Coach Ted talks about the first group body recomp and how it has influenced us both.
Group Recomp
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Welcome to The Ted O'Neill Program, podcast about the building blocks of optimal human performance with Ted O'Neill, and John Leon Guerrero.
0:25 Jon
Welcome to The Ted O'Neill program. We're talking about Body Recomposition. And now that you've had a quarter century plus of research and of data and of evolving effectiveness, you're ready to reframe Recomposition of the body.
0:43 Ted
Because I think we started doing group recomposition training in 2019 at Diablo Barbell as we were evolving into Lifted Academy. And what's funny about that, to me is, at that point, I already had essentially 20 years doing this, and I hadn't done it for groups, I always did it individually. And then all of a sudden, it's like, "Hey, what would happen?" What would happen if we took a group of people?
1:10 Jon
Could we scale this up?
1:13 Ted
Could we scale this? And then what would the group experience be compared to the individual experience? I think I was just so habituated to working with individuals one on one because there is so much nuance. I used to always say, give me 1000 people, and I can give you 1000 different nutrition plans.
1:30 Jon
You could, but would you need to?
1:32 Ted
Welcome to The Ted O'Neill Program, podcast about the building blocks of optimal human performance with Ted O'Neill, and John Leon Guerrero.
0:25 Jon
Welcome to The Ted O'Neill program. We're talking about Body Recomposition. And now that you've had a quarter century plus of research and of data and of evolving effectiveness, you're ready to reframe Recomposition of the body.
0:43 Ted
Because I think we started doing group recomposition training in 2019 at Diablo Barbell as we were evolving into Lifted Academy. And what's funny about that, to me is, at that point, I already had essentially 20 years doing this, and I hadn't done it for groups, I always did it individually. And then all of a sudden, it's like, "Hey, what would happen?" What would happen if we took a group of people?
1:10 Jon
Could we scale this up?
1:13 Ted
Could we scale this? And then what would the group experience be compared to the individual experience? I think I was just so habituated to working with individuals one on one because there is so much nuance. I used to always say, give me 1000 people, and I can give you 1000 different nutrition plans.
1:30 Jon
You could, but would you need to?
1:32 Ted
Well, that's what we endeavored to find out. Are there some ways that we could shortcut the process without losing the effectiveness? And that was really at the core of why I never did the group thing. I remember having these discussions and saying, you know, we can try anything, but the deal is this, if this reduces the effectiveness of how we do this, even like 1%, I'm out, I'm just gonna go back to do it the way that I do it. I didn't even have a financial metrics for the business back then it was strictly a result for our people metrics.
2:03 Jon
Right. And you didn't want to rob somebody of that.
2:07 Ted
No, because that was the overriding mission we're doing to get this result. So one of the things that I used to do is I would have people, and this was a fairly laborious process, and they would keep a one week nutrition journal. And then I would sit down with them individually. And I would look at it day by day, and we would look at what their macros were per meal. And really quickly doing that, if you chart that and see what someone's doing on a daily basis, you can see where the opportunities are. For example, numerically, if one meal is 10 grams of protein, 68 grams of carbs and 23 grams of fat and the next meal is 50 grams of protein, 30 grams of carbs and 30 grams of fat, those are totally different things happening chemically within the body. When you're sending that as a signal, that's the step back. If you look at not eating, that's the hormonal signaling to your body, even if it's the exact same food.
You can eat chicken, broccoli, rice and butter, and come up with those different ratios. And you think, "Well, I'm eating the same thing." It has to go deeper than that to create precision. So what other people do in this one week food log, we would analyze it, I would show them where their dips were and where the opportunities were. And then we'd apply this to the static macronutrient ratio. And we would track that and as it evolved and changed their numbers sometimes and all of this.
So in the group setting, it was really interesting, because what we had and you were involved in some of those early groups. And I think the first group, we had 20-something participants and it was kind of, I don't want to say misfits, we'll say it was a group that had a great deal of diversity. In other words, there were people from all ages, like early 20s to late 60s. And there were people who were doing rehabilitative exercise. There were people who were pro-elite powerlifters. And there were people who were just starting their fitness journey.
