Fitness for Fat Loss... Or Not - Live AMA #11 - Clovis

Fitness for Fat Loss... Or Not - Live AMA #11

Live Ask Me Anything #11 - Topics Covered:

Summary of today’s episode - 02:25

Why does everyone judge themselves by exercise?! - 06:30

Calories In, Calories Out is Bullsh*t! - 08:29

Eat More, Move Less?! - 09:39

Why experts keep giving you bad advice - 12:04

Less than 10% of you are healthy enough for CrossFit - 18:08

Gyms and their terrible results... - 18:48

Stop following athletes and celebrities - 19:49

Bad trainers = guaranteed injury - 21:21

Steady state cardio is stupid! - 22:40

Beachbody and CrossFit - 27:16

The best tool I've found to optimize training - 35:23

How much training is required for Fat Loss? - 39:20

My favorite fitness protocols - 42:20

Meet my dad... He's 59 and jacked! - 42:42

Resistance Training Protocols - 44:14

  • Strong Lifts 5x5
  • Kettlebells
  • MSP Training

Best protocols for time saving/ efficiency - 48:07

  • ARX Training
  • Body By Science

Best Movement Practice - 49:48

  • Yoga

Tips for the Athletes! - 50:27

Live Q&A! - 51:51

  • Should You Workout Hungover?
  • Best Time Of Day To Workout?
  • Timing Of Meals?
  • Is No Pain, No Gain True?
  • What is Glycogen Replenishment?
  • Should You Max Out Your Lifts?
  • Best Exercise for Abs?
  • Best Exercise for Butt?
  • "Spot" Fat Reduction Myth?

Listen to the Podcast:

Show Notes and Resources:

- I Am Clovis

- Stop With The F*cking Calories Already - AMA #8

- Wired To Eat by Robb Wolf

- Join The Clovis Academy for Free!

- Specialization is for Insects!

- "The 180 Rule" - Proper Aerobic Training

- Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson

- Abel James and Shaun T Interview

- Dr. Shawn Baker (The Carnivore) Robb Wolf Interview

- Dr. Shawn Baker on Joe Rogan Podcast

- Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor

- Elite HRV - Heart Rate Variability App

- The Oura Ring

- StrongLifts 5x5

- Kettlebell Simple & Sinister

- Justin's insane ARX workout

- Kettlebell Swing Instructional Video with Justin

- Myotatic Crunch Instructional Video with Justin

 

FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

 

I made it! Is it eight o'clock? 

 

It's eight o'clock. 

 

Yeah, it's 8:01, technically. We made it! What's up, everybody? I am Justin Nault. If you're here, you probably know me by now. 

 

This is week 11. This is Live Ask Me Anything Number 11. Today is all about fitness. When we were talking about fitness, non, non, non-stop. Literally all about fitness. This is like Childhood Nutritional that I did. This is a topic that I could do 10 Ask Me Anythings on. I could do literally 10 hours of this. It might go over an hour. I'm going to try to cram it down into less than an hour. 

 

There's a reason that we're doing an Ask Me Anything on fitness. And that is through the Clovis academy, through all the social media platforms, everything that I see. You guys know that I attack people real hard on Instagram. 



People like weight Watchers. We've been talking about them a lot this week. I kind of hammer people giving really poor nutrition advice because I think it's important to do so. I thought the nutrition space was giving the worst advice possible until the last five years, really exploring the fitness space. It's equally as bad fitness nutrition. There's so much nonsense out there. It's not even funny. 

 

We're going to talk about a lot of that today. Something I want to touch on real quick before we get started is sharing. Josh is not here this week. The wizard stayed home. I'm just kidding. He's partying with really bad people like Russell Brunson and Tony Robbins. I couldn't compete. He left me for the week. Sad. So I got dad here. What's up, dad? 



Dad: Hey. 

 

Justin: You can hear him. He's hanging out. He doesn't know. You can settle in. You can have a seat. Don't worry. You can get comfortable. You got an hour, dude. Go to the Facebook page. I'm at facebook.com/iamclovis. If you're on Facebook or watching it on Instagram, you're seeing us live now. Running lines selling simultaneously. If you're on the Clovis culture page, do me a huge favor, click the share button. I'm going to do that right now. You just click share, and then you click Share Now Public, and that's going to send it directly to your timeline. So your friends can see that, which is really cool. They can comment on your page, and that's really fun. I just shared it on my personal Justin Nault page. Instagram's good. Checking my notes here. Live, Ask Me Anything Number 11: Fitness For Fat Loss or not because exercise has nothing to do with fat loss. I know, I know, I know. You probably didn't expect to hear that within the first three minutes of this, Ask Me Anything, but we're gonna jump right in, and it's true. 

 

I want you to keep something in mind. I'm sure some of you are CrossFitters. I know some of you personally are endurance athletes. You compete. I know some of you get paid for sports. A lot of this is really not going to be geared towards you. I'm going to give some specifics at the very end that I think athletes can use to improve their training. And when I say, think, I mean, I know because I work with them. So we'll talk about athletes a little bit at the end. But what I want you to remember is 90% of the people who have found their way to me, probably more than 90%, are coming to me for fat loss. 



This is really going to be an Ask Me Anything about Fitness and Fat Loss. Honestly, it's a moot point. The two don't go hand in hand; it's not a requirement for fat loss as most of you know, you can get results without it. I've proven that time and time and time again. I made over 130 custom nutrition plans in the last two weeks. Over 130 of you have gotten a custom nutrition and movement slash exercise protocol designed by me over the previous two weeks. I know what you guys are looking for. I see the same things over and over and over. 

 

First things first, let me give you a quick summary of the episode. How this is going to go down. This is geared towards the 90% that are trying to lose fat. So CrossFitters, don't skewer me just yet because I'm not giving you advice on how to improve your snatch. Okay? 



So somewhere in the episode, I want to talk about how everyone judges themselves based on their activity level over and over. It's always on how much people exercise, how much they exercise. That's what anybody wants to talk to me about. I need to lose weight because I hadn't been working out. That has nothing to do with it. We're gonna talk about that. When we talk about calories in, calories out. The myth that just won't die, right? Eat less, exercise more. Eat less, exercise more. We hear over and over and over and over as the obesity epidemic gets worse and worse and worse. When you talk about that, it's the fastest way to fail. Why you're getting such bad advice? Why is it that you have to find the musician from Nashville to get answers to your questions and actually get results? 



When everyone that you've paid for results is standing around doing this. Hmm. We're going to talk about that, okay? I'm gonna talk about one of my favorite quotes that have to do with that. I want to talk about how following athletes and celebrities is a horrible idea for your overall fitness journey and mental wellbeing. It's really not a good thing. 

 

I want to talk about my all-time favorite protocols. The favorite protocols that I've used, time and time again, to get results in myself, to get results in other people. I'm going to show you the best tool I've found to optimize all training, the single best tool that I've found that I still use every single day. We're going to talk about steady-state cardio. Why steady-state cardio, as we know it? I know I ruffled a lot of feathers on Instagram with that treadmill picture. 

But as we know it, steady-state cardio is stupid. I'm gonna explain why okay? We're going to talk about Beachbody. We're gonna talk about CrossFit. We will talk about how to get jacked. If you want to get jacked, that's actually more in the Q and A towards the end. We're gonna give you some specific tips, like I said, for competitive athletes. We're going to talk about live Q and A. 

 

What I did was I took some Q and A's from the Facebook group, from the Clovis Academy, which is a free academy that we're running. We got over 255 members now. It's just crazy! Guys, if you're in the academy, I promise. I'm trying to keep up. I promise. I try to like every single comment. I try to look at everything you're doing. I try to answer the emails from your family members that are coming in. 

 

Some people have gotten grumpy with me for taking too long to respond, which is weird because I do this all for free, but you know, some people still get cranky. I'm trying. I promise I'm getting like 30 to 60 email inbox messages per day. I'm going to keep up in the academy. I'm doing everything I can. I promise. I'm going to get to everybody. I've gotten questions on Instagram as well, and I have some great, great, great Q and A questions. They're awesome! We're going to touch on them. 



