Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The 26-Week Plan to Build Muscle and Lose Fat After 40 | Ep 453

Transcript

The 26-Week Plan to Build Muscle and Lose Fat After 40 | Ep 453 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've been saying, I will give myself six months to really change my body, and you're planning to just pick a workout plan, cut some calories, and hope that it sticks, I want to be honest with you.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: That approach has about a six-week shelf life.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: Today I'm walking you through a 26-week plan.
• 0:17
  Philip Pape: That's six months to build muscle and lose fat after 40, broken into three phases that build on each other.
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why the first seven weeks should involve almost no changes to your diet, what actually happens when you start eating more instead of less, and the specific skill that determines whether your results last or just evaporate the moment you stop following a plan.
• 0:45
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds a hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:55
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and this episode is coming out just a few days before the start of spring.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: A lot of you are thinking about the next six months.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: Maybe you want to look different by fall, maybe you want to feel strong and lean and confident at the beach this summer.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: Maybe you have a wedding to go to, or maybe you just want to feel better in your own clothes.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: And if you're over 40 and you've been lifting for a while, but your body doesn't quite reflect all that work that you've been putting in, I think this episode is a good roadmap to plan out the next six months.
• 1:28
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna walk you through a complete 26-week plan.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: 26 is weeks is exactly half a year from start to finish.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna give you a list of exercises.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna help you calculate macros.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about the process, the phases that build the right skills in the right order, so that by the end of the six months, you know how to manage your own body composition without needing someone to tell you what to do.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Because you guys, you probably like this podcast, or maybe you just found it and you can binge all the information you want.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: But the real goal here is to actually make the change, to take the action to make the change.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: And then stick around to the very end because after the main episode wraps up, I'm gonna share a 60-second protein audit that you can do tonight at dinner.
• 2:11
  Philip Pape: It's the simple, single, fastest way to find out if protein distribution is the bottleneck holding back your results.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: So today you're gonna learn why the very first phase, where you change almost nothing, I know it sounds counterintuitive, is the most important phase of any transformation.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: Then you're gonna get a specific week-by-week structure for all 26 weeks across the phases.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: And I'll show you one diagnostic skill that separates people who maintain their results, right?
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: The 5% of people who maintain their results from the 95% of people who just bounce back and do it all over again.
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: So, first of all, why we have to understand why things don't work for a lot of people.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: What does a typical six-month transformation look like for most people, especially over 40, and just doesn't work?
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna tell you because I've coached hundreds of clients through this situation and I see what has happened and burned them in the past, and I don't want that to happen to you.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: It usually starts with what?
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: Motivation, the new year, right?
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: New Year's resolution, or maybe it's a birthday, or maybe a photo that you see of yourself and you're like, ugh, I gotta, I gotta change.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Like this is the time, right?
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you finally rated that candy drawer one last time, raising my hand here, and like I've got to change things.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: And then your plan looks something like this.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna find a workout program, I'm gonna get some sort of calorie tracker or app, I'm gonna go ahead and, you know, cut some calories, set a deficit, or maybe I'm gonna eat a certain diet, right?
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: Maybe I'm gonna go cut carbs or go keto or something like that.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: And I'm going to get more steps.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna work out, you know, three, four, five days a week, and then I'm going to just just push through.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna push through as long as I can.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: And that's how I used to do things.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: I mean, leading up to my wedding way back in 2006, I did this weird diet with a restricted list of foods, and I was starving all the time and it felt miserable.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: But I had this date, I had this wedding, and so it was very, very uh extrinsically motivating.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: And I pushed through it, but it was miserable.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: And of course, what happened?
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: I gained everything back afterward, starting with the honeymoon.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: So when this happens, right, the first week is great.
• 4:07
  Philip Pape: You're fired up.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're meal prepping, you go to the grocery store and get some new healthy foods.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're hitting the gym, you know, all three or four days that week, you know, you go in regularly, you're good.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: Maybe week two, you're still solid and you know, you're getting this going.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: Like, yeah, I've got this.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: Week three, you miss a day, you know, schedule gets in the way, you feel guilty about it.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: Maybe you have a, you know, somebody invites you out to dinner, or you just, you know, you have some alcohol, whatever, and things start to fall off.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: Week four, you're looking at the scale and it hasn't moved like you expected, or then it or it moved, but it bounced back up, and now you're confused.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: You're like, no, maybe this isn't working by week six.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: You've you're done with your willpower, the willpower is gone.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: And now you start making all of those little exceptions where okay, I'm not gonna track today because of this, or I'm gonna go, my my workout's gonna be shorter today, or I need to skip my workout today, but I'll make it up for for tomorrow.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: You know what I'm talking about.
