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I have chased a lot of shiny objects in my almost two decades in the industry, and I see it constantly, especially for women in midlife where we're hit with all these different things, the cortisol cocktail, the hormone hack, the fasting protocols that are magic, even the latest supplements promising to fix everything that perimenopause supposedly broke. We are constantly chasing fads and for a good reason. I mean, we're hit with them every single day. We all want the fast fix. We're human. But meanwhile, as we're chasing these things, the basics aren't really dialed in. And there's so much noise out there about optimizing your reconp, and most of it is honestly distractions dressed up as science. Meanwhile, most of us don't have a true system. We have these random collections of optimal things that we're trying, and many of which are actually working against each other.
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And then we wonder why results feel so inconsistent and so hard to maintain. So today, I'm not giving you another optimization or another fad. I'm giving you the seven non-negotiables I come back to every single time, not because they're complicated or cutting edge or sexy even, but because they work together as a complete system and that system is what matters. A basic plan executed consistently will always, always beat a perfect protocol you can't stick with long-term. These are the things I honestly wish someone had handed me before I spent years chasing shiny objects and trying things like the potato diet, which sounded really good at the time because I though French fries, but it's definitely not that and it did not work out well. So go for a walk, listen as you meal prep or get comfy on the couch because by the end of this, you're going to have the complete recomp blueprint that actually moves the needle.
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And if you want my guide to recomp for women who want that muscle first approach to fat loss, click the link in the video description or in the show notes. It's a great way to get started and really take you through this entire process I'm going to outline today. So I want to talk about non-negotiable number one, pick your primary focus. You can lose fat as you gain muscle or you can gain muscle as you lose fat. And I say those as two separate things because while recomp is real, you can achieve both and we think that they're conflicting goals or not. It's only because we've ever chased faster weight loss on the scale, which weight loss is not the same as fat loss. You can lose muscle in the process if you're trying to get that scale to change faster. You still need a primary focus because that dictates how you design everything.
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And in order for a system to work, it has to be designed with purpose, with a clear direction. You can't just say, oh, these turns look really good or I want to go to all these different locations on my road trip without actually mapping out how you're going to get there because otherwise you might drive one way out of your way to come back the other way versus if you have a plan in place, you can actually hit them in a strategic way to get to your end result faster or your end destination faster. So you need to have a primary focus. That's what's going to lead to the best results. So if you want to lose fat as your primary focus because you have more weight to lose, maybe you're shooting for a 40, 50 pound weight loss goal ultimately, but you want recomp, you don't just want to lose muscle too, you might have fat loss be your goal.
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But if your main focus with recomp is that you're pretty skinny already, maybe you're even little, what you would define as skinny fat, muscle building might be your primary focus because you'll see recomp and actually look leaner through building muscle first. And based on which one you do, you're then going to design your macros and your workouts. Now that being said, I am going to talk about macros and nutrition next, but I want to point out that when you're picking that primary focus, design or decide on your workout routine first because what your activity level is and what you're doing in terms of your training will really impact how you need to fuel. Too often we think about these things in isolation, right? We think about either fat loss in isolation, muscle building in isolation, workouts in isolation, diet in isolation, but it is everything being designed together.
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And that's why it's so key that we pick our primary focus first for what we really want to accomplish with recomp because what we put as the primary focus gets the most attention. And so if you have more fat to lose, that needs to be your primary focus while focusing on retaining lean muscle. However, if you're a leaner, you are only going to see recomp continue to happen if you actually do that build. And part of this too, it also helps make sure that when you have that shift in primary focus, potentially as you get closer to your goal to more of building, it's then easier to maintain your recomp because you're fueling that metabolic health, you're fueling that muscle. So really recomp will evolve in what you're focusing on. Now non-negotiable number two, because you can't do anything if you don't have the primary focus.
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And again, design your workouts first. I do want to go into non-negotiable number two, which is macros matter most. You got to set your macros first. You're not going to calories first, you're going to macros first because the type of calories that you consume has a huge impact on whether you maintain or even lose lean muscle. It also impacts the calorie intake that you ultimately set because macros have different thermic effects or that means that they burn different amounts of calories to be digested. They have a different impact based on the activity that we're doing. So if you're not paying attention to macros and just treating your body like a math equation with calories in versus calories out, you're not going to see the recop you want. It's honestly why, because calorie counting became so popular, people even started to say you can't see recomp happen because when you're just focusing on calories in versus calories out, you are not controlling for building and maintaining lean muscle or even for metabolic health.
