Ep 135 – You’re Injured, Now What?

TRANSCRIPT:

Giacomo

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Giacomo.

Dani

And I’m Dani.

Giacomo

And this is episode 135.

Dani

135. Wow. I can’t believe that. That is really crazy. Go us. Go Christina. Really? This has nothing to do with us. It’s all Christina editing this podcast. Otherwise it wouldn’t happen.

Giacomo

I like Christina editing the podcasts because just one afternoon, just cranking them out, and our sound has improved tenfold. And then we get to just focus on the conversation.

Dani

Which reminds me, we’re approaching the end of the year, which I can’t believe I’m saying right now. Which means we need to start drawing up what all of our topics are going to be for the podcast in 2024. If you guys have some ideas, please, if there’s stuff you want to hear about, let us know.

Shoot me a message on Instagram. It’s veganproteins or Giacomo is ussels by Brussels. You can email us coach veganproteins.com we want to make the kind of stuff that you want to hear, so if there’s stuff you want to learn about, let us know. We would love to talk about it or even questions.

Giacomo

It doesn’t have to be a topic. It could be something that you want to ask us about, and you might find your question on one of our Q and A segments.

Dani

Yeah, totally. So what are we talking about today?

Giacomo

Injuries. And what happens when you get injured? What do you do? Well, I feel like the first response, if I was a listener, I’d be like, I’m going to the doctor and I figure out what I’m working with, which that’s all well and good, and that’s true. Yeah, absolutely. Find out what your injury is. Find out what’s happening with your body. But before that, there are some things that you can do on your own before you get an actual and some, maybe some people don’t have access to the right

kind of doctor. That’s wholly possible. There are certain things that you can do once, and we’re not talking about a sprain or like a cranky muscle. We’re talking like, just straight up, you got hurt.

Dani

I was talking about any kind of injury. I wasn’t even thinking it had to necessarily be an injury that you needed to see a doctor for. Just something that you knew you couldn’t or shouldn’t train through.

Giacomo

Fair enough. Okay, so let me get this straight there. So we’re thinking about a period in time where you’re somewhat Sidelined from training. Correct. Okay. So when you sideline from training, regardless of whether it’s a serious acute injury that’s not so serious or whether you’re a little beat up from the gym and you shouldn’t be training all the.

Dani

Way up to a sprain or a strain, which to me is a pretty serious injury, you were like, I’m not talking about a sprain. I’m talking about a serious injury. Like, oh, I don’t know. Spraining your ankle can be a pretty serious injury. So it’s close. Once again, I am confused by your definitions of things.

Giacomo

Oh, gosh. Anyways, the whole reason why we want to have this discussion is because. Well, for one, I want to start with mindset. I want to start with the mental training from most. From what I’ve seen in my experience as a coach, training is what keeps people grounded. It’s what makes people happy. It’s their sanity. And when they can’t train like they normally do, they tend to just fall apart.

And, I mean, that’s a little bit of a dramatization and perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not too far off from the truth. When the thing that puts you together is no longer there the way that you

need it to be, you wind up starting to risk sabotage. And I think this episode is going to be all about how to prevent that from happening.

Dani

Yeah, I mean, I think that when you first get hurt in the gym, or it doesn’t even have to be getting hurt in the gym, just getting hurt and realizing, oh, like, my whole routine is going to have to change. I mean, I know when it happens to me, and it does happen to me, which I think is probably something we should address at the very, very beginning, is that injuries are inevitable. They’re inevitable. You’re going to get hurt. I’m not saying you’re gonna get hurt in the gym, but, like,

everybody gets hurt to smaller or larger degrees at some point, and it’s going to change your gym routine. And when that happens, I don’t know, it deflates the heck out of me the second it happens. And I realize, like, ugh, I was just starting to get on a roll, and now I’m, like, not gonna be able to, you know, train my lower body for the next couple of weeks till this clears up or whatever. Like, that’s tough to just mentally, it feels like it sucks the wind right out of your sails.

