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The Last Diet Podcast 🎙️
The Last Diet Podcast is for people who want to rebuild a strong, athletic body that supports their life — not consumes it.
We talk training, nutrition, structure, and identity for people in their 30s–50s who’ve been fit before and want a clear, sustainable way to perform well again in work, family, and life.
No extremes. No gimmicks. Just standards, structure, and long-term performance.
Welcome to the last diet podcast. The last podcast you'll ever need to create the last diet you ever need. I'm your host, Mike Finnegan. Let's dive in. Yes, team.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the podcast. I hope everyone's having a good start to your week. It is Monday, February 16. It's a long weekend here in Canada and Vancouver. So just doing a little bit of work today.
Speaker 1:I wasn't fully in it. I took a bit of a bit of time off this morning and had a bit of a a later start. But the show must go on. We actually had a a great call this morning with our group. I had Mick McDermott, who was on the podcast before, in talking to the community and just gave me a real buzz this morning.
Speaker 1:It's so hard to replicate, like, connection with people and stuff. Something I definitely do more in person and definitely something I will think about in the coming year. But enough of my rambling. Hope everyone is having a good start to the week as always. Guys, change of pace today.
Speaker 1:We're going to be talking about training today, right? Over the last couple of weeks, I've probably been talking a lot about just identity and lifestyle and behaviour change and everything that goes with that. So today I want to get a bit more practical. I want to talk a bit more about what kind of training brings about maximum results from a physique point of view, especially, Okay, muscle gain, building shape, building like the athletic physique a lot of people are looking for. So I'm going to caveat this first of all by saying this advice is for people that are kind of like a late beginner, right?
Speaker 1:So if you're someone who isn't doing any training at the moment, the most important thing for you is to get into the gym and just do stuff. Get a gym instructor to give you a general plan, start getting familiar with the exercises, start getting familiar with the machines, lifting some weights, staying away from the jump, just always doing cardio. That's where you need to start. If you are someone who is just starting off your journey or is like thinking about doing weights, but you haven't started yet, then this advice is probably a little bit further along. Now it's still gonna be useful.
Speaker 1:But if that is you, I would say just get into the gym and start. That's the hardest part for most people. But once you get confidence to start getting used to exercises, then you can start thinking about how you can start maximising it. This advice today is more so for people that are training for a while but feel like you're spinning your wheels a bit or you you feel a bit stuck, you're plateaued, maybe you saw some early progress but you just don't feel like you're actually making any progress considering how much time you're spending training. So you might be training maybe two to four times a week, you might be in the gym for an hour or more, but you feel like you're not really seeing any results.
Speaker 1:It might be good for your head. You might like the fact you're getting out of house. It might make you feel a bit better, but you're not seeing the results. That's a very hard place to be. It's a very, very, very frustrating place to be.
Speaker 1:And I've been there before. I absolutely have been there before where I just I was showing up, but I wasn't actually getting the results that my effort and time deserved. Right? So with this episode, I'm gonna almost troubleshoot this with you. And I'm gonna help you understand what you need to start thinking about and doing in order to make progress.
Speaker 1:It's a lot simpler than you think as well. At the very end of this podcast, I'm gonna summarize the main things to focus on. It's very simple stuff, but it's the stuff that you need to do because if you don't do it, you're not going to get any results beyond the early stages where someone goes into the gym. At the start, you can go into the gym and you can look at a weight and you'll start to progress because our body is just so unadapted to the stress. But as you start to progress a little bit, you get your kind of new begins, you want to call it that, where you get initial results from starting.
Speaker 1:Once you get that, then things you need to be a bit more structured with your actual attempts after that, Okay? So the first thing I'm gonna talk about here is the most optimal plan is always gonna be the one that you can stay consistent with. This is where a lot of people go wrong. They're looking for the most optimal plan. Give me the best plan to build muscle and build strength and build shape.
Speaker 1:But that optimal plan won't work for them because they haven't got the time and consistency to do it. The thing with gym especially and strength training and building muscle, it has to be something you do for months and months and months before you start to see real progress. So there's no point in going into this optimal program for a few weeks, and then you'd fall off, and then you start again to fall off because you're getting nothing out of it. And on paper, it looks fantastic, but it's not gonna suit you. So getting a plan online, like a generic plan online, it's not gonna work for you, right, because you have to take into consideration where you are starting from, but also how much time you have to actually give to this.
