, which is usually the case with beginners. You can do maybe two exercises per muscle group and that's fine, but you really don't need a whole lot of stimulus to build strength and build muscle as a beginner when you're in the first six months of your training, there's plenty of people who are more advanced who train total body as well, but just keep in mind that the more advanced you get, the more you're going to have to put load on your muscles during your total body training sessions.
(14:43)
So as you get more advanced, you're going to have to push a lot harder in those sessions. So a lot of intermediate and advanced exercises say that total body training days are killer and they're really hard to recover from because you have to hit the muscles a lot harder than you did when you were a beginner in order to make gains. But plenty of people do it, especially people who are limited in their availability and the amount of days that they can train. A lot of them will stick to a total body two or three times a week training split even when they're more advanced and they just know going into it that they're going to be really, really tired. Also, for my athletes who are in season, a lot of times I'll have them do two to three days a week of total body, but their intensity will be a little bit lower.
(15:30)
We'll incorporate a lot more mobility, style training, lower intensity, lower volume because when they're in season, their workouts need to be really supplementary to the sport that they're in. So in general, total body splits work for everybody, but a lot of times I'm going to start beginners off with total body. Now a second really common intermediate level, I would say type of splitting out your workouts is to do what's called an upper lower split. So in upper lower splits, we focus each training session either on your upper body or your lower body. So for upper body days, you're going to be doing exercises that are focused on your arms and probably your core as well. Although sometimes people will train core on lower body days as well. You can kind of fit in core training, abdominals, obliques your back, you can fit that in on either day, but the focus of an upper body day is going to be a lot of exercises for the chest, the shoulders, biceps, triceps, et cetera.
(16:29)
Now, the benefit of this, especially for intermediate people is it allows you to hit the same muscle group with a few more exercises. So if you have kind of hit a plateau trading total body two to three times a week, splitting out your workout sessions so that you're hitting the same muscle group with a couple more exercise varieties, a few more sets, performing the exercises to fatigue will help kind of stimulate those muscles to get stronger again or to start growing again For a lower body day, that's going to incorporate a couple of different exercises that all hit the legs, your quadriceps, your hamstrings, your glutes, your calves, all of those. All of those are going to get hit multiple times with multiple different exercises. Though I really like the upper lower body split. You can do this in two days a week. You can do this in four days a week.
(17:22)
Now another way that you can split out your workouts that's similar to the upper lower split is what's called a push pull legs split. Now, this can be practiced between 3, 4, 4 or five, six days a week. Essentially what you do is every workout session, you alternate between push focused exercises, whole focused exercises and exercises that target your legs. This split of your workouts is focused more around types of movements and a type of performance for your body versus just hitting a muscle group. So for athletes, push pull legs is a really great workout split that helps them to develop different movement patterns. So it's really great for training like functional movement. So a push day would include all of the muscles involved in different types of pushing exercises or pushing movements like pushups, bench press, overhead press, tricep dips or tricep push downs. The muscles that we're going to hit on a push day are going to be mainly like the chest, the shoulders, the triceps.
(18:32)
Anything that would be involved in pushing away from the body against some kind of resistance pull day is mainly going to feature muscles like the lats as well as the back of the shoulders and your back as well as your biceps because these muscles are all involved in pulling things closer to your body against resistance. So with the push day, we want to push out away from our body with the pull day. We want to be pulling things toward our body in different movements involving these muscle groups. Usually. Now you might have some exercises that you do on both a push day and a pull day. They fit for both. For example, like face pulls, I sometimes put those on a push day because they target the back of the shoulder, which is an important stabilizer for the shoulders in different push exercises. But I might also put it on a poll day because it's a literal polling exercise, so it doesn't have to be like a super black and white distinction or split, and you can mix it up over the course of your different blocks of training to give yourself some variety.
(19:35)
But in general, this is the theme of the workout. And then your leg day is just all legs. All legs. You can split these out between doing squats and squat based movements, or you can incorporate some deadlifts. Sometimes people will put deadlifts on their pole day because it is a literal polling exercise. Some people will prefer to put that on their leg day though because the deadlift is heavily involving the legs. So again, there's not really clear cut like black and white where everything goes. Just think about it as this is the theme of this training scheme. Push pull legs, and I really like this for my athletes. I really like this for people who are training for functional strength because these are movements that we practice in our everyday life, and especially if you're an athlete, you need to be able to perform these different types of movements.
(20:24)
Now, another way that you can split out your resistance training based on movement patterns is to do something where you are splitting out your days focused on different kinds of more specific style movements. So for example, you might have one day that is a squat emphasis that does exercises that are squat based. So you squats, lunges, different types of movements that involve squatting or that support the strength involved in squatting. And then you may have a hip hinge focus day where you're not really focusing on bending the knees very much. It's all about hinging at the hips. So this kind of a day would involve things like deadlifts and kettlebell swings, leg curls, these types of movements that involve your hips bending and straightening, and then you may have a push day and a pull day just like you would in a push pull leg split.
(21:23)
But also another important movement pattern that's included in the movement pattern emphasis type programs is rotational, which I really love because it's so important to involve rotational exercises because our bodies move in rotation, rotation through the spine rotation in our legs and our hips. So rotation and stabilizing type exercises, which you might put on a separate day would include things like wood chops, like with a cable or with bands, Turkish get ups, Russian twists. All of these are exercises that involve some kind of rotation and then some type of stabilizing exercises where you have to hold a plank or hold a squat while one part of your body is moving and doing something else. All of these are very functional movement patterns that you need for life. This style of training is really what the physical therapists at the office that I do personal training out of, they typically will train their clients using the movement pattern split because for them, they're trying to specifically diagnose and strengthen different movement patterns to help people move more functionally.
(22:36)
So this is a really common style of training. If you work with someone who is a physical therapist and a personal trainer, right, they're a lot of times going to give you a movement pattern split, which is a great way to train. And then finally, you have what is called the body part split or often the bro split. Now the bro split or the body part split is a style of splitting out your workouts so that each day you're focusing on one or just a couple different muscles at a time. Now, the bro split is really good for people who are specifically interested in building muscle size. So bodybuilders will often train according to a body split program or a body part split or a bro split because they're specifically trying to develop their muscles in isolation to develop them and give them more size.
(23:29)
So this is what I'm talking about what it takes to build big muscles. Bodybuilders have to do a lot of different exercises for the same muscle group to get the muscles to grow big, so they'll have an entire day that's just devoted to chest or an entire day that's just devoted to biceps or triceps, right? There's a lot of different ways that you can split this out, but that's essentially the idea is that each day you're really slamming one or just a couple of muscles in that training session to try to get them to grow and try to get as much of those little microscopic tears in the muscles as you can get, training the muscles to fatigue over and over and over again with different types of exercises from different angles, from different equipment so that you can maximize muscle growth. So a common bro split that we see is usually people will start the week off.
(24:20)
Their first date of the week will be training chest or chest and shoulders or chest and triceps. There's a joke that we like to call Monday International push day or international Chest Day because when you go to the gym, a lot of the people who are there are there to grow big muscles, and so they're going to be hitting chest and triceps or chest and shoulders or push on a Monday. So it's going to be really hard to get the bench available on a Monday if you go, because usually with a bro split, a lot of people are starting the week off with chest or chest, shoulders, chest triceps or chest, shoulders and triceps, and a common day for them to follow that up with is back day or back and biceps day. So this is going to be a lot of pulling exercises. So deadlifts might be included, but sometimes people will save their deadlifts for leg day pull-ups, lap pull downs, different types of rows and lots of different bicep curl type exercises.
(25:14)
And then for a third day, they might focus on a muscle group like the shoulders, and then they finish off with legs. There's lots of different ways that you can do a bro split. There are some people who train a bro split across seven days where they hit chest one day, shoulders the next day, back the next day, biceps the next day. They're hitting everything in isolation every single day of the week. Now, a lot of people are able to get away with this without developing symptoms of over-training because each muscle group is only getting hit one day a week, so they're slamming that muscle group, but they have seven whole days before they hit that muscle group again to recover and build. Now, this works for people who have been training for a long time and their body is really efficient and effective at recovering.
(26:00)
However, if you try to go into a six or seven day bro split as a beginner, you're probably going to risk developing the symptoms of over-training, which is when you are doing too much and your body is having a hard time recovering. So if you feel like super overly fatigued, even though you've been training consistently for three or four weeks, your body isn't getting better at recovering and your recovery is just like it feels like garbage. You might experience dips in your appetite or intense appetite, cravings. It could go the other way. You might be feeling tired all the time, but you're having trouble sleeping or you are getting lots of chronic aches and pains or injuries. These are all signs that you're doing too much in the gym. You're doing more than what your body can effectively recover from. And when we do more than what our body can recover from, it doesn't matter what you're doing in the gym, you're just not going to grow as much muscle and you're not going to get as much strength.
(26:52)
You're actually harming your body at that point. So in order to keep your training effective, you want to make sure that you're only doing as much as your body can properly recover from. So if you're interested in doing a bro split and you're a beginner, I would say do no more than four days a week and do day one chest and triceps, day two, back and biceps day three, shoulders day four legs, something like that. But I mean, I still personally, I'm never going to recommend a bro split to someone who's been training for less than six months, right? At that point, you do not need to spend an entire training session on your chest or an entire training session on your shoulders. You don't really need to hit those muscles more than with one exercise for 3, 2, 3 sets. So it just keep that in mind.
(27:36)
You don't need to blast your body to make progress, especially in the beginning. A little bit is going to go a long way, whichever way that you decide to split out your workouts. In general, we want to shoot for 10 to 20 sets for each muscle group total over the course of a week. That's how you want to organize it, and then you can split it out however you like. Again, I recommend that when you're starting out to start with total body training, because if you do a leg day and you're a beginner and you hit your quads for 10 sets in one training day, your legs are going to be cooked, you are going to have a really hard time recovering from that, right? So this is why I recommend starting with total Body. Now, what do I mean by a set? Okay, so a set is a period of time where you're actually doing the exercise.
