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In this episode the guys break down 5 things nobody tells men about losing fat after 40. They cover why it genuinely is harder and why the old methods stopped working, why accumulated stress is the real culprit (not just age), why building muscle is the single thing that changes everything for men in this category, and exactly what to do — get strong at basic compound lifts, eat only whole foods, prioritize very high protein in every meal, meal prep once or twice a week, and prep for sleep like it's a sport. Sal shares his own Sunday meal prep routine, Adam walks through why sleep habits have to be built one at a time, and the guys make the case that for most men over 40 doing this correctly, body fat will naturally settle in the mid-teens without counting a single calorie.
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0:00 - 5 things nobody tells men about losing fat after 40 1:08 - Why what worked before stopped working — and why it never actually worked long term 3:45 - The real reason it's harder — accumulated stress, not age 6:16 - The stress bucket shrinks with age — why your body holds fat when life gets heavy 10:12 - Accumulated movement pattern issues after 40 — knees, hips and lower back 13:19 - Time is the enemy — why efficiency matters more than ever 15:03 - The one thing that makes the biggest difference — building muscle 16:59 - Step 1: Get strong at basic compound lifts — bench, deadlift, squat, overhead press and rows 19:09 - Step 2: Eat only whole foods — the one rule that handles everything else 22:26 - Step 3: Very high protein — 40-50g per meal, eat it first 24:14 - Step 4: Meal prep — the one habit that makes whole foods actually possible 27:27 - Step 5: Prep for sleep — the single biggest lever for resilience and recovery 31:13 - MAPS 40 Plus + MAPS Powerlift — the recommended 6-month combo for this approach
Men over 40 struggle with fat loss not due to biological aging alone, but because of increased life stress and decreased recovery capacity. To succeed, they must move away from outdated routines and adopt precise programming that balances physical exertion with psychological stress, focusing on high-protein whole foods, efficient strength training, and optimized sleep to trigger fat loss and muscle growth.
Men over 40, you may be finding that losing body fat
is more difficult than it used to be.
Is it in your imagination?
It is not.
It is more challenging, but there are things
that nobody tells you about losing fat after 40.
We're gonna break it down for you.
We're gonna give you the solution.
It can happen.
It will happen.
You just gotta do what we say.
Justin feels attacked.
Let's go.
We're all over 40.
I'm already looking for more fuzzies all over me, dude.
It's got me all self-conscious.
It is.
First of all, we're all over 40.
The vast majority of our clients were in this age group,
I would say, when we were trainers.
And the truth is, it is more difficult
to improve your fitness and burn body fat
or lose body fat after 40.
Here's the big challenge,
and this is what you might be experiencing,
is that you might've lost weight in the past.
You might've done it successfully a few times.
You're attempting it again,
and what you did before, which used to work,
suddenly doesn't work.
It's not working.
What's going on?
It's very frustrating.
I had this formula.
I followed the formula,
and my body doesn't seem to be responding,
or I don't feel as good, or I feel burnt out.
What's going on?
By the way, I do wanna add this,
that the way that we as coaches, okay,
those of us who coach and train people for a living,
the way we define if something worked
isn't whether or not you got to your goal result.
The way we define did it work is if you kept it, right?
If you got the result that you were looking for,
and you maintained it.
So I do wanna add that,
because although you may think what worked before,
I'm gonna try that again,
because it worked before.
It actually didn't work before.
It worked halfway.
It got you to lose weight,
but then you gained it back.
So even if it did work like it used to,
what would end up happening is what always happens,
which is you end up gaining the weight back.
Nonetheless, nonetheless, I wanna speak to this.
It feels different.
Something doesn't feel the same.
What's going on?
Why is it different?
Is it just my age, or am I losing my mind?
What's happening?
Let's talk about that.
I actually think this is almost every client that I trained,
because rarely ever did you get a client
that came to you at their first attempt
to getting in shape.
Like, that was rare.
I can't think of a case.
People typically try on their own first.
Oh, yeah.
And they've tried several times,
and normally what's happened is exactly this.
They've gotten a little bit older.
There was a season in their life,
when they were playing sports,
when they were getting ready for that marathon,
or just young, when they were in their 20s, working out,
where a modality of training,
or a method that they followed,
or a diet they did worked really well for them,
or they could get in shape pretty quick.
That's like their go-to method.
Yeah, and so they have already attempted this
and applied this probably once,
or two, or three times already,
and it's just not working.
