Years ago I had the opportunity to interview fitness author Tom Venuto. Tom is author of Burn The Fat, Feed The MuscleBurn The Fat, Feed The Muscle and creator of the Burn The Fat Inner Circle. Tom Venuto is one of my mentors and I am happy to call him a friend. His book Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle is a classic and contains top notch information.
Here Is The Transcript Of The Interview With Kyle and Tom Venuto:
Kyle Battis:
Hey, this is Kyle Battis from www.AskTheFitnessExpert.com here with an awesome, awesome call tonight. We got Tom Venuto. So this is a special introduction for the call. I just wanted to chime in to let you know this call was absolutely maxed out. The response for this teleseminar was huge.
I have a 500-person limit on my phone line, for my bridge line, and we actually maxed that out on the first day. So Tom actually paid money to buy even more phone lines. So we had 791 people on this call.
So instead of cutting off registrations and turning people away, or even charging for the call, Tom paid money out of his pocket to get as many people on this call as we could. So, thank Tom for the generosity of getting as many people on there as he could.
So looking at the email registrations too, we had people from all over the world. We had people in Australia, in Kenya, we people in England in the UK, all over the United States. People were setting their alarm clocks, waking up at the wee hours of the morning. It was just overwhelming.
There were emails I got in anticipation of this teleseminar were amazing. Tom has just touched so many peoples’ lives with his program.
So without further ado, I’m gonna jump right into a bio for Tom. And then, I’ve edited this teleseminar so that we’re jumping right into the main content and you get to hear Tom sharing some awesome, awesome pearls of wisdom. This guy is just tremendous. You’re gonna love this.
So, here’s a bio for Tom. I think the majority of the people listening to this call probably are already familiar with Tom and his work. But for those of you who don’t know who Tom is yet, let me give you a quick introduction before we welcome him onto the call.
Tom Venuto has over 23 years of experience in bodybuilding and 17 years of experience as a fitness professional. He started training in 1983 and he’s been competing in bodybuilding since 1989. And he’s won and placed top three in more competitions than I have time to list. He’s also been involved in the fitness industry as a personal trainer, health club manager, nutrition consultant, and a freelance writer since 1988.
Tom Venuto:
Tom also has a formal education in the fitness field, including a Bachelor’s Degree in Exercise Science. And, he’s also a certified personal trainer and a certified strength and conditioning specialist with the National Strength and Conditioning Association.
What Tom is probably known best for is being author of the Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle program, which the best selling diet and fitness e-book on the Internet today. And it’s been the number one e-book for three years straight on ClickBank.
Tom is also an Internet publisher and prolific writer with over 200 articles online and also offline in print magazines, such as: Iron Man, Natural Bodybuilding & Fitness, Men’ s Exercise, and many, many others.
Tom has been a mentor of mine for many, many years. He’s been a role model, a teacher, an ally, an inspiration, and a friend. I always enjoy speaking with Tom and I’ve been looking forward to this night for some time. So it’s with great pleasure that I present to you this recording of the teleseminar I did with Tom Venuto. Enjoy the teleseminar and really listen to what Tom shares. This information is pure gold.
You brought that up to a pound a week then you’re right in line with what you should be seeing. If you lose a pound a week or just under a pound a week and you say to yourself, “Oh, this is painstakingly slow,” well then, of course, if that’s what you’re focusing on, then you gonna feel like throwing in the towel. But if you focus all your attention on forward movement and progress and you say to yourself, “You know, I’m losing a pound a week so I’m real close. I am successful and now it’s just a matter of I’m gonna begin enjoying a greater degree of success and, even better, I’m gonna bump it up to two pounds a week.” All fat, not weight, or water, or muscle, it’s all fat.
So first, be clear about an appropriate, and realistic, and reasonable goal in terms of the timeframe. That’s the first step. The next step is to decide, okay, what’s gonna have to change to increase your level of success? You’re moving forward. You’re successful. You’re slowly successful, so you just want to increase it. And it’s a basic principle you have to live by; more of the same brings more of the same. So something’s gotta change.
Okay, you can change your nutrition. You can change your cardio. You can change your weight-training program. But if you keep repeating what has been bringing you three pounds a week, you’re gonna keep losing three pounds a week.
So, the first thing I would ask is, “Are you doing a structured weight-training program for your whole body?” Using large muscle group exercises, I would say, about three days a week. ‘Cause you mentioned you hand weights with aerobics, but you didn’t say whether you’re doing a formal strength training program. ‘Cause one of the things I mentioned when I mentioned the Burn the Fat program, what makes it so successful is the four pillars of success. You’ve got the big four: nutrition, cardio training, the motivation, weight training. All four have to be in place.
So I think that’s a good place to start is looking at that big picture. Are the weights even in place? Sometimes that one change alone can make all the difference.
If you look on the nutrition side of things, you mentioned 1200 to 1400 calories. Definitely in the safe range, especially if you’re small, short, small framed, somewhat inactive, but maybe on the low side. So one of the things you may want to test is one of the techniques that I recommend in my Burn the Fat program, which is zigzagging or cycling your calories.
Which means, instead of staying on the low calories all the time, which can tend to make your metabolism a little bit sluggish, especially when you’re down around 1200 and definitely if you’re below 1200 a day. Take a higher calorie day at least every fourth day. And it may seem counter intuitive to you. And it may seem like, “Oh I can’t eat 1600 or 1800 or, God forbid, 2000 calories. I’m gonna get fat.” But, you would be stunned what that can do for your metabolism. And, it actually makes it easier to stay in your program ‘cause you get to look forward to eating more every fourth day. And you can call that a high-calorie, high-carb day every feed day. It’s not a cheat day though because what I’m suggesting is you eat more clean food. And, the idea here is kind of like throwing some fuel onto your metabolic fire. Stimulating your metabolism. Letting it try to bring those fat burning hormones back up a little bit.
And then, looking at one of the other pillars is your cardio. You mentioned you’re at 45 minutes, six days a week. So, I mean, that’s pretty high activity level. So more cardio is probably not the answer at this point. I mean, I would almost, if you had to, tell you to compromise your cardio to get the weight training in if you are limited on time. Provided you’re healthy and don’t have any cardiovascular or orthopedic problems, you can bring the intensity up a little bit to burn more calories in the same time. Whatever length of time you are doing your cardio – one thing people don’t think about when they look at their cardio workouts is progression.
Yeah.
It’s a given that your weight training must be progressive. It’s a principle that’s taught by just about everybody. But, most people don’t think about making cardio progressive. So go in and repeat an identical cardio workout every single time.
