Hello, my friends, Patrick here for a super duper quick intro.
Ben and I recorded this episode about our five factors year in review, and we talked way more than I thought we would.
So I'm going to split this episode up into two parts.
Part one, we're going to talk about training and eating.
And part two on Friday, we're going to talk about the other three factors. factors of health.
Enjoy.
Hello, and welcome back to Chasing Excellence, a show about chasing what truly matters.
My name is Patrick Cummings.
As always, I'm here with Ben Bergeron.
Thank you so much for joining us.
How the heck are you, Ben?
Doing good.
Be honest.
I'm tired.
So I just got back from Italy.
So it's like the travel.
Yeah.
So the travel is hard, especially for someone.
I mean people that listen to the show will know I live a pretty regimented, disciplined and routine life by design so that I and get my sleep and get my recovery and eating the foods I want to eat.
That, I think, will do me good training a certain way.
And if I get thrown off of that routine, particularly with the sleep one, obviously it takes a toll.
I'm very sensitive to it.
If you're intoxicated all the time and you're intoxicated another day, you don't feel that much different.
But if you're sober, sober, sober, and you get intoxicated, it's like, what the hell is this?
It's kind of the same thing.
I'm off kilter.
I'm like, what the hell is this?
Are you saying you got really drunk in Italy?
I tasted wine in Italy.
I did do that.
Hey, if you're going to be there, you might as well.
It was great.
Good for you guys.
All right, so that's actually somewhat appropriate to what we're gonna talk about today.
I thought it'd be fun, as we get to the end of the year, to do a bit of like a five factors year in review.
So we're gonna look at how you and I have evolved or changed over the last year in our approach across the five factors of health, from new habits to complete 180s.
We're going to break down the wins, the pivots and even the failures, if we've got any across how we eat think, train connect and sleep.
Cool.
Cool.
Yeah.
Before we do that, how we've evolved over the years.
That's kind of scary conversation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just this year, though.
Not the whole year.
Not all of our lives.
Two things before we jump into it.
One second one, we got a little shout out from from a listener.
But first, Before we jump in, a humble request.
If this episode or any of the episodes we've done recently have resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a friend or two.
I want to launch into the new year with as many people like you out there as we can.
And the best way to do that is if Folks who are already listening, already on the chase, share an episode or two with a friend or family member.
So wherever you're listening or watching this, just hit the little share button, send a text.
We appreciate it.
And your friends and family will also probably appreciate it.
So thank you in advance for that.
Okay, quick shout out.
We haven't done a shout out in a bit.
We love these notes when we get them.
So if you've got things like this that you want to send us, it makes us happy.
This is from C. Not a question, but a thank you.
I'm a longtime listener and follower.
Your podcast, books and conversations have a continual impact on the way I eat think train, sleep and connect, but the biggest impact has been learning and implementing the hierarchy of mindset.
Recently, my partner of 12 years told me that they did not love me and has resulted in experiencing the hardest year of my life.
Focusing on what's in my control, striving to have a competitor mindset and striving for excellence through this earthquake in my life has been a lifesaver.
Thank you both for what you give the world.
You are leaving a legacy and making an impact.
I couldn't get through this without what I learned from your books and podcast.
Wow.
See, see, damn.
Yep.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Thank you for the vulnerability and sharing that.
And pretty awesome that you're.
Navi, not that you're using this stuff is that you're navigating this in a productive way.
Yep.
Yep.
And if we can add a tool to the toolbox and we are surely happy to do so.
Heather recently did a blog post and she didn't call it a toolbox.
She called it a tool bag.
I was like, just so you know, a tool bag is kind of like a douche bag.
It's like a put down that you give like somebody in like middle school.
Like, listen to your tool bag.
She's like, ah, whatever.
I've already published it.
I'm keeping it.
No going backwards with that.
No going back.
But for future note.
For future note, yeah.
It's a box.
Let's jump into the first one.
I thought we'd do the biggest one first.
At least the biggest one for me was the train bucket this year.
I can start, you can start, but let's jump in.
Anything worth noting as to what you did differently, what you focus on differently, what you stopped doing this year that you've done in the past that is worth mentioning, that folks might get some value out of.
Well this year.
In terms of the training, I made more progress in this year than I have in the previous, at least 10.
So 2010.
10.