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When you cut your calories lower, you're going to end up seeing metabolic adaptations. That is natural and part of the weight loss process. But when we focus on macros, we can control for that as much as possible and then make it easier to transition to maintenance. So if you've ever done a weight loss diet, you're like, "I cut my calories super low. Now what? When I start to increase my calories, I just gained it's because you didn't focus on macros." So macros have to be a non-negotiable to focus on. Now, if you're like, "I hate tracking," I'm going to tell you partly suck it up buttercup because tracking is the way to learn. It's like studying for a test. If you want to make sure you get an A, you study. So you track your macros to really learn what your body needs and not only help you reach the goal, but then transition into maintenance.
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And once you get into that maintenance process, that's where you can have a little bit more flexibility, but you need to learn what you need. Most of us don't know what we need. And trust me, it's way more frustrating to feel like you're spinning your wheels than have to track a little bit extra for a little bit to get to your goal and actually be able to maintain it long term. Get off this cycle, you've been spending years on it, get off of it, suck it up buttercup. Sorry, tough love here from a coach, but macros really matter. And when we focus on that protein especially, we are making sure that especially for our main recon focus is fat loss, we are maintaining and even building lean muscle and fueling our metabolic health. Protein is so key in a deficit and actually going higher than you even would if you're in that surplus or eating at maintenance because you're focusing on recon from the other perspective of building.
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It's so important because you need to preserve that lean muscle. And when you're not getting enough of anything, if you don't get enough amino acids to rebuild from all the hard training that you're doing, your muscle is going to seek out amino acids from the biggest reserve of them, which is your muscle mass. It's why you can feel like you're spinning your wheels. So focus on macros, focus on protein. You're going to dial in your carbs or fat based on your activity level and what you're also doing. But if you don't set your macros first, you're not going to get a correct calorie intake. You're not going to really be able to focus on either fat loss or muscle building. You're also not going to see all of your hard work in the gym payoff. So this really matters as a non-negotiable. Sory, no if, ands, or buts about it.
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If you're not paying attention to how you're feeling and the breakdown of the foods you're consuming, you're not going to see results or be able to really adjust and tweak as you go. Number two then, once you actually have your macros set, then you're going to want to go to tweaking your calories. And I say this too, because you might be surprised by how if you just track what you're currently doing and you eat at your current calorie intake and just change your macros, you already start to see progress because by adjusting even up in protein, we can put ourselves into a slight deficit because protein has a higher thermic effect, which means it requires more energy to be digested. So once you have your macros set, then you can go to your calories. And this is where you might have to embrace going against what you've always done and a bigger deficit or a bigger surplus is not better.
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Small changes add up. You might even find that eating at maintenance, you just cycle your macros and you see results for recomp. Recomp is slow. It's not sexy. It's not going to lead to quick changes on the scale, but it is going to lead to lasting results, metabolic health, you feeling energized, and you actually looking the way you want to look. Losing inches, if you don't lose weight, it's a good thing. And I mean, trust me, when you're looking in the mirror and you're seeing that ab definition, you're not going to really care what you weigh. So often we're caught up on that weight on the scale just because that's been the number that we felt good at. So it's the association with a good feeling. But if you have that good feeling and you don't have that weight, do you really care? Anyway, going back to the calories.
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So you want to first start with eating where you're at currently with adjusting your macros. And then from there you might do a small deficit of 100 to 200 or a small surplus of the same, but you want those small amounts of change because the more you cut dramatically, the more your body's going to adapt quickly and then you have less room to cut. You're also putting yourself at greater risk not to see the recon happen, just to drop even muscle as you see the scale change faster. So you only want to tweak your calories after. Macros first, calories second. And again, all of this is then based on the non-negotiables of how you're designing your workouts because just trying to say, "Oh, I'm going to do this calorie intake because this one diet says eat 1200 calories." Well, if your activity level is dramatically different than that, you could be setting your yourself into a thousand calorie deficit, ultimately creating a lot of metabolic adaptations, throwing your hormones out of whack, impacting your sleep negatively, impacting your training.
