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Transcript
- 02:16 About David Sean
- 09:53 Being Competition Ready
- 13:54 Biggest Diet Mistakes that Fitness Competitors Make
- 18:28 The Right Intensity for Making Transformational Change in Your Body
- 26:40 Changing Your Food Choices in a Sustainable Way
- 30:25 Biggest Workout Mistakes that People Make
- 42:15 Sustainable Transformation
- 45:30 David Sean’s Typical Daily Diet
- 48:03 The Stay Competition Ready Summit
Wendy: Welcome to the Live to 110 podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me at my website, myersdetox.com. You can also find this video podcast on the YouTube channel at WendyLiveto110. Please go there and subscribe. And you can find the video on the corresponding blog post on my website.
Today, we have David Sean on the podcast. He’s going to be talking about how to stay competition ready, staying fit all year round. We also talk about this. I was a guest, a presenter at his upcoming summit, Stay Competition Ready, which is airing May 22nd. So check out the link below and the YouTube channel or on the corresponding blog post if you want to check that out.
Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on the show.
Wendy: I’m so excited that I finally have launched my online health program, Body Bio Rehab. Go check it out at BodyBioRehab.com. I created this program because I work with so many clients, they’re so tired all the time, they have brain fog, they can’t lose weight and they had a lot of basic questions about, “What kind of exercise should I do and how much? What type of diet should I be eating? How do I detox? What are the most effective detox techniques?”
It can be very expensive to work with a nutritionist such as myself that costs hundreds of dollars an hour, so I created this online program that’s only $99 where you can get all the answers that you seek.
If you do this program, it’s only 30 days. At the end of that 30 days, you will find that you have increased energy, you have improved brain fog and many of your annoying health symptoms and conditions have improved or dramatically reduced.
So go check it out, BodyBioRehab.com and see for yourself.
Wendy: Our guest today, David Sean is an entrepreneur from Independence, Kansas. He was a pitcher in college from 2000 to 2005 when a shoulder injury ended his baseball career. He studied biology and business in college and graduated with a BS in business in 2006. He’s held multiple jobs in the supplement industry, nutritional supplements from 2007 to 2010.
In 2010, he created the Stacker Bottle, the ultimate supplement dispenser, which is currently carried in nutrition stores throughout the world.
As a physique competitor in July of 2013, David won his first place at the NPC Missouri State Championship. David went on to win his pro card in the Kansas City Naturals Classic in September of 2013 and is now an IFPA professional physique competitor.
David is currently studying nutrition with an emphasis on macronutrient timing to manipulate body composition under Dr. Jerry Brainum. David is also a cancer survivor.
David, thank you so much for coming on the show.
David: I’m very excited to be here.
Wendy: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to find the summit that you had me on.
David: Okay! So I’m a physique competitor, so Stay Competition Ready, when people hear “competition” and they see the promos for it, they see a physique competitor, so they might think that it’s all about fitness competition, but it’s not just that.
I do physique competitions, yes. But the whole purpose behind it is when I started jumping in and doing physique shows, the first show I did – a lot of people do this 12-week exhausting prep, they call it, for their shows. I had a friend that was doing a show and we were actually texting – I’ll just say this. We were texting pictures of each other back and forth with no shirt on because he was kind of showing me where he was coming in to this show. I looked at that and I said, “I’m going to send him one of me” and he says, “Why don’t you jump in on the show?”
So I signed up for my first show and I was four days out. I signed up for a Saturday show on a Wednesday. And so I showed up. I’ve never been a big guy, so I got to try to win with conditioning. So when I showed up, everybody backstage, they’re like, “Oh, I can’t wait to eat pizza again. I can’t wait to do all these things. Oh, my gosh! Man, you’re shredded. You just tons of cardio. What do you do to get that lean?” My friend was standing there with me and he goes, “This guy’s this lean all year around.” They’re like, “Oh, I hate you. You just do tons of cardio.” I’m like, “No, I do no cardio.”
And so at that point of time, I started kind of formulating in my mind that there’s a lot of people doing things wrong in the fitness competition arena. As I kept doing show after show, I went on to win Natural. And if anyone is familiar with the NPC, it’s a non-tested organization. I took first place at the Missouri Championships in 2013. I went on to get my pro card in the IFPA, which is the pro affiliate to the MANBF.
I’m completely natural. And you’re not really supposed to be able to compete that well as a natural guy in the MPC. There are people that do it.
But my point being is I felt like this burning desire to get out of the way that I ate and the way that I trained and start getting some people to where they’re not in such a miserable state when it comes to preparing for a competition.
And so as I refined how I do this, there’s been a lot more research that’s come out to support what I’ve been doing for years and people say, “Oh, that’s the wrong way.”
So Stay Competition Ready and then our tagline is kind of this, “Fitness Expert Share How to Have the Abs Year Round While Eating What You Love and Never Counting Calories.” That’s what I do. I do eat foods that I love. I do not count calories. I went through a phase where I broke everything down and I learned how to do it.
You’ve been doing this a long time, Wendy as far as being as a functional diagnostic nutritionist, so I know that you can look in your menu, I know that you can look at your plate and get a pretty good macro breakdown in your head without having to think about it too much.
So if someone is just starting their fitness journey, I’m not against counting calories and breaking this down and taking the time to go through the process of learning that if that’s what they need to do to reach success. The point being is it doesn’t have to be a micromanaged life all the time. There are ways to time your nutrients. There are ways to eat foods that you love. There are ways if you want to call it a ‘cheat meal’ or a ‘refeed meal’ or whatever you want to call it, there are ways to do this to where your life is awesome. It’s not a trade-off of, “My life is going to suck or I’m going to look good.” You can do both.
