Playing the Long Game with Luke Leaman

# Playing the Long Game with Luke Leaman

**Channel:** Ali Do Is Win
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.transistor.fm/ac39e4eb/7703c402.mp3

Welcome to the Allie Do Is Win podcast. Today we've got Luke Lehman, whose life motto is never trust a fart, any fart. And you guys can't see right now, but he's sitting in front of a whiteboard that he drew me a very anatomically correct penis because he knows what I'm all about. He knows me so well. I do. So Luke is the co-founder of Muscle Nerds along with his wife, Zoe and they live in Australia but he's originally from Texas and I'll obviously let him give more of an in-depth background on himself but I did want to give a shout out to our mutual friend Todd Georgie who owns New York Strong in Mamaroneck, New York where Charlie and I train people out of and Todd told me I think it was like five or six years ago he was like Allie you got to follow this guy Luke Lehman and his wife Zoe like they're totally right up your alley like the stuff they talk about the hormones and stuff. And I was like, okay. So, you know, I follow you guys, stalked you on Facebook and everything. And then finally in 2018, I made one of your live seminars in Vancouver. And then since then, I've been a client of theirs, a royal pain in the ass client, mind you. I've also done their program design course, and I'm now doing a mentorship with Luke. So I want them to be extremely sick of me. So Luke, welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Hello. Hello, everyone. So for those who don't know who you are, can you give us a little bit of a more bigger background than just not trusting farts and being from Texas? Because we know you've been lifting forever and you started out as knowing all computer stuff. So he's definitely really, really smart. Yeah. So yeah. So I'm originally from Texas, born and raised my entire life. and uh yeah so i started lifting when i was really young um like eight years old and it's it's funny because now that more and more people are starting to look at our social um that don't really know us they find this unbelievable that someone would start lifting like seriously at eight which is weird to me but you you know you only see that in places like america and australia where people don't lift weights until they're usually a teenager but i mean it's super common in places like Russia and China and Eastern Europe. But in Texas, it's super common too because we're all getting ready for high school football. And so when people watch like Friday Night Lights and Varsity Blues, which I did stunts in. You're in that. Yeah. So they don't understand that culture. Like legit, my entire town would shut down for a Friday night football game. And there would be thousands of people in a town of under 7,000 people. Almost everybody would be at the game. Wow. And so we started lifting when we were really young to get ready for that. And so, yeah, I kind of got into it mainly because of Arnold Schwarzenegger and seeing him in Conan the Barbarian. And then I kept on with it for football. And so did that until I was 14, then went into powerlifting. So I started doing powerlifting for football and also because we built a really good team that pretty much dominated every single meet we went to. Then when I went to college, I kept up with it a little bit, but I kind of fell out of powerlifting, went into bodybuilding, decided I didn't like that, went back into powerlifting. And that was back in the 90s, in early 2000s, where people were using all the supportive equipment, and I didn't like it. I was the dumbass that I would buy a really extreme shirt, and I wouldn't put it on until the meet, and then I would mess myself up. I almost broke both my elbows in a bench press contest, and that was the last meet I ever had because I put on an Enzo Rage X and dumped, I think it was 480 in my lap, and the spotters didn't get it in time. And at that point, I went, man, screw this, because I was getting beat by guys that I was stronger than, but they were stronger in the shirt. So I said, screw this, and I left. And it got into things like strongman, and then I went back to bodybuilding, but I went to men's physique, and then I got bored with that. I've got a bit, my ADD doesn't allow me to do much for very long before I get bored. So yeah, so then somehow I found myself in Australia. I met a girl in Sydney, one of my students. Nothing happened during the course. It happened later. And yeah, I couldn't get rid of her after that. She followed me to America. And then, yeah, we started Muscle Nerds. I've heard you tell the story of how you guys met. So she shut you down initially, right? Oh, yeah. She shut me down. She shut me down. She did not like me. When she was in my class, I didn't even notice her. Because what's funny is when you go to these classes, especially the Poliquin stuff, which I was an instructor for, everybody, they like do contest prep to go to BioSig because everyone's got their shirts off and they're measuring each other. So everyone will do a contest prep diet, and then everybody's there to get laid. Like that realistically what you do You go to learn and you go to try to hook up And she walks in in like trackies no makeup hair disheveled She didn give a fuck She didn care what people thought She was there to actually learn And it wasn't until I went to Gold Coast to stay with a friend that I actually took notice of her. And then I pestered her online and broke her down over two weeks and had her go out with me the first time. And then two and a half months later, she sold her car, quit both of her jobs and moved to America. And we've been together ever since. That's awesome. that's such a great story so why exactly did you guys start muscle muscle nerds like what was the concept and what did you want to teach that was different than what everybody else was teaching well I think when I when I went to pollock and group so I started studying Charles's stuff when I was very young like 12 to 14 through muscle media and also testosterone.net which is now I I think it's T-Mag now. And when I read his articles, I was like, okay, I get this guy and his stuff, it works. And he became almost like a father figure to me. So I liked his humor and I liked the way he wrote and everything he said about Strength and Condition made a lot of sense. And then when I did the programs he put together and the periodization, it worked really well for me. So I said, okay, eventually I'm going to save up and I'm going to go take this guy's certifications. And then in 2007, I flew for the first time by myself outside of Texas and I flew to Chicago and I did my PACP1 and my bio-sig. And at that point I was hooked because the culture for, for Polycon Strength Institute was crazy. It was like a real, real brotherhood, sisterhood type of thing. And so it was always exciting. And you look forward to going to courses and, um, made a lot of really good friends that I'm still friends with now. I still go to courses with now, I still talk to now. Um, so over the few years, I kept going to more and more courses and eventually asked me to come and teach with them. So I did that. And then in 2013, um, they called me and said, Hey, do you want to come up? We have to shoot some material for, um, a video and for our new books and things like that. Do you want to come be the model? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like how close are you to being shredded? Dude, I was like 20, I was like 23, 24% body fat. I was fat as shit. And I went, uh, yeah, I'm pretty close. They go, can you be here in four weeks? And I went, yeah, sure. So they booked my flights and I shredded down to about 10 to 12 percent over four weeks, which is horrendous. And then I flew up there and I did some of the videos and the pictures and stuff. And they asked me to come back on full time. And I said, well, yeah, I'd love to do that. You know, at that point I was selling fitness equipment and things like that. And I said, yeah, I'll come back on. And they said, we have to move to Rhode Island. And I went, absolutely not. No fucking way. I'm not moving to Rhode Island. They said, well, we don't have part. We don't have full time for you unless you move here. And I went and I'll get. And then a few months later, I said, you know what? Screw it. And so I flew up there in our first meeting. Charles was gone. Andre Benoit was gone and Ryan Finley was gone. So I walk into this meeting and I go, hey, where is everybody? They're like, oh, they're gone. Like what? They go, yeah, you're now head instructor with Derek Woodsky. And now you're teaching all the courses. And I went, uh, OK. OK, so why did I move to Rhode Island if I'm going to be gone 230 days out of the year? And so, yeah, so then it just became this crazy, crazy travel schedule going all over the world. I never thought I would ever travel like that. I had no interest in traveling until that point. And then I fell in love with it. So, you know, a few years later, I was having some issues with the way they were doing things and some of the stuff they were teaching and me having to teach what they wanted me to teach. And I didn't agree with it. And I would have arguments with them in meetings. And then finally, I guess they got sick of me and they let me go. And that's after Zoe had quit both of her jobs and come over. So neither of us had a job. And I'm like, oh, shit, what are we going to do? We're running out of money. We don't have jobs. And so I announced that I was leaving Polycon Group. And I had hundreds of messages from people that were like, we want to do stuff with you, but we didn't want to do stuff with Polycon Group. Can you come to Kuwait and do a seminar? Yeah. Can you come to Dubai? Yeah. So we knocked out Dubai and Kuwait to try to get home because we had no money. We didn't know how we were going to get back to Australia or New Zealand. And that got us home. And then we had one in Nelson, New Zealand. We had one in Gold Coast. And then it just kind of took off from there. So it was two years of just being super reactive and not knowing what we were doing and just doing a seminar wherever somebody would want us to do it. So for the first two years, we just traveled nonstop because we couldn't live in the same country more than three months at a time. Oh, that's right. Legally. Yeah. Yeah, it was wild, man. It was fun, but it was wild. I loved it. Zoe hated it. She doesn't do well living out of a suitcase. So then we ended up moving to Australia. And they