As a former professional athlete with an Economics degree, Alex Feinberg went on to work in a global macro hedge fund and later became a Google employee, so he is more than just a ripped health and fitness enthusiast.
In 2014, when he decided to change his training by running faster in just a short distance, he unexpectedly lost fat without much effort. He seemed to do everything against the book, yet he saw desirable results. Running faster at a shorter distance, lifting weights, but with fewer reps, not counting calories or tracking macros, and not sacrificing eating delicious foods.
He wants to influence and help people with this strategy - on paper, it wasn’t supposed to work, yet it has been effective with the people he trained. How is this possible? Learn from him in this episode as he shares why we should eat protein-dominant real food, what workouts work, and how our cravings can be our body’s signals to inform as what we need. He even gives his personal two rules in health and fitness - one that includes to never go hungry! Listen to know more.
Quick Guide:
01:16 Introduction
03:20 The unexpected fat loss strategy
10:18 What is Intuitive eating?
17:23 How to trust the hunger signals when you’re metabolically broken
20:45 The interval training
28:55 Intentionality is paired with progress
30:59 Measuring the cardio output
33:31 Too much protein in relation to fat can kick you out of ketosis
35:51 Understand what your body is craving for
39:08 Build muscle first before fat loss
47:14 Workout advice
52:18 Contact information
Get to know our guest:
Alex Feinberg is an Economics major and played baseball professionally for a few years. He is a fitness and nutrition enthusiast and the author of Ten Easy Wins for Easier Fat Loss Guide.
“You need to make progress like intentionality is paired with progress. Because if you're not pushing your body to do something that it's uncomfortable doing, it has no reason to physiologically adapt to any stimulus, right? You need to give your body stimulus that it's not accustomed to if you want your body to look or perform in a way it hasn't performed before.” - Alex Feinberg
Connect with him:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexfeinberg1
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexfeinberg1
Episode snippets:
07:16 - 08:18 - There should be l
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
As a former professional athlete with an Economics degree, Alex Feinberg went on to work in a global macro hedge fund and later became a Google employee, so he is more than just a ripped health and fitness enthusiast.
In 2014, when he decided to change his training by running faster in just a short distance, he unexpectedly lost fat without much effort. He seemed to do everything against the book, yet he saw desirable results. Running faster at a shorter distance, lifting weights, but with fewer reps, not counting calories or tracking macros, and not sacrificing eating delicious foods.
He wants to influence and help people with this strategy - on paper, it wasn’t supposed to work, yet it has been effective with the people he trained. How is this possible? Learn from him in this episode as he shares why we should eat protein-dominant real food, what workouts work, and how our cravings can be our body’s signals to inform as what we need. He even gives his personal two rules in health and fitness - one that includes to never go hungry! Listen to know more.
Quick Guide:
01:16 Introduction
03:20 The unexpected fat loss strategy
10:18 What is Intuitive eating?
17:23 How to trust the hunger signals when you’re metabolically broken
20:45 The interval training
28:55 Intentionality is paired with progress
30:59 Measuring the cardio output
33:31 Too much protein in relation to fat can kick you out of ketosis
35:51 Understand what your body is craving for
39:08 Build muscle first before fat loss
47:14 Workout advice
52:18 Contact information
Get to know our guest:
Alex Feinberg is an Economics major and played baseball professionally for a few years. He is a fitness and nutrition enthusiast and the author of Ten Easy Wins for Easier Fat Loss Guide.
“You need to make progress like intentionality is paired with progress. Because if you're not pushing your body to do something that it's uncomfortable doing, it has no reason to physiologically adapt to any stimulus, right? You need to give your body stimulus that it's not accustomed to if you want your body to look or perform in a way it hasn't performed before.” - Alex Feinberg
Connect with him:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexfeinberg1
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexfeinberg1
Episode snippets:
07:16 - 08:18 - There should be l
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
S3E11 Alex Feinberg
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
eat, people, cardio, calories, workout, day, protein, sets, hunger signals, hungry, craving, body fat, alex, fat, lift, training, week, vanderbilt, squats, burn
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Jack Heald, Alex Feinberg, Dr. Philip Ovadia
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:35
Do the cloud here we go. And we're live for what's the name of this show? That's right. The Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. Oh, we just had, we had a bit of a train wreck here before we started recording. We had a guest in Australia who thought this was her time for the interview. And she showed up at the same time today's guest Alex Feinberg showed up. I thought I screwed up some awful by researching the wrong person. But we have today, Alex Feinberg. Philip, why is he here? Why do we have Alex here with us today?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:16
Yes, welcome to Alex. Alex, I think, has a very interesting background that includes being a professional athlete, and a fitness and nutrition enthusiast. And I think we originally connected because we had a discussion on Twitter. Some of Alex's thoughts and messaging around nutrition might seem to be a little counter to mind. But in reality, I think we agree on a lot more than we disagree on. And so, I thought it would be an interesting discussion to go through some of that. But before we get to that, I'd love for Alex to tell us a little bit more about his background, introduce himself to our audience. And then we can get into it. Welcome, Alex.
Alex Feinberg 02:10
Thank you very much for having me, guys. So excited to be here. So, a quick synopsis on who is Alex Feinberg who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like I mentioned, I wanted to be a professional baseball player when I was in high school and worked very hard to earn a scholarship offer from Vanderbilt University, among other schools, ended up taking a leap of faith moving to Nashville, Tennessee back in 2004, spent four years at Vanderbilt, played on their baseball team, but actually got drafted by the Colorado Rockies and played professionally a couple of years after that. But during my time at Vanderbilt, I noticed a couple things that have...
Jack Heald 02:48
Wait, I gotta ask you something. What position are you?
