Hey, Athletes! This week we are talking about Body Fat! Tune in to learn how it can impact your immune system and how it responds!
Episode 79 of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!
How Body Fat Impacts Immune Response
This week on the Garage Gym Athlete podcast we have Jerred, Joe, and Ashley! They go over their updates and announcements before going over the study. This week’s study is body fat and if too low of a percentage can actually be a hindrance to your immune system. For this week’s topic, the three coaches go over goals. They talk about how they set them and their process behind it. Lastly, this week’s Meet Yourself Saturday Workout is Zone 2 Murph. Probably the most mental MYS we have!
If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast either on Stitcher, iTunes, or Google Play by using the link below:
IN THIS 68-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
- Body Fat Percentage
- Immune Response
- Goals For The New Year
- Zone 2 Murph
- Over Training
- Tips For MYS
- Updates and Announcements
- And A LOT MORE!!
Diving Deeper
If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you:
Study of the Week
Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week
Be sure to listen to this week’s episode:
Related Resources at End of Three Fitness:
- Crushing Your Fat Fears
- How Mental Training Increases Gains, The Fat Loss-Muscle Gain Checklist, and MURPH
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Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add them to the comments below!
To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:
Jerred Moon
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. I’m here with Ashley Hicks. How’s it going, Ashley?
Fabulous.
Jerred Moon
And we have Joe Courtney, What’s up, dude?
Joe Courtney
Hello?
Jerred Moon
Yeah, no Kyle today. And Ashley is actually here,
Joe Courtney
but we’re gonna say he has other general he has just gonna keep that a secret right over it.
No, I mean, that would have been kind of fun like having to push Jared awesome. Like so I could talk. But
Joe Courtney
yeah, this is already why apparently, Ashley needs her own office for the eventual HQ because I can’t work in the same office, what day one,
Jerred Moon
it has to be a wall
Joe Courtney
or a dressing, partition, whatever it is.
Jerred Moon
Don’t reveal the secrets there.
Joe Courtney
That’s gonna be on YouTube. They’re gonna see.
Jerred Moon
Alright, so I’m gonna start as per 2021. And kind of did this once already. I’m going to start doing the podcast overview just so people know what we’re talking about. And if you want to check out because you’re not interested in what we’re talking about, then you know what, that’s fine like you either. But the podcast Overview The study today is the actual name of the study is high plasma soluble levels of immune checkpoint HLA dash g molecule among bodybuilders done in 2020. And that really means nothing to anybody. But what they’re they’re looking at is a specific marker that has to do with your immune system. And they want to see if there’s a correlation between this marker and having extremely low body fat. So we’re going to get into is there some some sort of immunosuppression from being too lean? So we’ll talk about that today at for the study the topic. Given that it’s the new year, we’re gonna be talking about how we set goals and how we plan out our training and what we want to accomplish and all those things. Whether that’s whether we do it every 12 weeks, or for a full year, we’ll get into the details of all those things. And then lastly, the workout this week is zone two Murph, so we’ll be going over exactly what that workout is. You could probably guess from just the name of it wasn’t super creative. But we’ll talk about some tips there and things to look out for the zone to Murph. So welcome to the new year. Let’s get into some updates. Ashley, how’s life?
Live? Life is good. Still traveling. So I am. It’s vacation has been awesome. But it’s you know, you kind of get that point where you’re just like, I want to get home and get back to my routine and things. So that’s kind of where we are at. But yeah, like Jared said, we’re at the moon Casa so was able to knock out day one of VCT with Jared and the moon on the moon. Moon Casa of love, but we knocked out BCT so nice and sore today. And, uh, according to Jared, we’re the first guests to sit in the sauna. with Jared and Emily. We fit all four of us in there.
Jerred Moon
Joe wouldn’t do it when he’s here.
Joe Courtney
I don’t want to be in there with four adults. I didn’t see it. But well,
Jerred Moon
you’re in there with other adults. Not four other adult that would be too many. That would be one too many
Joe Courtney
less I count myself to people.
Jerred Moon
I couldn’t remember. I was trying to tell them I just said you were scared. What was the reason that you didn’t want to get on a sauna when you visited?
Joe Courtney
We don’t we never fired it up. I forgot what we were doing. We were pressed on time.
Jerred Moon
Okay, I don’t know we’ll go with that. That’s fine.
Joe Courtney
Or it was summer. So I use already like hot out.
Jerred Moon
I think that was it. I think it was like you might get in a sauna and you’re like okay, dude 20 in your garage right now like don’t worry about it.
Joe Courtney
Like the first week of September which is still like 90s in Texas.
Jerred Moon
Yeah. All right. Cool. Anything else going on? Ashley?
No, nothing really.
Jerred Moon
Joe what’s new in your world?
Joe Courtney
I don’t think anything honestly we can’t really do that much here we did went on a staycation for Christmas else fun. Finally hung the rings found that found a spot in the house to hang the ring guy in the house outside the house because there’s no trees here there’s no cross beams there’s no nothing to do it on but there’s like an overhang thing so we finally hung those yesterday so we can do a little bit more here. Although I’m still the dummy head that left the kettlebells in the US so there’s only so much
Jerred Moon
we can do shift for like two years yeah,
Joe Courtney
I I’ve never been in charge of moving again cuz I forget the kettlebells and details
Jerred Moon
Yeah, but did you kind of do it on purpose? Like where you don’t have to be because moving sucks. Like I’ve done it a few times. It’s I would love to not be in charge of moving again.