don't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch there, huh? They do, but it's $15 a box. God might as well get it from the US Yeah might as well start an import business Jesus So the thing that everything is so expensive It crazy Like when I see you post about stuff I like oh my God that's ridiculous. But the thing that I appreciate very much about you guys and the way you teach is that you can take very difficult concepts and simplify it in a way that is very applicable to what we do. So like, you know, in college I learned about some biochemistry and exercise science, but you don't learn how to apply it to the general population, which most coaches work with. So you guys are able to simplify those concepts, but also you're real, like being a no bullshit person who can kind of sift through a lot of the crap that's in the industry, especially in the modern area era is kind of unique in my sense. You know, like you don't find a lot of people who can keep it real and you curse, which I appreciate very much. You know, our audience appreciates that most of my clients, I think all my clients follow you. Like they love the way you speak and everything. So carrying that information to, you know, trainers like worldwide, I think it's pretty damn cool. And I want more people to understand exactly why you teach the way you do. And I think a lot of that, you know, as you gave your background is like, we, we would spend the money we made to go to seminars and to learn stuff. I don't think that happens so much anymore. I think a lot of people train people for like a year and then they're like, oh, I can do this better online. And they think that they can make a lot of money online. So how do you think the industry has changed as a whole since the early 2000s? I think, you know, there's a lot of a lot of different ways we can talk about this. I think it's a it's a great time to be alive because there's so much information that you can learn, but there's also a problem that there's so much information because if you don't have a background, you don't study the physiology and the chemistry and the underlying science, you never know what's bullshit and what's not. So that makes young coaches, you know, pray to people who just want to take their money and teach them either repackage stuff that they learned from somebody that they don't understand, or they teach them all the wrong things. And, you know, a lot of guys are doing a lot of sales and marketing, but they're not, they're not good coaches. They don't know how to coach. They don't know nutrition. They don't know training. So they just repackage programs they got from somebody else that may or may not be appropriate for that person. There's no customization to it. It's all, you know, playing the numbers, playing the marketing sales funnels and all this type of thing, because they don't care if they keep clients long term, because there's always someone else that they can sell a $50 program to. and it's really watering down what we do and it's not a good thing. When you and I were coming up in the industry, you would have to travel very far to go to a seminar but if there was something you wanted to learn bad enough, you would do it. Now people think that they can learn this stuff just online and you can't and that's why I still have, in all of our seminars, even the online ones, we still do an in-person component because there's only so much I can teach in an online module that's, say, six to 20 hours long or like in the program design that's got hundreds of hours of content. I've got to have an opportunity to fill in all those details. That's one of the hard things about the online too is that people will steal all your shit. We just busted a guy that was trying to trade one of our really low entry options, like a four or five hour how to train people online. he was trying to trade it to one of my best friends for another program for program design and my buddy's guy like dude you realize he's one of my best friends like i train at his gym he's my coach he we've been good friends for years he goes i'm gonna tell him this and of course the guy doesn't give a shit but i saw that yeah and what he doesn't understand is you can have our material it doesn't mean you're gonna know it because i still have to fill in all the details and i have There has to be an actual live in-person teaching portion or online teaching portion like a go-to meeting or Zoom or something like that because this stuff is so in-depth that you have to be able to talk it through and field questions and things like that to get people to truly understand it. And, I mean, you've been through the program design multiple times, and we have people go through it multiple times because it's going to take three or four or five times before it actually clicks, right? And before you actually know what to ask, like ask me or ask Ben or ask Shane or ask Zoe, like you're going to have to in order to get those questions, you have to go through it enough times to be able to understand it well enough to even have a proper question to ask. Right. So and I think that should be the future of courses where they're long term courses like that, where you go through multiple times, which is why we wrote it like that and why we will write all of our new courses like that. You pay one time and you go through it as many times as you need to to understand because we want people to truly understand and make the industry better Like we not doing this to become rich If I want to be rich I go into real estate or something else You know I become a drug dealer I don't know something. Remember when we met in Vancouver, like I think we became fast friends over ephedrine and Adderall. Luke's my people, man. That was a fun course because, um, because canna had just made weed legal and i'm not a big marijuana guy but everybody in class was getting crunk it was so funny i think one of the students i'm not going to name who this is but one of the students came up to me the next day he goes luke man um i think i took the the dab a little bit too far yesterday i go what happened he goes man i pissed my pants while i was asleep last night and i go well we'll keep that between me and you let's not let's not advertise that He was like, man, I've never been that high. And I'm like, I know because last night I felt the same way. I just didn't pee myself. You know, another thing too, like about, about your course is that, you know, it makes, it makes the difference between online training and online coaching very clear. And I think that's another misconception is that online training, it is way harder than training in person because training in person, you have that face to face. And most people who train in person, they don't want nutrition. They don't really care. They want someone to talk to get a workout in. But online training usually is with a specific goal and somebody wants usually an aesthetic goal. And there's a lot of data that you have to monitor. And I think my my ability to coach online was like increased tenfold. And I'm still learning from you guys because I was like, holy shit, there's a lot that I have to monitor and take into consideration and how to know when to change stuff and everything. So can you go into more detail about that too, about like the data metrics that you guys analyze? And I know it's a loaded question, but as deep as you want to go. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what people don't understand in-person training. Cause I do both and I don't train a lot of people anymore. The people I train online, I've trained for years and they're animals. You know, Krista and Costa, Luke Fodden, all these guys that I train, I give them their programs and it's kind of like, here's your program, fuck off. I don't have to coach them much because they just do their shit. And then if they have questions and we do coaching and things like that, but they just do their stuff. But in-person training is so much easier because you're seeing somebody, you know, two to four times a week. You can ask questions, detailed questions while you're training them. You can fix things very quickly. it's a lot less work. The coaching that we do is very in-depth. It takes us hours and hours to write your programs because we do everything from scratch. We don't use a lot of canned programs. We use some templates, but those templates then have to be modified based on your equipment, your injury profile, and that type of thing, and the way we periodize things and add the nutrition to it. But people don't understand we can spend easily 20 hours a month on every single client, you know, and that's why we work as a team. So I don't have the capacity to train a lot of people anymore. If somebody wants to pay me a lot of money, I will. But most of it is, you know, Shane's talking to the client, then Shane's talking to me and I'm telling Shane, okay, let's do this, this and this. Ben's doing the same thing. Now, luckily, both of them are now very skilled. So I don't have to, I'm only pretty much pulled in to audit accounts and make sure we're doing everything right and and to solve problems that they don't know how to fix like super complicated problems with things like autoimmune things and you know hormones and stuff like that but um like you i think you've got the best of both worlds because you've come to all of our programs and you're also been trained by us for over two years so it makes people a better coach if they learn a system and also get trained by the people who wrote the system because then they go through it and that allows them to then put that knowledge back on their clients so that they're doing the right thing and understanding like if you want to be a good online coach you have to coach and a lot of people a lot of people are just training where they're doing $50 programs and sending people out that's fine dude make lots of $50 programs put them on your website for people to buy don't give them any coaching but to do the coaching it has to be more expensive which is why we are a little bit more expensive than what you would normally see because it's so labor intensive and we pay a lot of money for a lot of systems and there's multiple coaches talking about these problems so you know it's and it's a mentorship like we teach you what you need to know to get there and as a coach that's great all of our coaches will write that off as a as a business expense because it's it's almost like a mentorship so you're getting a sexy body you're getting strong you're getting fast and you're also getting educated and i think that's that's the way should be and I think too many people go on online training that have no reason to be there especially if they've never trained anyone

