Setting The Stage: Evidence-Based Fitness

Philip Pape 0:00

Hey, this is Philip. And on this bonus episode, I'm sharing my conversation with Jen Trepik on her podcast, Salad with a Side of Fries. Jen is a health coach who takes a similar evidence-based approach to nutrition and fitness. And we actually appeared on each other's shows recently. So, of course, if you caught Friday's episode here on Wits and Weights, you already heard her appearance on my show. In this conversation, I walk through my adapt framework, assess, do, analyze, pivot, test, and how to actually personalize your training instead of just following generic templates. We also get into walking and neat, training around injuries, building a home gym, and why measuring energy and performance matters more than the scale. Enjoy the conversation.

Jenn Trepeck 0:46

Will you share your experience and what you learned that really changed everything?

Philip Pape 0:51

Yeah. You mentioned, you mentioned, uh, you mentioned physique engineer, right? And I'm a real engineer too, which is where I got that name. And I love it. Real engineers tend to be a little bit sedentary, sitting in front of computers for years and years and

Philip’s Journey From Diets To Data

Philip Pape 1:03

years. And so, you know, I didn't grow up in athletics. I didn't grow up playing sports. I didn't grow up with very good dieting habits, like many of us in the 80s. I don't know how old the listeners are, but you know, the clean your plate club, but also the very picky and only eat like five foods club. And so when I got to college, gained a bunch of weight, very sedentary, didn't understand anything about lifting weights. And for the next 20 years, like my 20s and 30s, I sort of flailed around in the world trying to figure out what to do with my body, with my health. I didn't even understand the differences between weight loss and fat loss. I didn't understand, you know, the macros and why one was important versus another. And I definitely didn't know how to lift weights. So all of that was kind of lost on me, but I definitely tried a lot of things. I tried Slim Fast, Atkins, Keto, right? We do diets. I did paleo for like eight years while I was in CrossFit for about eight years. And we we can go there, like the pros and cons. You know, I touched a barbell, pro, lots and lots of cons. Anyway, and then it wasn't until just before and leading into the pandemic that I don't know what it was, I don't know what the catalyst was, but I all of a sudden it could have been time on my hands. The catalyst was, but I really started to dive into a certain niche or world of evidence-based training and nutrition that's out there that you and I now are just in love with and trying to get out to the world that I think we're a part of now. And that is hey, how do we take what years of anecdote and science and coaching practice and experience have shown us that work psychologically and behaviorally, not just nuts and bolts. You know, we know if we cut calories, we're gonna lose weight, but that's not necessarily the optimal way to get there for the long term. So it was like during the pandemic that I started reading the muscle and strength pyramids and nutrition pyramids by Dr. Eric Helms and Flexible Dieting, Alan Aragon. I started to look at starting strength and some of the big, you know, basic powerlifting programs. And it really got into that world and started to lift and eat and focus on energy and performance. And really, just to kind of long story short over the next two years, a lot of self-experimentation, which I think we're gonna talk about some of that today for you, the listener, led to I need to create a podcast and tell people that this is possible, that you can yo-yo diet and gain weight and lose weight for years and feel like you're broken and you're not. You just have to figure out the thing that is optimal for you. And it's not found in a template, it's not found in what works for your best friend. There's something special about that. So that led me to the podcast. That led me to coaching, and that led me to where I am today.

Jenn Trepeck 3:40

Yeah, I love it. And one of the things that stands out, as you just shared that, is you started to measure energy and performance. And so I think that even right from the jump gives us a different framework for thinking about this fitness component, you know, less about the scale and much more about how we feel in our own body.

Philip Pape 4:03

Yeah, I just literally before this call did a check-in with a client, and she has gone through this journey of I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, to I'm still having trouble losing weight, but I'm starting to feel stronger and my energy is better. To wow, now I realize the power of sleep and doing what makes sense for me and measuring everything but the scale, performance, energy, and so on. And it's just this psychological change that happens over time with your identity and the way that you approach it. And now you can do this for the long haul. So yeah, it's super important.

Jenn Trepeck 4:35

Thousand percent. So, all right, with our focus today on personalizing fitness, I think beyond just the idea of, you know, maybe our strength or injuries require that we have to maybe do something differently. Why is

Why Personalization Beats Templates

Jenn Trepeck 4:54

personalizing our exercise and activity so important?

Philip Pape 4:57

And I'm glad you mentioned those examples because I think the marketing in this industry suggests that everything is personalized. You know, it suggests that it's like you come in, you do an intake, and we personalize the program to you. And then when you go behind the curtain, you see, okay, we're gonna get your demographic data, we're gonna get some basic history, and we're gonna give you a template that just happens to fit that data and then go with it. You're done. Right. So why I think it's so important is very little people are testing and experimenting and measuring what they need to measure to close the feedback loop, which ultimately is what motivates us to move forward. Because you and I had a conversation on my podcast about consistency versus intensity and like taking that action to build momentum. Well, people don't know what to do. And then when they do something, they don't know what to measure. And then even when they measure it, they don't know how to change. So I want to talk about kind of that whole process of personalization so that people can do it the right way.