All right. Let's jump right in how everyone judges themselves on exercise, right? So like I said, I've done 130 custom nutrition/fitness plans in the last two weeks. I've noticed this trend that's kind of funny. And literally, every single email starts the same way. They come to me via email, justin@iamclovis.com. You can do it right now if you want to. If you're going to open a new tab and go, "Hey, Justin, I want to help too." I'll do it for you. It might take me a couple of days, but everyone starts at like this in the last three weeks. Literally 100% of people it starts with, this is my name, age, where I'm from. This is how much I work out. Or it's, I have a nine to five job now and I work, or I worked the graveyard shift. I used to work out all the time. 



It's like, they're trying to validate this decision to not work out anymore. They say like, I used to work out all the time, and I promise I will, again, maybe I'm just making excuses. Hey, how can you give me the motivation to work out more? 



I don't want to give you the motivation to work out more. I don't give a sh** if you work out. I'm trying to get you healthy, right? Most of you are coming to me with a significant amount of weight to lose. You're not in a position where you should be working out, but everybody tries to justify this thing. Like, Hey, I'm going to work out more. Or if they do work out, they insist on telling me exactly how much they work out. How many days a week they work out what the type of workout is and how much they love it. Right? They wear it like a badge of honor. Everyone is judging themselves based on the amount that they exercise. That's crazy! You don't need to do that, right? 



Here's the issue, and this is just cold hard truth. This is tough love right now. Every person who comes to me who is proud of how much they work out is at least 30 pounds overweight—130 of you. I get your numbers. I get your age, height and weight. And you tell me, you're doing CrossFit five times a week, and you're 255 pounds. You're actually hurting yourself. You're damaging your body. You're stumping your fat loss. You're literally preventing your fat loss. 

 

You've been lied to, you've been lied to about calories in, calories out. Eat less, train more. Eat less, train more over and over and over and over. I have a video about this on YouTube. I've had some people come to me pretty emotional about it. Because I talk about specific people whose trainers and doctors have actually told them they're lying. They're like, "Listen, I exercise five days a week, and I'm eating a thousand calories a day, and I can't lose weight. Why can't I lose fat?" And people think they're lying. They tell them that they're lying. It's ridiculous! 

 

It's just everything that they've learned is based on nothing. There's no science to back this up. There's no science for calories in, calories out. I'm not going to go in-depth on calories in, calories out because I already did that on Ask Me anything Number Eight. Ask Me anything Number Eight was called Stop With The Calories Already. That was the name of Ask Me anything Number Eight. I did almost an hour about calories in, calories out and how it's a myth. Go watch, Ask Me Anything. You can go to iamclovis.com and search AMA. You can see all the AMAs and all the show notes. Watch Ask Me Anything Number Eight: Calories In, Calories Out

 

I'm not going to get into the calories in, calories out science which don't exist again—spoiler alert. Instead, I am going to borrow from Robb Wolf here. Robb Wolf has become a buddy of mine over the years. He's absolutely awesome. He's never steered me wrong with recommendations. 



I've given you guys some of his recommendations. He has a best-selling book called Wired To Eat. I highly recommend you pick up Wired To Eat and read it. He explains how we are genetically wired to move less and eat more. Listen to that again; like all animals in the animal kingdom, we are genetically wired. That means coded in our DNA, in our survival instincts to eat more, move less. To consume the most amount of calories possible while spending the least amount of energy. And what do we talk about for Health and Wellness? Eat less, move more. It literally goes against your genetic coding. It goes against every single fiber of the human cells. Every single part of you is screaming. 

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want to do that. That goes against our survival instinct. 

 

That's why this is so hard. This eats less, exercise more is the number one reason for the fitness diet and fitness and nutrition roller coaster. This thing that you do, and I tried every fad diet. I've tried every workout. I've tried beach body. I've attempted to bar class. I've tried yoga. I've gone swimming. I ran a marathon last year, and I'm still 30 pounds overweight. The roller coaster, why? Consistently eat less, move more. Eat less, move more. It's insane! It's quite literally the definition of insanity. If you keep trying this over and over and over again and expecting a different result. That's crazy people's stuff. 

 

We're focusing on the genetically gifted or the few that this works for. You're looking at The Rocks Instagram page every day, right? 

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for you.

It doesn't work for anyone, and it doesn't work long-term. I'm all about setting up lifestyle design, changing your lifestyle in a way sustainable that you can carry with you long-term forever. What do I tell everyone in the Clovis Academy on social media all the time? If I do my job correctly, you won't need me in two months. Remember that as we get further into this AMA because not everybody thinks like that. Not everybody has your best interest at heart. Okay? Not everybody is not fueled by profit. It's a big deal when it comes to your health. You need to take care of yourself. 

 

Why do you keep getting bad advice? Why do we keep getting this stuff repeatedly and fed the same lines by the same people? I tried this, Jim, and he said the same thing that the other guy said. And then I went to this nutritionist, and she said what my doctor said. And then my doctor told me this, and it's also in the food pyramid, move more bull****. And it never works. So now I'm 15 years into my fitness journey, and I'm obese and can't figure out what to do about it. And now I'm frustrated, and I'm considering putting hormone injections in my body to lose weight or gastric bypass surgery or something like that. It's crazy! Don't do it. 



I'm going to tell you why you keep getting bad advice. To do that, I'm going to take you to one of my favorite quotes of all time. It's a lengthy quote, and I'm going to read it to you. But my favorite part about it is an excerpt from the school. This quote, the excerpt, is specialization is for insects. Remember that specialization is for insects. 

We're not insects; we're human beings. We're not ants that just carry food blindly to the queen and would die for her. Walk in a straight line, like all the other ants. We're not lemmings, right? Specialization is for insects. 



Let me explain to you what I mean by that? I'm going to read this quote, and it has nothing to do with fitness and nutrition, but the overall message is there and its sound. 

 

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Robert Heinlein. That's one of my favorite quotes of all time. Why? Because I get obsessive with everything from Spanish to travel, to jujitsu, to boxing, to fitness, to nutrition, into music and everything in between. I'm just one of these guys. 

 

I like to do everything. You are never going to find me bored. If you're ever bored, you're doing life wrong, okay? You're never going to see me bored in a million years, right? There are too many books to read for you to be bored. So specialization is for insects. What do I mean by this? And I'm sorry if this is horn-tooting. I would never recommend anything to anyone of you ever that I have not done myself, ever. Whether you got fat-adapted, you need to try the keto diet, prick your finger, do blood draws, and go into deep ketosis. You need to try paleo. You need to try powerlifting. 



When I used the deadlift, 425 pounds, right? You need to try extensive CrossFit workouts. You need to try boxing. You need to try jujitsu. You need to try gymnastics, whatever it may be. I've done it. There is nothing I will ever recommend to you, from ice baths, do deep breathing exercises, to psychedelic retreats in the jungle. There's nothing that I'm going to ever recommend to you that I have not done myself. I'm that guy. I lived this sh** every day. And you have to be willing to get outside your comfort zone and learn different things, right? I've read vegan books. I've read vegetarian books, I've read ketogenic books. And I'm still somehow the paleo guy. I fall somewhere in that realm because I know what works because I've tested these things out, right? You can't be dogmatic about it. 



So here's what happens with everybody else. Whether it's a personal trainer, a fitness class instructor, a CrossFit coach, a nutritionist, or a doctor. Right? Think about it this way. When the only tool you have is a hammer, suddenly everything starts to look like a nail. So think about it like that. If the only tool I have is a hammer and you come to me with a problem, I'm going to assume that your problem is a nail and I need to hit it. Cause that's the only tool I have. I don't have a screwdriver. I don't have a wrench. I don't have this. I don't have a diverse array of tools for different things that come to me. We get each individual is unique. They have particular problems. So you had these coaches, these fitness instructors, these nutritionists, these doctors that get these specialized certifications and degrees. 



For some reason, they decide that they're done. They're done learning. They get that education, right? To give you a really strong example of this. I'm going to do a little role-playing game, right? And this is what this looks like. So let's say I'm Bruno, right? I'm Bruno. I'm a personal trainer, I compete in bodybuilding competitions, and people pay me because they think they're going to somehow look like me, right? So then Mary comes along, and Mary's five foot two, and she's a hundred pounds. And she struggled with an eating disorder for the last six years. I look at her, and I go, "You're skinny. You should do my bodybuilding muscle-building program. Here you go, eat 400 grams of carbohydrates a day and lift weights six times a week. That should work for you." Crazy, right? 