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And then you might see the scale change fast, but you're going to regain it and probably even gain more fat in the process because muscle doesn't come back on when we start to even overeat. Our body is like, "Gosh, I got to store this as fat because I want to make sure that I'm not starving again and that I survive." Survival mechanism. So you want to make sure that you're really strategic in how you're actually implementing your calorie deficit and tweaking those things to maintain metabolic health, energy. We want to age strong. We want to look fabulous, but it shouldn't be we have to choose between fabulous and health or health and looking fabulous. Both can go hand in hand when we're actually strategic in how we're designing the system. Now, non-negotiable number four is focus on strength work. So while I do want you to set all this workout stuff first, so this isn't a full step-by-step, it is non-negotiable that you do strength work and I don't care what your primary focus is even.
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Whether you're trying to lose fat as the primary focus or build muscle, strength work is key because everything should be on that muscle focus. I call it muscle first fat loss because if we're not focused on building and retaining the muscle, even when we're trying to lose fat, we're not ultimately going to look leaner. Again, we're going to lose weight on the scale. We're going to repeat the yoga dieting cycle that most of us have been caught in. We're going to feel like even hormonal changes of perimenopause and menopause are even worse than they have to be. As we go into post-menopause, we're going to see belly fat creep on despite us doing the same things we've always done or even working harder. This is where often we see the effort doesn't feel worth the outcome. People wi say, "I'm working really hard. I'm super disciplined and I'm not seeing results." It's because you're not focused on muscle first.
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And so that's why the strength work is key. That's why then tweaking calories after tweaking macros, but the small changes really add up. But you want to focus on building muscle. And I am going to stay here with a caveat of lift heavy, but I also see this lift heavy mantra being overused. Lifting heavy doesn't mean you're only doing one to five reps. It doesn't only mean maximal strength. It doesn't mean only doing basic compound lifts. I think those things are magical. I think they're very important. I think there are certain movements that should be included in some form in almost everybody's training, whether it's some form of squat, some form of hip hinge, some form of upper body press and pull, but what you do exactly will vary. And this lift heavy mantra of everybody has to be working in the same rep range and only using one rep range and demonizing higher reps, it just holds us back from seeing results because we have smaller muscles, we have larger muscles, we have compound moves, we have isolation moves.
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And the longer we've been training, the more we need to use the diversity of these things. So when I say focusing on strength work, this is where everything has to be designed with strategy. And then of course the nutrition compliments the strategy we're doing in the gym, but you want to make sure that everything you include challenges you and that week over week that you're pushing that progression. And this should mean that at some point you do hit a little bit of mental fatigue and potentially need a deload week or recovery week because you're pushing. It shouldn't feel like you can go through the motions of your workouts every single week and they feel hard enough, right? There should be some challenge where you hit some point of failure where you slightly dread a move even as you get into your progression, but you're repeating that strength work week over week.
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And you're using a diversity of types of moves, you're using a diversity of types of even training progressions. It's not just loads, right? You can train with body weight and see great strength gains, but you are challenging yourself to build muscle. Not cutting out rest to feel sweatier, not turning your strength workouts into cardio, not relying on cardio itself and turning everything into a sweat fest where you feel destroyed and out of breath, that is not building strength. It might feel hard, but I can make you feel worked by giving you a thousand burpees, but that's not going to move you forward towards your muscle building goals, your recon goals. Hard does not equate to good. It's hard to break down that mindset because I personally had that mindset for a long time. Well, it's not hard. It's got to be good. It doesn't work that way.
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You need to focus on strength with strategy and that means pushing progression week over week, tracking your progress, repeating the workout so that you can see that build, whether it's one more rep, a slower tempo, a little bit more weight, feeling that mind-body connection a little bit more, a little bit more range of motion or adjusting the range of motion. There's so many ways to progress, but you have to push that progression and it should start to even mentally wear you out in a weird way. I know it sounds weird to shoot for that, but you're not shooting for being slaughtered in workout.You're shooting for this weight, this move feels so challenging that there is a little mental, I don't want to say dread, but dread going into it so that you want those recoveries, you want those days off, you even want that de-load week or that switch up at some point because you feel like each week you're really trying to go to the max with the move and optimize it.