(28:26)
We usually define a set by a number of repetitions. Now, a repetition is one time doing the exercise. So if you're squatting one time down and back up, that's one rep in general, especially for people who are beginners or even intermediate. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends doing roughly between eight and 12 repetitions for each set of every exercise. That's a good general recommendation personally for me in how I teach my clients. And if you do one of my training programs, one of my body sculpt programs, a lot of times you're going to see that I actually recommend doing between 10 and 15 reps per set, and I like to do this rep range because one, it's memorable, eight to 12 is kind of like weird numbers for people, especially if they've never done any kind of exercise before. So I would say 10 to 15, easy to remember.
(29:28)
Two, it also is a higher rep range, which means that you're going to not need to use as heavy resistance or as heavy of a weight, and you're going to get more reps in to practice the technique. So especially for beginners, 10 to 15 is my favorite rep range to recommend for people. You don't have to stay to that. You don't have to do that yourself. I just find that that is what my clients respond best to. And I've trained both. I've done eight to 12, I've done six to 10, and I've done 10 to 15. And in general, 10 to 15 seems to be the Goldilocks zone for my especially beginner clients because it's memorable. And again, they don't have to use quite as much weight to get the muscles burning when they're going to 15 reps or somewhere between 10 and 15 reps.
(30:19)
Now, over time, as someone gets stronger, I'm going to reduce their reps as they get closer to wanting to develop more strength and power training. However, when you are just starting out, you can stick to one of those larger rep ranges. We call this high volume training. High volume meaning a high number of repetitions, 10 to 15 is a high number of repetitions. Eight to 12 is also a high number of repetitions, especially when you consider advanced lifters who are lifting really heavy weight for up to six reps, right? You'll see heavy lifters or power lifters doing super heavy weight for just one rep or two or three. We call that singles, doubles or triples. I don't recommend trying to do singles, doubles and triples with heavy weight until you have been training at least one or two years. You want to have one to two years of resistance training, exercise and solid technique before you start trying to mess with the heavy stuff.
(31:17)
Now, another note that we should take is you don't really need to set aside more than one hour or an hour and a half at most for resistance training. When you go to the gym and you're going to do a resistance training session, you don't need to be in the gym for hours and hours and an hours. Now, I know that some people do like to train for two or three hours, but keep in mind that when it comes to resistance training and working out in general, that you're going to get a diminishing return on the investment of energy that you put into your workout. So whatever you do at the beginning of your workout is what is going to benefit the most. And if you work out for hours and hours and hours, what you train towards the end, you're not really going to get a whole lot of benefit from it.
(31:57)
Versus if you were to train that within an hour and an hour and a half, our central nervous systems, they fatigue over time and you're just not going to get the muscle activation that you would get if you kept your workouts to a shorter period of time. And so when we're trying to grow the muscles, when we're trying to build strength, we want the central nervous system to be able to activate as much of the muscles as possible. So keep that in mind. You do not need to be working out for hours and hours and hours. Some people do it because they think it's fun. Some people do it because they feel like they need to, but that's just not the case. And in fact, you may actually be hurting your gains if you are in the gym for more than an hour and a half hitting those muscles because again, you may put yourself at risk of over-training.
(32:41)
Your body is only going to yield as so much benefit from those exercises. There's a diminishing return on that investment. Now, with that said, I recommend putting your compound or more technically difficult exercises at the beginning of your workout because that's when your body is fresh. That's when your central nervous system is able to activate everything. And so you want to put your technically complex things like squats and deadlifts at the beginning or towards the beginning of your workout. You don't necessarily need to do it first, but when you are more fresh, that's going to be safer for you because you're going to be able to activate your muscles more. Your central nervous system is going to be more connected to your muscles, so you're less likely to slip on your technique, and then you can kind of finish off as your workout goes along.
(33:29)
You can finish off the little muscle groups in isolation with more isolation exercises like bicep curls, tricep, kickbacks that work just one muscle. Save those towards the end of your workout. So we get the more complex compound exercises first, and then work your way down to the isolation exercises. And then one more note when we're talking about resistance training. If you want to continue to build muscle over time, you want to continue to get stronger over time, you need to make sure that you are always giving your muscles a little bit more challenge than what they're used to. So over time, as your muscles get stronger, you're going to need to add more repetitions or you're going to need to add more weight or more exercises or more frequency, something more to your muscles to give them the challenge that they need to keep getting stronger.
(34:20)
Remember, your body is a smart system. It's going to adapt to whatever stimulus you give it. So if you work out for weeks and weeks and you use the same amount of weight and you do the same number of repetitions for the same exercises, you're going to reach a plateau. And a plateau is a point where your body doesn't change very much or it doesn't change at all, right? You're not getting stronger, you're not burning more fat, you're not burning more calories. Your body is just staying like this. So if you have been doing the same exercise, the same routine, and you haven't changed anything or added more reps, added more weight, you're going to be in that plateau. So if you've hit a plateau, change something, do something different in your workouts, add something more, add more reps, add more weight, add another training day, add another exercise to hit the same muscle group.
(35:06)
We call this the principle of progressive overload. So we always want to be giving the muscles a challenge a little bit more than what they're used to. That said, I highly recommend tracking your workouts. Write them down or use some kind of a workout tracking app. Now, I have actually created some workout tracking worksheets that you can download, print out and put into a little notebook for yourself to write down and track what you do every time you go to the gym. You want to write down what exercises you do, how many reps you do in each set, how much weight you use or whatever resistance you're using, and then how hard it was for you, your scale of one to 10 rate of perceived exertion, or write down how many reps you had in the tank. And you want to use this data to help yourself know when it's time to progress.
(35:55)
For example, if you have been working out and you've done the same routine three or four times, and you look back at your workout tracking logs and you've used the same weight, you've done the same number of reps, you know it's time to advance. So keeping a record of your workouts, writing them down is a great to consistently practice that principle of progressive overload. I've also very recently come out with some new journals that you can buy off Amazon. These are monthly fitness tracking journals that you can use to track your progress, including your workouts, and they come in a variety of different designs. So check out the link in the show notes for those. And the link to the free downloadable tracking sheet is also in the show notes. Now, if everything that I said went way over your head and you're just like, I still am not sure how to organize my workouts, it's okay.
(36:50)
A lot of people really don't like to program for themselves, meaning they don't like to schedule what exercises they're going to do and how they're going to organize their workouts. So in that case, I recommend getting onto a pre-planned program, which is an exercise program where someone tells you this is the schedule, these are the exercises you do on day one. These are the exercises you do on day two. You can look up different workout programs on bodybuilding.com. There's a ton of free programs available on the internet if you specifically want to try one of my programs. There's a couple of different ways that you can do that. I do have some follow along workouts that are available on Vimeo. If you go to the link underneath this video or the link in the show notes, I have a subscription service where I'm adding new follow along workouts to my Vimeo channel every month.
(37:39)
And you can just follow along with those. And you don't have to think about splitting up your workouts because those workouts are already planned out for you. So you can follow along with those. There's also an app version of those workouts that you can access through the Trainer Eyes app and the link for that, the Body Sculpt Program on Trainer Eyes is in the description and in the show notes as well. So if you specifically want to do my programming and access my videos, and I'll break down how to do these exercises, check out those links. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and if you found this episode helpful, I would love if you could leave a like and a comment on the YouTube or subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I'll see you again soon in the next episode. And in the meantime, make sure that you stay hydrated, drink some water, eat some protein, eat your veggies, and I'll see you soon.
1: Total Body Training
If you’re in the first 6 months of your resistance training, I suggest sticking to a 2-3 day program doing Total Body training in all of your workouts. Total Body workouts train all major muscle groups in each session (upper body, lower body, and core).
This style program is recommended for beginners because you don’t really need to hit each muscle group for more than 1 or 2 exercises per day to get stronger and build muscle. Once you have been training consistently for at least 6 months, then you can split out your workouts to focus on one or a handful of muscle groups (like in the options below).
Note that this style program is also great if you have limited time available to train during the week, even if you are more intermediate or advanced.
2: Upper-Lower Split
Once my clients have been doing resistance training consistently for 2-3 days per week for 6 months, I move them into an Upper-Lower 4-day split program.
This style program focuses each training session on either upper body muscles (arms, chest, back, etc) or lower body (legs & glutes).
Training like this allows you to increase the amount of load each muscle group gets in your training sessions (doing 2-3 exercises for the chest, then the lats, etc). In a beginner-level Total Body program, for example, you might do 1 or 2 exercises for the legs in one training session. However, with an Upper-Lower split, you’ll hit the legs with 3 to 5 different exercises. This increase in load will give the muscles the increased challenge they need to keep making gains.
3: Push, Pull, Legs (PPL)
Another way to split up your exercises throughout the week is to do a Push, Pull, Legs routine. This type of workout split is based on movement patterns and is especially helpful for athletes.
For a Push, Pull, Legs split, each workout focuses on a specific type of movement pattern involving a certain group of muscles.
Push Day exercises usually include movements primarily targeting the muscles of the chest, shoulders, and triceps (like chest press, shoulder presses, and triceps dips).
Pull Day workouts are focused on exercises that emphasize pulling movements, primarily targeting the muscles of the back and biceps. This often includes pullups or pulldowns, rows, biceps curls, and different deadlift variations.
Legs Day workouts include exercises that heavily involve the legs muscles, like squats, lunges, leg press, and certain deadlift variations.
4: Movement Pattern Emphasis
Similar to a Push, Pull, Legs split, a Movement Pattern Emphasis split program focuses on movement patterns such as squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, and rotating. This can help improve functional strength and athletic performance.
5: Body Part Split (“bro split”):
Body Part Split programs are popular among people who are interested in building muscle and achieving an aesthetic physique. In this style of programming, each gym session targets a specific muscle or muscle group with at least 2 exercises, usually with high volume (many reps). Bodybuilders and “gym bros” often train with a body part split to maximize hypertrophy (muscle size).
Plan your program and track your gains with one of my monthly fitness journals, now available on Amazon.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 11: The Ultimate Guide to Starting Your Fitness Journey
Getting in shape can be overwhelming! In today’s episode, I’ll share the 3-step process that I use to help my clients get started on their fitness journeys.
