You might be strength training, watching your nutrition, doing cardio, doing all the things, and still not seeing the fat loss or muscle gains you expected. And the problem might not be your effort. It might be that your goals are fighting each other. And every week you train this way, you're getting further from all of them. Today I'm breaking down exactly how fat loss, muscle building, endurance, and longevity conflict at the physiological level, why the popular do-it-all approach produces mediocre results and a simple sequencing method that gets you to every goal faster. If you keep stacking goals without a plan, you could spend the next 12 months working hard and ending up right where you started. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, founder of the Fitness Lab app. And you have probably been told, or maybe you just assumed, that a good fitness routine should cover all the bases at once. You're gonna lose fat, you're gonna build muscle, you're going to improve endurance, you're gonna live longer, and if you're eating well and training consistently, all of those should just happen together, right? And it sounds reasonable, sounds intuitive, and it tends to be wrong. Not entirely wrong, right? It puts you well above the average population doing some of those things, but wrong enough to keep you stuck or frustrated or plateaued for a pretty long amount of time, sometimes months or years, if you don't understand why. And this is one of the most common patterns I do see in people my age who are over 40, who come to me frustrated and doing all the right things, but they're just doing all the things at once. And that tends to be the problem. Their body has no idea which signal to respond best to, and they're kind of mediocre at everything. Not only are they mediocre, I think it actually sets all of it back even further. So today I'm gonna walk you through why these goals interfere with each other at the cellular and metabolic level. And then I'm gonna give you a straightforward sequencing approach that gets you to every one of those goals, just not in the exact same training block. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to walk you through a 60-second exercise I call the goal audit. You could do it tonight with a pen and paper. You'll know which goal to prioritize and which ones to put on maintenance for the next three months, but you're gonna want to listen to the whole episode to understand how to get the most out of that exercise. All right, let's get into it and talk about the advice that sounds logical, but isn't always. And that's all often the case in this fitness world, isn't it? Something that sounds like it should work doesn't necessarily work. And that is, you know, train for all the goals at the same time, eat quote unquote clean, be consistent. The results are gonna come if you just have a fitness lifestyle. And you hear it in things like the boot camp marketing, the boot camp classes or hybrid training programs, which is really are really popular right now. I hear from a lot of listeners about, you know, how do I combine endurance with lifting? And that's why I'm doing more episodes like this. By the way, our next episode is going to be about how to combine the two. But the promise is that one lifestyle or one routine that you just continue to follow is going to make you leaner, more muscular, better conditioned, healthier all at once. Now, I've used some of that messaging myself when I talk about, for example, lifting weights, which was in our last solo episode about how powerful it is for really checking off all the boxes of fitness, but it doesn't maximize specific goals depending on what those goals are. So if you're not getting results, you know, rather than hitting your head in a wall and just working harder and thinking you need more discipline or I just need to do better, it's probably more about the physics and you're not efficiently going after the right goal right now. And this brings up the concept of periodization. Your body is going to adapt specifically to the demands you place on it. Okay, this is specificity. The idea of specificity is really, really important. And I hope you understand it and really listen carefully. In exercise science, they call it the said principle: specific adaptations to impose demands. You get better at exactly what you train for, right? Heavy squats don't necessarily improve your 10K. Now, there's always little caveats relative to other variables like how much you weigh and what skill how fast you are and your muscle fiber types and all of that. But we know that people trying to maximize a long distance running outcome, their number one priority isn't heavy squats, even though squats can be helpful or helpful, especially in the offseason. Just like marathon training is not going to build your strength or your deadlift PR. Now it's obvious when you compare very different things. So that's easy. But when it gets, I think, costly for you as an individual, like the time you invest, is when your goals actually need to have opposite conditions to succeed. And then you're trying to provide both at the same time. So think about what that looks like in practice. Let's say you want to