And also, what it is, some people think that saying having abs is it’s like this goal. They think that’s like an inflammatory way to say something because there’s this movement of, “Oh, we want to be comfortable in our bodies.” I support that. I think people should be comfortable in their bodies, but I think that people should also be able to achieve what they want and admit that they want to look a certain way or reach a certain goal without being judged for it.
I mean, I have clients that say, “Well, I don’t want to be lean. I just want to be healthy,” well, they said ‘just’. The fact that they said ‘just’ tells me that they’re not really telling me what the goal is. And as they move several steps down the road, I start to actually see people go, “Well, I actually want to do this,” and I say, “Well, at first, you said you just wanted to be healthy, but you’re not worried about dropping excess fat. And now, you’re saying that’s what you want. What changed here?” Well, what happened was they started seeing the goal more clear. People will tell you what they think is possible instead of what they really want.
So what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to give people permission to say, “You know what? I want to have abs.” And I don’t care if you’re 15% body fat and you need to get to single digit to get abs or if you are obese and you think that if you say ‘abs’, people are going to look at you and go, “That’s impossible. You’ll never do it.”
My whole thing is say what you really want to do in life instead of, “Well, here’s what I think might be possible because I don’t want the judgment. I don’t want to have this judgment if I put this outlandish dream of what I want for myself after.” Put it out there and be bold and there’s a way to do it.
And what’s cool is we’ve got 21+ several bonus speakers now. You’re one of my experts on the actual panel. We’ve got 21 people that are going to come on and talk about how to have abs year round, eat what you love and never count calories.
And on top of that, we’ve got physiology experts, physical therapist, we’ve got functional diagnostic nutritionists like yourself. We’ve got people that are going to talk about digestive health, hormonal health, everything that you need to be a competitor and be healthy.
We even have people that talk about, “Here’s how you select a good coach to coach you through it. Here are the supplements you should take.”
So we’re trying to cover everything that’s missing in this wildly fast exploding arena of fitness competition that’s not very well understood by science in certain areas. And also, there’s even less coaches to keep up with how many people want to compete.
And on top of that, outside of the actual fitness competition, it’s about being lean and mean in life if that’s what you want to be so you can be more competitive in sports, in business, so you can think more clearly and just have a happier life where you’re sharp and you’re able to go after the goals that you want.
So that’s kind of the long answer, but that is the idea behind the summit.
Wendy: So we know that physique competitors, they’ll have a few competition. Like you said, they work three or four months to get in that physique-ready, competition ready. But is there a way you can stay competition ready year round? And even as a lay person, what they can do to stay competition ready, so to speak, year round?
David: Right! So let’s define competition ready. Competition ready doesn’t mean that you’re ready to step on the stage right now at 4% body fat. But what it does mean is that you’re a stone’s throw away from that. You’re not in a situation where you have to do like a 12-week prep. You can be lean and mean year round.
I like to say “lean and mean” because when I’m leaner, some people think if you’re leaner, you’re going to have less energy. I feel more energy. I feel more aggressive when it’s time to attack the weights when I’m lean. A lot of cool stuff starts happening when you’re “competition ready.”
So yeah, you can have abs year round. You’ve got to have your diet on point. You’ve got to be able to listen to your body. Too many people are bulking up, cutting down, bulking up, cutting down. and what happens is they think that they can just reduce their body fat percentage to a certain point and get on stage and think that they can win.
And competition isn’t all about winning. Everybody has their different goals. I’m just giving you an added advantage of being competition ready all year. You’re not going to have fat under your skin.
So someone lets themselves get up to 15% or 16% as a guy – let’s say a physique competitor – or 17% body fat because they’re bulking. They can cut down for that show. They can cut all the way down to 4% or 5% body fat and they’re going to have a really low body fat. But guess what? They’re going to have a little bit of extra skin and that skin’s not going to be necessarily tight, that nice, dry look that you want on stage.
So if you take a guy, everything else being equal that’s let excess body fat happen throughout the year, when you put him next to a guy that sits at eight or nine or ten or let’s say even lower than that and then he drops down to four and you put them by each other, one of them is going to have skin that’s much tighter. So that’s the advantage. If you stay lean year around, you’re going to look better on-stage.
I like to say this. The guy that’s the leanest the day of the show, he was probably the leanest six months before the show as well.
Wendy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good goal. I need to aspire to be lean year around, which I’m doing that. I actually just lost 15 lbs. I’m super excited. I have been working out, lifting weights, eating a lot healthier, following my own advice.
David: That’s awesome! So to what do you attribute this recent 15-pound reduction to?
Wendy: I just got tired of eating a little bit too much. I’ve been working a lot, trying to help the listeners out there get healthy and not taking care of myself. I decided to take some of my time back and I started lifting weights and going to hit the gym, doing some walking, cutting out sugar completely. I was kind of cheating a little bit here and there. I just got real strict with my diet more.
David: That’s cool. I’m glad you brought this up because it’s something you hear over and over from experts and I’ve had several different people that have written books say this. One of the worst things you can do for your health is to write a book on being healthy.
Wendy: Yeah.
David: Because it’s such a tremendous amount of work that you, for the short-term, sacrifice your own health in the spirit of trying to help other people.