Giacomo

And I feel like no matter how much of an accepted and move on kind of approach you take like the kind of athletic thing where it’s like, I’m gonna focus on what I can do and I’m gonna keep doing it. There are ways where you can look back and after injury and be like, well, that more than took the wind out of my sails. That put me back a little bit as far as like what I could have been doing had I not gotten injured.

So I am all for injury prevention, but I am also of the mindset that you do. Like said, you do have to accept that when you’re pushing in one way or another, you’re going to get injured. So it is something you might as well find a way to work through. And you focus on what you can be doing, not just to nurse the injury, but other things like not making sure other areas of your routine and whatnot, that they don’t fall apart.

So how do I say this? It should be low hanging the fruit, but it is not the one thing that you can do. The best thing to focus on is your nutrition, hands down. And yet I think that it is the first thing to go when training changes, which is crazy to me because I’m sure I could create some arguments where sometimes it’s a little bit harder to get your groceries or to prep your food, or you’re spending time figuring out a different solution or plan of attack.

But your focus should be right there. How can you make sure that you’re eating well and when you’re injured it’s that much more important because your food is going to be what gets you to recover faster. I mean, it’s other things too. Don’t get me wrong, it’s sleep, it’s stress management. It’s finding a way to modify your training so that your injury doesn’t become chronic because of the way that you’re training and working around your injury.

But food’s a pretty important one and I feel like it’s literally the first thing to go. People just start trying to self soothe by eating food that’s more comforting or just be like, well, can’t do what I want to do now. So who really cares about eating habits?

Dani

That’s it right there. For whatever reason, people think that if they’re not able to train the way they normally train, then their food choices can just go out the window because none of it matters. And I am a firm believer that your nutrition is probably like 70% of your results. Honestly, whether you’re training or not, nutrition is that freaking important.

They always say you can’t out train a bad Diet, you can’t, you literally can’t. So when you are injured, I mean, think about. Injuries could mean all sorts of things. It could be a sprained ankle, it could be throughout your back. It could be that you are sick, right? Like you could be really sick. Whatever it is, something not good is happening inside of your body.

So if there ever was a time that your body needed to kind of be like flooded with good nutrition, this is it. It’s going to speed up the anti inflammation process. Got lots of antioxidants into your body. Like this is the time where nutrition probably matters more because you don’t even have the wiggle room of your workouts to kind of pad you a little bit.

Giacomo

And the irony of it all, Dani, is that the injury probably happened because that person. Well, not in all scenarios, but in the scenario. The picture that I like to paint here is the injury that happens when someone is doing a lot of things right that you have to accept as part of the process. When you get taken out, when you take yourself out after the fact because you got hurt, you’re literally reversing progress wise as opposed to accepting that the injury is.

Injuries are bound to happen. So you do a lot of things right. You work on your body composition, you’re putting on muscle, now all of a sudden you get hurt, now what do you do? That whole, oh, whatever, it doesn’t matter. And then you turn around. And one, it’s going to be that much harder to get back to your habits when everything is going right.

And two, aside from doing progress that way, it’s going to take longer to, to heal up and you’re gonna feel like crap about yourself. And all the time, all the while you’re gonna justify being apathetic because you’re like, what’s the point right now? I’m not training so I don’t really need to get in.

Dani

That took me a second to understand what you were saying, but I got there.

Giacomo

Yeah.

Dani

So you’re saying like you’re already gonna be taken out of the gym, so you’re not gonna make progress, but then people just kind of double down on it being worthless to even bother with the nutrition. And then they make sure that not only do they not make progress, but they actually because of their poor nutrition in several ways.

Giacomo

Yes.

Dani

Gotcha.

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Giacomo

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Giacomo

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Giacomo

So I guess the idea here is, well, what would you say to somebody, let’s say it’s your client and they just got hurt and they’re showing up and they’re not doing what they need to be doing. What kind of recommendations would you give someone like that when you’ve already given them options to modify their training or suggested this is, this is what needs to happen activity wise. Now focus on your nutrition.

Dani

In what regard are they not showing.

Giacomo

Up compared to the way they were doing things before they got hurt?

Dani

I don’t understand what you’re saying though. In what regard are they not showing.

