Show Notes

In this episode, we discuss different forms of exercise suitable for those new to fitness. We cover flexibility, mobility, strength training, and cardio, providing valuable insights and practical tips. They also highlight yoga, Pilates, P90X, and even exercise video games as effective ways to get started. The episode concludes with recent vegan fitness news and a discussion on homemade vegan recipes including pizza sauce and cashew mozzarella.

Full Podcast Transcript

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Hi, welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast. This is episode 17. I’m the Muscle Deficient Vegan here with the Protein Deficient Vegan. You want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Hi. So today we’re going to talk about different types of exercise you can do. So this is going to be pretty basic.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: If you’re trying to just get into doing some kind of workout, some kind of fitness, you might not know which avenue to take. There’s a lot of different ways you can exercise, so we’re going to talk about some of those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: First up, we’re going to talk about flexibility. This is something that a lot of people have an issue with, especially if you haven’t been moving around lately. And it’s pretty low impact, easy to get into.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Flexibility is basically just stretching out your muscles, getting them to where they can get into different positions, and you feel a little more…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Limber.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The technical definition of flexibility is the ability to temporarily elongate a muscle. So you can bend your arm a little more.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can touch your toes.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can touch your toes. Stuff like that. Having extra flexibility can also help you avoid injuries in some cases.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: There’s some debate around exactly how much it helps you, but it doesn’t seem to hurt. You can do stretches kind of around other workouts. If you’re combining that with something else, or you can do stretches on its own in a standalone workout.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: If you’re doing stretches with some other workout like strength training, you don’t really want to do what we call static stretches, which is where you just like bend your leg and hold it for 30 seconds, something like that. You don’t want to do that necessarily before the workout, because you can lose a little bit of your strength for that workout in particular.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But you can do what are called dynamic stretches, which is more where you kind of swing your arm. You may have seen people grab a resistance band in the gym and kind of, you know, move their arm back and forth while they do stretches. You can do that and it doesn’t have that same issue.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Have you ever done P90X?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’ve seen P90X, I haven’t tried it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They have really cool dynamic stretches that I’ve always liked. Like they do the hug yourself.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I really like the hug yourself one. And then they also have one where you like stir the soup.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, yeah, I did do that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Stir the soup stretch with you. That was pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: The stir the soup stretch is very underrated.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yes, there’s a common muscle cramp you can get in your upper back, if you’re doing weightlifting. And, uh, there’s a couple of different ways to stretch it out. But that stir the soup, where you basically just, you know, lean over and

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Wave your arm around a little bit, that helps a lot with that particular cramp.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and it kind of like, um, stretches out your legs too, because you’re bending forward.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, a little hamstring stretch.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Plus it’s fun, and then Tony Horton will be like, What soup are you stirring?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then he shames you if you say something like bisque because he’s like no, we don’t eat butter

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’ve seen you do a couple of P90X’s.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: They look pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They are pretty cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Do they have stretching work?

Protein Deficient Vegan: I really like. Do they have what?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Stretching specific workouts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They do have a stretching specific workout Uh, I think it’s like 60 minutes actually just all stretching.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Wow.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. I’ve always liked p90x I know it’s like 20 something years old now, but like man, it was good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s still good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: From what I’ve seen the way they structure the workouts is actually pretty solid. Yeah, no complaints. Really.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’m a big fan.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Um, you can also do yoga. That’s the one probably people probably think of the most when they think of you know, flexibility. Really been around for a very long time and pretty effective. So you can do like a beginner yoga routine until you get more comfortable with it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or you can do that wrestling guy, what is that guy?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah, the DDP, Diamond Dallas Page has a yoga, it’s called DDP yoga.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I didn’t like that because he doesn’t use the right names for stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, well I don’t know the right names for stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So I know, it doesn’t bother you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I liked it quite a bit. Um, I need to do that one more, but I did like that. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can also check out, there’s something called starting stretching. So there’s an old weightlifting routine called starting strength, and somebody made starting stretching to kind of go along with it. And it’s just a handful of stretches you can do, kind of over and over, do them once a day, maybe get a little extra flexibility.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and you can find a bunch on YouTube also.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, for sure, yeah. There’s tons of stretching routines out there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then I personally inherited all of my mom’s, like, early 2000s, late 90s VHS tapes. Yeah. And I’ve got a couple yoga ones that are really excellent.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They’ve got that like, majestic, woodsy, music vibe.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, Denise Austin had this really good 20 minute power yoga video, which I think was the first one I ever did.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah?