Speaker 1:Okay? So think about that. So for example, during COVID, I was doing two sessions some days. So I was doing eight sessions a week because I had all the way around the world, and it was easy to do it. So I was doing like two days.
Speaker 1:So I'd do one session in the morning, one session even. Had gym at home. I had all the time in the world to do the sessions. I had all the time in world to eat, cover, de stress. There was no problems outside of that.
Speaker 1:But that isn't the case in today's world, right? Because after COVID, things seem to have got busier. So first of all, doing eight sessions a week now would actually just would crush me because I have so much other stress going on. I'm trying to balance so many other things. And for the people that come to me, especially busy parents, busy professionals, they can't afford to be doing six sessions a week.
Speaker 1:You just can't. It won't work. And even if you manage to do it, it's gonna put so much stress on you that it's gonna end up being like a net negative for your actual results. Okay? So that's the biggest caveat at the start.
Speaker 1:Optimal for you is what you can actually consistently stick at, okay? So before I get into the principles of what you need to do, right, you have to ask yourself the question, first of all, what do you truly want from your training and your weight sessions? So if we're today, we're just talking about building a strength and building some muscle, okay? But what do you truly want from that? What do you want to look like?
Speaker 1:Where do you wanna get with that? Because some people don't think about this enough. And then your goals might be actually just to get a little bit stronger, build a little bit of muscle, look like you lift weights, look a little bit athletic, but you have no dream or intention of becoming a bodybuilder. You have no intention of wanting to get shredded lean and look incredible. You mightn't actually value that that much.
Speaker 1:But the problem with this is we're so binary with things. We think, well, in order to get any results, I need to do what they're doing. The person that's bodybuilding, the person that's trying to get the best physique in the world, the 1%, you think that's what you need to do, but it's not. So if you actually figure out, first of all, what do you truly want from your weight training? What are the results you want?
Speaker 1:Then you can actually start to realize, okay, well, what do I need to do in order to get that? So what's the trade offs? What do I need to give time wise, effort wise, in order to get that? And you'd be so surprised that it actually isn't as much as you think. And this is where a lot of people go wrong.
Speaker 1:They try to do too much because they think that's what's gonna get the best results, but then it ends up them not doing anything because it's too much. So instead of doing like as always, it's always somewhere in the middle. Instead of doing a little bit at the right intensity and the right volume, it's kind of a case of trying to do too much, then you end up doing nothing. It's just overwhelming. Okay, so what do you truly want from this?
Speaker 1:And then on top of that, what's realistic for you as well, as I said at the start? So if you want to be in bodybuilding shape, but you have a family of four and you're working fifty hours a week and you have hobbies and you have other responsibilities, then you have to ask yourself the question, is it actually truly something you can commit to right now? Because honestly, unless you have a lot of time and a lot of extra resources and just real passion for this, nobody wants to become a bodybuilder. It takes away from so much of your life, right? So the beauty of this is this is what I do.
Speaker 1:I don't train for crazy, crazy, crazy results. I just train because I want to look like I train. I want to feel strong. I want to look relatively well. And I also want to live a flexible lifestyle and enjoy my other values as well.
Speaker 1:So this is exactly what I teach our clients to do. Because nobody comes to me who wants to be elite bodybuilding or wants to have the most amazing physique of all time. Nobody wants that. When people come to me generally for them, it's like, I just want to be stronger, fitter, healthier, look like I train, look like I'm somewhat athletic. That's it.
Speaker 1:And you can get there without extremes, right? So first of all, right, I want you to just take a second now, and I want you to audit your current training. So if you wanna actually write this down, it would be really good for your awareness. Like, a lot of times we don't take enough time to actually reflect on what we're doing, whether that be with training, nutrition, anything else, like anything else we're working Sometimes we go full on and we're just like, yeah, do, do, do, but we don't actually reflect and see, is it actually working? Audit this, from what you're currently doing with your training, if you're currently doing something at the moment or have been doing something recently, Rate out of five, your enjoyment of it.
Speaker 1:So how much do you truly enjoy that training plan you're doing at the moment? So just rate out of five and just don't take no at moment. Just the first number that comes to your head. Five being, I love it, really enjoy it, and I wanna keep doing it. One being I have to drag myself to the gym whenever I do, and I actually, I hate it.
