Discipline

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, sports nutritionist, Master life coach and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you, properly fuel your body and your mind so you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to Episode 255 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, She Shortcut to Health and Fitness Success. Everyone wants to know how to lose weight, how to get healthier, how to run faster and how to get there as quickly as possible. We’ve become a society of instant gratification from being able to instantly download any music or any movie that’s ever been made to having whatever we want delivered right to our door, oftentimes, the very same day. Nowadays, people have no patience for anything, especially when it comes to something like losing weight, which can take a long time for a lot of people, it’s not uncommon for it to take six months or more to lose 20 or 30 pounds.

This is all good and fine, but isn’t there anything we can do to get there faster? So in this episode of the podcast, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, the shortcut to health and fitness success, so that you can get to your goals maybe just a little bit faster.

But first, if you’re considering coaching, if this is something that you’ve been thinking about, if it’s something that you want for yourself, right now is the time to take action. For most of us, this is the off season. We’ve done our fall races. We’re starting to get into the holidays, and then we’re going to pick up our training again in January. So right now is the best time to get started, because if you want to lose some weight, if you want to change your diet, if you want to start, you know, working on getting stronger, or getting yourself ready to start your training in January, then you’re going to want a few weeks, a month or so, to get yourself ready for all of that. This is a very, very good time to change your diet, because you don’t want to start changing your diet in the middle of your training cycle, or, you know, right before your race. You can do that. And I work with a lot of people who do that very successfully. They, you know, they might be halfway through their marathon training, and they, we work on changing their diet, getting the fat adapted, getting off the sugar and stuff like that. And it can work fine for a lot of people. But honestly, if I had to tell you what’s the best time to start, it would be in the off season, and that would be right now, okay, this means that you’re going to make some changes to your diet. You’re going to get used to those changes. You’re going to start losing weight, you’re going to start feeling better come January, you’re going to be stronger, you’re going to feel lighter, and you’re going to be well on your way to getting fat, adapted and then feeling your best so that when you do start your training, you’re giving yourself every opportunity you you need in order to perform at your best.

Okay, so just understand that you know having a coach getting you through the holidays is also something to consider, because listen, the average American gains like eight pounds from Thanksgiving until January 1. Average, that means there’s a lot of people that gain a lot more than that. Okay, you don’t want to be one of those average people. Okay, so instead of, you know, showing up on January one, regretting all the decisions you made over the last six weeks or so, wouldn’t it be awesome to show up on January one feeling like you’ve been making progress all this time. So having a coach to help you get through the holidays is an amazing thing to have. You got somebody guiding you, supporting you, helping you along the way, keeping you on track so that you don’t become one of those quote, unquote, average Americans who gains about eight pounds during the holidays. Okay, so if you’re interested in coaching, like I said, Now is the perfect time to get started. Just go to my website. That’s your first step. Go to runningleancoaching.com. Click on work with me. You’ll fill out a little application, and you and I will get on a zoom call. I’ll tell you all about coaching, how it works. We’ll talk about your goals. We got to make sure that you know this is a good fit for you, and if it is awesome, we can get started right away. Okay, runningleancoaching.com. Click on work with me, and I will show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself, yet. Cool.

Okay, so today. I want to talk about the shortcut to your health and fitness success. And the reason I’m talking about this is because I was having a conversation with one of my running besties, so one of my running friends, and she mentioned that she would really, really love to be able to do one pull up. Okay, this is a goal that I’ve worked on with a lot of my clients. Actually, there’s a lot of, especially women out there who, they just want to be able to do, like a pull up or a straight leg push up, you know, like a normal push up. However you want to say that.

And it’s hard to do because it requires a lot of strength, and a lot of women just have never really had that kind of strength. Now there’s a lot of women that do have that kind of strength, which is amazing, but there’s some women that have not really developed that kind of strength, and to do a pull up requires a lot of upper body strength. So I started having this conversation with her, and she was like, This is my new goal. I really just want to be able to do one pull up. And I said, okay, I’ve worked with people on this before, so let’s talk about what you’re doing. And she’s doing a lot of the right things.