Alex Feinberg 02:52
I got recruited as a shortstop, but my coach didn't think I had the athleticism to actually play shortstop after he saw me play several dozen games. And so, I ended up playing third base my freshman year, and then second base my last three years and a combination of all of those in the minor leagues.
Jack Heald 03:07
Do you have third baseman’s arm or a second baseman’s arm?
Alex Feinberg 03:09
I had a third baseman’s arm at one point in my life, and I think I ended my career with a second baseman’s arm.
Jack Heald 03:14
Okay, didn't need to take you off track there. People will want to get to know this stuff.
Alex Feinberg 03:20
Of course. And I always tell people that I was an economics major in at Vanderbilt, which is considered to be a real major, even though I don't consider it to be a real major, I consider it to be alchemy or an advanced form of alchemy. But the job market considers it to be a real major. But in my four years at Vanderbilt, I thought I learned more in baseball practice and on field than I did in any classroom. And one of the things that I learned in that I had to learn in order to be top of mind for scouts, or at least valuable in the eyes of scouts is I need to learn how people thought and understand heuristics thinking, because if you guys have seen Moneyball, or you're familiar with a lot of sports psychology, a lot of the people making the plane decisions, the drafting decisions, they're not really looking at statistics, they're making heuristic assessments about what they perceive your potential to be. And once I realized that a majority of people made heuristic assessments to navigate the world rather than making data driven, statistics-based decisions, I started noticing a couple of things that are really, really important. Namely, a lot of the successful businessmen who are around us when I was at Vanderbilt were in good shape and they spoke and I found myself in the in my seat in finance classes, listening to bankers who dressed well, spoke well, and were in good shape. And the thing that I took from it is the real world seems like it's going to be a scary place. I have no idea how I'm gonna make money. I have no idea what the job market is going to be like. But if there's one thing that I can make sure of when I'm in the job market is I'm going to be good shape. And so, after I got done with my lackluster binary career, I spent about a year and a half working in a global macro hedge fund in Hong Kong, came to believe that central banks around the world were coordinating to devalue currencies. And I thought that the tech sector was going to be the best place for me to bet my time because startups as well as larger tech companies are very sensitive to lower cost of capital, low interest rates, which essentially meant the venture capital firms are going to be able to raise a ton of money and deploy it into then overvalued startups. And so back when I was about 25 years old, I thought, well, if I want to make money, I had to put myself in the center of the money. And I moved back to Silicon Valley. Ultimately, elevator pitch my way into Google, because I had the conviction that if I show up in a custom-tailored suit, and I'm in good shape, and I speak well, I can talk my way into a job. And that is actually what happened. That's actually how I got into Google. And while I was at Google, I spent six years at Google, I made sure that I would continue to train hard every morning, because I wanted that advantage of being in good shape. That being said, and I didn't realize it at the time, but I do now look back at some of the pictures, I had managed to actually pack on some pounds. In my first couple of years at Google, a very crazy thing happened in 2014, I switched teams, I got into a strategy role. I worked alongside a triathlete named Woods. And we had a bro bench-press competition back in 2014. This was back when I bench-press. And I won the bench-press competition, I got 15 repetitions, and Woods got six, he’s second place. And I thought, man, Woods isn't really that much weaker than me. But he can run a lot faster than I can, it's really cool that he can run mile after mile in low six-minute pace. I wonder if I can do that. And so, one thing that I changed with my training back in 2014 was I decided to run fewer miles but faster. And I knew based on the research at the time, and one of the research that still exists, that that is not supposed to be an effective fat loss strategy, that you don't burn more calories by running faster. In fact, you burn fewer calories, because you're active for a shorter duration of time. And so, I jumped into this endeavor with zero expectation of any body change. I just wanted to get better at running fast. And the crazy thing happened like within two weeks, I noticed fat melting off my body, fat that I didn't even realize that I had to lose was melting off my body with no additional effort, actually less effort because I wasn't running as long. And I thought, well, let's keep playing with this. I know it's not supposed to work, but it's working. Let me see if I continue to make similar adaptations, continue to run faster, but shorter continue to lift heavier, but for fewer reps, let me see where that takes me. And this entire time, I was eating delicious food every meal and every day because I believed that that was my right as a reasonably successful individual to only eat delicious food. And I wanted to make a point to not become consumed by fitness, I want to have a life outside of fitness, I wasn't going to be counting calories, I wasn't going to be tracking macros, I wasn't going to be eating salads in order to get ripped. The only thing I was willing to do was maintain our commitment about daily to the gym, and never sacrifice taste in how I eat. So those are the two rules that I gave for myself is I can't try harder than x in the gym. Otherwise, it's not sustainable. And I'm unwilling to ever sacrifice taste or go hungry in my diet. Let me see how much progress I can make. Over the next three years, I ended up dropping from about 12% caliber body fat or hydrostatic body fat is what it's based off of to about 4% hydrostatic body fat without ever counting calories, without ever going hungry, without ever doing crazy workouts. And I thought to myself back in 2017, if there's any one way that I can actually change the world or influence people and make their lives better, it's to share how much easy your fitness can be if you change your NorthStar. If you move away from targeting calories as the foundation of your diet and fitness plan and switch towards targeting performance, because if you target performance and path to get recovery right, you have to get nutrition right, and you end up building a body that I came to find out later burned 2600 calories at reps like resting metabolic rate. So, 3000 calories a day on days that I don't go to the gym. And if I had to point to why that exists is how I eat and how I train. And it's not supposed to work based on a lot of available science, but it works for me and it works for dozens of people who I train one on one or hundreds of people, thousands of people who purchase my products. There's a reason why they're mostly rated five stars, right? And so, I think the key to our collective success is we seem to have found an easier way to accomplish the hard thing doesn't involve the struggle that fat loss is supposed to involve.