in person. There's a lot of people that are getting their certifications and going straight to online. You've never coached somebody in the squat. Your squat looks like garbage. What are you doing? Like you have no right to be jumping into that. You still haven't, you don't have enough time under the bar. You don't have enough experience to solve anybody's problems. And that's realistically what you're doing as an online coach and as an in-person trainer is you're solving problems, right? And you need a lot of exposure to seeing a lot of problems, movement patterns, eating disorders, things like that, to be able to help your clients appropriately. So if you're getting your credentials and you're going straight to online training, you're a real jerk. No, I agree. It takes years to be in front of different personalities, different body types, different like dysfunctions and stuff to actually be able to understand the depth of that, let alone be able to make decisions on the fly about it and program design. So I mean, it's nuts. Like the Instagram versus reality from a coaching perspective, let alone that and the transformation too. Like, as you know, Photoshop is huge. People recycle old photos and everything. And like, you know, that it is a mind fuck, especially to a lot of us women. But also, you know, I coach a lot of men. They see these guys. They send me photos of them on Instagram all the time. And they're like, this is what I ultimately want to look like. And I'm like, all right, well, I've been telling you it's going to take a long time. And that whole concept of playing the long game, you know, could not be more true. And I think all coaches should have a coach. And you guys train mostly coaches, right? Yeah, we do train Gen Pop. But because of the expense, a lot of Gen Pop don't see, like they don't understand how much we're doing and how much we're analyzing and all that. so a lot of gym pop people don't want to spend the money because they can hire somebody for 50 bucks and they don't know the gym pop they don't know the difference between experience and some schmuck who doesn't know what they're doing yeah the coaches the coaches get it because but the coaches are really hard to train because you guys are all fucking crazy um you're nuts like the coaches think they know more than we do so they fuck with the recipe if you fuck with my recipe, I'm just not going to talk to you anymore. I'll just, you keep paying and I'll just keep sending you shit. Cause you're going to, you're going to alter it anyways. There's no reason for me to coach you. But, um, you know, they coaches a lot of times flip flop a lot of their goals. Um, the girls are, they want to get bigger booties and they want to get more muscle and they want to get stronger, but they won't put on any weight because they're scared of the scale. I mean, there's a lot of dysfunctional disordered thinking in our industry of people. And, you know, I've been there too, but you know, I've been lifting for over 34 years. So I've kind of gotten through that in the first half of my career. And then the second half, I'm a lot more loose on that because you, you train for over three decades and you, you track your food and you diet for a couple of decades. It takes a lot of the crazy away because then you start understanding that when I gain weight, it's this, when I lose weight, it's this, this is how I look. So I don't look, I find out what works for me. But a lot of coaches don't have enough experience to understand that, Or they've had bad experiences, which has skewed their thought process and then make they start making irrational choices on what they do. And they start freaking out because they just get into a state where they're desperate and they think they think they're a special snowflake and they think the carbs are going to mess them up. And they think that, you know, they have to lift it in a certain way because of their muscle fiber makeup. And it's like, oh, my God, just shut up and just do what the fuck I tell you to do and just be patient and I'll show you the truth. And like you said, this stuff takes a long time. Instagram has screwed that up for a lot of people because they see these guys that have these fantastic bodies And then I have to tell them look that guy doesn't actually look like that Like most of that's photoshop lighting and angles because I know those people like that guy is a lot smaller than you think Pictures make people look bigger Um, that guy does not have a waist like that or a chest like that. I know him i'm telling you right now It's all smoke and mirrors Don't look at instagram and say I want to look like that person because you don't know how altered that stuff is a lot of these coaches, all they do is eat, sleep, train, poop, and take steroids. So unless you're willing to quit your job and do that, it's going to take you a bit longer than it took them. And you don't know how long somebody has been training, right? You know, I've been training a very long time and we get a lot of people. It was surprising to me at our gym that we opened that a lot of the guys come in when our trainers ask them what they want, they go, I want to look like Luke. I'm like, dude, I'm 42. I've been lifting my entire life. this is gonna, you can do this, but it's gonna take you a very long time. And a lot of them don't wanna hear that. Yeah, I think there's a concept that last time you and I spoke that really resonated with me because, and I tell you guys listening like I came to Luke and Shane eating 1 calories thinking I was a special snowflake that you know if I ate a carb I would blow up because I have a unique physiology different from any human being like ridiculous shit and um they completely transformed everything got have gotten me what you've gotten me ready for like three different wedding dates and then pulled me out of it and like I've maintained my weight and everything like stuff that no one else has been able to do, but you've taught me why. And that's another reason why also you said, and I think coaches should hire coaches to understand what works with you because we as coaches overthink everything. And so last time we spoke, you brought up the concept of training age. And I was like, oh yeah, like my training age, I picked up weights when I was 15 years old, but like it's different when you've tried a zillion different workouts your whole life. And then when I've actually dedicated time to training the way that you guys have me training, it's really only been two, two and a half years. And that really resonated with me because I was like, you know, why I've trained so long. Why haven't I built the physique that I highly covet? It takes fucking time. And I've only been at this theoretically like two and a half years. And that's a brilliant concept that I don't think people understand because they've been doing so many like circuit, like workouts and cardio style, you know, when hit training got really popular and we can kind of segue into the whole hashtag fuck cardio stuff because that's another thing too that you guys teach and you're big on is is aerobic work and this was what 2005 or 6 when the whole industry was like we don't need that we just need to do hit if you do cardio or run a marathon you're going to end up gaining 40 pounds and and all that um but guys consider how long you've actually been following a program and been under resistance because it takes years to build a great physique let alone naturally a great physique. So, you know, take that into consideration. But so like your whole concept with prepping to prep and getting people healthy, aerobically and all that stuff. Talk about that, because that is what a lot of people wanted to hear about. Well, let me let me I want to say one thing about the training age, too, because training age is not a constant. OK, so if you if you stop training for a long time and you get really deconditioned and really detrained, you're going to have to not really start over, but you're going to have to start somewhere in the middle. So in 2013, when I started traveling for Polycon Group, I didn't train for years, not consistently. Because the first year I worked for them, I think I taught over 230 days. So I was constantly jet lagged, and my body had no idea where I was in space or time. I can remember a two and a half or three month period where I think I traveled east and west back and forth over 36 time zones. And after I met Zoe, like I for about two months, I was up all night and sleeping all day because my body was like, where are you? I have Are you still in Australia? Are you back home? I don't know. And I fell into a deep depression. And you know, I started, you know, self medicating with booze and food and, you know, and I could not fix it until I got back on my ADD drugs. And so a lot of people need to understand that when you don't train for a few years, you're you can't just pick up where you were like, I'm not near as strong as I used to be. So I've had to start over again. So now my training age isn't, you know, 34 years, my training age is now back at like two and a half years. And if I want to get really strong again, and get my physique where I want it again, it's going to take me three or four more years to get there. And that's kind of a concept where I was talking on a podcast on Sunday with Gus at lifters league people. He's a, he specializes in getting people really fucking strong. Like he only does powerlifting and he's produced some amazingly strong lifters. He's a world, like a Australian top level power lifter. And these people think that they're going to start training. And in two years, they're going to deadlift 300 kilos. That's not how it works. Like it's going to take you seven to nine years to get to that elite level state, if that's what you want. so if you're going to start having big hairy audacious goals like that you need to understand that you're going to have to put in the work and it's going to have to be consistent it's going to have to be for a very long time in order to get to that that goal now with the prepping the prep stuff um i kind of i started coming up with this years ago and i i talked about it started started talking about it at swiss in canada in 2015 and i did a bigger lecture on it in 2018 and it's kind of on the premise of if you aren't healthy first you don't need to focus on performance and the reason I got