lose fat, so you're in a calorie deficit, but you also want to build muscle, which works better at maintenance or a slight surplus. That's a very simple one, right? So, you know, let's say you're lifting four days a week for strength for hypertrophy, but you're also running three days a week for endurance and heart health. And maybe you're, you know, you want to compete in endurance sport. I've worked with bikers and runners, for example. Your legs in that case may not be recovering the way they need to, which then stalls your strength and then also stalls your endurance. And then your body fat barely changes in the first scenario because the deficit is too mild to drive fat loss, but too aggressive to support muscle growth. And you kind of get this slow, wonky, half-assed body recomp, right? And by the way, listen to my other episodes on body reconp. There's there's a more efficient way to do body reconp that, in my opinion, involves the very slightest of surpluses. So most people respond to this by just doing more, doing harder, you know, stricter dieting, whatever. They think they just need to ramp up one of those dials, like that it's not strong enough, but you actually haven't addressed the root cause, right? You're pouring more effort into a system that's not working for you. So, what I want to look next is what's happening under the hood. Like, why do your goals fight each other and address the three biggest conflicts that we tend to have so that we can attack them? Okay, the first one is fat loss versus muscle gain. This is the most common one. To lose body fat, you have to have a deficit, a sustained calorie deficit. And for a lot of people, that's gonna be in the say three to five hundred calories below maintenance is a good sustainable deficit for a lot of people, right? Depends on your body weight, depends on your expenditure. And what does your body do? Okay, it doesn't have enough energy coming in, so it pulls from your stored energy, your fat cells to make up the gap, and you lose fat. To build muscle optimally, though, you need enough calories to support that new tissue that's being generated, right? The amino acids from your protein combine to form new skeletal tissue, new muscle mass or skeletal muscular tissue. And for most people, that means not being a diet, and that means being at least at maintenance, if not a little bit above that, or even more above that, right? Like 100, 200, 300 calories above. And so these are opposite nutrition environments. Now, can you do both at the same time? Yes, you can do both at the same time. It's called body recomposition. We talk about it all the time. We've seen studies that support body recomposition. A 2020 meta-analysis by Barricat, Barricat, great research source if you're looking for good citations. Barricat and colleagues found that untrained individuals can gain muscle in a deficit. A 2021 study by Campbell showed that train lifters can recomp under very tight conditions. You have to have high protein, around a gram per pound, progressive overload, and only a very, very mild deficit. And when I say mild, I mean as much as 10, 15, 20% below maintenance. It's not nothing. But the rate of change is slow, very slow in some cases. Maybe, maybe a half a pound of muscle gain a month alongside a pound or two of fat loss. Now, for someone, for many of you, that might be perfectly fine way to live. And we again we talk about that. I have a body recomp workshop in physique university where we go over all these scenarios. But once you've been lifting consistently for even a couple of years and you got to a kind of healthy body fat, then you're you're barely gonna notice these kinds of changes if you keep trying to recomp, in my opinion, from my experience. Whereas if you have a focused 12-week cut and a focused four to six months, let's say six month building phase, the visible change is gonna be more dramatic and in a shorter period of time, even though you're doing two different things and you have trade-offs that come along with that. Right. That's why I assume I'm a big fan of bulking and cutting, but it doesn't have to be extreme. It just has to be precise and focused. So that's one. The second one is strength and muscle versus endurance. Okay, a lot of you are asking about this these days. Uh hybrid training, concurrent training comes up. People are kind of getting more into cardio again. I shouldn't say again, but like lifters are more interested in cardio because they know it doesn't really interfere as much as we used to think. And this one runs really deep. It's called the interference effect. We're gonna talk about this in detail in the next episode. It was first described by Hickson in 1980. That was the year I was born, by the way. Classic days. When you combine heavy resistance training with high volume endurance training, the interference effect says you're gonna blunt your gains in both. And there's there's still some truth to it, although it's been overblown. The mechanism is that resistance training activates one pathway, it's the mTOR pathway, and that drives muscle protein synthesis. Endurance training activates the AMPK pathway, and that improves your mitochondrial density and your energy