2702: 5 Obstacles to Being a Strong Dad

0:00If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, five obstacles, things that get in the way of being a strong dad. We break them down for you. By the way, this episode is brought to you by PRX Performance. This is home gym equipment. It's the best in the world. You can also make payments on it. So it's like having a gym in your home with a gym membership, except this equipment is amazing and it's in your house.

0:39So you can work out in your underwear if you want. Go check them out. Go to prxperformance.com forward slash mind pump. That link will get you 5 % off. We also have a sale on MAPS GLP-1. This workout program also has nutrition advice, lifestyle advice. It's designed for people using a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Wagovi. This program maximizes fat loss, minimizes muscle loss, helps keep your metabolism where it's at. so it doesn't slow down. Go check it out. Go to maps at glp1.com. Use the code GLP50 for the 50 % off discount. Back to the show. You're a dad. You want to be a strong dad. Of course you do.

1:15You want your kids to think you're awesome. You want to be able to start the lawnmower with one pull. You want to be awesome. Heck yeah. But there's five obstacles, five common obstacles that get in the way. Suddenly you have kids. It's hard to be strong. What do you do? We're going to talk about that in today's episode and give you the solution. Is that not the universal measure of dad strength right there? That or the chainsaw. Can you start the mower, chains, any sort of pool? Anything, yeah. Can you start it in one pool? That's the ultimate flex when you start your neighbor. Or like one wood chop with just one stroke.

1:48So I want to do this episode because we get a lot of guys that call in, and either they're becoming fathers, and so like, okay, what do I do with my workouts? Or they just became dads. and a lot of, you know, when you look at the data on like what motivates men to work out, this is actually one of the top 10. One of the top 10 things is I became a dad and I thought, you know, I should probably be fit so I could play with my kids or at the least take care of my health. But you've got lots of new responsibilities. And so objectively, it's more difficult. It definitely is. I mean, it's different when you're a bachelor, especially you're not married, you have no kids.

2:25Like it's your schedule is your schedule. There's nothing in there. Now, being both you guys were in your 20s having kids and also in the fitness space, did this cross your mind or was this just, was this an afterthought because it was already your profession? Good question. It wasn't, you know, there's always that initial phase when kids are real young, but because I worked in gyms, I worked, my work had weights. So it wasn't that hard for me to be consistent. Yeah. It just brought on a whole nother level of hustle. And so, yeah, I threw the workouts definitely ramped up for me just because I just felt this like compelling urge to do everything at once.

3:04But, yeah, I think I think for me, I always wanted to maintain a level of strength, you know, as my kids got older, just to make sure I kind of led the example of that. Yeah, I know that, you know, I'm the one who waited. Right. So wait, my mid 30s before or late 30s, even before having Max. and I do think that it played a role in the whole mobility kick. Oh, I remember. You became more motivated for it. Yeah, I remember being buff and jack guy and then thinking like how uncomfortable it was for me to even get down in a seated, squatted position and thought, man. And I could just picture being down with him as a baby and thinking like, you know, this is going to be, I'm going to be all jacked with him like getting down.

3:45And so I remember that being in the back of my mind like, okay, this is a good enough reason for me to go down this kind of rabbit hole of mobility. So it did play a role for me. But I figured you guys were probably in your prime, in your 20s, already in fitness. Well, I put on some weight, dude. Oh, you did? And then I had to, yeah. Then I was on the hustle to get rid of some of that weight. But yeah, it was one of those sneaky things. You look back at pictures, you're like, oh, wow, did I put on weight with her? Well, you put on baby weight, huh? Yeah. A lot of men do. I know. I think it's, what is the average, Doug?

4:15I want to say it's 15, 15 to 25 pounds. I think the average man puts on when his wife gets pregnant. Yeah, they start eating the same foods together. Guy starts just, yeah, I'm eating for two also. No, you're not. No, you're not good for business. Well, I mean, again, to be objective, it's just more challenging. You have mouths to feed, so the job becomes much more important. Your schedule is now more limited. It's just more difficult to maintain a good level of fitness. Food now, you know, it's harder to plan. You start to eat more processed foods or eat out more. So the average man gains weight after he becomes a father.