Personal trainer Jayd Harrison gives step-by-step guidance for building a body that you love.
Getting in shape can be overwhelming, but I’ve broken down the process into 3 steps that you can add to your life at your own pace:
👉 Step 1: Get More Active
👉 Step 2: Clean Up Your Diet
👉 Step 3: Work Out Effectively
I’ve used this 3-step process to help my clients over the last 10 years to make meaningful and sustainable changes to their body composition.
One of the things that makes this process so powerful is that it incorporates habit stacking. This involves attaching a new desired healthy habit to something you already do every day. Once something becomes firmly settled as a habit in your life, you “stack” another healthy habit on top of the existing one. This process repeats again and again as you build your healthy lifestyle.
This slow reshaping of your lifestyle is an effective way to change your body composition because it works with your body and brain—not against it. We humans are creatures of routine and habit. Any changes to our routines (no matter how healthy) are going to be resisted. This is why so many people struggle to lose weight and keep it off in the long run.
However, when we take the time to slowly integrate healthier behaviors into our daily routine by attaching them to already-existing habits, it makes the transition to a healthier lifestyle a lot less stressful on our systems. Although this method may be slower than the “quick fixes” that short-term diets, cleanses, and extreme workout problems may promise, in the long run, you’ll end up losing more weight, building more muscle, and maintaining your physique for a much longer time.
For this process to work most effectively, I suggest starting with the easiest-to-implement behaviors and attaching them to already-existing routines. From there, you can add on more pieces over time as your new healthy habits settle into place.
Step 1: Get More Active
One of the easiest healthy habits to start adding to your life is everyday movement. Our bodies are built for movement, and so they look and feel their best when we get up and moving frequently every day.
To stack this habit, I suggest incorporating things like going on short walks or doing some light stretches to something that you know you’re going to do on most days. For example, you could go for a 10-20 minute walk on your lunch break at work. Or add a short yoga stretch session to your bedtime routine to help you relax. Check out the list below for more “stackable” activities to increase your everyday movement:
Ways to Get More Active:
Take the stairs
Take the long route
Walk or bike to work or to the store
Desk exercises
Active breaks
Lunchtime walks
Use a standing desk
Standing meetings
If you’re a goals-driven person, you could set either a daily steps goal or a total-minute goal of activity each week.
> Daily Steps Goal: Use a pedometer, a fitness tracker, or your smartphone to track your steps every day:
Level 1: 3,000 and 5,000 steps (for sedentary individuals)
Level 2: 5,000 and 7,000 steps (for individuals who have some activity already)
Level 3: 7,000 and 10,000 steps (for individuals who are already somewhat active)
> Weekly Activity Goal: The American Heart Association recommends getting a total of between 150 and 300 minutes of moderate-intensity activity each week to be healthy and maintain a healthy body weight. Moderate-intensity activity is anything that gets your heart rate elevated in a moderate-intensity zone (between 64% and 76% of your max heart rate). Wear a fitness tracker or heart rate monitor to keep an eye on your heart rate as you do your daily movement.
Step 2: Clean Up Your Diet
Another easy “stackable” healthy habit that will help you clean up your diet is to follow what I call the Healthy Plate model. This is my take on the MyPlate & Harvard Plate models for healthy eating.
Whenever you sit down to plan a meal, keep in mind the following graphic:
On half of your plate, fill it up with 1-2 servings of vegetables. On the other half of the plate, split the plate between a lean source of protein and either a grains-based food or starchy vegetable.
What I love most about the Healthy Plate model is its simplicity and adaptability. The Healthy Plate model encourages you to “plug and play,” using what you have available. Keeping the Healthy Plate graphic in mind, there are infinite combinations of healthy meals that you could create. All you have to do is know your food groups:
🍖 Protein: On at least a quarter of your plate, include a lean source of protein. Protein is both a source of energy for your body and a building block for your body tissues (like muscle). Eating a high-protein diet will help your body to more efficiently build muscle and keep your metabolism boosted (high-protein in this context means 20% of your daily calories come from protein). Prioritize lean sources of protein–items that come with little to no saturated fat like white meat (chicken breast & turkey breast), egg whites, fish, plant protein sources (tofu, tempeh, & edamame), and lean cuts of red meat.
🥦 Veggies (Vegetables): On half of your plate, include 1-2 servings of veggies. Veggies (or vegetables) are plants (or parts of plants) that you can eat. Fruits and grains are also plants, but we usually reserve the term “vegetable” for specific parts of the plant like the roots (like carrots and turnips), leaves (like lettuce and spinach), stems (like celery), bulbs (like garlic and onion), and flowers (like broccoli). Veggies are a great source of carbohydrates and healthy fats (i.e., unsaturated fats).
🌽 Grains/Starches: On the remaining quarter of your plate, include a grain or starchy food. Grains are essentially seeds and include foods made from wheat (bread & pasta), rice, quinoa, and oats. Try to include whole grains as much as possible (things like brown rice, oatmeal, whole wheat, quinoa, etc) in place of refined grains (white wheat, white bread, or white rice). Whole grains are more generally more nutritious, having more vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber than refined grains.
Some vegetables (like potatoes, corn, yuca, and plantains) are high in Starches (complex carbohydrates). Starchy vegetables tend to be high-calorie, and may not be suitable for every diet (for example, people with Type II Diabetes may want to avoid them). These kinds of vegetables should be limited to no more than a quarter of your plate, especially if you are trying to burn fat.
🍎 Fruit: Fruits are plant products that tend to be higher in sugar content, giving them a sweet taste. This group is optional and can take up 1 portion of the vegetables side of your plate. They include things like berries, cherries, apples, grapes, pears, and mangoes. The higher sugar and calorie content of fruits make them a food to be eaten in moderation–no more than a quarter of your plate at meal times.
Give yourself time to practice and master building a Healthy Plate at every meal. If you feel overwhelmed, I suggest starting with just one meal a day. For example, you could say “At lunch time I’m going to follow the Healthy Plate model and eat like I normally do for breakfast and dinner.” Once you feel more comfortable with following the Healthy Plate at lunchtime, then you can begin to work on making your dinners follow the Healthy Plate model.
Another way to gradually “stack” this behavior is to break the Healthy Plate model down into its different food groups and work on adding just one at a time gradually to your daily diet. For example, you could say “I’m going to add a serving of vegetables at lunchtime” every day until it becomes a habit. After that, you could say, “I’m going to focus on getting a good source of protein in my lunch every day.” Once that habit is established, you could say “Now I’m going to focus on getting whole grains into my lunch every day.” So on and so forth.
The Healthy Plate model is a great place to start when it comes to cleaning up your diet. It will allow you to give your body the much-needed nutrition it needs to look and feel its best.
Many people make a ton of progress in their fat loss journeys by following the Healthy Plate model alone. However keep in mind that if you hit a plateau (i.e., stop making progress), then it may be time to consider tracking and managing your calories and macros.
When you’re ready to dive into calories and macros, you’ll need to track what you eat every day. But don’t feel like you have to track what you eat if you don’t feel ready for that yet! Just focus on the Healthy Plate model first.
If you’d like more support, check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program where I’ll walk you step-by-step through cleaning up your diet in more detail. In this program, I’ll teach you how to incorporate the Healthy Plate Model, set a calorie & macronutrient goal, and plan your meals around your goals. Click below to learn more:
Healthy Diet Makeover
Clean up your diet in 5 simple steps with nutrition coach Jayd Harrison.
Step 3: Add Workouts
Once you have a well-established routine of getting active every day, you can take your activity to the next level by turning some of that activity every week into workouts.
“Workouts” are just sessions of focused exercise. There are many different types of workouts, and some are better than others at helping your body to burn fat and build muscle.
I suggest turning 2 or 3 of your activity times each week into mobility & resistance training workouts. These workouts will help to improve your coordination, balance, and flexibility while combating the loss of lean muscle tissue that often happens when you lose weight.
Check out my series of guided workout videos on my vimeo channel if you’d like to learn how to tone your body and get strong:
Body Sculpt
Build strength and tone your body with expert-guided workouts by Jayd Harrison.
It takes a lot of brain power to incorporate new habits—so give yourself time in each step. With enough time and consistency, you’ll reach a point where you’ll be able to do each thing without having to think about it too much or push yourself to show up as much.
You’re not going to be perfect, but you don’t have to be. Just focus on doing 1% better every day 😊
And remember—I’m here to help. Come hang out with me while I’m live on my Twitch channel throughout the week. You can also connect in the Coaching Corner Discord server to find community and get your questions answered there. Check out the programs mentioned above if you’d like more help on eating better or working out.
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(00:00):
If you don't make lifestyle changes and you're not constantly being aware of how you're eating and if you're not constantly managing an active lifestyle and living an active lifestyle, what happens with a lot of people is they finish their program, they reach their fat loss goal, and then they go back to what they were doing before they went on their program. That is why so many people end up gaining all of the weight back, they end up gaining all of the weight back, or even worse, they gain the weight back and then they end up heavier than when they lost all of that weight. And the problem is that they go back to the lifestyle that yielded a body that they weren't happy with. So again, there's no quick fixes. You can't just go on a fat loss diet or get into this workout program for a year, finish it, and then just go back to where you were before and expect your body to stay what you just earned. If you continue to engage in the types of lifestyle choices that yield weight gain or that make your body unhealthy, then of course the weight is going to come back.
(01:20)
Hey there, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and welcome to the Coaching Corner Podcast. I'm really excited about today's episode because in it I'm going to share with you the three steps that I use with my clients to help them to achieve sustainable fat loss and build a body that they love for life. If you have tried to get in shape in the past, you've probably gone on a short-term diet that has you eating a super low number of calories, or maybe you've tried a cleanse that had you eating a super restricted diet of just a handful of things, or maybe you have tried a really extreme workout program that had you killing yourself in the gym and working really, really hard to get a sense of having a good workout and getting your butt kicked. I have been a personal trainer for 10 years and I'm here to tell you that there is another way You do not have to starve yourself or kill yourself in the gym to achieve a body that you love.