into it is because I'm sick and tired of fixing people that are going to bodybuilding coaches and they have no reason to start a prep and they start a prep anyways so then they do you know 12 16 week prep they do a contest they've had to starve themselves because they weren't they weren even lean enough to start their prep in the first place you get girls with 34 body fat and they try to shred it down to 14 to 16 over 12 weeks Can you do it Absolutely But you going to have to pay a price because the more you push the body to an extreme, the more extremely it pushes back on you. And so we get girls that they never stop competing because once they get lean, they don't want to be anything. Once you've been dick skin lean, anything above that is fat to you, which is completely irrational. If you've been as a guy, sub four or 5%, 8% is fat to you, which is so fucked up. But that's the truth. That's the, that's the psychology of things. Now you're going to do yourself. Um, you're going to do yourself a better service. If you focus on getting certain metrics in order first, before you start bashing yourself in the gym. One of the ones that we see a lot is blood pressure. So we have a lot of coaches that come to our courses that have stage one, stage two hypertension. They have no idea because they never take the blood pressure and they don't take their client's blood pressure, which should be the first thing you do with someone. We had a guy come into the IOPC and I was doing an interview, myself and Shane's partner, Courtney, who was training the guy. And we spoke to him and he says, yeah, I just got back from the cardiologist. They did a stress test, blood pressure, all that. They said, everything's fine. I'm totally clear to do any type of training. So to me, that's a red flag because I'm not going to trust the doctors. because the doctors here, the doctors here, if your blood pressure is 140 over 90, they think you're sweet. They don't see anything wrong with that. So I put the blood pressure cuff on the guy and he was something like 177 over a hundred. And I went, uh, let me take this again. Let me take this again. Cause you just got from the doctor and they said you were fine. I took it again. It was the same thing. I said, okay, now this is going to tell me that there's certain things we probably don't want to do. We probably don't want any vascular pressure. So we're not going to go on the leg press. We're not going to do anything really heavy. We're going to do more metabolic work and a lot more aerobic activity, get control of your blood pressure. Then we'll move to specific training of hypertrophy or strength or whatever it is. And within, you know, four or five weeks, we had them down to almost normal blood pressure. And that should be what people focus on first, prepping them to even get ready to start specific physical preparation. You know, if you're, if your resting heart rate is high, fix that first. If your HRV is low, fix that first. if your body temperature is low fix that first like there's a lot of things you need to do before you start going through the stress of an actual you know specific training block which is when you push it going to create some type of maladaptation that then you have to control with either deloads or switching the emphasis of the training program but if you don't measure it you have no idea so if we can get their baseline metrics looking really good then we can train them really hard until the metrics start to skew. Now we know they're overreaching. Now we can deload to a metabolic block or something like that, or take a week long break, get their metrics good again, and then wash and rinse, repeat that over time. And it keeps people on the right path moving forward without going too far and creating all kinds of maladaptations to their metabolism or getting injured or whatever. And that, that, that's like, I love that because, you know, it is not something that like we learned how to do blood pressure while during exercise but like now we have bluetooth cuffs that it can't be any easier guys you order this stuff off amazon you know the more data the better i remember like you asked for heart rate body temp blood glucose like you know if you're a nerd about data it's actually kind of cool to be able to track because then when it improves it also validates what you're doing if people are just hell-bent on seeing something on the scale, but then they see all these other metrics. It's like, yeah, progress is not only measured on the scale. It's not only an aesthetic thing too. That's right. So go ahead. Well, like for me, and it surprises people, if I do a consult or if I train them, I don't do a lot of metrics anymore because I've done them for so long. I know what questions to ask and I can already predict where you're going to be. So I'll have somebody come in and I'll go this, this, this, this, and this. They're like, yeah, how'd you know? Because I'm looking at your questionnaire and this is what I'm finding. And they're like, how did, how did you know all those things were happening to me? I said, I can, a, I can see it in your face and I can see the tone of your, hear the tone of your voice. And I know what questions to ask where I can get enough subjective data to then know where the objective data is going to be. So I don't even need that stuff anymore, but it's good when you have coaches come on to teach them that stuff. So they start seeing the patterns in how the body works and how the body moves, depending on what type of adaptation. And if you take that adaptation too far, that stimulus too far, what happens when you start to maladapt. So like none of my clients really take many metrics. Krista still takes the metrics now and then, especially when we're really pushing it for her. Like she's in a massive strength phase right now. And I know that I've got about two, maybe two and a half weeks tops where I can smash it with maximal strength before we have to do switch emphasis to a more of a metabolic block And then we just keep going back and forth two weeks on one week off and she get to keep getting stronger keep getting leaner but i think it important that if you a beginning trainer you just learning our methods and how we do things that you take as much data as the client will give you but you need to also be able to understand what questions to ask and what you're looking for because not everybody's going to take all these metrics coaches will because they want to learn gen pop they're not going to take this stuff consistently all the time so you just have to take what they will do. And then you have to figure out, you know, how they train when you're watching them train. What are you looking for? When you're looking at their food, are they self-sabotaging? Are they binging? Are they going through days where they don't eat enough? Because those are going to give you a lot of information that you don't really need a lot of hard, solid, objective data to figure out how to fix that stuff if you know what you're looking for. But it takes time to learn that. It's a skill. 100% because that you can take all the data in the world, but if you don't know what to do with it, you know, then it doesn't really matter or it doesn't help anything. And that's another thing too, is like some people, if they're coming to you for fat loss and you're asking them to do blood pressure and prick their finger, that might scare them. So what do you guys, like, what do you say to people when, when they don't necessarily have the buy-in to show them that this is what they need versus what they want? Yeah. Well, number one, you don't have to train everybody. And if you have a client that's not going to be compliant and not going to get you the data that you need within reason. I mean, you have to be, you have to be reasonable about it. Well, then you just don't have to train them. Just say, look, I can't help you. Like this is, I, this is what I charge. The reason I charge is because I'd like to get all this data. I'm looking at you as an individual. I'm taking subjective data, objective data. I'm analyzing, I'm creating protocols and I need you to do at least something. You either need to communicate or you're going to have to track some things. If you're not willing to do that, then I'm probably not the coach for you. Let me refer you out to somebody who doesn't actually give a shit and just will take your money and be your friend. And you and I've had these conversations before where I'm your friend, but when it comes to coaching, I'm not your friend. Shane's not your friend. Get your shit done or you can hit the road. And that's just the way it is. Like I can still be friends with somebody and tell them to fuck off or not coaching them. But as long as they can separate that, because I appreciate that, you know, because again, it's like, I don't understand why people would want to pay just to be told what they want to hear because there has to be some, you know, tough love too. Absolutely. And that's why, that's why I really only train the, uh, like the high level athletes and stuff because they're, they know how I coach. I don't mince words. If you're not doing your shit, I have no problem telling you do your shit. Like I don't need the headache of somebody who's not gonna do the thing. And then, you know, if they're not doing what we tell them to do and they're constantly altering the program, it's no longer our program. They don't get results like that. They want to, then they bad mouth us and hold on you actually didn't do a single thing i told you to do that's on you not me like i did all the coaching you didn't know how to apply it or you wouldn't apply it or maybe you don't need coaching you need therapy you know some people just need to go to the fucking counseling before they get trained but they don't want to hear that i've had a few clients like that where all of a sudden they blame you and then you're like well i actually laid it all out i could show you the emails to prove you know all that stuff so i could appreciate the frustration with that. Um, but back to like, so fixing those metrics when someone comes in and they've got blood pressure, blood pressure through the roof, their resting heart rate is like 92. Their HRV is like 12, you know, they sleep like shit, but they're like, Oh, I want to lose fat. What is the initial approach to fix all those metrics? I'll tell you the top three things that I look at first. And the most important thing is sleep. Um, the fastest way to get your heart rate and blood pressure down is to prioritize your sleep and stop making excuses on why you can't sleep and that it doesn't cost you anything. You just need to go to bed earlier and get off of Netflix. If you can take a nap in the afternoon, take a nap, do what you have to do to go to sleep. And a lot of people say, well, I have a hard time sleeping. Great. Start practicing sleeping, practice taking naps. Um, if you just keep, if you keep self manifesting this and saying, well, I don't sleep well, well, guess what? Your perception is a reality. That's going to be your reality. We need to come up with strategies on helping you sleep. I'll tell you one thing that helps me and is actually helping Zoe doesn't need any help sleeping. She can fall asleep. There could be bombs going off in a war zone. I have minds a little bit different where I'm always amped up. So I can take specific supplements to help calm my brain down. But the one thing that that I like to do now is I'll put on an audio book and I'm out within five minutes. So I'll put it on audible. I'll set it for 30 minutes. I'll put it on, you know, whatever book. And then that's like somebody reading a bedtime story. And I find that's a really good strategy, as weird as that sounds. But sleep is the main one. The second one is take an assessment of your anaerobic to aerobic fitness level. A lot of people are massively anaerobic because, again, they think aerobics are bad and they think that