Or now I'm Mary, the yoga instructor. Joe comes up to me, who is six foot, three, 240 pounds and has never exercised. For some reason signed up for a marathon. He's going to run his first marathon six weeks from now. And I'm Mary, the yoga instructor. And I go, "Joe, you should come to try my hot yoga class. That's going to get you ready for your marathon." Good luck, right? Or my favorite. I've seen this time and time again because of my time spent in the CrossFit world. I saw this over and over and over and over and over again. I'm Joe, the CrossFit trainer, and I meet a 350 pound, 60-year-old woman. She walks into my gym, and she comes up to me. I realized she can't bend over to tie her shoes. And I say, "Here's a barbell. Don't worry. I'm going to put you through a four-week class. That's going to teach you how to be safe." This is insane! 

 

But the only tool they have is a hammer. That's the only thing that they know how to do, right? So what it becomes is you see, you find an expert and trust them, and they tell you to do it my way. And when their way doesn't work, they say, "you're not trying hard enough." 

 

"I don't know what you're talking about. It worked for all these other people, right?" You're unique. You're individual. This is crazy. Stop trying to do what other people do. It's crazy! I've made this literally makes me like, okay, angrier than I should express to you that people do this to people, right? I've worked with now over 130 plans that I made in the last couple of weeks. Maybe 10 of them, we're in a position where they were healthy enough to do something like CrossFit three days a week. Let alone five to six days a week, which is what most people are doing, right? You'll get there. I'm not saying that you can't do these things. I'm saying that you're not healthy enough to do them now. 

 

I have to meet you where you are, and if you're not ready and you're punishing yourself, and you're damaging your body, you're doing more harm than good. And you're never going to get to fat loss that way. I don't give a sh** what motivational posts your local CrossFit gym put on Instagram with a picture of a 70-year-old woman flexing who is still 30 pounds overweight saying, "you're never too old to get it started." 

 

It's crazy because it makes me more to put my head through a wall when I'm on Instagram. I'm looking at cycling gyms, Bootcamp gyms and CrossFit gyms, and they keep posting their insane before and after pictures, right? And they're all always the same.



It's like this is Gina. Gina joined our gym six months ago, and she's lost 10 pounds. Yay, Gina. I'm looking at this screen going 10 pounds in six months? You lost 10 pounds in six months. Fire everyone that you were paying for advice right now. Fire all of them, 10 pounds in six months. That's a six-day goal in my world. Go to the Clovis academy right now. facebook.com/groups/clovisacademy. And you know, there was a post today from a girl that said, "I'm a getting there, 12 pounds down." Zero fitness, zero, zero fitness. Okay. If you want to be a personal trainer and make money? Keep people hungry and sore, so they constantly think they're doing something. People are paying for torture. It's ridiculous! 

 

The same thing goes for celebrities. And I talk about this with cheat days. People want to talk to me about cheat days.



Like The Rock does a cheat day. He eats three large pizzas every Sunday, and he eats brownies, right? You can have that same cheat day when you are The Rock. When you're a 265-pound man of Samoan descent, who is solid muscle, who has been working out six hours a day for countless years and is literally taking all the steroids. You can eat like The Rock, then you can do that. Until then, you don't get to do that. The same thing goes for athletic training. You guys are modelling your training after athletes. You're doing CrossFit, and you're like, "I'm going to do the regionals", right? 

You're not competing. You don't compete. Why aren't you doing this to 

yourself? Right. You're modelling it after these celebrities or Instagram models or whatever. And you're setting yourself up for failure because this is true of 99% of you. You're not an athlete. Why are you training like one? I don't mean that in the wrong way. I'm a musician; I'm a professional. I get paid for it. If you play the guitar for fun, congrats, you have a hobby. You're not a musician, right? If you're not playing gigs, you're not really a musician. You have a hobby that you do, right? For most of you that are doing something like CrossFit. CrossFit is a hobby that makes you feel good. That's great! But if it's making you feel good mentally, cause you have a big ego and you want to be the tough guy, and it's hurting your health. Why would you keep doing that? There's no excuse for that.



I wouldn't keep playing the piano every day if the piano was terrible for my health. I just stopped doing it. You know? I give you these random examples of people, and you'll never know who these people are, but it was a guy today. He was over 300 pounds and went to Orange Theory Fitness. What does Orange Theory Fitness know how to do? Sell you their program. They sold them this program, and all the trainers kept saying, push harder, push harder, push harder. What happened? Multiple injuries, dude, couldn't work out. You're done working out now. You weren't ready, and you're injured. But what happened? Orange Theory Fitness trainers have a hammer. He was a nail.



They hit him with a hammer. Literally, it busted them up to the point where he couldn't work out anymore. It's the same, right? You got to think about this stuff. Think about it from a different perspective. Please understand. It's the same thing with nutrition. If mainstream nutrition vice worked, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. If this fitness-first approach to fat loss worked, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. If it was as simple as workout more, do you know how many overweight people work out every day? And they feel like sh**, and they're embarrassed. They don't want to be in the gym on the cardio machine. They don't want to be there. They know people are looking at them, but they feel like they have to because people tell them they have to. We're abusing people, man. We are abusing people straight up, and people are abusing themselves. It's damaging. It's damaging to your brain, right? That's crazy!




Let's talk about steady-state cardio. Again, this is another thing where there's a separate, Ask Me Anything I did. It's Ask Me Anything Number six, the one that I filmed from Mardi Gras was called Potato Tricks and Party Tips. I talked about the cardio myth, so I'm not going to really dive into all that. I just basically line up the evidence about how there is no evidence for the heart rate. As we know it, two 20 minus your age equals max heart rate. What're the fat-burning zones? People always talk about these zones. There's no evidence for these zones. There's no scientific data to back it up. It's from nonsense studies done in the 1960s that were just kind of curated. It's a bunch of nonsense, right? 



So know that when you're on a treadmill for 45 minutes, an hour or whatever, and you're huffing and puffing, and you're like, "oh, I ran an eight-minute mile a day. It almost killed me." But I ran an eight-minute mile. You're not burning any fat. I don't care what the machine tells you. You're in the fat-burning zone or whatever you're huffing and puffing. You're sweating like that as glycolytic; you're burning sugar. As long as you're burning sugar, you can't burn fat. Now people make the argument with me too. They say, "Well, if I'm burning sugar, you say, if I don't have sugar in my system, then I'll burn fat. So if I'm burning all the sugar, I'm gonna burn fat, right?" No, it doesn't work that way because certain activities are glycolytic, and specific activities are aerobic, right? So it's an aerobic means with oxygen, and anaerobic means without oxygen, right? Glycolytic exercise is anaerobic. You burn sugar, no matter what. If your body doesn't have it, it creates it. 

 

It creates it by stripping your muscle tissue. Literally takes your lean muscle tissue, strips it through something called gluconeogenesis and turns it into glucose, okay? So as long as you're eating carbohydrates, or even if you're not eating carbohydrates and you're just doing non-stop CrossFit, or you're running at a really, really high pace or whatever, you're not going to burn fat. You're only going to burn sugar. And if you don't have the sugar in your bloodstream, your body's going to create it from your own lean muscle tissue. 

 

This is crazy to me because what happens when people say I'm going to get in shape. What's the first thing everyone does? They just start running. Randomly. It's like new year's resolutions, everything. They're just like, "I'm gonna get in shape tomorrow. I'm going to run." And everybody hates it. And they're super sore. And they're counting the seconds. They're looking at the treadmill going, "Seriously. It's only been 10 minutes. Somebody kill me." Everybody hates it. It's terrible. And that's what everyone does. Why? Why do you run to get in shape? If you were in the room right now and I said, "why do you run to get in shape?" I would want you to tell me why you run to get in shape. And you can't say, "because running is good for you." There's no evidence to support that. And I know there's no evidence to support that because I've tried to find the evidence to support that. Okay? This is what I'm saying is we don't know why we're doing things. It's just bad advice. I'm trying to help you lose weight, trying to get you healthy, right? If you're trying to run because you want to be a better runner. Cool! But if you're doing it to lose fat, nope, unless you do it correctly. Which is why I say steady-state cardio, as we know it is stupid. 

