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You're listening to episode number 17 of the fat fuelled female podcast.
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Welcome to the fat fueled female podcast. I'm your host Marja Chow, a holistic nutritionist, personal trainer and proud dog mama of two. I am obsessed with helping women achieve their goals, feel confident in their skin and become empowered health advocates. This podcast is designed to help ambitious women thrive on a low carb, high fat lifestyle. So tune in each week as we talk all aspects of nutrition, improving your fitness enhancing your mindset so that you can take inspired action and live your best life all starting from the inside out. I'm so happy to have you here. Now let's get started.
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Hello, hello and welcome back to another episode of the fat fuel female podcast where we talk all the things health and nutrition so you can take full control of your biology and live your best freakin life that you desire and deserve. I am your host, Marja Chow, and today we're going to talk all about exercise.
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And the title of this episode is called are your workouts preventing you from hitting your fat loss goals. And I'm going to give you my five top tips when it comes to working out that I want you to consider.
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So first off, I'm going to explain the difference between physical activity and exercise working out because they are not the same. So physical activity is going for a walk hiking, taking the stairs over the elevator at work, walking to the grocery store to get all the goods taking the dogs or dogs for a walk. Leisurely riding your bike around the neighborhood rollerblading or at rollerblading at a park, if you have a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, trying to hit those 10,000 steps a day. Okay, that's what most people go for. It's that 10,000 mark.
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So physical activity is what we should be doing every day. Especially if you have a sedentary job and you sit at a desk all day or in front of a computer, you don't really have much movement.
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Yes, it's even more important that you get more physical activity in. If you're someone who does landscaping or construction or a labor intensive job, of course, your body is going to be doing physical activity all throughout the day. So maybe it's not as important to go for a walk with a girlfriend or go for a hike because you're moving your body all throughout the day.
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Another thing to mention is if you are sedentary and if you work in front of a computer or corporate job, or whatever it is another or if you work from home, another great option is standing desks. And these are becoming more common for people who work at home. Or people even companies have been adding them to the workforce. So instead of you know when we're sitting, our shoulders can be rounded, our hip flexors can be tight.
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So it's a little bit more beneficial if you're on your feet, even if it's not all day. But say you work eight hours a day and you're on your feet, maybe four hours of the day, maybe something to consider talk to your boss or maybe something you want to implement into your home office. Okay, so moving our bodies doing physical activity. Our bodies are designed to move everyday and it's vital we move these beautiful, amazing freakin machines every single day.
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But to further improve our health, adding weekly exercise is key. So let's talk about exercise. Exercise is planned. It's structured, there's a timeframe, it's usually repetitive and there are intentional movements or ways you are deciding to train.
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So exercise go into the gym lifting weights, maybe you're doing plyometrics or doing bodyweight exercises, kickboxing, or boxing, spin classes, yoga classes, Pilates classes, those are all forms of exercise.
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So what type of exercise should you do? I always say the type of exercise you should specifically do is the type that lights you up and that you can be consistent with.
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If you enjoy doing boot camps, continue doing boot camps. If you love lifting weights, that's your jam. If you like Pilates, if you like hot yoga, continue doing what you get excited to do, right, the last thing you want to do is do a form of exercise. You're like I freakin hate this, then you're it's a lose lose, right? You want to be doing something that you're excited about and be that's going to provide results.
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If you're doing something you're not excited about, then it's probably not going to get you the results you want because you're going to have some form of subconscious blocks from getting you the results you want because you don't like doing it in the first place.
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Okay, so let's start off with tip number one.
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I want you to pay attention to your stress levels and the amount of time and type of training you're doing You are doing so a lot of people are walking around in a high state of stress. You know, they're if you look at someone's just examine your own stress level, like, how full is your plate, how many things on a scale of one to 10. One being you are in lala land life is peaches and cream, it is rainbows and butterflies, your stress level is like non existent, you have a little bit of stress because we need a little bit of stress, right? But and then 10 is like you want to rip your hair out. Okay, so examine where your stress level is, if your stress level is at an eight or a nine, you know, tipping it over the edge with doing say you're doing intense hit workouts, or CrossFit classes, or hour long spin classes, those types of exercise may not be best for your hormones.
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Sometimes if we're under such chronic stress, doing a long workout and be working out at high intensity can actually bring on adrenal burnout if you're burning the candle on both ends. And so it may be more beneficial to reduce the length of your workouts and reduce the intensity. And take it a little bit step further.
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Maybe get rid of one of those training days and throw in a gentle yoga class, like a restorative class or a yin yoga class. Because you have two parts of the two branches of the nervous system, you have your fighter flight, that's your sympathetic, and then you have your parasympathetic, which is your rest, digest, relax, restore meditate.