Jack Heald 10:02
Okay, Phil, help me out here because I've got lots of questions. And I hear a conflict here.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 10:18
Well, so and that's what's interesting because on the surface, I think people would look at it and say you're basically saying, eat whatever you want. And we're going to compensate for it with training and activity. But I know, that's not actually what you talk about having heard you in other arenas, and for some of the exchanges that we've had, there is one of the things that I think you agree with is that you should be eating real food, you can eat a lot of it, but you need to eat real food first and foremost.
Alex Feinberg 11:03
And absolutely. So, I get into this in my “Ten Easy Wins for Easier Fat Loss” Guide, like, I would never just tell somebody eat intuitively, because if you tell somebody to eat intuitively, they're going to eat exactly the way they've eaten their entire lives that has led them to looking the way they look. My intuitive eating was crafted and perhaps I should have specified this in the intro, right? I specifically chose to eat protein dominant real food. Because protein dominant real food, for me and for most people, is extremely hard to overeat if you have your stress levels moderated, if you're properly hydrated, if you're properly sleeping, and especially if you're doing some form of intense exercise, which are found to regulate appetite as well. And so, if several preconditions are met, and you end up eating protein dominant real food, it's really, really hard to get overweight on an all-sushi diet, right? Or if you ate poke, poke balls, with like 12 ounces of fish, three meals a day, it would be really hard for the average person to eat like 1800 calories worth of that. Now, there's a couple of ways you could get to eating below 1800 calories, you could count them. And if you count them and you ate processed food, then you'd end up hungry at the end of your day, it’s not even sustainable or if you end up eating protein dominant real food, perhaps with a leaner tilt, if you're not hugely active in the gym, then you'll find that it's actually incredibly difficult to eat the amount of calories that you previously been eating, and you found that you're actually on a diet without realizing it.
Jack Heald 12:43
So, are you saying that, I'm going to try to put the pieces together here. It sounds like what you're saying is that over eating is primarily and by overeating, consuming more calories than your body needs, and therefore turning it into stored fat. That over eating is far more... It's far more difficult when the food that you're eating is high protein is well, protein dominant. Which would imply that if you are over eating, you're probably not eating a protein dominant diet?
Alex Feinberg 13:39
Not necessarily. So usually that's the case. But a lot of times people will eat because it's a mealtime or they'll eat because they're bored. They'll eat because food is in front of them. And one thing that I tell people is food is very different than air in the sense that you have a choice whether to consumers in front of you. And so, if you think about how the average American consumes food, I'll give you an example. I've seen one of my buddies plays last major league series in Washington DC a couple years ago, I went to the gym on the last day of the series and I got my workout and went to the airport, got picked up by a Lyft driver. And I got my veins pumping because I just got of a workout and Lyft driver looks at me and he's like, oh man, like how can you help me get rid of some of this tummy fat. Everybody thinks that it's just tummy fat, they don't realize that it's like all fat. And so, I'm talking to him and I'm saying okay, so what do you eat? So, I wake up in the morning, have some orange juice, maybe like a muffin or something like that. What? Are you hungry in the morning? No. Okay, well, why are you eating if you're not hungry in the morning? Oh, I just want to make sure that I won’t get hungry later. It's like, well, how about you just wait until you're hungry? And so, we as a society have grown up around the idea that we're supposed to have fixed mealtimes, we've got to eat breakfast before we go to work. We got to eat lunch and dinner. Realistically, I think the average sedentary American probably only needs to eat two meals a day, and only one of which I think needs to have carbs. Now if you're an active person, you might eat three, four or five, six meals a day. But if you're not that active, it you'll end up eating a lot less if you simply eat when you're hungry, provided that you don't have an underlying metabolic condition or any of the red flags that I mentioned earlier. If you simply just wait till you're hungry and eat when you're hungry and stopping when you're full, and you eat protein dominant real food, most people will find that they're eating a lot less than, oh, it's eight o'clock, so I’m gonna eat breakfast. Oh, it's four o'clock, so, eat lunch. Oh, it's happy hour. So, I’m gonna eat what’s in front of me. Oh, it's seven o'clock, so I'm gonna eat dinner.
Jack Heald 15:41
So, this is a behavior modification that just happens to express itself as eating better. But it's not so much, hey, I'm going to focus on eating fewer calories or eating better food. The focus is I'm eating only when I'm hungry. And then inside that narrow parameter, protein dominant real food.
Alex Feinberg 16:13
Yeah. And I think I've learned that as a competitive athlete, where bad coaches will tell you to achieve the effects, they'll tell you, your pitches are sailing, or they'll tell you, they'll give you some explanation for your biomechanics. And they'll tell you that, oh, you're dropping your hands, you’re popping up because you're dropping your hands. Whereas a good coach doesn't tell you to keep your hands on. A good coach actually tells you, imagine you're doing x. And the outcome of imagining you're doing X is the result that they want. And so, I think I've looked at life with a similar prism where bad coaches will tell people to do the thing that they want, good coaches will tell people to do the easiest thing that then results in the thing that they want. If I wanted you to eat less, I could tell you eat 1500 calories a day. Right? Or I could simply tell you, just wait till you're hungry, eat protein dominant real food. Both suggestions may leave you eating 1500 calories a day. Which one's easier?