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Now, I know I mentioned don't turn all of your strength workouts into cardio. I am not demonizing cardio here, and non-negotiable number five is actually even to strategically include cardio, but you need to know the cost and reward of every type of thing you include. When you do more strength workouts that are more metabolic, other outside cardio needs to be reduced because you're already burning more calories in those sessions, you're already doing more cardiovascular type lifting. So if you're really short on time, you might make your strength worth a little bit more metabolic, but be conscious of when you're turning them too much into cardio. But outside cardio then is going to potentially put you at greater risk for losing muscle, especially that steady state moderate intensity. This can be more catabolic. And again, this is why you do have to be strategic in designing your workouts first because if you are an endurance athlete but you want to see that recomp, you need to really own the mileage that you're doing to account for it with how you're fueling.
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And you even need to know the mileage you're doing with the cardio to account for it and how you're designing your strength workouts because if you're doing a lot of mileage, those strength workouts are going to need to be a lot less metabolic than if you're doing no extra mileage because there's this cardio strength continuum we can work along with one rep max lifts on one side and that endurance long, steady state, moderate intensity cardio on the other side in terms of how we're designing things. And with using cardio strategically for recomp, there are two forms that honestly are ideal over anything else, just for reccomp. Not talking about health, not talking about working in different energy systems, not talking about what you like. And only doing what we like is going to be a very dangerous thing of really sabotaging us working towards our goals, unfortunately.
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Sometimes you have to sacrifice a little bit of what you like for what you need to get to your goal, knowing that once you reach your goal, what you do to reach it is not what you do to maintain it, you can have some evolution in the process. But sometimes we have to go a little bit more all in, especially the longer we've been training, we have to dial things in with a little bit more precision. It's not sexy to say now. We all want the sustainable, the easy, and I want to get people to that point, but it's recognizing there is a sacrifice. So in terms of just recomp and you're picking your focus, and this is where you'll vary how you're using these two things. Sprints and walking are the keys. Sprints and walking are the key. Sprints have been shown to help with metabolism and metabolic health.
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They help you even build a retaining muscle because they also work on those fast stretch muscle fibers, which can help you be more reactive, have a better mind-body connection, be more explosive with your lifts and actually lift more, which leads to better muscle gains. They're great for insulin sensitivity. They have lots of different benefits inside our body, which can even help with reducing that stubborn belly fat. No, we can't spot reduce and sprints actually aren't even that spot reduction, but they do actually help specifically with seeing that metapot we can see or that midlife middle gain that we see the belly fat creeping on that we didn't used to have. Sprints are actually very magical for reducing that and helping with that fat loss process. So we need to include those sprints. And in the sprint spectrum is power work, which can again help with that mind-body connection, us being able to react and live well and avoid falls and fractures, but also lift more.
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So we want to use those things strategically, especially if we are in that fat loss phase. This can be incredibly important if the main focus is fat loss. If we're really trying to build muscle, and especially if we're a harder gainer, you might want to really cut back on to one time a week with the sprints or even focus more on power work where it is very, very short intervals of eight to 10 seconds of work just to be really explosive with very long rest. Now walking, no matter your focus, you want to include it. It's going to raise your neat or non-exercise activity thermogenesis, meaning you're going to burn more calories to rest. It's a recovery modality. It's great for de-stressing. It can even help with, because it's stress reduction, if you even get out in the sun a little bit and get some vitamin D.
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Obviously in moderation, you want to be careful that you don't get burned, that type of stuff. If it is very hot, summer, weather, whatever, you're in a very sunny place, but you want to make sure that you're using it too, not as a way to stress your body more, but recover because that can help you fight inflammation, get better sleep, reduce your stress overall, which all go to you recovering better, you seeing better results, your body being optimized to function better when your hormonal environment might even be shifting. It can help with hormonal balance even, just like sprints can as well. But you want to think about really focusing on that walking no matter your primary focus for that reconp. And while they say that you don't necessarily get any health benefits over 7,000 steps and there's even some minimums with 3,000 that you want to hit, we're not just going for surviving here, we're going for thriving.