(02:17)
So today I'm going to share with you the three main action items that you need to take to build a life that supports a body that you love. Remember that your body is a reflection of your lifestyle. So if you go on and off extreme diets, on and off workout programs, you're going to really struggle to see sustainable progress. But if you followed these three steps that I lay out in today's episode, you're going to set yourself up for success. And not only that, you're going to keep that success for a longer period of time. This episode was recorded while I was live on my Twitch channel, which you can check out at twitch.tv/jaydigains. I go live throughout the week in the fitness and health category, and I also play some games there. So come and hang out anytime. Also, keep in mind that I do have an email newsletter. Make sure that you sign up for that at jaydigains.com to get notified when I post new episodes to the podcast, and you'll also get some discounts and news about different services and products that are coming this way. And without further ado, let's get into this episode and learn the three steps to set up the ultimate fitness journey.
(03:31)
A super common problem that a lot of people experience when they first try to start their fitness journey is they try to just do all the things at once. They try to do too much too soon, and this causes a lot of problems, like it can cause you to burn out, it can cause you to feel overwhelmed, and that overwhelm paralysis super, super common. So when people come to me to work with me as a personal trainer, a lot of times that's where they're coming from. Is this like I've been trying to do it on my own, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what to do, I don't know how to sort through all of this stuff. I'm going to break down today, the framework and the process that I use to help my clients to go from never having worked out ever before in their lives to getting into a steady routine that's going to sustain them and help them reach their goals.
(04:20)
But when it comes to getting in shape, there are no quick fixes. Okay? There's a lot of fitness influencers out there. There's a lot of content out there that will kind of sell you this idea that, oh, you just do this one week detox or this one week cleanse, or you do this short workout plan that's only a couple of weeks and you'll burn all of your fat and you'll be good to go and you'll have a body that you love that is not the way to build a body that you love. That's a way to burn out, get injured. And a lot of times when people do these short-term detoxes or short-term cleanses or whatnot, a lot of times what happens is they might lose a lot of weight really, really quickly. Some of that weight is likely going to be water weight, especially if you're, if you've changed up how you eat drastically and you've cut out processed foods or simple carbs or high sodium foods, your body is going to retain less water, so it will weigh less and you may burn some fat.
(05:23)
But a lot of times with these crash diets where you drastically reduce what you're eating, they're not sustainable for the long run, and that's the problem with them. They're not sustainable. And what happens to a lot of people is that they do the detox, they do the whole thing, they may lose some weight, and then they go off of the detox or the cleanse and then they go right back to what they were doing before. And for a lot of people, what this means is that all of the weight comes back, or worse, the weight comes back with more weight, then you end up heavier than what you started with. And this is a really common pattern. And then what people will do is like, oh no, I need to do that again. And so they'll go on their crash diet a couple weeks later and they'll do it again.
(06:05)
They'll lose a bunch of weight and then they'll go off the diet and then they go back to what they normally do, and it's just over time they are getting heavier in the long run. So if you want to break out of this kind of binge restrict pattern, the best thing that you can do is set yourself up with something that you can sustain without having to go on and off diets. So what you want to do is build up kind of an approach to eating and an approach to exercise that you can sustain most of the time without having to starve yourself or without having to go without your favorite foods or killing yourself in the gym to burn off the calories that you eat, which you want, is to build something moderate and sustainable, and I can help you with that. So this is the approach that I use to help people to build little bit by little bit step by step by step, a healthy lifestyle that will allow you over time to build a body that you love.
(07:04)
So the best way to do it is to slowly build out a lifestyle that supports health, wellness and your body weight being where it needs to be in order for it to be healthy. The first step to building a healthy lifestyle that actually sets your body up for success is to get active. This is one of the easiest, quickest things that you can start to incorporate in your day-to-day life that can yield pretty substantial results. I know a lot of people who are able to just incorporate more walking into their life, just get moving, or they go for a walk for 30 minutes a day, something like that. And if you have just been doing no activity, if you just sit all day for work and then you sit when you come home from work or you get off work and you start building in some activity, what you're going to do is you're going to get your body burning more energy and you know what body fat is, it's your stored energy.
(07:58)
So as your body energy expense goes up, it's going to be more likely to tap into its energy stores. So a lot of people without making any other changes, are able to make substantial progress in their fat loss by just getting up and getting moving every day. So get active is what I recommend as the first step because this is also going to help you to build this sense of daily habits. Daily habits and lifestyle are what build up to a body that you love. What are you doing every day or what are you doing every week? So you can start to kind of build in this sense of I do something every day for my health, even if it's just one time a day, I'm doing something for my health, which is going for a walk, going for a swim, walking my dog, going, putting on some music and having a little dance party in the living room.
(08:47)
Do something that gets you up and active, even if it's just once a day, because what we're going to do is what we call stacking habit. Stacking is when you're just trying to incorporate one habit at a time and allow it to become a habit, allow it to get fully immersed into your lifestyle and how you just run your life, and as it becomes a habit and you don't have to think about it as much anymore, then you can add other stuff rather than adding in everything at the same time and overloading your system. So it's kind of like a little bit by little bit adding more stuff into your life. So getting active can look like one of two main ways that I usually encourage people to start getting active. One is that you can set a daily step goal for yourself. A daily step goal is one where you're actually keeping track of how many steps you take.
(09:38)
So if your goal is to get up and moving more and go for walks or walk more in your everyday life, setting a steps goal can help keep you accountable to this. So you can use a fitness tracker. I have an Apple watch. A lot of my clients use Garmin or Fitbits, right? You can also just get a cheap little pedometer that clips on your pants and it will count your steps, and if you have a smartphone, you can actually set your smartphone to track your steps. If you keep your phone on you, it's not going to be quite as accurate as using a fitness tracker device or a pedometer, but it's something. So track your steps in some way and set a daily goal for yourself of how many steps you want to take. If you are completely sedentary and you don't get any exercise at all, or you're very out of shape or very overweight when you first start getting active, remember that a little bit is going to go a long way here.
(10:35)
Okay? Initially I would say figure out how many steps you take on an average day first. So kind of get a sense of go ahead and get your fitness tracker or set your smartphone or use a pedometer to track your steps, get a sense of what your daily step intake is to start off with, and then I would set a goal of doing more than what you do right now. I typically will break it down in three different levels. For level one, your goal is going to be to get 3000 to 5,000 steps a day, somewhere between 3000, 5,000 steps a day. That's going to get you to the point where you are at the minimal requirement recommendations. Find out for yourself how many steps you take, and if you are getting 1000 steps a day, I would start with that level one goal, 3000 to 5,000 steps.
(11:23)
If you're already getting somewhere between 3000 and 5,000 steps, then shoot for between 5,000 and 7,000 steps a day. A level two goal, if you are already somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 steps, then you can set a level three goal, which is between 7,000 and 10,000 steps a day, right? So you're setting a goal for yourself to move more than we already are, and this is a great way to do it. Give yourself at least a month to practice this to try to reach these step goals, this step goal every day, try to give it at least a month and that alone, you'll already notice that you're able to improve your health. You might be feeling more energized. You might start to lose some fat from that as well. You might also be sore. You might build some muscle from that because if you're going from very little activity, anytime you add in more activity, you're going to be challenging your muscles.
(12:15)
So you're going to be getting a little bit of strength in there as well by getting active more. So that's one way. Another way is to set a total minutes goal, and you can do this for every day or for every week total. The American Heart Association recommends getting a minimum of a 150 minutes total per week of moderate intensity activity or exercise. So moderate intensity activity or exercise is any activity or exercise that gets your heart rate up. Specifically if you're tracking your heart rate, you want it to be 64 to 76% of your maximum heart rate, and you can break up these 150 minutes, however works best for you. You can set a daily movement goal of getting 15 to 20 minutes in every single day, or you can say, on five days a week, I'm going to get my heart rate up for 30 minutes.
(13:04)
If you only have three days that you can exercise, then you'll say, okay, I'm going to go on a walk for 50 minutes, five, zero or almost an hour, and you can break it up however you like. Again, you want to kind of figure out what your starting base level is and kind of set your goal to something that's a little bit above that so that you're reaching a little bit further above what you already are doing. So I would start with 150 minutes total and try to get that in every day or a couple days a week. I'm going to tell you one thing to keep in mind is the more frequently you move, the better it's going to be for your health. You could technically do all 150 minutes in one day by going on this big walk over the weekend, but it's actually going to be better for your long-term health.
(13:44)
If you spread those minutes out and you get moving and get active a little bit every day, that's going to be best because especially when it comes to building habits, we're trying to build habits into your everyday life. Setting a movement goal for five to seven days a week is going to much better help you incorporate the future healthy habits that are going to help you build that body that you love. I have a little list of ways that you can increase your steps or just get more active if you usually use the elevator, if you live on a top floor of an apartment building or if you work in a higher floor, try taking the stairs instead of taking the elevator. That's going to help get your heart rate up. It's also going to give you more steps in your day-to-Day life. You can also park further away from the store or from work so that you get more steps in as you're going to the place between the place and your car.
(14:37)
If you do commute to work and it's close enough, you could also try an active way to get there. If it's close enough for you to walk or bike or skateboard, then start considering other modes of transportation that are more active. And the same goes for going to the grocery store or somewhere else that you frequent. If you can walk there or cycle there, if it's safe, if you live in a safe place for you to be able to do that, then try to do that more. That will get you more activity in your day-to-Day. Life Desk exercises is another one. I encourage my clients to break up their workday throughout the day. Set a timer for an every hour, hour and a half to two hours. When that alarm goes off, you can step up and just pace a little bit, do some stretches, get moving just at your desk just to get some blood flowing.
(15:26)
That's going to help increase your daily calorie burn. It's also going to help you to get more active. Take some walks throughout the day as well. You can take a break if you can from your work. Take a break and every hour or two get up. Go for a little five minute walk or on your lunch break, eat your food, and then go for a 20, 30 minute walk afterwards. That's going to help you. Let's see. You can play with your pets. That's one of my favorite ones. Or garden. Just try to look for ways to when you get off of work or when you're not working to do activities that keep you up and moving for fun. So gardening is one of my favorite activities that gets me active where I'm moving around a bunch or playing video games that are movement games or rhythm games like Beat Saber.