I mean, this Stay Competition Ready Summit, it’s a lot of work right now and I’ve not been as on-point with my workouts. I’m still trying to keep the diet on-point, but it’s a lot of work. So if you’re putting in all these work for other people, it’s really easy to let yourself not do some of the things that you’re actually preaching.
Wendy: Yeah, because the last two years, I’ve just poured everything, all my time into my website and writing and doing the podcast and what-not and I haven’t really worked out. This is the first time in my life I’ve slacked off on that. Now, I’m just getting back into it and be more consistent with it. It feels really good.
David: Good, good. That’s awesome.
Wendy: So what are some of the biggest mistake that fitness competitors make with your diet or anyone trying to get in shape does with their diet?
David: Let me answer that question from the perspective of because I’m a physique competitor. I always like to say, “There’s no universal path to individual success,” so everybody has their different goals. But if I’m answering this from a specific niche (and a lot of this will lead into bikini competition figure, body building as well, a lot of these can cross over), if I’m just speaking on physique, one of the biggest mistakes people make (we’ve already talked about that) is having this thing in their head where they’re going to bulk up and cut down. Usually, it’s just an excuse to eat bad.
Another mistake they make is that they – okay, for instance, they don’t have energy on-stage. What I see a lot of guys doing is you have a morning show and a night show usually. And so you have to pump up for both shows and you’re probably water-depleted at least the night before. And then you’re carbing back up. There’s al these things that are going on in your body that are making you more tired.
So guys, if you’re going to pump up twice in one day to go out and look your best, don’t work out once per day in preparation for that. One thing I’ll start doing – and like I said, I’m not a big guy. I’ve had six shoulder surgeries, elbow surgery, I’ve cracked a few vertebra and a long list of health problems that I’ve had. So I can’t lift as heavy sometimes and I have to miss workouts because of my body. So I feel like I have to do everything else so right in order to jump up there and have a chance to win. And part of that is the conditioning part.
So about, let’s say, four to six weeks out from a show, start doing your regular workout and then come back and get like a 20- to 30-minute full body – not fully body. I mean, you don’t really need to pump up your quads that much, but just the full upper body pump workout. Start doing that about six weeks out. Do it once a week. So when it’s the day of the show, your body is ready to receive two pumps in a day and actually be able to hold the pump.
What they do is they’ll show, they’ll do that pump workout for the morning show (and there’s so many things that are going on that they’re not used to) and then they’re going to pump up again for the night show and they just can’t get that pump going, they can’t get their energy going and they can’t hold the pump for very long.
So that’s one little tip, just to practice starting six weeks out. Once a week, do your regular workout and then another pump workout.
And I can go on and on all day about some of the mistakes that competitors make, but another one is that people really need to utilize the time that they’re burning fat. And what I mean by that is too many people are doing the whole sweet potato and chicken every three hours. Their glycogen levels are so full all the time that it’s too easy for them to spill over in the fat storage.
And there are a lot of bodybuilders and physique competitors that have had lots of success doing a diet where they’re getting – I don’t care if it’s good or bad carbohydrates, they’re getting them in every three hours. I get that. There are a lot of people that have had success with that. But your goal should be to be on the best condition on stage. If you really want that to happen, you’re going to have to utilize that time that you’re fat-burning. We’re ready to burn fat right when we wake up because we’re faster throughout the night.
But if you’re constantly putting good or bad carbohydrates into your body, your glycogen levels are going to be either full or close to full. And for the people that don’t know what glycogen is, it’s the storage form of carbohydrates. And when you take those in, it makes your muscles look bigger and fuller, but once your muscles get to where they’re full of glycogen and they spill over it, now you’re going to be massively storing fat.
So what I see people doing is they have their macronutrients all portioned out perfect, but there’s almost no room for error because they’re getting themselves in a situation where their glycogen is full all the time, so one little cheat meal, one slip up, one whatever it is and they’re spilling over to fat storage really, really quick.
So try to walk around with your glycogen levels a little bit more empty. This is nothing new. There’s something called the ketogenic diet which I don’t follow on that like a big fan and I’ve been doing it long-term. This is nothing new out there in science, but there’s a lot more people that are catching on that this works.
So I’d say maybe the biggest mistake people make is the diet and just really keeping glycogen levels full all the time and spilling over in the fat storage and not coming in in good enough shape to where they have a chance to win or just to be their personal best.
Wendy: Yeah, I think a lot of people, they’re working out, but they’re not really doing the right intensity. What’s the best way to maintain the kind of intensity in the weight room that’s required to cause a transformational change in your body?
David: Oh, my gosh! That’s a really good question. You’ve got to put yourself in a good position to where your nutrition is on point. If I’m at 10% body fat, I usually don’t even get that high, I’m not as intense as I am, let’s say, at 7% or 8%. As I get to leaner, I start to feel more aggressive and I want to attack those weights. I feel really good. My testosterone is high. And we’ve talked about that a little bit. If I dip down to 4% body fat (there’s a sweet spot in there), then the energy start going down a little bit.
So physiologically, you have to be on point and your nutrition has to be on point. But the main thing for maintaining that intensity in the weight room (especially when you’re closing in on a show) is the mental aspect.
And this is not going to come as a surprise to anyone that’s listening. Everybody knows that it’s a mental thing.
Excuse me, my mouth is getting dry. This is I think my fifth or sixth interview for today.
Wendy: I’ve always got plain water in all my podcasts too.
