The Consistency Conundrum | Kettlebell Fat Blast

Welcome into the platform podcast kettlebell fat blast edition. I am your host Jordan Kunde-Wright founder and head coach of the Twin Cities kettlebell club on these special episodes I'm going to tell you about my own personal journey to get into the best shape of my life And it's about to get real. I'm gonna take you on this journey with me and tell you about the good the bad and the ugly and share all of the successes and struggles along the way. I'm going to talk to you about the frameworks and methods that I'm applying to accomplish this goal and the why behind them without the BS and fluff that you see on social media every day. So follow me at Twin Cities kettlebell club on Instagram and Facebook go to our website Twin Cities kettlebell club.com or reach out to me via email Twin Cities kettlebell club at gmail.com And if you enjoy the content, please leave me a five star rating and review and share on social media to help me grow my impact. And as always please support the podcast by supporting the affiliates listed in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. I am glad you're here. All right, welcome into the platform podcast kettlebell that blessed edition. This is actually the 50th episode 50 episode of the platform podcast. I am incredibly grateful that it has gone on this long. Thank you first of all to all of my guests who have come on to the platform podcast and sat down to interview with me, answer questions about themselves and about their background, their stories, their approaches to training nutrition mindset. I really, I'm really, really grateful to everyone who has taken the time out of their busy lives to spend some time letting me ask them questions. But most importantly, I want to say thank you to all of the audience members, the people who follow this podcast, the people who listen and give me feedback. People who have gone out of their way to introduce me to guests, which I truly, truly appreciate because I am a one man operation here. This is not a huge podcast with a massive team of people or producers, people scheduling guests for me. It is largely a scattershot approach by me when I have time in between my full time day job coaching my team, being a husband, being a dad to my two kids. I do this because I am passionate about it and I really enjoy this time. I love, I love the time I get to spend interviewing people. It's a blast. But I really appreciate everybody that has gone out of their way to help me, supported me in any way, supported my affiliates, given me feedback, introduced me to guests, sent me a message, given me a review on whatever, you know, Apple podcasts or anywhere. Or even just, you know, taking the time to send me a note, I truly, truly appreciate it. It means a lot to me and it helps keep me, it keeps me honest, keeps me going, keeps me doing this. So hopefully there are at least 50 more episodes coming. So with that, I'm going to reflect a little bit on some lessons. I think I've learned from from the first 50 episodes and give you a sense of where I'm hoping to go as we move forward. I have reinforced my belief that the kettlebell sport community is an amazing community. If not the most amazing community in sports, it's right up there with any other community that I can think of that I've been fortunate enough to be a part of, including being a rugby player, being a football player, baseball, you know, all the various sports I've played. Community here is fantastic. And so it has only further solidified my opinion that the kettlebell sport community is truly, truly special and that, you know, it's, it takes it unique, takes a unique person to step onto the platform and do what we do for fun or for competition. But I think that there are some amazing people in that in this community. And but with that said, I will also say that there are a lot of things outside of this community that also a lot of people and a lot of things outside of this community that I think we could all benefit from. And I'm going to try and explore that a little bit more deeply. I'm going to try and reach out to people that are outside of the kettlebell sport world a little bit more. Not that I'm going to stop interviewing kettlebell sport people obviously because those are my people, y'all are my people. So don't worry, I'm not, I'm not planning on discontinuing any kettlebell sport content or anything like that. I'm just going to try and get some interviews set up with people who are outside of the sport. And maybe in other strength sports do a little bit more deep diving into some nutrition, some health and wellness components. Because when I set out to make this podcast it and I never fully intended for it to be a kettlebell sport podcast per se. It very intentionally chose the name of the platform podcast because a platform can be just a place where you speak. It is where you're heard. It is also obviously a through line that connects multiple strength sports. You use a platform for Olympic lifting, you use a platform for powerlifting, you use a platform for kettlebell sport, obviously. And then there are obviously a lot of sports where there is no platform, at least no formal platform like that. But the intention was was never for this to be fully a kettlebell sport podcast. It just happened to go that direction a little bit more because that's my community. That's where I have connections. That's where I know people and, you know, it's also my passion, obviously. So, but it's not my only passion kettlebell sport to me is a is a vehicle. It's a mechanism. It's the thing that gets you to the thing. And the thing, if to me is better, a better version of you, right, a better version of yourself, health, wellness, improvement, right. That's hopefully the, you know, theme that you've, that you've noticed, regardless of the