(16:11)
Nintendo has a bunch of fitness games as well. You could also join a kickball league or a softball league. I have clients who play cricket. That's a great way to socialize, but be active. Using a standing desk can be helpful, but only if you're moving around a little bit here and there. Again, whether you're doing a seated or a standing desk, you want to get moving and get that blood flowing every hour or two. You could also take some classes like some exercise classes or martial arts classes so that you learn a new active skill. Start learning a new active skill like Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Why Thai boxing or some other skill that's active. Taking a class like a workout class is another great way to do this. However, I want you to keep in mind that you want to be careful of the intensity. Sometimes workout classes will make you work super, super hard.
(17:03)
I think body pump or bootcamps, these are the type of workouts that are really known for pushing you to the edge of your capacity, which can be really fun, but it's very easy to get hurt doing one of those. You don't necessarily need to do a crazy high intensity bootcamp style group fitness class. A cycling class might be good for you or a yoga class, something that's more gentle. You don't have to push yourself to the max in order to make gains. So just be mindful of that. If you are going to be taking some kind of high intensity class that really pushes you in the beginning, I would try to do that no more than once or twice a week. And then for the rest of your activity and exercise, do something that's more gentle. So go for walks, do yoga, swim or something like that, and then try to limit your really intense stuff to once or twice a week, otherwise you risk burning out or getting injured from overuse injuries because your body needs to be able to recover properly from the exercise that you're doing.
(18:07)
Your old pedometer feels like a lifetime ago. That was like a year and a half ago, right? That's when you started. Yeah, you crush it. PA grow. That was how you started your fitness journey, was just getting walking every day, right? I think I remember you walking to work and walking back from work, and that was the first step that you added in as well close to two years ago. Wow. How do you think starting with walking helped set you up for success for your fitness journey? In what way did that impact it's low impact? And if you're also monitoring how you eat, you can see the results. It demonstrates your actions matter. It shows you don't need to kill yourself to get results. Yes, yes. I love it. I love that for you. My personal favorite ways to get active, well, of course one is I love walking my dog.
(18:54)
I put on a podcast or a, what's it called, an audio book. So it is time that I don't feel like I am wasting. I'm not in front of my computer doing stuff. I don't feel not productive because I'm learning things that I need to learn in order to make progress in my business and be more effective. I mean, it's also a good brain break for me to be not in front of the computer. So that's my top favorite way to get active is walking my dog. And I try to do that for 30 to 60 minutes total a day, but I usually break it up in two or three different walks. I also love putting music on and just like dancing, especially if I'm cooking. If I'm cooking, I like to put music on and just kind of like dance as I cook. That's another favorite way to get active.
(19:39)
And also, I mean, my job is active. I train clients and I love it. I love training people. I love it. It's pretty low intensity, but it's constant movement because I'm demonstrating exercises. I'm standing, I'm walking around. I mean, I come alive when I'm teaching, which is one of the reasons why I think I will always have at least a handful of personal training clients always, because it does bring me so much joy. Even as my online business takes off, I so enjoy working with people and my online people too. I so enjoy helping people to get those wins and get those gains. But the one-on-one training sessions are, they're just so fun. They're fun. So activity, get your heart rate up, get moving. It all counts no matter what it is that you're doing because you don't necessarily need to even be in a gym to benefit your heart.
(20:29)
You don't necessarily need to go to the gym to actually start to build more activity into your life and become more healthy. And there's lots of reasons why different people don't like to go to the gym. So any activity that gets your heart rate up a little bit, think of it as a bonus. That's the place to start once you have kind of gotten into the groove of getting more active in your day-to-day life. Step two is cleaning up your diet because what you eat has a huge impact on how your body feels, how your body looks, your energy levels, how you recover from your workouts, and ultimately just the overall results. I mean, you can work out super, super hard every day of the week, and if you are not minding what you eat, your weight is going to go nowhere. You're not going to see results.
(21:23)
You're not going to see those muscles coming in because you're not being mindful of what you eat. So it's really important not only for the sake of getting into a calorie deficit for fat loss, but also just making sure that your body has the nutrients that it needs to stay healthy, because ultimately this is the goal is to build a healthy lifestyle. Our bodies look and feel their best when they're healthy. So health is the foundation here. So to clean up your diet, one easy peasy, lemon squeezy way to get started doing that is just to follow the healthy plate model. The healthy plate model is my take on the MyPlate or the Harvard plate model. So you can see here, this is from my blog. The healthy plate model is a picture of what your plate should look like when you sit down to eat a meal.
(22:11)
So this is something you can do without having to track your calories or track your macros. Generally, if you follow this model, you're going to be able to eat roughly the amount of nutrients and calories that your body needs to be healthy, which is a good place to start with the healthy plate model. You divide your plate in half at meal times and on one half of the plate, you fill it up with one to two servings of vegetables. And you want these vegetables to be like a variety, right? You don't want to eat the same vegetables every meal, every day, every meal. Variety is key here. So we can get a variety of nutrients. So we're talking broccoli, kale, dark green veggies is part of it, but also don't forget about beans, legumes, lentils, chickpeas, these kinds of things. Cucumbers, bell peppers. Think about eating the rainbow when it comes to your vegetables.
(23:08)
We want to eat the rainbow. We want to eat a variety of colors. We don't want to always be eating the same thing. Bodybuilders are notorious for eating, just like chicken, rice and broccoli every day for dinner or for lunch every single day. You don't need to do that, okay? You don't need to do that. Make it a variety. That's going to give you a variety of nutrients. You can do one to two servings of vegetables, or you can do one serving of vegetables and one serving of fruits. Fruits are things like grapes, cherries, strawberries, banana apples, oranges. So they have a higher sugar content. They taste sweeter. They are going to be a little higher calorie than most vegetables. So if you are specifically concerned with fat loss, I would keep this side of the plate just vegetables and only do fruit maybe once a day or twice a day, maybe no more than that on the other half of the plate.
(24:00)
You want to divide it between a good lean source of protein and either grains or a starchy vegetable. So lean sources of protein are going to be lean cuts of meat, white meat, poultry, right egg whites and vegetable proteins like edamame, tofu, Tempe, black beans. These are protein rich foods that are very low in saturated fats. Unsaturated fats are fine, but just keep in mind that we want to limit our intake of saturated fat with the grains you want to most of the time shoot for things that are whole grains. They're usually going to be labeled if it's made with whole grains. It's usually going to be on the label. These are things like whole wheat, quinoa, barley, and then starchy vegetables, which you can do instead of grains, which would be like potatoes or yams, squash, that kind of thing. So this is kind of an image of what you want your plate to look like.
(24:57)
And in general, if you follow this initially, after you have maybe been not eating so well, maybe you eat a lot of processed or packaged foods, a lot of high sugar foods, a lot of high sodium foods. If you switch to this model, it can help to improve your nutrition and your nutrient intake, and it might also help you. It's likely that it will also help you to burn fat because you'll probably reduce your calorie intake and give your body the nutrients that it needs and just the right amount of energy to be its healthiest. So this is a good place to start. Now, for some people, just by getting more active and following the healthy plate model, they're able to make a lot of progress in their fat loss journey, but also just like getting healthier. But especially if your concern is fat loss, eventually it may become important for you to consider your caloric intake, your calories.
(25:54)
This is not for everybody, and especially it can be really intimidating initially if you're a beginner to track your calories and then shoot for eating a specific number of calories. For a lot of people, that's very overwhelming and intimidating. In that case, I would say just try to follow the healthy plate model and just try to focus on increasing your veggies, increasing your protein, usually the parts that people struggle with the most. But eventually, you're probably going to reach a point where in order to continue making progress, you're going to need to consider how much energy you're bringing into your body every day, and is that energy matching up with your goals? I can walk you through the process of figuring out how many calories you should be eating every day and how to track your calories and how to plan your eating around your calorie goal.
(26:42)
In my Healthy Diet Makeover program, which is live now, you can find it, oh, stream elements, learn to eat better stream Elements. Just posted it in the chat. Learn to eat better with Jade's Healthy Diet Makeover program, which is live on Vimeo right now. So I go into much more detail in the lesson in the lessons calories count. So the first part of this program is how to eat the healthy plate model. And then once we get to get past that point and you want to go a little bit deeper, that's where we start to talk about calories. So the calories count intro, how to find your maintenance level, how to set a new calorie goal, how to reverse diet if that's something that you need to do, and then everything else kind of builds on that. So if that's something that you're interested in and you want to take that next step, I would suggest going to the Healthy Diet Makeover program.
(27:32)
But I'm going to leave it at that because what we're talking about is getting started as a beginner. So get the Healthy Plate model settled first, I would say. And then when you're ready to take that next step, you can join the Healthy Diet Makeover program and learn how to figure out how many calories you should be eating and balance your calorie intake. So those are the first two pieces. Get moving more, build a little bit more activity into your life, and then start cleaning up your diet little bit by little bit. You don't have to go crazy and do all the things. Just try your best to follow the healthy plate model. Try your best to get up and moving every day at your level. As long as you're doing a little bit more than what you were doing before, you're going to make progress.
(28:10)
I promise you, you'll make progress if you just start to do a little bit more than what you did before. And this is a huge mindset shift that you want to incorporate. If you want to have success and you want to build a body that you love for life is 1% better every day. You want to do 1% better than what you did the day before. Okay? If every day you try to do 1% better, make 1% better choices for your health, what you eat, 1% better choices for how much you get up and get moving, and by the end of the year, you're going to be 365% better than how you started. So try not to get too overwhelmed with this and just step by step by step, okay? And I got you. Okay? That's why I'm here. If you're feeling overwhelmed, that's why I'm here.
(29:00)
So let's continue to break this down into easy peasy, actionable step-by-step framework. Once you've got those two pieces in place and it's settled, it's a habit. You don't have to force yourself to show up as much because it's just part of what you do. It's just part of what you do. You get active every day. You go on a walk at lunchtime. It's just what you do. You don't even have to really sit with yourself and push yourself to do it. You just do it. It's just part of what you do. And also, you don't have to force yourself to eat vegetables or force yourself to put protein on your plate. It's just what you do. It's just how you think about food, right? Once you're at that place, you've got those first two steps in place. It's all a matter of refinement. From there, it's all a matter of turning up little knobs here and there, depending on what's easiest for you to manage at a given point and also according to what's important to you.