Giacomo

Up when I, when I mean showing up, I mean they’re, they’re checking in with you, they’re not avoiding. Because sometimes, other times.

Dani

I don’t, I don’t understand what you mean. You said they’re not showing up.

Giacomo

No, they are. Someone, someone checks in with you, they’re your client and they were eating a certain way, now all of a sudden they got hurt. What do you tell them to do?

Dani

I would explain all the things that I just explained that we just talked about that you’re, you’re making sure that you’re moving in the Wrong direction by continuing to just eat whatever. I mean, it’s hard to say exactly because I’m not a person that actually exists.

But I would let them know all of the consequences of these actions. And you know, especially if they’re working with me during that time, I would remind them that we don’t have eternity together necessarily. So make the most of this time, you know.

Giacomo

Yeah, for sure. I still think it makes sense to continue to focus and getting in a certain amount of protein. I think eating even healthier is probably a good thing. Like healthier than you normally would.

Dani

Right.

Giacomo

Flood your body with nutrients. Also, we tend to recommend that someone eats a little more than they were before they got hurt, just so they heal up faster.

Dani

It depends on the situation.

Giacomo

Not always, but it is something we suggest at times. Yeah. So you got anything else you want to add to what to do as far as eating habits go? When someone falls off track, mindset wise.

Dani

Maybe don’t try to eat less. A lot of people, you know, there are some people that just say screw it and eat bowls of ice cream, but there are a lot of people that say, well, I’m not working out so I should cut my calories. Right. And most of the time the answer is no, don’t cut your calories. Because healing an injury takes a lot of energy from your body. And if you cut your calories to make way for an injury, then you’re just going to prolong the healing process.

Like by eating enough, you’re going to speed up the healing process. But if you under eat, the healing process is just going to take longer. So, you know, most of the time I would say do not try to cut your calories just because you’re not able to get in the gym.

Giacomo

Is there ever a situation where you would be okay with someone eating less.

Dani

When they got hurt if they had been doing a crapload of cardio and now they can’t do any. If they went from doing like 45 minutes of cardio a day to zero because they sprained their ankle and they also can’t train their lower body, then maybe we would make a change there. But most of the people I work with are not doing 45 minutes of cardio a day, so that’s not an issue.

Giacomo

Fair enough. And still within reason, you still try to err on the side of them eating a little bit more. You just account for them, their exercise, the amount of exercise, yes, they had was a lot and it’s going down. Fair enough. Gotcha. Well, and then the other thing Is, well, what do you do as far as when you got hurt? Like, what kind of ways do you modify someone’s training? How do you get them to a point where they can safely train again? Why don’t we start there?

Dani

Well, that’s. I mean, the very first thing I do when someone gets hurt is we go through and modify their training. Because rather than just say, oh, no, I can’t train, I am constantly thinking, okay, what can we do right now? That is the very first thing I think when someone gets hurt. What are we capable of doing right now? And sometimes this requires, like, a good amount of out of the box thinking.

I’m working with this one woman. She fractured a bone in her foot, I don’t know, a couple months ago. So we were very limited in what we could do for lower body because she couldn’t really put much weight. Like, she could stand on it, but she couldn’t do, like step ups or lunges or anything where your foot’s in a compromised position. So her lower body workout, which she trained her lower body the whole time it was healing, were like leg extensions, leg curls, back glute, dominant

back extensions. And I think that. And like abductor, an adductor machine, like, very minimal. We

couldn’t even do, like a leg press. Just not possible. She heals up. And she did it, she trained. That was her whole lower body workout for a couple of months until she healed up. Like six sets of everything. Like a lot of sets. Right. And then she took a test, a karate test, and she, like, basically hurt her hand really badly during the karate test.

So now her foot is better, but her hand is, like, busted up. So now I’m like, okay, well, now we could be back to our lower body training, but what can we do for your hand? And we had to use, you know, the straps you would put around your ankle to do, like, cable kickbacks. Yeah, we put those around her wrists.

Giacomo

Yep.