efficiency, right? These are like different energy systems and different uses of nutrients. So these pathways kind of suppress each other a little bit. A 2012 meta-analysis by Wilson and colleagues found that concurrent training reduced strength gains by about 15 to 20% and hypertrophy gains by about 28% compared to resistance training alone. Now that's an older study. In the next episode, we are actually gonna get into how to combine lifting with endurance in a way that doesn't cause that effect. Okay, so I think again, you have to take it with a grain of salt and look at how the cardio and lifting are being put together, the amounts of it, the volume, the order, all of that, there's definitely a way to have a decent amount of cardio alone with your lifting and it not be an issue. We're gonna talk about that in the next episode. But as far as the actual practical nature of this, when you have those two different goals, you're trying to build strength over here or you're trying to build for endurance over here, it's kind of a practical recovery problem. Because if you're running, say 25 or 40 or 50 miles a week on top of squatting and deadlifting, your legs might not be recovering. Okay. And again, it's it's the volume, the volume matters. Training quality will drop when that happens, then you're gonna accumulate fatigue, and then you're gonna work really, really hard. And the numbers may not go the way you want because you're trying to do two goals. Now, a few moderate cardio sessions a week, they're not gonna wreck your gains. Also, some more rigorous endurance work won't wreck your gains if you're trying to maintain, like if you're not trying to just go all out and build PRs. So that's why I think it matters like what degree to each goal you have. And we know certain modes like running is gonna cause a little more issues for people than say cycling, and it has to do with the eccentric use of your muscles, right? And the tearing and the fatigue and all that. So, again, we're gonna talk more on the next episode about that specific topic, but it is important, and I am covering it today, kind of at the goal level. The third conflict is performance versus longevity. And this is more subtle because muscle mass is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and healthy aging. And so maintaining and building strength and lean tissue protects against falls, protects against metabolic disease, helps with insulin sensitivity, so it protects against resistance, protects cognitive against cognitive decline, right? So, in that sense, strength and longevity actually do align really, really well. But once you start chasing a more extreme level of performance, it could work a bit against longevity. So, for example, trying to keep very stay very shredded with a really low body fat percentage, well, you're probably causing some adaptation, if not some disruption to your hormones and your sleep, your immune function, all of that, right? We you you probably heard horror stories of physique competitors having a very unhealthy situation when they're right at around showtime, you know, and combine that with something like chronic overtraining, which is endemic in people who are trying to chase performance. You know, you think elite athletes and CrossFitters and even powerlifters and whatever, which can drive things like inflammation if you're doing it too much. Extended calorie restriction also adds stress to this whole thing. And you may be doing that because of a performance goal, but it can lower your metabolism, it can compromise things like bone density or whatnot. And so the the path to living well for decades to come is has got to include some level of, I'll say moderation and recovery or balance or whatever word you want to use as an essential variable of the whole thing. So recovery is a good word for it. I, you know, not just hard training, harder and harder training. And those of us over 40 notice this because we have a lower ability to recover and we have, you know, it's harder to come by sleep because of our lives. And also joint what joint pliability and and our synovial fluid and all that stuff seems to be less responsive. We're less resilient physically than we were when we were younger. That's no excuse not to still train and still perform and improve. But most people conflate peak performance with optimal health, and they're related, but they're not the same thing. Okay, so those are the the mechanisms and the conflicts, and they're they're pretty much physiological, right? What I just talked about, they're not psychological conflicts, they're actually physiological. What do you do about it? What do you do about it? All right. So the fastest way to reach all your goals is to stop chasing them simultaneously. And the fix to that is to sequence your goals combined with periodizing your goals. So periodization is the word I would encapsulate this whole thing with sequencing or periodization. You pick one primary goal for a defined period, let's say eight to 16 weeks. You have a set period in mind, not because you're trying to chase the scale by a certain date, but because that period of time makes sense for the goal. And then you design your training, nutrition, recovery