I have the honor of hosting a very special guest, Tyla Serro, for the first ever interview on this podcast. Tyla is not only an engineering colleague of mine—we work for the same aerospace company—she finds time to train and compete as a raw powerlifter, placing second this March in the 2022 USPA Connecticut state championship in her weight class…and only missing first in a close tiebreaker against her training partner.

I invited her on the show because I think her story is very relatable to those of us who are working professionals with busy lives, maybe a full-time job and a family, who still want to find a way to get “big, strong, jacked, swole, ripped, fit, tone, lean, healthy” whatever term you want to use. Tyla juggles work, family, and the challenges of life using a sustainable approach to training and nutrition, so I wanted to pick her brain on how she makes it all work.

RELATED LINKS

• Tyla Serro on Instagram @tylaserro
• RTL Powerlifting Training

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

Last year, I went under the knife for a microdiscectomy, a type of minimally invasive spine surgery where a portion of a herniated disc is removed using microsurgical tools.

In this episode, I share my story of what happened, how I dealt with low back pain in the context of health and fitness, the surgery and recovery process, and lessons I learned along the way.

I hope my story sheds light on some productive ways to think about pain and injury and even inspires you to consider multiple options when faced with a situation like this.

Medical Disclaimer
One last thing. I am NOT a medical practitioner and am NOT dispensing medical advice in this podcast. Everything I say is my personal opinion and experience. Do NOT use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition. Consult your own physician for any medical issues!

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
06:18 - Different types of pain
10:18 - Book recommendation for lifters dealing with pain
12:10 - Things to try before considering surgery
13:53 - My surgery process
19:27 - Movement is the key to recovery
20:51 - A surprise surgery two months later
21:48 - One year after back surgery

RELATED LINKS

• Book about dealing with pain through screening and corrective movements:
  Rebuilding Milo: A Lifter's Guide to Fixing Common Injuries and Building a Strong Foundation for Enhancing Performance (by Dr. Aaron Horschig)
• Starting Strength article about "pin firing" for elbow tendinopathy:
  Elbow Tendonitis: How It Occurs and What to Do About It

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

Let’s say you’re a busy, working professional, perhaps in your 40’s with a family, a mortgage, and a high-stress job. But you want to improve your health through lifting and nutrition. That’s why you’re listening to this podcast!

The last thing you want is a one-size-fits-all training program that has you lifting six days per week with 90-minute-long sessions. Something so out of whack with your current lifestyle is not exactly sustainable, and it’s a surefire way to bomb out within weeks if not days.

On this podcast, we focus on maximizing your time, inside and outside the gym, for a sustainable, long-term approach you can stick to consistently. Results only come with steady application over time. That is the “first principle” of this whole deal, or else the rest is irrelevant.

Therefore, you’ll probably want a training program that has you in the gym maybe 3 or 4 days a week (of course, if you can swing more and that makes sense for YOU, go for it) for maybe an hour, not counting commute time. Although we talked about the benefits of a home gym back in Episode 8, today I want to cover how to maximize your lifting sessions regardless of where you train so you can get the most out of your workout without it taking forever, while also producing the results you want.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
02:09 - Having a plan before you leave your house
04:25 - Avoiding distractions and focusing on the work
09:09 - Selecting programming that fits your schedule
11:51 - Warmups: do you need them and how to do them
19:16 - Supersets: a valuable time-saving approach for some movements
21:52 - Rest periods: how long, avoiding distractions, and some hacks to save even more time

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

As a follow-up to the last episode on losing weight without losing muscle, I want to address the frustration many of us have experienced with either not being able to lose weight or hitting a plateau, usually in the form of scale weight no longer going down.

This is a complex, nuanced topic that ultimately comes down to understanding the root cause behind being unable to lose weight and taking back control so YOU can do something that will nudge your fat loss back in the right direction.

That’s not to say this is your “fault” but rather that, 99% of the time, we just need to identify the problem so we can apply the right solution, and YOU are empowered to uncover the problem with the right tools and information. That is the goal of this podcast!

Every fat loss phase is just a bit different, even for an individual. You may sail through and shed the pounds with ease, or you may struggle with fits-and-starts, ravenous hunger, and the feeling that there’s just something else going on beyond calories in, calories out.

However, at the end of the day, it really is about energy balance. The challenge is identifying which SIDE of that balance (diet vs. metabolism) and accounting for recent changes and other factors that could mess with this balance, often in subtle ways like a sneaky ninja trying to sabotage your hard-earned progress.