4:54The average guy's fitness level drops after he becomes a dad. So what does that say there, Doug? Yeah, so some don't gain much, but some may gain 10 pounds or more. I feel like it's more than that. I mean, it's very general. I know all of my buddies that are not – I mean, you're admitting you're a fitness guy. All my buddies that were non-fitness guys put on a lot more than 10 pounds, I remember. Well, let's talk about some of the challenges. Let's talk about that. So I would say the first challenge is time. Yeah. You know, getting away. For sure. Going to the gym, taking an hour at the gym, you know, 30 minutes drive time, all this and that and the other.

5:31But now you have a kid or more. And, you know, you've got a wife that you want to also support. It feels, it is objectively more difficult to find time. It also feels kind of like wrong to take tons of time. It's not even just that either. It's also the other factor that Justin kind of alluded to, which is this new internal drive to provide more. And so you now actually - You end up working more. You kick up this work kick of like, I've got to make sure retirement's now set. I can feed all these mouths that were like, you're starting to think differently. And I remember you guys telling me this, that you'll see, you'll find a new level of work ethic when that happens.

6:11So now you have this new dedication to work more than what you already had. So regardless, if you were already a hardworking dad, you become a harder working dad. And then it becomes this kind of like, well, I'm already sacrificing this time with my kid. Like, okay, do I want to go to the gym and do another selfish act? Forget it. I'll just, I can handle not being in shape right now. And so we tend to let that go. Yeah. And I mean, I don't think I need to make the case, but a fit, healthy version of you is going to be more productive at work. You're going to be, have more energy at home. You're going to be more often than not in a better mood versus if you're not fit, not healthy, you're less likely to be anxious, depressed.

6:51And I'm sure your family wants you fit and healthy as well. So the challenge is how do I fit this in my schedule? How do I keep this consistent? Well, there's this myth out there that in order to be, and we'll talk about strength training because that's the form of exercise that's going to give you the most ROI. So there's many different ways to exercise, but strength training gives you a very high return when it's done right, at least, versus the time spent. In other words, you'll get the most muscle, fat loss benefits, metabolic benefits, health benefits, hormone benefits from strength training on a time-for-time basis in comparison to other forms of exercise.

7:25So let's just start there. There is this myth with strength training that you have to go to the gym at least a few days a week, and it needs to be like an hour workout. Now, I'm not saying that's not good. You know, you can go to the gym three days a week, an hour each time, and that'll probably be, as long as it's a good program, decent. But for a lot of men, it's just too difficult to be consistent three days a week, to take that time away because it's not just an hour at the gym. It's going there and back. So you're really looking at an hour and a half, two hours. Is there another alternative?

7:52And there is. And it literally looks like this. Every day, you do one or two lifts. That's it. So every single day, you do three sets of an exercise or three sets of two exercises, and you're done. This will take you 15, 20 minutes a day, especially if you have some pretty basic equipment at home like just a basic barbell, squat rack, or even just dumbbells. You could do this on a daily basis and get tremendous returns. So you're actually getting phenomenal gains and strength and muscle and all these things from what seems like very minimal effort. And that's because you're doing it every single day.

8:29This would have saved me back in the day so much. I was under the impression even back then that I had to make sure I got like at least 45 to an hour's worth of work in for it to be valuable. And then on top of that, it's like I'm working two jobs. Then one I added on because my wife was out of work. And so I got this added stress and then no sleep on top of that. So it's just like and then you're increasing your calories and your cravings. So, yeah, if you're just focused and dialed in and you don't add too much excess of stress with exercise and you match it so it's actually beneficial, it's huge.

9:06This completely saved me and changed the way I thought about home gyms. If you guys remember, those are the best. You were anti-home gyms. That's right. If you listen far enough back, I was the gym rat guy. And I'm just, oh, I don't see myself working at home. And I was kind of not a fan of it. Never had done it consistently. when we moved to marina when uh max was a newborn uh we was the first time i had built i'd put the prx gym inside of our garage and this is how i train and this is how katrina trains so we both train this way and it was so great to have this newborn baby that i felt so present to be with she felt so and we just kind of would alternate like i'm gonna go do a set of squats and i'd go in and then she'd come out and we were like taking turns playing with them and going back and forth and just we'd even take like an hour to do two of these exercises, just taking turns on sets and just kind of trained and worked out that way.