Joe Courtney
Well, that’s right. It was laundry in general because came out recently, but I
Jerred Moon
just like turn everything pink like I don’t know.
Joe Courtney
I just sound so bad. Why everything’s wrinkly cuz I just roll things up. Yeah. It’s like it’s it’s fine. It’s fine. Yeah, that’s all I got. I want some rings starting the year. Plant trying to plan out the year now of traveling and future opportunities, but there’s just way too many things up in the air.
Jerred Moon
Too many unknowns, right? Like is there’s 2021 gonna be somewhat like 2020? Or is everyone going to be vaccinated so we can actually travel again, we we don’t know yet see the world as we know it at the moment updates for me, not a lot It was a really good Christmas season, you know, having the kids home. So in Texas, the kids went back to school. At the start of when they should have gone back to school, we didn’t have any restrictions. I know a lot of other states are different. But my kids had been going to school every, every day, they never got sick, which is kind of cool. It’s a little weird. It’s like they’re, they’re like cleaning the schools too. Well, you know, because you send a young kid to school, you expect them to get a cold or something. And that just like never happened. So and I go rub their faces in dirt.
Joe Courtney
I was just gonna say I could push them outside.
Jerred Moon
Yeah. But it’s been really fun just playing sports with them outside Ashley and Scott got to experience some of the soccer they I mean, Ashley was pushing children down yesterday. She’s She’s pretty into into soccer, but they’re having a fun time. And it’s been really cool. I think it’s their first visitors to like, for a long time who actually stayed and stuff. So it’s cool to have them over. And it was just a good holiday season. I don’t have a lot of updates, otherwise, I’m excited for 2021 I always am we’re gonna kind of talk about goals and like how I look at things. But I’m not. I’m not like a burned out on New Year’s guy. You know, like, I love the new year. I love fresh starts I love Even if it’s arbitrary. It’s awesome. You know, and because other people are excited. And so it’s really cool. So those are my updates. And I don’t know, maybe I’ll get more interesting as the as the year rolls on. Maybe we all will 2021 should be way better than 2020. Right? I mean, I’m always struggle with these with these updates in 2020. Right. All right, we can get into the study, I kind of already gave the name. And I’m just going to kind of go over a few things. So they we’ve talked about the J shaped curve with athletes before with upper respiratory infections and how the more you train, you know, they’re like I said, A j shaped curve. So the at the tail of the J, there’s sedentary people who get sick, you know, whatever, a certain amount, then there’s the healthy people who get sick about half as much as the sedentary people. And then when you get to elite athletes, they get sick twice as much as the sedentary, sedentary people which is crazy, right? And so there there has been correlation to immune function and elite athletes or let’s just say aggressive training I think is better a better thing than to say elite athletes. And this is what they were looking at here but it was mainly with boughter bodybuilders. So they were looking at leanness to see if it increased the degree of immunosuppression. And this is one of the first studies to directly assess the relationship with body fat and immune function in bodybuilders. And again, most everyone in our community is not a bodybuilder but it’s just good to know. I think this study is going to help athletes kind of set their expectations. But the researchers measured body composition and human leukocyte antigen g are which we will refer to as HLA dash G and which is a marker for immune suppression. And there were 64 controls or 24 female 40 male 77 body builders 27 female 50 male during weigh ins at the Brazilian national championships, they then compare to the group’s HLA dash G and body composition and form correlations between HLA dash G and body fat percentage, lean mass into endurance and did indices and fat mass indices in bodybuilders. So, the main purpose of this study was just to look at this one little marker and see if there was some sort of correlation between being extremely lean and possibly having some sort of immunosuppression and I’m just going to read the exact conclusion that the study came to and then we can get into like what we thought was interesting or other other takeaways, but they the actual study I think concluded really well it says in bodybuilders with less body fat, the systemic levels of soluble HLA dash G and immunological molecule with recognize, okay, why am I reading that? Nevermind. It’s not not any good. What it actually just states is Yeah, there is a correlation that if you’re really lean, you’re going to have this increase marker, which could be problematic means your immune system could be suppressed and not working as well as it should. Just the other thing to note is that there are a lot of different immune markers that you can look at. But this one in particular is pretty important. I’m sure doctors, medical doctors could get more into the why behind it and everything else. But yeah, being too lean can be bad. And I have a lot to like to say about this more personal opinion related and stuff. But I’d love to hear what you guys think of the study or any takeaways you saw.