around that one goal. Your other goals are go into a maintenance mode and then you rotate through them. So any one goal comes to the top. That's your priority. All the other goals are maintenance mode. And what's cool about this is the maintenance mode stuff is still gonna need some attention to maintain them, right? But not nearly as much as to push them forward or to improve. And then you rotate through them. And by the way, we're gonna go through this step by step right now, real quick. I'm working on a relaunch. You guys have heard me talk about physic university. I'm gonna re-launch soon something called Eat More Lift Heavy. Pretty cool. Because after all these years, I realized what people really need is this exact approach of sequencing and periodization, essentially written out for them over a six-month period. And I think even the best one-on-one coaches have trouble doing that. So I'm actually put creating a whole system for that. Stay tuned. I know it's a tease. I don't actually have there's no way to sign up or anything like that. Of course, if you're interested, you could always reach out. Or if you come into physique university now and join, I'm gonna give a really nice deal to people who are already in. So you can come in, start getting the courses and the help and support to hit your goals now, and then check that out when it comes out. Anyway, here is the step by step. All right. Step one is to pick your primary goal. Okay, sounds obvious, but it it it's it's something people skip. They just go and they assume, okay, I'm gonna get fit, and here we go. If you could only improve one thing about your body composition or fitness over the next four months, what would make the biggest difference? So answer that question right now. That's your focus. If you could only improve one thing, okay, don't say I want to build muscle and lose fat. That's two things. Say one thing. And it could be specific, it could be I want to reduce belly fat, I want to get a my first pull-up, I want to deadlift PR, I want to compete in a powerlifting meat, I want to compete in that endurance race, that 5K, 10K or ultra marathon, whatever. That's your one thing. One thing, start there. Step two, you're going to put everything else into maintenance. And this is where people resist because it feels like they're giving something up or they're gonna slow everything down, but it's not. Maintaining anything is dramatically easier than building it. And for example, research shows muscle mass can be maintained on as little as, I'll say one third is like the absolute risk-free, but I've heard as little as one eighth the volume used to build the muscle. So it's somewhere in that range, meaning a lot less, as long as you keep the intensity high, the the stimulus high, right? Like the weight on the bar, you know, you're training close to failure, you're still trying to use progressive overload. So if it normally took you 15 hard sets per muscle group per week to build, you could probably maintain that with as little as like five sets a week. And then you can switch up your training schedule accordingly to save all that time and recovery capacity for your primary goal, if if if that's not your primary goal. So if let's say fat loss is the priority, then of course you're gonna be in a moderate deficit. We're not trying to body recop, we're trying to go all out into a deficit, but keep that protein high, keep lifting to preserve the muscle, keep the cardio at like the low intensity stuff like walking, easy cycling, maybe a little sprinting that kind of is very recoverable, even if it still bumps up your calorie burn a little bit, if that's what you're going for. You are not chasing PRs on your lifts. You're not training for a race. If muscle building is a priority, uh if fat loss is the priority, you're in a deficit holding on to muscle. Now, if muscle building is a priority, you're gonna eat at maintenance or slight surplus. Train harder and with the idea to get PRs. And the cardio, you have maybe a little more capacity for some cardio, but it's still more easy type of sessions versus a ton of miles, let's say, because you're trying to be an endurance athlete, athlete. Right. And I can go through this list. I could say, okay, if you're an endurance athlete, you've got to put that number one, figure out your easy days, your medium days, your long days, if that's something you have, make it very recoverable. You got to have a build-up training plan both on the cardio side with the like miles per week and sprints and all that, as well as on the food side where you might be going a little bit lower protein and a little bit more carbs as you get closer to an event, let's say. So, but and while you're doing that, you might only train two days a week, and it might be a very minimal program to maintain your muscle and strength. So you get the idea, right? Now, the if longevity is the goal, that that gets a little trickier because really, really the thought there is to optimize everything you're doing so that it's sustainable for decades to come, which means you're not necessarily chasing PRs or huge amount of fat loss or a huge endurance output. And it's a, I think of longevity as