(29:59)
So the next little thing that I would suggest as your step three to building a fitness lifestyle and building a body that you love is to start incorporating actual workouts. Now, I know workout, but the word workout or fitness may seem like I don't want to do that because maybe your association with working out is super hard fitness classes like bootcamps or beach body type of thing. Maybe you've done group fitness for a while and you burned out on it. You don't need to do that. You don't need to kick your own ass. Remember, you just have to do 1% better. You just have to do a little bit more than what you did before. So when I'm talking about adding in workouts, for most people when they come to me, they're saying, I just want to burn fat and I want to be toned.
(30:47)
And by be toned, it means that they want to look like they've got some muscle. They want to look strong, but not like don't want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. They just want to look strong and healthy. So in order to be toned or look strong and lean, you don't have to work that hard. You really don't have to work that hard in the gym. In fact, a little bit goes a long way when you're doing resistance training. Resistance training is another secret elixir of building a body that you love. And resistance training is the type of workouts you're specifically trying to challenge your muscles to get stronger. Or I mean, you can do resistance training at home. You don't necessarily need to go to the gym. You can do it with body weight, you can do it with bands. A lot of times people do it with weights, weight training, or with machines.
(31:35)
But the whole point is that you're challenging your muscles to encourage them to get stronger. And resistance training, you don't need a whole lot of it to go pretty far, especially as a beginner, you only need to do two or three times a week. So you can take that activity time that you set aside for yourself as you've built up your activity levels for on two or three of those days, make your activity an actual resistance training workout. And for that, I have lots of resources for that. I would be careful about following along with just looking up workouts on YouTube, because a lot of times the workouts that you're going to find on YouTube are going to be more cardio than anything else. They're going to try to get you to burn a lot of calories. Our goal is not to burn a lot of calories within the space of the workout.
(32:20)
Our goal is to build muscle that is in the long run, going to make your body burn more calories. So it's kind of a time investment. It's kind of an energy investment. I have some programs that if you are interested in learning how to build muscle, I have my Vimeo guided workout videos. So you can go to my Body Sculpt program on my Vimeo channel. I also have workout plans on the Trainerize app. You can follow along with the workout plans that are specifically for teaching you how to do resistance training, and I have beginner level workouts that are available there regardless of what equipment you're using, whether you're just using bands, minimal equipment, or if you just want to learn with weights or if you have access to a full gym, there's several six month programs that will take you from zero to now on building muscle new workouts every single month.
(33:08)
The cool thing about those, especially working with the app, is that you can track your progress, which is something I encourage you to do is track your progress, track how much weight you're using for the different exercises or what bands you're using. Track how many repetitions you do in each set so that you can kind of see yourself as you make progress and get stronger, because that is going to be one of the key ways to keep you motivated as you build your healthy fit lifestyle, tracking your progress, seeing the data of like, oh, I was only able to use 10 pounds on my squat at the beginning of this, and now I'm squatting 60 pounds or something like that. Now I'm squatting 200 pounds maybe eventually. So seeing that progress can be very, very motivational. It's very helpful. So I have a bunch of information.
(33:56)
I have a bunch of programs that you can try, but the goal of resistance training is to challenge your muscles to stimulate muscle growth so that you get stronger and you can get that toned body. Don't be afraid that you're going to blow up and look really, really big and turn into a bodybuilder overnight. This is a common fear that a lot of women have. It's just not going to happen, okay? It's not going to happen. Even if you are trying to make it happen like me, even if you want big muscles like me, it's very, very hard. It takes a very, very long time. It takes eating a specific way, and it takes working out in a specific way, my friend. It is just not going to happen. Even if you want it to. It's hard even for men to build muscle and their bodies are the best equipped for that.
(34:44)
Their bodies are set up the most to be able to build muscle the best, and even men struggle with it. So if you're worried about getting too bulky, I promise you it's just not going to happen. If you do want to build big muscles, feel free to talk to me. I can help you with that. There's a specific way to do it, but you do need to get your foundation settled. So I would still go with one of my workout programs either on Vimeo or Trainerize, because you need to get your foundations first. You need to get a foundational level of strength and technique, and those programs will help you because that really is the next step. And once you start doing that, I promise you, you're going to be set for life if you can maintain this. Step one, step two, step three.
(35:24)
Step one, get more active. Step two, clean up your diet. Step three, do some resistance training. A couple times a week, you will be able to build a body that you love. Those are the foundations, and from there, it's just a of turning some dials up, turning some dials down, fiddling a little bit with the details, but this framework is going to sustain you for life, but you have to be ready to commit to maintaining this for life. It's not just that you add this step one, step two, step three, and then you just do that for a couple of months, and then you go back to what you were doing before. If you go back to what you were doing before, then your body is going to return to what it was before. Okay? Our bodies are smart, smart systems. They will yield results of whatever stimulus we give them.
(36:13)
So if you continue build a lifestyle where you're habitually giving your body the type of stimulus that it needs to build muscle, burn fat, have energy, fight off infection, which is what these three steps will allow you to do, if you commit to maintaining that for life, it's not actually that hard. It's hard initially because changing anything about our habits is always going to be hard, but once you get those habits established, you don't even have to think about it anymore. How awesome would that be to have a body that you love that you're able to maintain without feeling like you're depriving yourself or starving yourself or forcing yourself to do things that you don't want to do, because all of these things are just habits that you just do, just like going to work. Although I would say for a lot of people, going to work is something that you have to force yourself to do, but they become so ingrained into what you do that it doesn't become so much of a heavy weight.
(37:11)
So it may be overwhelming now, and if that's the case, I would say step one, just focus on one step at a time and have it stack just one thing at a time, step by step. Start with step one, one, step one feels like it's established. Then you move on to step two. Once step two feels like it's established, then you move on to step three. If you want to go crazy and you're super excited and you want to do all the things, feel free to try to do all three steps at the same time. Nobody's going to stop you. You're the hero of your journey. The world is your oyster. Do whatever you want. You're an adult, okay? Just keep in mind that the more things you try to do new at the same time, the less frequently you're going to be able to do it just right, right?
(37:56)
You're going to mess up a lot. Just know going into it that you're going to drop the ball a lot because you're learning and it's okay. Some people perform best when they feel overwhelmed or overloaded. They give themselves a lot to do. Just be patient with yourself. Let yourself be bad at it for a while. Just keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Just give yourself, I say promise yourself for three months, you're going to try three months to incorporate this. Step one, step two, step three. Give yourself three months to try it before you say, this is garbage. This is not going to work for me. Give it three months of trying. Let yourself fail. Do something different. Okay? If you don't like what you see in the mirror, if you don't like how you feel in your body, then you have to do something different.
(38:47)
So give it a try. Let me know how it goes, and if you have any questions, thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA, Jaydigains. If you'd like more information on the content that I create or my coaching programs, check out jaydigains.com. You can also join the email newsletter to stay up to date on what I have going on in the Jaydigains community. And if you would like to join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, make sure to follow me at twitch.tv/jaydigains. Now, I'll see you in the next episode. Make sure that in the meantime, you stay hydrated, drink some water, eat veggies, eat protein, and prioritize your self-care. I'll see you soon.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 10: Build a Healthy Mindset
In this episode, I talk about the essential mindset shift you need to make if you want to achieve long-term success in your fitness journey. Cultivate a mindset of body positivity that keeps you motivated as you build a body you love.
Kick negativity to the curb in this heart-to-heart mindset chat.
In this episode, I talk about the essential mindset shift you need to make if you want to achieve long-term success in your fitness journey. Cultivate a mindset of body positivity that keeps you motivated as you build a body you love.
Links:
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(00:00):
I think that the first thing that you need to do is start to cultivate a mindset of body positivity in the sense that you tell yourself, I'm going to take the best care of myself that I possibly can.
(00:21)
Hey there, friend. Welcome back to another episode of the Coaching Corner podcast. It's been a minute since I last posted to this podcast and I want to let you guys know that I have been thinking about you every single day. Long story short, this has happened several times over my career as a personal trainer over the last 10 years, but I always reach this point where I'm maxed out in terms of how many clients I can take on, but I want to be able to serve my community with more resources that you guys can use to put your healthy fitness lifestyle into action. So I have been working on distilling my coaching that I give to my one-on-one clients into several different formats that you guys will be able to use to help move along in your fitness journey. So I've got courses coming along as well as follow along workouts on my Vimeo channel, as well as some books and workbooks that you guys can use.
(01:21)
All of that stuff has taken a lot of my time, so I apologize for not being more present here, but I promise the time has been well spent and we've got lots of goodies coming your way. So don't worry, we are getting back on track with regularly coming out with new episodes of the Coaching Corner podcast, and I am still showing up live on my Twitch channel a few times a week to answer your questions and create new content. Make sure though that you have subscribed to my email list because that is where I'm going to be sending a lot of the goodies and announcements as these things come out. You can go to jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. Make sure to also subscribe to this podcast wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts or subscribe on YouTube if you're watching me there.
(02:08)
Now, today's episode I'm super excited about because we are starting back up with a bang moving forward with the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm going to be giving you guys tons of tips on how to implement healthy habits into your life to improve your relationship with yourself and improve your relationship with your body as we move along. This episode was recorded when I was live on my Twitch channel. You can follow me on Twitch. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you'd like to hang out with me while I'm live and ask your questions there. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(02:44)
I tell my clients, they always come to me with these ideas of like, I want my arms to look like this, and I want my belly to look like this, and I want my legs to look like this. Instead of focusing on trying to get our bodies to look a specific way, like that one fitness influencer or that one model, what I teach my clients is, first of all, let's focus on health.