Before I get into the list, a few caveats. First, these reasons aren’t always in a vacuum: you may be experiencing more than one at the same time, and some of these may be interrelated. Second, I want to reiterate this isn’t a blame game; while a weight-loss stall ultimately comes down to energy balance, it can indeed be challenging to identify the true root cause, which often stems from something out of your control. My intent is to empower you to take back control.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
02:42 - The 20 common mistakes that sabotage your fat loss goals

RELATED LINKS:

• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use discount code "WITSANDWEIGHTS")

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

The last episode covered why gaining weight while training hard is an effective way to get lean by packing on muscle, increasing metabolism, and making it easier to lose fat later.

Today we’re tackling the “losing fat” part of getting lean. If you haven’t listened to episode 12, go back and do that first. If you’re a newer lifter who is not extremely overweight, your best gains will come through hard strength training and eating at maintenance or in a slight surplus to improve your body composition. I recommend focusing on building muscle before you worry about losing fat.

However, if you’re a late novice or intermediate lifter who has spent time in a building phase and is ready to “lean out” through a fat-loss phase, this episode is for you. After all, most of us want to maintain a healthy weight, and we can’t keep packing on muscle (along with some fat) forever. The body adapts, muscle-building slows down, and sometimes we need to “rev the engine” by taking a break, cutting some weight, and resetting ourselves for the next building phase.

The challenge is losing weight at a reasonable pace while retaining as much of that hard-won muscle as possible through appropriate training and nutrition choices. Just as we want to maximize muscle size and growth while gaining weight, we want to minimize muscle loss and maximize fat loss while losing weight.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
02:39 - When to enter a weight-loss phase
03:57 - How fast you should lose weight
11:42 - Training and diet strategies to retain muscle
17:29 - Metabolic adaptation and "diet breaks"
21:58 - Biofeedback, especially as you get really lean
23:35 - Recent and current fat-loss phases

RELATED LINKS:

• MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use discount code "WITSANDWEIGHTS")

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

It seems that everyone wants to get “lean” these days. There’s almost an obsession with six-pack abs, visual muscularity, and thinness if you’re to believe the legions of fitness influencers who appear ready for an instant photo shoot on any given day.

I’ve got nothing against maintaining a healthy weight, and in fact this podcast is all about finding a sustainable way to get stronger, build muscle, and stay healthy. But if you were to ask yourself, “what exactly is my goal when it comes to body composition?,” most of us would answer that we want to be lean, as in lower our body fat percentage.

The reasons why are many, from improved performance and cardiovascular health to just feeling and looking good, often measured by whether we can fit into our favorite pair of pants again.

But it often leads to a cycle of aggressive dieting and gaining back the weight (and then some) in an attempt to “see our abs” rather than a steady, consistent approach that results in “leanness” without the extreme dieting, hunger, and disappointment at failing to reach this coveted goal.

Today I want to talk about a refreshingly sustainable, enjoyable approach to getting lean by gaining weight! This episode is all about the benefits of using a nice, long building phase to develop muscle, increase your metabolism, and set yourself up for a much easier dieting phase later on. You’ll be able to perform better in the gym, eat more, and eventually reach your goal without (as much) suffering.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
02:47 - The right and wrong ways to get "lean"
09:22 - Why gaining weight is the sustainable approach
20:58 - Recent successful 15-week building phase
39:11 - Listener Q&A: wearables, calories, and dieting

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

You decided to get stronger, improve your body composition, and become more healthy. You selected a simple but effective barbell-based strength training program and committed to consistent training. During your first year of lifting, there will be many new things to learn, habits to develop, and temptations to lead you off your chosen path.

After going through the process myself and talking with hundreds of other lifters, I wanted to share some thoughts to help you keep making progress and avoid some common pitfalls that could derail you. When I started lifting seriously and intelligently a few years ago, it was thanks to those who came before me that I could avoid making some big mistakes while still figuring out what worked for me as an individual. I hope these ideas help you in your first year of lifting or really any time during your fitness journey!