Jenn Trepeck 5:51

Excellent. I think I have one more question before we do that process. Because to your point, everything is marketed to us as personalized, or maybe we should, as you say, you know, adapted to you-ish, right? So let's just set the stage a second before the framework of how to do it. What are the drawbacks of, you know, maybe some of the YouTube workouts or the resources that a lot of people are using or exploring, you know, you mentioned also, right, not knowing what to measure, how to adapt, but are there sort of bigger pieces that maybe give people a stronger why for approaching this a different way?

The ADAPT Framework Overview

Philip Pape 6:33

Sure. So we all have unique constraints and we all have unique goals. And if you told me, hey, my knee hurts and I've got hormone issues, what drug should I take? You think I'm gonna give you an answer to that question? But but if someone says what workout should I do, they're like, Yeah, here you go. Here's the post-40 menopausal woman with knee issue workout, right? So, I mean, there's definitely a chance of injury and actually not making progress and in fact stepping back from where you are. That's one thing. I think more psychologically is the frustration that I'm gonna do another thing, I'm gonna do another program, another diet, another point system. All my friends are doing it, everybody's on Ozempic, whatever. I'm gonna do it, and then it doesn't work for you, right? And you beat your head over the wall and say, I'm broken, my metabolism is broken. It's something like that. So, whatever works for your best friend, like I said, could be terrible for you in multiple ways. I don't know if where you're trying to leave me with that, Jen, because I'm with you.

Jenn Trepeck 7:29

No, that's exactly because I do think even if you're not physically injured, the mental component of feeling like something's wrong with you or feeling like you failed is so much bigger than I think people realize, and has a much bigger impact on true wellness in every facet.

Philip Pape 7:52

I think it's everything. I really do. Behavior and the feedback loop and the reinforcing of I'm a hard worker and I put in the effort and I track the thing, I'm smart and I listen to podcasts, and it doesn't work. And it's like, how deflating is that? Right, for sure.

Jenn Trepeck 8:12

All right, so you're gonna give us the other way to approach this, right? Walk us through it.

Philip Pape 8:17

Stay tuned for the next episode where no, I'm just kidding. Right. So I love frameworks, I love acronyms, especially as an engineer. I just think that way. And so I like the word adapt because at the end of the day, we're trying to adapt a principle to a specific method and to a person. I use those words deliberately because principles are universal. Principles are the things that, like the law of gravity, they will always work. The idea that you need some tension on your muscles so that they get bigger works for every human being, right? Unless you want to take a myostatin blocker and that's the future of medicine, you can sit down and get jacked on drugs. Fine. But that's the principle. Okay, so if we take the adapt method and we start with the A, I'm gonna give you one for each. The first thing you have to do is assess. And assess is almost everything. We talked about how generic templates are personalized to you and they usually have some sort of intake. Well, you do need to have that, right? But you also have to understand what is your target, what is your goal, what is your lifestyle look like, what's your schedule, right? Can you actually get eight hours of sleep? Or are you a busy mom with three kids and taking care of the family? And so practically, you know, six and a half hours of sleep is going to be the case for the next few years. You know, what are your food preferences? Maybe your culture is such, you know, I have a client from Israel who's Jewish and she's like, you know, every Friday it's a specific food culture that is what it is for her religion, right? You mentioned injury history, your training background. It's not just the history itself, but how has that history changed your body and even your mind that we now have to unravel and work with? So understanding your starting point is really important. And I think that's gonna lead to some of the other steps. But what that means is collecting data coming in and then spending some time collecting more data. And so, for example, Jen, if you don't know what how much protein you eat, and I tell you, like, protein's really important. We want to increase that protein. Well, you need to know the starting point, you need to track protein for some amount of time. You know, somebody says you don't have enough energy, you need to track calories from some amount of time. So that's the first step.

Jenn Trepeck 10:14

Yeah. And when it comes to assessing our capacity for activity, how do we do that for ourselves? Like going to a trainer, going to someone and doing that intake. But is there a way I think now more than ever, people are, even still since the pandemic, I mean, at home doing these things and even trying to figure out for themselves where to start with some of that? Like, what are some things that you recommend for assessing our capacity to understand? And maybe I'm jumping ahead in this, right? But what we're capable of doing versus what it looks like to really push ourselves.

Philip Pape 10:50

We're talking about training in this case.

Assess: Goals, Constraints, And Capacity

Philip Pape 10:52

Yeah. Yeah, I have this conversation a lot because I'm a huge fan of barbell training when somebody has access to that. But I also have a lot of clients and talk to people who don't have access or they have dumbbells or bands or they've never lifted before. They can't even do a push-up, they can't do a pull-up. You know, a lot of women are like, I want to get my first chin up, but I don't even know how to hold the bar properly, right? And so you're saying, like, where do you start? I think there's some basic principles about movement, movement patterns, the way that humans move through the world that I think take some basic education, right? And you can listen to your podcast, my podcast, and understand that. But, you know, bending down to pick things up, right? Hip hinge, pulling things off the ground, squatting, pulling, and pushing. Those basic movement patterns, if assuming you don't have any massive limitation, there are videos, there are basic guidelines. You can get a book like Starting Strength, which my opinion is like the Bible on biomechanics for the lifts, and just do things without any weight or equipment or implements whatsoever in your living room. You know, there's uh Megan Dalman, she's been on my show a bunch of times. She's awesome, right? I know you're awesome too, Jen. We're all like reach out to coaches and experts and figure it out that way. If you can get into a squat, if you can pick things up, if you can push things, you're capable. And if you have a limitation or you're paralyzed from the waist down, I know a gentleman, uh his name is Kevin McShann, who can't walk. And so he does a lot of upper body work, but he still finds a way, right?