Jack Heald 17:20
Wait till you're hungry and eat the protein dominant? Okay.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 17:23
Yeah. And it's so interesting to me that basically, that's the same conclusion that I've come to and starting from a different point. And so, I guess I'd love to hear your perspective on, because you said one of the sort of preconditions for this is that you have to be attune to your hunger signals. And that gets into our metabolic health. And when we're metabolically broken, one of the things that gets broken is our hunger signals. We know that almost everyone is metabolically broken as the statistics show 88% of the adults in the US are metabolically broken on some level. So how do you start that process with people who are already metabolically broken, overweight, diabetic, however you want to look at it? How do you get them to that point that they can then trust their hunger signals?
Alex Feinberg 18:27
I think you need to take a wait-and-see approach. So, what I want to do when I'm working with somebody, first and foremost, is make any suggestion that I make sustainable. So, before I want to put somebody on a prescriptive plan, what I want to figure out is what are you eating? If you could just eat protein dominant real food when you're hungry until you're full, just send me pictures of what you're eating. Most people that I've worked with, who were very overweight, they're not, when they follow that sort of diet framework, they don't end up eating in a highly dysregulated way. They actually eat much more in accordance with what normal people would eat. So, I haven't encountered that many people whose hunger signals are so dysregulated that hey, Alex, I'm eating protein dominant real food when I'm hungry. I'm just so hungry that I'm eating four pounds of steak a day with just a couple cup of rice or two, like I have no, I literally have not encountered somebody who does that. And if I did, I don't know what I would tell them. I would probably then put them on, try to suggest a restrictive eating window, right? It's like well, okay, if you're if your bio signals are skewing you towards over consuming, there's like six different levers we can pull to get you eating less. Let's try one of them. Another one that I try is intense exercise. I've noticed that with intense cardio and one of the reasons why I like intense cardio is it tends to have an appetite suppressive effect, whereas moderate cardio, I’ve noticed tends to make people more hungry, intense cardio can make people less hungry. And so, I've been very in tune with I would say nonlinear biofeedback. Right? Because I think a lot of a lot of the medical community, a lot of the University System trains people to falsely save linear patterns in the world where a lot of times exceptions exist at the tail end. And that's where you can learn a lot, where it's like, okay, I do notice that the harder I work out, the hungrier I get, except if I work out 10 out of 10, then I'm actually less hungry, what's going on there? And how can I use this tool to number one, see if it's true without people, number two, make what we're trying to accomplish easier.
Jack Heald 20:45
So, I want to pursue the working out. Most folks will make a dividing line in a workout between the cardio and some form of weight training. Let's talk first about what that kind of hyper intense cardio looks like. How? Yeah, let's just what's that kind of hyperintense cardio look like? Working harder for less long.
Alex Feinberg 21:17
That's interval training, either on a treadmill or on an assault bike. So, assault bike for the people that may not be familiar, it's the bike that has handles as well as pedals. It's the only exercise of cardio machine that I found that can replicate the intensity of running without the joint loads. So that's one reason why I like it a lot. But a cardio session might mean something as short as 5/60 second intervals with 60 seconds rest in between, and maximum 8/60 second intervals with 30 to 60 seconds rest in between. And so, what we're looking at is a 10-to-16-minute cardio event. And I call it an event because unlike most trainers, I'm tracking that, right? I'm not asking you to hey, go get on the bike for 20 minutes, see if you can burn through calories. No, I'm saying this is your event. Let's measure how you're doing. Let's compare your output to last week to the week before. And in your previous output. We'll keep you honest with yourself. Because if you're not tracking your cardio, and then you say, well it's pretty hard. I felt pretty hard. It's like, Yeah, but how did your output compare to last week and the week before? What I found is that people force themselves to have increasingly higher output. Yeah, it's hard. It's the hardest part of the training that we do. But it's only 12 to 15 minutes a day, a few times a week. Most people have the emotional reserves to do something challenging for all the 15 minutes a day, a few times a week. And then the end result is less body fat. And it's either because doing cardio, like that increases your resting metabolic rate, or it curves your hunger, or a combination of the two. But it works. And it's much more emotionally sustainable than oh I'm gonna go run for miles. And I'm going to do it again tomorrow. I'm gonna do it again the day after that. It's like, I used to do that it didn't work well from fat loss standpoint. What I'm doing now is shorter. It's easier. It's not easy, but it's easier. But it was better.
Jack Heald 23:17
Because the duration is shorter? Comments please, Phil.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 23:26
I was just gonna say, so when you're doing that, though your intervals are like true max intensity, max exertion. I think people oftentimes confuse the intensity of the workout with the duration of the workout. They think an intense workout because they jogged for an hour, as opposed to doing a couple of 62nd sprint intervals is, and we actually had a previous guest on Sean O'Mara, I'm not sure if you know him, familiar with him, but he says the same thing, go out there and sprint, don't bother jogging.
Alex Feinberg 24:14
Right. And so, is it as intense as I can do it? Over the cumulative duration, it is. So, if I went 100% as hard as I could, on my first interval, I would have zero gas in the tank for my second. So, I'm pacing myself so that the summation of my output across six to eight intervals, however many I'm doing, is as high as I can make it. Now some, if we get into some specific, some days I actually target 90% of our PR, so 95% of my PR, some days I try to hit my PR, but the goal is to is to pace myself such that my output throughout the whole thing can be maximized. What that looks like is I'm probably going about 90%, 85% of my maximum capacity that I could actually do for one repetition of 60 seconds, but I'm doing it for about eight of them.
Jack Heald 25:05
So, I'm an old guy. And the story I've been told for most of my adult life is you want your cardio workout to stay in the I think they're calling it the orange zone now; I don't know why that's. So, watch your heart rate. And that heart rate zone training is the secret, that's the key, don't let it get too high. You know about the story, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the older you get, the lower that number gets. I find it really, really easy to get out of that orange zone to get above that. And I'll be frank, I don't have a clue which ways, which one makes the most sense.
