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, there only once one, one and a half sessions a week and upper bodies about four sessions a week. So basically with my upper body work, I am doing my own variation of the Kaisen 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've mentioned in the last video where I can do high intensity interval training on the assault bike. We're 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, a liptical, etc. So with the guys end training, I'm taking it and basically it's a daily undulating program where you know one day it's kind of fives with the slow progression to get stronger. Another day's tens or 15s with a little bit more hypertrophy in the upper body movements and the lower body movements. 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 pull 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 three to four 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 milk in and 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 five rounds. I want to try to slowly increase that to six, seven, eight 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 three or four 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. 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 in really good condition. Both lungs and your body, kind of that lactic acid threshold. It can only take two, four, six weeks to get in really good condition. Obviously we're talking at a 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 of our squat, conventional pull, even a sumo pull, something of that nature, even RDL. 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? There's no 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 pushups. 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. You know structural injuries and some are also from a mobility or a imbalance where you need to fix. And that's where the muscle docs come in to help my imbalances. Let's talk about nutrition a little bit. I mentioned I'm kind of tracking what 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 kinds of 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 piece of paper and track it. Then 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 ate over seven days and find the average of what you weighed over seven days. And then you basically figure out that three thousand 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. So if you want to gain 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. We're 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 as if you are at a higher body fat percentage, if you're over 25 percent 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 and the types of foods they eat and how they feel. So 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. And 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 each pocket 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 five to ten 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 what 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, you know, maybe 250. So say we'll take that example, you're 200 pounds and you have maintenance at 3,000 calories, which we 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 200, 2007, 750 calories and now you're doing two cardio sessions a week, you milk that out till you plateau, etc, etc. But since I'm on a more aggressive 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 zikiel 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 2-10. Remember I started at 2-12, 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, overhead strict press 205 for three. So I ate mad at you and I will see you guys Tuesday. We're visiting our homey, the muscle doc who's helping me with my lower body rehab with a little bit of log, a little bit of information.