 

Go back to AMA number six, and we talked about the 180 rule. This is from Dr Phil Maffetone. It does have science behind it. You can go to DrPhilmaffetone.com. Look up his 180 rule, and you can learn about this yourself. So 180 minus your age. I'm 31. That brings me to 149, which means my max for my aerobic threshold is 149 BPM. That's beats per minute. So I put a chest strap, heart rate monitor on. It is to monitor my heart rate while I'm jogging between 139 and 149 is my sweet spot. That little 10 beats per minute zone, right? 

 

I can carry a whole conversation. My dad and I go out and run, and I'm at my heart rate, and he's at his heart rate. We can sit there and chat. You're breathing through your nose all the time. You have a conversation; it doesn't suck. It's kind of fun. You're outside. You get the sun. Now, in the beginning, you'll probably only be able to walk, and your ego is going to go, "oh my God, I can't believe how out of shape I am. This is crazy." Right? But know that you're burning fat and know that you're increasing your aerobic threshold. For me, I started running like 13-minute miles with aerobic threshold training is 180. 



I was running 13-minute miles. Now keep in mind, I trained in jujitsu. I'm an ex-boxer. As I said, I did powerlifting. I did CrossFit. I've done everything you can think of, right? I'm a pretty competitive dude. So I was just like, "What? A 13-minute mile?" And I'm spiking over one 50 heart rate. This is crazy. My body is useless. What is this garbage I'm carrying around? This is insane, right? And then, before I know it, weeks and weeks later, daily training with t his, all of a sudden, I can run a nine-minute mile at the same heart rate. That's genuinely improving aerobic efficiency in my body's ability to burn fat. This is a way to accelerate fat adaptation. There's a great book about this called Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson. I'll put that in the show notes. 

 

So now that we've talked about the Cardio Myth, the other thing I want to talk about is that literally, everyone is over-training. Everyone is over-training all these people that come to me that are currently involved in fitness. They're over-training; it's five days a week, it's six days a week. I lift weights three days a week, and then the other days, I do cardio. And then, on Saturday, I do yoga. So I get the idea of moving every day and all that. But this intense training every day is simply over-training. It's not good for your body. I want to talk about two things, and I know I will get hate mail or whatever. Don't kill me for this, right? 



Beach body and CrossFit. I get asked specifically about these. I got many questions today about the beach body and a lot of questions about CrossFit. 

 

Beach body. You know what I love about beach body? Shawn T. He's a fantastic dude. He's absolutely incredible. I did the insanity program four times. I did his insanity 30-day max or whatever he came out with. Abel James is a good buddy of mine. He's known as the fat-burning chef. Abel sat down with Shawn T. Shawn T is so open-minded as a dude. It's amazing. There's a great little article that Abel put up called Shawn T puts butter in his coffee, right? That goes against every single nutrition rule that Beachbody has ever put out. I did P90X, P90X 2, P90X 30, whatever it was a 30-day thing. I did insanity. All these things back when I didn't know better, I was like eating subway and working out six times a week and going, why am I not getting skinny? Dam* you beach body! Right? But the programs were pretty cool, but they're over-training an hour and a half a day at P90X is absolutely over-training.




It's fun! It's motivational. It's all that I get it. But what happens is you get stuck in this mindset of this calendar, right? So now you have this Beachbody calendar that's staring at you every day. There's a new 80-day obsession thing. It's like an hour a day, right? You don't need to be doing that. So what happens if you miss a day? You feel guilty.

 

I get stories from people who miss a day; they start over. "I missed a day. I screwed up the whole thing. I, well, I'm just going to quit the rest of this week. And then I'll start day one again on Monday." It's this vicious cycle. They know what they're doing. They're manipulating you. Okay? Think about that behavior. You're getting manipulated. And their nutrition plan is sh**. Their products and supplements are sh**. Okay? 



It's this fitness-first approach of like, we're going to crush, crush, crush, crush, crush! Exercise more, eat less and take our $130 a month shake that tastes pretty terrible. You're going to get results. And then when you don't get results, what? You see the testimonies on their sales pages, on their website. You see their before and after videos. You see their testimonies. These are all ingredients in our shake, and you feel bad about yourself. They are preying on you. That is predator behavior. It's predator behavior. This doesn't work for you. No, uh, looking at all these other people that work for, they must have done it right, and you must have done it wrong. Tough shi*, dummy. That's what they're doing to you. It's really crazy. I was caught in this. I did this; as I said, there's nothing I recommend that I haven't done. There's nothing that I sh** on that I haven't done. 



Trust me. I've been on that treadmill for hours. I've eaten brown rice into lobbyists six times a day. I've paid a shitload of money to personal trainers to try to cut my body fat, and none of them ever worked for me, ever! And told me to try harder. I've been there. I was a fat kid and didn't want to take my shirt off to go swimming. I was that guy. I've been there with you. All of this, the good, the bad, the ugly, I've been there with you. Okay. If it ever feels like I'm yelling at you, I'm yelling at the universe for what I've been through. Okay. Think about it that way. 

 

This stuff is just this over-training approach is completely unnecessary. Let me break into some science of what actually happens here, because CrossFit is notorious for this. You're training five days a week, six days a week, you're doing regionals, and you're repeating regionals over and over to get a better score. You're doing this, that the other thing, right? You're spiking your cortisol levels, and your muscles never get a chance to recover. I get a lot of hell for this term, but I use the term pleasantly plump CrossFitters. There are many pleasantly plump CrossFitters because CrossFit has this weird thing where they like glorifying bad nutrition. It's like doughnuts and deadlifts or carb front-loading before a workout or carb-backloading. Let's go eat pizza after because we deserve it or CrossFit events where they're hosted by caters with cupcakes. 

 

There's some crazy sh** going on in the CrossFit world in terms of nutrition. It's just notoriously bad because it's a fitness-first approach. 

It's the idea that you can burn off a bad diet. You cannot burn off a bad diet. We talked about glycolytic. We spoke about anaerobic. We spoke of aerobic. You can't burn off a bad diet. It's just not going to happen. 

 

The other thing to remember with Beachbody and CrossFit is the risk of injury. Now, let me be very clear, I know a lot of CrossFitters that I love. I know a lot of CrossFit gym owners who are fantastic. They're incredible coaches. They don't let somebody who's not ready. They don't put a barbell in their hands. They teach perfect programming. They don't do things like this. One of the highest risks of injury is taking a complicated move, adding weight and adding speed, right? We're going to do overhead snatches for time. That's insane! Unless you are trying to get to the CrossFit games and planning on competing for an average person to just be healthy. That's insane! 

 

I know many CrossFit owners in gyms who have actually banned this type of thing. They will not allow you to do really complicated, and what's called Olympic lifts for time, for speed, for reps, whatever. They just won't do it. You might do a couple of reps at a heavyweight, and then you're resting three to five minutes. We're trying to get your Olympic lift up. That's great. Awesome. 

 

The other thing with beach body is low weight. High reps are also the fastest way to failure. You're just fatiguing your muscle, and women always do this because they're afraid they're going to bulk up. Let me tell you something. You guys are watching me for the last 22 days. What do I look like? I've been eating 3,500 calories a day, trying my absolute best to gain as much weight as possible. 

And I look pretty much the same. Have I gained some muscle? Yes, I have. But trust me, girls, you're not going to get bulky from lifting weights. This is a myth. Nutrition can get you bulky combined with lifting weights, but you're not. If you're doing high weight, low rep, which is what you should be doing for proper resistance training, not this low weight, high rep until your muscles are so sore. You're screaming. Don't do that stuff anymore. It's actually really dangerous, and you're not going to woke up from weight lifting. 

 

I'm going to show you the number one issue that I have with fitness combined with nutrition. This is the idea that carbohydrates are required for performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. And there's actually a great example of this because Robb Wolf just interviewed him. His name is Dr Sean Baker. 