Jenn Trepeck 12:10

So I don't know if that answers the question, but it's like well, but it gives people a place to assess their movement and you know what they're capable of, what maybe needs more attention. Okay, so A, the first A of adapt was assess. What's next?

Philip Pape 12:25

You're gonna love this one. It's due. It's due. It's take the action because I don't want to wait, I don't want to do 10 steps before you take that action. Literally, listening to this podcast, guys, you're listening to Jen's show today, you can do a basic assessment and take action today with something. Whether that's I'm gonna track my meal, I'm going to increase you know my protein, I'm going to find the gym that I'm gonna check out or do something at home or whatever. So, you know, when we talk about science and evidence, I don't want people to get confused with massive research papers and studies having to guide what you do. To me, the hierarchy of evidence is yes, science in principle, but also coaching practice, anecdote, and personal experience, the ultimate being you, n equals one, right? Sample size of one, you are the one that's gonna be the outlier for yourself. And so you're not gonna be able to collect data until you do the thing. And so do the thing might be, okay, I'm going to do a basic full body program twice this week or even once. Okay, I'm gonna start tracking my food. Okay, I'm going to whatever. There's a bunch of things that we can track. Okay, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna follow what's in weights. And I'm gonna start listening to this weirdo talking about fat loss and why I shouldn't care as much about the scale. So that's the second step, is just to do it.

Jenn Trepeck 13:41

I love it. Take the action. Take the action. So assess, do, analyze next, analyze.

Philip Pape 13:47

Analyze. You got it. So this is where a lot of people go wrong in that. A lot of people are doing things, okay? Maybe they know where they're from, maybe they know they want to lose fat or get stronger, whatever the goal is. They want to be healthier for their kids, they want to reduce their APOB and their A1C, whatever. And they they know that they have to do something, but then they don't track the progress against that something. And that could be as simple as people aren't tracking their workouts. I see this all the time. People will do the YouTube workout or follow a decent workout in an app, but then they're not tracking the load, the sets, the reps, so that I know Monday I squatted 95 pounds. This time I'm gonna swat 100. And that simple switch for progressive overload with training is missing from a lot of a lot of people. I'm surprised to this day how many people don't realize they have to do that, and then when they do, it's a game changer. So logging that is huge. Analyzing your nutrition data, that that can get very complicated because people come from the diet world of cutting and restricting. I'm gonna suggest that you can eat quite flexibly with some constraints and some controls, some structure, but in a way that works for what you like, what you need, you know, what you want, your schedule, et cetera. So I like logging my food. I'm sorry to say it. It's actually

Do: Take Action And Start Simple

Philip Pape 15:02

not that hard to log a meals, especially with modern technology. It is not that hard to do. I had my community give me screenshots of their screen time for Macro Factor, the app that we use, and it averaged about three minutes a day. Three minutes a day, right? Because each meal is like 30 seconds, 45 seconds. So that's the second piece. Then analyzing your biofeedback is huge. We talked about energy and performance. For some people, that's everything. Like I've got a stressful job. I have a client who works for ABC. Her job is so stressful right now because of the news cycle. Okay. And mood, sleep, digestion. Another person I remember, she was having digestive issues. We were adding fiber to her diet. That was making it worse. It turns out she had reactions to supplements for fiber, right? But because she was tracking it, she knew that was the peach. She was analyzing the variables. There's a bunch of other things we can track, like your body composition, the scale weight. You put it all together at the end of the day, I want to be able to answer the question when someone says, Why am I not making progress anymore? I want to be able to have the data to answer that question.

Jenn Trepeck 16:03

A thousand percent. I'm so with you. And I think part of what you're highlighting with the analysis and all of the things that we're keeping track of is that, as I often say, we're not focusing on any one measurement in isolation or any one data point. It's about the collective and patterns. You know, each time we have this reaction. Right, exactly. Like each time we have this reaction, what did we eat that day, the day before, and the day before that, so that we can identify what's creating the issue. And so it's so interesting because people say all the time, oh, I have it in my head. And I'm like, I promise you.

Philip Pape 16:41

I promise you. No, there's a lot. And it could get overwhelming. And I know people that go the other direction. Like, I have the aura ring, I have the you know, the glucose monitor, I take hormone panels once a month, and I have all the data you're telling me to track. I mean, I think it's cool to have the data if it doesn't like stress you out to actually collect the data, but there's always a trade-off, a middle ground, you know, in between. I like to be efficient, I like things to be easy. To me, it takes stress off my future self this week when I have data that tells me what's going on, like you mentioned. And then also there's education behind that. Like the scale's gonna jump up and down. If you take it daily, you get to see that that it goes up two pounds, down two pounds. And there are reasons that have nothing to do with fat, gain or loss for that. And then you can start to reconcile psychologically with the actions you're taking so you don't program hop and you don't quickly change your strategy.

