 Okay. Stairmaster versus walking on a high incline. Which one is better for fat loss? Our first caller is Marie from California. Hey Marie, how can we help you? Hi. I just had a silly question actually. So I've been prepping. I have eight weeks to my net show and my coach wants me on the Stairmaster, which I'll do, but I absolutely loathe the Stairmaster. I will try everything but that first. And so I'm wondering what the significance of the Stairmaster versus incline walking at a fast pace, like a 3.5 on a 10 incline. What's the significance between the two? What's the prominence of the Stairmaster versus the incline walk? Those kinds of things. Yeah, good question. First off, why do you think it's a silly question? Yeah, no, it's a good question. Because some people really like the Stairmaster and I absolutely hate it. Your coach is not going to like me when I get a hold of this question. Just so you know. I tried to get out of it. Let's put it that way. Good. Here's the most significant difference between the two. Okay. You hate one and you don't hate the other one. I mean, that's the truth now. Now, is one going to burn more calories than the other one? Yeah. I mean, Stairmasters tend to burn more calories and walking fast on an uphill. It's not a huge difference. You could easily make up for it with a calorie reduction or maybe a faster pace. Honestly, I don't understand why coaches are so weird about specific cardio applications and I almost feel like their goal is to make it as miserable as possible. Like they get off on really hammering people and making them do stuff that they don't want to do. But no, there's not a huge, I mean, you might burn a little more calories, I guess, but it's not such a big difference that it's going to make. Well, I mean, she'll burn more if all she does is walk incline most of the time and she never does Stairmaster. There's value in that because of the novelty of it, right? Because it is different. So it's not just purely getting your heart rate up. It's a different modality. So the fact that it's new and different, that's part of why you probably hate it. You don't like it and there is some benefit to that. But that's not what I want to address because you wrote your question and I can actually see it right now. And there's a part that you left out that your coach is not going to like me addressing right now. But this is also how I made my bones in the space because so many coaches did this and it just didn't make sense to me. Tell me what he or she had you doing during the bulking phase. Were you doing cardio during the bulking phase? I was. It wasn't as much. It was about 30 minutes, four to five times a week, not very intense and no hit. And now I have some hits in conjunction with incline walk and or stairs. And so we're not bulking anymore. But I think one of the reasons why I hate the stairs so much is I exert way more energy, almost like an asthmatic effect. I just can't stay on there very long. My endurance on the stairs is miserable compared to the incline walk. I don't know if there's a difference in that. So this is part of the benefits of it though too, right? So you've probably become very adapted to walking incline that your body's become very efficient at it. Therefore it's not going to burn as much energy as it would if you were on the stair master. So there's the really though. Now there's some people that love the stair master. They do it all the time. And then I would tell them to go do the elliptical, the bike or something else, because they never do that. So the thing that the thing that's going to bring you the most benefit is the thing that you never do it. Do you ever, if you never row, then go row instead. There's a lot of, there's lots of different cardio modalities that you can do to gain those benefits. But if you do the same thing all the time, consistently weeks in, months out, years out, as far as your mode of cardio, then your body's going to be most efficient at that. And when you're trying to burn more calories, burn more body fat in your, in your case, getting ready for a show, then doing something that you're not used to doing is going to benefit you the most for cardio. But I'm not done addressing this coach because this, this, this never makes sense to me why these coaches keep cardio in the, in the routine all the time. Because we would be far better off in during the bulk if you eliminated all cardio. And we, we would only need to add enough calories. So you could add less calories and get the same benefits bulking. I also would get the benefit of you taking off all cardio. So then when I reintroduced your walking incline that you haven't been doing for the last three to four months, your body's going to respond again, like it's, it's a new stimulus. So it always, it always blew my mind when these coaches during a bulking season would still have their clients doing cardio, even, even though you're, you're saying 30 minutes for 30 minutes, four to five times a week, my, my female clients were doing that four weeks out from a show. That we, yeah. And we didn't get, we didn't start doing our cardio till the last week or two because we adjusted our, our weight, our weight routine and our calories to lean