We're trying to make you a marathon runner and blah, blah, blah, but that's not the key concept. The key concept is we are aerobic animals. We make most of our energy through an aerobic pathway. If we constantly focus on the anaerobic things, our bioenergetic flux gets screwed up, and we become metabolically inflexible, and then all kinds of crazy metabolic mishap can happen, and that can create large stressors. If you think about things from an evolutionary perspective, we're designed to basically walk all day and find food we're not really designed to run really fast unless we're in danger we're not um built to to have a lot of high strength like resistance strength output unless we're fighting off an animal or another human so your brain doesn't understand if i'm going in the gym to squat it doesn't know that you're trying to build nice outside sweep on your quads or you're trying to trying to improve your front squat your brain thinks, oh my God, I'm in danger. I must be fighting off a bear. Shit. Increase sympathetic drive. Then when you go get on the echo bike and you do aerodyne sprints, your body just assumes you're running away from something. So if you're already really stressed out with your job, your partner, your kids, bills, Corona, whatever, and then you go into the gym, you're just layering on more stress, which is going to increase your allostatic load, which is all the sum of your stressors combined and there's only so much your body can take. So what we tell people is in order to build strength, stress resilience, the first thing we need to do is we need to take an assessment. Are you overly anaerobic? And if you are, let's build up your aerobic fitness and let's get it not doesn't have to be to a high level, but it needs to be a sufficient level. So for gen pop, I don't think they can get to aerobic. Like I think, you know, if we build a really good aerobic base, they feel better, they poop better, they think better, they have more energy. They eat, they can oxidize more food better. Um, and then we say, well, okay, here, your VO two max is estimated to be here. Do you want to carry that higher or do you want to work on strength or what's next? And most of them will almost always say, I just want to get more conditioned. And that's kind of what happened to you too. We got you really conditioned and we try to take out your cardio and you went, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I actually enjoy doing that now because it makes, it makes me feel better. Like, okay, cool. Are you still getting stronger? Yes. great we'll keep the cardio in there as long as it's not impairing some of the other strength qualities that you're looking for you know with an athlete it's a little bit different because having too high of a vo2 max or being too aerobic will take away from power production so we have to weigh how how fit does this guy need to be to play a sport and to stay healthy and not get injured and to be able to eat more food um how how how sufficient does that level need to be as long as it's not taking away from the qualities of their sport. Yeah. I have a few, like my, my male clients, they'll either think they have to do all the cardio and that's it for fat loss. Whereas some of them are like, Oh, I'm going to lose my gains. And then I, I tell them what you guys did with me. My, my heart rate overnight was like 68. And now if it's above 56, it's because some stress event or whatever. And the fact that I can deadlift like 200 pounds for reps and then just go out and run a 5k in under half an hour to me is like, that's pretty fucking cool without dying and feeling like shit the next day. You don't find that quite often. And, and people don't realize how that can help them. Can you elaborate to like, Like the reason why that'll allow you to recover easier and then eat more food and all that. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is how much energy can I make? Okay. And so in order to make energy, you need mitochondria. So we know that slight caloric deficits, slightly lower carbs, more aerobic activity, more high reps, you know, increasing type one fiber increases and type two A increases mitochondrial content. The more mitochondrial volume I have, the more energy I can make faster without creating bottlenecks at the mitochondria. So that's kind of one of the main things we focus on. So when we tell people to do aerobic work, whether that's steady-state aerobics, whether that's steady-state cardiovascular conditioning, whether that's reverse Tabata, Tabata, aerobic intervals, we're not using that to burn fat directly. We're doing that to burn it indirectly depending on where your diet is. So some people will have them do a massive amount of aerobics initially because their blood pressure is high, but we won't actually put them in a massive deficit. We'll keep them somewhere around maintenance because we're not trying to chase calories. We're trying to create aerobic adaptations globally and locally so it builds your work capacity and builds your ability to tolerate more and more food, helps you sleep, helps you relax, helps you get in a parasympathetic state, which is where you should be at rest. later we might use some of that to create a caloric deficit so you don have to diet as hard but the chasing calories comes later not at the start At the start it should be about what adaptations am I looking for that's going to carry over to the next training blocks, and how is that going to affect my lifting, and how is that going to affect my recoverability? How does that work where people are more aerobically fit, they're able to actually tolerate carbohydrates much better? Because that's still very misunderstood. Yeah. So I, the way I view, the way I view macros is a little different than other people. I view carbohydrates as being your fight or flight, uh, macronutrient. So when we look at the, in terms of metabolic flexibility, what that means is you should be able to switch between different energy substrates easily, depending on what you're doing. And what we find is that the more sympathetically dominant it is, or the more chronic stress someone has for a long time, the more their body gets to where it wants to burn carbohydrates at a higher percentage than fat. So let's assume that in someone who is metabolically flexible, at rest they're burning roughly about 70% fat and about 30% carbohydrate. As they get chronically stressed out, the rate of glucose flux into the cell increases to the point where the mitochondria can't process it, so it has to move these substrates out of the way. So like glucose will turn into pyruvate, go in the mitochondria. But if pyruvate can't get into the mitochondria because something else is high like acetyl-CoA, then pyruvate has to be moved out of the way. So it's reduced as lactate. So you'll see people that have really high fasting serum lactate. And I've got a monitor that I can prick you. It looks like a glucometer. You've seen it. I showed it to you in Vancouver. And I can see what your resting lactate is. And if that is over where it needs to be, that's telling me that your flow of glucose is not very good. So we can use that. We can use a glucometer to see if the cell is becoming resistant because it's basically trying to slow down substrates coming into the cell because the mitochondria can't keep up with it. So then they become insulin resistant and it gets very difficult for them to eat carbohydrates without causing further issues. So if we can create more mitochondrial volume, then I can spread that glucose out to more energy factories, which then lessens that insulin resistant state. And it also lowers the amount of serum lactate, which means that I'm not having to reduce a lot of pyruvate. I can carry that through to make more energy faster and I can store glycogen more easily. So you're saying like learning the Krebs cycle is kind of important or something? It is massively important. And it blows my mind that number one, it blows my mind that more trainers and nutritionists and dietitians especially don't understand basic, like basic first semester nutritional biochemistry. And this stuff is not that hard. It's tedious to learn. But once you understand it, it's like the matrix. When you look at a program or you look at somebody's nutrition or their training, everything's like zeros and ones. and you're just, you can just start putting this stuff together without even thinking about it, but it does take a lot of work to learn the stuff. And especially if you're, if you're teaching yourself or I'm teaching you, and it's not like at a university, but the problem with the university stuff is they teach you, they glaze over this stuff. They don't reinforce why it's important. So you just learn enough to pass the test and you forget about it. Um, so then we, we get people with nutrition degrees, dietitians, doctors in my courses, and they're like, I don't know any of this and how did how the fuck did you become a doctor how did you become a nutritional dietitian and you don't understand what happens when food goes in your body where the bottlenecks are so it creates a situation where your only your