And then they come to me, and they go like,
hey, here's the deal.
I've been in shape before,
and this is what's worked for me in the past,
but I can't seem to lose weight anymore.
What's going on with me?
How do you help me?
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Yeah, now a big part of this,
or a big part of the reason why this isn't working anymore
is it's not that you're older.
And yes, age plays a role,
but it plays less of a role than we think.
We tend to place all of the blame on our age.
And yeah, it is true that as you get older,
your body, your potential,
like your ultimate potential starts to decrease
in terms of athletic performance,
fat loss, and that kind of stuff.
But a 45-year-old man has got pretty high potential
even when he compares himself to when he was 35 or 25.
Age by itself doesn't start to play a major role
until once you start to get your 50s and 60s,
then it starts to play a much bigger role.
So what the heck's going on then?
It's your behavioral patterns, man.
I mean, your whole lifestyle is different at this point.
That's right.
I think it's like, I mean, you fondly look back
at like when you got in shape
and that you just applied this one method
that was like this intense form of training
and sleep was okay,
but like you could pretty much rebound pretty easy.
And like, I mean, the real difference for me
that I've seen, now I can actually relate.
Like before I was like, my clients would come in
and they'd say these things and you'd kind of roll your eyes
and be like, ah, you're just not sticking with it
or consistent enough or whatever it is.
But really it's like at this point now,
you understand that it's,
you have to be a lot more intentional.
You have these like smaller windows,
you have more stress that accumulates,
the recovery process, a little bit more challenging
to really like implement that.
And there's a lot more kind of factors
that you got to consider like more intensively.
You hit the big one that I think that age plays a big role
is just the accumulation of stress.
That's it.
And we taught you on the podcast,
we talk a lot about that in the context
of like a fat loss journey and exercise programming
and diet and sleep in the context of like,
say like a three month window of a training,
trying to get in shape.
Yeah.
But I think the part that like we don't consider a lot too
is like there is that, right?
Like if I have a stress bucket
and last night I didn't get very good sleep,
I filled a lot of that bucket up.
And if I got in an argument with my wife
before I went to work, I just add a little bit more
to that on top of that.
And then I also am underfed because I've just didn't have
time to make any of my meals.
So now I'm getting higher.
And then I go to the gym and I just hammer myself.
And then now I'm over.
So there's that accumulation of stress in the immediate.
And then there's the accumulation of stress
over years and decades.
That that's what I think is the real differentiating thing
between 40 years old and 20 years old.
At 20 years old, we tend to be able to almost be able
to dump that bucket out and start over so much faster.
And because you've only done it so many times
because you're only 20 years old, maybe it's not as bad.
Whereas when you've had these behaviors to your point
for decades of-
It builds.
Burning the candle at both ends, yes.
It builds or another way to say
that stress bucket shrinks, right?
Like maybe when you were younger-
You can tolerate quite as much.
Exactly, your stress bucket was bigger.
You dumped it out faster.
Where now that stress bucket seems to have shrunk
in a sense and your tolerance for all those things
in addition to bigger life stresses on top of that.
Okay, to put it plainly, right?
The reason why exercise triggers changes in your body,
the reason why you get stronger or you build more stamina
is because exercise is a stress.
It's actually a stress.
In fact, if we were to examine you and take blood tests
and hook you up to machines
and see what's happening during exercise,
all the machines would register elevated stress.
You'd see elevated stress hormones.
You'd see inflammatory markers go up.
In fact, if we just looked at that,
we would never have anybody exercise
because it'd be like, this is terrible for you.
But obviously it's not.
The reason why it's not is because your body,
if you do it right,
that stress triggers a cascade of things
that happens in the body,
which starts with recovery and then moves into adaptation.
And the reason why your body adapts
is it's trying to become more resilient to that stress.
So if I lift heavy things,
the way that my body becomes more resilient
to lifting heavy things is it becomes stronger, okay?
If I challenge my stamina,
the way that my body becomes more resilient
is it increases my capacity so I have more stamina.
So it is a stress.
But what we don't realize,
so a lot of us don't realize exercise is stress.
It is.
We also don't realize that lots of things are a stress.
You're in your 40s now.
You probably have bills.
You probably have a mortgage or rent
and kids to take care of.
When you were 25, you didn't have any of those things.
And although now you're used to it,
so if you ask the typical 40-something-year-old
about their stress,
unless something big's going on,
they're like, oh, I'm fine.