But, you’re not going to be on a fat loss program forever. You’re gonna hit a goal. You’re gonna hit a long-term goal. So, as your working up towards that’s goal, that’s a peak, you can gradually bring up your cardio intensity, frequency, duration. In this case it would be the intensity. Bring the intensity up for a week. Go back, measure the results in a week and see what happens. And adding that in conjunction with the weight training and restimulating the metabolism, by actually eating a little bit more every fourth day, I think it might work wonders.
That’s great. And how long – you say to go in back the drawing board and incorporate one of these changes to your workout or your nutrition plan. How long should they stick with that change and kind of see how it works and then maybe retest? What are some of the things they retest Tom? Should it be like every week, every day, every couple weeks? What do you usually recommend?
Well I don’t think a day is enough time to really get measurable changes. For example, if you were measuring body composition. If you were doing a caliper test, or even a more precise body fat testing method, you’re not gonna see a very significant change everyday. But you can see a significant change every week and absolutely every two weeks.
But I prefer to get frequent feedback because if you get feedback every week you make a change. You may want to work with one variable at a time. Make one change, stick with it for a week, remeasure your progress. Seven days, see how your rate of fat loss is. You’re up to a pound-and-a-half, two pounds a week, beautiful, that one change did the trick. Keep doing that. And if your fat loss slows down again or if you plateau, then you test another variable for another seven days.
Kyle Battis:
So give it a week. Give it at least a week. Some people like to allow two weeks before they redo a weigh-in or a body composition measurement. But, I think there’s a lot to be said for getting frequent feedback, just not so frequent that the measurement is statistically insignificant.
Right, right, right. And another I want to touch on. We talk about weight training, and I know you go into depth in this in your book, but I’ve seen a lot of people that say, “Oh, Kyle, I do some weight training at home.” And then the more I probe, the more I found out sometimes, women especially, tend to be doing, even guys too, they’re weight training program might not be the most ideal program.
And you mentioned multi-joint, complex exercises. Could you go into, real quickly, what some of the multi-joint, complex exercises are? I know a lot of people will be doing just bicep curls, or tricep kickbacks. Guys will be doing bench presses, endless amounts of bench presses, but they’re missing out on some these other big, structural exercises. So could you touch on some of those and maybe one or two key concepts that you share in your book about what a good weight-training program focuses on?
Well the weight-training program depends a lot on somebody’s goals and a lot on somebody’s need for time efficiency. And we have a lot of fitness professional today, and I know you’re one of them, that specialize in time-efficient workouts and workouts that can even be done at home.
Now, what I present in Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is a very fundamental, bodybuilding style of training. And it’s a fabulous way to gain muscle and to lose body fat. But I will say it may not be the most time efficient thing for somebody who’s extremely short on time. The more time efficiency is an issue for you, absolutely the more important it is for you to spend the time that you do have on those compound exercises. Basically the idea is get the most bang for your buck in the time that you have allotted.
Now let me give you an example. If we’re talking about lower body training, the king of exercises, of course, is the squat because it involves the entire body. It could a barbell squat. I mean for beginners it could very well be a just bodyweight squat or a bodyweight squat up against the wall with a Swiss ball. That’s a compound exercise because you’re working the entire lower body. The main emphasis may be on the quads, but you’re getting the glutes, you’re getting your hamstrings. You’re really involving the whole body and you’re also getting a metabolic, metabolism- stimulating effect. And you’re getting a high-energy expenditure, a high calorie expenditure. So you’re burning a lot of calories just with that exercise.
Lunges is another great example, compound, multi-joint movement. And variation of lunges. There’s probably about 100 different ways you can do a lunge.
You could even do combined exercises. For example, like a lunge with a press, which even involves a greater muscle mass. Step-up is another example of a compound exercise.
Now an example of an isolation exercise on the lower body is a leg extension machine. Or, a inner and outer thigh machine is an isolation exercise. There’s nothing wrong with those, per se, especially in a bodybuilding program. I would often recommend a leg extension in a bodybuilding program. But if you’re pressed for time, you wanna stay with your compound exercises. On the upper body your talking about, primarily, presses, pressing and rowing exercises.
And if you want to take this to the next level, in terms of time efficiency, then you can start to use supersets. And this is an absolutely fabulous technique. It’s one of the best methods you can use. Where you would combine – you can either do a same muscle group superset. For example, that would be going from a squat to a lunge with no rest in between the two exercises. Or, you can do unrelated muscle group supersets. For example, you might do a squat and then with no rest go into a rowing exercise.
Yeah, that’s great. Cool. And what are some – so those are great I love exactly what you’re sharing. And what are some of the key principles – I guess I’m kind of leaning towards – what are some of the things people need to do with their weight-training program once they’ve got some of the better exercises picked and they’ve got a good exercise routine set, how do they kind of progress? And, you talk about changing it every four weeks or so, what are some of the things they should change and how do they keep the progress going so they don’t hit those training plateaus?
Well there’s a principle in weight-training that is “everything works but nothing works for long”. The body’s very, very adaptive. And, it’s probably one of the bigger mistakes people make is to stay with the same program too long. They’ll stay with it for months. Or, I’ll sometimes hear of somebody who’s been in really the same workout for over a year. I think it’s a very good idea to change workouts weekly. You wanna stay with a program long enough so that you have continuity. And continuity just means that you’re building on your previous workout. That allows an adaptive response to take place.
So if your first workout was squats with 135 pounds for three sets of ten, on your second workout your goal is to beat that. And you’re either going to increase your reps, you could bring your reps up to 11 or 12, or you could increase your weight, you can bring it up to 140/145 pounds. You could even decease your rest intervals so that you’re more done in less time, and that’s a form of progression. And you’re gonna continue that for about a month and then you’re gonna change your workout. A lot of things can change. The most obvious thing you think of is the exercise. And the exercise choices are almost limitless.
There’s a guy by the name of Bill Pearl. And a lot of the people in the call may be familiar with him, some people may not be. He was Mr. Universe five times back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He won his last Mr. Universe when he was 42. He wrote a book called Keys to the Inner Universe, the encyclopedia on weight training, and I believe it has something to the effect of 3,000 or 4,000 different exercises.
It is an encyclopedia.
For example, if you wanna do a thigh exercise, you could open up the book and there’s about 300 different leg exercises. Most people don’t realize that there’s this much variety. And you could, if you wanted to, literally, continue to change your workout programs every month and never repeat the same routine over and over again.
Right.
But the exercise is only one thing you can change. You can change your repetition range. Sometimes your best bet is to stay with the same exercise and change your reps. If you’ve been working in, say, a six or eight rep range, you may on the next month go up into a higher rep protocol and go up to 15/20 reps.