So one of the things I mentioned is probably the best thing you can be doing for this particular goal, to do a pull up, is work on lat pull downs. So that’s where you’re sitting at a machine where you’re sitting down, you kind of lock your knees in, and you grab a bar that’s straight above your head, and you pull that bar down to your chest. And the nice thing about this particular exercise is that you can adjust the weight so that you can actually pull it down. So you’re doing the exact same movement as a pull up, but you’re able to lower the weight so you’re not pulling your entire body weight. So let’s say you weigh 130 pounds. You know, you may only be able to pull down 60 pounds or something like that.

So if you’re just getting started with this, that is a really, really good place to start, because as you get stronger, you can begin to increase the weight that you’re pulling down. And you could go to 70 pounds, 80 pounds, 90 pounds, and that’s a really great progression in order to be able to pull up your own body weight. So the lat pull downs are a really great place to start.

Another thing you can do is, you can wrap a resistance band around the pull up bar, and then you step into that resistance band so that when you pull yourself up, it is taking some of that weight off of you. So you’re actually it’s going to pull you up, and the stronger the resistance band, the more weight that it’s actually pulling up. And I did this quite a bit when I was trying to learn how to do pull ups, when I was, you know, just building muscle and trying to get stronger, and had a hard time doing pull ups myself. I would, I was working out at this gym, and we would do these group classes, and we’d have to do pull ups, and I couldn’t do a pull up, you know, by myself. So I had to use the bands. So I step into the band, you know, you wrap the band around the bar, and then you step into it, and then it assists you up. Okay?

And they also have a machine that you can use that mimics the pull up, where you kneel on this machine and it and then you can adjust the weight. So anything like that is going to help you to get stronger. Again, the idea is that we’re working on this principle of progressive overload, where you’re going to overload your muscle groups, and as you overload those muscle groups, you’re going to have a positive adaptation, a positive response, and you’ll get stronger. And then the next time you do it, you should be able to do just a little bit more weight. And so that’s another thing that you can do if you’re interested in being able to do a pull up.

Another thing that she and I talked about was doing dead hangs. So that’s where you just hold on to the bar and let yourself hang. Now, this is a hard one for a lot of people, because they don’t have the grip strength, but it is one of the ways that you start to build that endurance. And you build, you got to have grip strength if you’re going to be able to do a pull up. So you need to build that grip strength. You’re building that forearm strength. You’re going to start building the bicep strength and the tricep strength, and, of course, the lat strength, and the shoulders, and things like that. So dead hangs is another great tool that you can use if you are interested in being able to do a pull up or increase the number of pull ups that you do.

Let’s see another thing that you can do if you’re interested in getting stronger in general, but especially if you’re trying to do something like a pull up or a push up for the first time, you’ve got to give your body what it needs in order to build muscle. So that means you got to increase your protein intake.

This is one area that she and I talked about where she’s doing all the other things I mentioned so far, but she wasn’t really, she doesn’t eat enough protein. She says, she totally admits, actually, I am probably not eating enough protein. I said, okay, well, let’s try to work on increasing the protein, because if you want to build muscle, you need the building blocks of muscle. So you need to give your body what it needs in order to turn that protein into muscle. So increase your protein intake. And a lot of people, especially runners, they don’t think about that correlation there. But if you want to get stronger and you want to get larger muscles or stronger muscles, you got to give your body what it needs in order to create those muscles, which is protein.

So a lot of runners don’t do enough strength training in general, and they don’t get enough protein in general. So if you make those two changes, right there, you start some sort of regular strength training routine, and you give yourself enough protein, you should be able to get stronger muscles so that you can actually do things like a pull up, okay? Okay, so these are just a few things that you can do if you’re interested in being able to do a pull up. And you might be thinking, what does this have to do with the shortcut to health and fitness success? Well, I’m getting to that. Okay, I’m taking a long way around to get there, but I’m, promise you, I’m going to get to that.

So she’s doing all these things, and she told me that it’s taking too long. And I just laughed, like I just did. And she said, well, how long is it supposed to take? And I said, listen, it’s gonna take whatever it takes. Everybody’s different. Everybody that I’ve worked with is at a different place with this. And sometimes you got to do this stuff for a long time. She’s been working on this for I don’t know the exact number, but I’m going to guess it’s just been a few weeks that she’s been doing these things. And a few weeks may not be enough time if you’re kind of starting from scratch.