guest or the topic is that it ultimately circles back to self improvement and becoming the best version of yourself that you can be through taking care of your body, taking care of your mind. Doing hard things, choosing what those hard things are doing the things that fuel your passion, focusing on your mindset in particular and really pushing yourself to grow. So, I think in the next, you know, the next coming seasons, I'm going to do more reaching out to people outside of kettlebell sport with plenty of kettlebell sport guests sprinkled in obviously. But I'm going to try and talk to people about things other than kettlebell sport or adjacent to kettlebell sport, or maybe, you know, with a guest who, you know, comes from the kettlebell sport world, but we didn't get into some of their other interests or some of their other areas of expertise because I've had some phenomenal guests on who, you know, because I try and keep the podcast to an hour and be respectful of people's time. Sorry, Tim. Sorry, sorry, Bobbi, I do, I do try and generally keep the podcast to an hour except, except when I have the occasional guest who, who tells me ahead of time that they don't have a hard stop or they don't care if we go along, you know, or if it's just me and Bobbi rapping for, for hours. I do try and keep it to an hour, so that means that limits the amount of topics I can dive into with people and have it be, you know, substantive so I may have some guests come back invite some people back on who have a wealth of knowledge in many, many areas and we'll dive into some of those other areas of fitness and performance and health and wellness and kettlebell sport and mindset and all of those things. But hopefully, hopefully it gives hopefully the topics are ones that can be applied not just to people training kettlebell sport, but also in other areas of interest, hopefully it's areas you can get you can apply in your personal life, your professional life, et cetera. I really just want to talk to people about, you know, how do we optimize our lives, how do we optimize ourselves and therefore optimize our lives. Anyways, that is my long winded version of saying I'm going to keep doing this podcast and I'm going to keep trying to push and pursue growth and reach out to interesting guests and people who have different perspectives and can teach us something about health, wellness, performance, et cetera, as well as continuing to bring on some people that are experts in the kettlebell sport world, because you know they have plenty to teach us about those things as well. So thank you so much for listening if you've made it if you've made it this far, I am going to pivot to the intended topic of this podcast as I mentioned in the top of the top of the podcast, this is a kettlebell fat blast edition, which it has been a minute since I have talked about the kettlebell fat blast since I've talked about my own journey. As a rewind you'll remember that the kettlebell fat blast edition podcasts were supposed to be more about me talking through my own personal journey or my own approaches to coaching and to fat loss weight loss, et cetera, because I have set the goal for October at my competition here in the Twin Cities that I wanted to try and compete in the in the light. Light Clydesdale division so down from the you know instead of the 105 plus kilogram category the 105 category so that would mean for us Americans under 225 pounds basically is what that that roughly equates to so for me that meant you know about a 50 pound weight loss from the start of the year and then you know 40 pounds. I still had 40 pounds to go when I started recording the first kettlebell fat blast edition and I spent about 12 weeks or I spent exactly 12 weeks I guess working with my coach Samantha Burr who I had on this on this podcast so shout out to Sam hopefully she's she's still listening. She was awesome but I promise you guys that when I when I started these special these special edition podcasts that it was going to be the good the bad the ugly and everything in between there was going to be no bullshit I wasn't going to lie to you I wasn't going to hide things you know that it was going to be fully transparent because you know it's a hard thing honestly what what I'm trying to do is a hard thing and I was going to share in the journey with you whether I succeeded or failed. And so to give an update on where I stand currently I have neither succeeded nor failed you know I still have I still have a good chunk of time left before before it's October but I will say that I have not made the progress on the scale that I wanted to at this point but the point of this episode in particular is that a that's okay. And be I was probably not in a place to think that that would be realistic and I'm going to I'm going to dive into that a little a little bit more so when when I talk about this before we talked about you know clarity commitment and then you know the next piece of that is consistency so I was very clear on what my goals were I articulated them clearly to everyone I wanted to compete you know in the 225 weight class by October 23rd when we had the competition so there was a very clear time bound goal I publicly committed to it I have been committed to it so everyone's aware of that commitment and you know then the next piece is consistency that that's always the next the next thing that you really have to dial in on is how can you be consistent with your behaviors to move you towards that goal and there's really kind of a conundrum there the consistency conundrum to use some alliteration or you can call it a polarity to use another term that you know people in my life like to use my the CEO of my company loves to use the term polarity and what that essentially means is its attention between two opposing forces and the consistency conundrum is that in the short