you out. And I'd rather do it that way as much as possible until we get to the final weeks and use calories. That's exactly what I was going to say because you're especially intense cardio while you're dieting. I'm sure your calories are really low while you're doing a lot of resistance training, you're, you may be sacrificing muscle because of this adaptation signal. I, I, I don't get it. I think again, I say it's trivial because the difference because you can make up for it with caloric, you know, restriction or dropping calories a little bit and or you might even have a faster metabolism by not doing so much intense cardio on top of your intense resistance training on top of a calorie deficit. This is, that's why I made that comment. I feel like coaches are like, let's see how much we can beat this person up because I just don't, I just don't understand. It's really not a scientific approach. So it's not at all. It's, it's the formula for most of these coaches is again, this is, I did not get into that space with the intent of becoming a coach. I just saw, I had so many people coming up to me and asking for help. And when I would assess what their coaches were telling them, I thought, this is so ridiculous. Like you have to understand that when you're in a cut, like Sal saying, you're, you're restricting calories already. And then if you go add intense cardio, the signal you're sending to the body is not one to keep muscle. And that's part of, part of the goal of us bulking together. So if I just bulked you for, you know, two months or three months before we get ready for our stage and get ready for our cut, obviously the goal is to hang on to as much of that muscle you and I worked for building as possible. So that, for me, that means I want to, I want to minimize how much intense cardio I do with you. I only want to do it in those last few weeks as a, like kind of an emergency, like, okay, okay, we're getting ready. We were almost ready for stage. You're not quite as lean as I want you to. Okay, let's ramp this cardio up, knowing that I'm probably going to lose a little bit of muscle along the way too, because I know I've got you in a calorie deficit and I'm pushing the shit out of your body and cardio. You start doing that six, eight, 10, 12 weeks out before the show. And of course your body is going to pare down muscle and you're going to slow down the metabolism. And this is going to be a fucking grind for the last four weeks. Yeah, what are your, what are your calories at right now before your show? Okay, so right now I'm at 1640. I have 40 grams of fat a day. And then the rest is split between the protein and the carbs. But my last last show last year around this time, the coach I was using had me at 600 calories towards the end. So I have a different coach now working much better with feeding, but I'm kind of freaking out because I'm eight weeks out and my body's not responding. So yeah. Well, eight, okay, hold on, eight weeks out, 1600 calories, you're doing how much cardio and how much resistance training every week? Oh gosh, I love the gym. I'm kind of addicted. I know I've listened to your show before, so I know I should take a little more time off, but it makes me happy to go. So I'm about five, sometimes I'll still go that sixth day and just keep it lighter. And it's pretty intense. My leg days are easily two and a half hours and I'm really, I'm lifting very heavy and I've got five kids, so it's taking me a lot longer to get this off my body. And then my, my shoulder days, maybe an hour and a half, then some cardio, cardio's four to five days a week, about 30 minutes each time. And then on top of that, three out of those five days I'm doing HIIT with the cardio. Okay. Wow. This is, it's so hard about this. Sorry, Sal, I couldn't you off there, but I just want to make the point that no matter what you say or what I say, right now it's like, it's too little, too late. Yeah. But I mean, when we get somebody that like yourself who asked me a question like this, and we're in the middle of a cut, you know, a lot of times I normally tell them like, listen, just ride it out with your coach. They're paying attention to you more than I'm paying attention to you every day. But the next time when we get out of the show, there is a much better way for us to approach this prep. Sorry, Sal, for cutting it. Yeah. No, I was just, you know, I look, if you were a family member, a friend of mine, I'd say, if you could just not do this, stop. And if you, okay, fine. If you want to finish this show, do it. Don't do this again. Okay. You got to use a little bit of logic here. And I say that not because you're not logical, but because I know there's a lot of emotion and energy behind it. So look at this logically. Okay. You're lifting weights for hours, five days a week, not like a 45 minute workout, but hours and sometimes over two hours. You're doing five days a week of cardio on top of that and additional three hit workouts. You got five kids. You're doing, you're doing, you're doing this for a decent period of time. Your calories is 1600, which tell me you're probably going to be closer to a thousand by the end of this prep. Does this seem like something that could cause long-term