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And so I will always encourage clients to go as close to the 10,000, especially during that fat loss phase as they can. Now, if you're at 2,000, you're like, well, 10,000 sounds impossible, shoot for 500 more steps. Small changes add up. Time some walks after meals, but get moving a little bit more. Even if it's shorter bursts of it, those little movement snacks can really pay off. Now, number six, cycle everything before you plateau. So often we wait till we hit that stuck point to change things up. And now this is not just jumping ship after a week of not seeing change because we can also go that direction, right? One week where we don't see the results we want, all of a sudden we're searching for something new. You want to set every two to three weeks just that check-in. How have things actually gone?
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How have I actually optimized or implemented all the things I said I was going to do? Not search for something new, not search for something extra complicated, but how have I actually optimized and enacted all the basics that I said I was going to do? Did I really hit my macro ratios? Did I really do it in the best way possible? Did I really do my workouts? Did I really push in them? How can I get a little bit more out of those things? But then if I am getting things out of those things and I mentally even know, we want change, right? We search for that new thing. Give yourself that new thing with strategy. If you want a little bit higher carb, maybe you go a little bit lower carb to even especially test out in that first phase to see how your body responds.
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But even by cycling carbs and fat, which is higher and which is lower, you can not only get glycogen depletion from depleting your carbs, which can help you tap into fat stores, but then by adding carbs back, you can sometimes see the whoosh effect where if you've even technically lost fat, but your fat cells are retainingly water, so you haven't seen that scale drop at all, or even you kind of feel like you're looking a little bit softer, but you've been really consistent. Sometimes releasing that water weight in those fat cells, which you can do by actually increasing carbs or sometimes even when calorie increases, it's why sometimes if you've ever had a cheat day after being in a deficit, you can say, "How the heck did I lose weight with this?" It can be that whoosh effect where your fat cells actually release the stored water because it has enough energy coming in.
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So you can cycle those ratios proactively and they often build on each other because our body does get comfortable where it's at. It wants to maintain homeostasis. So throwing in a little change up strategically and done with purpose and not just done even reactively can help us trust in the process. Too often we are doing things reactively over proactively and we're not really seeing the full benefit, but we have to address the mindset of we like change. So every two to three weeks, I like cycling macro ratios with clients. I generally change the progressions at three to four weeks. Yes, sometimes we go longer to six weeks when there's room to optimize still, but even if they have a little room for growth, we do like change. So using that strategically to help us keep being bought into the process or even owning when our lifestyle has evolved.
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So often we don't think, okay, I'm entering a new season, what does the season require? And then proactively changing. And so what ends up happening is a lot of times we feel like when we have to, or because we're hitting burnout, we have to change. We feel like we're letting ourself off the hook, we're giving ourself grace, and that can lead to a bad spiral of guilt, us completely falling off our plan, struggling to get back on. So even assessing the season, I'll sit down with a client and be like, "What's changing your life?" Or if they see stress mounting, "Okay, what's changed in your life? And let's proactively even make a shift with how we're doing your workouts, how we're doing your macros," because that helps you plan for it where it doesn't just feel like you're giving up or you're taking it easier on yourself and you're also not using willpower to lead to that burnout.
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So I will tell you one of the most underutilized tools for recomp is proactively changing. And if you've been in that fat loss phase, even if you're still seeing changes positively, but you've been in that deficit for over 12 weeks, it might be a time to shift the folks to a little bit more muscle building. You might be surprised by how much that recharges you, how much more you feel energized because we do start to say, "Well, I feel good enough." But when we start to say we feel good enough, could you feel better? Sometimes that's just little shift in focus even in recomp during it, even if you want to lose more fat, can be what you need to make sure that your metabolism is still humming, that you're still feeling energized, that you're still feeling motivated. And it can give you that little shift in focus that allows you to keep going because this really is a forever process.