only thought process is well if they're not losing weight keep pulling more food and adding more exercise but that can only go so far it works but that can only take you so far if you're eating 900 calories or in your case like 1100 and you're training 15 hours a week, where do you go from there? Like you can't just train 30 hours a week and eat 500 calories. And in really obese people, that stuff works. But once you start getting at an average level of leanness, that stuff starts to become disastrous and your wiggle room is not that high. So you have to have better strategies. And sometimes that is to take a break, work on the adaptations, and don't worry about dieting so much as getting a better relationship with food and understanding how food works in your body. and then getting to the point where you can train a lot and eat a lot. And then when you create a deficit, your deficit, you're still eating a lot of food, but now you're losing weight. Yeah, I remember like I think after, you know, I think it took nine months for you guys to like quote fix me. And I remember when you first put me to deficit and I was like so scared. I was like, it's not going to work. Oh, my God. And then I was like, holy shit, that was so easy. Things are just like falling off. Like, oh, my God, I'm losing weight. And it like it like oh I remember saying I wish every woman who has been in my position can just spend a winter in leggings and baggy sweatshirts Get used to okay what did I gain Like three kilos? Like get used to the extra five to six pounds, you know, focus on lifting as heavy as you can and eating and enjoying that. And then it'll just make it that much easier for you because your body will actually respond. Because what our clients are used to seeing too is the before and after picture. But as we preach, the after after picture is never what is shown. What what happens that that after after picture ends up like that? Well, man, there's so much stuff that's going on. So understanding that the body is going to adapt in whatever way you push it. So if I give the body less food, then the body is naturally going to try to accommodate less food by moving to that level. So when somebody has been chronically dying for a long time, they could be eating eleven hundred calories and not losing weight. Um, now there's obviously some people who just straight up lie or they under report or they don't know how to track and report food properly, or they overestimate their output. There's stuff like that. But, you know, training a lot of coaches, I've come to understand that there's these long-term issues where somebody has been chronically dieting to try to look like a trainer or contest prep or whatever photo shoots. they get to a point where 1100 calories might actually be their maintenance and they have a choice they're either going to eat less which we don't recommend or they increase their food up to whatever we calculate their maintenance to be and they just understand that they're going to gain a little bit of weight initially but that's going to be important if you want to get your hormones back your period back if you don't want your hair to fall out anymore if you don't want to be freezing cold all the time and if you want your strength to go up you're going to have to gain a little bit of weight. Um, now the interesting thing is if you do it right and you stay within the mathematics of, of what we do and energy availability, we don't really see a lot of people get fat. What we do see is an increase of fat free mass. But again, a lot of women are focused on the scale. So if they see the scale go up, um, six pounds, they're going to freak out even though they look better. And even though their clothes are fitting better. Um, so it takes a long time to basically get them out of that brainwashed state that they identify with what the number on the scale. And like, you know, you remember one of the strategies I did for you, because you wouldn't get on the scale, you'd have to get on it backwards. And Charlie would have to send us your weight. And then occasionally, you'd look at it and freak out. So I had you change your scale to kilos, because Americans don't understand the metric system. So if you gain three kilos of weight, that's not as scary to you as gaining 6.6 pounds because a pound is a very scary concept for a lot of people, especially women. So, you know, if you're 60 kilos versus 132 pounds, that 60 kilos looks a lot more desirable to you. The only time that that's not the case is your weights when you lift. It's a lot better to say, you know, I bench press 440 pounds than to say, oh, I bench 200 kilos. So it sounds a lot more impressive. But, you know, a lot of it is not, I don't want to say manipulating or tricking people, which is exactly what I did to you and exactly what Shane does to you. But sometimes you have to do that. Um, if it's going to push the client to start learning concepts and looking at things in a different way and taking away the stigma of the scale, because every women are indoctrined into this stuff. I mean, you look at commercialism, they tell you you're not pretty enough. You're not small enough. You're not skinny enough. Your dress size is too large. You know, muscles are bad. Fat is bad. They tell you all this stuff and you hear this your entire life. So it programs you to be absolutely scared of the earth's gravitational pull on your mass. And it's, it is ridiculous, but it's the way the system's been designed for a long time to sell you more bullshit. Yeah, I actually weighed, I weighed less coming to you, even though it was still higher than I wanted. But now that my body composition is different, then I tell people all the time, I've been within four pounds of the same weight for two years, including three wedding preps, I guess, quote wedding preps. And it's been a different look around that weight, which to me, you know, my biggest fear was always blowing up because that's what I had been used to. And, you know, you have a coach who understands your lean body mass like you guys, where you were like, you know what, you don't need to weigh yourself anymore because it would get to the point where I'm like, all right, I know if I eat late and I'm thinking I need to weigh a certain amount by a certain time, the next morning I'm going to weigh a little bit more. That's been so liberating now the past few weeks, not even getting on the scale because I know I look better and your relationship with that and the stress that it causes is like, it's amazing. So getting people to understand like lean body mass also weighs something It not just fat So if the scale goes up it not just body fat Right And that's the thing, right? When you look at those first two to three kilos that women will gain when they start eating closer to maintenance, you have to understand that some of that's fecal matter because you've got an increased amount of food. Some of that's going to be more water retention because you're now eating more carbohydrates. So they need to understand that's actually fat free mass. That is not fat. If you look at body fat percentage, a lot of people, even trainers don't understand what that number means. It is a ratio between what's fat on your body and what's not. And people can have a higher body fat percentage and not be fat if they're under muscle. Right. So like my wife, anybody who's met my wife, she's they'll say, man, she's she's, you know, very lean. Right. she's actually not if you look at body fat percentage she's around 25 to 27 percent but she's only like 54 55 kilos her she's her ratio is off just because she hasn't spent enough time training with weights consistently enough to put on appreciable amount amount of muscle so we've got to stop telling people that you know if you're a certain body fat percentage you're fat because that's not the case um you know obviously if you're 50 body fat yeah you you know, sorry, you've got a lot of stored energy on your body. We need to take care of that. But, you know, for some of these women who might have a higher body fat percentage, but don't weigh a lot, they need to understand that, you know, lifting weights and eating to fuel that weight lifting is going to make you look better, even if your body fat percentage doesn't change much, because you're going to have a better ratio of fat free mass to fat mass. And that's, that's going to make a big difference. And over time, if you just focus on building more muscle and getting more conditioned, it's almost effortless to get the body fat off when you're ready to say, get from 25 to 20% body fat. But a lot of girls have a, uh, a weird, um, a weird viewpoint of what their body looks like. Most men, it doesn't matter how fat a guy is. He's going to look in the mirror and he thinks he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, yes. Yes. Every guy. And he's going to say, I'm 12% body fat. And you look at him, you go, look, honey, you're about 24, dude. Like that's not 12%. Yeah. 12% is a lot leaner than you think it is. And in girls are the opposite. It doesn't matter how good they look. They always think that they're fat and they look like shit and all that. So, you know, it takes a long time to break people out of that mentality. It does. It's, it's interesting when, you know, a lot of my clients will comment when I increase their food and the scale goes up and it's like, I feel bad for how I have said things like this to you and Shane, but then it also helps to talk them off the ledge in that sense because it's like all right listen there's like a billion reasons why the scale can change but you know this is what we have to do now because you know people will pick like some arbitrary number that they were in college and they're like i want to get down to like 119 all right when's the last time you were 119 i was 17 years old like okay and say they were an athlete and then they lifted a little bit sporadically like all right you're probably not going to be 119 if you were 140 and you had a 14 pack are you going to be upset you know positioning it that way and it's crazy because i can say that to people and like we could all say that to others but when it comes to ourselves it can still play with our minds and it's one of the harder things and i know you guys deal a lot too with like stuff that happens in people's lives in childhood and the trauma and that also contributes to their disordered eating or relationship with food and the scale and that. So that's another thing that you have to take into account when training people online is that their past, it'll also be very highly psychological too. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's, you've got to, you have to recognize the red flags and you have to recognize where the, where the line on the sand is, what you can and can't do or say. Like one of the things that we'll do with some people, if we see red flags, we'll send them an ACE score sheet, which basically measures childhood trauma. And if we see that the number is at a certain level, we'll recommend that they go get some trauma counseling because, you know, they could have baggage that they're not consciously understanding. That's kind of subconscious baggage that they can't process through that they need to get rid of. And that could be leading to a lot of these feelings of lack of self-worth and self-sabotage and things like that. And, you know, more coaches need to have the balls or the ovaries to tell these people that, look, I think you need to go see someone. And I think that most trainers in the industry should also probably get counseling too, because I've never seen so many fucked up dysfunctional people, myself included, in one industry. And so it makes a big difference when you go in and work on your own issues. And then it gives you more leverage to talk to clients about, hey, this is what I was going through something very similar to you, maybe a little different, but I went and talked