Alex Feinberg 26:05
I think they're working different systems in your body. And I think I could kick it to a to a medical expert to correct me on this. But my sense is the zone 2, orange zone or whatever you want to call it and that training probably is better for at least certain elements of cardiac output. That being said, I don't think it affects your endocrine system to nearly the extent of intense training. And so that's something that people don't realize, when they're assessing the efficacy of a workout is every exercise you select is optimized to achieve a different goal than a different exercise. So, is a 30 Minute 55% maximum heart rate cardio session better for you than a 12-minute-high intensity interval session, it's like, well, it depends what you mean by better, right? One may be better for building cardiac health, another may be better for regulating your appetite, and perhaps lowering your blood sugar, improving your body composition, both outcomes are ideal or beneficial, if you want to be healthy and live long, but each activity is optimized for a slightly different end goal.
Jack Heald 27:22
I like that answer.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 27:23
Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it the zone 2 training, if you're trying to build your aerobic capacity, zone 2 training is kind of shown to be effective for that. But if you're not trying to be a marathon runner, then you don't need to train for marathons it's kind of what it comes down to. And so, I think it really does come down to your goals. Like anything else, you have to kind of be directed, different things are going to get you different results. And you have to figure out what you're trying to accomplish, to then figure out the best way to go about it. I guess, tying back to your earlier career, if you can approach your finances in many different ways. And you can kind of spend less and save over the long run, or you can try and hit the lottery and you'll end up wealthy with both of those approaches. But you got to really figure out I guess which one you're going for there. But I think the key thing that I pull out of your messaging is you need to be intentional about all of this, and you need to be thinking about what you're doing. And you can't just be sort of doing things because that's what everyone else around you is doing.
Alex Feinberg 28:55
Yeah, and you need to make progress like intentionality is paired with progress. Because if you're not pushing your body to do something that it's uncomfortable doing, it has no reason to physiologically adapt to any stimulus, right? You need to give your body stimulus that it's not accustomed to if you want your body to look or perform in a way it hasn't performed before. And the cool thing about that that I have found, and this may not be true for your first few months on a training plan, but it is true after you've been doing it for a couple of a few years, is for myself, and for a lot of the people that I work with, we benefit from doing less, right? I tweeted about this a few days ago, I'm not, I’ve taken four days off from working out this week. My sleep was not good for a couple of nights over the weekend. I had several weeks of really, really effective and intense training leading up to that which could actually cause sleeping challenges and so I'm just not feeling my best this week. And there's no reason for me to get in there just to get some reps in big cuz my metabolism isn't just going to grind to a halt from that training, I'm not going to just add a bunch of fat from that training, all I'm going to do is get more rested, so that when I start back tomorrow, I'm gonna have more energy, I'm going to be at lower risk for injury, I'm going to have greater output from my training, and I'll be able to make more progress from that. And so, a lot of people I think, get burned out from diet and exercise, because they start believing that calories in and calories out are their God. And if calories in calories out is your god, you're never allowed to miss a day in the gym, right. And when you when you make performance, your God rather than calories in calories out, you know that you can't miss that many days because your performance is gonna suffer. But if you skip zero workouts, your performance is also going to suffer. So having a performance focused goal makes it a lot more emotionally sustainable, in my view, and in the experience of the people who I've worked with.
Jack Heald 30:59
So, what are you measuring when you say measuring output with the cardio? What are you measuring?
Alex Feinberg 31:06
So, if it's a treadmill, and we're measuring speed, so I'm measuring my average speed. This Sunday I did seven repetitions, 60 seconds each, I started 10.5 than 2.5 miles per hour with 1% incline. So, at 10.5, 11, 11.5, 11.7, 1.9, 12.1 12.3 12.5. And so, what I'll do at the end of that, and we'll just kind of say, Okay, what's my average? That average was actually slightly below the previous week, when I have a little bit more energy, that's fine, I'm not going to be able to outperform myself every week. But I want to be able to track what is my moving average on say, an eight-sprint set, or if I'm doing it on the assault bike, I'm tracking my calories per interval, not because I care about calories burned, but I use it as an output tracker because the harder you're pedaling, the more calories that bike is gonna say you're burning. And so, excellence. Cardio output day for me on the road to Salt Lake is anything over 20 calories per 60 second interval, very, very good output. Anything over 19 calories on average for a 60 second interval, for me, it's quite a decent output, nothing to be ashamed of. Anything over 18 calories per interval is like, Hey, that's not bad. You got your work in better than not doing it. And I'm never gonna go below 80. Because if I'm going to go below 80, I'm just not going to do it.
Jack Heald 32:33
And we're talking 5, 6, 7 sets. So, when you're when you're killing it, you're burning 160 calories?
Alex Feinberg 32:45
Maybe. I mean, I've talked about the fact that we don't actually know how many calories are burning when we workout. That's the estimate yet. Like, if I were to use basic templates for calorie burn as it relates to workouts, my guess is I'm burning about 3000 calories per week in the gym. But my probably eating about 23,000 calories per week. And so, probably more than that, actually, I'm probably getting closer to 25,000 calories through. Yeah, I'm getting over 3000 a day on average, but not every day, but like I can eyeball it.
Jack Heald 33:22
This is 3000 high protein?
Alex Feinberg 33:27
High protein, high in fat. Yeah. Okay.
Jack Heald 33:31
So, I'm gonna take a little rabbit trail here very briefly. Phil surprised me several weeks ago by talking about the importance of getting my macros right. I just, I assumed as long as I'm keeping my carbs low, my chances of staying in ketosis are good. And Phil pointed out to me that if you get too much protein in relationship to fat, that can kick you out of ketosis as well. Am I saying that right, Phil? But so, I've started to pay attention to the relationship, the ratio of fat to protein.
