A Successful How to Lose Belly Fat Program for Men

How to Lose Belly Fat for Men

You can never allow yourself to get comfortable with getting fat. Once you lower your standards, you essentially turn your brain off from trying to achieve anything better than where you’re currently at.

Video Transcript

Thanks for joining us today for How to Lose Belly Fat Men
here are the 10 best ways to get 6 pack abs and lose your belly fat quickly and naturally
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how to lose fat for man. This talk is a part of Health@Google–a speaker series which provides Googlers with more information on health and wellness. The aim of Health@ is to provide Googlers with tools and resources to make the right health and wellness choices for themselves and their families. We’re also still looking for wellness champions–folks who help to shape and promote the wellness programs at Google. You can check out goto/wellnesschampions to find out more. To see all our upcoming speakers and topics, visit goto/oil. a fitness community and blog dedicated to helping desk jockeys and average Joes level up their lives. A gamer his whole life, Steve has been focused on strength training and exercise as a hobby for the past ten years, as an obsession, as an obsession for the past five years, and as a full-time job for the past year. Currently on his epic quest of awesomeness, a 35000 mile trip around the world, Steve has exercised everywhere and anywhere getting in the best shape of his life despite living out of a backpack and never setting foot in a gym. In between workouts, he’s rock climbed in Thailand, scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, sky dived in New Zealand, and even piloted a stunt plane. Thanks for joining us, Steve. [applause] >>Steve Kamb: Thanks Chad for that. Can everyone hear me OK? >>FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Yeah. >>Steve Kamb: All right. Great. First of all, guys, I just wanna start by saying thank you so much for having me. Google is one of those companies that you always hear about, but you don’t–. You always wonder what goes on there. So, for me today, it feels like Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, getting to see everything happening around the world–. [clears throat] Excuse me. Getting to see how this place actually runs. So, I’m sure many of you are wondering who I am what the heck I’m doing here. So let’s get started. This is a picture of me as Superman, back when–I wanna say–maybe when I was four, maybe five. To be honest with you, I don’t actually know the date. Generally, you could say, “Oh, that’s Halloween of October 2005,” or I’m sorry, Halloween when I was five or Halloween when I was four. But that could’ve been me on a Tuesday. I just happened to like dressing up like Superman as often as possible, because I really wanted to be the Man of Steel. I was just fascinated with the whole concept of being strong and super-fast and lightening quick and all these things. Unfortunately, my genetics did not really line up with being Superman. So, I’d always been that scrawny, weak, I don’t wanna say slow, but scrawny weak kid that just never had an opportunity to become super strong. And normally it wasn’t an issue growing up as a kid. It’s all right. It’s fine. You don’t need to be strong. And it never really caught up to me until I got to high school and everybody else around me had this wonderful thing happen to them and it missed out on me. Puberty. Well, by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I think I was maybe five feet tall, a hundred pounds. And then my junior year, I finally started growing. I was five feet tall. I’m sorry. Five feet, ten inches tall, still a hundred pounds. Just a total weakling. A stiff breeze would blow me over. I really wanted to start playing basketball. My brother played. My dad played. All of my friends played. I had played growing up, so I signed up for the high school basketball team. And actually, as a five foot ten, hundred pound weakling, I got cut from the basketball team. But this was the most horrifying moment of my life. I can’t believe I got cut from this basketball team. So the very next day, I signed up for a gym membership. I remember this day like it happened yesterday. I went to the gym and having no clue what I was doing, walked upstairs to the free weight section. I remember lying down on the bench. Like an idiot, I loaded up 45-pound plates on each side of the bench. And I remember lying down on the bench, just that’s what guys do. They do bench presses. I didn’t know any better. All right. Why not? Let’s get started. So I laid down on the bench, lifted the weight off the rack, brought it down to my chest– [laughter] and it got stuck there. Fortunately again, I was stupid enough not to put any clips on the outside of the rack. So I’m lying there and I slowly twisted my body to the left until that big 45-pound plate spiraled off the end of the bar bell. Boom! Smack down on the ground. As soon as that one hit, the whole weight shifted to the other side. Boom! That one fell down on the ground. I’m lying there on the bench. OK. It’s OK. Maybe nobody saw this. So I quickly put the weight back, the bar bell back on the rack. And I sat up. And I looked as those 45-pound weights were rolling across the gym floor and about 40 pairs of eyes were just staring at me, like “Who is this kid and what is he doing in a gym?” I thought the basketball cutting was getting the most mortified area of my life. Nope. It was that day, in that gym. But I realized something. Like, you know what? OK. There’s a start here. I obviously can’t get any worse than what I just did. I can build from this. There’s something that I can do. So from that point on, I made a commitment to myself saying, “You know what? I wanna get stronger. I don’t wanna be weak. I don’t wanna be that skinny kid. I wanna start making some changes in my life.” So I spent two years, the last two years of my high school strength training. I spent four years of college strength training, desperately trying to get stronger. I read every muscle and fitness magazine, ’cause that’s what you’re supposed to do if you wanna get in shape, right? I started drinking protein shakes, ’cause that’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t help. Through four years of college, I think I put on maybe two pounds. Just a complete, I’m not gonna say waste of my time, ’cause I learned so much in that time. But I realized in those six years, I really hadn’t accomplished much. At this point after graduating, I moved out to California. Got a desk job in sales and signed up for a gym membership. And fortunately, they gave me five free personal trainer sessions. Something I had never had before, something I didn’t think I needed. I was like, “Oh, I’ll be fine. I don’t need a trainer. I’d been exercising for six years.” Well, I sat down with that trainer, who completely changed how I ate and how I exercised. And I’ll tell you, in those first 28 days, I had more progress than I did in the entire six years prior of training. From that point, I was addicted. And I knew it. It’s like, “I got it.” From that point, I just started reading everything I could about fitness. I wanted to be–. I was like, OK. If I made six years of mistakes and I’ve finally seen the light, there have to be other people out there like me who don’t know who to talk to, who don’t know where to turn, maybe don’t have the money for a personal trainer, but they wanna start getting in shape. So I started formulating this idea of a community of folks that would help other people get started on that path to getting in shape. It was actually right around this time that a movie by the name of “300” came out. This was back in 2007. And I’m sure most of you guys have seen this movie. It may be not the deepest plot in the world, or the deepest characters, but damn, those dudes were in shape. And I couldn’t help but get inspired watching these guys and thinking here are actors getting paid millions of dollars and they dedicated their lives for months and months and months and months and months to get in the best shape of their lives. So I started doing some research how they got in shape. What did they do? And I came across this quote from Mark Twight, who is the trainer of all the actors from the movie, “300.” And that quote is “appearance is a