But the reality is there's a lot of things on your plate.
And by the way, you can see this in the data.
When you look at how much men earn,
when men become married and have children,
their earning goes through the roof.
Is it because all of a sudden they become smarter
and more capable?
No, they got more things to take care of
and more things to worry about.
And so you have, in your 40s, more stress on you,
more worries, more responsibilities,
and your body has a limited capacity
to recover from and adapt to stress.
So when you have all these other things happening
and then you throw exercise on top of it,
you better be judicious and precise
with how you apply your workout programming
and the kind of workout programming you apply.
Now, when you're 25, you could have the worst,
you could have programming that is excessive with stress,
but because you don't have other things in your life
and other responsibilities,
and you can sleep in on the weekends
and you can hang out with your buddies
and you don't need to take care of your kids,
you really don't have a mortgage,
you're going to school right now,
you got maybe a part-time job.
Like, it's not a big deal, you can handle it.
You can recover from bad programming.
In fact, you get in shape
in spite of your crappy workout programming.
But now you apply that same crappy methodology
on yourself in your 40s
with all this other stuff that's going on,
and you're like, why am I burnt?
Why am I not responding?
Why do I feel tired?
And why is my body not losing body fat?
One of the reasons why your body's not losing body fat
is too much stress on your body
tells your body to hold on to body fat.
Now, why would it want to hold on to body fat?
Body fat is insurance against famine,
one of the major stressors of all of humanity
for most of the time.
Not now, right?
Now we live in modern societies, not an issue.
But our bodies have already, they're designed this way.
When you get stressed, it tries to hold on to body fat.
It's no different than, it's like your bank account.
When things get stressful in the world,
you're not sure if you're going to lose your job,
maybe they're cutting back,
you're like, honey, we got to cut back on our expenses
and we got to save this money just in case.
This is what your body does with body fat.
So one of the main reasons
why this is so much more challenging for men
has nothing to do with somehow the aging processes
changing your body has much more to do
with the fact that you've just got more stuff
that you're dealing with.
And if you don't have proper, precise workout programming,
the stressor applying is either wasted or too much
and your body won't respond.
I mean, I would add to that,
it becomes even more challenging sometimes
when people don't realize all the things that you just,
like you said, people that are like,
why am I so tired?
Why is this?
Sometimes, and I see this a lot,
where our bodies, they're so resilient
and they do such a good job of adapting.
People adapt to all that and they survive
and they think they're okay and normal.
This is their normal.
Yeah, and so they think,
I can't tell you how many conversations I've had
with somebody who's struggling
with body composition change
and they feel like they're doing a lot of the right things.
They're like, I'm doing this, I'm doing that,
my body isn't changing.
And I'm asking the questions like,
well, how's your sleep and how's your stress?
I'm fine.
And they think they're okay
and they think their energy is okay.
And what they don't realize is over the course of decades,
it's just adapted lower, lower, lower.
And they think they're fine
because they don't know what good feels like.
So I have a buddy of mine.
He does, what does he do?
He's an electrician.
So he's a blue collar worker.
He's got four kids.
Great guy, great guy.
Otherwise healthy.
And he wants to start working out.
He wants to start.
Guess what time he has to work out in the morning?
4.30.
Because he goes to work.
He's got a drive to work.
He's got these jobs
and then he gets off at two or three o'clock.
But then he's going to be with his kids
and his wife and have dinner.
And then going to bed, he's got a little one.
And his wife mainly handles it.
But look, if you're a man,
your wife gets up with the kid,
like your sleep's also getting broken
even though she's kind of handling it.
And that's in his case.
And so he's coming to me.
He's like, oh yeah, I can work out four days a week.
I'm like, oh cool, what time?
4.30.
I'm like, well, what time are you going to bed?
You better be going to bed at 8.30 at night.
He's like, well, I got to go to bed at 10
because I'm doing...
Like, listen, that's not going to work, dude.
And so he's trying to apply his old methods
and he's coming to me and he's like, why am I so tired?
I'm like, dude, that's too much for you right now.
So there needs to be the right amount of stress
considering what's going on in your life.
And we have a general idea of what this looks like
for the average 40 something year old man.
There's also accumulated issues with your movement, okay?
These are called movement pattern issues.
And a 45 year old man has a higher likelihood
of poor recruitment patterns and potential pain
than a 25 year old,
just because he's been moving on earth for more.