Jenn Trepeck 17:30

Yeah, for sure. Okay. Assess, do, analyze.

Philip Pape 17:35

And then pivot, pivot. And notice pivot is like a subtle word, right?

Jenn Trepeck 17:39

It's like except that all I can hear is the Friends episode where Ross is like, pivot.

Philip Pape 17:44

Don't get me stuck. Oh my god, my sister-in-law has watched Friends about 20 times all the way through. Yeah, so pivot is just now you're taking the information you've gathered and been gathering while you're doing and taking action and saying that there's something that I can tweak and pivot with. Not, I'm not gonna program hop, I'm not gonna change five things. I'm just going to either I'm getting a poor outcome and something

Analyze: Logs, Biofeedback, And Progress

Philip Pape 18:07

has to change, or I'm getting a good outcome and I need to lean in to something and continue to get better, right? So that could be your training volume, your exercise exercise selection. It could be your nutrition timing, you know, it could be the macros. And okay, I realize that carbs are really helpful for me. So I'm gonna continue to shift that, or vice versa. So this is like the golden part of it where you look at anything in life where you're trying to improve and get it get better, like public speaking. I used to be such an introvert, so scared of speaking in public for 10 years into my career. And then I joined Toastmasters where I had to speak, and people told me to my face what they were hearing. And that alone was the catalyst to say, oh, okay, my awareness is jacked up. Now I can tweak that. So by you analyzing the things you're doing, having the data, now you can apply it to pivot with in and make informed choices.

Jenn Trepeck 18:59

Great. And I feel like I have a whole slew of follow-up questions, so we'll come back to that. Give us the T of a depth.

Philip Pape 19:05

Okay, the T is to test. And it's an interesting one, right? Because you would think, okay, I've applied feedback. Don't I go back to the beginning and just do? But I think there's a each of these is a little experiment. And sometimes you don't necessarily want to go all in and change something for the long haul. And this is where I love, especially when you're working with a coach. I know my clients, they kind of have me to lean on for that emotional stress of all the uncertainties, where it's like, you know what? We're gonna change as one thing, and it's gonna sound a little crazy, but we're gonna do it because we know that it might affect these things you've been analyzing. Like I mentioned, the carbs. We're not just gonna go up by 20 grams, we're gonna go up by 100 grams this week and test it. I'm not saying you have to do it that way, but that can be an efficient way to quickly jolt the system and see what's happening if you're able to measure it on the appropriate timescale.

Jenn Trepeck 19:51

I like the idea of test because it reinforces what we often talk about, which is approaching it with curiosity. What happens? Happens because frankly, going back to your point of principles and evidence-based, we know theory, what that ends up looking like in your body, we don't know. No one can guarantee anything. Yeah. And so this approach of test, I think, really reinforces that.

Philip Pape 20:20

It's awesome. And then you now you're back to the beginning. Now you're back to the beginning where you now you reassess your new situation. It's kind of like people, people always think in terms of before and after in this industry, which is that very short-term mindset. I refuse. You know, I I like to think of it as before, before, before. Like there's always there's always a new milestone and a baseline that you can improve from, and you're never gonna stop improving. That's the beauty of it. And if you are executing a process that is not fun, that is miserable, that is always extremes, and I tell you you're gonna have to do this the rest of your life, how does that make you feel? Right? That doesn't feel right, does it? You don't have to do it that way. There, there's definitely pushing. There's elements of, I'll call it discipline if you're going for extremes, but the day-to-day can be quite enjoyable when the process is designed around you.

Jenn Trepeck 21:05

For sure. Love that. All right. I want to dig more into some of those pivots and help people with some direction in terms of how they might want to pivot or things that they might want to consider testing. Okay, Philip, working with your adapt framework and this idea of doing something, assessing what's happening, making adjustments, testing different, you know, things for lack of a better word. One of the big buzzwords in fitness, even in terms of like you have an episode about strength versus hypertrophy. And how do we even know and assess like our progression and level up, right? Pivot as we get stronger, or knowing how much do we move up and when do we do that? Does that make sense?

Philip Pape 21:58

Yeah, no, it does. That's where we get like one level down, two levels down to the education. When we're talking about progression, my own wife just started running a program I just wrote for her because she has a wonky knee that needs a little work for her. So she said, What do I start with for week one? And by the way, you shouldn't coach your spouse. So I don't coach her. She knows I she just asks me a question, I answer it, and then move on. And if you need me, honey, I'm here for you, right? So that's a good thing, right? Good approach, Jen. I like it. Okay. So how do you know where to start, right? So when you first start, we mentioned the movement patterns and assessing just basic skill. That's a good first start. Then when you start to have some load through a dumbbell or barbell or whatever, you're gonna start light. You know, the goal is not to injure yourself and go hog wild and ego lift on day one. Just feel it out. And once you feel it out, you kind of know, okay, the program said I should try to get 10 reps. I got to 10, it felt easier like I could do 10 more. Okay, that's a great bit of feedback that you just assessed that says I can go quite a bit heavier next time, right? Or I was struggling to get five, I was grinding. Okay, it was way too light. That kind of lets you calibrate. Anytime you're starting a new program, that's a great way to calibrate. Then from that point, progression, I see a lot of mistakes or misunderstandings with how to do that. It is very subjective, but also you have to have the tools. And what I mean by that is micro plates, for example, right? Microplates, a lot of women use dumbbells that I work with and they're like, how do I go from 10 to 15? That's a huge jump. It's 50%. So there's things called microplates, right? Like little hacks like that that people don't understand. But if we get back to principles, I would say there's a few key principles. One is are you jumping up the correct amount that's not overreaching and stressing you out and creating fatigue, but is enough to push you? I would say if you're able to go up at all and it's not like a half pound or something,