Dr Sean Baker was also on the Joe Rogan podcast for three hours. Dr Sean Baker is a carnivore. When I say he's a carnivore, I don't mean an omnivore like you and me, where we eat vegetables, and we eat meat. He is 100% carnivore has been for 15 months. He eats four pounds of meat a day, zero carbohydrates, and holds four world records in athletic performance. He's about to break another one in two weeks. He's going for another world record. The guy deadlifts 500 pounds for 10 reps. He's an absolute savage monster. He hasn't eaten a single carbohydrate in 15 months, and his performance only gets better. Now he has professional athletes all over the world that are repeating this carnivorous diet, getting better and better and better and better and better. 

 

I've been in CrossFit gyms, and I've had people look me in the face and tell me if you don't eat carbohydrates, you'll die. Now, when they tell me that they don't know my background, they don't know who I am. They're just having a conversation. I don't poop on their parade. I just go, "Oh, that's some new interesting stuff." And then I walk away, and then my head explodes, and I die in the parking lot. They say carbohydrates are required for human survival. No, not at all. It's the only macronutrient that's not required for human survival. Fat and protein are necessary for human survival. Without them, you die! Without carbohydrates, you live a long, happy life. 

 

You don't need a single carbohydrate for human survival. You absolutely don't. Now I'm not saying you need a ditch carbohydrates. I eat a ton of vegetables. I think that they're great. But I'm just saying this argument is nonsense. 

 

Let's talk about the number one tool that I've used. I actually forgot about this until right now because I had it in the show summary. I'm just going to have to skip all this one off the top of my head. Dad and I both use this every single day. It's called HRV. This is Heart Rate Variability training. So you're afraid that you've been overtraining. This is a big question that I get that I was asking myself is, "Well, how do I know if I'm overtraining?" Right? 

 

How do I know if I'm overtraining? This is a definitive way for you to know. It's called Heart Rate Variability training. Now I use a Polar H7. The chest drop monitor I recommend now is actually the Polar H10 because I've been doing this for years. There's an H10 out now. That's how old I am to this thing, right? So you wake up in the morning, put on the polar H7, which is H10 now, and I use the elite HRV app. That is free. The elite HRV app measures the milliseconds in between your heartbeats, and it tells you how stressed your body is. 



You'll see a curve like this. I'm going to do it this way because you're reading left to right. There's a curve like this. There's sympathetic, middle point, parasympathetic, but you get a needle, and it's red to green or red on both sides and greens in the middle, right? You may have too much sympathetic nervous system. You might have too much parasympathetic nervous system. Now parasympathetic is your rest and digest. Your calm that's what you want when you're going to sleep. Your sympathetic is when you first get out of bed, you get a cortisol spike. That's kind of your fight or flight, right? This measures where you're at based on feedback from your body. It will give you a number. 

 

Let's say it's a number three and it's bright red. You don't train that day. It doesn't matter. Your body doesn't care what day of the week it is. This is something I want to drive into people's heads. The human brain has constructed a calendar. It has constructed dates. Your internal organs and muscles and tissues don't give sh** about your calendar. They don't care at all. They don't care that Monday's chest day. When it's chest day, it doesn't matter how I feel. I'll fight through it. If you wake up and you have an HRV of two, and it's bright red, guess what, dude? You better move chest day to Tuesday because your risk of injury is through the roof right now. Literally, through the roof. Now, if you get a perfect 10 in HRV and you want to go run sprints and do a Crossfit. Cool! Congratulations, go do it but save it for that day.  

 

I never say Monday's this day, Wednesdays this day, Fridays this day, it doesn't work like that. For me, everything runs off my HRV. I won't say you got a new tool that's coming out. I guess we'll call it a piece of wearable tech called The Oura Ring. The Oura Ring is amazing. I tested the Oura ring over a year ago, but it was giant and bulky, and I couldn't really wear it while playing the piano. It was kind of ugly. They're coming out with a new Oura ring. I believe in April, that looks like a men's wedding band. It's about that thing. You can get it in white, pink, whatever you want for girls. It measures your HRV consistently all throughout the day; it measures your sleep, your deep sleep, your light sleep, your REM sleep. 



It's the best tracker I've ever seen. I repeat that the Oura ring is the best fitness and leads to sleep tracker I've ever seen in my life. I pre-ordered. I got friends that pre-ordered. When that little one, it looks like a wedding band comes out. I cannot wait for that thing. The Oura ring is amazing. You can check your HRV every day, and it gives you a percentage score of zero all the way to 100. So if you're at an 87, think of that as like an eight, right? Okay. Go train that day. Go have fun. Hit a hard workout, but that's the thing with this. The mindset of all, this is like you wake up, you know, your kid was up screaming until two in the morning, and you have a Pilates workout scheduled at 6:30, and you wake up, and you feel like you're going to die. 



Stay in bed, screw the Pilates class, whatever, listen to your body. Because I assure you, if you were measuring your HRV was something like the aura ring. The aura ring would tell you that your sleep sucked. You're not well-rested, and your HRV is terrible. Don't work out that day. We don't need to guess any more about your body. It's 2018. We don't need to guess. I track everything. I quantify as much as I possibly can. I hook electrodes up to my blinds so that my meditation is more powerful. 

 

Literally, you're getting feedback. You can get neurofeedback. You can get biological feedback. You can use all these different tools to know exactly how your body's feeling that day. Right? So that's my spiel on what everybody is getting wrong with fitness.

 

Let's talk about why? So how much training is required for fat loss? Exactly zero! Exercise exists for two reasons. 

 

One - to improve a specific skill.  

Two - to build muscle. 

 

Notice that fat loss isn't anywhere on that list. The only thing that you could really argue for is like the 180 rule; the aerobic training threshold teaches your body how to burn fat. That's pretty great or something incredibly violent, like weekly sprints, like weekly, a hundred meter sprints. Those will help you burn fat, but they're freaking brutal. So I don't recommend them to everyone. I recommend that these 15 minutes of warmup before you make your first sprint because the risk of injury is off the chart. I really don't recommend it to people. Literally, exercise exists to improve specific skills and to build muscle. Now, this is glycolytic versus aerobic, aerobic versus anaerobic, all that. 



People are shocked when they come to me for fat loss. Let's jump on the fat loss training now. They're shocked when they come to me, and they tell me all about their workouts. I'm doing this, this, this, this, this, and I go, "not anymore." You don't get to do that anymore. For the next 30 days, I want you to take a 20-minute walk every day. What's funny is people freak out at first, and then they come back. And they're honest with me, and they're like, "I can't tell you how happy I am that you said that. I thought that you would tell me that I need to work out six times a week and I need to do this. I need you to do that." The only thing that I allow them to do, and I asked them, stick to my protocol. If you want results, do what I tell you. And I say, walk. Walk every day if you wish. If you can walk every day, it's not a problem. There's no risk of overtraining. Even with the 180 rule, there's really no risk of overtraining. 



I actually take exercise away from people and what happens in the Clovis Academy. I told you about the girl that dropped 12 pounds in her first week. A guy texted me the other day. His mom dropped to 12 pounds in her first week. I got ladies that drop 30 pounds in their first 30 days. I have dudes that are down 40 pounds in there. I have a girl who lost 90 pounds in a matter of months. It's all about fitness.



Flip the fitness-first script on his head. Let's take this nutrition first. Now, I'm not saying you can't do these things. But, again, I'm just saying that you're not ready yet. Now, we'll get you to a point where you're ready. That's the whole point. I'm going to start from the ground up and will rebuild your health. We're trying to undo decades of damage. If you end up obese and you can barely move. That's decades of damage that we have to undo, and I want to help you undo it more than, you know. I will do everything in my power to help you undo it. And then further down the line. I don't know what that time marker is. I'm not even going to say one. Maybe it's a year, perhaps it's two years, whatever. And you say, "Hey, I think I'm going to try CrossFit." 

And I go, "hell yeah, let's do this. You to do CrossFit? Let's do it together." Awesome. I'm so pumped you want to do this. 

 

That's another step in your journey, but your journey starts here. You don't go from sedentary and obese to six CrossFit workouts a week in an instant. You don't do that unless you want injury, pain and failure. Don't do it. It should be nutrition first. 

