 Our next caller is Brenda from Michigan. Brenda, how can we help you? Hi. So, I'm going to try to keep it short. I just had a baby about seven months ago, but I am in the military, and thankfully they changed the standards that we now have a year to get back to where we were. It used to be six months. I'm just struggling a bit. I kind of lost all of my strength, all of my endurance, everything I worked hard for. So I'm starting back from zero, and I'm trying to do everything at once, which is lose the weight, get my pull-ups up, and get my run time down. And it's just a lot in like, I have five months left. So I was just hoping I could get some advice on how, I don't want to push it because my issue is, I'll push it and then I'll just quit because my body breaks down. It gets tired, obviously. And that's just kind of what I'm struggling with, is how to do it all at once without breaking down. Okay. Well, Brenda, are you breastfeeding at the moment? Still are you done? Not anymore. Not anymore, no. All right, that's good because it gets a little more challenging when we're talking about fat loss while breastfeeding. Well, here's the good news. Losing weight might make it harder to get a heavier deadlift or a squat, but it actually makes pull-ups and running faster easier. So all of your goals don't actually conflict. They actually help each other out a little bit. The weight loss is going to come from diet. I don't want you to try to exercise the weight loss because that's going to be a losing, that's going to be a totally losing approach. Now, as far as getting better at all of those things that you're doing, you want to do the minimal amount of work to see results because then you can move from there. All you want to do is do as much as you possibly can and see if you can recover from it, but rather do enough to get the improvement to start happening. And then once you start to see the improvement and it starts to happen, you feel good, then you can add a little bit more. So my next question is, what does your routine look like now? So right now, I work out about five days a week. That's pretty much the most I can do. I try to fit in a sixth or seventh in there, but it's just not practical with the baby. I'm kind of alone right now. My husband works somewhere else. So I work out five days a week for about an hour. I do weightlifting every day, all those five days, and then I do some formic cardio for 15 minutes. I try not to run that often because I know my body and I've had two knee surgeries before. So I try to limit my running and I've been doing the rower. So pretty much that's where I'm at. Don't forget, I think, because you have this written up here, so I want the audience to hear this. You need to be able to do three miles sub 30 minutes. You need to also be able to do a minimum of three pull-ups, and then you also need to be able to do a minute 10 plank. Correct. Okay, so this is important because you obviously have to the way where you're getting back in shape is being measured is by these things, correct? There's nothing else that you have to do physically to prove that you're back in the shape. Correct. And those are all the minimums. So obviously I'd like to do more than that because that's your baseline score, which isn't a very good score. So since you have something very specific like this, we should build your training routine geared around that. But that doesn't mean that you should be like, for example, the three mile 30 minute run, I definitely wouldn't have you do that every day or even three times a week. I'd have one day a week where you're challenging that and then maybe shorter bouts, maybe two other times in the week. But you definitely want to build your routine around the pull-ups, the planks, and this ability to run. So I don't know if I would want you to not run whatsoever because you're going to be challenged that way. Yes, rowing will give you some cardio endurance and help some carry over to that. But you could take, we've talked about this before, you could take somebody who is an incredible swimmer and they've been swimming their whole life and you can have somebody who's an incredible runner. You flip-flop them and they wouldn't perform as well, even though they both have great cardiovascular endurance just because their body has not adapted to that specific modality. So we do, and I think five days of weight training is a lot. I think you could get a lot done in two to three days of lifting and then the rest of the time and focus I would be put around these three skills. Practice those things. How many pull-ups can you do now? I'm at one now. Okay, so do you have space in your home for a pull-up bar? Yes. Okay, so put the pull-up bar up, get a resistance band, tie it around the pull-up bar so you can use it to give you assistance. And I would practice one pull-up, I don't know, five times a day throughout the day. Well, you step on the band so it helps you so it's not like a hard one pull-up. It's kind of a moderate one pull-up. And you just practice that throughout the day. Planks, how long can you plank for now? I'm at a minute 25 right now. Oh, so you already beat that, right? Yes. Yeah, so, I mean, if you want, you could practice that same way 30 seconds so you could do like a 30-second plank a few times a day. Those two things right there will get way better just from doing that practice. The run, I think Adam gave you great advice. You could practice once a week for the three-mile run and then do a couple shorter runs. And then maybe one or two days a week of full-body traditional resistance training. And on those