Pivot: One Change At A Time

Philip Pape 23:44

it's probably gonna be fine to progress. Secondly, do you have enough rest and recovery? That's huge, right? We can get into a whole topic about are you sleeping enough? Are you eating enough? If you are in a fat loss phase, if you're in a deficit, that creates a whole extra level of allostatic load on your body that's gonna change your ability to progress. And the more advanced you are, the more you're not even going to be able to quote unquote progress necessarily. And you have to look at other variables of intensity in your workout. And then the third thing is the rest periods. Let me tell you, a lot of people make this mistake. They come from YouTube world, circuit world, quad world, and they're like, 30 seconds is enough rest, right? No, no, no. Two, three, four, five minutes rest between most exercises, depending on how heavy it is and whether it's a compound lift or isolation. I'm getting a little bit of the weeds, but the principle being you have to rest enough between sets to actually get all the reps that you want. So I think that answers the question about progressing, right?

Jenn Trepeck 24:37

Yeah, well, and it gives people, in the way that you answered that, I think it gives people different things to consider as they're looking at their movement. And one of the things in terms of what you just mentioned, where depending on the goal, right? Are we in a fat loss phase? So even personalizing the movement to the goal, right? Like it might be fat removal, it might be building muscle, it might be building bone density, right? So I think, especially going back to people using YouTube or some of the other resources or different apps or things like that. How can we even to the first A of Adapt? How do we assess whether the plan or program that seems interesting is a match for our goals?

Philip Pape 25:27

It's not a simple answer. This is where I really think coaches can be helpful, even if it's like a one-time consultation. I squatted for like two years thinking I was doing everything right until I met a coach for one hour and he fixed 20 things going on with my form. You mentioned the strength versus hypertrophy episode. You know, in there and another one I did recently called the 12 rules of volume, it seems like there's a lot of things to think about. I would say if you're a beginner, and that's a question almost geared toward beginners. Yeah. If you're a beginner, stripping it down to three major movement patterns, right? A squat, a hinge or deadlift, and a press, and just doing that each workout three times a week is enough to kind of let you assess the progress that you're making, what your recoverability is, what the frequency should be, and what the load set rep schemes should be. Now, again, we can go always one or two levels deeper. What should the set rep scheme be? This and that. We can get into all

Test: Experiments And Curiosity

Philip Pape 26:25

that. I like basic barbell programs, for an example, like starting strength. But if you're doing a dumbbell workout, there are really good apps today where you could filter on I'm a beginner, I have three days a week, and here's my equipment to kind of get a starting point. I'm actually not too hung up on the training program being that crazy personalized early on until you get more advanced.

Jenn Trepeck 26:46

But I think even thinking about it that way helps people get over the hump of taking the action.

Philip Pape 26:53

100%.

Jenn Trepeck 26:55

Yeah. These days there's a lot of talk about walking or walking with a weighted vest or intervals, walking, jogging, you know. How might you recommend personalizing our walking?

Philip Pape 27:12

I love walking because one of the biggest things we have control over with our metabolism is our need, right? Our non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Probably the biggest lever. There's a famous landmark study that compared sedentary people to shop clerks, to construction workers, and they found a variance of 2,000 calories a day between those who pretty much sat all day and those who moved all day. And not saying you're going to increase it by that much, but it's a huge lever in fat loss and how much you can eat and so on. So when we look at the evidence, what does it say for basic health and mortality? We see 7 to 9,000 steps a day is a good target to shoot for. And I will tell you, it makes a massive difference. So if you're going to do the adapt framework, what do you need to assess? Not just your steps, because that's kind of the outcome. You want to assess what those steps are getting you. Well, they're probably getting you a higher metabolism, they're getting you a lower resting heart rate, right? They're getting you maybe better digestion, better blood sugar management. There's a lot of things that walking gives us. And it's, I would put it second to strength training in terms of all the benefits for your health and your metabolism. So it's as, I'll say as simple as assessing where you are today.

