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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Good morning. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast titled One Day at a Time. Guess what we gotta do. Take things one at a time.
Speaker 1:I think one of the maybe it was Monday, one of the podcasts about gonna say some stoic quotes for realizing, like, just do what you need to do today. I was thinking of writing a book and I thought you open the first page and it says you don't need any more information, just do what you gotta do. I was thinking what a waste of paper for one. But true. Very true.
Speaker 1:I mean, you all know what you gotta do. No? Most of you do. If you were confused on what you need to do when you speak it out it's fine but a lot of you are sorry, got a coughing. A lot of you have got analysis, a paralysis, fight analysis.
Speaker 1:Maybe I need a new plan, maybe I need a new coach, maybe I need a new program, maybe I need new this, new that, no. Can you walk today? Yeah. Can you be mindful of your eating today? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can you put a smile on your face today? Yeah. Can you keep your cool head under pressure today? Yeah. Can you not act like a child when things are going wrong?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can do these things today. Can you do a bar of exercise? Yeah, if you're happy to do fifteen, twenty minutes like I am without being like, that's not enough. It's not enough.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? Twenty minutes better than zero. Come on. Stop thinking you gotta do an hour workout and five workouts a week and got a perfect day's perfect hour, perfect new diet. Also what you've eaten over your calorie allowance today.
Speaker 1:Maybe you've eaten over a thousand calories over last week. We're making movements, bringing awareness back into our actions. That's really what we've to do. And for a lot of people who are listening maybe and it's been the case for me and my friends and stuff over summer, it's like, you go out on weekends and it really knocks you off center, you wake up Monday not feeling great. And it's like, I can't wait to get four, five, six weeks under my belt of no drinking and just really smashing work and getting back into like more training.
Speaker 1:Pursue for me like a martial arts in this case not to the gym. But yeah, but anyway I'm gonna give you a quote to like ponder and then I'm gonna go into a study, a recent study to give you a kick of the ass. So quote here for you, your perception of difficulties will determine your state of mind. Will you see them as opportunities to grow stronger or injustices sent to undermine you? That really is the big difference between how you see things and how you react to it but have a think about that one.
Speaker 1:Now this research was done on, senior strength training. Is it better to keep it simple and stuff like that? And the attention grabbing headline of a study in 2012 was a lot of people just go for walks and don't do anything else. Right? And they basically interviewed 15 active seniors and were like, do know what the government recommendations are?
Speaker 1:And the seniors are like, yeah, yeah, just walk in aerobic activities. Not a single one of them knew the guidelines about strength training twice a week. Maybe it's news to you as well. So when they asked them more why not do strength training? They were like, I don't like the gym, it's intimidating, it's boring, it's pointless, what's the point doing this hostile territory in the gym?
Speaker 1:They felt a bit like out of, what's the word, just felt like not involved. But they go for walks, but never really did any weight or resistance training. So how do we get more people to strength training to start with? And I've spoken a bit about this before. And it's really about just knocking down from the thought of doing five a week, just do two a week, just do two strength trainings a week.
Speaker 1:You're gonna get the majority of the benefits you need from that. And here's a few things the research looked at. So if we're trying to teach people or help people especially elderly people or senior people to start lifting weights because that is gonna be massively important for the health and it's in the guidelines, what benefits do we get? So we get the benefits of improved body composition so less fat and more lean mass. We get improved metabolic function so faster glucose clearance, accelerated protein turnover.
Speaker 1:We get more strength, we get better balance and better mobility. And this is the results you get from any type of strength training without complicated programming, without complicated weights and reps and set structures. It's simply just turning up within the strength training twice a week. You've got to put effort in. So the conclusion of it was as long as you put in enough effort in to what you're doing, as in that weight you're using is heavy or at least is heavy to you and you're not like kidding yourself, yourself, you're you're gonna gonna get progress.
Speaker 1:So whilst programs are awesome and you can progressively overload out of all that, that's important if you're taking it seriously. But if you're like me right now and the gym isn't all that important to me at the moment, I don't really have a PB and my squat and deadlifts have to reach. I just wanna maintain strength or at least gain some strength so I can do some martial arts and my mobility and stuff and get my general fitness up. I just know I need to show up to the gym, do some weights at least two or three times a week for me and I gotta do at least one or two sets where I push it. And the weight I'm using is taking me to knee failure.
Speaker 1:That is really the only thing you need to focus on to make it really simple for you and you gotta be using good form obviously. So if you're listening to this and you're like Scott there's so many workers I can do, I'm just out of the picture, I don't know what to do, I wanna focus on my health, I want total health. Well get your steps in, get your protein in, look at your total energy intake, look at your total calorie intake, make sure that's in line with where you need to be. And then if you've got time, you just say to yourself I will do two strength workouts a week. I can go on the turtle lap, can go on other lap, can do the workouts from there, I can get a program, a written program, go to the gym to do it.
Speaker 1:But all I got to do is make sure that the weights I'm using are quite challenging, right? But actually at least one of the sets I'm doing, so say now I do three sets on each exercise and I just crack on. For at least at least the last exercise, the last set, sorry, you wanna be pushing it. Like if you find you're doing 10 reps with ease, you wanna be like, well maybe I could go up in weight and I'll try for eight and I'll, when you reach eight you're like wow, maybe I could do one or two more reps. That's where you need to be, it's very simple.