David: So, you really have to feel yourself with the right mental intensity going into this. Really, when you decide you’re going to sign up for a show, know that it’s going to be awesome at first because you send in your competitor form and you told your friends and you posted on Facebook that you’re doing a show or whatever it is that these people do. That’s going to be exciting for a while.
And then you run into your first road block, that first dip in energy level or that first week where you’re not really feeling that you look that great. Maybe you start carb depleting a little bit and your muscles went flat. You think that you’re not as lean as you were, but really, you’re just flat, your muscles aren’t as tight. There are a lot of things that are going to try to trick your mind when you’re going into a competition.
And not just this competition, I’m talking about people who are on a fitness journey or a health journey that are trying to get to a goal. There are so many little tricks. There are a million distractions out there in the world. And so when you start hot, you have to keep that intensity.
And so there are little tricks that I have. For instance, I will share a story about myself. This is something I use on the days where I have a lot of energy, where I have medium energy and especially when I have low energy. I like to look back at how far I’ve come in my life. And that’s something that anybody can do. We’re always trying to be better. I get that. I think it’s really important to set your goals high. But it’s all so important, so you don’t become disheartened at the journey you’re on to look back and see the distance you’ve traveled as well.
And so fuel yourself from the beginning with a very clear goal. Be ready mentally for that dip in the energy level, maybe in the motivation. Know that it’s coming. And it’s okay. You’re human. And when that moment comes –
Here’s what I’ll do a lot of times. If I feel like my progress is not exactly where I want to be, I would remind myself how far I’ve come. How I will do that is I will picture – and anyone can do this. It could be their lowest moment in life or they could picture the worst their physique or their body ever looked, the worst their health ever was.
And I’m not talking about living in the past here and being negative. What I’m talking about is reflecting on the distance that you’ve traveled. So for me, I’ve tried to channel the most powerful thing in my life, which is my all-time low and then I try to look at the mirror and go, “Here’s where you are now.” What that moment was for me was that when I was 15 years old, my hip started hurting in wrestling practice. I was trying to tough it out, but then I got to where I couldn’t walk.
Long story short, six months of just excruciating pain, I was going to physical therapy trying to get my hip right and the physical therapist put these thongs on my hips and they were off by an inch and a half. These doctors put me in a body cast and they threw all these pain medication, all these stuff at me. They couldn’t figure out what was going on. This physical therapist called the doctors and he said, “You need to get him a CAT scan, there’s something really wrong with his hip.”
Well, we got a CAT scan and there’s this big spot on it that showed up in my hip and I found out that I had KI1 non-Hodgkinson’s lymphoma cancer in my left hip joint. And so what started out as just a day trip to Tulsa, Oklahama (I’m from 90 minutes from there in Kansas) ended up being a 5-day hospital stay with a biopsy. Shortly after that, I started chemotherapy.
I was a skinny kid. I was wrestling and I had no fat on me, but I was 135 lbs. My first chemo treatment, I didn’t even have any fat or weight to lose. I was about probably 5”10 or 5”11 at the time. That first chemo treatment took me down to 103 lbs. at 5”10 or 5”11. And you picture, 103 lbs. is not much. Even for a petite female, 103 lbs. is pretty little. So picture a 15-year old boy who’s 5”10 or 5”11.
I remember my little moment. I was dragging my IV because I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in five days. I’m wasting away. I’m on my crutches because I can’t walk. I walk into the bathroom and I tripped and caught myself on the sink. There was something about that moment where I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw how skinny I was and how unhealthy I looked. I mean, it looked like something from a concentration camp. It really did.
So that was the moment where I felt like, “Okay, this is a real challenge. There’s been a lot of challenges that’s been thrown at me. Here’s a real one.”
I became disheartened and all these emotions came over me. I never cried because I think I was too angry to cry or maybe too dehydrated. I don’t know what it was. But I looked in the mirror and I remember thinking, “Alright, this is where you sink or swim right now.” And so I decided, “You’re going to beat this and you’re never going to be weak again.”
And so, to me, I made a promise to the kid in the mirror, a very, very sick 15-year old kid. I remember looking in my own eyes in that mirror and saying, “You’re going to beat this. You’re going to come back and you’re going to be stronger.”
So when I’m in the weight room and I’m preparing for a set, a lot of times, I’ll close my eyes and I’ll go back to that moment because it’s really easy when you’re making progress to think that you’re not getting anywhere because it’s not linear, it’s like this.
So I will picture that moment. And as I’m preparing for the set, I will close my eyes, I’ll picture that moment and I can still remember very vividly the promise I made to myself. And when I feel the energy coming because I think about the distance I traveled, I will then open my eyes and I will see what I am today and that discrepancy in what I was picturing with my eyes closed and opening my eyes to see what I am today, it’s like lightning strikes to me. Every time I do that, it never gets old. And that’s how I start my set.
And trust me, when I fuel myself mentally that way, motivation is never, ever a problem. So it doesn’t matter what somebody has going on in their past. If you’re in the weight room and you’re lifting or whatever your journey is, you can always reflect on the progress that you have made.
So that’s just a little trick that I have where I picture my lowest moment, I picture where I am now and all of a sudden, you realize, “You know what? You have made progress. There is reward for what you’re doing.” And all of a sudden, there’s an insurgence and motivation that I can’t even describe. That’s how I keep my intensity high.