Progression Basics And Recovery

Philip Pape 28:20

If you get 3,000 steps a day because you sit all day, what is a reasonable jump? It's probably not 10,000, but it might be an extra 1000 steps a day by going for a 10-minute walk after your lunch. It might be like an episode I recently did talking about walking snacks, it might be every half hour, walk for two minutes. And that not only does that give you the steps, it actually improves your blood flow, improves your inflammation, improves your insulin sensitivity. It's insane. It's just not sitting is insane in how beneficial it is. So I would start where you're at, I would slowly chip away and increase it. I'll give you a quick client case study. Gentleman I worked with had lifted for 20 years, lots of muscle. If you saw him, you'd be like, I don't want to get in a fight with that guy, you know, beard, big guy, lawyer. And he had no problem with his lifting. That wasn't the concern. He wanted to lose a little bit of fat and he wanted to improve his health. Well, we started that, but before we even got into a fat loss phase, we said, you know what, you don't walk very much. You walk 3,000 steps a day. Let's increase that to like six. His resting heart rate went from like 75 to about 50 in a few weeks. I mean, that's how impactful and powerful walking is. So that's the starting point. When you mentioned the weighted vest, I'll say if you're comparing it to strength training, it gets blown out of the water. There's no comparison. A weighted vest is a nice tool to make walking a little harder. And if you're worried about bone health, you got to lift weights. But if you're worried about like not dying of being sedentary, a weighted vest can help. I hate to be a little cheeky about it, but that's effectively a weighted vest is like rucking. It's like throwing on a bag and just making it a little harder. That's my opinion. Exactly. I'm with you.

Jenn Trepeck 29:51

And one of the things that I really appreciate about how you just explained all that and all the examples that you gave is that you also touched on, I'm gonna tell everybody, go rewind and listen to this. Because what you talked about was also how to personalize the schedule, how to actually make it happen and get it in. Because so often we're in this space and the information coming at us isn't enough. Is it long enough? Is it hard enough? Is it sweaty enough? And when we start to look at those things versus the examples you just gave, like two minutes of walking each hour, that wouldn't compute in the enough category that comes at us.

Philip Pape 30:35

Oh, yeah, with the stories of like, you know, 12,000 steps a day, look at me, you know, and it's using an influencer that's showing them you their perfect routine, which none of them actually have those routines, let's be honest. But the walking piece, look, if you're not lifting weights and you're getting, say, 6,000 steps a day, I think lifting weights is your low-hanging fruit, right? If you're lifting and eating well, but you're sedentary all day, maybe that's the low-hanging fruit. So it's all part of the system, and that's where you have to assess where you are and kind of pick the best place to start right now to be efficient. That'll give you the biggest improvement in the short term for the least amount of, I hate to say the least amount of effort, because some things are hard, but they get it you most efficiently, which for many of us that means time. Like we want to put it in the world. I was gonna say least amount of upheaval. Yeah, upheaval. There you go, least amount of chaos and friction. Right.

Jenn Trepeck 31:22

All right. I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you this question because you have an episode or many where you talk about adapting to injuries and still strength training, still moving even around the injured area. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because I hear it all the time, where the injury, and sometimes rightfully so, makes people fearful and so they back off completely.

Philip Pape 31:54

Well, I mentioned my wife, she has knee osteoarthritis. My 13-year-old just dislocated her knee yesterday because she's growing really fast. She top heavy, grew fast, right? And so she dislocated her knee and I, you know, had a shoulder surgery a couple years ago. I'm not related to lifting, just long-term repetition. And anyway, that's not the point. So we know that use of a muscle is so important for a variety of reasons for its healing and for injury prevention as well. Not just strength. Strength is extremely important when we think of the shoulder girdle, how the shoulder is not even a closed system. It's got like a loose bone, the humerus, and then a socket, and they're separate. It's amazing when you look at the anatomy. And so you lift your arm up and then it kind of sits into that. The muscles are what, and the rotator cuff is what's helping support that, right? So if you're not, even if you have an injury like I did, I kept training around it so that when I had the surgery and could recover afterward, it was easier. Same thing with a back surgery, right? Like people get super fearful, but actually might help to deadlift or whatever. Again, with guidance, this is not medical advice, of course. You gotta, you know. Of course, we are not here to diagnose, treat care, prevent any disease ever. But there are things like blood flow and scar tissue that are huge. Scar tissue alone is probably the root of most people's long-term problems. Even when you do everything right, scar tissue can develop because you keep things immobile, like in a sling or using crutches or not using your knee. Like when you have a knee replacement, they tell you to walk right away, right away. Because scar tissue can develop and just think of that as like really hard, almost like dead tissue in there that's tightening everything together. And unless you break it up later on with like aggressive massage or even another surgery, the best way to prevent it is to actually use it. So, what I've learned from my physical therapists who are also barbell trainers is that, you know, heavy weight is not to be feared and can actually help when it comes to training through it, but you never want to do something that's painful. Like, don't do something that's just sharp

Matching Programs To Your Goals

Philip Pape 33:52

pain, acute pain. Like that's a recipe for disaster. But if you can find alternatives, I did a whole, oh, I don't know if I did an episode about it. I might have or might have been in my group. I talked about all the ways you can vary a single lift to experiment and test whether this works for you. Do the assessment, do the test. You could go with a neutral grip. You can go with a narrow grip. You can use a partial range of motion, right? There's like 10 different things you can step through that that are variables that you can change to see if the same exact lift can be done, but just in a slightly different way. So, yeah, there's you should definitely train around and through healing without exacerbating and without causing pain.