and it really helped me out a lot and got rid of some of these issues I was dealing with, I really recommend you maybe go talk to somebody and just see if that's for you. And that way you can empathize with them and you're kind of on the same team and you've been there before so you understand how they feel. So let's see if we can get you with someone that can help you get over these hangups that you have because that's not something I can do because I don't have the credentials for it. Yeah, I think too like it says a lot about communication and not being afraid to say those things not being afraid of honesty. I think a lot of people are afraid to be honest and they fear somebody's reaction. But again, you're doing both of you a disservice. If you can't say what you know is really going to help this person, then you just deal with the fallout. And if they leave, they leave because they couldn't handle the truth and that's okay. And you knew that you did the right thing. And that was basically the best that you could do. Yeah. And the thing is too. Like these people, if they're not willing to get help and they're always a Debbie Downer and they're always telling you about their problems, that's going to have an effect on you as well. So it's, you're better off getting them to go get some help or just referring them to someone else. Um, because you, you don't want to, you don't want to take that shit home every day where it's all this negativity and all they do is, is bash on your own emotional state because they won't address their emotional state. Have you had to fire clients for that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I won't put up with it. You know, you're hiring me as, I don't like the word expert, but you're hiring somebody with more expertise than you. And so if part of my instructions is you need to work within, not just work without, or work in, not work out, and you need to get maybe talk to somebody here. I want you to take this test. Oh, God, this is your score. Listen, I really think you need to go see somebody. Let me give you a referral to someone to talk to and see what they think. And they've got there are a lot of coaches, a lot of our students. I know Juggie in the UK. He's the Indian Indian body coach. And he's like all he does is train Indians. And he's done everything. He's done the mentorships. He's done program design. He's done foundations, everything. And the first thing he did when he started his company is he got with a trauma counselor. And every client gets one session that's already paid for in their initial package so that they can talk to that person. And that counselor can tell them whether they need ongoing help or whether it's a simple fix. That's brilliant. And he gets crazy good results because he addresses that psychological, emotional part, not just the physical part. I think that that's actually that's a really good idea because I've noticed even more during quarantine, people will use their check ins as like a journal and like it's just diarrhea of their thoughts because they don't talk about this stuff with anybody else. And it's the only time per week that they actually get introspective and think about, OK, how do I act around this or how is my mood? Like no one asks me that or I don't talk to anyone or see anybody. So it's yeah. And, you know, it's it's really a lot worse for the guys than the girls, I think, because, you know, at least the most of the girls know they're like crazy. But most of the guys don't know it because we're told to swallow our emotions and you're not a man if you cry and you can't talk about things. So a lot of guys just bottle that shit up, which I don't understand because I'm a I'm a I'm like the woman in my relationship. So I talk I talk about everything and I have a big cry at least once a week just to get it out. but a lot of guys are you want to be macho and they don't think that that they think that that's weak but what's weak is not addressing it and then being a burden on yourself and everyone else around you yeah and you like ballet too right i love ballet yeah i love musicals ballet zoe zoe hates them i'll drag them to him but she drags me to shit like justin bieber how can you not like justin bieber come on you know i'm not gonna lie the concert was pretty good the last thing I want to talk about is you know something I think you and I touched on last time we spoke also where we'll have clients who nail their diet they do everything we say and the results are still lackluster for where we think they should be and it always ends up where they're not training intensely enough and that seems to be something that happens more often than not nowadays where you know we know how to like kill ourselves and we're doing the last set we're crying and on the floor and you just don't see that as much. No especially in the younger generations They they just don know what hard graft is and they think they training hard but they giving up a few reps before they actually done And I don't know what it is, but all the time I'm like, man, you're wanting your body to adapt in a certain specific manner. You're going to have to put your brain into a state of fear to get it to actually change. a lot of a lot of the younger coaches don't have great exercise technique and so a lot of them are injured or in pain so we have to fix all that stuff and get their training to not look like garbage so then they can train hard and it's teaching them how to train hard so a lot of people are really surprised when they come over to my house and train or when they come to the OPC and train and they figure out how I how what I expect like wow this is uh this is next level compared to what I thought I was supposed to do. It's like, look, you can only get so far just lifting weights. At some point, you have to go to an evil, deep, dark place. If you want to build a championship physique, if you want to compete at a high level, you're going to have to go to a place that's probably fairly dangerous. So we've got to get you where you're conditioned enough and strong enough to lift like this without getting hurt. But then you also have to be able to push past the pain of, you know, you start working at a high lactate threshold. That's not fun, but it's going to be important if you're in a sport that demands that. Or even with bodybuilding, if you're not pushing it to one ugly rep, you're probably leaving a lot in the hole. And that's why I don't really – I know a lot of people on that concept of RPEs and RIRs and things like that. And I don't really believe in that because – unless you're a very high-level lifter because most people have never lifted hard enough to understand the difference between an RPE of 3 and RPE of 10. or rpe of 10 most people when they lift you'll say how many reps do you have left they'll say two they'll do another eight so if if that's their concept of reps and reserve they're never actually taking themselves to to rir so we we would rather people lift until one rep looks significantly different than the others and then you you finish your set on that rep yeah that like and also they they don't have the gym cultures like they used to did you ever go to metro flex in texas oh yeah Yeah, absolutely. Like if there's a gym, I mean, excusing the stupid coronavirus, but like, you know, if there's a gym that's dirty with equipment, that's old as shit, where everything's all over the place, that's the place you want to be. Like that's that's the culture that you want to be around, where people around you are also going to elevate. Because if you are the strongest person in the gym, it's time to find a new gym. Yeah, yeah. Or you become the mentor for that gym, but you also take a few sessions somewhere else where you're now not the strongest person or the most experienced. And I think I was spoiled being in Texas because there's such a big lifting culture. You've got all these corn-fed country boys. We don't have anything else to do except for lift weights and fight and drink. So you go into any gym in Texas, and there's at least a dozen dudes who can squat 550, 600 pounds. is a dozen dudes who can lift 405 or more a couple of guys who can bench 500 like that's common in any texas gym you go to and traveling all over the world i quickly realized that's not the case everywhere um like you go to a gym in australia and people think a 180 kilo squat's a big squat that's dude that's nothing like squatting 280 that's a good squat you're squatting 180 you're still kind of an intermediate lifter you're not really advanced yet you know so you know i think there's a big disconnect from people that they weren't raised in the type of gyms that I was raised in. So they don't have that competitive streak and they don't have a good concept of what being truly strong really is. I know. And I like that. And you guys named your gym, the Institute of Physical Culture, right? And you bought that right before the shutdown. Yeah. Five days after we bought it, we had to close it down for a couple of months. So yeah, that was pretty hectic. We made it. And with the membership that you took over, because I know they weren't, it was another gym beforehand. Did