 

All right, let's get into my favorite programs. Let me do a time check. We have 15 minutes. 

 

My favorite programs. I'm certain I'm gonna leave things out. You're gonna say, what about swimming? What about the bar class? What about this? What about that? I know I'm going to miss something, right? I'm cramming for time here, but these are my favorite protocols. I use them over and over with people. I've used them in men. I used them in women to get fantastic results. I've used them with dad. 

Overall fitness resistance training. This is my dad. My dad is 59 years young, right? I can't take him anywhere without people commenting on his biceps. It's a little ridiculous. And some of you in the Clovis academy have asked me if my dad's single. So it's rude to stop talking to me like that. But he's 59 years old. We did about a year on my favorite overall resistance training protocol, which is strongest five by five. This is three days of resistance training every week. It monitors everything on an app. You can track your weights and everything, that's it. So how'd you got in such good shape?



Dad: Just do what he said. Honest to God. I just did what he said.



Justin: And we're lucky that we built an entire powerlifting / CrossFit / jujitsu gym in my house. We get to train together, which is fantastic. 

 

Dad: It just makes it more convenient rather than having to drive somewhere? 

 

Justin: Exactly. 

 

Dad: Little more convenient. 

 

Justin: He still has to drive in my house. He has to drive to me. But in just over a year, he was deadlifting over 300 pounds. 

 

Dad: Yeah. 

 

Justin: What do you weigh? 

 

Dad: 165.

 

Justin: 165 deadlifts and over 300 pounds. That's ridiculous! Three days a week and resting in between. Literally nothing in between. He goes for walks. That's it! Nutrition, fitness. So that's dad. 

I want to talk to you about dad.

 

Dad: Nice to meet you

 

Justin: But that's Stronglifts 5x5. Stronglifts 5x5 has an app on Google and iPhone that you can track all your workouts. It's awesome. 

 

Now this one's a little tricky because it has the most significant learning curve. However, I still have to recommend it because I've never found anything better for overall fitness, mobility, and strength. That's Kettlebells. So the book I would start with is Simple and Sinister by Pavel Tsatsouline. I'll put it in the show notes. 

Kettlebells literally are one piece of equipment gym that you can have in your house, and you can use anytime. Now, the only thing that I'll disagree with is fat loss for all of you. He does recommend six days a week. I don't do it three days a week. That's it! The beginning of the workout takes you about 40 minutes because you don't know what you're doing. Eventually, you're gonna get it down to 15 minutes, and you do it twice a week, three times a week, perfectly fine. You literally do it twice a week, and you're gonna lose fat, and you're gonna find your overall health and wellness are going through the roof. Assuming the nutrition is correct. 

 

Remember, we start nutrition first, and fitness is just added. This is an additional bonus, right? Stronglift 5x5 also can be done with machines. If you don't like the idea of free weights, you can go to a place like Planet Fitness. You can do Smith machine squats. It's just five little bits. It's a squat, bench press, overhead press, bent-over row, and deadlift. You can do all this on machines if you really want to, or you can use dumbbells if you're not comfortable. A lot of women have told me that they're not comfortable with resistance training. I know that's tough. I've actually sent some people videos. I make instructional videos in my garage, and I can show you. I sent one girl a video on how to deadlift. So if you guys want to see that deadlift video? Let me know. I'll share that with you. Just did it right in my garage real quick. 

Well, you can't use machines if you're worried about it. Stronglift 5x5, kettlebells are amazing. 

 

Another one that I also learned about this from Primal Endurance. That book by Mark Sisson, and again, this is called MSP Training. It's Maximum Sustained Power Training. I think I also have a video of me doing this, but it's a time-lapse in fast forward. This is literally a full-body workout inside of 15 minutes. I tend to do it with squats and deadlifts. You'll take whatever you want, right? Just start low. I take about 70% of my one-rep max. Let's say I'm squatting 210 pounds or something like that for MSP, right? I'll take 70% of whatever my maximum is, which is like 310 on a squat.



So rack the weight. I'll put the weight on my back. I'll do five reps, put it on the bar. I'll rest 20 seconds. Pick it back up, three reps, put it on the bar. Rest 20 seconds. Pick it up. Two reps, rest, two reps, rest, two reps, rest one rep, boom. I'm done with squats. Maybe it takes, I don't know, two to three minutes. And then I move on, and I'll do the same thing with deadlifts, right? That 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1 with about 20 seconds between at about 70% of my max. So I max deadlifts, 420, whatever I find my deadlift 70% is. Let's say 60 to 70%, and I just bang that out. Now, this is maximum sustained power output. It's the idea that you're actually lifting more weight total than if you were to do, say three sets of 10 reps with a bunch of rest in between.



It's maximum sustained power. This is effective, efficiency training. You're in and out, in and out, in and out, right? Do this two times a week. And you're pretty much done. And then new, maybe some, 180 rural cardio in between. Now again, I can build you a protocol for these things if you want. But remember, it's going to be my opinion on whether or not I think you're ready for this. If you're five foot two, when you weigh 265 pounds, we're not going there yet, but we will get you there. I promise this. 

 

For overall fitness, resistance training is where it's at, and let me tell you why. Especially as you age, the only type of exercise you can do that is proven to increase bone density is resistance training. Running, cardio, all these other things have an opposite effect. They can actually damage the density of your bones as you age because your bones tend to get more brittle.



So reversing osteoporosis, things like that. It's always going to start with resistance training. So kettlebells, strong lift, MSP training are some of my overall protocols. Remember, they all meet you where you are, right? If you need a lighter kettlebell, use a lighter kettlebell. You need lighter weights; use lighter weights. If you need a machine, use a machine. If you want fewer sets on your MSP training, use fewer sets. Start where you are. This is all a journey, right? The rest is just progress. 

 

For convenience and efficiency, ARX training. I've never seen anything that beats it. It's once a week. I have a video of it on Facebook. I'm going to share it on the Facebook page. Literally once per week because you exhaust your entire body and all your muscle fibers to absolute failure, which is excellent for combining strength and hypertrophy, which are two different things.



The strength being strength, hypertrophy, being muscle growth, getting bigger muscles. This is all sponsored by something called Body by Science. By the way, the science thing is by Dr Doug McGruff, but Body by Science is the idea of "you never let your muscles rest." You work your muscles non-stop. There's no lockout in the reps. It's just over and over and over and over and over until total exhaustion. You're actually engaging all of your muscle fibers, slow-twitch, fast-twitch, and everything in between. Every single muscle fiber you have is getting exhausted. But the problem with that is you literally need a week to recover. If you do the big five workouts for air, extra body by science, you need a week to recover. I don't care if you feel good after. You need a week to recover. Trust me, that's actually what we're using for the mass gains protocol.



I'm splitting the body and doing two workouts per week. Josh and I are doing that. We have it all documented. I'll share the Facebook video of me doing ARX. I'll share a link from Body by Science, and we can explain to you exactly how those things work. If you want to go deeper on any of this stuff, email me, justin@iamclovis.com. We can talk about hypertrophy and how to eat for that. It's also in the Q and A coming up. 

 

Overall favorite movement practice. Yoga. For all yogis out there. I love it. That's great. That's awesome. You can't really overtrain it unless you're doing 90 minutes of hot yoga, six days a week or something. I mean, I'm sure you could overdo it if you really tried, but even just 30 minutes a day of yoga practice would be great, and I'm not worried about overdoing it.

And that's something that I actually recommend to clients who are not healthy enough for intense physical activity. We'll do a really, really simplified version of yoga, maybe 30 minutes. 

 

Start them there to get some mobility work going. And that's just really, really good for overall health. So yoga. I love it. If you want to try heated yoga, do heated yoga maybe once a week and see how you like that. It's really, really intense. 

 

Let's see how much time like that I got about 10 minutes. I promise something for the athletes. So real, real quick for the athletes. Stop combining sports specific training with fitness training. They're two different things, right? This is the issue that I have with CrossFit is like most people are not competing, and every single training session is as if they are competing. They're training like they're going to compete.