Speaker 1:We don't need to be going all these really complicated programs. If you go and get, the problem is when you go to inexperienced coaches or younger coaches or people that wanna try and make a name for themselves in the coaching world and stuff, you'll find that if you look at the Dunning Kruger graph where when you start off you think you know everything and then over time you realize how little you know. What people do at the start is they'll, as coaches, they'll put you through like really intense workout programmes, complicated ones and they'll tell you this and that and they'll confuse you really. You'll be thinking well there must be something to this sound because it's so complicated. That's one mistake we do as humans because there's complexity beyond what he's saying it must be better.
Speaker 1:They really kill you if you were in a PT and a PT puts you through your first session and you're literally dying on the floor after forty minutes and you can't breathe, that's an inexperienced PT that doesn't realize that it's a long term game over time, it's not about killing you to make you think that you just have the best worker, the best PT of all time, that's one of the worst PT's. So you don't wanna be going down that path. And because they wanna make a name for themselves and all that, they start throwing around things they've read once online or whatever and it becomes a very, if I shoot them with enough, like, variables they have to think about, they think they need me more. You know, that type of thing. If they said to you, you can literally do go to do strength training twice a week in a gym.
Speaker 1:Here's a basic program for you. An upper body, I want you to do some chest press. You can do it via dumbbells or bar barbells or even press ups. You can do some shoulder presses with dumbbells, cable machine. You can do a back row, so that back row machine over there or you can do it with dumbbells or maybe you want to do some dead lifts.
Speaker 1:You can maybe do some pull ups on the assisted machine as well, some bicep curls and then tricep extensions. You just do those things for upper body and make sure that the last set is a tough one for you and just do that and then the next day you do legs, the next work you do legs and just do maybe some lunges or some assisted, or some leg presses or you could do leg extensions and leg curls, can do these machines and keep it safe, right? Just do and make sure you go in a bit hard. What's there left for them to do? They think they've got nothing else to give because that's what their job is, right?
Speaker 1:And online as well, they want you to think the but really it's not about like you know what to do most of the time and there's these little pieces of advice to make it easier for you. If you really live the eightytwenty rule for life and this is not the same as 80% good foods, 20% bad foods, know what they say, this is the Pareto Principle of 20% of effort delivers 80% of results. If you truly see this and everything it changes your life. What's the 20% of the time you spend each day, what is that 20 of time that delivers 80% of your results? When are you most productive in the day?
Speaker 1:Because that usually is the most productive, You do more now one or two hours and you do the rest of the day. You all know this, you wake up early in the morning, you do more in the first two morning hours and you do the rest of the day. You might be an evening person. This is everywhere, you've to find it. When it comes to strength training, it's here.
Speaker 1:Two strength trainings with some exercises pushing it on the last set, at least put effort in. When you think of running, when you think of nutrition, it's just calories and protein, calories and protein, calories and protein. Don't worry about the rest of the details for now with fat loss as your goal. We move on from there. What about another thing for fat loss?
Speaker 1:What are steps? It's clearly steps. Not fasted cardio for forty five minutes in the morning, not sixty minutes of cardio after you work or in the evening, you gotta do this all the time, just get your step level up, be a bit more active day to day. Why you put more effort into the things that don't bring much back? It makes no sense to do this.
Speaker 1:You are literally putting yourself in a position where you're expending most of your energy and little results and you think it's the thing to do. So I think an important lesson for you there is Friday. So you might be thinking I haven't even worked out this week, what's the point, I'll start Monday. If one workout in a week and it's two workouts really that the recommendation is and you think what's the point if I can't do three or five? But if recommendation is two, we do one now, brilliant.
Speaker 1:That's 50% of the recommended strength training for the week. You can still get it in now. You can still do something today. And even on the weekend you can do something, you can get familiar with the workout, you can like go through the motions of it and then yeah you can actually on Monday you've got a base to start with, don't like wait all the time to only if it's gone by Thursday or Friday and a tough shift the week is gone, you've got three days left, Friday, Saturday, Sunday But you still got today left. So today is a day you could have a really good day if you wanted to.
Speaker 1:If you wanted have that perspective, you could. So go and write your one big thing down. If you're trying to get back into workouts, make today a day you do it. Even if it's fifteen minutes, I promise. Fifteen minutes in and out, twenty minutes.
Speaker 1:Just do that. Crack on. If you really want to lose fat, well you need to get a grip on how much food you're eating. So you need to track or you need to be at least aware of what you're eating and bring their attention back to that. If you're getting your steps in, feet aren't gonna magically walk.
Speaker 1:So when can you fit walking into your day? Do you wake up and go for a walk? When is it? Do you wanna read more? Well, you're not gonna just randomly read more.
Speaker 1:You gotta see it as a thing you do. Anyway, have a good day. Hope that was useful. Scott Minimalist Fleer here talking to you and I'll be back on Monday for another podcast but have a good weekend but remember to focus on today now and I'll see you all soon.