term there are behaviors that will will move you towards your goal and they can move you towards your goal rapidly especially but the conundrum is that if you're too aggressive with those that you will stall out and you will actually not move towards your goals when you pull the aperture open wider right so consistency in the short term is very different than longitudinal consistency and that's where that's where we get into the the term sustainability right and I talk about you know the mission that I have is to help people build sustainable healthy lifestyles and I was very clear with Sam when we talked about what my goals were I was not willing to take on any behaviors that were not healthy long term not sustainable long term so even if I fall short of my goal for October that's okay if I'm moving directionally the right way to where I can truthfully say that I'm in a better position closer to my goal in October than I was when I started in January I am okay with that even even if that means that I don't hit that specific goal that I talked about so the challenge for me was a few things well we'll get into we'll get into all of the challenges but you know I started at the first of the year I weighed in at like 274 275 pounds something like that and no 278 that's where it was I weighed in at 278 after new years kind of you know kind some of that I'm sure was you know fluctuation and you know alcohol right you know water retention after drinking booze on New Year's Eve and you know on some of those things but you know the month of December I had not been tracking or you know anything particularly aggressive so I felt like I was in a good spot to start a weight loss journey because I thought a month off you know a period of time off was probably enough for me a month off from tracking but I never stopped working out you know was probably enough time for me to to be ready for a fat loss phase but the thing about fat loss is that you have to be in a position where your body is physiologically safe to lose body fat and what that what I mean by that is if you have been dieting or in a deficit for an extended period of time that puts a lot of stress on the body and at a certain point you get metabolic adaptation where your body will intentionally decrease the caloric burn for any activity just in general whether it's sitting in your chair whether it's working out right your body's primary function is to keep you alive keep you alive long enough to reproduce that's our evolutionary programming so if you're in a caloric deficit for an extended period of time your body starts to register that as there's not enough calories coming in for us to sustain and survive so to do to combat that it makes your caloric burn less right it matches the caloric burn with the intake that you get if you do that for an extended period of time so you get a decrease in an overall metabolic rate and other things that can have similar effect are anything that your body would do would consider a prolonged stressor on the body so another another piece might be your training intensity your training volume and how long you've been training at at a high level of intensity so for me with kettlebell sport I've been I've been training kettlebell sport now for probably about seven years the at least the last I'm going to say five or six of which have been relatively intense and fairly consistent and then another piece that you have to look at is other sources of stress in your life so do you have do you have a high stress job do you have kids how's your sleep you know et cetera so we'll look at the job so for me for the last three and a half years I have been working in tech startups which if you think that sound stressful it's because it is working working in any startup is stressful but especially when you're in a fast paced volatile industry like AI and machine learning and doing consulting it is a very high stress fast paced job so I've had that going on for for three years and then if you pull the aperture back even further you go back further in my timeline before that I was working in the perishable produce industry and in logistics and supply chain which is even more stressful than then working in a tech startup I can honestly say that I went from you know the position I was working at before I got into before I got into tech I was working six days a week I was working at least 50 hours in the office if not more I was on call all the time I always had my cell phone with me so I could get calls anytime something went wrong I was always on my email I was basically available 24 7 365 and I did that job for you know five six years before that thanks for tuning into this episode of the platform podcast kettlebell fat blast edition we interrupt this program to share some exciting updates about prizes from our sponsors for the first annual Twin Cities kettlebell open happening October 23rd here in little Canada Minnesota in the heart of the Twin Cities 27 degrees apparel is designing our event t-shirt and has given us a discount code TCKB 10 for 10% off of his apparel which you should definitely check out and as with all orders four dollars of every shirt purchase goes to support one of several mental health charities of your choosing when you check out additionally barefoot athletics has given us gift certificates for six pairs of the earth's barefoot training shoes which are my personal favorite for snatch as well as for any gpp or deadlifts that I do and as I mentioned before bellevator by Dennis Vesilov has given us two belts to give away our friend Nucle Poochlove from the Seattle kettlebell club is providing his new made in the USA pro kettlebells for competitors to try out news on the platform as well as support from Gaspari nutrition and others if you have ideas or connections to other interested sponsors please reach out to me and please