damage to your body and your health, the likes of which you'll be paying the price for for years to come? Answer that question yourself. You don't have to give me the answer, but think about that for a second because what you don't, because I see this all the time where I've seen this many times, people do this. And then afterwards, like why, you know, I've been, I've been trying to reverse diet for two years. Why aren't my hormones going back to normal? Why am I gaining weight? What happened to me? And it's like, it's because of what you did. So I'm not trying to scare you, but this is just the truth. Okay. If you looked at all these numbers, all the stuff that I listed out, it's kind of crazy. Well, the truth is, even if you, even if you don't do anything long-term metabolic to yourself as far as damage, even if it's not that, like maybe that doesn't happen right now. But at the very least, you're going to have a hell of a time not allowing the body fat to come on and come on fast when you get out of this. Cause there's no, there's no way you're going to sustain that amount of activity, that low of calorie for the rest of your life. So the rebound effect at the bare minimum that you're going to get from this is going to be a pain in the ass. So that's the part that, that's the part that I'm most concerned about. I mean, Sal brings up a good point too. I mean, this is the type of, this, the, where we're heading right now could set you up for metabolic damage. But at the bare, I mean, that's less likely, what's more likely to happen is that you're doing five, six days of an hour of cardio, you're cutting your calories down to 1200 or less, you're training like crazy. And then you get down to the show way, let's say you look awesome. And then you come out of that. And it's like, there's no way you're maintaining that. You're going to come, and then when you come back out, boy, is the, is the weight going to come on fast. And it's going to be really tough to speed that metabolism back up. So you're right. Sal's right. If you were, if you were a family member of mine, or someone very close to me, I would urge you not to do the show where you're currently at. And then let's talk about what it would look like if you were to do this, I think in a healthier way, which would have been, first of all, we would have, before I even let you get here, by the way, when I coached my clients for shows, they often time I get called or reached out to and they'd say, Hey, Adam, I want to do a show in November. Can you, can I hire you to do that? I said, that's not how it works. What I'm going to do. And what I would say as a coach, I said, what I'm going to do is we're going to prep you off season, which I say is the most important part of competing is the off season. And then when I feel that your metabolism is in a very healthy place, then we'll, then we'll plan a show from there. Because what I don't know is how long is it going to take me to get someone like you up to a healthier place of calories, say 2,500 calories or so a day without putting any body fat on. That could take us a month or two. It could take us six months to get there longer. So a good coach would do that. A good coach wouldn't allow you to pick a show. A good coach would say, let's first get you in a good place or let me assess where your metabolism is now, because I want you to be able to eat somewhere between 2,300 on the low end, 2,700 on the high end amount of calories with no cardio, just maybe straight training three, four times a week and you're not putting on body fat, but being able to maintain. If you're there, then I'm like, okay, we're in a good place right now with no cardio, 2,700 calories a day, training three to four days a week, maintaining. I have a lot of room now to manipulate calories, to add cardio, to manipulate the intensity in your training, to set you on a nice eight week to 10 week prep to get you ready for a show. That, that is the way you want to get ready. And if you're, if you're starting prep and you're not in the mid 2,000 calorie ways, calorie wise, you're probably not in a good place to be cutting for a show. That's my opinion. Sorry, sorry, we all sound so negative. I was at, I was at 2,300 just before the cut. And then that's when we dropped down to 1640. And so I was there. And with my last show, even though I was about 600 calories a day close to the show, I never lost my period at all. It stayed regular. And I just had my hormone levels checked before starting this last prep and everything was optimal. I just bringing up testosterone is the tad. So I'm, I'm watching my, my levels and it seems like my body's okay. Okay. I responded well, I sleep good. I mean, the markers are there, but I did do the cardio when I was at 2,300 calories. Yeah. You shouldn't have been, we would want to be, we would want to be able to maintain and then also only training three, four days a week. I don't need you to be doing more than that, especially in a bulk and a bulk, you know, we're focused on building muscle strength, I want recovery and rest and calorie surplus is way more of an importance at that point. And then when we, when we would transition, okay, when I would transition you from that bulk of doing no