• 5:01
  Philip Pape: It's these little excuses we make to ourselves that just start to build up like a thousand little cuts.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: And then by month three, what happens?
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: You're back where you started.
• 5:08
  Philip Pape: Except now you're also frustrated and a little more convinced that your body doesn't respond the way it used to and that you can't do this.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: Does that sound familiar?
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: I hope I'm hitting you really hard where you recognize this pattern in yourself because I see it a lot and I used to be this.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: Okay, I used to be this.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: It's not, it's not you.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: It's not by you, I mean it's just not, it's not discipline, working harder, doing more, all of that, right?
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: You didn't fail because you're lazy.
• 5:33
  Philip Pape: It's not because you lack motivation, it's because of the approach, and it actually is skipping the most important part of any transformation.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: I want you to think of it like building a house.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: Okay, analogies are really helpful here.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 5:45
  Philip Pape: Most plans for transformation, and I know this because people come to me having worked with a coach, gotten a result, and then they go right back to where they were before.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: So even working with a coach or with a structured program isn't always enough, right?
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: It's got to be uh long-lasting after that.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: Most transformation plans, it's like if you were building a house, it's like they gave you cans of paint and they gave you the furniture, right?
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: And that's like the calorie deficit and the workout plan.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: But there's actually no foundation.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: Like you literally are putting a plot of land on some dirt, and you have a pan of a can of paint and a couch.
• 6:24
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: And here we go, right?
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: And you never understand, you know, how much you're actually eating or why you're eating it or how your body is responding to your food and your training and what your stress and sleep look like or what your actual metabolic expenditure is.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: I can't tell you how many programs people never really learned their metabolism.
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: I don't understand that.
• 6:43
  Philip Pape: If you go through six months with a coach, how did you never really know your metabolism?
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: I don't understand it.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: And you could say, well, because I'm not calorie counting.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: Well, yeah, but if you don't have any understanding at all, how can you make any adjustments that make sense with any level of precision?
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 6:56
  Philip Pape: And then every decision you make is based on guesses.
• 7:00
  Philip Pape: Half the people I've worked with come into me thinking that they are overeating.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: And it's understandable why, right?
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: Because we gain weight over many years of a certain lifestyle and we think it's simply because of overconsumption.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: Or people like to simplify it.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: Hey, it's just calorie balance, just calories in, calories out.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: That's the obesity problem.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: But a lot of people are actually undereating and not necessarily calories per se, but it is calories for a lot of people.
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: But it's also protein, right?
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: Nearly 50% of people cite protein as their number one struggle, not because they don't know it matters.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: They hear it all the time, like too much on podcasts, but because they haven't figured out how to hit it across full-day meals.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: And that's a very simple problem solution set.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: But yet if you haven't solved that problem, it's going to cascade into all the other problems that you also haven't solved.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: About half of people say they have problems with their hormones, especially peri postmenopausal women, a huge demographic that we speak to on this podcast, especially now that I see how impactful it is and how frustrating it is that affects your nutrition and training.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: So if you don't account for those variables, then you're just fighting everything from day one.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: So I think the hidden flaw in the advice to like you just need to be in a calorie deficit and you just need to train the right way, isn't the deficit or the training.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: It is the sequence of how you put those skills in place so that they work for you and not executing before you understand the system you're trying to change, not taking action on a lack of a plan, if that makes sense.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: So I think the fix is a phased approach.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: We've talked about periodization in the past.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: We've talked about phases and structure.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: We're gonna go over that today.
• 8:39
  Philip Pape: And I'm gonna split it into three phases over 26 weeks with a very specific progression.
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: And I've given them names.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: They're called Stop Guessing, Eat More Lift Heavy, and Trust Yourself.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, stop guessing, eat more lift heavy, which yes is also the name of our program that walks you through all of this and trust yourself.
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: So I'm gonna walk through each one.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: And by the way, if you do want to go check out that program, which opens on March 30th, just go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: That's eatmoriftheavy.com and you can learn all about it there.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: We've got lots of cool information available for you to check out.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: But let's walk you through this today.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: All right, phase one is stop guessing.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: This is the first seven weeks.
• 9:20
  Philip Pape: This is the phase that feels the most counterintuitive because the goal is not to change your body, the goal is to understand your body.