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
01:36 - Set yourself up to develop successful new habits
04:13 - Objectively measure your progress
05:55 - Avoid program hopping
07:59 - Stop obsessing about getting "lean"
10:06 - Start obsessing about form and technique
11:14 - Get feedback through a coach or online group
14:39 - Prepare for early gains, things getting hard, and not failing reps
18:43 - Use biofeedback for health and avoiding injury
22:06 - Learn as much as you can about lifting

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

Sometimes advice from the fitness industry can be overwhelming. There are so many ways to program your lifting, eat your food, and meet your goals that we often get lost in the small details.

At the end of the day, it’s the BIG details, applied consistently, that contribute the most to your progress and result in sustainable habits of success in getting big and strong, losing or gaining weight, and sculpting a healthier version of you.

In this episode, I wanted to take it to a higher level, so to speak, and go over 7 “big priorities” for strength and fitness that, if you can do these at least 80% of the time, will help you accomplish your goals.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
01:23 - Get moving!
03:17 - Keep programming simple and fun
04:54 - Get enough sleep (recovery)
06:44 - Get enough protein (as part of hitting calories)
10:53 - Make your own food for most meals
13:21 - Track progress
16:18 - Enjoy the PROCESS (the results will follow)

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

Today I share some helpful and sometimes counterintuitive things I’ve learned over the last year about fitness and nutrition that either changed my mind or were completely new to me.

As a forty-something-year-old lifter who has only been training seriously and effectively for the last few years, I used to believe a lot of nonsense—ideas, myths, preconceptions, assumptions, whatever you want to call them—that often held me back from progress or, even worse, were counterproductive.

Chances are that you’ve heard some of these too, and it’s quite possible you’ll be surprised by some of my thoughts in this episode—or perhaps not. At the very least, I hope you’ll learn something new that will help you continue to remain skeptical, ask questions, and become even more informed on your journey to greater strength, better health, and long-term consistency.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
01:35 - #1 More muscle means you can eat more
04:09 - #2 Metabolism is determined by body composition
05:55 - #3 Genetics are no excuse
07:00 - #4 Calories are the LEAST important reason to exercise
08:47 - #5 Walking has more benefits than you think
12:17 - #6 Carbs are not the enemy (they are crucial for training)
14:34 - #7 Losing weight is as "simple" as being in a caloric deficit
15:51 - #8 There are multiple ways to make objective progress
17:52 - #9 Being strong makes it easy to recover from injury or surgery
19:14 - #10 We don't know everything yet but learn new insights every day!

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏

One of our big goals on this podcast is sustainability and consistency, and the whole process of going to the gym is a huge barrier for many of us.

The hassle of preparing your clothing, gym bag, nutrition, and then factoring in drive time, weather, convenience within our schedules, compounded by access to random equipment at the gym, sharing a rack or barbell with other members, and sometimes dealing with policies like “no deadlifting” are just some of the many reasons we find to just hit the snooze button and avoid our workouts altogether.

That’s why building your own home gym can be a huge factor in developing good habits and consistency with your workout routine. It saves a ton of time, you can choose exactly the equipment you need, you can control the entire experience, and you can be more flexible with your training schedule. It’s a simple but highly effective step you can take to eliminate excuses and keep making progress.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• The pros and cons of a home gym
• Where in your home and how much space you need for your home gym
• What type of flooring to use
• Basic equipment to get started for the main lifts
• Extra equipment for accessory and bodybuilding movements
• Nice to have equipment to cover almost everything else

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
02:14 - Pros and cons of a home gym
08:46 - Location and space requirements
15:15 - Flooring
17:49 - Basic (must have) home gym equipment
31:35 - Extra home gym equipment
40:35 - Ultimate gym equipment
44:34 - Final thoughts

RELATED LINKS:

• Fitness Reality Power Rack (Amazon)
• Vertical Leg Press (Titan Fitness)

💪 Join Eat More Lift Heavy - a 26-week evidence-based strength training and fat loss program for lifters over 40 to build muscle, lose fat, and maintain your weight loss and physique (even in perimenopause and menopause)

📱 Get Fitness Lab - AI-powered coaching app for evidence-based fitness and nutrition over 40. Real-time, personalized guidance that evolves with your data and lifestyle to help you build muscle, lose fat, and body recomp

👥 Join our Facebook community -  For adults over 40 who want to build muscle with strength training and lose fat with evidence-based nutrition. Support for lifting weights, hypertrophy, fat loss, and hormones.

👋 Ask a question or find Philip Pape (evidence-based nutrition coach) on Instagram & thanks for making us one of the best fat loss and nutrition podcasts for adults over 40! 🙏