Dani

And hooked them onto a cable machine so she could still do rows and lat pull downs and lateral raises and stuff without actually holding a dumbbell in her hand. Now, that’s not something I would program for somebody that didn’t have an injury in their hand. But it worked. We were able to work around that injury.

Giacomo

And you can do other stuff, too. Sometimes someone can have a shoulder injury and you avoid overhead pressing, and you can still wind up training their shoulders with lateral raises, for example. Or the type of overhead pressing can change from like a barbell to a machine, for example. Or you can take another person who has some elbow issues.

And you can throw something like blood flow restriction training, where they’re getting a different kind of pump by deoxygenating their blood faster, getting them to the point where they’re getting to a pump with less weight because they’re cutting off. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways.

Dani

There’s so many ways to modify training.

Giacomo

Giving their elbow a little bit of a break because they can use 20% of working weight. Like, that’s another example. You can do preventative things like using grip aids for rows and pulls, where you’re also arguably training your back more like that. You can work. You can, you can reverse engineer and think about the form that got them there and work on their form for the future as well, as opposed to

just being in the moment

and trying to work on modifying training their injury. Like, look at movement, find out what that person is doing. Think about how they’re moving outside of the gym, too.

Dani

That’s massive. Most people are not getting hurt in the gym. Most people are getting hurt outside of the gym.

Giacomo

Yeah, it’s like that silly. You know, how people explain things in like a funny kind of silly way. Like, I got. I got hurt picking. Picking my arm up and getting something out of the cabinet because it was the repetitive motion of doing something occupationally or lifestyle wise that got them to the point where they lifted their arm and then, boom, just opening up a cabinet to get something. They got hurt.

Right. It wasn’t what they did in the gym. It was something to do with their occupation or their lifestyle that got them there. Not necessarily. I mean, sometimes it’s deconditioning, but we’re obviously, we’re not speaking to that kind of person right now, but. Yeah, and you know, working on that stuff can make a big difference. What were you saying yesterday? To me, the physical therapy thing?

Dani

Oh, it’s just a saying in physical therapy that your best position is your next position. And that just means that you shouldn’t stay in any position for too long, whether that’s standing, sitting, or lying down. Because, you know, we always think like, sitting is the new smoking kind of. But sitting is not necessarily terrible. It’s just that we all do it way too much. Now, standing, lying down, shifting your position regularly is a good thing.

Giacomo

Okay. So even if you’re someone ironically like us, who we’re fitness, we’re online vegan coaches, but we sit down for a good portion of the day, like a.

Dani

Huge portion of the day.

Giacomo

Yeah, but that’s not a death sentence. It doesn’t mean that our job has to.

Dani

Feels like a death sentence.

Giacomo

Oh, here we go, Dani. Nope, nope. We’re not going there. Not going there.

Dani

It’s my own fault. I need to turn this into a standing desk or something. I have a kneeling chair, which is nice, but I need to somehow make this a standing position. Sorry, continue.

Giacomo

That’s all right. So. But the point here is that there are things that you can do without forcing more activity into your workday, because you can. Because you’re required to be at your desk to be a little safer outside of the gym, which will lessen your chance of injury, like moving around a little bit, changing positions. That being said, what you do inside the gym matters, too, the way that you move.

So when someone gets injured, it is helpful to look at their movement patterns, especially if they haven’t been showing you how they move. And you can do this on your own, too, just whether you have a coach or not. Obviously, having a different set of eyes and the experience, having that kind of person does help. But you could do video analysis on yourself, because you can’t look at yourself when you train.

You’re too focused on lifting. If you’re looking at yourself when you train, you’re probably training with bad posture and you’re not focusing on your lift. But if you can record yourself and then look at the lift after the fact, you can get a lot out of seeing how you move and making sure mobility. Mobility helps as well. Right. To focus on mobility, there’s a lot that you can do.

Stress management, breath. I mean, I’m just throwing tips out here, like rapid fire. Because there are a lot of things that you can do outside of modifying your exercises just to be able to continue to train. And these are things that you can do to, like, sort of course correct a little bit, you know, so that’s stuff we think about also. So we talked about training modifications.