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Most people if you are under a lot of stress are in fight or flight are in sympathetic. So the thing is, if you are stressed out at work, you have a deadline, you are fighting with your partner, you are stressed about finances, your kids are driving you crazy.
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And you are working out on top of that and doing hour long spin classes or our hour long CrossFit classes. That is all sympathetic, that is all fight or flight that is all cortisol, adrenaline firing all the freakin time.
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So if you have a physical stress, right, like you're working out, or if you have a mental stress, or an emotional stress, right, like you're going through a hard time with your wife, or your husband, same physiological response happens internally, you are in fight or flight all the time, a lot of people are in fight or flight all the time.
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So it's so much more beneficial. Get rid of one of those workouts, go find even on YouTube, do a restorative class at home, do a yin class at home. Or maybe you want to be in the environment, you feel a little bit more you like being in that environment, you like the ambience of being a yoga studio, go do that.
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Bring your body into rest, digest, restore, regenerate, focus on your breathing, because if you're operating at an eight or a nine or a 10, at your stress level, we want to combat that we want to lower and reduce your stress.
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So A). shorten the workouts, shorten the intensity, and then B). add in some form of spiritual practice some form of some form of parasympathetic, relaxation, that is going to calm your nervous system down.
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Okay? And this is something that you're going to have to examine and see where your stress level is, and how can you mitigate it and reduce the stresses in your life. Now, if you love hits sessions, you're like, hey, well, I'm really stressed.
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But hit sessions, you know, that's my jam. That's where I feel way more clear headed. And I feel ya sister if that's you, I love battle ropes, burpees jump squats, like I feel so lit up.
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And if you can explain that feeling. When your heart's pumping, you're sweating. And you're just like, I just crushed that workout like that compares to nothing. So I get it. If you love hiit training, again, you know yourself and what lights you up. That's important.
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But what I want you to consider again, scale back on the hiit sessions. If you're doing five a weak heart, can we really do three? And maybe can we shorten the time if you're doing 20 minute sessions, let's do 10 or 12 minutes.
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And let's incorporate some form of yoga or breathing or some form of just weight training, where we're not actually bringing our heart rate to such a high level.
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Okay, as much as exercise is to improve our physical fitness. It's so much more than that. I always say gym is a therapy session for many people. And it's a it's a therapy session for me. It will instantly improve your mood after you train and sweat. And you don't have to train for an hour to know that you did a good job. You can train for 10-15 20 minutes and still have all these benefits mentally right.
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So think about it, people who exercise often and it's part of their routine, I find this is just my own personal opinion, they're in happier moods, you know, they just feel better because they're releasing and secreting, or producing all those natural endorphins.
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And exercise is what we are supposed to do. Okay, so just look at the intensity, how long you were training. And again, if you love hit sessions, like I do, scale back on the time, and scale back on how many you are doing a week.
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Okay, so this is the perfect segue into Tip number two, when it comes to cardio exercise, there is a right way and a wrong way to do cardio. First off, you have a hormone called HGH, human growth hormone. And it's kind of referred to as our anti aging hormone.
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So this hormone is secreted when you lift weights, when you work out at a high intensity, like doing hiit or doing sprints. But it is not secreted. When you do steady state cardio, when you're doing long bouts of cardio, on the treadmill on the elliptical like 45 minutes an hour, when you're doing that you're adding extra stress, you can be adding extra stress on your body and increasing your stress hormone cortisol, which can keep you from losing fat.
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So there isn't much benefit in changing your body composition, reducing some body fat by doing 60 minutes of on the treadmill or elliptical, you're not going to be building muscle mass, okay.
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So you have different energy systems, you have your aerobic, and you have your anaerobic, so your aerobic system is me jog in semi jogging, and like speed five on the treadmill, I could have a conversation pretty much to the person next to me, maybe your speeds 4.5, maybe it's six, we're all different, right?
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But for me, I could go like speed five, and have a conversation to the person next to me. So aerobic means with oxygen, anaerobic means without oxygen. So that would that would mean me on the treadmill, sprinting at like 9.5. Like there's no way I could have a conversation with anyone.
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So what I'm trying to say here is interval training will get you using both energy systems. So say if you like doing cardio, let's say do 20 minutes, and you're on the elliptical and you're doing, you know, maybe you're doing one minute of aerobic and then you're doing like 10 seconds of anaerobic.
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So you're one minute of like, you can have a conversation. And then 10 seconds that you can't have a conversation, right. So we want to be training both energy systems. And we don't want to be doing long bouts of cardio for 45,60 minutes.