• 9:29
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: And I know you want to start losing fat immediately, or many of you use the term lose weight, which if you're new to the podcast, we differentiate between weight loss and fat loss.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: Fat loss is really what you want.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: You want to lose fat and hold on to muscle.
• 9:41
  Philip Pape: You don't want to just lose muscle and fat.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: Everybody wants to lose fat.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: Most people come into the program, even if they want to build muscle, they also want to lose fat.
• 9:50
  Philip Pape: But if you start a calorie deficit in week one before you actually know what your calorie needs are, then you're guessing.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: And guessing is probably why the last plan didn't work.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: Even if you were working with a coach who is who you were dependent on to tell you what to do, but you were still guessing as to your own data of what to do.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: So here's what the first seven weeks look like.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: Week one is where you start setting things up just for tracking.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: You start tracking your food and weight every day.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: Now, I would recommend using Macro Factor.
• 10:18
  Philip Pape: MacroFactor is the only app on the market still, I'm surprised about this, but it's the only app that calculates your metabolism, your daily expenditure based on your food and weight.
• 10:29
  Philip Pape: All the other apps, MacroFactor, I mean MyFitnessPal, Chronometer, Lose It, they're trackers, but they don't calculate with an algorithm your metabolic needs to give you the right targets.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: So then you're not actually trying to hit the right targets.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: You're using a calculator, and that's not good enough.
• 10:46
  Philip Pape: That can be off by hundreds of calories.
• 10:48
  Philip Pape: So start tracking your food and weight every day and ideally use a tool like MacroFactor.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: Use my code WITS and Waights, all one word, to get a two-week free trial.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: You don't have to.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: That would support the podcast.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: You don't have to, but it's wits and weights all one word.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: Download MacroFactor from your app store.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: And what that'll let you do when you just start logging, don't worry about the target yet.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: Just start logging.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: You're gonna see what's happening.
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: What are you eating?
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: How much are you eating?
• 11:10
  Philip Pape: How much protein?
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: How does your weight fluctuate day to day?
• 11:13
  Philip Pape: Oh wow, it goes up and down, you know, three pounds some days.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: You're building a measurement system, and that system needs about six weeks of consistent data before you can get an accurate picture of your true calorie expenditure.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: And some people will say, well, it's only two to three weeks, but really, you know, at least a month to six weeks before it's really dialed in.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: And then you also need training programs.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: So to me, it's it's the food and weight side, and then the training side are the two big buckets.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: So the food, the tracking food that we just talked about, that's just tracking, that should take you three to five minutes a day.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: You're not changing anything.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: You're just tracking three to five minutes a day.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: Super, super easy.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: For training, you gotta be careful here, right?
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: There are a ton of things online.
• 11:55
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of free programs online, there's apps that have free programs, and that's cool, but you can't just pick a random program.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: You have to have one that's matched, first of all, to you know what will work for you to actually show up and do it regularly.
• 12:09
  Philip Pape: So that's how many days a week you can realistically train.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: If you want to train four, but really you're only gonna get in three on most weeks, go for three.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Your equipment.
• 12:19
  Philip Pape: So do you have a well-equipped home gym or not?
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: Most people don't, although that's a great aspirational goal.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: But if you don't, you're probably gonna go to a commercial gym in the area that's within a short driving distance so that you make sure you get to it.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: But it has to have enough equipment to get the job done.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: There's also your experience level, and there's of course your goal.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: A lot of people over 40, especially, are running programs that are not designed for them for one reason or another, having to do with their joint health or the movement patterns or the strength levels or whatever, or even the equipment.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: So if you are, you know, a woman who is training three days a week and you have a barbell in a rack, your program is gonna look different from someone training five days a week with a full commercial gym setup, for example, right?
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: All right, so that's that sounds like a lot for week one, but really all it is is you're starting tracking food and weight and you're identifying how you're gonna train, getting a training program.
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: Week two is now you're gonna take baseline measurements.
• 13:16
  Philip Pape: So you don't even do that in week one, just get things set up.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: Week two, you're gonna take measurements like you could take photos, you could take some circumference measurements, you can start tracking biofeedback, things like sleep, energy, stress recovery.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: We have a very simple tracker in Eat More Lift Heavy that does this all in one place once a week.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: Yeah, again, it takes you five minutes.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: So it takes you five minutes on a Sunday, you're done.