consequence of fitness.” And that really, really resonated with me. It made sense. I said, “OK.” For me, I wanted to get bigger and stronger. For many other people, they needed to lose weight and maybe get a little bit stronger. And this concept really fascinated me. OK, if you wanna look better on the outside that’s quite all right. Put your focus into becoming the best athlete or getting in the best shape of your life if you can and your appearance will follow. So, I started building the concept of Nerd Fitness around that. So that’s how it happened, how I decided on the whole concept of Nerd Fitness. It’s actually really pretty simple. I had this idea from “300”. I had been training, from that point, probably eight years in a gym–two years pretty seriously. I was like, “Well, I’m kind of a nerd. I like fitness. Stick ’em together.” I looked it up. Couldn’t find any online for a community of folks that worked at a desk job that wanted to get in shape. And I realized that I had been making mistakes for the majority of my life trying to exercise. There had to be other people out there like that. And as far as exercise goes, it’s not like in a video game. You always start on that first level where everything is really easy. They hold your hand and walk you through it. In fitness, you’re thrown to the sharks. You walk into a gym. There’s a million elliptical machines, a bunch of exercise machines, free weights with huge dudes standing. It’s really intimidating. And that stuff used to intimidate me, but it didn’t anymore. And I thought I had an opportunity to help people that were in my same position maybe six years prior to start getting in shape. So I come to you today not as a fitness expert. I don’t claim to be one. I leave that to the actual fitness experts themselves. But I come to you as a guy that’s in the trenches with you. I spend all day on a computer, sitting behind a desk, until recently when I booked this crazy trip, which I’ll get to in a little bit. But I booked this trip–. I’m sorry. I sit behind a desk and I play video games at night, but I also enjoy reading about fitness and diet and health and exercise. And I want to pass on that information to folks that don’t know where to begin who really wanna get started. So I formulated the concept for Nerd Fitness and broke it down to one main goal. That’s be better today than you were yesterday. It’s a simple concept. One sentence to grow around. But I didn’t think that sounded nerdy enough. If I’m gonna run a website called Nerd Fitness, I have to come up with a cooler, nerdier tag-line than that. So that sentence became, “Level up your life, every single day.” That’s a simple concept and it breaks down into whatever aspect of fitness you’re hoping to accomplish. If you wanna be stronger, if you can find a way to lift one more pound today than you did last week, you’re officially stronger. [male voice interrupting] If you’re a runner–. Sorry guys. >>Female: Hi. If you’re on VC, please make sure to mute. We can hear you. [male voice interrupting] >>Steve Kamb: [chuckles] Hi guys on VC. >>Female: OK, thanks. >>Steve Kamb: [chuckles] Alrighty then. So yeah. Back to the concept of leveling up your life. It’s simple. If you wanna be a better runner, all you have to do is worry about running one second faster, or one meter farther than you ran last time. And you’re gonna start to make those changes. You’re gonna start improving and leveling up your life, very similar to a video game character. And that’s something that I grasped on to and have been running Nerd Fitness as concept around for almost three years now. So I wanted to break that down a little bit more. What are four aspects of Nerd Fitness? Four aspects of being a nerd that you can really rally behind and apply to your everyday life, to actually get better at fitness. I like to refer to those affectionately as the Four Pillars of Nerdiness. But we’ll get to these shortly. But they come down to Zero to Hero, Leveling Up, Achievements and Rewards, and also Clans and Competition. So let’s take a look at that first concept, Zero to Hero. What does Spiderman, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk all have in common? They all started out as nerds, zeros. And through some super awesome act, became an incredible super human version of themselves. And I always, again, as the skinny guy, a weak guy, it’s something I enjoyed reading about and watching movies on. It’s like, “Hey, that’s kinda cool. This is a guy that used to be a nobody and suddenly became a great, an updated version of themselves.” So obviously, until Google invents it, we don’t have any radioactive spiders that can bite us to turn us into superheroes. So, I wanna take a look at a different concept in the same Zero to Hero category. That’s a game that I grew up playing, fell in love with. I will play each one of them until the day I die. I’m talking about “The Legend of Zelda.” And the reason I fell in love with The Legend of Zelda is because at the beginning of every game you’re always this scrawny, a little kid with a wooden sword and a wooden shield and you’re told you need to go save the world. Holy crap. That’s a little intimidating. What happens by the end of the game? You’re wielding this sweet Master Sword. You’re defeating Ganon, rescuing Zelda, saving the world. You’ve done it. You’ve gone officially from zero to hero–level zero to level 50 . You’ve been able to accomplish something that you didn’t think was possible back at the beginning. Sticking with that same concept. We’re gonna move on to Leveling Up here. So, my favorite game in Zelda was always “A Link to the Past,” way back in the Super Nintendo. I remember playing this game actually back in 3rd grade. My mom told me I couldn’t play at once for an entire month because I played so often I couldn’t sleep ’cause I had the music from–I think it was–the third dungeon in the Light World playing in my head. I told my mom, “I can’t sleep. The music’s stuck in my head.” She said, “All right. Well you’re not playing anymore.” Crap. Luckily, she let me finally start playing it again. And I realized why Zelda really appealed to me. And it was this concept of this kid had to go save the world with just this huge, terrifying, overwhelming idea to him. But he didn’t worry about it. What did he do? Link started with level one. He beat level one, got a little bit stronger, got a new weapon, moved on to level two. Did he have to worry about the future? No. He moved on to level two. As soon as he got to level two, he can move on to level three and so on. Essentially, to borrow a phrase from “What About Bob?” Essentially, this poor kid was simply taking baby steps towards saving the world and he was able to accomplish it. The next concepts are Achievements and Rewards. I don’t know if anybody here plays a game like World of Warcraft, or any of those persistent online games. I’m sure everybody has had months of their lives sucked into these things, like I have. For me, I actually started playing a game called EverQuest, which is World of Warcraft’s precursor, back in my–I wanna say–sophomore year of high school. At the time, I had no car, but I had a great computer and an EverQuest install disk, which meant months of my life were sucked into this game. And you know, it’s all virtual stuff. You don’t really–. At the end of the day, you could spend 15 hours getting all these really cool things, but you don’t actually accomplish anything in the real world. But it didn’t matter. You were still–. You had this idea of constant achievements and rewards. If you started as level one, they tell you to go kill some rats and deliver a message to somebody. I’d say, “Well, why the heck am I gonna do that?” Well, because it’s gonna get you closer to level two. As soon as you get to level two, hey, I might a sword or I might get this cool spell or this new attack and go to this new zone. You get to all these really cool things that continually escalate what you’re hoping to accomplish when it comes to–. What you do in this game you, again, very similar to Zelda, you get to go up from a zero to a hero–zero to level 50, or whatever the level cap is these days. I have no idea because my computer broke and I couldn’t play it anymore. And last but not least, we have Clans and Competitions. I’m sure everybody has also played a game like Modern Warfare 2 or Halo, Half Life, Counter