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And if we don't slightly shift our focus or our goals or measure success in other ways, we're not going to keep going. And so cycling proactively can give us a way to measure success in new ways. It can give us something new to focus on which can help us keep going. Now, the final and least sexy of all the non-negotiables, but oh, so important before you even get started is recognize it's going to be slow. And this is going back to what I just mentioned too of measure success in other ways. So often we have one way we want to see progress in, and when it doesn't happen fast enough, we jump ship. And then we miss out on all the other things that are showing that build is happening. And especially with recomp, we can hit dead zones where it really feels like nothing's changing.
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We can even feel like, especially looking in the mirror, we look softer, as I said, because our fat cells could be retaining water or because we've even lost off of areas we don't care about. Making the areas we do care about look even bigger. I can tell you one of the most eye-opening things for me was that when I was seeing recomp happen, I started to notice that inches were losing from everywhere. I basically didn't care about except my middle, because I tend to store there and lean down everywhere else first. And I was like, my middle looks even bigger. How is this possible? It didn't actually go up. I have the data to know it didn't, but why does it look bigger? And it's because I was losing off of other areas. So we have to measure success in a lot of different ways.
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Otherwise, we will miss out on how the habits are building and jump ship or go to something new. And honestly, it's not that most of us don't have a good enough plan, it's that we're searching for the perfect plan or rushing results. And so we jump ship before things actually have time to snowball. We get good at what we consistently do. We never stick with stuff often enough, consistently enough to see those results snowball. So I will tell you that one of the most important things is to set all the different ways you're going to measure success. How can you track your performance in the gym in different ways, whether or not it's like saying I did extra things during this interval workout, like extra burpee this round or lifted more weight or slow down the tempo, but making notes of how things felt, making notes of even then maybe when you're feeling burned out because that could be a reason to say, "Hey, I'm noticing a downward trend in my performance.
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I'm going to proactively cycle or again, even shift recount focuses, but measure success in other ways. How are you sleeping? How is your stress level? How is your mental clarity? How much are you moving throughout the day or wanting to move throughout the day?" Because all these things give you markers of things working or a shift needing to be made. But the more you actually have data validating one or the other, not just the scale didn't change or my progress pictures didn't look good because our body's living organism and so many things impact it, the more you can A, put those data measurements in their place by actually understanding where they're coming from. If you have that scale jumped in one day, okay, well, did you eat late the night before? Have you seen all these other great markers, but you ate late the night before and that's why the scale was up because you still hadn't digested all the food or you have more sodium, whatever else.
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So they help you really put all the data markers in their place, but they help you really stack evidence as to what's going on and what needs to shift. So I would tell you the more ways you can measure success, the more ways you give yourself to be successful and truly embrace the process long term. But sleep, energy, even how your skin is looking, how your brain fog might be if you've had it, how hot flashes are, any other symptoms you're seeing or you have seen with other changes, make note of them. They're not the sexiest thing, but the more we can even recognize, hey, I even made this positive change. The habits themselves could be measures of success. I logged every single day, I hit this protein minimum, or I did my workouts consistently at the same time, I pushed the progression, whatever it is, measure it because it's going to give you the data to know whether or not things are working in this very slow process.
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And then get your mind into that, I can't jump ship. And the second you feel like things aren't happening fast enough, the second you want to jump to something new, the second you hit that hard, that's the time to push through. So often that first pushback that we really get where we're not feeling successful, we're feeling like we're in this dead zone, we feel like nothing's working even though we actually have seen progress, but we're starting to forget about it in a weird way because maybe we saw ourselves regain three of the 10 pounds we lost, we're ready to jump ship. And recognize right here is the hard you've always hit and that you always turn back at. So don't turn back this time, keep going. These are my seven non-negotiables. I would love to hear which ones that you find yourself really being drawn to needing to dial in more or which ones were the most eye-opening for you.
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And if you do want that guide to help you really focus on that muscle first fat loss, click the link in the video description or in the show notes. It's a great way to really start enacting these non-negotiables and setting up that system for success because nothing works in isolation and we really need everything dialed in together. And I can tell you it's sometimes hard to be objective from inside the process, which is why it can be really good to have a coach, but you need to make sure that you're going back to those basics because no amount of optimizing the 1% is going to outwork the very boring, unsexy fundamentals.
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