Joe Courtney
I had two main thoughts that kept coming to mind as I was reading this first one was, man, am I at that peak prime body fat position to have a great immune system just just right there, happy medium and about 16%. But the other one that I kept thinking of, as I was reading through everything is somehow this theme has come up a lot with a lot of studies and back to literary episode one, or the study one, about how high intensity always training always can just wreck your body and mess you up. And it’s it’s kind of in the same vein, as this view, strive for too low of a body fat percent or on the other side, then it’s a stress that you’re putting your body through, just like always beating yourself up in the gym, high intensity, training, things like that. So there are repercussions to certain things that you’re going to put your body through, and it’s always going to have a backlash to it. Same with extreme calorie deficit if you you know, people that if you just really, really extremely restrict yourself calorically, then your body’s gonna be stressed, you’re probably going to get sick. And you’re it’s not gonna be good. And then I thought of a if you guys are familiar with Devil Wears Prada movie, actually, yeah. To where Emily Blunt’s character was trying to get ready to just completely set a sidebar, but that’s fine. She’s trying to get ready for something to lose a bunch of weight. And somebody remarks on how she looks good. She loses weight. She’s like, Oh, I’m on this new diet, where I don’t eat anything. And until I’m about to pass out, I eat a square of cheese. And she’s sick while this is happening. So that’s just kind of encompasses just kind of
one stomach bug away from my goal weight, too.
Joe Courtney
Yeah, yeah, that I forgot about that too. Basically. Well done.
Jerred Moon
Yeah, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to fit that movie into the podcast.
Joe Courtney
Did a congrats me a lot of a lot of people were curious if it could be done. And we did it. So I’m gonna try and fit some other some other new pop culture references in? Yeah. So yeah, that’s that was the main thing that I kept thinking of, as I was reading through it, how there are repercussions to some of these things that people might be striving for. And if it’s, you know, competition and your goal, yeah, that that’s fine. But I think for us, our athletes, as coaches were more of the overall health fitness, you know, trying to keep that good healthy zone while still achieving things. So it might not be taking things to extremes, but we can still, we can still get there.
So just what Joe said, and Jared already kind of gone over it. Like, obviously, if you are going to be at a super low body fat percentage, and overtrain or just overtraining in general. Again, it’s that j curve. So not going to hit on that too much, but just kind of touch on the things that I found interesting in the study, like one of them being that men actually had a higher level of the HLA g than females. Which I wonder if it’s because, you know, a woman’s low body fat percentage is not quite as low as a net as a man who is bodybuilding, if that makes any sense. That’s the correlation that I could see there. But I again, there’s I wouldn’t really know I guess I would have to like, talk to someone about that and why that is. And then another thing that I found was cool is that they said high levels of HLA actually HLA dash G. If it was found in somebody who had like an autoimmune disease, it actually kind of helped them. It actually wasn’t an inverse, or an adverse reaction, I guess. Again, I would like to see that because you know, someone who personally has an autoimmune disease, I would like to know, you know, obviously, I wouldn’t want to overtrain to get high levels of that. I would want to see what it would do but but the cool thing that I found that I think is a great takeaway from all for all garage gym athletes, wasn’t just the fact that I’m going to actually read this quote here. It wasn’t, you know? Yes, high. A lot of high intensity is going to do what you don’t want it to do. Right. So it says it is also reported that physical exercise, when intensively performed contributed to increase the incidence of upper respiratory tract infection. But this is the takeaway here while exercise of mine intensity would have a protective effect against the risk of infections. So saying here, workout is not bad, it’s what you’re doing, how much of it you’re doing and exactly what Joe said, it’s all about the balance of it, right? So if you hit that sweet spot of that moderate, you know, intensity, you’re gonna actually help your immune system. So to find that, you know, not always crushing it and hitting it hard, and putting that hard strain on your body all the time. Anyways, even though that’s kind of what some people’s mindset is, I need to be as low body fat as I can, I need to lose all this weight, and I need to always get in the gym and work out for three hours. You know, that’s not necessarily the case. This is clearly telling you here like, no, this is not what would help you. In fact, it’s going to hinder you. So
Jerred Moon
it’s really interesting. It’s almost like Raja mathletes, becoming the, the anti hardcore training place to be, which, which is a good thing. I know, some people look at us would like meet yourself Saturday, and maybe think otherwise, because some of those workouts are hard or crazy, but they’re not the norm. And they’re also optional, right there. There is that mental toughness piece that I think has to be covered in training and should not be ignored. That’s why we have something like meet yourself Saturday. But for the most part, we’re telling you like actually said, we’re telling you to do moderate intensity, high intensity occasionally. Now we’ve covered all these studies, we just covered one a few weeks ago that’s talking about the, you’re gonna die sooner, you know, that’s how I put it in the previous podcast, you’re gonna die sooner if you train harder. It’s there’s an actual correlation with people who go too hard for too long. Like, specifically, let’s say zone four, zone five for one to two hours. Every day is really bad. And then also high intensity is not good. So all these studies are just coming out and saying like, Hey, don’t be so freakin hardcore. And if you just look at history, it’s an interesting ride we’ve been on right, like being overweight, back in the day was a sign of wealth, right is like, Look, I can afford so much food, I can just, I can be fat, you know. And so the peasants were skinny, but that was not a desirable thing. And then somehow, over the last couple of decades, we shifted to extremely low