Wendy: I think that’s amazing. I think that’s just a really amazing way to mentally get you pumped up, so to speak. I definitely want to employ something like that as well. I think that’s just a really good tip, absolutely.
Wendy: A lot of people, when they’re trying to get in shape or work out, they get really hung up on food. I think the food is what really trips them up when they’re trying to get in shape to get competition ready. So what’s the best way to mentally approach a change in food choices that will lead to a sustainable transformation?
David: Well, there are a lot of people that are carrying excess fat and they want to maybe lose some of that. Usually, what they’re going to have to do is they’re going to have to break up with processed carbohydrates pretty much completely outside of some kind of a strategic refeed. If you get to where you’re really good at, you just know when it’s time to maybe do some type of a refeed meal or a cheat meal or whatever you want to call it.
But as far as mentally approaching it, you got to know that when you break up with carbohydrates, it can be painful. And I don’t mean breaking up with all carbs, but breaking up with processed carbohydrates and staying away from them. It can be very painful.
And when you go through that process, once again, fuel yourself to know that you’re going to feel possibly a little lethargic going through that carb addiction.
Try to think about how you’re going to feel when you come out on the other side and you get what I like to call fat adapted. It’s this painful process when you first start doing that that makes people want to give up. But if you crank your fats up a little bit and you pull some of those carbs out, you’re going to still have energy.
You might not have that quick carb energy, but know you’re going to go down before you go back up. But once you see that light on the other side, your energy is going to be so much higher. And so you just have to know that there’s going to be this little dip, but if you stick with it, you’re going to feel better.
This carbohydrate addiction that our society has is so terrible right now. I’m sure you work with lots of people and you have ways – I’m curious, I want to ask you. I’m sure you work with people trying to get them unaddicted to carbs. Maybe you have tips on how to fuel them with the right mental approach and the right actual structural approach to how they should do it.
Wendy: Yeah. Well, I always tell people to get pissed off, just to get tired.
David: Oh, yeah. I love it!
Wendy: You’re just sick of where you are, you’re sick of how you feel, you’re sick of not maybe getting the respect that you want because you’re overweight and you’re tired of it. You’re just tired of what you feel. Your mind doesn’t work. I try to get people to really get in touch with that feeling to motivate them because the problem is biology always overcomes will power. It can be really, really tough for people.
My clients tend to have a slug metabolism. They’re maybe not well. They have chronic fatigue and things like. So it’s a little bit different genre. But sometimes, people do really need that exhilarating anger or emotion to push them over that hump, so to speak.
David: I like that. I think that that’s something a lot of people would be afraid to advice, something like, “Oh, no! Don’t get angry. Stay in total acceptance all the time.” But I do, I think once in a while, get pissed. That’s going to bring some kind of a change.
You don’t want to state this necessarily, but it’s okay to get temporarily pissed off to make something happen. That’s the tune you need. Yeah, I’m right there with you.
Wendy: I’m going to say that’s just what has worked for me. I think humans are all fairly similar, so maybe that’s something that will work for other people as well.
David: Yeah, absolutely.
Wendy: So what are some of the biggest mistakes that people make in their workout routines that keeps them from making the progress that they want to make?
David: Once again, it depends on the individual. But each time I try to think about a way to explain this, I want to keep a specific person in mind. I want to talk about specifically. It doesn’t have to be a woman who’s doing a figure show or a bikini competition or whatever. But maybe I could be a woman who wants to lose body fat.
The biggest mistake that I see there is this fear of doing strength training and lifting weights. So if you’re a woman, I know that it sometimes can be hard to wrap your mind around the fact that if you lift weights, your body may actually get, as far as total mass, smaller and you’re going to get tighter and leaner. I know a lot of woman hear that, but they’re still like, “Oh, I don’t know if I believe this.”
So I’m going to draw a little picture in the air here. Here’s a pie. There are three ways. What I’m trying to get women to do is lift more weights and not do so much steady state cardio. In fact, they probably, for the most part, could cut it out and use the weights as their cardio, if you will or HIIT, high intensity interval training.
But what I want these women that are afraid to lift weights to actually picture is this pie. And in that pie, there are three different ways that we actually burn calories. Ten percent of that pie is the thermic effect of our food. It literally takes us energy to break apart our food. That’s only ten percent, so we’ve still got 90% left.
Okay. Well, how else do we burn calories? We burn calories from the obvious one, exercise. So here’s the thermic effect of feeding. Here’s exercise and this part’s a little bit bigger. Fifteen to thirty percent of the calories that we burn are from exercise. So if you’re a moderate exerciser, you might be in that 15% to 20% range of your calories are being burned from actual exercise.
If you’re doing weights five or six times a week and maybe you’re doing cardio on top of that and you’re just putting all these work in the gym, you may be a person who is not a 15%, you may be burning 30% of your calories from exercise.
So we’ve got 10% from the thermic effect of food. We’ve got 15% to 30% of the calories we burn from exercise. So what is this big part over here, the 60% to 75% source of the calories we burn? What is that? What that is our resting metabolic rate. And if you want to burn fat, turn your body into a fat-burning furnace, you need to increase your resting metabolic rate.
And there’s all kinds of hormones and things that we can talk about that play into that, but if we’re talking about specific workouts as a protocol, to put yourself in a position to increase your resting metabolic rate, do strength training.
So if you sit there and you’re doing all these cardio, you’re trying to increase that 15% to 30%. Okay, let’s say you burn 15% of your calories from exercise. And it’s like, “Well, I want to push that up to 30%. I really want to max this up. So I’m going to do a bunch of cardio.” Okay, cool. So you just pushed this up to, let’s say, upwards of 30%.