Alex Feinberg 34:12
Well, so my question that might precede that is how would you ever find yourself eating insufficient animal fat if you're not a masochist?
Jack Heald 34:22
Well, like for example, I had tuna for lunch, and I was looking at it and was like, there's 42 grams of protein in this can. And it was, I think, 10 grams of fat.
Alex Feinberg 34:33
I would be surprised if it's actually that many, maybe. But I mean, sure you eat tuna, I eat tuna, I eat salmon, but like surely you like eating steak? Yeah. So, you would have to be intentionally abstaining from animal fat. If you're eating an animal product intensive diet, you would have to be intentionally abstaining from the medium fat or higher fat products in order to get your overall fat consumption to be like lower than 20% of your total calorie consumption. If you like, I eat the amount of fat that I crave. So, for lunch because I haven't been that active this week, I haven't been credited as much steak. So, I had mostly salmons, that’s my protein for lunch. But if I did squats yesterday, I'd probably be a little bit hungrier today. So, I need steak. What I have found is my hunger levels will correspond to what my metabolic needs are. And so, if I'm craving that fatty or steak or from craving bone marrow, or if I'm craving fatty or chicken or something like that, it's like, there's probably a reason why you're craving fattier meats today than you were last week. Eat that.
Jack Heald 35:43
Have you always been that aware of your, what your body is asking for?
Alex Feinberg 35:51
Well, let's reverse engineer it. I have always known what I've wanted to eat, what's tasted like, like this all started, this didn't start from me wanting to be ripped. This started from me wanting to enjoy the taste of every meal of every day. And so, if you really just take that to its logical extreme, if you want to savor every meal of every day, what do you need to do? You can't eat when you're not hungry. Because if you eat when you're not hungry, that food doesn't taste as good when you are hungry. So, you got to be really, really protective of those meal mealtimes. Because if you're just grazing all day, your foods not going to taste as good, right? The other thing that you need to do to maximize your enjoyment of food, you probably need to moderate your sugar consumption a little bit. Because the more sugar you have, the less sensitive you are to the delicious flavors that exist outside of sugar. Another thing that you need to do is you need to have a really good idea of what will taste absolutely the best your next meal. And so, because before I got ripped, I was still eating 3, 4000 calories a day I'm thinking if you're if it's 11 o'clock, and you're hungry, you think about it, but do I want to eat shrimp? Do I want to eat steak? Do I want to eat a burrito? Like, you'll be naturally inclined to think I want to eat x. And so, I just ran with that. I'm just like, well, if I want to eat that, I'm gonna eat that. And over the years, I just steered it towards protein dominance. So, I've always been in tune with, I really want to eat this in an hour. But I have a craving for this. And I arrogantly decided to run with that, in thinking that if my body's telling me, there's probably a reason, lo and behold, several years later, looking back on the results, my body seems to know what it's asking for. Right, as long as they maintain the preconditions that I mentioned earlier.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 37:48
Yeah, and I think, again, that's where the caution has to come in because for most people especially if you've become obese, if you become metabolically unhealthy, those signals, you don't have that intuition. We, the processed food hijacks our hunger signals and our satiety signals. And so most people who are in that situation, if you say, what are you craving? They're gonna say something like ice cream, or cake or cookies or burger, because the sort of sugar addiction has taken over for that intuitive eating. But when you look at, for most of our existence as human beings, what did we crave? We craved fatty animal meats. That's what we craved as human beings. That's what drove our evolution and our survival. And it's only in modern times that we've now introduced this other stuff into our food environment that messes with those signals. And I think that's a large part of why we are where we are on the societal health level.
Jack Heald 39:08
That makes sense. So, I'm gonna play devil's advocate a little bit. If I remember you said, after some amount of time, you got down to 4% body fat from what you say 11, 12%. Okay, I'll tell you, I'd be thrilled to be 12% body fat, I'd be ecstatic. In my mind, you started from a place infinitely better than I mean, my goal is to get to 14. That's where I'd really like to be if I'm at 14, I'm going to be pretty lean healthy 60-year-old. So, how do we know this didn't just work cuz you started you were born on third base, you started with when you had a head start on us normal folks.
Alex Feinberg 40:07
Right? So, I didn't have a head start from a body fat standpoint in the sense that if you looked at pictures of me when I was a kid, on the baseball teams that I played on, I was usually the fattest kid on the team. I did have a head start from a muscle building standpoint, it was always easier for me to build strength and muscle than my peers. So, growing up, I was always like, heavier sets, probably, I don't like saying that. But yeah, I guess I was heavier set growing up, easier for me to build muscle, easier for me to build fat. That that type of person will do well with my system, because they already have lean muscle mass and lean muscle mass is I call it the engine, your metabolic engine, it is more challenging for people who don't have lean muscle mass to start with. It's sort of like an economic problem, where it's much easier to solve for inflation, or unemployment. It's much harder to solve for inflation and unemployment, what I found is typically you need to focus on one or the other. And so, if you look at, say muscle gain is inflation and, and fat loss, or factoring is unemployment or something like that. Typically, what I found is unless the person is obese and actually has metabolically challenging metabolic symptoms for eating, I actually prefer people as the muscle first before they shift their focus to fat loss because I find it to be a lot easier to lose fat when somebody has a faster metabolic engine. So, if I were working with you one on one, I wouldn't be staring you and chances are, you haven't actually trained in the way that would even let if you can maximize the way you build muscle. So, if if your resistance training has been confined to like, oh, I went to a bootcamp class, and I tried lifting weights for a few months back then it's like, well, you probably have a much higher ceiling than you realize. I would first target getting your lower body stronger, if I were working with you. So, I'd say let's see how this goes. Right, we're gonna have you protein dominant real food when you're hungry till you're full, once you’re getting stronger on your squats, and if your body's not in position to do squats, what you're getting stronger on walking lunges, on to stronger one leg press and find a movement that fits you better mechanically, but we want to get your legs stronger. And we'll see how that goes. Very few people are hyper optimized at 18% body fat, there are so many levers that can be pulled to get somebody from 18% body fat to 14% body fat, that even if my exact approach isn't viable for somebody at that point, there's many paths to victory, if the goal is simply 14% body fat. If the goal is 4% body fat, there are fewer paths to victory for that. But if we're just talking about drop dropping 4% body fat, there's a lot of levers we can pull to get somebody in your position dropping 4% body fat.