Or not moving.
Lack of movement.
Or not moving.
Great example of this is your engineer
or somebody who's been sitting at a computer desk
for 20 plus years.
Locked in position.
Yeah.
Total challenge.
And so what you sometimes hear is,
well, I work out but my shoulder hurts.
Yeah.
Or I squat and I can't squat because I'm above my knee
or my hip hurts.
And that's because you have this kind of accumulated
movement pattern issues,
either from sitting all day
or from doing the same thing all day or whatever,
that you might not have had in your 20s
when in your 20s,
you're kind of coming out of your teens
when you're playing sports and moving all the time.
And so you got to consider that as well.
And then finally,
here's a big one that you need to consider.
Big one.
Time.
You don't got all the time in the world to work out.
I see guys in their 20s go to the gym
and it's usually midday or after school
and they're in there for like two and a half hours.
That's because they're not working out
for two and a half hours.
They're hanging out.
They're working out and they're hanging out.
47 year old dude doesn't got two hours
to go spend in the gym.
He's got a family.
He's got life.
He's got work.
So the time that I do spend working out,
it needs to be really effective.
And I don't have a lot that I can sacrifice.
Efficiency is everything.
So efficiency is very, very important.
Now here's the one thing that makes the big difference.
And we're going to get to kind of what this looks like,
but here's the one thing.
Building muscle makes all the difference in the world.
So when you build muscle,
you're leveraging this active tissue
in a way to burn more calories for you
to improve your hormone profile.
So building muscle is great for man for testosterone.
It's great for growth hormone.
It's great for insulin sensitivity.
And here's the good news with building muscle.
You don't need to spend a lot of time in the gym.
The data supports this.
You don't need to do a lot of crazy workouts
to build strength.
Now building endurance and stamina takes a lot more time,
but here's the deal.
If you're listening to this, you're like,
look, I just want to get in shape and look better.
And I don't have a lot of time.
You don't need a lot of time.
You actually don't need a lot of time to build muscle
if you approach it the right way.
It also lends itself really well to a calorie maintenance
to surplus type of diet too,
which also lends itself well to lowering or reducing stress.
Putting somebody who has got all kinds of stress,
has all this stuff going on in their life
into an extreme diet to cut, to lose,
also just adds exponentially.
Build into it, build into a fat burning machine
and stop trying it.
Much better strategy for this person
when it comes to hormones, sleep, all other things.
Yeah, energy.
By the way, and I'm just going to communicate this.
If you're listening right now and you've tried this,
you're like, man, I don't have the energy
to do these workouts and work and do all this other stuff.
If you do this properly,
if you follow workout programming
that's designed for someone like you,
it won't take energy away, it'll add.
Yes, what you'll find is you have more energy for work,
more energy for your family.
You're going to feel better day one,
not three months later.
You'll actually feel better.
That in itself is such a new mentality
for people to address their workout and fitness in general
of something that's going to actually increase their energy
when they leave.
That's right.
So here's number one, okay?
Get strong at basic lifts, okay?
Basic lifts and practice them often.
One of the mistakes people make when they work out
is they think they need to do different stuff all the time.
This actually takes away from your body's ability
to adapt in ways that build muscle.
There's an adaptation process
that happens with strength training.
Some of it, and there's a lot of crossover.
So it's not like it just goes from one to the other.
A lot of it is kind of muddy, but this is what it looks like.
Initially, when you first start an exercise,
the initial adaptations are all central nervous system.
Okay, so when I first, I'm getting back into the gym,
I'm practicing an overhead press.
The strength gains I get initially
are really just my central nervous system
organizing better, organizing my muscles better,
providing more stability,
because it's what controls the muscles.
It's basically making me better at the overhead press.
So I get strength gains right off the gates from that.
Once those central nervous systems adapt to a certain point,
then the adaptation looks like bigger muscles, okay?
But if I change exercises all the time
and do a bunch of weird stuff,
I'm never really giving my body the opportunity to do that.
So number one with your strength training
is get strong at the basic lifts.
Basic lifts.
Fundamentals.
The fundamentals, your bench presses, your deadlifts,
your squats, your overhead presses, your rows.
Don't mix it up a ton.
Stick to the basics and get strong at those,
and that'll give you the most carry over.
Well, this is so important
when we're talking about this avatar specifically,
because time you made is one of the major issues,
and this is the greatest ROI you can get on training.