But guess what you might’ve done if you’re doing too much cardio and you don’t have the right strength training protocol, what you might’ve done is you might’ve hurt your resting metabolic rate because cardio, steady-state cardio is a catabolic exercise. And for the most part, it’s going to break down your lean muscle tissue.
So you increased over here in this 15% to 30% range for where you burn your calories from over here, but you’re playing small ball because you took your resting metabolic rate, you took that and you lowered it by losing that lean muscle tissue that you worked so hard to get.
So don’t play small ball over here in this 15% to 30% range and try to do all do the steady-state cardio to burn fat. Think about trying to turn your body into a fat-burning furnace by adding lean muscle tissue to take advantage of this 60% to 75% over here that’s your resting metabolic rate. Increase your resting metabolic rate and you’re going to be burning more calories where you’re sitting on the coach at home than the person who’s doing cardio all day.
So build lean muscle tissue and increase your resting metabolic rate. The biggest mistake I see out there, too much steady-state cardio, not enough lifting weights.
Wendy: Yeah, I had the same experience. Every time I’ve lost weight or tried to lean out, it’s always lifting weights, always. I try to lift weights three to four times a week or doing a lot of body resistance training. It wasn’t with cardio. It wasn’t cardio at all. I did a little bit of walking or whatever it is to get my circulation going, but always, with weight lifting, I just wheedled down to very small amounts, very small.
That’s always been my strategy. I’ve always noticed that that works for me. I see these women doing cardio five times a week. They’re just spinning their wheels. It’s just not the way to burn fat.
David: And you and I have talked before when you came into the summit. We talked about this issue a little bit. So when you ask me, “What’s the biggest mistake that a lot of people make?”, I’m going to use this as an opportunity since I’m having a conversation with a woman to bring up the example of women doing too much cardio because if I say it, I’m a man, sometimes, that will not resonate with a woman. So because you and I are talking right now, I’m hoping that some of the women that are listening might actually resonate a little bit more because they’re hearing you saying it too.
Wendy: And I know a lot of women, they’re afraid they’re going to bulk up if they lift weights. But for me, the heaviest, hardest weights that I’ve lifted, I just keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And I’m talking really, really intense where I can barely walk down the stairs, leave the gym or I completely have just gone to muscle failure. The harder I worked, the smaller I got. I never bulked up. I know there’s some women out there that might bulk up a little bit, but I think 90% of women are going to just get smaller.
David: Well, I’ve seen that. Here’s what happens. I can’t remember this author. I read a couple of his books. They were marketing books. He would say something in his first book that was wrong and you believe it. This is the first time you’ve read this book. And in the second book, he came back and he admitted that that wasn’t right all the time.
Wendy: Is that Peter D’Adamo?
David: What’s that?
Wendy: Peter D’Adamo, the blood type diet?
David: No, this was a marketing book. I can’t remember his name. I just totally can’t remember his name. But what he said was, “I know I told you this in the first book. But now, I’m telling you, there are exceptions to that rule. And the reason I didn’t tell you this in the first book is if I give you one inch, that’s all you’re going to hear and you’re going to think that your situation is that one inch.” He said, “So I would rather go back and admit later that there are exceptions to that rule than have you focus on that one inch.”
So the reason I’m talking about this right now is that when we talk about women in cardio, what always seems to come up, “Well, there are certain women that genetically, they lift and they just bulk up too much.” So really, I’ve hardly seen any women. I’ve been in fitness for, let’s say, 15 or 16 years. I’ve hardly seen any women that just bulk up fast. And usually, the ones that think they bulk up fast is because their diet is on point.
So if there’s any woman listening, please don’t think, “Well, I’m that rare exception that I bulk up fast.” It’s probably the diet.
And so if we’re talking about mistakes that guys make, I’m going to say this, guys are doing way too much steady-state cardio too. But when we’re talking about that, I’m always going to bring up the women first. And here’s why. Guys, in their head, they want to get big and strong, so they’re still going to lift weight. They might screw up their weight lifting by doing too much cardio, but they’re still going to lift weights, whereas women are more prone to think, “We’ll cut out the weights altogether.” So even if guys are doing too much steady-state cardio, at least they’re still lifting, whereas women might just totally not touch it.
So like I said, if there’s any women listening, please don’t think that you’re that one that’s just going to bulk up. Well, not even everyone else. Me, I remember when I started doing this, another thing that happens is when you first start a strength training routine, it depends on who they talk to, it depends on what you read. But for every gram of carbohydrates that’s pulled into your muscle cells, which is glycogen like we talked about earlier, 2.6 grams of water have to come in with that. So guess what? You’ve got water in your muscles now too. When that happens, you might see a little bit of a weight gain initially at the beginning of a strength routine. But all it is it’s water getting pulled into the muscle cell.
Women might go, “Well, I don’t want that water weight.” No, no, no. This is the kind of water weight that actually makes you look better because it’s making your muscles look firmer and tighter. It’s not that ugly water under your skin. We’re talking about water that’s going to make your muscles feel more firm.
So know this, if you’re a woman and you’re going to do strength training, your muscles are going to increase their water uptake. So if you see a little bit of a gain initially and you think, “Oh! Well, I guess I’m that woman that bulks up too fast. This isn’t for me.” No, you have to know this going in what’s actually happening.