(03:06)
A lot of things that you're doing right now that are not healthy and the result of those things is the way that your body looks and how it feels is in a lot of ways, things that you don't like. So I say, let's first focus on getting healthy, doing all of the things that your body needs in order to be its healthiest and however it is that your body looks when it is at its healthiest is how it should look, and your body will reveal to you what it's supposed to look like once you have all of those things in place where you are living your healthiest, when you're eating your healthiest, when you're exercising in a healthy way, when you are drinking plenty of water, when you're sleeping as much as you should, when you're managing your stress, what your body looks like at that point is how it should look when your body is at a healthy body fat percentage.
(03:58)
We can't tell our body where to store fat and where not to store fat. For some of us just genetically, we're going to be more predisposed to our body, storing more fat in our bottoms or up top, and we can't really change those genetics. But what you can control is the health of your lifestyle and how you eat and how you exercise. And I would challenge you to start trying to absorb the idea of I'm going to love my body and I'm going to appreciate my body and how it looks when I'm taking the best care of it that I can, and however it looks when I'm taking the best care of it that I can is how it should look. And I love it for that, right? I think that we need to approach it is more of a body positivity type mindset, but not the type of body positivity that says, oh, it's totally okay that I am unhealthy.
(04:58)
I mean, it is okay. I mean, at the end of the day, you're a grownup. Do whatever the fuck you want it is your life. But if you're unhappy with how, look, if you're unhappy with how you look now before you've made any healthy changes to your life, it's still very possible that you could be unhappy with how you look even when you are your healthiest because you may have a poor relationship with yourself and you may just always be wearing these lenses of looking at yourself, picking apart the things that you don't like. Because I'll tell you right now, there's bodybuilders who have gorgeous aesthetic bodies, and when they look in the mirror, they're looking for their faults and they've already decided in their mind to look for their faults. And so even though they had these beautiful bodies that are sculpted and amazing, they still don't like themselves very much because their relationship with theirselves has not changed.
(05:50)
So I can absolutely help you to change how your body looks by getting healthier, and I can help you to get the most toned or lean and just healthy looking. But if you don't do the inner work to change your relationship with yourself and to question and challenge the beliefs that you have about your body and about yourself, you're going to be right back where you started. Maybe you'll look different, but in terms of how you feel about yourself, nothing will have changed. So I think that the first thing that you need to do is start to cultivate a mindset of body positivity in the sense that you tell yourself, I'm going to take the best care of myself that I possibly can. We're not going to work out to punish ourselves. We're not going to starve ourselves to punish ourselves for how we look or for overeating.
(06:45)
Our mindset going into this journey is going to be, I'm going to learn to take the best care of myself that I possibly can because let's be honest, nobody else is going to do that for you. Almost all of my friends have small children. Almost all of my friends have babies. I'll be bouncing little Kai on my knee and just looking at him or little Addie or little Annie, and I'm just like, how amazing it must be to just have a giant person totally in tune with your needs, just taking care of you When you're unhappy, you need a nap, you need to eat something, maybe you need some exercise, you need to get your wiggles out. There's some giant person who can be like, you know what? Let's go outside and play. Let's have a snack and then make you a snack and orchestrate your day.
(07:35)
But as adults, we don't have that. There's no giant person who's going to take care of us unless you're in a particular kind of relationship, but for most of us, you are it. You are the big person in your life. You're the person who has to take care of you, and nobody is going to do it better than you because you alone are able to be in tune with what you actually need. Once you learn how to listen to your body and trust it, to tell you what it needs something, once you learn how to listen to your body, once you learn how to listen to your brain and to your central nervous system, then you learn how to take better care of yourself. So we want to enter into this journey with this mindset of, I am going to take the best care of myself that I can and I'm going to learn how to take better care of myself, and as I learn to take better care of myself, I'm going to take better care of myself.
(08:31)
So that's kind of the mantra that I want all of us to have as we enter into this journey of trying to eat better or into this journey of trying to exercise and just take care of ourselves. The whole point is why you're here. Why you want to start eating better is because you want a better life. You want to thrive, but you're not going to thrive if you make all of the changes that I teach you how to make and you haven't changed your relationship with yourself, and you haven't changed how you see yourself and see your body. So moving forward, we're going to try to fix that mindset. We're going to cultivate it. We're going to practice things to ourselves. We're here to take the best care of ourselves that we can. I am the only one who can take care of me, so I'm going to strive to take the best care of me that I can, and I'm going to keep learning how to take better care of myself.
(09:22)
So that's the first thing that I want all of us to think about when it comes to our fitness journeys. And I want us to try to move away from that shame-based mindset that everybody, if you've tried to get in shape before or if you tried going on diets or if you tried those crazy high intensity programs like beach Body or whatever, it's all about it trying to exhaust yourself. It's all these extreme things of, it's almost like you're going this, I got to punish myself. I got to whip myself into shape. And that is based on a really old fashioned authoritarian model of influencing, and it doesn't work. At least it doesn't work, and it's not healthy. If you want to establish a healthy dynamic with yourself or with any person, whether it's like your child or an animal, if you want to be in a relationship with someone and you want to have a good relationship with them, if you have a dynamic with that person of if they mess up, you're going to punish them and you're going to make them suffer, that's not going to be a healthy relationship.
(10:32)
And I'm sure you probably have been in relationships like that. Maybe you were in a relationship like that with your parents or with a romantic partner or with a friend. It doesn't feel good to be in a relationship with somebody who when you mess up and even if you mess up because you don't know better, you know that you're just going to be punished for it. All this does is create a cycle of fear and shame, and you cannot grow, right? You cannot grow in that kind of a context. So instead, if you want to develop a better relationship with yourself, you're going to have to develop some compassion for yourself. And self-acceptance, we're going to have to practice some self-acceptance. At the end of the day. Most of the time, people's behavior is driven by survival. We're all just trying to survive. We're all just trying to survive.
(11:24)
We're all just trying to stay alive from one day to another. And a lot of the behaviors that you have are likely coping mechanisms that you picked up at some point in the past, and they worked at some point in the past and helped you to survive from one day to another. Even behaviors like overeating and binge eating, a lot of times people engage in those types of behaviors because they are under extreme stress and they have no dopamine and binge eating or returning to food and comfort eating may be the only kind of comfort, the only relief from the stress of their environment or the relationship or whatever it is. So that behavior was a coping mechanism that helped you to survive this very, very stressful period. And the problem becomes when that coping mechanism no longer serves us. So if we want to switch that behavior, if we want to stop that behavior, we're not going to do it by causing more stress on our system, by shaming ourselves and punishing ourselves either by over-exercising or starving ourselves a bunch.
(12:30)
That's why people end up on these binge-restrict cycles, because you're not going to fix the binging behavior, which is a coping mechanism of stress by adding more stress to your life. Do you see what I mean? It's not going to work. So changing your relationship with yourself to where I want you to take this approach of I'm trying to build a healthy relationship with myself, one that is accepting of where I am, and also approach yourself with a little bit of gratitude because some of the behaviors that you have may have been the one thing that kept you alive at some point in the past. So in that context, they were a good thing. But now, once we understand, once we learn the role that those things played in our lives and keeping us alive at that time, we can give ourselves other options that don't cause these negative side effects like weight gain or messing up our insulin sensitivity, for example, with the example of overeating or eating lots of sugary food.
(13:30)
So just try to keep that in mind, these behaviors that you are struggling with with your eating, try to have a little bit of compassion for yourself because those behaviors at some point probably saved your life, or they at least helped you to survive something that you were going through that was really stressful or hard. But you can give yourself other options. And here's the thing is if you don't change that relationship with yourself and learn how to give yourself other stress relief mechanisms, you're going to find yourself falling back on those behaviors again and again and again because they're kind of programmed into your system at this point. So you're going to have to open your mind to maybe accepting these behaviors is like, yeah, this is something that I did and it helped. It did have its place, but I can grow and I can learn other coping mechanisms.
(14:22)
I can learn to self-soothe in other ways while I also learn to eat in a way that supports how I want to look and how I want to feel. So as I teach you how to eat better, I want you to really try to reflect on your current patterns and view them with compassion. You bored eat. Sometimes dopamine, dude, people with ADHD are really susceptible to this people with ADHD and people with autism, ASD, because it's stimulus, right? And a lot of times we need the stimulus or we think we need that stimulus, but when you learn how to give yourself other stimuli that help to give your brain the dopamine release that it needs, or to help stimulate you the way that you need in a way that you're not adding more calories than what your body needs or putting food into your body that isn't really good for you, you can learn other methods.
(15:21)
So that is the mindset shift that I just kind of want to introduce as we head into this journey of transforming our bodies and transforming our lifestyle around how we eat or how we exercise. We want to have that relationship with our body. We want to develop a healthy relationship with ourselves, and we want to approach ourselves with compassion and understanding while at the same time we're learning how to do better. Because you know what? In the past, if you had had access to the knowledge that you're going to gain through your time here, and if you were put into an environment that was healthy, you probably would've made different choices. You can only do so much with the information that you had at the time, so you did the best that you could with what you had. And a lot of these behaviors, they start as when we're children, right?
(16:17)
If you're a child in a high stress environment, that might be where you learn to stress, eat, or binge or restrict or whatever. And as children, we don't know any better, or even maybe later in life when you're a young adult and you're just sprung out onto the world, it's just there you go. Get a job and pay bills and whatever situation that these behaviors may have started and you were doing the best that you could with what you had at the time, and you might not have had the knowledge or the stability to be able to do better. And that's okay. It's okay. You're still alive, you're still here. So as long as you're still alive and you're still here, we can still do better. So we're going to learn how to do better, but I just want to make sure that we have that attitude moving forward or that we're going to try to practice having that attitude moving forward.
(17:08)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Make sure to stay subscribed to this podcast because I've got a lot more juicy content coming your way about how to eat better and exercise to build a body that you love. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you are eating your veggies, eating your protein, drinking water, and prioritizing your self-care. And I will see you soon.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 9: How to Combat Body Dysmorphia
Check out these tips if you’re struggling with body dysmorphia after losing weight.
Check out these tips if you’re struggling with body dysmorphia after losing weight.
One of the first things to happen when you stop eating a calorie deficit is that you begin to lose muscle definition. This can send some folks into a panic. They begin to think: “Oh no! I’m going to lose my gains and end up exactly where I started!”
