 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode two of The Aggressive Cut. I'm taking the next six to eight weeks cutting down as hard as I can. The last episode you saw was about three days ago. It was a lower body slash upper body day, I hit those front squats. But since I'm rehabbing the back, lower body days are only one, one and a half sessions a week and upper body is about four sessions a week. So basically with my upper body work, I am doing my own variation of the Kaizen off season, infinite off season, which is just a free program we put out to base program that's made to be customized for you guys. Link below for the free program and link below for my video on how to customize it for yourself. Stimulus and fatigue is all kind of one big battery. The more and it takes away from everything. Although you'll think you have a leg battery and a life stress battery and a kids battery and a homework battery and upper body battery. They're all kind of the same. And so when you do a lot of fatigue to it, it soaks away the battery from one battery. So point being that I'm doing less lower body weight and volume so I can give more attention to my upper body and hopefully recover still and more condition and more into my conditioning, which I mentioned in the last video where I can do high intensity interval training on the assault bike where typically if I'm squatting and deadlifting a lot that would be too fatiguing for me personally. Some people get away with it in which my cardio would be more like a long walk elliptical, etc. So with the Kaizen training, I'm taking it and basically it's a daily undulating program where you know one day is kind of fives with the slow progression to get stronger. Another day's 10s or 15s with a little bit more hypertrophy in the in the upper body movements and the lower body movement. So today my variation is close grip. I did it for sets of 8 to 10. I did do a little bit heavier work with my overhead pressing because last time I overhead earlier in the week, it was sets of 8 to 10. So I kind of flip flop those some strength work with pole weighted chin-ups sets of 8. Finish it off with just a little bit of arms. I try to hit my arms the frequency fairly high. So again, 3 to 4 times a week for chest, back and arms basically. But then the volume in each session kind of goes down a little bit. So we're stimulating kind of milking it out. The conditioning is going to be the same for me. It's an assault bike 15 to 20 seconds all out. Start as I can about a minute and a half recovery. Today I did 5 rounds. I'm going to try to slowly increase that to 6, 7, 8 rounds. As the weeks go by, my conditioning gets better. My lungs, now this is probably 10 days in of the conditioning. I'm doing about 3 or 4 times a week. My lungs are getting better on the recovery part. But now kind of the lactic acid pump feeling in my legs is what stops me or is holding me back. So all that kind of will get better as time improves. To get strong, typically it takes years and years and years of doing the same thing and progressively overloading. To get a really good condition, both lungs and your body, kind of that lactic acid threshold can only take 2, 4, 6 weeks to get a really good condition. Obviously if we're talking Olympic level, that's a lifetime of work, etc. But to get into a generally good condition where I can handle more rounds, the progression is a lot easier. So the question is to avoid compression of the spine or an axial load, a load coming down on your spine because your back hurts or because of whatever reason. Should you avoid the overhead press? And my answer to most things is one, if you have any kind of injury or something, you need to see a doctor. You don't need to go to Instagram. You don't need to go to YouTube to get that answer. For me myself, I know my back flares up when I do a hip hinge. So lower bar squat, conventional pull, even a sumo pull, something of that nature, even RDLs. So those are the things that I'm worried about. Generally speaking, yes, maybe if an overhead press is aggravating your injury or pain, then you need to avoid it. For me, myself and I, I can do strict overhead just fine with no pain. So I'm not too worried about it. Even right now, we're doing front squats, as you saw in the last video, hopefully, with no pain. I can ride a bike with no handlebars, you know what I'm saying? You should know about that. I can do overhead press with no pain. I can do light RDLs with no pain and I can do front squats with no pain. So those are the things that I'm sticking to and then we'll slowly scale upwards. Do the lifts you can at a load you can with no pain and no form breakdown and then slowly progress to that. Right now I'm doing the stiff legs at 185 with no pain. I'll build up to maybe 315 stiff leg with no pain. Then we'll go to a conventional pull 225 with no pain and build up from there. That's kind of literally the basis of all strength training and it's going to be the basis of all rehab beyond any catastrophic injury where you might need something more entailed. But if you're hurt and bench press hurts your elbow tendonitis, stop bench pressing. Try to do push-ups, try to do dumbbell press. If those don't hurt, continue to progress with those with volume and load until you're at an extreme or until you're at kind of a plateau. Then you can go back to the bench press and slowly build your way back up and that's how you program. That's how everything works. I know that sounds basic and there are some tricks and things to figure out in between because not all injuries are just from the stimulus. Some are actual injuries, structural