Speaker 1:I hate it, but I have to do it just to get results. Okay? Secondly, thought is your intensity. When you're in the gym, like, good is the workout? Are you going through the motions, or are you actually putting in a good effort?
Speaker 1:I see the extremes of this, but generally, for a lot of people, they try to do too much, but then the sessions they're doing aren't great. So there's a lot of being on the phone. There's a lot of taking lots of rest. There's a lot of going through emotions but not actually pushing himself. There's a lot of just doing the same weights all the time.
Speaker 1:So be honest yourself. How intense is your is your workout? So five is I push every set I do, like, to failure. And I feel after every session, I feel drained almost. It's a really good work.
Speaker 1:Okay? Third thing, your consistency. Out of five, how consistent have you been with your training in the last three to six months? Okay. So how many weeks have you been able to actually hit all the targets you've had to what you've actually been looking to do?
Speaker 1:Okay, so again, consistency is subjective because what are you actually striving for? So how many sessions? So for example, if your aim was to hit three sessions a week, how often actually have you ticked that box? So five, again, being really consistent, one being very rarely. Then the fourth and final one, progression.
Speaker 1:The progression even. How much have you progressed in your training in the last six months? So progression to me is, have you got stronger at your main lifts? Or have you added more reps to some of your lifts? So that's how you track your actual progression.
Speaker 1:So you do more reps on the same weight, or are you doing heavier weights than you started with? And how much have you progressed? Again, five being progressing pretty consistently, week on week, one being I'm pretty much stagnant or regressing. So just have a look at that now and see on paper which ones of them are you struggling with. For a lot of people, and there's no judgment here, for a lot of people, every single one of them is probably great.
Speaker 1:Now you might say, well, enjoyment isn't bad. So it's about a two or three. That's Okay. But intensity isn't great. It kind of go through emotions.
Speaker 1:Consistency has been Okay. Been a lot of ups and downs with that. And then progression, not just. So if you're someone who is really low on all them things, this is what I want you now to focus on going forward. Okay?
Speaker 1:It's really important if you want to see progress to get these things right Because without them, you're just gonna be winging it and spinning your wheels. And look, that's fine for some people. If you want to go to the gym and you enjoy the outlet, it's good for your head and you're fine with that, there's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if you're someone that truly wants to see results for the effort and I always find, look, if you're gonna be there anyway, you may as well you may as well get the most out of it.
Speaker 1:You may as well enjoy what you're doing and see where you're going with it as well. Because there's nothing worse than feeling like you're just going through the motions, but there's no actual vision of what you want out of it. Okay? So here are the rules you need to think about if you want to progress. So the first thing is volume.
Speaker 1:So volume, when I talk about volume when it comes to weights, it's how many sets of each muscle group are you doing per week. Okay? So, for example, if you're doing a chest press, that will count as volume towards your chest and a little bit of volume towards your triceps as well. But we'll keep it simple and we'll just say the main groups, the main areas you're working. Just the smallest groups like the biceps and triceps and stuff, they're going to be hit a lot anyway as you're doing the bigger compounds.
Speaker 1:But for most people, for beginner, late beginner, I would just say focus on mainly compounds with a small bit of isolation work. So compounds are basically anything that works to two joints at once. So if you're doing a chest press, you're working your shoulder joints, but you're also working your elbow joints as well. So you're working your chest, but you're also working your triceps because two of your joints are moving at once. Okay, that's compound exercise, so you're working more muscle groups in one exercise.
Speaker 1:An isolation exercise is when you're just doing one muscle group. So if you're doing a bicep curl, you're just working biceps. So that's just isolation. You're isolating the biceps. If you're doing tricep dip, it's triceps again, isolation.
Speaker 1:So we just focus on compounds. Compounds like the bench press, chest press, pull down machines, pull ups, bent over rows, any of the main lifts like shoulder presses, squats, dead lifts, all of them are compound exercises because they work more than one muscle group at once. So coming back to the rules, right, volume is so important. So for you, right, you want to be focusing on, I would say for most people, probably 10 to 14 sets per muscle group per week. So that would look like, Okay, let's just say you're doing three sessions a week.
Speaker 1:Maybe you're doing a whole body every day because it just works for you. You're doing every muscle group and every day. So that would basically look like if you wanna hit 10 reps or 10 sets of chest, you would do maybe bench press on one of your sessions. Maybe in the second session, then you might do an inclined dumbbell press. And then maybe on your third session, you might be doing four sets of cable flights.