10:03And it was so great. I felt so good. Yeah, we're going to give you the exercises that you could just rotate through. And literally, if you did these exercises, if you did one of these a day or two of them in a day, you're going to get good results. You're going to get stronger. You're going to see results. And you'll be pretty consistent because it's not a big time suck. Not only that, but if you miss a day, you just pick right back up. You just literally pick right back up. Here's what the exercises are. And you can just rotate these. Just make sure you do one of them almost every week. You have a squat, a deadlift.

10:36You have an incline press, an overhead press, a row, a lateral drag of some sort, so a lateral slag drag or tube walking, a windmill, and a perfect sit-up. If you did one of those a day for three to four or five sets, every single day, you're looking at 15 minutes a day, you have yourself a complete strength training routine. A lot of people listening might be like, is that really going to work? Try it. Yeah. This is part of our grade eight, right? I mean, these are the grade eight. This is the grade eight exercises that we talked about just recently. And they're very balanced. Everyone I named, if you did all of these, it's very balanced.

11:09You're working your whole body, different planes of motion. You cover the swath of function of the body. That's right. That's right. And if you just did this, you're going to get like 80 to 85 % of all the results you could ever expect from strength training. And I don't say that lightly. So yes, you could squeeze out more results by more working out. But think about that. 15 minutes a day. As a baseline, though, this is so perfect and simple. Amazing. I even like looking at it more like the month than even like a weekly thing, too, or just like you said, where even if you had a rough day or two or a bad night of sleep, up night, all with baby, and so you didn't train that day, you just pick up where you left off.

11:41That's right. So you just follow these eight in a row and just keep repeating it over for an entire month and don't worry so much about this three-day-a-week split or four-day-a-week splitting your week up. It's just like, hey, try and get in there every day. Try and do one of these main exercises and work through them consecutively. You'll get stronger each time. And even if you get a day missed here or there, you just keep following it like that. At the end of the month, you'll have hit these all several times, and I guarantee you'll see good results. That's right. I love that. The next challenge is diet.

12:10Now, I think there's a couple reasons why diet is so challenging. One of them is we tend to overcomplicate the heck out of this. Say, oh, God, okay, what do I eat? How many calories? How do I cut? Like, okay, am I eating enough to build muscle? What about body fat? What's my macro balance? Do I got to track? No, no. Here's some simple rules. Follow simple rules. And literally, if you just do these rules, we're about to say right here, there's three of them, your food intake will be pretty appropriate. Meaning, you'll eat enough to build muscle. You'll also eat enough to start to help yourself burn body fat.

12:47You'll get body composition change just by following these. Here's the rules. Number one, only eat whole foods. So this is the one thing you stay away from. Stay away from processed foods. Anything that comes in bags or boxes or wrappers, things with lots of ingredients, just stay away from those. They make you overeat. They're engineered to make you overeat. Trying to eat an appropriate amount of food, unless you track every calorie, when you're eating processed foods, it's almost impossible. They just make you overeat. All the data shows this. So just avoid those. The next thing, aim for 50 grams of protein for each meal.

13:19eat it first. That's it, 50 grams. For most men, this is appropriate. That'll be about 150 grams a day. If you're eating three meals a day, you're a big guy, four meals, that's 200 grams of protein. Eat it first because it has a natural appetite suppressing effect. Protein typically comes paired with fat, so you're getting your essential fats along with your essential proteins. And then if you want to eat a little more in that meal, go and eat the rest of the food. Eat the carbohydrates, which in the vegetables and stuff that comes after. But just eat the 50 grams of protein first, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

13:48and last, drink a gallon of water a day. That's it. If every man listening to this right now just did those things and was good with those three rules, your body fat percentage would eventually fall to around 15%, give or take a few percent. You'd build muscle and strength with the routine that we listed. That's pretty much it. I said, so I just got interviewed last week by our friend Doug Bobst and this was what he wanted to talk about was, does he hear me respond to an Alex Hormose thing about being ripped? And I made the comment of like, actually, most women want men between 10 and 15%, a peak of them actually being 12 to 13%.