body fat with being able to see muscle is what looks good. And if you think about it, it’s it’s weird. That’s even a thing. Like we decide these things, right? Like, that’s not how people always looked. It’s not necessarily what we found attractive. But that’s what people are leaning towards today. Maybe because it’s hard to do, maybe because it’s impressive for you to be able to see every muscle on your body, but these things are not good for you. And I remember when I first started working out someone was there, like, What’s your goal, and I wanted to be lean and cut like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I was like, I want to look like that just like all the time. And I remember being told by a very smart individual, you can’t do that. Like, that’s not possible. You can’t just look like that all the time. And I was like, why not? Like it’s not healthy. And all I mean, that was like 15 years ago, or whatever. And it’s just true, you can’t be like that all the time. Like I said it a relatively low body fat percentage, but not like, four to 6%, you know, and those things are not healthy. And that’s some people, some people want that that’s their goal, they want to be ridiculously low body fat. And I think females have the best indicator of this being a problem. Like if you go too low in your body fat percentage, all sorts of bad things start happening, like you stopped getting your period. You know, that’s, that’s a pretty crazy thing if you just think about it, because that is a normal biological process. And somewhere in our you know, it was along the way let you call it evolution or divine creation, whatever you you believe in, but that is the body’s way of protecting itself. To be able to keep going for a female right to like, okay, we need to shut down this important process where we can continue to press forward and move move on. And we’re in girls are doing this to themselves just in normal training like that. That shouldn’t be okay. And with guys, maybe it’s it’s not, you know, we don’t have a cycle that we can turn off, but we’re showing this study, if we want to try and be hardcore, low body fat, high intensity, or whatever it is, we’re wrecking our immune system, and it opens you up to a whole bunch of things that you might not want, which could be Yeah, autoimmune disease, or you know, other things. It’s not just like, Oh, yeah, my immune system is slightly suppressed. Maybe I’ll get a cold that’s, that’s not what they’re saying here. Like if you dive into HLA dash G and I would love to have medical profession on to talk about that more specifically, because I’m not gonna lie. I’m not an expert. In In any of these things, you know, I just read the the information and trying to get as much as I can from it. But it’s just really interesting that we are kind of becoming the anti hardcore, and it’s for good reasons like it, you can’t be perfect, you can’t have this 4% body fat like, in stay there, it’s actually really bad for you.
Yeah, and I think also for men, their testosterone levels probably are jacked up to, I feel like it’s gonna be a hormonal imbalance on both sides. So
Jerred Moon
now, and one thing I they noted in this study, and then there’s another study, that it looked at the immune function, over 21 weeks of like, bodybuilder prep, and then they went through recovery phase of 18 weeks. And what they find is that everyone bounces back, if you do go through, if you go through a lot of caloric restriction, and hard training, you’re going to suppress your immune system. But then once you bounce back, you’re eating enough calories, you change your training, you you go, everything recovers, which is good news, because this is not permanent. And but what about training, our kind of training, we don’t do cyclical, we’re not trying to be super cut in the summer. And then you know, bulk out in the winter, I mean, people might try and plan their training around on their own that way, or their nutrition that way. But that’s not really what we’re doing. So I was gonna ask you guys, what do you think people should do with garage gym athlete training? To not be, you know, in a caloric deficit all the time, or you seeking this low body fat all the time? Well, how do you think people should be eating to sustain their training? And how do you think people should be approaching their intensity,
Joe Courtney
I’m actually going through this right now a bit, and I need to do a little bit more digging and insight to it, as Liz and I were talking about it, but like San Francisco, we started counting macros, I’ve been in a deficit, that’s about two months now and for county, and I might do for another one or two months. But then I remember Liz mentioned, because she’s been doing a lot more research, because hormones and things like that, but saying that, you’d only be in a deficit for so long. And I’m not like in a huge, huge deficit. But I think after four months being a deficit, I need a bounce back to bump up my calories. And I don’t know if the surplus needs need to be surplus or just normal. But either way, I think you need to treat things like that to where, okay, you need to you stick to something for a while, but not too long and easy, you still need to go back to a bit of what was normal. And even with some of the training, whether what track you’re on, you know, if you’re on strength for a cycle or two, and you and you’re doing something, a whole bunch of stuff extra on the on the outside, maybe you need to back that off in ways a little bit as well, you know, we do D loads for within the waves. But I think you should every couple of months, you still might be need to take like an entire week, completely off or completely like D load from a D load, you know, kind of thing. So think of things in longer terms versus just shorter within 12 week periods that you need to just do something for 12 weeks, but zoom out. Yeah,
you want to look for longevity versus, you know, just the short. And I know everyone wants, you know, the quick, I want to lose weight. Now I want to do this. I agree with Joe, like if you’re going to try to cut or trying to do things, you know, you don’t want to be in a caloric deficit or, you know, doing certain things for a very long period of time, like, for example, a woman’s health check we carb cycle. But that is not something that I think somebody needs to be doing all the time, like that is a means to try to get things back in balance. And then once they do, then you go back to, you know, eating things that are more moderate, you know, you know, just not restricting as much. And so I think that you have to you can’t always be cutting all the time, I guess is what I’m trying to say here.