Protein Deficient Vegan: I liked it. I don’t know

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’m sure I mean yoga hasn’t really changed, so I’m sure they’re just as effective as they ever were.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so if you want to get into something that’s low impact, kind of easy to start, but can be really hard.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Like, if you don’t find a beginner routine, I would recommend doing some, some just flexibility to get into the groove of things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, don’t go pro.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yoga first. Or you’re not going to be able to walk.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No, and if you think yoga or flexibility is not something that’s really sophisticated enough for you to do. I recommend you just try some yoga. It’s probably going to be pretty difficult.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Dude, it’s hard, even from like a cardio perspective, some of that stuff’s pretty hard.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And strength, too. A lot of that stuff has some strength built in.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for some of the poses, you have to be able to manipulate your own body weight pretty well, so.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, like, they got some different planks and stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But there are definitely beginner routines that don’t require a lot of that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can work your way up there. Cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Next up is mobility. Kind of similar to flexibility, but mobility is the ability to move through a full range of motion under load. So mobility adds the aspect of, like, weight, basically, to kind of a, sort of like a stretching routine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also under mobility is something like foam rolling. So you may have seen people have a little foam cylinder type thing and get on the ground and roll body parts around on it. So that’s something called, foam rolling is the kind of casual term, I think it’s technically called self myofascial release.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Wow.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Uh, which basically is just a way to get some blood moving to a certain part of your body and certain muscles.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know if I just don’t know how to do that right, but that always hurts.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s supposed to hurt. Oh. So you’re probably doing it right. Okay. Yeah, and usually if you get to the part that hurts, you want to roll that part out a little more.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, you just keep going.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty brutal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay, but. It, you just always keep going because…