cardio to now into your cut for a show, the cut doesn't start with cardio. The cut starts with me either one adding training volume or adding more intensity or adding more days and lifting or a slight reduction in calories or a mix of both. Maybe I drop you to 2100 calories. I let you lift in the gym an extra day or two, or we increase the volume in your training set one way or another that way. And then we watch and see what happens your body. If, if I did my job correctly, I should start to see nice change just from that. And then we're going to ride that way for a couple of weeks until I see you kind of start to slow down or plateau. And then again, I'm either going to one, I have more days to add volume and intensity or restrict calories, or maybe I ask you to do a walk. You know, I said, now I want you to do an hour walk every day. There's a lot of things that we do, but cardio, I'm saving intense cardio till the damn near end. Because I know that we just came off of a bulk where I'm trying to build muscle with you. And I know a calorie deficit with high-intensity cardio is the perfect recipe for your body to pare down muscle. And so I want to leave that to be the very last thing that we potentially do. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's still so new. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, why am I doing? Are you in our forum by chance? I don't think so. Not yet. I just listen to you pretty much every morning when I get ready. Okay, so I'm going to have Doug add you to our Facebook private forum. We actually have a lot of competitors in there. So a lot of people that there's, there's even a few girls in there that I have trained. So it's a great community. And I would, and there's some people that have done this show themselves with no coaches just from talking to our community and getting help from all of us. So I just urge you to get in there. We'll figure out things after whatever you decide to do for this show or not. But going forward, you know, use that, use that community to kind of help you through your process. Okay, perfect. That's great. Thank you so much. No problem. Thanks for calling. What percentage would you say, Adam, of people who do these shows, what percentage of them would you say do it in a relatively healthy way? Very little. Very, I mean, like I said, it was, I had no intentions of coaching with none at all. It was, it was, but it was almost like I felt, I felt compelled to, like I felt so bad for so, especially the bikini competitors, because I feel like they get abused the most in getting ready for shows. It's like this, there is, there's this one, there's this on cardio. Yeah, there's this weird idea. And this is, this is also prevalent in the men's space too. It's not just women that do this too. Men are guilty of this too, which always blew on this idea of doing all this cardio in the office. And by the way, okay, remember when we're talking about this, because you might hear me contradict myself if I'm talking to a health person or someone who wants just to be healthy, right? We're not talking, we're talking about sport right now, how to maximize this, how to do it in the safest, smartest, fastest, healthiest way. There's some things that my rules change a little bit here. That person in a bulk, I don't want them doing any cardio. Why? Doesn't make sense for them. Now, if you're, if in general health, who's somebody, that's a different situation. So the way these, these coaches prep these, these bikini girls for shows, it just doesn't make any sense. It's not science based at all. It's like star view and work you to death. Yeah. And then it literally, what it is, is the girl or the guy who wins the show was the one who was just could adhere to the most punishment or had the best genetics going into it. They had the most resilient genetics to the damage. Yeah. Yeah. I would even venture to say just if you, if you look at the whole picture, the fact that it, who it attracts. So who's attracted to a sport where you're presenting your body on stage to get it judged. When you look at the caloric restriction, the overtraining, the types, again, the types of people it attracts. It's a perfect recipe for eating disorders, body image issues, hammered in, in damaged bodies and hormones. And it's just, it's got to be one of the, the most unhealthy places to compete, you know, regardless of sports, just, it just doesn't seem like a good idea for most people. So if you're thinking about doing it, like really, really consider all the stuff that we just mentioned, you know, Rochelle is in our forum. And I got her like this. She had already kind of gone through this with other coaches and stuff like that. And we, we linked up. And so she's a great person. So if you're listening to this, you're a competitor, you're in our forum, you're thinking about getting in there, but get a chance that she's amazing too. Like she's an open book. She'll share like her experience, both before me and then after coaching with me. And I think she's, she's full of wisdom, very, very smart. And then we'll share and she's completely natural athlete and looked incredible after we got ready for a couple of shows. So talk to her if you're in our forum.