Great.
Kyle Battis:
And you could change your program design where, if you were doing straight sets, you can begin to do supersets. The variables are really, really endless. Most –
Right. And you share a lot of those in the book. Is that correct?
I do list all the variables. Yeah. Burn the Fat is first and foremost it’s a nutrition program but you can’t get idea result without all four of those big four. So there’s a pretty thorough chapter on weight training and it does list all the different variables that you can change.
Great. And so once again folks, if you don’t already have a copy, go to www.askthefitnessexpert.com/burn, B-U-R-N, and remember that special “Mission Abdominals” promotion going on if you’re listening to this call live.
I know we got off on a couple tangents there, Tom, which is great. I think people love to hear that information. But getting back to some of the questions. This person says, “I know I’m not perfect however I’m really conscious of what I eat. Eating five small meals a day consisting of protein, vegetables, whole-grain carbs, avoiding processed foods whenever possible. I play racquetball, tennis, have recently started lifting weights, low reps, heavy weights. My body fat percentage is extremely high. It has not budged since beginning to lift. What am I missing? It’s very frustrating. I’m concerned about the body fat percentage, not necessarily how much I weigh.”
Well there’s not enough information to troubleshoot accurately everything there. It helps to really see the exact training program, the exact diet, and a lot of lifestyle factors involved to figure out if somebody’s at a plateau what needs to be done. But there are some things she’s definitely doing right and we could start there by saying more of those things.
First of all, you don’t have to be perfect. You said you know you’re not perfect. And again, if you can go by the idea that if you’re at least 90 percent your gonna get pretty good results. You’re eating five full meals a day, so you’re on the right track there. You’re getting your lean protein, vegetables, whole-grain carbs; you’re on the right track there. Keep doing more of that. You’re avoiding processed foods; keep that up.
You’re hitting the weights and that’s great. You mentioned heavy weight and low reps? Again, we mentioned the importance of changing workouts, so that may be a variable you want to change is the repetition range. And, depending on how low your reps are, you may want to consider working more in a eight to twelve rep range. I mean if you’re using a very low rep program, three to six reps for example, that could certainly build some muscle and build strength. But, it’s primarily geared toward strength and has more of a affect of strength in terms of training the central nervous system. That’s the stimulus provided from low reps, whereas when you higher up a little in the reps, in the eight to twelve rep range, you’re stimulating more of a metabolic effect and even a hormonal effect.
There’s quite a bit of research that showed in the ten rep range can increase the growth hormone release. So that may have a little bit more of an impact on your body composition. And even using that superset technique if you haven’t been using that, so super-setting in the eight to twelve rep range may be a good change. And, again, going on compound, big muscle group exercises.
With cardio, for a lot of people recreational types of cardio, like tennis and racquetball will absolutely do the trick. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who just competed. He’s 42- years-old and he won his procard in the WMBF Bodybuilding Federation at his first competition.
Wow.
And he does absolutely no conventional cardio. He would never get on a treadmill. He would never get on a Stairmaster. He lives in Arizona so he’s got all this great country and he mountain bikes.
Oh, wow.
And that’s all the cardio he did. Sometimes he would go out and do a quick 20/30 minutes. Sometimes he’d go out and do two hours. So if you’re doing something like that – in your case it’s tennis or racquetball, in his case it was mountain biking – and it’s working for you, keep doing it.
If you’re at a plateau, once again, more of the same gives you more of the same. I’d recommend maybe considering a change in the cardio program. Maybe if you’re doing recreational-type of
cardio, consider more of a formal-type of cardio, whether it’s in the gym, or if it’s on a bike, or treadmill. Experiment maybe with – see the tennis and the racquetball is a lot like interval training, which is really the popular trend right now because you’re going in spurts and in sprints. Usually the advice these days is back off of the long-duration, low-intensity – increase your intensity and do a shorter duration. But in your case you might want to do the reverse.
So the principle sometimes is change. And it may not be in the direction that conventional wisdom says it goes in. But sometimes just a change and changing all your variables and changing the type of training your doing can work. Can really work wonders.
That’s great. Yeah, and you mentioned earlier if you never change anything, nothing’s ever gonna change. So adding that variety into your program, be it both in weight training and with your cardio training, can be ultra powerful and help kind of break you through some of those training plateaus and get you back on the path towards results. And that’s what this next person is interested in achieving.
He’s hit his training plateau. He said he’s been, “Trying to lose weight, fat specifically, for the past ten years by following a sensible diet and exercise plan, only to just maintain my weight. When I stop I end up gaining even more weight back. The reason I end up stopping is because I feel very, very fatigued. I’m wondering if because back in my early teens, all the way through my 20s I used a starvation-type diet to maintain a lean body and maybe that has caused me to lose so much muscle that I can’t burn fat effectively. And, if that is the case, how do I regain the muscle I need and how do I improve my damaged metabolism? I’ve been working out with weights and doing cardio for over a year but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Is there something I’m missing?”
Well the metabolism may be slow. That may exactly be the case but that doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way.
Right.
And if you have lost muscle – you can absolutely increase your metabolic rate in a variety of ways with proper eating and proper training. If you lost muscle and you know it’s from over-dieting, your metabolism can be sluggish but it can come back up. And you can bring your metabolism and your hormones back into a more productive state.
The first thing that be on your mind is keeping the muscle you do have, of course, but also, first and foremost focusing on adding new muscle. And the only way you’re gonna do that is with serious, serious weight training.
Way too often I see people with fat loss goals who just don’t put the necessary importance on the weight training. It just seems counterintuitive. They think it’s just diet, or they think it’s just aerobics, or they think it’s just diet and aerobics. Especially if they’re female, they think the weight training is gonna make them too masculine or too bulky or they think they’re too old. Whatever the reason, they can’t wrap their minds around the idea that lifting weights really contributes to helping you get leaner.
But it does, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that muscle is literally the engine that drives your metabolism. Every pound of muscle you carry increases the amount of calories that you have to burn just to maintain that bodyweight. And every pound of muscle you lose decreases the amount of calories that you require. And if you keep eating the same – or your metabolic rate declines and you end up at the maintenance or even on a surplus of what used to be a deficit ‘cause your metabolism is decreasing.
So weight training isn’t just a important part of the puzzle. I mean in this case it isn’t just one of the pillars, it’s the most important one of all. It’s critical. And building muscle is important for long- term metabolic efficiency. Because once you put muscle on, as long as that stays on your body, that keeps your metabolism cranking.