Jenn Trepeck 34:31

Awesome. All right. I want to go back to a tab of your story that's really about, you know, during the pandemic, you build a home gym. And you've mentioned barbell and dumbbells and microplates and different kinds of equipment. And, you know, yes, we're out of the pandemic. I do think a lot of people are still working out at home. I am, you know, I go into a studio less often than before the pandemic, even though things are back. So, what do you recommend for people building out their home gym so that they have the tools to personalize, to adapt, and improve?

Philip Pape 35:09

Yeah, I did uh episode eight. Crazy. Episode eight was like years ago. And I actually re-released it not long ago because I listened to it and said, you know what? It kind of holds up. What's the principle and then what's the specific? The principle is that you want to get slowly stronger over time. If that's the principle, and we know we do that through load or resistance training, you need tools that can apply more load over time. Now, I know some people who have really cool niche expertise in like TRX machine, you know, suspension trainers, banded work, calisthenics, and they're like, you know what, you could get stronger for a long time doing that. Fine. That is not my expertise. I come from the world of like simple gravity-based resistance that we know for decades and decades, have like the movements have been tested out by bodybuilders and power lifters and you know, physique people. So adjustable dumbbells or dumbbells, if you're talking about saving as much space as possible, that and a bench can get you somewhere. It really can, you know. Adjustable dumbbells don't take up much space, and neither does the bench, and there you go. If you have a little bit of more space, which most people do, like people make excuses, but most people have the room.

Walking, NEAT, And Metabolic Health

Philip Pape 36:12

A power rack that has like a pull-up bar, safety features, you know, spotter arms and whatnot, plus a bench and a bar is gonna take you the next two years, you don't even need to supplement and you can make massive progress. Beyond that, toys, it's toys. Like I work in my home gym.

Jenn Trepeck 36:29

I respect that. I respect that.

Philip Pape 36:31

I do have a lot of specialized equipment, like developers and leg press and all this fun stuff. But for a lot of people, if you can get to a commercial gym like within less than 10-minute commute, that's probably a good place to start just to play around with it and see what works for you. And then you could do the power rack and bar. And the whole investment's probably less than two grand, even in today's inflationary market, to get that set up.

Jenn Trepeck 36:51

Yeah. Awesome. All right. Wrapping this up, we've talked about your adapt framework and personalizing all this movement and our mindset. And, you know, you and I are both big on mindset. You know, your show is wits and weights, right? Also great name. Maybe to wrap this up, what are some of the keys that you want people to know or think about in terms of that mindset piece?

Philip Pape 37:19

Well, why don't we do this for each one? Let me just come up with something real quick. So for assess, it's forget the scale as the thing that you're assessing. Like the scale needs to be assessed, but find the other thing right now in your life that's giving you the most frustration and spell it out, you know, and put it into words. And that might be like an a Y type exercise, a five Y, where, you know, why am I doing this? Okay, I'm doing it because I want to look great. No, no, no. Why are you doing this? Well, because I want to be strong. Why are you doing and go all the way through to the deep thing? I think that helps you know what to assess, right? So that's a little psychology. We get to the do, and I think a lot of us are perfectionists, paralysis by analysis. That's why I say it's got to be an early step and don't wait to assess everything. I almost do those at the same time. It's like start assessing and start doing, and you're going to help the assessment while you do. You know what I mean? You kind of can't feed off each other just right behind a slight lag because you're afraid of picking the wrong plan. Well, you don't know if it's right or wrong until you go through the whole framework. So who cares? Just do it. You got to get the data. When it comes to the analyzing, I think I did mention the lack of inconsistent data collection is the problem, whether it's with lifting or food or whatever. I get people come to me saying, like, I'm frustrated, this is not working. And I say, Well, give me your last month of data. Oh, I wasn't tracking the XLA. Okay, all right. Let's take a step back. And before trying to come up with a solution to a problem we don't know exists or we don't know why it exists, let's go back and assess. So you don't need to be per have perfect data, but just consistent data, right? That's really, really important. If you're gonna go on vacation and not track for a week, cool. I want you to do that. We should have fun. You get back, you get right back on it. For pivot, it's I mentioned this already, but it's worth repeating one thing at a time, guys. One thing at a time. People want to change everything. I had a client who wanted to go on TRT, start taking creatine, start gaining weight, change from low carb to high carb all at once. They said, Well, we can, but I'll tell you what, you're gonna get your result about five months from now when you do it that way. If you change one thing, you're gonna get each result updated a few weeks at a time, right? Like it makes it actually speeds up the process when you don't try to change too much at once. And then my last one is my favorite one for testing impatience. People are impatient, they don't want to wait till the result comes out, and a lot of this comes through scale obsession. But the nice thing about having gone through the ADAP part of the process is you got so much good objective information that you can assuage yourself with usually that sometimes the help of a coach or a community to say, you know what, you're actually doing great. Like you're getting stronger, your numbers are going up, your waist size is holding. Who cares what's happening in the scale? You're feeling better, right? You're sleeping better, all right. And You're able to kind of reframe the wins.

Jenn Trepeck 40:03

Awesome. All right. It's time for a rapid fire off-topic questions. You ready? Sure. All right. What's the best thing you've done for your health this week? What's the naughtyest thing you've done? Not that anything's really naughty. Let's call it like the salad of your week and the fries of your week.