14:23And so the whole episode was about dieting to get down to 12 to 13. And like, what does that look like? And literally, this is the steps I took. The only difference is I said, for just one month, just focus on the whole foods. I was like, just there. Yeah, if you're somebody, if you're a man in your mid 20s at 30 % body fat, trying to get down to this, the mid teens, 13 to 15%. percent i'm like just telling them for a month to eat whole foods will shift them several percent just by doing that and then the next phase after that would be okay now go get protein i'm like and he was like what no weighing no i'm like no no calorie counting no weighing no measuring the only thing that you're going to track is protein and follow that and lift consistently and i said either a three day a week or like a map 15 type of routine and i said you would be surprised how far that will take the the average person it will take you at least down to that 12 to 15 you may not get on stage and when no you're not gonna get shredded on this no but you'll fall in the category that the opposite sex thinks is the ultimate you're not gonna have a belly yeah you'll have flat you know relatively flat midsection good muscle you'll look fit uh this is typically what women are attracted to it's easy to maintain you just do these rules and you'll always fall right around there it's a nice slow progression so if you follow this your body will just nice, even change month after month after month.

15:42It's not such a low cut that you lose and sacrifice muscle mass or testosterone. You'll build muscle doing this as well while you're hitting the grams of protein. You're going to feel satisfied. So you're not going to feel like you're starving yourself. The only thing that you're not doing or trying to take away is the processed foods. Otherwise, you're kind of chasing things, right? And you're going to feel great doing it. It's very, very simple. That takes care of the diet part. Next up is sleep. Sleep can be a very difficult one, especially when you have newborns. But I will say this. So when you look at dads, you're like, okay, what's the thing that gets in the way of sleep?

16:16There's two things that really get in the way for fathers. One is my mind is racing. Yeah. So I go to bed and my mind is resting. So I got to figure out a way to get my body into a parasympathetic kind of relaxed state. The other one is you're watching TV or you're on your phone. These are just sleep killers. Okay, so I'll start with the last one. First, wear blue light blockers about two hours before bed, or better yet, turn off your electronics a couple hours before bed. I know that's hard for some people. So wear really nice, dark, blue light blocking glasses that'll help reduce the wake signal that the light is sending your brain.

16:51And then for the parasympathetic, do slow, deep, static stretching for 10 minutes before you go to bed. Breathe through the stretches. Don't hold your breath while you're doing these stretches. That'll actually do the opposite. Breathe. static stretching literally sends a signal to the central nervous system that says, chill out and relax. And what you'll find is, especially if you're in bed and you find yourself to be tense or tight, where you get that feeling in your legs, like this solves that. And you'll go right to sleep. Well, yeah, two of you, especially you include breathing techniques alongside with that to really enhance, you know, that parasympathetic state, like getting those deep, long expanding type of inhales and then a slow exhale.

17:35It's really hard not to be in a calm state after you guys do that. You know what else has kind of helped me? I've really noticed the patterns of when I do it, when I don't do it in regards to getting a better night's sleep. When I, and it's become kind of a family tradition now when we sit down for dinner, we turn it on in the background and having like easy listening dinner jazz. Chill music. Yeah. Or Brain.fm, if you like what they have on there. Classical music. Yeah, there's something about that playing in the background. It's not distracting because it's all instrumental, so there's no words or anything I'm singing to.

18:12It's just this soothing. It's very soothing. And I feel it shift me from this kind of thinking about the day, working with that, to like, oh, it's time to relax. I'm with the family, dinner that's playing in the background. And it sets the tone for winding down and all the other things you guys are talking about. for bed. I've noticed a big difference with that. Yeah. Getting your body into this parasympathetic state before bed, even if you're only going to sleep six or seven hours because you're like, oh my God, I'm going to bed late or I got to wake up really early, you'll get more restful sleep.