We talked. You and I were just talking about things that you can do to be in a healthier body outside of the gym so that you’re less likely to get injured inside of the gym. And we also talked about how to assess in the gym. We talked about nutrition. What about how to assess the level of your injury when you get hurt?

Dani

Okay, interesting. Well, oh, that’s so tough. Because sometimes injuries happen right away. You ever do something and the second you do it, you’re like, oh, shit, I am hurt. That does happen. And I think very obviously, if that happens, call it a day. But I also think, like, almost as many injuries kind of start very slowly and get worse. This happens a lot with back problems. People will start to feel like, uh, oh, a little twinge in their back and then over the next 24 hours that

thing seizes up and they can barely move. So that is a lot tougher. But you know, soreness and muscle tiredness or fatigue in the gym is a normal thing to feel. But I would say anytime you feel like an ouch in the gym, even if it’s a small one, I would stop doing that exercise for the day at least and give that some time to settle in and see how it feels later. Might be fine, might have been nothing. Right. Or it might turn into something bigger. Especially if you try to work through.

Giacomo

It, 12 hours later, it’s still there and it doesn’t feel like muscle soreness. How much time do you give it before you start to really assess what you’re working with?

Dani

At least a few days. Yeah, I mean, at least a few days. You know, I would do like a Rice method. Arrest, ice, elevate and compress. If that body part made sense for that, then I would do that for a few days. I would try to really lay off that body part for a few days.

And if it did not improve at that point, that’s when I personally would reach out to a doctor and be like, hey, what the heck is this? But sometimes you hurt yourself right away and you know immediately, like that’s going to require a doctor.

Giacomo

Right? You hurt yourself right away, you know it’s going to require a doctor. You hurt yourself right away and you’re not sure if it’s going to require a doctor. But the pain ain’t going away in 12 days. Somewhere in between there. I feel like the three to five day mark is pretty suspect as far as going resuming regular training with less intensity.

You really gotta watch because muscles spasm around injured areas and things whether they feel well, obviously they’re gonna feel worse because your body’s spasming to protect the area and heal it up. But aside from that, you really just don’t know what you’re working with. Right. So. And the focus at that point in time right then and there is to get the inflammation down, like said, with the rest ice, compression, elevation method, and

then somewhere between the three to five day mark, at that point in time, you can start to focus on moving your body. I feel like people tend to fear movement when they get hurt.

Dani

Yeah. Especially with back injuries like back pain specifically, people are afraid to move. But actually Dr. Stuart McGill, who I think is a fantastic back. Doctor says that walking as soon as your pain is low enough that you can walk, like walking is one of the best things you could do for a back injury to help it heal up faster.

Now that’s not true of every injury in every spot. You shouldn’t just start using it as soon as you can. But yeah, moving your body again, what can you do? Think, what can you do? And try to do that.

Giacomo

The easiest thing to do is get lost in your emotions and worry on top of that. And before you know it, if you’re not moving, you don’t give your body a chance to heal as fast or worse, the injury persists. So movement definitely does heal both during, like said, during that time where your body’s a little spazzed out for whatever reason.

Like walking, for example, to after the three to five day period of time where you’re like, you know what, I’m still hurting. But I know this isn’t going to require an mri, for example, or like a diagnosis at a doctor, what do you do five days later? You start to assess and focus on ways you can move outside of just walking, for example. And that’s when you can figure out, okay, I can get back to the exercises that I was doing.

I just get into them somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 70% of the intensity that I had before hurt. Or like said, you realize, okay, this is going to take more than five to 10 days, even with me moving my body again. Now, like the examples you mentioned with the, with the wrists, for example, you want to start modifying your training a little bit.

Dani

So how do you get back into training once you’re on the mend, I guess is a really good question. So I usually, and it depends on the injury, and it depends on what a doctor said, but I usually tell people, like, don’t try to do whatever exercises it was that hurt it in the first place until you’re feeling at least 80% better. Like until it is at least 80% healed.