Jerred Moon
You have people are like some people. That’s all they’re ever doing. They’re only ever trying to reduce their body fat. And it becomes problem once this turns into like yours. For sure.
For sure. And I think a lot too is like for our training, you know, yeah, it’s an hour. And sometimes people have you know, sedentary jobs and whatnot. But you also need to make sure that you’re eating properly, not just for you to function, but to just even recover from certain things as well. You know, I found when I worked with Jared for the first time I was under eating, I didn’t think I was under eating but I was under eating. And I ate more and did the training. And I saw more results faster that way. So it’s it’s kind of funny, because you know, especially for different people, the way your mind works, you’re like, Oh, well, if I just eat less calories, you know, you know, less calories in. yada yada, yada. That’s not necessarily the way it works. You know your body is there’s all sorts of things going on in your body that you could definitely hinder if you don’t take care of it.
Jerred Moon
Yeah, I think just making sure that you’re on top of that, like Ashley And this is going to be my stance on macro counting forever is, it’s something that I normally recommend athletes do, if they have a very specific goal for like a 12 week period, you can go maybe another 12 weeks if you really, really want to, or if you have a lot of body fat to lose, and that would probably be okay. But then I always recommend a break after, and maybe even permanently, because there’s a couple, there’s the the mental side, and then there’s a physiological side. So physiologically we’re talking about, you could actually suppress your immune system. And there could be problems there, right. But then the other issue with the mental side is just counting all the damn time, like it can, it can take its toll mentally if you’re not careful. So I just want to stress to everybody, as we go into the new year, I think this is a great time to bring up this topic is cut yourself a little bit of slack on the body fat and body weight side of things. Like guys 5% body fat, if that is something that you’re chasing, cool, maybe you can, you can touch the sun, but then you’re immediately going to have to come come back before your wings melt off, right? Like that’s, that’s what’s gonna, what’s gonna happen. And so you got a there’s a healthy range that you should be sitting at. And I know, this is probably one of the only studies I’ve ever read where I think personally, maybe I should eat more like I should eat more and gain some more body fat, right? Like, I’m not sitting, I’m normally sitting like eight to 10% body fat. And right now it’s probably I would if I had to guess I think I’m probably like 1011. I mean, I’ve been running a lot. So I don’t I don’t ever know. But when I do get measured that’s about where it’s at. And I often wonder I’m like, Is that too low? You know, is that too low? I have to eat a lot more to try to gain body fat. But I’m actually looking at these these kind of things, because I don’t really care. You know, and I think as you go into the new year, you shouldn’t be so worried about those things. So cut yourself some slack and be mindful of what your goals are and whether or not they should actually be your goals. Speaking of
high like that segue, nonstick, staple, Joe, what’s
Jerred Moon
what’s the topic for today, man? Yeah, so I’ll go over the topic, Joe’s have a little issue. Hopefully he comes back. But we are going over New year, new goals type stuff. So we’re just going to kind of lay out our process for what we do with goals. And how we select our goals, what we do I have, I’d say a specific process or a specific thing that I do now for for setting goals every single year. So we can get into it. Ashley, you want to kick things off? Like what do you do in the new year? Do you set goals? Is that something that’s important to you? I’d love to hear all the details on this.
Yeah, so for this is something that I do? Yes, I do set goals? That is the short answer to that question. But um, for me, this is not something that I just do for one day, I kind of take a few days to kind of process like what I want. And to take into account what I need to do in order to achieve the goals, and what’s the best way to get there. So I do that with garage, gym athlete, you know, with our programming with that in mind, like, what do I want to do? And I also take into account, not just training, but also I take into account nutrition, as well as the I don’t want to say toxin level, but that I’m kind of taking that into account, like how can I eliminate certain things in order to you know, again, we’re talking about longevity. So I’m trying to think over a long period of time. But also like, what can I do this year in order to help myself. So like, for example, I will go into the goal for this year, it’s actually super simple. And there’s nothing like, you know, I’m not like, well, I’m going to eat like this for this way or whatnot. Basically, my goal is, you know, everybody has heard about my hormonal imbalances, and I’ve talked about my medical issues, but that’s it, like, this year is about getting my hormones back into the balance, and it needs to be in and I’m going to allow my body the time to do that. And I need to eat, train and live the best way that I possibly can in order to give my body the correct amount of time, but also help it process it, you know, as best as it possibly can. So, you know, that doesn’t mean I’m restricting things, but it just means that I’m, you know, potentially going to eliminate certain things that you know, like sugar or certain high carb things that would not necessarily help my body you know, so that’s kind of how I look at it. It’s not really a detailed process. I don’t you know, look at a calendar and stuff like that. I kind of just pick what I’m going to Pick one, I’m gonna try to accomplish that year and try to have all aspects of life. It’s not just performance, but you know, life kind of things.
Jerred Moon
That’s awesome. Joe, are you back?
Joe Courtney
Yes. Okay. Like 20 seconds. I just yeah, timeout.
Jerred Moon
What’s your what’s your process man?
Joe Courtney
for New Year’s stuff I’m not. So I’m actually not a bowl person, pretty much at all, I don’t have a vision board with the the red thread that I pull out and make everything align. I mean, that’s, that’s how I have that fixture tracks.