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: And this data is going to become incredibly valuable in phase two when we start making decisions, but only if you have a baseline to compare against.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: I mean, wouldn't it be great to see your trend for your sleep and your stress and your mood and your energy and your recovery and your hunger, and then know where the dials are, where the bottlenecks are, that is really, really powerful.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: We're able to coach people tremendously well when we have that kind of data.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: All right, then week three is where things get interesting, and it's one of the most important weeks because this is where we tackle some of those initial fears that I know are in a lot of your heads, especially the fear of eating more.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: If you're, for example, a woman over 40 who's been dieting on and off for years, maybe decades, this is genuinely a scary thought.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: Eating more food, right?
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: Because you've you've been told your whole life that less food equals less body fat, or you know, you need to eat less, move more to lose weight.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: And I think that false belief is the single biggest barrier to changing your body composition right now.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: It's the single biggest fear I've seen.
• 14:38
  Philip Pape: So in this week, you're gonna understand why people are not helped by this undereating.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: And it's a metabolic argument about chronic restriction having to do with a lower expenditure and metabolism over time.
• 14:53
  Philip Pape: And there's a psychological case as well related to diet trauma, to food fear, the belief that eating more is gonna make you fat.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: And really what eating more looks like in practice.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: It's not cheap meals, it's not free-for-all, it's not just eating uninhibited, it's actually strategic.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: It's protein first, it's food volume and fiber first, it's nutrition, you know, quality and quality, quality and quantity coming together combined with the enjoyment of food as well.
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: And we want to address this before making changes to your nutrition because if you skip that mindset piece, everything is gonna feel like a resistant, you know, like friction as you try to change your nutrition habits.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: And then the next few weeks of the first seven weeks, this is where you start to introduce some of the specifics.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: Nutritional foundations and meal timing, for example, protein.
• 15:45
  Philip Pape: Protein is super, super important.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: How much protein you need per day, how much protein you should get per meal.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: You know, per day, we're gonna talk about the evidence-based target of 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: And per meal, it's really more of a practical thing.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: And relative to when you're training and pre- and post-workout nutrition and just general distribution per your schedule.
• 16:08
  Philip Pape: And then in the next few weeks, as you're setting all this up and establishing your baseline, you want to look at things like how many steps you're getting, what kind of movement you're doing outside the gym, your sleep, your stress, and then as you go along, how to read this biofeedback data that you've been collecting, right?
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: So this is by weeks five and six, I would say you're starting to collect and learn about this data.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: And it's really not a lot that you're changing each week.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: You're just slowly putting the pieces together.
• 16:35
  Philip Pape: And then now look, if I work with a one-on-one client, we're we're fast tracking this process a little bit.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: But if you're doing this on your own, or if you're doing this as part of our eat more lift heavy program, where we want you to to, we want the habits to stick and to teach you the skill, then you you want to be methodical about it and do it the right way.
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: And then week seven, now you get to the culminating milestone of your first big week.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: And this is you're gonna assess how your training's been going.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: You're going to look at the data of your biofeedback, your recovery, your food, and your expenditure and put it all together and say, what's been going on without me trying to change things.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: Without me trying to change things, what is my body doing?
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: What is its, what are its tendencies?
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: What is it telling me?
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: What are the signals it's telling me?
• 17:21
  Philip Pape: And then you're ready to go into phase two and set some targets based on actual data.
• 17:27
  Philip Pape: That's what's at that, that's what's happening.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: And that's why we call this first phase stop guessing.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: Because now you're ready to stop guessing.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: So I know seven weeks sounds like a long time to just set things up, but you can tell there's actually a lot of little pieces in here.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And every client I've coached who goes through this tells me the same thing.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: Like, I wish I had done that in the past.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: As frustrating as it first seemed, because it seemed like I wasn't doing anything.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: I actually, it was actually the most powerful thing I've ever done.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: Because for the first time, I understand my body and I know what to do now.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: I've got confidence.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: Boom, huge.
• 18:01
  Philip Pape: Now, everything I just described, this phased approach, the week by week structure, building this foundation before making changes, that is exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is designed to do.
• 18:11
  Philip Pape: I am really proud of this.
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: This is a new 26-week coaching program that launches March 30th in just a few days.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: You get a phased program, an experience, I like to call it, with one focus per week.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: You get a training program matched your situation from week one.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: There are monthly live coaching calls with me and Coach Carol, and there's a community where you get questions answered.
• 18:33
  Philip Pape: And so it's a really powerful way to combine your training and nutrition needs and how to build those skills.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: It combines both.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: Eat more lift heavy gives you both coached together because they are not separate things.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: It's very hard to take a training thing over here and a nutrition over here and smoosh them together.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: These work together with a defined endpoint of 26 weeks where you have the skills now to manage your own physique.