100%.
Like going in there, and there's nothing wrong
with easy curl bars.
There's nothing wrong with some tricep pushdowns.
Those are all cool exercises.
They have their benefits.
But when time is the issue
and you are trying to make major changes
as fast as you can, as efficiently as you can,
the basic big lifts are the things
that are gonna give you the greatest ROI.
100%.
Now let's talk about diet a little bit,
and we're gonna spend a little bit of time here,
because diet is the hardest thing.
Okay, so getting into the gym two days a week,
three days a week, that can be difficult alone
to be consistent, but I'd be lying if I said
that would be the most difficult thing
you'd have to deal with.
Easily, by far, diet is far harder.
There's nothing harder than diet
when it comes to your health.
Exercise, being consistent a couple days in a week,
difficult, but I could almost always make that work
with my clients.
The diet part was a big one.
So here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna give you a few things to do,
and the reason why we're only gonna give you
a few things is there's two reasons.
One, these are things you can stick to,
but two, these are the ones that make the big difference.
Okay, so there's a lot of things you can do
with your diet to make it work better for you,
but if you just did the couple things
that we're gonna mention right now,
most guys listening to this,
most guys in their 40s listening to this
who exercise properly, and we'll get to that,
who follow good workout programming for them,
if they follow these next pieces of advice for diet
and they were just consistent with this,
the average 40-something-year-old man's body fat percentage
would fall somewhere in the mid-teens.
Now, give or take, right?
Some guys can be a little leaner,
some guys a little heavier,
but most guys over time, without having to do anything else,
without having to count things and track things
and cut things or whatever,
will fall somewhere around 13 to 18% body fat
is where you'll end up falling for most people.
Here's number one.
This is one rule, that's it.
Eat only whole foods, that's it.
Stay away from things in boxes or wrappers.
Stay away from fast food.
Stay away from candy.
Eat whole, natural foods.
Now, notice I'm not saying eat less.
Notice I'm not saying this many grams of carbs.
Just stick to whole foods.
This will naturally bring your caloric intake down
to where it needs to be.
The studies on nutrition on whole foods
versus heavily processed foods are remarkable.
They're the best studies there are.
The best part about this, too, is it keeps it so simple,
especially for somebody who is busy
and got so much going on, it's just like,
if you're hungry, eat.
Just eat whole foods.
You don't have to overthink this, and your body will.
It'll fall right where it needs to be.
Where this gets difficult is when 50% is whole foods
and the other 50% is processed.
Then this gets confusing.
Then this gets challenging.
Then that throws it off,
and then this is where people overeat,
because every time I tell somebody this,
they always go, but what about how much carbs
and how much fat and how many calories?
It's like, just hit the protein intake
and eat whole foods, and that'll take care of the rest.
Yes, and so here's why, and I'll briefly cover this.
We've had whole episodes on this,
but processed foods are designed
in a way that makes you overeat.
If you eat whole, natural foods,
your natural satiety actually is quite remarkable
at maintaining an appropriate caloric intake.
There's this weird belief that if we just eat
as much as we want, that we're all gonna be 350 pounds.
That's only true with heavily processed foods.
With whole foods, if you ate until you were satisfied,
barring any eating disorder issues,
barring anything crazy like that,
if you just ate when you were hungry,
your calories will naturally fall in this place
that allows you to burn body fat and build muscle.
That's just where it goes.
You'll actually be satisfied.
In fact, here's the challenge with eating whole foods.
There's a couple challenges.
We'll cover the second one here in a second,
but the first challenge I found with whole foods
is my clients will eat just whole foods,
and then they'll say, but I'm craving.
And I'll say, eat a whole food meal.
Yeah, but I'm craving the whatever.
And they know if they eat the whole food,
it's actually like, that doesn't,
I actually don't wanna eat that.
It's because you're not hungry, you have a craving,
and processed foods will do that.
So stick to just whole foods.
And then the second part, what Adam said,
make it very high protein.
All of your meals, protein-centric.
Every single meal you eat, 40, 50 grams
in the meal of protein.
Steak, chicken, fish, eggs, cottage cheese, whatever.
Eat it first, eat the rest of the meal.
Your calories will fall where they need to go.
High protein builds more muscle and causes more fat loss.
And by the way, there's new studies
that are coming out on protein intake.
On the show, we recommend about one gram
per pound of target body weight.