Now, you can also increase your metabolism by thinking about short-term effect. For example, doing cardio training that’s gonna have the maximum stimulation on your metabolic rate and the least possibility of decreasing lean body mass through over-training. That, without a doubt, is high intensity, interval training. Because earlier we mentioned about how that type of training, where for example you do a sprint, which is a work interval, for, it could be anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute or even a minute-and-a-half to two minutes. There’s all kinds of different interval training protocols. The ones I like is a minute work interval and a minute rest interval. And that workout maintained for somewhere between 15 to 25 minutes. But the work intervals that are very high intensity literally, really spins your metabolism. And if that’s done in short workouts frequently, that can get your metabolism cranking too.
So, you have some serious weight training, high intensity interval training, and the right nutrition, especially regarding choosing foods with a high thermogenic effect and eating them frequently.
The five to six meals a day rule is something that you really can’t break if you’re concerned about bringing your metabolism back up. You really can’t get away with the two or three meals, or skipping meals. It’s almost an absolute must to eat every three hours. And, with every single meal, form the foundation of that meal with a lean protein. Because, out of all the macronutrients, your lean protein food: your chicken and fish and egg whites and other lean proteins, have the highest thermic effect. Which means just the fact of digesting them and the way that your sympathetic nervous system is increased after eating such a meal, that alone is gonna stimulate your metabolic rate.
I got some emails, Tom, from some folks that do your program. They were starving themselves. They were on that kind of starvation diet. And when they switched over to the small, frequent eating of the meals, not only did they get to enjoy eating again but they noticed that their metabolism was cranked up and that the fat came off their bodies at a much faster rate and it stayed off. And that’s probably a major difference between some of the starvation diets that people try and they go to that kind of negative cycle that you’re just talking about, compared to people that lose the fat by following your system, by feeding the muscle and by burning the fat in a safe and effective manner. Is that correct?
Yeah and the other aspect of the frequent meals is not just the impact on your metabolic rate, and not just the impact on your energy, and not just the impact on the healthy aspects of smoothing out your blood sugar and the insulin, there’s also the aspect of increasing muscle. Because if you’re taking in protein at three- hour intervals that’s the ideal way to stay in positive nitrogen balance, which is the condition where you’re taking in more protein than your body’s excreting and the net effect of increase in muscle, very, very difficult to do with three meals a day.
Right, right.
No matter how well those meals – you could eat perfect meals, but it is very, very difficult to gain lean body mass with a three-meal- a-day eating plan.
And, Tom, I’m a huge, huge fan of eating so your program was just – it was awesome for me. And I enjoy – and people laugh all the time like, “How can you eat so much and stay lean?” But most people, I think, are just missing the boat. I try to explain this type of program but – yeah, so this is great. So it’s almost like magic, voodoo magic, once you start following this type of program and convincing your body to feed the muscle by burning more fat and keeping going. It’s a really powerful effect and it’s fun to eat like that too. So it’s cool.
This person says, their question is, “Can one break up workouts in five ten-minute blocks in the day and achieve any results? Time is my greatest enemy. My work is 12 to 14 hours a day in the movie business. Often I opt for sleep instead of exercise. Could one workout on a short routine and maintain any fitness level?”
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the American College of Sports Medicine has a position stand – the American College of Sports Medicine is really one of the most respected health and exercise organizations out there. And they put some position stands, these documents, and they update them pretty frequently. But last time the ACSM updated their position stand on the recommended quantity and type of exercise for cardiovascular fitness and for body composition, they changed their previous stand, which said your workout had to be 20 to 60 minutes continuous. And they added one little thing. They said, “Ten-minute bouts that cumulatively add up to a total of 20 to 60 minutes are enough to provide benefits in terms of cardiovascular fitness and body composition.”
So, in my opinion, it may not be the most effective way to transfer body composition if the workouts are too short, if they’re like five or ten minutes. But, you’d be surprised at what you can achieve if you could swing 15 minutes, 20 minutes. If you being – see this is a situation for an extreme need for time efficiency for somebody that’s working 12 hours a day and they have a stressful job and a busy life, where high intensity, interval training is very, very appropriate. Two very short sessions done twice a day can really crank up your metabolism. You’d be surprised. And if somebody could only squeeze in five to ten minutes a few times a day, I would say, “By all means, do it.” Because it’s very often people get into an all or none mindset.
Right.
Again, maybe they heard somewhere that the workout has to be 30 minutes. Or is has to be 45 minutes. Or, your weight-training workout has to be 45 minutes to an hour and that’s the way it’s done. And they think to themselves, “Well if I can’t do that, I might as well not do it at all.” And that’s not true. You should do whatever you can do with the time that you have.
So, I mean, what is ideal and what will get maximum results may be different than what you can squeeze in. But, you should always do whatever you can fit in. And, I think if you get really clear about your goals and if you’ve gone through that procedure, written down why it’s important to you, and then you begin to make it a priority in your life, you can find a little bit more time.
I mean I don’t anybody who can’t squeeze in 15/20 minutes a day. And if that’s what you do and you can get than in every day, you could achieve a lot. Three days a week of high intensity cardio and three days a week of a very efficient weight-training program that uses superset training. That’s a very minimal amount of time. Is it gonna give you the ultimate results? Is it gonna win you a procard in bodybuilding? Probably not. But can you maintain a good level of fitness and maybe even improve? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Awesome. Yeah. I think that’s very sound advice for sure.
Okay, this next person is looking for travel meal ideas. “I would like to know what Tom would recommend for travel meals. No need to refrigerate, maybe like a bar or something, that would be accessible as a once in a while type of meal and better than not eating at all when on the road. Something that I could keep in my purse that didn’t have gluten or MSG and maybe even limited in preservatives too. I might be asking for the impossible, but I thought I’d ask. I know it won’t be one of the best choices on the food list but I thought I could get something that was a good choice that would be better than eating a mid-meal when I’m stuffed. Thank you, Tom.”
Oh, I got a good one. Yeah, what do you got?
And it is a best choice. And it’s not impossible and I can even cook it. And if I can cook it, then anybody can cook it.
(Laughter)
Okay. Oatmeal pancakes. Oh, I love these things.
In fact, my favorite way to make them, I call it “high-protein, apple-cinnamon oatmeal pancakes”.
Nice.