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No, no.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No. Disclaimer, no, don’t, don’t go until it like really hurts, right? But yeah, if it’s a little tender, you might try rolling it out a little more and see how that feels.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay. I guess tangentially.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Is that how you say that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Tangentially.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Tangentially. I bought this thing off of Shark Tank, as you do. Yeah. And it was like this acupuncture back thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Because I had this like part of my back that was hurting. So I was like, I’m just, it hurts really bad when I poke it. So I’m just gonna keep poking it until it stops hurting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That was a bad idea. I could not lay down for like three days.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That sounds like a bad idea. So I wouldn’t recommend going that way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It kind of felt good at the time though. Yeah. So, you know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You gotta weigh those things out.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It hurts so good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So, uh, the foam rolling has been shown in studies to be able to improve your range of motion.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So maybe if you’ve got some exercises or even something functional you’re doing, like you want to do squats, you want to squat lower, you have some kind of like, maybe you’re doing rowing and you can’t quite bend the spot you need, anything like that, where your, your range of motion personally is limited.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Split squats.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Split squats. Yeah, something like that. You can work on that with foam rolling before you do your exercises. It doesn’t make you any stronger, but increasing the range of motion and it’ll also help increase your stability. So, you know, a little less chance of getting hurt, a little more, just kind of a solid feel as you do the exercise.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Better form.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, better form. Definitely something to try. And then for like a mobility routine, you can do something like Pilates, which is kind of similar to yoga, but it involves some dumbbells and a little bit of weight. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And along those lines, you could do the P90X 90 minute yoga video, which is like insane.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they do about like 45 minutes of sun salutation, so.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, at that point, everything is strength training, right? If you’ve done it for 45 minutes in a row. Uh, and yeah, even professional athletes, a lot of NFL players will do Pilates. Make sure they have full range of motion to go out there on the field and do everything they need to do and they’re not limited that way.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Next up is any kind of like resistance training or strength training. So this is typically something like weightlifting, right? There, uh, if you go out there with dumbbells, barbells, you’re in the gym, your machines, stuff like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or resistance bands.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Resistance bands, yeah. But you can also do resistance training with just your body weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like pull ups.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, pull ups, push ups, crunches, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Walking lunges. Those will burn your legs out if you do 40 back and forth ones.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, absolutely. Air squats, too. So, I mean, you can make a whole routine if you’re on a budget or you just don’t want to have a bunch of equipment in the house, you don’t want to go to the gym.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can make a routine you can do for probably years on just your body weight and be really effective and make a lot of progress. Yeah. Uh, it’s a little harder, it’s not optimal because you can’t like add five pounds every time necessarily. I mean, if you get something like a weighted vest, but then you’re not really doing body weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or a child.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, somebody to sit on your back. Yeah, so it’s, it’s not quite optimal, but I mean, you would just do more and do more sets, do more reps. Um, and you can definitely get a good routine with just your body weight. So any kind of just general resistance, strength training, you know, this is the typical thing you think about probably when you think about exercise in the gym.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Another way you can get into exercise is with cardio or endurance type exercise. So endurance just means being able to go for a long time. So I think that probably the standard example of this is people like, go for a long run or go for a long bike ride. Running can be a little hard on your joints, but uh, some people still really enjoy it and it is great exercise for your heart.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So if that’s something you like to do, you can just go out and start running. Even walking can be cardio. I mean, if you do it long enough and you do it kind of a fast pace.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or if you take little baby dumbbells.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or those, like, walking sticks. We bought those, we haven’t fully figured out how to use those properly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What are they?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The Nordic Walking Sticks.