The old data showed a little less.
We always rounded it up to one
because we always found it worked better.
Guess what the data supports, fellas?
Higher.
One gram.
The data supports one gram,
maybe even a little higher for building muscle.
So if you're a guy and you wanna weigh about 200 pounds,
aim for 200 grams, that's 50 grams of protein in four meals.
Aim for that.
The best part about this too
is you don't even have to overcomplicate
what types of protein.
You can really enjoy yourself.
You can eat fattier cuts.
You can enjoy ribeye, tri-tip,
you can enjoy ground beef.
Eating things like this,
if you just stick to that rule of whole foods,
eat it first, then everything follows,
it'll take care of the rest.
And so this idea of even having,
because I think a lot of times too,
people think high protein,
they think right away chicken breasts and fish.
Like boring.
Yeah.
I didn't say high protein, low fat.
Right.
I just said high protein.
That's right.
Whole foods.
That's right.
And you can really enjoy good cuts of meat
and just eat it first
and then let the carbs and everything else follow second.
That's right.
And then here's the part that makes this all possible.
If you don't do this,
eating only whole foods will be almost impossible.
Okay, so here's what you gotta do.
Meal prep.
This is the one thing that made the biggest difference
with my male clients over 40.
Once a week or twice a week,
they would go out and they'd grill a bunch of meat,
a bunch of chicken, a bunch of whatever,
cook a bunch of ground beef
and prep their meals for them
because here's what happens.
If you're trying to stick to whole foods
and you don't have a meal available.
It's just not there.
It's not there, you're screwed.
Yeah, the environment just doesn't promote this enough
to where you're gonna go down to your local store
and it's gonna be an easy option that's convenient.
Never.
Nothing's ever convenient within the whole foods realm,
but you can control that by prepping ahead of time
and kind of making these last.
Sometimes we really overcomplicate this too.
Like a lot of the times the challenge
that people have with this
is just getting out of their way of thinking
of like the way they've made dinner
their whole lives before is this like.
Just gotta make them bigger.
You just gotta be way bigger.
Like that's all it is.
It's just like if you made.
You can actually meal prep every night
with dinner by just making a huge dinner.
That's exactly what I'm saying by overcomplicating
is because some people are like,
man, that means I gotta spend all day Sunday
meal prepping all this stuff.
I was like, that's one way to do it.
Or just if you say just two or three nights out of the week,
you actually make home cooked meal.
Just double or triple the serving.
Like just get used to, instead of making a pound of meat
for you and your spouse or family or whatever,
it's four or five pounds.
And instead of cooking one or two cups of rice,
it's five to six cups of rice.
And that gets you for the next two or three days.
And then when you do it again, you do it again like that.
So here's what I do on Sundays, I meal prep
and I make about five pounds of chicken thighs
or sometimes less chicken thighs.
And I'll do a big thing of ground beef.
I'll make a big pot of white rice.
And then I'll cook a big thing of broccoli
or whatever, choose your vegetable.
You can make ground beef rice bowls.
You can do chicken thighs and rice, whatever, it's all good.
I enjoy it.
You can choose different cuts.
And then in my fridge, I got a bunch of meals ready to go.
By the time Wednesday, Thursday comes around,
I typically run out.
And that's when my wife will make extra dinner.
Yeah, so she'll, instead of making one tri-tip,
she'll make two and then I have more meals.
And it's just, by the way, fellas, in your forties,
look, this has got a double, there's a double side to this.
There's another side to this of value, you save money.
Hell yeah.
Guys, let's-
Especially today.
You're taking care of your family.
You got a job.
You want to take some stress off your life, meal prep.
It saves you money and it gets you lean.
It does both of those things.
Now you're not eating out.
You've got your meals.
Two birds.
That's pretty much it.
Eat whole foods, very high protein, meal prep.
Diet part is done.
Here's the last part, okay?
The number one thing that will increase
your resilience to stress, okay?
Because there are stresses in your life
and sometimes you'll hear people say this.
I used to say this when I was a stupid young kid
and I didn't understand what it was like
to manage all these things.
Sometimes you'll hear people say,
well, you got to get rid of certain stresses in your life.
Like, oh, what, my mortgage?
I got three kids.
Like, what am I going to get my job?
Like, I can't get rid of these.
Yeah, what am I going to get rid of?
Or I'm taking care of an old parent.
Like, what am I going to get rid of?