They're just killing themselves, killing themselves, killing themselves. What you need to do is build an aerobic base. Use that 180 rule to build an aerobic base. Because generally speaking, I know there are outliers, but CrossFitters don't love aerobic exercise. If there's a one mile run in their wad, they're really upset about it, right? So every athlete should build an aerobic base outside of their sport. 

 

Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson. Look it up, build an aerobic base. If you want to learn how to build an aerobic base and you don't want to read the book, just email me, justin@aimclovis.com. We'll do this during your off-season when you're not competing. I've done this with MMA fighters. And then they are also a great example of training smarter, not harder. A large number of MMA fighters don't even do full context sparring anymore.



It's the same thing as CrossFit, but why are you training that you're going to compete? Risking injury and all these things before the competition. Put your best foot forward in the competition, right? You don't need to be getting punched in the face as an MMA fighter every day to be a good MMA fighter. You just don't need to. 



All right. Q and A. Let's see, we got some comments coming in on Facebook. How's Instagram look up there and just make sure that's still running. I hope so. All good. All right. A couple of Q and A's that I had from people that already came in today, I'm gonna try to bang through these pretty quickly. 

 

Hangover, should you work out when you're hungover? I was notorious for this. Remember, I was the frontman for a band called the Cougar Petting Zoo. We played nothing but college bars and drank Jagermeister and Miller were like all day, every day to some o'clock in the morning, right?

I'd wake up, hungover as sh** every day. And I would work out and try to pull them away through it. I wouldn't do that now. I'm very, very, very rarely, maybe once a year, hungover these days. I don't really deal with that. Rest, hydrate and electrolytes, the salt trick over and over and over the salt trick. As much as you need it. Plenty of water, plenty of electrolytes. Don't forget the electrolytes. It doesn't work one without the other, right? Hydrate in electrolytes. Don't go training. If you're really, really hungover, rest, stay in bed, electrolytes, water. Do it. 

 

Time of day to work out? 

This idea that if you work out in the morning, you'll burn more calories throughout the day. 

Who cares? We already talked about calories in, calories out? Now let's talk about hormones, which run the show. There is actually very little evidence that working out in the morning has a beneficial hormonal response. It can be quite the opposite. Rather than the end of this science, there's a book called The Power of When. It discusses different chronotypes it's like bayer, wolf, dolphin, all these other things. Like some people do really well at night with the graveyard shift. Some people do well waking up really early in the morning. I think those are the lions that wake up really, really early. Everybody has a different chronotype. You can take a quiz to figure out the power of when. I think it's thepowerofwhen.com. Take a quiz, figure out your chronotype. And generally speaking, the best time to work out for hormonal responses is the afternoon—just kind of the way it is like between 1:00pm and 4:00pm. But if your schedule doesn't allow for it to just work out when you can work out, don't worry about it.Don't worry about the details. Just get started. 

 

Timing of meals was another question we had. This is all about goals, right? Let's say you're looking for longevity. If you do an intense resistance training session, you're actually better off not eating for like two hours. This the same way where some people will finish a workout and jumping in an ice bath. You just completely blunted the hormetic response of that workout and the inflammation response. What you're doing is you're putting a stressor on your body, and you're making the body recover. The recovery process is where you see results. Like you don't build muscle while you're working out. You build muscle while you sleep. Anything that you do to get in the way of the body's natural response to that stressor is not necessarily a good thing unless you have a specific goal in line. As for me, I'm doing mass gains right now. If you're looking for hypertrophy, you want to get your muscles as big as possible. Do a crazy resistance training session where you exhaust all muscle fibers, Body by Science, ARX, that type of workout. And then you have a 90-minute window called the window of gains. I had an article published about this, and it was in fitness RX for men. I'll put a link to that too. The window of gains has about a 90-minute where you want to eat until you are ridiculously uncomfortable, and you want it to be all protein and some carbs in there as well. If you're trying to build muscle, right? So we can talk about how many carbs don't get all excited that I just said that, right? But that is what you want to do for hypertrophy.



Now, these performance goals don't always line up with longevity and health goals, right? They really don't. Actually, they tend to go like this longevity and human performance. They go like this. If you want to be like a world record holding athlete, you're going to have some issues when you get older. It's just the way it is. It's a trade-off, right? Because there's so much inflammation. There are so many chemical responses happening within the body for that level of output. It depends on your goals. Let's say you want to lose weight, do aerobic training. The 180 rule, 180 minus your age. Do it in the morning and do it completely fasted. Maybe drink a glass of water and go out and do 30 minutes of aerobic training with that heart rate, completely fasted, and that's best for fat loss.



And then try to hold off as long as you can to eat after that. Once you get starving, you just go ahead and eat. If you want muscle growth, slam, slam, slam protein with a few carbs, immediately post-workout. You're looking for overall health longevity, wait about two hours in that post-workout window. After your workout to go get food. Don't stunt that response, the natural response in your body. 

 

The question was no pain, no gain. Is no pain, no gain true? 

Kind of, it's not all bull****, but it's a lot of because it's not used as like ARX is incredibly painful, but I do it once a week, right? And then I let my body recover, and I do gain from it. So yes, there's a lot of pain there. It's brutal, and then I get gain and benefit out of it.

 

If I were to do that day after day after day after day and justify it by saying no pain, no gain. No pain, no gain. No pain, no gain. I'm going to really, really hurt myself and have terrible long-term effects. So no pain, no gain kind of true. But the way it's used in society is very detrimental to your goals. 

 

Another question, glycogen replenishment. What is glycogen replenishment? 

If you're taking glucose, glucose, it's sugar. All carbohydrates equal glucose because they all eventually get converted to glucose into the body. So glucose is sugar. When your body stores that sugar, it either stores it as two things. 

 

One glycogen, the storage form of glucose, or converts it into triglycerides and stores it as fat. I know this is a crazy biochemistry lesson, right? But glycogen replenishment replenishes the 300 to 400 grams, depending on the size of your body of muscle glycogen that you have stored glucose.



Remember I told you some activities are glycolytic. Now, throughout all of human history. What's glycolytic? "Oh, sh** those lions were trying to eat me. I better sprint." That's the only time that glycolytic things happen. These people weren't working out for fun to stay in shape, right? The body keeps these things, these glycogen stores, to save them for emergency fight or flight situations. The idea was something like ARX. I'm depleting all of my muscle glycogen because I'm exhausting. All of my muscle fibers simultaneously, then that 90-minute window, I can shove carbs in my face if I want to. It's just going to replenish muscle glycogen. It's not going to get stored as fat. That's the idea of glycogen replenishment. Here's where you go wrong. You're not depleting muscle glycogen. I'm telling you right now. I've worked with a lot of you.

I worked with a lot of people. Your workouts aren't that hard. I hate to tell you, really. It's like people think that their workouts are hard. I'm like, "okay, your Beachbody workout was kind of hard." And then I showed them ARX. And they're like, "if you ever make me do that again like just hit me with a car instead because that's horrible." That's depleting muscle glycogen. You have to justify muscle glycogen replenishment by depleting it. Most workouts don't deplete it. So that's why I don't really tell people to do it.

 

Maxing out. Should you max out? Nope. If you're not competing, don't max out. What reason do you have? It's literally just for Eagle. Let me tell you a story. When I maxed out my deadlift, I pulled a 425-pound deadlift, which was a 70 pound PR for me, right? 

 

I deadlift 70 pounds—less than that. And one day, I was just feeling froggy, strapped a belt on pulled 425 pounds deadlift. I got it on video. I'll share the video with you guys if you want to see it. I pull a 425-pound deadlift, and at the time, I was sick in the head. I was a Savage, and my brain, I dropped that weight down, done just succeeded something I never thought I would accomplish, and my brain said 500. I'm going to deadlift 500. Why? I weigh 167 pounds right now. Why? I have no plans on competing, ever. Why would I risk injury? Why do I need to deadlift 500 pounds? What do I have to prove? If a small car happens to fall on a level one and I have to remove it before they die. It's ridiculous.