Okay. Oatmeal. Old-fashioned oatmeal like Quaker Oats, not the sweetened kind, you don’t want the refined sugar or the flavoring that’s in there. You can make one large pancake by taking a cup of Quaker Oats, you can do about four egg whites or so, you could use a whole egg if you wanted if you didn’t mind the extra fat and extra calories. Chop up an apple; dice an apple, either one small apple or if it’s a big apple, maybe about two-thirds or three- quarters of the apple. A dash of cinnamon. If you use a sweetener you could put in stevia or if you use Splenda. Some people do, some people don’t, you could add that, that’s totally optional. Mix it all together in a bowl. And, stir it up until it’s just like a pancake batter-like consistency. Okay and then you cook it just like a pancake. Spray some non-stick spray on a pan. Pour the batter into the pan. Let it cook on medium heat and when the one side firms up, flip it over.
And it makes one big – or you can make little, small ones too. But that makes on big pancake and that’s a meal for a guy. That would probably make almost two meals for women. You can adjust the calorie count and – oh, I don’t know if I mentioned the protein powder. If you want to increase the protein intake, vanilla- flavored protein powder added in this is delicious, especially with the apples and the cinnamon. There’s a vanilla-praline flavor if you can find that, it’s just killer.
I haven’t tried that one, well, I’ll definitely then. I made these for my girlfriend about a week ago and she absolutely loved them. And they taste great, folks. You might be listening to some of the ingredients and be like, “Oh, wow. I don’t know about that.”
Oh it’s a treat.
Yeah, they’re great.
This thing has saved my life so many times. (Laughter)
Tom Venuto:
I mean if I’m taking a road trip, I’ll make three of these things up. And it’s kind of boring but I know I got food with me. I take these on airplanes with me and you should see the envious, jealous stares. People – everybody says – they’re eyeballing my food and I’m like, “Oh, no. You can’t have any.” I usually end up giving a little piece away and they’re jealous ‘cause they’re stuck with airline food.
But, yeah, and it’ll stay fresh all day long. You can wrap it up in foil. It’ll stay fresh all – it’ll keep all day long without refrigeration.
There’s one other thing you could do is to make your own meal replacement. I did an interview with a guy. His name is Darrin Steen. He’s a really sharp a guy. He’s a personal trainer out of Chicago and he happens to be a Masters Professional bodybuilder. And what’s unique about him, you talk about people who need time efficiency, this guy just opened up a 15,000 square-foot gym and he trains 60 hours a week and he’s got two kids and he’s married.
Wow.
Okay. Now, he’s not only a world champion bodybuilder but he manages to pull of this diet, this six-meals-a-day thing. I mean if he can do it, anybody can do it. I had a chance to interview him about a month ago and he told what his secret is. He makes his own meal replacement. He takes a shaker container. He’ll put in some whey protein and he’ll add oatmeal in it. And then what he’ll do is he’ll add in some ground flax seed. And he slices up some almonds and sesame seeds. And he packs it in dry – these ingredients dry into a shaker. When it comes time to eat, he just pours water in, shakes it up, and he just kind of drinks it and he chews it ‘cause there’s whole food in there.
And I love that idea because he made his own homemade meal replacement. And really the only powdered product is the whey protein, which is straight protein. So he’s got a lot more control over the nutritional contents, the macronutrients, and he’s not taking in a bunch maltodextrin or high fructose corn syrup or whatever else might be in a meal replacement that he doesn’t want. And you talk about convenient, just add water and there’s your meal.
That’s great. And, folks, one of the key things I want you to get out of what Tom just shared with those two recipes is that he thought ahead. If you put yourself in a reactive situation, you’re traveling, you end up at a airport, and you go to try to find something good to eat, you’re chances aren’t that good that you’re gonna find something healthy, supportive that’s gonna fit into your nutrition plan.
But what Tom does, he plans ahead. He brings these things. Packs them ahead. That personal trainer, he just mentioned, planned ahead. So I think that’s a huge, huge mindset difference in a lot of people that are successful and some that aren’t as successful, is the people that achieved great success levels have planned ahead.
They think of these kind of situations like, “Where am I gonna be a day from now? What am I gonna have access to?” And I think there’s just a lot to be said for that. Wouldn’t you agree, Tom?
Oh, 100 percent. If you’re stuck somewhere without food, I mean what are you gonna do? You have to grab what’s there. And you’re gonna end up getting whatever’s in your path. You have to plan ahead even if that means packing a food cooler, which I often do if I’m gonna be traveling. The more you plan the more you’re gonna be able to stick with your program.
Right. So put yourself in that kind of proactive mindset, and think of all those situations before you get in them and that’ll set you up for success for sure.
Okay. So this next person wants to know, “Is a cardio workout more effective immediately after a weight-training workout than when it is performed on a non-weight-training day? I find I can get my heart rate in the fat burning zone range more easily after weight training than when I do cardio alone. In fact, sometimes I don’t reach an effective fat-burning heart rate, even after 30 minutes of cardio, on days when I do only cardio.”
So, I know you already touched on the myth of the fat-burning zone, Tom, but what do you think about this person’s question?
Doing cardio after weight training is a good time to do it for sure. And it’s definitely possible that it might be a better time than others because you might burn more fat relative to carbs. And you could say the same thing about doing cardio fasted first thing in the morning. It’s a controversial subject, but the theory is that you’re more glycogen depleted in both situations so you burn more fat relative to carbs.
But, going back to the first thing we talked about tonight, when you’re doing with what’s fundamental versus what is the details, or you could even say it’s minutia, I would say that now, when you talk about cardio timing, I would say that now you’re starting to get into the details.
So, not that you shouldn’t fine-tune and experiment with when you do your cardio to see that you get the best results possible, but the most important factor is that you are burning a substantial amount of calories by manipulating your intensity, your duration, and your frequency so that you can reach your goals and get the results that you want.
As for getting your heart rate up, the target heart zone is somewhat different than the fat-burning zone. Fat-burning zone is based on the idea that exercising at a low intensity burns more fat. Target heart zone is basically trying to give you a guideline of where to be when you’re training. For most people that’s 70 to 85 percent of your maximal heart rate. Unless you’re deconditioned or a total beginner, out of shape, or it’s a rehabilitation situation, then you might be only 60 percent. But those are just guidelines. Even the best heart rate formula is only an estimate.
Right.
So something I would suggest more than your training heart rate is your body composition test. Every week – what if you never hit your so-called target heart rate but the fat is falling off of you? Are you working out incorrectly because you’re not in your target zone? The end game here is results. Hitting a target heart rate is not your ultimate outcome. That’s a guideline. Fat loss is your outcome.
So tune into your results from your measuring and getting feedback every week and then adjust your duration, adjust your intensity, adjust your frequency, and adjust your program. Experiment, whether it’s steady or interval, based on the results of your body fat testing, your weigh-in, or however else you’re tracking your progress, even if it’s your mirror or your belt size. If you’re getting results, keep doing what you’re doing.