Hey, hey,
Joe Courtney
I always have an idea of what I want to do for that year, except this past year, because I knew things are gonna be in flux. And they were in flux way longer than they should have been. I just needed to survive. But this year, going in, and the last two months, we’ve already kind of started it, I know that I have goals of running. So five K and one mile run that I’ve been adding to the strength track programming. And I know, I also know that I’m gonna be on strength probably for a while here. And I think it’s because For starters, I don’t change tracks very much. I think, since 2015, when we started teambuilder, I’ve changed my track twice. Once I’m on a track, I pretty much just stick on there for a while because I know, alternate supplement for there. And I also know that with the gym situation that we have here now unless like certain rules and times and stuff change here, which I don’t think they will for a while, I’ll probably strength works to the absolute best for what I want to do. And I also know that I like running. And I also like and have become pretty decent at programming, some running workouts for listeners. So I can easily submit that and add conditioning to it. So I think that’s my vision for this year. And also the fact that there’s a loop by my house, that’s almost exactly a five K. So like, it’s just easy to make that a thing for us regularly. But planning out my year, it’s it all depends on where I’m living, because we move every few years. So that kind of changes things. And that what I just laid out was the environmental factors of here and kind of what I want to do. And the expectations for the year. Go wise, there’s not anything too specific of what I am doing besides some of the some of the runtime things and keeping consistent with that. Yeah, I always kind of think of it on a longer term versus just 12 weeks. So as I mentioned earlier, I kind of zoom out to beyond 12 weeks, I know I use it’s about more of like six months, map out plan, which is why when it comes to end of cycle track change time, I kind of already know what to expect and what’s going on. One thing that I will be figuring out and also why strength track will work is because come April or May when it’s ungodly, hot here, I’m not gonna be running a damn bit. Yeah. So good thing, they have a true form here on base they’ve won. And I think I’m the only person meaning was the only people that have ever used it. Which is kind of crazy to me. So I’ll use that. But that’s like at a specific place. And it’s part of the gym that I’ve pretty much never go to. So that’s kind of my thinking for this year. Did you just want specific goals for us? Or just like, how planning the year goes? Whatever, man? Yeah,
Jerred Moon
whatever you want to come?
Joe Courtney
Obviously, from there. And if I have more,
Jerred Moon
yeah, we’ll see if anybody has more. So I stopped setting concrete goals a few years ago. Even though I’m very goal oriented person, most of the things that I’m trying to achieve at this point are like question marks, like, I have an idea if I want to do it, but I don’t know, like, let’s talk about business. So if we want to grow garage, gym, athlete to certain number of athletes, businesses is not a science, it’s an art, you know. And so we can, we can sit down as a team and plan out our best guess our best hypothesis of what we think would get more athletes to stick around and also get new athletes to come into the programming, but at the end of the day, we don’t know if that will work for certain, right? So we can, we can basically come up with a list of things that we think will get us there. And then the real job from that point is sticking to doing those things that we thought would would help us achieve that goal. Now in fitness is very similar. Like when I stated the whole the BCT track going for a 500 pound back squat and five minute mile. Believe it or not, if you go back and listen to any of the podcasts or if you watch the YouTube videos kind of where I announced this. I never really say that. That’s the goal specifically like that’s that’s what I want to achieve. But that’s not what I’m committed to achieving. I’m committed to doing the BCT track for a year. That was the ultimate commitment. Like I will squat and run for one year with very specific programming and then we will just see where I’m at. I don’t actually know If that if what I’m doing will get me to a 500 pound back squat and five minute mile in 12 months, you know, like maybe this programming would be perfect to achieve that. But maybe maybe I need more like a two year timeline. And maybe I don’t want to do that, you know, maybe maybe I’ll get to a year. And I’m like, absolutely not like, I got the 475 and a 515. And I’m good with that. You never know. So that’s, that’s what I do. Because I don’t like that specifically in the BCD track, it’s a hard track to be on, it’s kind of hard on your body. And so I don’t want to go beyond a year. So I’ll either achieve it or I won’t. But what I know I can do, and that the whole point of like killing comfort and all these things is just the process, I’ve committed to the process of doing the training every single week, for 365 days, that is such a better skill to have, then the 500 pound backs about the five minute month, right? It’s like that is being able to stick to something every single day is the better skill to have. And so those are the types of goals I set these days. It’s a process goal. And so for the last two years, I’ve done 300 training sessions, I want to hit 300 training sessions in a year I did last year, and I did this year. So I just track training sessions. And I’ve hit it I’ve gone over 300 training sessions both years. So now that thing, it’s, it’s not something I want, like if I do it another year, it’s just like it’s a vanity metric. It’s like something you already know you’re going to do. And so it’s useless to try and achieve it again. So what I’m actually doing this year, and this is not, I’m not trying to promote my killing comfort planner journal. If you want to buy one by one, if you don’t, that’s fine. But the the way the planner actually came about is like, how you see it laid out the the daily pages is how I kept my journal every single day like a notebook, I would just write out exactly what’s in there and have the grid, I’d have the elements, all these things so I could track each and every single day. But that gets annoying to do every single day to like make yourself your own template every day. And so that’s why I made a planner. So I could have something that was printed, and I could just use but that’s one of my big goals this year is I want to use be consistent with that planner for the full year, I want to go 365 days using that planner specifically, as consistent as I can just because there’s so many good things that’ll come from it. It has been really on top of like I mentioned all making sure I do all the elements because I know they’re in the app, but they’re also staring me in the face in my my journal, that would be a big thing. Getting an extra reps making sure you know, I’m focused on my goals and doing a hard thing for me says, you know, all these things that are in this singular page are so good for you. And so if I looked at the killing comfort journal, it’s really like 15 different things I have to do every single day. But it’s just one habit, right? It’s one process, and that is to stick to doing the journal daily, and I’m going to miss some days. See, this one’s gonna be really freakin hard training 300 days in a year wasn’t that hard for me. But if I say I want to use this journal, at least 300 days per week, this year, that’s going to be challenging, and it should be easier, right? It should be easier just to sit on your butt and write something down. But it’s not a habit for me yet. But I’m hoping if I can stick to it this year, it’ll become a habit, I do it two years in a row, like I did the training. And then after that, I don’t need the journal anymore. You know, I can I can just know I’m doing all these things, like a lot of the elements are habits these these days, but just making sure I’m really dialed in them. So all my stuff these these days is process goals. So just sticking to something over a very long period of time.