• 18:56
  Philip Pape: That is the goal.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: And if you're a woman over 40 who lifts and is tracking, but you're not seeing results, this is gonna help you get those results finally and have the skills to keep them.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: So you don't go afterward and say, oh, I worked at Philip and now I've gained all the weight back.
• 19:11
  Philip Pape: That's not gonna happen.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:14
  Philip Pape: That's eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: We have what's called founders pricing.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: If you're listening to this podcast, available through March 29th, and it locks in permanently as long as you stay enrolled.
• 19:27
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmorliftheavy.com.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get to phase two.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: Phase two is where the real work happens, I'll call it eat more lift heavy.
• 19:36
  Philip Pape: This is weeks roughly eight through eighteen, so that's 11 weeks.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: And by real work, I don't mean suffering or being miserable.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: I mean this is where you make decisions with your data and you learn to read the signals your body is sending you.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: So by the beginning of this week, your data is somewhat dialed in and somewhat consistent.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: And I say somewhat because it'll never be perfect, and that's fine.
• 19:57
  Philip Pape: So for example, if you're using macrofactor, your expenditure should be very well known at this point because it's been learning your metabolism for seven weeks.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: And now you could know is it going up, down, is it stable?
• 20:08
  Philip Pape: And how many calories can I work from for a fat loss phase?
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: So if you're in a fat loss phase and your expenditure is relatively stable or it's starting to decline slowly, you know, we would expect that, right?
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: We expect a little bit of metabolic adaptation, but you need to start from the right baseline to begin with.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: And then you can decide later on, do I need a diet break, this and that, all the decisions you have to make.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: So you're no longer flying blind because you have the starting data.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: And then as you move into the next few weeks of this phase, there's some different things that unlock.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 20:39
  Philip Pape: So if we were to tie it to the way we designed our program, if you're doing this on your own, let's say, week nine is going to try is going to tackle things like weekend and social eating because that is what trips up roughly 40% of people.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: So what we do in this program is we start from the biggest hitter problems and we work our way down the list and unlock them for you so you can deal with all the issues life throws at you.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: So things like alcohol, eating on the weekends, going out.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: And the fix here is simpler than most people expect, and it has to do with structure and planning.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: You don't want to make decisions when your willpower is low.
• 21:14
  Philip Pape: You want to make them when it's high.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: Well, where when's the willpower low?
• 21:17
  Philip Pape: Well, when you go to eat at that restaurant, you're all excited, the passions are high, the emotions are high, the hunger is high.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: You're gonna make the worst decisions at that point.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: So the act of planning actually changes the outcome because it shifts you from reactive to intentional to when you have the most willpower, which is earlier in the week.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: Earlier in the week.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 21:34
  Philip Pape: Now, in our program, we also talk about alcohol and the research about its effects on fat loss and recovery and things like that.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: It's a separate little piece that's important.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: But, you know, the step one here is to plan ahead for whatever you're doing.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: This is a very important thing.
• 21:49
  Philip Pape: All right, then you get to week 10, and now you have eight weeks of training data, eight plus weeks of training data.
• 21:56
  Philip Pape: This is usually a good time to diagnose your training.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: Are your lifts stall?
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: You have recovery issues.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: How does the volume look?
• 22:03
  Philip Pape: How does the intensity look?
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: Is the program right for you?
• 22:06
  Philip Pape: This is a great time to decide.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: Do you need to switch your training whole in what am I trying to say?
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: Switch the whole training program or just make adjustments, right?
• 22:15
  Philip Pape: And then we're gonna tick through the next few weeks pretty quickly.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: So week 11, we're gonna go deeper into protein because most people at this point, they've now truly understood what they're able to hit and what they're not able to hit.
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: And now you can build a fix for all the meals that fall short and get you to where you need to be consistently.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: Weeks 12 through 16 are really about biofeedback pattern analysis, adjusting your program, you know, continuing to adjust your program, planning for phase transitions.
• 22:46
  Philip Pape: So, like what are you gonna do when your fat loss phase is done in a moment, you know, in a few weeks?
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: How are you gonna come out of that?
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: How are you gonna deal with plateaus?
• 22:53
  Philip Pape: What about supplements, right?
• 22:55
  Philip Pape: So notice that we didn't try to solve all this in week one.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: What I'm saying here is that as you go, each of these things unlock in the right priority.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: Like supplements, I don't even like to deal with them until you're maybe 10 or 12 weeks in, because by then you'll understand where some of the deficiencies might be.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: You might even have some lab work.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: You might find that you know energy is a problem, but you've solved everything else.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: So now it could come down to like a sub a nutrient deficiency, maybe you're low in magnesium or something like that, and so on, right?