If you’ve experienced that yourself, then make sure to give this episode a listen or watch it on Youtube.
Body dysmorphia is an obsessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in your appearance and body image. It makes it difficult to see your own body accurately since you focus on what you perceive to be flaws or defects.
People who have lost fat often experience body dysmorphia in the form of perceiving themselves as overweight or “fat,” even when they are within a healthy body fat percentage. They often struggle to see their own progress and are very sensitive to the normal, healthy fluctuations of body weight and size. Any slight change in their weight or waist size can send them into a panic or depressive state.
Hyper-focusing on the shape of your body or weight can negatively impact your motivation to keep going in your fitness journey—especially when it comes time to build muscle.
In this podcast episode, I talk about the importance of doing the inner work to develop a healthy relationship with yourself and your body to help combat body dysmorphia. Seeing a licensed therapist, journaling, and practicing mindfulness meditation are all great ways to develop a better connection with one’s self.
I also suggest focusing on celebrating your gains and the positive changes you’re making in your life to combat the inner critic. Use a journal or the ABC Trainerize app (if you’re subscribed to one of my workout programs below) to track your workout progress, stay disciplined, and identify obstacles.
-Jayd
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 8: Tips for Staying Consistent
In this short episode, I give 3 main tips for building that consistency. When it comes to reaching your fitness goals, staying consistent over a long time is crucial!
In this short episode, I give 3 main tips for building that consistency.
When it comes to reaching your fitness goals, staying consistent over a long time is one of the most important things.
Quick-fix diets and intense workout plans might get you fast results--but these results rarely stick in the long term for most people.
If you want to burn fat and keep it off for good, you need to change your lifestyle to something you can sustain over the course of many weeks, months, and years.
First, I suggest that you get on a schedule. I'm a big fan of time blocking. Each week, I use an appointment calendar to block out my time for my workouts, personal training sessions, and other work. This helps me to stay organized by ensuring that I'm setting time aside for my workouts.
In addition to getting on a regular schedule, I also recommend getting onto an actual training program. Many people just show up to the gym without a plan and wonder why they never seem to make progress. Getting on a training plan will ensure that your workouts are the most effective for pushing you toward your goals. Check out my programs for beginners listed below!
If you struggle to stick to a schedule and training plan, I also recommend working with a personal trainer. Meeting with a personal trainer every week has helped many of my clients to stay consistent and make consistent gains. Look for a trainer at your local gym or check out my online personal training program.
Programs for Beginners
Check out my collection of DIY programs for building beginner strength, delivered via the ABC Trainerize app. DIY programs are $27 monthly, cancel at any time.
Beginner Body Sculpt Foundations (Bands)
Beginner Body Sculpt Foundations (Weight Training)
Beginner Body Sculpt Foundations (Full Gym)
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
Sign up for updates ✉️
Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.
Episode 7: Tips for Building a Home Gym
Build your home gym one step at a time with my equipment suggestions. Start with resistance bands and progress to weights over time.
Build your home gym one step at a time with my equipment suggestions. Start with resistance bands and progress to weights over time.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of big-box gyms. They seem to often be crowded and noisy—whereas I prefer to work out on my own in a quiet space. For this reason, a few years ago I turned my living room into a home gym and filled it with the equipment that I love to use in my workouts.
In this podcast episode, I give tips to help you build your own home gym as a beginner. You don’t have to go all-out like me and get a squat rack, barbell, weights, and cardio equipment immediately. In the beginning of your fitness journey, you can start building strength at home with relatively inexpensive equipment that doesn’t take as much space. Check out the episode and equipment list below!
Resistance Bands
The first thing I recommend you get for your home gym is resistance bands. These are relatively inexpensive and don’t take up much space.
if you don’t have much space available in your home, bands are a great option. You can just store them away in a drawer when you’re not using them—so you don’t need a dedicated “gym” room or area in your home.
Bands are also a great option if you’re a beginner to fitness. They provide a relatively safe way to learn resistance training exercise technique while building foundational strength.
Intermediate and advanced exercisers can also benefit from using bands—especially for muscle-building and strength accessory exercises.
There are 3 main types of resistance bands I recommend you stock up on: mini bands, tube bands, and superbands.
Mini Bands (Loop Bands)
These small, loop-shaped bands are great for exercises like monster walks, banded squats, and my favorite rear delt exercise—the single-arm high row.
I recommend getting a set that is graded for different resistance levels so that you can track your progress over time. Personally, I almost always recommend the Fit Simplify 5-pack of mini bands to start with. These bands are rated for different resistance levels, which allows you to better track your progress as you get stronger.
Tube Bands (Handle Bands)
Tube bands are great for many upper-body exercises. You can anchor the band to a door or hook in the wall for exercises like lat rows, chest presses, and pull-downs.
There are many brands and varieties of tube bands, however I recommend getting a set that is graded for different resistance levels. For instance, the set that I use is labeled from lightest to heaviest according to weight equivalence (10lb, 20lb, 30lb, etc). This will allow you to track your progress as you get stronger as over time you’ll need to use heavier bands.
Superbands (Monster Bands)
Superbands are long loop-shaped bands that are great for a variety of exercises like kickbacks, good mornings, deadlifts, and mobility exercises. You can also use them as support for pullups and other hanging exercises.
As with the other bands, I recommend getting a variety set of superbands that are rated for different levels of resistance. Some exercises you’ll need lighter bands whereas others will require heavier bands.
Floor Mats
Another great piece of equipment to include in your beginning home gym is an exercise mat. I recommend getting two types of exercise mats. First, you should have one that is thick and squishy to give some cushion to your body while doing exercises on the floor like crunches, bridges, and planks. Second, you should also have a thinner yoga mat that will provide some grip to your hands and feet—especially if you plan to do standing balancing exercises or work out barefoot.
Dumbbells
Dumbbells are my go-to recommendation for beginners to weight training. These handheld weights allow you to perform various exercises for your upper body and lower body, like dumbbell chest presses, rows, lateral raises, goblet squats, Romanian deadlifts, and weighted lunges.
For many exercisers, dumbbells are a staple equipment item that allows you to target different muscle groups for bodybuilding and strength accessories effectively.
I suggest starting your home gym with an adjustable set of dumbbells like power blocks or spin-lock weights. These don’t take up much room and will allow you to progressively overload your muscles with heavier weight over time.
Personally, I use spin-lock dumbbells, but I also have several clients who use some variation of powerblocks. The spin-lock weights are a little more time-consuming to adjust, but they do tend to be more solid than powerblocks.
Bench
It’s also a good idea to invest in a sturdy, adjustable bench. This allows you to perform exercises like chest presses, chest flys, and box squats.
I always recommend that my clients get a bench for their home gym that can lay flat or go into an incline or decline. This will give you more options for variations of exercises that will allow you to target different muscle groups.
Barbells & Plates
As you get more into intermediate and advanced training, having a good-quality barbell will be important for making gains in your home gym. The bands and dumbbells alone should provide enough resistance for you as a beginner to build muscle and get stronger for the first 3-6 months.
Eventually though, you’ll need more resistance to keep your muscles challenged. Barbells like the one featured below allow you to add significantly more weight to exercises by adding plates to the bar. You can use the barbell for exercises like barbell deadlifts, back squats, and bench press.
When you’re ready to get a bar, I recommend investing in a few sets of barbell plates as well. Start with 2 of each: 2.5lb, 5lb, 10lb, 25lb, and 45lb plates. This will allow you to progressively overload your exercises by adding more weight to your exercises up to 220lb total.
Make sure to also invest in a set of plate collars (also called locks or clamps). These secure the plates onto the barbell to keep your lifts safe and sturdy. I use a variety of collars, including plastic clip-ons as well as stainless steel weighted ones.
Squat Rack/Power Rack
Some barbell exercises (like squats and bench press) are much easier to do if you have a squat rack or power rack to hold the weight between sets. The Fitness Reality squat rack is a surprisingly inexpensive and good-quality rack that can be ordered from Amazon. Make sure to also get a set of J Hooks to hold the weight between your sets.
ABOUT JAYD HARRISON
Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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Episode 4: How to Stay in Shape When Life Gets Busy
When our schedules get hectic and disrupt our regular routines, fitness and nutrition often take a back seat. During these times, it's easy to fall into the trap of self-criticism, which only makes it harder to get back on track. For several years, I've been guiding my clients in breaking free from this cycle through a strategy I've named the MVP, which stands for the Minimally Viable Plan.
Struggling in an on-again, off-again relationship with fitness? You’re not alone!
It’s difficult for many people to make consistent gains, thanks to the demands of everyday life.
Whenever life gets busy and disrupts our normal routines, fitness & nutrition are the first things to go out the window. When this happens, it can be tempting to get stuck on the self-shaming cycle—which only makes it more difficult to start up again.
For several years, I have helped my clients break out of this cycle with a concept I call the MVP: the Minimally Viable Plan (MVP).
The MVP is your bare minimum, “nothing but the basics” plan for exercise and nutrition that you fall back on when you’re struggling to keep up with your normal plan. In this episode, I go over the importance of having an MVP for your fitness and how to create your own MVP.
In general, your personal MVP just needs to hit the basic requirements for health & fitness:
Follow the Healthy Plate Model
Hit a Daily Movement Goal
Total Body Resistance & Mobility Training 2x per week
The MVP allows you to scale down your nutrition and exercise plan to something simpler and more manageable. It allows you to keep some momentum going in your fitness journey and avoid a full stop. This, in turn, will make it much easier to scale your efforts back up when you have the availability in the future.
This episode was recorded during a group coaching call with my clients. Group coaching calls happen in my Coaching Corner Discord server on the 4th Sunday every month at 4:00pm EST. You can attend the group coaching calls by subscribing as a Supporter+ in the Discord or as a Tier 3 subscriber on Twitch. Personal Training Clients and DIY training program subscribers are also free to attend!
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Sign up to get notified whenever new episodes drop. Opt in for more tips on training, fat loss, and nutrition by filling out the form below:
Your privacy is important to me! I will never share your information with any third party. Unsubscribe from the email list at any time.