a little bit more of a balanced approach where everything is kind of being maintained. And maybe you focus on some things like your diet and your nutrition, your nutrient sufficiency, hormones, those kinds of things, if that makes sense. All right. Step three then, once you've got your primary goal and then what's in maintenance, is to plan the sequence across your year. I like to think of a 12-month period. It's a nice bit of time to plan things out and think of it in phases. So if I were working with a client over a year and we're thinking of body composition change, I'm probably gonna plan a month or two of prep work for fat loss phase, probably 12 to 16 weeks of fat loss at most, and then like six to nine months of muscle building. Now, it might not be in that order, right? It might switch around based on what the immediate goal is, but you would plan it over the whole year. Now, if they have an endurance focus in there, well, you'd have to fit that in somewhere, maybe an eight-week block. If they have a powerlifting meet, maybe a block there, and then they're not dieting. You know, where do you put your maintenance and diet phases in there? All the phases have to be building on each other, and that's where the compounding happens because whatever you did in the last phase now gives you a higher foundation for the next phase. Now, when you, for example, build muscle in a surplus, you're probably raising your expenditure and you are also adding muscle mass. So that's gonna make your next fat loss phase easier because you can now eat more calories and you're just healthier overall. Let's say when you improve your cardiovascular fitness in an endurance phase, well, that's gonna give you bigger work capacity to recover in the gym, and now you can maybe lift heavier. You know, maybe a phase of fat loss resensitizes your body to nutrients and hunger signals and eating more fiber and eating from fullness. So when you shift back to building, you're gonna have a better time of eating and using that nutrition. See what I mean? It's pretty cool. So each focus block creates advantages for the next one, and you end up progressing faster over that year by doing one thing at a time than you would by doing three things at once. And this is a huge revelation for me when I got into learning about nutrition science and doing it the right way, because I had sort of inadvertently done these types of things on my own without realizing it. Like the time when I built a ton of strength and drank whole milk and ate a bunch of food and knew, hey, I have to gain weight while I'm doing this. I can't be trying to lose fat. I did it kind of out of control without structure, but I at least in my mind had the idea that you had to do this. And then once I got into coaching and got my certification and started learning more about the evidence and the science, I realized oh, this is this is the what we need to do. We need to specify and be very intentional and then set up structure with flexibility to get there. All right, step four is to integrate all. Of these goals without them competing. So having a primary goal doesn't mean zero attention to everything else. It doesn't mean you just drop it all. Like, okay, I have an endurance sport, come endurance race coming up, so I'm just gonna not lift weights at all. That's the worst decision you can do. It does mean that the secondary work supports or at least doesn't interfere with or like sabotage the main goal. So in a muscle building phase, the cardio is as much as it needs to be without interfering with your building muscle. And that that could be a wide range depending on your capacity, capability, and desires, and also depending to the degree which your primary goal is taking priority. You know, so in that case, you know, walking and easy cycling might come before running, let's say, and stuff that aids recovery without taxing your legs. Whereas if you are going after endurance goals, then as I mentioned before, maybe you still only live twice a week. Or if it's if it's three or four times, it's very short sessions, very little volume to maintain that muscle. Now, you may you may titrate these things, right? Where, okay, 16 weeks out, I have this bike race, and right now I'm just lifting weights for muscle mass and I'm eating. How do I transition? Well, the transition can occur as one thing slowly coming down and one thing slowly coming up. It doesn't always have to be abrupt. There could be a transition phase in between these. And that's sometimes a really smart thing to do with something like nutrition, let's say. Okay. And then the last step, step five, is keeping it sustainable, right? It always still has to be sustainable in a way. Now, there's a the caveat on that is how we define sustainable. So what is not sustainable is like a very extreme version of each thing constantly, thinking that that's like you can sustain that. Like, so I'm gonna go on a dreamer bulk, then I'm gonna go in a massive fat loss phase, it's super aggressive. And then, you know, there's a having said that, there's a certain amount of aggressiveness you can handle that's still sustainable depending on the phase. So, for example, some people can handle a big