Speaker 1:Okay? So you do three sets on session one, three sets in session two, and four sets on session three. So that would give you 10 total sets of chest per. So I would say for most people, getting between 10 to 14 is good, especially because some people do too much. Like you did, too much volume but not enough good volume.
Speaker 1:It's volume, but it's not actually it's just going through the motions. It's lots of sets, not a lot of intensity. So that brings me to the second rule. Intensity needs to be high. So we have to get to these right.
Speaker 1:So volume intensity is most important thing when it comes to building muscle and strength. So when I talk about intensity, all I'm talking about here really is your proximity to failure at the end of a set. For example, if your goal was to do 10 reps of the bench press, by the last rep of whatever weight you were doing, you should be close to failure. You should be saying in your head, I've only, at the very, least, I've only two reps. One rep, I couldn't have done any more.
Speaker 1:That's what you should be thinking the same. If you're going through a set of exercise and at the end, you kind of just stop because you hit your target, but you didn't really have to, Then your body doesn't need to adapt. Your body's like, I got this, you're fine. This is within the realm of the fitness I already have. I don't need to adapt or get stronger.
Speaker 1:Our body's adaptive, that's what it does. Everything we do is survival. So any strength characteristic, any muscle growth, it's basically our evolutionary body's decision to adapt because it feels like we need it. So if we were getting chased by a tiger in the woods, it's like if we need an ability to get stronger to climb a tree or whatever to get away, then tigers climb trees maybe. But our body basically would need to adapt to that to keep us alive.
Speaker 1:So anytime we give it something to do, we overload it, then it adapts. So that's the whole point. We overload, adapt, overload, adapt. That's why recovery is so important as well. But if we don't have a high intensity in our trend, if we don't go close to failure, your body's like, I'm fit enough to do this.
Speaker 1:I don't need to adapt. Whereas if you go like you're really close to failure, so you're you're doing exercise, like, last trip, body basically responses, oof, that was hard. I'm not quite strong enough. I need to get stronger so that next time we do this, can do it easily. So it's an efficiency thing for the body as well.
Speaker 1:So if you don't go close to failure, your body doesn't need to that. That's the key thing here. So what I would say to most people is if you're even doing 10 sets of each muscle group per week, the muscle groups that you kind of really want to build anyway, right? If you're doing 10 sets a week and you're taking each exercise within a rep or two of failure, you know you pretty much can go much further, then you're in a good place. What a lot of people will do is the opposite.
Speaker 1:They'll do like They could end up doing 20 sets of muscle group, but each exercise they have 10 reps in the tank. They could have kept going and going, but they just stop. So your body is doing you're doing loads of jump volume is what we call that, where you're not actually getting anything out of them. But you're just wasting your time. So for you, you want to take a close failure.
Speaker 1:And I would say less sets is gonna work better because you can actually put intensity and effort into it. Whereas if you do loads of sets, you're just going through the motions and you're just direct, whereas can be more for a lot of people, especially if you're someone who struggles with time as well is perfect. Time efficiency as well, which works really good. Okay, third thing, Rep range and technique is really important. So when it comes to rep range, people have asked me, how many reps should I be doing of each exercise?
Speaker 1:There's no right or wrong with this, right? But I often say to people to play around with it and see which feels best for you. So for isolation exercises like biceps and triceps and stuff, I always find kind of like a higher rep range works better. You just get a better pump. It feels bit better.
Speaker 1:Then if you're doing biceps and you're trying to do five reps really heavy, you just don't get a whole lot of it. It's a lot of like, it feels hard and your joints are a bit sore, but it doesn't actually give you a whole pile. So I would say for isolation exercises, triceps, just working within the ranges of maybe 12 to 15, even to 20, it can work really well. For more compound exercises such as bent press or squats and stuff, I would say moderate reps work well for that. So anywhere between six to 12 reps is a great range for them.
Speaker 1:So play around with that and see what works. The key here is no rep range is better than other rep range. Golden rule is take the exercise close to failure and it's all pretty much the same. So if you're going close to failure in the exercises, then you're golden in most things. But obviously from a practicality point of view, you also wanna find the rep range that just feels right for you and gives you the best kind of fatigue on the muscle group.
Speaker 1:Because some people will do exercise and they're like, Oh, that was really hard. So I'll be like, Okay, well, you've done squats. Yeah, that was really hard. It's like, Where was it really hard? And you're just like, I don't know, soul.