4:03 Jon
Everybody had different objectives.
4:07 Ted
And different histories... everything was all over the map. Like this wouldn't have been the group you'd want to assemble if you were doing a double-blind study, or attempting to sell your product. If your overarching goal was, "We're gonna do this. And this is how we're gonna sell our product because we have this one profile now this would be like the worst possible picture of inconsistency." But what turned out was quite interesting. There was tremendous consistency amongst the results. And I think in that round the average body fat loss across all 20+ subjects was something like 13 pounds body fat. This wasn't a six and a half week period, by the way. It was supposed to be eight weeks but now we had to structure the body fat test. Yes, we got a little dependent on scheduling an outside vendor and they're averaging 13-14 pounds as the fat loss in six and a half weeks. Now, that's all well and good. But what about muscle mass? Because if you lose six to seven pounds of muscle to get there, I would consider that very traditional. Actually, that's probably better than a traditional result. But I would consider that still wildly unacceptable. So the average was a plus of something like one and a half pounds of muscle. So this was the first time that I jumped in a group setting and did this. And at that time, I was very much in the process of retiring from competitive powerlifting. And I was now in this quest to see "Well, can I get lean?"
5:51 Jon
For our audience, your retirement from competitive powerlifting offered an opportunity that you hadn't given yourself in the previous many years because you'd had a specific objective, which was to move weight. And so now you were in a different place. It's interesting that when I began my fitness journey with you, I had met you the previous year and then I didn't see you for about eight or nine months. Then I saw you right around that time period and I walked in and you had a completely different silhouette. And that was one of the things that was remarkable at first was I saw and wondered, "What happened to the rest of you?!" And you said something to the effect of, "You know, I've retired from competitive powerlifting, and I am the boss of what happens to me, so I have chosen for my body to operate in this fashion."
6:49 Ted
Because what a lot of people didn't get when I tried to work with them on nutrition back when I was a powerlifter weighing 285 pounds is they would have this connotation that I didn't know how to do it.
So I had a little bit of fun with that because I went from 285 all the way down to 192. And then went back up to about 205. And at 192, everyone all of a sudden wanted me to write them a custom plan. They would pay me forever for it! And they would say, "Well, tell me what you're doing." I'd say, "Well, I'm doing the same thing I've always done." And they'd say, "No, but tell me what you're doing now." And I'd say, "I just did! You know, I was 285 on purpose. That wasn't a mistake." I would actually say that it was harder for me to weigh 285 than it was to weigh 192.
7:38 Jon
Just from having heard the stories, I get that.
7:42 Ted
It was a lot of work that goes into that if you're not made and built to be gigantic. And there's a lot of people a lot bigger than 285, but that was a weight topped out in an effort to move maximum weights.
So then we come to 2018 when we launched our first group test, and I was one of the participants. During that six and a half weeks, I lost 22 pounds of body fat and gained three and a half pounds of muscle. Your group was right on the heels of that, and you had a similar result if I recall, like minus 20 plus pounds of fat and up three or four pounds of muscle.
8:21 Jon
And that was it. Once I saw that, I thought of the RECOMP concept. You know, I never was a big fan of "I'll just lose some weight," either. But I knew that I had a picture in my head of how I wanted my body to operate as well. And when I saw that result, two things happened to me when I had that result: first of all, I was engaged in the work. I was not enamored of the result nor focused on the result. I just was enjoying this process, which was grueling; and one day, I walked into the gym and my name was on the board for having won. And that was a terrific surprise. And when that surprise happened, I realized, "Oh, this is working!" And it was nice because I wasn't concerned about it working, I was concerned about the work. And that was one of the things that I enjoyed about the process. And one of the things that I sometimes see when I see others training, I identify someone enjoying the WORK.
9:40 Ted
Well, if you're not enjoying the process, you're gonna have a really hard time getting there.
To begin your own BODY RECOMPOSITION process, go to liftedacademy.com/recomp
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