Yeah, 2014.
I had back surgery in 2014.
I had a lower back fusion.
And since then, prior to that, I competed at the games on a team and was pretty high level fitness.
That...
Set me up for a quick recovery, but I also didn't recoup a lot of the fitness I had until this year.
And so this you know I posted something about this recently in terms of the kind of the across the spectrum, in terms of the gains that I've had over this year.
My VO2 max was phenomenal when I got tested at human performance health.
I knocked 21 minutes off of my Chad time, which is this huge work capacity test over an hour of box step ups with a 40 pound backpack.
And, knocked 20 minutes off of it, which is like, that's absurd.
This is from a year ago.
And then, you know, my strength numbers are as good as they've been since pre-surgery.
So this has been a really good year for me in terms of the things that I changed in order to reclaim a lot of that capacity was really simply a year of following structured training that's republished on CompTrain.
Honestly, some of the training is... really, really fun and engaging, like really fun.
Some of it is just like bro sesh, like pump, like bicep curls and Bulgarian split squats like accessory work.
And then some of it is like, we call it like grunt work.
It's just like put a... pushing sleds and carrying weights around.
I think that the combination of those three things really changed things, especially with another thing that I started doing, which is in the training, which is Sunday run days.
Every Sunday in the programming, there's a undulating progression for running.
And my running was really poor up until this year.
It's not anymore.
Like just by the third cycle of the running, it was completely different.
So that's what I've.
I've seen probably the biggest changes in.
People ask me if I'm going to go to the CrossFit because I'm back in the top of the leaderboard for a lot of things, which I haven't been in a very, very long time, and hanging with the 22-year-olds at the gym.
And they ask if I'm going.
It's like, no.
My strength numbers are nowhere near where they should be for that.
But considering for where it was to where it is in 12 months.
And that's really where I started doing.
This was 12 months ago, last November, December.
It's been a drastic change, both in what I'd done, but a drastic change also in the outcomes as well which, you know.
We had this conversation a while ago and we talked about how, you know, people said it's about like well, it's the consistency.
It's not that because I trained, five or six days a week for 10 years before this.
It was this, and you said it well, it's like, well, first it has to be consistency.
That's gonna be the biggest thing.
But then... you consistently doing it's that like it's compound interest.
Like if you're doing something that's returning five or 6 versus something that's returning eight, nine or 10 over the course of a couple of months, a couple of weeks not that big of a difference over the course of 12 months, it's huge.
It's a massive difference.
So yeah, that's, I feel like that's the biggest of all of these I've done so far.
That's probably the one I've changed the most.
And I've seen the most changes with.
Yeah, take that.
And yeah, obviously we've had lots of conversations to dive even deeper into what those changes or what that program, those changes to the program, look like.
So go back and listen to those episodes if you want some more details.
We won't get into it too much here.
Love that.
I think the train bucket is also the one that I probably improved the most this year.
Cool.
And in sort of different ways.
So a couple of things that I've done.
One, I've actually got back into a CrossFit gym, which we've talked about briefly.
I've been there for about a year.
I go to my local affiliates, CrossFit Harpoon, shout out to them.
I go on Friday mornings.
That's sort of my jam right now, having that sort of structure in my week and then I sort of backfill and figure out what I'm doing around.
Whatever I know I'm doing on that Friday has been great.
And obviously anybody who's been or is in an affiliate knows how much the environment, how much the coaching, all the things that we love about CrossFit Gym.
So it's been amazing to have that back in my life.
It's been probably before.
This year was probably seven years since I regularly stepped foot in an affiliate, since we moved up here to Maine.
It's been even longer since I've had a coach in a structured, you know class and you know people I see at a regular time, on a regular basis.
So that's been awesome.
I can't underestimate how impactful that's been.
And then other little things is I've started rucking, which we've talked about before.
And I've really genuinely fallen in love with rucking.
So it was not something I'd ever tried before, not something I'd ever really considered.
I don't actually remember.
Maybe it was comfort crisis, but I feel like I was doing it before that.
I don't remember what sparked the idea of like hey, go throw some weights in a backpack and go for a walk.
But I'm glad I figured that out because that's been great.
I've been able to add at least one day of rocking a week, which has been fantastic.
What's a typical ruck look like for you?
What's the weight?
What's the distance?