So you’ve got to give yourself the time that is required in order to build that strength, and building stronger muscles takes time. So it’s not something you can do for a few weeks and expect to see, like, massive results, like, it’s gonna take a while. And the thing that kind of spurred me to want to talk about this today was that she wants it to go faster. She wants to know what the shortcut is. And the funny thing is, is that I told her, you’re doing the shortcuts, all the stuff that you’re doing, that is the shortcut. You know, if you want it to take longer, don’t do that stuff. You know, if you want it to go faster, keep doing what you’re doing like there really isn’t a shortcut in this particular instance to being able to do a pull up if you’re not able to do that.

I worked for a long time, I want to say, a few months, on getting to the place where I could do pull ups unassisted. You know, I used those bands. I wrapped the band around the top, stepped into it. I used that to pull myself up. And I was able to do that and keep lowering the, whatever you want to call it, the strength of the band. So I got to the really light bands, like the lightest ones that we had at the gym, super light, almost no resistance at all. And I could do those. And then I was able to do them without, but I could only do like one or two pull ups at a time. And, but then I, you know, got to the place where I could do seven to 10, you know, and, and today I can do like 10 or 12 pull ups at a time. And I have been working on that for a long time, you know.

But the thing is, if I had given up on myself, if I had just said, like, Oh, this is taking too long, why bother, then I never would have been able to get to that one pull up or 10 pull ups. And this is so true of so many things that we do in life that people will give up if it looks like it’s taking too long, which to me, is a really silly thing to do, because all these things we’re talking about today, not just doing a pull up or a push up, but being able to lose weight or being able to run faster, like if you want to run a faster marathon, that is not something that is going to be quick to achieve. You cannot run a faster marathon. You can’t get faster over that distance in just a few weeks, or even a few months.

Sometimes it takes a couple of years to get there. When I first started running, I remember my first marathon, actually had a pretty good time. It was under four hours, like 3:57:00 I think was my first marathon, and that was a pretty good time, but I wanted to do better. You know? I wanted to be closer to that 3:45:00 and so that was my goal for a long time, and I got a little bit closer, like I did a 3:55:00 and then I did a 3:50:00 like, a year later, and then I was able to do a 3:47:00 or something like that. And it just kept ticking down until, you know, it was probably six years. I mean, now that I’m thinking about it, yeah, it was six years after I ran my first marathon, when I had my marathon PR of 3:43:00, you know, which is nothing completely stellar, but for me, that was pretty amazing at the time and but it took a long time to get there.

You know, it’s not something that happens overnight, but if I had just given up on myself, I never would have got to that place, you know. So just understand that if you want something and it’s something that is important to you, it’s something that would be considered a big accomplishment, that it’s going to take time to get there, and that we have become this society of people who just, we thrive on instant gratification. We want everything right now, from being able to instantly download any bit of music or any movie we’ve ever wanted in our lives, we can just instantly watch it.

I was thinking about that today, because I thought about having to go get some music at the store, like, if you heard some music that you liked on the radio, if you if you heard a song that you loved on the radio, you could either, like, try to record that song off the radio, which was really hard to do, or what you could do is hear that song and then go to the music store, hope they had what you were looking for, and then buy that album, because you had to buy the whole album. Sometimes you could get a single, but usually you had to buy the whole album, and then to get home, and then open that thing up and take the plastic off and all that stuff, and then you could actually start listening to that song, but it was a process.

And now any song that has ever been created in the history of the world is instantly available to you. Any movie that has ever been made you can basically watch instantly on your phone, you know, so and then, you know, I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this episode things like, you know, ordering food. Or, you know, we can order food. We can just sit on our couch and have food delivered to us within an hour or so, or half an hour, or order something from Amazon and have it delivered sometimes within a couple of hours, you know, just about any item you can think of on the planet, and it’ll show up in your door within a day or two, you know, whatever.

But we’ve just become so used to instant gratification that anything that takes longer than a day or so or a few weeks just seems like, why bother? And we have to get out of this mentality. We have to start losing this mentality when it comes to things like our own health and fitness, because your health and fitness journey is something that you’re going to be on from now until the end of your life. If you do it right, it’s going to be something that you’re committed to forever.