Strike, Team Fortress, any of those online shooter games. And to be honest with you, I suck at first person shooters. I am terrible. I lived with two kids in Atlanta for the past three years who were great at these games. And I never wanted to play because I knew they’d always kick my ass. One day last year, they got Halo Reach. They said, “Steve, c’mon man. Let’s play.” “All right. I’ll get into it. I’ll finally start playing Halo.” I think the first time I played, I got one kill and I died 37 times. Not exactly a great ratio, but I learned something. You know what? One kill is better than zero. And next time I went out, I got two kills and only 35 deaths. It’s like, “Well, you only got one more kill, but hey. That’s a hundred percent increase in my kill ratio right there. Thank you very much.” So I could build on that. And I noticed I could start not only comparing myself against my previous stats, but I could compare myself to people all around the world and have these competitions and say, “Well you know what? I got great at this. I wasn’t so good at this, but I can get better and I can see if I’m getting better in the right way.” So, we now have these four concepts. I wanna think of what we can do to combine them and actually use them to essentially level up our lives. Here’s a term I like to call “Real Life Role-Playing,” which is a little different than the role-playing you’re probably used to at home with your wife or husband. Let’s start with that first goal. We have a concept of going from zero to hero. And for this, whenever anybody comes to me and says, “Steve, I wanna get in shape,” or “I wanna get stronger. I wanna run faster,” I encourage them to get super specific with that goal. And by that I mean if you’re gonna be a superhero, what would your super power be? And the reason for that is it takes things from the abstract and makes them tangible. So, if somebody says, “I wanna get in shape,” encourage them to put a date and maybe a goal on it. And that becomes maybe lose ten percent body fat by September 1st. You all of a sudden have a specific goal that you can start working towards. Getting stronger becomes do a freaking pull-up by Halloween. Everybody always wants to be able to do one. They never can. And they say they want to get stronger. In what way do you want to get stronger? Be specific and then you can start tailoring your work outs and your plans around how you’re gonna get stronger. Maybe you wanna run faster. Everybody wants to run faster. It’s, you like running? Maybe you wanna run faster. Let’s break that down. Instead of just running faster, maybe you wanna run a half marathon in under two hours. Or maybe you wanna finally run a full marathon. Whatever it is set a specific goal so that you know exactly what your particular level fifty is. And by that I mean you’re working your way up slowly. Yeah, you can get into it, but if you have that specific idea in mind, that tangible goal that you can work towards, it makes it a lot easier to start putting the steps in place, which is that next level up concept. And for this, I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase, “What gets measured gets improved.” The reason I say that is because if you don’t know how good you did last week, how the heck are you gonna know how good you’re gonna do this week in order to be better? And for that, I mean it’s time to track every workout you do. And if you’re not working out yet, I’ll get to this a little later on. And by that I mean what exactly you did. Did you do push-ups, squats? Did you do pull-ups? Whatever you did, how many of them did you do? How long did it take you to do it? And how did you feel afterwards? Once you have these things written down and kept track of, next week you can look back at your previous workouts and say, “OK, I got it. Last week I did ten push-ups. In order for me to be stronger this week, simple. I need to do 11 push-ups. If I can do 11, I am now officially stronger.” If you’re running, maybe you ran a mile last week and it exhausted you. OK. How long did it take you to run that mile? If it took you nine, nine and a half minutes, great. If you can do it this week in nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, you are now officially faster. Congratulations, you made a step in the right direction. On top of that, if you’re really interested in how your appearance looks, or you know you wanna lose weight, you wanna make sure you’re losing the right kind of weight. I wholeheartedly encourage you to keep track of your measurements. And I don’t mean measure yourself on a daily basis. That can lead to all kinds of mental issues. Oh my God, my weight went up one pound or down two, or vice versa. I mean, over the course of a couple of weeks, keep track of not only your body fat percentage, of which you can use a simple caliper that you can buy online for ten bucks to show if it’s progressing in the right direction. Also your weight. You can even use a simple tape measure. Take measurements like your chest, navel, waist, hips, thigh, whatever. As long as you’re measuring the same thing in the same spot at the same time of day each week, you can show that you’re getting healthier in the right way. Another thing that you can also track is your diet. I know a lot of people don’t like to track calories. For me personally, that’s one of the best things I think somebody can do the first couple days of starting out. The majority of people don’t have any idea how much they’re actually eating. And after a couple days of tracking that, they realize, “Oh, I was eating way more than I thought,” or maybe, “I was eating way less than I thought.” So that’s the Leveling Up concept. At this point, I wanna introduce a good friend of mine. I’ve never actually met her. She actually lives in Boston, so I’ll get a chance to meet her in a couple of weeks. It’s a girl by the name of Staci, who has recently become a moderator on the Nerd Fitness message boards, a community that we have through the site. The reason I wanna bring up Staci, or Spezzy, as she’s known on the boards, is that she has become such an inspiration to all the girls that read Nerd Fitness because of her great, incredible story. So we’re gonna back up a little bit. Staci works as an email marketing manager up in Boston. Back in August of 2009, this is about a year before she discovered Nerd Fitness, she weighed 172 pounds. On top of that, she had a body fat percentage around 35 to 37 percent, according to her doctor. And she wanted to lose weight. So what she started doing, we’ll get to that in a second. This is Staci at 172 pounds here back in August of 2009. Now, what Staci did is what every girl that generally runs across fitness starts doing. They start to starve themselves. They start running six hours a day on a treadmill because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do. And Staci did this for over a year. She worked out every single day. All she did was run, run, run, run, run, run, run. I think she was eating somewhere between 900 and maybe 1100 calories a day, practically starving herself. As a result, she got all the way down to 120 pounds as of August of 2010. As an unfortunate side effect of that, Staci was also a twig. She had no muscle on her. She was tired all the time. She felt like crap. And incredibly weak, she told me a story of how she, at this point in her life, she actually wanted to start weight training. So she bought herself a Gillian Michaels DVD and two pink, 5-pound dumbbells. And could not actually physically lift them up to do a chest press because she was so weak. So from that point on, this is the point when she discovers Nerd Fitness, hops on the message boards and starts speaking with all the other folks on there that are doing strength training. And from here on over the next two months, she was actually able to put on ten pounds of healthy muscle. And how she did that was honestly through strength training. And I know a lot of girls are very hesitant. They don’t wanna get too bulky. They’re, “Oh my God, if I start lifting weights I’m gonna start looking like some ‘roided up girl that belongs in a body weight competition and not in a, not the look that they’re going for.” Well, I’m here to tell you that’s all crap. I show you here that Staci, like I said, she started weight training. And not only did she start weight training, she started weight