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: So you've got all of this data pretty mature by now.
• 23:27
  Philip Pape: You've got things like photo before and afters to see and motivate you as you go.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: You see the change in your trend weight probably having moved significantly at this point, or you know, at least meaningfully.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: You've also collected physique data to tell you whether you're building muscle and losing fat and body recomping, right?
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: So weeks 12 through 16 are the sweet spot for that.
• 23:49
  Philip Pape: And within that is, I mentioned, a point where you need to know: should I change phases?
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: What do I do when I change phases?
• 23:58
  Philip Pape: Should I keep cutting?
• 23:59
  Philip Pape: Should I switch to maintenance?
• 24:01
  Philip Pape: Should I start a recovery diet?
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: Should I take a diet break?
• 24:03
  Philip Pape: Should I switch how I distribute my calories?
• 24:06
  Philip Pape: Again, notice these are advanced things that come later on.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Once you see how things are moving for you, don't you do these from step one.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: And so this decision-making framework is methodical and it's based on your signals and your signs and your biofeedback.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: And if all this sounds very complicated and confusing, it's because we've thought about it over years with hundreds of clients and have broken it down to something that's actually doable and actionable.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:32
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com if you want to jump on the program to help you do that.
• 24:37
  Philip Pape: This podcast episode is really just to lay it all out for you and let you decide, okay, is this something I want to try on my own?
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: And then I could deep dive into Phillips' podcast and do it, or do I want to get some help doing it?
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 24:49
  Philip Pape: And then we get to the final couple weeks of this phase where we go a little bit deeper on training.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: Okay, we look at D loads, we look at block periodization, we look at evaluating whether your program still fits your goals.
• 25:00
  Philip Pape: We want to make you really autonomous when it comes to strength training.
• 25:03
  Philip Pape: So you're not like tied or dependent on, say, a personal trainer or a coach.
• 25:07
  Philip Pape: And then finally you get to your milestone for phase two, where you do a full review, you update your targets again, clear set of goals for the next and final phase.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: So let's do that.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: Phase three, the final phase is called trust yourself.
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: This is weeks 19 through 26.
• 25:23
  Philip Pape: And this also, I think, is very different from almost any other program because the goal here in these final eight weeks is independence.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: Independence and sustaining your results.
• 25:37
  Philip Pape: By the end of this phase, you should be making most decisions about your nutrition and training on your own with decreasing reliance or dependence on a coach or program.
• 25:45
  Philip Pape: And all the coaches listening to this are like, Philip, what are you doing to us?
• 25:48
  Philip Pape: You know, we want to keep, we want to keep clients locked on forever.
• 25:52
  Philip Pape: That's not the way I work.
• 25:53
  Philip Pape: I actually want you to feel so independent and powerful that you can go coach this stuff yourself.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: But you know what usually happens is you then, if you have a more advanced goal, I'm here to help you do that as well if you'd like, right?
• 26:03
  Philip Pape: That's that's that's an authentic, I'll say trust-based way to coach, in my opinion.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: So think about what you've built at this point.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: You've got five months of body weight data, biofeedback trends, training cycles with progression on your lifts.
• 26:18
  Philip Pape: You know what your PRs are.
• 26:19
  Philip Pape: You've probably gone through one phase transition at least.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: Well, definitely you went from the first phase to the second phase, you know, probably for maintenance of fat loss, for example.
• 26:29
  Philip Pape: You know your expenditure, you know how your expenditure changes, you know your protein gaps, you've practiced eating around social situations and weekends, so many skills.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: You're super proud of yourself at this point.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: So now what do we want to do?
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: Well, now we want to step it up one more level to the final bottlenecks and points of friction that people face.
• 26:50
  Philip Pape: So, for example, week 19, we look at travel and disruption strategies, right?
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: What happens when life gets in the way and you have vacation, business travel?
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: How do you keep a minimum effective dose?
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: How do you maintain protein without getting too obsessive at like restaurants and eating out?
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: How do you get back on trap track when a trip throws you off?
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: And by the way, the answer to that one is you just start again.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: Like I'll just give you that answer.
• 27:13
  Philip Pape: It's you start again.
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: But a lot of this has to do with planning ahead for those types of situations.
• 27:18
  Philip Pape: Week 20 is one of my favorite weeks.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: Uh, we call it in our program teaching yourself.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: It's an exercise.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: And what you do is you write out your current approach, your system, your fitness, your training, all that, as if you were explaining it to a friend.