 

I don't need to do that. I look back on myself three years ago, just like, "dude, I wanted to pull 500 pounds. I really cared about that." And I ended up in a bad way. I have an article about this, my blood work. I almost near killed myself with CrossFit. We can talk about that if you want to. It sucked! It sucked really bad. And it's because of the Headspace I was in because I'm a meathead sometimes, right? What you want to do if you're going to test your one-rep max, you can do a simple calculation. Your five rep max times 20% is generally around your one-rep max, right? So it's the Pavel Tsatsouline idea, the kettlebell guy I told you about. If you want to see what your max is, or you want to prove you're getting stronger, continually test your 70%.



What's your 70%? So if I have my 100% here and my 70% here and my 70% keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier, is it going to go like this? Then all of a sudden, my 70% is my 100%. It doesn't work like that. It's going to move like this. As my 70%, my one rep max, my 100% gets higher and higher and higher and higher. I know it's getting higher. That doesn't mean I need to test it. Why do I need to test it? That's just 100% ego. Don't do that to yourself. Don't put yourself in that mindset because it leads nowhere good. I promise you unless you're trying to compete in a powerlifting event or something. 

 

Best exercises for booty. Best exercises for abs. Let's try to hammer through this. I'm still good on Instagram, right? Instagram tries to cut me off sometimes.

 

Dad: Our live video ended. Yea

 

Justin: Uh, oh, can we start it over? I think you might have. Hold on one second. 

 

Dad: That's a shame.

 

Justin: Yeah. Hold on one second. We're coming back, and that was Mario music. Boom.

 

We're live, again. Sorry about that. I talked too much for Instagram, but okay. 

 

So best exercises for booty and best exercises for abs. 

 

The best exercise for AB is the myotonic crunch that's done with the Bosu ball. I can show you a video of that because Josh and I have videos of it. There's really no way for me to explain these things to you, but it engages all of your muscle fibers called the myotatic. Myotatic crunch is done on a Bosu ball. Look that up. It's amazing. 

 

Another one for abs is the kettlebell swing, the two-handed kettlebell swing. There's a steep learning curve. I have a great instructional video on kettlebells. So if you want that, I'll send it to you, justin@iamvclovis.com Kettlebell swings and a myotatic crunch are fantastic for abs. 

 

Now, for butt, the same thing. Kettlebell swings are fantastic for your butt cause your butt and your abs are engaged entirely at the top of the swing. So two-handed kettlebell swing, and I would probably say weighted hip raises. I can show you guys how to do those. And then there's something called Catbird where you're just basically doing backwards leg raises for your butt. I have an entire protocol called Build A Better Butt, so if you want that, just let me know, and I'll send it to you. But most girls don't like it because they go, "I want a better butt." And I go, "okay, you're going to exercise twice a week, and you're going to eat probably two to three times more food than you're used to eating." And they tell me I'm crazy and never even try it. But the girls that do try it send some pretty killer before and after pictures.



If you want to try the Build A Better Butt protocol, hit me up, and I'll teach you how to do it. This is another one, a quick myth that we touched on is Spot Reduction. Spot reduction for fat like I have fat in my thighs or fat in my love handles. Whatever spot reduction is a myth unless you want to go do cold sculpting or some insane stuff at some hair salon, right? Don't do that nonsense or put a gel on. It's ridiculous. You need to lower overall body fat. You need to change your body composition. Your ratio of muscle to fat, right? Your body composition. That's what I changed. That's what I am masterful at. That's what I'm doing for all the people in the Clovis Academy and all these crazy testimonies that we have. So don't go for spot production.



We need to lower overall body fat to take care of those trouble spots. They'll eventually go away, right? 

 

Heart rate zones already touched on that. 

 

Let's see if we got anything else good on this book. I wish I could see it in; there may have been some Instagram comments, but now I'm not going to see them because we lost the live video. 

 

All right, well, we're over an hour now. That was Live Ask Me Anything Number 11, Fitness and Fat Loss or not, you know better now. All of these things we can touch on more like I said, I tried like hell to cram these things. I ran out of time on Instagram. I've done that twice now. So I try to squeeze these things in as much time as possible, but I can't give you a crash course on this stuff in one hour.



If you want to go deeper on anything that I talked about, give me a shout. 

justin@iamclovis.com facebook.com/iamclovis. 

Join the academy. facebook.com/groups/clovisacademy. Join the academy. Tons of free, fantastic information there. Check that out. 

Instagram is @iamclovis. 

I'm @justinnault. 

 

Look me up there. All the show notes and resources will get put up as a blog post. You'll have access to all of those. If I mentioned any cool tricks, the Oura ring, I'd probably reach out to Oura ring and see if I can do something for you guys to get you hooked up with that. It's incredible. I've never been more excited about a piece of technology in my life and this new Oura ring. I'm totally nerding out about this thing. I'm super excited.



Let's end this with this. Please be kind to your bodies. Be kind to your bodies. Be kind to your bodies. I could literally sit here and say that to you 10 times because I know what will happen. What's going to happen is the same thing that happens when I tell everyone to stop stepping on the scale. They tell me that they get it. I get it, Justin. I get it. I get it. I get it. I'll weigh myself 30 days from now. And then they weigh themselves the next day. Well, we lost another pound. I just don't have a thought that I was going to lose another 15 pounds in the 12 hours since I weighed myself last. It's a quick way to frustration. Be kind to your bodies. Listen to your bodies. If you don't know how to listen to your body quite yet, pick up a Polar H10, test your heart rate variability, pick up an Oura ring. Test your heart rate variability; listen to your body that way. Let your body tell you. 

 

Be kind to your body because you're going to wake up tomorrow, and you're going to see an Instagram athlete who's kicking a** in the gym at 4:30 in the morning. You're going to feel guilty because it takes time to undo this brainwashing. It takes time to unwrap these wires that have just gone to strain your brain. It's like, wired to eat, right? 

 

We're genetically wired to move less and eat more. So stop going against your genetic programming and find something that's sustainable. That's lifestyle design. We're going to find a lifestyle design that works for you. Stop feeling guilty because working out all the time doesn't make you happy. Does that make you less of a person? No, not at all. It's crazy. Who cares if you don't like working out? Right now, I'm pulling 15 to 18 hour days, and I'm traveling all the time. The only human being that I know that works more than I do is Josh, and you guys know Josh now in the Clovis Academy. He's the fricking wizard. The kid never stops. He's the Energizer bunny blows my mind. All right, I'm working 15 to 18 hour days. What do I do? ARX twice a week or ARX once a week. Do I look like I'm in horrible shape because I'm only working out once a week? No, my nutrition is perfect.



You do what you can for your lifestyle. Stop feeling bad because you're not somebody else. Screw somebody else up and do its thing. Just be you! If working out doesn't make you happy. Let's get you healthy without it because you don't need it. I promise you. I can take care of you here. So shoot me an email. justin@iamclovis.com. If you're in the queue, if you're in my inbox and you sent me a message already, I promise I'm gonna get to you. I try my very best. It has been busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, really long hours. I still got to prep for things like this. I8 have been a lot of travel lately, but I promise I'm to get to it. I love you guys so much. This is Ask Me Anything Live Number 11, Fitness For Fat Loss or Not. Thank you guys so much for hanging out the whole time.



I know this was long. We went an hour and eight minutes. You are awesome. Ask me more questions. Hit me up on all the socials. Click the like button, click the love button. Share with your friends and family tag your friends who need to hear this. Join the Clovis academy. Also, one more thing. One trick for you. One little tip, just because I want to take care of you. I invented the Perfect Paleo Powder. I don't know if you know that, but we sell it, and I've graded a coupon code just for you, just for tonight. So I can try to drill this in your head. The coupon code is RESTDAY. That's good for the whole store, and it's going to get you 20% off. So get on there. iamclovis.com.


I highly recommend digest and rest or fat loss. If you are wanting to lose fat or if you are one of my athletes listening out there. The pre-workout, post-workout, 20% off the entire store use promo code RESTDAY. I haven't decided how long we leave that up for. So you should probably go into it. Uh, promo code RESTDAY. Pump it in iamclovis.com. Go check it out. Thank you guys so much. Please share this. I love you. We do this every week. We're going to do it again next week, Live Ask Me Anything Number 11, Fitness For Fat Loss or Not. Thank you, dad.

Leave a comment

Please note, comments need to be approved before they are published.