Protein Deficient Vegan: The Nordic Walking Sticks, yeah. Still not sure how to use those. If anyone has tips, let us know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we watched a couple videos, we didn’t really try it outside, but we tried walking around the basement for a while. It seemed pretty cool and it was definitely harder than just walking.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you could also do power walking, walking with a weighted vest, anything like that in the walking category. And then in kind of the more than walking category, we got running, cycling, rowing on a rowing machine, swimming. A lot of different things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I love a row machine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, row machines are good and they’re actually like probably one of the, well a rowing machine is really good for a warm up before an exercise because it’s kind of full body, you’re using your legs and your back and your arms.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and mobility too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And mobility because it’s a pretty big range of motion you’ve got to go through, so.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Rowing machines all around are just really nice. Um, and they don’t take up a whole lot of space. They’re kind of long. Yeah. But they’re not very wide.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think you can hang them on a wall too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, most of them you can pack up against the wall if you want to keep one in your house. Every gym will have one.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And the one we have, it has this little fish game you can play.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Where you’re this little fish trying to avoid getting eaten by a shark, but then you eat these other little fishies.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which is kind of sad, but also you get points. It’s digital, so it’s okay. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also a really good form of cardio that you pretty much only see in a gym.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I don’t think anybody has these at home and maybe you haven’t even used because they’re kind of old school. It’s a Stairmaster.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Ew.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Exactly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Although, you know that there are a couple Bowflex ones that have the illusion of being an elliptical, but they’re really just like an angry elliptical Stairmaster child.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that Bowflex thing is kind of crazy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, I hate that thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that’s more of a HIIT type thing. High intensity interval thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s like do it for 15 minutes and you’ll live forever or something. I don’t know. I would count it as Stairmaster adjacent though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And that’s actually a whole other category of cardio is HIIT training, there’s one called Tabata and there’s a couple other protocols for it. But basically it’s some form of like, go really hard for a minute, rest for 20 seconds, go really hard for a minute, rest for 20 seconds, and you can change that, you know, timer, kind of however you want.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But the idea is. Go real hard, ease off, and then do that a few cycles. And the workouts are a lot shorter, usually 10 to 20 minutes.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But the benefits are just as good as doing like an hour on a treadmill or an elliptical as kind of like a traditional long, steady state cardio. People typically do that for 45 minutes to an hour. But if you do HIIT, you can get kind of the same benefits in 10 to 20 minutes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and you can do that on a bike.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yep.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Uh, ooh, battle ropes are pretty good for that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Battle ropes are good for cardio. Yeah, for sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And for just like, hit, like, for circuits or whatever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and they’re real fun.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also another one that’s kind of non traditional is there’s a lot of video games now where you can do exercise.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh my god. I love beat saber.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, beat saber a VR game.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you have to like go hard though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can’t just like move your wrists.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You have to be like fully immersed for I think for it to count.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, and then they have this one on the switch. Is it ring fit?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They have like a pilates The circle thing, what are the arm ones?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, I don’t know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s like a, it’s like shaped like a circle and you push it in. I don’t remember what it’s called.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Okay.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Anyways, it’s something they use in Pilates.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. But you use that and it also has like, uh, I think leg cuffs.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, that’s pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Cause you like fake run while you’re playing it. Anyways, that’s a fun game.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s kind of like that old Wii sports.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh my God. Okay. My brother was playing Wii tennis at his friend’s house and his friend’s mom walked behind him and my brother accidentally backhanded her in the eye! I don’t remember if she fell over or not, but it was like, I think he almost gave her a black eye. It was like a whole thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Uh, so anyways, if you’re going to play. video game sports and stuff like..