go register for the event on our website twin cities kettlebell club dot com and without further ado let's get back into it. So when you look at life stress I've been in a high stress career basically my entire life since I graduated from college I've never had a low stress job so add to that recently that my wife has been in graduate school as I had alluded to many times across other interviews so my wife started nursing nursing school and so she was in grad school so she was working in the emergency room several days a week going to class during the day and then studying on the nights that she wasn't working so that left me trying to help her take care of the house take care of the kids so I also have two children six year old and a five year old and then there was the whole thing of the pandemic so on top of everything else you add in the stress of the pandemic so that's another stressor then when you look at the training that I have been doing for as I said the past six seven years as I looked at my training volume and I looked at my training log because I train I track everything when I was asked when's the last time you took a break from training I didn't know the answer and that's not a good that's not a good thing. I looked back at my training log and realized it had been over a year since I had taken a week off from training intentionally now there there had been periods where I had I had stopped training either because of sickness or injury. But those are not those that's not the same as taking an intentional deal of week because an intentional deal of week or an intentional break is a period of decreasing the stress of training because you know that you need it to recover taking a break because you hurt yourself doesn't mean that your body is any less stressed out it actually means that your body is stressed needing to repair itself so all of that is to say. When when you look holistically where I was at coming into this process when I started I was not in a place where I should have expected my body to be able to drop body fat to be able to lose weight because I was in a conflagration of stress and it was the confluence of many many many areas of long term longitudinal stress I have. High stress job kids pandemic high training volume extensive diet history you know et cetera et cetera so what that means is you know as I as I went through the process with Sam and we were we were looking at we were looking at trying to target some of my some of my goals you know she she did what I asked her to do and she she gave me a deficit and she gave me a fairly aggressive deficit knowing that I wanted to see some results quickly because. Of course what's get her what the only thing better than seeing results is seeing results quickly so so she she and I talked and she she put me she put me in in a deficit and I saw some changes right but basically what we saw is you know week by week by week I would fluctuate between you know 265 and 268 sometimes going back up to two into the two. 70s and then you know sticking but mostly sticking in the 260s regardless of regardless of what I did from a from a caloric from a caloric standpoint so. As any good coach would do she started looking at you know we started simple and we we just started with looking at protein carbs fat fiber and water you know and then we moved on and we started looking at okay let's let's make sure we're getting our steps. Let's let's see in you know tracking biofeedback and seeing all the seeing all of these things and and what really ended up continuing was that I was very consistent on my water water very consistent on my kettlebell training that never went away I was always really good with that stress varied pretty significantly you know depending on what was going on my weight continued to stay about the same just fluctuating up and down and. I was struggling with launch to know adherence to a lot of these to a lot of these things whether it was hitting the calorie numbers whether it was not drinking so I definitely had I definitely had to you know too many too many things where it was you know there was there was there was a reason for you know there was an event there was a reason for eating for eating. Like an asshole or drinking too much you know had a whiskey night with a friend had date night got sick had a birthday celebration had a birthday celebration for a friend. St. Patrick's Day you know my son's birthday which was you know it was stressful and you know then you're eating cake and you know et cetera you know and on and on and on and so really. What it what it comes down to is when you when you look at it and over the course of you know over the course of 12 weeks my habits got more and more solid I was more consistent with my fiber more consistent with my water more consistent with getting my steps in hitting my getting my calories you know and I got down to about the the to 63 to 65 but then right back up again. 272 68 you know et cetera so what does that mean well that means you need a break it means it means you've been pushing too hard for too long and instead of instead of trying to hit. 2500 calories or 2600 calories when you know in a given kettlebell session I might burn a thousand that you need to start fueling the body more and you might need to take a break from these from these things the and these things being the stresses. So you need to decrease the cumulative stress load and you need to recover from that so we decided to decided to really bump my numbers up and needed to take a step back and assess where I'm at realistically and when you look at all of the things that are going on it's really important that I understand that I was probably not in a place to expect my body to to be able to drop body fat and I needed to to. Take a break and so that's what I did oddly enough I and you know it's you know it's time and