So the answer to every question like this one is, “How’s your results?”
Right.
“Is doing my cardio after weight training what I should be doing? Is doing my cardio first thing in the morning what I should be doing?” How’s your results? If it’s working for you I’d say, “Keep doing it.” If you’re doing it after your workout –or you’re doing it first thing in the morning and you’re seeing – your workouts are suffering and you’re tracking your results and your lean body mass is dropping, then maybe that might not be as good of an idea. So maybe you might want to do it separately.
And the other point I’d like to make is do your cardio when you can fit it into your lifestyle and it’s going to become a habit consistently. That’s more important. Bottom line is the timing is secondary. Getting it done and doing it consistently that’s the fundamental, that’s the primary part.
Right. There’s that difference, like you said earlier, between the ideal and the real. You gotta fit it in there. That’s more important than the best time to do it, for sure.
So this next person, Tom, wants to know, “Is there any thing different about losing the last ten pounds? I feel like I’m struggling now. Can you explain, in detail, what is required to lose the last ten pounds from a diet and training standpoint? I’m specifically interested in exactly how to get ready for a photo shoot. Thanks, man. You rock.”
You got a big fan here, Tom.
Thank you.
And I know it might be hard to give exact training, nutrition plan because you don’t know this person. But any general points you that you could give here, Tom?
Well there is. There is a difference about losing the last ten pounds. But a lot of it is preventable because a lot of it’s self- inflicted. A lot of it’s due to the faulty dieting that occurred over the last 10, 12, 15 weeks or so. So it’s not so much the last ten pounds, per se, as it is, what did you do to yourself to get down to that last ten pounds?
Right. Right.
Did you rush it? Did you insist on losing five pounds a week and sacrifice muscle in the process, which ended up slowing your metabolism down before the last ten pounds was gone? Did you force yourself into starvation mode? If so, sometimes, and again this is a counterintuitive step, sometimes the best thing to do is eat more for a week, especially if you’ve been on a very calorie restricted diet for a long time, especially if it’s months. If it’s more than three to four months, I would strongly recommend a week up maintenance.
And, most of the time, if somebody still has 10, 15, 20 pounds of fat they want to lose they don’t want to do that. It’s one of the best things you could possibly do. Because in a week’s time some very substantial hormonal and physiological changes can take place so that when you go back down into a deficit in your calories, your body recognizes that deficit again, and the fat loss kicks back in.
Another thing I’d recommend is if you – well, in addition to taking a whole week up, or in place of it, you can start that carb cycling or zigzagged of your calories method where you refeed every fourth day and at least bring your calories back up every fourth day.
So basically you have to send your body the message that you’re not starving and that everything is okay. Because the reason that last ten pounds is so difficult is you’re – your body does not like being that lean. Getting from overweight to average body fat is one thing. Getting from average or good body fat to ripped can be a whole other ballgame. When you have an ambitious goal like that –
Another thing to consider is what we said about the level of compliance and the level of discipline necessary to reach a certain goal. So I really think a lot of people really underestimate the degree of effort it takes to get really ripped. If you’re talking about the last ten pounds, I mean really the last ten pounds; I don’t mean the last ten pounds until you’re at average body fat. I’m talking about really the last ten pounds then you have to realize your body is not normal for your body to be at that level. From a survival point-of-view having ripped abs is not a good idea. So your body’s gonna fight you. So sometimes you do have to push yourself if you wanna reach an extreme. Your compliance has to be much higher, you have to be stricter, sometimes you do have to pull back the carbs and sometimes substantially if you’re not very carbohydrate tolerant.
Just ask any bodybuilder figure or fitness competitor. Ask them what it’s like in the last few weeks of a contest diet. They’ll tell it’s pretty grueling, hard work and you’re hungry. If you want to take it that far, that’s the price that you have to pay. If you’re just talking about the final stage of a more average goal then sometimes it’s just as simple as eating a little bit for a little while and then going back to your diet.
I think it was once said, that competition begins where health ends. It’s kind of tough on the body to get, like you said, to get down to that ultra low body fat percentage. Wouldn’t you agree, Tom?
Yeah, but I think it’s important to keep that in perspective and understand that it is a peak. So, when you talk about peak condition, the definition of a peak is that it’s surrounded by two valleys. Or, another way to put that is any condition that you can maintain all the time is not a peak condition. For example, if I compete at four-and-a-half percent body fat, that literally only lasts a few days.
Right.
I stay pretty lean all year round. But now, lean all year round is maybe nine percent body fat. So the lower you want you to go, the more discipline you’re gonna need, the harder you are gonna have to work, the stricter you’re gonna have to work. But it’s a peak. It’s going from good shape to great shape. And when that peak, when that photo shoot, or competition, or summer, whatever the reason it is, whatever motivated you to reach that peak is over, then you kind of scale back a little bit.
And I think your body really – your body likes it when you do that. When you train and you diet in cycles. They call it “periodization training” in sports, where they train up to a peak for the season so they’re really in the top condition and they go through different phases of training. But it’s not all-out, 100 percent all year round. Your body can’t take a nonstop pounding. So you have –
I think if you’re in the northeast, Tom – you’re down in New Jersey, I’m in New Hampshire. We kind of have to train in cycles. You get those natural rhythms. Summer’s coming so everybody’s working hard to get leaner so they can get out and enjoy the couple months of sunshine that we have here in the northeast. And then winter will come – and we have this really long, miserable winter – and so we’re inside training hard all winter long. Maybe building up muscle during that period.
But yeah, that idea of periodization, just kind of going with the rhythms, the natural rhythms of the body and changing your program and maybe changing your goals at different times of the year is a great way to break up the training and to keep your body going and progressing, for sure.
It’s a way that you can push yourself to a very low body fat and do it healthy too. The only thing that’s unhealthy about it is if you try to get to an extreme of body fat and you insist that you’re gonna keep it there and that’s not in synch with your natural body type.
Yeah, that’s absolutely – it’s great. Okay, so this next person wants to know, “When you’re sick, as in like ill, with something like a cold, should you work out or stop until you feel better? PS, your book is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I went from 165 pounds to 120 and I’m five feet tall. I went from 35 percent body fat down to 13. Thank you.”
Wow, that’s great. Congratulations and thanks. .
Well, I think the answer to this one is the obvious one, if you’re really sick, lay off and recuperate.
Right.