This brings up a whole different thing that people really need to know. They need to know the why. Empower yourself with knowledge. You don’t have to become an expert, but try to read about what you’re doing and understand what it is. And that right there is an example of if you don’t have that piece of information and you’re a woman and you’re lifting weights and you see this initial kind of couple of pounds you gain, like, “What the heck?! I’ve got to stop.”
Wendy: I’ve had that too, for sure. I’ve had that experience. I know because I lifted weight so much my entire life since I was a teenager that when I first started working out again (whenever I quit or whatever) that I will gain a couple of pounds at first, feel a little bit bigger even though I’m like, “What the hell? I’ve been working out so hard.” But then it eventually start wheedling down. You have to get over that hump.
David: Yeah. And another thing that happens, your inflammation, your body can increase a little bit because your body is not used to actually lifting heavy weights. That can happen too. But what also happens is a lot of times, when people start strength training, man, their metabolism shoots up through the roof. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh!” You want to eat everything in sight.
So in that time period, if you’re not careful, it’s really easy to overdo it on either processed carbs or just even good carbs. You get in this mindset where your appetite just goes up and it ramps up and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh! I want to eat everything” and a lot of people will take that too far.
So it’s not the fact that you’ve added so much muscle that you’re bulking up from the weights. It’s the fact that your diet probably isn’t perfect, it’s the fact that there might be some inflammation in your body initially and it’s the fact that you are are going to take up more water into your actual muscle at the beginning. So know that that’s going to happen.
And that’s something that happens, let’s say, for the first three to four weeks. And after that, it balances back out and then you’re going to start seeing some really good results. Don’t look at the weight. Don’t think that if you feel little bit bigger after that, you’re doing something wrong. Keep lifting weights and get your diet on point. You’re going to love your results.
Wendy: So can a non-competitor have a lean body or do you have to make a miserable lifestyle? Is there any way to be lean all year around without making it a full-time job? A lot of people, a lot of listeners out there, they want to get lean. They want to be lean all the time. They don’t want to have to work so hard for it.
David: Yes. So if you’re a person who is listening and you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t want to do a competition. That’s not me. There’s no point in being like that. There’s no point in starving myself like that,” what you’ve got to know is that –
And if you go to my website, DavidSean.co, home of the sustainable transformation, that is what I’m all about. It has to be sustainable. So I’m not a person who does competitions and then snaps a picture the day that I’m on stage and says, “This is how everybody should be year around. I’ve lived that life.” Now, onstage, my body fat might be 3% or 4%. Offstage all year, 6% to 9%. And if I never did a competition in my life, I could still, at this point (because I’ve gotten a lot better at it), I could effortlessly stay in that 6% to 9% without question.
And it’s because of some of the things that we’ve already talked about like not eating too many carbs. Try not to eat carbs at the beginning part of the day. So there’s a lot of ways that you can make this sustainable and get really good at knowing this.
There’s no universal path to individual success, so you’ve got to listen to your body. But if I’m just going to throw out some rules that maybe are bullet points that you can use as some kind of a starting blueprint, try to go with fats and proteins as needed. Try to stay away from processed altogether and try to take your carbohydrates and put them into a more compressed time period.
At this point, if I say intermittent fasting, a lot of people know what that is. So what I do is not intermittent fasting, but I would say it’s my own modified version of intermittent fasting in the sense that I get carbs twice a day. I do like to have – not a lot, about 15 to 20 grams.
And this is just me personally. Your numbers are going to change based on your body type and everything else.
I like to get a little bit of simple carbs right after my workout to transport the protein to my muscles. And at some point, I’m probably going to need some carbs again. For me, my staples are either brown rice or white rice.
And at some point during the day (and it’s usually the evening when I’m going to do that), I will have a big meal with brown rice or white rice. I try to keep fats out of that meal. So I’m going to high with protein in that meal, pretty high with the carbohydrates and pretty low on fat in that meal. But outside of those two times where I get carbohydrates, the post workout insulin spike and then that time where I’m actually reloading glycogen, I’m doing fats and proteins as needed.
So what am I eating? I eat a lot of greens. I love spinach, I love kale and I like green beans. There’s not hardly any digestible carbohydrates in those. So you don’t have to count those as digestible carbohydrates. Eat greens and eat a big volume of those.
And by the way, your micronutrients are important as well for having energy levels. Outside that, it is literally proteins and fats as needed.
David: A day for me might look like this. I might wake up in the morning and have some Brain Strain Amino Acids and maybe some coffee. I will probably have heavy whipping cream, just a little bit in my coffee and maybe some Stevia.
And then, it depends on what I’m doing that day. If I’m not working from my home, I will probably have – my go-to, I like to have beef which has fats and proteins or I like to have chicken and almonds (fats and proteins).
And so those are my staples that I’ll stick with throughout the day. And I’ll just eat them as needed. I won’t necessarily like, “I’ve got to sit down with a plate and get a fork and a knife and have this meal.” I really will just go as needed and eat when I’m hungry. I like to eat a lot of hardboiled eggs too because they’re so easy to carry around.
So it’s fats and proteins as needed from the standpoint of listening to my body.
And then when it’s time to eat carbs, don’t think that you just need to eat carbs every three others because that’s just what you do. There has to be a reason that you should take in carbohydrates. And that reason, it’s pretty simple. It can boil down to really just a couple of things. You want to release some insulin to transport some nutrients to your muscles. That’s a good time to do that, right after your workout. Another reason to do it is to replenish glycogen, the storage form of carb.