Jack Heald 43:22
Okay, well, let's take it now to the resistance training. How did your resistance training change?
Alex Feinberg 43:30
Longer rest periods between sets, longer rest periods in between workouts, and they got stronger. And so very much the opposite of what was taught and still probably is taught to trainers for fat loss. Like if you go to most trainers and say, hey, I want to lose 10 pounds of fat loss. Okay, great. Well keep your heart rate high through a workout, do a set, well, sometimes you see people like do we'll do push-ups between deadlifts sets or something like that. Don't do that. And they're trying to maximize their calories burned in session. So, here's what happens if you do if you do a deadlift, and say you're deadlifting 225 pounds, which is hard for you. And then you probably need four minutes rest to be able to do that again with a similar level of intensity keeping your form Well, if you do a set of push-ups in between, you're not going to be able to lift as heavy the next set. And so, what ends up happening is in order to perform your resistance training in the aerobic capacity that your trainer has designed it, you are lessening the stimulus that is applied to your muscles. You can't lift this heavy. If you can't lift this heavy you should not expect your muscles to grow as large. You should not expect your resting metabolic rate to spike this high because you should not expect to carry the additional lean muscle mass that you would carry if you took longer rest periods in between sets, collected yourself and apply full effort and intensity to the set that you’re doing.
Jack Heald 45:02
So, if I understand correctly, your philosophy in regards to resistance training, and we are speaking specifically now about fat loss, but your philosophy and regarding resistance training is lift heavier or fewer sets, fewer reps. And it sounds like as heavy as you can manage, or fewer sets, fewer reps with as much rest in between sets as you've got to get. Would that be a...
Alex Feinberg 45:42
That's a decent approximation with like several qualifiers that was probably imagined. But yeah, you want to be able to lift heavy, what do you need to do to lift heavy? You need to rest well if want to lift heavy. Number one, you need to rest between sets, you need to rest between workouts, if you're not doing that, you're not maximizing your ability to lift heavy, particularly once you've been lifting for a few years. It's a little bit different when you're a beginner because your body can respond, your body doesn't know how to lift heavy enough weights that will require multiple days of rest in a row after an intense workout. But as you get stronger, as you get to an intermediate or advanced stage, you simply can't go in and squat heavy twice a week and benefit from it, it's just not gonna work. You cannot rest 90 seconds in between squat sets and expect to benefit from it, it's not going to work. Can you get away with that your first three to six months? Yeah, you might be able to because your body's still getting in generally better shape. And you need to practice lifting weights and you're maximizing the practice repetitions effectively. But as you get stronger as your body's developed, the ability to move more weight, it needs to rest more. And this flies right in the face of the calories in calories out model, because I'm literally telling you to burn fewer calories in the gym by training less.
Jack Heald 47:07
I get it, I think I get it. Good. This makes sense.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 47:14
What would you what are your thoughts on the training regimens that are professed or pushed, like one set of failure. And these kind of quick efficient workouts and we see this, there are a number of them out there the Doug McGuff’s Body by Science, the Dr. Ben Bocchicchio, John Jaquish and his X3 bar system but they're basically pushing just one set, that you go to true failure, and that then provides the stimulus for muscle growth.
Alex Feinberg 47:57
Yeah, I mean, I think most people provide that they don't get hurt. Most people would benefit from that, because most people are doing zero sets to failure. Right? They're either getting, they're doing their lifting with insufficient intensity, whether it's because they're not trying hard enough, or they're not resting long enough in between sets. So, if you take somebody lifting that way and say, okay, don't do four sets like this, do one set like that, you're gonna get more benefit in one set, like that with the high intensity than four sets of lower intensity. The challenge around something like that is you can't hurt yourself; you need to make sure you're warmed up properly. Right. So, one of the reasons why most trainers will have their client's condition after they lift, because they say, well, you don't want to burn through your muscle glycogen, you want to make sure you got energy to lift again. Yeah, I understand that argument. But the reality is, most people don't warm up properly. And, and so if you don't warm up properly, and you try to go perform a set at max effort to failure, you're asking for an injury, which you do not want to have ever, you're gonna have minor stuff here and there, it's inevitable to train but you do not ever want to have a catastrophic injury. And so, what I do myself and with people that I train is we do cardio first, right? Let's get our heart rate up, it's gonna record temperature up and then we're gonna go lift weights, we're going to be in a much safer position to lift closer to failure when your core temperature is elevated, and you've done a more dynamic workout. And so, it's probably not smart to go try to do a set of squats to failure without doing any sort of dynamic workout, maybe doing two warm up sets and then going probably don't want to do that. But provided that you've warmed up effectively, yeah, I would much prefer one set to failure than the way most people train which is like half assed or just insufficiently intense.
Jack Heald 49:51
Is this cardio warm up the type of this high intensity cardio? So, you're actually doing your cardio and your resistance on the same day?