training old school. I’m talking barbell, big plates on the side, lifting heavy, dead lifts, squats, overhead presses, bench press. And it was actually right around this point in October when she started to really get into the whole strength training thing. These are her stats over the past seven months she’s kept meticulous track of. The top bar is actually her, how much she’s been able to dead lift. You notice back in October she started at 135 pounds, and last week she actually dead lifted 315 pounds. She weighs 140 pounds now. So, it’s about two and a half, two point two five, two and a half times her own body weight. Her bench press has gone from 95 pounds up to 135. And her overhead press has gone from 50 pounds all the way up to 95. And it’s been so cool to see this happen. So you’re probably wondering, “OK. This girl packs on an additional ten pounds of muscle again. She’s been strength training heavy.” I mean, 315 pounds is a ridiculous amount of weight to lift. “So what happened?” What happens to somebody that packs on more weight, as a female, while lifting heavy? This is her back in October at 131 pounds. This is her taken yesterday at 142 pounds. Believe it or not, the picture on the right, she’s actually 11 pounds heavier than the picture on the left. How was she able to do it? One, she tracked all of her weight. She did every week. And honestly, I wouldn’t believe this if somebody sent me these pictures and said, “Hey, look what I did.” Because every, honestly the internet, everybody is skeptical. However, she’s been keeping track of every one of her workouts for the past seven months on the Nerd Fitness message boards. You go back through there and read the archives and see on this day she lifted this much. She did these exercises. She weighed in at this amount of weight. This is awesome to see what she’s been able to accomplish simply because she knew what she wanted, she put her focus on getting stronger. And as a result, her appearance started to show that. Now let’s move on to that Achievements and Rewards category. And this is very similar to what I was just discussing. But I want you to always show progress. And by that I mean, if you’re keeping track of your stats. It’s really easy for you to see, OK. If I did this last week, I need to do this, this week in order to start seeing some success. On top of that, I highly encourage people–and this is one that drives me absolutely crazy–I see people go to a gym and they start lifting weights. And they take a class and they do some sort of cardio aerobic class and they come home and stuff their face with a 300-calorie Gatorade and a piece of cake because they’ve earned it because they worked out. They’ve actually done more damage with the food that they ate compared to the amount of exercise that they have actually been able to do. For that, I encourage you to reward yourself with things that reward you back. And by that, I mean if you are–. If you wanna lose weight, say, by the time I get to 50 pounds loss, I’m gonna buy myself some new clothes. That will encourage you to wanna lift, encourage you to want to continue to be better. Let’s say maybe you want to take a karate class. You say, “OK, great. I will take that karate class after I’ve exercised three days a week for two months in a row.” So that you have the confidence to walk into that class. You have these things that you can build on and reward yourself with to give you things to look forward to. Not only look forward to them, but look forward to them and use those things to even get better and better and better. At this point, I wanna introduce you to another guy that came across my site back in October of 2010. His name is Tony. Back in October, Tony weighed in at 257 pounds. He had a waist size of 40 inches. He had a shirt size of double XL and he came to me looking for a plan to follow. He wanted to get in shape. He knew he needed some sort of specific plan and he didn’t have one. He emailed me and said, “Steve, I just picked up your Rebel Fitness guide.” It’s a workout plan that I offer through the website. He said, “I picked it up. I wanna get started. I just wanna let you know that today is the day that I’m starting.” All right, Tony. Thanks, man. I didn’t hear from Tony for five months. I just figured it happens. People drop off the face of the earth. He tried it, failed, didn’t work out for him. Fortunately, Tony actually stuck with it. I got an email from Tony again back in March. Tony, at this point in March, dropped his weight down to 211 pounds, which is 46 pounds lost in five months. His waist size dropped by four inches. Shirt size went down to large. The way the Rebel Fitness guide is set up is it’s broken into different levels. For somebody that’s brand new to exercise, you can start at Level One. If you do your eight weeks at Level One, then you progress up to Level Two. As soon as you get through Level Two, you can move on to Level Three. So there’s this constant progression and reward system that says, “Hey, you’re able to accomplish this. I encourage you to move on to the next one.” Well, Tony emailed me in March with his after picture and said, “Hey, I don’t have a Nerd Fitness t-shirt yet, but as soon as I get through Level Three, I’m gonna buy one.” And it was so, pretty cool. So Tony actually sent me a picture wearing his homemade Nerd Fitness t-shirt, where he had taken his I Heart New York and taped a blue “F” onto it. [laughter] I was so inspired by Tony’s story enough that I said, “If you get through Level Three man, I’m gonna send you a shirt.” And fortunately, he got through it. So I decided to send him a Nerd Fitness t-shirt. And on top of that, what’s been great to see is Tony not only says something like, “Hey, I made it through Level Three. I can’t wait to get to Level Four.” When he gets to Level Four and beats Level Four, he said, “I can’t wait to move on to the next Rebel Strength guide.” There’s another e-book that I put out. And that was his reward was to move on to the next step. He wasn’t gonna reward himself by binge eating and drinking and regressing. He was gonna reward himself with things that continue to reward him in the right direction. So here’s a look at Tony again, before and after. Why was Tony so successful? And I’d love to say that it was my e-books, but to be honest with you my e-book is no different from the other e-books that are offered out there. It always pretty much comes to the same thing–having a plan that you can stick with. The reason I think my book worked for Tony is because it’s filled with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings references and things like that that keep people interested and excited and have that level progression that Tony really latched onto. So, he had a specific plan to follow. Tony started at Level One. He worked his eight weeks. As soon as he got through that, he moved on to Level Two. He did his eight weeks there and he moved on to Level Three. He’s now halfway through Level Four and as soon as he’s done with that, he said he’s gonna move on to the next e-book, which I told him I’d send him absolutely free of charge because I just can’t help but love what this guy’s been able to accomplish. It’s been so inspiring for me. And last but not least, we have our Clans and Competitions. And this one is relatively self-explanatory. For this, I mean it’s simple. Have a support group. A lot of us, and I’m assuming at Google here, you guys have plenty of friends that are all interested in these type of things. We’re all–. Here you guys are all work in a similar type of job. You’re sitting behind a desk. You’re sitting at a computer. Maybe you wanna start getting in shape. So you have those folks that you can reach out to, folks that you can express your concerns with and say, “Hey, I’m not making progress on this,” or share your goals. And share your successes. If you have an unsupportive husband or wife and you go home and say, “Honey, I just dead lifted 225 pounds,” and they don’t know what a dead lift is, well, they’re probably not gonna care. And you’re not gonna have that encouragement. So, the reason the thing about Nerd Fitness that I’m most proud of, the thing that I think is the future of where this community is headed is the message board community and the community itself that has sprung up around the blog. The reason I say that is because it’s nerds and desk