• 27:35
  Philip Pape: Have you ever done that before?
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: If you've never done that before, it's powerful.
• 27:38
  Philip Pape: You're writing down your system, how you eat, how you train, how you make decisions.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: Kind of like into a little manual for yourself.
• 27:45
  Philip Pape: And this exercise is going to reveal gaps because anything you can't articulate, especially you can't, especially if you can't explain why you do it, you don't quite understand or own it yet.
• 27:56
  Philip Pape: There's still some mystery that we need to unlock so you truly, truly understand it.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: So I really love this one.
• 28:02
  Philip Pape: Um, and you can do that exercise for yourself as well.
• 28:04
  Philip Pape: The next week, we're getting up to week 21, we start to talk more about hormones.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: You're like, why don't we start talking about hormones at the beginning?
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: Well, in our program, we will deal with hormones early if they are relevant to you individually.
• 28:17
  Philip Pape: But in general, this is one of those more advanced things where I say, look, get the basics in place, do it for these, you know, two to four months, right?
• 28:26
  Philip Pape: Get through this second phase and then see what's left and see what you have to deal with from a hormone perspective.
• 28:32
  Philip Pape: If you're in peri or postmenopause, now you've got five months of data showing how your cycle and hormonal shifts are affecting things independent of the lifestyle changes because you've already made those.
• 28:44
  Philip Pape: So now, how exactly are hormones affecting your weight and your energy, your recovery, et cetera?
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: And now you can see the patterns and make those tactical adjustments.
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: And that might be, you know, seeking out hormone therapy or some other form of treatment or, you know, therapy that you might need or supplementation.
• 29:01
  Philip Pape: All right, then we get to weeks 22 and 23.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: And this is where we talk about maintaining your maintenance and using long-term periodization.
• 29:09
  Philip Pape: So these are skills that really coaches learn, people into nutrition science like myself learned.
• 29:15
  Philip Pape: And a lot of, I'll say, people doing this for themselves don't think too much about this stuff, I'll be honest.
• 29:21
  Philip Pape: But they're very important skills.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: Most people are jumping from one program to the next.
• 29:25
  Philip Pape: But what's important is how do you transition between phases, not programs, but between phases without regaining all the weight or without losing what you've lost?
• 29:35
  Philip Pape: How do you map out the next six to 12 months of your training and nutrition when it might look different than the last six to 12 months?
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: You're not just going to keep doing the same thing, even though the underlying skills are the same.
• 29:45
  Philip Pape: When do you cut versus build versus maintain?
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: What triggers those changes?
• 29:49
  Philip Pape: So I think at this point in your journey, you are thinking about these things and maybe stepping it up to that level of awareness and knowledge.
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: And we we teach people to do that for themselves.
• 29:58
  Philip Pape: We're getting to the end here.
• 29:59
  Philip Pape: Okay, week 24 is learning to troubleshoot things without a coach as well.
• 30:05
  Philip Pape: So we actually give you scenarios and you work through them.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: You know, you practice scenarios like, okay, what if your weight jumped three pounds overnight after restaurant meal?
• 30:13
  Philip Pape: What do you do?
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: Like, tell us why that happened and what do you do?
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: Your energy tank this week, what do you check?
• 30:18
  Philip Pape: You've been in a deficit for 12 weeks and progress all of a sudden stalled.
• 30:21
  Philip Pape: Well, what are your options?
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 30:23
  Philip Pape: And these are the diagnostic questions I would ask to get to an answer to help someone on a coaching call.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: But we actually have exercises to help you do that for yourself.
• 30:32
  Philip Pape: And then week 25, you're gonna take your measurements, you're gonna compare everything to your starting point, you're gonna write a story about your own transformation.
• 30:41
  Philip Pape: So, this is how did your identity reveal itself to what it is today?
• 30:46
  Philip Pape: What changed?
• 30:46
  Philip Pape: What did you learn?
• 30:47
  Philip Pape: What surprised you?
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: Actually, writing it down.
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: So again, these are all things you could do on your own, guys.
• 30:51
  Philip Pape: I'm explaining our program, but also telling you the roadmap so that any of these things that resonate, like, oh my gosh, I've never actually written down my story of success to learn something from it and then and then also motivate myself.
• 31:06
  Philip Pape: And then finally, the final week is you're gonna choose what's next.
• 31:10
  Philip Pape: You can choose, am I going to you know implement more of this phase?