And then when you do go to the gym, start with 50% of what you did last time. So if you were overhead pressing 30 pound dumbbells, you know, don’t try to press more than 15 pound dumbbells over your head, do a set and then see how it feels the next day. If you wake up the next day and it feels aggravated or worse again, you are not ready to get back to training. If it feels fine the next day, then you can, you know, the next time you do that workout, maybe try to go up 10% until you get back.

So now you’re trying 60% of what you did the last time before you got hurt, then 70%, then 80%. But if at any point during the exercise or the day following it feels worse, do not progress past that point. And you might even want to back off a little bit.

Giacomo

Yeah, exactly. Injuries are not a death sentence. They’re not a reason to not resume training, and they’re definitely not a reason to fall off a deep end as far as your habits and routine go. And all the more reason where you can focus on other things that you may have been unintentional and neglecting outside of the gym if you frame it as an opportunity.

And like we were saying earlier in this conversation, something that is inevitable, if you take that mindset going into a period of injury, you can actually wind up coming out on the other side better and smarter because you realize you’re also gaining understanding of your body, because every person’s body has limits. And no matter. I feel like no matter how well you train one way or another, your body is going to give you pushback. And this is.

And this is maybe a little bit too optimistic of me to say, but I do like to look for more than silver linings. Injuries teach you your limitations, and they teach you what parts of you, you need to improve, as opposed to just rinse, wash, repeat, get in and get out and get it done and get back to it. They show you the holes and the flaws in your mechanics, in your body’s capabilities, this and that. They’re opportunities for you to work on yourself.

Dani

I think another thing that’s important to remember is generally when something gets injured, especially if it gets, like, injured pretty badly, it’s also more likely to get injured again in the future. This is a sad reality of getting older, is like, once you hurt something once, you might hurt it again and again and again. So you know this type of thing where it’s like a recurring injury that pops up regularly, that’s like doctor territory.

Like, go to a doctor, they’ll probably refer you to a physical therapist. And we didn’t even touch upon physical therapy. So physical therapy can be wonderful, or it also can feel like a giant waste of time, I have found. So I’ve been to physical therapy for a bunch of different injuries. And just like a lot of professions, it really comes down to the individual.

So if you find a physical therapist that is really helping you, like, try to stay in that person’s network if you can, because there are a Lot of physical therapists quite frankly, that I just don’t think are very good or very helpful. They give you stuff you could have googled on the Internet yourself. I remember when I was going for a shoulder injury when I had frozen shoulder, this was the worst. I was literally at the gym doing like lat pull downs at £100.

And then I’d have my physical therapy appointment a couple hours later and they would have me doing lat pulldowns at like 10 pounds, but for like 30 reps. But I’d be like, guys, I. I literally just did 10 times this weight like two hours ago. You’re not listening to me. And it was just like a terrible. They didn’t say, hey, don’t do that at the gym.

Giacomo

That would have been a different thing. Like a baby thing maybe.

Dani

I think it’s just like, maybe they were just really young and it was just standard protocol or something. Like they couldn’t do X until they tried Y. Insurance bs. I’m not sure, but it was terrible. And then I’ve gone to other. I went to another physical therapist for that same frozen shoulder and you know, he didn’t fix it. You can’t fix frozen shoulder.

But at least they gave me a lot of exercises to work with that I feel like kind of helped move things along a little bit. So if you have an injury that’s popping up over and over again, it could be a bunch of things, but one of the things it could probably be is just like a super weak muscle or an underdeveloped muscle or set of muscles that you have that you don’t even know that you have. It could be like you have a really weak transverse abdominis and that’s why you keep throwing your back

out. Or your rotator cuff is super weak and that’s why you keep hurting your shoulders. But a physical therapist should be able to help you identify it and give you a routine that you can do long after your sessions are over on your own to keep those areas strong, to hopefully have it become injured less frequently.

Giacomo

Yeah, and you can throw those in for prehab right before you train to sort of warm up the connective tissue. That can be a little bit challenging to use because of the injury, for example. And you can sprinkle that in even like way post injury.

Dani

I would say one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they do physical therapy is once the area feels better, they stop doing their physical therapy exercises, not realizing that it is the physical therapy exercises that are making them feel better. And they need to keep doing it. And it’s just like, one of those things they’re probably gonna have to do maybe forever, but for a very long time at least.