jockeys from all over the world that don’t have this support group at home. Because they don’t have it at home, they have all friends that all just wanna sit around and play video games all day and say, “Hey, you wanna go exercise?” “No, I’m just gonna sit here and do this.” Well, they have a support group online–people that they can reach out to and say, “Hey, I just did this,” or, “I just accomplished that.” And there’s thousands. We’re up to, I think, 1700 people on the boards now. So if anybody posts something like, “Hey, I just ran my first half marathon,” there will be 20 people posting within a couple of minutes to say congratulations. And I know that person is so fired up reading these things and saying, “You know what? I’m starting to, I get it. I’m part of something now, something that’s bigger than me and I’m making success. And not only am I being successful, but I’m inspiring other people to have success as well.” At this point, I wanna introduce you to my friend Saint. Saint and I grew up together and we played basketball back when we were in, I think, 5th grade. And stayed in touch. Actually, the way Saint and I stayed in touch–. He lives in Boston and after that, I went to college in Tennessee, California, and Atlanta. The way that Saint and I stayed in touch was really through EverQuest–EverQuest and Gchat these days. Saint came to me back in–let’s see–it was January of 2009 and a weight of 236 pounds. Like any other desk jockey, he had kinda sat around after he graduated college. Didn’t really keep track of his weight. Didn’t really exercise much. And wanted to start making some changes. He said, “Steve I wanna lose weight.” All right, bud. Well, it’s somebody that wants to get in shape. I said, “I encourage you to start putting some goals in place.” Well, he wasn’t really interested in strength training. He wasn’t really interested in keeping track of what he ate. He’s like, “I’ll just eat less and run a lot more.” All right. Well, it’s a start. So what happened was Saint lost about 30 pounds over the course of the year. Honestly, through the same way that Staci, or Spezzy, was able to lose her weight by almost starving himself and running ragged. So what happened was Saint, back in January, got all the way down to 203 pounds and then continued to try and work that weight off. Unfortunately, over the year nothing happened. He got stuck at 203 pounds and he ended up at a body fat percentage around 20% or so, which is–. He’s not a really out of shape guy. He stayed relatively active, but it wasn’t where he wanted to be. He’s always struggled to get across the 200-pound barrier. And then something happened that I will always look back on. What happened is Saint emailed me out of the blue, or actually it was on Gchat, back in January. Said, “Steve, I’ve made a huge mistake.” “All right, Saint. How much money do you need?” “No. I don’t need any money. I entered into a competition with my friends at work.” “OK. That sounds like a good idea. Well, what happened?” “Well, I’m getting married in June and I wanna be in the best shape of my life for my honeymoon. So I told my friends that if I didn’t get below ten percent body fat by the time Memorial Day rolled around, I owe them $500 .” “Saint, are you an idiot?” “Yes. I’m an idiot.” “Do you have $500 to give to your friends if you don’t make it?” “No, I don’t, which is why I need you to help me get there.” “All right, dude. You got it. It’s gonna be tough, but let’s make it happen.” So, over the past five months, I told Saint he needed to start tracking everything that he did meticulously if he wanted to get down to that level. And obviously, ten percent is a really low number. So he had to be incredibly diligent with not only what he ate, but how he trained. And obviously, decent genetics and everything like that factored in there as well. But he started to–. He wanted to get down to that body fat percentage. So this is Saint’s weight over the past five months. If you notice, he started up around 203 pounds. He quickly weight dropped off. He lost seven pounds or so right around the February mark. Weight went down a little bit. Went down around to 193 pounds. And then his weight started going back up again. So by the time middle of May rolled around, Saint had only lost seven pounds. Fortunately, Saint had been tracking a lot of other metrics as well. So for the past five months, Saint has been tracking his body fat percentage by getting it measured every two weeks. He also took measurements of different parts of his body every two weeks to make sure he was progressing in the right direction. So after a month and a half, Saint’s body fat, although his weight was dropping as we saw in the previous slide, his body fat wasn’t going anywhere. And he’s like, “Oh, crap. Well, I’m two months in. I got three months to go. I don’t have $500 to give up. I need to start making some changes.” So I told Saint, “All right, man. What you need to do is focus on getting stronger. Put the focus on getting stronger. We’re gonna clean up your diet.” That day, he signed up for a gym membership and started lifting heavy. Like clockwork, Saint’s body fat dropped back in March. Actually, he started joining the gym right around mid-February. He went from right around 20 percent in mid-February all the way down to nine point five percent in May. He emailed me halfway through May and said, “Holy crap. I did it.” “What did you do?” He said, “I got down to nine point five percent.” “All right.” Well again, this is one of those situations where I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it. This is Saint back in January. And this is Saint in May. Again, and when I say January. The weight really didn’t start dropping off until halfway through February. The reason Saint was able to have the success is ’cause he had that fire lit underneath him. I’m not encouraging everyone to start betting their friends that they pay them 500 bucks so they don’t get what they want, but it was able for them–. It was a way for Saint to finally start making some changes. Not only did he make these changes, but he put his focus on getting stronger. Saint leveled up his life by focusing on getting stronger. And the best part about this whole thing is I get emails from Saint, Gchats from Saint on a daily basis still. Whereas for the past two years, they’d always been, “I need to lose weight,” or, “I can’t get to where I need to be,” or, “I can’t do this.” These Gchats are now, “Holy crap, Steve. I just dead lifted 225 pounds for the first time.” “Steve, I can do five pull-ups in a row now. Last year, I couldn’t do a single pull-up.” Or, “Hey, I just dunked a basketball. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do that.” But he did it. His goals have now completely shifted. They’ve gone from “I need to lose weight,” something generic to something super specific. He wanted to get to a certain body fat percentage. That was his driving force to begin with. And since then, his goals have shifted to wanting to become stronger and a more leveled up version of himself. And that’s what all three of these folks have in common. They all set specific, concrete goals. Not only did they have these specific, concrete goals, but they broke these goals down into specific steps. So they knew what they needed to do to go from Level One to Level Two to Level Three. There was always that progression. It was never too overwhelming for them ’cause all they had to focus on was that next logical step of the progression. On top of that, they all tracked their workouts. They tracked their weight and multiple other things on themselves to make sure they were headed in the right direction. If Saint wasn’t tracking his body fat and he just saw that his weight was dropping off, he wasn’t taking measurements, he never would’ve known that–. He wasn’t sure why things weren’t working out for him, but because he was keeping track of all these different things and he could compare them week over week, month over month, he could see that progress and say, “OK. I’m there. I’m starting to do things in the right way. I’m making progress. I can build on this.” Last but not least, they all incorporated community. I can guarantee you–. Community and competition. I can guarantee you, Staci wouldn’t look the way she does today if she had never found the Nerd Fitness community that helped her find her love of