Speaker 1:It's like, oh, we wanna work on more than your soul. So for that, we want to be working the specific muscle groups. So if you're doing the squat, you should be really feeling it on your quads, depending on the type of squat you're doing. If you're doing bench press, you should be really feeling it in your chest. It shouldn't just be generally hard, systemically really fatiguing, but you're not actually getting any out it.
Speaker 1:So that's where you can play around this model with the rep range and just find what works. But your technique's really important as well. There's no point in lifting heavier weights and your technique just going cat because what that's going to do then is just you're going to get injured, but also you're not even putting the strain on the muscle group that we're targeting. So you obviously want to have good technique, push it quite close to failure, and give it good intensity, and then just find, like I said, direct ranges and exercises that suit your body. So not every exercise is going to suit you either.
Speaker 1:Sometimes doing a different variation of exercise work better for some, depending on their their makeup in terms of like your your your limb length, your injury history, different things like that as well. So different exercises will work different for people. But you don't have to overtake it. Just finding the ones that quite suit you, Okay? Last thing, no program hopping.
Speaker 1:This is by far the biggest mistake I see with people. It's like, oh, I need to freshen it up. I need to keep the muscles guessing. It's like if you don't stick to a programme for longer than a couple of weeks, then you're not going to adapt to the exercise. Remember, the whole point of doing this is that we get used to an exercise, we learn to do it, but then over time we get stronger and stronger and stronger.
Speaker 1:If you're changing up your programme every couple of weeks, you have no chance to actually adapt the exercise. So your body is getting living. So basically all you're doing is workouts. So if you're constantly changing the programme, you're just doing workouts that feel hard, you get a bit of a buzz, but your body never adapts to it. So the difference between doing workouts and in a program is a program is something that is built in sequence to get stronger over time, and a workout is something you do just to burn a few calories and get sweat on.
Speaker 1:Okay, so a program is something that we want to be focusing on if we want to get the best results from a strength and muscle point of view. So guys, that's it in nutshell. Look, I have obviously went into a lot more depth in different things. But the basics of this for you, really, is to find consistency with exercises, find the exercises that suit you, do the right amount of volume for you, and then do the right amount of intensity. That's it.
Speaker 1:Not sure. Don't overthink it. The volume thing especially, if you're doing the right amount of volume, you'll know because you'll be finding it hard, you'll be getting a bit sore, but you won't be absolutely beat up every single day. If you're feeling really run down and really beat up all the time, you're doing too much. So we wanna be in that sweet spot of like, I'm a bit sore.
Speaker 1:That was a bit hard, but I can do another session. And the idea of this is if you get really good at that, eventually, you'll come to the point where you'll actually you'll need a break for like a week. Like I took last week off the gym, or the week for us off the gym because I had done six weeks previous since my Hawaii trip in Christmas. I did six weeks of building, building, building, building, building, and my body just needed a break at end of it. I took a week refreshing, now I'm back for block two of the program, where now I'm gonna be building for the next five, six weeks again.
Speaker 1:And by the end of that, I'll need another recovery. But you have to earn that. You earn that by consistency. If you're on and off the whole time, then you don't need a break, actually you're breaking just naturally. So that's what you're trying to get to.
Speaker 1:Right, guys, I'm gonna leave it there. I hope that helped. What I'm gonna do is over these next few weeks, I'm gonna do a few more sessions like this, just building a small bit into more training side of things and specifically the exercises you can work on and the different ways you can pinpoint certain areas of your body if you're not happy with it, how to change your body composition and stuff, and as well how that links then towards the recovery side. So the nutrition, the sleep, the hydration, all that stuff. Because like I said at the start, the whole point of you doing workouts to break down the body is so that you can actually recover, adapt, and build a body back up.
Speaker 1:So we need to get two sides of the equation with this. So this is the breaking down part, and we're also gonna have to talk a little bit about the building backup part. So, guys, hope you enjoyed the episode. As always, other than that, have a fantastic week, and we're back in on Thursday with another session. Thanks for tuning in to the latest episode of the Last Diet podcast.
Speaker 1:If you wanna inquire about how you can join the Last Diet lifestyle and find out more about our coaching, then the show notes below has a link to coaching inquiries. Just fill that out, and we'll be in contact as soon as possible. See you in the next one.