Giacomo

So depending on severity.

Dani

Yeah, I hate explaining that to people like, yeah, I know you feel great right now. And then a couple months later, they’ll be like, I have a twinge in my shoulder or something. And I’m like, are you still doing your physical therapy exercises? And they’re like, uh, no, no, I haven’t been doing those. And I’m

like, okay, we need to start doing those, because that’s why you weren’t getting hurt for the last couple months.

So it’s tough. But that’s just what it means to, you know, one, get injured and two, get older. Like, those two things just kind of happen. But I think trying to keep your head in the game and recognize that it’s temporary, you will be back at it. There are other things you can focus on is the best way through any kind of an injury. Giacomo, this question is for you.

I’m trying to lose weight by lifting, cardio and dieting. I like to step on the scale and track my weight once a week. I usually weigh myself on Monday morning, but since my refeed cheat meals are on the weekend, should I weigh myself on Friday morning instead? I asked my boyfriend this, and now we are in a debate. Can you help us settle this?

Giacomo

Sure. Well, the first thing that I would want to say is as long as you’re weighing yourself on the same, like, within the same set of circumstances, it should make too much of a difference. So, like, if your refeeding days are always on Saturday and Sunday, and you always take your stats on a Monday, well, then all the variables are the same. You may want to see a different number on the scale.

You may want to see different measurements for emotional reasons or to get a sense of, like, what that would look like not after a leafy day. But as far as measuring actual progress, your variables are all the same. It doesn’t really matter. I think that’s more like a personal thing based on what kind of stats you want to keep. As far as seeing what your body looks like, I don’t think it makes that much of a difference in all honesty, as long as you’re not. Again, like, if you’re.

If you’re doing it on a Monday, half the time after your refeed days, and then the other half of the time you’re doing it on a Wednesday or Thursday, well, then, yes, that’s not going to make sense at all. But as long as you do it after your refeed day, pretty consistently, not a big deal, because it’s always. It’s more or less going to be the same. Dani, this may be a silly question, but I wanted to know how to start to get into bodybuilding.

Dani

I don’t think it’s a silly question at all. I think it’s a great question. So I have a couple of answers for you. One, you can join our Muscles by Brussels membership, because that’s basically what it is. Everybody’s doing sort of bodybuilding style workouts and learning about how to eat appropriately to build muscle and lose fat. And I think it’s a great introduction into that lifestyle, whether you’re brand new or more advanced.

But outside of our awesome membership, I would say Google and YouTube the heck out of bodybuilding in general. Not necessarily to get information, because Google and YouTube are kind of cesspools for bad information. But bodybuilding is a lifestyle and I feel like learning about the lifestyle and kind of what it entails. I found it in the beginning of my journey to be very motivating and exciting, and that is something great to have when you’re first learning.

But I guess if you don’t know anything about lifting, which I don’t know if this person does or not, go to your local gym, sign up for your local gym, hire a personal trainer, or sometimes they give you like a free week or free session with a personal trainer when you first sign up and have them write you a routine for your goals, with your limitations, any injuries that you have for your schedule, like if you can train three, four or five days a week, they can write your program based on

that. And they can also usually make some general nutrition suggestions for you, like give you a rough idea how many calories to eat, how much protein to eat, and do that consistently. Build up consistency there for six months before you consider kind of changing gears and trying to do something else. My number one tip would be don’t try to diet right out of the gate.

We know you want abs, we all want abs. And everybody tries to do it as step one. And it is not step one. It’s like step three or four. Step one is learn how to train consistently, learn how to train properly, learn how to eat enough and learn how to eat enough protein. And if you can do those four things right there, you are already ahead of like 50% of the population. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio.

Feel free to reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, email us coacheganproteins.com and if you are interested in any kind of coaching go to veganproteins.com check out what we have to offer. Fill out a coaching application if you’re interested in one on one coaching and we will get back to you once again. My name is Dani and I’m Giacomo and we will talk to you soon.