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If you want to, you know, do cardio like that. Make that your physical activity outdoors. Go for a walk, go for a hike, take your dogs out, have human connections be in nature, don't do your cardio as exercise, do your do your cardio as your physical activity.
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Now, if you love doing cardio at the gym, just try to do the interval training, not the steady state, long amounts of cardio and I would say leave your cardio to like 10 to 20 minutes max, that's just my own personal.
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That's just my own personal belief. You can take it or leave it but you know, you're not gonna get much benefit in changing your body composition. By walking on a treadmill guys, it's just not going to cut it.
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Okay. Now, of course, there are exceptions to every rule. If you're training for half marathon or a full marathon, well, I just want to tell you, you are a hero, because that is a hefty goal.
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So yeah, your goals are going to be different than someone your goal is different. You're going to be doing steady state cardio because you're focusing on endurance training.
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But for the average person wanting to reduce body fat, and who's not training for a marathon marathon. The last thing you want to do is do endless amounts of cardio.
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Because the more muscle mass you have, the more calories your body burns at rest. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue and having more muscle will keep you metabolically healthy.
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And it will give you the curves you desire in all the right places. Now again, say you're a runner and you love running you've been running forever you're like that's my jam. This is my physical. This is this is my exercise.
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This clears my mind I'm out in nature, I sometimes will do it with a friend it covers so many aspects of my life. Beautiful, love it continue doing that. But what I want you to consider is incorporating some form of resistance to training.
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And this is the perfect segue into tip number three. So no matter what type of exercise you like I just said running whatever type of exercise you like that lights you up that you can be consistent at, yes, continue doing that.
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But what I want you to consider is incorporating some form of resistance training into your routine.
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So here's why, at approximately age 30, you know, we can begin to lose anywhere from 3%, up to 8% per decade of muscle mass. And this is referred to as a sarcopenia.
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Now, just because it says 3% to 8% does not mean you have to lose three to 8%. The best means to build muscle mass, no matter what age you are, is to do resistance training. Now, of course, there is aging, and you know, we can't prevent everything. But if you can only lose one percent, every decade or 2%, I'm going to take that over not doing anything and lose 6% 7% 8%.
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Think about it in 30 years, you could lose almost 30% muscle mass opposed to maybe losing five or six or seven, you know, I'm going to do the resistance training and preserve my muscle mass and keep my body metabolically active and have the physique I desire right.
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So I'm not saying you have to become a bodybuilder unless you like that unless you're like I love bodybuilding, right? I'm saying you have to have a load. So you have to have some form of resistance to build and maintain the muscle mass you have.
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So you can start off your body is a machine your body is resistance. Start off just doing some air squats at home if you're really novice to exercise, modified push up, okay. modified push ups are hard if modified push ups are hard when you're starting out. And then when you build your way up and you get a full on push up that's not modified. You are gonna feel like a superstar.
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When my female clients were able to do full on push ups, it was like a celebration. Okay. So again, your body is a machine, start off there.
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Then add some dumbbells, okay, start with two, then go to five, right? Even just doing squats, holding dumbbells or lunges, holding dumbbells.
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Again, add some resistance, add some load, even bands bands are great as well. Okay. So again, no matter what type of exercise you love you enjoy that lights you up, add some form of resistance training into your weekly exercise.
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Okay. Tip number four, crappy workouts are the most important. Yes, I said that crappy workouts are key. Why? Because those are the workouts you probably didn't want to do. Say it's gloomy outside.
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I live in Vancouver, Canada, it can be so rainy. And when it's dark at four o'clock, it's like, oh, let's just Netflix and chill. Let's call it a night, right? The coach is looking pretty damn good. Skip the dishes or DoorDash. Let's let's go right.
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But those days when you don't want to go and you decide to train and you go to the gym, or you go to your fitness class, you took a step, you took a vote for yourself that you are the kind of person who works out rain or shine.
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The more steps you take in making fitness a priority, the more that this becomes a part of your identity.
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That's why I say crappy workouts are the most important because it's easy to train when we feel motivated or life is going away. Or we're seeing results or it's sunny outside. Oh yeah, let's go for it. Let's go for a run. It's beautiful outside. But what's going to set you apart is going when you don't want to freaking go. Do you think every day I'm like, yes. I'm so excited to train. No, most of the time I am but if my sleep was crap, if I'm on my period, if I'm bloated or if I'm just having a day, I don't want to go to the gym.
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And those days, my workouts kind of suck. They're not the best because I'm not operating at 100% But it's those workouts that are the most important okay, because I'm reminding myself no matter what this is just part of who I am I showing up going to the gym getting my sweat on this is who I am. This is my identity.