And so if it’s something you’re committed to forever, it doesn’t matter that losing 30 pounds takes six months or a year. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you’re on that journey, and you’re doing something, and you’re moving in that direction every single day, even if it’s baby steps. You know my friend, it may take her three or four months to get to the place where she can do a pull up, or maybe six months, I don’t know, but I told her that it really doesn’t matter. She didn’t want to hear that. She just laughed and said, that is not the answer I was looking for. She wanted the shortcut. And the truth is, all those things that she’s doing is how you get there faster, like there isn’t really a true shortcut other than just doing all the little things that you can do each day.

You know, it’s kind of like running that faster marathon. You know, you got to do your speed work, and you got to do that a couple times a week. You might do a high interval session, high intensity interval session. One day, you might do a tempo run. Another day, you might have a couple of maintenance runs, then you have your long run on the weekend, and you got to rinse and repeat that over and over and over again. Same principle applies, though, that progressive overload, you overload your systems. You know, you overload your skeletal muscular system. You overload your cardiovascular system with these high intensity intervals. The next time you go for a run, your body has adapted positively to those stressors that you put on yourself, and you get a little bit faster, you get a little bit more efficient. Your heart rate improves a little bit. Your vo two Max goes up a little bit. That’s how you how you get better. That’s how you get faster. It takes a long time to get there, though, it is not something, there is no fast track. There is no next day delivery when it comes to your health and fitness. Okay?

So for my friend, she didn’t want to hear that, you know, that the shortcut was just doing all the things she’s already doing. She won the true shortcut. And when I told her there wasn’t one, she was a little bummed out about that. But I think she understands that. You know the thing is to never give up. The thing is that you just have to commit to this process, commit to the journey, and stay on that journey.

Now, I will say this, when it comes to having a shortcut to health and fitness success, there is something that you can do that will help you, and that is a true shortcut, and that is having a coach help you. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a coach or because I’m trying to get you to do coaching with me or anything like that, but a coach actually is a shortcut to your success, because they’ve already made all the mistakes, they’ve worked with hundreds of people, they know what works and what doesn’t work. You’ve got somebody there that can give you a step by step guide, which, when you’re trying to figure this stuff out for yourself, it’s, there’s so much information out there anymore that it’s very confusing, especially when it comes to things like your diet or getting stronger.

Like there’s so many different ways of doing this that having somebody there that’s in your corner, that’s got your back, that’s holding you accountable, that’s providing a step by step guide for you. Is really a pretty amazing shortcut, in my opinion. This is what helped me to become healthier, stronger, lose weight, like I had somebody just showing me what to do, and I just do what they said, like that, right? There is a true shortcut. Okay, it’s still going to take a while, but to keep that under in your mind, because it’s one of those things that you might have somebody guiding you and helping you through the process, but it’s still going to take whatever it takes.

Getting stronger is not a fast process. Getting faster is not a fast process. Losing weight is not a fast process, okay, it takes what it takes, and everybody’s different, and so we just have to accept all of that. We have to accept that, you know, we are, are committed to this lifestyle of being a healthy human being. We’re committed to this as a lifestyle. We’re not looking for short term fixes. We’re not looking for, you know, the fastest way to get there possible. What we’re looking for is what is going to work for us for the long term. What is going to keep us healthy, get us healthy first of all, and then keep us healthy for the rest of our lives. That’s what we’re really looking for here.

Okay, so you know, while I’ll say there really isn’t a shortcut. Having a coach is kind of like having the shortcut, right? It’s just a way to fast track your success as much as possible. So you’re going to get the benefits of having somebody that’s just done it all before and has that experience and that right there is the true power up. That is really the true shortcut to your health and fitness success. But at the same time, you have to just commit to the process, commit to the process of change. What am I doing today to better myself? What am I doing today to stay on my plan? What am I doing today? To be consistent? What am I doing today to get a little bit stronger? And you just have to keep doing these things over and over and over again and and you will see results. You will see progress.

If you don’t, then you got to do something different. You know, don’t keep doing the same things, expecting things to change for you, right? If it’s not working, try something else. But for my friend, who is, you know, working on doing a pull up, she’s doing all the right things, she just has to commit to this process and stay committed. She’ll get there. I know she’s going to get there when she does, I’ll let you guys know. I’ll ask her about it next time I see her, see how things are progressing, but I’ll try to keep you guys posted with her progress, because I think it’s pretty fun to watch.

Okay, that’s all I got for you today. I hope this has been helpful. If it has, feel free to share this with someone that you care about. It’s really all I got for you here. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean. I will talk to you soon.