If you’re just a little bit under the weather, then based on your own judgment and common sense, you might be able to do some light exercise. What I don’t think you ever want to do if you sick and rundown physically at all is high-intensity exercise. Especially not high-intensity weight training ‘cause of the way that breaks down muscle tissue. But I would even say the high-intensity cardio training, too, would be out. So you’d be talking about light or moderate cardio and very light or moderate lifting.
Intense exercise places some very serious demands on your immune system, on your recovery system. When you train intensely, there’s a super compensation effect that takes place, which is actually what causes the muscle growth. You train – and a good analogy I’ve heard is it’s kind of like digging a hole. You’re down in the hole, figuratively speaking, shortly after the workout. Even literally speaking if you think about the way that you break down muscle tissue; you break down muscle fiber.
Then a little more times go by. If you provide the recovery and the nutrition, then the super compensation process takes place where you not only fill in that recovery hole, you build on top of it, like a little mountain.
And that’s the growth, or the adaptation if it’s a fitness adaptation, that takes place beyond the level you were at before. That can only happen with proper recovery.
If you’re sick, you’re already physically in the hole and you’re trying to recover. So imagine then you hit some high-intensity exercise, you dig yourself down an even deeper hole and you can’t get out of it. And your system breaks down. And you get more sick. And you get injured. And you’re not gonna have an effective workout anyways if you’re not feeling good. And then the super compensation effect can never take place. It can actually go in the other direction.
So the moral here, it’s not just about training it’s about recovery. If you’re not recovered from your last workout, even if you’re not sick, you shouldn’t train again. And if you can’t recover because you are sick, then obviously you shouldn’t train.
So you gotta kind of listen to your body, right? And kind of do what you feel you can.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah, great. Okay so this next person, Tom, is looking for some practical ideas. Has read your book and is looking for a few strategies – help this person best implement the strategies in your book. So maybe some habits, getting into the real world. What are some things they can do on a daily basis that will help implement the strategies in you book?
The best thing to implement the whole program, we already covered, which is writing everything down and measuring everything too. Keeping the idea that what gets measured, gets done and provides accountability. So, I mean, to just recap that: write down your goals, do your calorie calculations, and your macronutrient calculations, create a menu on paper, keep your nutrition journal, keep your progress chart including: weight, body fat, pound of fat, lean body mass, and whatever else is important to you. Measurements are helpful too. Keep a training journal. That’s really the best way to implement the actual program. If you do those things everything else is gonna take care of itself.
And going back to the first one, your goals, it will help if you set some behavioral goals. Because when I say goals a lot of people will only think in terms of what’s their goal three months from
Right.
But take that and go from the end backwards. Maybe set some weekly goals and that would be also a goal in terms of a body composition or a weight goal. But then go backwards more and set daily goals and make them outcome-based, behavioral goals of things you’re going to do every day. So now that you know what your weekly goal is and your 12-week goal is, what are the actual steps you have take? That’s the daily goal. And the daily goal could be writing down things like what time are you going to train? Writing that in your calendar book. Writing the times that you’re gonna eat.
One of your goals could be to prepare all those meals. Maybe one of those goals for daily behaviors or weekly behaviors is to do all your shopping on Sunday and to cook all your food in advance. Have a little food preparation ritual in the morning and cook all your food. Think in terms of things that will set you up for success and daily behaviors. So include those into your daily goals. And that’s gonna help you implement the program.
That’s great. And it all comes down to habits. Like Tom just said, habits will either make you or break you. So just kind of look at those habits you have on a daily basis and try to implement some of the ones Tom just shared with you. Writing everything down. Making sure you’re doing your weekly shopping. Doing your daily food preparation. Planning your meals in advance. And making sure your training is where it needs to be. And then regularly evaluating every couple of weeks, or every week, or every day, kind of check your progress and make sure you’re staying on the right track towards your goals. That’s awesome. Very cool.
All right, so this next person says, “I recently purchased your e- book and I’m thrilled to find the inspiration, satisfaction, and direction I’ve been seeking since 2006, to begin. I am only on chapter two of the book and I’m still digesting it. I’m powdered up and ready to begin. I’m 50-something woman who has ballooned to just over 200 pounds in the last ten years. I have been in shock and awe over programs I’ve witnessed on morning news shows basically saying I will require surgery to get rid of skin I have stretched with fat. Like especially on my arms and my abdomen.
Is this inevitable? Has my skin lost the elasticity it needs to rebound?”
We actually had a few women on the call who had been on your program and lost a ton of weight and are interested in that same question, Tom. So this seems to be a big, popular one for a lot of people.
Yeah. Well it’s not inevitable. And it’s not inevitable that you will require surgery. From what I have seen, I would say in the majority of cases skin tightens up over time. But there’s a lot of different factors that can affect the elasticity of the skin.
One of the first things I tell people if they’re just starting out is to expect the best. Because if somebody is just starting – like if you’re 200 pounds now, just because you’re looking at, whether it’s commercials or, I don’t know, negativity, if you wanna call it pessimism, of people who say that, “You’re gonna have to get surgery.” To me, that’s just a pessimistic outlook from the beginning. There’s no guarantee either way.
But I’ll tell you what I have seen. Kyle, do you know Rob Cooper, the Former Fat Guy?
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Okay. He’s a friend of mine and he weighed 500 pounds at his peak.
Wow.
500 pounds. He got all the way down to 185 pounds. Wow.
And at that point he said he had a little bit of loose skin. He did have some loose skin. But what he did is he got very interested in bodybuilding and he started to take the weight training really seriously. And over the course of another year, I mean we’re talking about a substantial amount of time, he did notice the skin tighten up. But moreover, he gained 50 pounds of muscle.
Wow.
And when the muscle gains in your extremities, it actually can fill out the skin a little bit. And the muscles fill with glycogen a little bit. And it just gives a tighter look all around. The lower abs can sometimes be a little bit problematic.
But, if I can see a guy like that go from 500 pounds down to 185 and then bring himself back up to 230 or 240 of mostly muscle, then I have to believe that it can be done. And then I’ve seen this happen over and over and over again. My best guess would be that in 90 percent of cases, the skin will tighten up over time especially if the nutrition is done correctly and the weight training is done. There’s bound to be a few, isolated cases where skin removal might only be the last option if you can’t look – if you can’t live with the way the skin on the lower abdominals looks. But I would say consider that a last resort.
And consider there’s a lot of factors that can affect this. Skin is really elastic. The elasticity of your skin is gonna decrease a little bit with age, that’s an actual consequence of aging. How much your skin comes back to normal depends on how much weight you gained and how much, how quickly you lose it. How long you carried the extra weight is a factor. How fast the weight was gained to begin with. How quickly it was lost. And there’s exceptions. There’s exceptions to everything.