Yeah, so I'll do it depends on what I've got going on in the day.
If I've got a little bit of time, I'll go out on the treadmill and I'll do like 5050 pounds on and it's not like an air runner.
So I'll jack the thing up the the elevation and I'll go for at least a mile, if not try to get a little bit longer.
And that gets me somewhere in the range of like 20 minutes.
If that's all I've got, I can get out there, get sweaty, get my heart rate up and get back to whatever I'm doing.
So that's been great.
And then longer, I'll do a couple miles on the road.
One of the things that I've done this year that I love and that I'm really excited about doing more of is The micro Masogi that I've mentioned before, which was for me in October, six hours up and down the local mountain here with I forget I think I had 40 pounds.
And so anywhere in between those makes you really happy.
And so I'm looking forward to doing that.
I'm, again, happy that I've sort of stumbled my way into that.
And then the last thing that is actually relatively recent, but it's been on the back of some of the things we've talked about here is playing with the time of day that I'm training.
Most of the time I'm training by myself, and for years and years and years I do it first thing in the morning.
But I've actually found that over the years Because I'm doing it first thing in the morning, when the house is still sleeping and my garage slash gym is literally right underneath the two bedrooms.
I stopped doing a lot of things with a barbell because I didn't want to make noise.
I didn't want to wake people up at 530 when they didn't need to be up at 530.
So I sort of just accidentally shied away from that stuff.
I'm trying to now, at least a couple times a week, get trained in the middle of the day so that i can do deadlifts, so that i can drop a barbell if i need to, etc.
It just smokes me, smokes me more than it should based on my general level of fitness.
And so it's because I just don't touch heavy weights much.
And partly that's because when I'm at home, I just don't want to make too much noise.
So all to say, trying to get back into touching the heavy barbell more often.
And in order to do that, I'm trying to shift the time of day that I do it.
Yeah, very cool.
Yeah.
First off, when you do your rucking, do you have a quote bag from like Ruck?
Like you have like one of their bags?
I've got a Go Ruck bag, yeah.
A Go Ruck bag, yeah.
Cool.
Which I really recommend.
I played with just I just had a backpack and I threw some some change plates in it.
And that was fine.
That got me to the point where I was like, this is worth me investing a couple hundred bucks in.
And so I got a bag and I got some some proper, you know, rucking weights.
And that's you know.
You can certainly make it work with just a backpack and some change plates, but nicer.
But you find it noticeably different.
Yeah, I found that I can go longer with a proper ruck than just a backpack.
And have you done it on the beach?
I've not done it on the beach.
That would be gnarly.
That would be gnarly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also with the strength thing, that's certainly a thing that I've found as well.
It's just this, I've implemented like through the comp train, this structured approach.
Yep.
It's so regular and there's so many frequent touches.
Yep.
And it's so like, we did this last time, so now we do this this time.
It's so... intentional.
You never feel like it's scary.
So it's just like the strength is just calm, which is awesome.
All right, cool.
Let's take a quick break before we jump into our other buckets or other factors.
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Let's jump into the eat category.
What do you got?
Anything?
Of all the things I thought.
I don't know if Ben's going to have anything to say here, but maybe you will.
Don't surprise me.
Yeah, and I've changed things.
So this year we did a nutrition challenge at the gym that incentivized increasing protein a lot.
And this is, I think, the first time I've eaten as much protein as I do.
I have over 200 grams of protein a day now.
That's a lot.
Easily.
And I think that's really changed and helped.
I really do.
Do you find it hard to get that much in?
Was that a hard shift for you?
No, I don't actually.
I don't find it hard.
The other thing I've done is I did a food sensitivity test.
It was from...
So this is wild.
I actually really recommend this for people.
And if you had asked me this right after I did it, I would have said, no, I don't feel any changes.
Because the recommendation is they give you results.
You eliminate the foods for 10 weeks and you go back on the foods.
And when I would eliminate them and when I went back on, you know like all of the things are like and they all feel like gut distress.
You'll feel your skin will break out.
You'll feel stiff.
You're going to feel, I didn't have any of that at all.
Yet, once somebody says something's not good for me, I have a really hard time going back to it.
So even though I knew – even though I didn't feel like any different, I still eliminated the foods.
And –
I felt real, I do feel very different.
So my whole, my whole family did.