Philip Pape 40:17

Okay. The best thing I've done for my health, I started going to physical therapy a few weeks ago. So actually showing up and getting my shoulder capsule massage is absolutely amazing. And it led to one of my answers to the questions today when you asked about injury, talking about scar tissue. Okay, naughty. I don't even know if it's naughty, but I took the family out to hibachi Saturday night. Delish. And just went hog wild. I didn't drink alcohol, but I had like way more than I quote unquote should have, except I loved it. Awesome.

Jenn Trepeck 40:46

All right. If you weren't a physique engineer, what would you do?

Philip Pape 40:50

Oh man. If I wasn't a physique engineer, I would be either a lawyer or an astronomer. Actually. Whoa. I know, weird, right? I love legal thrillers and I've been in a jury. And I remember one when I was in the jury, I said, these lawyers, I could do that. Like they're not even doing that great of a job. Like I could do this job. No, not to sound cocky, but more like it looked like something I would enjoy digging into and trying to figure out. But it then I read books about like the criminal defense system. Like, I don't know. But an astronomer, I've always been into math and science and outer space and looking at the world today. And the Parker solar probe just went into the corona of the sun this week. Fantastic. Amazing stuff. Awesome.

Jenn Trepeck 41:27

All right, your favorite book on any topic other than your area of expertise, or you could give us a fiction book.

Philip Pape 41:33

Oh, I see. I was gonna say fiction. It's funny. Yeah, go for it. Fiction sketch. My favorite fiction book is Pillars of the Earth by Ken Pollett. He's

Training Around Pain And Injury

Philip Pape 41:40

one of the best fiction authors, very intelligent guy, but it's also super accessible, like summer beach kind of thing at the same time. And this was about cathedrals in the Middle Ages. It sounds boring, but the intrigue of all the people's lives across the whole spectrum of wealth is amazing. It's a fiction book. It is, it's awesome.

Jenn Trepeck 41:57

All right. If you could cure one ailment, disease, or sickness, what would it be?

Philip Pape 42:02

I'm gonna say Alzheimer's because my grandmother died of Alzheimer's. I have the both the genes that are supposed to maximize your risk for it. So it's like a little bit of a fear in my head. And I also know there are so many, there's like now 12 or 14 lifestyle measures associated with Alzheimer's that we can do something about. I'm actually gonna do an episode about it because it's so powerful. And it just affects so many people. It's just an awful disease.

Jenn Trepeck 42:27

Yeah. I know we should talk about that one offline because there's so much. Okay. If you were a superhero, what would be your superpower?

Philip Pape 42:34

This is gonna, I don't know, this is gonna sound lame. I was gonna say empathy, but to the level like beta zet beta's always have, like Deanna Troy, if she was not half human, you know, from Star Trek.

Jenn Trepeck 42:46

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Philip Pape 42:47

Where you could like not to the level of Mel Gibson in what women want, because that is scary. Like reading women's thoughts, minds, yeah. But more like the ability to receive emotions. Actually, my wife is very much very good at that. And I've always felt like I'm kind of a cold a-hole sometimes with that stuff in my head. And so, and as a coach, it's maybe better. But honestly, that would be an amazing thing if everyone had that power. I'm with you. What's your biggest pet peeve? I don't have a lot of pet peeves. I'm I'm I'm kind of a nice guy, but the use of the word ask as a noun. Do you know what I mean? When people say, What is the ask? This is the ask, that annoys me. I have a lot of grammar, I have a lot of grammar pet peeves. Let's just put it that way.

Jenn Trepeck 43:29

So do I. Stay off dating apps. Luckily, you're married, but like grammar pet peeves go to a next level on a dating app. All right. I bet. In your opinion, this is the last one. In your opinion, what's the next frontier in wellness?

Philip Pape 43:42

I think the next frontier is it's either genetically customized health or AI, but I think they're gonna converge. Like I think the two are the use of AI for massive data sets that are then personalized to tie it into our episode today. I've talked to people in that industry, like not the founder, but one of the guys at Wild Health, and there's another company as well. And they're doing a little bit of science and a little bit of hocus pocus with like inferring that you're a carb eater or you're a morning person from, you know, I don't quite buy that stuff. I don't think the evidence is there yet. But on, like I said, the Alzheimer's gene, I found out that way, it could inform better inform what you do. So that's just another level of personalization. For sure.

Jenn Trepeck 44:22

Awesome. Well, Philip Hape, thank you so much for being here. Tell everybody how to connect with you, where to find your podcast, wits and weights, all the things.

Philip Pape 44:30

Yeah, just go to witsandweights.com or search for wits and weights in your app. I'm sure we'll have a link in the show notes, and you can get to all my stuff that way. And that was my conversation with Jen Trepik. If you want to check out our show, it's called Salad with a Side of Fries. I'll link it in the show notes. And if you missed Friday's episode where Jen was on Wits and Weights, go back and check that out as well. If you're enjoying these bonus replay episodes, let me know. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify or comment. Reviews help the show reach more people and understand what it's all about. I actually do read them and I give shout outs on the show as well. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you next time.