barbell training and really enjoying strength training. I can tell you Saint would still be stuck at 203 pounds today if he didn’t have that competition behind him to finally push him over the edge and wanna start making some serious changes. And I’ll tell you just a quick, little bit about my epic quest. Back in December, I was living with two friends in Atlanta. And one is moving in with his girlfriend. And another one is moving out of state. So I had this opportunity as well. I could get my own place to live and keep doing what I’m doing. I had already been running Nerd Fitness as my full-time job for the past six months. Or, I could book some crazy trip. And the reason I wanted to book a crazy trip is because honestly, I’m one of the most risk-adverse homebodies that you’ll meet. Up until November of last year, I had never been out of North America. I am a very picky eater. So, traveling to foreign countries scared the crap out of me. And things that scared me, I told myself, “How are you going to encourage people to want to live better and step outside of their comfort zone if you can’t do it yourself?” So for me, I essentially travel-hacked. I sold my car. Sold most of my stuff. And travel-hacked my way into a 35,000 mile trip around the world. I wanted to start crossing things off my bucket list. Now, obviously a bucket list doesn’t sound nerdy enough, so I decided to call it my Epic Quest of Awesome, ’cause I thought it sounded cooler. So, while traveling, I started doing things that scared me when visiting a foreign country. Here I am doing push-ups on the Great Wall of China. Bungee jumping. Scuba-diving with sharks and finding Nemo down there. And even jumping out of an airplane. I started doing things that really scared me because I not only wanted to level up my workouts and my fitness, but I wanted to level up my life. And for me to level up my life, it was doing things and seeing things and experiencing things that I had never seen or done or felt before. It also presented an interesting situation for me. I’ve been a gym rat, I guess, for the past decade of my life. I can think of maybe three or four months along the way where I haven’t had a gym membership. And in those three or four months, I’ve gotten weaker because I didn’t know what the heck to do if I didn’t have barbells and plates and all that good stuff to workout. So, I had to put a plan in place. Honestly, it was for you guys. I wanted to come back to Google in better shape than when I left. So I was scared I was gonna come back after four months of living out of a backpack, no gym, looking like a complete skeleton and having you guys saying, “Who the heck is this guy and who is he to tell us about fitness?” So I spent the three months while traveling, I’m sorry, three and a half months while traveling, no gym, living out of a backpack, completely readjusting how I worked out. And to do that, I put my focus on getting stronger with only body weight exercises. And that was a concept that I just honestly didn’t think was possible. I can do push-ups, but I don’t think that’s gonna get me any stronger, if I keep doing the same kind of push-ups in a row. So I started doing research into guys like gymnasts and people from Cirque du Soleil. I figured, “You know what? If these guys can get in great shape without picking up a weight, maybe I could, too.” On top of that, a term I like to use is “MacGyvering” a workout. I’m sure everybody has seen the show MacGyver, where MacGyver, he’s save the world or blow up something that if you give him a paper clip, a piece of gum, and a plastic straw, and he’ll figure out a way to make a bomb out of it. Well, for me, I had to figure a way how to make a workout out of everywhere that I was traveling. So every time I got out into a new city, I would walk around until I found either a tree branch, a kid’s swing set, overhang of a bus station. I’ve even worked out hanging off of something inside the Auckland, New Zealand airport because that was where I could find something to do pull-ups on. And beyond those pull-ups, everything else I did was just using my body weight. And along with just using the body weight exercises, I had to clearly defined path for success. And what I mean by that is there was a logical progression for each exercise that I had to go through in order for me to actually get to that successful stage. And what I mean by that is I started out doing regular push-ups. As soon as those became too easy for me, I knew where to go next. I put my feet up on a bench and do decline push-ups. From there, I started working towards handstand push-ups, where I just put my feet up against a wall and try to hold a handstand as long as possible. From there, trying to do maybe a half handstand push-up. Beyond that, doing a full handstand push-up. I’m at the point know where I can do nine handstand push-ups in a row, something that I hadn’t even considered five months ago. It’s something I never even thought I’d be able to do just because it wasn’t something I’d considered. On top of that, I can now do–. I went from doing seven pull-ups in a row to 20 pull-ups in a row. And from zero one-legged squats, I can almost do five on each leg now. And as a result of getting stronger and doing these things, I put a focus on eating healthier. As a result, I put on ten pounds in the past three months of almost all muscle while living out of a backpack and traveling. And I realized, “You know what? If I can do this while traveling, there’s no reason that nobody else can not build a workout.” And here at Google, you guys have such a great advantage. You guys have personal trainers on staff that can help you out if you’re interested. You have people that can answer your questions. But there’s sometimes where maybe you’re traveling or on vacation and you wanna get in shape and you don’t really know where to begin. Well, you can really break things down to make things as simple as possible. As they say, “Keep it simple, stupid.” So, in order to build a workout, I like to keep everything at 45 minutes–no longer than that. Be super intense in those 45 minutes. And also, focus on doing real world movements. And by that, I mean doing exercises that prepare your body for the real world. I don’t mean doing bicep curls and getting in a machine and doing leg curls and all that garbage. I mean doing things that actually help you out while you’re traveling. I mean, help you out in your real life. And for that, I mean if you can do a simple body weight squat and drop down below–. Drop your body down and focus on squats. The next time you need to move your couch, pick up your kid, grab your groceries, your body is already prepared for these movements because you’ve put your body through these movements on a repeated basis. It’s ready to handle these things. So if it’s ready to handle these things, you’re gonna be far less likely inclined to get injured. On top of that, you can also pick your exercise, I’m sorry. Pick your level for each exercise. And by that, I mean for a push-up. You go from a push-up to a declined push-up, to that next level. Each push-up is going up. Squats can go from two-legged squats to one-legged squats while holding on to something, down to–. There are huge–. There’s levels and levels of progressions for each exercise you can do. So for this, I made things super simple for while I was traveling ’cause I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time. I might be at a bus station one day, the next day in a different town. So I wanted to keep things super simple. I started with a simple push exercise. By that, I mean push-ups. If you can’t do a single push-up yet, you can start by doing them against a wall, putting your hands on the side of a bench, something where it makes it a little easier for you. Just like the rest of your life, you can level it up step by step by step until you’re getting stronger. After you do your push exercises, we move on to a pull exercise. Pull is gonna work your back, your biceps and your forearms. So right there you’ve pretty much covered almost every single muscle group in your entire upper body in two exercises. Now, you might be able to do a pull-up. You might not. If you can’t do a pull-up, it’s OK. There are progressions you can take on pull-ups as well, whether it’s a bent over row where you’re down on one knee, lifting your backpack, your laptop