deficit really well, but only for a certain duration. And then when they go into a muscle building phase, it's very conservative. Some people go the opposite way. They want to go very aggressive on the muscle building, but then they want to go very conservative on the fat loss. So that's what I mean by sustainable. Each phase should be moderate, or the the phases that need to be more extreme, you've got to know that that you can do them at that extreme level with the appropriate trade-offs. And the trade-offs might be the duration or the recoverability in other areas or whatever, right? Okay, I hope that was clear, right? Sustainability is always a challenge and it's a very personal thing. Like when we work with our clients or members, the sustainability piece is really what comes up almost all the time. Because at the end of the day, we need to understand what the feedback is telling you, what's your body telling you, what is your data telling you, so we can keep iterating on that and find your level of sustainability. So we've been talking about how all these goals compete for the same recovery budget. At the end of the day, I really think it comes down to recovery, especially if you're over 40. And the one thing I keep coming back to is that recovery is actually the only goal that never conflicts with anything else. So this is kind of interesting. It's like a meta goal that sits on top of everything. Right? You can argue about whether I should cut or bulk, whether I should do cardio versus lifting. But nobody in the history of mankind has ever said that you should sleep more poorly to help with any of it. Now, I take that back because there has been a in business circles and like entrepreneurship and CEOs over the years, like, hey, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or I only need four hours of sleep. But I think we're finding that that's not the case, that even those people need more sleep to perform their best. Which is my very smooth segue into our sponsor today, Cozy Earth. I know, I know, hear me out, hear me out, because I am a convert, a genuine convert about this company. Um, I really like high quality products. And by high quality, sometimes it comes with a price, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends. I would say Cozy Earth is right in that sweet spot of price and quality. And last year I talked about their sheets, which we use all the time now, and I would never give those up. I bought a second pair, but right now I'm wearing their pajamas and using their blanket because thankfully, as a sponsor, I get to try these things out before I tell you about them because I don't want to sell you junk. So you think about the recovery aspects of sleep and what you sleep in and your environment and keeping it cool and dark and all of that stuff. Well, how do we help with those things? Well, sheets are one, but what you wear is another. And I don't usually give it a second thought because I tend to sleep in just shorts or underwear or whatever TMI. But then I tried the Cozy Earth Bamboo Pajama set, and now I actually like wearing them. Whether it's winter or it's warm because they keep you cool. And maybe on a super hot day, I don't know. But for now, I think they're awesome. I think they give me that signal that it's actually the nighttime and it's time to wind down and it's this weirdly effective thing for something that's just close. And so they make a lot of things like that. Cozy Earth makes things derived from bamboo that have that breathability and that temperature regulation. And that's what I like about it. Um, and so their blanket has a similar concept, but of course, a blanket you're trying to keep yourself warm. You're not trying to cool yourself down, but you want it to be comfortable. And this thing is really, really heavy. And I've been using it every morning. Before I work out, I sit on the couch, I read a book, usually fiction, usually science fiction or post-apocalyptic dystopian novel or a legal thriller. Those are the general categories I've been liking lately. Just to kind of chill out in the morning and start to wake up, relax with this very thick, soft blanket, which my kids say feels softer than their hamsters, which tells you how soft it is. And you're just not getting up once it's up. And I think that's a good thing. And then, you know, you can get recovered with a really comfortable blanket. So they back up their products, Cozy Earth does. They have a hundred night sleep trial to test it, which is a massively long amount of time to try something out. They have a 10-year warranty, and you'd be supporting me if you check out the product. So go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. Code Wits and Weights will give you 20% off. When you go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth, it'll actually show you the code in case you forget it. Go to wits and weights.com slash cozy earth. All right, let's get back to this and keep talking about conflicting goals. And remember, when we get to the end, I'm gonna walk you through your goal audit that's gonna put all this together so you can actually map them out. So let's talk about quickly when doing two things at the same time can