So if your glycogen is empty, you can get a pretty good amount of carbohydrates. For me, maybe sometimes 75 grams, maybe a hundred grams of carbohydrates in that meal, but my glycogen stores are empty. So I’m not going to spill over in the fat storage. I’ve buffered in a little bit of room for error here.
And so that’s pretty much how I eat throughout a typical day. And my workouts, I rotate between volume and strength routines.
So yes, there is a way to do that. That’s a quick snapshot of how I do my diet. I would say it would work for most people, but it can’t work for everybody because there’s no universal path to individual success. But yes, you can maintain a pretty low body fat year around.
With women, don’t listen to the numbers of 6% to 9% like I just said. Women are going to carry more fat in their hips and in their breasts, so the percentages aren’t going to be the same. So you can say maybe add 5% to that for women, but it does vary upon the actual individual.
So absolutely, yes, you can stay within a stone’s throw of competition ready all year even if you’re not a competitor. I know I have a lot of friends that do. I’m like, “Why don’t you jump in a show?” and they’re like, “Oh, it’s not my thing.” But they could if they wanted to.
Wendy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wendy: David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about where they can find you and your summit, Stay Competition Ready?
David: Absolutely! It’s pretty easy, just StayCompetitionReady.com. When you go to that page, it’s a really simple landing page for the summit. There’s a video of me describing what “stay competition ready” means, things that we’ve talked about in this interview. I basically say, “Guys, enter your name and email.”
All you’ve got to do is enter your name and email. Once you enter that, what’s going to happen is you’re going to get a thank you and a welcome email.
So right now, we’re in our promo period and it’s not started yet. But on May 22nd, we’re going to have two experts per day. Everyone that opted into the summit is going to get an email and they’re going to get access with the password for two days to these videos. So you guys got to watch these within two days. This will be in the email. There will be two experts per day and there will be show notes based on what that expert and I talked about.
So because there are 21 experts in the summit, almost everyone out there is going to find one of these experts that has some type of a solution to whatever their problem is or something they can learn. So when you get these emails, I know not everyone is going to watch 21 hours of interviews (it’s 21 experts), but read that email when it comes in, see what we talked about and if it resonates with you, go ahead and click on it and watch. But everything that a competitor might run into it, you name it, and there’s probably an expert that talked about it.
So go to StayCompetitionReady.com if you guys want to opt in to this. And for anyone who does, I just want to thank you in advance because we’re really excited about this project.
Wendy: I’m excited about it. I was really happy when you called me and asked me to be on it. I thought it’d be a really good idea to talk about food sensitivities because I’ve known a lot of trainers, I’ve had a lot of personal trainers and I know a lot of guys that are training and they tend to eat the same foods over and over and over. They have their meals at work for them. They know the carb, the macronutrient ratios and what-not. So I thought it’d be a good idea to talk about some of the problems that can occur and issues with losing weight and leaning out if you have food sensitivities to all these same foods you’re eating day in and day out.
David: Yeah, absolutely. So when you get to the point where, let’s say, you start a fitness journey. At first, you don’t know what works for you. And then you get to the point where you may be even competition ready and now you know exactly what foods work for you. You hear people say this all the time that are doing competitions. They know what works for them, so they stick to what they know is simple.
And so we have this environment of people that have gotten where they’re a little bit more advanced in fitness and that environment has put them in this little space where they just stick with the same things all the time because, “I know what works for me. I’m afraid that if I switch this up, maybe I won’t look as lean or I might not be as big.” So they think they’ve got it all figured out.
But like you said in the interview, if you keep eating the same thing every day, you can develop food sensitivities to these things. So guys, please watch that interview with Wendy and she’s going to talk about how to rotate some of these foods. And if you know your macros, you can actually swap these different foods in and out and rotate it.
David: And real quick, do you want to talk about some of the things that can happen if you start to develop food sensitivities. I think we sound like we’re selling fear here.
Wendy: No, no.
David: You could talk about some of the symptoms that might come up if you start developing food sensitivities.
Wendy: Well, that’s the thing. The food sensitivities symptoms are very vague and they can be attributed to almost anything. But a very common one is throat clearing. If you eat a meal and you’re clearing your throat all the time, you’ve got a constant runny nose (you’re one of those people your nose is just always running or you’re always blowing it), you can get headaches, you can feel nauseated, you can have GI issues (a lot of gas, bloating, diarrhea and constipation), people that have stomach pains or stomach aches after they eat. For me, after I eat gluten, my stomach will just ache for hours and I thought, “Oh, my God! I’m dying of cancer or something.”
There are many, many symptoms. Brain fog is a very common one – fatigue. So these are vague symptoms that people just don’t attribute. But when you discern and discover your food sensitivities and eliminate those foods, you can eliminate so many symptoms that people are having, these nagging, vague symptoms the doctor has no cure for, treatment or medication for. You also reduce inflammation and lose weight and you’re more able to lean out as a result of getting rid of these foods that don’t work for your body.
David: I’ve been competing for years. And in that interview, I learned some really cool stuff that I didn’t know. So guys, if you’re not competing, if you’re not competing check out the interviews because there’s some really cool stuff in there.
Wendy: David, thank you so much for coming on the show. And listeners, if you want to learn more about my website, myersdetox.com, go there and check out how to detoxify, all about my version of Paleo, the Modern Palo Diet and how to heal your health conditions naturally. Thanks so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.