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And one more thing I want to add on here is motivation is garbage. Because for many people motivation, just like when it's raining outside when it's gloomy when we have our period when we sleep bad motivation can be very conditional, okay.
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And I teach my clients a lot of this in the fat fuelled method about limiting beliefs and conscious and subconscious mind and your motivation He lives in your conscious mind. And your conscious mind is only 5% of your mind, opposed to your subconscious mind, which is 95%.
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So it's so hard to strum up the motivation and the energy all the time, with only 5% of your mind. Whereas when you have a desire, a purpose and are creating that identity for yourself, and you have a deeper meaning, you develop discipline. And that will get you to the gym on the days when you don't want to go.
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And you know, the saying, I really regret doing that workout - said no one ever. But again, going back to tip number one, look at your own personal stress levels. Exercising and moving your body will help with your health.
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And you know, mitigating your stress, as long as you don't overdo it work at workout at too much of a high intensity for a long period of time, and do too much steady state cardio.
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So let's move on to tip number five, repetition, doing the same workout over and over and over and over again, just like I teach my clients about sustainable weight loss, your metabolism needs to go through phases and cycles to be healthy and to maintain the results you desire. So it's the same thing when it comes to exercise.
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You can't just do the same thing over and over again, because your body's going to adjust and adapt to it and it's going to plateau. So you need to progressively overload. So say you're brand new, to exercise your novice or like I'm going to start with maybe two and a half pounds, okay, you're going to do that.
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Maybe you do that for six to eight weeks. And they're like, Okay, that's like really easy. Okay, then let's increase that to five. Okay, then that gets easy. Let's increase that to eight, then that gets easy. Let's increase that to 10.
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Right, you get what I'm saying you want to increase the load. Another thing you can do is increase the reps and just change it up also, so you're not getting bored. Remember, more is not always better.
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We don't want to be doing these long prolonged exercises. It's about working smarter. Okay. Not not always working. Yeah, it's what working smarter and it's not, you know, it's quality, not quantity.
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Okay. So let's recap. Remember, physical activity and exercise are not the same thing.
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Number one, examine your stress levels, shorten your workouts, if you're at a high if you're operating at a high level of stress, but still get it done. Just shorten them. And don't you don't have to do prolonged periods of exercise, right? Ditch the cardio, use that as physical activity, unless you love doing cardio, okay.
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And if you're doing the cardio, do the intervals, okay, focus on both of those energy systems.
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So this is number two. Okay, stop doing steady state cardio. If if you want to do cardio, right, do intervals, use your aerobic and your anaerobic system. And then if you really love doing cardio, okay, like on the machines, incorporate some resistance training, incorporate even your own bodyweight, some light dumbbells, some bands before doing your cardio, because this requires more energy and more focus.
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Number three, do resistance training, please, please please to build and preserve your muscle mass. Okay. Again, whatever type of exercise lights you up that you are consistent that you enjoy doing. Continue doing that, okay?
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What I'm saying is add some resistance training into your weekly routine. Because remember, age 30, we start to decline in muscle mass. So let's preserve your muscle mass as best as you can.
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Because remember, muscle is a metabolically active tissue.
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And number four crappy workouts are key get to the gym, when you don't want to get to the class when you don't want to. You will feel a million times better, you will become so much more disciplined if you go when you don't want to go.
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Because you might start this habit. Oh, I got my period. I'm not going ah, I didn't sleep well. I'm not going and then it's just all these excuses. Just go right map out days you're gonna go there non negotiables how I look at it. If I have a client call if I have to podcast if I have to do something for work. That's a non negotiable I have to do it. Okay. So same thing with working out. I schedule it. It's a non negotiable.
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It's just as important as a live training. It's just as important as a one on one client. It's just as important. If you don't schedule it, how can it be important okay.
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And then number five, switch up your workouts, increase the load, increase the reps, increase or change the exercises up, just change it keep your body guessing so you don't plateau. So that is everything for this episode. I hope these five tips gave you a lot more clarity and inspiration around exercise. And again, do you boo.
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Do the type of exercise that lights you up gets you excited, but please incorporate some form of resistance training. Your future self will thank you for it.
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That is everything for this episode and I will catch all of you beautiful humans next week. Bye for now.
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Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed what you heard, make sure to subscribe to the podcast. And if you feel you got some extra value from this episode, it would mean the world to me. If you could head over to Apple podcasts or whatever service you're listening to this podcast on. Drop a five star review. Let me know your thoughts in the show. Doing this really helps more people like yourself by the podcast. And if you're not already following me on social media right now is the time you can find me on Instagram at Marja Chow for all your nutrition tips, tricks and inspiration or visit my website at Fat fuel female.com where you can download my free seven day keto meal plan with recipes. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will catch you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