Joe Courtney
I think it’s a good point for how people should look at it. And I’m just going to kind of pull on a little bit to you know, think of if you have a goal think of what what am I want to be for six months to a year from now, you know year from now, where do you want to be for what this goal is. So have your what for the goal for what your goal is, but you should be focusing on the how and the why throughout. So my goal for example, just to pull a mine was running, I know I have started running both from my five K and my one mile that I want that I want to do for about time it’s next running season. But what I’m going to focus on is adding three to four run days per month. Starting now on top of the strength track work that I’m doing so that I know I’m working toward the goal and a year from now, I’m sure I’ve gotten better if I stuck to the the how, how now, brown cow has stuck to it now versus a year from now and if I’m not I don’t quite hit the what of the goal I still know that I stuck to the how plan of what to do with it and and maybe I just don’t see what my progress is. But I think focusing on the how and what you’re doing to build it to because you’re building those habits basically, this is kind of what it’s doing is forming new and good habits and seeing how they affect over a year. But never because if you say if you don’t achieve that goal, you might get really discouraged but really should be focusing on the the how part of it and then adding those processes and habits to to what you might want to do so that a year from now you’re still better.
sounds like to me, Joe, that you’re basically doing the best Si tu si te tracktest strength?
Jerred Moon
He wasn’t
Joe Courtney
mbct like VCT? Like that’s it?
Jerred Moon
Yeah, I mean, I think this is a great way to look at things. It’s just it’s detaching yourself from the outcome. Because like Joe said, you can get really discouraged if you don’t achieve a goal. But who really cares? Like, I mean, seriously, if, if at the end of my PCT training, I’m going to be fitter and stronger, right? If I don’t hit 505, I’m fitter and stronger, like, what what did I lose in that process that I use anything at all? You know, and this is same with. Same with business, if we have a goal, and say we hit 75% of our goal, instead of 100% of our goal. That’s still growth that’s still moving us in the right direction. There’s really no losing in goal achievement if you’re focused on just doing the daily thing. That’s it.
Boom, sauce.
Jerred Moon
sauce. Alright, let’s get into the workout. joke and you brief it. It’s got a good one.
Yes, I can. You have to pull it off.
Joe Courtney
Some tumeric. Yeah, you know, I need to be all official and stuff. Well, I wanted to show it on the screen. But okay, it’s on to Murph. So you know, Murph, but stay within zone two, and we’re sticking with the typical zone 260 to 70%. Correct.
Mm hmm.
Joe Courtney
Yeah. So Murph, run a mile, then 100, push ups, 200, push ups, 300. squats. It’s been a while since I’ve done that one. And then run a mile. And you can partition the reps however you see fit. But the caveat, main caveat is staying within zone to 60 to 70%. You should not do this with a vest unless you’ve completed it unvested. Most likely, because if you haven’t done before, you’re probably not going to complete it. And there is a 60 minute time cap, which is the frustrating part. Because you might be like me the first time you do it thinking, Oh, I’m great. And then you get kept on the run. And then you just want to never do that workout again. Because it mentally messes with you.