injuries and some are also from a mobility or an imbalance where you need to fix. And that's where the muscle doc is coming in to help my imbalances. Let's talk about nutrition a little bit. I mentioned I'm kind of tracking but I'm kind of not. Sometimes I do better mentally by just eating and being aware of what I'm eating. I have tracked my food kind of a flexible dieting style for two years pretty much straight. So I have a really good idea of what my body needs when and also what type of calories, protein, carbs and fats, what macronutrients are in each type of food. So I do suggest that every athlete at some point in their life tries to track their food for a good six months straight to get a general idea of nutrition and what is inside the type of foods that they like to eat. I will probably track my food every two to three days just to make sure I'm on where I'm going. To find your macronutrients for yourself the best way to start is just to find your maintenance. And there's a couple ways to do that. There's calculators online, helps you easy enough. The Kaizen programs that we sell come with a macronutrient calculator that progresses you through your diet or through your bulk. But if you don't want to go through that all you basically have to do is find your variable. And so what you're going to do is you're going to weigh yourself every morning. Write that down in a note on your phone or on a piece of paper and track it. And what you're also going to do is just track every single thing you eat. Then after seven days of this you just find the average of both. You find the average of the calories you weight over seven days and find the average of what you weight over seven days. And then you basically figure out that 3,000 calories or whatever that average is allows you to weigh whatever this average is, 200 pounds. And then from there you can figure out what you want to do. The main weight you add 250 calories a day, typically in carbs and fat. If you want to lose weight you can subtract 250 calories a day, typically in carbs or fats. Where the protein, majority of the time what I have people do is eat their body weight in grams of protein. So if you weigh 200 pounds you're going to eat 200 pounds of protein. The only time that may adjust is if you are at a higher body fat percentage. If you're over 25% body fat we may knock that protein down a little bit. And then adjusting carbs and fat depending on the athlete, the person, the type of sport they play. And then also a little bit of personal preference on the types of foods they eat and how they feel. That's a general outline of it. For conditioning myself as I mentioned the high intensity historically has left me more fatigued. And it's been harder to recover from. I think that's for a lot of people obviously you're going all out. And so it does take away some of that glycogen. It does take away some of that battery stimulus or energy that we have. It is more fatiguing. But the results for myself historically have burnt more fat. I felt leaner that way. Now I know burning calories is burning calories and HPOC and all these things. So basically when you do high intensity cardio people say that you may burn less calories. Or science says that you burn less calories during it because you're only going for 5 to 10 minutes. Even with those rounds. But then the lasting calorie burn is elevated throughout the next 24 hours. And that's similar to weight training. That's why people say when they want to lose weight all they do is cardio is probably the wrong thing. You want to build that muscle because not only does the training session burn more calories long term but having more muscle burns more calories long term meaning days, years, weeks, months, etc. So the high intensity for me historically works really well. What I like to do is as well as those calories we want to slowly take them away. Slowly layer them away by maybe 250. So say we'll take that example. You're 200 pounds and you have maintenance at 3,000 calories. What you'd maybe do is add one cardio session a week and take away 250 calories a day. Milk that out until you plateau and then you slowly adjust something. So maybe then you add another cardio session a week and you're still eating 2,750 calories. And now you're doing two cardio sessions a week. You milk that out until you plateau, etc. But since I'm on a more aggressive a cut we're bumping everything up a little bit. So my calories are fairly far down. I know what I need to lose weight. I maintain my weight really good in a big range and a big calorie eating a lot of food. But to lose weight I have to get pretty aggressive with it. And then my cardio is high as I mentioned. I'm jumping straight into three times a week, four times a week-ish high intensity intervals. So that's the plan for me. Today I woke up. I ate a little bit of z-keel bread, like three or four pieces. And they are 10 carbs each. And after eating that I forgot to weigh myself right away. I was 210. Remember I started at 212. So progress is good. I'm about 10 days into my calories. Being in the deficit as well as the cardio. So a little bit of that is water. A little bit of that is just the added cardio and stimulus. So we'll see how it progresses and goes. I'm feeling good. Just ate some Chipotle. That session felt pretty good. My strength and my upper body is solid. Hit a PR. Beltless. Raw, raw, raw. No, no, no. Overhead strict press. 205 for three. So I ain't mad at you. And I will see you guys Tuesday. We're visiting our homie, the muscle doc, who's helping me with my lower body rehab with a little bit of log, a little bit of information.