bag, something up in the air, pulling backwards. That is working your back and will get you started in the right direction towards finally doing a pull-up. After that, we have leg exercises. This is simple. Squats, lunges, anything that involves your lower body. If you squat deep enough, not only are you activating your quads, but you’re also activating your hamstrings, your flutes, your calves. Your whole lower body essentially gets worked out along with your core. When you’re doing things like squats and lunges and you can do things called step ups, where you’re stepping up onto a high ledge, or doing box jumps where you’re jumping up onto a ledge. It’s putting your entire lower body through a workout in just one exercise. Last but not least we have our core exercise. It’s gonna work your stomach, your lower back, and your obliques. So just like that in four exercises, we’ve almost covered every muscle group in your body. And I understand this is not a fully complete workout, but if you’re pinched for time, if you’re traveling, if you don’t have a gym, you don’t have weights to lift, or maybe you’re just not interested in going to a gym. To be honest with you, I might never have set foot in a gym again because I’ve had so much fun doing what I’ve done over these past four months. And you take these four exercises. Now I realize this chart looks a little intimidating at first. But it really is very similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure. I remember reading those books as a kid. What you take is you have your four exercises from the previous page and you decide on what your desired outcome is. If you want to build strength, you simply focus on only doing four to six reps. If you want to hypertrophy, which is essentially increasing muscular size, you’re gonna focus on doing eight to twelve reps. And maybe you wanna focus on muscular endurance, if you’re an endurance athlete or you just wanna see how much of a certain exercise you can do. That’s when your reps are gonna go from 12 to 15 plus. So what you’re gonna do, is you take your four exercises–it’s almost like fill in the equation–you pick your four exercises. You decide on your sets, your reps, and your rests. And then you track your results. You say, “I did four sets of ten push-ups this week. I did three sets of five squats this week. And I did four sets of two pull-ups.” Perfect. Write it down. Pull up Evernote on your phone or shoot yourself an email. Keep track of what you did this week so next week you know exactly what you need to do in order to be better. And I realize that’s a very simplified version of what a workout is. I also make sure you warm up beforehand and stretch properly afterwards. I didn’t want to get into all that stuff here in this presentation. It would take way too long. I actually love to work with the Google trainers here and send everybody that’s interested a .pdf of not only what I’ve been doing on the past four months with descriptions and videos of each exercise, but also a unified message between Nerd Fitness and Google. I don’t think there’s a better audience that I can get in front of as far as being a nerd and being excited about fitness. And putting together something that you guys can not only take with you, but read and kinda start building your own concepts. It’s very similar to the whole give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime, blah, blah, blah. You know it. It’s very similar to that. So, today I wanna leave you with one final concept before we open up to questions. It comes down to “Do something. Do anything.” We’re all at that point in our lives where certain things seem overwhelming. If you’re really overweight and you wanna get down to a certain weight, it could be very overwhelming and intimidating. If you wanna go to a gym and it’s scary for you to get there, don’t worry. Maybe you wanna finally you run a marathon, but you can’t walk ten feet without losing your breath. That’s OK. Focus on doing something today. And by that, it can honestly mean as something as walking a little bit, doing a couple push-ups at your desk in-between sets. I’m sorry, in between projects. And maybe you’re trying to eat better. Focus on changing one thing in your diet, trying to eat a little bit healthier. And the example I always like to call upon is–just to cement my nerdiness–I like to look back and think about Optimus Prime from Transformers. When you think of Optimus Prime, you got this huge Mack Truck, and all of a sudden he becomes a freaking giant robot. How did he do it? One step at a time. It wasn’t he snapped his fingers and all of a sudden transformed from a truck into a robot. One tire pulled in. The windshield pulls down a little bit. Something else gets tucked behind something else. And little by little, step by step, Optimus Prime transforms himself literally, from a Mack Truck into a robot. So, I encourage you to start doing something. Build on that. And once you’re doing something, get a little bit better at it each time and you’ll start to see some results and hopefully start leveling up your life. I guess we open up to questions now. Before I get there, I just wanna say again guys, thank you so much for coming out. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be here at Google and probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. I actually added this to my Epic Quest. I finally crossed this off today. So thank you again for having me. [applause] I don’t know if anybody has any questions. Maybe, maybe not. I guess not. Yes. Sure. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: [ inaudible ] >>Steve Kamb: You know, it’s funny you should mention–. My dad, actually, growing up, my dad–. I’m sorry. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: [ inaudible ] >>Steve Kamb: Oh, sure. The questions was thank you for reminding me. The question was a question about my parents and what my parents have done since before starting Nerd Fitness and since then. Is that what you mean? Or like growing up and–. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Growing up and then [ inaudible ]. >>Steve Kamb: OK. So, growing up and through then. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: [ inaudible]. >>Steve Kamb: Sure. Absolutely. So, my parents were never overweight. Never, never really overweight, but they both worked desk jobs so they all had the same thing over the course of 20, 30 years of sitting behind a desk. My dad developed a little bit of a gut, like every other guy that generally works at a desk and spends all his time there. And I never told him to make any changes. And this is actually something that I have really come to enjoy. I wanna say my dad is a big guy. He’s six five. He weighs, I think at his biggest he was probably 230, maybe 240. But he hadn’t exercised in years up until I started Nerd Fitness. And I never told him to make a change, but his diet wasn’t the cleanest. And he wasn’t exercising a lot. And I was actually worried about him. I want my dad to be around forever, like everybody does. And I was kind of worried about him. But my dad has been such an important figure in my life, that how do you bring up something to your dad and say, “Hey dad. I need you to start losing weight.” And I didn’t. Instead, I chose to try to inspire him through my actions. And by that, I mean I never once brought up, “Hey Dad, you need to lose weight.” It was more, “Hey Dad. Check out this article I read.” Or he made sure he was reading Nerd Fitness every day since then. I’d been very, very lucky to have supportive parents throughout this whole thing. And since then, my dad has actually been able to lose–I wanna say–between 20 and 30 pounds through nothing I’ve requested, but he started doing push-ups and started cleaning up his diet. And it’s been cool to see that he emailed me and said, “Hey, I’ve lost 12 pounds this year and I’m gonna lose another 12 next year.” Wow. Dad, that’s awesome. I didn’t ask it of him, but I really wanted it for him. So it’s been cool to see that progression happen. Same thing with my mom and also my sister. My sister actually started strength training along with the Rebel Strength guide. It’s the e-book I put out a couple months back. And I saw a picture of her the other day. And I haven’t seen her since I left for my trip. Holy crap. You look great. And my sister, what she’d been doing, she’d been strength training. She emailed me the other day and said, “Holy crap Steve. I did two pull-ups.” And this is my younger sister, who had never been able to do a pull-up in her life. She said, “Hey Steve. I can finally do two pull-ups.” And that’s awesome. Go for three. So now, my family has started to embrace this stuff through not because I’ve asked them to, but because they’ve been inspired. But not only what I’ve written about, but inspired by these stories and the people that have started popping up in the blogs and in the message boards and stuff like that. So, my folks were never overweight, but they were very typical Americans with a desk job. A gut to lose and some weight to drop and something they never considered focusing on until Nerd Fitness finally started happening. Yes. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: I have a nerdy question. >>Steve Kamb: A nerdy question, yes. Absolutely. I love it. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Any particular tools you’d want a person to look at for tracking and reporting progress? >>Steve Kamb: Absolutely. Tools that I recommend. The question was any nerdy tools out there to recommend for progress? The best thing that I found as far as keeping things digital was a website called dailyburn.com. And what it is, it’s just a simple program for you to keep track of what you’re eating and your workouts. And you can put your weights every time you measure it. And every time you weigh in, you put your weights in there. And the reason I found it so great is because when I wanted to start building muscle, I realized I wasn’t eating enough. And for most people that wanna start losing weight, they don’t realize that they’re eating too much. So I encourage them to sign up for Daily Burn. Spend two to three days tracking their calories. And really keeping track of–. And the reason Daily Burn makes it so easy is you can simply type in something like “strawberries” or “Kit-Kat” or whatever. And it provides all statistics for it–the carbs, grams of sugar, total calories, everything. And at the end of the day, you can look at it and go, “Wow. I didn’t realize I ate that much.” Or, “Wow. I didn’t realize I wasn’t eating enough or was eating enough protein and etc.” And then on top of that as far as tracking workouts, I love to use a program called Evernote. It’s a simple app for my phone. And I’m sure many of you have it where I just pull-up a document. I put the title and it’ll say, “5/31,” or “6/01” will say Mountain View, California. And I’ll write down what I did. I started out with a dynamic warm up and jump roped for five minutes to get my blood pumping. Then I did this many push-ups with 90 seconds in-between each set. And then I did this many push-ups, so very basic. I don’t–. You can track it on Excel, if you’re interested. If people wanna be more–. Or Google Docs if you wanna be, keep in the cloud like that. But for me, Evernote worked out great ’cause I knew it would email it, or I could–. It would live in infinity. And for me while traveling, I didn’t have internet while traveling. All I had was Wi-Fi if I could find it here and there. So my iPhone pretty much became a glorified iPod for four months while traveling, so I never used the 3G service on it. So more me, Evernote worked out great ’cause I could go track a workout, go back to the hostel or hotel I was staying in and it would upload my document to Evernote so I could keep track of each of my workouts and compare them to previous workouts. On top of that, there is a thing called an Accu-Measure 3000, to measure your body fat percentage. Now, this is one of those things where the most accurate methods are also some of the most expensive. You could do the hydrostatic testing, where they float you in a tub, or they put you in a room where they can pressurize the air and they can figure out your body fat percentage. For most people, that’s just not realistic. And it’s also not something they’re interested in doing. So, you can pick up one of these body fat calipers for, I think it’s like ten bucks online. And it’s relatively accurate. And the thing that’s important about it is it might be off by a percentage point or two, compared to the super complex advanced thing, like the hydrostatic testing. But as long as you’re testing yourself in the same spot and using the same tool on a bi-weekly basis, you can see that progress is changing. So, I use an Accu-Measure body fat tester. And then also, just a simple tape measure. They have ones that you just wrap around your arms. You can take measurements of your chest, your navel, your waist, your hips, your thighs, to see if the weight is coming off in the right spots. For most guys, they wanna keep the weight up on their shoulders and chest, and lose it down in their gut. So, if you’re taking measurements and you know it’s coming off in the right spots and you’re tracking those things. So, I’d say a combination of those four things, super basic. You can get a tape measure for three bucks. Evernote is free and the body fat caliper, which is tiny. It’s this big. You pinch yourself, you read a chart, put your age in, and it’s relatively accurate. So between those things, you spent 15 bucks, you can track yourself on a daily basis, or bi-weekly basis, depending on what you’re interested in doing to get some results out of it. So, those are the four I do recommend. One more. Yes, sir. Go ahead. And I’ll stick around for as long as you guys want, if you wanna talk after this, for sure. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: [ inaudible ] >>Steve Kamb: Yes. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: [ inaudible ] >>Steve Kamb: Mm-hmm. >>MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: I’m wondering [ inaudible ]. >>Steve Kamb: You know, it depends. From what I found–. Oh, to repeat the question people. The question was, do people, as Staci started taking on strength training, do you see a lot of guys start taking on aerobic activity? And to be honest with you, I think most people that’s the natural progression, is they start with the aerobic stuff because that’s the easiest thing for them to grasp. They don’t have a gym membership. They don’t know how to exercise, so the easiest thing for them to do is to put on a pair of running shoes and go for a walk. So, they always start with the exercise and maybe counting calories and making a couple adjustments there. There’s definitely plenty of folks that read Nerd Fitness that don’t do any sort of strength training, but they love to run. I try to push them towards strength training ’cause I’m personally biased. I think that’s such an important part of getting in shape. But there are plenty of folks that are in great shape that run marathons that don’t strength train that do that aerobic cardio stuff. Absolutely. And as far as girls go, I think, I’m actually hoping to highlight Staci more on the blog because she has such a great story to encourage more girls to wanna start strength training, to show that you’re not gonna get bulky and big, which is the issue that all girls have. They pick up their five-pound pink dumbbells and do bicep curls ’cause they’re scared of getting too big. I’ll tell you, Staci is dead lifting 315 pounds, putting weight on, and looking better than she’s ever looked before, in better shape, healthier, happier than she’s ever been before. So I think there’s gonna be a lot more crossover from the girls, hopefully to the strength training. And not even just weights, but maybe even body weight type stuff. That’s something they’re getting into while still supplementing that with running and things that still make them happy. If somebody runs, I don’t tell them to stop running. If it makes them happy, by all means, do it. The best exercise plan is something that you’re actually going to follow. So if you hate strength training and you love running, by all means keep running. If you hate running and love strength training, keep strength training. Don’t–. Put you’re focus on the stuff that you love and you’ll find a way to find some success with it. And I think we’re out of time. So guys, thanks. Everybody up there watching, thank you. And I guess we’ll see you later. I am gonna stick around for a while if anybody wants to talk. And I guess we’ll go from there. So, thanks. [applause]

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