you've probably gone too far that you're getting a little bit too obsessive when you start having a rage session because my fitness pal crashed I was swearing at my phone because my fitness pal had a had a had a had a database outage for a few hours like 12 hours or something but it was. Like at the end of the day I had tracked every single thing that had crossed my lips and I was you know I was putting in my dinner to figure out well what's my before bed snack to hit my macros perfectly for for this day I need to know exactly how much you know how many grams of peanut butter I can eat and you know how many scoops of protein I need and you know what what fruit I can put in my smoothie you know et cetera and the database was down and so I couldn't log into my account I couldn't. Log my food and so I had no idea what my what my before bed shake needed to be for it to be perfect and rather than just being like okay that's fine i'm just going to put a scoop of protein and some milk and some veggies you know and some fruit and blend it and you know it'll be what it'll be. No I was I was like viscerally angry for at least 30 40 minutes swearing at my phone could not could not call myself down because I was so focused on needing to hit my numbers and needing to hit my numbers perfectly. That means that you've gone too far that means that you know i was getting into obsessive obsessive thinking obsessive tracking. Right and that's that's never a good thing, especially for someone with a history of disorder eating someone who who is a person who has had an eating disorder has an eating disorder you know that's where you need to be careful and so. I took that as a sign that I needed to take a break and it worked it worked out pretty well because in we knew that in May that my my wife would be graduating from nursing school. Which she did and we had booked a trip to Florida to take a vacation with with the family and so. We took 10 days in Florida and on that trip I did not track anything I ate what I wanted I slept in. I drink alcohol if I wanted to drink alcohol I walked every day I worked out only a couple of times while I was there and it was it was just. Low lowish intensity exercise even even getting together with Bobby to do kettlebells on the beach we didn't do anything super intense it was just a fun workout you know with a friend on on the beach you know so. I took a nice solid break and really gave myself the opportunity to. D stress D load and yeah it's been two weeks and then I had my birthday so came back home got home had my birthday had cake on my birthday still didn't start tracking. Didn't didn't worry about tracking didn't worry about calorie intake any of those things and it was great it was a nice mental break it was definitely something that I needed. And and now I am you know I am hoping that I can take take that energy and start refocusing and the plan is not to go crazy go dive right back into a super severe deficit or anything like that I'm going to I'm going to try and reestablish baseline and see where I'm at from a you caloric state. I still haven't weighed in because from a mental health standpoint I didn't want to give myself two weeks off from the the mental stress and obsessive thought of not tracking not weighing in or any of those things and then come back and immediately step on the scale and then have a negative connotation with doing what my body needed to do because it is entirely likely that I put some weight back on. You know I I would I would bet a large sum of money that I did put some weight back on but that's okay because I needed the break I needed the decrease in activity my biofeedback is better my HRV is better my sleep scores are better you know so indications are that it was something that was very good for me but I also have to take care of my mental health and not. stress myself out by stepping back on the scale too soon so now i am back into getting back into my routine i'm easing back into my routine I did not come back and say okay now my birthday is over i'm doing a 24 hour fast and i'm going right back to you know major deficit or anything like that i'm i'm. just gently guiding myself back onto the path that I was on before as far as my habits are concerned i'm going to start tracking my food again i have. You know i'm going to be tracking my fiber tracking my water i've i've got my my data points and back into to training with kettlebell sport three times a week more focus now on recovery and sleep low hopefully a little bit lower stress level now that my wife is. Almost done she's done with school she's got the end clicks you know sometime this month but you know from there i'm just i'm very i'm very excited to be. going about this the right way right and and. working with a new a new nutrition coach you know sam and I decided that it was it was it was it was best for us to part ways because she wants to really focus on women and i am not one. So that's really her niche and she wants to focus on women and i'm like incredibly grateful for sam and all of her help and encouragement me she she she really helped guide me through some some really challenging times you know i was kind of a. You know as you probably got a glimpse of here i was a little bit of a mental case i'm getting frustrated with the lack of progress and unreasonable expectations of myself and perfectionism and and then you know some binge behavior. As a result of that you know so you know and that's and that's what happens when you when you over stress and you're over you know when. When you when you're when you're when you're over indexed cravings get really strong binge behavior tends to get really strong or the diet desire for for binge behavior tends to get really strong that's your body's way of telling you that you've you've gone too far and it needs more. you know but when you try and deny