But I would say give your skin time. And don’t look at it as being inevitable, any kind of surgery, look at it as last resort. Because in my experience, and I have seen a lot of people losing 100 pounds, 150 pounds, or more, usually the skin does tighten up. I don’t have a magic solution. I can only give you my observations and the facts that I’ve seen.
So give it some time. Be patient. Keep training. Stay focused on the positive things. Right?
Yeah.
Great. Good stuff. And that’s awesome that you’re taking those steps and you’re on the way to losing the fat. So that’s great.
Tom, are you okay for one more question? I know we’re way over time. We’re approaching an hour-and-a-half time.
Yeah, go ahead.
Okay, great. Appreciate you taking the time to share, answer everybody’s questions.
So this person says, “Hi, Tom. I’ve heard that body fat is a storage place for toxins and that by reducing the amount of toxins that you expose yourself you can reduce your body fat. Such as like: cutting back on pesticides in food, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think about that?”
Well I’m not sure exactly what the scientific research would say about the relationship between toxins and body fat. You do have to be a little careful if you go into the area of detoxification because there is a lot of pseudoscience in that particular area. For example, if you look at something like a cellulite remedy. They’re often pitched to you by saying, “The reason you have cellulite is primarily, or entirely, because there are toxins in your body and the only way to get rid of the cellulite is take our detoxification product.”
And there’s really no discussion of the calorie deficit, or the exercise necessary, or even the fact that medical science and science makes no distinction between cellulite and regular fat, other than the fact that it’s dimpled because of the presence of connective tissue.
Right.
So be a little careful there and understand that if cellulite is just regular fat then the calorie deficit, and the exercise, and nutrition is what’s gonna get rid of it.
However, there is no doubt that toxins and chemicals can wreak havoc in our bodies. And it definitely stands to reason that that can include or fat burning machinery and especially the hormones that govern fat burning. If you’re introducing toxins that can increase estrogens in a man’s body, for example, or – the first step would be stop eating manmade, and refined, and processed, and packaged foods. Read ingredients lists. Look at the food labels. Don’t just look at the calories, proteins, carbs. Read the ingredients list. And it’s pretty obvious when there’s chemicals ‘cause usually you can’t even pronounce them. Look for artificial colors, flavors, preservatives. Absolutely stay away from hydrogenated oils and trans fatty acids. Just avoid processed and packaged foods in general. Usually the foods you want to eat came out of the ground. You eat them the way they came out of the ground: vegetables, and yams, and rice, and fruit, completely natural foods.
If you want to go to the next level then, you might consider organic. And that’s a – organic foods are getting very, very popular although it is a debatable subject. But one thing that just about everybody seems to agree is that, in fact, if it’s certified organic that you’re not gonna – it’s not grown with pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. So some people might be ready to go to that next step if they want to avoid a lot of chemicals. And that might be one way to do it.
But, in any case, detoxification to me it means you stop putting toxins in your body in the first place. And the idea is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Right. And even with that said you still have to get all four of those pillars that we talked about earlier, right, in order to get the best possible results.
Yes. Be careful with the idea that, okay, you are toxic and that is why you are fat. Okay. Because maybe there is a correlation but that is not the cause. The cause of body fat is a surplus of calories was converted into the storage energy form, which is body fat. And then to remove that, you’re going to have to create a calorie deficit in order for your body to burn some of that fat for energy.
And it reminds me, with what you just said, it’s a marketing ploy I’ve seen used by a lot of supplement manufacturers. I think some of the cortisol, the stress hormone, the evil stress hormone that they’ve made it out to be. You see some of these cortisol blockers, or cortisol reducers, and they’ll say the same thing that the reason you’re so fat is because you live a high-stress lifestyle and that’s what’s making you fat. Is it the same kind of wisdom there too, Tom?
Yeah, exactly. In fact, that’s the very first thing we mentioned in the interview I did with David in the “Mission Abdominals” report.
Oh, okay.
So I know we’re out of time but I go into that with David in a lot of detail in the “Mission Abdominals” report.
All right, so could you tell people one more time how they can get that report and what is in it? Maybe go into a little bit more depth in what’s in the report, the “Mission Abdominals” report.
Yeah. It’s an interview that I did with David Grisaffi, just a couple weeks ago, that we had transcribed. And it started out as a short interview and then we just kept going and he just kept firing
Kyle Battis:
questions at me and I answered them in great detail. And we had it transcribed in a e-book format, and then very carefully edited, and really nicely graphic designed. It’s a short e-book and the title’s “Mission Abdominals”, which we chose after we did the interview because the primary topic we talk about is body fat reduction and abdominal training.
And one of the things we talk about is how to recognize scams and gimmicks in the marketplace. For example the, just like we said, detoxification or cellulite scams, cortisol reduction pills, various types of diet pills, diet patches. Then we move into training and talk about differences between machine and free-weight training. We talk about functional training versus traditional bodybuilding style training. How to prevent back pain. We list some exercises that are old standards to bodybuilding standards and compare them to some of the new exercises, like the Swiss ball exercises and the core stabilization exercises. And then go into nutrition, nutrition for fat loss.
And there is just a ton of great information on reducing body fat, strengthening your abs, abdominal training. And it’s brand new. It’s never been released before and we’re offering this right now, with the Burn the Fat, it comes with Burn the Fat, this week up until Wednesday.
That’s awesome. And once again folks, if you don’t have a copy of this already, this is the time to go get it if you’re listening to this live. www.askthefitnessexpert.com/burn, B-U-R-N, and that’s all lowercase.
Tom, thank you so much for being on the call tonight. It’s really awesome to have you here. I know we had people from all over the place, all kinds of different time zones, calling in tonight to hear what you had to say, and I’m sure they’re very excited with the information you shared. So thanks again and just wondered if you had any parting words for our listeners.
We’ll go back right to the beginning. And I just remind everybody to take to heart what Jim Ruland said about focusing on the fundamentals. Working hard on the fundamentals is where it’s at and you’ll just be absolutely amazed at your results. If you don’t get caught up in the little details and you just train hard, work hard, be disciplined, be consistent, and keep your eyes on your goal and it’ll happen.
That’s awesome. And with that, guys, thanks again Tom for being here. Maybe we can convince you to join us sometime in the future again.
Yeah, that would be great. Thanks a lot Kyle.
Hey, no problem. All right guys, everybody have a great night. Thanks again for calling in and if you missed this live, we’re gonna be posting a replay within a day or two. So take care. Have a great night.
This is Kyle Battis signing off.