So for me I'll just the test is done through the feel good lab and it's their food inflammation test.
It's a blood test that you do at home.
You send it in, they send you back the results.
And it's like hey, here's the foods that you it's not an allergy, but here's the foods that you are sensitive to.
Mine was red meat, number one.
I'm like hamburgers and steak, bro.
I'm that kind of guy.
Eggs was number two.
And then some other things, pineapple and maybe asparagus or something like that.
So I eliminated eggs and red meat.
And maybe that combined with the strength stuff and the Sunday run, so it's never one thing, right?
But for whatever reason this year has been, it's been easier for me to stay lean than normal, like pretty substantially.
Now, there are other things I've done as well, which is obviously I said, increase the protein.
But another thing I've done is decreased alcohol by a lot.
We did another challenge, which was we did Sober October, which was just not that long ago, but even through the summer and before, I didn't do what I had done in years past.
So it became like the rarity instead of the norm, would be like lots and lots of social gatherings where I would not have any, which that would never be the case in the previous handful of years.
I was basically where I am now for most of like my, this version of me.
You know, that is like what's finding CrossFit.
Like I would have, maybe one to three drinks a month.
That'd be like the norm for me.
And that's where I am again now.
It's probably one to three drinks a month.
During COVID that changed.
Like it changed a lot.
So I've gotten back to reducing alcohol.
Now the other interesting thing is what I introduced was I?
Usually people that listen to this know that I'm pretty disciplined in terms of eliminating treats and sweets and junk processed foods.
I introduced a one treat a week.
We, as a fam, the Sunday run day thing is really, it's been really impactful for our family.
We do it together.
The kids ride bikes and Heather and I go for a run.
When we get back, we all go out to breakfast as a family.
Really cool.
So we just spent an hour out on a rail trail or running in some.
Then we all go out to breakfast.
Even before we shower, we just go right there.
Then we have our day, right?
And then that night we go out for ice cream.
And we do as a family.
And I never did that.
I never did sweets.
So the changes I made have been like the feel good lad food elimination.
By the way.
I was going to get to this.
My family did that same test and their changes have been bonkers, like crazy changes.
Jonah, my 20-year-old had some skin issues and went off of his number one thing was eggs as well.
Went off egg.
He was trying to bulk and get big.
20-year-old dude in college wants to...
He's doing the German volume training and you know, and eating, like you know, six eggs a day just to try to get bigger.
Went off eggs and, within three weeks, like he had the crazy changes when like, eliminate this.
And like his skin cleared right up.
Heather, strangely enough, also had eggs.
She also had salmon, went off of it.
And we didn't think.
She thought it was like me, like no real changes, but still stayed off of things.
Once you hear it's not good for you, it's hard to go back.
And then went through the whole summer.
And then in the fall, she had some eggs one day and then had salmon by mistake.
She just like forgot.
And she was at like a baby shower and they had these like little salmon sliders.
And all of a sudden, we forgot her.
She gets every year, she would get what we thought was heat rash.
Every single summer, very sensitive skin, Filipino.
And she didn't get that this summer.
But then we thought it was like we didn't even remember, she didn't get it because she didn't know all those things.
Yeah.
And then she ate the eggs and the salmon and they came right back, like within two days.
Yep.
So kind of crazy, that stuff.
That's the changes I've seen.
That I've implemented is the protein, eliminating the food sensitivity, increasing treats and decreasing alcohol.
Yeah.
Good for you.
That's awesome.
See, what do I know?
I was like, Ben's the most consistent eater I've ever met.
But like I said, I was wrong.
Cool.
What about you?
I tweaked a couple of things.
It's all part of the same thing, which is when I started tracking specifically lazy macros.
So lazy macros is EC.
Everybody knows EC.
She's been on the show a number of times.
I also have a podcast with her, Consistency Project.
And lazy macros is really simple.
It's 800 grams of fruit and veg every day, and then 07 grams of protein per body weight every day as well.
And those are the two things that you track.
Those are the two metrics.
So it's lazy macros because there's lots of wiggle room, and you're not tracking every single thing.
You can learn a lot more if you go follow EC in various places.
And so that was the biggest thing I've done is starting that and tracking it.
And all of it was under the...
The aim or the the understanding the admission that I'm sort of consistently calorically underfed.