work. And I mentioned body recomp. There are specific scenarios where body recomp, losing fat, and gaining muscle at the same time is reasonable. And I I've done entire episodes about this, but just at a high level, if you're a true novice, a true beginner to strength training, your body's gonna respond rapidly to the signal from your training. Your body's gonna adapt. Neuromuscular and muscular, like physical stimulus is going to allow you to build fat, build muscle and lose fat almost at any kind of level of a deficit or surplus. So in that case, you may be fine just sitting around maintenance and doing the thing and working hard. I really wouldn't encourage just a diet right off the bat if you're strength training for the first time, because I really want you to get the most out of the training piece and be fully fueled and recovered. And then you can get in a good position for fat loss phase. You know, in all these cases of body recomp, it's going to be not too far from maintenance. It's either gonna be a slight deficit, it's gonna be at maintenance, or it's gonna be a slight surplus. And really that's it. Now, someone who doesn't really fit into that category, who maybe is an experienced lifter, you're already at a healthy body composition, and you want to do these simultaneously, it's just gonna take a lot longer and it's gonna be hard to measure the changes. They're just so slow. And I see people comment on my stuff all the time about this who are like, well, it took me, you know, 12 months to see a change. And then I ask more about the details. And, you know, either they're they're doing it in a very modest way that's going to take a long time, or they have some experience in their past and it's gonna slow it down. So the same principle applies to hybrid or concurrent training. If you want to do some running or other endurance alongside your lifting because you enjoy it, it supports your health, awesome. Two or three moderate sessions a week, if they're low impact, even better, separated from your lifting by at least six hours. Those kinds of things, those little rules that help that we're gonna talk about on the next episode. But if you're training for a marathon or ultra marathon or a big, you know, like a 10K or whatever, and you also want to get a squat PR, something has to give. Most likely, something has to give. I mean, I guess there are exceptions. You know, there's definitely people talking about trying to do both with some massive level of recovery. Maybe you're sleeping nine hours a night, you have no stress in your life. But for most of us, they're not going to happen together. And you have to go back to the steps that we went through of what's my primary goal? Can I do the secondary thing at a maintenance without it draining my recovery? And the other steps. And I guess, I guess the final thing is psychological because I think most people operate in this space with what I call a simultaneous mindset. The assumption is that, hey, I need to be progressing on everything all the time. Philip talks about all the pillars, right? Lifting and walking and eating and everything, sleeping and stress. And so I feel like I need to make progress on all these things. And then I'm failing if I'm not. And that's a very exhausting mindset and it creates guilt. It creates guilt when you're not doing enough of whatever it is, cardio, you know, your lifts aren't making progress. You get all this anxiety, you send me a message on Instagram. Why am I not building muscle? Why don't I see muscle definition? You get frustrated when your weight goes up more than you thought it would during a building phase, or you're feeling fluffy, and you're like, is this even working? You know what I'm talking about. Right now, the alternative to that would be a sequential mindset focused on the process. And that's what we've been talking about today. In any given phase, you're pushing one thing forward and maintaining everything else. And I don't want you to think of that as a compromise or a trade-off. That's actually on the net going to give you more results. That's how you solve this complex system that we're trying to work with, which is our body. You don't optimize everything at once. You identify the constraint, you focus resources on that constraint, low-hanging fruit, whatever phrase you want to use, and then you move to the next one. Even if that's constraint is deeper, like hormonal or nutrients or whatever, focus on that and go all in on it and fix it and improve it. And guess what? It's gonna help everything else anyway. And then when you truly do that, you remove the internal friction that was draining your energy and draining your willpower. Because now you know exactly what you're doing and why it actually takes the stress out of the process. And now you can measure things clearly because there's one metric that matters. Maybe there's submetrics, but you know, there's this one set of metrics that matters for the next, say, 12 weeks or six months or whatever. And that mental clarity by itself can accelerate your results more than any physical tweak. Lastly, don't forget that fitness is a lifelong project. And I mean that in the best way. I mean that in the best way