you notice that a lot of the members were not training to the intensity that you would like them? Yeah, I mean, the gym was pretty poorly run and poorly mismanaged. It just the people that were running, it just didn't have any passion for this. So when we took it over, we changed everything. And now now we that gym was not known as a gym where people are doing a lot of PT. And now we're doing a lot of PT, we're getting a lot of fantastic results. People are doing everything right. We start everybody out with more structural like balance type training. And, you know, we don't let people deadlift from the floor or bilateral squat or do any of the big lifts until we get all of their wrinkles ironed out first and get them moving and feeling better Um and then you know it a very it is a gym pop mainly gym but it's, it's also highly specific too. So we're, we're looking at let's fix people. And then once they're fixed, let's convince them that strength being strong is cool. Um, and then working on, you know, metrics other than just the way your body looks of, Hey, look, you know, you just squatted your female, you just squatted your body weight. Let's try to get you to 1.25. Then they're like, oh, yeah, yeah. And then they don't care so much about the scale anymore because they're having too much fun getting strong. That's awesome. That's awesome. Hopefully when we can all travel again, I'll be able to make it over there. One day. I'm so over this. Can you go over, you know, I know you guys have a course coming up, you have a new course coming up. So can you talk about what you guys all offer? yeah so we've got our our kind of our flagship nowadays is a program design so we have i think three or four intakes a year right now it's open enrollment because of the people have time and do the coronavirus stuff so it's a good time for trainers to study but we've got i think it's 11 or it started out as an eight-week course now i think it's 11 or 12 so we keep adding stuff to it and i'm i'm actually about to revamp a lot of the anatomy and physiology things and so when you when you go into that course, you pay one time, but you go through it as many times as you need until you understand the material. So it's, you know, a good 11, 12 weeks long. We have fortnightly calls where we get online and talk for a couple hours to answer questions, or sometimes we'll give surprise lectures. We have all of those calls are recorded in timestamps. So there's over a hundred and something calls that you can get on and just find topics you like. And here's some of my dirty jokes and that type of thing. And we've got a forum you can ask questions on. You have to, we teach you the science behind how this stuff works, but then we also teach you how to think outside the box. So you don't do things the way we want you to do them. You do things in a way that you like to do them as long as it's sound science, as long as you're getting results. So we've got that. We have a nutrition course we're coming out with now that's going to be basically, when we did the program design course, we did the whole thing up front and then we just kind of kept tacking onto it. Um, now we're going to sell individual modules. So the first module for the nutrition is all about relative energy deficiency, calories, protein, fat, carbs, uh, nutritional design. And then it also goes into the psychology of, of self-sabotage, uh, cultural identities, religious identities, how to work with your clients and understand them so that if you get someone from a different culture or a different religion that might have certain food restrictions, you know how to handle it and deal with it. So it goes into a lot of that type of stuff. Stuff when you can and can't actually address a nutritional thing. So when you have to refer out or when you don't need to refer out. So it's pretty packed with a lot of information. We're going to put that out and then we're going to tack on other stuff. Most of our foundation stuff will now be integrated as online modules into that. So we'll do a gut course. I'll do an immune system course. Um, we'll go into special populations like bodybuilding, weightlifting, MMA, weight cuts, stuff like that. So those will be tacked on just for people. Then, you know, we do the mentorships as well. The long-term mentorships, we do online training. Um, we do in-house mentorships. When the, when the world opens back up, you can come stay with us for a week and train at our gym and our home gym. And I feed you barbecue and stuff and in lecture. Yes, we do. God, we do a lot of stuff. And when the world finally opens up, we'll be able to get back out there. So I love the in-person seminars. So as part of the program design, it's not just the online. There's also, you know, multi-day in-person seminars where I'll travel to Holland or to London or to Canada or to America and then also in Australia. And you can come to any of those courses you want to. So yeah, it's a pretty big thing. I think it's the only course of its kind probably in the world that has as much information as it has and allows you to go through it as many times as you need. For sure. And when is the nutrition one coming out? Zoe's going through it now. It's been edited. It's ready. Right now we're writing workbooks and we're writing quizzes because we want you to make sure that you retain the information, you can actively recall it. So we're getting all the kind of the bells and whistles tacked onto it and then it should be out pretty soon And so the and then for program design the next intake is next Monday right October 5th It starts we got a rolling intake for that right now So you can and we keeping all the modules open so anybody can jump into it at any time, but the fortnightly calls will start. Yeah. October 5th, I think is when it starts up. So that's a good time to jump into it. And you guys having taken this course, I really, you know, Luke's not paying me to say good things. I promise. And I think that there's no other course that offers what they offer. And for someone like me, who I know a lot of you are also ADD, where you have trouble actually paying attention to online courses, the fact that they let you go through it multiple times, nobody does that. It's usually, oh yeah, you could do it again and pay, you know, whatever obscene amount of money. And the calls that they have every two weeks, they're extremely supportive. There's no question that's dumb. A lot of people are afraid to ask questions at seminars. They don't make you feel like you shouldn't ask something. You're always going to get an answer. The group forum on Facebook is priceless just to get an answer because someone who might live in the same country will give you an answer quicker than you guys are 14 hours ahead. So there's always someone in some country that you can chat with. I've actually made some really good friends that live in other countries as well as the U.S. that have done the Muscle Nerds course. so the fact that if you want to learn about how to use carbohydrates and when and when somebody's ready and how to interpret the data and the physiology and things that you may have glazed over in school like I did and then actually apply it to your clients I'm I swear to god your coaching skills will be upgraded like no other because there is no other course out there like these guys offer and having been a client and actually going through it myself it gives me that better understanding. So, you know, how, how would they get ahold of, um, you guys to register for this? Yeah. So, um, one, one thing I'll tack onto that is what you said about, you know, making friends, like we run everything like a community and I try to run things like they used to before it was Polycon group when it was Polycon strength Institute, where it actually was a really hard community. Like we're trying to replicate that now. And so even the networking and the friendships and we've got hundreds of people that have gone through that program. So you have a lot of different people with a lot of different experiences and a lot of different expertise and everyone's willing to help each other out, which is how it should be. And we also do job placement too. We've gotten probably three dozen people jobs all around the world because a lot of our students will only hire other students. They don't want to hire people that haven't gone through the courses. So that's also a benefit and we're happy to help people find work and give recommendations and referrals and things like that. So if anyone wants to inquire, then they can send an email to info at muscle nerds.net and we can get on a call and talk about it. And I know like some, some of my clients that follow you, they always tell me like, you know, Oh, I love that Luke, you know, trained you or does the mentorship with you and stuff. Cause it helps validate some of the stuff that I've been doing. Cause they're like, Oh yeah, I remember hearing him talk about that on a podcast and whatnot. So, um, and how can they get ahold of you if they want to talk to you on social media? Yeah. So we've got, uh, muscle nerds underscore health on Instagram. We have our muscle nerds page on Facebook. We've got, we have a forum muscle nerds, Inc. We don't really do a whole lot with it. Like it's not very active. If more people would get on there and ask questions and do stuff, we'd get more active with it, but it's just not something we've really tried to nurture too much. Um, yeah, and that's it. And then if you want to see really unpolitically correct memes you can follow me at luke leeman on instagram dude you've been crushing the meme game lately luke probably sits on the toilet for like a half hour and all of a sudden you see all these amazingly highly offensive which i think other people would find offensive memes but i know you and i appreciate that type of humor but they're friggin hilarious hilarious occasionally people do get a little offended i'm like just don't follow my personal page like that's that's it's just all fun and jokes and stuff. So, um, and yes, every time you see me put up 10 memes, I'm usually taking a shit. So what else, what else are you going to do? Cause I find funny stuff to laugh about. Exactly. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. I know your time's very valuable and it's what time's it over there now? Eight 30. It is eight 26 in the morning. I'll be heading to the gym at 10 to thrash one of my basketball players. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Luke, very much. All right. Thanks, Allie. Thanks for having me on.