days, you don't need to do the practicing of the pull-ups and the plank. Those days is just the resistance training. And I think you'll see some pretty rapid results that way. Yeah, I mean, I agree with the protocol they're presenting in terms of also keeping because that is like a specific goal you need to consider. But trying to kind of ease up on trying to tackle everything at once, especially in the beginning. Really just focusing on your strength training two to three times a week is the major focus there is to get your body back in strong and resilient. The cardiovascular adaptation is going to come naturally as you start to kind of ramp it up there towards your five-month sort of goal there. So I would definitely try to taper that in the beginning and start adding to that in terms of intensity and then go from there. But really, the strength should be the focus. And like Sal said, with having a pull-up bar there, just continually practice that as frequently as possible. Yeah, you're not training it or you're practicing it. You just hop up on the pull-up bar when you walk by, put the strap in your foot, do one. And it's like moderately hard. If you wanted to, you could probably do five. That's it. And then you just get down and just practice it. And you'll see the strength will go up very quickly with that particular movement. And to be more specific with the running since you mentioned that you've felt your body break down before, part of why you probably feel that way is trying to run three miles or more as fast as you can in addition to strength training four to five times a week. If you pull back on the weight training so you're not pushing so hard there and also scale back on the distance that you're running, I think a lot. So for me, it would look something like this if I was coaching you. You would do one to two days. We're just mile runs. When we do the mile run, we're trying to obviously improve your time every time that you do that. One time a week, you would do a mile and a half. Also trying to continually improve that mile and a half time week over week. And then the only one day a week would we actually test at the max distance, which would be the three miles. And then you're trying to slowly improve that. And that's all I would need you to do. And you would be surprised how fast your body would acclimate to that and get good at it. And then the practicing, like the guy said with training, but if you are feeling like your body is breaking down, that's your clear indication. You're just you're overdoing it. You don't need to do that. There is like a program that's somewhat similar. We don't really highlight very often, which is our OCR program does, you know, focus specifically on grip training, but also pull ups and distance running. And so there is a bit of a protocol in there to try and like meet this timed run. But so that's something to, if it's not, it's not as quite as specific as like what you need in terms of like what your standards are, but it would be something complimentary to that. Yeah, it's pretty intense though. I would definitely work up to it. Yeah, work up to that. You know what, Brenda? Do you have maps prime pro? I don't. All right, we'll send that to you because we talked about your knees hurting you. You probably have some mobility issues in your hips or ankles that can help fix that particular issue so that you could start running. So we'll send that over to you. Okay. And you know what? Justin mentioned OCR. We'll send that to you as well. I wouldn't jump into that though until you're feeling good and strong. Or just peel, just pull out a one day out of it. You don't need to follow the whole protocol. I know we're just modify it. Yeah, Justin is alluding to that because of the pull ups that we program in there and the running. So I would look at that as far as the programming and how we set that up and use some of that guidance and then maybe one day a week you can follow one of the foundational training days in there and that will benefit you. But I wouldn't actually, to Sal's point, follow the whole program to a tee because it's a little bit more than what you probably need right now but you could probably get some value from it so we'll send that to you too. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Brenda. This is a common theme, obviously, but how many times have you guys experienced this? You do less, you get better. The results finally come. Yeah, and it's always, every time that happens to him I'm always like, obviously, right? But it's such a hard switch to make mentally because usually... It doesn't compute. Yeah, well usually doing more and working harder equals better, right? It's usually not the opposite but often in many cases, especially with people like Brenda who are working so hard and have a specific goal, oftentimes that's what needs to happen. Well, especially when you're, you know, she's weight training five days a week and then also running. So much. They're so conflicting, you know. So she'd be far better off doing mobility three, four days a week and only strength training once and then focusing on the run if she wants to get good at the run but the reason why she feels the body breaking down all the time is she's probably sore and tight and immobile from all the strength training and not addressing mobility and then she goes out and goes for a run for three miles or what like that and the body just says FU that doesn't feel good and so then it probably sets her back. So there's definitely a way to scale up to this to be able to do all that. Gotta consider the recovery process.