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You know, make sure no one’s around you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely, definitely have some spatial awareness. The VR helps with that because it gives you a little zone to be in, but people can still walk into that. You gotta be careful.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, another good one. Uh, did you ever play Switch Boxing? I really like that. Yeah, that’s a really fun one.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So there’s a lot of video game type stuff you can do for cardio if you want to do it that way. And then, last but not least for kind of cardio endurance and also fun is like some recreational sports or if you happen to be on like an organized real team, that’s good too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So bowling?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Bowling? Hmm. I don’t know. I think you have to do that thing where you like dance between, uh, your, your bowls?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Your bowls?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: What do they call it when you throw the ball?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Throws?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Rounds?

Protein Deficient Vegan: A throw?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Anyway, if there are any bowlers out there .

Protein Deficient Vegan: What do they call that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s gotta be a round, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Turns? Turns?

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Anyway, throws?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Throws.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then the last one kind of just combines all that stuff together into what they call a circuit or kind of combination training. So a circuit is essentially, uh, typically the way it’s traditionally set up is there are stations in a room where you do different things, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So think like, uh, five different spots in the room. One of them has like some kind of strength machine. One of them has just like a jump rope laying there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Battle ropes!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Battle ropes. Yeah. One of them just…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Push the sled!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Push the sled. Yeah. Maybe just one, just, there’s nothing there and you just do push ups.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, stuff like that. So you kind of go around the room doing these different things. And so you can find your own, uh, first of all. Also, if you go to something like a Planet Fitness, they usually have a room that’s set up just for this with like a timer on the wall, and all the different stations set up in order, and you just kind of go around as the timer runs down.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So those are pretty cool. But also, there are some places that are kind of dedicated to this type of exercise. So one of them is Orange Theory. Uh, this is basically a circuit where you do, go back and forth between strength training and like using the treadmill.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I thought it was like the row machine, treadmill, and the bike.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, and I think there’s also like some bench press, or there’s something with dumbbells in there too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Uh, and another big one that I guess you could probably consider circuit training, although these, you know, they might get mad at me if I simplify it like that, is CrossFit.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, so CrossFit is like huge, you’ve probably heard of it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Don’t piss off the CrossFit people.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I know, I got all the respect in the world for CrossFit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They can jump high on boxes.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I could never.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, I know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s insane.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so CrossFit’s a great option. Basically, you just do a bunch of different things. They mix cardio, they go on runs, they do, uh, lifting, Olympic style lifting.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They’re so hardcore.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they’re real hardcore. And something else you want to ease into, but most of those places have great coaches and they’ll ease you into it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, um, CrossFit has been something that a lot of people have used to get into fitness right off the bat. So it’s got a little bit of everything. You can kind of learn what you like. Probably a pretty good option.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s true.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So if you were building a program for someone who was just starting, like, what things would you include?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: How often would you do them?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I think I’d probably start for like just the first couple weeks. Just do a little cardio to get used to moving and being out of breath and sweating a little bit. Uh, so maybe you do cardio like three days a week for the first two weeks just to get kind of used to it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then maybe you could delve into using some machines. I think trying to find like a Planet Fitness near you with the circuit room is probably a really good intro to that. Because you’ll try different machines, you’ll have different muscle groups, um, and you’ll kind of get used to what you like, what you don’t like, what kind of stuff you really enjoy doing and pushing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You know, as someone who used to only do free weights, I really like the machines because I feel like you can’t hurt yourself as easily.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, there, it’s a lot harder to hurt yourself and also you kind of, it kind of forces you to do it the right way to a certain extent. I mean, you can still kind of not do it right, but like it’s, it’s on rails.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So you push and you’re, that’s the muscle that you’re supposed to use. And for the most part, you’re engaging what you should be. So it’s a good intro.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: After you do that for a little while and you kind of get used to the lay of the land and just all the different muscles, then you’d probably want to go into something like a, a real, you know, program. There’s a bunch of different beginner programs you can do.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And it really depends on kind of what exercises you like to do and what’s going to keep you going to the gym. So, do you like lifting weights? Do you like just doing cardio? Do you like using dumbbells or machines or barbells? And so you can kind of go from there, uh, and build a program around the type of stuff that you’re actually likely to stick to doing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So where does mobility and flexibility, like, factor into all that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, mobility and flexibility are something that you would probably try to do a little bit of every day. Like, maybe get up in the morning. That starting stretch one is one I was talking about. Or if you do some kind of yoga. You just do those first thing in the morning, maybe every day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Man, I like it at night. It makes me all mellow.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, again, whatever is most consistent for you and what you’ll actually do is good, but, uh, and then mobility, you can kind of combine that with your workouts, just do some mobility before and maybe after, or after, whatever you have time for.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Stretching, do stretching.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I would try to do some sort of flexibility or mobility probably every day if you can, just spend ten minutes on it, do a little bit of something.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Well, that’s pretty much all the information about basic exercises you can use to get into starting some sort of fitness program.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Saw a couple cool things in the news this week around vegan fitness. So the U. S. Open, uh, tennis, if you watch that, I haven’t ever actually watched tennis, but it always seems pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I have watched tennis.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Really? I’ve seen clips. I’ve seen a lot of like clips of tennis matches that look pretty cool, but I’ve never actually watched a whole match.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I went in person in Cincinnati once.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, that’s really cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It was cool. I didn’t know what was going on though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah I’m still not sure how they like score tennis, but…

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I just remember they say love.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And I don’t remember what that means.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I think that means a tie

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’m, probably wrong on that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It might be right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I used to play racquetball in the gym sometimes it’s pretty similar to tennis, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Uh, yeah. And I used to play badminton, which I think is I think pretty much identical to tennis really.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Definitely as hard. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Probably harder, honestly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You could probably be playing in the U. S. Open since you played badminton.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I know. I’d crush them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So yeah, the U. S. Open starts August 26th, and the news is that they have committed to serve more plant based foods than before. That’s exciting. I guess there was a demand for that, so they have decided they’re going to do more plant based foods, kind of like the Olympics did.