Oh, yeah, this one’s super mental. This is the only one that I don’t have a wine pairing for, just because I
Jerred Moon
don’t brush it. Yeah,
I don’t listen,
Joe Courtney
reading app exercises or something. For your heart rate,
I actually do a audio book that was Jerry’s recommendation for me. And it actually works. It works. I will caveat that with I’ve never finished it yet without a vest. And then I even scaled down my because you should try to do strict movement, obviously, because you’re trying to keep your heart rate down. So obviously, you’re not trying to keep your pull ups here. So for that, I’ll do inverse body rows, with the barbell on the rack. And what’s funny to me is that my heart rate actually spikes the most doing air squats, because I am really efficient at AIR squats. But so that’s where I have to slow it down. It’s just, it’s killer, because you’re like, in your mind, you’re like this is Murph, I should not be slowing down. But it’s not the goal of this one, right? So yeah, this was on paper, you’re like really Jerred Moon, this is a meet yourself Saturday. And then you do it, you’re like, Okay, now I know what this is a meet yourself Saturday. So to be
Jerred Moon
honest, this one might have the most. Like it might mess with people the most mentally over any other workout that we’ve had. Because you know, people don’t have the report in the group and stuff. So this is kind of just a subjective feeling I have, but I get a lot of complaints about this one, how it affected their their mind and stuff. I would say this is most people ignore this. But some of our athletes who are really paying attention to what we’re doing, I would want you to do it. I introduced the math training zones. For everybody in the last webinar. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can if you are one of our athletes, I posted it in the new cycle webinar, Facebook post. So there are links in that and it has like a new way to calculate your zones. So it does it all for you super easy. You just need to find that if you are one of our athletes and you’re in the group. But what this will give you is essentially a new zone to and it’s quite a liberal spread like it goes quite a bit further if you’re in a caveat that it’s only if you’re really healthy and trained athlete, most people will answer the questions the little questionnaire and they’ll end up with almost the exact same zones. But if you have been training for a long time and you don’t get sick very often then your zone two will go up quite a bit. So it’s a very tailored way to do zone two. And that’s why I like it because if you are overweight or you do get sick or you haven’t been training consistently, you’re pretty much just going to stay where we’re in zone two is that but if you are more trained athlete, I think you probably could push it down to a little bit further. And so maybe try zone two in that new zone. If you’ve calculated that, and see what you do, and I know I think I got extra an extra 13 beats per minute in my new zone two, which is going to equate to a much faster zone to merge. So I’ll probably I’ll try it out. But I just know like, I’m in zone two, like when I’m running now, in the new zone two, it’s, it’s much faster, like it’s still a slow run, but it’s much faster than it was before. Like before, it was like, if people saw me on the side of the road, they’d be like, that guy. What’s wrong with him? Basically dragging his feet, you know, zoning out every day. And now I can actually keep, I think I normally start around an eight to 830 minute mile with the new zone too. And then by the if I’m running for like an hour, it does slow down to like upper nines or 10s. But that’s from a shift of like having to be starting in the 10s. And then finishing at like, high elevens or even 12 minute per mile pace to welcome to my world. Yeah, and so that’s it, that would be my only thing is, um, it’s kind of a little bit more detailed. But do go dive into those new zones and try it out. Especially if you’ve already done the workout before, this might be a good way to challenge yourself. And then if you have finished the workout under the time cap, if you’re one of those athletes who have done it, then try adding that extra thing to make it a little bit more challenging. And I don’t know if it’s the next step is okay, I achieved it bodyweight only, I don’t know if the next step really is throw on a 20 pound weight vest and do it. Maybe put on your weight vest with only 10 pounds or something like that. It just try a gradual increase with the ultimate goal being finishing zone to Murph with the weight vest on which I think is very possible, especially with the new zones that we have people calculate. So it’s a fun one, get out of your head and just focus on controlling your heart rate. which interestingly enough, maybe we could cover this book as a future topic. I think it’s called Building Superman or something like that. Have you guys heard of this book? I read it several years ago, there’s two of them. But they talk about a lot of awesome stuff. They talk about things the navy seals are doing with nootropics. And like all this other stuff, but one of the topics in the book was like controlling your heart rate. And they had this guy he hooked something up to wear is basically a heartrate monitor. But it made a made a clicking noise every time his heart would beat. So like it made a noise when his heart would beat. So you just think about the annoyance of that. Oh,
Joe Courtney
yeah. And rise of Superman.
Jerred Moon
That Yeah, so he did it for he did it for weeks on end. But what they found out is when you bring that level of attention and awareness to your heart rate, you could actually control it on command, he could actually lower his heart rate or raise his heart rate. So I we probably should cover the book. It’s really awesome. I’ve been wanting to reread it lately. Because this has been many years since I initially read it but uh, that’s a great one. That’s really cool. So you can’t control your heart rate more than you think it’s not as out of control, as you would believe. So work on it. That’s actually my everyone’s official goal. Make sure you are in control of your heart rate with only your mind by the end of the workout.
Okay, that’s my advice.
Jerred Moon
All right, guys. That’s it for this one. You guys have anything else?
Nope.
Jerred Moon
Cool. New Year, Happy New Year. Hopefully we’ve helped with you know, setting some of your goals going over the body fat thing like maybe you need to rework that goal. You know, your goals can be your goals, but I don’t think anybody needs or deserves a goal that’s going to force them or lead to them beating themselves up about so make sure you have some good goals, I would recommend process goals. And if you do want to get started with our training, we’re right here at the beginning of new cycles. There’s really not a bad time to join garage gym athlete training. There only is a good time and that time is right now. So join garage, gym athlete, go to garage mlb.com you can start a 14 day free trial. Start on any one of our tracks, try them all out and have a great 2021 that’s it