Alex Feinberg 50:01
Yeah, I can space it out because I don't have a normal office job. Where I'll do cardio, I like to do cardio on an emptier stomach, I feel like I can, I know that my numbers are better when they don't have a chance to get on me, in me. And so commonly, although do cardio just with coffee and some collagen and credit to me, and I'll go do my morning cardio, then I'll eat, I'll eat my lunch or breakfast, whatever you wanna call it, do a little bit of mobility work, and then I'm lifting, right, and so I have 30 minutes, 60 minutes to recharge after I've done that cardio because to do other things that I need to do like eating. But yeah, I'll do one then the other.
Jack Heald 50:43
Okay, I'll confess Phil. I wasn't sure what this one was going to be. I really wasn't. I was like, Oh, great. we got another muscle head, guy who was a professional athlete, what's he going to be able to tell us normal people? This is this, it's different, but it makes sense. I really, I like it. That's a bad way to say it. This resonates with me.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 51:17
No, and I think that was exactly it, when you first may be looking at the, on the surface, it seems like a very different approach. And what I kind of talked about is maybe counter but really when you get into it, like I said I think Alex and I agree on a lot more than we would disagree on and we really have come to a similar place. Eat real food, focus on getting enough protein and train and eat with intentionality. And that that really are the basics of success.
Alex Feinberg 52:02
Yeah, great.
Jack Heald 52:04
Well, Alex, obviously, you help people follow this approach. What's the best way for folks to get a hold of you if they want to learn more?
Alex Feinberg 52:18
Find me on Instagram, find me on Twitter, AlexFeinberg1, F E I N B E R G. So, it's Feinberg 1, at the end one. On Twitter, I commonly promote one of my several training or diet products, depending on which day of the week it is. So right now, today, on recording day, I'm promoting my fat loss guide. But also, the recipes, training programs, masterclass kind of teaches exactly how I approach and how the group I run, approaches how to manage this thing called fitness in life with a smile on her face. I think my biggest bragging moment from the class that I run is I had a guy named Paul, most of the people who I work with lose about a pound a week, some people lost a lot more, but most of the people I work with lose about a pound a week. And Paul's favorite part about working with me was the eating. And I thought to myself, man, where have you ever found a fat loss plan where the person's most enjoyable part of the fat loss plan is the eating part. Like I need to figure out how to commercialize this around various...
Jack Heald 53:25
That’s good. There's a good headline hiding in there somewhere. But what's your favorite... What is your favorite treat for yourself that is surprisingly healthy as well?
Alex Feinberg 53:48
Anything with Cinnamon. Cinnamon is like Ceylon cinnamon is a cheat code because it tastes like it's sugar but it's not sugar. So, I found cinnamon is a cheat code. Local raw honey is a cheat code because especially if you have allergies, right? That's great. Organic maple syrup like real maple syrup. People don't realize that most of them, I would estimate that most of the maple syrup that people think they're consuming in the United States is actually corn syrup. Right? You get that log cabin syrup that they have at the store. I estimate most people who buy that don't realize that's not maple syrup. The profiles of natural sweeteners seem to be much better than the profiles of artificially sweetened or processed foods. And so, I tried to stick with natural sweeteners or I would call cinnamon a synthetic sweetener because it doesn't really have sugar in it, but it tastes like it does. A lot of food like that tastes really good. And the cool thing about reducing your sugar consumption is you become more sensitive to the sugar that's already in your diet. So, I probably can see I'm about 70% less sugar than I consumed 10 years ago, but I'm not craving sugar like, I like the amount that I eat, I lower sugar chocolate, it tastes awesome to me. It doesn't taste any less good than the higher sugar chocolate that I used 10 years ago. And so, if you want to maximize the value, the taste of all your meals, get sensitive to sugar, and you'll find a small amount goes a long way.
Jack Heald 55:26
Aside from all the benefits of increasing your insulin sensitivity, yeah, right, Phil?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 55:35
Exactly. Yeah, there, Jack. Very good.
Jack Heald 55:41
My brain is getting bigger and bigger. Just getting to talk to people that Phil brings on the show. This one has been surprising Alex, you've given me a lot to think about.
Alex Feinberg 55:55
I'm glad I change your mind. People look at me, they think I'm some... and sometimes I talk like I'm stupid too. But people assume that there's not like an IQ behind what I'm doing. It's like, well, I did work at Google for six years.
Jack Heald 56:11
I would read your blog. And you talked about working for a hedge fund manager. And I thought, boy, this guy's smart. And then the photos were, you're just ripped and muscle head. Well, crap. He's smart and fit.
Alex Feinberg 56:32
And there's a connection between the two. Because if you're smart, you can find easier ways to do hard things.
Jack Heald 56:41
I'm looking for that. I liked that idea. Easy Ways to do hard things. Yeah. All right. Well, Phil, any last words before we let Alex go for the day?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 56:51
Another great discussion. Thank you, Alex. And I look forward to interacting more on Twitter and everywhere else.
Alex Feinberg 57:00
Thank you. And I don't know if you guys can, I don't think you can now. But like we just recording. I don't know if you guys got a call coming in on my system. But like for the first five seconds, there's that.
Jack Heald 57:13
I'll take a look at it. That's certainly doable. It adds some complexity to my whole process. But I'll see what we did it. I will tell you as a producer. it wasn't a big problem. I'm gonna sign off and then I'll finish this conversation with you because our listeners don't care about this part. For Dr. Philip Ovadia, I'm Jack Heald. This has been the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. I encourage you to follow Phil on Twitter @ifixhearts and go to his website ifixhearts.com and take his metabolic health quiz. Real good way to just measure yourself, where am I? And what do I need to get better at? And we'll talk to y'all next time.
Jack Heald 58:15
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health, reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia’s operating table. This has been a production of 38 atoms