Well, you can increase your resilience to stress.
And the number one thing, nothing comes close to this.
Nothing touches us, no recovery hack, no supplement.
Nothing is better than sleep.
And so how do you do this as a man in your mid-40s?
You prep for your sleep.
You prep for it.
You know what your bedtime is, an hour before you get ready.
Go to bed at the same time,
wake up at the same time every day.
If you do that consistently by yourself,
it makes, in fact, I had clients,
I had more clients than I can count right now.
I'm thinking, I can think of many clients I had
in this category where when we nailed down sleep,
it was like turbocharged.
Nothing else changed.
All we did was get their sleep done.
Everything else became 10 times more effective.
It was wild.
So let's list off something,
because I've been helping some people
with getting better at their sleep.
And one of the things I'm starting to find,
it's very similar to the way
that we start somebody on a fitness journey
is we tend to build one or two good habits
and stack on that side.
And what I'm finding with a lot of people
when it comes to sleep,
their sleep patterns or sleep habits are so bad
that telling them to do all these things
is too much at once.
And so my advice would be to,
and I'll give you a list of different things
that people tend to do to improve,
and don't try and do all of them at once.
Find the thing that's most egregious
and try and get consistent with that one thing.
So it's like screen time past seven or eight o'clock,
you see all the time.
People on their phones, they're like,
I see that all the time.
I see late night eating.
I see doing work and work email stuff late at night.
These things are drinking right before,
like a bunch of water or fluid right before it.
There's a handful of these things that people tend to do.
It's like, if you're doing all of those,
pick one and get really good at eliminating it.
And then stack another one on it
and then treat it the same way.
That's how powerful sleep is,
that it deserves that much attention
to try and get better at it
because of the ROI on that.
What I found is going to bed at the same time
and waking up at the same time every morning
makes the biggest difference.
But the challenge is always going to bed at the same time.
And the thing that gets in the way
from the people that I've worked with
oftentimes is tech.
I got Netflix, I got to watch the show, I got whatever.
And so if you give yourself a hard and fast rule,
eight o'clock, everything, I'm not going on any electronics,
going to bed is a lot easier because there's nothing to do.
It's actually a lot easier.
No, I agree.
It makes a big difference.
You got a way to get bored, 100%.
Let's go back to the workout.
So workout programming is everything.
It needs to be appropriate for the avatar
of a man in his 40s with responsibilities,
with more stress in his life,
who wants to build muscle and burn body fat.
Programming is everything.
There's a couple of things
you want to focus on with the programming.
We talked about this already, the basics.
But some of those basics require a decent amount of skill.
A deadlift and a barbell squat, for example,
require a decent amount of skill.
They're phenomenal exercises.
But if you're listening to this,
you may be someone that's like,
man, when I deadlift, I feel like my back,
I'm going to throw up my back.
Or when I squat, I'm unsure,
or I feel at my knee, like what do I do?
You can replace those two exercises with variations
that are a lot safer,
that have pretty much the same kind of value.
For example, instead of a straight bar deadlift,
do a trap bar deadlift.
Instead of doing a traditional barbell squat,
do a box squat.
That's just a simple example of things
that you can do in your programming
to make the workout safer,
but not reduce any of its effectiveness.
So here's what we have.
We have a strength training program
for people who are over 40,
and it's everything that we just said.
It's called MAPS 40 Plus, okay?
We also have a program called MAPS Powerlift,
which would be a great program to follow up with
after 40 Plus, because both of them are to build strength.
Build strength, build muscle,
combine it with the nutrition tips that we gave,
and you're going to watch yourself
have this nice consistent pattern of getting leaner
and building more muscle.
And here's what we're doing right now,
because this episode, if you buy 40 Plus,
you get MAPS Powerlift for free.
It's a buy one, get one free.
It's happening right now.
Go to mapsbogo.com, get 40 Plus,
and get Powerlift thrown in for free.
All right, I know you liked that episode.
If you did, check this one out.
30% body fat.
For men, this is way too high.
This is actually a bit high for women as well.
So in today's episode,
we're talking about how you can go from 30 to 10.
What is 10% body fat?
This is when you have a visible six pack.
Can you go from 30 to 10%?
Yes, it's possible,
but not if you guess along the way.
So we're going to talk about
how you can do that in today's episode.
Now there's a huge range, right?
Of like body types.
Yeah, some people can run a little bit heavier
or a little bit higher.