I just don't eat enough.
I've never eaten enough food is not something that I really like like a little baby bird.
Yeah, I don't spend a lot of thinking about it.
It's mostly just like an annoyance to me.
And so I was like, I'm not eating enough.
So I need a way to know if I'm getting close, on a daily basis, to actually getting the calories I need.
And so lazy macros works perfect for me.
It's very simple.
You could do it with a post-it note just track your veggies and your fruit and track your protein.
Uh, and so that's been great because now, much more consistently, every single day, i'm actually getting enough calories, which.
So what's that?
What's that look like for you now?
Yeah, what's a normal day of 800 plus 07?
Yeah so Yeah, I mean it really comes down to I have to eat basically four meals with at least 30 grams of protein at each one of those, which I was genuinely like.
If I got two meals a day previous to this, it would have been like a normal good day for me.
And so that just understanding what it needs to look like on a regular basis.
It was the biggest thing for me when you actually start measuring it.
It's like so many things we've talked about before.
Once you actually start measuring like measure your screen time, measure how much time you spent outside you start to realize oh, I'm not even close to what I thought I was.
And that's what the biggest eye-opener for me was in starting to track these two things specifically.
The lazy macros was like oh, I have to put in real effort to get the amount of food i should be getting on a regular basis.
Usually what i do in the morning is a protein bar, a couple cheese sticks and a bunch of fruit, and then lunch is a bunch of eggs and maybe a potato or some kind of potato and some more fruit, and then i'll try to do a protein shake in the afternoon, and then evening is usually no issues, because we got plenty of food for dinner And so that's been.
Massively helpful is just to know how often I need to be in the kitchen getting food for myself.
Yeah, that's cool.
Maybe just for to color in between the lines for people for what I do to get to the 200.
Yeah, I was gonna ask that because 200 would be effort for me.
So it's a double scoop protein shake after training.
So that's 50 grams.
It's so much easier.
So I just don't eat more frequently.
It just turned everything that was 25 grams into 50.
Into 50.
That's smart.
It's that simple.
Yep.
So I have a 50 gram shake after training.
I have a normal size chicken breast, just for people that is 40 grams.
So I either have two chicken breasts, so it's probably like closer to 60 grams.
You can make your money on chicken breasts.
Completely.
I do tons and tons of chicken breast.
It's also the most efficient.
It's just like eating iceberg lettuce if you're trying to lose weight.
Like, yeah, there's a reason for it.
This is if you're trying to increase protein, chicken's the moneymaker for sure.
And then I do the same thing for dinner, double chicken breast.
We cook like three, four pounds at a time and we just have it there.
And then I do...
Greek yogurt, which has 17 grams per serving.
So I'll do like a serving and a half or even two, which gets you 30.
And then I scoop a protein, which is another 25.
So it's four meals of 50 grams each at each one.
And you have no problems with that much protein powder?
No.
Cool.
Yeah.
I think that's the thing that I would hear.
I could hear people asking about or thinking like, oh gosh, that's a lot of protein powder.
But if you can tolerate it, certainly.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
Dig that.
It's a very, very efficient, healthy.
There's nothing wrong with it, efficient and from a calorie to protein standpoint.
This is one of the things I became really aware of this year as well the calorie to protein ratio of things.
And like there's a lot of things that say protein on them, but they're a tiny fraction of actually, of the overall calories.
And the easy way to think about it is like, is it plus or minus 10%?
What that means is if it's 300 calories, does it have at least 30 grams of protein?
That's pretty darn good.
If it's upwards of 15%, that's really good.
So an example of that would be a scoop of protein will have usually around 230 calories calories and probably 25 to 30.
So that's like 10, 12, 13, 14%.
That's really, really efficient protein source.
Now chicken's even better.
Chicken's really, really good.
I found it very easy to get it in actually.
All right, like I said, at the top of the episode, part two is gonna drop on Friday.
So do make sure you are subscribed or following the show wherever you are listening or watching this, so you do not miss anything.
Also check out chasingexcellence.email.
Get on our free newsletter list.
We've got some cool things coming in the new year.
Link to that is in show notes.
We'd love to have you over there.
Thank you so much for listening this time around.
Thank you for listening every and any episode you do.
We appreciate it.
And I'll be back on Friday for part two of this conversation.
