Hey athletes! Have you ever had multiple goals that seemed as if they were competing against each other? Listen in to this week’s Ask Me Anything to learn how to tackle this!
Episode 03 of Ask Me Anything is up!
Ask Me Anything: Competing Goals
This week’s question is from Gabe and he asked how do you balance competing goals. Can you build muscle AND lose fat? Jerred goes over how you can meet both of these goals and dives into the science of it!
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Related Resources at End of Three Fitness:
- Do something that scares you. Every single day. (Patrick Sweeney)
- The Passion Paradox and Peak Performance with Brad Stulberg
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Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!
To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:
Ask Me Anything: Competing Goals
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage gym athlete. Ask me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to Verragio dot com slash AMA let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, Jared moon here from the garage, the mathlete podcast, and we haven’t asked me anything today and I’ll be jumping right in before I do. If you have a question, go to garage gym, athlete.com forward slash AMA ask a question, submit a topic, we’ll cover it in one of our podcasts, one like this, or even one of our longer hour long episodes where we really dive in, pulling all the research science and things of that nature.
So getting into this one right away, this is from Gabe. He wants to know about how to balance competing goals. So say you want to build muscle and lose fat. If you have two of these contrasts and goals that don’t seem [00:01:00] possible, you know, how do you, how do you balance that? What do you do? What’s, what’s the takeaway?
You know, what’s the mindset approach and all these things. And this is a really a great question. It comes up a lot in our training because some people, I mean that’s, that’s what everyone really wants to do, or a majority, you know, a lot of people want to lose a little bit of fat, get their body fat percentage as low as they can while also building muscle.
And depending on which camp you talk to, you know, a lot of people were going to say it’s not possible. Some are going to say it is possible. And I really think it is possible if you go into the bodybuilding world, people are going to start being, start talking about being catabolic or anabolic and having a, a nitrogen balance state and all these things and how you can’t be catabolic and anabolic at the same time.
And I would highly urge you to get away from anybody talking like that. I’m not saying that they’re not giving you decent information, but it just might not be 100% correct. So I’ll show you where I’m getting most of my information [00:02:00] these days when we’re talking about things like, catabolism, anabolism, breaking down carbon or building things up through me.
Mino acids, your metabolism in general. this is the book I like to reference. This is organic chemistry, fifth edition by Mark Loudon. A really good book. Oh, just for understanding organic chemistry and some of the topics that I was just mentioning. That’s a great place to get it. Not some random article you read on the internet about, you know, being catabolic versus anabolic.
And the reason I say that is because, you know, I’ve heard people say you can’t be catabolic and anabolic at the same time. So catabolic means, you know, you’re breaking things down. So a lot of people think about like a robotic training, you know, breaking the body down and then anabolic is building the body back up.
And that goes more in line with bodybuilding stuff. So that would be building muscle or losing fat is kind of the argument there. And I would say that you absolutely can do both, but if you want to do both, it’s going to be on a very long timeline. So just, you know, really good a GPP type, you know, general physical [00:03:00] preparedness programming, that you’re following on a long enough timeline.
So, can we, can we look at a one year goal or a three year, five year goal as opposed to, can I gain six pounds in muscle and lose 10 pounds of fat. In the next eight weeks. That’s where everyone’s getting tripped up in the industry and people are fighting over it over like who’s right and who’s wrong is because yes, you can’t do a lot in eight weeks, doesn’t really matter what the program is.
You can see some incremental changes. You can, you know, see where things are trending towards and keep pushing in a certain direction. But fitness, you really need this very longterm view if you want to have any success at all. So the first thing I would say is if you have these competing goals. Look out what you want from, you know, five years from now, what is the real goal?
And can you work backwards? Because if you are extremely overweight, and that’s not your case, gay, but if you’re extremely overweight, you know, that didn’t happen in. Six weeks, you know, it may, maybe it happened over six years. So why would reversing that process be so easy and [00:04:00] so quick and on such a short time schedule?
That’s not what’s going to happen. So really think about, you know, how you got to where you’re at and how long you think it’s going to reverse it. So try and try and put that out there. Now if it’s just a little bit of muscle and losing a little bit of fat, yeah, you could probably do that in a shorter time period.
Maybe six months. So you’re just going to have, have to have a caloric intake that matches what activity you’re doing. And that’s about, as you know, scientific as you need to get because it’s whole calories in, calories out argument. People were talking about whether or not that’s, how we should be approaching things.
But for the most part, we’ve seen a lot of success by. You know, having some sort of macronutrient breakdown for athletes and it seems to work quite well, whether or not the calories is a true measure of, of, you know, energy or not. So I would say. Go on a longer timeline, know that it is possible, but only on a longer time.
I not a shorter timeline. And if you have a lot of fat to lose, it is probably easier to push the, let’s lose fat, break, break things down, and then afterwards gain muscle. You [00:05:00] know that that’s, these kinds of cycles are, are something body, but there’s been doing for a long time. And it works out pretty well, but just don’t think it’s impossible.
I think if you do like, just take that longer timeline and you’re patient, you’re going to see all the results you want. You just need that consistency over a very long period of time. But if you’re looking to accelerate this process, then do one than the other, and you know, you could switch. Back and forth, but don’t listen to any of the bro science.
get your, you get your science from the, the textbooks, the studies, all the research that’s out there and know that you can achieve anything you want. You just need to really be patient and consistent. All right, Gabe, that’s all I have. If you guys have any other, you know. It asks me anything, questions or whatever.
You got topics, put it in garage, mouthy.com, forward slash, AMA and we will get them answered. also if you like this, if you’re on iTunes, leave us five star review, positive comment, YouTube, comment, subscribe, all that good stuff. All the things I’m supposed to say at the end of the video. There it is.
Either way. Thanks so much for watching. Until next time.
[00:06:00] I hope you enjoy today’s ask me anything episode. So one more time. If you want to submit a question, topic or idea, you can do so at garage gym, athlete.com/ama and Hey, while you’re there, if you haven’t already, sign up for garage gym athlete membership. We are the best community and programming on the internet.
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