• 31:14
  Philip Pape: Am I gonna go to a new phase?
• 31:16
  Philip Pape: Do I need to step it up to a new goal?
• 31:18
  Philip Pape: Do I want to compete?
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: You know, all those kinds of things.
• 31:21
  Philip Pape: Like there is really no endpoint, there's just a next level, a next level and a next level after that.
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: All right, before I share detail, share details on how to get started with this plan, I do want to remind you stick around because I've got a 60-second protein audit that I promised you.
• 31:38
  Philip Pape: But if you want to follow this exact 26 roadmap, 26-week roadmap today with the exact instructions and exercise and guidance, as well as automated tools and of course human coaching.
• 31:50
  Philip Pape: That is what Eat More Lift Heavy is for.
• 31:53
  Philip Pape: So you'll have two coaches, you'll have a 26-week phased experience.
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: Each week unlocks, I'll say teachable moments, but also specific actions to take that are achievable week by week.
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: You're gonna get a training program assigned from day one, monthly live coaching calls, and the community that can help you with that accountability.
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: It's not a Facebook, it's not a social media thing.
• 32:14
  Philip Pape: It is a let's get the work done thing.
• 32:16
  Philip Pape: The program starts March 30th.
• 32:18
  Philip Pape: Founder pricing is still available right now through March 29th.
• 32:21
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 32:23
  Philip Pape: And if you lock it in, you're gonna have that price forever.
• 32:26
  Philip Pape: It's quite a big discount from the public price.
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 32:30
  Philip Pape: That's eatmorliftheavy.com.
• 32:32
  Philip Pape: We also have spots available in the dialed in tier, which is a little bit higher tier that includes personal coaching from me and Coach Carroll, a private telegram chat, uh, form checks, weekly and monthly reviews of your data.
• 32:45
  Philip Pape: So it's asynchronous, very personalized coaching in that tier, but we have limited spots.
• 32:50
  Philip Pape: Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 32:52
  Philip Pape: If you see the option to select dialed in, that means we have some spots left.
• 32:56
  Philip Pape: So go ahead and select that if you want it.
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: Eatmoriftheavy.com, link in the show notes.
• 33:01
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 33:01
  Philip Pape: Here is the fastest way to find out if protein is the thing holding back your body composition.
• 33:07
  Philip Pape: Tonight at dinner, I want you to look at your plate visually and estimate how many grams of protein are on it.
• 33:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 33:15
  Philip Pape: Then I want you to think about your breakfast and lunch.
• 33:17
  Philip Pape: Are any of these meals below 30 grams per meal?
• 33:20
  Philip Pape: Are any of them below 30 grams per meal?
• 33:22
  Philip Pape: Not because that's a magic threshold, although there is some evidence related to muscle protein synthesis, but because that's a practical limit where you need about that much each meal to get the protein for the day for most people's goals.
• 33:35
  Philip Pape: Now, most people who are tracking protein are not even hitting their daily daily total, let alone people who aren't tracking protein.
• 33:44
  Philip Pape: And usually it's because you're loading it into one or two big meals, usually dinner and maybe lunch, and then falling short at the others.
• 33:51
  Philip Pape: You'll see like, you know, 10 grams of breakfast, if that, maybe 20 at lunch, and then you try to make up for it at dinner with the 60 grams.
• 33:58
  Philip Pape: And it just doesn't work well from a consistency standpoint, from a hitting your protein standpoint, but then there's other factors like it affects your hunger, and you often miss your protein by doing it this way, especially if you miss a meal or you don't get quite enough in the earlier meals.
• 34:13
  Philip Pape: So, simple audit.
• 34:14
  Philip Pape: I want you to check your last three meals and just find the one that is consistently the lowest.
• 34:19
  Philip Pape: It's usually breakfast.
• 34:20
  Philip Pape: That's your gap meal that you start with.
• 34:22
  Philip Pape: I want you to fix that one meal, find the swaps to get it over 30 grams.
• 34:26
  Philip Pape: I think you'll see a huge difference in recovery, in satiety, in body composition when you do that.
• 34:32
  Philip Pape: And again, for most of you, that's gonna be breakfast.
• 34:34
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 34:34
  Philip Pape: Simple protein audit, just to remind you, let's start with the weakest meal and jack that protein up, then go to the next one, jack it up, and pretty soon you'll be, you'll be rolling.
• 34:43
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 34:46
  Philip Pape: And remember, the best transformation isn't the fastest one.
• 34:49
  Philip Pape: It's the one that teaches you how to never need a transformation again.
• 34:54
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.