that deny that deny that deny that deny that you know you can only keep that up for so long so you know like Mike Milner talked about you have to work with your you have to work with your your bodies brain chemistry in order for it to be long term sustainable. So i'm i'm now working with with Liz Larson who's one of Mike Milner's coaches on his staff and he did a great job matching me up with somebody who's a good personality fit for me i've connected with her and we're we're just getting started on establishing my baseline she knows my neuro type type one B in case anybody was wondering. One B with some with some two A and two B tendencies but pretty strongly one B so she's going to be working with me on my neuro type and working with me on my on my on my behaviors and on my habits I should say so you know steps water fiber macros self care stress relief stress management consistency with my movement but not overdoing it. You know and all of those all of those dimensions that are that are very important so i'm going to spend more time talking to you guys more about each of those kind of individually and the frameworks that I use. To apply these same things with my with my clients. Because this this is the same framework that I tend to use with people and tracking biofeedback tracking macros and how we can and how we can get into those those different dimensions because when you really start looking at. All of the dimensions that come into a total transformation, you know really doing it in a sustainable long term way it's a lot. And so you have to do it incrementally it has to be habit stacking and building things over time checking boxes consistently you know and if you know you've got to get to the point where you have to. You know check 20 boxes consistently you know that's a lot and especially if you're only checking one when you start you know. But if you're if you're checking one and then you're like hey I need to get to the point where I can check to consistently. And then you get to the point where you can check three okay those three are pretty solid I check those all the time now that's just the way that's the way I live okay great then it doesn't feel like you're. Then it doesn't feel like you have more boxes new boxes to check right. it's no longer 20 now it's like okay now i've got 17. So that's where the power of habit stacking and the power of building sustainable habits comes in you know I no longer think of. training three times a week for kettlebell as a box I have to check or anything like that or it's just. it's part of my life because i've done it for so long now that I can't imagine not doing it you know and that's and that's where it becomes powerful right so that's what i'm working on that's where i'm at. Like I said I don't I don't know what i'm weighing right now but you know when I start the start weighing in again and start taking measurements again i will share that i'm not going to hide anything. So which is a little scary but you know it's all good i'm really i'm really excited i'm really excited about it and. yeah i feel i feel good about where i'm at and i'm i'm really looking forward to this process and looking forward to this journey and you know this is why even coaches need coaches because it helps me to have somebody else to to help hold me accountable and and. save me from my own tendencies a little bit which sam did a great job of of really. putting me back on the rails and keeping me from keeping me from going crazy and and really helping me focus in on on the important habits that I could focus on controlling my controllables keep in my mindset solid. you know so I really want to give a shout out to her and give her a lot of appreciation because she was great and encouraging and I would highly recommend any ladies out there. I won't say anybody because she clearly wants to focus on women but any ladies out there who are looking for a good coach Sam. Sam burrs is is a good coach so I can personally vouch from having to work with her for three months she she did it she did an excellent job with me so. saw a ton of progress in so many in so many dimensions and and you know it's important to remember that that the scale is only one dimension and I still saw progress on the scale just not at the level that we wanted it to you know. but having started the having started the year 278 and getting down to you know 263 while I was working with her that's not that's not insignificant amount of progress but anyways. that's it for this episode of the kettlebell fat blast edition I will see you guys on the other side and I promise I will be bringing these episodes to you with a little bit more consistency than I had been but hopefully I'll understand why I couldn't. I couldn't add that to my plate at the time it just didn't feel like didn't feel like I could handle it honestly and it just felt like I needed to focus on some other areas and keep my try and keep my head above keep my head above the surface so I was trying water a little bit there but. feel like i'm in a much better spot now and i'll keep you guys posted on on how this goes and we'll and we'll dig will deep dive on some of these on some of these dimensions some of these frameworks a little bit more. and yeah thank you all for listening if you made it this far and we will talk soon. thanks for listening to this episode of the platform podcast i'm Jordan Kunde-Wright we'll be back with a new episode for you next week please don't forget to register for the twin cities kettlebell open on our website twin cities kettlebell club dot com and if you have a question or suggestion please email me at twin cities kettlebell club at gmail dot com. and don't forget to follow us on social media twin cities kettlebell club and if you want to step under the platform and competing kettlebell sport please reach out to me until next time.