18:40And it's a very easy practice. It's like you're going to bed, 10 minutes, get on the floor, do these stretches, breathe real deep. The areas you probably are going to want to stretch are your hips. Hips really have a lot to do with parasympathetic. So stretch the hips, stretch the hamstrings stretch the hands a little bit get into bed and it makes a huge difference even a good practice to figure this out like how to calm your body down even after like a really grueling workout to get right into parasympathetic state your recovery rate increases substantially that's right i think it was what a great point justin is just i think one of the things with this is i've i've met different people like maybe your jazz is not your thing right so i'm not telling everybody they got to listen to that but finding what is it that gets you into that calm state like and maybe it is the stretching maybe it's reading you know maybe it's just shutting the electronics off maybe it's having switching the lights to kind of the red light but it's like i think the most important thing is literally just awareness around trying to create that we put so much energy and focus on uh waking up right the cold plunges and the get up by five and these morning routines we have all these routines around the morning to set the tone for the day yet sleep is more important and we don't really put any energy and effort i think simply making an attempt on what really does calm me down at night and what helps that process and leaning into that i think is the is the sweet you know it's crazy you said uh reading uh reading a on paper a paper book tactile puts you to sleep yes reading on your phone wakes you up try it try it people read before bed all the time to wind down.

20:16This was a practice for, well, for probably for hundreds of years where they read by candlelight or have a nice soft light next to you. But it moved from that to reading on our phones, which is stimulatory, which does the opposite. So I'm glad you said that. Every time I read a textbook for college, it was like. No, there was time. I remember figuring that out. And I'd be laying in bed. And if I was tossing and turning, my mind was racing. I'd get up and just. Open a book. Open a book and then give me about 15 minutes of reading that late. I'll be like, so awesome. All right, next up is pain. So pain can be an issue, back pain, knee pain, shoulder pain.

20:51So here's what you do. Here's how you solve this. Pick one or three, one to three mobility movements that are good for you. So the ones that you know help you the most. So some guys with hip pain, they do the cross-legged mobility movement where they're sitting in their chair. It could be something for your shoulder. Pick one to three of them, and you just practice them throughout the day. So when you find yourself with a couple minutes, get in there and stretch and do the mobility movement. And you do that two, three times a day on a daily basis. This is, by the way, this is the way to get rid of pain, whether you have time or...

21:21This is how trainers, good trainers, get their clients to solve pain, is to do mobility throughout the day. And it doesn't take much time at all. I'm glad you prescribed a number. I think the mistake that I see some people doing, say they go through Prime or Prime Pro, and they get overwhelmed by all these great mobility moves, and they try and implement a bunch of them. And you're far better off picking one or two that really give you relief and doing them more frequently than trying to do every single one in the book and only doing it occasionally. And so it's like, find that one or two mobility drills that make the greatest impact and then do them more frequently instead of doing more exercises.

22:04That's right. And then there's two supplements that can help with pain. High EPA fish oil, take it with meals. and then bromelain taken in between meals on an empty stomach. They're actually extremely effective at reducing inflammation. Finally, a recommendation for activity that benefits both white collar and blue collar workers. So both people, both avatars have different challenges, right? White collar, you're not moving much. You work at a desk in front of a computer. You're lucky if you get, you know, 4 ,000 steps a day. blue collar, you're moving all day long, you're swinging a hammer or whatever, and your body hurts and you're just, so one's inactive, one's very active.

22:46What would benefit both of them? That's the same thing. Walking. Walking is great activity for the white collar worker. It's also recuperative for the blue collar worker. And so what you do with the walking is try to take a couple 10 minute walks a day. The best time to do this is after a meal to improve insulin sensitivity. This for the blue collar worker actually helps with pain, stiffness, stress for the white collar worker, it gives you the activity that you need. And that's it. Two, 10 minutes a day, maybe three and you're good. It's crazy how profound a 10 minute walk is in regards to like an energy spike too.

23:23I mean, we do it here every day and it's, it's always a difference. We get in this studio before our second podcast. And it, it like makes such a different to just get outside like that. It's a short walk. We're not walking very long, but just moving like that out in sunlight, out in fresh air and comes back to work, such a huge difference. That's right. Look, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram. We'll see you at Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com.

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