Do you think that’s like in part because Serena Williams is vegan?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I assume she has a lot of influence there, so she probably had at least something to do with it. I would guess. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m sure that probably leads to demand.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: She has some fans that are vegan and they want to see more vegan food, you know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I can see that having an influence. Also, one more, uh, vegan powerlifter named Daniel Austin was in a powerlifting competition in Nevada this year. It was, uh, it was some form of nationals, I’m not exactly sure which federation, but it was some powerlifting nationals in Nevada.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And he broke three of the state powerlifting records, uh, as a vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That is awesome.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and that was a, uh, drug tested league, I did see that. Oh. So, he’s natural.

Protein Deficient Vegan: A natty?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s neat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Okay, moving on from that, we had a couple new recipes we made this week that will be showing up on the site at some point. Uh, you made a really cool pizza. You want to tell us about that a little bit?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, so our parents, who we visited last weekend, was it last weekend?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It was recently.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t remember. Anyways. They’re awesome and they have gardens and uh, basically, we were super lazy this year and didn’t grow gardens. So, they graciously blessed us with a bounty of vegetables. Which was awesome! So, we haven’t used many of the things yet, but I have ideas.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What we did use is the tomatoes. And if you haven’t made homemade pizza sauce, you really should.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah, that was super easy. It

Protein Deficient Vegan: makes pizza so much better. We’ve been on this pizza kick where it’s like We’re gonna do Saturdays for pizza and we’re calling them Zotterdays.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, because some people call pizza za.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, because we’re really creative like that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: We’re also very hip.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we’re very.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Anyways, making homemade pizza sauce is super easy too. You basically just dump in tomatoes into a glass container or whatever. And then, uh, I used garlic because I put garlic in everything. So, like, some raw garlic and tomatoes, and then drizzle a little olive oil, and I use balsamic vinegar, too, and then you just, like, cook them in the oven for, like, 45 minutes to an hour, and then once they’ve, like, blistered and popped open and stuff, then you just blend them.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Magic pizza sauce.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it was really good. And then we had like pizza sauce out of a jar for something else the next day and it was really disappointing. So now we’re just spoiled on this homemade pizza sauce. Yeah,

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think probably we won’t do jar pizza sauce anymore because it’s really easy. I think it’s probably even cheaper.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then we did make cashew uh, stretching mozzarella, which is really cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can basically just take cashews, blend them with water and some seasoning. And then either you use tapioca starch, which I thought I had, but apparently I did not. So instead we used a combination of potato starch and arrowroot starch and I, it still turned out really good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that was really good. It was like, uh, the big fluffy piles of cheese, like on the margarita pizzas.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. It’s similar to like Fresh mozzarella?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Really good. Definitely would be making that again. It’s really easy to make too and actually I’ve liked it better than any of the like store bought cheeses, vegan cheeses that we bought.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I like it even, because Miyoko’s was my top one, the liquid Miyoko’s. But I think like homemade cashew whatever cheese goop is actually better than that. Yeah, really appealing. I’m great at naming things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And you also made a fake kind of chicken stand in from seitan?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So, if you use, like, insta Cause normal seitan is made with, like, just water and wheat gluten.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or, you know, vegetable stock and wheat gluten. If instead of just all water, if you were to half your water and throw in silken tofu for the remainder of it, The texture you get is like, to me, similar to chicken, although I don’t really remember chicken, but you’ve had chicken within the last three years, so you said it was close.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it was pretty close to what I remember.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think it gives it a really good texture, and then you can just add in some seasoning, but it’s really easy to make. You just steam it for like 15 to 20 minutes. And then you have like chicken patty things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we use it in some quesadillas.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and like a harvest bowl.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, the harvest bowl is really good, too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah with the tahini sauce on top.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Tahini and maple syrup. And a splash of apple cider vinegar.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, right, right. Yeah, that was a good bowl. Hopefully that makes it up on the website too. That’s pretty good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I’ve been lazy lately. If you guys haven’t noticed me put recipes up lately, I’ve been very tired.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Alright, well, I guess that’s all we had for this week. Do you want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bye!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Bye, everybody!

Vegan that likes to pick up heavy things and put them down again.
USAW Level 1 Coach
NASM CPT

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