because you don't have to be your leanest, strongest, fastest, most enduring self by next Tuesday. You just want to be making consistent, measurable progress on the thing that matters right now, and you're gonna feel great for it. You're gonna feel great because you're making progress and improving. And the human struggle is a process of improving until the day you die. I mean, to me, that's a positive thing. It means I can always improve. I'm never gonna hit the finish line because if I did, why be alive? Why be alive anymore? All right, before I let you go, I'm gonna walk you through that quick goal audit that I promise it'll take you two minutes. I want you to grab a pen and paper because you're gonna walk away knowing exactly what to focus on next. And instead of pausing, I'm just gonna talk quickly about something else that might be helpful while you grab that pen and paper. Because if this episode made you realize you've been stacking your goals without a clear priority, my lab, my my lab, my app fitness lab, I believe truly and honestly can fix that based on the feedback we're hearing. It's an AI coaching app that I built. I trained it. It's built on my stuff. It's not just Chat GPT giving you whatever it wants based on all human knowledge. It's very specifically trained on the evidence and what to do. And the very first thing it does is ask about your goals, your body, your lifestyle, your training history, all of this stuff in a free two-minute quiz. And then based on your answers, it gives you a custom plan around your primary goal right now, not every goal at once. And guess what? It's periodized, just like we're talking about today, because I've trained it to do that. So whether your focus is fat loss or muscle building or getting stronger or endurance even, Fitness Lab is going to adapt your nutrition and training plan, your daily activities to get to that goal specifically and forget all the rest. Not forget as in they're not important, but it's gonna help you prioritize and maximize for the thing that matters. And then as your goals shift, it's gonna shift with you and you can tell the coach in the app, hey, my goal is different now. This is what I want to do going forward. Help me out. You know what? We're gonna change our activities now to match that new goal. So go to wits and weights.com slash app to take the free quiz. And actually, depending on when this comes out, if you still want the 20% off because you follow the podcast, I'm gonna include a special link in the show notes for that in case our promotion is done for the winter. So you still get the 20% off. So use the link in the show notes to absolutely make sure you get that. All right, here is the simple exercise that takes two minutes and can save you months of wasted effort in the gym. Grab a pen and paper, write down every fitness goal you're currently working toward. Not the one, not the one you care most about. I want you to write them all down. I want you to write, hey, I want to build muscle, I want to lose fat, I want to get faster, I want to improve my heart rate, I want to live longer, I want to improve my testosterone, anything you can think about, right? Stream of consciousness, write them all down. You could even come back to it, add more later. You got it? Okay, write down every goal you're working toward. Now, circle the one that if you achieved it in the next three months would change dramatically how you feel about your body and your training the most. All right. If you achieved it in the next three months, that one thing on the page, I want you to circle and be like, yes, yes, this is the thing. And then look at all the other ones you wrote down. For each of those, write the word maintain next to it or a little M or whatever makes sense. And that means you're still gonna train for it, but at the minimum effective dose, right? Whatever that is, like we talked about, two lifting sessions to hold on to your muscle, some easy walks for cardiovascular health, whatever. Then look at the one you circled again. So you've got one circled and all the other ones say maintained. That is your primary goal for the next 12 weeks. So every decision about nutrition, training, recovery gets filtered through that goal first. First. If a choice supports it, you do it. If it competes with it, you save it for the next phase. And if you're not already doing things to maintain the other stuff, then don't worry about it yet. Don't worry about it yet. Just focus on the one thing. You're gonna build this up over time. Because the next time, three months from now or six months, whatever, you're gonna do this exercise again and switch to your next goal. All right, do it tonight. Put it somewhere you'll see it, put it on the fridge, put it on your nightstand. And when you feel that pull to add more, look at the piece of paper and don't do it. Don't do it. Focus on the thing that you circled. Your future self is gonna thank you for that. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember the fastest path to all your goals isn't doing everything at once, it's doing one thing at a time and trusting the sequence and process to get you there. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.